The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

of his lonely

park, arrived at a conclusion that he divined was but the

beginning of a struggle.

 

It took long introspection to determine the exact nature of

that struggle, but at length it evolved into the paradox

that Helen Rayner had opened his eyes to his duty as a man,

that he accepted it, yet found a strange obstacle in the

perplexing, tumultuous, sweet fear of ever going near her

again.

 

Suddenly, then, all his thought revolved around the girl,

and, thrown off his balance, he weltered in a wilderness of

unfamiliar strange ideas.

 

When he awoke next day the fight was on in earnest. In his

sleep his mind had been active. The idea that greeted him,

beautiful as the sunrise, flashed in memory of Auchincloss’s

significant words, “Take your chance with the girl!”

 

The old rancher was in his dotage. He hinted of things

beyond the range of possibility. That idea of a chance for

Dale remained before his consciousness only an instant.

Stars were unattainable; life could not be fathomed; the

secret of nature did not abide alone on the earth — these

theories were not any more impossible of proving than that

Helen Rayner might be for him.

 

Nevertheless, her strange coming into his life had played

havoc, the extent of which he had only begun to realize.

 

For a month he tramped through the forest. It was October, a

still golden, fulfilling season of the year; and everywhere

in the vast dark green a glorious blaze of oak and aspen

made beautiful contrast. He carried his rifle, but he never

used it. He would climb miles and go this way and that with

no object in view. Yet his eye and ear had never been

keener. Hours he would spend on a promontory, watching the

distance, where the golden patches of aspen shone bright out

of dark-green mountain slopes. He loved to fling himself

down in an aspen-grove at the edge of a senaca, and there

lie in that radiance like a veil of gold and purple and red,

with the white tree-trunks striping the shade. Always,

whether there were breeze or not, the aspen-leaves quivered,

ceaselessly, wonderfully, like his pulses, beyond his

control. Often he reclined against a mossy rock beside a

mountain stream to listen, to watch, to feel all that was

there, while his mind held a haunting, dark-eyed vision of a

girl. On the lonely heights, like an eagle, he sat gazing

down into Paradise Park, that was more and more beautiful,

but would never again be the same, never fill him with

content, never be all and all to him.

 

Late in October the first snow fell. It melted at once on

the south side of the park, but the north slopes and the

rims and domes above stayed white.

 

Dale had worked quick and hard at curing and storing his

winter supply of food, and now he spent days chopping and

splitting wood to burn during the months he would be

snowed-in. He watched for the dark-gray, fast-scudding

storm-clouds, and welcomed them when they came. Once there

lay ten feet of snow on the trails he would be snowed-in

until spring. It would be impossible to go down to Pine. And

perhaps during the long winter he would be cured of this

strange, nameless disorder of his feelings.

 

November brought storms up on the peaks. Flurries of snow

fell in the park every day, but the sunny south side, where

Dale’s camp lay, retained its autumnal color and warmth. Not

till late in winter did the snow creep over this secluded

nook.

 

The morning came at last, piercingly keen and bright, when

Dale saw that the heights were impassable; the realization

brought him a poignant regret. He had not guessed how he had

wanted to see Helen Rayner again until it was too late. That

opened his eyes. A raging frenzy of action followed, in

which he only tired himself physically without helping

himself spiritually.

 

It was sunset when he faced the west, looking up at the pink

snow-domes and the dark-golden fringe of spruce, and in that

moment he found the truth.

 

“I love that girl! I love that girl!” he spoke aloud, to the

distant white peaks, to the winds, to the loneliness and

silence of his prison, to the great pines and to the

murmuring stream, and to his faithful pets. It was his

tragic confession of weakness, of amazing truth, of hopeless

position, of pitiful excuse for the transformation wrought

in him.

 

Dale’s struggle ended there when he faced his soul. To

understand himself was to be released from strain, worry,

ceaseless importuning doubt and wonder and fear. But the

fever of unrest, of uncertainty, had been nothing compared

to a sudden upflashing torment of love.

 

With somber deliberation he set about the tasks needful, and

others that he might make — his campfires and meals, the

care of his pets and horses, the mending of saddles and

pack-harness, the curing of buckskin for moccasins and

hunting-suits. So his days were not idle. But all this work

was habit for him and needed no application of mind.

 

And Dale, like some men of lonely wilderness lives who did

not retrograde toward the savage, was a thinker. Love made

him a sufferer.

 

The surprise and shame of his unconscious surrender, the

certain hopelessness of it, the long years of communion with

all that was wild, lonely, and beautiful, the wonderfully

developed insight into nature’s secrets, and the

sudden-dawning revelation that he was no omniscient being

exempt from the ruthless ordinary destiny of man — all

these showed him the strength of his manhood and of his

passion, and that the life he had chosen was of all lives

the one calculated to make love sad and terrible.

 

Helen Rayner haunted him. In the sunlight there was not a

place around camp which did not picture her lithe, vigorous

body, her dark, thoughtful eyes, her eloquent, resolute

lips, and the smile that was so sweet and strong. At night

she was there like a slender specter, pacing beside him

under the moaning pines. Every campfire held in its heart

the glowing white radiance of her spirit.

 

Nature had taught Dale to love solitude and silence, but

love itself taught him their meaning. Solitude had been

created for the eagle on his crag, for the blasted mountain

fir, lonely and gnarled on its peak, for the elk and the

wolf. But it had not been intended for man. And to live

always in the silence of wild places was to become obsessed

with self — to think and dream — to be happy, which state,

however pursued by man, was not good for him. Man must be

given imperious longings for the unattainable.

 

It needed, then, only the memory of an unattainable woman to

render solitude passionately desired by a man, yet almost

unendurable. Dale was alone with his secret; and every pine,

everything in that park saw him shaken and undone.

 

In the dark, pitchy deadness of night, when there was no

wind and the cold on the peaks had frozen the waterfall,

then the silence seemed insupportable. Many hours that

should have been given to slumber were paced out under the

cold, white, pitiless stars, under the lonely pines.

 

Dale’s memory betrayed him, mocked his restraint, cheated

him of any peace; and his imagination, sharpened by love,

created pictures, fancies, feelings, that drove him frantic.

 

He thought of Helen Rayner’s strong, shapely brown hand. In

a thousand different actions it haunted him. How quick and

deft in campfire tasks! how graceful and swift as she

plaited her dark hair! how tender and skilful in its

ministration when one of his pets had been injured! how

eloquent when pressed tight against her breast in a moment

of fear on the dangerous heights! how expressive of

unutterable things when laid on his arm!

 

Dale saw that beautiful hand slowly creep up his arm, across

his shoulder, and slide round his neck to clasp there. He

was powerless to inhibit the picture. And what he felt then

was boundless, unutterable. No woman had ever yet so much as

clasped his hand, and heretofore no such imaginings had ever

crossed his mind, yet deep in him, somewhere hidden, had

been this waiting, sweet, and imperious need. In the bright

day he appeared to ward off such fancies, but at night he

was helpless. And every fancy left him weaker, wilder.

 

When, at the culmination of this phase of his passion, Dale,

who had never known the touch of a woman’s lips, suddenly

yielded to the illusion of Helen Rayner’s kisses, he found

himself quite mad, filled with rapture and despair, loving

her as he hated himself. It seemed as if he had experienced

all these terrible feelings in some former life and had

forgotten them in this life. He had no right to think of

her, but he could not resist it. Imagining the sweet

surrender of her lips was a sacrilege, yet here, in spite of

will and honor and shame, he was lost.

 

Dale, at length, was vanquished, and he ceased to rail at

himself, or restrain his fancies. He became a dreamy,

sad-eyed, campfire gazer, like many another lonely man,

separated, by chance or error, from what the heart hungered

most for. But this great experience, when all its

significance had clarified in his mind, immeasurably

broadened his understanding of the principles of nature

applied to life.

 

Love had been in him stronger than in most men, because of

his keen, vigorous, lonely years in the forest, where health

of mind and body were intensified and preserved. How simple,

how natural, how inevitable! He might have loved any

fine-spirited, healthy-bodied girl. Like a tree shooting its

branches and leaves, its whole entity, toward the sunlight,

so had he grown toward a woman’s love. Why? Because the

thing he revered in nature, the spirit, the universal, the

life that was God, had created at his birth or before his

birth the three tremendous instincts of nature — to fight

for life, to feed himself, to reproduce his kind. That was

all there was to it. But oh! the mystery, the beauty, the

torment, and the terror of this third instinct — this

hunger for the sweetness and the glory of a woman’s love!