CHAPTER III
About ten days later Tommy Rutherford walked into Hollister's room ateight in the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seatedhimself, swung his feet to and fro for a second, and reached for oneof Hollister's cigarettes.
"It's a hard world, old thing," he complained. "Here was I all set foran enjoyable winter. Nice people in Vancouver. All sorts of fetchingaffairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself next week.Chucked out into the blooming street with a gratuity and a couple ofmedals. Damn the luck."
He remained absorbed in his own reflections for a minute, blowingsmoke 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," heremarked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at theGranada 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. "Youought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that."
"Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters andbecomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fancy your prescription. I'd be moreapt 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-containedmood, presently left him.
Hollister was glad when the man went away. He had a feeling of reliefwhen the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. Hehad grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a mandrowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. AndRutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort ofstraw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurerpure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of onesort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He couldtolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grownaccustomed to horrible sights,--not because he had any particularsympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or anyunderstanding of such a man's state of feeling. To Rutherford that wasthe fortune of war. So many were killed. So many crippled. So manydisfigured. It was luck. He believed in his own luck. The evil thatbefell other men left him rather indifferent. That was all. WhenHollister once grasped Rutherford's attitude, he almost hated the man.
He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouverthat day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was alowering, slate-colored mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts ofrain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the streetbelow a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddlesthat were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The winddroned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shookwith its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way,rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lullof the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister couldhear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach atEnglish 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 hungimpaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the bestthat was in him, played the game faithfully, according to the rules.And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster. So faras Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a naturalconsequence. He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife hadsimply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown toolargely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tincturedby the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He hadalways known that his wife--women generally were the same, hesupposed--was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason.But that had never struck him as of great significance. Women werelike that. A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, thatmen also were much the same. He was, himself. When his feelings andhis reason came into conflict, it was touch and go which shouldtriumph. The fact remained that for a long time the war had separatedthem as effectually as a divorce court. Hollister had always had ahazy impression that Myra was the sort of woman to whom love wasnecessary, but he had presumed that it was the love of a particularman, and that man himself. This, it seemed, was a mistake, and he hadpaid 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 followher bent with a moral sanction. That she had bestowed herself andsome forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not thething Hollister resented. He resented only the fact that her glow oflove for him had not endured, that it had gone out like an untendedfire. But for some inscrutable reason that had happened. He had builta dream-house on an unstable foundation. It had tumbled down. Verywell. He accepted that.
But he did not accept this unuttered social dictum that he should bekept at arm's length because he had suffered a ghastly disarrangementof his features while acting as a shield behind which the rest ofsociety rested secure. No, he would never accept that as a naturalfact. He could not.
No one said that he was a terrible object which should remain in thebackground along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. Hewas like poverty and injustice,--present but ignored. And this beingshunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about infurtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a stateapproaching desperation.
For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than ahealthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink atcertain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mindthat his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been sodrained 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 theirbodies.
But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had goneaway, a man in full possession of his faculties, his passions, hisstrength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. Hismind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammedwith vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in itsmanifestations and adventures.
Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank fromcontact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain offriendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of somehideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as ifthe sight of him affected men and women with a sense of somethingunnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, andlife was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unlesshe succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue tostruggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, andfundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circumstance.
How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was aquestion that harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watchedthrough his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to themournful cadences of the wind.
"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit stilland think much more----"
He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressingchannels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should setabout doing.
Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as hisexperience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making andmarketing of it, from top to bottom
. But he could not see himselfbehind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Verylikely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a millyard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to aman's appearance.
Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on thetraffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the stormin pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperateloneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat,of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, toget away out of sight and hearing of men.
It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to thesummer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast longago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting theblack walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down onrivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the streetitself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silentbetween wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wildthings of the forest went their accustomed way.
Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with hisface to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he coulddo that again.
He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened bythem, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old daysthat were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he wentto 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 solitudeslay 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 theirbusiness of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not onewho cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whetherhe had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He haddone his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in acruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat himout on the scrap heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared tobe annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.
And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, thispalpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midstof light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and beutterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as aman chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold streamflowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding inhis room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that allabout him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which hecraved and which he could not share because war had stamped its ironheel upon his face.
Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge ofsilence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least hecould withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And sohe began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, forsomething that should save him from being purely aimless. In the endit came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timberin the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortunewhich remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as aninvestment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would havesmiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of hisowning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material tobuild a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelterhis head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.
Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For afew weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye himaskance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as theypassed.