They made camp under the maples after a look at the moldy cabin interior. The stars came out to speckle a cloudless sky as they sat over their evening fire. Before they turned into blankets spread on a layer of fern and hemlock boughs, a moon sailed up from behind the Coast range. It touched all the hills with a silver glow, filled every hollow with ebony shade. They fell asleep to the lullaby of falling water and wakened with the sun on their faces.
They had no definite object beyond an impulse to be alone, to live awhile in those peaceful solitudes, to fish or loaf or climb as the spirit moved them. But that eagerness of spirit which has sent men alike to the Poles and into equatorial jungles to look on the face of new lands touched them both. They spent a day setting their camp to rights after the fashion of the woodwise. Then they sought and found the trapper's blazed line. It led them by dim marks through dense thickets, across lowlands where cedars stood like brown columns supporting the sky itself, their feet planted in thick mosses and sunless shade, over fir-clad ridges where a west wind made a faint sighing among branches a hundred feet above their heads, and brought them at last out on the shore of the lake.
The numerous lakes bordering close on the heavily wooded, mountainous coast of British Columbia have two characteristic features. They lie in granite pockets with steep-to, rocky shores. Or they spread in low basins shrouded in dense forest, and the margins of such lakes are a marshy jungle. In either case they are difficult of approach. One must clamber over jagged rocks, or work up through crabapple, devil's club, and sedgy grass.
The Granite Pool on Valdez was one exception. This nameless lake proved another. Rod and Mary came to it through a heavy stand of cedar, massive old trees which had killed all the lesser growth in their centuries of possession. No sapling grew there, or bush or fern or vine. The level ground was carpeted with moss, which alone could thrive in that sunless place. Over this soft footing Rod and his wife walked by the little creek, flowing with faint murmurs in its bed of worn pebbles, till they stepped suddenly out of that semi-gloom into the brightness of open water rippling in the sun.
A low, gravelly beach at their feet; wooded points jutting into the lake; an island lifting a green mound of trees a little distance offshore; the lake itself bending away out of sight behind the base of a great mountain five miles distant,—this they saw.
"You never know what you're going to find back in these hills." Rod sat down on the gravel. "Let's sit and look. It's worth a look."
"If we just had a boat up here," Mary observed, after a little.
"We'll have one," Rod answered promptly. "I have an ax. There are plenty of cedars. I can make a dugout of some sort in three or four days. Let's move camp up here. There'll be trout umpty-inches long in here, and I would like to see what's behind that mountain. We'll certainly explorethis."
He made good his word, in sweat and strain. It was not a light task to shoulder-pack their food, bedding and tent over that pathless two miles. Nor was the shaping of a rude canoe from a cedar log and the hollowing of it by ax and fire so easy and simple as it seemed. But they accomplished these things. And having done so, they viewed their works with sinful pride, blessing the wilderness for what it bestowed upon them.
They meant to stay two or three weeks. Their food was reckoned on that basis. But they had been liberal in their estimate of supplies. There were trout in lake and stream. The blue grouse hooted on every hillside, and when they wanted meat they hunted these toothsome birds. Three weeks lengthened to four, to five—six. It became an amiable contest, a matter of achievement, to see how long they could live off the wilderness. They were completely happy there. It was as if some invisible barrier stood between them and the world of their fellows, where griefs and pains and irritations, hopes and fears and joys and ambitions ran their course. They did not know what went on beyond the rampart of their seclusion. And they did not care. They were too absorbed in what each day might bring forth as it passed. They experienced deep, ecstatic satisfactions in the simplest things. Rod began to work on his book again, in the intervals of hunting, fishing, exploring. He would lift his head, stirred out of concentration on imaginary things, at the sound of Mary singing as she moved about certain tasks. And he would smile. It was good; it was what he wanted. Peace to dream, to catch and transfix incident, character, a colorful background for heroic undertakings, as they mysteriously took form in his brain. To love and be loved; to get something more out of life than just a leisurely existence; to create something of worth above the measure of money.
He was aware that this was just an interlude. They would have to go back to the business of living along more conventional lines. They were both too much the normal product of society even to wish complete withdrawal from their kind. That would only be an evasion. But it was an experience they found to their liking. They promised themselves to repeat it often.
"We're barbarians at heart," Mary said once. "Our so-called culture is only skin-deep. Otherwise we couldn't sit over a camp fire and be content. Nor lie in the sun on a mossy rock and feel that blissful sense of complete well-being. People with instincts like those should survive more or less complacently almost anything but loss of freedom. What do shops and streetcars, cities and frontiers mean to us here?" She waved a hand at the ring of mountains, the enclosing forest. "People handicap themselves when they grow too civilized."
"I wonder if they do?" Rod mused. "Perhaps. I know people who would be very uncomfortable here—where we have been quite at our ease. It seems to be instinctive with us. We get quite a kick out of it too. Maybe we're throwbacks. Why shouldn't hereditary impressions crop out?"
"Maybe," Mary said reflectively. "By all accounts Roderick the first was a man who didn't mind long journeys or isolation. He must have felt at home here, or he wouldn't have made his home in a savage country. Certainly it wasn't compulsory with him. You don't have to throw back very far, Rod, to the self-sufficient type."
"And my people," she continued presently. "They were originally New York—upstate, not Manhattan—before the Boston Tea Party. Then they went across the Alleghanies. Then they went to Illinois. Then to Minnesota. Both my grandfathers fought in the Civil War. When they came back from that Minnesota was too crowded for them. With half a dozen other families they trekked across the plains—in '67. They drove their stakes in southern Idaho on the banks of the Snake. Always restless. Always striking out into new territory. Wanting elbow room. Determined to have it. Never taking root for more than one generation. They went into virgin country with their cattle and horses, their tools and rifles, and made homes where there had never been homes. They didn't get rich, but they were always independent, always competent to fend for themselves. Why shouldn't we have an instinct for this, Rod? It's in our blood."
"Well, we'll do it again," Rod prophesied. "This is a good retreat. We'll come back."
With that as a mark to shoot at when summer came again, they left the Hiding Place one cool September morning. By the coasting schedule Rod knew a steamer should touch at the logging camp across the Inlet that afternoon. They were leaving reluctantly. Their supplies had stretched to the elastic limit, but the limit had been reached. Time had accelerated his pace. It seemed but yesterday that they had come, in burning July. Now the mornings were touched with autumn chill. The vine maples showed glints of russet, streaks of burnished copper. The alders were growing yellow. Frost touched the leaves at night. New snow had fallen on the high peaks. Rain threatened. It was time to go.
They rowed across the inlet and tied up to the logger's landing. Two men worked on the floating logs, making up a tow. Far in the woods, in a deep valley, they could hear the toot of donkey engines. A train rumbled out on a trestle, dumped five cars of logs with a terrific splash. A clutter of raw, unpainted buildings stood about the shore end of the trestle.
"I'll go see if the storekeeper knows what time the steamer's due," Rod said. "May be able to get a newspaper. Funny. So long as we were in there, I never thought about papers. Old habits revive."
He walked the trestle ashore, disappeared among the buildings.
Presently he came into view again, walking slowly, an opened news sheet in his hands, reading as he stepped from timber to timber. Midway, still two hundred yards from the float, he sat down on an abutting platform, and remained there, the paper before his face, until the minutes lengthened to half an hour and Mary grew impatient.
She left the float. She neared her husband without him giving a sign, so deep was his absorption. He only looked up when she spoke. There was a strange bewilderment on his face, a look of mingled anger and incredulity.
"Why, Rod," she exclaimed. "What is it?"
He thrust another paper at her.
"Read," he said. "The world's gone crazy. There's a war. There's been war in Europe since early August. And we're in it up to our necks. Read."
They sat side by side in the autumn sunshine, reading of places drenched with blood,—Liége, Louvain, Charleroi, Mons, Cambrai, Namur. The battle of the Marne was over. The prolonged battle of the Aisne was at its height. Rod had commandeered every paper in the camp. Page by page, column by column, they conned that incredible account, piecing it out by inference, filling the terrible gaps by vivid conjecture. There remained the primal fact that all Europe was in arms, that men perished by thousands daily, that their own countrymen were crossing the seas to fight.
"Phil's gone," Rod broke a long silence. "Says so here. He left for Valcartier the other day."
He looked out over the inlet's benign face.
"He'd do that," he said absently. "They'd give him a command at once. He's trained—went to Kingston."
He sat with hands clasped over his knees, silent, absent-eyed. And Mary looked at him with a catch in her throat, filled with intuitive foreboding. Words, of which each had a better command than falls to most, failed them. They sat there wandering in the maze of their own thoughts until the shrill whistle of the approaching steamer woke an echo in the hills.
A day and a night on this slow-footed vessel brought them to Vancouver. They passed through the Narrows at dusk, cleared Brockton Point and stood up to the dusky wharves ranged below a vast haze of reflected light. Roof signs twinkled in all the colored extravagance electrical sign experts could devise. Looming high on a square office building stood Grove's heraldry:
THE NORQUAY TRUST
Rod's upper lip drew in a curl. He could not exactly say why. It was involuntary, instinctive. That sign offended him. The taxi that wheeled them to the Vancouver Hotel passed the place, and Rod's lip curled again at sight of the chaste illumination upon richly polished mahogany revealed through immense windows of plate glass. Again in their room that curious distaste for his brother's works came over him at an advertisement of the Norquay Trust Company in one of the evening papers he bought. It ran thusly:
Your country calls you. Before you go overseas put your affairs in the capable hands of
THE NORQUAY TRUST COMPANY
Then he turned to the war news.
Wherever he went in the city for the next two days the war topic hovered on men's lips. The streets wore the panoply of war in the recruiting aspect. Troops drilled in parks, on playgrounds. Bands marched abroad to stir men's blood. There was an edge of expectancy in the air, for theLeipsig, theDresden, theNuremberg, and two unknown battleships were loose in the Pacific. No one knew what truth lay in the rumor that any hour might see their shells dropping in the downtown section. There was nothing to stop them. They outsteamed and outgunned any British Squadron in those waters.
Amid this ferment Rod walked the streets, bodily restless, uneasy in his mind. For he had somehow none of the illusions about war that carried many a young man lightly along the line of least resistance in those hectic days. There was no glamor for him in a purely military adventure.
He loved his native country. He was proud of it. It had bestowed upon him a splendid heritage. He did not question a matter of duty. With his temperament and traditions such a questioning was impossible. But he revolted against being a pawn in the European game. He could not muster up an excited, voluble hate of the enemy. He did not respond so readily as some to the propaganda already loosed so effectively. He wondered a little at the execration and exhortation and invective that poured from the press, the pulpit, the fulminations from every public speaker, the vixenish resolutions of the women's societies. It was as if they were urging each other on to a task for which few had much stomach. It perplexed Rod. If one's country was at war, one must fight. That was plain to him as two plus two. Why should all these non-combatants lash themselves into such a fury over a European frontier, over the ancient feud between the Teuton and the Gaul? It amounted to this in his mind: we must fight because our statesmen have committed us to the task; but we will not whip the German by foaming at the mouth. That's childish.
He met Andy Hall the second day. Before theProvinceoffice on Hastings Street there was always a crowd reading the bulletins posted from time to time, studying the war map on which the positions of the opposing armies were kept up to date by little flag-headed pins. The curbstone Boards of Strategy functioned there. Knots of men held heated discussion, or stood silently digesting news. There was a sprinkling of the indifferent, the merely curious.
A man at Rod's elbow broke out:
"I'll go. Damn right I'll go—in the ranks of a regiment made up of bankers, bond owners, and politicians. But I don't see them breakin' their necks to sign up. Why should I? I never had nothin' but a job, and poor ones at that. I ain't goin' to fight just for a job."
"Maybe you'll fight for that?" a voice taunted,—and with the words came the sound of a blow, and then a scuffle and oaths. Rod turned to look. The bystanders were parting two struggling men. Andy Hall's freckled face glowed genially beside him.
"Even in these times the dissenter is with us," Andy indicated the brawlers. "How are you?"
"So, so," Rod shook hands with the high-rigger. "Still working for us? How did the strike pan out?"
"Oh, they got what they asked. I got fired as soon as old Handy thought things had settled down. About two weeks later. I guess he was afraid I might rib them up to ask for something else," Andy smiled amiably.
"Oh, that was rotten," Rod sympathized.
"Fortunes of war," Hall observed lightly. "Don't do to criticize your master's methods; not if you make your criticism so effective that it costs them money. Then they say you're an agitator and they can you off the job. The working man is mostly a sheep. The bosses know that. When a fellow like me—who isn't a sheep, but who understands and pities the sheep—sets out to show 'em how to get better pasture, he either gets taken into the fold and becomes a minor boss or he gets outlawed. Perfectly simple. You must not disorganize a profitable industry by demanding better pay. Industry doesn't like that."
"What do you think of this fracas across the pond?" Rod changed the subject to one that was for him personally, at that moment, much more important.
"Come and have a drink, and I'll tell you," Andy suggested.
They walked west to the Strand bar. Rod looked at his companion as they stood ordering their liquor. The Strand was a far cry from the usual haunt of the logger. He flourished in what Andy called the "slave market" down on Cordova Street, a region of Semitic clothing stores, cheap hotels, employment agencies where the woodsmen flocked in hundreds, gathered in groups along the sidewalk, rioted in the bars, or sought a job with empty pockets.
And Andy Hall was a logger from his head to his heels. That was his trade, the only means of livelihood he ever practiced. But he did not look the typical logger now. Apparently he did not follow the average logger's cycle of a red-hot time in town as a reaction from intensive labor in the woods.
"This fracas interests me more than you'd think, maybe," Andy proceeded over his glass. "In the first place it was inevitable as the result of the constant extension of spheres of influence—which is merely a euphemism for control of certain markets. The world's getting too small for the competitive system. Commercial interests are bound to clash. Armies are the policemen of trade."
Rod smiled. It was not a new nor in any way revolutionary statement. He had heard the same interpretation of world affairs, more subtly expressed, in university classrooms.
"What's the navy?"
"The water patrol," Andy bantered.
"'Oh, the liner she's a ladyAn' she never looks nor 'eeds.The man o' war's 'er 'usband—'
"Out of the mouth of the greatest drum-beater in English letters I answer you."
"It's a wonder you aren't away," Hall changed his tone abruptly. "Your brother's gone. Or have you got better sense?"
"Sense? Is there any sense in a war?" Rod countered. "But we're in it. If fellows like me won't go, who will?"
"You've said something," Andy replied quietly. "Leaving aside the sordid causes of war, war itself is the most senseless pastime any nation can engage in. There's a confusion of sentiments, a queer mixture of anger and defiance, vindictive cravings for retaliation, and hatreds that civilized men should have outgrown. An ingrowing fever to see your own side win. Once the first gun pops, it doesn't seem to matterwhy—any more than it matters to two men scrapping what the scrap started over. What each wants is to whip the other. But this particular war—commerce is at the bottom of it. You know it. You're too wise not to know. Struggle for commercial supremacy has started every war since the Crusades, and a few of the dynastic rumpuses. This is a row over property rights, real or potential. And as a member of the propertied class you have a vital interest in it. The bird who started that fuss in front of theProvincewasn't so far wrong. He has nothing to fight for—nothing worth fighting for. You have."
"From a purely material point of view, certainly," Rod answered. "But can't you see any more in it than that?"
"Should I?" Andy asked musingly. "Can there be an obligation of service to one's country without one's country assuming some obligation in return? And does one's country assume any obligation toward such men as me? If it does I don't know what it consists of. The man with nothing but his hands has few rights and no privileges. What does the casual worker, the completely propertyless man receive from his country that he should gladly cross the seas to die for it on foreign soil? Can you tell me? I don't think you can. In that sense one doesn't mean one's country geographically. These mountains we call ours will stand unchanged, the forests will grow, the rivers run to the sea, the salmon go up to the spawning grounds, the birds will mate and sing, whether we win or the Germans, or if both sides fight to the last man and the two races expire. So that really one's country means Bill Jones and Sam Smith and Jack Robinson—human society—the national unit. If Sam Smith, by skilful exercise of the acquisitive instinct, acquires ownership of the hills and the forest, and permits me and Bill Jones and Jack Robinson to work for him whenever he can profitably use our labor, and has no responsibility for our welfare at such times as he can't employ and pay us wages, why should we shoot and kill, and be ourselves shot and killed in defense of his hills and forests?
"That," Andy went on in his low, deliberate voice, "is one way of looking at it, one way of putting it. I'm what they call a common worker. So far as I know, my people have never been anything else but workers, tied to a job because they knew nothing else. I've never had anything but a job myself. I've dug up quite a lot of assorted facts and a variety of knowledge out of books between hours on the job. I've done quite a bit of thinking about what I've seen, and heard and read. Every dollar I've ever had, the food I've eaten, the clothes on my back—since I was nine years old I've earned 'em all by sweat and aching flesh. By way of illustration I'll cite the fact—with no personal reflection, you understand—that the Norquay estate employed last year on its timber operations upward of three hundred men. The net profits for the year run over two hundred thousand dollars. That's what your country means to you. But that means nothing to me. I have only myself, my energy, the strength of my arms and a certain skill to sell. And you don't employ me because I'm hungry or need clothes, or because I'm ambitious to better my condition. Oh, no. You don't recognize me as having the slightest claim on you for subsistence. You will only hire me at a wage where my labor can be transformed into cash at a profit to yourself. In slack times I can starve. It doesn't make any difference to you. That attitude and practice is typical of the industrial system of every civilized nation. I present you with the case of the intelligent worker, when he analyzes his situation in and relation to society. I ask you if we, who are the have-nots, should be proud and glad—as they tell us we should be—to die for the perpetuation of this state of affairs?"
Rod had an uncomfortable impression of the perfectly ordered and smoothly moving world he knew being critically examined and condemned by a dispassionate, impartial, and very acute intelligence. As Andy Hall put it, there seemed no bond of common interest, of sentiment, even of common justice to bind them together. Andy did not ask on behalf of his class, nor of himself as an individual, "What is there in it for us?" He only asked in moody accents, "Why should we, who have only the shadow, sacrifice ourselves for those who have the substance?"
Only a sophist could make other than one reply. And Rod was no sophist. He was only an earnest and troubled youngster reacting to the day and hour, according to the best traditions of the best of his class. He felt that there was more to be said on the subject than a laconic answer to Andy's "why?" There must be, or his world was a sham, thriving on social usury, and patriotism was a farce. It did not seem to Rod this could be possible. But he could not voice the thing that was in him. It was an emotional certainty, not a reasoned conviction. And he knew that as an impulsion to act the first was by far the greatest driving force in all men.
"I don't know. A man,—each man—must answer that for himself," he spluttered. "It's like this. We're all in the same boat. If everybody stands on his rights and demands a readjustment of a faulty arrangement of things before he will make a single defensive move—we'll be whipped out of hand. In fact, it looks as if the Germans had us staggering now. And I daresay two thirds of their armies are made up of the working class of Germany—who seem to be quite in accord with their masters' policy of conquest, or they wouldn't put up such a corking fight. If you fellows as a class refuse to meet them at their own game——" he threw out his hands in an eloquent gesture.
"Hell, you think I'm so thick-headed I can't see both sides of the fence?" Andy grunted. "I wasn't speaking for my own class. It's speaking for itself every day—to the recruiting sergeant. I'm speaking to you as a thinking, feeling individual who sees himself being sucked into a whirlpool. I'm trying to point out to you in the most rational manner possible what the real situation is. You can't deny it. It exists. Why, if the bulk, even a working majority of the damn fools that call themselves men, had a few glimmerings of social and economic wisdom there wouldn't be any German or French or Russian or British armies in the field. Only a few handfuls of atavistic adventurers. I'm not by nature a humble, peaceful toiler. I'd just as soon as not fight for anything that's worth fighting for—and all the hard fighting isn't done with guns, either. All my life I've seen the show run by arrogant, power-proud people who aren't nearly so clever as they seem to be. They make a mess of things too often to be really clever. And the rest of us growl and knuckle down to our jobs. We're slaves, not so much to our masters, as to our own inertia, our own lack of intelligence, slaves to the common, well-nourished illusion that to get something for nothing is the solution for all our difficulties. We merit contempt. No one among the well-fed and the cultured who have never soiled their hands with common work has more impatience with the bovine mass than some of us who are of the mass. We lose faith in ourselves and our own kind—but our masters never lose faith in us—in our docility to fetch and carry. They know how to use us without our knowing how it's done. They tell us now that the Germans threaten our lives, our freedom, our country and its cherished institutions. That's true enough. But we risk our lives daily in industry with very much less freedom of choice in the matter than even primitive man had in pursuing his food, clothing, and shelter. What cherished institutions of ours are threatened that we should go five thousand miles to fight in a quarrel between Russians, Germans and French?
"And still," Andy drummed on the polished bar with his finger tips, "in spite of my reasoned convictions I find myself as much of a herd animal as the rest. Logic tells me this row is the same old thing on a larger scale—an affair in which the have-nots will do the fighting as they do the work. But logic doesn't help me where I live, inside of me, when I see fellows I know, fellows I like, getting ready to go. The old tribal instincts that are stronger and deeper than civilization and industry keep stirring up in me, nagging at me. The flag—it's only a symbol. Patriotism, patriotic duty has only a hollow sound when I hear the phrase used. And still—something gets me—I don't know quite what it is—but it's there.
"It's a queer pass for me to come to," he finished whimsically. "Wouldn't it be? Me to go and fight for things and people that I don't believe in? Why should a man find his rational conclusions upset by an emotion he can't define? I stood looking at the Gulf the other day, and I thought how easy it would be for those German cruisers that are reported off the West Coast to start slinging shells in here. And the picture of 'em potting at us made me sort of swell up and get all hot and angry inside. It's illogical and absurd for me to feel that way about what's going on in Europe. And still—there it is. Some of these days I'll find myself in the army headed overseas. And I'll be wondering how in hell I got there. How, I ask you, can a man who thinks as I do,feelthe way I do, about this?"
But that was as difficult of answer as Andy's other question,—and Rod was too deeply involved in a personal problem of his own, a conflict between two powerful sets of feelings, to consider Andy's psychologicalimpasse. They had another drink and went about their separate affairs.
For another forty-eight hours Rod stirred uneasily about the town. He met his father by chance, talked with him briefly. He spent a little time each day in one or the other of two clubs in which he held membership. He and Mary went once to dinner at the home of a classmate, married now and frankly unsettled by the war cloud. He met other young men he knew. He missed a great many others, but he knew where they were. He heard the one thing discussed in clubs, in hotels, on the streets. People lived the war in public and private. Rod wondered if they dreamed about it in their sleep, as he sometimes did.
Between himself and Mary a singular constraint had arisen. It was as if some impalpable substance enfolded them, sealing their lips upon things they both felt and feared but could not embody in speech. Where the unspoken thought had scarcely needed words, so perfect an accord of mind had they attained, now each was locked in a separate chamber of his soul, brooding inscrutably, wordlessly even when they sat knee to knee by their room window or lay wide-eyed in the night, flesh touching flesh, mute in the face of an ache to speak and be understood.
Rod came in one evening after dusk. Mary had begun to dress for dinner. She sat on the edge of their bed, hair down, a silver slipper hanging idly from one hand. She looked at Rod when he came in, a silent question, almost an appeal, and then her eyes dropped to the floor.
"Dorothy is over from Victoria," she said tonelessly. "She telephoned half an hour ago. Charlie has been offered a commission. She's planning to go east with him and later across to London."
Rod sat down beside her, put his arms about her. His fingers stroked her thick, soft hair.
"I have to go," he said quietly. "I've hammered it out for myself. I can't keep out of it."
She laid her face against his breast. Her arms pressed tightly about him. A little shudder shook her.
"Oh, Rod, Rod," she whispered. "I can't bear it. I've seen it coming. We've just begun to live. And I'm going to have a baby."
He sat holding her close. She did not cry. She clung to him silently. The slow heave of her bosom, the occasional shiver, that desperate struggle for calmness, made him ache.
And he thought, with a slowly rising tide of bewilderment, of the wholly inadequate preparation that had been bestowed upon them for such a bitter sip of life's cup. For her a lonely childhood, an education frugally achieved, and marriage. For him eighteen years of a sheltered, tutored existence, four years of college, twelve months in a logging camp, three months of inconceivable happiness—and the war.
The Great War—which in five years was to bestow upon his country, at the price of many lives and out-poured treasure, such priceless victories as a scramble for oil and a squabble over debts!
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 theWorldBuilding, 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. "Somethinghasworried 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. Youarewhimsical, 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 downstamp,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 onstamp,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 hehadgrown 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!
At breakfast Rod was introduced to his son, Roderick Thorn Norquay, who lacked a few weeks of being four years old. Born in London, hurried home in 1917 when every unnecessary mouth England had to feed brought her so much nearer want, Roderick junior had no memory of his father. Rod marveled that two years could change a toddler into a sturdy boy in knickers who could be tentatively intrigued by gold braid, red tabs, and a shiny brown belt. They were both self-conscious enough to afford Mary a smile at their guarded approach to each other.
"It's funny to see you two," she said, when the youngster had marched away in care of a nurse girl. "You're like boxers—sparring for an opening."
"I suppose so," Rod returned. "I don't see the joke myself."
"Don't be so touchy, old dear," she wheedled. "You know what I mean."
"Not touchy." He smiled. "Just a bit off-color. We've missed such a devil of a lot that we can't catch up with. Having to present myself cautiously to my own kid reminds me of that. Four years wasted—worse than wasted. And we're only two out of millions."
"Wasted?"
"Absolutely."
"Then you don't think it was worth the fight? Belgium, destroying an arrogant militarism, saving the world for democracy, making further wars impossible—all those high ideals?"
Rod looked at her. Her face was placid as a shaded pool, expressionless. Her tone had been without accent—no key to her faith in those matters.
"Just phrases. Useful phrases that served their turn. Who is so naïve as to believe that now? Do you?" he asked without heat.
Mary smiled.
"No. But a great many people do. Or they say they do. They've gone about mouthing those catch phrases so long they repeat them as a sort of liturgic response whenever the war is mentioned. They respond to all questioning, all criticism, with that formula."
"I daresay," Rod mused. "But nobody in the army has any such illusions. I haven't had much chance to observe personally, but I don't know any place where democracy is in good working order. We certainly put a crimp in German militarism, but our own militarists are in a very flourishing condition, especially in France. In fact, a lot of men, from battalion commanders down to ranks, are beginning to ask what wedidfight for. The few weeks I've been in civil life haven't enlightened me. After passing through that long trance of dirt, danger and drudgery, men do want to know. Some people, quite a lot, regard it as some sort of spectacular game at which our side won. They seem to be rather eager for the distribution of prizes. And there aren't any prizes. I don't think there will be. Nothing but bigger taxes, higher prices—a hell of a struggle to pay the bill—labor demanding to know why, after having fought a war and won it, they must come home and get to work and pay the bill. Oh, we won the war right enough, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. The significance of that long-drawn wrangle at Versailles doesn't seem obvious to many people."
"People—people in the mass," Mary said scornfully, "are just sheep. One big sheep says 'Baa!' and all the lesser sheep chorus 'Baa!' defiantly or plaintively, as the case may be."
Rod laughed. He got up from his chair.
"Where's that club bag? Oh, I see it. That sheep thing reminds me. I heard Andy Hall use that simile once, and I came across the same observation in a book I bought on the train."
He came back to his wife with a volume in his hand.
"Have you seen this novel?" he asked. "If not you must read it. Some one who knows this country and loves it and understands it has been putting a lot of things very clearly and sympathetically in a book. Some of it is real enough to have happened, and some of the characters seem like people I know. There's truth and power in the thing. There's a man or two in it who feels about the war and political flapdoodle and tricky manipulation of affairs and a lot of current skulduggery, very much as a good many able men I know feel about it all. There is some corking good description, some fine characterization, and some almost brilliant writing. Part of the scene is laid on the B.C. coast. It's so vivid it made me homesick. Have you seen it?"
He handed her the book. Mary opened it, let the leaves riffle through her fingers, turned back to the title page.
"'The Swirl,'" she read. "A trifle reminiscent of Gissing's 'The Whirlpool' but none the worse for that, I daresay. By Margaret Pierce. Yes, I've read it," she said soberly, "read it over and over till my eyes ached, and it seemed like words, words, words. You see this happens to be my book, Rod."
"Eh?" he looked blankly at her.
"I wrote it," she explained. "Mary—diminutive of Margaret. Pierce—what is the purpose of a thorn? Hence Mary Thorn—Margaret Pierce. I didn't particularly like to camouflage my identity. But I wanted to say a lot of things which coming from Margaret Pierce would be considered on their merits, and which coming from Mrs. Roderick Sylvester Norquay might arouse local misconceptions. I wanted to be unhampered by family considerations. I wanted to express my inner convictions about various aspects of life as it has been unfolding to me for a long time. So I hoisted anom de plume. It would be strange if you didn't find a resemblance to persons and things and people you know. Yet there isn't a photograph there—just traits and habits of thought, inhibitions and passions that are common to humanity in general. I'm not a propagandist. I don't know that this book, or any other books I may write, has a message, unless it is the oblique inference that stupidity and ignorance and intolerance are more fatal than guns. I'm not so much concerned with isms as I am with—well, with what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote: 'Fashions in monsters do change; but the truth of humanity goes on forever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures.' You really think," she ended a bit hurriedly, "it's good?"
"Good?" Rod echoed. He sat down on the arm of her chair. "Of course it's good. Didn't I come lugging it home as a find?"
He looked down at the imprint.
"New York, eh? Did you have any trouble placing it?"
"Well, yes—and no," she said. "One publisher wrote me saying that it was work of a high order but he felt sure the time was scarcely opportune for its publication—unless I cared to modify certain passages which seemed to cast a doubt on the great moral forces underlying the war. That's almost verbatim. Another said that he personally enjoyed reading it very much, but was sure it would fail to get a hearing in view of the present demand for tales completely devoid of war atmosphere.
"It is amusing sometimes to try and trace motive and action," Mary smiled. "A publisher wants to publish books that will sell. Nearly every one is affected directly and indirectly by the war. Therefore the publisher concludes people want to ignore the war, or that they will uniformly recoil from a given aspect of the war, even if it is an individual attempt to interpret some obscure phase. War isn't the theme of this book. It's incidental, just as the war is incidental,—one of humanity's growing pains. Anyway, I found a publisher. And it's getting a hearing, he tells me. Peoplearereading it."
"You've found yourself," Rod said a little wistfully. "You've got the vision, and the power to embody your vision so that it stands out clear. I couldn't get it. I tried; I wanted to capture the spaciousness, the drama, the unquenchable spirit of the pioneers. And I couldn't. What I wanted to do seems mere inconsequential romancing beside the vivid reality you've achieved. How did you do it, wonder-woman? How do you know with such certainty what men think and feel, and how they can be beasts and heroes, groping blindly toward certain ends? Where did you get the astonishing grasp of those obscure motives which so often actuate people? You ought to write the history of the Norquay family, Mary. There's a theme for a novel. First the pioneer adventurer, courageous, determined, resourceful, infinitely patient about his foundation laying, seeing clearly what he was about. Then his son following in his father's footsteps. The grandson expanding upon the solidly laid groundwork, elaborating the original plan, acquiring land and timber, increasing the tradition of permanence. Then a generation that stands pat on its hereditary past, accepting wealth and culture as a birthright, things irrevocably bestowed upon a superior class, as a condition fixed and final for all time. Last of all a generation where the eldest son and heir is only a passionate, superficially glossed animal, who expends his fierce energy on women and financial undertakings, proving eminently successful with both. The second son, the well-balanced, sound-minded one, killed in the war. The youngest, a dreamy, sensitive youth, coming back from the war with a cracked heart and most of his romantic illusions about great men, great nations, and great idealistic undertakings knocked into a cocked hat—with no task ahead of him worth an effort, with his keenest consciousness that of a world where all stability has gone by the board; a tired, disillusioned man who wants only to sit and think, and to be grateful that if everything else seems pinchbeck there's still a woman who is eighteen-carat gold to him. I don't quite see how you would make a pattern out of such a snarl—but—"
He didn't finish the sentence. Mary's arms drew him down to her with a fierce, protecting pressure. She held him, whispering tensely:
"What have they done to you? I can't bear to hear you talk like that. It isn't true. Life hasn't gone sour. We mustn't let it. We can make it good—we must. One daren't falter. One must not brood. We're over the top of a long hill that has tried us both. Well, then—'Courage, the devil is dead!' Eh, Roderick Dhu? Love'ssomethingto hold fast by, isn't it?"
For a few days Rod went about a little, picking up threads of old acquaintance with places and people. The uneasy consciousness of a heart which might fail him at any moment troubled him now and then. Once or twice he felt that strange faltering. But it did not stop—not quite. He wondered if he had passed a crisis that first night at home when he felt himself locked in a grapple with death itself. And so he was very careful. It was easy to be apathetic, to be completely acquiescent. Nothing, he thought, would ever again make his heart swell with such repressed passion as the sights and sounds of the western front, the carnival of non-combatants in Paris and London, the bitterness with which for so long he had seen the agonies and endurances and destructiveness of war as sheer waste—blind, blundering waste, the offspring of cupidity wedded to arrogant ignorance.
He wanted to forget what could not be changed. Here it was easy to forget, at least to thrust it all into the background, now that he was home. For a time he would rest. When his heart strengthened he would take stock of his resources and move with determined purpose in some direction, toward some as yet indefinite goal.
In the meantime, free from military discipline, interminable parades, orders, red tape that fettered the hands of initiative and bound up a man's mouth so that he needed only two phrases in his vocabulary, "Yes, sir" and "No, sir," he went about in his native city observing, noting, listening in clubs, homes, on the streets, in hotel lobbies where he went to meet other men who had just come back.
If the landscape endured and the outstanding architectural features, many things had changed, contrary to his first glad impression, were still changing at an accelerated pace in this winter of 1919. In four years and a half his native city, when he came to examine it closely, presented a transformed physiognomy. Its lifeblood, people and money, flowed in a heavier stream through complicated arteries. Vancouver was bigger and better, he heard on every hand. New industries, shipyards, shipping, more elaborate affairs. The war had done a great deal for British Columbia, an elderly banker naïvely remarked to him.
Rod conceded that it probably had. But it had also done something "to" British Columbia. He couldn't say just what. It wasn't clear enough in his mind. But he could feel it. Or perhaps it was only himself. He could not be sure. He could dimly apprehend a difference. His world was changed. Phil was dead. Grandfather Norquay took his long sleep beside other dead Norquays in the plot at Hawk's Nest. Grove flourished largely, a scintillating comet, streaming across the moneyed spaces.
Rod sometimes paused after dark in some distant part of the city to look at the flamboyant sign with a speculative interest, without the old resentment, but with a shade of disapproval. Grove was become a big man—Rod couldn't escape that conclusion—a big man in his chosen field. Scarcely a day but some newspaper quoted him. He figured in local print co-equal with the Peace Conference and the latest authentic report of Lenine's death. Nearly nine years now of waxing great in the financial firmament. Grove bade fair to win greater fame and fortune than that old forebear of his who beat around the Horn to found a family in the wilderness because the land filled his eyes with pleasure and his soul with peace.
Would old Roderick have found pleasure and profit in discounting notes, clipping coupons at so much per cent, buying and selling bonds and mortgages, squeezing little debtors and bolstering up big ones for a consideration? Rod smiled at the quaint notion.
But he had evidently underestimated Grove's capacity. Grove had his community behind him. His finger was in every pie. His skill at extracting plums was envied and admired.
"He's what they mean when they talk about the greatness of our country," Rod thought cynically. "That sort of thing."
Oliver Thorn had sold his timber to the Norquay Estate and retired to live in a cottage on the Capilano slope fronting on the city, where he could, as he told Rod, spend his last years seeing the sun rise from behind the Coast range and set behind the far, blue rampart of Vancouver Island. John P. Wall, Grove's father-in-law, had made a fortune in building wooden ships and another in airplane spruce. Wall's youngest son had been killed overseas, but his eldest had been too precious an asset to the community to risk his life in war. Isabel was a beauty, still unmarried. (It seemed to Rod an astonishing thing when Mary told him Isabel was her dearest friend.) The Deanes and Richstons flourished, with one or two gaps in the younger ranks. They had grown richer with the war, vastly more sure of themselves, setting a pace in the social parade that lesser folk found hard to follow.
There were two avenues open along which Rod could saunter to exercise this detached observance of his own people: the homes which automatically opened to him, and brief daily contacts with men downtown. Socially things seemed a little more feverish, people just a trifle keener in the futile pursuit of futile diversion, the dancing just a little more frankly sensuous, the drinking a little freer, the talk looser. If one couldn't or wouldn't keep the pace one was "slow." It amused Rod and it vaguely troubled him. These people seemed so remote from so many things of importance that pressed close on them, matters that constituted both a warning and a threat. Downtown it was worse. Uptown rested on downtown. The economic link—the strongest link in the invisible chain—shackled them together whether they knew it or not.
And downtown was frankly on the make, with the most shrewd and far-seeing already privately dubious about a let-down in the swift flow of affairs that followed the close of European hostilities. Perhaps it had always been the same. He had not been aware how consistently material, how harshly practical, the world of commerce must be. But he couldn't get used to hearing them tot up Canada's share in the reparations, the gloating on what enlarged African and Asiatic possession meant to trade, their chesty pride in having swept the Hun from the seas (as if they had done it in their office chairs). He couldn't get used to that, because it was invariably accompanied by an undertone of growling about confiscatory taxation, enormous pension bills.
Here and there some elderly hardshell solemnly viewed with alarm three items debited to the war: first, the growing demand of labor for shorter hours, increased pay, and a voice in the conduct of industries for which they furnished the motive power; second, the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia which constituted a horrific menace to the sacred rights of private property; third, the military strength and insistent demands of France.
The war as a business proposition! Rod got up and walked away from a group of men in a club who rather vindictively discussed these important phases of the Europeandébâcle. If that were all—commerce—shipping—iron—coal—territory—indemnities. If that were all! His heart wouldn't stand his talking to those bankers and merchants and manufacturers and brokers as he wished to talk. He left them. What was held as piracy and brigandage for the individual became somehow the unchallenged privilege of a nation, if only the scale of operations were large enough. The Barbary corsairs were at least open in their deeds. They flew the Jolly Roger and their victims walked the plank without ado. Nor did the pirates get their fighting done by proxy and then grumble because they found it expensive.