Book: The Hidden Places

B >> Bertrand W. Sinclair >> The Hidden Places




There was a little of that quality, also, about Charlie Mills. He
worked in the timber with a fierce energy. His dark face glistened
with sweat-beads from morning till night. His black hair stood in
wisps and curls, its picturesque disorder heightened by a trick he had
of running his fingers through it when he paused for a minute to take
breath, to look steadfastly across at the slide-scarred granite face
of the north valley wall, with a wistful look in his eyes.

"Those hills," he said once abruptly to Hollister, "they were here
long before we came. They'll be here long after we're gone. What a
helpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway. A squirrel on his
wheel in a cage."

It was a protesting acceptance of a stark philosophy, Hollister
thought, a cry against some weight that bore him down, the momentary
revealing of some conflict in which Mills foresaw defeat, or had
already suffered defeat. It was a statement wrung out of him,
requiring no comment, for he at once resumed the steady pull on the
six-foot, cross-cut saw.

"Why don't you take it easier?" Hollister said to him. "You work as if
the devil was driving you."

Mills smiled.

"The only devil that drives me," he said, "is the devil inside me.

"Besides," he continued, between strokes of the saw, "I want to make a
stake and get to hell out of here."

Hollister did not press him for reasons. Mills did work as if the
devil drove him, and in his quiescent moments an air of melancholy
clouded his dark face as if physical passivity left him a prey to some
inescapable inner gloom.

All about him, then, Hollister perceived strong undercurrents of life
flowing sometimes in the open, sometimes underground: Charlie Mills
and Myra Bland touched by that universal passion which has brought
happiness and pain, dizzy heights of ecstasy and deep abysses of
despair to men and women since the beginning of time; Lawanne
apparently succumbing to the same malady that touched Mills; Bland
moving in the foreground, impassive, stolidly secure in the possession
of this desired woman. And all of them bowed before and struggling
under economic forces which they did not understand, working and
planning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of their
being, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means of
livelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the human
desire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could be
grasped.

Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabin
and Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit of
drowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see the
river, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly along
between the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green of
the fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drank
in the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls,
and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestion
of delight. At such times he felt the goodness of being alive, the
mild intoxication of the fragrant air which filled the valley, the
majestic beauty of those insentient hills upon which the fierce
midsummer sun was baring glacial patches that gleamed now like blue
diamonds or again with a pale emerald sheen, in a setting of worn
granite and white snowdrifts five thousand feet above.

In this wilderness, this vast region of forest and streams and wild
mountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks hurrying here and there
about their self-appointed tasks. Those like himself and Doris, who
did not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, fared
well enough. The land held out to them manifold promises. Hollister
looked at the red-brown shingle bolts accumulating behind the
boom-sticks and felt that inner satisfaction which comes of success
achieved by plan and labor. If his mutilated face had been capable of
expression, it would have reflected pride, satisfaction. Out of the
apparent wreckage of his life he was laying the foundations of
something permanent, something abiding, an enduring source of good. He
would tangle his fingers in Doris' brown hair and feel glad.

Then perhaps his eyes would shift downstream to where Bland's stark,
weather-beaten cabin lifted its outline against the green thickets,
and he would think uneasily upon what insecure tenure, upon what
deliberate violation of law and of current morality he held his
dearest treasure. What would she think, if she knew, this dainty
creature cuddling against his knee? He would wake in the night and lie
on elbow staring at her face in the moonlight,--delicate-skinned as a
child's, that lovable, red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes which
sometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their gray
depths.

What would she think? What would she, say? What would she do? He did
not know. It troubled him to think of this. If he could have swept
Myra out of North America with a wave of his hand, he would have made
one sweeping gesture. He was jealous of his happiness, his security,
and Myra's presence was not only a reminder; it had the effect upon
him of a threat he could not ignore.

Yet he was compelled to ignore it. She and Doris had become fast
friends. It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes. Except for the
uprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he would
have been revolted at his own actions. He had committed technical
bigamy. His children would be illegitimate before the law.

Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment; his
class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face
rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption
that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so;
that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions in
living, loving, marrying, breeding--even in dying--does so because of
innate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, book
and candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in the
next.

Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were
wholly matters of free will. From the time he put on the king's
uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris
Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of
devastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened to
others. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like
frail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex of
the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what
he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances
that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.

Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and
actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost
his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the
special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple
competently with any material problem but who stand aghast,
apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before
the wavering gusts of human passion.

If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and he
had dragged Doris Cleveland down with him. So was Myra smeared with
the pitch of moral obloquy. They were sinners all. Pain should be
their desert; shame and sorrow their portion.

Why? Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust of
circumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion which
had overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblence of
happiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands.

The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisively
intolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called to
pass judgment.

But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wife
than he could feel within himself a personal conviction of sin. Love,
he perceived, was not a fixed emotion. It was like a fire which glows
bright when plied with fuel and burns itself out when it is no longer
fed. To some it was casual, incidental; to others an imperative law of
being. Myra remained essentially the same woman, whether she loved him
or some other man. Who was he to judge her? She had loved him and then
ceased to love him. Beyond that, her life was her own to do with as
she chose.

Nor could Hollister, when he faced the situation squarely, feel that
he was less a man, less upright, less able to bear himself decently
before his fellows than he had ever been. Sometimes he would grow
impatient with thinking and put it all by. He had his moods. But also
he had his work, the imperative necessity of constant labor to
satisfy the needs both of the present and the future. No man goes into
the wilderness with only his hands and a few tools and wins security
by any short and easy road. There were a great many things Hollister
was determined to have for himself and Doris and their children,--for
he did not close his eyes to the natural fulfilment of the mating
impulse. He did not spare himself. Like Mills, he worked with a
prodigious energy. Sometimes he wondered if dreams akin to his own
drove Charlie Mills to sweat and strain, to pile up each day double
the amount of split cedar, and double for himself the wages earned by
the other two men,--who were themselves no laggards with axe and saw.
Or if Mills fantastically personified the timber as something which
stood between him and his aching desire and so attacked it with all
his lusty young strength.

Sometimes Hollister sat by, covertly watching Mills and Myra. He could
make nothing of Myra. She was courteous, companionable, nothing more.
But to Hollister Mills' trouble was plain enough. The man was on his
guard, as if he knew betrayal lurked in the glance of his eye, in the
quality of his tone. Hollister gauged the depths of Mills' feelings by
the smoldering fire in his glance,--that glow in Mills' dark eyes when
they rested too long on Myra. There would be open upon his face a look
of hopelessness, as if he dwelt on something that fascinated and
baffled him.

Sometimes, latterly, he saw a hint of that same dubious expression
about Archie Lawanne. But there was a different temper in Lawanne, a
flash of the sardonic at times.

In July, however, Lawanne went away.

"I'm coming back, though," he told Hollister before he left. "I think
I shall put up a cabin and winter here."

"I'll be glad to see you," Hollister replied, "but it's a lonely
valley in the winter."

Lawanne smiled.

"I can stand isolation for a change," he said. "I want to write a
book. And while I am outside I'll send you in a couple that I have
already written. You will see me in October. Try to get the
shingle-bolt rush over so we can go out after deer together now and
then."

So for a time the Toba saw no more of Lawanne. Hollister missed him.
So did Doris. But she had Myra Bland to keep her company while
Hollister was away at work in the timber. Sometimes Bland himself
dropped in. But Hollister could never find himself on any common
ground of mutual interest with this sporting Englishman. He was a
bluff, hearty, healthy man, apparently without either intellect or
affectation.

"What do you think of Bland?" he asked Doris once.

"I can't think of him, because I can't see him," she answered. "He is
either very clever at concealing any sort of personality, or he is
simply a big, strong, stupid man."

Which was precisely what Hollister himself thought.

"Isn't it queer," Doris went on, "how vivid a thing personality is?
Now Myra and Mr. Lawanne are definite, colorable entities to me. So is
Charlie Mills, quiet as he is. And yet I can't make Bland seem
anything more than simply a voice with a slightly English accent."

"Well, there must be something to him, or she wouldn't have married
him," Hollister remarked.

"Perhaps. But I shouldn't wonder if she married him for something that
existed mostly in her own mind," Doris reflected. "Women often do
that--men too, I suppose. I very nearly did myself once. Then I
discovered that this ideal man was something I had created in my own
imagination."

"How did you find that out before you were committed to the
enterprise?" he asked curiously.

"Because my reason and my emotions were in continual conflict over
that man," Doris said thoughtfully. "I have always been sure, ever
since I began to take men seriously, that I wouldn't get on very long
with any man who was simply a strong, healthy animal. And as soon as I
saw that this admirable young man of mine hadn't much to offer that
wasn't purely physical, why, the glamor all faded."

"Maybe mine will fade too," Hollister suggested.

"Oh, you're fishing for compliments now," she laughed. "You know very
well you are. But we're pretty lucky, Robert mine, just the same.
We've gained a lot. We haven't lost anything yet. I wouldn't
back-track, not an inch. Would you--honest, now?"

Hollister answered that in a manner which seemed to him suitable to
the occasion. And while he stood with his arm around her, Doris
startled him.

"Myra told me a curious thing the other day," she said. "She has been
married twice. She told me that her first husband's name was the same
as yours--Bob Hollister--that he was killed in France in 1917. She
says that you somehow remind her of him."

"There were a good many men killed in France in '17," he observed.
"And Hollister is not such an uncommon name. Does the lady suspect I'm
the reincarnation of her dear departed? She seems to have consoled
herself for the loss, anyway."

"I doubt if she has," Doris answered. "She doesn't unburden her soul
to me, but I have the feeling that she is not exactly a happy woman."

The matter rested there. Doris went away to do something about the
house. Hollister stood glowering at the distant outline of Bland's
cabin. A slow uneasiness grew on him. What did Myra mean by that
confidence? Did she mean anything? He shook himself impatiently. He
had a profound distaste for that revelation. In itself it was nothing,
unless some obscure motive lurked behind. That troubled him. Myra
meant nothing--or she meant mischief. Why, he could not say. She was
quit of him at her own desire. She had made a mouthful of his modest
fortune. If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask of
scars, and from some obscure, perverted motive meant to bring
shipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he would
strangle her without a trace of remorse.




CHAPTER XIV


All that summer the price of cedar went creeping up. For a while this
was only in keeping with the slow ascension of commodity costs which
continued long after the guns ceased to thunder. But presently cedar
on the stump, in the log, in the finished product, began to soar while
other goods slowed or halted altogether in their mysterious climb to
inaccessable heights,--and cedar was not a controlled industry, not a
monopoly. Shingles and dressed cedar were scarce, that was all. For
the last two years of the war most of the available man-power and
machinery of British Columbia loggers had been given over to airplane
spruce. Carpenters had laid down their tools and gone to the front.
House builders had ceased to build houses while the vast cloud of
European uncertainty hung over the nation. All across North America
the wind and weather had taken toll of roofs, and these must be
repaired. The nation did not cease to breed while its men died daily
by thousands. And with the signing of the armistice a flood of
immigration was let loose. British and French and Scandinavians and
swarms of people from Czecho-Slovakia and all the Balkan States,
hurried from devastated lands and impending taxes to a new country
glowing with the deceptive greenness of far fields. The population had
increased; the housing for it had not. So that rents went up and up
until economic factors exerted their inexorable pressure and the tap
of the carpenter's hammer and the ring of his saw began to sound in
every city, in every suburb, on new farms and lonely prairies.

Cedar shingles began to make fortunes for those who dealt in them on a
large scale. By midsummer Carr's mill on the Toba worked night and
day.

"Crowd your work, Hollister," Carr advised him. "I've been studying
this cedar situation from every angle. There will be an unlimited
demand and rising prices for about another year. By that time every
logging concern will be getting out cedar. The mills will be cutting
it by the million feet. They'll glut the market and the bottom will
drop out of this cedar boom. So get that stuff of yours out while the
going is good. We can use it all."

But labor was scarce. All the great industries were absorbing men,
striving to be first in the field of post-war production. Hollister
found it difficult to enlarge his crew. That was a lonely hillside
where his timber stood. Loggers preferred the big camps, the less
primitive conditions under which they must live and work. Hollister
saw that he would be unable to extend his operations until deep snow
shut down some of the northern camps that fall. Even so he did well
enough, much better than he had expected at the beginning. Bill
Hayes, he of the gray mustache and the ear-piercing faller's cry, was
a "long-stake" man. That is to say, old Bill knew his weaknesses, the
common weaknesses of the logger, the psychological reaction from hard
work, from sordid living, from the indefinable cramping of the spirit
that grows upon a man through months of monotonous labor. Town--a
pyrotechnic display among the bright lights--one dizzy swoop on the
wings of fictitious excitement--bought caresses--empty pockets--the
woods again! Yet the logger dreams always of saving his money, of
becoming a timber king, of setting himself up in some business--knowing
all the while that he is like a child with pennies in his hand,
unhappy until they are spent. Bill Hayes was past fifty, and he knew
all this. He stayed in the woods as long as the weakness of the flesh
permitted, naively certain that he had gone on his last "bust", that
he would bank his money and experience the glow of possessing capital.

The other man was negligible--a bovine lump of flesh without
personality--born to hew wood and draw water for men of enterprise.

And there was always Mills, Mills who wanted to make a stake and "get
to hell out of here", and who did not go, although the sum to his
credit in Hollister's account book was creeping towards a thousand
dollars, so fierce and unceasing an energy did Mills expend upon the
fragrant cedar.

Hollister himself accounted for no small profit. Like Mills, he worked
under a spur. He wrestled stoutly with opportunity. He saw beyond the
cedar on that green slope. With a living assured, he sought fortune,
aspired to things as yet beyond his reach,--leisure, an ampler way of
life, education for his children that were to be.

This measure of prosperity loomed not so distant. When he took stock
of his resources in October, he found himself with nearly three
thousand dollars in hand and the bulk of his cedar still standing.
Half that was directly the gain derived from a rising market. Labor
was his only problem. If he could get labor, and shingles held the
upper price levels, he would make a killing in the next twelve months.
After that, with experience gained and working capital, the forested
region of the British Columbia coast lay before him as a field of
operations.

Meantime he was duly thankful for daily progress. Materially that
destiny which he doubted seemed to smile on him.

Late in October, when the first southward flight of wild duck began to
wing over the valley, old Bill Hayes and Sam Ballard downed tools and
went to town. The itch of the wandering foot had laid hold of them.
The pennies burned their pockets. Ballard frankly wanted a change.
Hayes declared he wanted only a week's holiday, to see a show or two
and buy some clothes. He would surely be back.

"Yes, he'll be back," Mills commented with ironic emphasis. "He'll be
broke in a week and the first camp that pays his fare out will get
him. There's no fool like a logger. Strong in the back and weak in
the head--the best of us."

But Mills himself stayed on. What kept him, Hollister wondered? Did he
have some objective that centered about Myra Bland? Was the man a
victim of hopeless passion, lingering near the unobtainable because he
could not tear himself away? Was Myra holding him like a pawn in some
obscure game that she played to feed her vanity? Or were the two of
them caught in one of those inextricable coils which Hollister
perceived to arise in the lives of men and women, from which they
could not free themselves without great courage and ruthless disregard
of consequences?

Sometimes Hollister wondered if he himself were not overfanciful, too
sensitive to moods and impressions. Then he would observe some
significant interchange of looks between Mills and Myra and be sure of
currents of feeling, furtive and powerful, sweeping about those two.
It angered him. Hollister was all for swift and forthright action,
deeds done in the open. If they loved, why did they not commit
themselves boldly to the undertaking, take matters in their own hands
and have an end to all secrecy? He felt a menace in this secrecy, as
if somehow it threatened him. He perceived that Mills suffered, that
something gnawed at the man. When he rested from his work, when he sat
quiescent beside the fire where they ate at noon together, that cloak
of melancholy brooding wrapped Mills close. He seldom talked. When he
did there was in his speech a resentful inflection like that of a man
who smarts under some injury, some injustice, some deep hurt which he
may not divulge but which nags him to the limits of his endurance.

Hollister was Mills' sole company after the other two men left. They
would work within sight of each other all day. They ate together at
noon. Now and then he asked Mills down to supper out of pity for the
man's complete isolation. Some chord in Hollister vibrated in sympathy
with this youngster who kept his teeth so resolutely clenched on
whatever hurt him.

And while Hollister watched Mills and wondered how long that effort at
repression would last, he became conscious that Myra was watching
_him_, puzzling over him; that something about him attracted and
repulsed her in equal proportions. It was a disturbing discovery. Myra
could study him with impunity. Doris could not see this scrutiny of
her husband by her neighbor. And Myra did not seem to care what
Hollister saw. She would look frankly at him with a question in her
eyes. What that question might be, Hollister refused even to consider.
She never again made any remark to Doris about her first husband,
about the similarity of name. But now and then she would speak of
something that happened when she was a girl, some casual reference to
the first days of the war, to her life in London, and her eyes would
turn to Hollister. But he was always on his guard, always on the
alert against these pitfalls of speech. He was never sure whether they
were deliberate traps, or merely the half-regretful, backward looking
of a woman to whom life lately had not been kind.

Nevertheless it kept his nerves on edge. For he valued his peace and
his home that was in the making. There was a restfulness and a
satisfaction in Doris Cleveland which he dreaded to imperil because he
had the feeling that he would never find its like again. He felt that
Myra's mere presence was like a sword swinging over his head. There
was no armor he could put on against that weapon if it were decreed it
should fall.

Hollister soon perceived that if he were not to lose ground he must
have labor. Men would not come seeking work so far out of the beaten
track. In addition, there were matters afoot that required attention.
So he took Doris with him and went down to Vancouver. Almost the first
man he met on Cordova Street, when he went about in search of bolt
cutters, was Bill Hayes, sober and unshaven and a little crestfallen.

"Why didn't you come back?" Hollister asked.

Hayes grinned sheepishly.

"Kinda hated to," he admitted. "Pulled the same old stuff--dry town,
too. Shot the roll. Dang it, I'd ought to had more sense. Well, that's
the way she goes. You want men?"

"Sure I want men," Hollister said. "Look here, if you can rustle five
or six men, I'll make it easier for you all. I'll take up a cook for
the bolt camp. And I won't shut down for anything but snow too deep to
work in."

"You're on. I think I can rustle some men. Try it, anyhow."

Hayes got a crew together in twenty-four hours. Doris attended to her
business, which required the help of her married cousin and a round of
certain shops. Almost the last article they bought was a piano, the
one luxury Doris longed for, a treat they had promised themselves as
soon as the cedar got them out of the financial doldrums.

"I suppose it's extravagance," Doris said, her fingers caressing the
smooth mahogany, feeling the black and ivory of the keyboard, "but
it's one of the few things one doesn't need eyes for."

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