For a week Hollister nursed this fear which so depressed him, watching
the slow return of his wife's vision, listening to her talk of all
they could do together when her sight was fully restored. From doubt
of ocular treatment she changed to an impatient desire of whatever
benefit might lie in professional care. A fever of impatience to see
began to burn in her.
So Hollister took her out to Vancouver, thence to Seattle, on to San
Francisco, passing from each city to a practitioner of higher standing
in the next, until two men with great reputations, and consulting fees
in proportion, after a week of observation announced their verdict:
she would regain normal vision, provided so and so--and in the event
of such and such. There was some mystery about which they were
guarded. They spoke authoritatively about infusions into the vitreous
humor and subsequent absorption. They agreed in language too technical
for a layman to understand that the cause of Doris' blindness was
gradually disappearing. Only when they put aside the formal language
of diagnosis and advised treatment did Hollister really fathom what
they were talking about. What they said then was simple. She must
cease to strain for sight of objects. She must live for a time in
neutral lights. The clearing up of her eyes could perhaps be helped by
certain ray treatments, certain forms of electrical massage, which
could be given in Vancouver as well as anywhere.
Whereupon the great men accepted their fees and departed.
So too did Hollister and his wife depart for the North again, where
they took a furnished apartment overlooking the Gulf of Georgia, close
to a beach where Robert junior could be wheeled in a pram by his
nurse. And Hollister settled himself to wait.
But it was weary work to nurse that sense of impending calamity, to
find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in
which he should walk alone, and while he was thus harassed still to
keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris. She was abnormally
sensitive to impressions. A tone spoke volumes to her. He did not wish
to disturb her by his own anxiety at this critical period.
All the while, little by little, her sight was coming She could
distinguish now any violent contrast of colors. The blurred detail of
form grew less pronounced. In the chaos of sensory impressions she
began to distinguish order; and, when she began to peer unexpectedly
at the people she met, at the chubby boy in his cot, at her husband's
face, Hollister could stand it no longer. He was afraid, afraid of
what he might see in those gray eyes if she looked at him too long,
too closely.
He was doubly sensitive now about his face because of those weeks
among strangers, of going about in crowded places where people stared
at him with every degree of morbid curiosity, exhibiting every shade
of feeling from a detached pity to open dislike of the spectacle he
presented. That alone weighed heavily on him. Inaction rasped at his
nerves. The Toba and his house, the grim peaks standing aloof behind
the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impassive, impersonal
silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and
think--and hope. A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a
lingering one. Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not
possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into
his wife's eyes. Better that she should fully regain her sight, and
then see with what manner of man she had lived and to whom she had
borne a son. Then if she could look at him without recoiling, if the
essential man meant more to her than the ghastly wreckage of his face,
all would be well. And if not,--well, then, one devastating buffet
from the mailed fist of destiny was better than the slow agony of
daily watching the crisis approach.
So Hollister put forth the plausible fact that he must see about his
affairs and took the next steamer for the Toba.
Lawanne, expecting letters, was at the float to meet the steamer.
Hollister went up-stream with him. They talked very little until they
reached Lawanne's cabin. There was a four-mile current to buck, and
they saved their breath for the paddles. Myra Bland waved as they
passed, and Hollister scarcely looked up. He was in the grip of a
strange apathy. He was tired, physically weary. His body was dull and
heavy, sluggish. So was his mind. He was aware of this, aware that a
nervous reaction of some sort was upon him. He wished that he could
always be like that,--dull, phlegmatic, uncaring. To cease thinking,
to have done with feeling, to be a clod, dead to desires, to high
hopes and heart-numbing fears.
"Come in and have a cup of tea and tell me the latest Vancouver
scandal," Lawanne urged, when they beached the canoe.
Hollister assented. He was as well there as anywhere. If there were an
antidote in human intercourse for what afflicted him, that antidote
lay in Archie Lawanne. There was no false sentiment in Lawanne. He did
not judge altogether by externals. His was an understanding, curiously
penetrating intelligence. Hollister could always be himself with
Lawanne. He sat down on the grass before the cabin and smoked while
Lawanne looked over his letters. The Chinese boy brought tea and
sandwiches and cake on a tray.
"Mrs. Hollister is recovering her sight?" Lawanne asked at length.
Hollister nodded.
"Complete normal sight?"
Hollister nodded again.
"You don't seem overly cheerful about it," Lawanne said slowly.
"You aren't stupid," Hollister replied. "Put yourself in my place."
It was Lawanne's turn to indicate comprehension and assent by a nod.
He looked at Hollister appraisingly, thoughtfully.
"She gains the privilege of seeing again. You lose--what? Are you sure
you stand to lose anything--or is it simply a fear of what you may
lose?"
"What can I expect?" Hollister muttered. "My face is bound to be a
shock. I don't know how she'll take it. And if when she sees me she
can't stand me--isn't that enough?"
"I shouldn't worry, if I were you," Lawanne encouraged. "Your wife is
a little different from the ordinary run of women, I think. And, take
it from me, no woman loves her husband for his Grecian profile alone.
Nine times out of ten a man's looks have nothing to do with what a
woman thinks of him, that is if she really knows him; whereas with a
man it is usually the other way about, until he learns by experience
that beauty isn't the whole works--which a clever woman knows
instinctively."
"Women shy away from the grotesque, the unpleasant," Hollister
declared. "You know they do. I had proof of that pretty well over two
years. So do men, for that matter. But the women are the worst. I've
seen them look at me as if I were a loathsome thing."
"Oh, rats," Lawanne returned irritably. "You're hyper-sensitive about
that face of yours. The women--well, take Mrs. Bland as an example. I
don't see that the condition of your face makes any great difference
to her. It doesn't appear to arouse any profound distaste on her
part."
Hollister could not counter that. But it was an argument which carried
no weight with him. For if Myra could look at him without a qualm,
Hollister knew it must be because her mind never quite relinquished
the impression of him as he used to be in the old days. And Doris had
nothing like that to mitigate the sweeping impression of first sight,
which Hollister feared with a fear he could not shake off by any
effort of his will.
He went on up to his own house. The maple tree thrust one heavy-leaved
branch over the porch. The doors were shut. All about the place hung
that heavy mantle of stillness which wraps a foresaken home, a
stillness in which not even a squirrel chattered or a blue-jay lifted
his voice, and in which nothing moved. He stood amid that silence,
hearing only a faint whisper from the river, a far-off monotone from
the falls beyond the chute. He felt a heaviness in his breast, a
sickening sense of being forsaken.
He went in, walked through the kitchen, looked into the bedroom, came
back to the front room, opening doors and windows to let in the sun
and air and drive out the faint, musty odor that gathers in a closed
house. A thin film of dust had settled on the piano, on chairs, on the
table. He stood in the middle of the room, abandoned to a horrible
depression. It was so still, so lonely, in there. His mind, quick to
form images, likened it to a crypt, a tomb in which all his hopes laid
buried. That was the effect it had on him, this deserted house. His
intelligence protested against submitting to this acceptance of
disaster prior to the event, but his feelings overrode his
intelligence. If Doris had been lying white and still before him in
her coffin, he could not have felt more completely that sense of the
futility of life, of love, of hope, of everything. As he stood there,
one hand in his pocket, the other tracing with a forefinger an aimless
pattern in the dust on the piano, he perceived with remarkable clarity
that the unhappiness he had suffered, the loneliness he had endured
before he met Doris Cleveland was nothing to what now threatened, to
what now seemed to dog his footsteps with sinister portent.
In the bedroom occupied by their housekeeper stood the only mirror in
the house. Hollister went in there and stood before it, staring at the
presentment of himself in the glass. He turned away with a shiver. He
would not blame her if with clear vision she recoiled from that. He
could expect nothing else. Or would she endure that frightful mien
until she could first pity, then embrace? Hollister threw out his
hands in a swift gesture of uncertainty. He could only wait and see,
and meanwhile twist and turn upon the grid. He could not be calm and
detached and impersonal. For him there was too much at stake.
He left all the doors and windows wide and climbed the hill. If he
were to withstand the onslaught of these uncertainties, these
forebodings which pressed upon him with such damnable weight, he must
bestir himself. He must not sit down and brood. He knew that. It was
not with any particular enthusiasm that he came upon his crew at work,
that his eye marked the widening stump-dotted area where a year before
the cedars stood branch to branch, nor when he looked over the long
ricks of bolts waiting that swift plunge down the chute.
Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister's
absence. So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the
mill. Hollister's profits were accelerating, the fruit of an
insatiable market, of inflated prices. As he trudged down the hill, he
reflected upon that. He was glad in a way. If Doris could not or would
not live with him, he could make life easy for her and the boy. Money
would do that for them. With a strange perverseness, his mind dwelt
upon the most complete breaking up of his domestic life. It persisted
in shadowing forth scenes in which he and Doris took part, in which it
was made plain how and why they could no longer live together. In
Hollister's mind these scenes always ended by his crying despairingly
"If you can't, why, you can't, I suppose. I don't blame you." And he
would give her the bigger half of his funds and go his way. He would
not blame her for feeling like that. Nevertheless, Hollister had
moments when he felt that he would hate her if she did,--a paradox he
could not understand.
He slept--or at least tried to sleep--that night alone in his house.
He cooked his breakfast and worked on the boom until midday, then
climbed the hill to the camp and ate lunch with his men. He worked up
there till evening and came down in the dusk. He dreaded that lonely
house, those deserted rooms. But he forced himself to abide there. He
had a dim idea of so disciplining his feelings, of attaining a numbed
acquiescence in what he could not help.
Some one had been in the house. The breakfast dishes were washed, the
dust cleared away, the floor swept, his bed made. He wondered, but
gave credit to Lawanne. It was like Archie to send his Chinese boy to
perform those tasks.
But it was Myra, he discovered by and by. He came off the hill in
mid-afternoon two days later and found her clearing up the kitchen.
"You don't mind, do you?" she asked. "I have nothing much to do at
home, and it seems a shame for everything here to be neglected. When
is Doris coming back?"
"I don't know exactly. Perhaps two or three weeks, perhaps as many
months."
"But her eyes will be all right again?"
"So they say."
Hollister went out and sat on the front doorstep. His mind sought to
span the distance to Vancouver. He wondered what Doris was doing. He
could see her sitting in a shaded room. He could see young Robert
waving fat arms out of the cushioned depths of his carriage. He could
see the sun glittering on the sea that spread away westward, from
beneath the windows of the house where they lived. And Doris would sit
there anticipating the sight of all those things which had been hidden
in a three-year night,--the sea rippling in the sun, the distant
purple hills, the nearer green of the forest and of grass and flowers,
all the light and color that made the world beautiful. She would be
looking forward to seeing him. And that was the stroke which Hollister
dreaded, which made him indifferent to other things.
He forgot Myra's presence. Six months earlier he would have resented
her being there, he would have been uneasy. Now it made no difference.
He had ceased to think of Myra as a possible menace. Lately he had not
thought of her or her affairs at all.
She came now and sat down upon the porch step within arm's length of
him, looking at him in thoughtful silence.
"Is it such a tragedy, after all?" she said at last.
"Is what?"
He took refuge in refusal to understand, although he understood
instantly what Myra meant. But he shrank from her intuitive
penetration of his troubled spirit. Like any other wounded animal, he
wanted to be left alone.
"You know what I mean," she said. "You are afraid of Doris seeing you.
That's plain enough. Is it so terrible a thing, after all? If she
can't stand the sight of your face, you're better off without her."
"It's easy to be philosophic about some one else's troubles,"
Hollister muttered. "You can be off with one love and be reasonably
sure of another before long. I can't. I'm not made that way, I don't
think. And if I were, I'm too badly handicapped."
"You haven't a very charitable opinion of me, have you, Robin?" she
said reflectively. "You rather despise me for doing precisely what you
yourself have done, making a bid for happiness as chance offered. Only
I haven't found it, and you have. So you are morally superior, and
your tragedy must naturally be profound because your happiness seems
threatened."
"Oh, damn the moral considerations," he said wearily. "It isn't that.
I don't blame you for anything you ever did. Why should I? I'm a
bigamist. I'm the father of an illegitimate son. According to the
current acceptance of morality, I've contaminated and disgraced an
innocent woman. Yet I've never been and am not now conscious of any
regrets. I don't feel ashamed. I don't feel that I have sinned. I
merely grasped the only chance, the only possible chance that was in
reach. That's all you did. As far as you and I are concerned, there
isn't any question of blame."
"Are you sure," she asked point-blank, "that your face will make any
difference to Doris?"
"How can it help?" he replied gloomily. "If you had your eyes shut and
were holding in your hands what you thought was a pretty bird and
suddenly opened your eyes and saw it was a toad, wouldn't you recoil?"
"Your simile is no good. If Doris really loved you, it was not because
she pictured you as a pretty bird. If she could love you without
seeing you, if you appealed to her, why should your marred face make
her turn away from you?"
But Hollister could not explain his feeling, his deep dread of that
which seemed no remote possibility but something inevitable and very
near at hand. He did not want pity. He did not want to be merely
endured. He sat silent, thinking of those things, inwardly protesting
against this miraculous recovery of sight which meant so great a boon
to his wife and contained such fearful possibilities of misery for
himself.
Myra rose. "I'll come again and straighten up in a day or two."
She turned back at the foot of the steps.
"Robin," she said, with a wistful, uncertain smile, "if Doris _does_
will you let me help you pick up the pieces?"
Hollister stared at her a second.
"God God!" he broke out. "Do you realize what you're saying?"
"Perfectly."
"You're a strange woman."
"Yes, I suppose I am," she returned. "But my strangeness is only an
acceptance, as a natural fact, of instincts and cravings and desires
that women are taught to repress. If I find that I've gone swinging
around an emotional circle and come back to the point, or the man,
where I started, why should I shrink from that, or from admitting
it--or from acting on it if it seemed good to me?"
She came back to where Hollister sat on the steps. She put her hand on
his knee, looked searchingly into his face. Her pansy-blue eyes met
his steadily. The expression in them stirred Hollister.
"Mind you, Robin, I don't think your Doris is superficial enough to be
repelled by a facial disfigurement. She seems instinctively to know
and feel and understand so many things that I've only learned by
bitter experience. She would never have made the mistakes I've made. I
don't think your face will make you any the less her man. But if it
does--I was your first woman. I did love you, Robin. I could again. I
could creep back into your arms if they were empty, and be glad. Would
it seem strange?"
And still Hollister stared dumbly. He heard her with a little rancor,
a strange sense of the futility of what she said. Why hadn't she
acquired this knowledge of herself long ago? It was too late now. The
old fires were dead. But if the new one he had kindled to warm himself
were to be extinguished, could he go back and bask in the warmth that
smoldered in this woman's eyes? He wondered. And he felt a faint
irritation, as if some one had accused him of being faithless.
"Do you think it's strange that I should feel and speak like this?"
Myra persisted. "Do people never profit by their mistakes? Am I so
unlovable a creature? Couldn't you either forget or forgive?"
He shook his head.
"It isn't that." His voice sounded husky, uncertain. "We can't undo
what's done, that's all. I cross no more bridges before I come to
them."
"Don't mistake me, Robin," she said with a self-conscious little
laugh. "I'm no lovesick flapper. Neither am I simply a voluptuous
creature seeking a new sensation. I don't feel as if I couldn't live
without you. But I do feel as if I could come back to you again and it
would be a little like coming home after a long, disappointing
journey. When I see you suffering, I want to comfort you. If she makes
you suffer, I shall be unhappy unless I can make you feel that life
still holds something good. If I could do that, I should perhaps find
life good myself. And it doesn't seem much good to me, any more. I'm
still selfish. I want to be happy. And I can't find happiness
anywhere. I look back to our old life and I envy myself. If the war
marred your face and made you suffer, remember what it has done to me.
Those months and months that dragged into years in London. Oh, I know
I was weak. But I was used to love. I craved it. I used to lie awake
thinking about you, in a fever of protest because you could not be
there with me, in a perfect passion of resentment at the circumstances
that kept you away; until it seemed to me that I had never had you,
that there was no such man, that all our life together was only a
dream. Think what the war did to us. How it has left us--you scarred
and hopeless; I, scarred by my passions and emotions. That is all the
war did for any one--scarred them, those it didn't kill. Oh, Robin,
Robin, life seems a ghastly mockery, sometimes. It promises so much
and gives so little."
She bent her head. Her shoulders shook with sobs she tried to
strangle. Hollister put his hand on the thick coils of honey-colored
hair. He was sorry for her--and for himself. And he was disturbed to
find that the touch of her hair, the warm pressure of her hands on his
knee, made his blood run faster.
The curious outbreak spent itself. She drew herself away from him, and
rising to her feet without a word she walked rapidly away along the
path by the river.
Hollister looked after her. He was troubled afresh, and he thought to
himself that he must avoid scenes like that. He was not, it appeared,
wholly immune from the old virus.
And he was clearly conscious of the cold voice of reason warning him
against Myra. Sitting there in the shadow of his silent house, he
puzzled over these new complexities of feeling. He was a little
bewildered. To him Doris meant everything that Myra had once been. He
wanted only to retain what he had. He did not want to salvage anything
from the wreckage of the past. He was too deeply concerned with the
dreadful test that fully restored eyesight would impose on Doris. He
knew that Doris Cleveland's feeling for him had been profound and
vital. She had given too many proofs for him to doubt that. But would
it survive? He did not know. He hoped a little and feared much.
Above this fear he found himself now bewildered by this fresh swirl of
emotion. He knew that if Myra had flung herself into his arms he would
have found some strange comfort in that embrace, that he could not
possibly have repulsed her. It was a prop to his soul--or was it, he
asked himself, merely his vanity?--that Myra could look behind the
grimness of his features and dwell fondly on the essential man, on the
reality behind that dreadful mask.
Still, Hollister knew that to be only a mood, that unexpected
tenderness for a woman whom he had hated for betraying him. It was
Doris he wanted. The thought of her passing out of his life rested
upon him like an intolerable burden. To be in doubt of her afflicted
him with anguish. That the fires of her affection might dwindle and
die before daily sight of him loomed before Hollister as the
consummation of disaster,--and he seemed to feel that hovering near,
closely impending.
That they had lived together sixteen months did not count. That she
had borne him a child,--neither did that count. That she had pillowed
her brown head nightly in the crook of his arm--that he had bestowed a
thousand kisses on her lips, her hair, her neck--that she had lain
beside him hour after hour through the long nights, drowsily
content--none of these intimacies counted beside vision. He was a
stranger in the dark. She did not know him. She heard his voice, knew
his tenderness, felt the touch of him,--the unseen lover. But there
remained for her the revelation of sight. He was still the mysterious,
the unknown, about which her fancies played.
How could he know what image of him, what ideal, resided tenaciously
in her mind, and whether it would survive the shock of reality? That
was the root of Hollister's fear, a definite well-grounded fear. He
found himself hoping that promise of sight would never be fulfilled,
that the veil would not be lifted, that they would go on as they were.
And he would feel ashamed of such a thought. Sight was precious. Who
was he to deny her that mercy,--she who loved the sun and the hills
and the sea; all the sights of earth and sky which had been shut away
so long; she who had crept into his arms many a time, weeping
passionate tears because all the things she loved were forever wrapped
in darkness?
If upon Hollister had been bestowed the power to grant her sight or to
withhold it, he would have shrunk from a decision. Because he loved
her he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that
long night in which she groped her way. But he dreaded lest that light
gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which
everything he valued would be lost.
Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this
darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands,--and Hollister
frowned and tried not to think of that.