"I passed up a chance at a commission in '15—because I was still too class-conscious. But I grabbed the next chance. That's what I'm going to do in civil life—grab chances. I don't know how, yet. I don't think much. I'm still in the army, and in the army you're not supposed to think. But I didn't run wild in France, except for brief spells, so I've saved most of my pay. And I hear talk of a gratuity to us heroes," he smiled broadly. "I'll probably come out with a couple of thousand dollars. After that—well, you see before you a man who has had a bayonet stuck through his leg, his carcass lightly punctured with shrapnel, one or two faint whiffs of gas. None of which did him more harm than to give him long spells of lying still and thinking. And he thought himself into a condition of mind that will prevent him from ever again working hard—for other people. No, Norquay, I will never again labor faithfully to make two dollars grow—for some one else—where only one grew before. I don't believe I could feel the slightest obligation toward a job again, or an atom of pride in doing a job well. You see, I can't lose sight of the job-owners—I don't like 'em. I despise 'em. They got us all into this mix-up. They called us to arms in the name of all the old gods that man has been taught to reverence. And then they laid down on us, and went to making money out of our necessities. No, whenever a man offers me a job, I'll think of war contracts, of seventeen prices for clothes and food, of the bonds they've salted away, of shoddy boots and defective ammunition—and the fact that some of them are secretly sorry the war is over and the big, easy money at an end. No, I couldn't be loyal to a job, with all that in my mind."
"Fiddlesticks," Rod answered this last. "If I had a stand of timber and I said to you, 'Here's a crew and machinery—go to it; you've got a free hand,' you'd get it out for me as if you were getting it out for yourself."
"Well," Andy hesitated, "if you bring yourself into it, that's different. You don't come in any of the categories I mentioned, or I'm very much mistaken. Operating a real job for a man you could like and respect. That is different."
"You see, you haven't lost a capacity for loyalty," Rod pointed out. "It's only been deflected. I understand that. Psychologically I've traveled pretty much the same road you have. All that you say is true. Only it isn't all the truth, Andy. Just one side of the shield; the side that's turned to us; that's hard for us to get our eyes off. Fellows like you and me are a little up in the air right now. We feel like tramping savagely on the toes of a lot of smug, comfortable persons. That wouldn't get us anywhere. Nor would it change them—because they simply don't understand. What we'll probably get down to after awhile—those of us who have a sense of order and any touch of creativeness—will be some sort of activity that won't set the world on fire or turn it into a Bedlam, but that will possibly do some little good in the immediate radius of our own activity. Sabe? A man has to do what he can, before he can do what he wants."
"A man," Andy observed thoughtfully, "generally has to solve his material problems before he can tackle spiritual ones. Yet the two are interwoven. It's very difficult. I'm a rampant individualist, by nature. Man is. But if you didn't have some check on individualism the world would be a regular Kilkenny. Rampageous individualism in big affairs is what started the big scrap. The same thing will start another. It may even start hellish struggles between individual exploiters here at home and the masses they're keen to exploit. You can't have order and peace and security in a society where everybody is straining every nerve to get what he wants, and to hell with the other fellow. I'm no Utopian any longer, but I do know that if evolution doesn't speed up the process of industrial reorganization, there are going to be some corking rows, and a lot of material and spiritual uncertainty for everybody. I may not seem very consistent in what I say or do, but I'm consistent in my perception of certain things. We've built up a complex mechanism of affairs. The machine is our master instead of our servant."
Rod thought of the Norquay Trust Company as a vast creaking mechanism exacting unrewarded service, sacrifice, claiming the vital substance of himself, his father, the estate. Grove's Frankenstein creation!
"It may be so," he conceded. "But we are not yet automatons."
They continued to talk until the dusk of the short winter's day closed in. When the lights began to blink along the street they separated, Andy to his barracks, Rod to his home.
A taxi stand fronted the hotel, looking across Georgia Street. Rod crossed the way. As he did so a newsboy passed crying "ex-x-x-truh" in a shrill treble. In the distance he could hear other voices wailing the same cry. The Peace Conference, a fresh outbreak in Europe. Anything was possible in that welter of political, racial, and economic antagonisms across the Atlantic. He beckoned the boy.
In the glare of a white-globed light standard he read the headlines: