“I thought of you so often,” she went on. “It must be dreadful to be an idealist and then see all your ideals go—violently—one by one—”
“Violently, yes,” he interrupted coolly. “Not one by one.”
“Crushed to death by facts—not average facts, all the horrible evil facts herded together and organized until they must have seemed normal!”
“Oh,” he said, “facts are facts! They aren’t either evil or good. And you’re much too polite in saying that I was an idealist. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the right word. Can’t say that the method employed to remove my illusions was particularly gentle, but I’m grateful enough for the removal.”
There was a look of pain on Mrs. Latimer’s face. “No! No!” she cried. “It isn’t fair! There’s good disillusionment and bad! It’s good to have false prettiness, false sentiment—whatever is false—scrubbed off, but it isn’t good, it isn’t fair to a man, to see only pain and death and agony and mud for four years and be made to feel that that’s all there is of true. It isn’t fair! It isn’t!”
Stacey’s face was pale but calm and touched with a distant haughty scorn of all things. “Oh, it wasn’t only that!” he said in a chill voice. “I doubt if that was even the profoundest lesson in disillusionment. That was the lesson of pain and brutality and ugliness and fatigue—incredible fatigue. It even had gleams of relief—flashes of lightning in chaos. Men showed themselves beasts, but with a capacity for enduring more suffering than you’d have thought possible. There was funk, of course,—individual cowardice and rank, bestial, mass terror, just as there was mass cruelty. But there was amazing heroism, too. And the men did carry on in spite of everything. Oh, no, the trouble with the front line was the senselessness of squandering so much life. The place to get real disillusionment—where you learned the senselessness and sordidness of life itself—was behind the lines, back where things were neat and pretty, where the officers had feuds over questions of personal prestige, and stupid fools gave orders disposing of men’s lives, and the peasants gouged the soldiers for all they were worth. Or back in Paris where the shop-keepers gouged every one. And the Y. M. C. A. with their silly sloppy Christianity—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds! Or down in Italy, where butter and sugar were rationed down to the minutest fragments and there wasn’t enough so that women and children could always get even those tiny rations, and yet some people had butter on their table in quantities three times a day and bought sugar in five-kilo packages at their back doors at six times the established price. And the American Red Cross with its silly pompous ‘majors’ and ‘colonels’ out for decorations! ‘Colonel’ So-and-So thought he’d been slighted, and ‘Major’ Thingumbob absolutely was going to be given a place on the balcony when that ceremony came off, by God he was or know the reason why! And the Committee on Public Misinformation! And no coal to run trains enough to carry the people who absolutely had to travel, and President Wilson coming to Rome with a million journalists!” He laughed harshly. “Or, for the matter of that,—America! I haven’t seen very much of it yet, but I gather—oh, I gather a great deal!”
Stacey paused at last. But he did not look crushed or dejected by his enumeration of abuses. He looked more alive than before. He looked like a young, evil, disdainful god.
It was Mrs. Latimer whose face was white. “Poor Stacey!” she murmured brokenly. “All true, no doubt, but not the whole truth! Poor Stacey!”
“Poor me?” he asked. “Why? I’m all right, and free—or almost.”
“Free, or almost?” she repeated.