 16 Hollister had gone down to Luwans with a haunch of venison. This neighborly custom of sharing meat when it is to be had for the killing prevails in the northern woods. Officially there were game seasons to be observed, but the closed season for deer sat lightly on men in a region three days journey from a butcher shop. They shot deer when they needed meat. The law of necessity overrode the legal pronouncement in this matter of food as it often did in other ways. While Hollister, having duly pleased Luwans China boy by this quarter of venison, sat talking to Luwans, Charlie Mills came in to return a book. "'Did you get anything out of that?' Luwans asked. "'I got a bad taste in my mouth,' Mills replied. "'It reads like things that happen. It's too blame true to be pleasant. A man shouldn't be like that. He shouldn't think too much, especially about other people. He ought to be like a bull, go around snorting and pawing up the earth till he gets his belly full, and then lie down and chew his cud.' Luwans smiled. "'You've hit on something, Mills,' he said. "'The man who thinks the least and acts the most is the happy man, the contented man, because he's nearly always pleased with himself. If he fails at anything he can usually excuse himself in the grounds of somebody else's damn foolishness. If he succeeds, he complacently assumes that he did it out of his own greatness. Action, that's the thing. The contemplative analytical mind is the mind that suffers. Man was a happy animal until he began to indulge in abstract thinking, and now that the burden of thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to his own disadvantage. "'I'll say he does,' Mills agreed. "'But what can he do? I've watched things happen. I've read what some pretty good thinkers say. It don't seem to me a man's got much choice. He thinks, or he don't think, according to the way he's made. When you figure how a man comes to be what he is, why he's nothing but the product of forces that have been working on all the generations of his kind. It don't leave a man much choice about how he thinks or feels. If he could just grin and say, it doesn't matter, he'd be all right. But he can't unless he's made that way. And since he isn't responsible for the way he's made, what the hell can he do? You're on the high road to wisdom when you can look an abstraction like that in the face,' Lowan laughed. "'What you say is true, but there's one item you overlook. A man is born with, say, certain predispositions. Once he recognizes and classifies them, he can begin to exercise his will, his individual determination. If our existence was ordered in advance by destiny, dictated by some all conscious, omnipotent intelligence, we might as well sit down and fold our hands. But we still have a chance. Free will is an exploded theory, in so far as it purposes to explain human action in a general sense. Men are biologically different. In some, weakness is inherent. In others, determination. The weak man succumbs when he is beset. The strong man struggles desperately. The man who consciously grasps and understands his own weaknesses can combat an evil which will destroy a man of lesser perception, lesser will, because the intelligent man will avoid what he can't master. He won't butt his head against a stone wall either intellectually, emotionally, or physically. If the thing is beyond him and he knows it is beyond him, he will not waste himself in vain effort. He will adapt himself to what he can't change. The man who can't do that must suffer. He may even perish. And to cling to life is the prime law. That's why it is a fundamental instinct that makes a man want to run when he can no longer fight. Hollister said nothing. He was always a good listener. He preferred to hear what other men said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out his own ideas. Luan sometimes liked to talk at great length, to assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him speak as he did now to Luan. Mills walked back through the flat with Hollister. They trudged silently through the soft, new snow, the fresh fall which had enabled Hollister to track and kill the big deer early that morning. The sun was setting. Its last beam struck flashing on the white hills. The back of the winter was broken. The marked storms nearly at an end. In a little while now, Hollister thought, the buds would be bursting. There would be a new feel in the air, new fragrant smells arising in the forest, spring freshets in the rivers, the wild duck flying north. Time was on the wing in ceaseless flight. Mills broke into his reflections. Come up in the morning, will you, and check in what cedar I have piled. I'm going to pull out. All right, Hollister looked his surprise at the abrupt decision. I'm sorry you're going. Mills walked a few paces. Maybe it won't do me any good, he said. I wonder if Luan is right. It just struck me that he is. Anyway, I'm going to try his recipe. Maybe I can kid myself into thinking everything's Jake, that the world's a fine sort of place and everything is always lovely. If I could just myself think that, maybe a change of scenery will do the trick. Luan's clever, isn't he? Nothing would fool him very long. I don't know, Hollister said. Luan's a man with a pretty keen mind and a lively imagination. He's more interested in why people do things than in what they do. But I daresay he might fool himself as well as the rest of us, for all we know, now and then. I guess it's the way a man's made, Mills reflected. But it's rather a new idea that a man can sort of make himself over if he puts his mind to it. Still, it sounds reasonable. I'm going to give it a try. I've got to. But he did not say why he must. Nor did Hollister ask him. He thought he knew, and he wondered at the strange tenacity of this emotion which Mills could not shake off. A deep-rooted passion for some particular woman, an emotion which could not be crushed, was no mystery to Hollister. He only wondered that it should be so vital a force in the life of a man. Mills came down from the hill-camp to settle his account with Hollister in the morning. He carried his blankets and his clothes in a bulky pack on his sturdy shoulders. When he had his money he rose to go to catch their coastwise steamer which touched the inlet's head that afternoon. Hollister helped him sling the pack, opened the door for him, and they met Myra Bland setting foot on the porch-step. They looked at each other, those two. Hollister knew that for a second neither was conscious of him. Their eyes met in a lingering fixity, each with a question that did not find utterance. I'm going out, Mills said at last. A curious huskiness seemed to thicken his tongue. This time for good, I hope. So long! Good-bye, Charlie, Myra said. She put out her hand. But either Mills did not see it or he shrank from contact, for he passed her and strode away, bent a little forward under his pack. Myra turned to watch him. When she faced about again there was a mistiness in her eyes, a curious, pathetic expression of pity on her face. She went on into the house with scarcely a glance at Hollister. In another week spring had ousted winter from its seasonal supremacy. The snow in the lower levels vanished under a burst of warm rain. The rain ceased and the clouds parted to let through a sun fast growing to full strength. Mountains swelled and burst on willow and alder. The soil, warmed by the sun, sent up the first shoots of fern and grasses, a myriad fragile green tufts that would presently burst into flowers. The toba rose day by day, pouring down a swollen flood of snow-water to the sea. And life went on as it always did. Hollister's crew, working on a bonus for work performed, kept the bolts of cedar gliding down the chute. The mill on the river below swallowed at the blocks and spewed them out in bound bundles of roof-covering. Laouan kept close to his cabin, deep in the throes of creation, manifesting strange vagaries of moroseness or exhilaration, which in his normal state he cynically ascribed to the artistic temperament. Bland haunted the creeks where the trout lurked, tramped the woods gun in hand, adogged his heels, oblivious to everything but his own primitive, purposeless pleasures. "'I shouldn't care to settle here for good,' he once said to Hollister. "'But really, you know, it's not half bad. If money wasn't so dashed scarce. It's positively cruel for an estate to be so tied up that a man can't get enough to live decently on.'" Bland irritated Hollister sometimes, but often amused him by his calm assurance that everything was always well in the world of J. Kerrigan Bland. Hollister could imagine him in Norfolk, and gators striding down an English lane, concerned only with his stable, his kennels, the land whose rentals made up his income. There were no problems on Bland's horizon. He would sit on Hollister's porch with a pipe sagging one corner of his mouth, and gaze placidly at the river, the hills, the far stretch of the forest. And Hollister knew that to Bland it was so much water, so much uppiled rock and earth, so much growing wood. He would say to Myra, "'My dear, it's time we were going home, or I think I shall have a go at that big pool in Graveyard Creek to-morrow, or I say, Hollister, if this warm weather keeps on, the bears will be coming out soon, eh?' And between wiles he would sit silently puffing at his pipe, a big, heavy, handsome man, wearing soiled overalls and a shabby coat with a curious dignity. He spoke of family and breeding as if these were sacred possessions which conferred upon those who had them complete immunity from the sort of effort that common men must make. "'He really believes that,' Myra said to Hollister once. "'No Bland ever had to work. They have always had property. They have always been superior people. Jim's an anachronism, really. He belongs in the Middle Ages when the barons did the fighting and the commoners did the work. Generations of riding in the bandwagon has made it almost impossible for a man like that to plan intelligently and work hard merely for the satisfaction of his needs. "'I wonder what he'd do if there was no inheritance to fall back on,' Hollister asked. "'I don't know, and I really don't care much,' Myra said indifferently. "'I shouldn't be concerned, probably, if that were the case.' Hollister frowned. "'Why do you go on living with him, if that's the way you feel?' "'You seem to forget,' she replied, that there are very material reasons. And you must remember that I don't dislike Jim. I have got so that I regard him as a big, good-natured child of whom one expects very little. How in heaven's name did a man like that catch your fancy in the first place?' Hollister asked. He had never ceased to wonder about that. Myra looked at him with a queer lowering of her eyes. "'What's the use of telling you?' she exclaimed, petulantly. "'You ought to understand without telling. What was it drove you into Doris Cleveland's arms a month after you met her? You couldn't know her, nor she you. You were lonely and moody and something about her appealed to you. You took a chance and drew a prize in the lottery. Well, I took a chance also and drew a blank. I'm a woman and he's a man, a very good sort of a man for any woman who wants nothing more of a man than that he shall be a handsome, agreeable, well- mannered animal. That's about what Jim is. I may also be good looking, agreeable, well-mannered, a fairly desirable woman to all outward appearances, but I'm something besides, which Jim doesn't suspect and couldn't understand if he did. But I didn't learn that soon enough.' "'When did you learn it?' Hollister asked. He felt that he should not broach these intimately personal matters with Myra, but there was a fascination in listening to her reveal complexes of character which he had never suspected, which he should have known. I've been learning for some time, but I think Charlie Mills gave me the most striking lesson,' Myra answered thoughtfully. "'You can imagine I was blue and dissatisfied when we came here to bury ourselves alive because we could live cheaply and he could hunt and fish to his heart's content while he waited to step into a dead man's shoes. A wife's place, you see, is in the home, and home is wherever and whatever her lord and master chooses to make it. I was quite conscious by that time that I didn't love Jim Bland. But he was a gentleman. He didn't offend me. I was simply indifferent, satiated, if you like. I used to sit wondering how I could have ever imagined myself going on year after year, contented and happy, with a man like Jim. Yet I had been quite sure of that. Just as once I had been quite sure you were the only man who could ever be much of a figure on my horizon. Do you think I'm facile and shallow? I'm not really. I'm not just naturally a sensation-seeker. I hate promiscuity. He convinced me of that. She made a swift gesture towards Mills's vanishing figure. I ran across him first in London. He was convalescing from a leg wound. That was shortly after I was married and I was helping entertain these stray dogs from the front. It was quite the fashion. People took them out motoring and so on. I remembered Mills out of all the others because he was different from the average Tommy. Quiet without being self-conscious. I remembered thinking often what a pity nice boys like that must be killed and crippled by the thousand. When we came here, Charlie was working down at the settlement. Somehow I was awfully glad to see him. Any friendly face would have been welcome those first months before I grew used to these terrible silences, this complete isolation which I had never before known. Well, the upshot was that he fell in love with me. And for a while, for a little while, I thought I was experiencing a real affectionate last myself. A new love rising fine and true out of the ashes of old ones. And it frightened me. It made me stop and think. When he would stare at me with those sad eyes, I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to go away with him to some distant place where no one knew me and begin life all over again. And I knew it wouldn't do. It would only be the same thing over again because I made the way I am. I was beginning to see that it would take a good deal of a man to hold my fitful fancy very long. Charlie's a nice boy. He's clean and sensitive, and I'm sure he'd be kind and good to any woman. Still, I knew it wouldn't do. Curious thing. All the while that my mind was telling me how my whole existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man, for Charlie Mills is as full of romantic allusions as a 17-year-old girl, at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. But I could never convince myself that it was anything more than sex in me responding to the passion that so deeply moved him. That suspicion became certainty at last. That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about myself. I think it was a dear lesson for him, Hollister said, remembering the man's moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which must have torn Mills, you hurt him. I know it, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it, she said patiently. There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly went away with him. I think he felt that I was yielding, but I was trying to be honest with myself and with him. With all my vagaries, my uncertain emotions, I didn't want just the excitement of an affair, an amorous adventure. Neither did he. He wanted me, body and soul, and I recoiled from that finally, because I was afraid, afraid of what our life would become when he learned that truth which I had already grasped, that life can't be lived on the peaks of great emotion, and that there was nothing much else for him and me to go on. She stopped and looked at Hollister. I wonder if you think I'm a little mad, she asked. No, I was just wondering what it is about you that makes men want you, he returned. You should know, she answered bluntly. I never knew. I was like mills, a victim of my emotions. But one outgrows any feeling if it is clubbed hard enough. I daresay all these things are natural enough, even if they bring misery in their wake. I daresay, she said, there is nothing unnatural in a man loving me any more than it was unnatural for you to love Doris or for Doris to have a son. Still you are inclined to blame me for what I've done. You seem to forget that the object of each individual's existence, man or woman, is not to bestow happiness on someone else, but to seek it for themselves. That sounds like Luan, Hollister observed. It's true, no matter who it sounds like, she retorted. If you really believe that, you are certainly a fool to go on living with a man like Jim Bland, Hollister declared. It did not occur to him that he was displaying irritation. I've told you why, and I did not see any reason for changing my idea, she said coolly. When it no longer suits me to be a chattel, I shall cease to be one. Meantime, pacts, pacts. Where is Doris and the adorable infant? Myra changed the subject abruptly. I don't hear or see one or the other. They were all out in the kitchen a minute ago, bathing the kid, he told her, and Myra went on in. Hollister's work lay almost altogether in the flat now. The cut cedar accumulating under the busy hands of six men came pouring down the chute in a daily stream. To salvage the sticks that spilled, to arrange the booms for rafting downstream, kept Hollister on the move. At noon that day Myra and Doris brought the baby and lunch in a basket and spread it on the ground on the sunny side of an alder near the chute-mouth, just beyond the zone of danger from flying bolts. The day was warm enough for comfortable lounging. The boy, now grown to be a round-faced, clear-skinned mite with blue eyes like his father, lay on an outspread quilt, waving his chubby arms, staring at the mystery of the shadows cast upon him by leaf and branch above. Hollister finished his meal in silence, that reflective silence which always overtook him when he found himself one corner of this strange triangle. He could talk to Myra alone. He was never at a loss for words with his wife. Together they struck him dumb. And this day Doris seemed likewise dumb. There was a growing strangeness about her which had been puzzling Hollister for days. At night she would snuggle down beside him, quietly contented, or she would have some story to tell, or some unexpectedness of thought which still surprised him by its clear cut and vigorous imagery. But by day she grew distraught as if she retreated into communion with herself, and her look was that of one striving to see something afar, a straining for vision. Hollister had marked this. It had troubled him, but he said nothing. There were times when Doris liked to take refuge in her own thought world. He was aware of that, and understood it and let her be in such moods. Now she sat with both hands clasped over one knee. Her face turned toward Myra for a time. Then her eyes sought her husband's face, with a look which gave Hollister the uneasy, sickening conviction that she saw him quite clearly, that she was looking and appraising. Then she looked away toward the river, and as her gaze seemed to focus upon something there, an expression of strain, of effort, gathered on her face. It lasted until Hollister, watching her closely, felt his mouth grow dry. It hurt him as if some pain, some terrible effort of hers was being communicated to him. Yet he did not understand, and he could not reach her intimately with Myra sitting by. Doris spoke at last. What is that, Bob? she asked. She pointed with her finger. A big-seater stump, he replied. It stood about thirty feet away. Is it dark on one side and light on the other? It's blackened by fire, and the raw wood shows on one side where a piece has split off. He felt his voice cracked and harsh. Ah! she breathed. Her eyes turned to the baby, sprawling on his quilt. Myra rose to her feet. She picked up the baby, moved swiftly and noiselessly three steps aside, stood holding the boy in her arms. You have picked up baby. You have on a dress with light and dark stripes. I can see. I can see. Her voice rose exultantly on the last word. Hollister looked at Myra. She held the boy pressed close to her breast. Her lips were parted. Her pansy purple eyes were wide and full of alarm as she looked at Hollister. He felt his scarred face grow white. And when Doris turned toward him to bend forward and look at him with that strange peering gaze, he covered his face with his hands. End of Chapter 16 Recording by Roger Maline Chapter 17 of The Hidden Places This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline The Hidden Places by Bertrand W. Sinclair Chapter 17 Everything is indistinct, just blurred outlines. I can't see colors, only as light and dark, Doris went on, looking at Hollister with that straining effort to see. I can only see you now as a vague form without any detail. Hollister pulled himself together. After all, it was no catastrophe, no thunderbolt of fate, striking him a fatal blow. If, with growing clarity of vision, catastrophe ensued, then was time enough to shrink and cower. That resiliency, which had kept him from going before under terrific stress, stood him in good stead now. It seems almost too good to be true, he forced himself to say, and the irony of his words twisted his lips into what with him passed for a smile. It's been coming on for weeks, Doris continued, and I haven't been able to persuade myself it was real. I have always been able to distinguish dark from daylight, but I never knew whether that was pure instinct or because some faint bit of sight was left me. I have looked and looked at things lately, wondering if imagination could play such tricks. I couldn't believe I was seeing even a little, because I've always been able to see things in my mind, sometimes clearly, sometimes in a fog, as I see now. So I couldn't tell whether the things I have seen lately were realities or mental images. I have wanted so to see, and it didn't seem possible. Asking about the stump had been a test, she told Hollister. She did not know till then whether she saw or only thought she saw, and she continued to make these tests happily, exulting like a child when it first walks alone. She made them leave her and she followed them among a clump of alders, avoiding the trunks when she came within a few feet, instead of by touch. She had Hollister lead her a short distance away from Myra and the baby. She groped her way back, peering at the ground, until at close range she saw the broad blue and white stripes of Myra's dress. I wonder if I shall continue to see more and more, she sighed at last, or if I shall go on peering and groping in this uncertain fantastic way. I wish I knew. I know one thing, Myra put in quickly, and that is you won't do your eyes any good by trying so hard to see. You mustn't get excited about this and overdo it. If it's a natural recovery, you won't help it any by trying so hard to see. Do I seem excited? Doris smiled. Perhaps I am. If you had been shut up for three years in a room without windows, I fancy you'd be excited at even the barest chance of finding yourself free to walk in the sun. My God! No one with sight knows the despair that the blind sometimes feel, and the promise of seeing you can't possibly imagine what a glorious thing it is. Everyone has always been good to me. I've been lucky in so many ways. But there have been times, you know, don't you, Bob, when it has been simply hell, when I struggled in a black abyss, afraid to die, and yet full of bitter protest against the futility of living. The tears stood in her eyes, and she reached for Hollister's hand and squeezed it tightly between her own. What a lot of good times we shall have when I get so that I can see just a little better, she said affectionately. Your blind woman may not prove such a bad bargain after all, Bob. Have I ever thought that? he demanded. Oh, no, she said, smiling. But I know. Give me the baby, Myra. She cuddled young Robert in her arms. Little, fat, soft thing, she murmured. By and by his mother will be able to see the color of his dear eyes. Bless its little heart, him and his daddy are the bestest things in this old world, this old world that was black so long. Myra turned her back on them, walked away, and stood in the riverbank. Hollister stared at his wife. He struggled with an old sensation, one that he had thought long put by, a sense of the intolerable burden of existence in which nothing was sure but sorrow. And he was aware that he must disemble all such feelings. He must not let Doris know how he dreaded that hour in which she should first see clearly his mutilated face. You ought to see an oculist, he said at last. An oculist? I, specialists, I saw a dozen of them, she replied. They were never able to do anything, except to tell me I would never see again. A fig for the doctors. They were wrong when they said my sight was wholly destroyed. They'd probably be wrong again in the diagnosis and treatment. Nature seems to be doing the job. Let her have her way. They discussed that after Myra was gone, sitting on a log together in the warm sun, with the baby kicking his heels on the spread quilt. They continued the discussion after they went back to the house. Hollister dreaded uncertainty. He wanted to know how great a measure of her sight would return, and in what time. He did not belittle the oculists because they had once mistaken. Neither did Doris, when she recovered from the excitement engendered by the definite assurance that her eyes were ever so slightly resuming their normal function. She did believe that her sight was being restored naturally, as torn flesh heals, or a broken bone knits, and she was doubtful if any eye specialist could help that process. But she agreed, in the end, that it would be as well to know if anything could be done and what would aid instead of retard her recovery. But not for a while, she said. It's just a glimmer. Wait a few days. If this fog keeps clearing away, then we'll go. They were sitting on their porch steps. Doris put her arms around him. When I can see, I'll be a real partner, she said happily. There are so many things I can do that can't be done without eyes. And half the fun of living is in sharing the discoveries one makes about things with someone else. Sight will give me back all the books I want to read, all the beautiful things I want to see. I'll be able to climb hills and paddle a canoe, to go with you wherever you want to take me. More to be splendid? I've only been half a woman. I've only been half a woman. I have wondered sometimes how long it would be before you grew weary of my moods and my helplessness. And Hollister could only pat her cheek and tell her that he loved her, that her eyes made no difference. He could not voice the fear he had that her recovered sight would make the greatest difference, that the reality of him, the distorted visage which peered at him from a mirror would make her loathe him. He was not a fool. He knew that people, the women especially, shrank from the crippled, the disfigured, the malformed, the horrible. That had been his experience. It had very nearly driven him mad. He had no illusions about the men who worked for him, about his neighbors. They found him endurable, and that was about all. If Doris Cleveland had seen him clearly that day on the steamer, if she had been able to critically survey the unlovely thing that war had made of him, she might have pitied him. But would she have found pleasure in the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand? Hollister's intelligence answered, No. For externally his appearance would have been a shock, would have inhibited the pleasant intimacy at which they so soon arrived. Doris made light of his disfigurement. She could comprehend clearly many things unseen, but not that. Hollister knew she must have created some definite image of him in her mind. Something, he suspected, which must correspond closely to her ideal of a man, something that was dear to her. If that ideal did not, and his intelligence insisted that he could not, survive the reality, then his house was built on sand and must topple. And he must dig and pry at the foundations. He must do all that could be done for her eyes. That was her right to see, to be free of her prison of darkness, to be restored to the sight of beauty, to unclouded vision of the world and all it contained, no matter what the consequence to him. He would play the game, although he felt that he would lose. A cloud seemed to settle on him when he considered that he might lose everything that made life worth while, and it would be an irrevocable loss. He would never again have courage to weave the threads of his existence into another such goodly pattern. Even if he had the courage, he would never have the chance. No such fortuitous circumstances would ever again throw him into the arms of a woman, not such a woman as Doris Cleveland. Hollister looked at her beside him, and his heart ached to think that presently she might not sit so with her hand on his knee, looking up at him with lips parted in a happy smile, gray eyes eager with anticipation under the long curving brown lashes. She was so very dear to him, not alone because of the instinctive yearning of flesh to flesh, not altogether because of the grace of her vigorous young body, the comeliness of her face, the shining coils of brown hair that gave him a strange pleasure just to stroke, not alone because of the quick, keen mind that so often surprised him by its sureness. There was some charm more subtle than these, something to which he responded without knowing clearly what it was. Something that made the mere knowledge of her presence in his house a comfort, no matter whether he was beside her or miles away. Luan once said to him that a man must worship a God, love a woman, or find a real friendship to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for him, nothing. He would live on, obedient to the law of his being, a sentient organism, eating and sleeping, thinking starkly, without joy in the reluctant company of his fellows, his footsteps echoing hollowly down the long corridor of the years, emptied of hope and all those pleasant illusions by which man's spirit is sustained. But would he? Would it be worthwhile? I must go back to work, he said at last. Doris rose with him, holding him a moment. Presently I shall be able to come and watch you work. I might help. I know how to walk boomsticks to handle timber with a pike pole. I'm as strong as an ox. See? She put her arms around him and heaved, lifting the hundred and eighty pounds of his weight clear of the ground. Then she laughed, a low, pleased chuckle, her face flushed with the effort and turned into the house. Hollister heard her at the piano as he walked away, thundering out of the rollicking air of the soldier's chorus, its naive exultants of victory, it seemed to Hollister, expressing well her mood, a victory that might mean for him an abyss of sorrow and loneliness out of which he might never lift himself. CHAPTER XVIII For a week Hollister nursed this fear which so depressed him, watching the slow return of his wife's vision, listening to her talk of all they could do together when her sight was fully restored. From doubt of ocular treatment she changed to an impatient desire of whatever benefit might lie in professional care. A fever of impatience to see began to burn in her. So Hollister took her out to Vancouver, thence to Seattle, on to San Francisco, passing from each city to a practitioner of hire standing in the next, until two men with great reputations, and consulting fees and proportion, after a week of observation, announced their verdict. She would regain normal vision, provided, so and so, and in the event of such and such. There was some mystery about which they were guarded. They spoke authoritatively about infusions into the vitreous humor and subsequent absorption. They agreed in language too technical for a layman to understand that the cause of Doris' blindness was gradually disappearing. Only when they put aside the formal language of diagnosis and advised treatment did Hollister really fathom what they were talking about. What they said then was simple. She must cease to strain for sight of objects. She must live for a time in neutral lights. The clearing up of her eyes could perhaps be helped by certain ray treatments, certain forms of electrical massage, which could be given in Vancouver as well as anywhere. Whereupon the great men accepted their fees and departed. So too did Hollister and his wife depart for the North again, where they took a furnished apartment overlooking the Gulf of Georgia, close to a beach where Robert, Jr., could be wheeled in a pram by his nurse. And Hollister settled himself to wait. But it was weary work to nurse that sense of impending calamity to find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in which he should walk alone, and while he was thus harassed, still to keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris. She was abnormally sensitive to impressions. A tone spoke volumes to her. He did not wish to disturb her by his own anxiety at this critical period. All the while, little by little, her sight was coming. She could distinguish now any violent contrast of colors. The blurred detail of form grew less pronounced. In the chaos of sensory impressions she began to distinguish order, and when she began to peer unexpectedly at the people she met, at the chubby boy in his cot, at her husband's face, Hollister could stand at no longer. He was afraid, afraid of what he might see in those gray eyes if she looked at him too long, too closely. He was doubly sensitive now about his face because of those weeks among strangers, of going about in crowded places where people stared at him with every degree of morbid curiosity, exhibiting every shade of feeling from a detached pity to open dislike of the spectacle he presented. That alone weighed heavily on him. Inaction rassed at his nerves. The toba and his house, the grim peak standing aloof behind the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impassive, impersonal silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and think and hope. A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a lingering one. Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into his wife's eyes. Better that she should fully regain her sight and then see with what manner of man she had lived and to whom she had borne a son. Then, if she could look at him without recoiling, if the essential man meant more to her than the ghastly wreckage of his face, all would be well. And if not, well, then, one devastating buffet from the mailed fist of destiny was better than the slow agony of daily watching the crisis approach. So Hollister put forth the plausible fact that he must see about his affairs and took the next steamer for the toba. Lawan, expecting letters, was at the float to meet the steamer. Hollister went upstream with them. They talked very little until they reached Lawan's cabin. There was a four-mile current to buck, and they saved their breath for their paddles. Myra Bland waved as they passed, and Hollister scarcely looked up. He was in the grip of a strange apathy. He was tired, physically weary. His body was dull and heavy, sluggish. So was his mind. He was aware of this, aware that a nervous reaction of some sort was upon him. He wished that he could always be like that, dull, phlegmatic, uncaring, to cease thinking, to have done with feeling, to be a clawed, dead to desires, to high hopes and heart-numbing fears. Come in and have a cup of tea and tell me the latest Vancouver scandal Lawan urged when they beached the canoe. Hollister assented. He was as well there as anywhere. If there were an antidote in human intercourse for what afflicted him, that antidote lay in Archie Lawan. There was no false sentiment in Lawan. He did not judge altogether by externals. His was an understanding, curiously penetrating intelligence. Hollister could always be himself with Lawan. He sat down on the grass before the cabin and smoked while Lawan looked over his letters. The Chinese boy brought tea and sandwiches and cake on a tray. Mrs. Hollister is recovering her sight? Lawan asked at length. Hollister nodded. Complete normal sight? Hollister nodded again. You don't seem overly cheerful about it, Lawan said slowly. You aren't stupid, Hollister replied. Put yourself in my place. It was Lawan's turn to indicate comprehension and assent by a nod. He looked at Hollister appraisingly, thoughtfully. She gains the privilege of seeing again. You lose what? Are you sure you stand to lose anything? Or is it simply a fear of what you may lose? What can I expect? Hollister muttered. My face is bound to be a shock. I don't know how she'll take it. And if when she sees me she can't stand me, isn't that enough? I shouldn't worry if I were you, Lawan encouraged. Your wife is a little different from the ordinary run of women, I think. And take it from me. No woman loves her husband for his grecian profile alone. Nine times out of ten a man's looks have nothing to do with what a woman thinks of him. That is, if she really knows him. Whereas with a man it is usually the other way about, until he learns by experience that beauty isn't the whole works, which a clever woman knows instinctively. Women shy away from the grotesque, the unpleasant, Hollister declared. You know they do. I had proof of that pretty well over two years. So do men, for that matter. But the women are the worst. I've seen them look at me as if I were a loathsome thing. Oh, rats! Lawan returned irritably. You're hypersensitive about that face of yours. The women, well, take Mrs. Bland as an example. I don't see that the condition of your face makes any great difference to her. It doesn't appear to arouse any profound distaste on her part. Hollister could not counter that. But it was an argument which carried no weight with him. For if Myra could look at him without a qualm, Hollister knew it must be because her mind never quite relinquished the impression of him as he used to be in the old days. And Doris had nothing like that to mitigate the sweeping impression of first sight, which Hollister feared with a fear he could not shake off by any effort of his will. He went on up to his own house. The maple trees thrust one heavy-leaved branch over the porch. The doors were shut. All about the place hung that heavy mantle of stillness, which wraps a forsaken home, a stillness in which not even a squirrel chattered or a blue-jay lifted his voice, and in which nothing moved. He stood amid that silence, hearing only a faint whisper from the river, a far-off monotone from the falls beyond the chute. He felt a heaviness in his breast, a sickening sense of being forsaken. He went in, walked through the kitchen, looked into the bedroom, came back to the front room, opening doors and windows to let in the sun and air, and drive out the faint, musty odour that gathers in a closed house. A thin film of dust had settled on the piano, on chairs, on the table. He stood in the middle of the room, abandoned to a horrible depression. It was so still, so lonely in there. His mind, quick to form images, likened it to a crypt, a tomb in which all his hopes laid buried. That was the effect it had on him, this deserted house. His intelligence protested against submitting to this acceptance of disaster prior to the event, but his feelings overrode his intelligence. If Doris had been lying white and still before him in her coffin, he could not have felt more completely that sense of the futility of life, of love, of hope, of everything. As he stood there, one hand in his pocket, the other tracing with a forefinger, an aimless pattern in the dust on the piano, he perceived with remarkable clarity that the unhappiness he had suffered, the loneliness he had endured before he met Doris Cleveland, was nothing to what now threatened, to what now seemed to dog his footsteps with sinister portent. In the bedroom occupied by their housekeeper stood the only mirror in the house. Hollister went in there and stood before it, staring at the presentment of himself in the glass. He turned away with a shiver. He would not blame her if, with clear vision, she recoiled from that. He could expect nothing else. Or would she endure that frightful mean until she could first pity, then embrace? Hollister threw out his hands in a swift gesture of uncertainty. He could only wait and see and, meanwhile, twist and turn upon the grid. He could not be calm and detached and impersonal. For him there was too much at stake. He left all the doors and windows wide and climbed the hill. If he were to withstand the onslaught of these uncertainties, these four boatings which pressed upon him with such damnable weight, he must be stir himself. He must not sit down and brood. He knew that. It was not with any particular enthusiasm that he came upon his crew at work that his eye marked the widening stump-dotted area where a year before the cedars stood branch to branch, nor when he looked over the long ricks of bolts waiting that swift plunge down the chute. Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister's absence. So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the mill. Hollister's profits were accelerating the fruit of an insatiable market of inflated prices. As he trudged down the hill, he reflected upon that. He was glad in a way. If Doris could not or would not live with him, he could make life easy for her and the boy. Money would do that for them. With a strange perverseness, his mind dwelt upon the most complete breaking up of his domestic life. It persisted in shadowing forth scenes in which he and Doris took part in which it was made plain how and why they could no longer live together. In Hollister's mind these scenes always ended by his crying despairingly, if you can't, why you can't, I suppose, I don't blame you. And he would give her the bigger half of his funds and go his way. He would not blame her he would not blame her for feeling like that. Nevertheless Hollister had moments when he felt that he would hate her if she did, a paradox he could not understand. He slept, or at least tried to sleep, that night, alone in his house. He cooked his breakfast and worked on the boom until midday, then climbed the hill to the camp and ate lunch with his men. He worked up there till evening and came down in the dusk. He dreaded that lonely house, those deserted rooms. But he forced himself to abide there. He had a dim idea of so disciplining his feelings, of attaining a numbed acquiescence in what he could not help. Someone had been in the house. The breakfast dishes were washed, the dust cleared away, the floor swept, his bed made. He wondered but gave credit to Luan. It was like Archie to send his Chinese boy to perform those tasks. But it was Myra he discovered by and by. He came off the hill in mid-afternoon two days later and found her clearing up the kitchen. You don't mind, do you? she asked. I have nothing much to do at home and it seems a shame for everything here to be neglected. When is Doris coming back? I don't know exactly, perhaps two or three weeks, perhaps as many months. But her eyes will be all right again? So they say. Hollister went out and sat in the front doorstep. His mind sought to span the distance to Vancouver. He wondered what Doris was doing. He could see her sitting in a shaded room. He could see young Robert waving fat arms out of the cushion depths of his carriage. He could see the sun glittering on the sea that spread away westward from beneath the windows of the house where they lived. And Doris would sit there anticipating the sight of all those things which had been hidden in a three-year night. The sea rippling in the sun. The distant purple hills. The nearer green of the forest and of grass and flowers. All the light and color that made the world beautiful. She would be looking forward to seeing him. And that was the stroke which Hollister dreaded which made him indifferent to other things. He forgot Myra's presence. Six months earlier he would have resented her being there. He would have been uneasy. Now it made no difference. He had ceased to think of Myra as a possible menace. Lately he had not thought of her or her affairs at all. She came now and sat down upon the porch step within arm's length of him, looking at him in thoughtful silence. Is it such a tragedy, after all, she said at last? Is what? He took refuge and refusal to understand, although he understood instantly what Myra meant. But he shrank from her intuitive penetration of his troubled spirit. Like any other wounded animal he wanted to be left alone. You know what I mean, she said. You are afraid of Doris seeing you. That's plain enough. Is it so terrible a thing, after all? If she can't stand the sight of your face, you're better off without her. It's easy to be philosophic about someone else's troubles, Hollister muttered. You can be off with one love and be reasonably sure of another before long. I can't. I'm not made that way, I don't think. And if I were, I'm too badly handicapped. You haven't a very charitable opinion of Me, have you, Robin? She said reflectively. You rather despise Me for doing precisely what you yourself have done, making a bid for happiness as Chance offered. Only I haven't found it, and you have. So you are morally superior, and your tragedy must naturally be profound, because your happiness seems threatened. Oh, damn the moral considerations, he said, whirl-ly. It isn't that. I don't blame you for anything you ever did. Why should I? I'm a bigamist. I'm the father of an illegitimate son. According to the current acceptance of morality, I've contaminated and disgraced an innocent woman. Yet I've never been, and am not now, conscious of any regrets. I don't feel ashamed. I don't feel that I have sinned. I merely grasped the only Chance, the only possible Chance, that was in reach. That's all you did. As far as you and I are concerned, there isn't any question of blame. Are you sure, she asked, point blank, that your face will make any difference to Doris? How can it help? he replied gloomily. If you had your eyes shut and were holding in your hands what you thought was a pretty bird, and suddenly opened your eyes and saw it was a toad, wouldn't you recoil? Your simile is no good. If Doris really loved you, it was not because she pictured you as a pretty bird. If she could love you without seeing you, if you appealed to her, why should your marred face make her turn away from you? But Hollister could not explain his feeling, his deep dread of that which seemed no remote possibility but something inevitable and very near at hand. He did not want pity. He did not want to be merely endured. He sat silent, thinking of those things, inwardly protesting against this miraculous recovery of sight which meant so great a boon to his wife, and contained such fearful possibilities of misery for himself. Myra rose. I'll come again and straighten up in a day or two. She turned back at the foot of the steps. Robin, she said, with a wistful, uncertain smile. If Doris does, will you let me help you pick up the pieces? Hollister stared at her a second. Good God! he broke out. Do you realize what you're saying? Perfectly. You're a strange woman. Yes, I suppose so. Yes, I suppose I am, she returned. But my strangeness is only in acceptance, as a natural fact, of instincts and cravings and desires that women are taught to repress. If I find that I've gone swinging around an emotional circle and come back to the point, or the man, where I started, why should I shrink from that, or from admitting it, or from acting on it, if it seemed good to me? She came back to where Hollister sat on the steps. She put her hand on his knee, looked, searchingly, into his face. Her pansy blue eyes met his steadily. The expression in them stirred, Hollister. Mind you, Robin, I don't think your Doris is superficial enough to be repelled by a facial disfigurement. She seems instinctively to know and feel and understand so many things that I've only learned by bitter experience. She would never have made the mistakes I've made. I don't think your face will make you any the less her man. But if it does, I was your first woman. I did love you, Robin. I could again. I could creep back into your arms if they were empty and be glad. Would it seem strange? And still Hollister stared, dumbly. He heard her with a little rancor, a strange sense of the futility of what she said. Why hadn't she acquired this knowledge of herself long ago? It was too late now. The old fires were dead. But if the new one he had kindled to warm himself were to be extinguished, could he go back and bask in the warmth that smoldered in this woman's eyes? He wondered, and he felt a faint irritation as if someone had accused him of being faithless. Do you think it's strange that I should feel and speak like this? Myra persisted. Do people never profit by their mistakes? Am I so unlovable a creature? Could you either forget or forgive? He shook his head. It isn't that, his voice sounded husky, uncertain. We can't undo what's done, that's all. I cross no more bridges before I come to them. Don't mistake me, Robin. She said, with a self-conscious little laugh. I'm no love-sick flapper. Neither am I simply a voluptuous creature seeking a new sensation. I don't feel as if I couldn't live without you. But I do feel as if I could come back to you again, and it would be a little like coming home after a long, disappointing journey. When I see you suffering, I'm not going to go back to you. I want to comfort you. If she makes you suffer, I shall be unhappy unless I can make you feel that life still holds something good. If I could do that, I should perhaps find a life good myself. And it doesn't seem much good to me any more. I'm still selfish. I want to be happy. And I can't find happiness anywhere. I look back to our old life, and I envy myself. If the war marred your face and made you suffer, remember what it has done to me. Those months and months that dragged into years in London. Oh, I know, I was weak, but I was used to love. I craved it. I used to lie awake thinking about you in a fever of protest, because you could not be there with me in a perfect passion of resentment at the circumstances that kept you away, until it seemed to me that I had never had you, that there was no such man, that all our life together was only a dream. Think what the war did to us. How it has left us. You scarred and hopeless. I scarred by my passions and emotions. That is all the war did for any one. Scarred them, those that didn't kill. Oh, Robin, Robin, life seems a ghastly mockery sometimes. It promises so much and gives so little. She bent her head. Her shoulders shook with sobs she tried to strangle. Hollister put his hand on the thick coils of honey-coloured hair. He was sorry for her and for himself, and he was disturbed to find that the touch of her hair, the warm pressure of her hands on his knee, made his blood run faster. The curious outbreak spent itself. She drew herself away from him, and rising to her feet without a word, she walked rapidly away along the path by the river. Hollister looked after her. He was troubled afresh, and he thought to himself that he must avoid scenes like that. He was not, it appeared, wholly immune from the old virus. And he was clearly conscious of the cold voice of reason warning him against Myra. Sitting there in the shadow of his silent house, he puzzled over these new complexities of feeling. He was a little bewildered. To him Doris meant everything that Myra had once been. He wanted only to retain what he had. He did not want to salvage anything from the wreckage of the past. He was too deeply concerned with the dreadful test that fully restored eyesight would impose on Doris. He knew that Doris Cleveland's feeling for him had been profound and vital. She had given too many proofs for him to doubt that. But would it survive? He did not know. He hoped a little, and feared much. Above this fear he found himself now bewildered by this fresh swirl of emotion. He knew that if Myra had flung herself into his arms, he would have found some strange comfort in that embrace, that he could not possibly have repulsed her. It was a prop to his soul, or was it he asked himself merely his vanity, that Myra could look behind the grimness of his features and dwell fondly on the essential man, on the reality behind that dreadful mask. Still Hollister knew that to be only a mood, that unexpected tenderness for a woman whom he had hated for betraying him. It was Doris he wanted. The thought of her passing out of his life rested upon him like an intolerable burden. To be in doubt of her afflicted him with anguish. That the fires of her affection might dwindle and die before daily sight of him loomed before Hollister as the consummation of disaster. And he seemed to feel that hovering near, closely impending. That they had lived together sixteen months did not count. That she had borne him a child, neither did that count. That she had pillowed her brown-head nightly in the Kirk of his arm. That he had bestowed a thousand kisses on her lips, her hair, her neck. That she had lain beside him hour after hour through the long nights, drowsily content. None of these intimacies counted beside vision. He was a stranger in the dark. She did not know him. She heard his voice, knew his tenderness, felt the touch of him, the unseen lover. But there remained for her the revelation of sight. He was still the mysterious, the unknown about which her fancies played. How could he know what image of him, what ideal, resided tenaciously in her mind, and whether it would survive the shock of reality? That was the root of Hollister's fear, a definite, well-grounded fear. He found himself hoping that promise of sight would never be fulfilled, that the veil would not be lifted, that they would go on as they were. And he would feel ashamed of such a thought. Sight was precious. Who was he to deny her that mercy? She who loved the sun and the hills and the sea, all the sights of earth and sky which had been shut away so long. She who had crept into his arms many a time, weeping passionate tears, because all the things she loved were forever wrapped in darkness. If upon Hollister had been bestowed the power to grant her sight, or to withhold it, he would have shrunk from a decision. Because he loved her, he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that long night in which she groped her way. But he dreaded lest that light gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which everything he valued would be lost. Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands. And Hollister frowned and tried not to think of that. End of Chapter 18, Recording by Roger Maline Chapter 19 of the Hidden Places Chapter 19 at noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to sit in the sun, and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabilasian gavel of his crew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a man bent under a shoulder-pack coming up the slope that dropped away westward toward the Tobah's mouth. He came walking by stumps and threw thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognized him as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister came over to where he sat and, throwing off his pack, made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that stood in shining drops on his face. Well, I'm back, like the cat that couldn't stay away, Mills said. The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hint of pain colored his words, a subtle matter of inflection, of tone. The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his dark eyes. Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for this man, who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that no complaint ever escaped him. A strange man, tenacious of his black moods. How's everything, Mills asked? You've made quite a hole here since I left. Can I go to work again? Sure, Hollister replied. This summer we'll just about clean up the cedar here. You may as well help it along if you want to work. It isn't a case of wanting to. I've got to, Mills said under his breath. Already he was at his old trick of absent staring into space, while his fingers twisted tobacco and paper into a cigarette. I'd go crazy loathing. I've been trying that. I've been to Alaska and to Oregon, and blew most of the steak I made here in riotous living. He curled his lip disdainfully. It's no good. Might as well be here as anywhere. So I came back, like the cat. He fell silent again, looking through the trees out over the stone rim, under which Bland's house stood by the river. He sat there beside Hollister until the bolt gang, moving out of the bunkhouse to work, saw and hailed him. He answered briefly. Then he rose without another word to Hollister and carried in his pack. Hollister saw him go about selecting tools, shoulder them, and walk away to work in the timber. That night Hollister wakened out of a sound sleep to sniff the air that streamed in through his open windows. It was heavy with the pungent odor of smoke. He rose and looked out. The silence of night lay on the valley over the dense forest across the river upon the first swathed southern slope. No leaf stirred. Nothing moved. It was still as death. And in this hushed blackness, lightened only by a pale streak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountain crests, standing stark against the skyline, this smoky wraith crept along the valley floor. No red glow greeted Hollister's sight. There was nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavy odor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire. It might be over the next ridge. It might be in the mouth of the valley. It might be thirty miles distant. He went back to bed to lie with that taint of smoke in his nostrils, thinking of Doris and the boy, of himself, of Charlie Mills, of Myra, of Archie Luan. He saw ghosts in that dusky chamber. Ghosts of other days and trooping on the heels of these came apparitions of a muddled future, until he fell asleep again to be awakened at last by a hammering on his door. The light of a flash-lamp revealed a lager from the car settlement below. The smoke was rolling in billows when Hollister stepped outside. Down toward the inlet's head there was a red flare in the sky. We've got to get everybody out to fight that, the man said. She started in the mouth of the river last night. If we don't check it and the wind turns right, it'll clean the whole valley. We sent a man to pull your crew off the hill. In the growing dawn Hollister and the lager went down through the woods thick with smoke. They routed Luan out of his cabin, and he joined them eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon the woodsman chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Luan as something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his wonder, his curious interest in vast elemental forces unleashed. They stopped at Bland's and pressed him into service. In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshaled to the attack under men from cars. Woodsman experienced in battle against the red enemy, the spoiler of the forest, with his myriad tongues of flame and breath of suffocating smoke. In mid-summer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys, move always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the lagers feared. It would send the fire sweeping up the valley. There would be no stopping it. There would be nothing left in its wake but the blackened earth, smoking roots and a few charred trunks standing gaunt and unlovely amid the ruin. So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass. It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on. There was no time for malingering. There was a very real incitement to great effort. Their property was at stake. Their homes and livelihood, even their lives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire's advance and were trapped. They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floor from the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down. They felled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkey engines to manipulate their gear. They cleared away the brush and the dry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road, so that when the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space in which should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by the wind. There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished. They could not attack the enemy with excited cries, with brandished weapons. They could not even see the enemy. They could hear him. They could smell the resinous odor of his breath. That was all. They laid their defenses against him with methodical haste, chopping, heaving, hauling the steel cables here and there from the donkeys, sweating in the blanket of heat that overlaid the woods, choking in the smoke that rolled like fog above them and about them. And always in each man's mind ran the uneasy thought of the west wind rising. But throughout the day the west wind held its breath. The flames crawled, ate their way, instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in done clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat bath, in which the lagers worked stripped to undershirts and overalls, blackened with soot and grime. Night fell. The fire had eaten the heart out of a block half a mile square. It was growing. A redness brightened the sky. Lurid colors fluttered above the huddest blaze. A flame would run with incredible agility up the trunk of a hundred-foot cedar to fling a yellow banner from the topmost boughs, to color the billowing smoke, the green of nearby trees, to wave and gleam and shed corresponding spark-showers and died down again to a dull glow. Through the short night the work went on. Here and there a man's weariness grew more than he could bear and he would lie down to sleep for an hour or two. They ate food when it was brought to them. Always, while they could keep their feet, they worked. Hollister worked on stoically into the following night, keeping Luan near him. Because it was all new and exciting to Luan, and Hollister felt that he might have to look out for him if the wind took any sudden dangerous shift. But the mysterious forces of the air were merciful. During the twenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and the draughts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again, without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, they had drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws in so far as the flats of the toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to that cleared path and burn itself out, with men stationed along to beat out each tiny flame that might spring up by chance. And when that was done, they rested on their oars, so to speak. They took time to sit down and talk without once relaxing their vigilance. In a day or two the fire would die out against that barrier, always provided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery fling showers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning in the woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beaten until it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. They looked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot of them gathered by a tree. Someone had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffee, and tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food and stretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they could see a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hear the crackle and snap of burning wood. A forest fire is quite literally hell, isn't it? Luan asked. Hollister nodded. His eyes were unblanned. The man sat on the ground. He had a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other. He was blackened, almost beyond recognition, and he was viewing with patent disgust the state of his clothes and particularly of his hands. He sat down his food and rubbed at his fingers with a soiled handkerchief. Then he resumed eating and drinking. It appeared to him a matter of necessity, rather than a thing from which he derived any satisfaction. Near him Charlie Mills lay stretched on the moss. His head pillowed on his folded arms. Too weary to eat or drink, even at Hollister's insistence. Dirty job this, eh? bland remarked. I'll appreciate a bath. Phew! I shall sleep for a week when I get home. By mid-afternoon of the next day Sam Card decided they had the fire well in hand and so split his forces, leaving half on guard and letting the others go home to rest. Hollister's men remained on the spot in case they were needed. He and Luan and Bland went home. But that was not the end of the great blaze. Blocked in the valley, the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouth of a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demonic energy until it was burning fiercely over a bench-lend to the west of Hollister's timber. The fight began once more. With varying phases it raged for a week. They would check it along a given line and rest for a while, thinking it's safely under control. Then a light shift of wind would throw it across their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest would break into flame. The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatest menace lay in its steady creep westward. Slowly it aid up to the very edge of Hollister's timber, in spite of all their checks, their strategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandal course. Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loose with unrestrained exhalation. It fanned the fire to raging fury, sent it leaping in yellow sheets through the woods. The blaze lashed eagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of the Northwoods. Where its voice had been a whisper it became a roar, an ominous warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and got themselves and their gear off that timbered slope. They could do no more. They had beaten it in the valley. Backed by the lusty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and went its wanton way unhindered. In the flat by Hollister's house the different crews came together. There was not one of them but dropped with exhaustion. They sat about on the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up the hill. Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley. It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water and it was also bearing to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest. All that area where Hollister's cedars had stood was a red chaos out of which great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red, molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away to wrap an obscurity all the hills beyond. There was nothing they could do now. They watched it apathetically, too weary to care. Hollister looked in the destruction of his timber most stolidly of all. For days he had put forth his best effort. His body ached. His eyes smarted. His hands were sore. He had done his best without enthusiasm. He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these men by this vast and useless destruction. What did it matter, after all? A few trees, more or less? A square mile or two of timber out of that enormous stand? It was of no more consequence in the sum total than the life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of the earth. It was his timber. So was his life a possession peculiar to himself. And neither seemed greatly to matter. Neither did matter greatly to anyone but himself. It was all a muddle. He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking, almost too tired to feel. He was conscious of himself as a creature of weariness sitting against a tree. His scarred face blackened like the tired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum of all this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort, the pain and stress that men endure. A man made plans and they failed. He bred hope in his soul and saw it die. He longed for and sought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage, just as they seemed within his grasp. Luan and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs. Carsmen rested where they chose. They must watch lest the fire back down into the valley again and destroy their timber as it had destroyed Hollister's. They had blankets and food. Hollister gave his own men the freedom of the house. Their quarters on the hill stood in the doomed timber. The old log house would be ashes now. He wondered what Doris was doing if she steadily gained her sight. But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult. He thought in pictures, which he saw with a strange detachment, as if he were a ghost haunting places once familiar. He found his chin sinking on his breast. He roused himself and walked over to the house. His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping in grotesque postures. Hollister picked his way among them. Almost by the door of his bedroom, Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his head resting on a sofa cushion. He opened his eyes as Hollister passed. That was a tough game, Hollister said. It's all a tough game, Mills answered wearily and closed his eyes again. Hollister went on into the room. He threw himself across the bed. In ten seconds he was fast asleep. End of Chapter 19, Recording by Roger Maline