Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river
bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible
discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the
evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fix
upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The
cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last
and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the
house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned
reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.
He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction,
troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of
concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him
present,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward
critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.
In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the
correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly
impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in
those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among
stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of
luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.
He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had
access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to
him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not
revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure
his first thought had not been a concern for his property. And the
official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon
after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When
she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate
in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars
in negotiable securities.
And if so--then why?
Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and
useless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he had
seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he could
not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then he
must be going mad. He must know, beyond any equivocation.
There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the
embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took his
glasses and went down to the valley floor.
It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to
walk boldly up and rap at the door. Certainly he would not be
recognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need of
matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a
destroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony.
He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as to
his name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of all
frontiers.
But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why.
He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In the
social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him,
Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and
impulses as by any coldly reasoned process. He was moved to his
stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the
crawling worm.
He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through
thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. He
peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There,
in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving
hunter pass, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof against
cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.
For an hour he waited. Except for the wavering smoke from the
stovepipe, the place might have been deserted. The house was one with
the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb. But he held his
post. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the
opening.
She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.
Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle,
so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on
her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or two
gingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pile
of split wood. The door closed upon her once more.
Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat,
gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with
prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.
He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled
by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a
disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.
He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.
She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman
whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude
cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to
him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said
to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed
it to be true. How _could_ it matter now?
But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned
upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He
could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous
circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.
He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering
there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories
of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to
each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to
each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers
in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a
physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.
He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses
of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure
for a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of this
Hollister now became aware.
He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh
assault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish
recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this
woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding
to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.
When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose
in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.
It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead. In all
his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women
with a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curious
manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain,
grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him
every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out
of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought
of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would
find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.
He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.
The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore
he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.
Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests
where he had begun to perceive that life might still have
compensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away,
destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without
thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her
without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He
had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been
wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender
intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness,
to rise and torture him now.
And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when he
looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would
sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his
hand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of
the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive
smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping,
and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been
his wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which
the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and he
was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.
Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whose
unrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a
man, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.
Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood
in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he
possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not
love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes
he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his
fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had
ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he
sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith
was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and
suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of
war.
Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting pictures
of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories
of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and
laughter on her lips.
He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by
the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim
to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him
sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure
avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.
Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain,
shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion,
until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made
him shrink and feel a loathing of himself.
She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had given
herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them
together. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had
not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should
he not take her?
Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister
brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.
It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He
postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,
resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if
he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to
"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.
The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient
gesture.
The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which
merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise
lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of
passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a
ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this
fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very
well. But how?
That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the
Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about
unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great
cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of
weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single
track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that
should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not
because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was
not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his
interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did
interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he
did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man,
no jealousy.
The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that
nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the
obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.
All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in
his obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration of
consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive
instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.
This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified
it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances
which favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This he
readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it was
revealed to him.
A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his
canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. From
the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of
this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping
rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no
footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless a
searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.
And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and
came at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another man
who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of
his own!
Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It
pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate
upon his wife and her lover.
From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set
himself to watch through his glasses the house down the river. The
second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun
in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that
wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on
these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that
the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes
not till dusk.
He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen
river. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of the
house.
The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced
the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sun
had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened
to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow
softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.
Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the
interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the
door.
A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a bench
beside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast. And
Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. She
leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of
that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasped
hands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaning
eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.
Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelids
drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise
she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to
some blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned
hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot
eyes.
Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through
the window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the
tense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head and
press a kiss on the imprisoned hand.
He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away
over the ice. When he had put five hundred yards between himself and
that house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face and
wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over
his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a
hair's breadth some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that was
precisely his feeling,--as if he had been capering madly on the brink
of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to
him in a terrifying flash.
He shivered. His ego grovelled in the dirt. He had often smiled at
theories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen stream
with the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands he
was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk
a duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that,
or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of
isolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.
Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not
been there. But he did not think so now. The brake of his real manhood
had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the
door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a
brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.
Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,
double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor
steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own
ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born
in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early
in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.
And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the
last four years.
Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right
to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such
sophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen
lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious
complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river
bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to
know. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.
Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an
Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had
conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by the
brutal directness of her written avowal. Hollister had watched him
swinging his ax on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in the
bottom land. He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment.
Hollister found himself pitying this man. He found himself wondering
if it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helpless
victim of her own senses. There were women like that. Plenty of them.
Men too. Sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality. He could not
doubt that. He suspected that he was touched with it himself.
What a muddle life was, Hollister reflected sadly, looking down from
the last opening before he plunged into the cedar grove that hid the
log cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain and
forest, this silent land virginal in its winter garment, human
passion, ancient as the hills themselves, functioned in the old, old
way.
But he did not expend much thought on mere generalizations. The
problem of Myra and her lovers was no longer his problem; their
passions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearly
that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching
consequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with the
possible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, or
whatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he could
harbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to pass
through that furnace again.
He had had enough of the Toba Valley. No, he modified that. The valley
and the sentinel peaks that stood guard over it, the lowlands duskily
green and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodly
place to be. But old sins and sorrows and new, disturbing phases of
human passion were here at his elbow to dispel the restful peace he
had won for a little while. He must escape from that.
To go was not so simple as his coming. The river was frozen, that
watery highway closed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gained
in those casual wanderings along the ridge above the valley. He knew
a direct way of gaining the Inlet head on foot.
So he spent a last night before the fireplace, staring silently into
the dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing coals, lying
down to heavy, dreamless sleep at last in his bunk.
At daybreak he struck out westward along the great cliff that frowned
on the Big Bend, his blankets and a small emergency supply of food in
a bulky pack upon his shoulders. When the sheer face of the cliff ran
out to a steep, scrubbily timbered hillside, he dropped down to the
valley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here he
moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no
ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm
the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in
streamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. The
wild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scolded
as he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach within
twenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deep
snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down
from the highlands by the deeper snow above.
For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was
forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction
he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where
loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black
and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a
clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of the
houses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn upon
what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best
gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.