| CHAPTER XVI. OF A MAN IN DISTRESS
As, in the fourth year of the war, prices rose in their sudden jump upwards,
Jim was forced to go out of business altogether. The "lines" which he handled
were among the most expensive ones; cars were hard to sell at any price. The
country was prosperous enough; but all surplus wealth was absorbed by the fierce
determination to win the war. The whole Dominion was living on a diminished scale;
there was, it is true, a general feeling that the time to spend would come; there
was even a perhaps not quite so general premonition that a veritable orgy of
spending lay just ahead; but it was not yet; and before it came, Jim was snowed
under. He had not foreseen or had miscalculated the trend of the times; he began
to realise, with an indifferent, quite objective realisation, that he had missed,
in a business way, a tremendous opportunity. For the universal cry after a speeding
up of production called for just such faster and faster means of transportation
as motor-driven vehicles offered; but the demand had turned to the cheapest type
of such vehicles. Already a rival concern had sprung up in Stockton handling
these cheap cars. Jim, in a desperate effort to live up to the agreement arrived
at with Jane, applied for and promptly obtained a position as salesman; selling,
as the owners of this rival firm knew, had always been his strong point. Now
he saw himself faced with the task of earning eight thousand dollars a year in
commissions which varied from fifty to one hundred dollars a sale; it had to
be done within the short summer season; it was an impossibility; but, for the
time being, he lived only from day to day; he gave no thought to the problem
what he was going to do when winter came.
Strange to say, when, years ago, he had notified Jane that the money she required was on deposit at her bank, she had led him once more into her library and, when both doors had been closed, she had offered to cut down her establishment, to get along with one servant, to dismiss even Mlle. Lefèvre, and to sell her car. "No," he had said,
page 220
"there is no need." Jane had looked up at him, with a curious expression in her face - as if she divined his motive which was at least half defiance of a pitiless fate; but also as if she were half willing, not certainly, to resume a marital intercourse, but to re-establish a purely human relationship. It had been only a moment's interglimpsed potentiality; it had passed in less than a second; but it had been Jim who had declined conciliation; he had declined it by the unmoved rigidity of his mask. Between Jane and him it had come to the point where only an absolute and unconditional surrender on her part could have restored to him the profoundly shaken confidence that he was entitled to be what he was; without that confidence none of us can live. That surrender could not have been accomplished by words; he felt that he had nothing else to expect.
At this stage, with commercial ruin staring him in the face but leaving him at bottom indifferent, he was sitting one day in the rooms of the club of which he was still a member, on Duke's Avenue, ensconced in a deep leather chair, and, unwillingly, overheard a conversation between two men whom he knew.
Since the final breach between Jane and him, and especially since the war, Jim had spent most of his evenings there, at the club-rooms, reading magazines and papers, or sitting in front of a fire-place, brooding. At first, other men had still come and sought his company; but he was invariably irresponsive. He no longer liked to listen to smutty stories; nor to tell them. He took little interest in civic affairs. Openly or secretly, people regarded him as a man whose part was played; he was a sort of ruin. He felt, of course, that they were right; but he did not take pleasure in having it "rubbed in".
The conversation which he overheard concerned him closely; he happened to be sitting in front of the window where he had been staring out into the dusk; darkness had come; but, though he could not see any longer, he had not stirred; when he realised what was happening, he was unwilling to show himself; willy-nilly, he
page 221
had to listen to it all. The two men between whom the conversation was carried on, remained entirely unconscious of any third presence. They, too, were two brothers - Stephen and Leslie Carter.
"Eh?" Leslie had suddenly exclaimed, still outside, in the corridor which led past the small room in which Jim was sitting. "You here? That's a miracle, almost."
Stephen's quick, monotonous voice was the one to answer, "Yes, I don't care much for these places where liquor is consumed on the sly. I've come on business. I want to have a chat with young Anderson."
"Found him?" Leslie asked. "He's usually around a bit later. Comes for a game of chess."
"Haven't seen a sign of him. He isn't in the chess room."
"It's still too early. Won't be here till after ten. Come in. Sit down. Haven't seen you for ages. How are you coming?"
"Getting slow," Stephen said, entering. "Dropsy. It's got my legs and is coming upwards." With a wheezy sigh he subsided into a chair. "Still at your old game?" he asked.
"My old game? What's that?" Leslie's voice was rasping. Physically, he resembled his older brother more and more; both were in the grip of approaching age. But he was coarser-grained than Stephen; and so he fought the signs of decay by an assumed boisterousness.
"Skinning people, I suppose," Stephen said.
"I? Skinning people? I never meddle in anything but what's strictly legitimate."
"I know. You merely jump into a hole and pull the hole in after you."
Leslie laughed. "Pretty good," he said. "But I wish I knew what you're driving at with your figures of speech. That's what they are called, isn't it?" He was complacent; he rather enjoyed his brother's way of telling him the truth now and then; he had enjoyed it since they had been children together.
Stephen moved in his chair; probably he was shrugging his shoulders. "Great scheme," he said, "that firm of yours and the way you made
page 222
Forrest work for you and squeezed him out at the end. You're the pied piper in Stockton."
"Pied piper, eh? What next?" Leslie laughed a noisy laugh which betrayed that, though he was more robust, he was not exempt from the threat of his brother's complaint.
"I sometimes wonder whether you so-called people of action ever realise just how your activities must appear to unbiased reason."
"Unbiased reason is good, old man. Well, how?"
"What's the use of all that so-called subdivided land out there?"
"Objectively, not much, I admit," Leslie said cynically. "Subjectively, it gives some people the happy illusion that they own valuable property."
"You're the pied piper. Or perhaps Forrest was that, in your hire. There's money hidden away all over the country, a little here, a little there, withdrawn, so they think, from useful channels. It's the fruit of surplus labour. You tell them it can be multiplied by some conjuror's trick; it will give them something for nothing. You pipe or let somebody else pipe for you; and at once it begins the march into your bag."
"Like the rats and mice, eh?" Leslie laughed uproariously. "That's pretty good, you know. I'm danged if that isn't pretty good! Mind interpreting? What's the piping?"
"Advertising."
"Advertising, eh? Well, I guess you're right. I've always suspected that you had brains, Steve. But what do you mean by jumping into the hole and pulling it in after me?"
"You founded a firm that held the bag, didn't you? And when the beastly job was done, you dissolved the firm and coolly proceeded to skin your partners."
"You seem to take a great deal of interest in that chap Forrest. Well, there have been rumours."
"And that," Stephen said in his ordinary tone which knew of no
page 223
emphasis, "is where you'd better stop...Hi, there," he shouted. "Wasn't that young Anderson going by just now? Excuse me, I've business with him." And he lifted himself labouriously out of his chair and shuffled out of the room. His brother followed him.
When Jim remained alone, he looked about cautiously to see that nobody was near. His face was white. He rose, went out into the hall and down into the vestibule, to ask for his hat and cane.
The coloured attendant handed both across the counter of the cloak-room. "Leaving early, Mr. Forrest?" he said with a note of jauntiness which jarred upon Jim. He did not reply but turned away with a scowl.
He was going to have a walk, for he dreaded equally facing Jane should she still be up and finding the house asleep should she have retired. For a moment he stood, hesitating and irresolute. Which way should he go? No, of the country he saw enough in the daytime, during his long and incessant drives in the search for buyers of that cheap little car which he sold. He turned into the darker part of the city. The club-house stood at the corner of Eighth Street and Duke's Avenue. He went down Eighth Street, crossing Fairview and walking briskly. Fairview was almost deserted under the glare of its arc-lights. The few women threading its white canyon forlornly seemed to linger; the few men seemed bent on passing them, throwing sharp side-glances into their faces as if from below. Jim went straight on. The sight had dimly and painfully reminded him of a time when he had thus threaded the benighted streets of great cities. At the foot of the hill, where the remainder of Stockton was built on the level flood-plain of the river, he faced the maze of the freight yards of the Great Western Railroad. To his right, a huge bridge or viaduct led north, spanning the tracks and leading into the industrial quarters with its shops, factories, and warehouses. This bridge or viaduct branched repeatedly, up there, in the air above him, the branches leading down to various loading platforms between the tracks. From the yards, clouds of steam floated up, around it. At night the bridge was hardly ever used; and,
page 224
in the glare of the many arc-lights from below, it looked sinister, black, unsafe. Yet its sight seemed to deflect his thought, or rather the dim succession of the states of his consciousness, from himself; in it, they were objectified; the bridge seemed a symbol of his life; thus had he tried to leap across life's established tracks.
He went on and climbed its incline on the hither side. Then, standing there in the darkness, in the murky greyness of the haze produced by steam and smoke, he stopped and looked down on a shunting engine. As that engine passed the pillars on which the structure rested, the whole viaduct trembled. It was unsafe. So had his life been unsafe.
What had sent him out into this night? Henceforth it was forbidden to him to spend his evenings at the club - forbidden by no external prohibition which might have been contested but by something within him which admitted of no such contestation. Why?
The active things were two though one of them was of very little importance as compared with the other. In the first place, he had at one time occupied a large and prominent position in the eye of this business world. That world had learned to look down upon him, though perhaps in pity. Stephen Carter had been its spokesman. Stephen had never seen in him, Jim Forrest, anything but a tool of his brother's; Stephen had been shrewd; the rest of the world, himself, Jim, included, saw it only now. He was not going to face the pity of the world; he would withdraw. But, in the second place, he had suddenly seen his own part in the work of the world. True enough, there had been a time when he had looked forward to only one thing, his own enrichment and aggrandisement. But that was a thing of the past. Of late, he had sometimes tried to see the part he had played or attempted to play in its true light, in all its interrelations to the rest of the world. In that connection, the mere fact of success or failure seemed irrelevant. Perhaps it was the war which had forced these questionings upon him. For the moment many people were inclined to take a serious view of things which, without the war, would never have occurred to
page 225
them. But Jim had begun to flatter himself, in the face of the break-down of other things - his failure to hold Jane or to win her back; the recognition of the illusoriness of his fancied superiority to his brother - that he would have arrived in any case at such questionings; for, under the effect of suffering, he had discovered in himself an unexpected depth; that discovery had helped to sustain him. He had interpreted his former activities, ex-post-facto, as the outcome of a desire to do what was, within the work of the world, a necessary and not ignoble task: bold spirits were needed in that world; spirits who would and could promote "progress" and force an unwilling generation on to better things. That the men possessed by that spirit incidentally promoted their own fortunes was again beside the point. Everybody strove to help himself; so long as he did so in some way which was in accord with the general trend of the endeavour of humanity to better its plight, no indictment could be based on such self-interest. But he had suddenly seen, his eyes being opened by Stephen Carter's words, that in the work he had done for Stephen's brother Leslie there had been nothing noble, nothing which, in a wider view, promoted the interests of mankind or of any appreciable fraction of it except those of a single, rapacious man who preferred to remain in the background himself. In this view of things nothing would have been changed had he himself taken half the "loot" as he called it now. There would have been two robbers instead of one, that was all.
As he went on and finally descended the incline at the other end of the viaduct, he was in a wistful mood. Spiritually, the world represented by Jane, Arthur, and Stephen Carter had cast him out. He was utterly alone. His own children hardly knew him.
Going down into the flat maze of dark, untidy streets, the buildings being only here and there, from the outside, illumined by the feeble light of an electric bulb which was covered with dust or even bespattered with mud, he became suddenly conscious of a huge pulse
page 226
which seemed to beat in the very soil of this part of the city. He stopped and listened; and then he knew. It was the munitions factory which was kept going at night as well as in daytime and which was housed in one of the shops which he had owned in the past. As if drawn by an irresistible force, he began to thread the wide but ill-kept streets and littery lanes which were utterly deserted.
At last he faced the building which was glaringly lighted inside by a multitude of bluish arcs. He shrugged his shoulders. What were they doing there? Making shells to kill human beings with. Were they any better than he? But these shells were being made to defend a cause which seemed just and right to a large number of men; they were being made to serve as weapons to those who were giving their lives to that cause, with, individually, all to lose and nothing to gain. The whole structure trembled and vibrated with the feverish pulse of the machinery used. Suppose for a moment that the cause was at bottom a mistaken cause; yet the intention of this activity was not mistaken. How about his own? Besides, if his intention had merely been a mistaken one, it would not have mattered.
He turned and, for hours, wandered about in the labyrinth of dark corners, alleys, and road-ways. Several times he came to the bank of the river which glided by, softly gurgling at his feet. When, at last, he returned to the southern half of the town, still avoiding those thoroughfares which in daytime were the more frequented ones, he did so in a mood of black desolation. Never again would he be able to seek comfort or even forgetfulness in his work.
In the days which followed he drove over country roads, feeling almost righteous in his utter unhappiness. Every now and then he entered a farm-yard, found the farmer, and for an hour or so "talked car" to him. The moment he became convinced that his labour was in vain, he left abruptly and drove on till he found the next place. When, however, he though that the case was not entirely hopeless, he became merciless in his methods. He played upon every human passion known to him,
page 227
vanity, ostentation, greed. To the busy man who worked feverishly in order to produce the maximum his land would yield he expounded the advantages of having a car in threshing or seeding time; some mishap to his machinery might hold him up for a day when every minute counted. To the man whose pride consisted in having what others had not, he expatiated upon the satisfaction derived from going faster over the road than his neighbour who had only horses to pull him. To the old man he talked of the reliability and safety, to the young man, of the speed which distinguished this particular car which he himself had always despised. To the thrifty, he talked economy; to the unthrifty, easy terms; often he offered to take anything whatever in part payment, old farm-machinery, stock, mere junk; when he did so, he resold these things; and usually he did so at a profit, sometimes after having traded them again for other things which produced the cash more readily.
And he sold his car.
Then he drove on, sitting heavily behind the wheel which he handled with his old, expert skill. "I've handled cars ever since I've handled anything," he would say when somebody remarked upon it; he said it unsmilingly, with an almost weary boastfulness. Grimly, when on the road, he looked straight ahead, seeing nothing of the landscape, nothing of the droning brook in the hills, nothing of the spreading valleys, or the trembling trees. The whole country, to him, became a mere net-work of more or less detestable roads, all leading to the farms of various "prospects".
When he got back to Stockton and reported at the office of the firm employing him, he was well aware that the two partners treated him with a certain precipitate consideration which was almost deference. He despised them for it and threw down the signed orders which he brought in with a gesture of contemptuous indifference which was meant as much for these highly successful business men who, however, had but recently "arrived" as for the "suckers" whom he had "landed". He knew
page 228
that this consideration shown him was not for the man who at one time had been rich and powerful in the city; not for the unfortunate victim of circumstances who, but for the war, might have been the one in a position to dispense favours and whom chance had played a scurvy trick; least of all for the mere man in him who was spiritually lonesome and suffering and who dimly felt that before him lay the task of rehabilitating himself in his own eyes; it was simply for their most successful salesman who might turn elsewhere for a living if not treated as he perhaps thought himself entitled to be treated.
For, as the business of the canvassing salesman went, he was highly successful. During that short summer season of 1918 he sold over a hundred cars; and his record netted him over five thousand dollars. The trouble was that, even had he been content to go on as he was going - which he was not - five thousand dollars a year was simply not enough. What he was going to do when winter came he did not know.
Once or twice he thought of the fact that Jane had offered to cut her establishment down; he even knew that she had actually done so; but he acted as if he were not aware of the fact. She had named a certain sum; he would provide that sum, whether she spent it or not. Yet there would really have been nothing humiliating in his accepting her offer. All over the country people had long since cut down their establishments; they had not only done so, but had been forced to do so; those people who, being engaged in work which had no direct bearing on the prosecution of the war, found it hard or impossible to keep up their pre-war earnings. But he felt that he was in an exceptional position.
If things came to a climax, to a catastrophe, he wanted to be able to say that he had not asked for clemency, had not prayed to be spared. Sometimes he played with the idea that, in case of need, should the moment come when again he found himself unable to live up to her demands, he would simply go and commit some crime, break into a bank or kill somebody, then take the money, and step before her,
page 229
handing it to her and saying, "This is the last time I can do this. The detectives are waiting for me at the door."
In reality, of course, he never seriously thought of any such thing. He knew he was incapable of acting boldly and openly in contravention of the law. He despised himself for that very inability. "I can only go and sneak money of others," he said. "Or earn it in some established channel." But, since he had heard Stephen Carter speak to his brother, he despised even that "established channel". What was he doing? He was merely enticing people into buying what they neither needed nor, at bottom, wanted; but which, once acquired, led them on to new tastes and necessities which involved expense. In other words, he was diverting people's labour from useful aims to useless ones.
Once his mind had been set on a certain tack, it went on and on and overshot its mark. It was as if there were only one single aim and purpose left in his life; that of keeping a certain house on a certain street in a certain city running at a rate at which he had started it in the days of his youth and prosperity - at no matter what cost to himself. To do that seemed at once a vindication and a revenge: it seemed to give a meaning to a meaningless life.
Why? To that question he was by no means blind. He felt clearly that he was drifting towards a catastrophe; but he did not choose to focus his inner eyes upon it.
The reason was, of course, that in that house lived a woman whom he had wronged; and that he had come to repent bitterly of the wrong he had done her. In exactly what this wrong consisted he did not yet make clear to himself; instinctively he even avoided so far delving into that problem. He was becoming dimly aware of the fact that the mere crime of having married her when he was legally bound to another was the least of her wrongs. By that marriage and by his previous desertion he had wronged another woman. Yet, so far, that other wrong which he had committed had not troubled him. He felt as if, with regard to Jane, he stood just outside of a house
page 230
which was locked and which confronted him with blank walls; yet, sooner or later he would have to enter the unlocked door and face an unspeakable horror within.
This woman in the house on Albert Avenue - who, without knowing it, drove him to such desperate straits - meant something to him. In her he recognised a spiritual superiority which he envied: just as he had envied his brother. Not that, so far, he ever remotely thought of the possibility that he himself might have attained to that spiritual superiority; he recognised himself for what he was: an earthy, earthbound power of energy which needed direction, which, for the purposes of an ultimate salvation, could never have directed itself. But he felt that he might have worked in accordance and harmony with a world spirit which he had begun to discern if she, the woman, had not despised him but pitied him instead, and if, in pity, she had given him the direction which he lacked. The wrong he had done her by that actual crime, the double marriage, he did not even regret; for without it he would never have been able to face this suffering which he began to feel as a spiritual regeneration.
Thus, outwardly calm, settled in an attitude of seemingly iron composure, expressed in the gesture of contempt for everything, he was towards the fall of that year, the final year of the war, drifting towards a last and final stage in his spiritual development which could not but be catastrophic.
It partook of the effect of a purposeful irony that the first step in this catastrophic development which lay in the direction of an understanding interpenetration of others should have come to him with regard to "the other woman". This realisation of what things had meant to her was brief and short-lived, but poignant like a resurrection from the dead.
He had become pitiless; he thought that he had abased himself to a point where he was truly looking at all things from the depths. But one day, while driving along the road, he had the sudden idea of going
page 231
over his whole life step for step; this life, as far as it was not a mere outward thing, had unfolded distinctly in his reaction to a woman; it was concentrated in the last few years. Everything that now seemed memorable had started on a bottomless road, one night, in southern Saskatchewan. Was there really nothing before that? If the awakening of his spiritual entity was entirely due to his reaction to a woman, how about the other women whom he had met and known? There had been many. But far the greater number he simply dismissed from his thought; they had meant to him no more than the awakening of his body; he had meant to them no more than so much money earned. He could not yet see that he had in any way reacted to them. But on two of them he had acted profoundly, deflecting their lives by their contact with him. The fact that he had late in life learned to react to one of them in a way which he would have thought impossible in the past had prepared him for the realisation of what his loss must have meant to the other; he suddenly loathed himself for having inflicted suffering on her. Step for step he analysed that episode in his life; and he came to a conclusion which seemed terrible to him. For, what had been a mere episode in his life, could not but have been vastly more than an episode in hers. It had cut short her whole individual, emotional growth, turning it back upon itself and changing what might have been action into reaction, what might have been life into resentment.
In the first shock of this realisation, it seemed to plunge him into still deeper despair; for at bottom he did not yet consider at all what the thing had meant to her; in fact, what it had meant to her, he could not even know; and he was aware of the fact; but what the realisation of the thing it might have meant to her meant to him now.
Yet he rallied from that despair; to have reached the utmost depths of unhappiness is itself a species of happiness. He was almost grateful to fate for having isolated him in this way, so that he could scrutinise his past and abase himself. His mood became almost hopeful
page 232
once more. Surely, he was atoning for the past by his suffering in the present?
But that was not to last, either. Such a way of looking at things gave a value and virtue to suffering and consequent repentance which they did not inherently possess. If suffering and repentance had the power of undoing the past, if they in themselves were equivalent to atonement, then real atonement meant nothing. For, such a real atonement seemed still possible. Though the past could not be undone, the future could still, at least in part, be salvaged by removing some of the consequences of his acts in the past. If he removed himself, then two women, one of them an abandoned wife, the other, legally, an innocent concubine, would both be free once more to mould what remained of their lives as they saw fit.
He understood at last that his suffering and repentance were without value
because they were merely reflexed by-products of his own, desperate struggle
for and with life. But the mere fact of his living stood in the way of restoring
at least a fraction of life to others from whom he had stolen so much of their
lives. So far, he had at bottom felt that not they were to be pitied but he.
Henceforward he played with the idea of death.
|