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.