The Hidden Places | Page 3

accepted eighteen months earlier. His wife had married
again. She and her husband had vanished from England. And with his
wife had vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war
arrangement which he had never revoked.
He beheld himself upon the streets of London, one of innumerable stray
dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did not
particularly consider himself a victim of injustice. He did not blame
Myra. He was simply numbed and bewildered.
But that was before he grew conscious of what it meant to a sensitive
man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to
be penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn
from under his feet, to be so disfigured that people shunned him.
He had to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together, go
on as best he could. It did not occur to him at first to do otherwise, or
that the doing would be hard. He had not foreseen all the strange shifts
he would be put to, the humiliations he would suffer, the crushing
weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by the time he arrived
on the Pacific Coast, where he had once lived, to which he now turned
to do as men all over the war-racked earth were doing in the winter of
1919,--cast about in an effort to adjust himself, to make a place for
himself in civil life.
All the way across the continent of North America Hollister grew more
and more restive under the accumulating knowledge that the horrible
devastation of his features made a No Man's Land about him which few
had the courage to cross. It was a fact. Here, upon the evening of the
third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon him,

a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,--dead in so
far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with his
fellows went. It was as if men and women were universally repulsed by
that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a face, as if at
sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew to a safe
distance, as they would withdraw from any loathsome thing.
Lying on his bed, Hollister flexed his arms. He arched his chest and
fingered the muscular breadth of it in the darkness. Bodily, he was a
perfect man. Strength flowed through him in continuous waves. He
could feel within himself the surge of vast stores of energy. His brain
functioned with a bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,--ah, that was
the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought!
A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man,
was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue,
the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and
lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he had
always been.
For a moment there came over him the wild impulse to rush out into the
street, crying:
"You fools! Because my face is torn and twisted makes me no different
from you. I still feel and think. I am as able to love and hate as you.
Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead the men
who risked the scars? Is all your much advertised kindliness and
sympathy for war-broken men a bluff?"
He smiled sadly. They would say he was mad. They would classify him
as suffering from shell shock. A frock-coated committee would gravely
recommend him for treatment in the mental hospital at Essondale. They
would not understand.
Hollister covered his face with a swift, tight clasping of his hands.
Something rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding
wetness crept like a film. He set his teeth in one corner of his pillow.
CHAPTER II

When Hollister was eighteen years old he had been briefly troubled by
an affliction of his eyes brought on from overstudy. His father, at the
time, was interested in certain timber operations on the coast of British
Columbia. In these rude camps, therefore, young Hollister spent a year.
During that twelve months books were prohibited. He lived in the
woods, restored the strength of his eyes amid that restful greenness,
hardened a naturally vigorous body by healthy, outdoor labor with the
logging crews. He returned home to go on with his University work in
eastern Canada with unforgettable impressions of the Pacific coast, a
boyish longing to go back to that region where the mountains receded
from the sea in wave after wave of enormous height, where the sea
lapped with green lips at the foot of the ranges and thrust winding arms
back into