Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ Marriage had shattered no illusions. If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of each other, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm those illusions, to shape them into realities. They were young enough to be ardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination, but only an ecstatic phase in the working out of an inexorable natural law.
If Doris was happy, full of high spirits, joyfully abandoned to the fulfilment of her destiny as a woman, Hollister too was happier than he had considered it possible for him ever to be again. ”

“ She loved the beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color. Restored sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become transformed. The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor. All that he meant to her as a man, a lover, a husband, must be stripped bare of the kindly illusion that blindness had wrapped him in. Even if she did not shrink in amazed reluctance at first sight, she must soon cease to have for him any keener emotion than a tolerant pity. And Hollister did not want that. He would not take it as a gift—not from Doris ”

“ Up on the hill Hollister's men felled trees with warning shouts and tumultuous crashings. They attacked the prone trunks with axe and saw and iron wedges, Lilliputians rending the body of a fallen giant. The bolt piles 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. ”

“ 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 fulfilment of ideals that can never be attained. Slaves to our environment, to social forces before which the individual is nothing. It's all rot to talk about the free man, the man whose soul is his own. ”

“ Then suddenly there is an end to the sea. Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way, peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial age. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning declivities.
Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay of the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but the snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not confuse him. ”

“ The Toba and his house, the grim peaks standing aloof behind the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impassive, impersonal silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and think—and hope. A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a lingering one. Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into his wife's eyes. Better that she should fully regain her sight, and then see with what manner of man she had lived and to whom she had borne a son. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised in blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals to the rumble of guns.
He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to think that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up under it. ”

“ To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. ”

“ By no exercise of any power he possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of war. ”

“ Hollister never forgot that summer. He was young. He had no cares. He was free. All life spread before him in a vast illusion of unquestionable joyousness. There was a rose-pink tinge over these months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed. ”

“ He had known men to kill themselves for less. He had seen wounded men beg for a weapon to end their pain. He had known men who, after months of convalescence, quitted by their own hand a life that no longer held anything for them.
And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any moral scruple against self-destruction. He clung to life because instinct was stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he encountered and knew he must go on encountering. ”

“ Hollister watched her vanish among the thickets, thinking that she too had changed,—as greatly as himself. She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone over night in a house with telephones and servants, on a street brilliantly lighted. Now she could apparently face the loneliness of those solitudes without uneasiness. But war and the aftermath of war had taught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must, and he suspected that women were not greatly different. He understood that after all he had never really known Myra any more than she had known him. ”

“ Just as the man secure in the knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with its clammy touch.
For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw her nearly every day. ”

“ To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his disfigurement. A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance. To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship, friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life beautiful were always just beyond his reach. To be merely endured. To have women pity him—and shun him.
The sweat broke out on Hollister's face when he thought of all that. ”

“ 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 ”

“ All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was a busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting cedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntary slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. ”

“ As literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,—a home and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.
The house arose as if by magic,—the simple magic of stout arms and skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. ”

“ At daylight the wind died. A sky banked solid with clouds began to empty upon the land a steady downpour of rain. All through the woods the sodden foliage dripped heavily. The snow melted, pouring muddy cataracts out of each gully, making tiny cascades over the edge of every cliff. Snowbanks slipped their hold on steep hillsides high on the north valley wall. They gathered way and came roaring down out of places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slides thundering like distant artillery. ”

“ And still Hollister stared dumbly. He heard her with a little rancor, a strange sense of the futility of what she said. Why hadn't she acquired this knowledge of herself long ago? It was too late now. The old fires were dead. But if the new one he had kindled to warm himself were to be extinguished, could he go back and bask in the warmth that smoldered in this woman's eyes? He wondered. And he felt a faint irritation, as if some one had accused him of being faithless.
"Do you think it's strange that I should feel and speak like this?" Myra persisted. "Do people never profit by their mistakes? ”

“ Lawanne once said to him that a man must worship a God, love a woman, or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. ”

“ He, Robert Hollister, in the flush of manhood, with a body whose symmetry and vigor other men had envied, a mind that functioned alertly, a spirit as nearly indomitable as the spirit of man may be, was like a leper among his own kind; he had become a something that filled other men with pitying dismay when they looked at him, that made women avert their gaze and withdraw from him in spite of pity. ”

“ The Toba rose day by day, pouring down a swollen flood of snow-water to the sea.
And life went on as it always did. Hollister's crew, working on a bonus for work performed, kept the bolts of cedar gliding down the chute. The mill on the river below swallowed up the blocks and spewed them out in bound bundles of roof covering. Lawanne kept close to his cabin, deep in the throes of creation, manifesting strange vagaries of moroseness or exhilaration which in his normal state he cynically ascribed to the artistic temperament. ”

“ He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees, and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went back inside.
Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter. Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten a little, and that was all. ”

“ In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to the attack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle against the red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues of flame and breath of suffocating smoke.
In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys move always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggers feared. ”

“ Then, as if the clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky. ”

“ And half the fun of living is in sharing the discoveries one makes about things with some one else. Sight will give me back all the books I want to read, all the beautiful things I want to see. I'll be able to climb hills and paddle a canoe, to go with you wherever you want to take me. Won't it be splendid? I've only been half a woman. I have wondered sometimes how long it would be before you grew weary of my moods and my helplessness."
And Hollister could only pat her cheek and tell her that he loved her, that her eyes made no difference. ”

“ Out of this rigid, expressionless mask his eyes glowed, blue and [Pg 21] bright, having escaped injury. They were the only key to the mutations of his mind. If Hollister's eyes were the windows of his soul, he did not keep the blinds drawn, knowing that few had the hardihood to peer into those windows now.
Mr. Lewis looked at him, looked away, and then his gaze came slowly back as if drawn by some fascination against which he struggled in vain. He did not wish to look at Hollister. ”

“ Men passed him, walking rapidly, clad in greatcoats. Women tripped by, wrapped in furs, eyes bright, cheeks glowing. And as they passed, singly, in chattering pairs, in smiling groups, Hollister observed them with a growing fury. They were so thoroughly insulated against everything disagreeable. All of them. A great war had just come to a dramatic close, a war in which staggering numbers of men had been sacrificed, body and soul, to enable these people to walk the streets in comfortable security. ”