Stacey smiled. However, it had become difficult for him to smile, and when he did so his face took on uneasy lines. He was not at his best when smiling. He was at his best when his face remained impassive and soldierly.
“Oh,” he said drily, “it’s a romantic enough theory, quite Rousseau-like. I’ve just invented it this minute. If I had a son I should take him to live in the country, in some place where the landscape was neither too grand, and thus apt to arouse vast disturbing aspirations in him, nor yet ignominious and depressing, like these dingy middle-western plains. I would have him live among trees, that are handsome and do no harm, and associate familiarly with a great many kindly simple-minded animals such as dogs, cows and horses, with a few cultivated elegant animals such as cats, and—less frequently and intimately—with one or two goats, who are old, sophisticated and skeptical, the libres penseurs among animals.”
“And with no humans at all, eh?”
“Well,” said Stacey dubiously, “perhaps now and then an occasional, very choice human, such as you or Catherine, just to show him what human beings can become,—but rarely, Phil, rarely!”
“Thanks, from Catherine and myself,” Phil observed, with a rather weary smile, “but I’d rather you’d select some one else. I should be profoundly unwilling to pose as an example.”
“And I!” echoed Catherine. “Besides, I shouldn’t have time. I should have to be getting dinner for Phil and the boys—just as I must do now.” And she rose. “I’ve not been able to find a maid yet.”
But Stacey, considering Catherine and Phil, perceived, with a softening touch of sympathy, that they were both very tired and that no doubt he had been adding to their fatigue. These two lived with a life of their own, apart, serene, modestly adding their few grains of pure gold to that appallingly small treasure which represented the sole remainder of all these ages and ages of human existence. Yet because they did so, thought Stacey, because they were clear pin-points of light in chaos, all life was against them, chillingly indifferent where not actively hostile. The blackness swirled about with a malignant, dully sentient desire to engulf and extinguish them. They were repaid for their foolhardy torch-bearing, their unforgivable sin of having some meaning, by being ground down beneath the sordid difficulties of bare existence. Ames Price, who played golf, or Jimmy Prout, who tried law suits, or Colin Jeffries, who handled a dozen corporations of no value to life, had carpets unrolled obsequiously before them as they walked; while Phil must wear his genius frayed on hack labor and Catherine must cook for her family in a small hot kitchen. “What a brute of a world! What an ugly perverse mess of a world!” thought Stacey, with a fierce sick disgust. Worth nothing! Its hard won treasure was too tiny to justify such a colossal grovelling incoherence.
But while Stacey was reflecting moodily in this manner Catherine had gone into the kitchen. Stacey could hear her there, moving pots and pans. Suddenly he sprang up and went out after her.
“Look here, Catherine!” he said. “It’s too hot to cook this evening! Come on out with me. We’ll all go and have dinner at a chop-suey place. The boys, too, of course.”
She looked at him doubtfully for just a moment, then smiled. “Thank you, Stacey,” she said simply. “That will be awfully pleasant. I think Phil is pretty tired. I’ll go and get the boys ready.”