The Hidden Places Part 3

But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his pa.s.sions, his strength. He could not be pa.s.sive either physically or mentally. His mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its manifestations and adventures.

Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless he succ.u.mbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circ.u.mstance.

How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a question that hara.s.sed him with disheartening insistence as he watched through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the mournful cadences of the wind.

"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit still and think much more----"

He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.

Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set about doing.

Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.

He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a man's appearance.

Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat, of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to get away out of sight and hearing of men.

It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long ago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild things of the forest went their accustomed way.

Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.

coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town, among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in a cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him out on the sc.r.a.p heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be utterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they pa.s.sed.

CHAPTER IV

The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole occupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

Hollister stood looking about him. He was clad like a logger, in thick mackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments was appropriate to the temperature, the weather. He seemed to have stepped into another lat.i.tude,--which in truth he had, for the head of Toba Inlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and the thrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into the glacial fastnesses of the Coast Range. The rain that drenched Vancouver became snow here. The lower slopes were green with timber which concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil. A little higher certain clear s.p.a.ces bared the whiteness, and all the tree tops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow. Higher still lifted grim peaks capped with ma.s.sive snow banks that even midsummer heat could never quite dispel. But these upper heights were now hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded in this winter veil which--except for rare bursts of sunshine or sweeping northwest wind--would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.

It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compelling silence on everything in the land. Except the faint slapping of little waves against the ice-encrusted, rocky sh.o.r.e, and the distant, harsh voices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound, as he stood listening.

Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude. In that setting, silence was appropriate. It was merely unexpected. For so long Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunder and lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle and clatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,--and in the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievous loneliness. For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation, since there was no one by to remind him by look or act. He was only aware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at the majestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenly transferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractingly clamorous to a spot where life was mute.

The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay. One turns out of the island-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile in breadth. The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mile by mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for its floor. On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther and farther into the mainland through a pa.s.sage like a huge tunnel, the roof of which has been blown away. Then suddenly there is an end to the sea. Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way, peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial age. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning declivities.

Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay of the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but the snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not confuse him.

From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.

The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deep and narrow gash in the white-clad hills. On his right opened the broader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.

For a s.p.a.ce of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.

Then he was reminded of his immediate necessities by the chill that crept over his feet,--for several inches of snow overlaid the planked surface of the landing float.

Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capacious shoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float, loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern, paddled insh.o.r.e to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting current of a river.

Here, under the steep shoulder of a mountain, rows of piles stood gaunt above the tide flats. When Hollister had last seen the mouth of the Toba, those same piles had been the support of long boom-sticks, within which floated hundreds of logs. On the flat beside the river there had stood the rough shacks of a logging camp. Donkey engines were puffing and grunting in the woods. Now the booming ground was empty, save for those decaying, teredo-eaten sticks, and the camp was a tumbledown ruin when he pa.s.sed. He wondered if the valley of the Toba were wholly deserted, if the forests of virgin timber covering the delta of that watercourse had been left to their ancient solitude.

But he did not stop to puzzle over this. In ten minutes he was over the sandy bar at the river's mouth. The sea was hidden behind him. He pa.s.sed up a sluggish waterway lined by alder and maple, covered with dense thickets, a jungle in which flourished the stalwart salmonberry and the th.o.r.n.y sticks of the devil's club. Out of this maze of undergrowth rose the tall brown columns of Douglas fir, of red cedar, of spruce and hemlock with their drooping boughs.

Sloughs branched off in narrow laterals, sheeted with thin ice, except where the current kept it open, and out of these open patches flocks of wild duck scattered with a whir of wings. A mile up-stream he turned a bend and pa.s.sed a Siwash rancheria. The bright eyes of little brown-faced children peered shyly out at him from behind stumps. He could see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of an open-fronted smokehouse. Around another bend he came on a buck deer standing knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animal snorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.

Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.

His objective lay some six miles up-stream. But when he came at last to the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slack water new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres of logs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lesser craft moored to these timbers. A little back from the bank he could see the roofs of buildings.

He stayed his paddle a second to look with a mild curiosity. Then he went on. That human craving for companionship which had gained no response in the cities of two continents had left him for the time being. For that hour he was himself, sufficient unto himself. Here probably a score of men lived and worked. But they were not men he knew. They were not men who would care to know him,--not after a clear sight of his face.

Hollister did not say that to himself in so many words. He was only subconsciously aware of this conclusion. Nevertheless it guided his actions. Through long, bitter months he had rebelled against spiritual isolation. The silent woods, the gray river, the cloud-wrapped hills seemed friendly by comparison with mankind,--mankind which had marred him and now shrank from its handiwork.

So he pa.s.sed by this community in the wilderness, not because he wished to but because he must.

Within half a mile he struck fast water, long straight reaches up which he gained ground against the current by steady strokes of the paddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So he came at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve where the stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had been stripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, each with a white cap of snow.

On the edge of this, where the river swung to the southern limit of the valley and ran under a cliff that lifted a thousand foot sheer, he pa.s.sed a small house. Smoke drifted blue from the stovepipe. A pile of freshly chopped firewood lay by the door. The dressed carca.s.s of a deer hung under one projecting eave. Between two stumps a string of laundered clothes waved in the down-river breeze. By the garments Hollister knew a woman must be there. But none appeared to watch him pa.s.s. He did not halt, although the short afternoon was merging into dusk and he knew the hospitality of those who go into lonely places to wrest a living from an untamed land. But he could not bear the thought of being endured rather than welcomed. He had suffered enough of that.

He was in full retreat from just that att.i.tude. He was growing afraid of contact with people, and he knew why he was afraid.

When the long twilight was nearly spent, he gained the upper part of the Big Bend and hauled his canoe out on the bank. A small flat ran back to the mouth of a canyon, and through the flat trickled a stream of clear water.

Hollister built a fire on a patch of dry ground at the base of a six-foot fir. He set up his tent, made his bed, cooked his supper, sat with his feet to the fire, smoking a pipe.

After four years of clamor and crowds, he marveled at the astonishing contentment which could settle on him here in this hushed valley, where silence rested like a fog. His fire was a red spot with a yellow nimbus. Beyond that ruddy circle, valley and cliff and clouded sky merged into an impenetrable blackness. Hollister had been cold and wet and hungry. Now he was warm and dry and fed. He lay with his feet stretched to the fire. For the time he almost ceased to think, relaxed as he was into a pleasant, animal well-being. And so presently he fell asleep.

In winter, north of the forty-ninth parallel, and especially in those deep clefts like the Toba, dusk falls at four in the afternoon, and day has not grown to its full strength at nine in the morning.

Hollister had finished his breakfast before the first gleam of light touched the east. When day let him see the Alpine creva.s.ses that notched the northern wall of the valley, he buckled on a belt that carried a sheath-ax, took up his rifle and began first of all a cursory exploration of the flat on which he camped.

It seemed to him that in some mysterious way he was beginning his life all over again,--that life which his reason, with cold, inexorable logic, had cla.s.sified as a hopeless ruin. He could not see wherein the ruin was lessened by embarking upon this lone adventure into the outlying places. Nevertheless, something about it had given a fillip to his spirits. He felt that he would better not inquire too closely into this; that too keen self-a.n.a.lysis was the evil from which he had suffered and which he should avoid. But he said to himself that if he could get pleasure out of so simple a thing as a canoe trip in a lonely region, there was hope for him yet. And in the same breath he wondered how long he could be sustained by that illusion.

He had a blue-print of the area covering the Big Bend. That timber limit which he had lightly purchased long ago, and which unaccountably went begging a purchaser, lay south and a bit west from where he set up his camp. He satisfied himself of that by the blue-print and the staking description. The northeast corner stake should stand not a great way back from the river bank.

He had to find a certain particularly described cedar tree, thence make his way south to a low cliff, at one extreme of which he should find a rock cairn with a squared post in its center. From that he could run his boundary lines with a pocket compa.s.s, until he located the three remaining corners.

Hollister found cedars enough, but none that pointed the way to a low cliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went up the hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. It bore here and there a ma.s.sive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and once a deer.

But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property, he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southern side of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smoke lifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of the log boom he had pa.s.sed in the river, he marked the roofs of several buildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land opened white squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. He perceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lower valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being cleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All over the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to invade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres, water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.

Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all that great valley for cultivation. Cleared and put to the plow, it would produce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive sustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.

He made no further explorations that afternoon. He spent a little time in making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man. But when day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compa.s.s in hand, bearing due west from the original stake. He found the second without much trouble. He ran a line south and east and north again and so returned to his starting point by noon with two salient facts outstanding in his mind.