Philip Blair and Stacey had been hunting houses. Catherine and the boys were to come on when one had been found and enough furniture rented to live with until their own could be shipped. Houses to let were scarce, applicants numerous, and rents high. But Stacey employed obstinate pressure and actually presented his friend with a choice of three. Which, better than anything else, indicates the position of the Carroll family in Vernon.
The thing was done, the lease signed, and the agent had left them; but Phil and Stacey stood for a little while on the wooden porch of Phil’s new house, looking down at the city.
Vernon was, for the most part, flat, but one hill of moderate eminence it did possess, which, in the narrow early days when the city was young and a man was deemed successful if he had at sixty amassed a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars, had been the supreme centre of fashion, as was evidenced by the towers (to say nothing of the lightning rods) on the now dingy frame houses. Stacey himself had lived on this hill when a small boy, and the school he had attended still crowned it. But those were the days when Vernon’s best citizens boasted that Vernon had a population of a hundred thousand (which it did not have). Now Vernon had two hundred and twenty-five or perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand, and its best citizens did not much care. The crowded business section had flowed to the foot of the hill and even burst like a wave upon it, spattering its slopes with small garages and second-rate shops. Noise rose and the odor of smoke. Fashion had long since departed—to the edge of the city, where the Carrolls lived, or still farther, to the hills that rose beyond.
Stacey withdrew his eyes from the prospect and glanced sharply about him at the porch, the steps, and the small front yard. “Sordid kind of place to have to live in,” he remarked. “Sorry I can’t get anything better for you.”
Philip Blair smiled his pleasant gentle smile. “You know you don’t think that, Stacey,” he returned. “You’re only saying what you take to be the proper thing. At heart you don’t feel that it matters in the least where one lives.”
“No, I suppose not,” Stacey assented absently. He was again staring off at the city. It stretched out, monotonous and unbroken save where the afternoon sunlight glittered on the two converging branches of its sluggish river.
“I wish,” said Phil shyly, after a pause, “that you’d let me thank you—for this whole business.”
“For God’s sake, don’t!” Stacey exclaimed sharply. “Thank me if I give you anything real—peace or—or freedom. Don’t thank me for anything to do with money!”
Indeed, he did not want to be thanked. Gratitude was a bond, the recognition of gratitude a bond.
Phil looked at him sadly, but Stacey did not see; his eyes were still fixed on the city.
“The solidity,” he muttered at last, “the damned solidity of it! Did you ever see anything like it?” he burst out, turning on Phil.
“The solidity of what?”
“Of that! Of the city! I didn’t feel it at first when I got back. It’s getting on my nerves now. There are churches in it where men preach at it, and lecture halls where men talk at it, and auditoriums where it’s sung at and played at,—faugh! Children with puffed-out cheeks trying to blow down a house! Why, look at it! It’s only sixty years old, yet it’s more eternally unchangeable than the Pyramids!”
“Well,” said Phil slowly, “what’s wrong with that? Why should it change?”
“Why? The whole world has gone through agony, has been wrenched and torn until not one atom of it, not one emotion, not one value, remains as it was,—and here is this damned ignoble changeless place that doesn’t know there’s been a war—or pretends not to know, so that it won’t be expected to change. Nothing can change it, I tell you,—but bombs!”
“But,” Phil asked steadily, “how do you want to change it? What do you want to do for it?”
“Nothing!” Stacey cried. “I don’t want to change it, either for better or worse. Nobody can change what a war like this couldn’t change. I want,” he concluded, his eyes glowing strangely, “to wipe it out, annihilate it! Bombs, I said. Nothing else is any good.”
A look of pain crossed Philip Blair’s face. “I think,” he said, “that you’re a little mad, Stacey.”
“Maybe,” said Stacey, with a short laugh.
“Because it isn’t only Vernon you’d have to destroy. Everything’s that way—unchanging. It has to be, I suppose, to endure. People have their own lives. They can’t change so very much. Even mothers don’t die because their sons have died. They suffer for a while, then forget. Vernon and the Middle-West shock you now because they’ve been too removed and too unimaginative to suffer at the war. They’ve scarcely felt the war. While you’ve been in places all raw with pain. But they, too, will get over it and be like Vernon. It isn’t Vernon you’d have to destroy. It’s all humanity.”
Stacey’s face was inscrutable. Not a muscle in it had moved. But his eyes had grown dark with a kind of shadow. “Maybe,” he said again quietly. “Come on! Let’s go.”
They went down the steps and along the brief board-walk to Stacey’s car, which was parked before the house.
Dinner was at seven, and they were in the living-room at ten minutes to. It was the one admonition Stacey had given Phil on the latter’s arrival the day before. “Do as you please in everything—only be on time at meals,” he had said.
Mr. Carroll was waiting for them, with cocktails ready to pour. He was in a genial mood and nodded appreciatively at the younger men’s promptness. “Pleasure to have to do with people who understand that seven means seven,” he observed. “You wouldn’t believe, Blair, the trouble I used to have with Stacey. He was almost as bad as his sister in his contempt for time.” He poured the cocktails. “Make them myself nowadays,” he explained. “I have profound respect for Parker, but I don’t want to strain his integrity too much. You can’t even trust the men at the club not to rifle one another’s lockers. Not that Parker wouldn’t make a more creditable member than a good many of them.”
They laughed.
“Dare say,” remarked Stacey. “But now this question of being on time,—I can see two sides to it.”
“Two?” his father exclaimed. “Not a bit of it! There’s only one side.”
“No, it’s a matter of two opposing theories of life. One is that you should always be on time so as to avoid inconveniencing one another and wasting energy and having dishes get cold. The other is that you shouldn’t worry too much about promptness or you let time get the upper hand of you and run your life.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Mr. Carroll interrupted, “It will run your life more if you neglect it.”
“Yes, that’s a point for you. I knew an Italian family in Rome, delightful people,—several branches of the family there were—lived all over the city. They were always going places together en masse. But it took them forever to get assembled. Once they stood in the rain in three separate bunches in three distinct and distant parts of Rome because they’d all forgotten at just what time they were to meet and where. No, you’re a slave if you disregard time and a slave if you bow down to it. You’re had either way.”
“Pshaw!” said Mr. Carroll.
“I rather think that there’s a little more to it,” Phil observed quietly. “I think Mr. Carroll’s side is right. It is better to be prompt. But not because you save time that way and are more efficient. Rather because you establish an apparent medium of smoothness to live in, make everything seem permanent, eternal and of value. To have the nine-seven train pull gently out of the Pennsylvania Station at precisely nine-seven gives you a feeling of confidence, a sense that everything’s going to be all right. An illusion, of course, but essential. A lot of bohemian marriages break up just because they don’t have it there, stable and making marriage seem stable.”
Mr. Carroll nodded. “Something in that, maybe,” he observed.
But dinner was announced, and they went in.
“Did you find a house?” Mr. Carroll inquired after a while.
“Yes,” said Phil. “I’m awfully pleased.”
“Where?”
Stacey told him.
Mr. Carroll fairly snorted. “Stacey, I’m ashamed of you!” he cried. “Blair can’t live in a hovel like that. He can’t surround his children with all that coal-dust and noise.”
“I give you my word, Mr. Carroll,” Phil protested, “that it’s a lot better than where we’ve been living. I really like the place. I can run a lawn-mower in the evening.”
But the older man shook his head impatiently. “Now look here!” he said. “This house of mine is three times too big for Stacey and me, especially since Julie married. You bring your wife and children here to live—anyway until you can find something really decent or build if you decide to stay.”
Philip Blair flushed slightly. “I never heard of anything quite so generous as that, sir,” he replied, a trifle unsteadily, “but I can’t possibly accept.” And there was a gentle decision in his voice.
“Well, well, well! I’d have been glad to have you,” said Mr. Carroll, and dropped the subject.
Stacey recognized that his father’s offer was more than ordinarily generous, especially since Mr. Carroll liked to lead his own life. And he would have lived up to it, Stacey knew. He would have tried to crush Phil’s opinions into the mold of his own and he would certainly have been cross if Phil or Catherine were late at meals or showed Bolshevik leanings, but in his own way, and with externals, he would have been both impetuously and consistently generous. He would probably even have given Phil a key to the wine-cellar. All this Stacey understood, and with it his father. But his understanding was intellectual. He should have felt a warm glow, but he did not. The only emotion he felt was a faint sadness at feeling nothing. “Dead!” he muttered to himself. “Dead as they make ’em!”
Yet he would not really have chosen to feel.
At coffee time a friend of Mr. Carroll’s dropped in to play pinochle, and Phil and Stacey went upstairs.
But Stacey was restless. He wanted to see Marian and resented the desire—another bond that he could not shake free of. Moreover, he knew that in Marian’s presence he should dislike her. So the endurance of the desire was doubly exasperating. All this lack of harmony—even of common sense!
“I think I’ll go over to see Marian Latimer,” he said at last to Phil. “Be glad to have you come along. Really, you know.”
“Thanks,” returned Phil, “no. I’m a bit fagged. Quite sincere about it. Run along.”
“I’ll find out first whether she’s in,” Stacey said, and lifted the receiver of the telephone on his desk. They were in his study. “If she isn’t I’ll go to a movie,” he added, while waiting for his number.
He got the house and, after a minute, Marian. She laughed musically in response to his question. “Why, yes, come! Do come!” she said.
Her laughter made him angry—but not with her, with himself. It was not her recognition of her power over him that he minded. It was that power itself.
He walked to her house—a matter of a mile. He never used a motor car nowadays if he could get anywhere without one. Swift walking calmed the persistent fever of his blood.
Mr. and Mrs. Latimer were in the drawing-room, and he stood there for a few minutes, chatting with them.
“Marian is in the library,” said Mr. Latimer presently. “She left word that you were to go up as soon as you came.”
“Ames Price is there, too,” Mrs. Latimer put in quietly.
“All right,” said Stacey, with apparent equanimity. “Thanks.”
But he saw Mr. Latimer flash a sudden glance of anger at his wife, who, however, went on with her knitting calmly.
“So that’s the way the land lies,” Stacey reflected, as he climbed the stairs. “Papa has been told, or, more likely, has found out. Decent of Mrs. Latimer, very!” Nevertheless, he was unhappy.
He knocked at the library door, and Marian called to him to enter.
She was curled up in her favorite arm-chair, and Ames Price was rising from a smaller chair near-by.
Marian gave Stacey a look of mischievous defiance. But he went over and shook hands with her so pleasantly and coolly that her eyes grew suddenly puzzled.
“Hello, Ames,” he said then, shaking his rival’s hand. “Haven’t seen you for years. How’ve you been?”
“First-class!” replied the other, eyeing Stacey doubtfully. “You look pretty fit.”
He was a tall, fair, loosely built man of forty, smooth-shaven and slightly bald. Stacey had known him in a casual way for years, but all that he really knew about him was that he had inherited money, had managed it well enough, was said to be a bit fast—but not excessively, and played an admirable game of golf. So far as Stacey or any one else was aware, there had been (except for golf) no passions in Ames’s life. Stacey felt a little sorry for him, that he should have been overwhelmed now by this one. Marian would make him uncomfortable. She would demand a great variety of emotions of him.
But, in spite of himself, Stacey also felt a hot jealousy. By Jove, Marian was beautiful!
“I suppose,” said Ames, with proper politeness, “that you must have had a pretty rough time in France. You were over the deuce of a while. I didn’t get across myself—division just about to sail when the Armistice came along.”
There was a touch of constraint in his tone. Stacey understood it at once. It was as though Ames had said: “You come back a hero. What chance have I got against you?”
“Oh, well,” Stacey returned, pleasantly enough, “that’s all done with now. Here we all are again. There’s no change in anything, really.”
He glanced at Marian. She was surveying the situation distantly, with a faint amused smile. Stacey’s own sensations beneath his calm demeanor were turbulent and mixed. He desired Marian keenly, hated to let her go, yet felt an antagonism for her that his desire increased rather than diminished. He was jealous of Ames, yet not in the least hostile toward him,—almost kindly, in fact.
“Going to build houses again?” Ames asked.
Stacey considered him for a moment, then Marian, and in that moment wrenched himself free.
“No,” he said, “I believe I’ll go away—travel. Funny thing, but a long stretch of the war-stuff turns a man into a rather solitary animal. Maybe it’s the noise of the guns that’s shut him off for so long from companionship.”
He was not really thinking, except vaguely, of leaving Vernon, and had spoken principally to reassure Ames; for which uncharacteristically benevolent act he was immediately rewarded. The other man’s face relaxed from anxiety into an expression so blissful as to be silly. In spite of his conflicting emotions, Stacey could hardly keep from laughing.
“We shall all be awfully sorry to have you go, Stacey,” said Marian gently. “I shall, especially.”
This might be directed at Ames (Marian was certain to spend a great deal of time in hurting Ames), but Stacey did not think it was. For it was a simple remark, simply phrased. And Marian sat there, quiet, carved, thinking no doubt that Stacey liked her best that way.
Well, he did.
Before long he rose to go. He would have liked to remain and look at Marian, but he had a well developed sense of fair play. Let Ames be happy! And deeper than this was the feeling that since he, Stacey, had decided for freedom he had better begin to act on the decision at once. That was it—act! do something! It was the only release from everything.
But when he rose Marian rose too, and accompanied him out into the hall, and closed the door behind her. Ames did not seem to mind. When Marian excused herself his rather vacuous face was as radiant as before. What more natural than that a girl should find it fitting to say good-bye to an outgrown lover of her early youth?
Ames would not, perhaps, have been so calm about it had he witnessed the setting and details. For outside the door Marian paused only for an instant to look up at Stacey, then, with a gesture of her hand to him, hurried down the hall a few yards, stopped abruptly at a door that opened off from it, turned the knob gently, and, giving first one swift glance up and down the hall, pulled Stacey a little way into the room beyond.
He gazed around him quickly. There was no light save that which came from the hall. It was Marian’s bedroom.
He turned on her and seized her wrists, his heart beating violently. But his hostility rose, wave for wave, with his passion. What a trick to play on him! Deliberate! Deliberate!
But she stood there, close to him, perfectly still, looking up into his eyes. The corners of her mouth trembled a little.
They kissed, madly.
“Good-bye, Stacey,” she murmured faintly, when he had released her. “Don’t think I was—trying to hold you. I wasn’t. I only wanted to say good-bye—like this. I think you’re—right—and I won’t hate you—any more than I can help. Good-bye!” And, with another swift glance up and down, she drew him back into the hall.
But when she was already half way to the library door she turned and came back a step or two. Her eyes were wet, but her mouth had curved into a mischievous smile.
“Poor Ames!” she said, and was gone.
Stacey managed to leave the house without seeing either Mr. or Mrs. Latimer. He walked away swiftly. And when the confusion of his senses wore off he began to see into things a little more deeply than before. He saw his feeling toward Marian as it really was and as, he perceived, Marian had understood it—animal desire and love of beauty. Desire was a bond. It hurt to have it go. Stacey felt a painful emptiness, as though he had torn something violently from his heart. Yet he also felt a kind of exultation.