Book: The Hidden Places

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He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that was
dulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, only
until such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up to
the flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent and
canoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and near
where the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.

It was curious to Hollister,--the manner in which Doris could see so
clearly this valley and river and the slope where his timber stood.
She could not only envision the scene of their home and his future
operations, but she could discuss these things with practical wisdom.
They had talked of living in the old cabin where he had found her
shelf of books, but there was a difficulty in that,--of getting up the
steep hill, of carrying laboriously up that slope each item of their
supplies, their personal belongings, such articles of furniture as
they needed; and Doris had suggested that they build their house in
the flat and let his men, the bolt cutters, occupy the cabin on the
hill.

He had two hired woodsmen with him, tools, food, bedding. When the
steamer set them on the float at the head of Toba Inlet, Hollister
left the men to bring the goods ashore in a borrowed dugout and
himself struck off along a line blazed through the woods which, one of
Carr's men informed him, led out near the upper curve of the Big Bend.

A man sometimes learns a great deal in the brief span of a few
minutes. When Hollister disembarked he knew the name of one man only
in Toba Valley, the directing spirit of the settlement, Sam Carr, whom
he had met in MacFarlan's office. But there were half a dozen loggers
meeting the weekly steamer. They were loquacious men, without
formality in the way of acquaintance. Hollister had more than trail
knowledge imparted to him. The name of the man who lived with his wife
at the top of the Big Bend was Mr. J. Harrington Bland; the logger
said that with a twinkle in his eye, a chuckle as of inner amusement.
Hollister understood. The man was a round peg in this region of square
holes; otherwise he would have been Jack Bland, or whatever the
misplaced initial stood for. They spoke of him further as "the
Englishman." There was a lot of other local knowledge bestowed upon
Hollister, but "the Englishman" and his wife--who was a "pippin" for
looks--were still in the forefront of his mind when the trail led him
out on the river bank a few hundred yards from their house. He passed
within forty feet of the door. Bland was chopping wood; Myra sat on a
log, her tawny hair gleaming in the sun. Bland bestowed upon Hollister
only a casual glance, as he strode past, and went on swinging his axe;
and Hollister looking impersonally at the woman, observed that she
stared with frank curiosity. He remembered that trait of hers. He had
often teased her about it in those days when it had been an impossible
conception that she could ever regard seriously any man but himself.
Men had always been sure of a very complete survey when they came
within Myra's range, and men had always fluttered about her like moths
drawn to a candle flame. She had that mysterious quality of attracting
men, pleasing them--and of making other girls hate her in the same
degree. She used to laugh about that.

"I can't help it if I'm popular," she used to say, with a mischievous
smile, and Hollister had fondly agreed with that. He remembered that
it flattered his vanity to have other men admire his wife. He had been
so sure of her affections, her loyalty, but that had passed like
melting snow, like dew under the morning sun. A little loneliness, a
few months of separation, had done the trick.

Hollister shrugged his shoulders. He had no feeling in the matter. She
could not possibly know him; she would not wish to know him if she
could. His problems were nowise related to her. But he knew too much
to be completely indifferent. His mind kept turning upon what her life
had been, and what it must be now. He was curious. What had become of
the money? Why did she and her English husband bury themselves in a
rude shack by a river that whispered down a lonely valley?

Hollister's mind thrust these people aside, put them out of
consideration, when he reached the flat and found his canoe where he
left it, his tiny silk tent suspended intact from the limb. He ranged
about the flat for an hour or so. He had an impression of it in his
mind from his winter camp there; also he had a description of it from
Doris, and her picture was clearer and more exact in detail than his.
He found the little falls that trickled down to a small creek that
split the flat. He chose tentatively a site for their house, close by
a huge maple which had three sets of initials cut deeply in the bark
where Doris told him to look.

Then he dragged the canoe down to the river, and slid it afloat and
let the current bear him down. The air was full of pleasant odors from
the enfolding forest. He let his eyes rest thankfully upon those calm,
majestic peaks that walled in the valley. It was even more beautiful
now than he had imagined it could be when the snow blanketed hill and
valley, and the teeth of the frost gnawed everywhere. It was less
aloof; it was as if the wilderness wore a smile and beckoned with
friendly hands.

The current and his paddle swept him down past the settlement, past a
busy, grunting sawmill, past the booming ground where brown logs
floated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to where
his woodsmen waited with the piled goods on a bank above tidewater.

All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was
a busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a
house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the
shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting
cedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntary
slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure
which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. As
literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of
his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a home
and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.

The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms and
skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of
Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life
had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick
of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of
shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.

Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk
of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancient
tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off
smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a
rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This was
furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw
stuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earth
cleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the Toba
River, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at one
corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when
October came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread a
deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north
wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.
Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was
good. He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it,
and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.

And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put
them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.




CHAPTER XI


A week of hot sunshine had filled the Toba River bank full of roily
water when Hollister breasted its current again. In midstream it ran
full and strong. Watery whisperings arose where swirls boiled over
sunken snags. But in the slow eddies and shoal water under each bank
the gray canoe moved up-stream under the steady drive of Hollister's
paddle.

Doris sat in the bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to
the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight
had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the
green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness
of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows
and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn
came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted
the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those
yellow-breasted singers and the watery murmuring of the river there
arose now and then the shrill, imperative blast of a donkey engine.

"Where are we now, Bob?"

"About half a mile below the upper curve of the Big Bend," Hollister
replied.

Doris sat silent for awhile. Hollister, looking at her, was stricken
anew with wonder at her loveliness, with wonder at the contrast
between them. Beauty and the beast, he said to himself. He knew
without seeing. He did not wish to see. He strove to shut away thought
of the devastation of what had once been a man's goodly face. Doris'
skin was like a child's, smooth and soft and tinted like a rose petal.
Love, he said to himself, had made her bloom. It made him quake to
think that she might suddenly see out of those dear, blind eyes. Would
she look and shudder and turn away? He shook off that ghastly thought.
She would never see him. She could only touch him, feel him, hear the
tenderness of his voice, know his guarding care. And to those things
which were realities she would always respond with an intensity that
thrilled him and gladdened him and made him feel that life was good.

"Are you glad you're here?" he asked suddenly.

"I would pinch you for such a silly question if it weren't that I
would probably upset the canoe," Doris laughed. "Glad?"

"There must be quite a streak of pure barbarian in me," she said after
a while. "I love the smell of the earth and the sea and the woods.
Even when I could see, I never cared a lot for town. It would be all
right for awhile, then I would revolt against the noise, the dirt and
smoke, the miles and miles of houses rubbing shoulders against each
other, and all the thousands of people scuttling back and forth,
like--well, it seems sometimes almost as aimless as the scurrying of
ants when you step on their hill. Of course it isn't. But I used to
feel that way. When I was in my second year at Berkeley I had a brain
storm like that. I took the train north and turned up at home--we had
a camp running on Thurlow Island then. Daddy read the riot act and
sent me back on the next steamer. It was funny--just an irresistible
impulse to get back to my own country, among my own people. I often
wonder if it isn't some such instinct that keeps sailors at sea, no
matter what the sea does to them. I have sat on that ridge"--she
pointed unerringly to the first summit above Hollister's timber,
straight back and high above the rim of the great cliff south of the
Big Bend--"and felt as if I had drunk a lot of wine; just to be away
up in that clear still air, with not a living soul near and the
mountains standing all around like the pyramids."

"Do you know that you have a wonderful sense of direction, Doris?"
Hollister said. "You pointed to the highest part of that ridge as
straight as if you could see it."

"I do see it," she smiled, "I mean I know where I am, and I have in my
mind a very clear picture of my surroundings always, so long as I am
on familiar ground."

Hollister knew this to be so, in a certain measure, on a small scale.
In a room she knew Doris moved as surely and rapidly as he did
himself. He had dreaded a little lest she should find herself feeling
lost and helpless in this immensity of forest and hills which
sometimes made even him feel a peculiar sense of insignificance. It
was a relief to know that she turned to this wilderness which must be
their home with the eagerness of a child throwing itself into its
mother's arms. He perceived that she had indeed a clear image of the
Toba in her mind. She was to give further proof of this before long.

They turned the top of the Big Bend. Here the river doubled on itself
for nearly a mile and crossed from the north wall of the valley to the
south. Where the channel straightened away from this loop Hollister
had built his house on a little flat running back from the right-hand
bank. A little less than half a mile below, Bland's cabin faced the
river just where the curve of the S began. They came abreast of that
now. What air currents moved along the valley floor shifted in from
the sea. It wafted the smoke from Bland's stovepipe gently down on the
river's shining face.

Doris sniffed.

"I smell wood smoke," she said. "Is there a fire on the flat?"

"Yes, in a cook's stove," Hollister replied. "There is a shack here."

She questioned him and he told her of the Blands,--all that he had
been told, which was little enough. Doris displayed a deep interest in
the fact that a woman, a young woman, was a near neighbor, as
nearness goes on the British Columbia coast.

From somewhere about the house Myra Bland appeared now. To avoid the
heavy current, Hollister hugged the right-hand shore so that he passed
within a few feet of the bank, within speaking distance of this woman
with honey-colored hair standing bareheaded in the sunshine. She took
a step or two forward. For an instant Hollister thought she was about
to exercise the immemorial privilege of the wild places and hail a
passing stranger. But she did not call or make any sign. She stood
gazing at them, and presently her husband joined her and together they
watched. They were still looking when Hollister gave his last backward
glance, then turned his attention to the reddish-yellow gleam of
new-riven timber which marked his own dwelling. Twenty minutes later
he slid the gray canoe's forefoot up on a patch of sand before his
house.

"We're here," he said. "Home--such as it is--it's home."

He helped her out, guided her steps up to the level of the bottomland.
He was eager to show her the nest he had devised for them. But Doris
checked him with her hand.

"I hear the falls," she said. "Listen!"

Streaming down through a gorge from melting snowfields the creek a
little way beyond plunged with a roar over granite ledges. The few
warm days had swollen it from a whispering sheet of spray to a
deep-voiced cataract. A mist from it rose among the deep green of the
fir.

"Isn't it beautiful--beautiful?" Doris said. "There"--she pointed--"is
the canyon of the Little Toba coming in from the south. There is the
deep notch where the big river comes down from the Chilcotin, and a
ridge like the roof of the world rising between. Over north there are
mountains and mountains, one behind the other, till the last peaks are
white cones against the blue sky. There is a bluff straight across us
that goes up and up in five-hundred-foot ledges like masonry, with
hundred-foot firs on each bench that look like toy trees from here.

"I used to call that gorge there"--her pointing finger found the mark
again--"The Black Hole. It is always full of shadows in summer, and in
winter the slides rumble and crash into it with a noise like the end
of the world. Did you ever listen to the slides muttering and
grumbling last winter when you were here, Bob?"

"Yes, I used to hear them day and night."

They stood silent a second or two. The little falls roared above them.
The river whispered at their feet. A blue-jay perched on the roof of
their house and began his harsh complaint to an unheeding world, into
which a squirrel presently broke with vociferous reply. An up-river
breeze rustled the maple leaves, laid cooling fingers from salt water
on Hollister's face, all sweaty from his labor with the paddle.

He could see beauty where Doris saw it. It surrounded him, leaped to
his eye whenever his eye turned,--a beauty of woods and waters, of
rugged hills and sapphire skies. And he was suddenly filled with a
great gladness that he could respond to this. He was quickened to a
strange emotion by the thought that life could still hold for him so
much that seemed good. He put one arm caressingly, protectingly,
across his wife's shoulder, over the smooth, firm flesh that gleamed
through thin silk.

She turned swiftly, buried her face against his breast and burst into
tears, into a strange fit of sobbing. She clung to him like a
frightened child. Her body quivered as if some unseen force grasped
and shook her with uncontrollable power. Hollister held her fast,
dismayed, startled, wondering, at a loss to comfort her.

"But I _can't_ see it," she cried. "I'll never see it again. Oh, Bob,
Bob! Sometimes I can't stand this blackness. Never to see you--never
to see the sun or the stars--never to see the hills, the trees, the
grass. Always to grope. Always night--night--night without beginning
or end."

And Hollister still had no words to comfort her. He could only hold
her close, kiss her glossy brown hair, feeling all the while a
passionate sympathy--and yet conscious of a guilty gladness that she
could not see him--that she could not look at him and be revolted and
draw away. He knew that she clung to him now as the one clear light in
the darkness. He was not sure that she (or any other woman) would do
that if she could see him as he really was.

Her sobs died in her throat. She leaned against him passively for a
minute. Then she lifted her face and smiled.

"It's silly to let go like that," she said. "Once in awhile it comes
over me like a panic. I wonder if you will always be patient with me
when I get like that. Sometimes I fairly rave. But I won't do it
often. I don't know why I should feel that way now. I have never been
so happy. Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave. I am
afraid your wife is rather a temperamental creature, Bob."

She ended with a laugh and a pout, to which Hollister made appropriate
response. Then he led her into the house and smiled--or would have
smiled had his face been capable of that expression--at the pleasure
with which her hands, which she had trained to be her organs of
vision, sought and found doors and cupboards, chairs, the varied
equipment of the kitchen. He watched her find her way about with the
uncanny certainty of the sightless, at which he never ceased to
marvel. When she came back at last to where he sat on a table,
swinging one foot while he smoked a cigarette, she put her arms around
him and said:

"It's a cute little house, Bob. The air here is like old wine. The
smell of the woods is like heaven, after soot and smoke and coal gas.
I'm the happiest woman in the whole country."

Hollister looked at her. He knew by the glow on her face that she
spoke as she felt, that she was happy, that he had made her so. And he
was proud of himself for a minute, as a man becomes when he is
conscious of having achieved greatness, however briefly.

Only he was aware of a shadow. Doris leaned against him talking of
things they would do, of days to come. He looked over her shoulder
through the west window and his eye rested on Bland's cabin, where
another woman lived who had once nestled in his arms and talked of
happiness. Yes, he was conscious of the shadow, of regrets, of
something else that was nameless and indefinable,--a shadow. Something
that was not and yet still might be troubled him vaguely.

He could not tell why. Presently he dismissed it from his mind.




CHAPTER XII


Hollister likened himself and Doris, more than once in the next few
days, to two children in a nursery full of new toys. He watched the
pride and delight which Doris bestowed upon her house and all that it
contained, the satisfaction with which she would dwell upon the
comforts and luxuries that should be added to it when the cedars on
the hill began to produce revenue for them.

For his own part he found himself eager for work, taking a pleasure
far beyond his expectation in what he had set himself to do, here in
the valley of the Toba. He could shut his eyes and see the whole plan
work out in ordered sequence,--the bolt chute repaired, the ancient
cedars felled, sawed into four-foot lengths, split to a size, piled by
the chute and all its lateral branches. Then, when a certain quantity
was ready, they would be cast one after another into that trough of
smooth poles which pitched sharply down from the heart of his timber
to the river. One after another they would gather way, slipping down,
faster and faster, to dive at last with a great splash into the
stream, to accumulate behind the confining boom-sticks until they were
rafted to the mill, where they would be sawn into thin sheets to make
tight roofs on houses in distant towns. And for the sweat that labor
with axe and saw wrung from his body, and for the directing power of
his brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him to
satisfy his needs. For the first time in his life Hollister perceived
both the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into which
modern industry has grown. In distant towns other men made machinery,
textiles, boots, furniture. On inland plains where no trees grew, men
sowed and reaped the wheat which passed through the hands of the
miller and the baker and became a nation's daily bread. The axe in his
hand was fashioned from metallic ore dug by other men out of the
bowels of the earth. He was fed and clothed by unseen hands. And in
return he, as they did, levied upon nature's store of raw material and
paid for what he got with timber, rough shaped to its ultimate uses by
the labor of his hands.

All his life Hollister had been able to command money without effort.
Until he came back from the war he did not know what it meant to be
poor. He had known business as a process in which a man used money to
make more money. He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal with
tokens rather than with things themselves. Now he found himself at the
primitive source of things and he learned, a little to his
astonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work. He began
to understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure of
pure achievement even in simple things.

For two or three days he occupied himself at various tasks on the
flat. He did this to keep watch over Doris, to see that she did not
come to grief in this unfamiliar territory. But he soon put aside
those first misgivings, as he was learning to put aside any fear of
the present or of the future, which arose from her blindness. His love
for her had not been borne of pity. He had never thought of her as
helpless. She was too vivid, too passionately alive in body and mind
to inspire him with that curiously mixed feeling which the strong
bestow upon the maimed and the weak. But there were certain risks of
which he was conscious, no matter that Doris laughingly disclaimed
them. With a stick and her ears and fingers she could go anywhere, she
said; and she was not far wrong, as Hollister knew.

Within forty-eight hours she had the run of the house and the cleared
portion of land surrounding. She could put her hand on every item of
her kitchen equipment. She could get kindling out of the wood box;
light a fire in the stove as well as he. All the stock of food staples
lay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchen
shelves. She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and box
and stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the river
bank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a great
spruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exact
diagram of the whole and with which as a guide she could move within
those limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself.

He never ceased to wonder at the mysterious delicacies of touch and
hearing which served her so well in place of sight. But he accepted
the fact, and once she had mastered her surroundings Hollister was
free to take up his own work, no matter where it led him. Doris
insisted that he should. She had a sturdy soul that seldom leaned and
never thought of clinging. She could laugh, a deep-throated chuckling
laugh, and sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she could go about the house
singing. And if now and then she rebelled with a sudden, furious
resentment against the long night that shut her in, that, as she said
herself, was just like a small black cloud passing swiftly across the
face of the sun.

Hollister began at the bottom of the chute, as he was beginning at the
bottom of his fortune, to build up again. Where it was broken he
repaired it. Where it had collapsed under the weight of snow or of
fallen trees he put in a new section. His hands grew calloused and the
muscles of his back and shoulders grew tough with swinging an axe,
lugging and lifting heavy poles. The sun burned the scar-tissue of his
face to a brown like that on the faces of his two men, who were piling
the cut cedar in long ricks among the green timber while he got the
chute ready to slide the red, pungent-smelling blocks downhill.

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