All that summer the price of cedar went creeping up. For a while this
was only in keeping with the slow ascension of commodity costs which
continued long after the guns ceased to thunder. But presently cedar
on the stump, in the log, in the finished product, began to soar while
other goods slowed or halted altogether in their mysterious climb to
inaccessable heights,--and cedar was not a controlled industry, not a
monopoly. Shingles and dressed cedar were scarce, that was all. For
the last two years of the war most of the available man-power and
machinery of British Columbia loggers had been given over to airplane
spruce. Carpenters had laid down their tools and gone to the front.
House builders had ceased to build houses while the vast cloud of
European uncertainty hung over the nation. All across North America
the wind and weather had taken toll of roofs, and these must be
repaired. The nation did not cease to breed while its men died daily
by thousands. And with the signing of the armistice a flood of
immigration was let loose. British and French and Scandinavians and
swarms of people from Czecho-Slovakia and all the Balkan States,
hurried from devastated lands and impending taxes to a new country
glowing with the deceptive greenness of far fields. The population had
increased; the housing for it had not. So that rents went up and up
until economic factors exerted their inexorable pressure and the tap
of the carpenter's hammer and the ring of his saw began to sound in
every city, in every suburb, on new farms and lonely prairies.
Cedar shingles began to make fortunes for those who dealt in them on a
large scale. By midsummer Carr's mill on the Toba worked night and
day.
"Crowd your work, Hollister," Carr advised him. "I've been studying
this cedar situation from every angle. There will be an unlimited
demand and rising prices for about another year. By that time every
logging concern will be getting out cedar. The mills will be cutting
it by the million feet. They'll glut the market and the bottom will
drop out of this cedar boom. So get that stuff of yours out while the
going is good. We can use it all."
But labor was scarce. All the great industries were absorbing men,
striving to be first in the field of post-war production. Hollister
found it difficult to enlarge his crew. That was a lonely hillside
where his timber stood. Loggers preferred the big camps, the less
primitive conditions under which they must live and work. Hollister
saw that he would be unable to extend his operations until deep snow
shut down some of the northern camps that fall. Even so he did well
enough, much better than he had expected at the beginning. Bill
Hayes, he of the gray mustache and the ear-piercing faller's cry, was
a "long-stake" man. That is to say, old Bill knew his weaknesses, the
common weaknesses of the logger, the psychological reaction from hard
work, from sordid living, from the indefinable cramping of the spirit
that grows upon a man through months of monotonous labor. Town--a
pyrotechnic display among the bright lights--one dizzy swoop on the
wings of fictitious excitement--bought caresses--empty pockets--the
woods again! Yet the logger dreams always of saving his money, of
becoming a timber king, of setting himself up in some business--knowing
all the while that he is like a child with pennies in his hand,
unhappy until they are spent. Bill Hayes was past fifty, and he knew
all this. He stayed in the woods as long as the weakness of the flesh
permitted, naively certain that he had gone on his last "bust", that
he would bank his money and experience the glow of possessing capital.
The other man was negligible--a bovine lump of flesh without
personality--born to hew wood and draw water for men of enterprise.
And there was always Mills, Mills who wanted to make a stake and "get
to hell out of here", and who did not go, although the sum to his
credit in Hollister's account book was creeping towards a thousand
dollars, so fierce and unceasing an energy did Mills expend upon the
fragrant cedar.
Hollister himself accounted for no small profit. Like Mills, he worked
under a spur. He wrestled stoutly with opportunity. He saw beyond the
cedar on that green slope. With a living assured, he sought fortune,
aspired to things as yet beyond his reach,--leisure, an ampler way of
life, education for his children that were to be.
This measure of prosperity loomed not so distant. When he took stock
of his resources in October, he found himself with nearly three
thousand dollars in hand and the bulk of his cedar still standing.
Half that was directly the gain derived from a rising market. Labor
was his only problem. If he could get labor, and shingles held the
upper price levels, he would make a killing in the next twelve months.
After that, with experience gained and working capital, the forested
region of the British Columbia coast lay before him as a field of
operations.
Meantime he was duly thankful for daily progress. Materially that
destiny which he doubted seemed to smile on him.
Late in October, when the first southward flight of wild duck began to
wing over the valley, old Bill Hayes and Sam Ballard downed tools and
went to town. The itch of the wandering foot had laid hold of them.
The pennies burned their pockets. Ballard frankly wanted a change.
Hayes declared he wanted only a week's holiday, to see a show or two
and buy some clothes. He would surely be back.
"Yes, he'll be back," Mills commented with ironic emphasis. "He'll be
broke in a week and the first camp that pays his fare out will get
him. There's no fool like a logger. Strong in the back and weak in
the head--the best of us."
But Mills himself stayed on. What kept him, Hollister wondered? Did he
have some objective that centered about Myra Bland? Was the man a
victim of hopeless passion, lingering near the unobtainable because he
could not tear himself away? Was Myra holding him like a pawn in some
obscure game that she played to feed her vanity? Or were the two of
them caught in one of those inextricable coils which Hollister
perceived to arise in the lives of men and women, from which they
could not free themselves without great courage and ruthless disregard
of consequences?
Sometimes Hollister wondered if he himself were not overfanciful, too
sensitive to moods and impressions. Then he would observe some
significant interchange of looks between Mills and Myra and be sure of
currents of feeling, furtive and powerful, sweeping about those two.
It angered him. Hollister was all for swift and forthright action,
deeds done in the open. If they loved, why did they not commit
themselves boldly to the undertaking, take matters in their own hands
and have an end to all secrecy? He felt a menace in this secrecy, as
if somehow it threatened him. He perceived that Mills suffered, that
something gnawed at the man. When he rested from his work, when he sat
quiescent beside the fire where they ate at noon together, that cloak
of melancholy brooding wrapped Mills close. He seldom talked. When he
did there was in his speech a resentful inflection like that of a man
who smarts under some injury, some injustice, some deep hurt which he
may not divulge but which nags him to the limits of his endurance.
Hollister was Mills' sole company after the other two men left. They
would work within sight of each other all day. They ate together at
noon. Now and then he asked Mills down to supper out of pity for the
man's complete isolation. Some chord in Hollister vibrated in sympathy
with this youngster who kept his teeth so resolutely clenched on
whatever hurt him.
And while Hollister watched Mills and wondered how long that effort at
repression would last, he became conscious that Myra was watching
_him_, puzzling over him; that something about him attracted and
repulsed her in equal proportions. It was a disturbing discovery. Myra
could study him with impunity. Doris could not see this scrutiny of
her husband by her neighbor. And Myra did not seem to care what
Hollister saw. She would look frankly at him with a question in her
eyes. What that question might be, Hollister refused even to consider.
She never again made any remark to Doris about her first husband,
about the similarity of name. But now and then she would speak of
something that happened when she was a girl, some casual reference to
the first days of the war, to her life in London, and her eyes would
turn to Hollister. But he was always on his guard, always on the
alert against these pitfalls of speech. He was never sure whether they
were deliberate traps, or merely the half-regretful, backward looking
of a woman to whom life lately had not been kind.
Nevertheless it kept his nerves on edge. For he valued his peace and
his home that was in the making. There was a restfulness and a
satisfaction in Doris Cleveland which he dreaded to imperil because he
had the feeling that he would never find its like again. He felt that
Myra's mere presence was like a sword swinging over his head. There
was no armor he could put on against that weapon if it were decreed it
should fall.
Hollister soon perceived that if he were not to lose ground he must
have labor. Men would not come seeking work so far out of the beaten
track. In addition, there were matters afoot that required attention.
So he took Doris with him and went down to Vancouver. Almost the first
man he met on Cordova Street, when he went about in search of bolt
cutters, was Bill Hayes, sober and unshaven and a little crestfallen.
"Why didn't you come back?" Hollister asked.
Hayes grinned sheepishly.
"Kinda hated to," he admitted. "Pulled the same old stuff--dry town,
too. Shot the roll. Dang it, I'd ought to had more sense. Well, that's
the way she goes. You want men?"
"Sure I want men," Hollister said. "Look here, if you can rustle five
or six men, I'll make it easier for you all. I'll take up a cook for
the bolt camp. And I won't shut down for anything but snow too deep to
work in."
"You're on. I think I can rustle some men. Try it, anyhow."
Hayes got a crew together in twenty-four hours. Doris attended to her
business, which required the help of her married cousin and a round of
certain shops. Almost the last article they bought was a piano, the
one luxury Doris longed for, a treat they had promised themselves as
soon as the cedar got them out of the financial doldrums.
"I suppose it's extravagance," Doris said, her fingers caressing the
smooth mahogany, feeling the black and ivory of the keyboard, "but
it's one of the few things one doesn't need eyes for."
She had proved that to Hollister long ago. When she could see she must
have had an extraordinary faculty for memorizing music. Her memory
seemed to have indelibly engraved upon it all the music she had ever
played.
Hollister smiled indulgently and ordered the instrument cased for
shipping. It went up on the same steamer that gave passage to
themselves and six woodsmen and their camp cook. There were some bits
of new furniture also.
This necessitated the addition of another room. But that was a simple
matter for able hands accustomed to rough woodwork. So in a little
while their house extended visibly, took on a homier aspect. The
sweet-peas and flaming poppies had wilted under the early frosts. Now
a rug or two and a few pictures gave to the floors and walls a
cheerful note of color that the flowers had given to their dooryard
during the season of their bloom.
About the time this was done, and the cedar camp working at an
accelerated pace, Archie Lawanne came back to the Toba. He walked into
Hollister's quite unexpectedly one afternoon. Myra was there.
It seemed to Hollister that Lawanne's greeting was a little eager, a
trifle expectant, that he held Myra's outstretched hand just a little
longer than mere acquaintance justified. Hollister glanced at Mills,
sitting by. Mills had come down to help Hollister on the boom, and
Doris had called them both in for a cup of tea. Mills was staring at
Lawanne with narrowed eyes. His face wore the expression of a man who
sees impending calamity, sees it without fear or surprise, faces it
only with a little dismay. He set down his cup and lighted a
cigarette. His fingers, the brown, muscular, heavy fingers of a
strong-handed man, shook slightly.
"You know, it's good to be back in this old valley," Lawanne said. "I
have half a notion to become a settler. A fellow could build up quite
an estate on one of these big flats. He could grow almost anything
here that will grow in this latitude. And when he wanted to experience
the doubtful pleasures of civilization, they would always be waiting
for him outside."
"If he had the price," Mills put in shortly.
"Precisely," Lawanne returned, "and cared to pay it--for all he got."
"That's what it is to be a man and free," Myra observed. "You can go
where you will and when--live as you wish."
"It all depends on what you mean by freedom," Lawanne replied. "Show
me a free man. Where is there such? We're all slaves. Only some of us
are too stupid to recognize our status."
"Slaves to what?" Myra asked. "You seem to have come back in a
decidedly pessimistic frame of mind."
"Slaves to our own necessities; to other people's demands; to burdens
we have assumed, or have had thrust upon us, which we haven't the
courage to shake off. To our own moods and passions. To something
within us that keeps us pursuing this thing we call happiness. To
struggle for fulfilment of ideals that can never be attained. Slaves
to our environment, to social forces before which the individual is
nothing. It's all rot to talk about the free man, the man whose soul
is his own. Complete freedom isn't even desirable, because to attain
it you would have to withdraw yourself altogether from your fellows
and become a law unto yourself in some remote solitude; and no sane
person wants to do that, even to secure this mythical freedom which
people prattle about and would recoil from if it were offered them.
Yes, I'll have another cup, if you please, Mrs. Hollister."
Lawanne munched cake and drank tea and talked as if he had been denied
the boon of conversation for a long time. But that could hardly be,
for he had been across the continent since he left there. He had been
in New York and Washington and swung back to British Columbia by way
of San Francisco.
"I read those two books of yours--or rather Bob read them to me,"
Doris said presently. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for writing
such a preposterous yarn as 'The Worm'."
"Ah, my dear woman," Lawanne's face lit up with a sardonic smile. "I
wish my publishers could hear you say that. 'The Worm' is good, sound,
trade union goods, turned out in the very best manner of a thriving
school of fictionsmiths. It sold thirty thousand copies in the regular
edition and tons in the reprint."
"But there never were such invincible men and such a perfect creature
of a woman," Doris persisted. "And the things they did--the strings
you pulled. Life isn't like that. You know it isn't."
"Granted," Lawanne returned dryly. "But what did you think of 'The Man
Who Couldn't Die'?"
"It didn't seem to me," Doris said slowly, "that the man who wrote the
last book could possibly have written the first. That _was_ life. Your
man there was a real man, and you made his hopes and fears, his love
and sufferings, very vivid. Your woman was real enough too, but I
didn't like her. It didn't seem to me she was worth the pain she
caused."
"Neither did she seem so to Phillips, if you remember," Lawanne said.
"That was his tragedy--to know his folly and still be urged blindly on
because of her, because of his own illusions, which he knew he must
cling to or perish. But wait till I finish the book I'm going to write
this winter. I'm going to cut loose. I'm going to smite the
Philistines--and the chances are," he smiled cynically, "they won't
even be aware of the blow. Did you read those books?" He turned
abruptly to Myra.
She nodded.
"Yes, but I refuse to commit myself," she said lightly. "There is no
such thing as a modest author, and Mrs. Hollister has given you all
the praise that's good for you."
Hollister and Mills went back to their work on the boom. When they
finished their day's work, Lawanne had gone down to the Blands' with
Myra. After supper, as Mills rose to leave for the upper camp, he said
to Doris:
"Have you got that book of his--about the fellow that couldn't die?
I'd like to read it."
Doris gave him the book. He went away with it in his hand.
Hollister looked after him curiously. There was strong meat in
Lawanne's book. He wondered if Mills would digest it. And he wondered
a little if Mills regarded Lawanne as a rival, if he were trying to
test the other man's strength by his work.
Away down the river, now that dark had fallen, the light in Bland's
house shone yellow. There was a red, glowing spot on the river bank.
That would be Lawanne's camp. Hollister shut the door on the chill
October night and turned back to his easy-chair by the stove. Doris
had finished her work. She sat at the piano, her fingers picking out
some slow, languorous movement that he did not know, but which soothed
him like a lullaby.
Vigorously he dissented from Lawanne's philosophy of enslavement. He,
Hollister, was a free man. Yes, he was free,--but only when he could
shut the door on the past, only when he could shut away all the world
just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold frosty night, his
neighbors and his men, by the simple closing of a door. But he could
not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must
meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange
repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by
them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web
of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome
possibility. He could say to himself that it was only an impression;
that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity. But he
could not help it. Life was like that. No man stood alone. No man
could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his
fellows. Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and
conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or
intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being. Who was he
to escape?
No, Hollister reflected, he could not insulate himself and Doris
against this environment, against these people. They would have to
take things as they came and be thankful they were no worse.
Doris left the piano. She sat on a low stool beside him, leaned her
brown head against him.
"It won't be so long before I have to go to town, Bob," she said
dreamily. "I hope the winter is open so that the work goes on well.
And sometimes I hope that the snow shuts everything down, so that
you'll be there with me. I'm not very consistent, am I?"
"You suit me," he murmured. "And I'll be there whether the work goes
on or not."
"What an element of the unexpected, the unforeseen, is at work all the
time," she said. "A year ago you and I didn't even know of each
other's existence. I used to sit and wonder what would become of me.
It was horrible sometimes to go about in the dark, existing like a
plant in a cellar, longing for all that a woman longs for if she is a
woman and knows herself. And you were in pretty much the same boat."
"Worse," Hollister muttered, "because I sulked and brooded and raged
against what had overtaken me. Yet if I hadn't reacted so violently,
I should never have come here to hide away from what hurt me. So I
wouldn't have met you. That would almost make one think there is
something in the destiny that you and Lawanne smile at."
"Destiny and chance: two names for the same thing, and that thing
wholly unaccountable, beyond the scope of human foresight," Doris
replied. "Things happen; that's all we can generally say. We don't
know why. Speaking of Lawanne, I wonder if he really does intend to
stay here this winter and write a book?"
"He says so."
"He'll be company for us," she reflected. "He's clever and a little
bit cynical, but I like him. He'll help to keep us from getting bored
with each other."
"Do you think there is any danger of that?" Hollister inquired.
She tweaked his ear playfully.
"People do, you know. But I hardly think we shall. Not for a year or
two, anyway. Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale odor
of uneventful, routine, domestic life. Then _you_ may."
"Huh," he grunted derisively, "catch me. I know what I want and what
contents me. We'll beat the game handily; and we'll beat it together.
"Why, good Lord," he cried sharply, "what would be the good of all
this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and
planning and anticipating things? Nearly every man, I believe," he
concluded thoughtfully, "keeps his gait because of some woman. There
is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some
woman--past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that."
"To keep him," Doris laughed, "in the condition a poet once described
as:
'This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing
Toward the gloom.'"
They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom,
of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.
When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills
humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The
Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon
meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke
derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.
That was beyond their comprehension.
But Hollister thought he understood.
Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the
vantage of height and saw Lawanne's winter quarters already taking
form on the river bank, midway between his own place and Bland's. It
grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a
shake roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now
began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which
deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the
torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes
vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its
density, in its variety of shrub and fern.
For a month after that a lull seemed to come upon the slow march of
events towards some unknown destiny,--of which Hollister nursed a
strange prescience that now rose strong in him and again grew so
tenuous that he would smile at it for a fancy. Yet in that month there
was no slack in the routine of affairs. The machinery of Carr's mill
revolved through each twenty-four hours. Up on the hill Hollister's
men felled trees with warning shouts and tumultuous crashings. They
attacked the prone trunks with axe and saw and iron wedges,
Lilliputians rending the body of a fallen giant. The bolt piles grew;
they were hurled swiftly down the chute into the dwindling river,
rafted to the mill. All this time the price of shingles in the open
market rose and rose, like a tide strongly on the flood, of which no
man could prophesy the high-water mark. Money flowed to Hollister's
pockets, to the pockets of his men. The value of his standing timber
grew by leaps and bounds. And always Sam Carr, who had no economic
illusions, urged Hollister on, predicting before long the inevitable
reaction.
The days shortened. Through the long evenings Hollister's house
became a sort of social center. Lawanne would come in after supper,
sometimes inert, dumb, to sit in a corner smoking a pipe,--again
filled with a curious exhilaration, to talk unceasingly of everything
that came into his mind, to thump ragtime on the piano and sing a
variety of inconsequential songs in a velvety baritone. Myra came
often. So did Bland. So did Charlie Mills. Many evenings they were all
there together. As the weeks went winging by, Doris grew less certain
on her feet, more prone to spend her time sitting back in a deep arm
chair, and Myra began to play for them, to sing for them--to come to
the house in the day and help Doris with her work.
The snow began at last, drifting down out of a windless sky. Upon
that, with a sudden fear lest a great depth should fall, lest the
river should freeze and make exit difficult, Hollister took his wife
to town. This was about the middle of November. Some three weeks later
a son was born to them.