Book: The Hidden Places

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




He was working at the chute mouth when Bland came to ask for that
loan. He continued to work there. Not long after he noticed Bland
leave his own house and go down the flat, he saw Myra coming along the
bank. That was nothing. There was a well-beaten path there that she
traveled nearly every afternoon. He felt his first tentative misgiving
when he saw that Myra did not stop at the house, that she walked past
and straight towards where he worked. And this slight misgiving grew
to a certainty of impending trouble when she came up, when she faced
him. Movement and the crisp air had kindled a glow in her cheeks. But
something besides the winter air had kindled an almost unnatural glow
in her eyes. They were like dusky pansies. She was, he thought, with
curious self-detachment, a strikingly beautiful woman. And he recalled
that anger or excitement, any emotion that stirred her, always made
her seem more alluring, always made her glow and sparkle as if in such
moments she was a perfect human jewel, flashing in the sun of life.

She nodded to Hollister, looked down on the cedar blocks floating in
the cold river, stood a moment to watch the swift descent of other
bolts hurtling down the chute and joining their fellows with
successive splashes.

"You let Jim have some money this morning?" she said then; it was a
statement as much as an interrogation.

"Yes," Hollister replied.

"Don't let him have any more," she said bluntly. "You may never get it
back. Why should you supply him with money that you've worked for when
he won't make any effort to get it for himself? You're altogether too
free-handed, Robin."

Hollister stood speechless. She looked at him with a curious
half-amused expectancy. She knew him. No one but Myra had ever called
him that. It had been her pet name for him in the old days. She knew
him. He leaned on his pike pole, waiting for what was to follow. This
revelation was only a preliminary. Something like a dumb fury came
over Hollister. Why did she reveal this knowledge of him? For what
purpose? He felt his secure foundations crumbling.

"So you recognize me?"

"Did you think I wouldn't?" she said slowly. "Did you think your only
distinguishing characteristic was the shape of your face? I've been
sure of it for months."

"Ah," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing. Nothing. What is there to do?"

"Then why reveal this knowledge?" he demanded harshly. "Why drag out
the old skeleton and rattle it for no purpose? Or have you some
purpose?"

Myra sat down on a fallen tree. She drew the folds of a heavy brown
coat closer about her and looked at him steadily.

"No," she replied. "I can't say that I have any definite purpose
except--that I want to talk to you. And it seemed that I could talk to
you better if we stopped pretending. We can't alter facts by
pretending they don't exist, can we?"

"I don't attempt to alter them," he said. "I accept them and let it go
at that. Why don't you?"

"I do," she assured him, "but when I find myself compelled to accept
your money to pay for the ordinary necessaries of living, I feel
myself being put in an intolerable position. I suppose you won't
understand that. I imagine you think of me as a selfish little beast
who has no scruples about anything. But I'm not quite like that. It
galls me to have Jim borrow from you. He may intend to pay it back.
But he won't; it will somehow never be quite convenient. And I've
squandered enough of your money. I feel like a thief sometimes when I
watch you work. You must hate me. Do you, Robin?"

Hollister stirred the snow absently with the pike-pole point. He tried
to analyze his feelings, and he found it difficult.

"I don't think so," he said at last. "I'm rather indifferent. If you
meddled with things I'd not only hate you, I think I would want to
destroy you. But you needn't worry about the money. If Bland doesn't
repay the hundred dollars it won't break me. I won't lend him any more
if it disturbs you. But that doesn't matter. The only thing that
matters is whether you are going to upset everything in some rash mood
that you may sometime have."

"Do you think I might do that?"

"How do I know what you may do?" he returned. "You threw me into the
discard when your fancy turned to some one else. You followed your own
bent with a certain haste as soon as I was reported dead. I had ceased
to be man enough for you, but my money was still good enough for you.
When I recall those things, I think I can safely say that I haven't
the least idea what you may do next. You aren't faring any too well.
That's plain enough. I have seen men raise Cain out of sheer
devilishness, out of a desperate notion to smash everything because
they were going to smash themselves. Some people seem able to amuse
themselves by watching other people squirm. Maybe you are like that.
You had complete power over me once. I surrendered to that gladly,
then. You appear to have a faculty of making men dance to any tune you
care to play. But all the power you have now, so far as I'm concerned,
is to make me suffer a little more by giving the whole ugly show away.
No, I haven't the least idea what you may do. I don't know you at
all."

"My God, no, you don't," she flung out. "You don't. If you ever had,
we wouldn't be where we are now."

"Probably it's as well," Hollister returned. "Even if you had been
true, you'd have faltered when I came back looking like this."

"And that would have been worse than what I did do," she said,
"wouldn't it?"

"Are you justifying it as an act of mercy to me?" he asked.

Myra shook her head.

"No. I don't feel any great necessity for justifying my actions. No
more than you should feel compelled to justify yours. We have each
only done what normal human beings frequently do when they get torn
loose from the moorings they know and are moved by forces within them
and beyond them, forces which bewilder and dismay them. The war and
your idea of duty, of service, pried us apart. Natural causes--natural
enough when I look back at them--did the rest. We all want to be
happy. We all grab at that when it comes within reach. That's all you
and I have done. We will probably continue doing that the same as
every one else."

"I have it," Hollister said defiantly. "That is why I don't want any
ghosts of the old days haunting me now."

"If you have, you are very fortunate," she murmured. "But don't leave
your wife alone in a city throbbing with the fevered excitement and
uncertainty of war, where every one's motto is a short life and a
merry one! Not if she's young and hot-blooded, if she has grown so
accustomed to affection and caresses that the want of them afflicts
her with a thirst like that of a man lost in a desert. Because if she
has nothing to do but live from day to day on memories and hopes,
there will be a time when some man at hand will obscure the figure of
the absent one. That is all that happened to me, Robin. I longed for
you. Then I began to resent your complete absorption by the war
machine. Then you got dim, like the figure of a man walking away down
a long road. Do you remember how it was? Leave once in six months or
so. A kiss of welcome and a good-by right on its heels. There were
thousands like me in London. The war took our men--but took no account
of us. We were untrained. There were no jobs to occupy our hands--none
we could put our hearts into--none that could be gotten without
influence in the proper quarters. We couldn't pose successfully enough
to persuade ourselves that it was a glorious game. They had taken our
men, and there was nothing much left. We did not have to earn our
keep. If you had only not stuck so closely to the front lines."

"I had to," Hollister said sharply. "I had no choice. The country----"

"The country! That shadowy phantasm--that recruiting sergeant's
plea--that political abstraction that is flung in one's face along
with other platitudes from every platform," Myra broke out
passionately. "What does it really mean? What did it mean to us? Men
going out to die. Women at home crying, eating their hearts out with
loneliness, going bad now and then in recklessness, in desperation.
Army contractors getting rich. Ammunition manufacturers getting rich.
Transportation companies paying hundred per cent. dividends. One
nation grabbing for territory here, another there. Talk of saving the
world for democracy and in the same breath throttling liberty of
speech and action in every corner of the world. And now that it's all
over, everything is the same, only worse. The rich are richer and the
poor poorer, and there are some new national boundaries and some
blasted military and political reputations. That's all. What was that
to you and me? Nothing. Less than nothing. Yet it tore our lives up by
the roots. It took away from us something we had that we valued,
something that we might have kept. It doesn't matter that you were
sincere, that you wanted to serve, that you thought it a worthy
service. The big people, the men who run things, they had no such
illusions; they had their eye on the main chance all the time. It paid
them--if not in money then in prestige and power. How has it paid you?
You know, every time you look in a mirror. You know that the men that
died were the lucky ones. The country that marched them to the front
with speeches and music when the guns were talking throws them on the
scrapheap when they come back maimed. I have no faith in a country
that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly. I've learned to
think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little. You have
suffered. So have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was
born with, which you didn't understand and which I'm only myself
beginning to understand--but mostly because the seats of the mighty
were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage. Oh,
life is a dreary business sometimes! We want so to be happy. We try so
hard. And mostly we fail."

Her eyes filled with tears, round drops that gathered slowly in the
corners of her puckered lids and spilled over the soft curves of her
cheek. She did not look at Hollister. She stared at the gray river.
She made a little gesture, as if she dumbly answered some futile
question, and her hands dropped idly into her lap.

"I feel guilty," she continued after a little, "not because I failed
to play up to the role of the faithful wife. I couldn't help that. But
I shouldn't have kept that money, I suppose. Still, you were dead.
Money meant nothing to you. It was in my hands and I needed it, or
thought I did. You must have had a hard time, Robin, coming back to
civil life a beggar."

"Yes, but not for lack of money," Hollister replied. "I didn't need
much and I had enough. It was being scarred so that everybody shunned
me. It was the horror of being alone, of finding men and women always
uneasy in my presence, always glad to get away from me. They acted as
if I were a monstrosity that offended them beyond endurance. I
couldn't blame them much. Sometimes it gave me the shivers to look at
myself in the glass. I am a horrible sight. People who must be around
me seem to get used to me, whether they like it or not. But at first I
nearly went mad. I had been uprooted and disfigured. Nobody wanted to
know me, to talk to me, to be friendly. However, that's past. I have
got a start. Unless this skeleton is dragged out of the closet, I
shall get on well enough."

"I shall not drag it out, Robin," she assured him with a faint smile.
"Some day I hope I'll be able to give you back that money."

"What became of it?" He voiced a question which had been recurring in
his mind for a year. "You must have had over forty thousand dollars
when I was reported dead in '17."

Myra shrugged her shoulders.

"We were married six months after that. Jim has some rather well-to-do
people over there. They were all very nice to me. I imagine they
thought he was marrying money. Perhaps he thought so himself. He had
nothing except a quarterly pittance. He has no sense of values, and I
was not much better. There is always this estate which he will come
into, to discount the present. He had seen service the first year of
the war. He was wounded and invalided home. Then he served as a
military instructor. Finally, when the Americans came in, he was
allowed to resign. So we came across to the States. We went here and
there, spending as we went. We cut a pretty wide swath too, most of
the time. There were several disastrous speculations. Presently the
money was all gone. Then we came up here, where we can live on next to
nothing. We shall have to stay here another eighteen months. Looking
back, the way we spent money seems sheer lunacy. The fool and his
money--you know. And it wasn't our money. That hurts me now. I've
begun to realize what money means to me, to you, to every one. That's
why when Jim calmly told me that he had borrowed a hundred dollars
from you I felt that was a little more than I could stand. That's
piling it on. I wondered why you gave it to him--if you let him have
it in a spirit of contemptuous charity. I might have known it wasn't
that. But don't lend him any more. He really doesn't need it.
Borrowing with Jim is just like asking for a smoke. He's queer. If he
made a bet with you and lost he'd pay up promptly, if he had to pawn
his clothes and mine too. Borrowed money, however, seems to come in a
different category. When this estate comes into his hands perhaps I
shall be able to return some of this money that we wasted. I think
that--and the fact that I'm just a little afraid to break away and
face the world alone--is chiefly what keeps me faithful to him now."

"Is it as bad as that?" Hollister asked.

"Don't misunderstand me, Robin," she protested. "I'm not an abused
wife or anything like that. He's perfectly satisfied, as complacent as
an English gentleman can be in the enjoyment of possession. But he
doesn't love me any more than I love him. He blandly assumes that love
is only a polite term for something else. And I can't believe
that--yet. Maybe I'm what Archie Lawanne calls a romantic
sentimentalist, but there is something in me that craves from a man
more than elementary passion. I'm a woman; therefore my nature demands
of a man that he be first of all a man. But that alone isn't enough.
I'm not just a something to be petted when the fit is on and then told
in effect to run along and play. There must be men who have minds as
well as bodies. There must be here and there a man who understands
that a woman has all sorts of thoughts and feelings as well as sex.
Meanwhile--I mark time. That's all."

"You appear," Hollister said a little grimly, "to have acquired
certain definite ideas. It's a pity they didn't develop sooner."

"Ideas only develop out of experience," she said quietly. "And our
passions are born with us."

She rose, shaking free the snow that clung to her coat.

"I feel better for getting all that steam off my chest," she said.
"It's better, since we must live here, that you and I should not keep
up this game of pretence between ourselves. Isn't it, Robin?"

"Perhaps. I don't know." The old doubts troubled Hollister. He was
jealous of what he had attained, fearful of reviving the past, a
little uncertain of this new turn.

"At any rate, you don't hold a grudge against me, do you?" Myra asked.
"You can afford to be indifferent now. You've found a mate, you're
playing a man's part here. You're beating the game and getting some
real satisfaction out of living. You can afford to be above a grudge
against me."

"I don't hold any grudge," Hollister answered truthfully.

"I'm going down to the house, now," Myra said. "I wanted to talk to
you openly, and I'm glad I did. I think and think sometimes until I
feel like a rat in a trap. And you are the only one here I can really
talk to. You've been through the mill and you won't misunderstand."

"Ah," he said. "Is Charlie Mills devoid of understanding, or Lawanne?"

She looked at him fixedly for a second.

"You are very acute," she observed. "Some time I may tell you about
Charlie Mills. Certainly I'd never reveal my soul to Archie Lawanne.
He'd dissect it and gloat over it and analyze it in his next book. And
neither of them will ever be quite able to abandon the idea that a
creature like me is something to be pursued and captured."

She turned away. Hollister saw her go into the house. He could picture
the two of them there together. Doris and Myra bending over young
Robert, who was now beginning to lie with wide-open blue eyes, in
which the light of innocent wonder, of curiosity, began to show, to
wave his arms and grope with tiny, uncertain hands. Those two women
together hovering over his child,--one who was still legally his wife,
the other his wife in reality.

How the world would prick up its donkey ears--even the little cosmos
of the Toba valley--if it knew. But of course no one would ever know.
Hollister was far beyond any contrition for his acts. The end
justified the means,--doubly justified it in his case, for he had had
no choice. Harsh material factors had rendered the decision for him.
Hollister was willing now to abide by that decision. To him it seemed
good, the only good thing he had laid hold of since the war had turned
his world upside down and inside out.

He went about his work mechanically, deep in thought. His mind
persisted in measuring, weighing, turning over all that Myra had said,
while his arms pushed and heaved and twisted the pike pole, thrusting
the blocks of cedar into an orderly arrangement within the
boom-sticks.




CHAPTER XVI


Hollister had gone down to Lawanne's with a haunch of venison. This
neighborly custom of sharing meat, when it is to be had for the
killing, prevails in the northern woods. Officially there were game
seasons to be observed. But the close season for deer sat lightly on
men in a region three days' journey from a butcher shop. They shot
deer when they needed meat. The law of necessity overrode the legal
pronouncement in this matter of food, as it often did in other ways.

While Hollister, having duly pleased Lawanne's China-boy by this
quarter of venison, sat talking to Lawanne, Charlie Mills came in to
return a book.

"Did you get anything out of that?" Lawanne asked.

"I got a bad taste in my mouth," Mills replied. "It reads like things
that happen. It's too blamed true to be pleasant. A man shouldn't be
like that, he shouldn't think too much--especially about other people.
He ought to be like a bull--go around snorting and pawing up the earth
till he gets his belly full, and then lie down and chew his cud."

Lawanne smiled.

"You've hit on something, Mills," he said. "The man who thinks the
least and acts the most is the happy man, the contented man, because
he's nearly always pleased with himself. If he fails at anything he
can usually excuse himself on the grounds of somebody else's
damnfoolishness. If he succeeds he complacently assumes that he did it
out of his own greatness. Action--that's the thing. The contemplative,
analytical mind is the mind that suffers. Man was a happy animal until
he began to indulge in abstract thinking. And now that the burden of
thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to his own
disadvantage."

"I'll say he does," Mills agreed. "But what can he do? I've watched
things happen. I've read what some pretty good thinkers say. It don't
seem to me a man's got much choice. He thinks or he don't think,
according to the way he's made. When you figure how a man comes to be
what he is, why he's nothing but the product of forces that have been
working on all the generations of his kind. It don't leave a man much
choice about how he thinks or feels. If he could just grin and say 'It
doesn't matter', he'd be all right. But he can't, unless he's made
that way. And since he isn't responsible for the way he's made, what
the hell can he do?"

"You're on the high road to wisdom when you can look an abstraction
like that in the face," Lawanne laughed. "What you say is true. But
there's one item you overlook. A man is born with, say, certain
predispositions. Once he recognizes and classifies them, he can begin
to exercise his will, his individual determination. If our existence
was ordered in advance by destiny, dictated by some all-conscious,
omnipotent intelligence, we might as well sit down and fold our hands.
But we still have a chance. Free will is an exploded theory, in so far
as it purposes to explain human action in a general sense. Men are
biologically different. In some weakness is inherent, in others
determination. The weak man succumbs when he is beset. The strong man
struggles desperately. The man who consciously grasps and understands
his own weaknesses can combat an evil which will destroy a man of
lesser perception, lesser will; because the intelligent man will avoid
what he can't master. He won't butt his head against a stone wall
either intellectually, emotionally, or physically. If the thing is
beyond him and he knows it is beyond him, he will not waste himself in
vain effort. He will adapt himself to what he can't change. The man
who can't do that must suffer. He may even perish. And to cling to
life is the prime law. That's why it is a fundamental instinct that
makes a man want to run when he can no longer fight."

Hollister said nothing. He was always a good listener. He preferred to
hear what other men said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out
his own ideas. Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to
assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put
his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most
remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him
speak as he did now, to Lawanne.

Mills walked back through the flat with Hollister. They trudged
silently through the soft, new snow, the fresh fall which had enabled
Hollister to track and kill the big deer early that morning. The sun
was setting. Its last beam struck flashing on the white hills. The
back of the winter was broken, the March storms nearly at an end. In a
little while now, Hollister thought, the buds would be bursting, there
would be a new feel in the air, new fragrant smells arising in the
forest, spring freshets in the rivers, the wild duck flying north.
Time was on the wing, in ceaseless flight.

Mills broke into his reflections.

"Come up in the morning, will you, and check in what cedar I have
piled? I'm going to pull out."

"All right." Hollister looked his surprise at the abrupt decision.
"I'm sorry you're going."

Mills walked a few paces.

"Maybe it won't do me any good," he said. "I wonder if Lawanne is
right? It just struck me that he is. Anyway, I'm going to try his
recipe. Maybe I can kid myself into thinking everything's jake, that
the world's a fine sort of place and everything is always lovely. If I
could just myself think that--maybe a change of scenery will do the
trick. Lawanne's clever, isn't he? Nothing would fool him very long."

"I don't know," Hollister said. "Lawanne's a man with a pretty keen
mind and a lively imagination. He's more interested in why people do
things than in what they do. But I dare say he might fool himself as
well as the rest of us. For we all do, now and then."

"I guess it's the way a man's made," Mills reflected. "But it's rather
a new idea that a man can sort of make himself over if he puts his
mind to it. Still, it sounds reasonable. I'm going to give it a try.
I've got to."

But he did not say why he must. Nor did Hollister ask him. He thought
he knew--and he wondered at the strange tenacity of this emotion which
Mills could not shake off. A deep-rooted passion for some particular
woman, an emotion which could not be crushed, was no mystery to
Hollister. He only wondered that it should be so vital a force in the
life of a man.

Mills came down from the hill camp to settle his account with
Hollister in the morning. He carried his blankets and his clothes in a
bulky pack on his sturdy shoulders. When he had his money, he rose to
go, to catch the coastwise steamer which touched the Inlet's head that
afternoon. Hollister helped him sling the pack, opened the door for
him,--and they met Myra Bland setting foot on the porch step.

They looked at each other, those two. Hollister knew that for a second
neither was conscious of him. Their eyes met in a lingering fixity,
each with a question that did not find utterance.

"I'm going out," Mills said at last. A curious huskiness seemed to
thicken his tongue. "This time for good, I hope. So-long."

"Good-by, Charlie," Myra said.

She put out her hand. But either Mills did not see it or he shrank
from contact, for he passed her and strode away, bent a little forward
under his pack. Myra turned to watch him. When she faced about again
there was a mistiness in her eyes, a curious, pathetic expression of
pity on her face. She went on into the house with scarcely a glance at
Hollister.

In another week spring had ousted winter from his seasonal supremacy.
The snow on the lower levels vanished under a burst of warm rain. The
rain ceased and the clouds parted to let through a sun fast growing to
full strength. Buds swelled and burst on willow and alder. The soil,
warmed by the sun, sent up the first shoots of fern and grasses, a
myriad fragile green tufts that would presently burst into flowers.
The Toba rose day by day, pouring down a swollen flood of snow-water
to the sea.

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