CHAPTER XVIII
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 the World Building, 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. "Something has worried 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. You are whimsical, 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 down stamp, 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 on stamp, 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 he had grown 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!