CHAPTER VI
Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the riverbank, wrestling with all the implications of this incrediblediscovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny theevidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fixupon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. Thecold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at lastand made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on thehouse below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turnedreluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.
He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction,troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods ofconcentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of himpresent,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forwardcritical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.
In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of thecorrectness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearlyimpossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering inthose snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack amongstumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature ofluxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she hadaccess to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed tohim by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had notrevoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosurehis first thought had not been a concern for his property. And theofficial report of him as killed in action which followed so soonafter had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. Whenshe left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associatein the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollarsin negotiable securities.
And if so--then why?
Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained anduseless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he hadseen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he couldnot look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then hemust be going mad. He must know, beyond any equivocation.
There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while theembers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took hisglasses and went down to the valley floor.
It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness towalk boldly up and rap at the door. Certainly he would not berecognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need ofmatches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is adestroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony.He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as tohis name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of allfrontiers.
But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why.He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In thesocial isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him,Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions andimpulses as by any coldly reasoned process. He was moved to hisstealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as thecrawling worm.
He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively throughthickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. Hepeered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There,in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a rovinghunter pass, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof againstcold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.
For an hour he waited. Except for the wavering smoke from thestovepipe, the place might have been deserted. The house was one withthe pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb. But he held hispost. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in theopening.
She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle,so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused onher face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or twogingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pileof split wood. The door closed upon her once more.
Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat,gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step withprodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.
He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubledby the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him adisturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned womanwhose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rudecabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor tohim. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He saidto himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believedit to be true. How _could_ it matter now?
But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckonedupon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. Hecould not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminouscircle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmeringthere still remained memory from which he could not escape, memoriesof caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been toeach other through a time when they desired only to be all things toeach other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambersin his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, aphysically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.
He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulsesof life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest securefor a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of thisHollister now became aware.
He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this freshassault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolishrecollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon thiswoman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from respondingto the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arosein Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.
It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead. In allhis life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon womenwith a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curiousmanifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain,grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in himevery fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing outof passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thoughtof this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who wouldfind pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Thereforehe was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.
Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forestswhere he had begun to perceive that life might still havecompensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away,destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff withoutthinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of herwithout the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. Hehad slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had beenwakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tenderintimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness,to rise and torture him now.
And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when helooked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He wouldsit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in hishand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow ofthe coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductivesmile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping,and in each the chief figure was that f
air-haired woman who had beenhis wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in whichthe conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and hewas delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.
Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whoseunrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was aman, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the bloodin his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power hepossessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did notlove this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimeshe hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made hisfingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She hadripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when hesorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faithwas his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed andsuffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments ofwar.
Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting picturesof her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memoriesof alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms andlaughter on her lips.
He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house bythe river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victimto his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to himsometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sureavenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.
Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain,shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion,until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer madehim shrink and feel a loathing of himself.
She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had givenherself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyondany shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined themtogether. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law hadnot released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why shouldhe not take her?
Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollisterbrooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. Hepostulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay ifhe demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatientgesture.
The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, whichmerely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to riselustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible ofpassion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, aferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of thisfair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Verywell. But how?
That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in theToba country. All these folk in the valley below went aboutunconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the greatcedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind ofweather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the singletrack that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints thatshould lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: notbecause Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man wasnot a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of hisinterference should be most easily avoided. Because if he didinterfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication hedid not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man,no jealousy.
The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed thatnearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For theobscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.
All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action inhis obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration ofconsequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitiveinstinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.
This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modifiedit. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstanceswhich favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This hereadily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it wasrevealed to him.
A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where hiscanoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. Fromthe river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface ofthis little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those slopingrocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave nofootprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless asearcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.
And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side andcame at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another manwho had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession ofhis own!
Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. Itpleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrateupon his wife and her lover.
From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he sethimself to watch through his glasses the house down the river. Thesecond day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gunin hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of thatwide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him onthese recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted thatthe man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimesnot till dusk.
He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozenriver. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of thehouse.
The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window facedthe river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sunhad grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softenedto a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snowsoftened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of theinterior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on thedoor.
A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a benchbeside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast. AndMyra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. Sheleaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm ofthat hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two claspedhands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaningeagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.
Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelidsdrooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwiseshe was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up tosome blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisonedhand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hoteyes.
Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring throughthe window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly thetense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head andpress a kiss on the imprisoned hand.
He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked awayover the ice. When he had put five hundred yards between himself andthat house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face andwiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all overhis body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by ahair's breadth some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that wasprecisely his feeling,--as if he had been capering madly on the brinkof some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed tohim in a terrifying flash.
He shivered. His ego grovelled in the dirt. He had often smiled attheories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen streamwith the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands hewas no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might
lurka duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that,or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, ofisolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.
Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had notbeen there. But he did not think so now. The brake of his real manhoodhad begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to thedoor and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with abrusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.
Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, norsteal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his ownethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been bornin him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character earlyin life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in thelast four years.
Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral rightto take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any suchsophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosenlover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obviouscomplaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the riverbank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough toknow. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be anEnglishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she hadconceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by thebrutal directness of her written avowal. Hollister had watched himswinging his ax on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in thebottom land. He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment.
Hollister found himself pitying this man. He found himself wonderingif it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helplessvictim of her own senses. There were women like that. Plenty of them.Men too. Sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality. He could notdoubt that. He suspected that he was touched with it himself.
What a muddle life was, Hollister reflected sadly, looking down fromthe last opening before he plunged into the cedar grove that hid thelog cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain andforest, this silent land virginal in its winter garment, humanpassion, ancient as the hills themselves, functioned in the old, oldway.
But he did not expend much thought on mere generalizations. Theproblem of Myra and her lovers was no longer his problem; theirpassions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearlythat he had escaped an action that might have had far-reachingconsequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with thepossible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, orwhatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he couldharbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to passthrough that furnace again.
He had had enough of the Toba Valley. No, he modified that. The valleyand the sentinel peaks that stood guard over it, the lowlands duskilygreen and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodlyplace to be. But old sins and sorrows and new, disturbing phases ofhuman passion were here at his elbow to dispel the restful peace hehad won for a little while. He must escape from that.
To go was not so simple as his coming. The river was frozen, thatwatery highway closed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gainedin those casual wanderings along the ridge above the valley. He knewa direct way of gaining the Inlet head on foot.
So he spent a last night before the fireplace, staring silently intothe dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing coals, lyingdown to heavy, dreamless sleep at last in his bunk.
At daybreak he struck out westward along the great cliff that frownedon the Big Bend, his blankets and a small emergency supply of food ina bulky pack upon his shoulders. When the sheer face of the cliff ranout to a steep, scrubbily timbered hillside, he dropped down to thevalley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here hemoved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that noray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warmthe earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung instreamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. Thewild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scoldedas he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach withintwenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deepsnow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven downfrom the highlands by the deeper snow above.
For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister wasforced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the directionhe wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place whereloggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood blackand cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working aclear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of thehouses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn uponwhat days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might bestgain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.