Book: The Hidden Places

B >> Bertrand W. Sinclair >> The Hidden Places




Mr. Lewis looked at him, looked away, and then his gaze came slowly
back as if drawn by some fascination against which he struggled in
vain. He did not wish to look at Hollister. Yet he was compelled to
look. He seemed to find difficulty in speech, this suave man of
affairs.

"I'm afraid I shouldn't have recognized you, as you say," he uttered,
at last. "Have you--ah----"

"I've been overseas," Hollister answered the unspoken question. That
strange curiosity, tinctured with repulsion! "The result is obvious."

"Most unfortunate," Mr. Lewis murmured. "But your scars are honorable.
A brother of mine lost an arm at Loos."

"The brothers of a good many people lost more than their arms at
Loos," Hollister returned dryly. "But that is not why I called. You
recollect, I suppose, that when I was out here last I bought a timber
limit in the Toba from your firm. When I went overseas I instructed
you to sell. What was done in that matter?"

Mr. Lewis' countenance cleared at once. He was on his own ground
again, dealing with matters in which he was competent, in consultation
with a client whom he recalled as a person of consequence, the son of
a man who had likewise been of considerable consequence. Personal
undesirability was always discounted in the investment field, the
region of percentum returns. Money talked, in arrogant tones that
commanded respect.

He pressed a button.

"Bring me," he ordered the clerk who appeared, "all correspondence
relating to this matter," and he penciled a few sentences on a slip of
paper.

He delved into the papers that were presently set before him.

"Ah, yes," he said. "Lot 2027 situated on the south slope of the Toba
Valley. Purchased for your account July, 1912. Sale ordered October,
1914. We had some correspondence about that early in 1915, while you
were in London. Do you recall it, Mr. Hollister?"

"Yes. You wrote that the timber market was dead, that any sale
possible must be at a considerable sacrifice. Afterward, when I got to
the front, I had no time to think about things like that. But I
remember writing you to sell, even at a sacrifice."

"Yes, yes. Quite so," Mr. Lewis agreed. "I recall the whole matter
very clearly. Conditions at that time were very bad, you know. It was
impossible to find a purchaser on short notice. Early in 1917 there
was a chance to sell, at a considerably reduced figure. But I couldn't
get in touch with you. You didn't answer our cable. I couldn't take
the responsibility of a sacrifice sale."

Hollister nodded. In 1917 he was a nameless convalescent in a German
hospital; officially he was dead. Months before that such things as
distant property rights had ceased to be of any moment. He had
forgotten this holding of timber in British Columbia. He was too full
of bitter personal misery to trouble about money.

"Failing to reach you we waited until we should hear from you--or from
your estate." Mr. Lewis cleared his throat as if it embarrassed him to
mention that contingency. "In war--there was that possibility, you
understand. We did not feel justified; so much time had elapsed. There
was risk to us in acting without verifying our instructions."

"So this property is still to be marketed. The carrying charges, as I
remember, were small. I presume you carried them."

"Oh, assuredly," Mr. Lewis asserted. "We protected your interests to
the very best of our ability."

"Well, find me a buyer for that limit as soon as you can," Hollister
said abruptly. "I want to turn it into cash."

"We shall set about this at once," Mr. Lewis said. "It may take a
little time--conditions, as a result of the armistice, are again
somewhat unsettled in the logging industry. Airplane spruce production
is dead--dead as a salt mackerel--and fir and cedar slumped with it.
However we shall do our best. Have you a price in mind, Mr.
Hollister, for a quick sale?"

"I paid ten thousand for it. On the strength of your advice as a
specialist in timber investments," he added with a touch of malice. He
had taken a dislike to Mr. Lewis. He had not been so critical of
either men or motives in the old days. He had remembered Lewis as a
good sort. Now he disliked the man, distrusted him. He was too smooth,
too sleek. "I'll discount that twenty percent, for a cash sale."

Mr. Lewis made a memorandum.

"Very good," said he, raising his head with an inquiring air, as if to
say "If that is all----"

"If you will kindly identify me at a bank,"--Hollister rose from his
chair, "I shall cease to trouble you. I have a draft on the Bank of
B.N.A. I do not know any one in Vancouver."

"No trouble, I assure you," Lewis hastened to assent, but his tone
lacked heartiness, sincerity.

It was only a little distance to the bank, but Lewis insisted on
making the journey in a motorcar which stood at the curb. It was plain
to Hollister that Mr. Lewis disliked the necessity of appearing in
public with him, that he took this means of avoiding the crowded
sidewalks, of meeting people. He introduced Hollister, excused himself
on the plea of business pressure, and left Hollister standing before
the teller's wicket.

This was not a new attitude to Hollister. People did that,--as if he
were a plague. There came into his mind--as he stood counting the
sheaf of notes slide through a grill by a teller who looked at him
once and thereafter kept his eyes averted--a paraphrase of a hoary
quotation, "I am a monster of such frightful mien, as to be hated
needs but to be seen." The rest of it, Hollister thought grimly, could
never apply to him.

He put the money in his pocket and walked out on the street. It was a
busy corner on a humming thoroughfare. Electric cars rumbled and
creaked one behind another on the double tracks. Waves of vehicular
traffic rolled by the curb. A current of humanity flowed past him on
the sidewalk.

Standing there for a minute, Hollister felt again the slow rising of
his resentment against these careless, fortunate ones. He could not
say what caused that feeling. A look, a glance,--the inevitable
shrinking. He was morbidly sensitive. He knew that, knew it was a
state of mind that was growing upon him. But from whatever cause, that
feeling of intolerable isolation gave way to an inner fury.

As he stood there, he felt a wild desire to shout at these people, to
curse them, to seize one of these dainty women by the arms, thrust his
disfigured face close to hers and cry: "Look at me as if I were a man,
not a monstrosity. I'm what I am so that you could be what you are.
Look at me, damn you!"

He pulled himself together and walked on. Certainly he would soon run
amuck if he did not get over feeling like that, if he did not master
these impulses which bordered on insanity. He wondered if that inner
ferment would drive him insane.

He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge,
depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which
lay in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying
drabness. Yet he must go on living. To live was the dominant instinct.
A man did not put on or off the desire to live as he put on or off his
coat. But life promised nothing. It was going to be a sorry affair. It
struck Hollister with disheartening force that an individual is
nothing--absolutely nothing--apart from some form of social grouping.
And society, which had exacted so much from him, seemed peculiarly
indifferent to the consequences of those imperative exactions, seemed
wholly indifferent to his vital need.

And it was not reward or recognition of service performed that
Hollister craved. He did not want to be pensioned or subsidized or to
have medals pinned on him. What he wanted was chiefly to forget the
war and what the war had visited upon him and others like him.
Hollister suffered solely from that sense of being held outside the
warm circle of human activities, fellowships, friendliness. If he
could not overcome that barrier which people threw up around
themselves at contact with him, if he could not occasionally know the
sound of a friendly voice, he felt that he would very soon go mad. A
man cannot go on forever enduring the pressure of the intolerable.
Hollister felt that he must soon arrive at a crisis. What form it
would take he did not know, and in certain moods he did not care.

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.

"Hello, 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 damnably 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 willies 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 assist 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. Damn 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, hell!" 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 attitude, 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 mass 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 shield 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 passive and let the world go by unheeded,
then he would have been at peace.

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

But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone
away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his passions, his
strength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. His
mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed
with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its
manifestations and adventures.

Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from
contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of
friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some
hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if
the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something
unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and
life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless
he succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to
struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and
fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circumstance.

How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a
question that harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watched
through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the
mournful cadences of the wind.

"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit still
and think much more----"

He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.
Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing
channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set
about doing.

Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his
experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and
marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself
behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.
He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very
likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill
yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a
man's appearance.

Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the
traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm
in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate
loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat,
of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to
get away out of sight and hearing of men.

It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the
summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long
ago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the
black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on
rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street
itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent
between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild
things of the forest went their accustomed way.

Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his
face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could
do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by
them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days
that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went
to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.
coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes
lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town,
among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their
business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one
who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether
he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had
done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in a
cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him
out on the scrap heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to
be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this
palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst
of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be
utterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a
man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream
flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in
his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all
about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he
craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron
heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of
silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he
could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so
he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for
something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end
it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber
in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune
which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an
investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have
smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his
owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to
build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter
his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a
few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him
askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they
passed.




CHAPTER IV


The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole
occupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down
the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of
her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing
a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

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