about a quarter of a mile from stacey’s house lay the village of meldrun, straggling along one side of a small river, which, having flowed prettily through the carroll property, its steep banks massed with rhododendrons, issued thence into practical life, like a business man after a condescending hour with the arts. it fell, that is, into rapids, the water power from which was utilized by a small hosiery factory. around this plant had grown up the village, consisting of a company store and of some fifty incredibly abject huts, leaning at strange angles, propped up anyhow, when in acute danger of collapse, by logs; the effect of the whole like that of a vorticist picture.
the beginning of many of stacey’s rides led him perforce through this ignoble place. the brick factory itself stood close beside the road he must follow, on a narrow strip of ground between it and the river, and through the broken glass of its windows slovenly girls leered out at him or shouted uncomplimentary remarks, and he could see the pale, hard-featured faces of ten- and twelve-year old children. if stacey was walking duke, he would wave his hat as he passed, but mostly he went through the town at a gallop. he rode well, and with his impassive, rather stern face, he must have looked like some callous medieval condottiere. no one in meldrun would have heard of condottieri, but the effect would be the same.
really, however, stacey was far from impassive. this misery of which he caught a glimpse troubled him profoundly,—the more since, so far as he could see, there was nothing he could do about it. yet, oddly, he rode through meldrun oftener than he needed to.
the house of the factory owner, a mr. langdon, stood on the crest of a low hill some distance back to the left just before the village began; on one side its grounds adjoined the carroll property. it was an imposing pillared mansion built as a plantation house before the civil war, but stacey gazed across at it grimly each time that he rode out through meldrun. however, he did not see what he could do about this, either. he tried to dismiss both house and village from his thoughts.
mr. langdon himself, a pleasant-faced elderly man with a young wife and three small daughters, he knew by sight and nodded to curtly when they happened to meet. but, for all his deliberate isolation, he had been unable not to pick up a few scraps of gossip here and there, and also there was elijah, an unquenchable fountain of information. so stacey learned that the langdons were a south carolina family; that they had formerly owned the house and a thousand acres round about—the whole valley, indeed, including the property that was now mr. carroll’s; that they had lost everything during the civil war and emigrated to georgia; and that it was only five years ago that the present mr. langdon had returned, to buy back the family home and with it the hosiery factory that had been erected by some one else. stacey also learned, listening distractedly to elijah, that there was no love for the factory owner among his employees, and that that one young fellow—“yes, suh, he’s bad, mistuh stacey!”—had said “how he was goin’ to get mistuh langdon one day.”
“well—and then?” thought stacey, with a shrug of his shoulders, finding the intention laudable enough, but seeing no solution of anything in it.
but one night toward the end of april stacey, lying awake on his sleeping-porch, became aware of an odd glow in the moonless night. “a fire, of course,” he thought, as he got quickly out of bed to make sure that it was not in his own house. houses hereabouts always burned down sooner or later, what with the general carelessness and the lack of any fire department. but from his porch, which faced west, stacey could not see the fire. it must be somewhere to the east, since it reddened the near side of the shrubbery on the lawn and shone fantastically against the glossy leaves of a tulip tree.
he hurried down the hall to the other end of the house. but tall trees and the distant barrier of white pines that marked the carroll boundary cut off his view, and he could make out only that the fire was somewhere in meldrun. the confused murmur of many voices reached him.
he threw on some clothes, slipped an electric flash-light into his pocket, then ran downstairs. elijah was just starting up then. the old man was breathless with haste and excitement. “it—it am mistuh langdon’s house ’at’s buhnin’, mistuh stacey!” he stuttered. “my lawd, but she shuah is buhnin’, suh!”
for a moment stacey was rather pleased at the news; then he shrugged his shoulders at feeling so childish an emotion. “all right,” he said, “i’ll go over and see if i can help.”
running easily, he did the quarter of a mile in three minutes, and, vaulting a fence, came out upon the sloping lawn of the langdon home. it was covered with people shouting and moving about busily—mostly workers from the factory, and strewn with such household goods as had been rescued. the east wing of the house was burning fiercely; flames lapped the roof of the central part, and black smoke curled out of its upper windows. the west wing was not yet burning, though its blistered paint was peeling off in great flakes, and little spirals of smoke rose from its roof where sparks had caught.
glancing around him in the flickering light, stacey perceived a young woman sitting motionless on an overturned mahogany sideboard, a child in her lap and two others clinging to her skirts. he went up to her quickly.
“mrs. langdon?” he said stiffly. “i’m stacey carroll. please tell me what to do.” he spoke stiffly not because he was unfriendly, but because mrs. langdon, like all the rest of the people around him, seemed far away, unrelated, a mere distant mathematical fact about which no emotion was possible.
“thank you, mr. carroll,” she said pleasantly. “i’m afraid there’s nothing. the men are getting out what they can.”
“well, i can help with that,” he replied.
the youngest child, a girl of six, was crying bitterly in her mother’s arms. “mitzi, i want my mitzi!” she sobbed monotonously.
“who’s mitzi?” stacey asked quickly. “some pet—still in the house?”
mrs. langdon smiled. “mitzi is only helen’s doll,” she explained. “we forgot it in the hurry, and now it’s too late. her room was full of smoke even when we left it.”
stacey, too, smiled—ever so faintly touched. “i’ll go and see if i can help mr. langdon,” he remarked. “where is he?”
“oh, thank you!” said the young woman. “he’s there at the west end of the house. please don’t let him climb in again. he’s strained his ankle.”
a ladder had been placed against the low porch at the end of the west wing. stacey scrambled up to the roof of the porch, where he found mr. langdon and others among a heterogeneous collection of household goods that had been carried out through an open second-story window. the tin roof was uncomfortably hot, and there was a good deal of smoke. mr. langdon was directing the lowering to the ground of a sofa and pausing between times to toss down less fragile belongings as they were brought out to him through the window. he appeared quite calm and greeted stacey courteously.
“mrs. langdon told me you had strained your ankle,” stacey remarked. “hadn’t you better go back down and let me tend to this for you?”
“that is very kind of you, sir,” mr. langdon replied, “but i am all right. i regret that i cannot go inside with the others.”
“well, i can do that, anyway,” said stacey curtly, and, disregarding the other’s protests, went quickly over to the window and through it.
the room beyond was very hot but not yet burning, and there was not even much smoke. three or four men were gathering up the few objects still remaining in it, and a frightened negro servant was standing very close to the window and directing their efforts. no one paid the least attention to his instructions, but a youth, coming in with a mattress from a room beyond, called: “come on in theah, joe!” at which the negro shook his head vigorously and the others laughed. stacey went through another door.
this room was smoky and also nearly emptied of its furnishings. but three doors opened out of it and beyond one of these stacey found himself at once in a hot choking mist. here he was alone. he drew out his flash-light, and, his eyes smarting, explored the room. it was a sitting-room, he saw,—mrs. langdon’s probably,—and he could be of some use after all; for here hung a small meissonier and there on a table was a vase—“sèvres,” he remarked hoarsely. “better than—mattresses.” he gathered up the vase, jerked the picture from the wall, and stumbled, coughing, from the room.
just outside the door he ran into the young man of the mattress. “here!” said stacey wheezing, “take this—carefully—to mr. langdon, will you?”
“shuah!” said the young man, who was chewing tobacco steadily. “you be’n in theah?” he inquired, waving his hand at the door.
stacey nodded.
“well, wait a minute en’ i’ll go back in with you when i’ve toted these out.”
“i’ll—have to—wait a minute,” stacey replied, and the young man departed.
presently he returned, and together the two went back into the sitting-room for more loot, emerging dripping with sweat and half choked. yet stacey was beginning to enjoy himself.
they tried the other two rooms, the doors of which stacey had already noticed. from the first they got—with difficulty—a fine rug, slightly scorched, and a mahogany stand. the second seemed impossible—a mass of black smoke.
“what’s in there, i wonder?” said stacey hoarsely.
“i dunno,” the young fellow replied. “we mout ask that nigger, joe.”
only two or three men were left now even in the room next the porch, and joe was definitely on the point of getting out of the window. however, he paused for an instant to answer the question.
“that theah room, that’s miss helen’s bedroom. don’ you go theah, suh,” he said, and vanished.
stacey reflected, with a half smile, then hurried back, his laconic acquaintance still at his side. voices shouted at them from the porch.
the house was a furnace now. there was a heavy roaring in the air and every little while the sound of something crashing down. nevertheless, stacey plunged into the bedroom, and so, too, did his companion. it was unbearable, but, at least, one could see; a vivid flickering light shot through the smoke. after a moment stacey made out the crib, dived for a blackened, almost unrecognizable object that lay on the smoldering sheets, and leaped back just as a beam fell, with a shower of sparks, from the ceiling. together he and his companion fled back to the room next the porch and leaned, coughing and choking, against the window. the room was empty.
“wh-what did you get?” stacey asked hoarsely at last.
“a hoss,” replied the other, with a grin, holding up a toy.
“i got a doll,” said stacey weakly.
and all at once, there in this burning room, it was as though something snapped within him. the strange barrier was down. the world came rushing up to meet him. he burst into a helpless fit of laughter.
“do i—do i look as wild as you do?” he gasped, gazing at the other’s grimy face and singed hair.
“you shuah look pretty bad,” said the young man.
stacey pulled himself together. “i should say we’d better get out of here,” he remarked.
“i reckon we had.”
they scrambled out over the smoking porch and down the ladder, surprised at the anxious group awaiting them.
mr. langdon seized stacey’s hand. “thank god, you’re down safely, mr. carroll!” he said. “we were worried, sir. you shouldn’t have stayed so long. you’re not burnt? your clothes. . . . but the things you saved were very precious to me. that meissonier . . .”
stacey laughed. “glad to be of some use,” he replied easily. “where is mrs. langdon?”
“back here out of the heat—just a few steps,” said the other, and led the way, limping.
the crowd had grown larger during stacey’s absence. there were half a dozen small motor cars, too, on the lawn, and the lights of others standing in the road, a hundred yards distant, were visible.
mrs. langdon uttered an exclamation at stacey’s appearance. but he gave her no chance to thank him.
“helen,” he called, “is this mitzi?” and held out the burnt blackened doll.
the child seized it, with a scream of joy. “mitzi! mitzi!” she cried.
mrs. langdon stared helplessly. “do you mean to say that you risked your life to save—that doll, mr. carroll?” she demanded, half laughing, half crying.
“oh, no, there wasn’t any danger—except of choking,” stacey replied.
however, it occurred to him suddenly that to run risks blithely for a doll was just what he had done, and that this was somehow—he didn’t know—connected with the odd change of heart he was feeling.
“oh,” he exclaimed suddenly, “and my friend saved a horse! where’s he gone?”
“i got the hoss, mistuh stacey,” said elijah, coming forward with the toy. “mistuh jim bradley, he give it to me to bring. he’s done gone, mistuh bradley is.”
“that was sweet of him!” mrs. langdon exclaimed.
“what the dickens did he go for?” stacey remarked regretfully. jim bradley? he’d heard the name somewhere.
“you must come over to my place for the night,” he observed. “no, no, it would be silly to go into town when i’ve all those empty rooms,” he added quickly, as mr. langdon attempted to protest. “and you’ll want to get back here early in the morning to see to things.”
he was insistent, and they, no doubt, were very tired. at any rate, they yielded.
“a cousin of mine has brought his ford around,” said mr. langdon. “he’ll take us over presently. but—”
“good! then elijah and i will cut across and get things ready,” stacey concluded.
back at the house, stacey plunged into a bath, then hurriedly put on other clothes. but all at once he paused in his dressing and uttered an exclamation. jim bradley? of course! it was the name of the young man who, elijah said, had threatened to “get” mr. langdon. stacey smiled, then frowned.
before long the langdons arrived, with a car-load of rescued clothes. stacey welcomed them cordially.
“elijah has your rooms ready,” he said, “and there’s a bathroom next one of them.”
“thank you,” murmured mrs. langdon. “i’ll put the children to bed and leave you my husband meanwhile.”
he helped them upstairs with their things, looked down with a smile at helen, as her father laid her, fast asleep, on the bed, mitzi still clutched in her arms, then returned with mr. langdon to the big living-room.
they sat down, and stacey gazed at his guest with interest. a simple likable man, with a kindly face, and extremely well-bred.
“i trust,” said stacey pleasantly, as he offered him a cigarette, “that you carried adequate insurance.”
mr. langdon smiled faintly. “about enough to cover the first mortgage,” he returned quietly.
stacey paused in the act of lighting a match, and stared.
“the whole investment was a mistake, sir,” his guest continued mildly. “for sentimental reasons i am sorry to lose the house, but it was a burden. the factory has never paid, and the rate of interest banks hereabouts demand on loans is ruinous—ten to twelve per cent. i shall sell out for what i can get and go back to macon. forgive my troubling you with such mention of personal affairs.”
“on the contrary, i am interested—and sorry,” stacey replied sincerely. he fell silent for a moment. so the villain of the piece must be sought elsewhere? among the bankers? stacey shook his head. not there, either. he pulled himself back to his duties as host.
after a time mrs. langdon came down. she had put on another dress, and there was a touch of coquetry in her manner toward stacey. both she and her husband were behaving like good sports, he thought. elijah brought in coffee and sandwiches, and the three talked pleasantly together for half an hour.
nevertheless, stacey was relieved when his guests went up to bed. somehow he seemed to have broken free; he was no longer a pacing animal in a cage; and he wanted to think things out. he leaned against the mantelpiece and gazed off across the room with grave abstracted eyes.
his absurd rescue of that wretched doll—why had so trivial an act seemed to shake him out of a long lethargy? the answer leaped up at him almost at once. not the kindness but the sheer futility of his act—just this was what had struck him as a heartening revelation. he had risked his life for a doll! jim bradley had sworn to “get” an enemy, then had gone through flames to save his enemy’s household goods!
for, thinking swiftly, stacey perceived now that he had not told the truth when he had asserted passionately to mrs. latimer that he found the world chaos—with no scheme, nothing. what reason for anger in that? no, as a youth, he had assumed the world to be built upon an agreeable scheme, and then afterward, all unknown to himself, he had fancied it an evil scheme. it was neither. it was what he had insincerely called it—chaos, a grovelling incoherent assemblage of facts. the thought of greed—he had been obsessed by it just because he had seen it as something permanent, consistent—and successful. pshaw! an ugly thing, greed, but pitiful and futile, like everything else. where did it get any one? the greedy man was a man struggling for happiness. well, did he achieve happiness? hate died out of stacey. you could not hate what was a failure.
so much he made out in a series of flashes. much more, that lay behind, was obscurer. he dropped into an arm-chair and sat there, motionless, for a long time, reflecting intensely. sometimes he would spring to his feet and pace up and down the room for a while, and light a fresh cigarette or pause to finger abstractedly some vase or book, then return to his chair.
it was not, of course, he understood, this one evening’s performance that had shocked him into sanity—or what he hoped was sanity. this long isolation from men, from a world interested only in economics, had calmed him; for in it his youthful gift of fancy, choked back for so long, had been let loose again. you could not choke things back without suffering for it. . . . he had been like a man living in compartments—first in one, then in another. that was wrong. he ought to live wholly, with all of himself. . . . what he had been in his youth—that, too, he still was. nothing in one ever died.
it was as far as stacey could get—and this only slowly, with difficulty. but he could, he thought, go back to the real world now and start over again.
