 5 A wind began to sigh among the trees, as Hollister made his way downhill. Over his evening fire he heard it grow to a lusty gale that filled the valley all night with moaning noises. Fierce gusts scattered the ashes of his fire and fluttered the walls of his tent, as though some strong-lunged giant were huffing and puffing to blow his house down. At daylight the wind died. A sky banked solid with clouds began to empty upon the land a steady downpour of rain. All through the woods the sodden foliage dripped heavily. The snow melted, pouring muddy cataracts out of each gully, making tiny cascades over the edge of every cliff. Snow banks slipped their hold on steep hillsides high in the north valley wall. They gathered way and came roaring down out of places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slides thundering like distant artillery. Watching that grim façade across the river he saw, once or twice during the day, those masses plunge and leap. Ten thousand tons of ice and snow and rock and crushed timber shooting over ledge and precipice to end with fearful crashing and rumbling in the depth of a steep-walled gorge. He was tied to his camp. He could not stir abroad without more discomfort than he cared to undergo. Every bush, every bow would precipitate upon him showers of drops at the slightest touch. He sat by his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of the comfortable cabin up in the Cedar Hollow and of Doris Cleveland's books. He began by reflecting that he might have brought one down to read. He ended before nightfall of a dull, rain-sodden day, with a resolution to move up there when the weather cleared. A tent was well enough, but a house with a fireplace was better. The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if the clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo, and rode light as unbalanced ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to the log cabin, while the moss underfoot, the tree-trunks, the green blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky. He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope, everything but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of careless, adventurous youth, freer because he had none of the impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he told himself, in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be governed by practical considerations? He was here alone in the unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to anyone whether he came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. There was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in such simple ways as were available to him here. Here, where at least there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his understanding. When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy green leaves of the solow. He folded his tent in a tight bundle and strung it to a bow with a wire out of reach of the wood rats. These tasks completed he began his survey of the standing timber on his limit. At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a professional cruisers would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In a week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had paid good money. The fur, as a British Columbia logging chance, was all but negligible. What value resided there lay in the cedar alone. By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came to an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky. Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued until valley and slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white. Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there in swirling clouds. And above the troubled voices of the storm, Hollister from the warm security of the cabin could hear the intermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremors in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche. This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chill whisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering and the great mountain ranges, white again from foot to crest, save where the slides had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite, were wrapped in winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver. He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to any one where he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well here as elsewhere, until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowled him into action. Here there was no one to look a scant at his disfigurement. He was less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort. So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house, food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now that his estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He could subsist two months. With care he could stretch it to three, for there was game on that southern slope, deer and the white mountain goat and birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because he needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison, and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stock a deer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze crackling in the stone fireplace, and he had Doris Cleveland's books. Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places. Eventually he would have to go back, but for the present, well, he occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit himself to look far beyond. From the deer skin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval shape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web of rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes, which were a necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee deep and in many places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods. It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snowbound granite rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest. From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the twin redondas, Cortes, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando, a picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish exploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches of Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky backbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched a steamer trailing a black banner of smoke slide through Baker Pass. Out there men toiled at fishing. The woods echoed with the ring of their axes and the thin twanging of their saws. There would be the clank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden and muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below the houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself, winding away into remote fastnesses of the coast range. A strip of level, fertile, timbered land abutted upon by mountains that shamed the Alps for ruggedness. Mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer. Where the hillhead split the tide of green and living air, I would press adventure hard to her deepest lair. I would let the world's rebuke like a wind go by with my naked soul lay bare to the naked sky. Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips and he looked a long time before he turned downhill. A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted his dominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. If he had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close to his cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamer landing would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared to undertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallow rapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the toba. Once or twice on clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold pressure of the north-west wind as he stood in the open. And through his field glasses he could see the inlet and the high roads of the sea past the inlet's mouth, all torn by surging waves that reared and broke in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris Cleveland's books one after another, verse, philosophy, fiction. And when physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piled firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too long and forced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick to enter. When neither Bortsnor self-imposed tasks about the cabin served he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and trudge far afield in the surrounding forest. On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flats in the big bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement, on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He could see on the river bank, and at another point in the nearby woods, the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people, buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled with this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by two or three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations at first hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertaking as one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure in former trials. But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hung listless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settler near his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when he dislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded once from the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struck with a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice. Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost bow of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin, although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors, a blue skirt, the deep green of Salal, and second growth cedar, the weathered hue of the walls. And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself. He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees, and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went back inside. Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter. His facial expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten a little, and that was all. But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a strange fire. The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with the sun playing hide-and-seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister, his wife, end of Chapter 5, recording by Roger Millean. His gaze fixed upon this house on the river bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen, nor deny the evidence of his vision. He kept watch with the glasses ready to fix upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the house below, until he came abreast of his own quarters, and turned reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin. He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction, troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him present, one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder. In the end he began to entertain a real doubt, not only of the correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this. He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France, that she had access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to him, by letter, the curious transformation of her affections, he had not revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure his first thought had not been a concern for his property, and the official report of him as killed in action, which followed so soon after, had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate in the field of emotion, she had at least forty-five thousand dollars in negotiable securities. And if so, then why? Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and useless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he had seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself. For if he could not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then he must be going mad. He must know beyond any equivocation. There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took his glasses and went down to the valley floor. It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to walk boldly up and wrap at the door. Certainly he would not be recognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need of matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a destroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony. He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as to his name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of all frontiers. But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why. He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In the social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him, Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and impulses as by any coldly-reasoned process. He was moved to his stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the crawling worm. He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. He peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There, in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving hunter pass, Hollister watched with the patience which was proof against cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs. For an hour he waited, except for the wavering smoke from the stovepipe the place might have been deserted. The house was one with the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb, but he held his post. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the opening. She poised for an instant on the threshold looking across the river. Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or two gingerly in the snow and stooping picked up a few sticks from a pile of split wood. The door closed upon her once more. Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat, gained the foot of the steep hill, and climbed step by step with prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin. He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question. He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable. She was here in the flesh, this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman whose arms and lips had once been his shore refuge. Here, in a rude cabin on the brink of a frozen river, Chance had set her neighbor to him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed it to be true. How could it matter now? But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence. He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering there still remained memory from which he could not escape. Memories of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him. He could not escape the consequences of being the dominant impulses of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure for a time in that belief. But it will fail him. And of this Hollister now became aware. He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh assault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink. When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape. It had been dormant in him for a time, dormant but not dead. In all his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women with a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curious manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain, grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no! He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face. The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him. Yet here, in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests where he had begun to perceive that life might still have compensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away, destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness to rise and torture him now. And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes, and when he looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his hand, and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping, and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been his wife. At night, while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board, and he was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious. Hollister had never been a sentimental fool nor a sensualist, whose unrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a man aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically. Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not love this woman whose nearness so proudly disturbed him. Sometimes he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and suffering and death of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of war. Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those hunting pictures of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and laughter on her lips. He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire, slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain, shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion, until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made him shrink and feel a loathing of himself. She was his wife. She had seized to care for him. She had given herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally beyond any shadow of a doubt. The law and the church had joined them together. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should he not take her? Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness. It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He postulated a hypothetical situation. If he, officially dead, resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if he demanded and exacted a literal fulfillment of her solemn covenant to love, honor, and obey? Be herself? Hollister snapped his fingers. The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient gesture. The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise lustily when slowly acquired moralities, shrivel in the crucible of passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this fair-haired woman, and she should have no voice in the matter. Very well. But how? That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the Toba country. All these folks in the valley below went about unconscious of his existence in that cabin, well hidden among the great cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash. Not because Hollister feared that, simply because in his mind the man was not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man, no jealousy. The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait. All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in his obsessed mind, with neither perception nor consideration of consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing. This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances which favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This he readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought away it was revealed to him. A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his canoe was cached, there jetted into the river a low rocky point. From the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray unless a searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track. And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountainside and came at last to the log cabin, what would he find? Only another man who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of his own. Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate upon his wife and her lover. From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set himself to watch through his glasses, the house down the river. The second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun in hand, cross on the river ice, and vanish in the heavy timber of that wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on these recurrent absences, hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon and sometimes not till dusk. He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen river. Twenty minutes rapid striding brought him to the door of the house. The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sun had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened to a bombiness like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty Christmas underfoot. Now through the uncurtained window his gaze marked a section of the interior. And what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to wrap on the door. A man, young, smooth-faced, dark, almost to swarthingness, sat on a bench beside a table on which stood the unclear litter of breakfast. And Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. She leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasp-tands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaning eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly. Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelids drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise she was motionless and faintly smiling as if she were given up to some blissful langer. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot eyes. Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through the window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the tense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head and press a kiss on the imprisoned hand. He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away over the ice. When he had put five hundred yards between himself and that house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face and wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a hare's breath, some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that was precisely his feeling, as if he had been capering madly on the brink of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to him in a terrifying flash. He shivered. His ego groveled in the dirt. He had often smiled at theories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen stream, with the white hills looming high above the green forest and lowlands, he was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk a duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that, or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of isolation, of brooding over unasswaged bitterness. Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not been there. But he did not think so now. The break of his real manhood had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a brusque hand of the cobwebs from his brain. Fundamentally Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness, double dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith and human goodness. And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the last four years. Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right to take her, not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such sophistry. She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious complacence was not the man she lived with in that house on the river bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to know. He was a tall, ready-faced man, a big man, and handsome. Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by the brutal directness of her written avowal. Hollister had watched him swinging his axe on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in the bottom land. He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment. Hollister found himself pitying this man. He found himself wondering if it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helpless victim of her own senses. There were women like that, plenty of them, men too, sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality. He could not doubt that. He suspected that he was touched with it himself. What a muddle life was, Hollister reflected sadly, looking down from the last opening before he plunged into the cedar grove that hid the log cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain and forest, this silent land, virginal in its winter garment, human passion, ancient as the hills themselves, functioned in the old, old way. But he did not expend much thought on mere generalizations. The problem of Myra and her lovers was no longer his problem. Their passions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearly that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching consequences. He was concerned with his escape, and also with the possible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, or whatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he could harbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to pass through that furnace again. He had had enough of the Toba Valley. No, he modified that. The valley and the sentinel peaks that stood guard over it, the lowlands, muscly green and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodly place to be. But old sins and sorrows and new disturbing phases of human passion were here at his elbow to dispel the restful peace he had won for a little while. He must escape from that. To go was not so simple as is coming. The river was frozen, that watery highway closed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gained in those casual wanderings along the ridge above the valley. He knew a direct way of gaining the inlet head on foot. So he spent a last night before the fireplace, staring silently into the dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing coals, lying down to heavy, dreamless sleep at last in his bunk. At daybreak he struck out westward along the great cliff that frowned on the big bend, his blankets and a small emergency supply of food in a bulky pack upon his shoulders. When the sheer face of the cliff ran out to a steep, scrubily timbered hillside, he dropped down to the valley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here he moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in streamers from the lower bowels. It was dusky there in full day. The wild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scolded as he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach within twenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deep snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down from the highlands by the deeper snow above. For a time in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black and cold on its skids, half buried in snow. Beyond this working a clear field opened and passed the field he saw the outline of the houses on the river bank, and he bore straight for these to learn upon what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before. CHAPTER VII Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking-room and stood outside by the rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the white rampart of the coast range. Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow-fort. STEEMER The man answered Hollister's inquiry. SAY, if you want to catch her, you just about got time. Two fellows from here left a while ago. If you hurry, maybe you can catch them. If you catch them before they get out over the bar they'll give you a lift to the float. If you don't, you're stuck for a week. There's only one rowboat down there. Hollister had caught them. He took a last thoughtful look. Over the vessel's bubbling wake he could see the whole head of the inlet deep in winter snows, a white world coldly aloof in its grandeur. It was beautiful, full of the majesty of serene distances, of great heights. It stood forth clothed with the dignity of massiveness, of permanence. It was as it had been for centuries, calm and untroubled, unmoved by floods and slides, by fires and slow glacial changes. Yes, it was beautiful, and Hollister looked a long time, for he was not sure he would see it again. He had a canoe and a tent cached in that silent valley, but for these alone he would not return. Neither the ownership of that timber, which he now esteemed of doubtful value, nor the event of its sale, would require his presence there. He continued to stare with an absent look in his eyes, until a crook in the inlet hid those white escarpments and outstanding peaks, and the inlet walls, themselves lifting to dizzy heights that were shrouded in rolling mist, marked the limit of his visual range. The ship's bell tinkled the noon hour. A white-jacketed steward walked the decks, proclaiming to all in sundry that luncheon was being served. Hollister made his way to the dining saloon. The steamer was past Salmon Bay when he returned above decks to lean on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking, with a little wonder, the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air, as the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba, with its aerial ice fields and snowy slopes. Twenty miles below Salmon Bay, the island-dotted area of the Gulf of Georgia began. There a snowfall seldom endured long, and the teeth of the frost were blunted by eternal rains. There the logging camps worked full blast the year around, in sunshine and drizzle and fog. All that region bordering in the open sea bore a more genial aspect, and supported more people and industries in scattered groups than could be found in any of those lonely inlets. Hollister was not thinking particularly of these things. He had eaten his meal at a table with half a dozen other men. In the saloon probably two score others applied themselves, with more diligence than refinement, to their food. There was a leavening of women in this male mass of loggers, fishermen and what-not. A buzz of conversation filled the place, but Hollister was not a participant. He observed casual, covert glances at his disfigured face, that disarrangement of his features and marring of his flesh which made men ill at ease in his presence. He felt a recurrence of the old protest against this. He experienced a return of that depression which had driven him out of Vancouver. It was a disheartening from which nothing in the future, no hope, no dream, could deliver him. He was as he was. He would always be like that. The finality of it appalled him. After a time he became aware of a young woman leaning, like himself, against the rail a few feet distant. He experienced a curious degree of self-consciousness as he observed her. The thought crossed his mind that presently she would look at him and move away. When she did not, his eyes kept coming back to her with the involuntary curiosity of the casual male concerning the strange female. She was of medium height, well formed, dressed in a well-tailored gray suit. Under the edges of a black velvet turban her hair showed glossy brown in a smooth roll. She had one elbow propped on the rail and her chin nestled in the palm. Hollister could see a clean cut profile, the symmetrical outline of her nose, one delicately colored cheek above the gloved hand and a neckpiece of dark fur. He wondered what she was so intent upon for so long, leaning immobile against that wooden guard. He continued to watch her. Would she presently bestow a cursory glance upon him and withdraw to some other part of the ship? Hollister waited for that with moody expectation. He found himself wishing to hear her voice, to speak to her, to have her talk to him. But he did not expect any concession to a whimsical desire. Nevertheless the unexpected presently occurred. The girl moved slightly. A handbag slipped from under her arm to the deck. She half turned, seemed to hesitate. Instinctively, as a matter of common courtesy to a woman, Hollister took a step forward, picked it up. Quite as instinctively he braced himself, so to speak, for the shocked look that would gather like a shadow on her peaked face. But it did not come. The girl's gaze bore impeturbably upon him as he restored the handbag to her hand. The faintest sort of smile lurked about the corners of a pretty mouth. Her eyes were a cloudy gray. They seemed to look out at the world with a curious impassivity. That much Hollister saw in a fleeting glance. Thanks very much, she said pleasantly. Hollister resumed his post against the rail. His movement had brought him nearer so that he stood now within arm's length, and his interest in her had awakened, become suddenly intense. He felt a queer thankfulness, a warm inward gratefulness that she had been able to regard his disfigurement unmoved. He wondered how she could. For months he had encountered women's averted faces, the reluctant glances of mangled pity and distaste which he had schooled himself to expect and endure but which he never ceased to resent. This girl's uncommon self-possession at close contact with him was a puzzle as well as a pleasure. A little thing, to be sure, but it warmed Hollister. It was like an unexpected gleam of sunshine out of a sky banked deep with clouds. Presently, to his surprise, the girl spoke to him. Are we getting near the Channel Islands? She was looking directly at him, and Hollister was struck afresh with the curious quality of her gaze, the strangely unperturbed directness of her eyes upon him. He made haste to answer her question. We'll pass between them in another mile. You can see the Western Island a little off our starboard bow. I should be very glad if I could, but I shall have to take your word for its being there. I am afraid I don't quite understand. A smile spread over her face at the puzzled tone. I'm blind, she explained, with what struck Hollister as infinite patience. If my eyes were not sightless I shouldn't have to ask a stranger about the Channel Islands. I used to be able to see them well enough. Hollister stared at her. He could not associate those wide gray eyes with total darkness. He could scarcely make himself comprehend a world devoid of light and color, an existence in which one felt and breathed and had being amid eternal darkness, yet for the moment he was selfish enough to feel glad, and he said so with uncharacteristic impulsiveness. I'm glad you can't see, he found himself saying. If you could, what a queer thing to say, the girl interrupted. I thought everyone always regarded a blind person as an object of pity. There was an unmistakably sardonic inflection in the last sentence. But you don't find it so, huh? Hollister questioned eagerly. He was sure he had interpreted that inflection. And you sometimes resent that attitude, huh? I daresay I do, the girl replied, after a moment's consideration. To be unable to see is a handicap. At the same time to have pity drooled all over one is sometimes irritating. But why did you just say you were glad I was blind? I didn't mean that. I meant that I was glad you couldn't see me, he explained. One of Fritz's shells tore my face to pieces. People don't like to look at the result. Women, particularly. You can't see my wrecked face, so you don't shudder and pass on. I suppose that is why I said that the way I did. I see. You feel a little bit glad to come across someone who doesn't know whether your face is straight or crooked? Someone who accepts you sight unseen as she would any man who spoke and acted courteously? Is that it? Yes, Hollister admitted. That's about it. But your friends and relatives, she suggested softly. I have no relatives in this country, he said, and I have no friends anywhere now. She considered this a moment, rubbing her cheek with a gloved forefinger. What was she thinking about, Hollister wondered? That must be rather terrible at times. I'm not much given to slopping over, but I find myself feeling sorry for you, and you are only a disembodied voice. Your fix is something like my own, she said at last, and I have always denied that misery loves company. You were right in that, too, Hollister replied. Misery wants pleasant company. At least that sort of misery which comes from isolation and unfriendliness makes me appreciate even chance companionship. Is it so bad as that? She asked quickly. The tone of her voice made Hollister quiver. It was so unexpected, so wistful. Just about. I've become a stray dog in this old world, and it used to be a pretty good sort of a world for me in the old days. I'm not whining, but I do feel like kicking. There's a difference, you know. He felt ashamed of this mild outburst as soon as it was uttered. But it was true enough, and he could not help saying it. There was something about this girl that broke down his reticence, made him want to talk, made him feel sure he would not be misunderstood. She nodded. There is a great difference. Anyone with any spirit will kick if there is anything to kick about, and it's always shameful to whine. You don't seem like a man who could whine. How can you tell what sort of man I am? Hollister inquired. You just said that I was only a disembodied voice. She laughed, a musical low-toned chuckle that pleased him. One gets impressions, she answered. Being sightless sharpens other faculties. You often have very definite impressions in your mind about people you have never seen, don't you? Oh, yes, he agreed. I daresay everyone gets such impressions. Sometimes one finds those impressions are merely verified by actual sight. So there you are. I get a certain impression of you by the language you use, your tone, your inflections, and by a something else which, in those who can see, is called intuition, for lack of something more definite in the way of a term. Aren't you ever mistaken in those impressionistic estimates of people? She hesitated a little. Sometimes, not often, that sounds egotistic, but really it is true. The steamer drew out of the mouth of Tobinlet. In the widening stretch between the mainland and the redundas a cold wind came whistling out of Humphrey Channel. Hollister felt the chill of it through his Mackinac coat and was moved to thought of his companion's comfort. May I find you a warm place to sit? he asked. That's an uncomfortable breeze. And do you mind if I talk to you? I haven't talked to anyone like you for a long time. She smiled ascent. Ditto to that last, she said. You aren't a Western man, are you? She continued, as Hollister took her by the arm and led her toward a cabin, abaffed the wheelhouse on the boat deck, a roomy, lounging place unoccupied, saved by a fat woman taking a midday nap in one corner. Her double chin sunk on her ample bosom. No, he said. I'm from the east, but I spent some time out here once or twice, and I remembered the coast as a place I liked. So I came back here when the war was over and everything gone to pot, at least where I was concerned. My name is Hollister. Mine, she replied, is Cleveland. Hollister looked at her intently. Doris Cleveland, her book, he said aloud. It was to all intents and purposes a question. Why do you say that, the girl asked quickly? And how do you happen to know my given name? That was a guess, he answered. Is it right? Yes, but let me tell you, he interrupted. It's queer and still it's simple enough. Two months ago I went into Toba Inlet to look at some timber about five miles up the river from the mouth. When I got there I decided to stay a while. It was less lonesome there than in the racket and hustle of a town where I knew no one and nobody wanted to know me. I made a camp and in looking over a stretch of timber on a slope that runs south from the river I found a log cabin. In a hollow full of big cedars back of the cliff along the south side of the big bend, the girl cut in eagerly, a log house with two rooms where some shingle bolts had been cut with a bolt chute leading down hill. The very same, Hollister continued, I see you know the place. And in this cabin there was a shelf with a row of books, and each one had written on the fly leaf Doris Cleveland, her book. My poor books, she murmured. I thought the rats had torn them to bits long ago. No, except for a few nibbles at the binding. Perhaps, Hollister said whimsically, the rats knew that some day a man would need those books to keep him from going crazy alone there in the quiet hills. They were good books, and they would give his mind something to do besides brooding over past ills and an empty future. They did that for you, she asked. Yes, they were all the company I had for two months. I often wondered who Doris Cleveland was, and why she left her books to the rats, and was thankful that she did. So you lived up there? Yes. It was there I had my last look at the sun shining on the hills. I daresay the most vivid pictures I have in my mind are made up of things there. Why, I can see every peak and gorge yet, and the valley below with the river winding through, and the beaver meadows in the flats, all those slides and glaciers and waterfalls, cascades like ribbons of silver against green velvet. I loved it all. It was so beautiful. She spoke a little absently, with the faintest shadow of regret, her voice lingering on the words. And after a momentary silence, she went on. We lived there nearly a year, my two brothers and I. I know every rock and gully within two miles of that cabin. I helped to build that little house. I used to tramp around in the woods alone. I used to sit and read, and sometimes just dream under those big cedars on hot summer afternoons. The boys thought they would make a little fortune in that timber. Then one day, when they were felling a tree, a flying limb struck me on the head, and I was blind. In less than two hours of being unconscious, I woke up and I couldn't see anything. Like that almost. She snapped her finger. On top of that, my brothers discovered that they had no right to cut timber there. Things were going badly in France, too. So they went overseas. They were both killed in the same action, on the same day. My books were left there because no one had the heart to carry them out. It was all such a muddle. Everything seemed to go wrong at once. And you found them and enjoyed having them to read. Isn't it curious how things that seem so incoherent, so unnecessary, so disconnected, sometimes work out into an orderly sequence, out of which evil comes to some and good to others? If we could only forestall chance. Blind, blundering, witless chance. Hollister nodded, forgetting that the girl could not see. For a minute they sat silent. He was thinking how strange it was that he should meet this girl whose books he had been pouring over all these weeks. She had a mind, he perceived. She could think and express her thoughts and sentences as clean cut as her face. She made him think, thrust him face to face with an abstraction. Blind, blundering, witless chance. Was there nothing more than that? What else was there? You make me feel ashamed of myself, he said at last. Your luck has been worse than mine. Your handicap is greater than mine. At least you must feel it so. But you don't complain. You even seem quite philosophic about it. I wish I could cultivate that spirit. What's your secret? Oh, I'm not such a marvel, she said, and the slight smile came back to lurk around the corners of her mouth. There are times when I rebel, oh, desperately. But I get along very nicely as a general thing. One accepts the inevitable. I comfort myself with a selfish reflection that if I can't see a lot that I would dearly love to see, I am also saved the sight of things that are mean and sordid and disturbing. If I seem cheerful, I dare say it's because I'm strong and healthy and have grown used to being blind. I'm not nearly so helpless as I may seem. In familiar places and within certain bounds, I can get about nearly as well as if I could see. The steamer cleared the redondas, stood down through desolation sound, and turned her blunt nose into the lower gulf just as dark came on. Hollister and Doris Cleveland sat in the cabin talking. They went to dinner together, and if there were curious looks bestowed upon them, Hollister was too engrossed to care, and the girl, of course, could not see those side-long, unspoken inquiries. After dinner they found chairs in the same deck saloon and continued their conversation until ten o'clock, when drowsiness, born of a slow rolling motion of the vessel, drove them to their births. The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in. He lay wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland. He envied her courage and fortitude, the calm assurance with which she seemed to face the world, which was all about her, and yet hidden from her sight. She was really an extraordinary young woman, he decided. She was travelling alone. For several months she had been living with old friends of the family on Stewart Island, close by the roaring titerance of the Euclidaw Rapids. She was returning there, she told Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver. The steamer would dock about daylight the following morning. When Hollister offered to see her ashore and to her destination, she accepted without any reservations. It comforted Hollister's sadly bruised ego to observe that she even seemed a trifle pleased. I have once or twice got a steward to get me ashore and put me in a taxi, she said. But if you don't mind, Mr. Hollister, and Hollister most decidedly did not mind. Doris Cleveland had shot like a pleasant burst of colourful light across the grayest period of his existence, and he was loathed to let her go. He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great-seeders with the snow-banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the fireplace, pouring over one of Doris Cleveland's books. And he was no longer lonely, because he was not alone. He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious mind, when the stewards' rap at the door wakened him half an hour before the steamer docked. End of Chapter 7 Recording by Roger Maline Chapter 8 OF THE HIDDEN PLACES THE HIDDEN PLACES by Bertrand W. Sinclair Chapter 8 Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier, Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just another illusion which would uphold him for a while and then perish. Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years through which he must live, because of the virility of his body, seemed nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where he went or what lay before him. Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change. Each time he met her he breathed a prayer of thanks for her blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man, instead of shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with its clammy touch. For that he could thank Doris Cleveland and her alone. He saw her nearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach. To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised that conclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remote degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for instance, through Stanley Park, from English Bay to Second Beach. That broad path, with the gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on one side, and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The buds of the pussy-wheeler were beginning to burst. Birds twitted in dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore, had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could hear and feel. She could respond to subtle external stimuli. She could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a whimsical humor, sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness. At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with the brisk movement. And she could tell him with uncanny exactness when they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or the rock groins and bath-house at Second Beach. She knew always when they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the gulf, with streamers trailing their banners of smoke, and the white pillar of Point Atkinson Lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to Howe Sound. No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous, resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always night, or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk. In the old comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him then to overlook the faint shadows that ran before coming events. It had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly, until in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him unprepared for their denouement, left himself a trifle dizzy as he found himself committed irrevocably to this or that. But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's actions. So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxical way. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion yet reluctant to draw back. When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to set to great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them far apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs, would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would say to himself, also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as he was, perhaps she would be like the rest. He would never have had the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she turned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thought of him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mental pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came within the scope of her understanding, which covered no narrow field. But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what image of him she carried in her mind. For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly reading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern border of Stanley Park, which faced the gulf over English Bay, continued to be their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they walked along Marine Drive, to where the sands of the Spanish bank lay bared for a mile offshore at Ebtide. If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick out a motion picture-house that afforded a good orchestra, or get tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at the Grenada, where there was always music at the tea-hour in the afternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover, she knew music, which is a thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the place where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard her play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment, forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard, and that the most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visit that house often. The people there looked at him a little ascant. They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his presence, and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face. By the time that April Fool's Day was a week old on the calendar, Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf him soon. For Doris told him one evening that in another week she was going back to the Euclotahs. She had already stretched her visit to greater length than she intended. She must go back. They were sitting on a bench under a great fur that overlooked a deserted playground, emerald green with new grass. They faced a sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver Island. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like the faint murmur of distant surf. In a week, Hollister said, if there was an echo of regret in his voice he did not try to hide it. It has been the best month I have spent for a long, long time. It has been a pleasant month, Doris agreed. They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep flame red of low straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east dusk walked silently down to the sea. I shall be sorry when you are gone, he said at last. And I shall be sorry to go, she murmured. But she threw out her hands in a gesture of impotence, of resignation. One can't always be on a holiday. I wish we could, Hollister muttered. You and I? The girl made no answer. And Hollister himself grew dumb in spite of a pressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue for utterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyond sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realised with an overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted her, not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was still a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She too was aware, and sometimes afraid, of drab years running out into nothingness. Hollister sat beside her visualising interminable tomorrows, in which there would be no Doris Cleveland, in which he would go his way vainly seeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice that thrilled him with its friendly tone. He took her hand and held it, looking down at the soft white fingers. She made no effort to withdraw it. He looked at her, peering into her face, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curious expectancy and a faint deepening of the colour in her cheeks. Don't go back to the Euclita's Doris, he said at last. I love you. I want you. I need you. Do you feel as if you liked me enough to take a chance? For it is a chance, he finished abruptly. Life together is always a chance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise you by breaking out like this, but when I think of us each going separate ways, he held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward to peer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment or surprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked, grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lost in thought. But there was a rising acquiver in the fingers he held, which belied the emotionless fixity of her face. I wonder if it is such a desperate chance, she said slowly. If it is, why do you want to take it? Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I could imagine, he answered. And because I have a longing to face life with you and a dread of it alone. You can't see my ugly face which frightens off other people, so it doesn't mean anything to you. But you can hear my voice. You can feel me near you. Does it mean anything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you? He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, that strange, thoughtful look still on her face. Tell me, do you want me to love you? Or don't you care? He demanded. For a moment Doris made no answer. You're a man, she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly. And I'm a woman. I'm blind, but I'm a woman. I've been wondering how long it would take you to find that out. End of Chapter 8, Recording by Roger Maline