To the world outside the immediate environs of the Toba, beyond those
who knew the people concerned, that double murder was merely another
violent affair which provided material for newspapers, a remote event
allied to fires, divorces, embezzlements, politics, and scandals in
high finance,--another item to be glanced quickly over and as quickly
forgotten.
But one man at least could not quickly forget or pass it over lightly.
Once the authorities--coming from a great distance, penetrating the
solitude of the valley with a casual, business-like air--arrived,
asked questions, issued orders, sent two men abroad in search of the
slayer, and removed the bodies to another jurisdiction, Hollister had
nothing more to do with that until he should be called again to give
formal testimony.
He was left with nothing to do but brood, to sit asking unanswerable
questions of a world and a life that for him was slowly and
bewilderingly verging upon the chaotic, in which there was no order,
no security, no assurance of anything but devastating changes that had
neither rhyme nor reason in their sequence. There might be logical
causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had
transpired. He conceded that point. But he could not establish any
association; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against
the common assumption that all things, no matter how mysterious, work
out ultimately for some common good.
Where was the good forthcoming out of so much that was evil, he asked?
Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for
everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was
little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous
circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a
backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by
adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away,
powerless to know where they went, to guess what was their
destination.
Nothing that he could have done would have altered one iota the march
of events. Nothing that he could do now would have more than the
slightest bearing on what was still to come. He was like a man beaten
to a dazed state in which he expects anything, in which his feeble
resistance will not ward off a single blow aimed at him by an unseen,
inscrutable enemy.
Hollister, sitting on the bank of the river, looked at the mountains
rising tier upon tier until the farthest ranges were dazzling white
cones against a far sky line. He saw them as a chaos of granite and
sandstone flung up by blind forces. Order and logical sequence in the
universe were a delusion--except as they were the result of ordered
human thought, effected by patient, unremitting human effort, which
failed more often than it succeeded.
He looked at one bold peak across the valley, standing so sheer above
the Black Hole that it seemed to overhang from the perpendicular; a
mass of bald granite, steep cliff, with glacial ice and perpetual snow
lurking in its crevasses. Upon its lower slopes the forest ran up, a
green mantle with ragged edges. From the forest upward the wind wafted
seeds to every scanty patch of soil. They took root, became saplings,
grew to substantial trees. And every winter the snow fell deep on that
mountain, piling up in great masses delicately poised, until a mere
nothing--a piece of stone loosened by the frost; a gust of wind;
perhaps only the overhanging edge of a snow-drift breaking under its
own weight--would start a slide that gathered speed and bulk as it
came down. And as this insensate mass plunged downward, the small
trees and the great, the thickets and the low salal, everything that
stood in its path, was overwhelmed and crushed and utterly destroyed.
To what end? For what purpose?
It was just the same with man, Hollister thought. If he got in the way
of forces greater than himself, he was crushed. Nature was blind,
ruthless, disorderly, wantonly destructive. One had to be alert,
far-seeing, gifted with definite characteristics, to escape. Even then
one did not always, or for long, escape being bruised and mauled by
the avalanches of emotion, the irresistible movement of circumstance
over which one could exert no control.
How could it be otherwise? Hollister thought of all that had happened
to all the people he knew, the men he had seen killed and maimed,
driven insane by the shocks of war; of Doris, stricken blind in the
full glow of youth; Myra pulled and hauled this way and that because
she was as she was and powerless to be otherwise; himself marred and
shunned and suffering intolerable agonies of spirit; of Bland, upon
whom had fallen the black mantle of unnecessary tragedy; and Mills,
who had paid for his passion with his life.
All these things pressed upon Hollister; a burden of discouragement,
of sadness. Not one of all these, himself included, but wanted
happiness according to his conception of happiness. And who and what
was responsible for each one's individual conception of what he
wanted? Not one of them had demanded existence. Each had had existence
thrust upon him. Nature, and a thousand generations of life and love
and pain, such environment in which, willy-nilly, they passed their
formative years, had bestowed upon each his individual quota of
character, compounded of desires, of intellect, of tendencies. And the
sum total of their actions and reactions--what was it? How could they
have modified life, bent it purposefully to its greatest fulfilment?
Hollister tried to shake himself free of these morbid abstractions.
He was alive. He had a long time yet to live. He was a strong man, in
whom the fire of life burned with an unquenchable flame. He had a
great many imperative requisitions to make on life's exchequer, and
while he was now sadly dubious of their being honored, either in full
or in part, he must go on making them.
There was a very black hole yawning before him. The cumulative force
of events had made him once more profoundly uncertain. All his props
were breaking. Sometimes he wondered if the personal God of the
Christian orthodoxy was wreaking upon him some obscure vengeance for
unknown sins.
He shook himself out of this depressing bog of reflection and went to
see Archie Lawanne. Not simply for the sake of Lawanne's society,
although he valued that for itself. He had a purpose.
"That boat's due to-morrow at three o'clock," he said to Lawanne.
"Will you take my big canoe and bring Doris up the river?
"I can't," he forestalled the question he saw forming on Lawanne's
lips. "I can't meet her before that crowd--the crew and passengers,
and loggers from Carr's. I'm afraid to. Not only because of myself,
but because of what effect the shock of seeing me may have on her.
Remember that I'll be like a stranger to her. She has never seen me.
It seems absurd, but it's true. It's better that she sees me the first
time by herself, at home, instead of before a hundred curious eyes.
Don't you see?"
Lawanne saw; at least, he agreed that it was better so. And after they
had talked awhile, Hollister went home.
But he was scarcely in his own dooryard before he became aware that
while he might plan and arrange, so also could others; that his wife
was capable of action independent of him or his plans.
He glanced down the river and saw a long Siwash dugout sweep around
the curve of the Big Bend. It straightened away and bore up the long
stretch of swift water that ran by his house. Hollister could
distinguish three or four figures in it. He could see the dripping
paddles rise and fall in measured beat, the wet blades flashing in the
sun.
He gained the porch and turned his glasses on the canoe. He recognized
it as Chief Aleck's dugout from a rancherie near the mouth of the
river, a cedar craft with carved and brilliantly painted high-curving
ends. Four Siwash paddlers manned it. Amidships two women sat. One was
the elderly housekeeper who had been with them since their boy's
birth. The other was Doris, with the baby in her lap.
A strange panic seized Hollister, the alarm of the unexpected, a
reluctance to face the crisis which he had not expected to face for
another twenty-four hours. He stepped down off the porch, walked
rapidly away toward the chute mouth, crossed that and climbed to a
dead fir standing on the point of rocks beyond. From there he watched
until the canoe thrust its gaudy prow against the bank before his
house, until he saw the women ashore and their baggage stacked on the
bank, until the canoe backed into the current and shot away
downstream, until Doris with the baby in her arms--after a lingering
look about, a slow turning of her head--followed the other woman up
the porch steps and disappeared within. Then Hollister moved back over
the little ridge into the shadow of a clump of young firs and sat down
on a flat rock with his head in his hands, to fight it out with
himself.
To stake everything on a single throw of the dice,--and the dice
loaded against him! If peace had its victories no less than war, it
had also crushing defeats. Hollister felt that for him the final, most
complete _débacle_ was at hand.
He lifted his head at a distant call, a high, clear, sweet
"Oh-_hoo-oo-oo_" repeated twice. That was Doris calling him as she
always called him, if she wanted him and thought he was within range
of her voice. Well, he would go down presently.
He looked up the hill. He could see through a fringe of green timber
to a place where the leaves and foliage were all rusty-red from the
scorching of the fire. Past that opened the burned ground,--charred,
black, desolate. Presently life would be like that to him; all the
years that stretched ahead of him might be as barren as that black
waste.
His mind projected itself into the future from every possible angle.
He did not belittle Doris' love, her sympathy, her understanding. He
even conceded that no matter how his disfigurement affected her, she
would try to put that behind her, she would make an effort to cling to
him. And Hollister could see the deadly impact of his grotesque
features upon her delicate sensibility, day after day, month after
month, until she could no longer endure it, or him. She loved the
beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color. Restored
sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become
transformed. The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor. All that
he meant to her as a man, a lover, a husband, must be stripped bare of
the kindly illusion that blindness had wrapped him in. Even if she did
not shrink in amazed reluctance at first sight, she must soon cease to
have for him any keener emotion than a tolerant pity. And Hollister
did not want that. He would not take it as a gift--not from Doris; he
could not.
Love, home, all that sweet companionship which he had gained, the
curious man-pride he had in that morsel of humanity that was his
son,--he wondered if he were to see all these slowly or swiftly
withdrawn from him?
Well, he would soon know. He stood up and looked far along the valley.
Suddenly it seemed a malevolent place, oppressive, threatening, grim
in spite of its beauty. It seemed as if something had been lurking
there ready to strike. The fire had swept away his timber. In that
brilliant sunshine, amid all that beauty, Myra's life had been snuffed
out like a blown candle flame--to no purpose. Or was there some
purpose in it all? Was some sentient force chastening him, scourging
him with rods for the good of his soul? Was it for some such
inscrutable purpose that men died by the hundred thousand in Europe?
Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight? Why Myra
had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and
had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control? All
this evil that some hidden good might accrue? Hollister bared his
teeth in defiance of such a conclusion. But he was in a mood to defy
either gods or devils. In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole
earth, as a sinister place,--a place where beauty was a mockery, where
impassive silence was merely the threatening hush before some
elemental fury. This serene, indifferent beauty was hateful to him in
that moment, the Promethean rock to which circumstance had chained him
to suffer. It needed only as a capsheaf the gleam of incredulous
dismay which should appear in his wife's eyes when she looked first
upon the mutilated tissue, the varying scars and cicatrices, the
twisted mask that would be revealed to her as the face of her
husband.
This test was at hand. He reassured himself, as he had vainly
reassured himself before, by every resource his mind and courage could
muster, and still he was afraid. He saw nothing ahead but a black void
in which there was neither love nor companionship nor friendly hands
and faces, nothing but a deep gloom in which he should wander
alone,--not because he wished to, but because he must.
He turned with a sudden resolution, crossed the low rocky point and
went down to the flat. He passed under the trestle which carried the
chute. The path to the house turned sharply around a clump of alder.
He rounded these leafy trees and came upon Doris standing by a low
stump. She stood as she did the first time he saw her on the steamer,
in profile, only instead of the steamer rail her elbow rested on the
stump, and she stared, with her chin nestled in the palm of one hand,
at the gray, glacial stream instead of the uneasy heave of a winter
sea. And Hollister thought with a slow constriction gathering in his
breast that life was a thing of vain repetitions; he remembered so
vividly how he felt that day when he stood watching her by the rail,
thinking with a dull resentment that she would presently look at him
and turn away. And he was thinking that again.
Walking on soft leaf-mold he approached within twenty feet of her,
unheard. Then she lifted her head, looked about her.
"Bob!"
"Yes," he answered. He stopped. She was looking at him. She made an
imperative gesture, and when Hollister still stood like a man
transfixed, she came quickly to him, her eyes bright and eager, her
hands outstretched.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "Aren't you glad to see me?"
"Are you glad to see me?" he countered. "_Do_ you see me?"
She shook her head.
"No, and probably I never shall," she said evenly. "But you're here,
and that's just as good. Things are still a blur. My eyes will never
be any better, I'm afraid."
Hollister drew her close to him. Her upturned lips sought his. Her
body pressed against him with a pleasant warmth, a confident yielding.
They stood silent a few seconds, Doris leaning against him
contentedly, Hollister struggling with the flood of mingled sensations
that swept through him on the heels of this vast relief.
"How your heart thumps," Doris laughed softly. "One would think you
were a lover meeting his mistress clandestinely for the first time."
"You surprised me," Hollister took refuge behind a white lie. He would
not afflict her with that miasma of doubts and fears which had
sickened him. "I didn't expect you till to-morrow afternoon."
"I got tired of staying in town," she said. "There was no use. I
wasn't getting any better, and I got so I didn't care. I began to feel
that it was better to be here with you blind, than alone in town with
that tantalizing half-sight of everything. I suppose the plain truth
is that I got fearfully lonesome. Then you wrote me that letter, and
in it you talked about such intimately personal things that I couldn't
let Mrs. Moore read it to me. And I heard about this big fire you had
here. So I decided to come home and let my eyes take care of
themselves. I went to see another oculist or two. They can't tell
whether my sight will improve or not. It may go again altogether. And
nothing much can be done. I have to take it as it comes. So I planned
to come home on the steamer to-morrow. You got my letter, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Well, I happened to get a chance to come as far as the Redondas on a
boat belonging to some people I knew on Stuart Island. I got a launch
there to bring me up the Inlet, and Chief Aleck brought us up the
river in the war canoe. My, it's good to be with you again."
"Amen," Hollister said. There was a fervent quality in his tone.
They found a log and sat down on it and talked. Hollister told her of
the fire. And when he saw that she had no knowledge of what tragedy
had stalked with bloody footprints across the Big Bend, he put off
telling her. Presently she would ask about Myra, and he would have to
tell her. But in that hour he did not wish to see her grow sad. He was
jealous of anything that would inflict pain on her. He wanted to
shield her from all griefs and hurts.
"Come back to the house," Doris said at last. "Baby's fretting a
little. The trip in a small boat rather upset him. I don't like to
leave him too long."
But Robert junior was peacefully asleep in his crib when they reached
the house. After a look at him, they went out and sat on the porch
steps. There, when the trend of their conversation made it
unavoidable, he told her what had overtaken Charlie Mills and Myra
Bland.
Doris listened silently. She sighed.
"What a pity," she murmured. "The uselessness of it, the madness--like
a child destroying his toys in a blind rage. Poor Myra. She told me
once that life seemed to her like swimming among whirlpools. It must
have been true."
How true it was Hollister did not dare reveal. That was finished, for
Myra and himself. She had perished among the whirlpools. He scarcely
knew how he had escaped.
"How lucky we are, you and I, Bob," Doris said after a time. She put
her arms around him impulsively. "We might so easily be wandering
about alone in a world that is terribly harsh to the unfortunate.
Instead--we're here together, and life means something worth while to
us. It does to me, I know. Does it to you?"
"As long as I have you, it does," he answered truthfully. "But if you
could see me as I really am, perhaps I might not have you very long."
"How absurd," she declared--and then, a little thoughtfully, "if I
thought that was really true, I should never wish to see again.
Curiously, the last two or three weeks this queer, blurred sort of
vision I have seems quite sufficient. I haven't wanted to see half so
badly as I've wanted you. I can get impressions enough through the
other four senses. I'd hate awfully to have to get along without you.
You've become almost a part of me--I wonder if you understand that?"
Hollister did understand. It was mutual,--that want, that dependence,
that sense of incompleteness which each felt without the other. It was
a blessed thing to have, something to be cherished, and he knew how
desperately he had reacted to everything that threatened its loss.
Hollister sat there looking up at the far places, the high, white
mountain crests, the deep gorges, the paths that the winter slides had
cut through the green forest, down which silvery cataracts poured now.
It seemed to have undergone some subtle change, to have become less
aloof, to have enveloped itself in a new and kindlier atmosphere. Yet
he knew it was as it had always been. The difference was in himself.
The sympathetic response to that wild beauty was purely subjective. He
could look at the far snows, the bluish gleam of the glaciers, the
restful green of the valley floor, with a new quality of appreciation.
He could even--so resilient and adaptable a thing is the human
mind--see himself engaged upon material enterprises, years passing,
his boy growing up, life assuming a fullness, a proportion, an orderly
progression that two hours earlier would have seemed to him only a
futile dream.
He wondered if this would endure. He looked down at his wife leaning
upon his knee, her face thoughtful and content. He looked out over the
valley once more, at those high, sentinel peaks thrusting up their
white cones, one behind the other. He heard the river. He saw the
foxglove swaying in the wind, the red flare of the poppies at his
door. He smelled the fragrance of wild honeysuckle, the sharp, sweet
smells blown out of the forest that drowsed in the summer heat.
It was all good. He rested in that pleasant security like a man who
has fought his way through desperate perils to some haven of safety
and sits down there to rest in peace. He did not know what the future
held for him. He had no apprehension of the future. He was not even
curious. He had firm hold of the present, and that was enough. He
wondered a little that he should suddenly feel so strong a conviction
that life was good. But he had that feeling at last. The road opened
before him clear and straight. If there were crooks in it, pitfalls by
the way, perils to be faced, pains to be suffered, he was very sure in
that hour that somehow he would find courage to meet them open-eyed
and unafraid.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Hidden Places, by Bertrand W. Sinclair