Book: The Hidden Places

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




And life went on as it always did. Hollister's crew, working on a
bonus for work performed, kept the bolts of cedar gliding down the
chute. The mill on the river below swallowed up the blocks and spewed
them out in bound bundles of roof covering. Lawanne kept close to his
cabin, deep in the throes of creation, manifesting strange vagaries of
moroseness or exhilaration which in his normal state he cynically
ascribed to the artistic temperament. Bland haunted the creeks where
the trout lurked, tramped the woods gun in hand, a dog at his heels,
oblivious to everything but his own primitive, purposeless pleasures.

"I shouldn't care to settle here for good," he once said to Hollister.
"But really, you know, it's not half bad. If money wasn't so dashed
scarce. It's positively cruel for an estate to be so tied up that a
man can't get enough to live decently on."

Bland irritated Hollister sometimes, but often amused him by his calm
assurance that everything was always well in the world of J.
Carrington Bland. Hollister could imagine him in Norfolk and gaiters
striding down an English lane, concerned only with his stable, his
kennels, the land whose rentals made up his income. There were no
problems on Bland's horizon. He would sit on Hollister's porch with a
pipe sagging one corner of his mouth and gaze placidly at the river,
the hills, the far stretch of the forest,--and Hollister knew that to
Bland it was so much water, so much up-piled rock and earth, so much
growing wood. He would say to Myra: "My dear, it's time we were going
home", or "I think I shall have a go at that big pool in Graveyard
Creek to-morrow", or "I say, Hollister, if this warm weather keeps on,
the bears will be coming out soon, eh?", and between whiles he would
sit silently puffing at his pipe, a big, heavy, handsome man, wearing
soiled overalls and a shabby coat with a curious dignity. He spoke of
"family" and "breeding" as if these were sacred possessions which
conferred upon those who had them complete immunity from the sort of
effort that common men must make.

"He really believes that," Myra said to Hollister once. "No Bland ever
had to work. They have always had property--they have always been
superior people. Jim's an anachronism, really. He belongs in the
Middle Ages when the barons did the fighting and the commoners did the
work. Generations of riding in the bandwagon has made it almost
impossible for a man like that to plan intelligently and work hard
merely for the satisfaction of his needs."

"I wonder what he'd do if there was no inheritance to fall back on?"
Hollister asked.

"I don't know--and I really don't care much," Myra said indifferently.
"I shouldn't be concerned, probably, if that were the case."

Hollister frowned.

"Why do you go on living with him, if that's the way you feel?"

"You seem to forget," she replied, "that there are very material
reasons! And you must remember that I don't dislike Jim. I have got so
that I regard him as a big, good-natured child of whom one expects
very little."

"How in heaven's name did a man like that catch your fancy in the
first place?" Hollister asked. He had never ceased to wonder about
that. Myra looked at him with a queer lowering of her eyes.

"What's the use of telling you?" she exclaimed petulantly. "You ought
to understand without telling. What was it drove you into Doris
Cleveland's arms a month after you met her? You couldn't know her--nor
she you. You were lonely and moody, and something about her appealed
to you. You took a chance--and drew a prize in the lottery. Well, I
took a chance also--and drew a blank. I'm a woman and he's a man, a
very good sort of a man for any woman who wants nothing more of a man
than that he shall be a handsome, agreeable, well-mannered animal.
That's about what Jim is. I may also be good-looking, agreeable,
well-mannered--a fairly desirable woman to all outward appearances--but
I'm something besides, which Jim doesn't suspect and couldn't understand
if he did. But I didn't learn that soon enough."

"When did you learn it?" Hollister asked. He felt that he should not
broach these intimately personal matters with Myra, but there was a
fascination in listening to her reveal complexes of character which he
had never suspected, which he should have known.

"I've been learning for some time; but I think Charlie Mills gave me
the most striking lesson," Myra answered thoughtfully. "You can
imagine I was blue and dissatisfied when we came here, to bury
ourselves alive because we could live cheaply, and he could hunt and
fish to his heart's content while he waited to step into a dead man's
shoes. A wife's place, you see, is in the home, and home is wherever
and whatever her lord and master chooses to make it. I was quite
conscious by that time that I didn't love Jim Bland. But he was a
gentleman. He didn't offend me. I was simply indifferent--satiated, if
you like. I used to sit wondering how I could have ever imagined
myself going on year after year, contented and happy, with a man like
Jim. Yet I had been quite sure of that--just as once I had been quite
sure you were the only man who could ever be much of a figure on my
horizon. Do you think I'm facile and shallow? I'm not really. I'm not
just naturally a sensation-seeker. I hate promiscuity. _He_ convinced
me of that."

She made a swift gesture towards Mills' vanishing figure.

"I ran across him first in London. He was convalescing from a leg
wound. That was shortly after I was married, and I was helping
entertain these stray dogs from the front. It was quite the fashion.
People took them out motoring and so on. I remembered Mills out of all
the others because he was different from the average Tommy, quiet
without being self-conscious. I remembered thinking often what a pity
nice boys like that must be killed and crippled by the thousand. When
we came here, Charlie was working down at the settlement. Somehow I
was awfully glad to see him--any friendly face would have been welcome
those first months before I grew used to these terrible silences, this
complete isolation which I had never before known.

"Well, the upshot was that he fell in love with me, and for
awhile--for a little while--I thought I was experiencing a real
affection at last, myself; a new love rising fine and true out of the
ashes of old ones.

"And it frightened me. It made me stop and think. When he would stare
at me with those sad eyes I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to go away
with him to some distant place where no one knew me and begin life all
over again. And I knew it wouldn't do. It would only be the same thing
over again, because I'm made the way I am. I was beginning to see that
it would take a good deal of a man to hold my fitful fancy very long.
Charlie's a nice boy. He's clean and sensitive, and I'm sure he'd be
kind and good to any woman. Still, I knew it wouldn't do. Curious
thing--all the while that my mind was telling me how my whole
existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man--for Charlie
Mills is as full of romantic illusions as a seventeen-year-old
girl--at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe
the slate clean and start all over again. But I could never convince
myself that it was anything more than sex in me responding to the
passion that so deeply moved him. That suspicion became certainty at
last. That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about
myself."

"I think it was a dear lesson for him," Hollister said, remembering
the man's moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which
must have torn Mills. "You hurt him."

"I know it, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it," she said
patiently. "There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly
went away with him. I think he felt that I was yielding. But I was
trying to be honest with myself and with him. With all my vagaries, my
uncertain emotions, I didn't want just the excitement of an affair, an
amorous adventure. Neither did he. He wanted me body and soul, and I
recoiled from that finally, because--I was afraid, afraid of what our
life would become when he learned that truth which I had already
grasped, that life can't be lived on the peaks of great emotion and
that there was nothing much else for him and me to go on."

She stopped and looked at Hollister.

"I wonder if you think I'm a little mad?" she asked.

"No. I was just wondering what it is about you that makes men want
you," he returned.

"You should know," she answered bluntly.

"I never knew. I was like Mills: a victim of my emotions. But one
outgrows any feeling if it is clubbed hard enough. I daresay all these
things are natural enough, even if they bring misery in their wake."

"I daresay," she said. "There is nothing unnatural in a man loving me,
any more than it was unnatural for you to love Doris, or for Doris to
have a son. Still you are inclined to blame me for what I've done.
You seem to forget that the object of each individual's existence, man
or woman, is not to bestow happiness on some one else, but to seek it
for themselves."

"That sounds like Lawanne," Hollister observed.

"It's true, no matter who it sounds like," she retorted.

"If you really believe that, you are certainly a fool to go on living
with a man like Jim Bland," Hollister declared. It did not occur to
him that he was displaying irritation.

"I've told you why and I do not see any reason for changing my idea,"
she said coolly. "When it no longer suits me to be a chattel, I shall
cease to be one. Meantime--_pax_--_pax_--

"Where is Doris and the adorable infant?" Myra changed the subject
abruptly. "I don't hear or see one or the other."

"They were all out in the kitchen a minute ago, bathing the kid," he
told her, and Myra went on in.

Hollister's work lay almost altogether in the flat now. The cut cedar
accumulating under the busy hands of six men came pouring down the
chute in a daily stream. To salvage the sticks that spilled, to
arrange the booms for rafting down stream, kept Hollister on the move.
At noon that day Myra and Doris brought the baby and lunch in a basket
and spread it on the ground on the sunny side of an alder near the
chute mouth, just beyond the zone of danger from flying bolts. The
day was warm enough for comfortable lounging. The boy, now grown to be
a round-faced, clear-skinned mite with blue eyes like his father, lay
on an outspread quilt, waving his chubby arms, staring at the mystery
of the shadows cast upon him by leaf and branch above.

Hollister finished his meal in silence, that reflective silence which
always overtook him when he found himself one corner of this strange
triangle. He could talk to Myra alone. He was never at a loss for
words with his wife. Together, they struck him dumb.

And this day Doris seemed likewise dumb. There was a growing
strangeness about her which had been puzzling Hollister for days. At
night she would snuggle down beside him, quietly contented, or she
would have some story to tell, or some unexpectedness of thought which
still surprised him by its clear-cut and vigorous imagery. But by day
she grew distrait, as if she retreated into communion with herself,
and her look was that of one striving to see something afar, a
straining for vision.

Hollister had marked this. It had troubled him. But he said nothing.
There were times when Doris liked to take refuge in her own
thought-world. He was aware of that, and understood it and let her be,
in such moods.

Now she sat with both hands clasped over one knee. Her face turned
toward Myra for a time. Then her eyes sought her husband's face with a
look which gave Hollister the uneasy, sickening conviction that she
saw him quite clearly, that she was looking and appraising. Then she
looked away toward the river, and as her gaze seemed to focus upon
something there, an expression of strain, of effort, gathered on her
face. It lasted until Hollister, watching her closely, felt his mouth
grow dry. It hurt him as if some pain, some terrible effort of hers
was being communicated to him. Yet he did not understand, and he could
not reach her intimately with Myra sitting by.

Doris spoke at last.

"What is that, Bob?" she asked. She pointed with her finger.

"A big cedar stump," he replied. It stood about thirty feet away.

"Is it dark on one side and light on the other?"

"It's blackened by fire and the raw wood shows on one side where a
piece is split off."

He felt his voice cracked and harsh.

"Ah," she breathed. Her eyes turned to the baby sprawling on his
quilt.

Myra rose to her feet. She picked up the baby, moved swiftly and
noiselessly three steps aside, stood holding the boy in her arms.

"You have picked up baby. You have on a dress with light and dark
stripes. I can see--I can see."

Her voice rose exultantly on the last word. Hollister looked at Myra;
she held the boy pressed close to her breast. Her lips were parted,
her pansy-purple eyes were wide and full of alarm as she looked at
Hollister.

He felt his scarred face grow white. And when Doris turned toward him
to bend forward and look at him with that strange, peering gaze, he
covered his face with his hands.




CHAPTER XVII


"Everything is indistinct, just blurred outlines. I can't see colors
only as light and dark," Doris went on, looking at Hollister with that
straining effort to see. "I can only see you now as a vague form
without any detail."

Hollister pulled himself together. After all, it was no catastrophe,
no thunderbolt of fate striking him a fatal blow. If, with growing
clarity of vision, catastrophe ensued, then was time enough to shrink
and cower. That resiliency which had kept him from going before under
terrific stress stood him in good stead now.

"It seems almost too good to be true," he forced himself to say, and
the irony of his words twisted his lips into what with him passed for
a smile.

"It's been coming on for weeks," Doris continued. "And I haven't been
able to persuade myself it was real. I have always been able to
distinguish dark from daylight. But I never knew whether that was pure
instinct or because some faint bit of sight was left me. I have looked
and looked at things lately, wondering if imagination could play such
tricks. I couldn't believe I was seeing even a little, because I've
always been able to see things in my mind, sometimes clearly,
sometimes in a fog--as I see now--so I couldn't tell whether the
things I have seen lately were realities or mental images. I have
wanted so to see, and it didn't seem possible."

Asking about the stump had been a test, she told Hollister. She did
not know till then whether she saw or only thought she saw. And she
continued to make these tests happily, exulting like a child when it
first walks alone. She made them leave her and she followed them among
a clump of alders, avoiding the trunks when she came within a few
feet, instead of by touch. She had Hollister lead her a short distance
away from Myra and the baby. She groped her way back, peering at the
ground, until at close range she saw the broad blue and white stripes
of Myra's dress.

"I wonder if I shall continue to see more and more?" she sighed at
last, "or if I shall go on peering and groping in this uncertain,
fantastic way. I wish I knew."

"I know one thing," Myra put in quickly. "And that is you won't do
your eyes any good by trying so hard to see. You mustn't get excited
about this and overdo it. If it's a natural recovery, you won't help
it any by trying so hard to see."

"Do I seem excited?" Doris smiled. "Perhaps I am. If you had been shut
up for three years in a room without windows, I fancy you'd be excited
at even the barest chance of finding yourself free to walk in the sun.
My God, no one with sight knows the despair that the blind sometimes
feel. And the promise of seeing--you can't possibly imagine what a
glorious thing it is. Every one has always been good to me. I've been
lucky in so many ways. But there have been times--you know, don't you,
Bob?--when it has been simply hell, when I struggled in a black abyss,
afraid to die and yet full of bitter protest against the futility of
living."

The tears stood in her eyes and she reached for Hollister's hand, and
squeezed it tightly between her own.

"What a lot of good times we shall have when I get so that I can see
just a little better," she said affectionately. "Your blind woman may
not prove such a bad bargain, after all, Bob."

"Have I ever thought that?" he demanded.

"Oh, no," she said smiling, "but _I_ know. Give me the baby, Myra."

She cuddled young Robert in her arms.

"Little, fat, soft thing," she murmured. "By and by his mother will be
able to see the color of his dear eyes. Bless its little heart--him
and his daddy are the bestest things in this old world--this old world
that was black so long."

Myra turned her back on them, walked away and stood on the river bank.
Hollister stared at his wife. He struggled with an old sensation, one
that he had thought long put by,--a sense of the intolerable burden of
existence in which nothing was sure but sorrow. And he was aware that
he must dissemble all such feelings. He must not let Doris know how
he dreaded that hour in which she should first see clearly his
mutilated face.

"You ought to see an oculist," he said at last.

"An oculist? Eye specialists--I saw a dozen of them," she replied.
"They were never able to do anything--except to tell me I would never
see again. A fig for the doctors. They were wrong when they said my
sight was wholly destroyed. They'd probably be wrong again in the
diagnosis and treatment. Nature seems to be doing the job. Let her
have her way."

They discussed that after Myra was gone, sitting on a log together in
the warm sun, with the baby kicking his heels on the spread quilt.
They continued the discussion after they went back to the house.
Hollister dreaded uncertainty. He wanted to know how great a measure
of her sight would return, and in what time. He did not belittle the
oculists because they had once mistaken. Neither did Doris, when she
recovered from the excitement engendered by the definite assurance
that her eyes were ever so slightly resuming their normal function.
She did believe that her sight was being restored naturally, as torn
flesh heals or a broken bone knits, and she was doubtful if any eye
specialist could help that process. But she agreed in the end that it
would be as well to know if anything could be done and what would aid
instead of retard her recovery.

"But not for awhile," she said. "It's just a glimmer. Wait a few
days. If this fog keeps clearing away, then we'll go."

They were sitting on their porch steps. Doris put her arms around him.

"When I can see, I'll be a real partner," she said happily. "There are
so many things I can do that can't be done without eyes. And half the
fun of living is in sharing the discoveries one makes about things
with some one else. Sight will give me back all the books I want to
read, all the beautiful things I want to see. I'll be able to climb
hills and paddle a canoe, to go with you wherever you want to take me.
Won't it be splendid? I've only been half a woman. I have wondered
sometimes how long it would be before you grew weary of my moods and
my helplessness."

And Hollister could only pat her cheek and tell her that he loved her,
that her eyes made no difference. He could not voice the fear he had
that her recovered sight would make the greatest difference, that the
reality of him, the distorted visage which peered at him from a mirror
would make her loathe him. He was not a fool. He knew that people, the
women especially, shrank from the crippled, the disfigured, the
malformed, the horrible. That had been his experience. It had very
nearly driven him mad. He had no illusions about the men who worked
for him, about his neighbors. They found him endurable, and that was
about all. If Doris Cleveland had seen him clearly that day on the
steamer, if she had been able to critically survey the unlovely thing
that war had made of him, she might have pitied him. But would she
have found pleasure in the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand?
Hollister's intelligence answered "No." For externally his appearance
would have been a shock, would have inhibited the pleasant intimacy at
which they so soon arrived.

Doris made light of his disfigurement. She could comprehend clearly
many things unseen--but not that. Hollister knew she must have created
some definite image of him in her mind; something, he suspected, which
must correspond closely to her ideal of a man, something that was dear
to her. If that ideal did not--and his intelligence insisted that he
could not--survive the reality, then his house was built on sand and
must topple.

And he must dig and pry at the foundations. He must do all that could
be done for her eyes. That was her right,--to see, to be free of her
prison of darkness, to be restored to the sight of beauty, to
unclouded vision of the world and all it contained, no matter what the
consequence to him. He would play the game, although he felt that he
would lose.

A cloud seemed to settle on him when he considered that he might lose
everything that made life worth while. And it would be an irrevocable
loss. He would never again have courage to weave the threads of his
existence into another such goodly pattern. Even if he had the
courage, he would never have the chance. No such fortuitous
circumstances would ever again throw him into the arms of a
woman,--not such a woman as Doris Cleveland.

Hollister looked at her beside him, and his heart ached to think that
presently she might not sit so with her hand on his knee, looking up
at him with lips parted in a happy smile, gray eyes eager with
anticipation under the long, curving, brown lashes. She was so very
dear to him. Not alone because of the instinctive yearning of flesh to
flesh, not altogether because of the grace of her vigorous young body,
the comeliness of her face, the shining coils of brown hair that gave
him a strange pleasure just to stroke. Not alone because of the quick,
keen mind that so often surprised him by its sureness. There was some
charm more subtle than these, something to which he responded without
knowing clearly what it was, something that made the mere knowledge of
her presence in his house a comfort, no matter whether he was beside
her or miles away.

Lawanne once said to him that a man must worship a God, love a woman,
or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim,
too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost
unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was
grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship?
Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she
would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for
him--nothing. He would live on, obedient to the law of his being, a
sentient organism, eating and sleeping, thinking starkly, without joy
in the reluctant company of his fellows, his footsteps echoing
hollowly down the long corridor of the years, emptied of hope and all
those pleasant illusions by which man's spirit is sustained. But would
he? Would it be worth while?

"I must go back to work," he said at last.

Doris rose with him, holding him a moment.

"Presently I shall be able to come and _watch_ you work! I might help.
I know how to walk boom-sticks, to handle timber with a pike pole. I'm
as strong as an ox. See!"

She put her arms around him and heaved, lifting the hundred and eighty
pounds of his weight clear of the ground. Then she laughed, a low,
pleased chuckle, her face flushed with the effort, and turned into the
house.

Hollister heard her at the piano as he walked away, thundering out the
rollicking air of the "Soldier's Chorus", its naive exultance of
victory, it seemed to Hollister, expressing well her mood,--a victory
that might mean for him an abyss of sorrow and loneliness out of which
he might never lift himself.




CHAPTER XVIII


For a week Hollister nursed this fear which so depressed him, watching
the slow return of his wife's vision, listening to her talk of all
they could do together when her sight was fully restored. From doubt
of ocular treatment she changed to an impatient desire of whatever
benefit might lie in professional care. A fever of impatience to see
began to burn in her.

So Hollister took her out to Vancouver, thence to Seattle, on to San
Francisco, passing from each city to a practitioner of higher standing
in the next, until two men with great reputations, and consulting fees
in proportion, after a week of observation announced their verdict:
she would regain normal vision, provided so and so--and in the event
of such and such. There was some mystery about which they were
guarded. They spoke authoritatively about infusions into the vitreous
humor and subsequent absorption. They agreed in language too technical
for a layman to understand that the cause of Doris' blindness was
gradually disappearing. Only when they put aside the formal language
of diagnosis and advised treatment did Hollister really fathom what
they were talking about. What they said then was simple. She must
cease to strain for sight of objects. She must live for a time in
neutral lights. The clearing up of her eyes could perhaps be helped by
certain ray treatments, certain forms of electrical massage, which
could be given in Vancouver as well as anywhere.

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