"Why not go in there and take that cedar out yourself?" Doris
suggested.
They had been talking about that timber limit in the Toba, the
possibility of getting a few thousand dollars out of it, and how they
could make the money serve them best.
"We could live there. I'd love to live there. I loved that valley. I
can see it now, every turn of the river, every canyon, and all the
peaks above. It would be like getting back home."
"It is a beautiful place," Hollister agreed. He had a momentary vision
of the Toba as he saw it last: a white-floored lane between two great
mountain ranges; green, timbered slopes that ran up to immense
declivities; glaciers; cold, majestic peaks scarred by winter
avalanches. He had come a little under the spell of those rugged
solitudes then. He could imagine it transformed by the magic of
summer. He could imagine himself living there with this beloved woman,
exacting a livelihood from those hushed forests and finding it good.
"I've been wondering about that myself," he said. "There is a lot of
good cedar there. That bolt chute your brothers built could be
repaired. If they expected to get that stuff out profitably, why
shouldn't I? I'll have to look into that."
They were living in a furnished flat. If they had married in what
people accustomed to a certain formality of living might call haste
they had no thought of repenting at leisure, or otherwise. They were,
in fact, quite happy and contented. Marriage had shattered no
illusions. If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of each
other, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm those
illusions, to shape them into realities. They were young enough to be
ardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination,
but only an ecstatic phase in the working out of an inexorable natural
law.
If Doris was happy, full of high spirits, joyfully abandoned to the
fulfilment of her destiny as a woman, Hollister too was happier than
he had considered it possible for him ever to be again. But, in
addition, he was supremely grateful. Life for him as an individual had
seemed to be pretty much a blank wall, a drab, colorless routine of
existence; something he could not voluntarily give up, but which gave
nothing, promised nothing, save monotony and isolation and, in the
end, complete despair. So that his love for this girl, who had given
herself to him with the strangely combined passion of a mature woman
and the trusting confidence of a child, was touched with gratitude.
She had put out her hand and lifted him from the pit. She would always
be near him, a prop and a stay. Sometimes it seemed to Hollister a
miracle. He would look at his face in the mirror and thank God that
she was blind. Doris said that made no difference, but he knew better.
It made a difference to eyes that could see, however tolerantly.
In Hollister, also, there revived the natural ambition to get on, to
grasp a measure of material security, to make money. There were so
many ways in which money was essential, so many desirable things they
could secure and enjoy together with money. Making a living came
first, but beyond a mere living he began to desire comfort, even
luxuries, for himself and his wife. He had made tentative plans. They
had discussed ways and means; and the most practical suggestion of all
came now from his wife's lips.
Hollister went about town the next few days, diligently seeking
information about prices, wages, costs and methods. He had a practical
knowledge of finance, and a fair acquaintance with timber operations
generally, so that he did not waste his own or other men's time. He
met a rebuff or two, but he learned a great deal which he needed to
know, and he said to Doris finally:
"I'm going to play your hunch and get that timber out myself. It will
pay. In fact, it is the only way I'll ever get back the money I put
into that, so I really haven't much choice in the matter."
"Good!" Doris said. "Then we go to the Toba to live. When?"
"Very soon--if we go at all. There doesn't seem to be much chance to
sell it, but there is some sort of returned soldiers' cooperative
concern working in the Big Bend, and MacFarlan and Lee have had some
correspondence with their head man about this limit of mine. He is
going to be in town in a day or two. They may buy."
"And if they do?"
"Well, then, we'll see about a place on Valdez Island at the
Euclataws, where I can clear up some land and grow things, and fish
salmon when they run, as we talked about."
"That would be nice, and I dare say we would get on very well," Doris
said. "But I'd rather go to the Toba."
Hollister did not want to go to the Toba. He would go if it were
necessary, but when he remembered that fair-haired woman living in the
cabin on the river bank, he felt that there was something to be
shunned. Myra was like a bad dream too vividly remembered. There was
stealing over Hollister a curious sense of something unreal in his
first marriage, in the war, even in the strange madness which had
briefly afflicted him when he discovered that Myra was there. He could
smile at the impossibility of that recurring, but he could not smile
at the necessity of living within gunshot of her again. He was not
afraid. There was no reason to be afraid. He was officially dead. No
sense of sin troubled him. He had put all that behind him. It was
simply a distaste for living near a woman he had once loved, with
another whom he loved with all the passion he had once lavished on
Myra, and something that was truer and tenderer. He wanted to shut the
doors on the past forever. That was why he did not wish to go back to
the Toba. He only succeeded in clearly defining that feeling when it
seemed that he must go--unless this prospective sale went
through--because he had to use whatever lever stood nearest his hand.
He had a direct responsibility, now, for material success. As the
laborer goes to his work, distasteful though it may be, that he may
live, that his family may be fed and clothed, so Hollister knew that
he would go to Toba Valley and wrest a compensation from that timber
with his own hands unless a sale were made.
But it failed to go through. Hollister met his man in MacFarlan's
office,--a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr. He was frank
and friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and millmen Hollister
had lately encountered.
"The fact is," Carr said after some discussion, "we aren't in the
market for timber in the ordinary, speculative sense. I happen to know
that particular stand of cedar, or I wouldn't be interested. We're a
body of returned men engaged in making homes and laying the foundation
for a competence by our joint efforts. You would really lose by
selling out to us. We would only buy on stumpage. If you were a broker
I would offer you so much, and you could take it or leave it. It would
be all one to us. We have a lot of standing timber ourselves. But
we're putting in a shingle mill now. The market looks good, and what
we need is labor and shingle bolts, not standing timber. I would
suggest you go in there with two or three men and get the stuff out
yourself. We'll take all the cedar on your limit, in bolts on the
river bank at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver. You can
make money on that, especially if shingles go up."
There seemed a force at work compelling Hollister to this move. He
reflected upon it as he walked home. Doris wanted to go; this man Carr
encouraged him to go. He would be a fool not to go when opportunity
beckoned, yet he hesitated; there was a reluctance in his mind. He was
not afraid, and yet he was. Some vague peril seemed to lurk like a
misty shadow at his elbow. Nothing that he had done, nothing that he
foresaw himself doing, accounted for that, and he ended by calling
himself a fool. Of course, he would go. If Myra lived there,--well, no
matter. It was nothing to him, nothing to Doris. The past was past;
the future theirs for the making. So he went once more up to Toba
Inlet, when late April brought spring showers and blossoming shrubs
and soft sunny days to all the coast region. He carried with him
certain tools for a purpose, axes, cross-cut saws, iron wedges, a froe
to flake off uniform slabs of cedar. He sat on the steamer's deck and
thought to himself that he was in vastly different case to the last
time he had watched those same shores slide by in the same direction.
Then he had been in full retreat, withdrawing from a world which for
him held nothing of any value. Now it held for him a variety of
desirable things, which to have and to hold he need only make effort;
and that effort he was eager to put forth, was now indeed putting
forth if he did no more than sit on the steamer's deck, watching green
shore and landlocked bays fall astern, feeling the steady throb of her
engines, hearing the swish and purl of a cleft sea parting at the bow
in white foam, rippling away in a churned wake at her stern.
He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that was
dulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, only
until such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up to
the flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent and
canoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and near
where the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.
It was curious to Hollister,--the manner in which Doris could see so
clearly this valley and river and the slope where his timber stood.
She could not only envision the scene of their home and his future
operations, but she could discuss these things with practical wisdom.
They had talked of living in the old cabin where he had found her
shelf of books, but there was a difficulty in that,--of getting up the
steep hill, of carrying laboriously up that slope each item of their
supplies, their personal belongings, such articles of furniture as
they needed; and Doris had suggested that they build their house in
the flat and let his men, the bolt cutters, occupy the cabin on the
hill.
He had two hired woodsmen with him, tools, food, bedding. When the
steamer set them on the float at the head of Toba Inlet, Hollister
left the men to bring the goods ashore in a borrowed dugout and
himself struck off along a line blazed through the woods which, one of
Carr's men informed him, led out near the upper curve of the Big Bend.
A man sometimes learns a great deal in the brief span of a few
minutes. When Hollister disembarked he knew the name of one man only
in Toba Valley, the directing spirit of the settlement, Sam Carr, whom
he had met in MacFarlan's office. But there were half a dozen loggers
meeting the weekly steamer. They were loquacious men, without
formality in the way of acquaintance. Hollister had more than trail
knowledge imparted to him. The name of the man who lived with his wife
at the top of the Big Bend was Mr. J. Harrington Bland; the logger
said that with a twinkle in his eye, a chuckle as of inner amusement.
Hollister understood. The man was a round peg in this region of square
holes; otherwise he would have been Jack Bland, or whatever the
misplaced initial stood for. They spoke of him further as "the
Englishman." There was a lot of other local knowledge bestowed upon
Hollister, but "the Englishman" and his wife--who was a "pippin" for
looks--were still in the forefront of his mind when the trail led him
out on the river bank a few hundred yards from their house. He passed
within forty feet of the door. Bland was chopping wood; Myra sat on a
log, her tawny hair gleaming in the sun. Bland bestowed upon Hollister
only a casual glance, as he strode past, and went on swinging his axe;
and Hollister looking impersonally at the woman, observed that she
stared with frank curiosity. He remembered that trait of hers. He had
often teased her about it in those days when it had been an impossible
conception that she could ever regard seriously any man but himself.
Men had always been sure of a very complete survey when they came
within Myra's range, and men had always fluttered about her like moths
drawn to a candle flame. She had that mysterious quality of attracting
men, pleasing them--and of making other girls hate her in the same
degree. She used to laugh about that.
"I can't help it if I'm popular," she used to say, with a mischievous
smile, and Hollister had fondly agreed with that. He remembered that
it flattered his vanity to have other men admire his wife. He had been
so sure of her affections, her loyalty, but that had passed like
melting snow, like dew under the morning sun. A little loneliness, a
few months of separation, had done the trick.
Hollister shrugged his shoulders. He had no feeling in the matter. She
could not possibly know him; she would not wish to know him if she
could. His problems were nowise related to her. But he knew too much
to be completely indifferent. His mind kept turning upon what her life
had been, and what it must be now. He was curious. What had become of
the money? Why did she and her English husband bury themselves in a
rude shack by a river that whispered down a lonely valley?
Hollister's mind thrust these people aside, put them out of
consideration, when he reached the flat and found his canoe where he
left it, his tiny silk tent suspended intact from the limb. He ranged
about the flat for an hour or so. He had an impression of it in his
mind from his winter camp there; also he had a description of it from
Doris, and her picture was clearer and more exact in detail than his.
He found the little falls that trickled down to a small creek that
split the flat. He chose tentatively a site for their house, close by
a huge maple which had three sets of initials cut deeply in the bark
where Doris told him to look.
Then he dragged the canoe down to the river, and slid it afloat and
let the current bear him down. The air was full of pleasant odors from
the enfolding forest. He let his eyes rest thankfully upon those calm,
majestic peaks that walled in the valley. It was even more beautiful
now than he had imagined it could be when the snow blanketed hill and
valley, and the teeth of the frost gnawed everywhere. It was less
aloof; it was as if the wilderness wore a smile and beckoned with
friendly hands.
The current and his paddle swept him down past the settlement, past a
busy, grunting sawmill, past the booming ground where brown logs
floated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to where
his woodsmen waited with the piled goods on a bank above tidewater.
All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was
a busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a
house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the
shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting
cedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntary
slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure
which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. As
literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of
his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a home
and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.
The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms and
skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of
Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life
had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick
of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of
shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.
Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk
of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancient
tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off
smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a
rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This was
furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw
stuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earth
cleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the Toba
River, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at one
corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when
October came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread a
deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north
wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.
Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was
good. He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it,
and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.
And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put
them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.