CHAPTER XXII
To the world outside the immediate environs of the Toba, beyond those who knew the people concerned, that double murder was merely another violent affair which provided material for newspapers, a remote event allied to fires, divorces, embezzlements, politics, and scandals in high finance,—another item to be glanced quickly over and as quickly forgotten.
But one man at least could not quickly forget or pass it over lightly. Once the authorities—coming from a great distance, penetrating the solitude of the valley with a casual, business-like air—arrived, asked questions, issued orders, sent two men abroad in search of the slayer, and removed the bodies to another jurisdiction, Hollister had nothing more to do with that until he should be called again to give formal testimony.
He was left with nothing to do but brood, to sit asking unanswerable questions of a world and a life that for him was slowly and bewilderingly verging upon the chaotic, in which there was no order, no security, no assurance of anything but devastating changes that had neither rhyme nor reason in their sequence. There might be logical causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had transpired. He conceded that point. But he could not establish any association; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against the common assumption that all things, no matter how mysterious, work out ultimately for some common good.
Where was the good forthcoming out of so much that was evil, he asked? Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away, powerless to know where they went, to guess what was their destination.
Nothing that he could have done would have altered one iota the march of events. Nothing that he could do now would have more than the slightest bearing on what was still to come. He was like a man beaten to a dazed state in which he expects anything, in which his feeble resistance will not ward off a single blow aimed at him by an unseen, inscrutable enemy.
Hollister, sitting on the bank of the river, looked at the mountains rising tier upon tier until the farthest ranges were dazzling white cones against a far sky line. He saw them as a chaos of granite and sandstone flung up by blind forces. Order and logical sequence in the universe were a delusion—except as they were the result of ordered human thought, effected by patient, unremitting human effort, which failed more often than it succeeded.
He looked at one bold peak across the valley, standing so sheer above the Black Hole that it seemed to overhang from the perpendicular; a mass of bald granite, steep cliff, with glacial ice and perpetual snow lurking in its crevasses. Upon its lower slopes the forest ran up, a green mantle with ragged edges. From the forest upward the wind wafted seeds to every scanty patch of soil. They took root, became saplings, grew to substantial trees. And every winter the snow fell deep on that mountain, piling up in great masses delicately poised, until a mere nothing—a piece of stone loosened by the frost; a gust of wind; perhaps only the overhanging edge of a snow-drift breaking under its own weight—would start a slide that gathered speed and bulk as it came down. And as this insensate mass plunged downward, the small trees and the great, the thickets and the low salal, everything that stood in its path, was overwhelmed and crushed and utterly destroyed. To what end? For what purpose?