Book: The Hidden Places

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




"I see," she said. "I understand."

She sat for a time with her hands resting in her lap, looking down at
the ground. Then she rose.

"I don't want to hurt you, Robin," she said soberly. "I can't help
looking for a way out, that's all. For myself, I must find a way out.
The life I lead now is stifling me--and I can't see where it will ever
be any different, any better. I've become cursed with the twin devils
of analysis and introspection. I don't love Jim; I tolerate him. One
can't go through life merely tolerating one's husband, and the sort of
friends and the sort of existence that appeals to one's husband,
unless one is utterly ox-like--and I'm not. Women have lived with men
they cared nothing for since the beginning of time, I suppose, because
of various reasons--but I see no reason why I should. I'm a rebel--in
full revolt against shams and stupidity and ignorance, because those
three have brought me where I am and you where you are. I'm a disarmed
and helpless _revolte_ by myself. One doesn't want to go from bad to
worse. One wants instinctively to progress from good to better. One
makes mistakes and seeks to rectify them--if it is possible. One sees
suffering arise as the result of one's involuntary acts, and one
wishes wistfully to relieve it. That's the simple truth, Robin. Only a
simple truth is often a very complex thing. It seems so with us."

"It is," Hollister muttered, "and it might easily become more so."

"Ah, well," she said, "that is scarcely likely. You were always pretty
dependable, Robin. And I'm no longer an ignorant little fool to rush
thoughtlessly in where either angels or devils might fear to tread. We
shall see."

She swung around on her heel. Hollister watched her walk away along
the river path. He scarcely knew what he thought, what he felt, except
that what he felt and thought disturbed him to the point of sadness,
of regret. He sat musing on the curious, contradictory forces at work
in his life. It was folly to be wise, to be sensitive, to respond too
quickly, to see too clearly; and ignorance, dumbness of soul, was also
fatal. Either way there was no escape. A man did his best and it was
futile,--or seemed so to him, just then.

His gaze followed Myra while his thought ran upon Doris, upon his boy,
wondering if the next steamer would bring him sentence of banishment
from all that he valued, or if there would be a respite, a stay of
execution, a miracle of affection that would survive and override the
terrible reality--or what seemed to him the terrible reality--of his
disfigured face. He had abundant faith in Doris--of the soft voice and
the keen, quick mind, the indomitable spirit and infinite
patience--but he had not much faith in himself, in his own power. He
was afraid of her restored sight, which would leave nothing to the
subtle play of her imagination.

And following Myra with that mechanical noting of her progress, his
eyes, which were very keen, caught some movement in a fringe of
willows that lined the opposite shore of the river some three hundred
yards below. He looked more sharply. He had developed a hunter's
faculty for interpreting movement in the forest, and although he had
nothing more positive than instinct and a brief flash upon which to
base conclusions, he did not think that movement of the leaves was
occasioned by any creature native to the woods.

On impulse he rose, went inside, and taking his binoculars from their
case, focused the eight-power lenses on the screen of brush, keeping
himself well within the doorway where he could see without being seen.

It took a minute or so of covering the willows before he located the
cause of that movement of shrubbery. But presently he made out the
head and shoulders of a man. And the man was Bland, doing precisely
what Hollister was doing, looking through a pair of field glasses.
Hollister stood well back in the room. He was certain Bland could not
see that he himself was being watched. In any case, Bland was not
looking at Hollister's house. It was altogether likely that he had
been doing so, that he had seen Myra sitting beside Hollister with her
hand on his shoulder, bending forward to peer into Hollister's face.
And Hollister could easily imagine what Bland might feel and think.
But he was steadily watching Myra. Once he turned the glasses for a
few seconds on Hollister's house. Then he swung them back to Myra,
followed her persistently as she walked along the bank, on past
Lawanne's, on towards their own rude shack. And at last Bland shifted.
One step backward, and the woods swallowed him. One moment his
shoulders and his head stood plain in every detail, even to the
brickish redness of his skin and the curve of his fingers about the
glasses; the next he was gone.

Hollister sat thinking. He did not like the implications of that
furtive observance. A suspicious, watchful man is a jealous man. And a
jealous man who has nothing to do but watch and suspect and nurse that
mean passion was a dangerous adjunct to an unhappy woman.

Hollister resolved to warn Myra, to emphasize that warning. No one
could tell of what a dull egotist like Bland might be capable. The
very fact of that furtive spying argued an ignoble streak in any man.
Bland was stiff-necked, vain, the sort to be brutal in retaliation for
any fancied invasion of his rights. And his conception of a husband's
rights were primitive in the extreme. A wife was property, something
that was his. Hollister could imagine him roused to blind, blundering
fury by the least suspicious action on Myra's part. Bland was the type
that, once aroused, acts like an angry bull,--with about as much
regard or understanding of consequences. Hollister had been measuring
Bland for a year, and the last two or three weeks had given him the
greatest opportunity to do so. He had appraised the man as a dullard
under his stupid, inflexible crust of egotism, despite his veneer of
manners. But even a clod may be dangerous. A bomb is a harmless thing,
so much inert metal and chemicals, until it is touched off; yet it
needs only a touch to let loose its insensate, rending force.

Hollister rose to start down the path after Myra with the idea that he
must somehow convey to her a more explicit warning. As he stepped out
on the porch, he looked downstream at Bland's house and saw a man
approach the place from one direction as Myra reached it from the
other. He caught up his glasses and brought them to bear. The man was
Mills,--whom he had thought once more far from the Toba with the rest
of his scattered crew. Nevertheless this was Mills drawing near
Bland's house with quick strides.

Hollister's uneasiness doubled. There was a power for mischief in that
situation when he thought of Jim Bland scowling from his hiding place
in the willows. He set out along the path.

But by the time he came abreast of Lawanne's cabin he had begun to
feel himself acting under a mistaken impulse, an exaggerated
conclusion. He began to doubt the validity of that intuition which
pointed a warning finger at Bland and Bland's suspicions. In
attempting to forestall what might come of Bland's stewing in the
juice of a groundless jealousy, he could easily precipitate something
that would perhaps be best avoided by ignoring it. He stood, when he
thought of it, in rather a delicate position himself.

So he turned into Lawanne's. He found Archie sitting on the shady side
of his cabin, and they fell into talk.




CHAPTER XXI


Lawanne had been thumping a typewriter for hours, he told Hollister,
until his fingers ached. He was almost through with this task, which
for months had been a curious mixture of drudgery and pleasure.

"I'm through all but typing the last two chapters. It's been a fierce
grind."

"You'll be on the wing soon, then", Hollister observed.

"That depends," Lawanne said absently.

But he did not explain upon what it depended. He leaned back in his
chair, a cigarette in his fingers, and stared for a minute up at the
trees.

"I'll get the rest of it pounded out in two or three days," he came
back to his book, "then I think I'll go up the Little Toba, just to
see what that wild-looking gorge is like twenty or thirty miles back.
Better come along with me. Do you good. You're sort of at a
standstill."

"I can't," Hollister explained. "Doris is coming back next week."

Lawanne looked at him intently.

"Eyes all right?"

"I don't know. I suppose so," Hollister replied. "She didn't say. She
merely wrote that she was coming on the Wednesday steamer."

"Well, that'll be all right too," Lawanne said. "You'll get over being
so down in the mouth then."

"Maybe," Hollister muttered.

"Of course. What rot to think anything else."

Hollister did not contradict this. It was what he wanted to feel and
think, and could not. He understood that Lawanne, whatever his
thought, was trying to hearten him. And he appreciated that, although
he knew the matter rested in his wife's own hands and nothing any one
else could do or say had the slightest bearing on it. His meeting with
Doris would be either an ordeal or a triumph.

"I might get Charlie Mills to go with me," Lawanne pursued his own
thought.

"Mills didn't go out with the rest of the crew?" Hollister asked. He
knew, of course, that Charlie Mills was still in the Toba valley
because he had seen him with his own eyes not more than half an hour
earlier. His question, however, was not altogether idle. He wondered
whether Mills had gone out and come back, or if he had not left at
all.

"No. He turned back at the last minute, for some reason. He's camping
in one of the old T. & T. shacks below Carr's. I rather like Mills.
He's interesting when you can get him to loosen up. Queer, tense sort
of beggar at times, though. A good man to go into the hills with--to
go anywhere with--although he might not show to great advantage in a
drawing-room. By Jove, you know, Hollister, it doesn't seem like nine
months since I settled down in this cabin. Now I'm about due to go
back to the treadmill."

"Do you have to?" Hollister asked. "If this satisfies you, why not
come back again after you've had a fling at the outside?"

"I can't, very well," Lawanne for the first time touched on his
personal affairs, that life which he led somewhere beyond the Toba. "I
have obligations to fulfill. I've been playing truant, after a
fashion. I've stolen a year to do something I wanted to do. Now it's
done and I'm not even sure it's well done--but whether it's well done
or not, it's finished, and I have to go back and get into the collar
and make money to supply other people's needs. Unless," he shrugged
his shoulders, "I break loose properly. This country has that sort of
effect on a man. It makes him want to break loose from everything that
seems to hamper and restrain him. It doesn't take a man long to shed
his skin in surroundings like these. Oh, well, whether I come back or
not, I'll be all the same a hundred years from now."

A rifle shot cut sharp into the silence that followed Lawanne's last
words. That was nothing uncommon in the valley, where the crack of a
gun meant only that some one was hunting. But upon this report there
followed, clear and shrill, a scream, the high-pitched cry that only a
frightened woman can utter. This was broken into and cut short by a
second whip-like report. And both shots and scream came from the
direction of Bland's house.

Hollister rose. He looked at Lawanne and Lawanne looked at him. Across
Hollister's brain flashed a thought that would scarcely have been born
if he had not seen Bland spying from the willows, if he had not seen
Charlie Mills approaching that house, if he had not been aware of all
the wheels within wheels, the complicated coil of longings and desires
and smoldering passions in which these people were involved. He looked
at Lawanne, and he could not read what passed in his mind. But when he
turned and set out on a run for that shake cabin four hundred yards
downstream, Lawanne followed at his heels.

They were winded, and their pace had slowed to a hurried walk by the
time they reached the cabin. The door stood open. There was no sound.
The house was as still as the surrounding woods when Hollister stepped
across the threshold.

Bland stood just within the doorway, erect, his feet a little apart,
like a man bracing himself against some shock. He seemed frozen in
this tense attitude, so that he did not alter the rigid line of his
body or shift a single immobile muscle when Hollister and Lawanne
stepped in. His eyes turned sidewise in their sockets to rest briefly
and blankly upon the intruders. Then his gaze, a fixed gaze that
suggested incredulous disbelief, went back to the body of his wife.

Myra lay in a crumpled heap, her face upturned, open-eyed,
expressionless, as if death had either caught her in a moment of
impassivity or with his clammy hands had forever wiped out all
expression from her features. There were no visible marks on her,--but
a red stain was creeping slowly from under her body, spreading across
the rough floor.

Mills sat on the floor, his back against the wall, his hands braced on
his knees to keep his body erect. And upon him there was to be seen no
visible mark of the murderer's bullet. But his dark-skinned face had
turned waxy white. His lips were colorless. Every breath he drew was a
laborious effort. A ghastly smile spread slowly over his face as he
looked up at Hollister and Lawanne.

"You fool. You damned, murdering fool!" Lawanne turned on Bland. "You
did this?"

Bland did not answer. He put his hand to his face and wiped away the
sweat that had gathered in a shiny film on his skin, from which all
the ruddiness had fled. Myra's pale, dead face seemed to hold him in
some horrible fascination.

Hollister shook him.

"Why did you do that?" he demanded.

Bland heaved a shuddering sigh. He looked up and about him stupidly.

"I don't know," he croaked. "I don't know--I don't know."

A gleam of something like reason came into his eyes.

"I suppose I shall have to give myself up to the authorities," he
mumbled. "My God!"

The last two words burst from his lips like a cry, as for the first
time he saw the full import of what he had done, realized the horror,
the madness, and the consequences of his act. He shrank against the
wall with a groan, putting out his hands as if to ward off some
invisible enemy. Then, thrusting Hollister aside, he rushed out of the
door, his rifle still clasped in both hands. He ran down the bank, out
into the shallows of the river, splashing through water to his knees.
He gained the opposite side where the heavy woods lifted silent and
solemn, full of dusky places. Into that--whether for sanctuary or
driven by some unreckoning panic, they did not know--but into that he
plunged, the last sight either Hollister or Lawanne ever had of him.

They turned to Mills. Myra was dead. They could do nothing for her.
But Mills still lived. The sound of his labored breathing filled the
room. He had shifted a little, so that he could reach out and lay one
hand on the dead woman's face, where it rested, with a caressing
touch. A red pool was gathering where he sat.

"How bad are you hurt, Charlie?" Hollister said. "Let me see."

"No use," Mills said thickly. "I'm done. He got me right through the
middle. And I wouldn't live if I could. Not now.

"Don't touch me," he protested, as they bent over him. "You can't do
anything. There's a hole in me you could put your hand in. But it
don't hurt. I won't last more than a minute or two, anyway."

"How did it happen?" Lawanne asked.

"I was sitting here talking to her," Mills said. "There was nothing
wrong--unless it's wrong for a man to love a woman and tell her so. I
found her sitting here, crying. She wouldn't tell me why. And I
suppose maybe that stirred me up. I hadn't meant to start it
again--because we'd had that out long ago. But I tried to persuade her
to go away with me--to make a fresh start. I wanted her--but I've been
doing that for a long time. She's only stuck to this Bland--because--oh,
I don't know why. I don't savvy women. She liked me. But not enough. I
was trying to persuade her to break loose. I don't remember--maybe I
had hold of her hand. A man doesn't remember when he's begging for a
chance. I don't know where he came from. Maybe he heard what I was
saying. Maybe it just didn't look good to him. I know his face was
like a wild man's when I saw him in the door."

Mills paused to catch his breath. The words tumbled out of him as if
he had much to say and knew his time was short.

"Don't think he meant to kill her. He popped me. Then she screamed and
jumped in front of me with her arms out--and he gave it to her."

Mills' voice broke. His fingers stroked feebly at the twisted coils of
Myra's pale, honey-colored hair. His lips quivered.

"Finished. All over--for both of us. Butchered like beef by a crazy
fool. Maybe I'm crazy too," he said in a husky whisper. "It don't seem
natural a man should feel like I've felt for months. I didn't want to
feel like that. Couldn't help it. I've lived in hell--you won't savvy,
but it's true. I'm glad it's over. If there is any other life--maybe
that'll be better. I hope there isn't. I feel as if all I want is to
sleep forever and ever. No more laying awake nights thinking till my
head hurts and my heart is like a lump of lead. By God, I _have_ been
crazy."

His body began to sag, and Hollister knelt beside him and supported
him. He shook his head when Lawanne offered him a drink. His eyes
closed. Only the feeble motion of his fingers on the dead woman's face
and the slow heave of his breast betokened the life that still clung
so tenaciously to him.

He opened his eyes again, to look at Hollister.

"I used to think--dying--was tough," he whispered. "It isn't. Like
going--to sleep--when you're tired--when you're through--for the day."

That was his last word. He went limp suddenly and slid out of
Hollister's grasp. And they let him lie, a dead man beside the dead
woman on the floor. They stood up themselves and stared at the bodies
with that strange incredulity men sometimes feel in the face of sudden
death.

Both Lawanne and Hollister were familiar with death, death by the
sniper's bullet, by machine gun and shell, by bayonet and poison gas.
This was different. It was not war. It was something that touched them
more deeply than any of the killing they had seen in war. The low hum
of foraging bees about the door, the foxglove swaying in summer airs,
the hushed peace of the distant hills and nearer forest,--this was no
background for violence and death. It shocked them, chilled and
depressed them. Hollister felt a new sort of ache creep into his
heart. His eyes stung. And Lawanne suddenly turned away with a choking
sound muffled in his throat.

They went out into the sunlight. Away down the valley a donkey engine
tooted and whirred. High above them an eagle soared, wheeling in great
circles about his aerial business. The river whispered in its channel.
The blue jays scolded harshly among the thickets, and a meadow lark
perched on a black stump near at hand, warbling his throaty song. Life
went on as before.

"What'll we do?" Lawanne said presently. "We've got to do something."

"There's not much we can do, now," Hollister replied. "You go down to
Carr's and tell them to send a man with a gas-boat out to Powell River
with word to the Provincial Police of what has happened. I'll keep
watch until you come back."

In an hour Lawanne returned with two men from the settlement. They
laid the bodies out decently on a bed and left the two men to keep
vigil until sundown, when Hollister and Lawanne would take up that
melancholy watch for the night.

"I wonder," Hollister said to Lawanne, as they walked home, "what'll
become of Bland? Will he give himself up, or will they have to hunt
him?"

"Neither, I think," Lawanne answered slowly. "A man like that is
certainly not himself when he breaks out like that. Bland has the
cultural inheritance of his kind. You could see that he was stupefied
by what he had done. When he rushed away into the woods I think it was
just beginning to dawn on him, to fill him with horror. He'll never
come back. You'll see. He'll either go mad, or in the reaction of
feeling he'll kill himself."

They went into Lawanne's cabin. Lawanne brought out a bottle of
brandy. He looked at the shaking of his fingers as he poured for
Hollister and smiled wanly.

"I don't go much on Dutch courage, but I sure need it now," he said.
"Isn't it queer the way death affects you under different
circumstances? I didn't see such an awful lot of action in France, but
once a raiding party of Heinies tumbled into our trench, and there was
a deuce of a ruction for a few minutes. Between bayonets and bombs we
cleaned the lot, a couple of dozen of them. After it was all over, we
stacked them up like cordwood--with about as much compunction. It
seemed perfectly natural. There was nothing but the excitement of
winning a scrap. The half-dozen of our own fellows that went west in
the show--they didn't matter either. It was part of the game. You
expected it. It didn't surprise you. It didn't shock you. Yet death is
death. Only, there, it seemed a natural consequence. And here
it--well, I don't know why, but it gives me a horror."

Lawanne sat down.

"It was so unnecessary; so useless," he went on in that lifeless tone.
"The damned, egotistic fool! Two lives sacrificed to a stupid man's
wounded vanity. That's all. She was a singularly attractive woman. She
would have been able to get a lot out of life. And I don't think she
did, or expected to."

"Did you have any idea that Mills had that sort of feeling for her?"
Hollister asked.

"Oh, yes," Lawanne said absently. "I saw that. I understood. I was
touched a little with the same thing myself. Only, _noblesse oblige_.
And also I was never quite sure that what I felt for her was sympathy,
or affection, or just sex. I know I can scarcely bear to think that
she is dead."

He leaned back in his chair and put his hands over his eyes. Hollister
got up and walked to a window. Then on impulse he went to the door.
And when he was on the threshold, Lawanne halted him.

"Don't go," he said. "Stay here. I can't get my mind off this. I
don't want to sit alone and think."

Hollister turned back. Neither did he want to sit alone and think. For
as the first dazed numbness wore off, he began to see himself standing
alone--more alone than ever--gazing into a bottomless pit, with Fate
or Destiny or blind Chance, whatever witless force was at work,
approaching inexorably to push him over the brink.




CHAPTER XXII


To the world outside the immediate environs of the Toba, beyond those
who knew the people concerned, that double murder was merely another
violent affair which provided material for newspapers, a remote event
allied to fires, divorces, embezzlements, politics, and scandals in
high finance,--another item to be glanced quickly over and as quickly
forgotten.

But one man at least could not quickly forget or pass it over lightly.
Once the authorities--coming from a great distance, penetrating the
solitude of the valley with a casual, business-like air--arrived,
asked questions, issued orders, sent two men abroad in search of the
slayer, and removed the bodies to another jurisdiction, Hollister had
nothing more to do with that until he should be called again to give
formal testimony.

He was left with nothing to do but brood, to sit asking unanswerable
questions of a world and a life that for him was slowly and
bewilderingly verging upon the chaotic, in which there was no order,
no security, no assurance of anything but devastating changes that had
neither rhyme nor reason in their sequence. There might be logical
causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had
transpired. He conceded that point. But he could not establish any
association; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against
the common assumption that all things, no matter how mysterious, work
out ultimately for some common good.

Where was the good forthcoming out of so much that was evil, he asked?
Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for
everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was
little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous
circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a
backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by
adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away,
powerless to know where they went, to guess what was their
destination.

Nothing that he could have done would have altered one iota the march
of events. Nothing that he could do now would have more than the
slightest bearing on what was still to come. He was like a man beaten
to a dazed state in which he expects anything, in which his feeble
resistance will not ward off a single blow aimed at him by an unseen,
inscrutable enemy.

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