Book: The Hidden Places

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




That night Hollister wakened out of a sound sleep to sniff the air
that streamed in through his open windows. It was heavy with the
pungent odor of smoke. He rose and looked out. The silence of night
lay on the valley, over the dense forest across the river, upon the
fir-swathed southern slope. No leaf stirred. Nothing moved. It was
still as death. And in this hushed blackness--lightened only by a pale
streak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountain
crests standing stark against the sky line--this smoky wraith crept
along the valley floor. No red glow greeted Hollister's sight. There
was nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavy
odor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire. It might be over the next
ridge. It might be in the mouth of the valley. It might be thirty
miles distant. He went back to bed, to lie with that taint of smoke in
his nostrils, thinking of Doris and the boy, of himself, of Charlie
Mills, of Myra, of Archie Lawanne. He saw ghosts in that dusky
chamber, ghosts of other days, and trooping on the heels of these came
apparitions of a muddled future,--until he fell asleep again, to be
awakened at last by a hammering on his door.

The light of a flash-lamp revealed a logger from the Carr settlement
below. The smoke was rolling in billows when Hollister stepped
outside. Down toward the Inlet's head there was a red flare in the
sky.

"We got to get everybody out to fight that," the man said. "She
started in the mouth of the river last night. If we don't check it and
the wind turns right, it'll clean the whole valley. We sent a man to
pull your crew off the hill."

In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woods
thick with smoke. They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joined
them eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon the
woodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne as
something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his
wonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed. They
stopped at Bland's and pressed him into service.

In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to the
attack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle against
the red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues of
flame and breath of suffocating smoke.

In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys move
always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its
zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows
the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes
rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggers
feared. It would send the fire sweeping up the valley. There would be
no stopping it. There would be nothing left in its wake but the
blackened earth, smoking roots, and a few charred trunks standing
gaunt and unlovely amid the ruin.

So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass.
It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on, there was no time
for malingering. There was a very real incitement to great effort.
Their property was at stake; their homes and livelihood; even their
lives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire's
advance and were trapped.

They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floor
from the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down. They
felled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkey
engines to manipulate their gear. They cleared away the brush and the
dry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road--so that
when the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space in
which should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by the
wind.

There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished. They
could not attack the enemy with excited cries, with brandished
weapons. They could not even see the enemy. They could hear him, they
could smell the resinous odor of his breath. That was all. They laid
their defenses against him with methodical haste, chopping, heaving,
hauling the steel cables here and there from the donkeys, sweating in
the blanket of heat that overlaid the woods, choking in the smoke that
rolled like fog above them and about them. And always in each man's
mind ran the uneasy thought of the west wind rising.

But throughout the day the west wind held its breath. The flames
crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in
dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all
through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic
curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and
the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a
sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and
overalls, blackened with soot and grime.

Night fell. The fire had eaten the heart out of a block half a mile
square. It was growing. A redness brightened the sky. Lurid colors
fluttered above the hottest blaze. A flame would run with incredible
agility up the trunk of a hundred-foot cedar to fling a yellow banner
from the topmost boughs, to color the billowing smoke, the green of
nearby trees, to wave and gleam and shed coruscating spark-showers and
die down again to a dull glow.

Through the short night the work went on. Here and there a man's
weariness grew more than he could bear, and he would lie down to sleep
for an hour or two. They ate food when it was brought to them. Always,
while they could keep their feet, they worked.

Hollister worked on stoically into the following night, keeping
Lawanne near him, because it was all new and exciting to Lawanne, and
Hollister felt that he might have to look out for him if the wind took
any sudden, dangerous shift.

But the mysterious forces of the air were merciful. During the
twenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and the
drafts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again,
without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, they
had drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws--in so far as the
flats of the Toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to that
cleared path and burn itself out--with men stationed along to beat out
each tiny flame that might spring up by chance. And when that was
done, they rested on their oars, so to speak; they took time to sit
down and talk without once relaxing their vigilance.

In a day or two the fire would die out against that barrier, always
provided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery fling
showers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning in
the woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beaten
until it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. They
looked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot of them gathered
by a tree. Some one had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffee
and tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food and
stretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they could
see a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hear
the crackle and snap of burning wood.

"A forest fire is quite literally hell, isn't it?" Lawanne asked.

Hollister nodded. His eyes were on Bland. The man sat on the ground.
He had a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other. He was
blackened almost beyond recognition, and he was viewing with patent
disgust the state of his clothes and particularly of his hands. He
set down his food and rubbed at his fingers with a soiled
handkerchief. Then he resumed eating and drinking. It appeared to him
a matter of necessity rather than a thing from which he derived any
satisfaction. Near him Charlie Mills lay stretched on the moss, his
head pillowed on his folded arms, too weary to eat or drink, even at
Hollister's insistence.

"Dirty job this, eh?" Bland remarked. "I'll appreciate a bath. Phew. I
shall sleep for a week when I get home."

By mid-afternoon of the next day, Sam Carr decided they had the fire
well in hand and so split his forces, leaving half on guard and
letting the others go home to rest. Hollister's men remained on the
spot in case they were needed; he and Lawanne and Bland went home.

But that was not the end of the great blaze. Blocked in the valley,
the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouth
of a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demoniac energy until it was
burning fiercely over a benchland to the west of Hollister's timber.

The fight began once more. With varying phases it raged for a week.
They would check it along a given line and rest for awhile, thinking
it safely under control. Then a light shift of wind would throw it
across their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest would
break into flame. The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatest
menace lay in its steady creep westward. Slowly it ate up to the very
edge of Hollister's timber, in spite of all their checks, their
strategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandal
course.

Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loose
with unrestrained exhalation. It fanned the fire to raging fury, sent
it leaping in yellow sheets through the woods. The blaze lashed
eagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of the
North Woods. Where its voice had been a whisper, it became a roar, an
ominous, warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and got
themselves and their gear off that timbered slope.

They could do no more. They had beaten it in the valley. Backed by the
lusty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and went
its wanton way unhindered.

In the flat by Hollister's house the different crews came together.
There was not one of them but drooped with exhaustion. They sat about
on the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up the
hill.

Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley.
It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water, and it was also
baring to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest.

All that area where Hollisters cedars had stood was a red chaos out of
which great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red,
molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away to
wrap in obscurity all the hills beyond. There was nothing they could
do now. They watched it apathetically, too weary to care.

Hollister looked on the destruction of his timber most stolidly of
all. For days he had put forth his best effort. His body ached. His
eyes smarted. His hands were sore. He had done his best without
enthusiasm. He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these men
by this vast and useless destruction. What did it matter, after all? A
few trees more or less! A square mile or two of timber out of that
enormous stand. It was of no more consequence in the sum total than
the life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of the
earth. It was his timber. So was his life a possession peculiar to
himself. And neither seemed greatly to matter; neither did matter
greatly to any one but himself.

It was all a muddle. He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking,
almost too tired to feel. He was conscious of himself as a creature of
weariness sitting against a tree, his scarred face blackened like the
tired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum of
all this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort,
the pain and stress that men endure. A man made plans, and they
failed. He bred hope in his soul and saw it die. He longed for and
sought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage just as
they seemed within his grasp.

Lawanne and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs.
Carr's men rested where they chose. They must watch lest the fire back
down into the valley again and destroy their timber, as it had
destroyed Hollister's. They had blankets and food. Hollister gave his
own men the freedom of the house. Their quarters on the hill stood in
the doomed timber. The old log house would be ashes now.

He wondered what Doris was doing, if she steadily gained her sight.
But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult. He thought in
pictures, which he saw with a strange detachment as if he were a ghost
haunting places once familiar.

He found his chin sinking on his breast. He roused himself and walked
over to the house. His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping in
grotesque postures. Hollister picked his way among them. Almost by the
door of his bedroom Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his head
resting on a sofa cushion. He opened his eyes as Hollister passed.

"That was a tough game," Hollister said.

"It's all a tough game," Mills answered wearily and closed his eyes
again.

Hollister went on into the room. He threw himself across the bed. In
ten seconds he was fast asleep.




CHAPTER XX


For another day, a day of brilliant sunshine and roaring west wind,
the fire marched up over the southern slope. Its flaming head, with a
towering crest of smoke, went over a high ridge, and its lower flank
smoldered threateningly a little above the valley. The second night
the wind fell to a whisper, shifting freakishly into the northeast,
and day dawned with a mass formation of clouds spitting rain, which by
noon grew to a downpour. The fire sizzled and sputtered and died.
Twenty hours of rain cleared the sky of clouds, the woods of smoke.
The sun lifted his beaming face over the eastern sky line. The birds
that had been silent began their twittering again, the squirrels took
up their exploration among the tree tops, scolding and chattering as
they went. Gentle airs shook the last rain drops from leaf and bough.
The old peace settled on the valley. There was little to mark the ten
days of effort and noise and destruction except a charred patch on the
valley floor and a mile-wide streak that ran like a bar sinister
across the green shield of the slope south of the Big Bend. Even that
desolate path seemed an insignificant strip in the vast stretch of the
forest.

Hollister and his men went, after the rain, up across that ravaged
place, and when they came to the hollow where the great cedars and
lesser fir had stood solemn and orderly in brown-trunked ranks, the
rudest of the loggers grew silent, a little awed by the melancholy of
the place, the bleakness, the utter ruin. Where the good green forest
had been, there was nothing but ashes and blackened stubs, stretches
of bare rock and gravelly soil, an odor of charred wood. There was no
green blade, no living thing, in all that wide space, nothing but a
few gaunt trunks stark in the open; blasted, sterile trunks standing
like stripped masts on a derelict.

There was nothing left of the buildings except a pile of stone which
had been the fireplace in the log house, and a little to one side the
rusty, red skeleton of the mess-house stove. They looked about
curiously for a few minutes and went back to the valley.

At the house Hollister paid them off. They went their way down to the
steamer landing, eager for town after a long stretch in the woods. The
fire was only an exciting incident to them. There were other camps,
other jobs.

It was not even an exciting incident to Hollister. Except for a little
sadness at sight of that desolation where there had been so much
beauty, he had neither been uplifted nor cast down. He had been
unmoved by the spectacular phases of the fire and he was still
indifferent, even to the material loss it had inflicted on him. He was
not ruined. He had the means to acquire more timber if it should be
necessary. But even if he had been ruined, it is doubtful if that fact
would have weighed heavily upon him. He was too keenly aware of a
matter more vital to him than timber or money,--a matter in which
neither his money nor his timber counted one way or the other, and in
which the human equation was everything.

The steamer that took out his men brought in a letter from his wife,
which Lawanne sent up by his Chinese boy. He had written to her the
day before the fire broke out. He could not recall precisely what he
wrote, but he had tried to make clear to her what troubled him and
why. And her reply was brief, uncommonly brief for Doris, who had the
faculty of expressing herself fully and freely.

Hollister laid the letter on the table. The last line of that short
missive kept repeating itself over and over, as if his brain were a
phonograph which he had no power to stop playing:

"I shall be home next week on the Wednesday boat."

He got up and walked across the room, crossed and recrossed it half a
dozen times. And with each step those words thrust at him with deadly
import. He had deluded himself for a while. He had thought he could
beat the game in spite of his handicap. He had presumed for a year to
snap his fingers and laugh in the face of Fate, and Fate was to have
the last laugh.

He seemed to have a fatalistic sureness about this. He made a
deliberate effort to reason about it, and though his reason assumed
that when a woman like Doris Cleveland loved a man she did not love
him for the unblemished contours of his face, there was still that
deep-rooted, unreasoning feeling that however she might love him as
the unseen, the ideal lover, she must inevitably shrink from the
reality.

He stood still for a few seconds. In the living quarters of his house
there was, by deliberate intention, no mirror. Among Hollister's
things there was a small hand glass before which he shaved off the
hairs that grew out of the few patches of unscarred flesh about his
chin, those fragments of his beard which sprouted in grotesquely
separated tufts. But in the bedroom they had arranged for the
housekeeper there was a large oval glass above a dresser. Into this
room Hollister now walked and stood before the mirror staring at his
face.

No, he could not blame her, any one, for shrinking from _that_. And
when the darting shuttle of his thought reminded him that Myra did not
shrink from it, he went out to the front room and with his body sunk
deep in a leather chair he fell to pondering on this. But it led him
nowhere except perhaps to a shade of disbelief in Myra and her
motives, a strange instinctive distrust both of her and himself.

He recognized Myra's power. He had succumbed to it in the old careless
days and gloried in his surrender. He perceived that her compelling
charm was still able to move him as it did other men. He knew that
Myra had been carried this way and that in the great, cruel,
indifferent swirl that was life. He could understand a great many
things about her and about himself, about men as men and women as
women, that he would have denied in the days before the war.

But while he could think about himself and Myra Bland with a calmness
that approached indifference, he could not think with that same
detachment about Doris. She had come, walking fearlessly in her
darkened world, to him in his darkened world of discouragement and
bitterness. There was something fine and true in this blind girl,
something that Hollister valued over and above the flesh-and-blood
loveliness of her, something rare and precious that he longed to keep.
He could not define it; he simply knew that it resided in her, that it
was a precious quality that set her apart in his eyes from all other
women.

But would it stand the test of sight? If he were as other men he would
not have been afraid; he would scarcely have asked himself that
question. But he knew he would be like a stranger to her, a strange
man with a repellingly scarred face. He did not believe she could
endure that, she who loved beauty so, who was sensitive to subtleties
of tone and atmosphere beyond any woman he had ever known. Hollister
tried to put himself in her place. Would he have taken her to his
arms as gladly, as joyously, if she had come to him with a face
twisted out of all semblance to its natural lines? And Hollister could
not say. He did not know.

He threw up his head at last, in a desperate sort of resolution. In a
week he would know. Meantime--

He had no work to occupy him now. There were a few bolts behind the
boom-sticks which he would raft to the mill at his leisure. He walked
up to the chute mouth now and looked about. A few hundred yards up the
hill the line of green timber ended against the black ruin of the
fire. There the chute ended also. Hollister walked on across the rocky
point, passed the waterfall that was shrinking under the summer heat,
up to a low cliff where he sat for a long time looking down on the
river.

When he came back at last to the house, Myra was there, busy at her
self-imposed tasks in those neglected rooms. Hollister sat down on the
porch steps. He felt a little uneasy about her being there, uneasy for
her. In nearly two weeks of fighting fire he had been thrown in
intimate daily contact with Jim Bland, and his appraisal of Bland's
character was less and less flattering the more he revised his
estimate of the man. He felt that Myra was inviting upon herself
something she might possibly not suspect. He decided to tell her it
would be wiser to keep away; but when he did so, she merely laughed.
There was a defiant recklessness in her tone when she said:

"Do you think I need a chaperone? Must one, even in this desolate
place, kow-tow to the conventions devised to prop up the weak and
untrustworthy? If Jim can't trust me, I may as well learn it now as
any other time. Besides, it doesn't matter to me greatly whether he
does or not. If for any reason he should begin to think evil of
me--well, the filthy thought in another's mind can't defile me. I
can't recall that I was ever greatly afraid of what other people might
think of me, so long I was sure of myself."

"Nevertheless," Hollister said, "it is as well for you not to come
here alone while I am here alone."

"Don't you like me to come, Robin?" she asked.

"No," he said slowly. "That wasn't why I spoke--but I don't think I
do."

"Why?" she persisted.

Hollister stirred uneasily.

"Call a spade a spade, Robin," she advised. "Say what you think--what
you mean."

"That's difficult," he muttered. "How can any one say what he means
when he is not quite sure what he does mean? I'm in trouble. You're
sorry for me, in a way. And maybe you feel--because of old times,
because of the contrast between what your life was then and what it is
now--you feel as if you would like to comfort me. And I don't want you
to feel that way. I look at you--and I think about what you said. I
wonder if you meant it? Do you remember what you said?"

"Quite clearly. I meant it, Robin. I still mean it. I'm yours--if you
need me. Perhaps you won't. Perhaps you will. Does it trouble you to
have me a self-appointed anchor to windward?"

She clasped her hands over her knees, bending forward a little,
looking at him with a curious serenity. Her eyes did not waver from
his.

Hollister made no answer.

"I brought a lot of this on you, Robin," she went on in the musical,
rippling voice so like Doris in certain tones and inflections as to
make him wonder idly if he had unconsciously fallen in love with Doris
Cleveland's voice because it was like Myra's. "If I had stuck it out
in London till you came back, maimed or otherwise, things would have
been different. But we were started off, flung off, one might say,
into different orbits by the forces of the war itself. That's neither
here nor there, now. You may think I'm offering myself as a sort of
vicarious atonement--if your Doris fails you--but I'm not, really. I'm
too selfish. I have never sacrificed myself for any man. I never will.
It isn't in me. I'm just as eager to get all I can out of life as I
ever was. I liked you long ago. I like you still. That's all there is
to it, Robin."

She shifted herself nearer him. She put one hand on his shoulder, the
other on his knee, and bent forward, peering into his face. Hollister
matched that questioning gaze for a second. It was unreadable. It
conveyed no message, hinted nothing, held no covert suggestion. It was
earnest and troubled. He had never before seen that sort of look on
Myra's face. He could make nothing of it, and so there was nothing in
it to disturb him. But the warm pressure of her hands, the nearness of
her body, did trouble him. He put her hands gently away.

"You shouldn't come here," he said quietly. "I will call a spade a
spade. I love Doris--and I have a queer, hungry sort of feeling about
the boy. If it happens that in spite of our life together Doris can't
bear me and can't get used to me, if it becomes impossible for us to
go on together--well, I can't make clear to you the way I feel about
this. But I'm afraid. And if it turns out that I'm afraid with good
cause--why, I don't know what I'll do, what way I'll turn. But wait
until that happens--Well, it seems that a man and a woman who have
loved and lived together can't become completely indifferent--they
must either hate and despise each other--or else--You understand? We
have made some precious blunders, you and I. We have involved other
people in our blundering, and we mustn't forget about these other
people. I _can't_. Doris and the kid come first--myself last. I'm
selfish too. I can only sit here in suspense and wait for things to
happen as they will. You," he hesitated a second, "you can't help me,
Myra. You could hurt me a lot if you tried--and yourself too."

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