Stacey looked at it inquiringly, almost as though it were new to him. And in a sense it was new; for he did not feel toward it in any way that he had felt before. He saw the business buildings standing2 angularly against the blue sky, the handsome residences of varied3 architecture, the wide streets that were rivers of motor cars, and he noted4, as often, that esthetically the city was faulty and aspiring5, and that socially it was energetic and confident. He received again an impression of people striving relentlessly6 to attain7 certain things and clinging to them desperately8 when attained9. But he did not feel for these characteristics either admiration10 or disapproval11, affection or distaste. What he did feel was curiosity, because it seemed to him that he knew very little about Vernon really, and an odd touch of pity. For the first time it struck him as rather pathetic to care so hard about motor cars and bathrooms and servants. Here were wealthy men riding triumphantly12 in imported Rolls-Royces, and poor men riding in Fords, or walking, and hating the rich men. What a to-do! Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped! Stacey supposed. Economics were the order of the day.
Presently he reached his father’s house. “Hello, Parker,” he said to the surprised servant who opened the door. “I’m back, you see,—and without so much as sending a wire. How are you? Mr. Carroll well? Take this bag up to my room for me, will you, please? I certainly do need a bath. Oh, yes, I’ve had lunch, thanks.”
An hour later he strolled down to the dining-room for a whiskey and soda14, then, glass in hand, into the library. And there, sitting with a book in a high-backed chair, was Catherine.
“Why, Catherine!” Stacey exclaimed, going toward her quickly and holding out his hand.
She had risen swiftly, as surprised as he. She was wearing a black dress, but with a wide pointed15 collar of white lace at her bare throat. She looked firm and grave and slender.
“Well, isn’t this jolly?” he said, shaking her hand cordially. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t you get my last letter?” she asked, with some embarrassment16. “I think your father wrote you, too.”
“I did get your letter and one from father,” he replied, “just before I left Pickens, but, to tell you the truth, I’ve brought them back unopened in my bag. I thought it would be so much nicer to talk with you both. It sounds rude and unappreciative, but I didn’t mean it that way.” She was still gazing at him, and he saw that she was distressed17 about something and as shy as ever. “Sit down, do!” he said.
She obeyed. “You see,” she began slowly, “I didn’t think you’d be back yet. And a little while ago, when the rent period on our house was up, your father said—he’s been so awfully18 kind to us always—and he said—”
“Catherine,” Stacey interrupted, “it’s oppressive to see any one with as much to say as you always have, so unable to say it.” (She bit her lip.) “My father said: ‘I insist on your coming to live here. It’s a big place and I need a housekeeper19.’?”
But, though he laughed, Stacey did not feel mirthful. He had a sudden perception of how lonely his father had been, how lonely Catherine had been.
“Yes,” she returned, “that was what he said. And I was weak enough to accept, though I knew it was only kindness on his part. But I was going away when you came back, Stacey.”
“Oh,” he remarked, “you were!”
Again she bit her lip. “I mean,” she added quickly, “that we might have been in your way and—”
“Catherine,” said Stacey, getting up and standing beside her, “I think your being here is delightful20. I should feel very badly if you went away. There’s my hand on it.”
She looked at him in a puzzled manner and thanked him, rather unsteadily, because he had been so cordial. A little of her shyness had vanished when he sat down again.
“You came back,” she said.
He nodded. “I’d ridden everywhere there was to ride; so all at once I decided21 I’d come back to the world.” And he became silent. “Where are the boys?” he demanded suddenly.
“At school,” she replied, “but it’s four now. They’ll be here any minute.”
And only a little later they did come in. Jack22 was unrestrained from the first, but Carter, probably coached by his mother, was impressively correct until he caught sight of Stacey and threw reserve to the winds.
The library echoed with noise and there was a touch of color in Catherine’s cheeks when at five o’clock Mr. Carroll opened the door of the room and stood at the threshold, looking in.
“Well, son!” he exclaimed.
Stacey sprang up. “Surprise party, dad!” he remarked, shaking his father’s hand. “Quite a good one, don’t you think?”
“I should say so!” Mr. Carroll replied, while Catherine quieted the boys and made them sit beside her with a book. “How was everything down there? Did you ride over that Garett Creek23 path you and I found once?”
“Yes,” said Stacey, “there and everywhere else.”
After the initial burst of cordiality they fell silent, finding little to say to each other. How estranged24 they were! Stacey thought. The murmur25 of the children’s voices and the subdued26 sound of Catherine’s words explaining a story were comforting—to Stacey certainly, to his father almost as certainly—filling in the emptiness.
Mr. Carroll called Jack to him—Jack seemed to be his favorite—and joked with the child much more naturally than he could joke with Stacey. As for Stacey, he talked with Catherine and Carter.
After a while Catherine announced to the boys that it was half-past five and they must go wash and get ready for dinner.
“Look here, Catherine!” remarked Mr. Carroll. “Do let them eat with us to-night.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said to them, “do as mother says,” and they went out slowly.
“No, please!” she replied to Mr. Carroll. “It’s awfully—good of you, but I’m sure it’s better this way.”
Mr. Carroll frowned. “Idea of Catherine’s,” he said, appealing to his son. “Boys must eat at six—an hour ahead of us. I’d like to have them at table with me. Can’t you do anything about it?”
Catherine was shy but firm. “I’d rather they wouldn’t, please,” she said.
Stacey laughed. “Lord! no, I can’t do anything about it!” he returned. “You have my full moral support, but what’s the use? Catherine’s the Rock of Gibraltar.”
His father laughed with him and spread out his hands in surrender. Perhaps he rather liked being successfully opposed. At any rate, there was less constraint28 between him and Stacey after this. If in no other way, Stacey thought, they could at least be united in a league of men against women. When Catherine went down to sit at table while her sons ate, the two men talked quite freely, though chiefly of her.
“You don’t mind my asking her and the boys to come over here?” Mr. Carroll asked apologetically.
Stacey was touched. “Good heavens, no!” he exclaimed. “It’s jolly for us and better for them. It was awfully good of you, sir.”
“No, no!” said his father gruffly. “Purely selfish. Brightens the house up. Long time since there were children here. You and Julie would grow up, confound you!” he added wrathfully.
Stacey laughed a little at this. “Couldn’t help it, dad,” he replied. “I regret it as much as you do.”
“Fine girl, Catherine!” Mr. Carroll went on, after a moment. “I like her honesty and lack of nonsense. Some women would have refused to come because damned impertinent people might talk. They will, I suppose, having the kind of minds they’ve got.”
Stacey opened his eyes wide. “I never thought of that,” he said. “But I should say,” he added, “that if they do, why, let them.”
So Stacey and his father were also incongruously united in a revolutionary league against society.
“But do you know what Catherine does, confound her!” Mr. Carroll added. “Insists on paying me the same amount as it cost her to live in that other house! Says she won’t stay otherwise!” He laughed, half admiringly, half in exasperation30.
Stacey enjoyed himself, in a mixed way, at dinner. Indeed, he was never really bored. He had loved life once and hated it later. Indifference31 was impossible to him, however much his attitude toward things altered. He looked across the table at Catherine, studying her firm grave face over which her grief had lowered an intangible something like a veil, an expression of reserve, sweetness and knowledge. At bottom Stacey was rather afraid of Catherine. And, while conversation ran on well enough, he studied his father’s face, too. What an odd trio they made! he thought. And he noted that his father’s expression was stern to harshness when Mr. Carroll talked of general subjects such as the present Democratic administration or Article X of the League of Nations, but softened32 when he spoke33 to Stacey or Catherine of individual things or people.
Just at present he was talking about the state of the whole country, and, as the subject was especially large, he looked especially fierce, his white eyebrows34 meeting in a frown above his fine nose.
“The country’s had enough of Wilson and his policies,” he was saying. “You can go way back to his action in knuckling35 down to the Brotherhood36 of Locomotive Engineers if you want to get at the start of the whole trouble. A toady37! A trimmer! A schoolmaster! Yes, sir! The world has taken Wilson’s measure pretty well by now.” Mr. Carroll drank a swallow of claret, then set his glass down with a bump. “Then the Armistice38!” he burst out again. “Look at that! All Wilson with his idiotic39 Fourteen Points and his ‘Peace without Victory!’ There we had the Germans on the run. Two weeks’ time—a month—and our boys and the Allies would have marched into Berlin, and then we’d have known who won the war.”
Mr. Carroll did not stop here by any means. He continued, sweeping40 along like a surf-rider on the flood of his indictments41.
But Stacey lost track. He remembered, as something out of a dim different past, that he had countered this same argument in regard to the Armistice at dinner that first night of his return, and that he had then apparently42 convinced his father. However, this awakened43 no antagonism44 in Stacey. He merely felt amused. Somehow, in some way not yet clear to himself, he had most certainly changed. He was recalled to the present by the vigor45 with which his father pronounced the word “Bolshevism.”
“That’s the whole trouble—Bolshevism! The country’s rotten with it, and will be until we get a sane46 business administration and put labor47 and radicalism48 in their place.”
Mr. Carroll was carving49 a chicken at the time—he scorned effeminate households where the carving was done in the butler’s pantry—and he thrust the fork deep down across the breast-bone of the chicken as though he were impaling50 Lenin, Gompers, Haywood, and Daniels all at once.
But a moment later, and quite instinctively51, he laid the liver and the heart beside a drumstick on Stacey’s plate; and at this Stacey was touched, for he knew that, like himself, his father had retained a boyish love of the giblets. Often he had seen his father on looking through the ice-box of a Sunday night turn around and hold out with a triumphant13 smile a plate of chicken where reposed52, brown, crisp and indigestible, a cold gizzard and perhaps a heart.
So: “I think you are very likely right, sir,” said Stacey.
As a matter of fact, it cost him little to say this; for he found himself quite without interest in Bolshevism, the labor problem, or the Democratic maladministration.
As for Mr. Carroll, he gave his son a pleased, rather surprised smile, and presently dropped all problems. But Catherine looked across at Stacey with a strange startled expression.
After dinner they went into the library and Catherine poured coffee.
“I wish, Catherine,” Stacey exclaimed, with a touch of exasperation, “that you wouldn’t glance at me in such a confoundedly apprehensive53 way, as though you were afraid I might object to your pouring coffee here! I like it. How many times must I tell you?”
“Very well, Stacey, I’ll try to be bold,” she replied, a faint smile relieving the gravity of her face.
Mr. Carroll laughed approvingly. “You’re going to be a great help to me, son,” he said.
But Parker came in to tell Mr. Carroll that Long Distance was calling him on the ’phone; so Stacey and Catherine were left by themselves for a few minutes.
“Any one not knowing my father well might think, to hear him talk of Bolshevism and labor, that he was harsh,” Stacey observed. “He’s not. He’s not even bigoted54, really.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s not!” Catherine exclaimed. “He’s the kindest man I’ve ever known.”
“Yes. You see, partly it’s because he himself has worked all his life like three ordinary men and, conceding the system, has made his fortune honestly. It isn’t merely that he wants to hold what he’s acquired. It’s rather that unconsciously he feels any attack on the system as an attack on his own integrity.” Stacey paused, with a frown. “It’s something even more than that,” he continued slowly. “If a man has all his life played the game vigorously and loyally according to the rules, he doesn’t at sixty-one want to be told that the rules were all wrong. That would be knocking everything from under him. Father has to believe that what is is right, or where would he be? Right and wrong mean a great deal to him—he’s old-fashioned in that. And then, I must say, it is a slovenly55 world at present for a man with clean-cut ideas to look out on. A bedraggled tattered56 place, with cocky young chaps sitting in literary offices and blithely57 announcing every week that something else is wrong with things in general. Not that there isn’t enough that’s wrong, and the more truth that’s told about it, the better; but a lot of the complaining is either whining58 or just rotten cleverness. Fancy being clever about a cyclone—or the Judgment59 Day!” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Father’s an out-and-out idealist,” Stacey concluded. “He’s got to believe passionately60 in something, and he’s too old to believe in something new. Besides, nothing new is clearly presented to one.”
“Yes,” Catherine said, “that is very clear and fair, Stacey.” But the look that her dark eyes gave him was full of perplexity.
“Oh,” he observed lightly, “I know! You think I’m a reformed character. Not a bit of it! ‘Nothing of me that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’?” He laughed ironically.
And Catherine was much too shy, as he knew she would be, to pursue the subject.
When later he went upstairs he stood for a long time before the open window of his study. “It can’t be done,” he said to himself at last. “You can’t look at the world as a whole and stay sane. Because there isn’t any such world. That’s a nightmare of ogre words. Bolshevism, labor problem, greed, reaction,—they’re merely words. All that there truly is is a lot of puny61 little men like myself, dreaming dreams—mostly bad ones.”
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1
gaily
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| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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aspiring
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| adj.有志气的；有抱负的；高耸的v.渴望；追求 | |
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relentlessly
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| adv.不屈不挠地；残酷地；不间断 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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disapproval
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| n.反对，不赞成 | |
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triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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soda
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| n.苏打水；汽水 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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estranged
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| adj.疏远的，分离的 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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unison
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| n.步调一致，行动一致 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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knuckling
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| n.突球v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的现在分词 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
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brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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toady
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| v.奉承；n.谄媚者，马屁精 | |
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armistice
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| n.休战，停战协定 | |
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idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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indictments
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| n.（制度、社会等的）衰败迹象( indictment的名词复数 )；刑事起诉书；公诉书；控告 | |
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42
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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43
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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vigor
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| n.活力，精力，元气 | |
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sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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47
labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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48
radicalism
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| n. 急进主义, 根本的改革主义 | |
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49
carving
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| n.雕刻品，雕花 | |
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50
impaling
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| 钉在尖桩上( impale的现在分词 ) | |
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51
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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52
reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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53
apprehensive
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| adj.担心的，恐惧的，善于领会的 | |
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54
bigoted
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| adj.固执己见的，心胸狭窄的 | |
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55
slovenly
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| adj.懒散的，不整齐的，邋遢的 | |
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56
tattered
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| adj.破旧的，衣衫破的 | |
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57
blithely
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| adv.欢乐地，快活地，无挂虑地 | |
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58
whining
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| n. 抱怨，牢骚 v. 哭诉，发牢骚 | |
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59
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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60
passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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61
puny
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| adj.微不足道的，弱小的 | |
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