It occurred to Stacey, however, that he had spent more than he could afford lately and had nothing with which to go on his travels. And this seemed an excellent excuse for remaining at home. But he presently recollected that on one War Christmas his father had made him a gift of Liberty bonds. He sold one, with a sense of resignation. He did not feel irony in the ease with which he could solve all financial difficulties, for the idea of personal virtue, asceticism, was absent from his mind. He was sending all that money to Vienna because he wanted to send it, not because he felt he ought to; he kept out two hundred dollars a month because he wanted them; and he sold a thousand-dollar bond now simply because if he was to go on a journey he needed money. It is much more difficult to understand why he was going on a journey at all. He was not affectionate enough to be going simply because Mrs. Latimer had asked him to. And one can hardly take seriously the reason he gave his sister, Julie.
He drove around to her house the afternoon before his departure, and on his way caught sight of Irene Loeffler walking briskly toward him and signalling violently. He waved his hat, but dashed by her in a burst of speed.
“You know, Julie,” he said, a few minutes later, sprawling on the davenport in his sister’s living-room, “it’s all due to you that I’m going away.”
“To me!”
“Absolutely! You lure me to your house, and then you turn an unscrupulous woman loose on me, and she makes my life unbearable, and I—”
“Who?” cried Julie, her eyes dancing.
“Who?” Stacey returned. “Who but Irene?”
Julie giggled. “Wh-what in the world has Irene done to you?” she demanded.
He sat up straight and gazed at his sister. “Jul-ia,” he said, “you know me to be modest, you know how little I esteem my personal charm, caring more for simple things such as goodness and—”
“Oh, yes,” Julie interrupted, “I know all that! I want to hear about Irene.”
“Therefore,” he continued, “when, from never having seen the lady at all, I began to see her almost daily, and, when I didn’t see her, to get invitations to functions given by her or functions at which she was to be present, it was long before I suspected purpose in all this. But, Julie, though modest I am not a fool. Things have now reached such a point that I cannot take a walk in the park or motor anywhere without meeting Irene. And I tell you there is evil design in all this, and I’m going away.” Julie was giggling increasingly. “Only five minutes ago I evaded her—but not for long. My senses are growing as abnormally acute as those of Roderick Usher in Poe’s story.” He paused and listened apprehensively. “And, in his words, ‘I tell you that she now stands without the door!’?”
At this moment the door bell did, indeed, ring. Stacey sprang up.
“You see? Good-bye, Julie! I’m going out the back way,” he concluded, and fled.
As for Julie, she threw herself down on the davenport and laughed helplessly, in which position Irene presently found her.
No one seeing Stacey with his sister could have reconciled him with the Stacey who set himself against society and flew into passions at his impotence to destroy. Yet there was no pose in his attitude toward her. Pose demands a marked consciousness of self, and this he was assuredly without. He behaved in that way because he felt that way when he was with Julie, which was not so very often; and he was obscurely grateful to her for making him feel so. He liked his sister better than in the old days. She had an ingenuous manner that concealed a rich sense of humor, and he was inclined to think that this was characteristic of her attitude toward all things, that, though her surface simplicity was unassumed, beneath it lay, not indeed a deliberate philosophy, but a mature apprehension of life. But he did not waste much thought on analysis of Julie; he accepted her as a pleasant fact.
Stacey, then, set off for New York the next afternoon. Julie was at the train to bid him good-bye, and so was Jimmy Prout, who tossed a book into his brother-in-law’s lap, and sat down opposite him. Stacey considered Jimmy’s agreeable face. Jimmy did no one any harm; on the contrary, he did people good by being such a companionable person. Why, thought Stacey, couldn’t he be like Jimmy? If turbulence of mind solved anything, got one anywhere, there would be something to say for it; since it didn’t, since it led only to impotent fuming, what was the use of it? But, even at the moment of putting the question to himself, Stacey was disconsolately aware that he might as well ask what was the use of the tides, since they only moved back and forth.
“You know, Stacey,” Julie was saying, “I’m over thirty, but every time I see any one off on the train I feel thirteen. I feel a positively aching desire to go too.”
“Come on along,” he returned. “Nobody I’d like better to have with me.”
“That’s nice of you, Stacey,” she said gratefully. “I would. I’d come just this way, without a thing, if it weren’t for Junior—he’s having whooping-cough. I’ve always wanted to do something impetuous like that.”
“Have you now?” asked Stacey, mildly surprised.
But Julie, who was sitting next the window of her brother’s section, suddenly gasped and burst into laughter. “Oh, Jimmy, Stacey, please, please, help me stop!” she cried, in a smothered voice, pressing her handkerchief against her mouth. “Oh, she mustn’t see me in this state!”
“Who mustn’t?” demanded her husband.
“I-Irene Loeffler. She—she’s come to see Stacey off,” Julie stammered weakly. “She’ll be in the car in a moment. Oh, dear!”
Jimmy laughed, too, and Julie made a tremendous effort at self-control, as Irene strode briskly down the car and paused beside them. She held a book in her hand.
“Hello!” she said abruptly. “Who’s going away?”
“I am,” and “he is,” returned Stacey and Jimmy, who had risen politely.
“That so? Where you going? Sit down! Sit down!”
“New York first,” Stacey answered cautiously.
Irene dropped into the seat beside Jimmy and crossed her legs. “I was looking for Effie Prince,” she remarked casually. “Supposed to be leaving on this train. Most likely couldn’t get her trunks packed in time. Never can. Here! You take the book I brought for her.”
“Thanks,” said Stacey. “Then you’re not going away? Sorry! I hoped you were when I saw you.”
The girl flushed faintly at this, but her embarrassment was covered by Julie, who gave a desperate choking cough.
“Here!” said her husband gravely. “Take another pastille, Julie,” and he drew a box from his pocket. “It’s that kid of ours,” he explained. “Given her whooping-cough—not a doubt of it. You’ll both have it now, probably.”
But the conductor was calling “All Aboard,” and the three departed hastily, Irene giving Stacey a mannish grip of the hand.
Stacey waved at them through the window, then stretched out in his seat and picked up Irene’s book. He laughed suddenly. It was “Les Chansons de Bilitis.”
It was, anyway, an amusing departure, and Stacey felt in quite a good humor.
But it was not a prelude to an amusing trip. Stacey wandered from city to city drearily. Except for being larger, they were no worse than Vernon; if they had been, they might have seemed less unbearable. They were merely empty—one after the other; empty places inhabited by empty people. New York sickened him. It wallowed in wealth, dazzled the eyes with it; rugs, imported motor cars, china, lights, theatres, food, more food,—there was an absorbed attempt to minister to every demand of the most exacting body, with, so far as Stacey could see, not a thought behind it all. The “Follies” were typical—gorgeous color, selected girls, riot of noise—not a word spoken that could reach beyond the intelligence of a sub-normal child. Stacey yawned through the show, to the justifiable annoyance of his companion, an old college friend, who had paid God knew what for the tickets. A hundred magazines stared at Stacey from the subway book-stalls, with a hundred pictures of sweet American girls on their covers, and who could tell how many hundred stories of thwarted Bolshevik plots among the advertisements inside?
Stacey fled to Philadelphia, thence to Baltimore, then up to Boston. He went to dinners and dances and dinner-dances in one place and another. Débutantes a little nakeder and bolder than he remembered them in past years. Quite in keeping with everything else. The whole country singing one vast jazz song of praise to the body, sole preoccupation how to gratify every instinct it possessed. It was callousness carried further than was credible, since across the ocean were thousands who, too, were thinking only about their bodies—perforce, being unable to get sufficient food and clothes to keep them alive.
He gazed at it all with bitter aloofness. What could he do about it? What could any one do about a world like this? There was a desolate emptiness in his heart that inhibited even rage. He longed for annihilation, the absolute eternal extinction of self. He had certainly altered in these last months. Even he, who tried not to think of himself, could not help perceiving this. His reactions were more jerky, disconnected with any former reactions, incoherent. He was not a strong scornful soul, detached and looking at everything in one manner; he was a series of sterile unrelated emotions, with the only continuous theme that ran through them all, disgust.
He gave it up at last and returned to Vernon—why, he could not have explained. He wrote no one that he was coming.
It was a morning in early December when he got back. Snow was thick on the city. The taxi that Stacey hired splashed through slush in the centre of town and slewed madly, despite its chains, on the boulevard leading to the Carroll house.
Stacey flung himself on the couch in his study and presently fell asleep. He did not wake until Parker knocked at the door to call him to luncheon. Two hours of unconsciousness. Well, that was so much gained, anyway.
He spent as many hours of the afternoon as he could in bathing and dressing, then at last left the house and tramped away through the snow. He had no objective in mind, but after a while, finding himself near Philip Blair’s house, went up the steps to it and rang the bell.
Catherine opened the door. At first he thought that she looked wan and tired; but she smiled with pleasure at sight of him, and the impression vanished.
“I’m awfully glad you’re back, Stacey,” she said. “Phil was saying last night that it seemed years you’d been away. Come in. Marian—Mrs. Price—is here.”
He felt the faintest touch of surprise,—no more, for he was almost done with correlating facts. His mind no longer worked that way. He was rapidly growing unable to see people in relation to one another, and so to find one relation natural, another curious. Unity was beginning to desert his impressions. Each of them seemed to come separately.
Thus he was scarcely at all surprised when, at sight of Marian, whom he had nearly forgotten, his old passion for her leaped up like sudden flame. He shook her hand, with a word or two of casual greeting, but his eyes met hers electrically. He made no ef............