The Hidden Places Part 27

"Oh, yes," Lawanne said absently. "I saw that. I understood. I was touched a little with the same thing myself. Only, _n.o.blesse oblige_.

And also I was never quite sure that what I felt for her was sympathy, or affection, or just s.e.x. I know I can scarcely bear to think that she is dead."

He leaned back in his chair and put his hands over his eyes. Hollister got up and walked to a window. Then on impulse he went to the door.

And when he was on the threshold, Lawanne halted him.

"Don't go," he said. "Stay here. I can't get my mind off this. I don't want to sit alone and think."

Hollister turned back. Neither did he want to sit alone and think. For as the first dazed numbness wore off, he began to see himself standing alone--more alone than ever--gazing into a bottomless pit, with Fate or Destiny or blind Chance, whatever witless force was at work, approaching inexorably to push him over the brink.

CHAPTER XXII

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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.surance 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 a.s.sociation; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against the common a.s.sumption 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 ma.s.s of bald granite, steep cliff, with glacial ice and perpetual snow lurking in its creva.s.ses. 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 ma.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sion 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, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, they pa.s.sed 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 c.u.mulative force of events had made him once more profoundly uncertain. All his props were breaking. Sometimes he wondered if the personal G.o.d 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 flas.h.i.+ng in the sun.

He gained the porch and turned his gla.s.ses 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. Amids.h.i.+ps 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 ash.o.r.e 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 crus.h.i.+ng defeats. Hollister felt that for him the final, most complete _debacle_ 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.sions during her troubled life and had perished at last, a victim of pa.s.sions 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 G.o.ds 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 impa.s.sive 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 circ.u.mstance 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 rea.s.sured himself, as he had vainly rea.s.sured 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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 repet.i.tions; 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.