Book: The Hidden Places

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




Sometimes, on a clear still day when he was at the house, he would
hear old Bill Hayes' voice far off in the woods, very faint in the
distance, shrilling the fallers' warning, "_Timb-r-r-r_." Close on
that he would hear a thud that sent tremors running through the earth,
and there would follow the echo of crashing boughs all along the
slope. Once he said lightly to Doris:

"Every time one of those big trees goes down like that it means a
hundred dollars' worth of timber on the ground."

And she laughed back:

"We make money when cedar goes up, and we make money when cedar comes
down. Very nice."

May passed and June came to an end; with it Hollister also came to the
end of his ready money. It had all gone into tools, food, wages, all
his available capital sunk in the venture. But the chute was ready to
run bolts. They poured down in a stream till the river surface within
the boom-sticks was a brick-colored jam that gave off a pleasant
aromatic smell.

Then Hollister and his two men cast off the boom, let the current
sweep it down to Carr's new shingle mill below the Big Bend. When the
bolts were tallied in, Hollister got a check. He sat with pad and
pencil figuring for half an hour after he came home, after his men had
each shouldered a fifty-pound pack of supplies and gone back up the
hill. He gave over figuring at last. The thing was profitable. More so
than he had reckoned. He got up and went into the kitchen where Doris
was rolling pie crust on a board.

"We're off," he said, putting an arm around her. "If we can keep this
up all summer, I'll build a new wing on the house and bring you in a
piano to play with this winter."

Hollister himself now took a hand at cutting cedar. Each morning he
climbed that steep slope to the works, and each night he came trudging
down; and morning and night he would pause at a point where the trail
led along the rim of a sheer cliff, to look down on the valley below,
to look down on the roof of his own house and upon Bland's house
farther on. Sometimes smoke streamed blue from Bland's stovepipe.
Sometimes it stood dead, a black cylinder above the shake roof.
Sometimes one figure and sometimes two moved about the place; more
often no one stirred. But that was as near as the Blands had come in
eight weeks. Hollister had an unspoken hope that they would remain
distant, no matter that Doris occasionally wondered about this woman
who lived around the river's curve, what she was like and when she
would meet her. Hollister knew nothing of Bland, nothing of Myra. He
did not wish to know. It did not matter in the least, he assured
himself. He was dead and Myra was married. All that old past was as a
book long out of print. It could not possibly matter if by chance they
came in contact. Yet he had a vague feeling that it did matter,--a
feeling for which he could not account. He was not afraid; he had no
reason to be afraid. Nevertheless he gazed sometimes from the cliff
top down on the cabin where Bland and Myra lived, and something
stirred him so that he wished them gone.

He came off the hill one evening in the middle of June to find a canoe
drawn up on the beach, two Siwashes puttering over a camp fire, and a
tall, wirily slender, fair-haired man who might have been anywhere
between twenty-seven and thirty-five sitting in the front doorway,
talking to Doris.

Hollister noted the expression on the man's face when their eyes met.
But he did not mind. He was used to that. He was becoming indifferent
to what people thought of his face, because what they thought no
longer had power to hurt him, to make him feel that sickening
depression, to make him feel himself kin to those sinners who were
thrust into the outer darkness. Moreover, he knew that some people
grew used to the wreckage of his features. That had been his
experience with his two woodsmen. At first they looked at him askance.
Now they seemed as indifferent to his disfigurement as they were to
the ragged knots and old fire-scars on the trees they felled. Anyway,
it did not matter to Hollister.

But this fair-haired man went on talking, looking all the while at
Hollister, and his look seemed to say, "I know your face is a hell of
a sight, but I am not disturbed by it, and I don't want you to think I
am disturbed." Behind the ragged mask of his scars Hollister smiled at
this fancy. Nevertheless he accepted his interpretation of that look
as a reality and found himself moved by a curious feeling of
friendliness for this stranger whom he had never seen before, whom he
might never see again,--for that was the way of casual travelers up
and down the Toba. They came out of nowhere, going up river or down,
stopped perhaps to smoke a pipe, to exchange a few words, before they
moved on into the hushed places that swallowed them up.

The man's name was Lawanne. He was bound up-stream, after grizzly
bear.

"I was told of an Englishman named Bland who is quite a hunter. I
stopped in here, thinking this was his place and that I might get him
to go on with me," he said to Hollister.

"That's Bland's place down there," Hollister explained.

"So Mrs. Hollister was just telling me. There didn't seem to be
anybody about when I passed. It doesn't matter much, anyway," he
laughed. "The farther I get into this country, the less keen I am to
hunt. It's good enough just to loaf around and look at."

Lawanne had supper with them. Hollister asked him, not only as a
matter of courtesy but with a genuine feeling that he wanted this man
to break bread with them. He could not quite understand that sudden
warmth of feeling for a stranger. He had never in his life been given
to impulsive friendliness. The last five years had not strengthened
his belief in friendships. He had seen too many fail under stress.
But he liked this man. They sat outside after supper and Doris joined
them there. Lawanne was not talkative. He was given to long silences
in which he sat with eyes fixed on river or valley or the hills above,
in mute appreciation.

"Do you people realize what a panoramic beauty is here before your
eyes all the time?" he asked once. "It's like a fairyland to me. I
must see a lot of this country before I go away. And I came here quite
by chance."

"Which is, after all, the way nearly everything happens," Doris said.

"Oh," Lawanne turned to her, "You think so? You don't perceive the
Great Design, the Perfect Plan, in all that we do?"

"Do you?" she asked.

He laughed.

"No. If I did I should sit down with folded hands, knowing myself
helpless in the inexorable grip of destiny. I should always be
perfectly passive."

"If you tried to do that you could not remain passive long. The
unreckonable element of chance would still operate to make you do this
or that. You couldn't escape it; nobody can."

"Then you don't believe there is a Destiny that shapes our ends,
rough-hew them how we will?" Lawanne said lightly.

Doris shook her head.

"Destiny is only a word. It means one thing to one person, something
else to another. It's too abstract to account for anything. Life's a
puzzle no one ever solves, because the factors are never constant.
When we try to account for this and that we find no fixed law, nothing
but what is subject to the element of chance--which can't be reckoned.
Most of us at different times hold our own fate, temporarily at least,
in our own hands without knowing it, and some insignificant happening
does this or that to us. If we had done something else it would all be
different."

"Your wife," Lawanne observed to Hollister, "is quite a philosopher."

Hollister nodded. He was thinking of this factor of chance. He himself
had been a victim of it. He had profited by it. And he wondered what
vagaries of chance were still to bestow happiness or inflict suffering
upon him in spite of his most earnest effort to achieve mastery over
circumstances. He felt latterly that he had a firm grip on the
immediate future. Yet who could tell?

Dusk began to close on the valley while the far, high crests of the
mountains still gleamed under a crimson sky. Deep shadows filled every
gorge and canyon, crept up and up until only the snowy crests
glimmered in the night, ghostly-silver against a sky speckled with
stars. The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of the
night, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfalls
roared over rocky precipices. The two Indians attending Lawanne
squatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank. Downstream a
yellow spot broke out like a candle flame against black velvet.

"There is some one at Bland's now," Hollister said.

"That's their window light, eh?" Lawanne commented. "I may go down and
see him in the morning. I am not very keen on two or three weeks alone
in these tremendous silences. This valley at night now--it's awesome.
And those Siwashes are like dumb men. _You_ wouldn't go bear-hunting,
I suppose?"

There was a peculiar gratification to Hollister in being asked. But he
had too much work on hand. Neither did he wish to leave Doris. Not
because it might be difficult for her to manage alone. It was simply
an inner reluctance to be separated from her. She was becoming a vital
part of him. To go away from her for days or weeks except under the
spur of some compelling necessity was a prospect that did not please
him. That which had first drawn them together grew stronger. Love, the
mysterious fascination of sex, the perfect accord of the
well-mated--whatever it was it grew stronger. The world outside of
them held less and less significance. Sometimes they talked of that,
wondered about it, wondered if it were natural for a man and a woman
to become so completely absorbed in each other, to attain that
singular oneness. They wondered if it would last. But whether it
should prove lasting or not, they had it now and it was sufficient.

Lawanne went down to Bland's in the morning. He was still there when
Hollister climbed the hill to his work.

Before evening he had something else to think about besides Lawanne. A
trifle, but one of those trifles that recurs with irritating
persistence no matter how often the mind gives it dismissal.

About ten o'clock that morning a logger came up to the works on the
hill.

"Can you use another man?" he asked bluntly. "I want to work."

Hollister engaged him. By his dress, by his manner, Hollister knew
that he was at home in the woods. He was young, sturdily built,
handsome in a swarthy way. There was about him a slightly familiar
air. Hollister thought he might have seen him at the steamer landing,
or at Carr's. He mentioned that.

"I have been working there," the man replied. "Working on the boom."

He was frank enough about it. He wanted money,--a stake. He believed
he could make more cutting shingle bolts by the cord. This was true.
Hollister's men were making top wages. The cedar stood on good ground.
It was big, clean timber, easy to work.

"I'll be on the job to-morrow," he said, after they had talked it
over. "Take me this afternoon to get my outfit packed up here."

Hollister was haunted by the man's face at odd times during the day.
Not until he was half-way home, until he came out on that ledge from
whence he could look--and always did look with a slight sense of
irritation--down on Bland's cabin as well as his own, did he recall
clearly where and when he had seen Charlie Mills.

Mills was the man who sat looking at Myra across the table that winter
morning when Hollister was suffering from the brief madness which
brought him to Bland's cabin with a desperate project in his
disordered mind.

Well, what of it, Hollister asked himself? It was nothing to him. He
was a disinterested bystander now. But looking down on Bland's cabin,
he reflected that his irritation was rooted in the fact that he did
not want to be a bystander. He desired to eliminate Myra Bland and all
that pertained to her from even casual contact with him. It seemed
absurd that he should feel himself to be in danger. But he had a dim
sense of danger. And instead of the aloofness which he desired, he
seemed to see vague threads drawing himself and Doris and Myra Bland
and this man Mills closer and closer together, to what end or purpose
he could not tell.

For a minute Hollister was tempted to turn the man away when he went
back up there in the morning. But that, he concluded with a shrug of
his shoulders, was carrying a mere fancy too far.

It did not therefore turn his thoughts into a more placid channel to
find, when he reached the house, Myra sitting in the kitchen talking
to Doris. Yet it was no great surprise. He had expected this, looked
forward to it with an uneasy sense of its inevitability.

Nothing could have been more commonplace, more uneventful than that
meeting. Doris introduced her husband. They were all at their ease.
Myra glanced once at his face and thereafter looked away. But her flow
of small talk, the conversational stop-gap of the woman accustomed to
social amenities, went on placidly. They were strangers, meeting for
the first time in a strange land.

Bland had gone up-river with Lawanne.

"Jim lives to hunt," Myra said with a short laugh. It was the first
and nearly the last mention of her husband she made that evening.

Hollister went out to wash himself in a basin that stood on a bench by
the back door. He felt a relief. He had come through the first test
casually enough. A slightly sardonic grimace wrinkled his tight-lipped
mouth. There was a grim sort of humor in the situation. Those three,
whose lives had got involved in such a tangle, forgathered under the
same roof in that lonely valley, each more or less a victim of
uncomprehended forces both within and exterior to themselves. Yet it
was simple enough. Each, in common with all humanity, pursued the
elusive shadow of happiness. The diverging paths along which they
pursued it had brought them to this common point.

Hollister soaped and scrubbed to clean his hands and face of the sweat
and dirt of his day's labor. Above the wash bench Myra's face,
delicately pink and white and framed by her hair that was the color of
strained honey, looked down at him through an open window. Her blue
eyes rested on him, searchingly, he thought, with a curious appraisal,
as if he were something to be noted and weighed and measured by the
yardstick of her estimation of men. If she only knew, Hollister
reflected sardonically, with his face buried in the towel, what a
complete and intimate knowledge she had of him!

Looking up suddenly, his eyes met hers fixed unwaveringly upon him and
for an instant his heart stood still with the reasonless conviction
that she did know, she must know, that she could not escape knowing.
There was a quality of awareness in her steady gaze that terrified him
for a moment by its implication, which made him feel as if he stood
over a powder magazine and that she held the detonator in her hand.
But immediately he perceived the absurdity of his momentary panic.
Myra turned her head to speak to Doris. She smiled, the old dimpling
smile which gave him a strange feeling to see again. Certainly his
imagination was playing him tricks. How could she know? And what would
she care if she did know,--so long as he made no claims, so long as he
let the dead past lie in its grave. For Myra was as deeply concerned
to have done with their old life as he. He rested upon that assumption
and went into the house and sat down to his supper.

Later, towards sundown, Myra went home. Hollister watched her vanish
among the thickets, thinking that she too had changed,--as greatly as
himself. She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone over night
in a house with telephones and servants, on a street brilliantly
lighted. Now she could apparently face the loneliness of those
solitudes without uneasiness. But war and the aftermath of war had
taught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must,
and he suspected that women were not greatly different. He understood
that after all he had never really known Myra any more than she had
known him. Externally they had achieved knowledge of each other
through sight, speech, physical contact, comprehension of each other's
habits. But their real selves, the essence of their being, the shadowy
inner self where motives and passions took form and gathered force
until they were translated for good or evil into forthright
action,--these they had not known at all.

At any rate he perceived that Myra could calmly enough face the
prospect of being alone. Hollister cast his eye up to where the cedars
towered, a green mass on the slope above the cliff. He thought of
Charlie Mills and wondered if after all she would be alone.

He felt ashamed of that thought as soon as it formed in his mind. And
being ashamed, he saw and understood that he still harbored a little
bitterness against Myra. He did not wish to bestow bitterness or any
other emotion upon her. He wanted her to remain completely outside the
scope of his feelings. He would have to try, he perceived, to
cultivate a complete indifference to her, to what she did, to where
she went, to insulate himself completely against her. Because he was
committed to other enterprises, and chiefly because, as he said to
himself, he would not exchange a single brown strand of Doris
Cleveland's hair for all of Myra's body, even if he had that choice.

The moon stole up from behind the Coast Range after they had gone to
bed. Its pale beams laid a silver square upon the dusky floor of their
room. Doris reached with one arm and drew his face close up to hers.

"Are you happy?" she demanded with a fierce intensity. "Don't you ever
wish you had a wife who could see? Aren't you _ever_ sorry?"

"Doris, Doris," he chided gently. "What in the world put such a notion
as that into your head?"

She lay thoughtful for a minute.

"Sometimes I wonder," she said at last. "Sometimes I feel that I must
reassure myself that you are contented with me. When we come in
contact with a woman like Mrs. Bland, for instance--Tell me, Bob, is
she pretty?"

"Yes," he said "Very."

"Fair or dark?"

"Fair-skinned. She has blond hair and dark blue eyes, almost purple.
She is about your height, about the same figure. Why so curious?"

"I just wondered. I like her very much," Doris said, with some slight
emphasis on the last two words. "She is a very interesting talker."

"I noticed that," Hollister observed dryly. "She spoke charmingly of
the weather and the local scenery and the mosquitoes."

Doris laughed.

"A woman always falls back on those conversational staples with a
strange man. That's just the preliminary skirmishing. But she was here
all afternoon, and we didn't spend five hours talking about the
weather."

"What did you talk about then?" Hollister asked curiously.

"Men and women and money mostly," Doris replied. "If one may judge a
woman by the impressionistic method, I should say that Mrs. Bland
would be very attractive to men."

It was on the tip of Hollister's tongue to say, "She is." Instead he
murmured, "Is that why you were doubting me? Think I'm apt to fall in
love with this charming lady?"

"No," Doris said thoughtfully. "It wasn't anything concrete like that.
It's a feeling, a mood, I suppose. And it's silly for me to say things
like that. If you grow sorry you married me, if you fall in love with
another woman, I'll know it without being told."

She pinched his cheek playfully and lay silent beside him. Hollister
watched the slow shift of the moonbeams across the foot of the bed,
thinking, his mind darting sketchily from incident to incident of the
past, peering curiously into the misty future, until at last he grew
aware by her drooped eyelashes and regular breathing that Doris was
asleep.

He grew drowsy himself. His eyelids grew heavy. Presently he was
asleep also and dreaming of a fantastic struggle in which Myra
Bland--transformed into a vulture-like creature with a fierce beaked
face and enormous strength--tore him relentlessly from the arms of his
wife.




CHAPTER XIII


From day to day and from week to week, apprehending mistily that he
was caught in and carried along by a current--a slow but irresistible
movement of events--Hollister pursued the round of his daily life as
if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had
done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of
the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a
chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his
hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true
course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the
perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not
so sure of untroubled passage. But mostly he did not think of these
potential dangers.

He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living. The
idea of poverty chafed him. He had once been a considerable toad in a
sizable puddle. He had inherited a competence and lost it, and power
to reclaim it was beyond him. He wasted no regrets upon the loss of
that material security, although he sometimes wondered how Myra had
contrived to let such a sum slip through her fingers in a little over
two years. He assumed that she had done so. Otherwise she would not
be sitting on the bank of the Toba, waiting more or less passively for
her husband to step into a dead man's shoes.

That was, in effect, Bland's situation. He was an Englishman of good
family, accustomed to a definite social standing, accustomed to money
derived from a source into which he never troubled to inquire. He had
never worked. He never would work, not in the sense of performing any
labor as a means of livelihood. He had a small income,--fifty or sixty
dollars a month. When he was thirty he would come into certain
property and an income of so many thousand pounds a year. He and his
wife could not subsist in any town on the quarterly dole he received.
That was why they had come to live in that cabin on the Toba River.
Bland hunted. He fished. To him the Toba valley served well enough as
a place to rusticate. Any place where game animals and sporting fish
abounded satisfied him temperamentally.

He had done his "bit" in the war. When he came into his money, they
would go "home." He was placidly sure of himself, of his place in the
general scheme of things. He was suffering from temporary
embarrassment, that was all. It was a bit rough on Myra, but it would
be all right by and by.

So much filtered into Hollister's ears and understanding before long.
Archie Lawanne came back downstream with two grizzly pelts, and
Hollister met Bland for the first time. He appraised Bland with some
care,--this tall, ruddy Englishman who had supplanted him in a woman's
affections, and who, unless Hollister's observation had tricked him,
was in a fair way to be himself supplanted.

For Hollister was the unwilling spectator of a drama to which he could
not shut his eyes. Nor could he sit back in the role of cynical
audience, awaiting in cushioned ease the climax of the play and the
final exit of the actors.

Mills was the man. Whether he was more than a potential lover, whether
Myra in her _ennui_, her hunger for a new sensation--whatever
unsatisfied longings led her to exercise upon men the power of her
undeniable attraction--had now given her heart into Charlie Mills'
keeping, Hollister of course neither knew nor cared.

But he did know that they met now and then, that Mills seemed to have
some curious knowledge of when Bland was far afield. Mills could be
trusted to appear on the flat in the evening or on a Sunday, if Myra
came to see Doris.

He speculated idly upon this sometimes. Myra he knew well enough, or
thought he did. He began to regard Mills with a livelier interest, to
talk to the man, to draw him out, to discover the essential man under
the outward seeming. He was not slow to discover that Mills was
something more than so much bone and sinew which could be applied
vigorously to an axe or a saw.

Hollister's speculations took a new turn when Archie Lawanne and
Bland came back from the bear hunt. For Lawanne did not go out. He
pitched a tent on the flat below Hollister's and kept one Siwash to
cook for him. He made that halt to rest up, to stretch and dry his
bear-skins. But long after these trophies were cured, he still
remained. He was given to roaming up and down the valley. He extended
his acquaintance to the settlement farther down, taking observation of
an earnest attempt at cooeperative industry. He made himself at home
equally with the Blands and the Hollisters.

And when July was on them, with hot, hazy sunshine in which berries
ripened and bird and insect life filled the Toba with a twitter and a
drone, when the smoke of distant forest fires drifted like pungent fog
across the hills, Hollister began to wonder if the net Myra seemed
unconsciously to spread for men's feet had snared another victim.

This troubled him a little. He liked Lawanne. He knew nothing about
him, who he was, where he came from, what he did. Nevertheless there
had arisen between them a curious fellowship. There seemed to reside
in the man a natural quality of uprightness, a moral stoutness of soul
that lifted him above petty judgments. One did not like or dislike
Lawanne for what he did or said so much as for what he suggested as
being inherent within himself.

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