 CHAPTER XIII From day to day, and from week to week, apprehending mistily that he was caught in, and carried along by a current, a slow but irresistible movement of events, Hollister pursued the round of his daily life as if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him, as if he had done for ever, with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of the spirit, as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a chart, whereof every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his hands and brain the instruments and knowledge were with to run a true course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not so sure of untroubled passage. But mostly he did not think of these potential dangers. He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living. The idea of poverty shaped him. He had once been a considerable toad in a sizable puddle. He had inherited a competence and lost it, and power to reclaim it was beyond him. He wasted no regrets upon the loss of that material security, although he sometimes wondered how Myra had contrived to let such a sum slip through her fingers in a little over two years. He assumed that she had done so. Otherwise she would not be sitting in the bank of the toba, waiting more or less passively for her husband to step into a dead man's shoes. That was, in effect, bland situation. He was an Englishman of good family, accustomed to a definite social standing, accustomed to money derived from a source into which he never troubled to inquire. He had never worked. He never would work. Not in the sense of performing any labor as a means of livelihood. He had a small income, fifty or sixty dollars a month. When he was thirty he would come into certain property and an income of so many thousand pounds a year. He and his wife could not subsist in any town on the quarterly dole he received. That was why they had come to live in that cabin on the toba river. And hunted. He fished. To him the toba valley served well enough as a place to rusticate. Any place where game animals and sporting fish abounded satisfied him temperamentally. He had done his bit in the war. When he came into his money they would go home. He was placidly sure of himself, of his place in the general scheme of things. He was suffering from temporary embarrassment, that was all. It was a bit rough on Myra, but it would be all right, by and by. So much filtered into Hollister's ears and understanding before long. Archie LeWon came back downstream with two grizzly pelts, and Hollister met Bland for the first time. He appraised Bland with some care. This tall, ruddy Englishman who had supplanted him in a woman's affections, and who, unless Hollister's observation had tricked him, was in a fair way to be himself supplanted. For Hollister was the unwilling spectator of a drama to which he could not shut his eyes. Nor could he sit back in the role of cynical audience, awaiting in cushioned ease the climax of the play and the final exit of the actors. Hollister was the man. Whether he was more than a potential lover, whether Myra, in her ennui, her hunger for a new sensation, whatever unsatisfied longings had led her to exercise upon men the power of her undeniable attraction, had now given her heart into Charlie Mills's keeping, Hollister, of course, neither knew nor cared. But he did know, that they met now and then, that Mills seemed to have some curious knowledge of when Bland was far afield. Mills could be trusted to appear on the flat in the evening, or on a Sunday, if Myra came to see Doris. He speculated idly upon this sometimes. Myra, he knew well enough, or thought he did. He began to regard Mills with a livelier interest, to talk to the man, to draw him out, to discover the essential man under the outward seeming. He was not slow to discover that Mills was something more than so much bone and sinew which could be applied vigorously to an ax or a saw. Hollister's speculations took a new turn when Archie Luan and Bland came back from the bear hunt. Or Luan did not go out. He pitched a tent on the flat below Hollister's and kept one sidewash to cook for him. He made that halt to rest up, to stretch and dry his bearskins. But long after these trophies were cured he still remained. He was given to roaming up and down the valley. He extended his acquaintance to the settlement farther down, taking observation of an earnest attempt at cooperative industry. He made himself at home equally with the Bland's and the Hollister's. And when July was on them, with hot, hazy sunshine in which berries ripened and bird and insect life filled the toba with a Twitter and a drone, when the smoke of distant forest fires drifted like pungent fog across the hills, Hollister began to wonder if the net Myra seemed unconsciously to spread for men's feet had snared another victim. This troubled him a little. He liked Luan. He knew nothing about him, who he was, where he came from, what he did. Nevertheless there had arisen between them a curious fellowship. There seemed to reside in the man a natural quality of uprightness, a moral stoutness of soul that lifted him above petty judgments. One did not like or dislike Luan for what he did or said so much as for what he suggested as being inherent within himself. There was a little of that quality also about Charlie Mills. He worked in the timber with a fierce energy. His dark face glistened with sweat-bands from morning till night. His black hair stood in wisps and curls. Its picturesque disorder heightened by a trick he had of running his fingers through it when he paused for a minute to take breath, to look steadfastly across at the slide-scarred granite face of the north valley wall, with a wistful look in his eyes. "'Those hills,' he said once abruptly to Hollister, "'they were here long before we came. They'll be here long after we're gone.' What a helpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway. A squirrel on his wheel in a cage.' It was a protesting acceptance of a stark philosophy, Hollister thought, a cry against some weight that bore him down, the momentary revealing of some conflict in which Mills foresaw defeat, or had already suffered defeat. It was a statement wrung out of him, requiring no comment, for he at once resumed the steady pull on the six-foot cross-cut saw. "'Why don't you take it easier?' Hollister said to him. "'You work as if the devil was driving you.' Mills smiled. "'The only devil that drives me,' he said, "'is the devil inside me.' "'Besides,' he continued, between strokes of the saw, "'I want to make a stake and get to hell out of here.' Hollister did not press him for reasons. Mills did work as if the devil drove him, and in his quiescent moments an air of melancholy clouded his dark face, as if physical passivity left him a prey to some inescapable inner gloom. All about him, then, Hollister perceived strong undercurrents of life flowing sometimes in the open, sometimes underground. Charlie Mills and Myra Bland touched by that universal passion which has brought happiness and pain, dizzy heights of ecstasy and deep abysses of despair to men and women since the beginning of time. Laouan apparently succumbing to the same malady that touched Mills. Bland moving in the foreground, impassive, stolidly secure in the possession of this desired woman, and all of them bowed before and struggling under economic forces which they did not understand, working and planning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of their being, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means of livelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the human desire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could be grasped. Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabin, and Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit of drowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see the river, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly along between the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green of the fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drank in the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls, and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestion of delight. At such times he felt the goodness of being alive, the mild intoxication of the fragrant air which filled the valley, the majestic beauty of those insentient hills upon which the fierce midsummer sun was bearing glacial patches that gleamed now like blue diamonds, or again with a pale emerald sheen, in a setting of worn granite and white snowdrifts five thousand feet above. In this wilderness, this vast region of forest and streams and wild mountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks, harrying here and there about their self-appointed tasks. Those like himself and Doris, who did not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, fared well enough. The land held out to them manifold promises. Souther looked at the red-brown shingle-bolts accumulating behind the boomsticks and felt that inner satisfaction which comes of success achieved by plan and labor. If his mutilated face had been capable of expression it would have reflected pride, satisfaction. Out of the apparent wreckage of his life he was laying the foundations of something permanent, something abiding, an enduring source of good. He would tangle his fingers in Doris's brown hair and feel glad. Then perhaps his eyes would shift downstream to where bland, stark, weather-beaten cabin lifted its outline against the green thickets, and he would think uneasily upon what insecure tenure, upon what deliberate violation of law, and of current morality, he held his dearest treasure. What would she think if she knew this dainty creature cuddling against his knee? He would wake in the night and lie on elbow, staring at her face in the moonlight, delicate-skinned as a child's, that lovable red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes which sometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their gray depths. What would she think? What would she say? What would she do? He did not know. It troubled him to think of this. If he could have swept Myra out of North America with a wave of his hand he would have made one sweeping gesture. He was jealous of his happiness, his security, and Myra's presence was not only a reminder, it had the effect upon him of a threat he could not ignore. But he was compelled to ignore it. She and Doris had become fast friends. It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes. Except for the uprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he would have been revolted at his own actions. He had committed technical bigamy. His children would be illegitimate before the law. Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment. His class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so, that the man and woman who deviate from the accepted conventions in living, loving, marrying, breeding, even and dying, does so because of innate depravity and that such people must be damned by bell, book, and candle in this world as they shall assuredly be damned in the next. Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were holy matters of free will. From the time he put on the King's uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of devastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened to others. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like frail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex of the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide. Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta, which are the special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple competently with any material problem but who stand aghast, apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before the wavering gusts of human passion. If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and he had dragged Doris Cleveland down with him. So was Myra smeared with the pitch of moral obliquy. They were sinners all. Things should be their dessert, shame and sorrow their portion. Why? Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust of circumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion which had overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblance of happiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands. The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisively intolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called to pass judgment. But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wife than he could feel within himself a personal conviction of sin. Love, he perceived, was not a fixed emotion. It was like a fire which glows bright when plied with fuel and burns itself out when it is no longer fed. To some it was casual, incidental. To others an imperative law of being. Myra remained essentially the same woman, whether she loved him or some other man. Who was he to judge her? She had loved him and then ceased to love him. Beyond that her life was her own to do with as she chose. Or could Hollister, when he faced the situation squarely, feel that he was less a man, less upright, less able to bear himself decently before his fellows than he had ever been. Sometimes he would grow impatient with thinking and put it all by. He had his moods. But also he had his work, the imperative necessity of constant labor, to satisfy the needs both of the present and the future. No man goes into the wilderness with only his hands and a few tools and win security by any short and easy road. There were a great many things Hollister was determined to have for himself and Doris and their children, for he did not close his eyes to the natural fulfillment of the mating impulse. He did not spare himself. Like Mills he worked with a prodigious energy. Sometimes he wondered if dreams akin to his own drove Charlie Mills to sweat and strain, to pile up each day, double the amount of split cedar, and double for himself the wages earned by the other two men, who were themselves no laggards with acts and saw. Or if Mills fantastically personified the timber as something which stood between him and his aching desire and so attacked it with all his lusty young strength. Sometimes Hollister sat by, covertly watching Mills and Myra. He could make nothing of Myra. She was courteous, companiable, nothing more. But to Hollister Mills's trouble was plain enough. The man was on his guard as if he knew betrayal lurked in the glance of his eye, in the quality of his tone. Hollister gauged the depths of Mills's feelings by the smoldering fire in his glance. That glow in Mills's dark eyes when they rested too long on Myra. There would be open upon his face a look of hopelessness as if he dwelt on something that fascinated and baffled him. Sometimes laterally he saw a hint of that same dubious expression about Archie Luan. But there was a different temper in Luan, a flash of the sardonic at times. In July, however, Luan went away. "'I'm coming back, though,' he told Hollister before he left. "'I think I shall put up a cabin and winter here.' "'I'll be glad to see you,' Hollister replied. "'But it's a lonely valley in the winter.' Luan smiled. "'I can stand isolation for a change,' he said. "'I want to write a book, and while I am outside I'll send you in a couple that I have already written. You will see me in October. Try to get the shingle-bolt rush over so we can go out after deer together now and then. So for a time the Toba saw no more of Luan. Hollister missed him. So did Doris. But she had Myra Bland to keep her company while Hollister was away at work in the timber. Sometimes Bland himself dropped in. But Hollister could never find himself on any common ground of mutual interest with this sporting Englishman. He was a bluff, hearty, healthy man, apparently without either intellect or affectation. "'What do you think of Bland?' he asked Doris once. "'I can't think of him, because I can't see him,' she answered. "'He is either very clever at concealing any sort of personality, or he is simply a big, strong, stupid man.' Which was precisely what Hollister himself thought. "'Isn't it queer?' Doris went on. "'How vivid a thing personality is! Now Myra and Mr. Luan are definite, colorable entities to me. So is Charley Mills, quiet as he is. And yet I can't make Bland seem anything more than simply a voice with a slightly English accent. "'Well, there must be something to him, or she wouldn't have married him,' Hollister remarked. "'Perhaps. But I shouldn't wonder if she married him for something that existed mostly in her own mind,' Doris reflected. "'Women often do that. Men too, I suppose. I very nearly did myself once. Then I discovered that this ideal man was something I had created in my own imagination. How did you find that out before you were committed to the enterprise?' he asked curiously. "'Because my reason and my emotions were in continual conflict over that man,' Doris said thoughtfully. "'I have always been sure, ever since I began to take men seriously, that I wouldn't get on very long with any man who was simply a strong, healthy animal. And as soon as I saw that this admirable young man of mine hadn't much to offer that wasn't purely physical, why the glamour all faded.' "'Maybe mine will fade too,' Hollister suggested. "'Oh, you're fishing for compliments now,' she laughed. "'You know very well you are. But we're pretty lucky, Robert-mine, just the same. We've gained a lot. We haven't lost anything yet. I wouldn't backtrack, not an inch. Would you, honest now?' Hollister answered that, in a manner which seemed to him suitable to the occasion. And while he stood with his arm around her, Doris startled him. "'You have told me a curious thing the other day,' she said. She has been married twice. She told me that her first husband's name was the same as yours, Bob Hollister, that he was killed in France in 1917. She says that you somehow remind her of him.' There were a good many men killed in France in 1917,' he observed. And Hollister is not such an uncommon name. Does the lady suspect I'm the reincarnation of her dear departed? She seems to have consoled herself for the loss, anyway.' "'I doubt if she has,' Doris answered. She doesn't unburden her soul to me, but I have the feeling that she is not exactly a happy woman.' The matter rested there. Doris went away to do something about the house. Hollister stood glowering at the distant outline of Blam's cabin. A slow uneasiness grew on him. What did Myra mean by that confidence? Did she mean anything?' He shook himself impatiently. He had a profound distaste for that revelation. In itself it was nothing unless some obscure motive lurked behind. That troubled him. Myra meant nothing, or she meant mischief. Why he could not say? She was quit of him at her own desire. She had made a mouthful of his modest fortune. If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask of scars, and from some obscure perverted motive meant to bring shipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he would strangle her without a trace of remorse. End of CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV OF THE HIDDEN PLACES CHAPTER XIV All that summer the price of cedar went creeping up. For a while this was only in keeping with the slow ascension of commodity costs, which continued long after the guns ceased to thunder. But presently cedar on the stump in the log in the finished product began to soar while other goods slowed or halted altogether, in their mysterious climb to inaccessible heights, and cedar was not a controlled industry, not a monopoly. Shingles and dressed cedar were scarce, that was all. For the last two years of the war most of the available manpower and machinery of British Columbia loggers had been given over to airplane spruce. Carpenters had laid down their tools and gone to the front. Housebuilders had ceased to build houses while the vast cloud of European uncertainty hung over the nation. All across North America the wind and weather had taken toll on roofs and these must be repaired. The nation did not cease to breed while its men died daily by thousands. And with the signing of the armistice a flood of immigration was set loose. British and French and Scandinavians and swarms of people from Czechoslovakia and all the Balkan states hurried from devastated lands and impending taxes to a new country glowing with the deceptive greenness of far fields. The population had increased, the housing for it had not. So that rents went up and up until economic factors exerted their inexorable pressure and the tap of the carpenter's hammer and the ring of his saw began to sound in every city, in every suburb, on new farms and lonely prairies. Cedar singles began to make fortunes for those who dealt in them on a large scale. By mid-summer, Carr's mill on the Toba worked night and day. "'Crowed your work, Hollister,' Carr advised him. "'I've been studying this cedar situation from every angle. There will be an unlimited demand and rising prices for about another year. By that time every logging concern will be getting out cedar. The mills will be cutting it by the million feet. They'll glut the market and the bottom will drop out of this cedar, boom. So get that stuff of yours out while the going is good. We can use it all.' But labor was scarce. All the great industries were absorbing men, striving to be first in the field of post-war production. Hollister found it difficult to enlarge his crew. That was a lonely hillside where his timber stood. Hollister preferred the big camps, the less primitive conditions under which they must live and work. Hollister saw that he would be unable to extend his operations until deep snow shut down some of the northern camps that fall. Even so he did well enough, much better than he had expected at the beginning. Bill Hayes, he of the gray mustache and the ear-piercing fallers cry, was a long-stake man. That is to say, old Bill knew his weaknesses, the common weaknesses of the logger, the psychological reaction from hard work, from sordid living, from the indefinable cramping of the spirit that grows upon a man through months of monotonous labor. Town, a pyrotechnic display among the bright lights, one dizzy swoop on the wings of fictitious excitement, bought caresses, empty pockets, the woods again. Yet the logger dreams always of saving his money, of becoming a timber king, of setting himself up in some business, knowing all the while that he is like a child with pennies in his hand, unhappy until they are spent. Bill Hayes was past fifty, and he knew all this. He stayed in the woods as long as the weakness of the flesh permitted, naively certain that he had gone on his last bust, that he would bank his money and experience the glow of possessing capital. The other man was negligible, a bovine lump of flesh without personality, born to hue wood, and draw water for men of enterprise. And there was always mills, mills who wanted to make a stake and get to hell out of here, and who did not go, although the sum to his credit in Hollister's account-book was creeping towards a thousand dollars, so fierce and unceasing an energy did mills expend upon the fragrant cedar. Hollister himself accounted for no small profit. Like mills he worked under a spur. He wrestled stoutly with opportunity. He saw beyond the cedar on that green slope. With a living assured he sought fortune, aspired to things as yet beyond his reach, leisure, an ampler way of life, education for his children that were to be. This measure of prosperity loomed not so distant. When he took stock of his resources in October he found himself with nearly three thousand dollars in hand, and the bulk of his cedar still standing. Half that was directly the gain derived from a rising market. Labor was his only problem. If he could get labor and shingles held the upper price levels, he would make a killing in the next twelve months. After that, with experience gained and working capital, the forested region of the British Columbia coast lay before him as a field of operations. Meantime he was duly thankful for daily progress. Materially that destiny which he doubted seemed to smile on him. Late in October when the first southward flight of wild duck began to wing over the valley, old Bill Hayes and Sam Ballard down tools and went to town. The itch of the wandering foot had laid hold of them. The pennies burned their pockets. Ballard frankly wanted a change. Hayes declared he wanted only a week's holiday to see a show or two and buy some clothes. He would surely be back. Yes, he'll be back, Mills commented with ironic emphasis. He'll be broke in a week and the first camp that pays his fare out will get him. There's no fool like a lager. Strong in the back and weak in the head, the best of us. But Mills himself stayed on. What kept him, Hollister wondered? Did he have some objective that centered about Myra Bland? Was the man a victim of hopeless passion lingering near the unobtainable because he could not tear himself away? Was Myra holding him like a pawn in some obscure game that she played to feed her vanity? Or were the two of them caught in one of those inextricable coils which Hollister perceived to arise in the lives of men and women, from which they could not free themselves without great courage and ruthless disregard of consequences? Sometimes Hollister wondered if he himself were not over-fantiful, too sensitive to moods and impressions. Then he would observe some significant interchange of looks between Mills and Myra, and be sure of currents of feeling, furtive and powerful, sweeping about those two. It angered him. Hollister was all for swift and forthright action, deeds done in the open. If they loved, why did they not commit themselves boldly to the undertaking? Take matters in their own hands and have an end to all secrecy. He felt a menace in this secrecy, as if somehow it threatened him. He perceived that Mills suffered, that something nod at the man. When he rested from his work, when he sat quiescent beside the fire, where they ate at noon together, that cloak of melancholy brooding wrapped Mills close. He seldom talked. When he did, there was in his speech a resentful inflection, like that of a man who smarts under some injury, some injustice, some deep hurt which he may not divulge, but which nags him to the limits of his endurance. Hollister was Mills' sole company after the other two men left. They would work within sight of each other all day. They ate together at noon. Now and then he asked Mills down to supper, out of pity for the man's complete isolation. Some cord in Hollister vibrated in sympathy with this youngster, who kept his teeth so resolutely clenched on whatever hurt him. And while Hollister watched Mills and wondered how long that effort at repression would last, he became conscious that Myra was watching him, puzzling over him, that something about him attracted and repulsed her in equal proportions. It was a disturbing discovery. Myra could study him with impunity. Doris could not see this scrutiny of her husband by her neighbor, and Myra did not seem to care what Hollister saw. She would look frankly at him with a question in her eyes, what that question might be Hollister refused even to consider. She never again made any remark to Doris about her first husband, about the similarity of name. But now and then she would speak of something that happened when she was a girl, some casual reference to the first days of the war, to her life in London, and her eyes would turn to Hollister. But he was always on his guard, always on the alert against these pitfalls of speech. He was never sure whether they were deliberate traps, or merely the half-regretful, backward-looking of a woman to whom life lately had not been kind. Nevertheless it kept his nerves on edge, for he valued his peace and his home that was in the making. There was a restfulness and a satisfaction in Doris Cleveland which he dreaded to imperil, because he had the feeling that he would never find its like again. He felt that Myra's mere presence was like a sword swinging over his head. There was no armor he could put out against that weapon if it were decreed it should fall. Hollister soon perceived that if he were not to lose ground he must have labor. Men would not come seeking work so far out of the beaten track. In addition there were matters of foot that required attention. So he took Doris with him and went down to Vancouver. Almost the first man he met on Cordova Street, when he went about in search of bolt-cutters, was Bill Hayes, sober and unshaven and a little crestfallen. Why didn't you come back? Hollister asked. Hayes grinned sheepishly. Kind of hated, too, he admitted. Pulled the same old stuff. Dry town, too. Shot the roll. Dang it! I ought to have more sense. Well, that's the way she goes. You want men? Sure I want men, Hollister said. Look here. If you can rustle up five or six men, I'll make it easier for you all. I'll take up a cook for the bolt-camp, and I won't shut down for anything but snow too deep to work in. You're on. I think I can rustle some men. Try it, anyhow. Hayes got a crew together in twenty-four hours. Doris attended to her business, which required the help of her married cousin and a round of certain shops. Almost the last article they bought was a piano. The one luxury Doris longed for. A treat they had promised themselves as soon as the cedar got them out of the financial doldrums. I suppose it's extravagance, Doris said, her fingers caressing the smooth mahogany, feeling the blackened ivory of the keyboard. But it's one of the few things one doesn't need eyes for. She had proved that to Hollister long ago. When she could see she must have had an extraordinary faculty for memorizing music, her memory seemed to have indelibly engraved upon it all the music she had ever played. Hollister smiled indulgently and ordered the instrument cased for shipping. It went up on the same steamer that gave passage to themselves and six woodsmen and their camp-cook. There were some bits of new furniture also. This necessitated the addition of another room. But that was a simple matter for able hands accustomed to rough woodwork. So in a little while their house extended visibly, took on a homeier aspect. The sweet peas and flaming poppies had wilted under the early frosts. Now a rug or two and a few pictures gave to the floors and walls a cheerful note of color that the flowers had given to their door-yard during the season of their bloom. About the time this was done, and the cedar camp working at an accelerated pace, Archie Luan came back to the toba. He walked into Hollister's quite unexpectedly one afternoon. Myra was there. It seemed to Hollister that Luan's greeting was a little eager, a trifle expectant, that he held Myra's outstretched hand just a little longer than mere acquaintance justified. Hollister glanced at Mills, sitting by. Mills had come down to help Hollister on the boom, and Doris had called them both in for a cup of tea. Mills was staring at Luan with narrowed eyes. His face wore the expression of a man who sees impending calamity, sees it without fear or surprise, faces it only with a little dismay. He sat down his cup and lighted a cigarette. His fingers, the brown, muscular, heavy fingers of a strong-handed man, shook slightly. "'You know, it's good to be back in this old valley,' Luan said. "'I have half a notion to become a settler. A fellow could build up quite an estate on one of these big flats. He can grow almost anything here that will grow in this latitude. And when he wanted to experience the doubtful pleasures of civilization, they would always be waiting for him outside.' "'If he had the price,' Mills put in shortly.' "'Precisely,' Luan returned, and cared to pay it for all he'd got.' "'That's what it is to be a man and free,' Myra observed. "'You can go where you will and when. Live as you wish.' "'It all depends on what you mean by freedom,' Luan replied. "'Show me a free man. Where is there such? We're all slaves. Only some of us are too stupid to recognize our status.' "'Slaves to what?' Myra asked. "'You seem to have come back in a decidedly pessimistic frame of mind. "'Slaves to our own necessities, to other people's demands, to burdens we have assumed or have had thrust upon us, which we haven't the courage to shake off, to our own moods and passions, to something within us that keeps us pursuing this thing we call happiness, to struggle for fulfillment of ideals that can never be attained. "'Slaves to our environment, to social forces before which the individual is nothing. It's all right to talk about the free man, the man whose soul is his own. Complete freedom isn't even desirable, because to attain it you would have to withdraw yourself altogether from your fellows and from a law unto yourself in some remote solitude. And no sane person wants to do that, even to secure this mythical freedom which people prattle about and would recoil from if it were offered them.' "'Yes, I'll have another cup, if you please, Mrs. Hollister.' Luan munched cake and drank tea and talked as if he had been denied the boon of conversation for a long time. But that could hardly be, for he had been across the continent since he left there. He had been in New York and Washington and swung back to British Columbia by way of San Francisco. "'I read those two books of yours, or rather Bob read them to me,' Doris said presently. "'You ought to be ashamed of yourself for writing such a preposterous yarn as The Worm.' "'Ah, my dear woman,' Luan's face lit up with a sardonic smile. "'I wish my publishers could hear you say that. The Worm is good, sound, trade union good, turned out in the very best manner of a thriving school of fiction-smiths. It sold thirty thousand copies in the regular edition and tons in the reprint. "'But there never were such invincible men and such a perfect creature of a woman,' Doris persisted. "'And the things they did, the strings you pulled. Life isn't like that. You know it isn't.' "'Granted,' Luan returned, dryly. "'But what did you think of the man who couldn't die?' "'It didn't seem to me,' Doris said slowly, "'that the man who wrote the last book could possibly have written the first. That was life. "'Your man there was a real man, and you made his hopes and fears, his love and sufferings, very vivid. "'Your woman was real enough, too, but I didn't like her. "'It didn't seem to me she was worth the pain she caused.' "'Neither did she seem so to Phillips, if you remember,' Luan said. "'That was his tragedy. "'To know his folly and still be urged blindly on because of her, "'because of his own illusions, which he knew he must cling to or perish. "'But wait till I finish the book I'm going to write this "'I'm going to cut loose. "'I'm going to smite the Philistines. "'And the chances are,' he smiled cynically. "'They won't even be aware of the blow. "'Did you read those books?' he turned abruptly to Myra.' She nodded. "'Yes, but I refused to commit myself,' she said lightly. "'There is no such thing as a modest author, "'Mrs. Hollister has given you all the praise that's good for you.' Hollister and Mills went back to their work on the boom. When they finished their day's work, Luan had gone down to the Blans with Myra. After supper, as Mills rose to leave for the upper camp, he said to Doris, "'Have you got that book of his about the fellow that couldn't die? "'I'd like to read it.'" Doris gave him the book. He went away with it in his hand. Hollister looked after him curiously. There was strong meat in Luan's book. He wondered if Mills would digest it. And he wondered a little if Mills regarded Luan as a rival, as if he were trying to test the other man's strength by his work. Away down the river, now that dark had fallen, the light in Blan's house shone yellow. There was a red glowing spot on the riverbank. That would be Luan's camp. Hollister shut the door on the chill October night and turned back to his easy chair by the stove. Doris had finished her work. She sat at the piano, her fingers picking out some slow, languorous movement that he did not know, but which soothed him like a lullaby. Vigorously he dissented from Luan's philosophy of enslavement. He, Hollister, was a free man. Yes, he was free. But only when he could shut the door in the past. Only when he could shut away all the world, just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold, frosty night, his neighbors and his men by the simple closing of a door. But he could not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills, with his strange repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome possibility. He could say to himself that it was only an impression, that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity, but he could not help it. Life was like that. No man stood alone. No man could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his fellows. Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being. Who was he to escape? No, Hollister reflected. He could not insulate himself and Doris against this environment, against these people. They would have to take things as they came and be thankful they were no worse. Doris left the piano. She sat on a low stool beside him, leaned her brown head against him. It won't be so long before I have to go to town, Bob," she said dreamily. I hope the winter is open so that the work goes on well. And sometimes I hope that the snow shuts everything down so that you'll be there with me. I'm not very consistent, am I? You suit me," he murmured, and I'll be there whether the work goes on or not. What an element of the unexpected, the unforeseen is at work all the time," she said. A year ago you and I didn't even know of each other's existence. I used to sit and wonder what would become of me. It was horrible sometimes to go about in the dark, existing like a plant in a cellar, longing for all that a woman longs for if she is a woman and knows herself. And you were in pretty much the same boat. Worse," Hollister muttered, because I sulked and brooded and raged against what had overtaken me. Yet if I hadn't reacted so violently, I should never have come here to hide away from what hurt me, so I wouldn't have met you. That would almost make one think there is something in the destiny that you and Luan smile at. Destiny and chance. Two names for the same thing. And that thing wholly unaccountable, beyond the scope of human foresight," Doris replied. Things happen. That's all we can generally say. We don't know why. Speaking of Luan, I wonder if he really does intend to stay here this winter and write a book. He says so. He'll be company for us," she reflected. He's clever and a little bit cynical, but I like him. He'll help to keep us from getting bored with each other. Do you think there is any danger of that? Hollister inquired. She tweaked his ear playfully. People do, you know. But I hardly think we shall. Not for a year or two, anyway. Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale order of uneventful routine domestic life. Then you may— Ha! he grunted derisively. Catch me. I know what I want and what contents me. We'll beat the game handily, and we'll beat it together. Why, good Lord! he cried sharply. Where would be the good of all this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and planning and anticipating things? Nearly every man, I believe, he concluded thoughtfully, keeps his gate because of some woman. There is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some woman, past, present or future, to egg him on to this or that. To keep him, Doris laughed, in the condition a poet once described as, This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing toward the gloom. They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom, of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together. When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found mills humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading The Man Who Couldn't Die. At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon meal, in the split-seater mess-house, the other bolt-cutters spoke derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book. That was beyond their comprehension. But Hollister thought he understood. Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the vantage of height and saw LeWon's winter-quarters already taking form on the river-bank, midway between his own place and plans. It grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a shake-roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its destiny, in its variety of shrub and fern. For a month after that a lull seemed to come upon the slow march of events towards some unknown destiny, of which Hollister nursed a strange prescience that now rose strong in him, and again grew so tenuous that he would smile at it for a fancy. Yet in that month there was no slack in the routine of affairs. The machinery of Carr's mill revolved through each twenty-four hours. Up on the hill Hollister's men felled trees with warning-shouts and tumultuous crashings. They attacked the prone trunks with ax and saw and iron wedges, Lilapushians renting the body of a fallen giant. The boltpiles grew. They were hurled swiftly down the chute into the dwindling river, rafted to the mill. All this time the price of shingles in the open market rose and rose like a tide strongly on the flood of which no man could prophesy the high water mark. Money flowed to Hollister's pockets, to the pockets of his men. The value of his standing timber grew by leaps and bounds. And always Sam Carr, who had no economic illusions, urged Hollister on, predicting before along the inevitable reaction. The days shortened. Through the long evenings Hollister's house became a sort of social center. One would come in after supper, sometimes inert, dumb, to sit in a corner smoking a pipe, again filled with a curious exhilaration, to talk unceasingly of everything that came into his mind, to thump ragtime on the piano and sing a variety of inconsequential songs in a velvety baritone. Myra came often. So did Bland. So did Charlie Mills. Many evenings they were all there together. As the weeks went winging by Doris grew less certain on her feet, more prone to spend her time sitting back in a deep arm-chair, and Myra began to play for them, to sing for them, to come to the house in the day and help Doris with her work. The snow began at last, drifting down out of a windless sky. Upon that, with a sudden fear, lest a great depth should fall, lest the river should freeze and make exit difficult, Hollister took his wife to town. This was about the middle of November. Some three weeks later a son was born to them. Doris was jealous of that privilege. She was a typical mother in so far as she held the conviction that no one could attend so well as herself the needs of that small, red-faced, lusty, longed morsel of humanity. And as if some definite mark had been turned, the winter season closed upon the valley in a gentle mood. The driving rains of the fall gave way to January snows. But the frost took no more than a tentative nibble now and then. Far up in the mountains the drifts piled deep, and winter mists blew in clammy wraiths across the shoulders of the hills. From those high, cold levels the warmth of day and the frosts that nod in chill darkness started intermittent glides rumbling, growling as they slipped swiftly down steep slopes to end with a crash at the bottom of the hill or in the depths of a gorge. But the valley itself suffered no extremes of weather. The river did not freeze. It fell to a low level, but not so low that Hollister ever failed to shift his cedar bolts from shootmouth to mill. There was seldom so much snow that his crew could not work. There was growing an appreciable hole in the heart of his timber limit. In another year there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few hundred stumps. With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur in Hollister's affairs. One day succeeded another in placid routine. The work went on with clock-like precision. It had passed beyond a one-man struggle for economic foothold. It no longer held for him the feeling of a forlorn hope which he led against the forces of the wilderness. It was like a ball which he had started rolling downhill. It kept on whether he tended it or not. If he chose to take his rifle and go seeking venison, if he elected to sit by his fire reading a book, the cedars fell. Their brown trunks were sawn and split. The bolts came sliding down the chute in reckonable, profitable quantities to the gain of himself and his men. Mills remained moody, working with that strange dynamic energy, sparing of words, except that now and then he would talk to Hollister in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed nothing. Mills always seemed in the point of crying out some deep woe that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of speech, but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic hint bestow some malediction upon life in general. And he never slackened the dizzy pace of his daily labor, except upon those few occasions when from either Hollister or LeWan he got a book that held him. Then he would stop work and sit in the bunkhouse and read till the last page was turned. But mostly he cut and piled cedar as if he tried to drown out in the sweat of his body whatever fever burned within. Hollister observed that Mills no longer had much traffic with the Blands. For weeks at a time he did not leave the bolt-camp except to come down to Hollister's house. LeWan seemed to be a favored guest now at Blands. LeWan worked upon his book, but by fits and starts, working when he did work with a feverish concentration. He had a Chinese boy for house-servant. He might be found at noon or at midnight sprawled in a chair beside a pot-bellied stove, scrawling in an ungainly hand across sheets of yellow paper. He had no set hours for work. When he did work, when he had the vision and the fit was on and words came easily, Chance collars met with scant courtesy. But he had great stores of time to spare for all that. Some of it he spent at Blands, waging an interminable contest at cribbage with Bland, coming up now and then with the Blands to spend an evening at Hollister's. It's about a man who wrecked his life by systematically undermining his own illusions about life. He answered one day Hollister's curious inquiry as to what the new book was about. And of how finally a very assiduously cultivated illusion made him quite happy at last. Sound interesting? How could he deliberately cultivate an illusion? Doris asked. If one's intelligence ever classifies a thing as an illusion, no conscious effort will ever turn it into a reality. Oh, I didn't say he cultivated the illusion. Luan laughed. Besides, do you really think that illusions are necessary to happiness? Doris persisted. To some people, Luan declared. But let's not follow up that philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wait ashore. We'll say whatever is is right and let it go at that. It will be quite all right for you to offer me a cup of tea if your kitchen mechanic will condescend. That chink of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner, so I throw myself on your mercy. This man bland is the dizzy limit, Luan observed when the tea and some excellent sandwiches presently appeared. He bought another rifle the other day, paid forty-five bones for it. That makes four he has now. And they have to manage like the deuce to keep themselves in grub from one remittance day to the next. He's a study. You seldom run across such a combination of physical perfection and childlike irresponsibility. He was complaining about his limited income the other day, income in his inimitable pronunciation. I suggested that right here in this valley he could earn a considerable number of shekels if he cared to work. He merely smiled amiably and said he didn't think he cared to take on a laborer's job. He had left a chap no time for himself, you know. I suppose he'll vegetate here till he comes into that money he's waiting for. He refers to that as if it were something which pertain to him by divine right, something which freed him from any obligation to make any effort to overcome the sordid way in which they live at present. He doesn't consider it sordid, Hollister said. Work is what he considers sordid, and there is something to be said for his viewpoint at that. He enjoys himself tramping around with a gun, spending an afternoon to catch half a dozen six-inch trout. But it is sordid, Luan persisted. Were you ever in their house? Hollister shook his head. It isn't as comfortable as your men's bunkhouse. They have boxes for chairs, a rickety table, a stove about ready to fall to pieces. There are cracks in the walls and a roof that a rat could crawl through. Or there would be if Mrs. Bland didn't go about stuffing him up with moss and old newspapers. Why can't a gentleman, an athlete and a sportsman, make his quarters something a little better than a side-wash would be contented with? Especially if he has prevailed on a woman to share his joys and sorrows. Some of these days Mr. Bland will wake up and find his wife has gone off with some enterprising chap who is less cocksure and more ambitious. Would you blame her? Doris asked casually. Bless your soul, no! Luan laughed. If I were a little more romantic I might run away with her myself. What a tremendous jar that would give Bland's exasperating complacency. I believe he's a hangover from that prehistoric time when men didn't believe that any woman had a soul, that a woman was something in which a man acquired a definite property right merely by marrying her. Doris chuckled. I can imagine how Mr. Bland would look if he heard you, she said. He had only smile in a superior manner, Luan declared. You couldn't get Bland fussed up by any mere assertion. The only thing that would stir him deeply would be a direct assault on that vague abstraction which he calls his honour, or on his property. Then he would very likely smite the wrong door with all the efficiency of outraged virtue. Hollister continued to muse on this after Luan went away. He thought Luan summing up a trifle severe. Nevertheless it was a pretty clear statement of fact. Bland certainly seemed above working either for money or to secure a reasonable degree of comfort for himself and his wife. He sat waiting for a windfall to restore his past splendour of existence, which he sometimes indirectly admitted meant cricket, a country home, horses and dogs, a whirl among the right sort of people in London now and then. That sort of thing and that sort of man was what Myra had fallen in love with. Hollister felt a mild touch of contempt for them both. His wife had also let her thoughts focus on the Bland. I wonder, she said, if they are so very poor, why don't you offer Bland a job? Maybe he is too proud to ask. Bland was not too proud to ask for certain things, it seemed. About a week later he came to Hollister and in a most casual manner said, I say, old man, can you let me have a hundred dollars? My quarterly funds are delayed a bit. Hollister gave him the money without question. As he watched Bland stride away through the light blanket of snow and a little later noticed him disappear among the thickets and stumps going towards the car-camp, where supplies were sold as a matter of accommodation rather than for profit, Hollister reflected that there was a mild sort of irony in the transaction. He wondered if Myra knew of her husband's borrowing. If she had any inkling of the truth, how would she feel? For he knew that Myra was proud, sensitive, independent in spirit far beyond her capacity for actual independence. If she even suspected his identity, the borrowing of that money would surely sting her. But Hollister put that notion aside. For a long time Myra had ceased to trouble him with the irritating uncertainty of their first meetings. She apparently accepted him and his mutilated face as part of Doris Hollister's background and gave him no more thought or attention. Always in the little gatherings at his house Hollister contrived to keep in the shadow, to be an onlooker rather than a participant, just as Charlie Mills did. Hollister was still sensitive about his face. He was doubly sensitive because he dreaded any comment upon his disfigurement reaching his wife's ears. He had succeeded so well in thus effacing himself that Myra seemed to regard him as if he were no more than a grotesque bit of furniture to which she had become accustomed. All the sense of sinister possibilities in her presence, all that uneasy dread of her nearness, that consciousness of her as an impending threat, had finally come to seem nothing more than mere figments of his imagination. Especially since their son was born. That seemed to establish the final bond between himself and Doris. Myra, the past which so poignantly included Myra, held less and less significance. He could look at Myra and wonder if this was the same woman he had held in his arms, whose kisses had been freely and gladly bestowed upon him, if all the passion and pain of their life together, of their tearing apart, had ever really been. He had got so far beyond that it seemed unreal. And lately there had settled upon him a surety that to Myra it must all be just as unreal, that she could not possibly harbor any suspicion that he was her legal husband hiding behind a mask of scars, and that even if she did suspect that suspicion could never be translated into action, which could deflect ever so slightly the current of his present existence. He was working at the chute-mouth when Bland came to ask for that loan. He continued to work there. Not long after he noticed Bland leave his own house and go down the flat, he saw Myra coming along the bank. That was nothing. There was a well-beaten path there that she traveled nearly every afternoon. He felt his first tentative misgiving when he saw that Myra did not stop at the house, that she walked past and straight towards where he worked. And this slight misgiving grew to a certainty of impending trouble when she came up, when she faced him. Movement and the crisp air had kindled a glow in her cheeks. But something besides the winter air had kindled an almost unnatural glow in her eyes. They were like dusky pansies. She was, he thought, with curious self-detachment, a strikingly beautiful woman. And he recalled that anger or excitement, any emotion that stirred her, always made her seem more alluring, always made her glow and sparkle, as if in such moments she was a perfect human jewel flashing in the sun of life. She nodded to Hollister, looked down on the cedar blocks floating in the cold river, stood a moment to watch the swift descent of other bolts hurtling down the chute and joining their fellows with successive splashes. You let Jim have some money this morning? She said then. It was a statement as much as an interrogation. Yes, Hollister replied. Don't let him have any more, she said bluntly. You may never get it back. Why should you supply him with money that you've worked for when he won't make any effort to get it for himself? You're altogether too free-handed, Robin. Hollister stood speechless. She looked at him with a curious half-amused expectancy. She knew him. No one but Myra had ever called him that. It had been her pet name for him in the old days. She knew him. He leaned on his pike-pole, waiting for what was to follow. This revelation was only a preliminary. Something like a dumb fury came over Hollister. Why did she reveal this knowledge of him? For what purpose? She felt his secure foundations crumbling. So you recognize me? Did you think I wouldn't? She said slowly. Did you think your only distinguishing characteristic was the shape of your face? I've been sure of it for months. Ah! he said. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. Nothing. What is there to do? Then why reveal this knowledge, he demanded harshly? Why drag out the old skeleton and rattle it for no purpose? Or have you some purpose? Myra sat down in a fallen tree. She drew the folds of a heavy brown coat closer about her and looked at him steadily. No, she replied. I can't say that I have any definite purpose except that I want to talk to you. And it seemed that I could talk to you better if we stopped pretending. We can't alter facts by pretending they don't exist, can we? I don't attempt to alter them, he said. I accept them and let it go at that. Why don't you? I do, she assured him. But when I find myself compelled to accept your money to pay for the ordinary necessities of living, I feel myself being put in an intolerable position. I suppose you won't understand that. I imagine you think of me as a selfish little beast who has no scruples about anything. But I'm not quite like that. It galls me to have Jim borrow from you. He may intend to pay it back, but he won't. It will somehow never be quite convenient. And I've squandered enough of your money. I feel like a thief sometimes when I watch you work. You must hate me. Do you, Robin? Hollister stirred the snow absently with the pike-pole point. He tried to analyze his feelings, and he found it difficult. I don't think so, he said at last. I'm rather indifferent. If you meddled with things, I'd not only hate you, I think I would want to destroy you. But you needn't worry about the money. If Bland doesn't repay the hundred dollars, it won't break me. I won't lend him any more if it disturbs you. But that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether you are going to upset everything in some rash mood that you may sometimes have. Do you think I might do that? How do I know what you may do? He returned. You threw me into the discard when you're fancy turned to someone else. You followed your own bent with a certain haste as soon as I was reported dead. I had ceased to be man enough for you, but my money was still good enough for you. When I recall those things, I think I can safely say that I haven't the least idea what you may do next. You aren't faring any too well. That's plain enough. I have seen men raise cane out of sheer devilishness, out of a desperate notion to smash everything because they were going to smash themselves. Some people seem able to amuse themselves by watching other people squirm. Maybe you are like that. You had complete power over me once. I surrendered to that gladly then. You appear to have a faculty of making men dance to any tune you care to play. But all the power you have now, so far as I'm concerned, is to make me suffer a little more by giving the whole ugly show away. No, I haven't the least idea what you may do. I don't know you at all. My God, no, you don't!" she flung out. You don't. If you ever had, we wouldn't be where we are now. Probably it's as well, Hollister returned. Even if you had been true, you'd have faltered when I came back looking like this. And that would have been worse than what I did do, she said. Wouldn't it? Are you justifying it as an act of mercy to me? he asked. Myra shook her head. No, I don't feel any great necessity for justifying my actions. No more than you should feel compelled to justify yours. We have each only done what normal human beings frequently do when they get torn loose from the moorings they know and are moved by forces within them and beyond them, forces which bewilder and dismay them. The war and your idea of duty, of service, pride us apart. Natural causes, natural enough when I look back at them, did the rest. We all want to be happy. We all grab at that when it comes within reach. That's all you and I have done. We will probably continue doing that the same as everyone else. I have it, Hollister said defiantly. That is why I don't want any ghosts of the old days haunting me now. If you have, you are very fortunate," she murmured. But don't leave your wife alone in a city throbbing with the fevered excitement and uncertainty of war where everyone's motto is a short life and a merry one. Not if she's young and hut-blooded, if she has grown so accustomed to affection and caresses that the want of them afflicts her with the thirst like that of a man lost in a desert. Because if she has nothing to do but live from day to day on memories and hopes, there will be a time when some man at hand will obscure the figure of the absent one. That is all that happened to me, Robin. I longed for you. Then I began to resent your complete absorption by the war machine. Then you got dim, like the figure of a man walking away down a long road. Do you remember how it was? Leave, once in six months or so. A kiss of welcome and a good-bye right on its heels. There were thousands like me in London. The war took our men, but took no account of us. We were untrained. There were no jobs to occupy our hands, none we could put our hearts into, none that could be gotten without influence in the proper quarters. We couldn't pose successfully enough to persuade ourselves that it was a glorious game. They had taken our men, and there was nothing much left. We did not have to earn our keep, if you had only not stuck so closely to the front lines. I had to, Hollister said sharply, I had no choice. The country, the country, that shadowy phantasm, that recruiting sergeants plea, that political abstraction that is flung in one's face along with other platitudes from every platform, Myra broke out passionately. What does it really mean? What did it mean to us? Men going out to die, women at home crying, eating their hearts out with loneliness, going bad now and then in recklessness, in desperation, army contractors getting rich, ammunition manufacturers getting rich, transportation companies paying 100% dividends, one nation grabbing for territory here, another there, talk of saving the world for democracy and in the same breath throttling liberty of speech and action in every corner of the world. And now that it's all over, everything is the same, only worse. The rich are richer and the poor poorer. And there are some new national boundaries and some blasted military and political reputations. That's all. What was that to you and me? Nothing, less than nothing. Yet it tore our lives up by the roots. It took away from us something we had that we valued, something that we might have kept. It doesn't matter that you were sincere, that you wanted to serve, that you thought it a worthy service. The big people, the men who run things, they had no such illusions. They had their eye on the main chance all the time. It paid them, if not in money, than in prestige and power. How has it paid you? You know every time you look in a mirror. You know that the men that died were the lucky ones. The country that marched them to the front with speeches and music when the guns were talking, throws them on the scrap heap when they come back maimed. I have no faith in a country that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly. I've learned to think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little. You have suffered, so have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was born with, which you didn't understand and which I am only myself beginning to understand. But mostly because the seats of the mighty were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage. Oh, life is a dreary business sometimes. We want so to be happy. We try so hard. And mostly we fail. Her eyes filled with tears, round drops that gathered slowly in the corners of her puckered lids and spilled over the soft curves of her cheek. She did not look at Hollister. She stared at the Gray River. She made a little gesture, as if she dumbly answered some futile question, and her hand dropped idly into her lap. I feel guilty, she continued after a little. Not because I failed to play up to the role of the faithful wife. I couldn't help that. But I shouldn't have kept that money, I suppose. Still, you were dead. Money meant nothing to you. It was in my hands, and I needed it, or thought I did. You must have had a hard time, Robin, coming back to civil life a beggar. Yes, but not for lack of money, Hollister replied. I didn't need much, and I had enough. It was being scarred so that everybody shunned me. It was the horror of being alone, of finding men and women always uneasy in my presence, always glad to get away from me. They acted as if I were a monstrosity that offended them beyond endurance. I couldn't blame them much. Sometimes it gave me the shivers to look at myself in the glass. I am a horrible sight. People who must be around me seem to get used to me whether they like it or not. But at first I nearly went mad. I had been uprooted and disfigured. Nobody wanted to know me, to talk to me, to be friendly. However, that's past. I have got to start. Unless this skeleton is dragged out of the closet, I shall get on well enough. I shall not drag it out, Robin," she assured him with a faint smile. Someday I hope I'll be able to give you back that money. What became of it? He voiced a question which had been recurring in his mind for a year. You must have had over forty thousand dollars when I was reported dead in seventeen. Myra shrugged her shoulders. We were married six months after that. Jim has some rather well-to-do people over there. They were all very nice to me. I imagine they thought he was marrying money. Perhaps he thought so himself. He had nothing except a quarterly pittance. He has no sense of values, and I was not much better. There's always this estate which he will come into to discount the present. He had seen service the first year of the war. He was wounded and invalid at home. Then he served as a military instructor. Finally, when the Americans came in, he was allowed to resign. So we came across to the States. We went here and there, spending as we went. We cut a pretty wide swath, too, most of the time. There were several disastrous speculations. Presently the money was all gone. Then we came up here, where we can live on next to nothing. We shall have to stay here another eighteen months. Looking back, the way we spent money seems sheer lunacy. The fool and his money, you know. And it wasn't our money. That hurts me now. I've begun to realize what money means to me, to you, to everyone. That's why when Jim Conley told me that he had borrowed a hundred dollars from you, I felt that was a little more than I could stand. That's piling it on. I wondered why you gave it to him. If you let him have it in a spirit of contemptuous charity. I might have known it wasn't that. But don't lend him any more. He really doesn't need it. Borrowing with Jim is just like asking for a smoke. He's queer. If he made a bet with you and lost, he'd pay up, promptly, if he had to pawn his clothes and mine, too. Borrowed money, however, seems to come in a different category. When this estate comes into his hands, perhaps I shall be able to return some of this money that we wasted. I think that, and the fact that I'm just a little afraid to break away and face the world alone, is chiefly what keeps me faithful to him now. Is it as bad as that? Hollister asked. Don't misunderstand me, Robin, she protested. I'm not an abused wife or anything like that. He's perfectly satisfied, as complacent as an English gentleman can be in the enjoyment of possession. But he doesn't love me any more than I love him. He blandly assumes that love is only a polite term for something else. And I can't believe that, yet. Maybe I'm what Archie Luan calls a romantic sentimentalist. But there is something in me that craves from a man more than elementary passion. I'm a woman. Therefore my nature demands of a man that he be first of all a man. But that alone isn't enough. I'm not just a something to be petted when the fit is on and then told in effect to run along and play. There must be men who have minds as well as bodies. There must be here and there a man who understands that a woman has all sorts of thoughts and feelings as well as sex. Meanwhile I mark time, that's all. You appear," Hollister said a little grimly, to have acquired certain definite ideas. It's a pity they didn't develop sooner. Ideas only develop out of experience, she said quietly, and our passions are born with us. She rose, shaking free the snow that clung to her coat. I feel better for getting all that steam off my chest," she said. It's better, since we must live here, that you and I should not keep up this game of pretense between ourselves. Isn't it, Robin? Perhaps, I don't know." The old doubts troubled Hollister. He was jealous of what he had attained, fearful of reviving the past, a little uncertain of this new turn. At any rate, you don't hold a grudge against me, do you? Myra asked. You can afford to be indifferent now. You've found a mate. You're playing a man's part here. You're beating the game and getting some real satisfaction out of living. You can afford to be above a grudge against me. I don't hold any grudge," Hollister answered truthfully. I'm going down to the house now, Myra said. I wanted to talk to you openly, and I'm glad I did. I think and think sometimes, until I feel like a rat in a trap. And you are the only one here I can really talk to. You've been through the mill, and you won't misunderstand. Ah! he said. Is Charlie Mills devoid of understanding, or LeWon? She looked at him fixedly for a second. You are very acute, she observed. Sometime I may tell you about Charlie Mills. Certainly I'd never reveal my soul to Archie LeWon. He'd dissect it and gloat over it and analyze it in his next book. And neither of them will ever be quite able to abandon the idea that a creature like me is something to be pursued and captured. She turned away. Hollister saw her go into the house. He could picture the two of them there together. Doris and Myra bending over young Robert, who is now beginning with wide-open blue eyes, in which the light of innocent wonder, of curiosity, began to show, to wave his arms and grop with tiny uncertain hands. Those two women together hovering over his child, one who was still legally his wife, the other his wife in reality, how the world would prick up its donkey ears, even the little cosmos of the Toba Valley, if it knew. But of course no one would ever know. Hollister was far beyond any contrition for his acts. The end justified the means, doubly justified it in his case, for he had had no choice. Harsh material factors had rendered the decision for him. Hollister was willing now to abide by that decision. To him it seemed good, the only good thing he had laid hold of, since the war had turned his world upside down and inside out. He went about his work mechanically, deep in thought. His mind persisted in measuring, weighing, turning over all that Myra had said, while his arms pushed and heaved, and twisted the pike pole, thrusting the blocks of cedar into an orderly arrangement within the boomsticks.