Book: The Hidden Places

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




She had proved that to Hollister long ago. When she could see she must
have had an extraordinary faculty for memorizing music. Her memory
seemed to have indelibly engraved upon it all the music she had ever
played.

Hollister smiled indulgently and ordered the instrument cased for
shipping. It went up on the same steamer that gave passage to
themselves and six woodsmen and their camp cook. There were some bits
of new furniture also.

This necessitated the addition of another room. But that was a simple
matter for able hands accustomed to rough woodwork. So in a little
while their house extended visibly, took on a homier aspect. The
sweet-peas and flaming poppies had wilted under the early frosts. Now
a rug or two and a few pictures gave to the floors and walls a
cheerful note of color that the flowers had given to their dooryard
during the season of their bloom.

About the time this was done, and the cedar camp working at an
accelerated pace, Archie Lawanne came back to the Toba. He walked into
Hollister's quite unexpectedly one afternoon. Myra was there.

It seemed to Hollister that Lawanne's greeting was a little eager, a
trifle expectant, that he held Myra's outstretched hand just a little
longer than mere acquaintance justified. Hollister glanced at Mills,
sitting by. Mills had come down to help Hollister on the boom, and
Doris had called them both in for a cup of tea. Mills was staring at
Lawanne with narrowed eyes. His face wore the expression of a man who
sees impending calamity, sees it without fear or surprise, faces it
only with a little dismay. He set down his cup and lighted a
cigarette. His fingers, the brown, muscular, heavy fingers of a
strong-handed man, shook slightly.

"You know, it's good to be back in this old valley," Lawanne said. "I
have half a notion to become a settler. A fellow could build up quite
an estate on one of these big flats. He could grow almost anything
here that will grow in this latitude. And when he wanted to experience
the doubtful pleasures of civilization, they would always be waiting
for him outside."

"If he had the price," Mills put in shortly.

"Precisely," Lawanne returned, "and cared to pay it--for all he got."

"That's what it is to be a man and free," Myra observed. "You can go
where you will and when--live as you wish."

"It all depends on what you mean by freedom," Lawanne replied. "Show
me a free man. Where is there such? We're all slaves. Only some of us
are too stupid to recognize our status."

"Slaves to what?" Myra asked. "You seem to have come back in a
decidedly pessimistic frame of mind."

"Slaves to our own necessities; to other people's demands; to burdens
we have assumed, or have had thrust upon us, which we haven't the
courage to shake off. To our own moods and passions. To something
within us that keeps us pursuing this thing we call happiness. To
struggle for fulfilment of ideals that can never be attained. Slaves
to our environment, to social forces before which the individual is
nothing. It's all rot to talk about the free man, the man whose soul
is his own. Complete freedom isn't even desirable, because to attain
it you would have to withdraw yourself altogether from your fellows
and become a law unto yourself in some remote solitude; and no sane
person wants to do that, even to secure this mythical freedom which
people prattle about and would recoil from if it were offered them.
Yes, I'll have another cup, if you please, Mrs. Hollister."

Lawanne munched cake and drank tea and talked as if he had been denied
the boon of conversation for a long time. But that could hardly be,
for he had been across the continent since he left there. He had been
in New York and Washington and swung back to British Columbia by way
of San Francisco.

"I read those two books of yours--or rather Bob read them to me,"
Doris said presently. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for writing
such a preposterous yarn as 'The Worm'."

"Ah, my dear woman," Lawanne's face lit up with a sardonic smile. "I
wish my publishers could hear you say that. 'The Worm' is good, sound,
trade union goods, turned out in the very best manner of a thriving
school of fictionsmiths. It sold thirty thousand copies in the regular
edition and tons in the reprint."

"But there never were such invincible men and such a perfect creature
of a woman," Doris persisted. "And the things they did--the strings
you pulled. Life isn't like that. You know it isn't."

"Granted," Lawanne returned dryly. "But what did you think of 'The Man
Who Couldn't Die'?"

"It didn't seem to me," Doris said slowly, "that the man who wrote the
last book could possibly have written the first. That _was_ life. Your
man there was a real man, and you made his hopes and fears, his love
and sufferings, very vivid. Your woman was real enough too, but I
didn't like her. It didn't seem to me she was worth the pain she
caused."

"Neither did she seem so to Phillips, if you remember," Lawanne said.
"That was his tragedy--to know his folly and still be urged blindly on
because of her, because of his own illusions, which he knew he must
cling to or perish. But wait till I finish the book I'm going to write
this winter. I'm going to cut loose. I'm going to smite the
Philistines--and the chances are," he smiled cynically, "they won't
even be aware of the blow. Did you read those books?" He turned
abruptly to Myra.

She nodded.

"Yes, but I refuse to commit myself," she said lightly. "There is no
such thing as a modest author, and Mrs. Hollister has given you all
the praise that's good for you."

Hollister and Mills went back to their work on the boom. When they
finished their day's work, Lawanne had gone down to the Blands' with
Myra. After supper, as Mills rose to leave for the upper camp, he said
to Doris:

"Have you got that book of his--about the fellow that couldn't die?
I'd like to read it."

Doris gave him the book. He went away with it in his hand.

Hollister looked after him curiously. There was strong meat in
Lawanne's book. He wondered if Mills would digest it. And he wondered
a little if Mills regarded Lawanne as a rival, if he were trying to
test the other man's strength by his work.

Away down the river, now that dark had fallen, the light in Bland's
house shone yellow. There was a red, glowing spot on the river bank.
That would be Lawanne's camp. Hollister shut the door on the chill
October night and turned back to his easy-chair by the stove. Doris
had finished her work. She sat at the piano, her fingers picking out
some slow, languorous movement that he did not know, but which soothed
him like a lullaby.

Vigorously he dissented from Lawanne's philosophy of enslavement. He,
Hollister, was a free man. Yes, he was free,--but only when he could
shut the door on the past, only when he could shut away all the world
just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold frosty night, his
neighbors and his men, by the simple closing of a door. But he could
not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must
meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange
repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by
them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web
of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome
possibility. He could say to himself that it was only an impression;
that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity. But he
could not help it. Life was like that. No man stood alone. No man
could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his
fellows. Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and
conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or
intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being. Who was he
to escape?

No, Hollister reflected, he could not insulate himself and Doris
against this environment, against these people. They would have to
take things as they came and be thankful they were no worse.

Doris left the piano. She sat on a low stool beside him, leaned her
brown head against him.

"It won't be so long before I have to go to town, Bob," she said
dreamily. "I hope the winter is open so that the work goes on well.
And sometimes I hope that the snow shuts everything down, so that
you'll be there with me. I'm not very consistent, am I?"

"You suit me," he murmured. "And I'll be there whether the work goes
on or not."

"What an element of the unexpected, the unforeseen, is at work all the
time," she said. "A year ago you and I didn't even know of each
other's existence. I used to sit and wonder what would become of me.
It was horrible sometimes to go about in the dark, existing like a
plant in a cellar, longing for all that a woman longs for if she is a
woman and knows herself. And you were in pretty much the same boat."

"Worse," Hollister muttered, "because I sulked and brooded and raged
against what had overtaken me. Yet if I hadn't reacted so violently,
I should never have come here to hide away from what hurt me. So I
wouldn't have met you. That would almost make one think there is
something in the destiny that you and Lawanne smile at."

"Destiny and chance: two names for the same thing, and that thing
wholly unaccountable, beyond the scope of human foresight," Doris
replied. "Things happen; that's all we can generally say. We don't
know why. Speaking of Lawanne, I wonder if he really does intend to
stay here this winter and write a book?"

"He says so."

"He'll be company for us," she reflected. "He's clever and a little
bit cynical, but I like him. He'll help to keep us from getting bored
with each other."

"Do you think there is any danger of that?" Hollister inquired.

She tweaked his ear playfully.

"People do, you know. But I hardly think we shall. Not for a year or
two, anyway. Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale odor
of uneventful, routine, domestic life. Then _you_ may."

"Huh," he grunted derisively, "catch me. I know what I want and what
contents me. We'll beat the game handily; and we'll beat it together.

"Why, good Lord," he cried sharply, "what would be the good of all
this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and
planning and anticipating things? Nearly every man, I believe," he
concluded thoughtfully, "keeps his gait because of some woman. There
is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some
woman--past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that."

"To keep him," Doris laughed, "in the condition a poet once described
as:

'This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing
Toward the gloom.'"

They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom,
of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.

When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills
humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The
Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon
meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke
derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.
That was beyond their comprehension.

But Hollister thought he understood.

Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the
vantage of height and saw Lawanne's winter quarters already taking
form on the river bank, midway between his own place and Bland's. It
grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a
shake roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now
began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which
deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the
torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes
vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its
density, in its variety of shrub and fern.

For a month after that a lull seemed to come upon the slow march of
events towards some unknown destiny,--of which Hollister nursed a
strange prescience that now rose strong in him and again grew so
tenuous that he would smile at it for a fancy. Yet in that month there
was no slack in the routine of affairs. The machinery of Carr's mill
revolved through each twenty-four hours. Up on the hill Hollister's
men felled trees with warning shouts and tumultuous crashings. They
attacked the prone trunks with axe and saw and iron wedges,
Lilliputians rending the body of a fallen giant. The bolt piles grew;
they were hurled swiftly down the chute into the dwindling river,
rafted to the mill. All this time the price of shingles in the open
market rose and rose, like a tide strongly on the flood, of which no
man could prophesy the high-water mark. Money flowed to Hollister's
pockets, to the pockets of his men. The value of his standing timber
grew by leaps and bounds. And always Sam Carr, who had no economic
illusions, urged Hollister on, predicting before long the inevitable
reaction.

The days shortened. Through the long evenings Hollister's house
became a sort of social center. Lawanne would come in after supper,
sometimes inert, dumb, to sit in a corner smoking a pipe,--again
filled with a curious exhilaration, to talk unceasingly of everything
that came into his mind, to thump ragtime on the piano and sing a
variety of inconsequential songs in a velvety baritone. Myra came
often. So did Bland. So did Charlie Mills. Many evenings they were all
there together. As the weeks went winging by, Doris grew less certain
on her feet, more prone to spend her time sitting back in a deep arm
chair, and Myra began to play for them, to sing for them--to come to
the house in the day and help Doris with her work.

The snow began at last, drifting down out of a windless sky. Upon
that, with a sudden fear lest a great depth should fall, lest the
river should freeze and make exit difficult, Hollister took his wife
to town. This was about the middle of November. Some three weeks later
a son was born to them.




CHAPTER XV


When they came back to the Toba, Hollister brought in a woman to
relieve Doris of housework and help her take care of the baby,
although Doris was jealous of that privilege. She was a typical mother
in so far as she held the conviction that no one could attend so well
as herself the needs of that small, red-faced, lusty-lunged morsel of
humanity.

And as if some definite mark had been turned, the winter season closed
upon the valley in a gentle mood. The driving rains of the fall gave
way to January snows. But the frost took no more than a tentative
nibble now and then. Far up on the mountains the drifts piled deep,
and winter mists blew in clammy wraiths across the shoulders of the
hills. From those high, cold levels, the warmth of day and the frosts
that gnawed in chill darkness started intermittent slides rumbling,
growling as they slipped swiftly down steep slopes, to end with a
crash at the bottom of the hill or in the depths of a gorge. But the
valley itself suffered no extremes of weather. The river did not
freeze. It fell to a low level, but not so low that Hollister ever
failed to shift his cedar bolts from chute mouth to mill. There was
seldom so much snow that his crew could not work. There was growing
an appreciable hole in the heart of his timber limit. In another year
there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient
when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few
hundred stumps.

With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur
in Hollister's affairs. One day succeeded another in placid routine.
The work went on with clock-like precision. It had passed beyond a
one-man struggle for economic foothold; it no longer held for him the
feeling of a forlorn hope which he led against the forces of the
wilderness. It was like a ball which he had started rolling down hill.
It kept on, whether he tended it or not. If he chose to take his rifle
and go seeking venison, if he elected to sit by his fire reading a
book, the cedars fell, their brown trunks were sawn and split, the
bolts came sliding down the chute in reckonable, profitable
quantities, to the gain of himself and his men.

Mills remained, moody, working with that strange dynamic energy,
sparing of words except that now and then he would talk to Hollister
in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed
nothing. Mills always seemed on the point of crying out some deep woe
that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of
speech,--but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic
hint, bestow some malediction upon life in general. And he never
slackened the dizzy pace of his daily labor, except upon those few
occasions when from either Hollister or Lawanne he got a book that
held him. Then he would stop work and sit in the bunk house and read
till the last page was turned. But mostly he cut and piled cedar as if
he tried to drown out in the sweat of his body whatever fever burned
within.

Hollister observed that Mills no longer had much traffic with the
Blands. For weeks at a time he did not leave the bolt camp except to
come down to Hollister's house.

Lawanne seemed to be a favored guest now, at Bland's. Lawanne worked
upon his book, but by fits and starts, working when he did work with a
feverish concentration. He had a Chinese boy for house-servant. He
might be found at noon or at midnight sprawled in a chair beside a
pot-bellied stove, scrawling in an ungainly hand across sheets of
yellow paper. He had no set hours for work. When he did work, when he
had the vision and the fit was on and words came easily, chance
callers met with scant courtesy. But he had great stores of time to
spare, for all that. Some of it he spent at Bland's, waging an
interminable contest at cribbage with Bland, coming up now and then
with the Blands to spend an evening at Hollister's.

"It's about a man who wrecked his life by systematically undermining
his own illusions about life," he answered one day Hollister's curious
inquiry as to what the new book was about, "and of how finally a very
assiduously cultivated illusion made him quite happy at last. Sound
interesting?"

"How could he deliberately cultivate an illusion?" Doris asked. "If
one's intelligence ever classifies a thing as an illusion, no
conscious effort will ever turn it into a reality."

"Oh, I didn't say _he_ cultivated the illusion," Lawanne laughed.

"Besides, do you really think that illusions are necessary to
happiness?" Doris persisted.

"To some people," Lawanne declared. "But let's not follow up that
philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wade ashore. We'll
say whatever is is right, and let it go at that. It will be quite all
right for you to offer me a cup of tea, if your kitchen mechanic will
condescend. That Chink of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun,
trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner. So I throw myself on your
mercy."

"This man Bland is the dizzy limit," Lawanne observed, when the tea
and some excellent sandwiches presently appeared. "He bought another
rifle the other day--paid forty-five bones for it. That makes four he
has now. And they have to manage like the deuce to keep themselves in
grub from one remittance day to the next. He's a study. You seldom run
across such a combination of physical perfection and child-like
irresponsibility. He was complaining about his limited income the
other day--'inkum' in his inimitable pronunciation. I suggested that
right here in this valley he could earn a considerable number of
shekels if he cared to work. He merely smiled amiably and said he
didn't think he cared to take on a laborer's job. It left a chap no
time for himself, you know. I suppose he'll vegetate here till he
comes into that money he's waiting for. He refers to that as if it
were something which pertained to him by divine right, something which
freed him from any obligation to make any effort to overcome the
sordid way in which they live at present."

"He doesn't consider it sordid," Hollister said. "Work is what he
considers sordid--and there is something to be said for his viewpoint,
at that. He enjoys himself tramping around with a gun, spending an
afternoon to catch half a dozen six-inch trout."

"But it _is_ sordid," Lawanne persisted. "Were you ever in their
house?"

Hollister shook his head.

"It isn't as comfortable as your men's bunk house. They have boxes for
chairs, a rickety table, a stove about ready to fall to pieces. There
are cracks in the walls and a roof that a rat could crawl through--or
there would be if Mrs. Bland didn't go about stuffing them up with
moss and old newspapers. Why can't a gentleman, an athlete and a
sportsman make his quarters something a little better than a Siwash
would be contented with? Especially if he has prevailed on a woman to
share his joys and sorrows. Some of these days Mr. Bland will wake up
and find his wife has gone off with some enterprising chap who is
less cocksure and more ambitious."

"Would you blame her?" Doris asked casually.

"Bless your soul, no," Lawanne laughed. "If I were a little more
romantic, I might run away with her myself. What a tremendous jar that
would give Bland's exasperating complacency. I believe he's a
hang-over from that prehistoric time when men didn't believe that any
woman had a soul--that a woman was something in which a man acquired a
definite property right merely by marrying her."

Doris chuckled.

"I can imagine how Mr. Bland would look if he heard you," she said.

"He'd only smile in a superior manner," Lawanne declared. "You
couldn't get Bland fussed up by any mere assertion. The only thing
that would stir him deeply would be a direct assault on that vague
abstraction which he calls his honor--or on his property. Then he
would very likely smite the wrongdoer with all the efficiency of
outraged virtue."

Hollister continued to muse on this after Lawanne went away. He
thought Lawanne's summing up a trifle severe. Nevertheless it was a
pretty clear statement of fact. Bland certainly seemed above working
either for money or to secure a reasonable degree of comfort for
himself and his wife. He sat waiting for a windfall to restore his
past splendor of existence, which he sometimes indirectly admitted
meant cricket, a country home, horses and dogs, a whirl among the
right sort of people in London now and then. That sort of thing and
that sort of man was what Myra had fallen in love with. Hollister felt
a mild touch of contempt for them both.

His wife had also let her thoughts focus on the Blands.

"I wonder," she said, "if they are so very poor? Why don't you offer
Bland a job? Maybe he is too proud to ask."

Bland was not too proud to ask for certain things, it seemed. About a
week later he came to Hollister and in a most casual manner said, "I
say, old man, can you let me have a hundred dollars? My quarterly
funds are delayed a bit."

Hollister gave him the money without question. As he watched Bland
stride away through the light blanket of snow, and a little later
noticed him disappear among the thickets and stumps going towards the
Carr camp, where supplies were sold as a matter of accommodation
rather than for profit, Hollister reflected that there was a mild sort
of irony in the transaction. He wondered if Myra knew of her husband's
borrowing. If she had any inkling of the truth, how would she feel?
For he knew that Myra was proud, sensitive, independent in spirit far
beyond her capacity for actual independence. If she even suspected his
identity, the borrowing of that money would surely sting her. But
Hollister put that notion aside.

For a long time Myra had ceased to trouble him with the irritating
uncertainty of their first meetings. She apparently accepted him and
his mutilated face as part of Doris Hollister's background and gave
him no more thought or attention. Always in the little gatherings at
his house Hollister contrived to keep in the shadow, to be an onlooker
rather than a participant,--just as Charlie Mills did. Hollister was
still sensitive about his face. He was doubly sensitive because he
dreaded any comment upon his disfigurement reaching his wife's ears.
He had succeeded so well in thus effacing himself that Myra seemed to
regard him as if he were no more than a grotesque bit of furniture to
which she had become accustomed. All the sense of sinister
possibilities in her presence, all that uneasy dread of her nearness,
that consciousness of her as an impending threat, had finally come to
seem nothing more than mere figments of his imagination. Especially
since their son was born. That seemed to establish the final bond
between himself and Doris. Myra, the past which so poignantly included
Myra, held less and less significance. He could look at Myra and
wonder if this _was_ the same woman he had held in his arms, whose
kisses had been freely and gladly bestowed upon him; if all the
passion and pain of their life together, of their tearing apart, had
ever really been. He had got so far beyond that it seemed unreal. And
lately there had settled upon him a surety that to Myra it must all be
just as unreal--that she could not possibly harbor any suspicion that
he was her legal husband, hiding behind a mask of scars--and that
even if she did suspect, that suspicion could never be translated into
action which could deflect ever so slightly the current of his present
existence.

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