The Hidden Places Part 16

And there was always Mills, Mills who wanted to make a stake and "get to h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sured, 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 s.h.i.+ngles 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 pa.s.sion, lingering near the un.o.btainable because he could not tear himself away? Was Myra holding him like a p.a.w.n 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 s.h.i.+pping. It went up on the same steamer that gave pa.s.sage 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 lat.i.tude. 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 a.s.sumed, or have had thrust upon us, which we haven't the courage to shake off. To our own moods and pa.s.sions. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.