About ten days later Tommy Rutherford walked into Hollister's room at
eight in the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seated
himself, swung his feet to and fro for a second, and reached for one
of Hollister's cigarettes.
"It's a hard world, old thing," he complained. "Here was I all set for
an enjoyable winter. Nice people in Vancouver. All sorts of fetching
affairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself next week.
Chucked out into the blooming street with a gratuity and a couple of
medals. Damn the luck."
He remained absorbed in his own reflections for a minute, blowing
smoke rings with meticulous care.
"I wonder if a fellow _could_ make it go in Mexico?" he drawled.
Hollister made no comment.
"Oh, well, hang it, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," he
remarked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at the
Granada presently. Banish dull care and all that, for the time being,
anyway."
His gaze came to an inquiring rest on Hollister.
"What's up, old thing?" he asked lightly. "Why so mum?"
"Oh, nothing much," Hollister answered.
"Bad thing to get in the dumps," Rutherford observed sagely. "You
ought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that."
"Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters and
becomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fancy your prescription. I'd be more
apt to run amuck."
"Oh, come now," Rutherford remonstrated. "It isn't so bad as that.
Cheer up, old man. Things might be worse, you know.
"Oh, hell!" Hollister exploded.
After which he relapsed into sullen silence, to which Rutherford,
frankly mystified and somewhat inclined to resent this self-contained
mood, presently left him.
Hollister was glad when the man went away. He had a feeling of relief
when the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. He
had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a man
drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And
Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of
straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer
pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one
sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could
tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown
accustomed to horrible sights,--not because he had any particular
sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or any
understanding of such a man's state of feeling. To Rutherford that was
the fortune of war. So many were killed. So many crippled. So many
disfigured. It was luck. He believed in his own luck. The evil that
befell other men left him rather indifferent. That was all. When
Hollister once grasped Rutherford's attitude, he almost hated the man.
He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver
that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a
lowering, slate-colored mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of
rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street
below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles
that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind
droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook
with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way,
rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull
of the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could
hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at
English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreary,
threatening night that fitted his mood.
He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung
impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best
that was in him, played the game faithfully, according to the rules.
And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster. So far
as Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a natural
consequence. He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife had
simply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown too
largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured
by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He had
always known that his wife--women generally were the same, he
supposed--was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason.
But that had never struck him as of great significance. Women were
like that. A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, that
men also were much the same. He was, himself. When his feelings and
his reason came into conflict, it was touch and go which should
triumph. The fact remained that for a long time the war had separated
them as effectually as a divorce court. Hollister had always had a
hazy impression that Myra was the sort of woman to whom love was
necessary, but he had presumed that it was the love of a particular
man, and that man himself. This, it seemed, was a mistake, and he had
paid a penalty for making that mistake.
So he accepted this phase of his unhappiness without too much rancor.
Myra had played fair, he perceived. She had told him what to expect.
And the accident of a misleading report had permitted her to follow
her bent with a moral sanction. That she had bestowed herself and
some forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not the
thing Hollister resented. He resented only the fact that her glow of
love for him had not endured, that it had gone out like an untended
fire. But for some inscrutable reason that had happened. He had built
a dream-house on an unstable foundation. It had tumbled down. Very
well. He accepted that.
But he did not accept this unuttered social dictum that he should be
kept at arm's length because he had suffered a ghastly disarrangement
of his features while acting as a shield behind which the rest of
society rested secure. No, he would never accept that as a natural
fact. He could not.
No one said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the
background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. He
was like poverty and injustice,--present but ignored. And this being
shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in
furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a state
approaching desperation.
For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than a
healthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink at
certain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind
that his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been so
drained that he could sit passive and let the world go by unheeded,
then he would have been at peace.
He had seen men like that--many of them--content to sit in the sun,
to be fed and let alone. Their hearts were broken as well as their
bodies.
But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone
away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his passions, his
strength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. His
mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed
with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its
manifestations and adventures.
Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from
contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of
friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some
hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if
the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something
unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and
life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless
he succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to
struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and
fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circumstance.
How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a
question that harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watched
through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the
mournful cadences of the wind.
"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit still
and think much more----"
He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.
Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing
channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set
about doing.
Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his
experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and
marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself
behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.
He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very
likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill
yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a
man's appearance.
Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the
traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm
in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate
loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat,
of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to
get away out of sight and hearing of men.
It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the
summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long
ago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the
black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on
rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street
itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent
between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild
things of the forest went their accustomed way.
Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his
face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could
do that again.
He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by
them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days
that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went
to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.
coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes
lay a sure refuge for such as he.
And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town,
among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their
business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one
who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether
he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had
done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in a
cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him
out on the scrap heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to
be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.
And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this
palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst
of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be
utterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a
man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream
flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in
his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all
about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he
craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron
heel upon his face.
Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of
silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he
could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so
he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for
something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end
it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber
in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune
which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an
investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have
smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his
owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to
build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter
his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.
Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a
few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him
askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they
passed.