“You know you think it ought to be, father,” replied the young man steadily. “I’ve heard you say so a score of times. Every one with any generosity whom we know thinks it ought to be. I only want to live up to that conviction. I believe it’s right against wrong, the—the—soul against the machine; and so do you, or you wouldn’t have given so generously to Belgium.”
His father did not seem to be listening. He was staring away over his son’s head almost dreamily. “I remember when I built a play-house for you and Julie back of the stable. You were six years old and tried to carry two-by-fours to me. You didn’t succeed.”
He paused and looked at his son again.
“Stacey,” he went on, “I sent you to school and college for nine years, and then for two years all over Europe, and then for three years to the Beaux Arts in Paris. It’s taken—how old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“You don’t look it. It’s taken thirty careful years to educate you. You’re an expensive instrument ready for use. Are you going to throw all that away to do what some untrained laborer can do as well—no, better than you? Are all those years of training going to be to fit you for no other service than to—to stop a machine-gun bullet?”
“They ought not to be, father,” said the young man. “They wouldn’t be in a normal world. They were given me in a normal world for use in a normal world. But all of a sudden the normal world has been upset. It’s been wickedly assailed, wiped out for the moment, by the greatest crime in history. It’s up to every one of us to help bring it back. And all over Europe better men than I, men equally well educated, have given themselves freely—poets, painters, thinkers,—and trained business-men,” he added hastily.
However, it did not for an instant occur to Stacey to question the justice of his father’s argument. It seemed to him the only considerable argument against his going to war, and he again respectfully recognized his father’s ability to go straight to the essential point.
“But you see, sir,” he said, “that, true as your contention is for the world as it was—and isn’t, it doesn’t hold good now. For it would be equally true if America were in the war, yet then you would, as you said, be the first to want me to go.”
“But—”