Book: The Hidden Places

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




The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that
nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the
obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.

All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in
his obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration of
consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive
instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.

This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified
it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances
which favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This he
readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it was
revealed to him.

A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his
canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. From
the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of
this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping
rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no
footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless a
searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.

And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and
came at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another man
who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of
his own!

Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It
pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate
upon his wife and her lover.

From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set
himself to watch through his glasses the house down the river. The
second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun
in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that
wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on
these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that
the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes
not till dusk.

He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen
river. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of the
house.

The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced
the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sun
had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened
to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow
softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.
Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the
interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the
door.

A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a bench
beside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast. And
Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. She
leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of
that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasped
hands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaning
eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.

Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelids
drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise
she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to
some blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned
hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot
eyes.

Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through
the window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the
tense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head and
press a kiss on the imprisoned hand.

He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away
over the ice. When he had put five hundred yards between himself and
that house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face and
wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over
his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a
hair's breadth some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that was
precisely his feeling,--as if he had been capering madly on the brink
of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to
him in a terrifying flash.

He shivered. His ego grovelled in the dirt. He had often smiled at
theories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen stream
with the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands he
was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk
a duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that,
or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of
isolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.

Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not
been there. But he did not think so now. The brake of his real manhood
had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the
door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a
brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.

Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,
double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor
steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own
ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born
in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early
in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.
And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the
last four years.

Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right
to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such
sophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen
lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious
complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river
bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to
know. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.
Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an
Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had
conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by the
brutal directness of her written avowal. Hollister had watched him
swinging his ax on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in the
bottom land. He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment.

Hollister found himself pitying this man. He found himself wondering
if it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helpless
victim of her own senses. There were women like that. Plenty of them.
Men too. Sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality. He could not
doubt that. He suspected that he was touched with it himself.

What a muddle life was, Hollister reflected sadly, looking down from
the last opening before he plunged into the cedar grove that hid the
log cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain and
forest, this silent land virginal in its winter garment, human
passion, ancient as the hills themselves, functioned in the old, old
way.

But he did not expend much thought on mere generalizations. The
problem of Myra and her lovers was no longer his problem; their
passions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearly
that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching
consequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with the
possible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, or
whatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he could
harbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to pass
through that furnace again.

He had had enough of the Toba Valley. No, he modified that. The valley
and the sentinel peaks that stood guard over it, the lowlands duskily
green and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodly
place to be. But old sins and sorrows and new, disturbing phases of
human passion were here at his elbow to dispel the restful peace he
had won for a little while. He must escape from that.

To go was not so simple as his coming. The river was frozen, that
watery highway closed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gained
in those casual wanderings along the ridge above the valley. He knew
a direct way of gaining the Inlet head on foot.

So he spent a last night before the fireplace, staring silently into
the dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing coals, lying
down to heavy, dreamless sleep at last in his bunk.

At daybreak he struck out westward along the great cliff that frowned
on the Big Bend, his blankets and a small emergency supply of food in
a bulky pack upon his shoulders. When the sheer face of the cliff ran
out to a steep, scrubbily timbered hillside, he dropped down to the
valley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here he
moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no
ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm
the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in
streamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. The
wild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scolded
as he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach within
twenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deep
snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down
from the highlands by the deeper snow above.

For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was
forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction
he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where
loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black
and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a
clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of the
houses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn upon
what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best
gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.




CHAPTER VII


Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking room and stood outside by the
rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the
white rampart of the Coast Range. Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of
human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood
on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other
men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and
mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow fort.

"Steamer?" the man answered Hollister's inquiry. "Say, if you want to
catch her, you just about got time. Two fellows from here left awhile
ago. If you hurry, maybe you can catch 'em. If you catch 'em before
they get out over the bar, they'll give you a lift to the float. If
you don't, you're stuck for a week. There's only one rowboat down
there."

Hollister had caught them.

He took a last, thoughtful look. Over the vessel's bubbling wake he
could see the whole head of the Inlet deep in winter snows,--a white
world, coldly aloof in its grandeur. It was beautiful, full of the
majesty of serene distances, of great heights. It stood forth clothed
with the dignity of massiveness, of permanence. It was as it had been
for centuries, calm and untroubled, unmoved by floods and slides, by
fires and slow glacial changes. Yes, it was beautiful and Hollister
looked a long time, for he was not sure he would see it again. He had
a canoe and a tent cached in that silent valley, but for these alone
he would not return. Neither the ownership of that timber which he now
esteemed of doubtful value nor the event of its sale would require his
presence there.

He continued to stare with an absent look in his eyes until a crook in
the Inlet hid those white escarpments and outstanding peaks, and the
Inlet walls--themselves lifting to dizzy heights that were shrouded in
rolling mist--marked the limit of his visual range. The ship's bell
tinkled the noon hour. A white-jacketed steward walked the decks,
proclaiming to all and sundry that luncheon was being served.
Hollister made his way to the dining saloon.

The steamer was past Salmon Bay when he returned above decks to lean
on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking with a little wonder
the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air as
the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba with
its aerial ice fields and snowy slopes. Twenty miles below Salmon Bay
the island-dotted area of the Gulf of Georgia began. There a snowfall
seldom endured long, and the teeth of the frost were blunted by
eternal rains. There the logging camps worked full blast the year
around, in sunshine and drizzle and fog. All that region bordering on
the open sea bore a more genial aspect and supported more people and
industries in scattered groups than could be found in any of those
lonely inlets.

Hollister was not thinking particularly of these things. He had eaten
his meal at a table with half a dozen other men. In the saloon
probably two score others applied themselves, with more diligence than
refinement, to their food. There was a leavening of women in this male
mass of loggers, fishermen, and what-not. A buzz of conversation
filled the place. But Hollister was not a participant. He observed
casual, covert glances at his disfigured face, that disarrangement of
his features and marring of his flesh which made men ill at ease in
his presence. He felt a recurrence of the old protest against this. He
experienced a return of that depression which had driven him out of
Vancouver. It was a disheartenment from which nothing in the future,
no hope, no dream, could deliver him. He was as he was. He would
always be like that. The finality of it appalled him.

After a time he became aware of a young woman leaning, like himself,
against the rail a few feet distant. He experienced a curious degree
of self-consciousness as he observed her. The thought crossed his mind
that presently she would look at him and move away. When she did not,
his eyes kept coming back to her with the involuntary curiosity of
the casual male concerning the strange female. She was of medium
height, well-formed, dressed in a well-tailored gray suit. Under the
edges of a black velvet turban her hair showed glossy brown in a
smooth roll. She had one elbow propped on the rail and her chin
nestled in the palm. Hollister could see a clean-cut profile, the
symmetrical outline of her nose, one delicately colored cheek above
the gloved hand and a neckpiece of dark fur.

He wondered what she was so intent upon for so long, leaning immobile
against that wooden guard. He continued to watch her. Would she
presently bestow a cursory glance upon him and withdraw to some other
part of the ship? Hollister waited for that with moody expectation. He
found himself wishing to hear her voice, to speak to her, to have her
talk to him. But he did not expect any such concession to a whimsical
desire.

Nevertheless the unexpected presently occurred. The girl moved
slightly. A hand-bag slipped from under her arm to the deck. She
half-turned, seemed to hesitate. Instinctively, as a matter of common
courtesy to a woman, Hollister took a step forward, picked it up.
Quite as instinctively he braced himself, so to speak, for the shocked
look that would gather like a shadow on her piquant face.

But it did not come. The girl's gaze bore imperturbably upon him as he
restored the hand-bag to her hand. The faintest sort of smile lurked
about the corners of a pretty mouth. Her eyes were a cloudy gray. They
seemed to look out at the world with a curious impassivity. That much
Hollister saw in a fleeting glance.

"Thanks, very much," she said pleasantly.

Hollister resumed his post against the rail. His movement had brought
him nearer, so that he stood now within arm's length, and his interest
in her had awakened, become suddenly intense. He felt a queer
thankfulness, a warm inward gratefulness, that she had been able to
regard his disfigurement unmoved. He wondered how she could. For
months he had encountered women's averted faces, the reluctant glances
of mingled pity and distaste which he had schooled himself to expect
and endure but which he never ceased to resent. This girl's uncommon
self-possession at close contact with him was a puzzle as well as a
pleasure. A little thing, to be sure, but it warmed Hollister. It was
like an unexpected gleam of sunshine out of a sky banked deep with
clouds.

Presently, to his surprise, the girl spoke to him.

"Are we getting near the Channel Islands?"

She was looking directly at him, and Hollister was struck afresh with
the curious quality of her gaze, the strangely unperturbed directness
of her eyes upon him. He made haste to answer her question.

"We'll pass between them in another mile. You can see the western
island a little off our starboard bow."

"I should be very glad if I could; but I shall have to take your word
for its being there."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."

A smile spread over her face at the puzzled tone.

"I'm blind," she explained, with what struck Hollister as infinite
patience. "If my eyes were not sightless, I shouldn't have to ask a
stranger about the Channel Islands. I used to be able to see them well
enough."

Hollister stared at her. He could not associate those wide gray eyes
with total darkness. He could scarcely make himself comprehend a world
devoid of light and color, an existence in which one felt and breathed
and had being amid eternal darkness. Yet for the moment he was selfish
enough to feel glad. And he said so, with uncharacteristic
impulsiveness.

"I'm glad you can't see," he found himself saying. "If you could----"

"What a queer thing to say," the girl interrupted. "I thought every
one always regarded a blind person as an object of pity."

There was an unmistakably sardonic inflection in the last sentence.

"But you don't find it so, eh?" Hollister questioned eagerly. He was
sure he had interpreted that inflection. "And you sometimes resent
that attitude, eh?"

"I daresay I do," the girl replied, after a moment's consideration.
"To be unable to see is a handicap. At the same time to have pity
drooled all over one is sometimes irritating. But why did you just say
you were glad I was blind?"

"I didn't mean that. I meant that I was glad you couldn't see _me_,"
he explained. "One of Fritz's shells tore my face to pieces. People
don't like to look at the result. Women particularly. You can't see my
wrecked face, so you don't shudder and pass on. I suppose that is why
I said that the way I did."

"I see. You feel a little bit glad to come across some one who doesn't
know whether your face is straight or crooked? Some one who accepts
you sight unseen, as she would any man who spoke and acted
courteously? Is that it?"

"Yes," Hollister admitted. "That's about it."

"But your friends and relatives?" she suggested softly.

"I have no relatives in this country," he said. "And I have no friends
anywhere, now."

She considered this a moment, rubbing her cheek with a gloved
forefinger. What was she thinking about, Hollister wondered?

"That must be rather terrible at times. I'm not much given to slopping
over, but I find myself feeling sorry for you--and you are only a
disembodied voice. Your fix is something like my own," she said at
last. "And I have always denied that misery loves company."

"You were right in that, too," Hollister replied. "Misery wants
pleasant company. At least, that sort of misery which comes from
isolation and unfriendliness makes me appreciate even chance
companionship."

"Is it so bad as that?" she asked quickly. The tone of her voice made
Hollister quiver, it was so unexpected, so wistful.

"Just about. I've become a stray dog in this old world. And it used to
be a pretty good sort of a world for me in the old days. I'm not
whining. But I do feel like kicking. There's a difference, you know."

He felt ashamed of this mild outburst as soon as it was uttered. But
it was true enough, and he could not help saying it. There was
something about this girl that broke down his reticence, made him want
to talk, made him feel sure he would not be misunderstood.

She nodded.

"There is a great difference. Any one with any spirit will kick if
there is anything to kick about. And it's always shameful to whine.
You don't seem like a man who _could_ whine."

"How can you tell what sort of man I am?" Hollister inquired. "You
just said that I was only a disembodied voice."

She laughed, a musical low-toned chuckle that pleased him.

"One gets impressions," she answered. "Being sightless sharpens other
faculties. You often have very definite impressions in your mind about
people you have never seen, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," he agreed. "I daresay every one gets such impressions."

"Sometimes one finds those impressions are merely verified by actual
sight. So there you are. I get a certain impression of you by the
language you use, your tone, your inflections--and by a something else
which in those who can see is called intuition, for lack of something
more definite in the way of a term."

"Aren't you ever mistaken in those impressionistic estimates of
people?"

She hesitated a little.

"Sometimes--not often. That sounds egotistic, but really it is true."

The steamer drew out of the mouth of Toba Inlet. In the widening
stretch between the mainland and the Redondas a cold wind came
whistling out of Homfray Channel. Hollister felt the chill of it
through his mackinaw coat and was moved to thought of his companion's
comfort.

"May I find you a warm place to sit?" he asked. "That's an
uncomfortable breeze. And do you mind if I talk to you? I haven't
talked to any one like you for a long time."

She smiled assent.

"Ditto to that last," she said.

"You aren't a western man, are you?" she continued, as Hollister took
her by the arm and led her toward a cabin abaft the wheelhouse on the
boat deck, a roomy lounging place unoccupied save by a fat woman
taking a midday nap in one corner, her double chin sunk on her ample
bosom.

"No," he said. "I'm from the East. But I spent some time out here
once or twice, and I remembered the coast as a place I liked. So I
came back here when the war was over and everything gone to pot--at
least where I was concerned. My name is Hollister."

"Mine," she replied, "is Cleveland."

Hollister looked at her intently.

"Doris Cleveland--her book," he said aloud. It was to all intents and
purposes a question.

"Why do you say that?" the girl asked quickly. "And how do you happen
to know my given name?"

"That was a guess," he answered. "Is it right?"

"Yes--but----"

"Let me tell you," he interrupted. "It's queer, and still it's simple
enough. Two months ago I went into Toba Inlet to look at some timber
about five miles up the river from the mouth. When I got there I
decided to stay awhile. It was less lonesome there than in the racket
and hustle of a town where I knew no one and nobody wanted to know me.
I made a camp, and in looking over a stretch of timber on a slope that
runs south from the river I found a log cabin----"

"In a hollow full of big cedars back of the cliff along the south side
of the Big Bend?" the girl cut in eagerly. "A log house with two
rooms, where some shingle-bolts had been cut--with a bolt-chute
leading downhill?"

"The very same," Hollister continued. "I see you know the place. And
in this cabin there was a shelf with a row of books, and each one had
written on the flyleaf, 'Doris Cleveland--Her Book.'"

"My poor books," she murmured. "I thought the rats had torn them to
bits long ago."

"No. Except for a few nibbles at the binding. Perhaps," Hollister said
whimsically, "the rats knew that some day a man would need those books
to keep him from going crazy, alone there in those quiet hills. They
were good books, and they would give his mind something to do besides
brooding over past ills and an empty future."

"They did that for you?" she asked.

"Yes. They were all the company I had for two months. I often wondered
who Doris Cleveland was and why she left her books to the rats--and
was thankful that she did. So you lived up there?"

"Yes. It was there I had my last look at the sun shining on the hills.
I daresay the most vivid pictures I have in my mind are made up of
things there. Why, I can see every peak and gorge yet, and the valley
below with the river winding through and the beaver meadows in the
flats--all those slides and glaciers and waterfalls--cascades like
ribbons of silver against green velvet. I loved it all--it was so
beautiful."

She spoke a little absently, with the faintest shadow of regret, her
voice lingering on the words. And after a momentary silence she went
on:

"We lived there nearly a year, my two brothers and I. I know every
rock and gully within two miles of that cabin. I helped to build that
little house. I used to tramp around in the woods alone. I used to sit
and read, and sometimes just dream, under those big cedars on hot
summer afternoons. The boys thought they would make a little fortune
in that timber. Then one day, when they were felling a tree, a flying
limb struck me on the head--and I was blind; in less than two hours of
being unconscious I woke up, and I couldn't see anything--like that
almost," she snapped her finger. "On top of that my brothers
discovered that they had no right to cut timber there. Things were
going badly in France, too. So they went overseas. They were both
killed in the same action, on the same day. My books were left there
because no one had the heart to carry them out. It was all such a
muddle. Everything seemed to go wrong at once. And you found them and
enjoyed having them to read. Isn't it curious how things that seem so
incoherent, so unnecessary, so disconnected, sometimes work out into
an orderly sequence, out of which evil comes to some and good to
others? If we could only forestall Chance! Blind, blundering, witless
Chance!"

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.