Book: The Hidden Places

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




Hollister nodded, forgetting that the girl could not see. For a minute
they sat silent. He was thinking how strange it was that he should
meet this girl whose books he had been poring over all these weeks.
She had a mind, he perceived. She could think and express her thoughts
in sentences as clean-cut as her face. She made him think, thrust him
face to face with an abstraction. Blind, blundering, witless Chance!
Was there nothing more than that? What else was there?

"You make me feel ashamed of myself," he said at last. "Your luck has
been worse than mine. Your handicap is greater than mine--at least you
must feel it so. But you don't complain. You even seem quite
philosophic about it. I wish I could cultivate that spirit. What's
your secret?"

"Oh, I'm not such a marvel," she said, and the slight smile came back
to lurk around the corners of her mouth. "There are times when I
rebel--oh, desperately. But I get along very nicely as a general
thing. One accepts the inevitable. I comfort myself with the selfish
reflection that if I can't see a lot that I would dearly love to see,
I am also saved the sight of things that are mean and sordid and
disturbing. If I seem cheerful I daresay it's because I'm strong and
healthy and have grown used to being blind. I'm not nearly so helpless
as I may seem. In familiar places and within certain bounds, I can get
about nearly as well as if I could see."

The steamer cleared the Redondas, stood down through Desolation Sound
and turned her blunt nose into the lower gulf just as dark came on.
Hollister and Doris Cleveland sat in the cabin talking. They went to
dinner together, and if there were curious looks bestowed upon them
Hollister was too engrossed to care and the girl, of course, could not
see those sidelong, unspoken inquiries. After dinner they found chairs
in the same deck saloon and continued their conversation until ten
o'clock, when drowsiness born of a slow, rolling motion of the vessel
drove them to their berths.

The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in. He lay
wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland. He envied her courage and
fortitude, the calm assurance with which she seemed to face the world
which was all about her and yet hidden from her sight. She was really
an extraordinary young woman, he decided.

She was traveling alone. For several months she had been living with
old friends of the family on Stuart Island, close by the roaring
tiderace of the Euclataw Rapids. She was returning there, she told
Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver. The steamer would
dock about daylight the following morning. When Hollister offered to
see her ashore and to her destination, she accepted without any
reservations. It comforted Hollister's sadly bruised ego to observe
that she even seemed a trifle pleased.

"I have once or twice got a steward to get me ashore and put me in a
taxi," she said. "But if you don't mind, Mr. Hollister."

And Hollister most decidedly did not mind. Doris Cleveland had shot
like a pleasant burst of colorful light across the grayest period of
his existence, and he was loath to let her go.

He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with
astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the
snow banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the
fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland's books. And he was no
longer lonely, because he was not alone.

He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious
mind, when the steward's rap at the door wakened him half an hour
before the steamer docked.




CHAPTER VIII


Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier,
Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new
plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less
barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just
another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?
Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he
was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years
through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed
nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where
he went or what lay before him.

Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a
goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a
great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he
did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent
change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And
he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that
Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.

Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her
blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of
shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the
knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can
endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so
Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the
averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through
the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with
its clammy touch.

For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw her
nearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with
all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those
in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.

To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable
woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than
compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world
about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise
comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He
had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of
uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised that
conclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remote
degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for
instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. That
broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on
one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees
on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The
buds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in
dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore,
had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones
of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could
hear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. She
could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a
whimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.

At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself
from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the
sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she
would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with
the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when
they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or
the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when
they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of
maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with
steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of
Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to
Howe Sound.

No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a
protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit
of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris
Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too
hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous,
resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize
fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always
night,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.

In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many
other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without
troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him,
then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. It
had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until
in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping
current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him
unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found
himself committed irrevocably to this or that.

But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster
without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less
nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with
the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a
reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy
seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes
pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's
actions.

So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the
night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went
away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the
definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not
thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He
found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation
concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a
possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would
honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his
mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxical
way. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious
state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yet
reluctant to draw back.

When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his
company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to
set too great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung
them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them
far apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among
the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs,
would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock
in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would
say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as
he was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have had
the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple
of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she
turned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thought
of him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mental
pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came
within the scope of her understanding,--which covered no narrow field.
But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what
image of him she carried in her mind.

For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly
reading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern border
of Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to be
their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they
walked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank lay
bared for a mile offshore at ebb tide.

If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick
out a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or get
tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at
the Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in the
afternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover she knew music, which is a
thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the place
where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard
her play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment,
forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and that
the most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visit
that house often. The people there looked at him a little askance.
They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his
presence,--and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face.

By the time that April Fool's Day was a week old on the calendar,
Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf him
soon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she was
going back to the Euclataws. She had already stretched her visit to
greater length than she intended. She must go back.

They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked a
deserted playground, emerald green with new grass. They faced a
sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver
Island. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like
the faint murmur of distant surf.

"In a week," Hollister said. If there was an echo of regret in his
voice he did not try to hide it. "It has been the best month I have
spent for a long, long time."

"It has been a pleasant month," Doris agreed.

They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep
flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale
gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness
of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment
above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east
dusk walked silently down to the sea.

"I shall be sorry when you are gone," he said at last.

"And I shall be sorry to go," she murmured, "but----"

She threw out her hands in a gesture of impotence, of resignation.

"One can't always be on a holiday."

"I wish we could," Hollister muttered. "You and I."

The girl made no answer. And Hollister himself grew dumb in spite of a
pressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue for
utterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyond
sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an
overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted
her--not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly
beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before
him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours
together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was
cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was
still a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She,
too, was aware--and sometimes afraid--of drab years running out into
nothingness.

Hollister sat beside her visualizing interminable to-morrows in which
there would be no Doris Cleveland; in which he would go his way vainly
seeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice that
thrilled him with its friendly tone.

He took her hand and held it, looking down at the soft white fingers.
She made no effort to withdraw it. He looked at her, peering into her
face, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curious
expectancy and a faint deepening of the color in her cheeks.

"Don't go back to the Euclataws, Doris," he said at last. "I love you.
I want you. I need you. Do you feel as if you liked me--enough to take
a chance?

"For it is a chance," he finished abruptly. "Life together is always a
chance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise you
by breaking out like this. But when I think of us each going separate
ways----"

He held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward to
peer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment or
surprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked,
grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lost
in thought. But there was arising a quiver in the fingers he held
which belied the emotionless fixity of her face.

"I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?" she said slowly. "If it
is, why do you want to take it?"

"Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I
could imagine," he answered. "And because I have a longing to face
life with you, and a dread of it alone. You can't see my ugly face
which frightens off other people, so it doesn't mean anything to you.
But you can hear my voice. You can feel me near you. Does it mean
anything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you?"

He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, that
strange, thoughtful look still on her face.

"Tell me, do you want me to love you--or don't you care?" he demanded.

For a moment Doris made no answer.

"You're a man," she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly.
"And I'm a woman. I'm blind--but I'm a woman. I've been wondering how
long it would take you to find that out."




CHAPTER IX


Not until Hollister had left Doris at her cousin's home and was
walking back downtown did a complete realization of what he had done
and pledged himself to do burst upon him. When it did, he pulled up
short in his stride, as if he had come physically against some
forthright obstruction. For an instant he felt dazed. Then a consuming
anger flared in him,--anger against the past by which he was still
shackled.

But he refused to be bound by those old chains whose ghostly clanking
arose to harass him in this hour when life seemed to be holding out a
new promise, when he saw happiness beckoning, when he was dreaming of
pleasant things. He leaned over the rail on the Granville Street
drawbridge watching a tug pass through, seeing the dusky shape of the
small vessel, hearing the ripple of the flood tide against the stone
piers, and scarcely conscious of the bridge or the ship or the gray
dimness of the sea, so profound was the concentration of his mind on
this problem. It did not perplex him; it maddened him. He whispered a
defiant protest to himself and walked on. He was able to think more
calmly when he reached his room. There were the facts, the simple,
undeniable facts, to be faced without shrinking,--and a decision to be
made.

For months Hollister, when he thought of the past, thought of it as a
slate which had been wiped clean. He was dead, officially dead. His
few distant relatives had accepted the official report without
question. Myra had accepted it, acted upon it. Outside the British War
Office no one knew, no one dreamed, that he was alive. He had served
in the Imperials. He recalled the difficulties and delays of getting
his identity reestablished in the coldly impersonal, maddeningly
deliberate, official departments which dealt with his case. He had
succeeded. His back pay had been granted. A gratuity was still
forthcoming. But Hollister knew that the record of his case was
entangled with miles of red tape. He was dead--killed in action. It
would never occur to the British War Office to seek publicity for the
fact that he was not dead. There was no machinery for that purpose.
Even if there were such machinery, there was no one to pull the
levers. Nothing was ever set in motion in the War Office without
pulling a diversity of levers. So much for that. Hollister, recalling
his experience in London, smiled sardonically at thought of the
British War Office voluntarily troubling itself about dead men who
came to life. The War Office would not know him. The War Office did
not know men. It only knew identification numbers, regiments, ranks,
things properly documented, officially assigned. It was disdainful of
any casual inquiry; it would shunt such from official to official,
from department to department, until the inquirer was worn out, his
patience, his fund of postage and his time alike exhausted.

No, the British War Office would neither know nor care nor tell.

Surely the slate was sponged clean. Should he condemn himself and
Doris Cleveland to heartache and loneliness because of a technicality?
To Hollister it seemed no more than that. Myra had married again.
Would she--reckoning the chance that she learned he was alive--rise up
to denounce him? Hardly. His own people? They were few and far away.
His friends? The war had ripped everything loose, broken the old
combinations, scattered the groups. There was, for Hollister, nothing
left of the old days. And he himself was dead,--officially dead.

After all, it narrowed to himself and Doris Cleveland and an ethical
question.

He did not shut his eyes to the fact that for him this marriage would
be bigamy; that their children would be illegitimate in the eyes of
the law if legal scrutiny ever laid bare their father's history; nor
that by all the accepted dictums of current morality he would be
leading an innocent woman into sin. But current morality had ceased to
have its old significance for Hollister. He had seen too much of it
vaporized so readily in the furnace of the war. Convention had lost
any power to dismay him. His world had used him in its hour of need,
had flung him into the Pit, and when he crawled out maimed,
discouraged, stripped of everything that had made life precious, this
world of his fellows shunned him because of what he had suffered in
their behalf. So he held himself under no obligation to be guided by
their moral dictums. He was critical of accepted standards because he
had observed that an act might be within the law and still outrage
humanity; it might be legally sanctioned and socially approved and
spread intolerable misery in its wake. Contrariwise, he could conceive
a thing beyond the law being meritorious in itself. With the Persian
tent-maker, Hollister had begun to see that "A hair, perhaps, divides
the false and true."

There was no falsity in his love, in his aching desire to lay hold of
happiness out of the muddle of his life, to bestow happiness if he
could upon a woman who like himself had suffered misfortune. Within
him there was the instinct to clutch firmly this chance which lay at
hand. For Hollister the question was not, "Is this thing right or
wrong in the eyes of the world?" but "Is it right for her and for me?"
And always he got the one answer, the answer with which lovers have
justified themselves ever since love became something more than the
mere breeding instinct of animals.

Hollister could not see himself as a man guilty of moral obliquity if
he let the graveyard of the past retain its unseemly corpse without
legal exhumation and examination, and the delivering of a formal
verdict upon what was already an accomplished fact.

Nevertheless, he forced himself to consider just what it would mean to
take that step. Briefly it would be necessary for him to go to London,
to secure documentary evidence. Then he must return to Canada, enter
suit against Myra, secure service upon her here in British Columbia.
There would be a trial and a temporary decree; after the lapse of
twelve months a divorce absolute.

He was up against a stone wall. Even if he nerved himself to public
rattling of the skeleton in his private life, he did not have the
means. That was final. He did not have money for such an undertaking,
even if he beggared himself. That was a material factor as inexorable
as death. Actual freedom he had in full measure. Legal freedom could
only be purchased at a price,--and he did not have the price.

Perhaps that decided Hollister. Perhaps he would have made that
decision in any case. He had no friends to be shocked. He had no
reputation to be smirched. He was, he had said with a bitter
wistfulness, a stray dog. And Doris Cleveland was in very much the
same position. Two unfortunates cleaving to each other, moved by a
genuine human passion. If they could be happy together, they had a
right to be together. Hollister challenged his reason to refute that
cry of his heart.

He disposed finally of the last uncertainty,--whether he should tell
Doris. And a negative to that rose instantly to his lips. The past was
a dead past. Let it remain dead--buried. Its ghost would never rise to
trouble them. Of that he was very sure.

Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard a great clock
somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay
staring up at the dusky ceiling. But his thoughts had taken a
pleasanter road. He had turned over the pages of his life history,
scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with
decisive finality into the waste basket. He was about to begin a new
book, the book of the future. It was pleasant to contemplate what he
and Doris Cleveland together would write on those blank pages. To hope
much, to be no longer downcast, to be able to look forward with
eagerness. There was a glow in that like good wine.

And upon that he slept.

Morning brought him no qualms or indecisions. But it did bring him to
a consideration of very practical matters, which yesterday's emotional
crisis had overshadowed. That is to say, Hollister began to take stock
of the means whereby they two should live. It was not an immediately
pressing matter, since he had a few hundred dollars in hand, but he
was not short-sighted and he knew it would ultimately become so.
Hence, naturally, his mind turned once more to that asset which had
been one factor in bringing him back to British Columbia, the timber
limit he owned in the Toba Valley.

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