The Hidden Places

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

  CHAPTER XII

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

  For his own part he found himself eager for work, taking a pleasurefar beyond his expectation in what he had set himself to do, here inthe valley of the Toba. He could shut his eyes and see the whole planwork out in ordered sequence,--the bolt chute repaired, the ancientcedars felled, sawed into four-foot lengths, split to a size, piled bythe chute and all its lateral branches. Then, when a certain quantitywas ready, they would be cast one after another into that trough ofsmooth poles which pitched sharply down from the heart of his timberto the river. One after another they would gather way, slipping down,faster and faster, to dive at last with a great splash into thestream, to accumulate behind the confining boom-sticks until they wererafted to the mill, where they would be sawn into thin sheets to maketight roofs on houses in distant towns. And for the sweat that laborwith axe and saw wrung from his body, and for the directing power ofhis brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him tosatisfy his needs. For the first time in his life Hollister perceivedboth the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into whichmodern industry has grown. In distant towns other men made machinery,textiles, boots, furniture. On inland plains where no trees grew, mensowed and reaped the wheat which passed through the hands of themiller and the baker and became a nation's daily bread. The axe in hishand was fashioned from metallic ore dug by other men out of thebowels of the earth. He was fed and clothed by unseen hands. And inreturn he, as they did, levied upon nature's store of raw material andpaid for what he got with timber, rough shaped to its ultimate uses bythe 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 bepoor. He had known business as a process in which a man used money tomake more money. He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal withtokens rather than with things themselves. Now he found himself at theprimitive source of things and he learned, a little to hisastonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work. He beganto understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure ofpure achievement even in simple things.

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

  Within forty-eight hours she had the run of the house and the clearedportion of land surrounding. She could put her hand on every item ofher 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 stapleslay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchenshelves. She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and boxand stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the riverbank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a greatspruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exactdiagram of the whole and with which as a guide she could move withinthose limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself.

  He never ceased to wonder at the mysterious delicacies of touch andhearing which served her so well in place of sight. But he acceptedthe fact, and once she had mastered her surroundings Hollister wasfree to take up his own work, no matter where it led him. Dorisinsisted that he should. She had a sturdy soul that seldom leaned andnever thought of clinging. She could laugh, a deep-throated chucklinglaugh, and sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she could go about the housesinging. And if now and then she rebelled with a sudden, furiousresentment against the long night that shut her in, that, as she saidherself, was just like a small black cloud passing swiftly across theface of the sun.

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

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

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

  And she laughed back:

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

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

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

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

  Hollister himself now took a hand at cutting cedar. Each morning heclimbed that steep slope to the works, and each night he came trudgingdown; and morning and night he would pause at a point where the trailled 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 housefarther 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; moreoften no one stirred. But that was as near as the Blands had come ineight weeks. Hollister had an unspoken hope that they would remaindistant, no matter that Doris occasionally wondered about this womanwho lived around the river's curve, what she was like and when shewould meet her. Hollister knew nothing of Bland, nothing of Myra. Hedid not wish to know. It did not matter in the least, he assuredhimself. He was dead and Myra was married. All that old past was as abook long out of print. It could not possibly matter if by chance theycame in contact. Yet he had a vague feeling that it did matter,--afeeling for which he could not account. He was not afraid; he had noreason to be afraid. Nevertheless he gazed sometimes from the clifftop down on the cabin where Bland and Myra lived, and somethingstirred him so that he wished them gone.

  He came off the hill one evening in the middle of June to find a canoedrawn up on the beach, two Siwashes puttering over a camp fire, and atall, wirily slender, fa
ir-haired man who might have been anywherebetween 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 indifferentto what people thought of his face, because what they thought nolonger had power to hurt him, to make him feel that sickeningdepression, to make him feel himself kin to those sinners who werethrust into the outer darkness. Moreover, he knew that some peoplegrew used to the wreckage of his features. That had been hisexperience with his two woodsmen. At first they looked at him askance.Now they seemed as indifferent to his disfigurement as they were tothe 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 atHollister, and his look seemed to say, "I know your face is a hell ofa sight, but I am not disturbed by it, and I don't want you to think Iam disturbed." Behind the ragged mask of his scars Hollister smiled atthis fancy. Nevertheless he accepted his interpretation of that lookas a reality and found himself moved by a curious feeling offriendliness for this stranger whom he had never seen before, whom hemight never see again,--for that was the way of casual travelers upand 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 theymoved on into the hushed places that swallowed them up.

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

  "I was told of an Englishman named Bland who is quite a hunter. Istopped in here, thinking this was his place and that I might get himto 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 beanybody about when I passed. It doesn't matter much, anyway," helaughed. "The farther I get into this country, the less keen I am tohunt. It's good enough just to loaf around and look at."

  Lawanne had supper with them. Hollister asked him, not only as amatter of courtesy but with a genuine feeling that he wanted this manto break bread with them. He could not quite understand that suddenwarmth of feeling for a stranger. He had never in his life been givento impulsive friendliness. The last five years had not strengthenedhis belief in friendships. He had seen too many fail under stress.But he liked this man. They sat outside after supper and Doris joinedthem there. Lawanne was not talkative. He was given to long silencesin 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 youreyes all the time?" he asked once. "It's like a fairyland to me. Imust see a lot of this country before I go away. And I came here quiteby chance."

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

  "Oh," Lawanne turned to her, "You think so? You don't perceive theGreat 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 myselfhelpless in the inexorable grip of destiny. I should always beperfectly passive."

  "If you tried to do that you could not remain passive long. Theunreckonable element of chance would still operate to make you do thisor 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, somethingelse to another. It's too abstract to account for anything. Life's apuzzle no one ever solves, because the factors are never constant.When we try to account for this and that we find no fixed law, nothingbut 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 happeningdoes this or that to us. If we had done something else it would all bedifferent."

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

  Hollister nodded. He was thinking of this factor of chance. He himselfhad been a victim of it. He had profited by it. And he wondered whatvagaries of chance were still to bestow happiness or inflict sufferingupon him in spite of his most earnest effort to achieve mastery overcircumstances. He felt latterly that he had a firm grip on theimmediate future. Yet who could tell?

  Dusk began to close on the valley while the far, high crests of themountains still gleamed under a crimson sky. Deep shadows filled everygorge and canyon, crept up and up until only the snowy crestsglimmered in the night, ghostly-silver against a sky speckled withstars. The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of thenight, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfallsroared over rocky precipices. The two Indians attending Lawannesquatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank. Downstream ayellow 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 andsee him in the morning. I am not very keen on two or three weeks alonein 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 hehad too much work on hand. Neither did he wish to leave Doris. Notbecause it might be difficult for her to manage alone. It was simplyan inner reluctance to be separated from her. She was becoming a vitalpart of him. To go away from her for days or weeks except under thespur of some compelling necessity was a prospect that did not pleasehim. That which had first drawn them together grew stronger. Love, themysterious fascination of sex, the perfect accord of thewell-mated--whatever it was it grew stronger. The world outside ofthem held less and less significance. Sometimes they talked of that,wondered about it, wondered if it were natural for a man and a womanto become so completely absorbed in each other, to attain thatsingular oneness. They wondered if it would last. But whether itshould 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 whenHollister climbed the hill to his work.

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

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

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

  Hollister engaged him. By his dress, by his manner, Hollister knewthat he was at home in the woods. He was young, sturdily built,handsome in a swarthy way. There was about him a slightly familiarair. 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 believedhe 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 itover. "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 fromwhence he could look--and always did look with a slight sense ofirritation--down on Bland's cabin as well as his own, did he recallclearly where and when he had seen Charlie Mills.

  Mills was the man who sat looking at Myra across the table that wintermorning when Hollister was suffering from the brief madness whichbrought him to Bland's cabin with a desperate project in hisdisordered mind.

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

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

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

  Nothing could have been more commonplace, more uneventful than thatmeeting. Doris introduced her husband. They were all at their ease.Myra glanced once at his face and thereafter looked away. But her flowof small talk, the conversational stop-gap of the woman accustomed tosocial amenities, went on placidly. They were strangers, meeting forthe 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 firstand 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 bythe back door. He felt a relief. He had come through the first testcasually enough. A slightly sardonic grimace wrinkled his tight-lippedmouth. There was a grim sort of humor in the situation. Those three,whose lives had got involved in such a tangle, forgathered under thesame roof in that lonely valley, each more or less a victim ofuncomprehended forces both within and exterior to themselves. Yet itwas simple enough. Each, in common with all humanity, pursued theelusive shadow of happiness. The diverging paths along which theypursued it had brought them to this common point.

  Hollister soaped and scrubbed to clean his hands and face of the sweatand 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 ofstrained honey, looked down at him through an open window. Her blueeyes rested on him, searchingly, he thought, with a curious appraisal,as if he were something to be noted and weighed and measured by theyardstick of her estimation of men. If she only knew, Hollisterreflected sardonically, with his face buried in the towel, what acomplete and intimate knowledge she had of him!

  Looking up suddenly, his eyes met hers fixed unwaveringly upon him andfor an instant his heart stood still with the reasonless convictionthat she did know, she must know, that she could not escape knowing.There was a quality of awareness in her steady gaze that terrified himfor a moment by its implication, which made him feel as if he stoodover 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 dimplingsmile which gave him a strange feeling to see again. Certainly hisimagination was playing him tricks. How could she know? And what wouldshe care if she did know,--so long as he made no claims, so long as helet the dead past lie in its grave. For Myra was as deeply concernedto have done with their old life as he. He rested upon that assumptionand went into the house and sat down to his supper.

  Later, towards sundown, Myra went home. Hollister watched her vanishamong the thickets, thinking that she too had changed,--as greatly ashimself. She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone over nightin a house with telephones and servants, on a street brilliantlylighted. Now she could apparently face the loneliness of thosesolitudes without uneasiness. But war and the aftermath of war hadtaught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must,and he suspected that women were not greatly different. He understoodthat after all he had never really known Myra any more than she hadknown him. Externally they had achieved knowledge of each otherthrough sight, speech, physical contact, comprehension of each other'shabits. But their real selves, the essence of their being, the shadowyinner self where motives and passions took form and gathered forceuntil they were translated for good or evil into forthrightaction,--these they had not known at all.

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

  He felt ashamed of that thought as soon as it formed in his mind. Andbeing ashamed, he saw and understood that he still harbored a littlebitterness against Myra. He did not wish to bestow bitterness or anyother emotion upon her. He wanted her to remain completely outside thescope of his feelings. He would have to try, he perceived, tocultivate a complete indifference to her, to what she did, to whereshe went, to insulate himself completely against her. Because he wascommitted to other enterprises, and chiefly because, as he said tohimself, he would not exchange a single brown strand of DorisCleveland'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 tobed. Its pale beams laid a silver square upon the dusky floor of theirroom. 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 everwish you had a wife who could see? Aren't you _ever_ sorry?"

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

  She lay thoughtful for a minute.

  "Sometimes I wonder," she said at last. "Sometimes I feel that I mustreassure myself that you are contented with me. When we come incontact with a woman like Mrs. Bland, for instance--Tell me, Bob, isshe 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 slightemphasis on the last two words. "She is a very interesting talker."

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

  Doris laughed.

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

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

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

  It was on the tip of Hollister's tongue to say, "She is." Instead hemurmured, "Is that why you were doubting me? Think I'm apt to fall inlove 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 thingslike that. If you grow sorry you married me, if you fall in love withanother woman, I'll know it without being told."

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

  He grew drowsy himself. His eyelids grew heavy. Presently he wasasleep also and dreaming of a fantastic struggle in which MyraBland--transformed into a vulture-like creature with a fierce beakedface and enormous strength--tore him relentlessly from the arms of hiswife.