Book: The Hidden Places

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




The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if the
clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as
unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white
in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over
the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to
the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green
blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were
still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.

He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four
days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything
but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as
he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to
act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of
careless, adventurous youth,--freer, because he had none of the
impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he
told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be
governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the
unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether he
came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. There
was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he
conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in
such simple ways as were available to him here,--here where at least
there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by
a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his
understanding.

When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he
hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy
green leaves of the salal. He folded his tent in a tight bundle and
strung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.

These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber on
his limit.

At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a
professional cruiser's would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In a
week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left
less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had
paid good money. The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, was
all but negligible. What value resided there lay in the cedar alone.

By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came
to an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.
Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying
soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days
and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley and
slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.

Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular
fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their
discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung
bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its
whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of
snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there
in swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the storm
Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the
intermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremors
in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.

This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chill
whisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the great
mountain ranges--white again from foot to crest, save where the slides
had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite--were wrapped in
winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed
again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was
at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.
He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to anyone
where he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well here
as elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelled
him into action.

Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement. He was
less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of
companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim,
aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that
misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was
sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.

So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house,
food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now that
his estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He could
subsist two months. With care he could stretch it to three, for there
was game on that southern slope,--deer and the white mountain goat and
birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for
ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse
is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear
dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty
yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because
he needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison,
and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk a
deer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze
crackling in the stone fireplace. And he had Doris Cleveland's books.

Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off
the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that
were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.
Eventually he would have to go back. But for the present,--well, he
occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit
himself to look far beyond.

From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval
shape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web of
rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a
necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in many
places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.

It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the
ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained
a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite
rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.
From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba
Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the
lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the
twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,--a
picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish
exploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches of
Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky
backbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched a
steamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide through Baker Pass.

Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of
their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the
clank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden and
muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, the
houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of
smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,
winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of
level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed
the Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy
crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed
foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.

"Where the hill-heads split the tide
Of green and living air,
I would press Adventure hard
To her deepest lair.

I would let the world's rebuke
Like a wind go by,
With my naked soul laid bare
To the naked sky."

Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long
before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips. And he looked a long
time before he turned downhill.

A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted his
dominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. If
he had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close to
his cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamer
landing would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared to
undertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallow
rapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice on
clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold
pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through
his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea
past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke
in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris
Cleveland's books one after another--verse, philosophy, fiction--and
when physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piled
firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too
long. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and
through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick
to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin
served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and
trudge far afield in the surrounding forest.

On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff
which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flats
in the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very
powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,
on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black
objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a
faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He
could see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woods
the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,
buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed
remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled
with this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by two
or three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations at
first hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertaking
as one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure in
former trials.

But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hung
listless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settler
near his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when he
dislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded once
from the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struck
with a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice.
Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost
bough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin,
although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment
of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors--a blue skirt, the
deep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of the
walls.

And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood
looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up
over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.
He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees,
and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute
her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her
shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went
back inside.

Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.
Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger
or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual
beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten
a little, and that was all.

But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow
with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the
mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons
amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a
strange fire.

The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with
the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister,
his wife.




CHAPTER VI


Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river
bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible
discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the
evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fix
upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The
cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last
and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the
house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned
reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.

He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction,
troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of
concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him
present,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward
critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.

In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the
correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly
impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in
those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among
stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of
luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.
He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had
access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to
him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not
revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure
his first thought had not been a concern for his property. And the
official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon
after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When
she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate
in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars
in negotiable securities.

And if so--then why?

Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and
useless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he had
seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he could
not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then he
must be going mad. He must know, beyond any equivocation.

There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the
embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took his
glasses and went down to the valley floor.

It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to
walk boldly up and rap at the door. Certainly he would not be
recognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need of
matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a
destroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony.
He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as to
his name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of all
frontiers.

But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why.
He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In the
social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him,
Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and
impulses as by any coldly reasoned process. He was moved to his
stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the
crawling worm.

He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through
thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. He
peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There,
in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving
hunter pass, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof against
cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.

For an hour he waited. Except for the wavering smoke from the
stovepipe, the place might have been deserted. The house was one with
the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb. But he held his
post. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the
opening.

She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.
Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle,
so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on
her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or two
gingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pile
of split wood. The door closed upon her once more.

Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat,
gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with
prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.

He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled
by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a
disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.
He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.
She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman
whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude
cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to
him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said
to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed
it to be true. How _could_ it matter now?

But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned
upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He
could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous
circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.
He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering
there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories
of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to
each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to
each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers
in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a
physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.

He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses
of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure
for a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of this
Hollister now became aware.

He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh
assault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish
recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this
woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding
to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.
When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose
in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.

It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead. In all
his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women
with a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curious
manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain,
grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him
every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out
of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought
of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would
find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.
He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.
The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore
he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.

Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests
where he had begun to perceive that life might still have
compensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away,
destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without
thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her
without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He
had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been
wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender
intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness,
to rise and torture him now.

And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when he
looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would
sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his
hand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of
the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive
smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping,
and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been
his wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which
the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and he
was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.

Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whose
unrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a
man, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.
Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood
in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he
possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not
love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes
he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his
fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had
ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he
sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith
was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and
suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of
war.

Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting pictures
of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories
of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and
laughter on her lips.

He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by
the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim
to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him
sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure
avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.

Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain,
shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion,
until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made
him shrink and feel a loathing of himself.

She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had given
herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them
together. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had
not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should
he not take her?

Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister
brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.
It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He
postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,
resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if
he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to
"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.
The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient
gesture.

The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which
merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise
lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of
passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a
ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this
fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very
well. But how?

That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the
Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about
unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great
cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of
weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single
track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that
should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not
because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was
not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his
interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did
interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he
did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man,
no jealousy.

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