Chapter 16

There must be in heaven a certain god--a paunchy, cynical god whose task it is to arrange for each of the birthward-marching souls a set of circumstances so nicely adjusted to its character that the result of its life, in triumph or defeat, will be hinged on the finest of threads. So Hugo must have felt coming home from war. He had celebrated the Armistice hugely, not because it had spared his life--most of the pomp, parade, bawdiness, and glory had originated in such a deliverance--but because it had rescued him from the hot blast of destructiveness. An instantaneous realization of that prevented despair. He had failed in the hour of becoming death itself; such failure was fortunate because life to him, even at the end of the war, seemed more the effort of creation than the business of annihilation.

To know that had cost a struggle--a struggle that took place at the hangar as the dispatch-bearer rode up and that remained crucial only between the instant when he lifted his fist and when he lowered it. Brevity made it no less intense; a second of time had resolved his soul afresh, had redistilled it and recombined it.

Not long after that he started back to America. The mass of soldiers surrounding him were undergoing a transition that Hugo felt vividly. These men would wake up sweating at night and cry out until someone whispered roughly that there were no more submarines. A door would slam and one of them would begin to weep. There were whisperings and bickerings about life at home, about what each person, disintegrated again to individuality, would do and say and think. Little fears about lost jobs and lost girls cropped out, were thrust back, came finally to remain. And no one wanted life to be what it had been; no one considered that it could be the same.

Hugo wrote to his family that the war was ended, that he was well, that he expected to see them some time in the near future. The ship that carried him reached the end of the blue sea; he was disembarked and demobilized in New York. He realized even before he was accustomed to the novelty of civilian clothes that a familiar, friendly city had changed. The retrospective spell of the eighties and nineties had vanished. New York was brand-new, blatant, rushing, prosperous. The inheritance from Europe had been assimilated; a social reality, entirely foreign and American, had been wrought and New York was ready to spread it across the parent world. Those things were pressed quickly into Hugo’s mind by his hotel, the magazines, a chance novel of the precise date, the cinema, and the more general, more indefinite human pulses.

After a few days of random inspection, of casual imbibing, he called upon Tom Shayne’s father. He would have preferred to escape all painful reminiscing, but he went partly as a duty and partly from necessity: he had no money whatever.

A butler opened the door of a large stone mansion and ushered Hugo to the library, where Mr. Shayne rose eagerly. “I’m so glad you came. Knew you’d be here soon. How are you?”

Hugo was slightly surprised. In his host’s manner was the hardness and intensity that he had observed everywhere. “I’m very well, thanks.”

“Splendid! Cocktails, Smith.”

There was a pause. Mr. Shayne smiled. “Well, it’s over, eh?”

“Yes.”

“All over. And now we’ve got to beat the spears into plowshares, eh?”

“We have.”

Mr. Shayne chuckled. “Some of my spears were already made into plows, and it was a great season for the harvest, young man--a great season.”

Hugo was still uncertain of Mr. Shayne’s deepest viewpoint. His uncertainty nettled him. “The grim reaper has done some harvesting on his own account--” He spoke almost rudely.

Mr. Shayne frowned disapprovingly. “I made up my mind to forget, Danner. To forget and to buckle down. And I’ve done both. You’ll want to know what happened to the funds I handled for you--”

“I wasn’t particularly--”