There must be in heaven a certain god--a paunchy, cynical god whose task
it is to arrange for each of the birthward-marching souls a set of
circumstances so nicely adjusted to its character that the result of its
life, in triumph or defeat, will be hinged on the finest of threads. So
Hugo must have felt coming home from war. He had celebrated the
Armistice hugely, not because it had spared his life--most of the pomp,
parade, bawdiness, and glory had originated in such a deliverance--but
because it had rescued him from the hot blast of destructiveness. An
instantaneous realization of that prevented despair. He had failed in
the hour of becoming death itself; such failure was fortunate because
life to him, even at the end of the war, seemed more the effort of
creation than the business of annihilation.
To know that had cost a struggle--a struggle that took place at the
hangar as the dispatch-bearer rode up and that remained crucial only
between the instant when he lifted his fist and when he lowered it.
Brevity made it no less intense; a second of time had resolved his soul
afresh, had redistilled it and recombined it.
Not long after that he started back to America. The mass of soldiers
surrounding him were undergoing a transition that Hugo felt vividly.
These men would wake up sweating at night and cry out until someone
whispered roughly that there were no more submarines. A door would slam
and one of them would begin to weep. There were whisperings and
bickerings about life at home, about what each person, disintegrated
again to individuality, would do and say and think. Little fears about
lost jobs and lost girls cropped out, were thrust back, came finally to
remain. And no one wanted life to be what it had been; no one considered
that it could be the same.
Hugo wrote to his family that the war was ended, that he was well, that
he expected to see them some time in the near future. The ship that
carried him reached the end of the blue sea; he was disembarked and
demobilized in New York. He realized even before he was accustomed to
the novelty of civilian clothes that a familiar, friendly city had
changed. The retrospective spell of the eighties and nineties had
vanished. New York was brand-new, blatant, rushing, prosperous. The
inheritance from Europe had been assimilated; a social reality, entirely
foreign and American, had been wrought and New York was ready to spread
it across the parent world. Those things were pressed quickly into
Hugo's mind by his hotel, the magazines, a chance novel of the precise
date, the cinema, and the more general, more indefinite human pulses.
After a few days of random inspection, of casual imbibing, he called
upon Tom Shayne's father. He would have preferred to escape all painful
reminiscing, but he went partly as a duty and partly from necessity: he
had no money whatever.
A butler opened the door of a large stone mansion and ushered Hugo to
the library, where Mr. Shayne rose eagerly. "I'm so glad you came. Knew
you'd be here soon. How are you?"
Hugo was slightly surprised. In his host's manner was the hardness and
intensity that he had observed everywhere. "I'm very well, thanks."
"Splendid! Cocktails, Smith."