CHAPTER VIII
Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier,Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by newplans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was lessbarren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, justanother illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as hewas concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future yearsthrough which he must live because of the virility of his body seemednothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing wherehe went or what lay before him.
Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and agoal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away agreat many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, hedid not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potentchange in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. Andhe did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand thatDoris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.
Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for herblindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead ofshrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in theknowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home canendure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, soHollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to theaverted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get throughthe days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder withits clammy touch.
For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw hernearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung withall his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were thosein which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.
To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkablewoman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more thancompensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The worldabout her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precisecomprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. Hehad always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter ofuncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised thatconclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remotedegree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, forinstance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. Thatbroad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore onone side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall treeson the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. Thebuds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered indusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore,had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertonesof the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She couldhear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. Shecould interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with awhimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.
At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herselffrom the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on thesidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way shewould keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing withthe brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness whenthey came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, orthe rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always whenthey turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe ofmaple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, withsteamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar ofPoint Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance toHowe Sound.
No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of aprotector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bitof desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. DorisCleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had toohardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous,resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realizefully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was alwaysnight,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.
In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like manyother young men, accepted things pretty much as they came withouttroubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him,then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. Ithad been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly untilin more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweepingcurrent. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught himunprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he foundhimself committed irrevocably to this or that.
But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disasterwithout an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or lessnebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well withthe world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, areluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophyseemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimespessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people'sactions.
So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in thenight. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and wentaway with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to thedefinite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was notthinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. Hefound himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculationconcerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to apossibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he wouldhonestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in hismind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxicalway. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubiousstate, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yetreluctant to draw back.
When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in hiscompany, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding toset too great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swungthem together, and that same blind chance would presently swing themfar apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it amongthe medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs,would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rockin the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He wouldsay to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him ashe was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have hadthe chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical rippleof her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as sheturned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thoughtof him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mentalpictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that camewithin the scope of her understanding,--which covered no narrow field.But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe whatimage of him she carried in her mind.
For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietlyreading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern borderof Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to betheir haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when theywalked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank laybared for a mile offshore at ebb tide.
If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pickout a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or gettickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea atthe Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in theafternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover she knew music, which is athing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the placewhere she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heardher play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment,forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and thatthe most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visitthat house often. The people there looked at him a little
askance.They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in hispresence,--and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face.
By the time that April Fool's Day was a week old on the calendar,Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf himsoon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she wasgoing back to the Euclataws. She had already stretched her visit togreater length than she intended. She must go back.
They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked adeserted playground, emerald green with new grass. They faced asinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of VancouverIsland. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was likethe faint murmur of distant surf.
"In a week," Hollister said. If there was an echo of regret in hisvoice he did not try to hide it. "It has been the best month I havespent for a long, long time."
"It has been a pleasant month," Doris agreed.
They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deepflame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and palegold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearnessof the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segmentabove the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the eastdusk walked silently down to the sea.
"I shall be sorry when you are gone," he said at last.
"And I shall be sorry to go," she murmured, "but----"
She threw out her hands in a gesture of impotence, of resignation.
"One can't always be on a holiday."
"I wish we could," Hollister muttered. "You and I."
The girl made no answer. And Hollister himself grew dumb in spite of apressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue forutterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyondsound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with anoverwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wantedher--not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendlybeacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched beforehim. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hourstogether without talking of themselves. No matter that she wascheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there wasstill a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She,too, was aware--and sometimes afraid--of drab years running out intonothingness.
Hollister sat beside her visualizing interminable to-morrows in whichthere would be no Doris Cleveland; in which he would go his way vainlyseeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice thatthrilled him with its friendly tone.
He took her hand and held it, looking down at the soft white fingers.She made no effort to withdraw it. He looked at her, peering into herface, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curiousexpectancy and a faint deepening of the color in her cheeks.
"Don't go back to the Euclataws, Doris," he said at last. "I love you.I want you. I need you. Do you feel as if you liked me--enough to takea chance?
"For it is a chance," he finished abruptly. "Life together is always achance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise youby breaking out like this. But when I think of us each going separateways----"
He held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward topeer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment orsurprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked,grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lostin thought. But there was arising a quiver in the fingers he heldwhich belied the emotionless fixity of her face.
"I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?" she said slowly. "If itis, why do you want to take it?"
"Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance Icould imagine," he answered. "And because I have a longing to facelife with you, and a dread of it alone. You can't see my ugly facewhich frightens off other people, so it doesn't mean anything to you.But you can hear my voice. You can feel me near you. Does it meananything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you?"
He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, thatstrange, thoughtful look still on her face.
"Tell me, do you want me to love you--or don't you care?" he demanded.
For a moment Doris made no answer.
"You're a man," she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly."And I'm a woman. I'm blind--but I'm a woman. I've been wondering howlong it would take you to find that out."