The Hidden Places | Page 2

by their own hand a life that no longer held
anything for them.
And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he
lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any moral scruple against
self-destruction. He clung to life because instinct was stronger than
reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he encountered and
knew he must go on encountering. He had to live, with a past that was
no comfort, going on down the pathway of a future which he attempted
not to see clearly, because when he did envisage it he was stricken with
just such a panic as now overwhelmed him.
To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his
disfigurement. A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance.
To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship,
friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life beautiful
were always just beyond his reach. To be merely endured. To have
women pity him--and shun him.
The sweat broke out on Hollister's face when he thought of all that. He
knew that it was true. This knowledge had been growing on him for
weeks. To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him with
terror. That was all. He did not cry out against injustice. He did not
whine a protest. He blamed no one. He understood, when he looked at
himself in the glass.
After a time he shook off the first paralyzing grip of this unnameable
terror which had seized him with clammy hands, fought it down by
sheer resolution. He was able to lie staring into the dusky spaces of his
room and review the stirring panorama of his existence for the past four
years. There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite regret--and

there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could have
changed. He could not have escaped one of those calamities which had
befallen him. He could not have left undone a single act that he had
performed. There was an inexorable continuity in it all. There had been
a great game. He had been one of the pawns.
Hollister shut his eyes. Immediately, like motion pictures projected
upon a screen, his mind began to project visions. He saw himself
kissing his wife good-by. He saw the tears shining in her eyes. He felt
again the clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would be so
lonely. He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He saw
himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with
shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again
till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised in
blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals to
the rumble of guns.
He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra
was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to think
that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up under it.
He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his thigh,
when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint perfunctoriness
in her greeting. It was on this leave that he first realized how the grim
business he was engaged upon was somehow rearing an impalpable
wall between himself and this woman whom he still loved with a
lover's passion after four years of marriage.
And he could see, in this mental cinema, whole searing sentences of the
letter he received from her just before a big push on the Somme in the
fall of '17--that letter in which she told him with child-like directness
that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved another man. She
was sure he would not care greatly. She was sorry if he did. But she
could not help it. She had been so lonely. People were bound to change.
It couldn't be helped. She was sorry--but--
And Hollister saw himself later lying just outside the lip of a
shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear when he felt it
with groping fingers. He remembered that he lay there wondering,

because of the darkness and the strange silence and the pain, if he were
dead and burning in hell for his sins.
After that there were visions of himself in a German hospital, in a
prison camp, and at last the armistice, and the Channel crossing once
more. He was dead, they told him, when he tried in the chaos of
demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his
identity, to find his wife. He was officially dead. He had been so
reported, so