Under foot were wet snow and ice. Stacey slipped again and again. But he tore on, as though there were some definite place he must get to, though, indeed, had he been capable of reflection, he would have perceived the reverse to be true.
He reached the boulevard and turned into it, ploughing along at a tremendous pace in the direction of his home. But presently some small capacity for thought did return to him, and he became aware that he most certainly did not want to go home. He began to walk less rapidly, and at last stopped altogether, bewildered, and looked about him, not knowing what to do.
It was only five o’clock, but the early winter dusk was already darkening the air, and lights were beginning to shine out in the windows of houses. Stacey stood beneath one of the brilliant clusters of electric globes with which the city government had adorned the boulevard, and stared in front of him. But he was not really reflecting; his mind was simply at a deadlock between the two opposing forces that usurped it. Some new factor, however slight, must intervene before he could act.
The factor revealed itself externally as a high-powered racing car, which drew up, throbbing, at the curb, with a grinding of suddenly applied brakes and a spatter of slush.
“Hello, Carroll!” called the young man who was driving it. “Pretty nasty under foot. Can I give you a lift?” He reached over and flung open the door of the car.
Stacey looked up, with a start. His mind cleared swiftly. The pause before he was able to reply was hardly perceptible. “Oh, hello, Whittaker!” he said, in quite a natural voice. “Thanks.” He rested one foot on the step of the car and frowned. “The only thing is that I don’t know where I want to go. I was just trying to make up my mind.”
The young man at the wheel laughed. He was a big fellow, appearing still bigger because of the enormous fur coat he wore, and had a ruddy face, with pleasant eyes and a hard mouth. He looked like a commercial traveller come into a fortune. “Well,” he said, “that does make it a bit difficult, don’t it? Anyhow, hop in! You certainly don’t want to stick around where you are.”
Stacey obeyed, slamming the door after him, and sat down beside Whittaker, who started the car off slowly along the boulevard.
The young man was of the type known in current slang as “hard boiled.” This quality, however, was not the result of his service in France—he had been a lieutenant of infantry in a different division from Stacey’s. The war had not had the slightest effect on Whittaker. He had always been “hard boiled,” even before the term existed.
“I don’t want to go home,” Stacey explained. “Fed up with home. Where you going? Can’t you take me along?”