"I really wanted you with me for moral support this afternoon, I think, Rod," he confessed, with a faint smile. "I'm sure it has been illuminating, if somewhat disagreeable. I think all the fireworks are touched off. Now I shall be here all afternoon with my solicitor attending to dry business matters. So I won't keep you. There are certain things I want to talk over with you, but to-morrow or another day will do as well."
Rod left the Trust building and walked along Hastings Street without a definite aim. There was an uncomfortable heaviness in his breast, a physical discomfort, which drove him to motion. And his brain was busy in a detached impersonal fashion. All the battles were not fought with guns and poison gas. Struggle seemed inherent in the very process of living, no matter how one lived, what precautions one took. Struggle was all very well,—until it became edged with pain and bitterness. Prides, ambitions, frantic strivings for this and that,—and defeats, reprisals, disasters close in their wake. He wondered what Grove would do now. He wondered if this unstable edifice of Grove's creation would go down in spite of all effort and bury the Norquay family in its collapse. He ruminated upon Grove's eagerly pursued career, slipping away now into sordid futility. A matter of dollars. No question of honor or duty, no sacrifice for anything resembling an ideal, no vision of usefulness to his family, his friends, or his country had illuminated Grove's headlong way. Grove had made a bid for neither respect nor affection in all his dealings with men. Only power, the purely material aspect of power, was a thing he valued. He had lost it. What would he do without it? A brigadier reduced to a K.P.
Rod's most conscious desire, as he moved along a street sodden with a drizzle of cold rain, was to be on the porch at Hawk's Nest, looking at high, aloof mountains deep in winter snow, hiding their heads in wisps of frost-fog, hearing the voice of the rapids lift up its ancient song. He craved rest and quiet, a surcease of incessant street noise, which was to him a faint echo of the sound and fury of the Western Front. He wanted freedom from clash and struggle until he could at least draw his breath and give his heart a chance. He believed he was past a physical crisis, that his heart would strengthen if he could withdraw from crowds and noise, from the swirl of acquisitiveness which bred the mean passions of which he had that day seen some manifestation. He didn't want to be chewed up in the machine which had got beyond Grove's control. He wanted no hand on those levers. Yet he seemed to see obscure forces thrusting upon him tasks he shrank from.
On the surface it was simple enough. They couldn't let a smash come. That was clear. To brace up that swaying structure unlimited funds must be created out of the raw material they controlled, that which had been the backbone of the Norquay estate,—those lordly firs which clothed granite ridges and mountain sides, those ancient cedars that masked gorge and hollow and swamp. That would be his job. One well enough to his liking. Even the destruction of a thing Rod loved as he did his native forest could have an element of the constructive, too, if it were not dictated by a necessity born of human folly and greed. Still, that couldn't be helped now.
It was a curious feeling of the Norquay Trust Company looming over his personal life as it loomed over the adjacent buildings that depressed Rod most. It seemed rather fantastic to imagine that as threatening his peace and welfare, but the feeling was real.
He drifted along the street. People passed him singly, in groups, in pairs, in little droves, hurrying or sauntering, rich and poor, men, women and children, an endlessly flowing stream, of humanity. A sprinkling of khaki showed among them. The majority were the last sweepings of the draft not yet demobilized. Others, he saw at a glance, were returned men. He wondered what they thought of it all now they were back.
He was to have that question partially answered before long. Within a block of the Province office where he had last met him Rod encountered Andy Hall. From the hand which grasped Rod's extended one the index and second fingers were missing. He wore a lieutenant's uniform; four wound stripes marked one sleeve. His freckled face had lost some of the old ruddy color, but his eyes flickered as brightly quizzical as in those days when he rigged high-lead spars in the Valdez camp. Rod took this all in at a glance.
Where were you? What division? When did you get back? How many times over the length and breadth of North America were those questions being asked and answered in 1919?
"Months ago—last of September," Andy said. "The idea was that I should bear a hand getting draftees into shape at Hastings Park, since I was classified as unfit for front-line service. But I haven't done much. Flu knocked me out in November. They'll can me pretty soon, I hope. It's easy to get into the army, but hell to get out, even when they don't need you any longer."
"The tribal instinct won out, eh?" Rod smiled. "For a downright rebel you seem to have got on in the army."