CHAPTER XIII
From day to day and from week to week, apprehending mistily that hewas caught in and carried along by a current--a slow but irresistiblemovement of events--Hollister pursued the round of his daily life asif nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he haddone for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings ofthe spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had achart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in hishands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a truecourse. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from theperils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, notso sure of untroubled passage. But mostly he did not think of thesepotential dangers.
He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living. Theidea of poverty chafed him. He had once been a considerable toad in asizable puddle. He had inherited a competence and lost it, and powerto reclaim it was beyond him. He wasted no regrets upon the loss ofthat material security, although he sometimes wondered how Myra hadcontrived to let such a sum slip through her fingers in a little overtwo years. He assumed that she had done so. Otherwise she would notbe sitting on the bank of the Toba, waiting more or less passively forher husband to step into a dead man's shoes.
That was, in effect, Bland's situation. He was an Englishman of goodfamily, accustomed to a definite social standing, accustomed to moneyderived from a source into which he never troubled to inquire. He hadnever worked. He never would work, not in the sense of performing anylabor as a means of livelihood. He had a small income,--fifty or sixtydollars a month. When he was thirty he would come into certainproperty and an income of so many thousand pounds a year. He and hiswife could not subsist in any town on the quarterly dole he received.That was why they had come to live in that cabin on the Toba River.Bland hunted. He fished. To him the Toba valley served well enough asa place to rusticate. Any place where game animals and sporting fishabounded satisfied him temperamentally.
He had done his "bit" in the war. When he came into his money, theywould go "home." He was placidly sure of himself, of his place in thegeneral scheme of things. He was suffering from temporaryembarrassment, that was all. It was a bit rough on Myra, but it wouldbe all right by and by.
So much filtered into Hollister's ears and understanding before long.Archie Lawanne came back downstream with two grizzly pelts, andHollister met Bland for the first time. He appraised Bland with somecare,--this tall, ruddy Englishman who had supplanted him in a woman'saffections, and who, unless Hollister's observation had tricked him,was in a fair way to be himself supplanted.
For Hollister was the unwilling spectator of a drama to which he couldnot shut his eyes. Nor could he sit back in the role of cynicalaudience, awaiting in cushioned ease the climax of the play and thefinal exit of the actors.
Mills was the man. Whether he was more than a potential lover, whetherMyra in her _ennui_, her hunger for a new sensation--whateverunsatisfied longings led her to exercise upon men the power of herundeniable attraction--had now given her heart into Charlie Mills'keeping, Hollister of course neither knew nor cared.
But he did know that they met now and then, that Mills seemed to havesome curious knowledge of when Bland was far afield. Mills could betrusted to appear on the flat in the evening or on a Sunday, if Myracame to see Doris.
He speculated idly upon this sometimes. Myra he knew well enough, orthought he did. He began to regard Mills with a livelier interest, totalk to the man, to draw him out, to discover the essential man underthe outward seeming. He was not slow to discover that Mills wassomething more than so much bone and sinew which could be appliedvigorously to an axe or a saw.
Hollister's speculations took a new turn when Archie Lawanne andBland came back from the bear hunt. For Lawanne did not go out. Hepitched a tent on the flat below Hollister's and kept one Siwash tocook for him. He made that halt to rest up, to stretch and dry hisbear-skins. But long after these trophies were cured, he stillremained. He was given to roaming up and down the valley. He extendedhis acquaintance to the settlement farther down, taking observation ofan earnest attempt at cooeperative industry. He made himself at homeequally with the Blands and the Hollisters.
And when July was on them, with hot, hazy sunshine in which berriesripened and bird and insect life filled the Toba with a twitter and adrone, when the smoke of distant forest fires drifted like pungent fogacross the hills, Hollister began to wonder if the net Myra seemedunconsciously to spread for men's feet had snared another victim.
This troubled him a little. He liked Lawanne. He knew nothing abouthim, who he was, where he came from, what he did. Nevertheless therehad arisen between them a curious fellowship. There seemed to residein the man a natural quality of uprightness, a moral stoutness of soulthat lifted him above petty judgments. One did not like or dislikeLawanne for what he did or said so much as for what he suggested asbeing inherent within himself.
There was a little of that quality, also, about Charlie Mills. Heworked in the timber with a fierce energy. His dark face glistenedwith sweat-beads from morning till night. His black hair stood inwisps and curls, its picturesque disorder heightened by a trick he hadof running his fingers through it when he paused for a minute to takebreath, to look steadfastly across at the slide-scarred granite faceof the north valley wall, with a wistful look in his eyes.
"Those hills," he said once abruptly to Hollister, "they were herelong before we came. They'll be here long after we're gone. What ahelpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway. A squirrel on hiswheel in a cage."
It was a protesting acceptance of a stark philosophy, Hollisterthought, a cry against some weight that bore him down, the momentaryrevealing of some conflict in which Mills foresaw defeat, or hadalready suffered defeat. It was a statement wrung out of him,requiring no comment, for he at once resumed the steady pull on thesix-foot, cross-cut saw.
"Why don't you take it easier?" Hollister said to him. "You work as ifthe devil was driving you."
Mills smiled.
"The only devil that drives me," he said, "is the devil inside me.
"Besides," he continued, between strokes of the saw, "I want to make astake and get to hell out of here."
Hollister did not press him for reasons. Mills did work as if thedevil drove him, and in his quiescent moments an air of melancholyclouded his dark face as if physical passivity left him a prey to someinescapable inner gloom.
All about him, then, Hollister perceived strong undercurrents of lifeflowing sometimes in the open, sometimes underground: Charlie Millsand Myra Bland touched by that universal passion which has broughthappiness and pain, dizzy heights of ecstasy and deep abysses ofdespair to men and women since the beginning of time; Lawanneapparently succumbing to the same malady that touched Mills; Blandmoving in the foreground, impassive, stolidly secure in the possessionof this desired woman. And all of them bowed before and strugglingunder economic forces which they did not understand, working andplanning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of theirbeing, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means oflivelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the humandesire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could begrasped.
Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabinand Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit ofdrowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see theriver, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly alongbetween the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green ofthe fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drankin the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls,and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestionof delight. At such times he felt the goodness of being alive, themild intoxication of the fragrant air which filled the valley, themajestic beauty of those insentient hills upon which the fiercemidsummer sun was baring glacial patches that gleamed now like bluediamonds or again with a pale emerald sheen, in
a setting of worngranite and white snowdrifts five thousand feet above.
In this wilderness, this vast region of forest and streams and wildmountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks hurrying here and thereabout their self-appointed tasks. Those like himself and Doris, whodid not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, faredwell enough. The land held out to them manifold promises. Hollisterlooked at the red-brown shingle bolts accumulating behind theboom-sticks and felt that inner satisfaction which comes of successachieved by plan and labor. If his mutilated face had been capable ofexpression, it would have reflected pride, satisfaction. Out of theapparent wreckage of his life he was laying the foundations ofsomething permanent, something abiding, an enduring source of good. Hewould tangle his fingers in Doris' brown hair and feel glad.
Then perhaps his eyes would shift downstream to where Bland's stark,weather-beaten cabin lifted its outline against the green thickets,and he would think uneasily upon what insecure tenure, upon whatdeliberate violation of law and of current morality he held hisdearest treasure. What would she think, if she knew, this daintycreature cuddling against his knee? He would wake in the night and lieon elbow staring at her face in the moonlight,--delicate-skinned as achild's, that lovable, red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes whichsometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their graydepths.
What would she think? What would she, say? What would she do? He didnot know. It troubled him to think of this. If he could have sweptMyra out of North America with a wave of his hand, he would have madeone sweeping gesture. He was jealous of his happiness, his security,and Myra's presence was not only a reminder; it had the effect uponhim of a threat he could not ignore.
Yet he was compelled to ignore it. She and Doris had become fastfriends. It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes. Except for theuprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he wouldhave been revolted at his own actions. He had committed technicalbigamy. His children would be illegitimate before the law.
Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment; hisclass was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its facerigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumptionthat everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so;that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions inliving, loving, marrying, breeding--even in dying--does so because ofinnate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, bookand candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in thenext.
Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness werewholly matters of free will. From the time he put on the king'suniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met DorisCleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession ofdevastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened toothers. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about likefrail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex ofthe social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, whathe became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstancesthat flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.
Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives andactions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had losthis old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are thespecial refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapplecompetently with any material problem but who stand aghast,apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, beforethe wavering gusts of human passion.
If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and hehad dragged Doris Cleveland down with him. So was Myra smeared withthe pitch of moral obloquy. They were sinners all. Pain should betheir desert; shame and sorrow their portion.
Why? Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust ofcircumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion whichhad overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblence ofhappiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands.
The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisivelyintolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called topass judgment.
But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wifethan he could feel within himself a personal conviction of sin. Love,he perceived, was not a fixed emotion. It was like a fire which glowsbright when plied with fuel and burns itself out when it is no longerfed. To some it was casual, incidental; to others an imperative law ofbeing. Myra remained essentially the same woman, whether she loved himor some other man. Who was he to judge her? She had loved him and thenceased to love him. Beyond that, her life was her own to do with asshe chose.
Nor could Hollister, when he faced the situation squarely, feel thathe was less a man, less upright, less able to bear himself decentlybefore his fellows than he had ever been. Sometimes he would growimpatient with thinking and put it all by. He had his moods. But alsohe had his work, the imperative necessity of constant labor tosatisfy the needs both of the present and the future. No man goes intothe wilderness with only his hands and a few tools and wins securityby any short and easy road. There were a great many things Hollisterwas determined to have for himself and Doris and their children,--forhe did not close his eyes to the natural fulfilment of the matingimpulse. He did not spare himself. Like Mills, he worked with aprodigious energy. Sometimes he wondered if dreams akin to his owndrove Charlie Mills to sweat and strain, to pile up each day doublethe amount of split cedar, and double for himself the wages earned bythe other two men,--who were themselves no laggards with axe and saw.Or if Mills fantastically personified the timber as something whichstood between him and his aching desire and so attacked it with allhis lusty young strength.
Sometimes Hollister sat by, covertly watching Mills and Myra. He couldmake nothing of Myra. She was courteous, companionable, nothing more.But to Hollister Mills' trouble was plain enough. The man was on hisguard, as if he knew betrayal lurked in the glance of his eye, in thequality of his tone. Hollister gauged the depths of Mills' feelings bythe smoldering fire in his glance,--that glow in Mills' dark eyes whenthey rested too long on Myra. There would be open upon his face a lookof hopelessness, as if he dwelt on something that fascinated andbaffled him.
Sometimes, latterly, he saw a hint of that same dubious expressionabout Archie Lawanne. But there was a different temper in Lawanne, aflash of the sardonic at times.
In July, however, Lawanne went away.
"I'm coming back, though," he told Hollister before he left. "I thinkI shall put up a cabin and winter here."
"I'll be glad to see you," Hollister replied, "but it's a lonelyvalley in the winter."
Lawanne smiled.
"I can stand isolation for a change," he said. "I want to write abook. And while I am outside I'll send you in a couple that I havealready written. You will see me in October. Try to get theshingle-bolt rush over so we can go out after deer together now andthen."
So for a time the Toba saw no more of Lawanne. Hollister missed him.So did Doris. But she had Myra Bland to keep her company whileHollister was away at work in the timber. Sometimes Bland himselfdropped in. But Hollister could never find himself on any commonground of mutual interest with this sporting Englishman. He was abluff, hearty, healthy man, apparently without either intellect oraffectation.
"What do you think of Bland?" he asked Doris once.
"I can't think of him, because I can't see him," she answered. "He iseither very clever at concealing any sort of personality, or he issimply a big, strong, stupid man."
Which was precisely what Hollister himself thought.
"Isn't it queer," Doris went on, "how vivid a thing personality is?Now Myra and Mr. Lawanne are definite, colorable entities to me. So isCharlie Mills, quiet as he is. And yet I can't make Bland seemanything more than simply a voice with a slightly English accent."
"Well, there must be something to him, or she wouldn't have marriedhim," Hollister remarked.
"Perhaps. But I shouldn't wonder if she ma
rried him for something thatexisted mostly in her own mind," Doris reflected. "Women often dothat--men too, I suppose. I very nearly did myself once. Then Idiscovered that this ideal man was something I had created in my ownimagination."
"How did you find that out before you were committed to theenterprise?" he asked curiously.
"Because my reason and my emotions were in continual conflict overthat man," Doris said thoughtfully. "I have always been sure, eversince I began to take men seriously, that I wouldn't get on very longwith any man who was simply a strong, healthy animal. And as soon as Isaw that this admirable young man of mine hadn't much to offer thatwasn't purely physical, why, the glamor all faded."
"Maybe mine will fade too," Hollister suggested.
"Oh, you're fishing for compliments now," she laughed. "You know verywell you are. But we're pretty lucky, Robert mine, just the same.We've gained a lot. We haven't lost anything yet. I wouldn'tback-track, not an inch. Would you--honest, now?"
Hollister answered that in a manner which seemed to him suitable tothe occasion. And while he stood with his arm around her, Dorisstartled him.
"Myra told me a curious thing the other day," she said. "She has beenmarried twice. She told me that her first husband's name was the sameas yours--Bob Hollister--that he was killed in France in 1917. Shesays that you somehow remind her of him."
"There were a good many men killed in France in '17," he observed."And Hollister is not such an uncommon name. Does the lady suspect I'mthe reincarnation of her dear departed? She seems to have consoledherself for the loss, anyway."
"I doubt if she has," Doris answered. "She doesn't unburden her soulto me, but I have the feeling that she is not exactly a happy woman."
The matter rested there. Doris went away to do something about thehouse. Hollister stood glowering at the distant outline of Bland'scabin. A slow uneasiness grew on him. What did Myra mean by thatconfidence? Did she mean anything? He shook himself impatiently. Hehad a profound distaste for that revelation. In itself it was nothing,unless some obscure motive lurked behind. That troubled him. Myrameant nothing--or she meant mischief. Why, he could not say. She wasquit of him at her own desire. She had made a mouthful of his modestfortune. If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask ofscars, and from some obscure, perverted motive meant to bringshipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he wouldstrangle her without a trace of remorse.