When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its
dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to
its ghastly presence and welcome it as a relief from unendurable
suspense. Upon these emotional reagents all the heroism and
endurance and cowardice of humanity in war is based. And when the
shouting and the tumult dies the survivors sometimes find themselves
incredible of their survival in a world excitedly muttering the
shibboleths of peace,--peace, where there is only a truce. For the
dumb clods, led or driven, and the high-spirited adventurers did not
alone comprise the armies which the nations lately sent forth.
Willy-nilly, by outward compulsion or inner sense of duty, the
sensitive, the lovers of beauty, the humanitarian, the altruist,
those strange souls to whom disorder is an evil, justice a
passionately cherished dream, freedom the birthright of every
man,--they too wore khaki and were deafened by the guns.
Upon them, and they are no inconsiderable portion of this our
country's manhood, the war has left its mark. Not so much in the
scars on their bodies--for those are things men forget as easily as
women forget the pangs of childbirth--but in the more tenuous fabric
of their souls, in the processes of their intellect. Many question
the value of the ordeal,--judged by its results.
It was a questioning of this nature that troubled Rod Norquay on an
evening in January, A.D. 1919. He sat among civilians in a Canadian
Pacific smoking car while the Imperial Limited rolled westward
through a rainy night. He was on familiar ground again, the soil
where five generations of his blood had been nourished. The Coast
Range was far behind the train. On his right the Fraser River made a
pale shimmer in the darkness, with here and there the glowworm
running lights, the yellow window squares of a river boat. It was
good to be back, back to life that could be lived fully and freely,
not simply endured.
But it was not good for him, in those last homeward miles, to listen
to the talk that ran in the smoker. It was pitched to the same key
as had fretted him in Paris, in London, all the way across North
America,--boundaries, coal and iron, concessions, indemnities,
reparations. Europe, Asia, and Africa, the islands of the Pacific,
had been rearranged, parcelled out, in Rod's hearing in hotel lobbys,
in ship saloons, in railway coaches, day after day, by sleek,
middle-aged civilians, clever successful fellows who knew what was
what. He was sick of it. Was that the reality behind the war to end
war?
"Loot," he said to himself scornfully. "They can call it what they
like, but that's what they mean."
In the field even Fritz shot his looters when he caught them
red-handed. But in civil life, behind the rampart of a victorious
army, they had their eye on the loot. They couldn't see much else
that was worth consideration. This group in the smoker,--he had been
in the enforced physical intimacy of railway travel with them for
four days. They had been a trifle backward about approaching this
moody young man in a London-tailored uniform of the C.E.F. with three
thin gold stripes on his sleeve. They had respected his reserved
silence. But they had talked for his benefit. Short of stuffing his
ears with cotton he could not avoid hearing. And they talked
voluminously, sagely, on the political and economic aspects of the
war, and the peace that was in the making. Rod grew to hate them.
In his own mind he called them buzzards. Which is a measure of his
state of mind, for he was naturally courteous and tolerant toward his
fellow men.
He welcomed the dim turreted and domed outlines of Hasting Park. He
recalled the mustering and drilling there, the housing of men by
thousands in buildings designed for show cattle. By a curious
association of ideas he reflected that many of those men had been
butchered less mercifully than the stall-fed beeves once shown in
those barn-like structures, every time a battalion went up the line,
wherever bombing squadrons could locate trench or billet, whenever
enemy field guns could get the range.
Well, it was over. As the train slowed into the eastern portion of
the yards, creeping between the docks and the city, he had a
momentary, fantastic impression of having passed through a vivid
nightmare of four years' duration. Because all this was the same.
The Europe he knew had been torn to pieces, disfigured to strange
aspects. Here the North Vancouver ferries, the self-same vessels he
had ridden on, were scurrying back and forth across the Inlet,
passing each other in midstream. Masts and funnels of deep-sea ships
rose beside well-known docks. The rumble of downtown traffic; the
chaste pyramidic roof of the Provincial Courthouse pricked out with
ten thousand incandescent bulbs; the Moorish pile of the Vancouver
Hotel; the white monolith of the Burns Block; the arching crown of
the _World_ Building, all these were adumbrated in the thin hovering
haze of light reflected from a million windows, thousands of arc
lights, batteries of electric signs. Here were things he knew,
greeting his eyes as if he had been gone merely overnight.
He took a final stare, before the coach slid under the long platform
roof, at one familiar, flamboyant sign,
THE NORQUAY TRUST
Letters of fire, six foot high. He had never been able to look at
that glowing emblem of Grove's career without a touch of scorn. It
had been the last thing his eyes marked from the rear of a departing
troop train. That, like this, had been on a wet, windy night.
His lip curled now. But his physical inertia, his moroseness, that
appallingly critical inturning of his mind, vanished with the final
clutch of the brakes. Something flowed through him, warming him like
strong brandy. He relinquished his bags to a porter, passed eagerly
to the vestibule. He was no stray dog of war now, wistful and
lonely. Through the car window he had caught a glimpse of Mary's
face, upturned in the glare of a light. Beside her stood his father,
a tall, erect figure in a belted overcoat,--both smiling, expectant.
This was something like! The old things, the things that mattered.
It was worth something to come home like this--to this--he thought as
his wife's arms closed about his neck, and he cut off her glad,
little cry with his lips. His father threw dignity, reserve, to the
winds and pounded him on the back, while a score of familiar faces
pressed about him and hands reached for his.
Then the reaction,--the unmistakable warning from a body too greatly
abused.
"Let's get home," he said to Mary. "I'm getting wobbly. Good night,
everybody. See you all again soon," he waved to the welcoming group.
"Come on. I have to move. I must."
Mary slipped one arm through his, peering up anxiously. Rod's face
was white, strained, in the station glare.
"Never mind the bags. Well, we can tell a red-cap to send them out
by an expressman," he muttered. "Give me your arm, pater."
"What is it, Rod?" Mary asked anxiously.
"Tell you later. Keep walking--slow. Can't talk. Walk."
His voice sounded dull and heavy. Three abreast they moved across
the platform, stood a few seconds in an elevator, passed out over a
tiled floor and between the high fluted columns of the main entrance,
to a street where pools of water glistened, where the wet asphalt
shone black, and the air was full of rain lines driving before a
southeast gale. Norquay senior guided him through scurrying people
bent under umbrellas.
"Here's the motor," he said.
"All right. Got my wind back now," Rod smiled.
"Been sick?" his father inquired solicitously.
"No. Just temporary let-down after being more or less keyed up.
You'll see lots of fellows coming home like that, soon. Something
lets go now and then."
He lay back on the upholstering between them, happy to feel Mary's
hand pressed warmly close in his. In a few minutes the machine
turned in a short, curved driveway, stopped under a portico.
Norquay senior kept his seat.
"I'll see you to-morrow, Rod," he said. "Good night. Pleasant
dreams to both of you."
The house was strange to Rod. He knew, of course, the street and
number, but nothing more of the place where Mary had made her home
for more than two years. He followed her into a living room where a
fireplace glowed cheerfully, a simple, comfortable room. And they
stood in the middle of it for a few seconds with their arms about
each other, careless of their damp clothes, of Mary's hat tilted
askew, of all but the fact that they were together after being long
apart.
"Did you miss me?"
"Are you glad to be home?"
Needless questions. Fond and foolish questions. They laughed and
stood apart, threw off their heavy coats.
"Kid's asleep, of course," Rod said.
"Yes. Come, look."
She drew him through a short passage into a bedroom. A small tousled
brown head rested on a pillow. One hand clutched a dilapidated
woolly dog with luminous glass eyes, the other was thrown straight
out on the white counterpane, the chubby fingers relaxed.
"How the little beggar has grown," Rod whispered. "He looks like
you, Mary."
"Everybody says he's a perfect Norquay," she replied demurely. "So
there you are."
"We've been very lucky," Rod said quietly. "If I'd known the
situation was so critical at sea, I shouldn't have let you come home
when you did. The place you had in Chelsea--I went out to see it
before I left--for old times' sake. I hadn't been there since you
came home. There's a new house--at least, the upper story's all new.
I made inquiries. A Gotha dropped high explosives on it about six
weeks after you left."
Mary shuddered.
"Well, it's over," she murmured. "I cried all Armistice night--after
the joy-whoopings. Silly thing for me to do. Everybody here went
mad. Where were you?"
"Mopping up," he said grimly. "We didn't believe it at first. Then
we sat down and smoked cigarettes and drank tea, and wondered how
soon we could get home. God damn the war--and the war-makers!"
His voice choked with passion.
"Ss-sh, Rod!" she warned, and drew him out of the room, back to a
chair by the fire.
"I can't help it. That's the way I feel," he broke out again. "And
I feel that way like other men who've been through the big show,
because of the things we saw done and had to do ourselves. The
beastliness--the uselessness of it! And you don't realize the
uselessness of it until you come back into civil life and notice the
glib way people think and talk about it all; what the papers print,
and the preachers preach, and politicians cooking up their little
messes, and a group of white-whiskered old men at Versailles politely
quarreling over the distribution of the plunder. Only there isn't
going to be much plunder. They can't realize that. And they go on
threatening and haranguing and wrangling over coal and iron and oil
and indemnities, as if that was what we fought for. If it had
been--I wonder if it was? When I feel that it was I have to curse.
"I'm home," he put his face in his hands, "but I know so many that
won't come--good fellows--lots of 'em just kids--the pick of the
bunch--Phil, and Bill Fraser and Dan Hale--dozens of fellows I went
to school with--scores out of my own company. People prattle about
the supreme sacrifice, as if that were a reward in itself. Damn
them, they don't know what it means. I'm sick of all the saccharine
tosh I hear about the war. It may have been necessary, and necessary
jobs have to be done. But if the war-glorifiers at home were taken
out and given a sniff of gas and a dose of cooties, and left lying
about here and there for a few hours with part of one leg blown off,
they might change their minds about the soul-uplifting part of it."
He lay back in his chair, eyes smoldering, fingers locked together
for a minute. Then he smiled wanly.
"Listen to me rave," he said. "You mustn't mind. I get that way now
and then. You do, in the army. You have to bottle up so much. I am
glad the row's over, and I'm glad to be here, and I'd like to go up
to the Hiding Place with you and the kid and camp out till I forgot I
ever was in a war. I expect in time it will get hazy. Only I have
spells of thinking that Andy Hall was right. I wonder what became of
Andy."
"Who was he?"
"A logger who worked for us. Clever chap. Thought his own thoughts
about things, which isn't characteristic of loggers--or men in
general, I'm beginning to believe. By the way, your father and
mother are looking uncommonly well. But it struck me that the
governor had aged a lot. Notice it? Did it knock him all of a heap
when Phil went West?"
"No, he was rather quiet and sad for awhile, but with the casualties
running so high we'd all schooled ourselves to expect bad news of you
both any time," Mary said quietly. "Something _has_ worried him
lately. He's here a good bit. Takes Roddy out for a walk or drive
nearly every day. He's well, I think, but lately he's been moody."
"See anything of Laska?"
She shook her head.
"Very little. I don't see a great deal of people, Rod. Every one
has been lovely to me. But--I don't fit into the giddy pace. You
know, if you don't flutter prettily and with all your heart, you
don't make a hit with the butterflies. Since I came back from London
I've--I've just put in the time. You know--oh, we're a pair of
softies--but it is good to be together. We have played the game."
A Chinese boy brought in tea and cakes. Rod and Mary toasted their
feet at the blaze and sipped tea and talked. The windows that gave
seaward over English Bay shivered in their casings under the gusty
puffs of the storm wind. A chime struck ten.
"Is there a bedroom upstairs?" Rod roused himself out of a silence
to ask.
"Two. But neither is completely furnished. There are two nice ones
on the ground floor, which is plenty for us so long as we have no
guests. Why?"
"I would much rather sleep upstairs."
"Why?" Mary repeated.
"Doctor's orders," he answered lightly. "High altitude advised. Oh,
it's just a notion of mine. You'll have to humor me."
"It's easily arranged," she said. "I'll have Yick make up a bed.
You _are_ whimsical, though, Rod. What's back of the notion?"
He laughed it off. An hour later, feeling himself sink into sleep
with a delicious, pervasive sensation of contentment, his last
conscious reflection was a hope that he would never have to explain
what lay back of the notion. He felt Mary's arm resting across him.
Surely body and soul could be at peace henceforth.
Well on in the night he wakened with a familiar apprehension tugging
at his consciousness. His brain was quite clear. He knew what was
happening. It had overtaken him before. The thinking, reasoning
part of him, or perhaps the purely intuitive, urged that he rise and
fight off a paralyzing numbness that seized his feet, his hands, that
crept slowly upward and inward, chilling his flesh. Curious, he
thought, to die like that, to stand by and watch himself run down
like an unwound clock. He could hear the slow regular breathing of
his wife beside him. He could feel the even beat of her heart where
her breast pressed against his shoulder. His own heart had
stopped,--fluttered and stopped as he awoke. Would it begin again?
He lay waiting, feeling that numbness seize his limbs, feeling his
breathing grow more difficult.
He remembered what he must do. His will--that strange, detached
segment of his being that was cognizant of and superior to his flesh,
commanded him to rise at once if he would ever rise again. And by
some supreme effort of a body dying if not already dead he twisted
himself sidewise, set his feet on the floor, hauled himself erect by
a bedpost. Three steps to the door. Three steps from door to
staircase. He moved in blind obedience to the will to live, moved
with that clear, fantastic conviction of being already on the
threshold of death. No pulse, scarcely a breath; speechless. He
could not utter a sound. Only motor muscles moving obedient to that
imperative will, and that crystalline awareness of what was
happening. He had a reluctant shrinking from that picture. To
escape all that war could dart at him,--and to die of a cardiac
failure on the night of his homecoming. No, by God! Not if he could
reach those stairs!
He reached them. Felt with a torpid foot for the top step, held to
the balustrade with two unfeeling hands, went down _stamp_, _stamp_,
heavily, jarringly from step to step. His head swam. He suffocated.
But he moved. His mind functioned. His body obeyed his will. All
but his heart. That stood still, lay inert in his breast,--until he
was within four steps of the bottom. Then it fluttered, feebly at
first, tumultuously after a second, so that his breath came in quick
gasps and long sobbing sighs.
As he realized with a rush of thankfulness that he had won against
long odds, a switch clicked above, light flooded stair and landing,
and Mary came hurrying after him.
"What is it, Rod? What's wrong?" she whispered.
He found words to answer while he kept on _stamp_, _stamp_, to the
bottom. Those dead hands; blood congealed in them. He began to clap
them together. He stamped with his feet on the hall floor like a
horse in the treadmill.
"Heart stopped," he said weakly. "Been giving me trouble. Nothing
the matter with it. Just flutters and slows down. This time it
stopped. Had to get up and jog it on the stairs. That's why I have
to sleep upstairs. Been warned."
"I'll send for a doctor," Mary cried.
"Doctor--hell!" Rod's strength was coming back. The blood pounded
in his temples. He could breathe, speak without effort, although
weakly. "I've had the best men in Paris and London at me. They
don't know what's the matter. They say there's nothing the matter.
Heart's organically perfect but functionally weak."
He repeated it ironically to himself, that phrase of the medical
men--when he had got back to normal and was able slowly to ascend the
stairs with her help--repeated it silently while Mary sat wrapped in
a bathrobe, looking at him with troubled, anxious eyes.
He made light of it. It was nothing much. Very soon he would be
quite all right. He had been warned that he might have a recurrence,
and that he must when possible be on an upper floor when he slept,
because to move jarringly was imperative and he would not have
strength to climb. He stepped heavily from step to step and so
joggled his circulation back to normal. But that would soon wear
off. She was not to worry.
Thus he lied gently to ease her mind. He did not want to die like
that. He did not want death in any form to overtake him. No. The
possibility was sufficient to stir him deeply. He had seen death at
his elbow a hundred times in four years. He had done his part,
expecting that soon or late his turn would come. It was part of the
game. Life came to have little significance to men whose occupation
was destroying life and being themselves destroyed. It would have
been a simple matter to die in action; merely a moment of surprise,
of incredulity, then oblivion.
He had escaped death; he had escaped marring. Suffering he could not
escape, nor the sight of suffering that wrung him as deeply as his
own. He had never been able to steel himself against the sights and
sounds of pain. He had never been able to look indifferently on
other men's agony. And he _had_ grown indifferent to death. Men are
seldom afraid to die, to risk death. Yet with the acceptance of
death as an imminent chance there still flourishes the deep,
instinctive desire to live.
Rod wanted to live more than he had ever wanted to before. He had
come through the storm of war to this haven where he knew there was
for him peace and security and affection beyond most men's lot.
Yet it was touch and go. The nervous man, the keenly strung,
sensitive man, the thoroughbred will fight; he can die on his nerve.
But there is a breaking strain beyond which he cannot endure. Before
the continual impact of pain, death, horror and disgust, the sight
and knowledge of merciless destruction, of blind and calculated
killing, of flesh and blood ground up and poured into a bottomless
pit to narrow a salient or test a military theory, Rod had sometimes
wondered if something in his heart would burst; if something in his
brain would crack from that inner ache, a quivering sensitiveness
that drew his nerves tight as fiddle-strings, a going on by sheer
will, with his heart burning in hatred of the bloody muddle that
engulfed him and his fellows. His heart had been strained until it
weakened somewhere. That was all. He had not known what it was that
changed the nervous heart into a weak heart. Some time before the
Armistice he noticed the difference,--a slowing-down under excitement
instead of a quickening of his pulse. A feeling of discomfort at
night. A desire to get up, to walk about, to fight off a weakening
sensation.
Then the Armistice. And a night in a Paris hotel when he was a dead
man if it had not been for that imperative command of a mind that
willed a body to defy dissolution. He had stirred somehow that
sluggish heart into beating again, and he had called a doctor. Later
he consulted specialists.
They could tell him little; they could do less. His heart was
organically perfect but functionally weak. They all agreed on that.
It might stop any time. Nothing could be done. He would either die
very suddenly, or slowly his heart would strengthen, build new
tissue, be strong again.
He coaxed Mary to settle down. He lay there beside her in the dusky
room, where feeble shadows from arc lights swung by the roaring wind
made flickering patterns on the wall, and he thought something like
this:
Heart failure is failure of the heart to pulsate. Pulsation of the
heart keeps the blood circulating (mechanics applied to the body) and
the passage of the blood in and out of the heart keeps it pulsating.
When the heart stops beating the blood stops moving. Hence start the
blood moving and it must pass through the heart. The heart being
organically perfect would pulsate mechanically--until--or unless----
Would he ever dare sleep again? Over and over that polysyllabic
phrase repeated itself until he grew weary and his eyes closed in the
sleep he would have denied if he could.
Organically perfect but functionally weak!