“Can’t say as to my men. My lieutenants knew. They’d never have split on me. But of course I was found out. There we still were, you see, after the Armistice, which came that very day, in the same position as before. My colonel, a decent fellow for a Regular Army officer, did the least he could under the circumstances—relieved me of my command and sent me as liaison officer to Italy, one being called for about then. Whole thing very quiet. No fuss made. I should think not! Wouldn’t I have loved a fuss? But the fact remains,” he said, “that, having set out to ‘make the world a better place to live in’ (wasn’t that the way my departure was explained?—not at the time, of course; then we were to ‘keep our minds neutral’—but posthumously, after three years) I return, having made it a place, of no matter what sort, for a hundred young men or so still to be alive in. They’d have been rotting in neat little graves but for me. And that’s all. I got demobilized over there—eventually—in Italy, and came back, a free man in spite of the uniform, on the ‘Dante.’ And here I am.”
He leaned back and lit still another cigarette.
“And do you know what people are going to say to you?” asked Catherine in an odd voice. “They’re going to say: ‘Stacey, you smoke too much.’ ”
Suddenly she buried her head in her hands and burst out sobbing.
Both men started, and Philip half rose, then sat down again, pulling his moustache and considering her helplessly. Stacey gazed at her with a kind of grim sadness, as if from an immense distance.
“Forgive me!” she said at last, controlling herself and wiping her eyes. “It—it isn’t because you’re bitter, Stacey,” she went on wearily after a moment, choosing her words with difficulty, “and, oh, not at all because you feel—burned out and unaffectionate. It’s—Phil, you tell him. I can’t talk.”
“It’s because Catherine is tired,” said Phil simply. “With all that you’ve been through, it would be too much to ask you to sympathize with what she’s been through. But, infinitely less than your experience, that’s been a lot, too. She always looked at things squarely—more squarely than I. And what are you going to do when the truth you’re seeking comes marching at you with great steps from a long way off and shows itself a bleak brutal thing?”
Stacey gazed at his friend with intellectual sympathy at least.
Phil went on slowly. “We believed in the war, too. Perhaps not quite so ardently as you, but we believed in it. It seemed, in the big essentials, right against wrong. We were told—oh, you know all the things we were told, the dreams we lived on!”
“I know,” said Stacey.