The Hidden Places Part 20

The Toba rose day by day, pouring down a swollen flood of snow-water to the sea.

And life went on as it always did. Hollister's crew, working on a bonus for work performed, kept the bolts of cedar gliding down the chute. The mill on the river below swallowed up the blocks and spewed them out in bound bundles of roof covering. Lawanne kept close to his cabin, deep in the throes of creation, manifesting strange vagaries of moroseness or exhilaration which in his normal state he cynically ascribed to the artistic temperament. Bland haunted the creeks where the trout lurked, tramped the woods gun in hand, a dog at his heels, oblivious to everything but his own primitive, purposeless pleasures.

"I shouldn't care to settle here for good," he once said to Hollister.

"But really, you know, it's not half bad. If money wasn't so dashed scarce. It's positively cruel for an estate to be so tied up that a man can't get enough to live decently on."

Bland irritated Hollister sometimes, but often amused him by his calm a.s.surance that everything was always well in the world of J.

Carrington Bland. Hollister could imagine him in Norfolk and gaiters striding down an English lane, concerned only with his stable, his kennels, the land whose rentals made up his income. There were no problems on Bland's horizon. He would sit on Hollister's porch with a pipe sagging one corner of his mouth and gaze placidly at the river, the hills, the far stretch of the forest,--and Hollister knew that to Bland it was so much water, so much up-piled rock and earth, so much growing wood. He would say to Myra: "My dear, it's time we were going home", or "I think I shall have a go at that big pool in Graveyard Creek to-morrow", or "I say, Hollister, if this warm weather keeps on, the bears will be coming out soon, eh?", and between whiles he would sit silently puffing at his pipe, a big, heavy, handsome man, wearing soiled overalls and a shabby coat with a curious dignity. He spoke of "family" and "breeding" as if these were sacred possessions which conferred upon those who had them complete immunity from the sort of effort that common men must make.

"He really believes that," Myra said to Hollister once. "No Bland ever had to work. They have always had property--they have always been superior people. Jim's an anachronism, really. He belongs in the Middle Ages when the barons did the fighting and the commoners did the work. Generations of riding in the bandwagon has made it almost impossible for a man like that to plan intelligently and work hard merely for the satisfaction of his needs."

"I wonder what he'd do if there was no inheritance to fall back on?"

Hollister asked.

"I don't know--and I really don't care much," Myra said indifferently.

"I shouldn't be concerned, probably, if that were the case."

Hollister frowned.

"Why do you go on living with him, if that's the way you feel?"

"You seem to forget," she replied, "that there are very material reasons! And you must remember that I don't dislike Jim. I have got so that I regard him as a big, good-natured child of whom one expects very little."

"How in heaven's name did a man like that catch your fancy in the first place?" Hollister asked. He had never ceased to wonder about that. Myra looked at him with a queer lowering of her eyes.

"What's the use of telling you?" she exclaimed petulantly. "You ought to understand without telling. What was it drove you into Doris Cleveland's arms a month after you met her? You couldn't know her--nor she you. You were lonely and moody, and something about her appealed to you. You took a chance--and drew a prize in the lottery. Well, I took a chance also--and drew a blank. I'm a woman and he's a man, a very good sort of a man for any woman who wants nothing more of a man than that he shall be a handsome, agreeable, well-mannered animal.

That's about what Jim is. I may also be good-looking, agreeable, well-mannered--a fairly desirable woman to all outward appearances--but I'm something besides, which Jim doesn't suspect and couldn't understand if he did. But I didn't learn that soon enough."

"When did you learn it?" Hollister asked. He felt that he should not broach these intimately personal matters with Myra, but there was a fascination in listening to her reveal complexes of character which he had never suspected, which he should have known.

"I've been learning for some time; but I think Charlie Mills gave me the most striking lesson," Myra answered thoughtfully. "You can imagine I was blue and dissatisfied when we came here, to bury ourselves alive because we could live cheaply, and he could hunt and fish to his heart's content while he waited to step into a dead man's shoes. A wife's place, you see, is in the home, and home is wherever and whatever her lord and master chooses to make it. I was quite conscious by that time that I didn't love Jim Bland. But he was a gentleman. He didn't offend me. I was simply indifferent--satiated, if you like. I used to sit wondering how I could have ever imagined myself going on year after year, contented and happy, with a man like Jim. Yet I had been quite sure of that--just as once I had been quite sure you were the only man who could ever be much of a figure on my horizon. Do you think I'm facile and shallow? I'm not really. I'm not just naturally a sensation-seeker. I hate promiscuity. _He_ convinced me of that."

She made a swift gesture towards Mills' vanishing figure.

"I ran across him first in London. He was convalescing from a leg wound. That was shortly after I was married, and I was helping entertain these stray dogs from the front. It was quite the fashion.

People took them out motoring and so on. I remembered Mills out of all the others because he was different from the average Tommy, quiet without being self-conscious. I remembered thinking often what a pity nice boys like that must be killed and crippled by the thousand. When we came here, Charlie was working down at the settlement. Somehow I was awfully glad to see him--any friendly face would have been welcome those first months before I grew used to these terrible silences, this complete isolation which I had never before known.

"Well, the upshot was that he fell in love with me, and for awhile--for a little while--I thought I was experiencing a real affection at last, myself; a new love rising fine and true out of the ashes of old ones.

"And it frightened me. It made me stop and think. When he would stare at me with those sad eyes I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to go away with him to some distant place where no one knew me and begin life all over again. And I knew it wouldn't do. It would only be the same thing over again, because I'm made the way I am. I was beginning to see that it would take a good deal of a man to hold my fitful fancy very long.

Charlie's a nice boy. He's clean and sensitive, and I'm sure he'd be kind and good to any woman. Still, I knew it wouldn't do. Curious thing--all the while that my mind was telling me how my whole existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man--for Charlie Mills is as full of romantic illusions as a seventeen-year-old girl--at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. But I could never convince myself that it was anything more than s.e.x in me responding to the pa.s.sion that so deeply moved him. That suspicion became certainty at last. That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about myself."

"I think it was a dear lesson for him," Hollister said, remembering the man's moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which must have torn Mills. "You hurt him."

"I know it, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it," she said patiently. "There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly went away with him. I think he felt that I was yielding. But I was trying to be honest with myself and with him. With all my vagaries, my uncertain emotions, I didn't want just the excitement of an affair, an amorous adventure. Neither did he. He wanted me body and soul, and I recoiled from that finally, because--I was afraid, afraid of what our life would become when he learned that truth which I had already grasped, that life can't be lived on the peaks of great emotion and that there was nothing much else for him and me to go on."

She stopped and looked at Hollister.

"I wonder if you think I'm a little mad?" she asked.

"No. I was just wondering what it is about you that makes men want you," he returned.

"You should know," she answered bluntly.

"I never knew. I was like Mills: a victim of my emotions. But one outgrows any feeling if it is clubbed hard enough. I daresay all these things are natural enough, even if they bring misery in their wake."

"I daresay," she said. "There is nothing unnatural in a man loving me, any more than it was unnatural for you to love Doris, or for Doris to have a son. Still you are inclined to blame me for what I've done.

You seem to forget that the object of each individual's existence, man or woman, is not to bestow happiness on some one else, but to seek it for themselves."

"That sounds like Lawanne," Hollister observed.

"It's true, no matter who it sounds like," she retorted.

"If you really believe that, you are certainly a fool to go on living with a man like Jim Bland," Hollister declared. It did not occur to him that he was displaying irritation.

"I've told you why and I do not see any reason for changing my idea,"

she said coolly. "When it no longer suits me to be a chattel, I shall cease to be one. Meantime--_pax_--_pax_--

"Where is Doris and the adorable infant?" Myra changed the subject abruptly. "I don't hear or see one or the other."

"They were all out in the kitchen a minute ago, bathing the kid," he told her, and Myra went on in.

Hollister's work lay almost altogether in the flat now. The cut cedar acc.u.mulating under the busy hands of six men came pouring down the chute in a daily stream. To salvage the sticks that spilled, to arrange the booms for rafting down stream, kept Hollister on the move.

At noon that day Myra and Doris brought the baby and lunch in a basket and spread it on the ground on the sunny side of an alder near the chute mouth, just beyond the zone of danger from flying bolts. The day was warm enough for comfortable lounging. The boy, now grown to be a round-faced, clear-skinned mite with blue eyes like his father, lay on an outspread quilt, waving his chubby arms, staring at the mystery of the shadows cast upon him by leaf and branch above.

Hollister finished his meal in silence, that reflective silence which always overtook him when he found himself one corner of this strange triangle. He could talk to Myra alone. He was never at a loss for words with his wife. Together, they struck him dumb.

And this day Doris seemed likewise dumb. There was a growing strangeness about her which had been puzzling Hollister for days. At night she would snuggle down beside him, quietly contented, or she would have some story to tell, or some unexpectedness of thought which still surprised him by its clear-cut and vigorous imagery. But by day she grew distrait, as if she retreated into communion with herself, and her look was that of one striving to see something afar, a straining for vision.

Hollister had marked this. It had troubled him. But he said nothing.

There were times when Doris liked to take refuge in her own thought-world. He was aware of that, and understood it and let her be, in such moods.

Now she sat with both hands clasped over one knee. Her face turned toward Myra for a time. Then her eyes sought her husband's face with a look which gave Hollister the uneasy, sickening conviction that she saw him quite clearly, that she was looking and appraising. Then she looked away toward the river, and as her gaze seemed to focus upon something there, an expression of strain, of effort, gathered on her face. It lasted until Hollister, watching her closely, felt his mouth grow dry. It hurt him as if some pain, some terrible effort of hers was being communicated to him. Yet he did not understand, and he could not reach her intimately with Myra sitting by.

Doris spoke at last.

"What is that, Bob?" she asked. She pointed with her finger.

"A big cedar stump," he replied. It stood about thirty feet away.

"Is it dark on one side and light on the other?"

"It's blackened by fire and the raw wood shows on one side where a piece is split off."

He felt his voice cracked and harsh.

"Ah," she breathed. Her eyes turned to the baby sprawling on his quilt.

Myra rose to her feet. She picked up the baby, moved swiftly and noiselessly three steps aside, stood holding the boy in her arms.