“All to end in this,—this bitter merciless peace, with all the seeds of new wars in it!”
“Well,” asked Stacey, “when you saw the futile pettiness that revealed itself in men, and the pomposity, and the selfishness, and the greed”—he spat the word out—“did you expect anything better?”
“Not after a while, no,” Phil replied steadily. “At first I did. When I saw the heroism. What happened to the war? A great wrong was done. Hundreds of thousands of you went to war nobly to right it. Belgium was invaded, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said Stacey. “I suppose so. You touched the truth when you said we ‘went to war.’ What did we go to? Suppose one ant massacred another and you arranged an earthquake to punish it. That’s what happened. You see, a time came,” he continued slowly, an odd dazed look in his eyes,—“about 1916 it began, I should think—when all the surface seemed to have been stripped from life, one layer after another, until there was nothing left showing but universal naked pain. Nothing mattered except this. It was so much bigger than anything else. Belgium didn’t matter. Prussian militarism was a word. Love and hate disappeared, unimportant. Nothing was left but pain.”
Catherine drew a long breath. “And then?” she murmured.
“And then,” he returned, “you went on existing somehow, impersonally, without any emotions—”
“Are you sure?” Phil broke in.
“And without one tattered shred of an illusion left. I made up a story about it once—it must have been in 1916. Imagine a man who has always lived in a house with a roof of beautiful stained glass, and who revels in the soft colors that shine through. One day a tremendous hail storm comes and shatters the glass to fragments and lets the bleak white daylight pour in. Well, at first the man is heart-broken. But, after a little, he thinks: ‘Anyway this is truth. This is real light. I’ve been living falsely.’ So he bends down to the marble floor to see what has done the damage, but all that he can find is a little pool of dirty water.”
Philip and Catherine stared at Stacey.
The latter shook his head impatiently. “But that’s all past,” he said coolly. “That was 1916. I give you my word that I don’t think about myself at all any more. It’s an effort, trying to. I haven’t any thoughts, and I don’t care a rap for any one, and there isn’t anything I want to do, but I’m jolly well not going to do anything I don’t want to do. So that’s that!”