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: