The Hidden Places Part 19

Borrowing with Jim is just like asking for a smoke. He's queer. If he made a bet with you and lost he'd pay up promptly, if he had to p.a.w.n his clothes and mine too. Borrowed money, however, seems to come in a different category. When this estate comes into his hands perhaps I shall be able to return some of this money that we wasted. I think that--and the fact that I'm just a little afraid to break away and face the world alone--is chiefly what keeps me faithful to him now."

"Is it as bad as that?" Hollister asked.

"Don't misunderstand me, Robin," she protested. "I'm not an abused wife or anything like that. He's perfectly satisfied, as complacent as an English gentleman can be in the enjoyment of possession. But he doesn't love me any more than I love him. He blandly a.s.sumes that love is only a polite term for something else. And I can't believe that--yet. Maybe I'm what Archie Lawanne calls a romantic sentimentalist, but there is something in me that craves from a man more than elementary pa.s.sion. I'm a woman; therefore my nature demands of a man that he be first of all a man. But that alone isn't enough.

I'm not just a something to be petted when the fit is on and then told in effect to run along and play. There must be men who have minds as well as bodies. There must be here and there a man who understands that a woman has all sorts of thoughts and feelings as well as s.e.x.

Meanwhile--I mark time. That's all."

"You appear," Hollister said a little grimly, "to have acquired certain definite ideas. It's a pity they didn't develop sooner."

"Ideas only develop out of experience," she said quietly. "And our pa.s.sions are born with us."

She rose, shaking free the snow that clung to her coat.

"I feel better for getting all that steam off my chest," she said.

"It's better, since we must live here, that you and I should not keep up this game of pretence between ourselves. Isn't it, Robin?"

"Perhaps. I don't know." The old doubts troubled Hollister. He was jealous of what he had attained, fearful of reviving the past, a little uncertain of this new turn.

"At any rate, you don't hold a grudge against me, do you?" Myra asked.

"You can afford to be indifferent now. You've found a mate, you're playing a man's part here. You're beating the game and getting some real satisfaction out of living. You can afford to be above a grudge against me."

"I don't hold any grudge," Hollister answered truthfully.

"I'm going down to the house, now," Myra said. "I wanted to talk to you openly, and I'm glad I did. I think and think sometimes until I feel like a rat in a trap. And you are the only one here I can really talk to. You've been through the mill and you won't misunderstand."

"Ah," he said. "Is Charlie Mills devoid of understanding, or Lawanne?"

She looked at him fixedly for a second.

"You are very acute," she observed. "Some time I may tell you about Charlie Mills. Certainly I'd never reveal my soul to Archie Lawanne.

He'd dissect it and gloat over it and a.n.a.lyze it in his next book. And neither of them will ever be quite able to abandon the idea that a creature like me is something to be pursued and captured."

She turned away. Hollister saw her go into the house. He could picture the two of them there together. Doris and Myra bending over young Robert, who was now beginning to lie with wide-open blue eyes, in which the light of innocent wonder, of curiosity, began to show, to wave his arms and grope with tiny, uncertain hands. Those two women together hovering over his child,--one who was still legally his wife, the other his wife in reality.

How the world would p.r.i.c.k up its donkey ears--even the little cosmos of the Toba valley--if it knew. But of course no one would ever know.

Hollister was far beyond any contrition for his acts. The end justified the means,--doubly justified it in his case, for he had had no choice. Harsh material factors had rendered the decision for him.

Hollister was willing now to abide by that decision. To him it seemed good, the only good thing he had laid hold of since the war had turned his world upside down and inside out.

He went about his work mechanically, deep in thought. His mind persisted in measuring, weighing, turning over all that Myra had said, while his arms pushed and heaved and twisted the pike pole, thrusting the blocks of cedar into an orderly arrangement within the boom-sticks.

CHAPTER XVI

Hollister had gone down to Lawanne's with a haunch of venison. This neighborly custom of sharing meat, when it is to be had for the killing, prevails in the northern woods. Officially there were game seasons to be observed. But the close season for deer sat lightly on men in a region three days' journey from a butcher shop. They shot deer when they needed meat. The law of necessity overrode the legal p.r.o.nouncement in this matter of food, as it often did in other ways.

While Hollister, having duly pleased Lawanne's China-boy by this quarter of venison, sat talking to Lawanne, Charlie Mills came in to return a book.

"Did you get anything out of that?" Lawanne asked.

"I got a bad taste in my mouth," Mills replied. "It reads like things that happen. It's too blamed true to be pleasant. A man shouldn't be like that, he shouldn't think too much--especially about other people.

He ought to be like a bull--go around snorting and pawing up the earth till he gets his belly full, and then lie down and chew his cud."

Lawanne smiled.

"You've hit on something, Mills," he said. "The man who thinks the least and acts the most is the happy man, the contented man, because he's nearly always pleased with himself. If he fails at anything he can usually excuse himself on the grounds of somebody else's d.a.m.nfoolishness. If he succeeds he complacently a.s.sumes that he did it out of his own greatness. Action--that's the thing. The contemplative, a.n.a.lytical mind is the mind that suffers. Man was a happy animal until he began to indulge in abstract thinking. And now that the burden of thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to his own disadvantage."

"I'll say he does," Mills agreed. "But what can he do? I've watched things happen. I've read what some pretty good thinkers say. It don't seem to me a man's got much choice. He thinks or he don't think, according to the way he's made. When you figure how a man comes to be what he is, why he's nothing but the product of forces that have been working on all the generations of his kind. It don't leave a man much choice about how he thinks or feels. If he could just grin and say 'It doesn't matter', he'd be all right. But he can't, unless he's made that way. And since he isn't responsible for the way he's made, what the h.e.l.l can he do?"

"You're on the high road to wisdom when you can look an abstraction like that in the face," Lawanne laughed. "What you say is true. But there's one item you overlook. A man is born with, say, certain predispositions. Once he recognizes and cla.s.sifies them, he can begin to exercise his will, his individual determination. If our existence was ordered in advance by destiny, dictated by some all-conscious, omnipotent intelligence, we might as well sit down and fold our hands.

But we still have a chance. Free will is an exploded theory, in so far as it purposes to explain human action in a general sense. Men are biologically different. In some weakness is inherent, in others determination. The weak man succ.u.mbs when he is beset. The strong man struggles desperately. The man who consciously grasps and understands his own weaknesses can combat an evil which will destroy a man of lesser perception, lesser will; because the intelligent man will avoid what he can't master. He won't b.u.t.t his head against a stone wall either intellectually, emotionally, or physically. If the thing is beyond him and he knows it is beyond him, he will not waste himself in vain effort. He will adapt himself to what he can't change. The man who can't do that must suffer. He may even perish. And to cling to life is the prime law. That's why it is a fundamental instinct that makes a man want to run when he can no longer fight."

Hollister said nothing. He was always a good listener. He preferred to hear what other men said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out his own ideas. Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to a.s.sume the oracular vein, to a.n.a.lyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him speak as he did now, to Lawanne.

Mills walked back through the flat with Hollister. They trudged silently through the soft, new snow, the fresh fall which had enabled Hollister to track and kill the big deer early that morning. The sun was setting. Its last beam struck flashing on the white hills. The back of the winter was broken, the March storms nearly at an end. In a little while now, Hollister thought, the buds would be bursting, there would be a new feel in the air, new fragrant smells arising in the forest, spring freshets in the rivers, the wild duck flying north.

Time was on the wing, in ceaseless flight.

Mills broke into his reflections.

"Come up in the morning, will you, and check in what cedar I have piled? I'm going to pull out."

"All right." Hollister looked his surprise at the abrupt decision.

"I'm sorry you're going."

Mills walked a few paces.

"Maybe it won't do me any good," he said. "I wonder if Lawanne is right? It just struck me that he is. Anyway, I'm going to try his recipe. Maybe I can kid myself into thinking everything's jake, that the world's a fine sort of place and everything is always lovely. If I could just myself think that--maybe a change of scenery will do the trick. Lawanne's clever, isn't he? Nothing would fool him very long."

"I don't know," Hollister said. "Lawanne's a man with a pretty keen mind and a lively imagination. He's more interested in why people do things than in what they do. But I dare say he might fool himself as well as the rest of us. For we all do, now and then."

"I guess it's the way a man's made," Mills reflected. "But it's rather a new idea that a man can sort of make himself over if he puts his mind to it. Still, it sounds reasonable. I'm going to give it a try.

I've got to."

But he did not say why he must. Nor did Hollister ask him. He thought he knew--and he wondered at the strange tenacity of this emotion which Mills could not shake off. A deep-rooted pa.s.sion for some particular woman, an emotion which could not be crushed, was no mystery to Hollister. He only wondered that it should be so vital a force in the life of a man.

Mills came down from the hill camp to settle his account with Hollister in the morning. He carried his blankets and his clothes in a bulky pack on his st.u.r.dy shoulders. When he had his money, he rose to go, to catch the coastwise steamer which touched the Inlet's head that afternoon. Hollister helped him sling the pack, opened the door for him,--and they met Myra Bland setting foot on the porch step.

They looked at each other, those two. Hollister knew that for a second neither was conscious of him. Their eyes met in a lingering fixity, each with a question that did not find utterance.

"I'm going out," Mills said at last. A curious huskiness seemed to thicken his tongue. "This time for good, I hope. So-long."

"Good-by, Charlie," Myra said.

She put out her hand. But either Mills did not see it or he shrank from contact, for he pa.s.sed her and strode away, bent a little forward under his pack. Myra turned to watch him. When she faced about again there was a mistiness in her eyes, a curious, pathetic expression of pity on her face. She went on into the house with scarcely a glance at Hollister.

In another week spring had ousted winter from his seasonal supremacy.

The snow on the lower levels vanished under a burst of warm rain. The rain ceased and the clouds parted to let through a sun fast growing to full strength. Buds swelled and burst on willow and alder. The soil, warmed by the sun, sent up the first shoots of fern and gra.s.ses, a myriad fragile green tufts that would presently burst into flowers.