From day to day and from week to week, apprehending mistily that he
was caught in and carried along by a current--a slow but irresistible
movement of events--Hollister pursued the round of his daily life as
if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had
done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of
the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a
chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his
hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true
course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the
perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not
so sure of untroubled passage. But mostly he did not think of these
potential dangers.
He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living. The
idea of poverty chafed him. He had once been a considerable toad in a
sizable puddle. He had inherited a competence and lost it, and power
to reclaim it was beyond him. He wasted no regrets upon the loss of
that material security, although he sometimes wondered how Myra had
contrived to let such a sum slip through her fingers in a little over
two years. He assumed that she had done so. Otherwise she would not
be sitting on the bank of the Toba, waiting more or less passively for
her husband to step into a dead man's shoes.
That was, in effect, Bland's situation. He was an Englishman of good
family, accustomed to a definite social standing, accustomed to money
derived from a source into which he never troubled to inquire. He had
never worked. He never would work, not in the sense of performing any
labor as a means of livelihood. He had a small income,--fifty or sixty
dollars a month. When he was thirty he would come into certain
property and an income of so many thousand pounds a year. He and his
wife could not subsist in any town on the quarterly dole he received.
That was why they had come to live in that cabin on the Toba River.
Bland hunted. He fished. To him the Toba valley served well enough as
a place to rusticate. Any place where game animals and sporting fish
abounded satisfied him temperamentally.
He had done his "bit" in the war. When he came into his money, they
would go "home." He was placidly sure of himself, of his place in the
general scheme of things. He was suffering from temporary
embarrassment, that was all. It was a bit rough on Myra, but it would
be all right by and by.
So much filtered into Hollister's ears and understanding before long.
Archie Lawanne came back downstream with two grizzly pelts, and
Hollister met Bland for the first time. He appraised Bland with some
care,--this tall, ruddy Englishman who had supplanted him in a woman's
affections, and who, unless Hollister's observation had tricked him,
was in a fair way to be himself supplanted.
For Hollister was the unwilling spectator of a drama to which he could
not shut his eyes. Nor could he sit back in the rôle of cynical
audience, awaiting in cushioned ease the climax of the play and the
final exit of the actors.
Mills was the man. Whether he was more than a potential lover, whether
Myra in her _ennui_, her hunger for a new sensation--whatever
unsatisfied longings led her to exercise upon men the power of her
undeniable attraction--had now given her heart into Charlie Mills'
keeping, Hollister of course neither knew nor cared.
But he did know that they met now and then, that Mills seemed to have
some curious knowledge of when Bland was far afield. Mills could be
trusted to appear on the flat in the evening or on a Sunday, if Myra
came to see Doris.
He speculated idly upon this sometimes. Myra he knew well enough, or
thought he did. He began to regard Mills with a livelier interest, to
talk to the man, to draw him out, to discover the essential man under
the outward seeming. He was not slow to discover that Mills was
something more than so much bone and sinew which could be applied
vigorously to an axe or a saw.
Hollister's speculations took a new turn when Archie Lawanne and
Bland came back from the bear hunt. For Lawanne did not go out. He
pitched a tent on the flat below Hollister's and kept one Siwash to
cook for him. He made that halt to rest up, to stretch and dry his
bear-skins. But long after these trophies were cured, he still
remained. He was given to roaming up and down the valley. He extended
his acquaintance to the settlement farther down, taking observation of
an earnest attempt at coöperative industry. He made himself at home
equally with the Blands and the Hollisters.
And when July was on them, with hot, hazy sunshine in which berries
ripened and bird and insect life filled the Toba with a twitter and a
drone, when the smoke of distant forest fires drifted like pungent fog
across the hills, Hollister began to wonder if the net Myra seemed
unconsciously to spread for men's feet had snared another victim.
This troubled him a little. He liked Lawanne. He knew nothing about
him, who he was, where he came from, what he did. Nevertheless there
had arisen between them a curious fellowship. There seemed to reside
in the man a natural quality of uprightness, a moral stoutness of soul
that lifted him above petty judgments. One did not like or dislike
Lawanne for what he did or said so much as for what he suggested as
being inherent within himself.
There was a little of that quality, also, about Charlie Mills. He
worked in the timber with a fierce energy. His dark face glistened
with sweat-beads from morning till night. His black hair stood in
wisps and curls, its picturesque disorder heightened by a trick he had
of running his fingers through it when he paused for a minute to take
breath, to look steadfastly across at the slide-scarred granite face
of the north valley wall, with a wistful look in his eyes.
"Those hills," he said once abruptly to Hollister, "they were here
long before we came. They'll be here long after we're gone. What a
helpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway. A squirrel on his
wheel in a cage."
It was a protesting acceptance of a stark philosophy, Hollister
thought, a cry against some weight that bore him down, the momentary
revealing of some conflict in which Mills foresaw defeat, or had
already suffered defeat. It was a statement wrung out of him,
requiring no comment, for he at once resumed the steady pull on the
six-foot, cross-cut saw.
"Why don't you take it easier?" Hollister said to him. "You work as if
the devil was driving you."
Mills smiled.
"The only devil that drives me," he said, "is the devil inside me.
"Besides," he continued, between strokes of the saw, "I want to make a
stake and get to hell out of here."
Hollister did not press him for reasons. Mills did work as if the
devil drove him, and in his quiescent moments an air of melancholy
clouded his dark face as if physical passivity left him a prey to some
inescapable inner gloom.
All about him, then, Hollister perceived strong undercurrents of life
flowing sometimes in the open, sometimes underground: Charlie Mills
and Myra Bland touched by that universal passion which has brought
happiness and pain, dizzy heights of ecstasy and deep abysses of
despair to men and women since the beginning of time; Lawanne
apparently succumbing to the same malady that touched Mills; Bland
moving in the foreground, impassive, stolidly secure in the possession
of this desired woman. And all of them bowed before and struggling
under economic forces which they did not understand, working and
planning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of their
being, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means of
livelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the human
desire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could be
grasped.
Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabin
and Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit of
drowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see the
river, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly along
between the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green of
the fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drank
in the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls,
and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestion
of delight. At such times he felt the goodness of being alive, the
mild intoxication of the fragrant air which filled the valley, the
majestic beauty of those insentient hills upon which the fierce
midsummer sun was baring glacial patches that gleamed now like blue
diamonds or again with a pale emerald sheen, in a setting of worn
granite and white snowdrifts five thousand feet above.
In this wilderness, this vast region of forest and streams and wild
mountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks hurrying here and there
about their self-appointed tasks. Those like himself and Doris, who
did not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, fared
well enough. The land held out to them manifold promises. Hollister
looked at the red-brown shingle bolts accumulating behind the
boom-sticks and felt that inner satisfaction which comes of success
achieved by plan and labor. If his mutilated face had been capable of
expression, it would have reflected pride, satisfaction. Out of the
apparent wreckage of his life he was laying the foundations of
something permanent, something abiding, an enduring source of good. He
would tangle his fingers in Doris' brown hair and feel glad.
Then perhaps his eyes would shift downstream to where Bland's stark,
weather-beaten cabin lifted its outline against the green thickets,
and he would think uneasily upon what insecure tenure, upon what
deliberate violation of law and of current morality he held his
dearest treasure. What would she think, if she knew, this dainty
creature cuddling against his knee? He would wake in the night and lie
on elbow staring at her face in the moonlight,--delicate-skinned as a
child's, that lovable, red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes which
sometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their gray
depths.
What would she think? What would she, say? What would she do? He did
not know. It troubled him to think of this. If he could have swept
Myra out of North America with a wave of his hand, he would have made
one sweeping gesture. He was jealous of his happiness, his security,
and Myra's presence was not only a reminder; it had the effect upon
him of a threat he could not ignore.
Yet he was compelled to ignore it. She and Doris had become fast
friends. It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes. Except for the
uprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he would
have been revolted at his own actions. He had committed technical
bigamy. His children would be illegitimate before the law.
Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment; his
class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face
rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption
that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so;
that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions in
living, loving, marrying, breeding--even in dying--does so because of
innate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, book
and candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in the
next.
Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were
wholly matters of free will. From the time he put on the king's
uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris
Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of
devastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened to
others. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like
frail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex of
the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what
he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances
that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.
Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and
actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost
his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the
special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple
competently with any material problem but who stand aghast,
apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before
the wavering gusts of human passion.
If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and he
had dragged Doris Cleveland down with him. So was Myra smeared with
the pitch of moral obloquy. They were sinners all. Pain should be
their desert; shame and sorrow their portion.
Why? Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust of
circumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion which
had overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblence of
happiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands.
The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisively
intolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called to
pass judgment.
But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wife
than he could feel within himself a personal conviction of sin. Love,
he perceived, was not a fixed emotion. It was like a fire which glows
bright when plied with fuel and burns itself out when it is no longer
fed. To some it was casual, incidental; to others an imperative law of
being. Myra remained essentially the same woman, whether she loved him
or some other man. Who was he to judge her? She had loved him and then
ceased to love him. Beyond that, her life was her own to do with as
she chose.
Nor could Hollister, when he faced the situation squarely, feel that
he was less a man, less upright, less able to bear himself decently
before his fellows than he had ever been. Sometimes he would grow
impatient with thinking and put it all by. He had his moods. But also
he had his work, the imperative necessity of constant labor to
satisfy the needs both of the present and the future. No man goes into
the wilderness with only his hands and a few tools and wins security
by any short and easy road. There were a great many things Hollister
was determined to have for himself and Doris and their children,--for
he did not close his eyes to the natural fulfilment of the mating
impulse. He did not spare himself. Like Mills, he worked with a
prodigious energy. Sometimes he wondered if dreams akin to his own
drove Charlie Mills to sweat and strain, to pile up each day double
the amount of split cedar, and double for himself the wages earned by
the other two men,--who were themselves no laggards with axe and saw.
Or if Mills fantastically personified the timber as something which
stood between him and his aching desire and so attacked it with all
his lusty young strength.
Sometimes Hollister sat by, covertly watching Mills and Myra. He could
make nothing of Myra. She was courteous, companionable, nothing more.
But to Hollister Mills' trouble was plain enough. The man was on his
guard, as if he knew betrayal lurked in the glance of his eye, in the
quality of his tone. Hollister gauged the depths of Mills' feelings by
the smoldering fire in his glance,--that glow in Mills' dark eyes when
they rested too long on Myra. There would be open upon his face a look
of hopelessness, as if he dwelt on something that fascinated and
baffled him.
Sometimes, latterly, he saw a hint of that same dubious expression
about Archie Lawanne. But there was a different temper in Lawanne, a
flash of the sardonic at times.
In July, however, Lawanne went away.
"I'm coming back, though," he told Hollister before he left. "I think
I shall put up a cabin and winter here."
"I'll be glad to see you," Hollister replied, "but it's a lonely
valley in the winter."
Lawanne smiled.
"I can stand isolation for a change," he said. "I want to write a
book. And while I am outside I'll send you in a couple that I have
already written. You will see me in October. Try to get the
shingle-bolt rush over so we can go out after deer together now and
then."
So for a time the Toba saw no more of Lawanne. Hollister missed him.
So did Doris. But she had Myra Bland to keep her company while
Hollister was away at work in the timber. Sometimes Bland himself
dropped in. But Hollister could never find himself on any common
ground of mutual interest with this sporting Englishman. He was a
bluff, hearty, healthy man, apparently without either intellect or
affectation.
"What do you think of Bland?" he asked Doris once.
"I can't think of him, because I can't see him," she answered. "He is
either very clever at concealing any sort of personality, or he is
simply a big, strong, stupid man."
Which was precisely what Hollister himself thought.
"Isn't it queer," Doris went on, "how vivid a thing personality is?
Now Myra and Mr. Lawanne are definite, colorable entities to me. So is
Charlie Mills, quiet as he is. And yet I can't make Bland seem
anything more than simply a voice with a slightly English accent."
"Well, there must be something to him, or she wouldn't have married
him," Hollister remarked.
"Perhaps. But I shouldn't wonder if she married him for something that
existed mostly in her own mind," Doris reflected. "Women often do
that--men too, I suppose. I very nearly did myself once. Then I
discovered that this ideal man was something I had created in my own
imagination."
"How did you find that out before you were committed to the
enterprise?" he asked curiously.
"Because my reason and my emotions were in continual conflict over
that man," Doris said thoughtfully. "I have always been sure, ever
since I began to take men seriously, that I wouldn't get on very long
with any man who was simply a strong, healthy animal. And as soon as I
saw that this admirable young man of mine hadn't much to offer that
wasn't purely physical, why, the glamor all faded."
"Maybe mine will fade too," Hollister suggested.
"Oh, you're fishing for compliments now," she laughed. "You know very
well you are. But we're pretty lucky, Robert mine, just the same.
We've gained a lot. We haven't lost anything yet. I wouldn't
back-track, not an inch. Would you--honest, now?"
Hollister answered that in a manner which seemed to him suitable to
the occasion. And while he stood with his arm around her, Doris
startled him.
"Myra told me a curious thing the other day," she said. "She has been
married twice. She told me that her first husband's name was the same
as yours--Bob Hollister--that he was killed in France in 1917. She
says that you somehow remind her of him."
"There were a good many men killed in France in '17," he observed.
"And Hollister is not such an uncommon name. Does the lady suspect I'm
the reincarnation of her dear departed? She seems to have consoled
herself for the loss, anyway."
"I doubt if she has," Doris answered. "She doesn't unburden her soul
to me, but I have the feeling that she is not exactly a happy woman."
The matter rested there. Doris went away to do something about the
house. Hollister stood glowering at the distant outline of Bland's
cabin. A slow uneasiness grew on him. What did Myra mean by that
confidence? Did she mean anything? He shook himself impatiently. He
had a profound distaste for that revelation. In itself it was nothing,
unless some obscure motive lurked behind. That troubled him. Myra
meant nothing--or she meant mischief. Why, he could not say. She was
quit of him at her own desire. She had made a mouthful of his modest
fortune. If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask of
scars, and from some obscure, perverted motive meant to bring
shipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he would
strangle her without a trace of remorse.