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 associate 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 shore 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 pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore, 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 attitude 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 assurance that God 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 offshore 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.