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THE HIDDEN PLACES

[Illustration: He did not shrink while those soft fingers went
exploring the devastation wrought by the exploding shell.
FRONTISPIECE. _See page 128._]

THE HIDDEN PLACES


By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR


Author of

_"Big Timber," "Poor Man's Rock," etc._


A.L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company
Printed in U.S.A.


_Copyright, 1922,_
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_
Published January, 1922.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




THE HIDDEN PLACES




CHAPTER I


Hollister stood in the middle of his room, staring at the door without
seeing the door, without seeing the bulky shadow his body cast on the
wall in the pale glow of a single droplight. He was seeing everything
and seeing nothing; acutely, quiveringly conscious and yet oblivious
to his surroundings by reason of the poignancy of his thought.

A feeling not far short of terror had folded itself about him like a
shrouding fog.

It had not seized him unaware. For weeks he had seen it looming over
him, and he had schooled himself to disregard a great deal which his
perception was too acute to misunderstand. He had struggled
desperately against the unescapable, recognizing certain significant
facts and in the same breath denying their accumulated force in sheer
self-defense.

A small dressing-table topped by an oval mirror stood against the wall
beside his bed. Hollister took his unseeing gaze off the door with a
start, like a man withdrawing his mind from wandering in far places.
He sat down before the dressing-table and forced himself to look
steadfastly, appraisingly, at the reflection of his face in the
mirror--that which had once been a presentable man's countenance.

He shuddered and dropped his eyes. This was a trial he seldom ventured
upon. He could not bear that vision long. No one could. That was the
fearful implication which made him shrink. He, Robert Hollister, in
the flush of manhood, with a body whose symmetry and vigor other men
had envied, a mind that functioned alertly, a spirit as nearly
indomitable as the spirit of man may be, was like a leper among his
own kind; he had become a something that filled other men with pitying
dismay when they looked at him, that made women avert their gaze and
withdraw from him in spite of pity.

Hollister snapped out the light and threw himself on his bed. He had
known physical suffering, the slow, aching hours of tortured flesh,
bodily pain that racked him until he had wished for death as a welcome
relief. But that had been when the flame of vitality burned low, when
the will-to-live had been sapped by bodily stress.

Now the mere animal instinct to live was a compelling force within
him. He was young and strong, aching with his desire for life in its
fullest sense. And he did not know how he was going to live and endure
the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but
frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was
making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field,
under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front
line or the ether-scented dressing stations. There is morphine for a
tortured body, but there is no opiate for agony of the spirit, the
sharp-toothed pain that stabs at a lonely heart with its invisible
lancet.

In the darkness of his room, with all the noisy traffic of a seaport
city rumbling under his windows, Hollister lay on his bed and
struggled against that terrifying depression which had seized him,
that spiritual panic. It was real. It was based upon undeniable
reality. He was no more captain of his soul than any man born of woman
has ever been when he descends into the dark places. But he knew that
he must shake off that feeling, or go mad, or kill himself. One of the
three. He had known men to kill themselves for less. He had seen
wounded men beg for a weapon to end their pain. He had known men who,
after months of convalescence, quitted by their own hand a life that
no longer held anything for them.

And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he
lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any moral scruple
against self-destruction. He clung to life because instinct was
stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he
encountered and knew he must go on encountering. He had to live, with
a past that was no comfort, going on down the pathway of a future
which he attempted not to see clearly, because when he did envisage it
he was stricken with just such a panic as now overwhelmed him.

To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his
disfigurement. A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance.
To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship,
friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life
beautiful were always just beyond his reach. To be merely endured. To
have women pity him--and shun him.

The sweat broke out on Hollister's face when he thought of all that.
He knew that it was true. This knowledge had been growing on him for
weeks. To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him
with terror. That was all. He did not cry out against injustice. He
did not whine a protest. He blamed no one. He understood, when he
looked at himself in the glass.

After a time he shook off the first paralyzing grip of this unnameable
terror which had seized him with clammy hands, fought it down by sheer
resolution. He was able to lie staring into the dusky spaces of his
room and review the stirring panorama of his existence for the past
four years. There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite
regret--and there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could
have changed. He could not have escaped one of those calamities which
had befallen him. He could not have left undone a single act that he
had performed. There was an inexorable continuity in it all. There
had been a great game. He had been one of the pawns.

Hollister shut his eyes. Immediately, like motion pictures projected
upon a screen, his mind began to project visions. He saw himself
kissing his wife good-by. He saw the tears shining in her eyes. He
felt again the clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would
be so lonely. He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He
saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with
shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again
till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised
in blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals
to the rumble of guns.

He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra
was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to
think that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up
under it. He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his
thigh, when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint
perfunctoriness in her greeting. It was on this leave that he first
realized how the grim business he was engaged upon was somehow rearing
an impalpable wall between himself and this woman whom he still loved
with a lover's passion after four years of marriage.

And he could see, in this mental cinema, whole searing sentences of
the letter he received from her just before a big push on the Somme
in the fall of '17--that letter in which she told him with child-like
directness that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved
another man. She was sure he would not care greatly. She was sorry if
he did. But she could not help it. She had been so lonely. People were
bound to change. It couldn't be helped. She was sorry--but--

And Hollister saw himself later lying just outside the lip of a
shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear when he felt
it with groping fingers. He remembered that he lay there wondering,
because of the darkness and the strange silence and the pain, if he
were dead and burning in hell for his sins.

After that there were visions of himself in a German hospital, in a
prison camp, and at last the armistice, and the Channel crossing once
more. He was dead, they told him, when he tried in the chaos of
demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his
identity, to find his wife. He was officially dead. He had been so
reported, so accepted eighteen months earlier. His wife had married
again. She and her husband had vanished from England. And with his
wife had vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war
arrangement which he had never revoked.

He beheld himself upon the streets of London, one of innumerable stray
dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did
not particularly consider himself a victim of injustice. He did not
blame Myra. He was simply numbed and bewildered.

But that was before he grew conscious of what it meant to a sensitive
man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to be
penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn
from under his feet, to be so disfigured that people shunned him.

He had to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together,
go on as best he could. It did not occur to him at first to do
otherwise, or that the doing would be hard. He had not foreseen all
the strange shifts he would be put to, the humiliations he would
suffer, the crushing weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by
the time he arrived on the Pacific Coast, where he had once lived, to
which he now turned to do as men all over the war-racked earth were
doing in the winter of 1919,--cast about in an effort to adjust
himself, to make a place for himself in civil life.

All the way across the continent of North America Hollister grew more
and more restive under the accumulating knowledge that the horrible
devastation of his features made a No Man's Land about him which few
had the courage to cross. It was a fact. Here, upon the evening of the
third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon
him, a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,--dead
in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with
his fellows went. It was as if men and women were universally
repulsed by that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a
face, as if at sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew
to a safe distance, as they would withdraw from any loathsome thing.

Lying on his bed, Hollister flexed his arms. He arched his chest and
fingered the muscular breadth of it in the darkness. Bodily, he was a
perfect man. Strength flowed through him in continuous waves. He could
feel within himself the surge of vast stores of energy. His brain
functioned with a bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,--ah, that
was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of
thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the
man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of
tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his
cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he
had always been.

For a moment there came over him the wild impulse to rush out into the
street, crying:

"You fools! Because my face is torn and twisted makes me no different
from you. I still feel and think. I am as able to love and hate as
you. Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead
the men who risked the scars? Is all your much advertised kindliness
and sympathy for war-broken men a bluff?"

He smiled sadly. They would say he was mad. They would classify him as
suffering from shell shock. A frock-coated committee would gravely
recommend him for treatment in the mental hospital at Essondale. They
would not understand.

Hollister covered his face with a swift, tight clasping of his hands.
Something rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding
wetness crept like a film. He set his teeth in one corner of his
pillow.




CHAPTER II


When Hollister was eighteen years old he had been briefly troubled by
an affliction of his eyes brought on from overstudy. His father, at
the time, was interested in certain timber operations on the coast of
British Columbia. In these rude camps, therefore, young Hollister
spent a year. During that twelve months books were prohibited. He
lived in the woods, restored the strength of his eyes amid that
restful greenness, hardened a naturally vigorous body by healthy,
outdoor labor with the logging crews. He returned home to go on with
his University work in eastern Canada with unforgettable impressions
of the Pacific coast, a boyish longing to go back to that region where
the mountains receded from the sea in wave after wave of enormous
height, where the sea lapped with green lips at the foot of the ranges
and thrust winding arms back into the very heart of the land, and
where the land itself, delta and slope and slide-engraved declivities,
was clothed with great, silent forests, upon which man, with his axes
and saws, his machinery, his destructiveness in the name of industry,
had as yet made little more impression than the nibbling of a single
mouse on the rim of a large cheese.

When he graduated he did return on a thirty-days' vacation, which the
lure of the semi-wild country prolonged for six months,--a whole
summer in which he resisted the importunities of his father to take
his part in the business upon which rested the family fortune.
Hollister never forgot that summer. He was young. He had no cares. He
was free. All life spread before him in a vast illusion of
unquestionable joyousness. There was a rose-pink tinge over these
months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning
escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a
region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed.
There had always lingered in his receptive mind a memory of profound
beauty, a stark beauty of color and outline, an unhampered freedom,
opportunity as vast as the mountains that looked from their cool
heights down on the changeful sea and the hushed forests, brooding in
the sun and rain.

So he had come back again, after seven years, scarcely knowing why he
came, except that the coast beckoned with a remote gesture, and that
he desired to get as far as possible from the charnel house of Europe,
and that he shrank from presenting himself among the acquaintances of
his boyhood and the few distant relatives left him upon the Atlantic
seaboard.

His father died shortly after Hollister married. He had left his son
property aggregating several thousand dollars and a complicated
timber business disorganized by his sudden death. Hollister was
young, sanguine, clever in the accepted sense of cleverness. He had
married for love,--urged thereto by a headlong, unquestioning,
uncritical passion. But there were no obstacles. His passion was
returned. There was nothing to make him ponder upon what a
devastating, tyrannical force this emotion which he knew as love might
become, this blind fever of the blood under cover of which nature
works her ends, blandly indifferent to the consequences.

Hollister was happy. He was ambitious. He threw himself with energy
into a revival of his father's business when it came into his hands.
His needs expanded with his matrimonial obligations. Considered
casually--which was chiefly the manner of his consideration--his
future was the future of a great many young men who begin life under
reasonably auspicious circumstances. That is to say, he would be a
success financially and socially to as great an extent as he cared to
aspire. He would acquire wealth and an expanding influence in his
community. He would lead a tolerably pleasant domestic existence. He
would be proud of his wife's beauty, her charm; he would derive a
soothing contentment from her affection. He would take pleasure in
friendships. In the end, of course, at some far-off, misty mile-post,
he would begin to grow old. Then he would die in a dignified manner,
full of years and honors, and his children would carry on after him.

Hollister failed to reckon with the suavities of international
diplomacy, with the forces of commercialism in relation to the markets
of the world.

The war burst upon and shattered the placidity of his existence very
much as the bombs from the first Zeppelins shattered the peace and
security of London and Paris.

He reacted to the impetus of the German assault as young men of his
class uniformly reacted. There was in Hollister's mind no doubt or
equivocation about what he must do. But he did not embark upon this
adventure joyously. He could not help weighing the chances. He
understood that in this day and age he was a fortunate man. He had a
great deal to lose. But he felt that he must go. He was not, however,
filled with the witless idea that service with the Expeditionary Force
was to be an adventure of some few months, a brief period involving
some hardships and sharp fighting, but with an Allied Army hammering
at the gates of Berlin as a grand finale. The slaughter of the first
encounters filled him with the conviction that he should put his house
in order before he entered that bloody arena out of which he might not
emerge.

So that when he crossed the Channel the first time he had disentangled
himself from his business at a great loss, in order to have all his
funds available for his wife in case of the ultimate disaster.

Myra accompanied him to England, deferred their separation to the last
hour. They could well afford that concession to their affection, they
told each other. It was so hard to part.

It scarcely seemed possible that four years had gone winging by since
then, yet in certain moods it seemed to Hollister as if an eternity
had passed. Things had been thus and so; they had become different by
agonizing processes.

He did not know where Myra was. He, himself, was here in Vancouver,
alone, a stranger, a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far
beach by the receding tides of war. He had no funds worth considering,
but money was not as yet an item of consideration. He was not
disabled. Physically he was more fit than he had ever been. The
delicate mechanism of his brain was unimpaired. He had no
bitterness--no illusions. His intellect was acute enough to suggest
that in the complete shucking off of illusions lay his greatest peril.
Life, as it faced him, the individual, appeared to be almost too grim
a business to be endured without hopes and dreams. He had neither. He
had nothing but moods.

He walked slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had
yet come upon him. It differed from that strange feeling of terror
which had taken him unaware the night before. He had fallen easy prey
then to the black shadows of forlornness. He was still as acutely
aware of the barrier which his disfigurement raised between him and
other men. But with that morbid awareness there rose also now, for the
first time, resentment against the smug folk who glanced at him and
hurriedly averted their eyes. Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, as the
tide rises on a sloping shore, his anger rose.

The day was cold and sunny, a January morning with a touch of frost in
the air. Men passed him, walking rapidly, clad in greatcoats. Women
tripped by, wrapped in furs, eyes bright, cheeks glowing. And as they
passed, singly, in chattering pairs, in smiling groups, Hollister
observed them with a growing fury. They were so thoroughly insulated
against everything disagreeable. All of them. A great war had just
come to a dramatic close, a war in which staggering numbers of men had
been sacrificed, body and soul, to enable these people to walk the
streets in comfortable security. They seemed so completely unaware of
the significance of his disfigured face. It was simply a disagreeable
spectacle from which they turned with brief annoyance.

Most of these men and women honored the flag. In a theater, at any
public gathering, a display of the national colors caused the men to
bare reverently their heads, the women to clap their hands with
decorous enthusiasm. Without doubt they were all agreed that it was a
sacred duty to fight for one's country. How peculiar and illogical
then, he reflected, to be horrified at the visible results of fighting
for one's country, of saving the world for democracy. The thing had
had to be done. A great many men had been killed. A great number had
lost their legs, their arms, their sight. They had suffered
indescribable mutilations and disabilities in the national defense.
These people were the nation. Those who passed him with a shocked
glance at his face must be aware that fighting involves suffering and
scars. It appeared as if they wished to ignore that. The inevitable
consequences of war annoyed them, disturbed them, when they came face
to face with those consequences.

Hollister imagined them privately thinking he should wear a mask.

After all, he was a stranger to these folk, although he was their
countryman and a person of consequence until the war and Myra and
circumstances conspired against him.

He stifled the resentment which arose from a realization that he must
expect nothing else, that it was not injustice so much as stupidity.
He reflected that this was natural. A cynical conclusion arose in his
mind. There was no substance, after all, in this loose talk about
sympathy and gratitude and the obligation of a proud country to those
who had served overseas. Why should there be? He was an individual
among other individuals who were unconsciously actuated by rampant
individualism except in moments of peril, when stark necessity
compelled them to social action. Otherwise it was every man for
himself. Yes, it was natural enough. He _was_ a stranger to these
people. Except for the color of his skin, he was no more to them than
a Hindoo or a Japanese. And doubtless the grotesque disarrangement of
his features appalled them. How could they discern behind that
caricature of a face the human desire for friendliness, the ache of a
bruised spirit?

He deliberately clamped down the lid upon such reflections and
bethought himself of the business which brought him along the street.
Turning off the main thoroughfare, he passed half a block along a
cross street and entered an office building. Ascending to the fourth
floor, he entered an elaborate suite of offices which bore upon the
ground glass of the entrance door this legend:

LEWIS AND COMPANY

SPECIALISTS IN B.C. TIMBER. INVESTMENTS

He inquired for Mr. Lewis, gave his card to a young woman who glanced
at him once and thereafter looked anywhere but at him while he spoke.
After a minute of waiting he was ushered into a private office. As he
neared this door, Hollister happened to catch a panoramic glimpse in a
wall mirror. The eyes of half a dozen clerks and other persons in that
room, both male and female, were fixed on him with the shocked and
eager curiosity he had once observed upon the faces of a crowd
gathered about the mangled victim of a street accident.

Mr. Lewis was a robust man, a few years older than Hollister. The
cares of a rapidly developing business and certain domestic ties had
prevented Mr. Lewis from offering himself upon the altar of his
country. The responsibility of eight per cent. investments entrusted
to his care was not easily shaken off. Business, of course, was a
national necessity. However, since the armistice, Mr. Lewis had ceased
to be either explanatory or inferentially apologetic--even in his own
thought--for his inability to free himself from the demands of
commerce during a critical period.

In any case he was there, sound in wind and limb, a tall,
square-shouldered, ruddy man of thirty-five, seated behind an oak
desk, turning Hollister's card over in his fingers with an
anticipatory smile. Blankness replaced the smile. A sort of horrified
wonder gleamed in his eyes. Hollister perceived that his face shocked
the specialist in B.C. timber, filled Mr. Lewis with very mixed
sensations indeed.

"You have my card. It is several years since we met. I dare say you
find me unrecognizable," Hollister said bluntly. "Nevertheless I can
identify myself to your satisfaction."

A peculiarity of Hollister's disfigurement was the immobility of his
face. The shell which had mutilated him, the scalpels of the German
field surgeons who had perfunctorily repaired the lacerations, had
left the reddened, scar-distorted flesh in a rigid mold. He could
neither recognizably smile nor frown. His face, such as it was, was
set in unchangeable lines. Out of this rigid, expressionless mask his
eyes glowed, blue and bright, having escaped injury. They were the
only key to the mutations of his mind. If Hollister's eyes were the
windows of his soul, he did not keep the blinds drawn, knowing that
few had the hardihood to peer into those windows now.

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