The Lonely Warrior

by Claude C. Washburn

The letters that came for him he tossed unopened into the library desk, except those from his father and Catherine. Theirs he read, but hastily, and replied to them with an effort. He did not so much mind reading or even answering Mr. Carroll’s; he did so almost mechanically. But Catherine’s were different. Matter-of-fact and never touching on general ideas, they were yet, in some cool way, intimate, and certainly without the shyness that had always hampered Catherine in talking to Stacey. It was as though in these letters she assumed that he was real, as he felt that she was. And this was painful to him, dragging him back into the world from which he had fled. Writing to her was hard, and he was aware that his letters must be dull. But Catherine did not write often—only once every two or three weeks.

Stacey also read a letter from Julie. But Julie was a poor correspondent, writing, when positively forced to, in an odd stilted manner quite uncharacteristic of her pleasant self. Only this one effort came from her; but Stacey would not have minded fifty letters as unreal. The postscript, however, did sound like Julie, and brought Stacey back for a moment to Vernon. “How did Irene know where you were when Phil was dying?” it demanded. Oh, so it was Irene who had told Julie, and Julie Catherine, that he was at Clarefield! He stared ahead of him, recalling the tragedy; then laid Julie’s letter among the others in the desk drawer.

A few people called on Stacey, and he was polite enough to them; but he never returned their visits, and soon no one troubled him further. It was a difficult matter to drive out from town through all that mud. When, rarely, he did talk with people he received an impression that they were literally very far off. Their voices seemed to reach him from a distance, or deadened as though through a barrier of fog. It was like conversation in a dream.

Sometimes on his rides he would get so far away or be caught in so terrific a storm that he would stay over night in some mountaineer’s cabin. On these occasions he was welcomed with a grave courtesy unmarred by apologies for what his hosts had to offer. The cabin invariably had but one room and a lean-to. Supper over, the women would go to bed, while the master of the house and Stacey smoked their pipes outside. Then the two of them would enter, undress in the dark, and lie down together. It did not irk Stacey to be with these people. They seemed apathetic and emotionless, and their eyes had an abstracted look.

On the other hand, if human feeling had faded in him, his long neglected fancy was waking to new life. His mind grew, like an enchanted wood, into a tangle of imaginings, that gave him sometimes a feeling of release, a lifting sense of delight. Similes flitted through it rapidly. A cloud shadow on a blue mountain was like a veil flung across the face of a goddess, heightening her loveliness. The sudden sound of a brook in the forest was like shy laughter. What was laughter? Something delicately unhuman, perhaps, an expression of the youthful buoyant relation between earth’s creatures and the earth. Biologists said that animals could not laugh. Idiotic! It was only animals and children that could laugh. A dog laughed. Even Duke could laugh. It was true that cats could not, but this was because they were not primitive animals, but civilized. Men did not laugh. They smirked or—or—ricanaient. Stacey could not think of the English word and indolently did not try to.

He noted with calm contempt this revival of fancifulness in himself, saying that he had reverted to the sentimentalism of his early life. For all along he was contemptuous of himself for his surrender. Further than this he would not look. He avoided himself as persistently as he avoided others.

Yet in his reading he did not turn to poetry and romance. He read Tolstoy, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. He cared, in fact, for no books that did not treat solely and squarely of men’s relations to one another. He would have nothing to do with men; he would read of nothing else.

Months passed, with Stacey scarcely aware of their smooth succession. He was like a man asleep, vaguely dreaming. But it was only a sleep, a semi-conscious state into which one sinks, however pleasantly, when tired. Even in those moments when his fancy played delightedly over some sudden glimpse of beauty he was at bottom dissatisfied—like a man struggling achingly in a dream to enfold and make real the unsubstantial vision of his mistress.

By this time April had come. The Judas trees had burned themselves out, the fresh pale green of oaks and maples shimmered against the dark green of the pines, the forests were white with dog-wood blossom, and on the lower mountain slopes masses of flame azalea made the ground beneath the trees appear on fire. Much of Stacey’s present calm came through his freedom from men; but much, too, from the silent satisfaction of his starved sense of beauty. He read less now and went on longer rides.

But his calm was insecure. Something impetuous fluttered within him, too strong for this life of fancy. Mentally he was still isolated; physically he was restless, stirred tumultuously by the spring, called to union with the warm thrilling life all about him.