So, business it is! Or so thinks his father.
A higher up in a thriving plate glass company, Hugh's dad is in a good place to find his son a position. Over a lunch at a department store restaurant, he introduces Hugh to a builder named Canby, who happens to belong to a committee dedicated to finding employment for returning soldiers:
"I'm only too glad to do it, Mr. Henderson. I know what you boys went through—," the statement seemed to lose by over-emphasis— "but just the same it's a handful for a man that's got to hustle."He raised his glass of milk and drank deeply, his little finger sticking out like a frozen sausage."Course most of the boys appreciate it," he went on. "But a few don't and that kinda makes me sore. You were over there, Mr. Henderson, and you know s'well's I do that some pretty useless tools got into the army. And some of them got shot up for us too. Mind I don't forget that, but it's these sort of men that's hard to place."
He thought of Canby trying to "place" the returned men. Canby was like a man with one of those puzzle boxes, getting impatient with the pellets that wouldn't let themselves be rolled into place. The rolling pellets annoyed him.
Against his father's wishes – "You'll lose out with Mogg and Binwell if you go traipsing up there." –Hugh sets out to help his old brother in arms. He finds that Cedar City is no city, rather a small, haphazard collection of houses and cabins separated by a creek from a similarly-sized Indian reserve. Hugh takes to his new surroundings in a way he did not in Vancouver. Evans devotes pages describing the natural beauty of British Columbia:
The sweep of the side-hill was broken in places by outcrops of granite. The lichens on these rocks were grey and brown, and where the rocks overhung and protected their faces from the weather, there were patches of brilliant green. Around these the moss and the strewn needles of the conifers fitted snugly. The sun, low now over the upper valley, sent its rays through the plumbed evergreens at right angles to the hill. It laid yellow light in strokes and curves across the ground, changing some colours, intensifying others. Hugh thought of the side-hill as some colossal canvas propped against the great lump of the upper mountain, and of himself as a toiling insect too minute to see the picture as a whole.
Hubert Reginald Evans 9 May 1892, Vankleek Hill, ON - 16 June 1986, Roberts Creek, BC RIP |
Access: As of this writing, no copies are listed for sale online. The novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada and four of our universities.