The muscles of the other man’s rather stern face contracted slightly. “Think of it?” he returned. “I don’t think of it. I don’t want to. Once in a while I dream.”
Stacey considered him with grim comprehension. From almost any one else the remark would have sounded melodramatic. Edwards made it quite sincerely, with no thought of effect. When the raw black-and-white stuff of melodrama became truth—that was horrible. Stacey shivered. But after a little he returned to it. “Yes, but I mean: do you feel now that it was all bad, all rotten selfish commercialism from the very beginning? Oh, you’ve every right to! I don’t blame you and your people if you do. But do you?”
“We’ve been tricked,” Edwards replied bitterly, “duped! And I’ll take that point of view—the one you ask me if I have—publicly as long as I live. It’s the only way for me and mine to fight you and yours. Just as the way for your side to fight is to assert that the war was noble. But—it’s not so simple. No, I don’t think that.”
“No more do I!” cried Stacey. “I hate the war! It brought out everything rotten that lay hidden in men. But—some hundreds of thousands of young men did go into it nobly, and to just that extent it was a decent war. They’re mostly dead now—worse luck to the world!—and a good many of those that aren’t are turned beastly by what they lived through. But . . .” He paused. A kind of dark light smoldered in his eyes.
“There was courage,” said Edwards in a deep voice. “My God! there was courage! Not your romantic high-adventure sort, but the sort that could live through mud and intensive shelling and still push men on, afterward, to advance. But, oh, Christ! the wasted lives in the Argonne!—thrown away through sheer incompetence! Your people did that!”
“And even so,” said Stacey somberly, “you didn’t see the Somme.” Suddenly the dull glow in his eyes rose to a flame. He struck the desk with his clenched fist. “The thing that gets me, Edwards,” he burst out, “is these beastly cheap editors of weeklies sitting up and writing pertly about the war as if it had been all a game of grab, nothing decent! Damn them! Petty complacent asses! What do they know about it? What do they know about physical courage—or any other kind? Have they suffered? Have they fought for ideals and been given dung? The Intellectuals, they call themselves! An honest protester like Debs, all right, I’ll respect him. But these vulgar underbred egotists—faugh! The only ones I hate as much are the others who sit up and write about how everything was first-rate—bully war—noble—good clearly coming out of it!” He ceased, panting with rage.
“Don’t hate so, Carroll,” said Edwards slowly. “Where’s the good?”
Stacey drew his hand across his forehead. “You’re right,” he returned. “It’s idiotic! I thought I’d learned better. And,” he added, laughing shortly, “fancy wasting emotion on that tribe!”
He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated, as though poisoned, and he was rather ashamed. It was a flash out of an earlier side of him.
For Stacey was like a fabric that was being woven together steadily out of varied strands. But here and there the woof was faulty; the pattern was broken; threads stuck out loosely.