The Lonely Warrior

On the afternoon of the fifth day of November, 1914, Edward Carroll was sitting as usual in his pleasant inner office, the windows of which looked down upon the middle-western city where Mr. Carroll had lived for forty of his fifty-six years. But he was not behaving quite as usual. At this hour he should normally have been conferring with other men upon matters of importance—matters concerning the cement works of which he was vice-president, or the bank of which he was a director, or the copper mines whose policy he principally determined. Or he should, at the very least, have been dictating replies to half a dozen important letters that had been placed on his desk while he was out at luncheon. Instead, Mr. Carroll merely sat in his chair and stared oddly at a calendar on the wall opposite, as though its large black announcement of the date had some deep significance for him, as perhaps it had.

At last he shook his head impatiently and with a quick gesture pressed a button in his desk. Almost at once his stenographer entered the room.

“Ruth,” said Mr. Carroll, “did you tell me a little while ago that some one was waiting to see me?”

A faint surprise showed in the young woman’s composed face, but she answered the question quietly. “Yes, sir. Mr. Barnett and Mr. King.”

“Well, they’ll have to wait a little or come some other time. I must see Stacey first. He telephoned that he’d be here at three o’clock. It’s three-five now,” Mr. Carroll observed, drawing out his watch; which was quite unnecessary, since on the table before his eyes stood a small, perfectly regulated clock encased in thick curved glass that magnified its hands and characters conveniently. “When he comes send him in at once,” he concluded.

But the stenographer had scarcely left the room when the door was opened again and Stacey appeared.

He was a tall, handsome, well-built, young man, with blue eyes, short brown hair, and a clear healthy complexion from which the summer tan had even yet not quite faded. He looked, and was, well-bred and well educated, but there was nothing unusual or distinguished in any of his features, except perhaps in his mouth, which was finely modelled and sensitive without being self-conscious. The only thing at all out of the common about him was the impression he gave of restless but happy eagerness, of being fresh and untired and curious. He appeared about twenty-six or seven years old.

“Sit down, Stacey,” said Mr. Carroll. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the young man, and took the chair at the opposite side of the desk.

There was a brief pause while the two gazed across at each other. Neither could consider the other with cool detached estimation,—years of familiarity were in the way; yet Stacey felt dimly that he was nearer to being outside than he could remember to have been before. He studied his father’s well-shaped head, with its thick gray hair, clipped moustache and firm mouth, in something of the spirit in which, being an architect, he would have studied a building. He saw his father to-day, quite clearly, as a man of tremendous, never wasted energy, and with a warm, generous, unspoiled heart. But it came over Stacey for the first time that the same directness which made his father go so unerringly to the point in business matters, discarding all non-essentials, made him inclined to hold very positive over-simplified opinions about things in general. Whereupon, all in this half-minute of silence, it also occurred to Stacey that business was like mathematics, founded on definite preassumed principles that you were always sure of, whereas those—Stacey supposed they were there—beneath life seemed a trifle wavering and indeterminate.

“Well, son, what was it?” asked Mr. Carroll.

“You know, father,” Stacey replied.

The older man pushed back his chair impatiently, and his face took on an almost querulous expression that set small uncharacteristic wrinkles to interfering oddly with its firm, deeply traced lines.

“Yes, I suppose I know what it is,” he said, “but I don’t see why you should make me state it. You want to go to the war, and you have an answer ready to every objection I can make. Damn it all, Stacey! It isn’t our war! If it becomes so I’ll be the first to say: ‘Enlist!’ but it isn’t—not yet, anyway.”

“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—”

“I know. America isn’t in the war—yet; but every single trivial example like mine will help, just a little, to bring her in.”

There was a moment of silence.

“What about me, Stacey?” Mr. Carroll asked at last.

The young man gazed at his father sadly. “I know,” he said. “It’s horrible. But all over the world it’s going on. The same question’s being asked—and set aside—in thousands and thousands of families. And—though it isn’t adequate compensation—you still at least have your work; which is more than wives and mothers have.”

At this Mr. Carroll pushed his chair back sharply. “My work!” he exclaimed angrily. “Who’s it for? For you, every bit of it! For you and Julie.”

After all, Stacey was young and had a sense of the ridiculous; so laughter surged up within him now and, though he kept it silent, relieved his tensity. For he was earning a respectable salary from the firm of architects in which he would soon have a junior partnership, and his father had long since given him two-hundred-thousand dollars’ worth of excellent municipal and industrial bonds, some bearing five, some five-and-a-half per cent.; while, as for his sister Julie, she not only had a strictly equal private fortune, but was also comfortably married to a prosperous young lawyer. But, knowing his father, and knowing him better than usual to-day, Stacey carefully kept his amusement to himself.

It vanished anyway when his father added: “And Marian?”—and Stacey winced.

“I haven’t told her yet. I’m going to tell her to-night,” he said, a little hoarsely. “It’ll almost break her heart, I’m afraid. All the Marians in the world are having their hearts broken to-day.”

“And all the fathers and mothers. I could pretty nearly say: ‘Thank God your mother is not living!’ ”

Stacey nodded grave assent. “The individual’s gone by the board.” After which silence fell upon both men.

At last the older man drew himself together. “What army?” he asked. “The French?”

“No, I thought of that, since I speak French decently,” said his son briskly, glad of the change in mood. “But I rather think—though I’m not sure—that I’d have to join the Foreign Legion there. And sacrifice is all very well, you know, but it needn’t be suicide. I mean to come back alive if I can do so honorably. And of course I’ve thought of the Canadian army. But there’s too much neighborly dislike between Canadians and Americans. So I’m going into the English army, if they’ll take me. I’ve a lot of friends in England, you know. I’ve visited some of them at their homes. They’ll all be in as officers. Perhaps I can get into some regiment where I’ll be under one of them.”

“And you leave?”

“Next Wednesday. I’ll catch the ‘Mauretania.’ Don’t be angry with me, sir,” he begged.

His father shook his head. “No,” he replied dully, “I suppose as a matter of fact I’d have done the same thing at your age.”

“It’s the kindest thing you could say to me,” said the young man, with a deep sigh of relief. He rose. “I mustn’t keep you any longer now. The office is full of people waiting to see you. I say, dad, to-night I—I must go to see Marian, but to-morrow night let’s dine at the club together and have champagne and then go to a show and be awfully gay!”

“All right,” said his father.

They shook hands, and Stacey departed.

But when the door had closed behind him Mr. Carroll did not at once summon his stenographer. Instead, he sat gazing, as before Stacey’s arrival, at the calendar on the wall opposite. At last he rose, crossed the room, and tore off the leaf—“Nov. 5.” He folded the paper once across and placed it carefully in his pocket-book.

Then he returned to his chair and pressed the button in his desk.