The Hidden Places Part 2

On the landing at the end of the narrow corridor off which his room opened he met a man in uniform whom he recognized,--a young man who had served under him in the Forty-fourth, who had won a commission on the field. He wore a captain's insignia now. Hollister greeted him by name.

"h.e.l.lo, Tommy."

The captain looked at him. His face expressed nothing whatever.

Hollister waited for that familiar shadow of distaste to appear. Then he remembered that, like himself, Rutherford must have seen thousands upon thousands of horribly mutilated men.

"Your voice," Rutherford remarked at length, "has a certain familiar sound. Still, I can't say I know you. What's the name?"

"Bob Hollister. Do you remember the bottle of Scotch we pinched from the Black Major behind the brick wall on the Albert Road? Naturally you wouldn't know me--with this face."

"Well," Rutherford said, as he held out his hand, "a fellow shouldn't be surprised at anything any more. I understood you'd gone west. Your face _is_ mussed up a bit. Rotten luck, eh?"

Hollister felt a lump in his throat. It was the first time for months that any human being had met him on common ground. He experienced a warm feeling for Rutherford. And the curious thing about that was that out of the realm of the subconscious rose instantly the remembrance that he had never particularly liked Tommy Rutherford. He was one of the wild men of the battalion. When they went up the line Rutherford was d.a.m.nably cool and efficient, a fatalist who went about his grim business unmoved. Back in rest billets he was always pursuing some woman, unearthing surplus stores of whisky or wine, intent upon dubious pleasures,--a handsome, self-centered debonair animal.

"My room's down here," Hollister said. "Come in and gas a bit--if you aren't bound somewhere."

"Oh, all right. I came up here to see a chap, but he's out. I have half an hour or so to spare."

Rutherford stretched himself on Hollister's bed. They lit cigarettes and talked. And as they talked, Rutherford kept looking at Hollister's face, until Hollister at last said to him:

"Doesn't it give you the w.i.l.l.i.e.s to look at me?"

Rutherford shook his head.

"Oh, no. I've got used to seeing fellows all twisted out of shape. You seem to be fit enough otherwise."

"I am," Hollister said moodily. "But it's a devil of a handicap to have a mug like this."

"Makes people shy off, eh? Women particularly. I can imagine,"

Rutherford drawled. "Tough luck, all right. People don't take very much stock in fellows that got smashed. Not much of a premium on disfigured heroes these days."

Hollister laughed harshly.

"No. We're at a discount. We're duds."

For half an hour they chatted more or less one-sidedly. Rutherford had a grievance which he took pains to air. He was on duty at Hastings Park, having been sent there a year earlier to instruct recruits, after recovering from a wound. He was the military man par excellence.

War was his game. He had been anxious to go to Siberia with the Canadian contingent which had just departed. And the High Command had retained him here to a.s.sist in the inglorious routine of demobilization. Rutherford was disgruntled. Siberia had promised new adventure, change, excitement.

The man, Hollister soon perceived, was actually sorry the war was over, sorry that his occupation was gone. He talked of resigning and going to Mexico, to offer his sword to whichever proved the stronger faction. It would be a picnic after the Western Front. A man could whip a brigade of those greasers into shape and become a power. There ought to be good chances for loot.

Yet Hollister enjoyed his company. Rutherford was genial. He was the first man for long to accept Hollister as a human being. He promised to look Hollister up again before he went away.

The world actually seemed cheerful to Hollister, after Rutherford had gone,--until in moving about the room he caught sight of his face in the mirror.

CHAPTER III

About ten days later Tommy Rutherford walked into Hollister's room at eight in the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seated himself, swung his feet to and fro for a second, and reached for one of Hollister's cigarettes.

"It's a hard world, old thing," he complained. "Here was I all set for an enjoyable winter. Nice people in Vancouver. All sorts of fetching affairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself next week.

Chucked out into the blooming street with a gratuity and a couple of medals. d.a.m.n the luck."

He remained absorbed in his own reflections for a minute, blowing smoke rings with meticulous care.

"I wonder if a fellow _could_ make it go in Mexico?" he drawled.

Hollister made no comment.

"Oh, well, hang it, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," he remarked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at the Granada presently. Banish dull care and all that, for the time being, anyway."

His gaze came to an inquiring rest on Hollister.

"What's up, old thing?" he asked lightly. "Why so mum?"

"Oh, nothing much," Hollister answered.

"Bad thing to get in the dumps," Rutherford observed sagely. "You ought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that."

"Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters and becomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fancy your prescription. I'd be more apt to run amuck."

"Oh, come now," Rutherford remonstrated. "It isn't so bad as that.

Cheer up, old man. Things might be worse, you know.

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" Hollister exploded.

After which he relapsed into sullen silence, to which Rutherford, frankly mystified and somewhat inclined to resent this self-contained mood, presently left him.

Hollister was glad when the man went away. He had a feeling of relief when the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. He had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a man drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to horrible sights,--not because he had any particular sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or any understanding of such a man's state of feeling. To Rutherford that was the fortune of war. So many were killed. So many crippled. So many disfigured. It was luck. He believed in his own luck. The evil that befell other men left him rather indifferent. That was all. When Hollister once grasped Rutherford's att.i.tude, he almost hated the man.

He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a lowering, slate-colored ma.s.s of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreary, threatening night that fitted his mood.

He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best that was in him, played the game faithfully, according to the rules.

And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster. So far as Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a natural consequence. He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife had simply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown too largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He had always known that his wife--women generally were the same, he supposed--was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason.

But that had never struck him as of great significance. Women were like that. A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, that men also were much the same. He was, himself. When his feelings and his reason came into conflict, it was touch and go which should triumph. The fact remained that for a long time the war had separated them as effectually as a divorce court. Hollister had always had a hazy impression that Myra was the sort of woman to whom love was necessary, but he had presumed that it was the love of a particular man, and that man himself. This, it seemed, was a mistake, and he had paid a penalty for making that mistake.

So he accepted this phase of his unhappiness without too much rancor.

Myra had played fair, he perceived. She had told him what to expect.

And the accident of a misleading report had permitted her to follow her bent with a moral sanction. That she had bestowed herself and some forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not the thing Hollister resented. He resented only the fact that her glow of love for him had not endured, that it had gone out like an untended fire. But for some inscrutable reason that had happened. He had built a dream-house on an unstable foundation. It had tumbled down. Very well. He accepted that.

But he did not accept this unuttered social dictum that he should be kept at arm's length because he had suffered a ghastly disarrangement of his features while acting as a s.h.i.+eld behind which the rest of society rested secure. No, he would never accept that as a natural fact. He could not.

No one said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. He was like poverty and injustice,--present but ignored. And this being shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a state approaching desperation.

For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than a healthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink at certain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind that his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been so drained that he could sit pa.s.sive and let the world go by unheeded, then he would have been at peace.

He had seen men like that--many of them--content to sit in the sun, to be fed and let alone. Their hearts were broken as well as their bodies.