After this a silence, that perhaps both young men had felt lying in wait, descended upon them. Blair was the first to meet frankly what it stood for.
“So you’re going over into it, Stacey,” he said.
Stacey nodded. “I’ve got to.”
“Well,” said Blair slowly, after another pause, “I suppose, in view of the tremendous issue, I ought to feel principally gladness that one bit more of strength and courage is thrown into the right side of the balance. But, do you know, I don’t—I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m not big enough to get away from personal feelings. And yet I don’t think it’s merely that. The truth is, Stacey, that you and I are individualists. We were born like that and we’ve been brought up that way. The profession we’ve chosen is individualistic—not perfectly so, because we have to meet the ideas of our clients; but a good deal so, all the same. For the very fact that people in general are so standardized, unindividual, wanting in ideas of their own, makes them leave pretty much in our hands the houses they hire us to build for them.”
Stacey was smiling. He recognized with affectionate amusement a characteristic of his friend’s mind—that inability to leave any side issue of a theme unexplored before pursuing the main theme onward. How different from Stacey’s father! And also how honest and thorough! Most people thought that Philip had a wandering mind. He knew better.
For Philip always did come back to the theme. He was back in it now. “We’re against the current,” he was saying sadly. “The whole trend of the world is overwhelmingly toward collectivism, doing and feeling in common, standardization. And yet—and yet—the unit is the individual; it can’t ever be the group. The individual’s a fact. There you have him, complete, a world—his only one—to himself. The group’s a fiction, a composite photograph, lifeless. Oh, I know the whole trend of things is wrong and that we’re right—so long as we harness our individualism and don’t let it grow into a silly cult.
“Right?—wrong?” he went on musingly, staring off through the window. “What do I mean by right and wrong? Well, I mean, I suppose, creatively valuable, creatively harmful. And the war’s going to rush and swell the advance of collectivism. No more art, no more thought, no more real life! Not till long after the war is over. You’ll see.”
Well, it was what Stacey himself had told his father. But he hadn’t perceived all that it meant. That was what you got for being impressionistic instead of thorough, he told himself humbly.
Blair turned his eyes back slowly to his friend. “And that,” he concluded, his thin face drawn with an expression of pain, “is why—though I know you’ve got to do it, and though I’d do it too, if I had the bodily health—that is why I feel, above all, grief that you must throw yourself into that inferno of awful physical and worse mental suffering. Forgive me!” he cried remorsefully.
But the shadow that had come over Stacey’s face was not there because of the prophecy of pain. Stacey was thinking of the contrast between Philip’s words and Marian’s. “That’s all right, Phil,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t what you said that bothered me. It was something else. Of course I know what I’m going into—so far as one can know through his imagination about something totally outside his experience. It’s a great deal better to think of it beforehand and be ready.”