Part 3 (1/2)

But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his pa.s.sions, his strength. He could not be pa.s.sive either physically or mentally. His mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its manifestations and adventures.

Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless he succ.u.mbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circ.u.mstance.

How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a question that hara.s.sed him with disheartening insistence as he watched through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the mournful cadences of the wind.

”I must get to work at something,” he said to himself. ”If I sit still and think much more----”

He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.

Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set about doing.

Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.

He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a man's appearance.

Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat, of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to get away out of sight and hearing of men.

It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long ago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild things of the forest went their accustomed way.

Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.

coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pus.h.i.+ng seaport town, among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in a cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him out on the sc.r.a.p heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be utterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellows.h.i.+p which he craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they pa.s.sed.

CHAPTER IV

The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole occupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

Hollister stood looking about him. He was clad like a logger, in thick mackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments was appropriate to the temperature, the weather. He seemed to have stepped into another lat.i.tude,--which in truth he had, for the head of Toba Inlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and the thrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into the glacial fastnesses of the Coast Range. The rain that drenched Vancouver became snow here. The lower slopes were green with timber which concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil. A little higher certain clear s.p.a.ces bared the whiteness, and all the tree tops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow. Higher still lifted grim peaks capped with ma.s.sive snow banks that even midsummer heat could never quite dispel. But these upper heights were now hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded in this winter veil which--except for rare bursts of suns.h.i.+ne or sweeping northwest wind--would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.

It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compelling silence on everything in the land. Except the faint slapping of little waves against the ice-encrusted, rocky sh.o.r.e, and the distant, harsh voices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound, as he stood listening.

Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude. In that setting, silence was appropriate. It was merely unexpected. For so long Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunder and lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle and clatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,--and in the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievous loneliness. For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation, since there was no one by to remind him by look or act. He was only aware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at the majestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenly transferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractingly clamorous to a spot where life was mute.

The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay. One turns out of the island-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile in breadth. The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mile by mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for its floor. On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther and farther into the mainland through a pa.s.sage like a huge tunnel, the roof of which has been blown away. 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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.

From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.

The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deep and narrow gash in the white-clad hills. On his right opened the broader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.

For a s.p.a.ce of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.