Stacey threw himself into work with a cold vigor that had in it nothing of fad or impulse. He did not find, as he had feared he might, that he had forgotten much. Everything came back to him at once; it had all been there, tucked away, neglected, within him. Neither did he chafe at the long regular hours he kept, nor feel them burdensome. In the old days he had perhaps been a little lazy; it had been hard for him on arriving at the office not to waste time—over a newspaper or a book-catalogue or anything that presented itself—before actually beginning his work; he had crept into work as a swimmer into cold water. Now there was no indolence about him; the instant he sat down at his desk he turned his mind on the problems before him; and, swiftly, intelligently, with intense concentration, he was soon accomplishing twice as much as any other man in the office. Indeed, less from a desire to be always busy than from a kind of impatient thoroughness, dislike of slovenliness, he often spent hours on drawings that he might have turned over to draftsmen. But, though he was extremely interested in his work, there was no such zest in it for him as he had once felt. Formerly he had romanticized it, had seen it all as something glowing and fine. Now it was only rarely that he experienced a little lifting sense of loveliness. This was when loveliness was really there to perceive. Mr. Parkins, who was something of a dreamer and himself inclined to waste time, was amazed. He had difficulty in supplying Stacey with enough to do.
“Look here!” he said, before Stacey had been back a month. “What the devil’s come over you? You’re insatiable! You turn the work out as though it were arithmetic.” And he smiled in his uncertain reflective way.
“So it is, nine-tenths of it,—as unemotional as arithmetic. Nothing but concentration needed most of the time. Restful. A mistake to use your soul when you don’t have to.”
The architect sat down on the edge of Stacey’s desk. “But,” he suggested tentatively, “you don’t feel your old delight in it? Or do you?”
“When there’s any occasion,” said Stacey. “There, for instance.” And he pulled from a mass of papers a drawing of a detail—a wrought-iron balcony for a window. His eyes showed pleasure.
“Yes. By Jove, yes! That is good Stacey! Fine and—sure at the same time. You’re better than you used to be. For Henderson’s house? Pity it’s so sort of wasted. I mean, that it won’t be appreciated.”
“Oh, I don’t feel that,” Stacey replied. “I feel that it’s worth while enough to do anything good, even a molding for a room,—I don’t know why.”
Mr. Parkins looked surprised. “Well, that’s the right way to feel, of course. There’s one thing certain,” he added, getting up. “You go into the firm the first of the month. And there’s no favoritism about that, either.”
“All right,” said Stacey. “Thanks. It’s awfully good of you.” And he went to work again.
What Mr. Parkins had said was true. Stacey was a better architect than formerly. He was still affectionately interested in detail, because that interest had always been a part of him, and he knew enough now to understand calmly that nothing in one ever vanished; but he saw things in a larger, more solid way than once.
Hammond, a younger man who was put under Stacey’s guidance, questioned him about Stacey’s preliminary sketch for a competition. It was of a great stone bridge that was to cross both branches of the river in the heart of the railway and warehouse section.
“Don’t you think it’s maybe a little—oh, well, grim, Carroll?” asked Hammond, puzzled.
“Good Lord! man,” said Stacey, “think where it is—mud, noise, confusion!”
“Well, that’s just it. Oughtn’t one to brighten the place up a little?”
Stacey shook his head. “I’m no damned beauty-doctor. Just the facts—the right ones—in the best way.”
Stacey played tennis hard for an hour every afternoon when he had finished work; for his strong body craved exercise. But his mind did not crave companionship. He mingled with only a few people, and most of these doubtless resented his manner as seeming hard and cold. In this they were wrong. Stacey was merely aloof. He was not superior, judging these people adversely; he was simply not letting them in—or himself into them. He had a feeling that this world of personal relationships was too rich. It was more like a sea. One might be swept away futilely on it. Toward those whom he did admit as companions—and they were sometimes the unlikeliest people—he was prodigal of interest, in his own different way as altruistic as Mrs. Latimer.
For his hasty luncheon Stacey frequented a small cheap restaurant near-by. So, also, did Jack Edwards, who had been commander of the local American Legion post at the time Stacey had set it in a turmoil, but was so no longer, having been succeeded by some one less incongruously radical. The two fell into the habit of sitting down at table together for their fifteen-minute meal, and Stacey found himself at once attracted by the other man. Something in his firm lined face—perhaps the odd expression of the brown eyes—hinted at a tortured courageous personality. Stacey was friendly from the first. Edwards, on the other hand, was in the beginning obviously suspicious. But he thawed gradually, and the two became friends, united by some deep, almost unrecognized resemblance between them. Yet for a long time their talk was hardly more than casual comment on events.
“What do you do after lunch?” asked Stacey one June day, as they pushed back their chairs and rose. “You must surely take more time off than this before going back to work.”
“Oh,” the other replied, “I generally stroll around for twenty minutes—down to the river sometimes.”
“Come up to my office and smoke a cigarette, won’t you? There’ll be no one there for half an hour yet.”
“Don’t care if I do.” And the two men paid their checks and went out together, Stacey walking slowly, since Edwards limped badly on account of his wounded leg.
In Stacey’s room they sat down, with the littered desk between them, and smoked silently for some minutes. Stacey had his feet up against the side of an open drawer, but suddenly he swung them down and turned to face his friend.
“Edwards,” he demanded abruptly, “what do you think of the war, anyway?”
The muscles of the other man’s rather stern face contracted slightly. “Think of it?” he returned. “I don’t think of it. I don’t want to. Once in a while I dream.”
Stacey considered him with grim comprehension. From almost any one else the remark would have sounded melodramatic. Edwards made it quite sincerely, with no thought of effect. When the raw black-and-white stuff of melodrama became truth—that was horrible. Stacey shivered. But after a little he returned to it. “Yes, but I mean: do you feel now that it was all bad, all rotten selfish commercialism from the very beginning? Oh, you’ve every right to! I don’t blame you and your people if you do. But do you?”
“We’ve been tricked,” Edwards replied bitterly, “duped! And I’ll take that point of view—the one you ask me if I have—publicly as long as I live. It’s the only way for me and mine to fight you and yours. Just as the way for your side to fight is to assert that the war was noble. But—it’s not so simple. No, I don’t think that.”
“No more do I!” cried Stacey. “I hate the war! It brought out everything rotten that lay hidden in men. But—some hundreds of thousands of young men did go into it nobly, and to just that extent it was a decent war. They’re mostly dead now—worse luck to the world!—and a good many of those that aren’t are turned beastly by what they lived through. But . . .” He paused. A kind of dark light smoldered in his eyes.
“There was courage,” said Edwards in a deep voice. “My God! there was courage! Not your romantic high-adventure sort, but the sort that could live through mud and intensive shelling and still push men on, afterward, to advance. But, oh, Christ! the wasted lives in the Argonne!—thrown away through sheer incompetence! Your people did that!”
“And even so,” said Stacey somberly, “you didn’t see the Somme.” Suddenly the dull glow in his eyes rose to a flame. He struck the desk with his clenched fist. “The thing that gets me, Edwards,” he burst out, “is these beastly cheap editors of weeklies sitting up and writing pertly about the war as if it had been all a game of grab, nothing decent! Damn them! Petty complacent asses! What do they know about it? What do they know about physical courage—or any other kind? Have they suffered? Have they fought for ideals and been given dung? The Intellectuals, they call themselves! An honest protester like Debs, all right, I’ll respect him. But these vulgar underbred egotists—faugh! The only ones I hate as much are the others who sit up and write about how everything was first-rate—bully war—noble—good clearly coming out of it!” He ceased, panting with rage.
“Don’t hate so, Carroll,” said Edwards slowly. “Where’s the good?”
Stacey drew his hand across his forehead. “You’re right,” he returned. “It’s idiotic! I thought I’d learned better. And,” he added, laughing shortly, “fancy wasting emotion on that tribe!”
He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated, as though poisoned, and he was rather ashamed. It was a flash out of an earlier side of him.
For Stacey was like a fabric that was being woven together steadily out of varied strands. But here and there the woof was faulty; the pattern was broken; threads stuck out loosely.
But moments of hate such as this were rare. Generally he was cool enough—cooler and perhaps more tolerant than Edwards, who always in general talk showed himself bitterly conscious of the “class struggle.” Edwards came up to the office for a few minutes after luncheon nearly every day now, and as long as the two men talked personally or of concrete subjects he forgot his obsession—or, rather, seemed almost irately unable to apply it in any way to Stacey; but at the least broadening of the conversation it emerged, a sullen thing.
“Come out to dinner with us some evening, will you? To-night, if you like,” Stacey suggested once.
“No,” said Edwards shortly.
Stacey laughed. “Why not? Bound to have no dealings with the devil or any of his allies? Better come. You’d like my father. You’d fight with him, but you’d like him.”
“I don’t want to,” said Edwards. “I don’t want to like any of your crew. It’s their likableness that I resent. Of course they’re likable. Why shouldn’t they be? They’ve leisure and all the appurtenances essential to becoming so. We’ve got to fight them—you, as class against class.”
“I see. Sentiment must be kept out. No fraternizing in the trenches.”
Edwards flushed. “You’re too rotten clever, Carroll,” he replied resentfully. “It’s easy for you to make me appear in the wrong.”
“No,” said Stacey, “I simply fancy you&r............