The Hidden Places Part 17

Away down the river, now that dark had fallen, the light in Bland's house shone yellow. There was a red, glowing spot on the river bank.

That would be Lawanne's camp. Hollister shut the door on the chill October night and turned back to his easy-chair by the stove. Doris had finished her work. She sat at the piano, her fingers picking out some slow, languorous movement that he did not know, but which soothed him like a lullaby.

Vigorously he dissented from Lawanne's philosophy of enslavement. He, Hollister, was a free man. Yes, he was free,--but only when he could shut the door on the past, only when he could shut away all the world just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold frosty night, his neighbors and his men, by the simple closing of a door. But he could not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome possibility. He could say to himself that it was only an impression; that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity. But he could not help it. Life was like that. No man stood alone. No man could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his fellows. Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being. Who was he to escape?

No, Hollister reflected, he could not insulate himself and Doris against this environment, against these people. They would have to take things as they came and be thankful they were no worse.

Doris left the piano. She sat on a low stool beside him, leaned her brown head against him.

"It won't be so long before I have to go to town, Bob," she said dreamily. "I hope the winter is open so that the work goes on well.

And sometimes I hope that the snow shuts everything down, so that you'll be there with me. I'm not very consistent, am I?"

"You suit me," he murmured. "And I'll be there whether the work goes on or not."

"What an element of the unexpected, the unforeseen, is at work all the time," she said. "A year ago you and I didn't even know of each other's existence. I used to sit and wonder what would become of me.

It was horrible sometimes to go about in the dark, existing like a plant in a cellar, longing for all that a woman longs for if she is a woman and knows herself. And you were in pretty much the same boat."

"Worse," Hollister muttered, "because I sulked and brooded and raged against what had overtaken me. Yet if I hadn't reacted so violently, I should never have come here to hide away from what hurt me. So I wouldn't have met you. That would almost make one think there is something in the destiny that you and Lawanne smile at."

"Destiny and chance: two names for the same thing, and that thing wholly unaccountable, beyond the scope of human foresight," Doris replied. "Things happen; that's all we can generally say. We don't know why. Speaking of Lawanne, I wonder if he really does intend to stay here this winter and write a book?"

"He says so."

"He'll be company for us," she reflected. "He's clever and a little bit cynical, but I like him. He'll help to keep us from getting bored with each other."

"Do you think there is any danger of that?" Hollister inquired.

She tweaked his ear playfully.

"People do, you know. But I hardly think we shall. Not for a year or two, anyway. Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale odor of uneventful, routine, domestic life. Then _you_ may."

"Huh," he grunted derisively, "catch me. I know what I want and what contents me. We'll beat the game handily; and we'll beat it together.

"Why, good Lord," he cried sharply, "what would be the good of all this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and planning and antic.i.p.ating things? Nearly every man, I believe," he concluded thoughtfully, "keeps his gait because of some woman. There is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some woman--past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that."

"To keep him," Doris laughed, "in the condition a poet once described as:

'This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing Toward the gloom.'"

They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom, of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.

When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.

That was beyond their comprehension.

But Hollister thought he understood.

Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the vantage of height and saw Lawanne's winter quarters already taking form on the river bank, midway between his own place and Bland's. It grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a shake roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its density, in its variety of shrub and fern.

For a month after that a lull seemed to come upon the slow march of events towards some unknown destiny,--of which Hollister nursed a strange prescience that now rose strong in him and again grew so tenuous that he would smile at it for a fancy. Yet in that month there was no slack in the routine of affairs. The machinery of Carr's mill revolved through each twenty-four hours. Up on the hill Hollister's men felled trees with warning shouts and tumultuous crashings. They attacked the p.r.o.ne trunks with axe and saw and iron wedges, Lilliputians rending the body of a fallen giant. The bolt piles grew; they were hurled swiftly down the chute into the dwindling river, rafted to the mill. All this time the price of shingles in the open market rose and rose, like a tide strongly on the flood, of which no man could prophesy the high-water mark. Money flowed to Hollister's pockets, to the pockets of his men. The value of his standing timber grew by leaps and bounds. And always Sam Carr, who had no economic illusions, urged Hollister on, predicting before long the inevitable reaction.

The days shortened. Through the long evenings Hollister's house became a sort of social center. Lawanne would come in after supper, sometimes inert, dumb, to sit in a corner smoking a pipe,--again filled with a curious exhilaration, to talk unceasingly of everything that came into his mind, to thump ragtime on the piano and sing a variety of inconsequential songs in a velvety baritone. Myra came often. So did Bland. So did Charlie Mills. Many evenings they were all there together. As the weeks went winging by, Doris grew less certain on her feet, more p.r.o.ne to spend her time sitting back in a deep arm chair, and Myra began to play for them, to sing for them--to come to the house in the day and help Doris with her work.

The snow began at last, drifting down out of a windless sky. Upon that, with a sudden fear lest a great depth should fall, lest the river should freeze and make exit difficult, Hollister took his wife to town. This was about the middle of November. Some three weeks later a son was born to them.

CHAPTER XV

When they came back to the Toba, Hollister brought in a woman to relieve Doris of housework and help her take care of the baby, although Doris was jealous of that privilege. She was a typical mother in so far as she held the conviction that no one could attend so well as herself the needs of that small, red-faced, l.u.s.ty-lunged morsel of humanity.

And as if some definite mark had been turned, the winter season closed upon the valley in a gentle mood. The driving rains of the fall gave way to January snows. But the frost took no more than a tentative nibble now and then. Far up on the mountains the drifts piled deep, and winter mists blew in clammy wraiths across the shoulders of the hills. From those high, cold levels, the warmth of day and the frosts that gnawed in chill darkness started intermittent slides rumbling, growling as they slipped swiftly down steep slopes, to end with a crash at the bottom of the hill or in the depths of a gorge. But the valley itself suffered no extremes of weather. The river did not freeze. It fell to a low level, but not so low that Hollister ever failed to shift his cedar bolts from chute mouth to mill. There was seldom so much snow that his crew could not work. There was growing an appreciable hole in the heart of his timber limit. In another year there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few hundred stumps.

With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur in Hollister's affairs. One day succeeded another in placid routine.

The work went on with clock-like precision. It had pa.s.sed beyond a one-man struggle for economic foothold; it no longer held for him the feeling of a forlorn hope which he led against the forces of the wilderness. It was like a ball which he had started rolling down hill.

It kept on, whether he tended it or not. If he chose to take his rifle and go seeking venison, if he elected to sit by his fire reading a book, the cedars fell, their brown trunks were sawn and split, the bolts came sliding down the chute in reckonable, profitable quant.i.ties, to the gain of himself and his men.

Mills remained, moody, working with that strange dynamic energy, sparing of words except that now and then he would talk to Hollister in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed nothing. Mills always seemed on the point of crying out some deep woe that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of speech,--but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic hint, bestow some malediction upon life in general. And he never slackened the dizzy pace of his daily labor, except upon those few occasions when from either Hollister or Lawanne he got a book that held him. Then he would stop work and sit in the bunk house and read till the last page was turned. But mostly he cut and piled cedar as if he tried to drown out in the sweat of his body whatever fever burned within.

Hollister observed that Mills no longer had much traffic with the Blands. For weeks at a time he did not leave the bolt camp except to come down to Hollister's house.

Lawanne seemed to be a favored guest now, at Bland's. Lawanne worked upon his book, but by fits and starts, working when he did work with a feverish concentration. He had a Chinese boy for house-servant. He might be found at noon or at midnight sprawled in a chair beside a pot-bellied stove, scrawling in an ungainly hand across sheets of yellow paper. He had no set hours for work. When he did work, when he had the vision and the fit was on and words came easily, chance callers met with scant courtesy. But he had great stores of time to spare, for all that. Some of it he spent at Bland's, waging an interminable contest at cribbage with Bland, coming up now and then with the Blands to spend an evening at Hollister's.

"It's about a man who wrecked his life by systematically undermining his own illusions about life," he answered one day Hollister's curious inquiry as to what the new book was about, "and of how finally a very a.s.siduously cultivated illusion made him quite happy at last. Sound interesting?"

"How could he deliberately cultivate an illusion?" Doris asked. "If one's intelligence ever cla.s.sifies a thing as an illusion, no conscious effort will ever turn it into a reality."

"Oh, I didn't say _he_ cultivated the illusion," Lawanne laughed.

"Besides, do you really think that illusions are necessary to happiness?" Doris persisted.

"To some people," Lawanne declared. "But let's not follow up that philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wade ash.o.r.e. We'll say whatever is is right, and let it go at that. It will be quite all right for you to offer me a cup of tea, if your kitchen mechanic will condescend. That c.h.i.n.k of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun, trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner. So I throw myself on your mercy."

"This man Bland is the dizzy limit," Lawanne observed, when the tea and some excellent sandwiches presently appeared. "He bought another rifle the other day--paid forty-five bones for it. That makes four he has now. And they have to manage like the deuce to keep themselves in grub from one remittance day to the next. He's a study. You seldom run across such a combination of physical perfection and child-like irresponsibility. He was complaining about his limited income the other day--'ink.u.m' in his inimitable p.r.o.nunciation. I suggested that right here in this valley he could earn a considerable number of shekels if he cared to work. He merely smiled amiably and said he didn't think he cared to take on a laborer's job. It left a chap no time for himself, you know. I suppose he'll vegetate here till he comes into that money he's waiting for. He refers to that as if it were something which pertained to him by divine right, something which freed him from any obligation to make any effort to overcome the sordid way in which they live at present."

"He doesn't consider it sordid," Hollister said. "Work is what he considers sordid--and there is something to be said for his viewpoint, at that. He enjoys himself tramping around with a gun, spending an afternoon to catch half a dozen six-inch trout."

"But it _is_ sordid," Lawanne persisted. "Were you ever in their house?"

Hollister shook his head.

"It isn't as comfortable as your men's bunk house. They have boxes for chairs, a rickety table, a stove about ready to fall to pieces. There are cracks in the walls and a roof that a rat could crawl through--or there would be if Mrs. Bland didn't go about stuffing them up with moss and old newspapers. Why can't a gentleman, an athlete and a sportsman make his quarters something a little better than a Siwash would be contented with? Especially if he has prevailed on a woman to share his joys and sorrows. Some of these days Mr. Bland will wake up and find his wife has gone off with some enterprising chap who is less c.o.c.ksure and more ambitious."

"Would you blame her?" Doris asked casually.

"Bless your soul, no," Lawanne laughed. "If I were a little more romantic, I might run away with her myself. What a tremendous jar that would give Bland's exasperating complacency. I believe he's a hang-over from that prehistoric time when men didn't believe that any woman had a soul--that a woman was something in which a man acquired a definite property right merely by marrying her."

Doris chuckled.