And downtown was frankly on the make, with the most shrewd and far-seeing already privately dubious about a let-down in the swift flow of affairs that followed the close of European hostilities. Perhaps it had always been the same. He had not been aware how consistently material, how harshly practical, the world of commerce must be. But he couldn't get used to hearing them tot up Canada's share in the reparations, the gloating on what enlarged African and Asiatic possession meant to trade, their chesty pride in having swept the Hun from the seas (as if they had done it in their office chairs). He couldn't get used to that, because it was invariably accompanied by an undertone of growling about confiscatory taxation, enormous pension bills.
Here and there some elderly hardshell solemnly viewed with alarm three items debited to the war: first, the growing demand of labor for shorter hours, increased pay, and a voice in the conduct of industries for which they furnished the motive power; second, the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia which constituted a horrific menace to the sacred rights of private property; third, the military strength and insistent demands of France.
The war as a business proposition! Rod got up and walked away from a group of men in a club who rather vindictively discussed these important phases of the European débâcle. If that were all—commerce—shipping—iron—coal—territory—indemnities. If that were all! His heart wouldn't stand his talking to those bankers and merchants and manufacturers and brokers as he wished to talk. He left them. What was held as piracy and brigandage for the individual became somehow the unchallenged privilege of a nation, if only the scale of operations were large enough. The Barbary corsairs were at least open in their deeds. They flew the Jolly Roger and their victims walked the plank without ado. Nor did the pirates get their fighting done by proxy and then grumble because they found it expensive.
Yes the world, his world, had changed. Of all that he had known through youth and early manhood only his wife—like the sea and the mountains—remained steadfast, a desirable reality. Now, more than ever, he was filled with gratitude and wonder that she had stood loyal, devoted, staunch as a rock in the bewildering flux of a period that seemed to him, in occasional somber moods, to have quickened the disintegration of men and the cherished works of men to a degree that made him apprehensive.
This couldn't be the reality of things, he assured himself. He had somehow got them twisted. His vision and his understanding must be askew. He had to stop pondering about it all. It was difficult for him to do this. He had always been a thinking being. That faculty had cursed him in France. On duty in trenches, in action, in long lonely vigils, his mind had hammered him with insistent questions and speculations on the why and the wherefore of human activities. Many an answer that came like the answer to a sum saddened him. One should not see too clearly.
He found it so now. But at least he, as an individual, was not too deeply involved to stand clear of all this feverish hurrying and scurrying to nowhere after nothing. There must be something a man could do in the world that would bring him dividends in satisfaction of accomplishment, as well as dollars. For him, because his forbears had been both adventurous and far-seeing, there was no immediate economic pressure. He had no great responsibilities, beyond himself and Mary and their boy. If he needed more than the minor share which he held in the Norquay estate, he could surely get it without bowing his head and twisting his moral sense awry before the Moloch of commerce.
The more he saw of town the more he desired to turn his back on it. Not because it was town but because for so long he had had his fill of noise and motion. To sit amid a great silence, the strange, restful hush of a forest, in the shadow of great mountains,—that calm, secure peace; to hear only the sighing of wind in high interlaced branches, the muted song of running water, the whistle of birds' wings,—that was his wish.
Practical wisdom forbade. There was really one place where he longed to be with Mary and his son, and they could not go there. Hawk's Nest was no longer his home. It was Grove's. His road and Grove's diverged too sharply for him to go there even as a guest. Elsewhere they could not find comfort at that season. It was a winter of sleet and snow, of alternate frosts and rains. A half-sick man couldn't go camping like a pioneer with a woman and a child. And it was not camping as such that Rod longed for, he knew, as the spacious background and comfortable security of his birthplace.
Whereupon, as a sensible man eschews the unattainable, he put it out of his mind. In the spring,—he and Mary lay awake nights planning what they would do in the spring.
He came home from one of these desultory excursions abroad a little before dinner one evening.