Indeed, he did not want to be thanked. Gratitude was a bond, the recognition of gratitude a bond.
Phil looked at him sadly, but Stacey did not see; his eyes were still fixed on the city.
“The solidity,” he muttered at last, “the damned solidity of it! Did you ever see anything like it?” he burst out, turning on Phil.
“The solidity of what?”
“Of that! Of the city! I didn’t feel it at first when I got back. It’s getting on my nerves now. There are churches in it where men preach at it, and lecture halls where men talk at it, and auditoriums where it’s sung at and played at,—faugh! Children with puffed-out cheeks trying to blow down a house! Why, look at it! It’s only sixty years old, yet it’s more eternally unchangeable than the Pyramids!”
“Well,” said Phil slowly, “what’s wrong with that? Why should it change?”
“Why? The whole world has gone through agony, has been wrenched and torn until not one atom of it, not one emotion, not one value, remains as it was,—and here is this damned ignoble changeless place that doesn’t know there’s been a war—or pretends not to know, so that it won’t be expected to change. Nothing can change it, I tell you,—but bombs!”
“But,” Phil asked steadily, “how do you want to change it? What do you want to do for it?”
“Nothing!” Stacey cried. “I don’t want to change it, either for better or worse. Nobody can change what a war like this couldn’t change. I want,” he concluded, his eyes glowing strangely, “to wipe it out, annihilate it! Bombs, I said. Nothing else is any good.”
A look of pain crossed Philip Blair’s face. “I think,” he said, “that you’re a little mad, Stacey.”