The Hidden Places Part 25

"Nevertheless," Hollister said, "it is as well for you not to come here alone while I am here alone."

"Don't you like me to come, Robin?" she asked.

"No," he said slowly. "That wasn't why I spoke--but I don't think I do."

"Why?" she persisted.

Hollister stirred uneasily.

"Call a spade a spade, Robin," she advised. "Say what you think--what you mean."

"That's difficult," he muttered. "How can any one say what he means when he is not quite sure what he does mean? I'm in trouble. You're sorry for me, in a way. And maybe you feel--because of old times, because of the contrast between what your life was then and what it is now--you feel as if you would like to comfort me. And I don't want you to feel that way. I look at you--and I think about what you said. I wonder if you meant it? Do you remember what you said?"

"Quite clearly. I meant it, Robin. I still mean it. I'm yours--if you need me. Perhaps you won't. Perhaps you will. Does it trouble you to have me a self-appointed anchor to windward?"

She clasped her hands over her knees, bending forward a little, looking at him with a curious serenity. Her eyes did not waver from his.

Hollister made no answer.

"I brought a lot of this on you, Robin," she went on in the musical, rippling voice so like Doris in certain tones and inflections as to make him wonder idly if he had unconsciously fallen in love with Doris Cleveland's voice because it was like Myra's. "If I had stuck it out in London till you came back, maimed or otherwise, things would have been different. But we were started off, flung off, one might say, into different orbits by the forces of the war itself. That's neither here nor there, now. You may think I'm offering myself as a sort of vicarious atonement--if your Doris fails you--but I'm not, really. I'm too selfish. I have never sacrificed myself for any man. I never will.

It isn't in me. I'm just as eager to get all I can out of life as I ever was. I liked you long ago. I like you still. That's all there is to it, Robin."

She shifted herself nearer him. She put one hand on his shoulder, the other on his knee, and bent forward, peering into his face. Hollister matched that questioning gaze for a second. It was unreadable. It conveyed no message, hinted nothing, held no covert suggestion. It was earnest and troubled. He had never before seen that sort of look on Myra's face. He could make nothing of it, and so there was nothing in it to disturb him. But the warm pressure of her hands, the nearness of her body, did trouble him. He put her hands gently away.

"You shouldn't come here," he said quietly. "I will call a spade a spade. I love Doris--and I have a queer, hungry sort of feeling about the boy. If it happens that in spite of our life together Doris can't bear me and can't get used to me, if it becomes impossible for us to go on together--well, I can't make clear to you the way I feel about this. But I'm afraid. And if it turns out that I'm afraid with good cause--why, I don't know what I'll do, what way I'll turn. But wait until that happens--Well, it seems that a man and a woman who have loved and lived together can't become completely indifferent--they must either hate and despise each other--or else--You understand? We have made some precious blunders, you and I. We have involved other people in our blundering, and we mustn't forget about these other people. I _can't_. Doris and the kid come first--myself last. I'm selfish too. I can only sit here in suspense and wait for things to happen as they will. You," he hesitated a second, "you can't help me, Myra. You could hurt me a lot if you tried--and yourself too."

"I see," she said. "I understand."

She sat for a time with her hands resting in her lap, looking down at the ground. Then she rose.

"I don't want to hurt you, Robin," she said soberly. "I can't help looking for a way out, that's all. For myself, I must find a way out.

The life I lead now is stifling me--and I can't see where it will ever be any different, any better. I've become cursed with the twin devils of a.n.a.lysis and introspection. I don't love Jim; I tolerate him. One can't go through life merely tolerating one's husband, and the sort of friends and the sort of existence that appeals to one's husband, unless one is utterly ox-like--and I'm not. Women have lived with men they cared nothing for since the beginning of time, I suppose, because of various reasons--but I see no reason why I should. I'm a rebel--in full revolt against shams and stupidity and ignorance, because those three have brought me where I am and you where you are. I'm a disarmed and helpless _revolte_ by myself. One doesn't want to go from bad to worse. One wants instinctively to progress from good to better. One makes mistakes and seeks to rectify them--if it is possible. One sees suffering arise as the result of one's involuntary acts, and one wishes wistfully to relieve it. That's the simple truth, Robin. Only a simple truth is often a very complex thing. It seems so with us."

"It is," Hollister muttered, "and it might easily become more so."

"Ah, well," she said, "that is scarcely likely. You were always pretty dependable, Robin. And I'm no longer an ignorant little fool to rush thoughtlessly in where either angels or devils might fear to tread. We shall see."

She swung around on her heel. Hollister watched her walk away along the river path. He scarcely knew what he thought, what he felt, except that what he felt and thought disturbed him to the point of sadness, of regret. He sat musing on the curious, contradictory forces at work in his life. It was folly to be wise, to be sensitive, to respond too quickly, to see too clearly; and ignorance, dumbness of soul, was also fatal. Either way there was no escape. A man did his best and it was futile,--or seemed so to him, just then.

His gaze followed Myra while his thought ran upon Doris, upon his boy, wondering if the next steamer would bring him sentence of banishment from all that he valued, or if there would be a respite, a stay of execution, a miracle of affection that would survive and override the terrible reality--or what seemed to him the terrible reality--of his disfigured face. He had abundant faith in Doris--of the soft voice and the keen, quick mind, the indomitable spirit and infinite patience--but he had not much faith in himself, in his own power. He was afraid of her restored sight, which would leave nothing to the subtle play of her imagination.

And following Myra with that mechanical noting of her progress, his eyes, which were very keen, caught some movement in a fringe of willows that lined the opposite sh.o.r.e of the river some three hundred yards below. He looked more sharply. He had developed a hunter's faculty for interpreting movement in the forest, and although he had nothing more positive than instinct and a brief flash upon which to base conclusions, he did not think that movement of the leaves was occasioned by any creature native to the woods.

On impulse he rose, went inside, and taking his binoculars from their case, focused the eight-power lenses on the screen of brush, keeping himself well within the doorway where he could see without being seen.

It took a minute or so of covering the willows before he located the cause of that movement of shrubbery. But presently he made out the head and shoulders of a man. And the man was Bland, doing precisely what Hollister was doing, looking through a pair of field gla.s.ses.

Hollister stood well back in the room. He was certain Bland could not see that he himself was being watched. In any case, Bland was not looking at Hollister's house. It was altogether likely that he had been doing so, that he had seen Myra sitting beside Hollister with her hand on his shoulder, bending forward to peer into Hollister's face.

And Hollister could easily imagine what Bland might feel and think.

But he was steadily watching Myra. Once he turned the gla.s.ses for a few seconds on Hollister's house. Then he swung them back to Myra, followed her persistently as she walked along the bank, on past Lawanne's, on towards their own rude shack. And at last Bland shifted.

One step backward, and the woods swallowed him. One moment his shoulders and his head stood plain in every detail, even to the brickish redness of his skin and the curve of his fingers about the gla.s.ses; the next he was gone.

Hollister sat thinking. He did not like the implications of that furtive observance. A suspicious, watchful man is a jealous man. And a jealous man who has nothing to do but watch and suspect and nurse that mean pa.s.sion was a dangerous adjunct to an unhappy woman.

Hollister resolved to warn Myra, to emphasize that warning. No one could tell of what a dull egotist like Bland might be capable. The very fact of that furtive spying argued an ign.o.ble streak in any man.

Bland was stiff-necked, vain, the sort to be brutal in retaliation for any fancied invasion of his rights. And his conception of a husband's rights were primitive in the extreme. A wife was property, something that was his. Hollister could imagine him roused to blind, blundering fury by the least suspicious action on Myra's part. Bland was the type that, once aroused, acts like an angry bull,--with about as much regard or understanding of consequences. Hollister had been measuring Bland for a year, and the last two or three weeks had given him the greatest opportunity to do so. He had appraised the man as a dullard under his stupid, inflexible crust of egotism, despite his veneer of manners. But even a clod may be dangerous. A bomb is a harmless thing, so much inert metal and chemicals, until it is touched off; yet it needs only a touch to let loose its insensate, rending force.

Hollister rose to start down the path after Myra with the idea that he must somehow convey to her a more explicit warning. As he stepped out on the porch, he looked downstream at Bland's house and saw a man approach the place from one direction as Myra reached it from the other. He caught up his gla.s.ses and brought them to bear. The man was Mills,--whom he had thought once more far from the Toba with the rest of his scattered crew. Nevertheless this was Mills drawing near Bland's house with quick strides.

Hollister's uneasiness doubled. There was a power for mischief in that situation when he thought of Jim Bland scowling from his hiding place in the willows. He set out along the path.

But by the time he came abreast of Lawanne's cabin he had begun to feel himself acting under a mistaken impulse, an exaggerated conclusion. He began to doubt the validity of that intuition which pointed a warning finger at Bland and Bland's suspicions. In attempting to forestall what might come of Bland's stewing in the juice of a groundless jealousy, he could easily precipitate something that would perhaps be best avoided by ignoring it. He stood, when he thought of it, in rather a delicate position himself.

So he turned into Lawanne's. He found Archie sitting on the shady side of his cabin, and they fell into talk.

CHAPTER XXI

Lawanne had been thumping a typewriter for hours, he told Hollister, until his fingers ached. He was almost through with this task, which for months had been a curious mixture of drudgery and pleasure.

"I'm through all but typing the last two chapters. It's been a fierce grind."

"You'll be on the wing soon, then", Hollister observed.

"That depends," Lawanne said absently.

But he did not explain upon what it depended. He leaned back in his chair, a cigarette in his fingers, and stared for a minute up at the trees.

"I'll get the rest of it pounded out in two or three days," he came back to his book, "then I think I'll go up the Little Toba, just to see what that wild-looking gorge is like twenty or thirty miles back.

Better come along with me. Do you good. You're sort of at a standstill."

"I can't," Hollister explained. "Doris is coming back next week."

Lawanne looked at him intently.

"Eyes all right?"

"I don't know. I suppose so," Hollister replied. "She didn't say. She merely wrote that she was coming on the Wednesday steamer."

"Well, that'll be all right too," Lawanne said. "You'll get over being so down in the mouth then."

"Maybe," Hollister muttered.

"Of course. What rot to think anything else."

Hollister did not contradict this. It was what he wanted to feel and think, and could not. He understood that Lawanne, whatever his thought, was trying to hearten him. And he appreciated that, although he knew the matter rested in his wife's own hands and nothing any one else could do or say had the slightest bearing on it. His meeting with Doris would be either an ordeal or a triumph.