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 exasperation.
Stacey enjoyed himself, in a mixed way, at dinner. Indeed, he was never really bored. He had loved life once and hated it later. Indifference 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 softened when he spoke 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 eyebrows 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 knuckling down to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers if you want to get at the start of the whole trouble. A toady! 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 Armistice!” he burst out again. “Look at that! All Wilson with his idiotic 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, sweeping along like a surf-rider on the flood of his indictments.
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 apparently convinced his father. However, this awakened no antagonism 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 vigor 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 sane business administration and put labor and radicalism in their place.”
Mr. Carroll was carving 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 impaling Lenin, Gompers, Haywood, and Daniels all at once.
But a moment later, and quite instinctively, 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 triumphant smile a plate of chicken where reposed, brown, crisp and indigestible, a cold gizzard and perhaps a heart.