Not until Hollister had left Doris at her cousin's home and was
walking back downtown did a complete realization of what he had done
and pledged himself to do burst upon him. When it did, he pulled up
short in his stride, as if he had come physically against some
forthright obstruction. For an instant he felt dazed. Then a consuming
anger flared in him,--anger against the past by which he was still
shackled.
But he refused to be bound by those old chains whose ghostly clanking
arose to harass him in this hour when life seemed to be holding out a
new promise, when he saw happiness beckoning, when he was dreaming of
pleasant things. He leaned over the rail on the Granville Street
drawbridge watching a tug pass through, seeing the dusky shape of the
small vessel, hearing the ripple of the flood tide against the stone
piers, and scarcely conscious of the bridge or the ship or the gray
dimness of the sea, so profound was the concentration of his mind on
this problem. It did not perplex him; it maddened him. He whispered a
defiant protest to himself and walked on. He was able to think more
calmly when he reached his room. There were the facts, the simple,
undeniable facts, to be faced without shrinking,--and a decision to be
made.
For months Hollister, when he thought of the past, thought of it as a
slate which had been wiped clean. He was dead, officially dead. His
few distant relatives had accepted the official report without
question. Myra had accepted it, acted upon it. Outside the British War
Office no one knew, no one dreamed, that he was alive. He had served
in the Imperials. He recalled the difficulties and delays of getting
his identity reëstablished in the coldly impersonal, maddeningly
deliberate, official departments which dealt with his case. He had
succeeded. His back pay had been granted. A gratuity was still
forthcoming. But Hollister knew that the record of his case was
entangled with miles of red tape. He was dead--killed in action. It
would never occur to the British War Office to seek publicity for the
fact that he was not dead. There was no machinery for that purpose.
Even if there were such machinery, there was no one to pull the
levers. Nothing was ever set in motion in the War Office without
pulling a diversity of levers. So much for that. Hollister, recalling
his experience in London, smiled sardonically at thought of the
British War Office voluntarily troubling itself about dead men who
came to life. The War Office would not know him. The War Office did
not know men. It only knew identification numbers, regiments, ranks,
things properly documented, officially assigned. It was disdainful of
any casual inquiry; it would shunt such from official to official,
from department to department, until the inquirer was worn out, his
patience, his fund of postage and his time alike exhausted.
No, the British War Office would neither know nor care nor tell.
Surely the slate was sponged clean. Should he condemn himself and
Doris Cleveland to heartache and loneliness because of a technicality?
To Hollister it seemed no more than that. Myra had married again.
Would she--reckoning the chance that she learned he was alive--rise up
to denounce him? Hardly. His own people? They were few and far away.
His friends? The war had ripped everything loose, broken the old
combinations, scattered the groups. There was, for Hollister, nothing
left of the old days. And he himself was dead,--officially dead.
After all, it narrowed to himself and Doris Cleveland and an ethical
question.
He did not shut his eyes to the fact that for him this marriage would
be bigamy; that their children would be illegitimate in the eyes of
the law if legal scrutiny ever laid bare their father's history; nor
that by all the accepted dictums of current morality he would be
leading an innocent woman into sin. But current morality had ceased to
have its old significance for Hollister. He had seen too much of it
vaporized so readily in the furnace of the war. Convention had lost
any power to dismay him. His world had used him in its hour of need,
had flung him into the Pit, and when he crawled out maimed,
discouraged, stripped of everything that had made life precious, this
world of his fellows shunned him because of what he had suffered in
their behalf. So he held himself under no obligation to be guided by
their moral dictums. He was critical of accepted standards because he
had observed that an act might be within the law and still outrage
humanity; it might be legally sanctioned and socially approved and
spread intolerable misery in its wake. Contrariwise, he could conceive
a thing beyond the law being meritorious in itself. With the Persian
tent-maker, Hollister had begun to see that "A hair, perhaps, divides
the false and true."
There was no falsity in his love, in his aching desire to lay hold of
happiness out of the muddle of his life, to bestow happiness if he
could upon a woman who like himself had suffered misfortune. Within
him there was the instinct to clutch firmly this chance which lay at
hand. For Hollister the question was not, "Is this thing right or
wrong in the eyes of the world?" but "Is it right for her and for me?"
And always he got the one answer, the answer with which lovers have
justified themselves ever since love became something more than the
mere breeding instinct of animals.
Hollister could not see himself as a man guilty of moral obliquity if
he let the graveyard of the past retain its unseemly corpse without
legal exhumation and examination, and the delivering of a formal
verdict upon what was already an accomplished fact.
Nevertheless, he forced himself to consider just what it would mean to
take that step. Briefly it would be necessary for him to go to London,
to secure documentary evidence. Then he must return to Canada, enter
suit against Myra, secure service upon her here in British Columbia.
There would be a trial and a temporary decree; after the lapse of
twelve months a divorce absolute.
He was up against a stone wall. Even if he nerved himself to public
rattling of the skeleton in his private life, he did not have the
means. That was final. He did not have money for such an undertaking,
even if he beggared himself. That was a material factor as inexorable
as death. Actual freedom he had in full measure. Legal freedom could
only be purchased at a price,--and he did not have the price.
Perhaps that decided Hollister. Perhaps he would have made that
decision in any case. He had no friends to be shocked. He had no
reputation to be smirched. He was, he had said with a bitter
wistfulness, a stray dog. And Doris Cleveland was in very much the
same position. Two unfortunates cleaving to each other, moved by a
genuine human passion. If they could be happy together, they had a
right to be together. Hollister challenged his reason to refute that
cry of his heart.
He disposed finally of the last uncertainty,--whether he should tell
Doris. And a negative to that rose instantly to his lips. The past was
a dead past. Let it remain dead--buried. Its ghost would never rise to
trouble them. Of that he was very sure.
Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard a great clock
somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay
staring up at the dusky ceiling. But his thoughts had taken a
pleasanter road. He had turned over the pages of his life history,
scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with
decisive finality into the waste basket. He was about to begin a new
book, the book of the future. It was pleasant to contemplate what he
and Doris Cleveland together would write on those blank pages. To hope
much, to be no longer downcast, to be able to look forward with
eagerness. There was a glow in that like good wine.
And upon that he slept.
Morning brought him no qualms or indecisions. But it did bring him to
a consideration of very practical matters, which yesterday's emotional
crisis had overshadowed. That is to say, Hollister began to take stock
of the means whereby they two should live. It was not an immediately
pressing matter, since he had a few hundred dollars in hand, but he
was not short-sighted and he knew it would ultimately become so.
Hence, naturally, his mind turned once more to that asset which had
been one factor in bringing him back to British Columbia, the timber
limit he owned in the Toba Valley.
He began to consider that seriously. Its value had shrunk appreciably
under his examination. He had certainly been tricked in its purchase
and he did not know if he had any recourse. He rather thought there
should be some way of getting money back from people who obtained it
under false pretenses. The limit, he was quite sure, contained less
than half the timber Lewis and Company had solemnly represented it to
carry. He grew uneasy thinking of that. All his eggs were in that
wooden basket.
He found himself anxious to know what he could expect, what he could
do. There was a considerable amount of good cedar there. It should
bring five or six thousand dollars, even if he had to accept the fraud
and make the best of it. When he reflected upon what a difference the
possession or lack of money might mean to himself and Doris, before
long, all his acquired and cultivated knowledge of business affairs
began to spur him to some action. As soon as he finished his breakfast
he set off for the office of the "Timber Specialist." He already had a
plan mapped out. It might work and it might not, but it was worth
trying.
As he walked down the street, Hollister felt keenly, for the first
time in his thirty-one years of existence, how vastly important mere
bread and butter may become. He had always been accustomed to money.
Consequently he had very few illusions either about money as such or
the various methods of acquiring money. He had undergone too rigorous
a business training for that. He knew how easy it was to make money
with money--and how difficult, how very nearly impossible it was for
the penniless man to secure more than a living by his utmost exertion.
If this timber holding should turn out to be worthless, if it _should_
prove unsalable at any price, it would be a question of a job for him,
before so very long. With the handicap of his face! With that
universal inclination of people to avoid him because they disliked to
look on the direct result of settling international difficulties with
bayonets and high explosives and poison gas, he would not fare very
well in the search for a decent job. Poverty had never seemed to
present quite such a sinister face as it did to Hollister when he
reached this point in his self-communings.
Mr. Lewis received him with a total lack of the bland dignity
Hollister remembered. The man seemed uneasy, distracted. His eyes had
a furtive look in them. Hollister, however, had not come there to make
a study of Mr. Lewis' physiognomy or manner.
"I went up to Toba Inlet awhile ago and had a look over that timber
limit of mine," he began abruptly. "I'd like to see the documents
bearing on that, if you don't mind."
Mr. Lewis looked at him uncertainly, but he called a clerk and issued
an order. While the clerk was on his mission to the files Lewis put a
few questions which Hollister answered without disclosing what he had
in mind. It struck him, though, that the tone of Mr. Lewis' inquiry
bordered upon the anxious.
Presently the clerk returned with the papers. Hollister took them up.
He selected the agreement of sale, a letter or two, the original
cruiser's estimate, a series of tax receipts, held them in his hand
and looked at Lewis.
"You haven't succeeded in finding a buyer, I suppose?"
"In the winter," Lewis replied, "there is very little stir in timber."
"There is going to be some sort of stir in this timber before long,"
Hollister said.
The worried expression deepened on Mr. Lewis' face.
"The fact is," Hollister continued evenly, "I made a rough survey of
that timber, and found it away off color. You represented it to
contain so many million feet. It doesn't. Nowhere near. I appear to
have been rather badly stung, and I really don't wonder it hasn't been
resold. What do you propose to do about this?"
Mr. Lewis made a gesture of deprecation.
"There must be some mistake, Mr. Hollister."
"No doubt of that," Hollister agreed dryly. "The point is, who shall
pay for the mistake?"
Mr. Lewis looked out of the window. He seemed suddenly to be stricken
with an attitude of remoteness. It occurred to Hollister that the man
was not thinking about the matter at all.
"Well?" he questioned sharply.
The eyes of the specialist in timber turned back to him uneasily.
"Well?" he echoed.
Hollister put the documents in his pocket. He gathered up those on the
desk and put them also in his pocket. He was angry because he was
baffled. This was a matter of vital importance to him, and this man
seemed able to insulate himself against either threat or suggestion.
"My dear sir," Lewis expostulated. Even his protest was half-hearted,
lacked honest indignation.
Hollister rose.
"I'm going to keep these," he said irritably. "You don't seem to take
much interest in the fact that you have laid yourself open to a charge
of fraud, and that I am going to do something about it if you don't."
"Oh, go ahead," Lewis broke out pettishly. "I don't care what you do."
Hollister stared at him in amazement. The man's eyes met his for a
moment, then shifted to the opposite wall, became fixed there. He sat
half turned in his chair. He seemed to grow intent on something, to
become wrapped in some fog of cogitation, through which Hollister and
his affairs appeared only as inconsequential phantoms.
In the doorway Hollister looked back over his shoulder. The man sat
mute, immobile, staring fixedly at the wall.
Down the street Hollister turned once more to look up at the
gilt-lettered windows. Something had happened to Mr. Lewis. Something
had jolted the specialist in British Columbia timber and paralyzed his
business nerve centers. Some catastrophe had overtaken him, or
impended, beside which the ugly matter Hollister laid before him was
of no consequence.
But it was of consequence to Hollister, as vital as the breaker of
water and handful of ship's biscuits is to castaways in an open boat
in mid-ocean. It angered him to feel a matter of such deep concern
brushed aside. He walked on down the street, thinking what he should
do. Midway of the next block, a firm name, another concern which dealt
in timber, rose before his eyes. He entered the office.
"Mr. MacFarlan or Mr. Lee," he said to the desk man.
A short, stout individual came forward, glanced at Hollister's scarred
face with that involuntary disapproval which Hollister was accustomed
to catch in people's expression before they suppressed it out of pity
or courtesy, or a mixture of both.
"I am Mr. MacFarlan."
"I want legal advice on a matter of considerable importance,"
Hollister came straight to the point. "Can you recommend an able
lawyer--one with considerable experience in timber litigation
preferred?"
"I can. Malcolm MacFarlan, second floor Sibley Block. If it's legal
business relating to timber, he's your man. Not because he happens to
be my brother," MacFarlan smiled broadly, "but because he knows his
business. Ask any timber concern. They'll tell you."
Hollister thanked him, and retraced his steps to the office building
he had just quitted. In an office directly under the Lewis quarters he
introduced himself to Malcolm MacFarlan, a bulkier, less elderly
duplicate of his brother the timber broker. Hollister stated his case
briefly and clearly. He put it in the form of a hypothetical case,
naming no names.
MacFarlan listened, asked questions, nodded understanding.
"You could recover on the ground of misrepresentation," he said at
last. "The case, as you state it, is clear. It could be interpreted as
fraud and hence criminal if collusion between the maker of the false
estimate and the vendor could be proven. In any case the vendor could
be held accountable for his misrepresentation of value. Your remedy
lies in a civil suit--provided an authentic cruise established your
estimate of such a small quantity of merchantable timber. I should say
you could recover the principal with interest and costs. Always
provided the vendor is financially responsible."
"I presume they are. Lewis and Company sold me this timber. Here are
the papers. Will you undertake this matter for me?"
MacFarlan jerked his thumb towards the ceiling.
"This Lewis above me?"
"Yes."
Hollister laid the documents before MacFarlan. He ran through them,
laid them down and looked reflectively at Hollister.
"I'm afraid," he said slowly, "you are making your move too late."
"Why?" Hollister demanded uneasily.
"Evidently you aren't aware what has happened to Lewis? I take it you
haven't been reading the papers?"
"I haven't," Hollister admitted. "What has happened?"
"His concern has gone smash," MacFarlan stated. "I happen to be sure
of that, because I'm acting for two creditors. A receiver has been
appointed. Lewis himself is in deep. He is at present at large on
bail, charged with unlawful conversion of moneys entrusted to his
care. You have a case, clear enough, but----" he threw out his hands
with a suggestive motion--"they're bankrupt."
"I see," Hollister muttered. "I appear to be out of luck, then."
"Unfortunately, yes," MacFarlan continued. "You could get a judgment
against them. But it would be worthless. Simply throwing good money
after bad. There will be half a dozen other judgments recorded against
them, a dozen other claims put in, before you could get action. Of
course, I could proceed on your behalf and let you in for a lot of
costs, but I would rather not earn my fees in that manner. I'm
satisfied there won't be more than a few cents on the dollar for
anybody."
"That seems final enough," Hollister said. "I am obliged to you, Mr.
MacFarlan."
He went out again into a street filled with people hurrying about
their affairs in the spring sunshine. So much for that, he reflected,
not without a touch of contemptuous anger against Lewis. He understood
now the man's troubled absorption. With the penitentiary staring him
in the face--
At any rate the property was not involved. Whatever its worth, it was
his, and the only asset at his command. He would have to make the best
of it, dispose of it for what he could get. Meantime, Doris Cleveland
began to loom bigger in his mind than this timber limit. He suffered a
vast impatience until he should see her again. He had touches, this
morning, of incredulous astonishment before the fact that he could
love and be loved. He felt once or twice that this promise of
happiness would prove an illusion, something he had dreamed, if he did
not soon verify it by sight and speech.
He was to call for her at two o'clock. They had planned to take a
Fourth Avenue car to the end of the line and walk thence past the
Jericho Club grounds and out a driveway that left the houses of the
town far behind, a road that went winding along the gentle curve of a
shore line where the Gulf swell whispered or thundered, according to
the weather.
Doris was a good walker. On the level road she kept step without
faltering or effort, holding Hollister's hand, not because she needed
it for guidance, but because it was her pleasure.
They came under a high wooded slope.
"Listen to the birds," she said, with a gentle pressure on his
fingers. "I can smell the woods and feel the air soft as a caress. I
can't see the buds bursting, or the new, pale-green leaves, but I know
what it is like. Sometimes I think that beauty is a feeling, instead
of a fact. Perhaps if I could see it as well as feel it--still, the
birds wouldn't sing more sweetly if I could see them there swaying on
the little branches, would they, Bob?"
There was a wistfulness, but only a shadow of regret in her tone. And
there were no shadows on the fresh, young face she turned to
Hollister. He bent to kiss that sweet mouth, and he was again thankful
that she had no sight to be offended by his devastated features. His
lips, unsightly as they were, had power to stir her. She blushed and
hid her face against his coat.
They found a dry log to sit upon, a great tree trunk cast by a storm
above high-water mark. Now and then a motor whirred by, but for the
most part the drive lay silent, a winding ribbon of asphalt between
the sea and the wooded heights of Point Grey. English Bay sparkled
between them and the city. Beyond the purple smoke-haze driven inland
by the west wind rose the white crests of the Capilanos, an Alpine
background to the seaboard town. Hollister could hear the whine of
sawmills, the rumble of trolley cars, the clang of steel in a great
shipyard,--and the tide whispering on wet sands at his feet, the birds
twittering among the budding alders. And far as his eyes could reach
along the coast there lifted enormous, saw-toothed mountains. They
stood out against a sapphire sky with extraordinary vividness, with
remarkable brilliancy of color, with an austere dignity.
Hollister put his arm around the girl. She nestled close to him. A
little sigh escaped her lips.
"What is it, Doris?"
"I was just remembering how I lay awake last night," she said,
"thinking, thinking until my brain seemed like some sort of machine
that would run on and on grinding out thoughts till I was worn out."
"What about?" he asked.
"About you and myself," she said simply. "About what is ahead of us. I
think I was a little bit afraid."
"Of me?"
"Oh, no," she tightened her grip on his hand. "I can't imagine myself
being afraid of _you_. I like you too much. But--but--well, I was
thinking of myself, really; of myself in relation to you. I couldn't
help seeing myself as a handicap. I could see you beginning to chafe
finally under the burden of a blind wife, growing impatient at my
helplessness--which you do not yet realize--and in the end--oh, well,
one can think all sorts of things in spite of a resolution not to
think."
It stung Hollister.
"Good God," he cried, "you don't realize it's only the fact you
_can't_ see me that makes it possible. Why, I've clutched at you the
way a drowning man clutches at anything. That I should get tired of
you, feel you as a burden--it's unthinkable. I'm thankful you're
blind. I shall always be glad you can't see. If you could--what sort
of picture of me have you in your mind?"
"Perhaps not a very clear one," the girl answered slowly. "But I hear
your voice, and it is a pleasant one. I feel your touch, and there is
something there that moves me in the oddest way. I know that you are a
big man and strong. Of course I don't know whether your eyes are blue
or brown, whether your hair is fair or dark--and I don't care. As for
your face I can't possibly imagine it as terrible, unless you were
angry. What are scars? Nothing, nothing. I can't see them. It wouldn't
make any difference if I could."
"It would," he muttered. "I'm afraid it would."
Doris shook her head. She looked up at him, with that peculiarly
direct, intent gaze which always gave him the impression that she did
see. Her eyes, the soft gray of a summer rain cloud--no one would have
guessed them sightless. They seemed to see, to be expressive, to glow
and soften.
She lifted a hand to Hollister's face. He did not shrink while those
soft fingers went exploring the devastation wrought by the exploding
shell. They touched caressingly the scarred and vivid flesh. And they
finished with a gentle pat on his cheek and a momentary, kittenish
rumpling of his hair.
"I cannot find so very much amiss," she said. "Your nose is a bit
awry, and there is a hollow in one cheek. I can feel scars. What does
it matter? A man is what he thinks and feels and does. I am the maimed
one, really. There is so much I can't do, Bob. You don't realize it
yet. And we won't always be living this way, sitting idle on the
beach, going to a show, having tea in the Granada. I used to run and
swim and climb hills. I could have gone anywhere with you--done
anything--been as good a mate as any primitive woman. But my wings are
clipped. I can only get about in familiar surroundings. And sometimes
it grows intolerable. I rebel. I rave--and wish I were dead. And if I
thought I was hampering you, and you were beginning to regret you had
married me--why, I couldn't bear it. That's what my brain was buzzing
with last night."
"Do any of those things strike you as serious obstacles now--when I
have my arms around you?" Hollister demanded.
She shook her head.
"No. Really and truly right now I'm perfectly willing to take any sort
of chance on the future--if you're in it," she said thoughtfully.
"That's the sort of effect you have on me. I suppose that's natural
enough."
"Then we feel precisely the same," Hollister declared. "And you are
not to have any more doubts about me. I tell you, Doris, that besides
wanting you, I _need_ you. I can be your eyes. And for me, you will be
like a compass to a sailor in a fog--something to steer a course by.
So let's stop talking about whether we're going to take the plunge.
Let's talk about how we're going to live, and where."
A whimsical expression tippled across the girl's face, a mixture of
tenderness and mischief.
"I've warned you," she said with mock solemnity. "Your blood be upon
your own head."
They both laughed.