Mr. Carroll looked at Burnham keenly and held out his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Sergeant,” he said.
“American Legion Veteran Attacked By Strikers!” announced the newspaper headlines next morning.
“The striking dock and dray men added another outrage to their intolerable behavior when they yesterday violently attacked former Captain Stacey Carroll, D.S.C., a hero of numerous battles in the late World War and son of Edward H. Carroll of this city. Captain Carroll had gone to strike headquarters at 13 Plumb Street at about five o’clock yesterday afternoon in a generous attempt to learn the men’s side of the case. His friendly questions, however, were met by a brutal assault. This time, however, the strikers mistook their man, and the only result of the attempted outrage is that Michael Dennis (24) has a broken nose, Vladimir Sarovitch (20) a black and blue facial coloring that improves his former appearance, while Lorenzo Cecchi (21) is in the City Hospital with a fractured wrist. The public will be relieved to learn that Captain Carroll is uninjured except for a few superficial bruises. Dennis and Sarovitch were arrested on a charge of assault and battery but were promptly released on bail, money, as is well known, being plentiful at strike headquarters.
“This brutal and uncalled-for assault upon a hero of the World War marks” . . . etc.
Stacey was infuriated. He wrote a sharp fetter to the paper, then, with grudging common sense, tore it up and wrote another milder one in which he protested that the whole affair was due to a misunderstanding and was anyway too unimportant to deserve mention in the press.
He went to the hospital to see Cecchi, a handsome dark-haired Neapolitan who stared at him angrily at first out of immense black eyes till Stacey apologized to him in Italian, after which the two conversed in that language with an increasing good humor that was heightened by their puzzled pauses over Stacey’s mistakes and Cecchi’s dialect. The interview put them almost on terms of intimacy. Stacey gave the Neapolitan, who had fought in the Battle of the Piave, some Austrian bank-notes printed in Italian for use in Venetia during the invasion, and Cecchi responded with a tiny silver medal of the Madonna.
“Accidenti alla stampa!” (damn newspapers!) they agreed heartily.
But Stacey’s pleasant frame of mind on leaving the hospital was destroyed by his glimpse of the morning paper’s noon edition. His letter was there, but ruined by the caption above: “Captain Carroll’s Generous Reply—Makes Light of Cowardly Attack—Would Exonerate Strikers,” and by the fulsome eulogy of his behavior that followed. A vibrant editorial completed the wreck, insisting that while the personal magnanimity shown in Captain Carroll’s letter must appeal to every red-blooded citizen, the time had at last come when law and order must be . . . etc.
Without the slightest desire to align himself either on one side or the other, save that he felt a little more personal sympathy with the strikers, who anyway lived in touch with the few realities of life, than with their opponents, Stacey saw himself established irremediably as a Saint-George-like champion of law and order. He damned the press more earnestly than before. He lunched at the club with his father, whose eyes shone with approval of him, and he had, moreover, to undergo an ordeal of praise and congratulation from his father’s friends, together with briefer, less intense words from men of his own age. (The younger men, he told himself, were anyhow less grandiloquent nowadays than the older, though perhaps this was only because they were younger). Once or twice he tried impatiently to explain the silly business as it really was, but unavailingly. Anything he said was taken, he saw, as merely a further proof of his generosity. He gave up the attempt sulkily. Clearly his position was fixed. People had made up their minds about him, his reputation was solidly established, and nothing he might henceforth do could affect it. It struck him that the levity with which people acquired convictions would be ghastly if it were not so ridiculous.
Deserting the club with a feeling of relief, he wandered aimlessly about the city. But toward five o’clock, being caught in a sudden rain-shower, he took refuge in Philip Blair’s house.