The Hidden Places | Page 8

that you could be what you are.
Look at me, damn you!"
He pulled himself together and walked on. Certainly he would soon run
amuck if he did not get over feeling like that, if he did not master these
impulses which bordered on insanity. He wondered if that inner
ferment would drive him insane.
He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge,
depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which lay
in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying
drabness. Yet he must go on living. To live was the dominant instinct.
A man did not put on or off the desire to live as he put on or off his
coat. But life promised nothing. It was going to be a sorry affair. It
struck Hollister with disheartening force that an individual is
nothing--absolutely nothing--apart from some form of social grouping.
And society, which had exacted so much from him, seemed peculiarly
indifferent to the consequences of those imperative exactions, seemed
wholly indifferent to his vital need.
And it was not reward or recognition of service performed that
Hollister craved. He did not want to be pensioned or subsidized or to
have medals pinned on him. What he wanted was chiefly to forget the
war and what the war had visited upon him and others like him.

Hollister suffered solely from that sense of being held outside the warm
circle of human activities, fellowships, friendliness. If he could not
overcome that barrier which people threw up around themselves at
contact with him, if he could not occasionally know the sound of a
friendly voice, he felt that he would very soon go mad. A man cannot
go on forever enduring the pressure of the intolerable. Hollister felt that
he must soon arrive at a crisis. What form it would take he did not
know, and in certain moods he did not care.
On the landing at the end of the narrow corridor off which his room
opened he met a man in uniform whom he recognized,--a young man
who had served under him in the Forty-fourth, who had won a
commission on the field. He wore a captain's insignia now. Hollister
greeted him by name.
"Hello, Tommy."
The captain looked at him. His face expressed nothing whatever.
Hollister waited for that familiar shadow of distaste to appear. Then he
remembered that, like himself, Rutherford must have seen thousands
upon thousands of horribly mutilated men.
"Your voice," Rutherford remarked at length, "has a certain familiar
sound. Still, I can't say I know you. What's the name?"
"Bob Hollister. Do you remember the bottle of Scotch we pinched from
the Black Major behind the brick wall on the Albert Road? Naturally
you wouldn't know me--with this face."
"Well," Rutherford said, as he held out his hand, "a fellow shouldn't be
surprised at anything any more. I understood you'd gone west. Your
face is mussed up a bit. Rotten luck, eh?"
Hollister felt a lump in his throat. It was the first time for months that
any human being had met him on common ground. He experienced a
warm feeling for Rutherford. And the curious thing about that was that
out of the realm of the subconscious rose instantly the remembrance
that he had never particularly liked Tommy Rutherford. He was one of

the wild men of the battalion. When they went up the line Rutherford
was damnably cool and efficient, a fatalist who went about his grim
business unmoved. Back in rest billets he was always pursuing some
woman, unearthing surplus stores of whisky or wine, intent upon
dubious pleasures,--a handsome, self-centered debonair animal.
"My room's down here," Hollister said. "Come in and gas a bit--if you
aren't bound somewhere."
"Oh, all right. I came up here to see a chap, but he's out. I have half an
hour or so to spare."
Rutherford stretched himself on Hollister's bed. They lit cigarettes and
talked. And as they talked, Rutherford kept looking at Hollister's face,
until Hollister at last said to him:
"Doesn't it give you the willies to look at me?"
Rutherford shook his head.
"Oh, no. I've got used to seeing fellows all twisted out of shape. You
seem to be fit enough otherwise."
"I am," Hollister said moodily. "But it's a devil of a handicap to have a
mug like this."
"Makes people shy off, eh? Women particularly. I can imagine,"
Rutherford drawled. "Tough luck, all right. People don't take very
much stock in fellows that got smashed. Not much of a premium on
disfigured heroes these days."
Hollister laughed harshly.
"No. We're at a discount. We're duds."
For half an hour they chatted more or less one-sidedly. Rutherford had
a grievance which he took pains to air. He was