The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in. He lay wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland. He envied her courage and fort.i.tude, the calm a.s.surance with which she seemed to face the world which was all about her and yet hidden from her sight. She was really an extraordinary young woman, he decided.
She was traveling alone. For several months she had been living with old friends of the family on Stuart Island, close by the roaring tiderace of the Euclataw Rapids. She was returning there, she told Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver. The steamer would dock about daylight the following morning. When Hollister offered to see her ash.o.r.e and to her destination, she accepted without any reservations. It comforted Hollister"s sadly bruised ego to observe that she even seemed a trifle pleased.
"I have once or twice got a steward to get me ash.o.r.e and put me in a taxi," she said. "But if you don"t mind, Mr. Hollister."
And Hollister most decidedly did not mind. Doris Cleveland had shot like a pleasant burst of colorful light across the grayest period of his existence, and he was loath to let her go.
He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the snow banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland"s books. And he was no longer lonely, because he was not alone.
He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious mind, when the steward"s rap at the door wakened him half an hour before the steamer docked.
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 new plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?
Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where he went or what lay before him.
Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.
Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can endure with fort.i.tude 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. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.
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. He revised that conclusion sharply in her case. He could not a.s.sociate the most remote degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. That broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery sh.o.r.e on one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The buds of the p.u.s.s.y willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the sh.o.r.e, had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could hear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. She could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a whimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.
At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to Howe Sound.
No, he could not easily fall into the masculine att.i.tude of a protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous, resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always night,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.
In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him, then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. It had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found himself committed irrevocably to this or that.
But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less nebulous a.s.surance that G.o.d was in his heaven and all was well with the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people"s actions.
So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love"s paradoxical way. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yet reluctant to draw back.
When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to set too great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them far apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs, would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as he was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have had the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she turned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thought of him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mental pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came within the scope of her understanding,--which covered no narrow field.
But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what image of him she carried in her mind.
For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly reading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern border of Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to be their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they walked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank lay bared for a mile offsh.o.r.e at ebb tide.
If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick out a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or get tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at the Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in the afternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover she knew music, which is a thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the place where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard her play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment, forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and that the most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visit that house often. The people there looked at him a little askance.
They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his presence,--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 him soon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she was going back to the Euclataws. She had already stretched her visit to greater length than she intended. She must go back.
They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked a deserted playground, emerald green with new gra.s.s. They faced a sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver Island. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like the faint murmur of distant surf.
"In a week," Hollister said. If there was an echo of regret in his voice he did not try to hide it. "It has been the best month I have spent for a long, long time."
"It has been a pleasant month," Doris agreed.
They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east dusk 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 a pressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue for utterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyond sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted her--not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was still a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She, too, was aware--and sometimes afraid--of drab years running out into nothingness.
Hollister sat beside her visualizing interminable to-morrows in which there would be no Doris Cleveland; in which he would go his way vainly seeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice that thrilled 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 her face, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curious expectancy 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 take a chance?
"For it is a chance," he finished abruptly. "Life together is always a chance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise you by breaking out like this. But when I think of us each going separate ways----"
He held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward to peer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment or surprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked, grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lost in thought. But there was arising a quiver in the fingers he held which belied the emotionless fixity of her face.
"I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?" she said slowly. "If it is, why do you want to take it?"
"Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I could imagine," he answered. "And because I have a longing to face life with you, and a dread of it alone. You can"t see my ugly face which 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 mean anything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you?"
He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, that strange, 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 how long it would take you to find that out."
CHAPTER IX