Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier,
Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new
plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less
barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just
another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?
Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he
was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years
through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed
nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where
he went or what lay before him.
Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a
goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a
great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he
did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent
change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And
he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that
Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.
Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her
blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of
shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the
knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can
endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so
Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the
averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through
the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with
its clammy touch.
For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw her
nearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with
all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those
in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.
To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable
woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than
compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world
about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise
comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He
had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of
uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised that
conclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remote
degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for
instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. That
broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on
one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees
on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The
buds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in
dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore,
had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones
of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could
hear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. She
could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a
whimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.
At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself
from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the
sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she
would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with
the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when
they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or
the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when
they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of
maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with
steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of
Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to
Howe Sound.
No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a
protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit
of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris
Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too
hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous,
resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize
fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always
night,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.
In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many
other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without
troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him,
then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. It
had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until
in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping
current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him
unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found
himself committed irrevocably to this or that.
But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster
without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less
nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with
the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a
reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy
seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes
pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's
actions.
So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the
night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went
away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the
definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not
thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He
found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation
concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a
possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would
honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his
mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxical
way. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious
state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yet
reluctant to draw back.
When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his
company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to
set too great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung
them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them
far apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among
the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs,
would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock
in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would
say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as
he was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have had
the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple
of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she
turned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thought
of him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mental
pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came
within the scope of her understanding,--which covered no narrow field.
But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what
image of him she carried in her mind.
For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly
reading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern border
of Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to be
their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they
walked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank lay
bared for a mile offshore at ebb tide.
If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick
out a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or get
tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at
the Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in the
afternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover she knew music, which is a
thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the place
where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard
her play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment,
forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and that
the most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visit
that house often. The people there looked at him a little askance.
They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his
presence,--and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face.
By the time that April Fool's Day was a week old on the calendar,
Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf him
soon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she was
going back to the Euclataws. She had already stretched her visit to
greater length than she intended. She must go back.
They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked a
deserted playground, emerald green with new grass. They faced a
sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver
Island. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like
the faint murmur of distant surf.
"In a week," Hollister said. If there was an echo of regret in his
voice he did not try to hide it. "It has been the best month I have
spent for a long, long time."
"It has been a pleasant month," Doris agreed.
They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep
flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale
gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness
of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment
above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east
dusk walked silently down to the sea.
"I shall be sorry when you are gone," he said at last.
"And I shall be sorry to go," she murmured, "but----"
She threw out her hands in a gesture of impotence, of resignation.
"One can't always be on a holiday."
"I wish we could," Hollister muttered. "You and I."
The girl made no answer. And Hollister himself grew dumb in spite of a
pressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue for
utterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyond
sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an
overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted
her--not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly
beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before
him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours
together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was
cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was
still a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She,
too, was aware--and sometimes afraid--of drab years running out into
nothingness.
Hollister sat beside her visualizing interminable to-morrows in which
there would be no Doris Cleveland; in which he would go his way vainly
seeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice that
thrilled him with its friendly tone.
He took her hand and held it, looking down at the soft white fingers.
She made no effort to withdraw it. He looked at her, peering into her
face, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curious
expectancy and a faint deepening of the color in her cheeks.
"Don't go back to the Euclataws, Doris," he said at last. "I love you.
I want you. I need you. Do you feel as if you liked me--enough to take
a chance?
"For it is a chance," he finished abruptly. "Life together is always a
chance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise you
by breaking out like this. But when I think of us each going separate
ways----"
He held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward to
peer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment or
surprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked,
grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lost
in thought. But there was arising a quiver in the fingers he held
which belied the emotionless fixity of her face.
"I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?" she said slowly. "If it
is, why do you want to take it?"
"Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I
could imagine," he answered. "And because I have a longing to face
life with you, and a dread of it alone. You can't see my ugly face
which frightens off other people, so it doesn't mean anything to you.
But you can hear my voice. You can feel me near you. Does it mean
anything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you?"
He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, that
strange, thoughtful look still on her face.
"Tell me, do you want me to love you--or don't you care?" he demanded.
For a moment Doris made no answer.
"You're a man," she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly.
"And I'm a woman. I'm blind--but I'm a woman. I've been wondering how
long it would take you to find that out."