Now there was certainly a mischief working in his blood that was not innocent. He knew it. It made him quiver. There was a ferment in his mind as well as in his body. Was this what Spence meant when he discoursed solemnly on the arrival of youth at man's estate? The pitfalls of uncontrolled passion. The ineradicable animal in man. Spence always spoke of the most intimate relation between a man and a woman in guarded terms. He conveyed the idea that it should be a matter of rational choice,—on the man's side. Spence never discussed the woman's part; he ignored the woman. The man, then, according to the Spencian ethic, carried on his sexual life according to his innate character. If he was inherently brutish he sought sexual satisfaction promiscuously. The ideal, sanctioned by society, therefore ethically sound, was love, matrimony, the ultimate family, achieved progressively with mature deliberation to balance emotion. Mr. Spence did not inform Rod that this ideal progression depended on a great many uncertain factors. Perhaps he did not know. But Rod had accepted his tutor for several years as an oracle on culture in general, as well as in its specific branches, and it was difficult for him to turn a deaf ear when the oracle spoke of ethics,—in spite of the fact that Rod's own observation, the conclusions of a fairly acute if youthful mind, stirred doubts.
He granted that Phil might pass muster. Grove wouldn't. He could think of several men, young and old, within the Norquay orbit, who wouldn't. But Grove was the most outstanding, because he had the most intimate knowledge of Grove's personality and his surreptitious amours, which had been overlapping each other ever since Rod was old enough to understand such matters. If a reasonable state of personal purity were necessary to the Spencian image of a gentleman, Grove could not qualify. Yet Mr. Spence had as much respect for Grove Norquay as Grove's world in general,—which was a great deal more than either of his brothers held for him. Grove was clever. He was handsome. He could be generous to his equals. His manner was beyond reproach. Yet outside of his own class women were to Grove a sporting proposition, to be pursued and captured for his sensual gratification.
No, there was something lacking in the wisdom Mr. Spence had attempted to impart. Mr. Spence distinguished sharply between love and lust. He had explained the difference without making the difference clear. Rod wondered which of the two had overtaken him all unexpectedly, sitting beside Mary Thorn on a log. Which was it that made his heart beat faster. Was it love,—blooming precociously? Or was it the other thing, against which Spence had warned him to be strong?
Rod had come down the path with a club bag in one hand, talking amiably with his father. He had seen his trunk put aboard theHaida. Mrs. Wall, Laska, Isabel, Miss Sherburne, Grove, and three or four other unattached young men and women who made up the house party were on the float to see him off. They filled the quiet upper bay with light talk and low laughter. Rod stood by the deck rail chaffering with them. But his eye missed one figure. He had not seen Phil since breakfast. Already the engineer was priming the big motor. He could hear the hissing of air through open petcocks. And old Phil hadn't come down to say "good-by, kid."
Rod's glance wandered to Grove, standing by Laska Wall, a fine upright figure of a man in white flannels. And he wondered idly why this elder son of the house should be like flint to his brothers' steel without ever seeming aware of the hostile undercurrents he so often aroused. Or perhaps he simply did not care. Perhaps he felt such a complete assurance that the liking and loyalty of younger brothers was a negligible thing.
Then, as the first deep bark of the exhaust waked a hollow echo in Mermaid Bay, Phil came down with long, quick strides, dressed in a gray suit, a bag in his hand.
There was a quick exchange of casual exclamations, a shaking of hands. Phil stepped aboard.
"All right," he called to the deck hand. "Cast off."
TheHaidabacked clear, gathered way as she turned into the slackening tide. She slid past the Gillard light, lonely and untended on its steel pillar. The narrow gorge of a canoe pass opened behind the island. From a rocky point south of the pass and the light a trail that Rod knew ran to Oliver Thorn's house. And as Rod's eyes swept the shore, he marked a figure on the highest point of this beach trail. He waved his hat. Something white fluttered like a pennant in answer. Then the cruiser's way cut off Gillard, the red roof of Hawk's Nest, and Mary Thorn on the trail. They vanished behind the low, timbered hills of Valdez, and Rod turned to his brother.
Phil sat on a skylight, his hands clasped over one knee, his eyes on the streaming wake. But Rod knew he was not looking at the bubbles in the wash, or at anything concretely visible. It was too much the concentrated look a man bestows upon things afar, remote, but vivid in the eye of the mind.
"Cheer up," he said abruptly. "The worst is yet to come."
"I wonder?" Phil replied absently. A faint smile replaced that set expression. "I suppose the worst always is ahead—only unseen."
"What's up?" Rod demanded. "Why this last minute dash, and the abstracted air?"
Phil stared at the deck.
"Do I show such outward signs of inner disturbance?" he inquired whimsically. "If I do it was a wise move to leave. I didn't think I gave myself away openly as a bad loser."
Rod said nothing. He waited. He knew his brother.
"Laska Wall's going to marry Grove," Phil said with a simulation of casualness that would have deceived any one but Rod. "I had the pleasure of wishing her much happiness last night."
Rod could think of nothing appropriate to say. He seemed to understand quite clearly. And he couldn't feel anything but resentment against a girl who, having a choice between the two, preferred Grove. Laska fell a long way in his estimation in those few seconds.
"Well," he ventured at last, "I should worry. She's a nice girl. But there are plenty of nice girls."
"That's true enough," Phil sighed. "But the devil of it is, kid, that I wanted this particular girl. And I can't seem to be cheerful about some one else getting her. Maybe it sounds a bit crude, but I'd almost rather it had been any other man I know. Grove's—well, I pass him up. He doesn't play the game. But he gets by. I suppose he always will. Even the governor, who isn't exactly a fool, and whoisdecent, can't see our worthy brother as he seems to us. Well, that's another chapter. I'm not funking, but I think I'll get off the Norquay band wagon pretty soon. I don't imagine things will seem quite the same around the old place once Mrs. Grove is installed. New brooms, you know."
"Maybe. I don't know. I can easily see where we might begin to feel like intruders in our own home," Rod hazarded. "But what's the use of crossing bridges before you come to 'em?"
"I think," Phil returned, "I've come to a rather important one."
He fell into moody reflection again. Rod leaned against the rail, unwilling to break into this absorption. He knew Phil was smarting under a hurt, the nature of which he could understand very well. And he was hotly on Phil's side, a position he took instinctively whenever Grove appeared as the protagonist.
That it was quite in order for Laska Wall to make her own choice probably carried much less weight with Rod than with Phil. Nor was Rod clearly aware that all his incipient clashes with Grove took root in profound differences of character, rather than in any definite invasion of his rights or Phil's by their elder brother.
There were crossed wires everywhere, he reflected. Why should Phil want Laska so badly, and why should Laska prefer by far the lesser man? These mysterious, passionate wants! Rod wandered idly if Mr. Spence, comfortable in a deck chair, his nose in a red-bound volume, could interpret these strange impulses of the flesh which could so sorely try the spirit? He decided Spence could not. Young as he was, Rod knew there were things in life that cannot be learned. They must be felt, suffered mostly. Lessons in the school of self-experience. Phil, he perceived, was getting a lesson, and taking it seriously. His own turn would come.
He shrugged his shoulders. There would be a different atmosphere about Hawk's Nest when he came home again. But Rod had already encountered the philosophic maxim that change was the only constant factor in a kaleidoscopic universe.
He went up forward, made himself comfortable in the bight of a coiled hawser, let his mind dwell on what green fields and pastures new four years on the Atlantic littoral might open to him.
While he pondered over the immediate future and what it might bring, theHaidaplowed down Calm Channel, cleared the Redondas and stood into the open Gulf, reeling off her fourteen knots per hour. Before night he would be in Vancouver. In a week he would be in Montreal. Beyond that Rod could not see, nor, as the sun filled him with a drowsy lassitude, did he greatly care. For four years yet his life would be ordered, directed; he would be a human sponge soaking up knowledge, impressions, experiences common to a university career. After that—
Rod sleepily declined to transform himself into a seer.
When the deck hands had dumped a trunk, a bag, a suitcase and sundry bundles on the float and theCamosunhad backed into the stream, Rod still stood looking about him, trying to mark changes and finding none. He had been away almost two years. He might have been gone only overnight for all the external difference in what he saw. Time's scythe had mowed no grass, felled no trees, had left untouched the bold contours of his native hills, had neither added to nor taken away from the well-remembered tintings of sky and sea, the delicate shadings of the green forest which seemed to hold its own on every hand against the continuous onslaught of the logger. It was as if the puny axes and saws of man could no more than make tiny openings in that incredible stretch of coastal forest. Pygmies attacking a giant in the vast amphitheater of the changeless hills!
Except for the stone house with a roof that gleamed like burnished copper in its setting of lawn against the deep olive of massed boughs, all that Rod Norquay could see by turning on his heel must have been bared to his eye much as it was bared to the gaze of his great-great-grandfather on the poop of theHermesin 1797. Earth and water, air and sky. The changeless elements. Life was a flux, but the hills endured, and the sea. Man could ravage the forests in the name of industry. But the forest would grow again. Those high aloof mountains, with glaciers clinging on their shoulders, held out welcoming hands to Rod as they had seemed to welcome the first of his name a century before. They would be there, flinging vast shadows at sunrise and sundown, bearing their robes of dusky green and royal purple and virgin white long after he was gone.
Rod felt a keen, deeply personal appreciation of this background. He had looked at the Alps and the Pyrenees and the Highlands since he last saw The Needles looming over Bute Inlet. And he loved his own hills best. He did not care if that stamped him as a provincial. There was something here that stirred him. His native fir and cedar, the maples that flamed along the beaches in autumn, were dearer to him than English oaks. The grassed area about Hawk's Nest, with thick-trunked, lofty trees rooted in noble hundreds, was more beautiful to him that the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was home, and he had never imagined he would be so glad to get home. And he was quite aware that it was neither persons nor things that filled him with this keen satisfaction.
In four semesters he had listened to and taken part in many a sophomoric discussion where Art and Beauty went on the dissecting table. To himself he had once defined beauty as such perfection of form, tone, color, expression, as touched human heartstrings to a responsive vibration. It did not matter, he sagely decided, whether this perfection lay in sculpture, architecture, painting, music, literature, in the everlasting hills or the shifting scroll of the sea. The sense of it, the response to it, wherever found, alone differentiated man from the animals. The attempt, more or less successful, to capture something of this beauty, to interpret it, to visualize it in marble, in colors, in words, he took to be the function of art. What art was he did not know. But beauty he could see and feel. He smiled to himself now, recalling bits of discussion between classmen about Art and Beauty. They could become so serious over abstractions. Here a man could forget abstractions. He was like his great-great-grandfather.Thisfitted him as a glove fits the hand.
He glanced across the channel. Oliver Thorn's weathered house stood blended with the forest, the west wind trailing a blue pennant from the chimney. Then he turned to meet Stagg, the butler, who had recognized the single debarkee and come down to welcome him and see about his things.
"Who's here, Stagg?" Rod inquired, as they walked up the path.
"Your grandfather, Mr. Rod, of course," Stagg answered. "Mrs. Wall, Miss Isabel, Miss Monty Deane, Miss Joe Richston, Mr. Sam Deane, Mr. Harold Collier of Seattle. Mr. Philip has taken them all down to Rock Bay on theHaida. We're expecting Mr. Grove and some people on his yacht for the week-end, sir."
Rod sought his grandfather in the library. He found the old man with his chair by a French window opening on a small balcony, his thin hands nursing a long-stemmed pipe.
Rod felt the firm pressure of his hand-clasp, wondered at the extraordinary vitality of the man. From this same vantage he had once fired a muzzle-loader at the painted Chilcotins. Down that same channel his eyes had beheld the historicBeaver, the first steamer to furrow the Pacific. He had seen the Anglo-Saxon and industry lay the firm foundation of a new commonwealth. He had seen steam supplant sail. And his eyes were keen yet, although he was eighty-three and walked slowly, leaning on a stick.
"You've filled out," the old man eyed him critically. "Did you get anything out of McGill besides girls and athletics? I understand you are being noticed in sport. I take the queening for granted."
"Why, gran'pere," Rod laughed, "does it run in the family? I haven't heard that the Norquays who attended McGill were outstanding cavaliers."
He made a mental reservation about Grove. Echoes of that young man's affairs still reverberated faintly along the St. Lawrence.
Grandfather Norquay smiled.
"In my day we were wild perhaps, but not wanton," he said. "I don't know the present generation very well, my boy. But it has curious aspects—what I see of it now and then."
"Are we much different from other generations, do you think?" Rod asked.
"In certain features," the old man answered slowly. "Yes. Very much. But I may be wrong—and it doesn't matter. I have seen a great deal of change. Some things go on unchanged. Others—my father, I recollect once—"
He went off upon a tangent of reminiscence. Rod listened, wondering if there would come a time when he would sit with snow-white hair and withered skin, telling his grandson of the now, which would then be fifty years under the horizon of time.
He went downstairs presently to have a bite of lunch, then outside to walk here and there. The warm June hush filled the parked spaces, that languorous stillness with an undertone of humming insects and—when one sat perfectly still to listen—the flutter and rustle of foraging birds. Under the drowsiness invisible growth, vegetable growth, responding vigorously to the warmth of sun on moist, fecund earth. One could almost hear the murmur of countless inorganic changes, expansions, all the old forms renewing themselves in the appointed way.
Rod went about from spot to spot, observing the lilacs, the rhododendrons, the bloom-hidden rockeries, all the fragrant beauty of the grounds and the sanctuary of the massed woods running back of Big Dent. He brought up at last on the float. He looked into a commodious boat-house. His dugout, the brilliant paint a trifle faded, sat on blocks, wide checks in the wood from long drouth. He shoved it into the water, let it fill to soak and swell tight. Then he took a rowboat and pushed out of the bay. A short run of tide made a slow current in the channel. He was well pleased to feel and smell salt water again, to have the sharp odor of kelp in his nostrils, to sniff the aromatic pungence wafted by faint airs out of the banked forest across the cool sea.
He had no particular purpose, no explicit destination. Perhaps for that reason, or lack of it, he landed an hour or so later at Oliver Thorn's float.
Your natural patrician is alone able to practice democracy without condescension, to meet his fellows on any common ground available. It made no difference to Rod Norquay that Oliver Thorn and his family were completely outside the Norquay orbit socially, financially, perhaps even intellectually,—although the last count was highly debatable. It merely amused Rod to recall that Norquay senior had once frowned on Thorn as a "dreamy-eyed incompetent." Rod knew these people, no matter how or why. He knew them. He liked them. That was sufficient.
And there was Mary besides, a stimulus to his adolescent curiosity. He quite frankly wanted to see her again. She had been almost the only real playmate he could associate with the later and most important part of his youth. He had vivid and pleasant memories of her, which had not grown less by two years during which she might have died or married or gone to a far country, for all he knew. There had been one or two stiff little letters, then silence. Rod easily accounted for that. Too many things pressing in on them both. Too acute a self-consciousness. Rod never thought of the manner of their parting without a slight wonder at that queer surge of feeling. He supposed it was the same with Mary Thorn,—a something that made for restraint between them, that could not be overcome by letters. He knew girls without number. He danced with them, rode with them, drove them about in motor cars. Two years of Montreal and three months in Europe had tremendously expanded his experience of femininity. And Mary stood out against this background of girls like an oil portrait among a group of half-tone prints.
Rod didn't attempt to account for this. He hadn't cast a sentimental halo about her. His pulse did not quicken when he thought of her. He simply remembered her vividly as a girl he knew and liked better than all the rest. The nearest he came to an analysis of the "why" was to wonder if it were not because he remembered Mary in her look and words, in her person and manner, as supremely natural. He had an ingrained dislike for the artificial. He had been born with that predisposition. So had Phil. He liked to think that was a Norquay characteristic. And the generation of girls and young women Rod knew seemed like exotic flowers,—with their lipsticks and powder, their exaggeration of speech, their startling frankness. They were easy to admire. Upon occasion their provocative sex might trumpet a challenge. But in the main rouge and talcum, pert slang, the assurance of complete sophistication amused Rod without greatly interesting him.
He took it for granted Mary would be at home. But the Thorn world had moved as well as his own. He found Oliver Thorn sitting on the porch looking over a newspaper. They shook hands. Mrs. Thorn came out to greet him. And freshly she impressed Rod with a sense of serenity, of kindliness, of a motherly quality he could not remember in his own life.
"Where's Mary?" he asked.
"Still in town. She'll be home soon, though, I hope. She cut a year in high school and entered the U.B.C. last summer," Mrs. Thorn told him. "She's quite grown up, Rod. I don't believe you'd know her. She's changed, like you."
"But I don't think I've changed much," Rod demurred.
"Of course you wouldn't see it yourself, but I can," Mrs. Thorn smiled.
She went back into the house. Rod sat talking to Thorn. Trout-fishing, the salmon run, timber, matters current along the B.C. coast. Westward of the float a set of boomsticks enclosed a floating mass of fresh-cut cedar in four-foot lengths, split to a size,—shingle bolts for the mills.
Oliver Thorn had owned for years a square mile of the finest timber on Valdez; magnificent fir close-ranked on the ridges, cool groves of cedar in shadowy lowlands. He held it indefeasibly, under a Crown grant. Rod knew that because he had once heard his father and Grove comment impatiently on the man's clear title, and wonder why in his circumstances he would neither sell nor cut the timber himself. Grove had observed caustically that some one had blundered. That particular stretch of woods was almost surrounded by the Norquay holdings. His father had merely shrugged his shoulders. Rod wondered idly now why a poor man did not turn those trees into useful cash. He uttered a modification of this thought.
Thorn smiled.
"I follow the wise course of greater folk," he said musingly. "Your people own miles and miles of timber, for instance. Yet they don't fill the woods with loggers and market every stick that can be cut. They log enough each year to bring in the necessary revenue. Isn't that about it?"
"Probably. I really don't know the family policy about timber, though."
"That's about it, I'd say," Thorn went on. "And mine, although it looks like a lazy man's tactics, is much the same. I bought this stretch of timber cheaply. By and by, when the time is ripe, I'll log it off or sell it to a logger. I'm doing just what the founder of your family did, Rod, and what your family continues to do. I'm holding property that will steadily increase in value."
He stopped to pick up his pipe and put a match to it. Then he continued in his slow, drawling voice.
"People have often thought me either a sluggard or a fool to sit tight here, as I've done. Some men would throw a crew of loggers in here, rip the heart out of this limit in a season, make twenty or thirty thousand dollars, and go somewhere else to do the same thing. Your pushing, bustling kind of man who doesn't see anything in the woods but so many thousand board feet per acre—that kind of man thinks I'm a damned fool."
"The fact is," he resumed, after a brief pause in this, the longest speech Rod ever heard him make, "I have no expensive social position to maintain, and I'm not keen to pile up a fortune. A reasonable amount of work is good for my liver. But working under pressure, driving other men, worrying over deals and prices and costs and contracts is not only distasteful to me, but I'm not good at it. I know because I did it for fifteen years. I not only didn't like it, but I didn't make money."
"You see," he turned to Rod, with a deprecating sort of smile, "men are born different. Some have a beak and claws to rend and tear, and they do rend and tear with the best. Some are bound to kick and gouge their way to the top of the dollar pile. For them that's the real object in life. Others have great foresight to grasp a great opportunity whenever it comes within reach. I imagine the first Norquay was that kind of man. And finally there's the fellow like me; more a dreamer than a doer; inclined to be contemplative rather than actively constructive—or destructive; more apt to take pleasure in seeing a tree grow than in cutting it down; able to work and plan and think clearly in respect of his individual acts, but somehow incapable of herding and driving and compelling other men to function for him. That's me. I pioneered in logging here on the coast. I was one of the first to introduce powerful machinery to handle this big timber. I made a little for myself now and then. But mostly I made money for some one else. And I got tired of going ahead under full steam. My wants are simple. My family's wants are simple. A reasonable amount of leisure. A reasonable amount of security. A chance to read and think. Freedom from hurry and worry. That seemed good enough for me. And this," he waved his hand toward the timber banked thick on the slopes behind his house, "has given it to me for several years. Each season I cut a few hundred dollars' worth of cedar,—without making a dent in the total. Each year the value of the stand increases. There's twenty-two million feet on my ground. When I choose to sell, it will bring me enough for a decent living as long as I'm likely to live, and something left over for Mary. That's good enough."
Half an hour later Rod heard theHaidawhistle far down channel. The tide had gone slack. He rowed back, a little keen to see Phil. And as he crossed he looked back at Oliver Thorn's timber and thought to himself that Thorn was doing precisely what the earlier Norquays had done. He had shrewdly based his material security on possession of a natural resource. There was no accident in Oliver Thorn's ownership. The man had a sound design that differed in scope but not in kind from the design whereby the Norquays had become what they were and held what they had.
This was the man Norquay senior had termed a dreamy-eyed incompetent.
Rod smiled. It wasn't like his father to make blunders in estimating men. Then he fell to thinking of Grove,—and he was not so sure of the paternal judgment. Or, was it that his own distaste for his elder brother blinded him to excellent qualities and abilities easily visible to a father's eye?
"When I went away you were talking about going on your own," Rod said. "What kind of a twist have things taken here? You seem to be pretty much the whole works now."
"Only by proxy," Phil answered. "Somebody has to be on the job more or less. I don't mind so long as they give me a fairly free hand. Matters here have become secondary in the Norquay scheme of things, but they're still quite a handful for somebody."
"Loosen up," Rod commanded. "You weren't at all explicit in any of your letters, and the governor confined himself mostly to checks and a few casual admonitions. Has Grove quit Hawk's Nest for a career in business? What does this trust company thing amount to?"
"Lord knows. Did you go and see the plant?"
"I wasn't interested. Seeing the governor was away I only stayed in town overnight. I saw an electric sign in huge letters on a roof downtown."
"The sign of progress. The oriflamme of a budding financier, a comet flashing athwart the financial firmament," Phil intoned with ironic inflection. "That's Grove. Hawk's Nest and timber was too cramped a field for his vaulting ambition. He couldn't be satisfied with the one-horse show that was started here a century back. Our brother is by way of shedding a golden luster on the name, Rod."
Rod snorted.
"What's he after?"
"That's whatIask," Phil replied. "Echo answers what? Money, is one's natural answer. But that doesn't follow. He could live here and run things in the same offhand manner that we're used to, and have more money than he would ever need. There's always been a surplus. Do you know what the income of this estate runs for the last twenty-five years?"
Rod shook his head.
"Over a hundred thousand on the average. It could be doubled, trebled, if one cared to go at the timber rough-shod. So it isn't money," Phil continued. "The governor would have been perfectly satisfied to turn everything over to him as soon as he married. On the contrary, he persuaded the gov. to set him up in this blatant money-grabbing scheme. Personally, I think private banking and trust fund operations are just a glorified sort of pawnbroking. We've always made our money out of productive enterprises. I can understand Christ's indignation at the money changers. They're damned parasites. Grove, however, has no such peculiar ideas. He's become a man of affairs. The two years he spent in New York and London financial circles have turned his head, I think. Talks in millions. A wizard of finance. A wizard! Grove could always fool women. He never fooled a man of keen perception—outside of his own father. Grove's actually proud of this trust company thing, you know. Nailed our name to his financial flag-pole. And he has associated with him five or six of the shrewdest business buccaneers on the coast,—Deane, Arthur Richston, Mark Sherburne, and his father-in-law, John Wall. I don't like it, Rod."
"It's his funeral," Rod answered carelessly, "if they pluck him."
"I wasn't thinking about him," Phil drawled. "It's the rest of us. We wouldn't like a smash. Maybe I'm pessimistic."
"What does the pater think of it?"
"Oh, backs him stoutly. Keeps all his loose change in the Norquay Trust. Believes Grove is launched on a wonderful career. Maybe he is. But I don't think our beloved brother has the necessary grip for that sort of career. He loves power; he's the chesty sort. He revels in big affairs. And I don't think he really knows what power consists of, nor how skilfully and wisely to direct affairs."
"Did you ever like Grove, or trust him?" Rod asked bluntly. "Did you ever get on with him?"
"No." Phil answered as bluntly. "I wouldn't admit it to any one but you, old kid. But I don't. I never did. I never will. We'll always be secretly at odds in everything."
"Same here. I wonder why?" Rod uttered reflectively. "Suppose we're subconsciously resentful—jealous because he's first and entitled to the lion's share?"
"No, no. Nothing so petty. It's fundamental. Grove looks like us. But heisn'tlike us, only outside. Inside he's different. They can talk all they damn please about heredity, environment, cultural influences. They don't account for some people. Grove's a snob at heart. He's gross. He's a fairly clever—or cunning—good-looking healthy animal, with a purely animal psychology under a veneer of good manners. And I suppose one should view him with a degree of tolerance, because he was certainly born what he is. But one doesn't like that type of man as the chief representative of one's family."
"And you think the governor fondly imagines Grove is quite a decent sort and plays the game like a gentleman—a bit masterfully, but still according to Hoyle?" Rod mused.
"Absolutely." Phil frowned. "To me, that's the devil of it. He's honest, the governor is, and a bit old-fashioned in some notions. And he's fairly tolerant and pretty blind to certain obvious defects of character close home. The fact is, old kid, he's rather proud of his three sons. He'd wink at almost anything one of us did—in reason. And Grove comes first. He simply can't see Grove with critical eyes. It's quite natural, Rod."
Rod would have pursued the subject farther, but there now approached them in a body, where they sat dangling their legs over theHaida'scabin, their male house guests armed with gear for salmon fishing at the upper narrows.
That evening, as they drew clear of a nook in Stuart Island at slack water, a long, lean, cruising yacht, canopied, mahogany tenders shining in boat chocks on deck, her bow wave curling out with a hissing sound, swept by theHaida.
Young Deane's eyes followed her enviously.
"Classy packet that," he said to Rod. "I was out on her a couple of week-ends. She's a dream inside. Fast, too; shows her heels to everything in Vancouver Harbor."
Rod smiled. Grove's yacht interested him less than the owner. Grove was expanding. Decidedly. Rod had a fanciful vision of his brother as a balloon, swelling and swelling to the ultimate overstrain and collapse. A whimsy, of course. Finance was profitable. Money bred money. Yet it seemed strange that a Norquay could turn his back on Hawk's Nest, its ordered comfort, its atmosphere of security, its leisure and its peaceful beauty, to sweat over making a barrel of money only to spend it on such costly toys. It was even more strange to think that their father abetted and encouraged Grove in this departure from the old accepted way.
"Makes this look like small potatoes, eh?" Rod found Phil grinning at his elbow as they rolled in theKowloon'swash.
"Must be money in trust companies," Rod observed sardonically. "That's bigger than theHermes, which old R.S.N. sailed around the Horn."
"I wonder whathe'dthink of Grove?" Phil murmured.
"I wonder," Rod echoed.
He repeated that mordant query to himself in the course of the evening. Grove brought a dozen people on theKowloon, a further installment of Deans and Richstons, and several young men and women whom Rod met for the first time, but whose names were familiar enough as people who were "somebody" in B.C. They had dinner aboard, but afterward they took possession of Hawk's Nest, hauled a piano outside and danced on the wide verandah or wandered over the grounds in pairs. Rod detected a livelier tempo than had been common to Hawk's Nest gatherings. They drank a little more freely than he remembered as the usual thing there. By eleven o'clock two or three of the men were quite comfortably "lit up." Rod noticed that, even before Laska drew his attention to them.
"Young Deane and Tommy Richston are tight," she said amusedly. "Look at their eyes. See how very solemn Tommy is."
They were sitting by an open window in the living room, watching the glide and dip and sway of the dancing couples.
"Yes, rather," he replied. "Time to turn off the tap when the guests get pickled."
"It won't hurt them," Laska remarked indifferently. "They generally behave well. Isn't it lovely here, Rod? So clean and fragrant with the woods all about and the sea at your door. I love this old place."
"You ought to," Rod smiled. "You belong to it now."
"Do I?" she said. "I hadn't thought of it in just that way."
It struck Rod that he might find it difficult to explain just what he meant. Hefeltthat he belonged to this old gray house. Some indefinable bond existed between him and it, something woven about him by heredity, usage, affection, by the generations of his blood who had belonged there before him. Could any one else feel that way about Hawk's Nest? He didn't know.
He looked at Laska with frank admiration. She was one of them now, in a special sense. One of the clan. She was a beautiful woman. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat straw, her eyes a very dark blue, luminous, expressive. She had grace and dignity. Rod had a feeling that she must be innately kind and generous. He wondered why in the name of God such a woman preferred a man like Grove to a man like Phil.
"I hoped we'd live here," she said presently. "But Grove has to be in town."
"Has to be?"
Rod could not help the inflection. Laska looked more keenly at him.
"Do you also disapprove of Grove?" she inquired.
"I also?" Rod countered. "I don't get you, sister-in-law."
"I don't really know you very well, Rod," she said softly. "But I'm quite sure you're not stupid."
She eyed him with a tantalizing smile that made Rod uncomfortable.
"You're just as well pleased we don't live here, aren't you now?" she went on. "And you aren't the only one with that attitude, are you?"
Rod considered a moment. He thought he understood her. And he retaliated, in so far as his breeding permitted him to retaliate. He had a retentive memory to draw on.
"I told you once that only the oldest son counted for much in this family," he replied, with a short laugh. "You drew the lucky number. Isn't that good enough?"
She sat silent for a few seconds.
"I am answered," she said briefly.
The subject ended there. Some one came to get Laska for a dance. Rod, who was tired of dancing, a little bored with the high spirits which had originated chiefly in various decanters, betook himself upstairs to bed.
Something had gone wrong with Hawk's Nest. The old sense of cohesion, of the family as a unit, seemed lacking. Rod missed that atmosphere of solidarity. Until now he had in a vague fashion regarded his brothers, his father and grandfather, his sister Dorothy, the little groups of first and second cousins as links in a chain. There might possibly be a weak link or two—he considered Grove such a one—nevertheless it had been a chain forged of kinship, common aspirations, interests, traditions. For each of them and for all of the fairly numerous brood descended collaterally from that adventurous fur-trader, Hawk's Nest and the Norquay estate had formed a cherished background, a guarantee of certain rights and privileges, a sure wellspring of reasonable opportunity to make the best of the business of living.
Materially it was still that. But Rod had a curious impression of the old spirit having subtly withdrawn, of them all having become individualistic, separate entities with conflicting desires, ambitions, both active and potential,—individual egos unleashed, clashing, bent head-long on each his own ends, without regard to the others.
He blamed Grove for this,—and his father for letting Grove make it so. Grove was the disturbing element. He was turning everything inside out. Rod didn't like the people Grove surrounded himself with. He resented Hawk's Nest being subject at Grove's pleasure to an invasion by free-drinking, slang-slinging people, whose pursuit was not so much pleasure as excitement.
He grew drowsy in the midst of such reflections. After all, it didn't matter much. Especially to him. Probably this crowd was not much different from the general run of people who had money to spend and time to burn. He supposed that he was hypersensitive, too damned particular, finicky,—too infernally quick on the hair trigger of an impression.
And so he fell asleep.
Grove's guests danced, drank, sang, tennised, gossiped and played cards during their waking intervals for forty-eight hours. Then the white yacht fled down the sea lanes to bring her owner to his mahogany desk on Monday morning rejuvenated by a quiet week-end at his country house, as the social page of the VancouverProvinceduly chronicled.
Perhaps the item was correct enough in one particular. Possibly Mr. Grove Norquay was rejuvenated, or refreshed. Quietness would not so have restored his force. Next to display, Grove liked action. Whatever else he might lack, he was endowed with abundant energy. He was a big man, like most of the Norquays, handsome, with an engaging manner. It was scarcely correct for Phil to say that Grove never fooled men. If he did not fool them he had a faculty of influencing them favorably to himself. That faculty had made men like Arthur Richston and John P. Wall willing to let him stir the financial pot in which their money bubbled as well as his own. A young man in search of a career would not have commended himself to them simply by reason of his search. Even with the Norquay prestige behind him he would still need that indescribable quality which is called magnetism for lack of a more definite term,—that personal power of suasion which successful motor-car salesmen and old-world diplomats alike exercise to secure signatures on the dotted line. Good men have that persuasiveness, that ability to compel confidence, and bad ones also. To which category Grove Norquay belonged it would be difficult to say. There is the blind power of circumstance to consider.
In this year of our Lord, 1911, Grove was a brilliantly successful young man in a city where success was most completely estimated by the noise a man and his money made. Grove was as well satisfied with himself as any young man could be whose career was assuming meteoric aspects. Everything he touched turned out well. The Norquay Trust Company seemed to exercise a hypnotic drawing power over investors with loose funds. There was a speculative movement in land rising to a climax in Vancouver, a something that was to assume gigantic proportions in the following eighteen months. Already shoe clerks were beginning to go without lunch to make payments on plots of land in distant suburbs, and to go about their duties dreaming of the quick turn-over and the long profit.
All of which, when it occurs in a seaport in conjunction with the building of two transcontinental railway terminals, an expansion of shipping, an upturn in mining and timber, breeds that phenomenon of Western America, the "boom." Great is the confidence of the participants,—and the entire community participates. For the time being it is forgotten that whatever goes up must come down. It is a great game while it lasts. Better than draw poker. Better than playing the ponies. It is legitimate, respectable, as well as thrilling. It isn't gambling. It isn't even speculation. It is investment.
Of course a trust company with a well-defined and legally restricted field of operations was not actively participating in this frenetic exchange of land titles, notes, mortgages, options and hand-to-hand agreements of sale. But the rapidity and number of such transactions created a business which Grove's company absorbed so thriftily that its growth shamed the furious beanstalk.
The Norquay Trust occupied the first two floors of a new building named after itself, on the roof of which rose a steel skeleton covered with incandescent bulbs, the sign Rod had marked on his return.
Here Mr. Grove Norquay appeared to feel that he moved at last in his proper sphere. He loved the sound and echo of huge sums, of complicated transactions, of facing men over a massive desk and deciding matters that involved much money. He liked noise, action—it gave him a sense of power, of irresistibility—just as he liked being master on his own yacht and host to a crowd of people who talked a little louder and faster and drank a little oftener and danced with a trifle more abandon than was really necessary. He could have a "whale of a time" with a lively crowd, whether the party was stag or mixed. On dead ones, either social or financial, Grove wasted no moment of his valuable time. A man with money and a sporting inclination, a woman with any pretensions to youth and beauty, could be reasonably sure of Grove Norquay's consideration,—at any rate for a time. He esteemed the good mixers as the salt of the earth. But they had to be the "right" sort of people. By his birth, training and antecedents Grove held himself duly qualified to judge of that beyond dispute.
He was attempting to convey the weight of this mature judgment to Rod one forenoon some days later. Rod and Phil had come down with theHaidato meet their father on his return from a trip South. A mild curiosity to see Grove's shop had led Rod into the Norquay Trust Building. Grove had shown him about and explained the scope of the undertaking with what interested Rod as ill-concealed pride.
"I believe you're all puffed up about this thing," he said amusedly, when they sat down at last in Grove's private office.
"Well, why not?" Grove conceded. "I organized it. It's a pretty big show, and it's my show."
"After all, it's only a money-making scheme, isn't it? You don't make anything or do anything, do you? You just handle sums of money and grab off a percentage. Eh?" Rod said innocently. He was thinking of Phil's phrase: glorified pawnbroking.
"Oh, tush—you don't understand." Grove dismissed that.
Then he proceeded to fraternal advice, slightly tinged with remonstrance.
"Didn't I see you walking along Beach Avenue with that Thorn girl after dinner last night? I understand she's down here going to school."
"Probably you did," Rod answered indifferently.
Grove frowned.
"It's hardly the thing for you to cultivate her publicly," he observed. "A fellow can't carry on these country kid acquaintances in town. Aren't there girls enough in your own crowd for you to stroll along the beach with?"
"Look here," Rod challenged earnestly, "with your record in the female line you're barking up the wrong tree when you start advising me to keep within bounds. My own taste and judgment are quite as good as yours."
Grove eyed him coolly.
"Myrecord in the female line," he murmured. "I didn't know I had one."
"No? You mean you didn't know I knew. Do you think I've been deaf, dumb and blind for the last six years? Even if I had been, you must remember you went to McGill before me. There are still a few lingering odors of you on the campus, and in some of the downtown joints."
"Well, well," Grove said cynically. "You aren't so slow as you seem, after all. So far as Mary Thorn is concerned, your taste is good enough—but your judgment is damned poor. I always told the pater he kept you cloistered too much, Rod. If you have a crush on the Thorn person, go to it. But do keep her out of sight. Saves talk. These nobodies from nowhere always mess things up by trying to horn into your own crowd if they get half a chance. You understand?"
Rod looked at him soberly.
"You're a piggy sort of creature, d'ye know it, Grove?" he said with icy deliberation. "I sometimes wonder what induced Laska Wall to marry you."
A faint tinge of color crept into Grove's face.
"I sometimes wonder myself," he said slowly, as if the thrust had set him thinking. "However, that's beside the point. If I made an ass of myself on certain occasions, that's no reason you should. Of course," he waxed sarcastic, "if you are like Phil, a youth of virginal purity, all I need to say is that it's advisable for you to seek your chemically pure companionship in your own class, on the streets or off."
"Your idea of virginal purity doesn't interest me," Rod said as he rose. "If Phil and I happen to have certain ideas about common decency which you can't understand, why, that's your misfortune. But if you want to get along with me, eldest brother, you'll leave my moral and social training alone. If you don't like my associates, you can ignore them. Keep your homiletics for your customers."
"All right, kiddo," Grove agreed ironically. "You're a Norquay and you can do no wrong. But I can tell you from experience, Roderick, old kid, that these poor men's daughters generally figure on getting something out of traveling with fellows like us. Believe me, they do."
Rod didn't answer. He was angry, both at Grove's advice and insinuation. In another second he would have been ready to blow up. So he walked to the door. In a square mirror let into a panel he got a glimpse of Grove, half-turned in his chair, looking after him with a slightly puzzled expression.
Laska had asked Rod to luncheon at the house. Grove lunched at his club. Phil had vanished about his own affairs after declining Laska's invitation. He wondered if Phil suffered from constancy; if love were a thing that endured beyond hope. He couldn't say. There was a difference in Phil. But there was a subtle sort of change manifest in everything Rod knew. At any rate he, himself, had no reason to find anything but pleasure in lunching with his sister-in-law.
So he went alone. He walked the twenty blocks that lay between the downtown traffic roar and Grove's home in the West End, thinking of his brother's cynical advice. In so far as it bore upon Mary Thorn, Rod dismissed it contemptuously. He had met Mary by such chance as brings people together in any town. She was on her way to keep an engagement and he had walked with her the length of the beach along English Bay. But Rod had foresightedly provided himself with her telephone number. Now in a spirit closely akin to defiance he stopped at a pay station and called her up. Yes, she was free that afternoon. Yes, she would go for a walk with him.
Rod went on, more placidly. She was the same Mary Thorn who used to run the rapids with him, but a little taller. She had attained womanhood and bore herself accordingly. Rod had never been able to make invidious class distinctions between himself and her. He couldn't now. Along with Phil she had a place in his affection which she had preëmpted long before either was aware of sex. Rod's active and analytical mind had lately come to the conclusion that of all the people young and old in this land of his birth there were only two who could stir him to any warmth,—Phil and Mary. That puzzled him. He supposed he must be an emotional freak. He had chums in Montreal. He knew men, women and girls by the score here in Vancouver. He regarded girls here and elsewhere with sophomoric condescension. He never missed them when they were absent. And he had missed Mary Thorn. How much he didn't realize until he met her again, after two years. It was very odd. The emotional and intellectual experience of twenty couldn't account for such facts.
Rod soon gave over trying. He found himself turning in at Grove's gate, and Laska coming forward in a hall to greet him.
Late June had ushered in a burst of heat. Their luncheon was served on a porch screened by wistaria. The purple clusters of bloom scented the cool shade. A seven-foot ivy-grown wall enclosed the grounds, shutting away everything but the neighboring upper stories and the high, green timber of Stanley Park on the west. It was almost as quiet there as in the woods. The downtown rumble was a far surflike mutter that made a tonal background for the hum of bees foraging in the wistaria.
Laska talked at intervals. She had grown up in Montreal. She asked Rod about places and people there, grew briefly reminiscent about her childhood. Curled in a hammock after luncheon, she was silent for a time.
"Rod," she said abruptly, "when your father comes—he's due to-morrow, isn't he?—do something for me, will you?"
"Of course," Rod answered. "What shall it be?"
"Suggest to him that it would be pleasant to have me up at Hawk's Nest for a few weeks."
She regarded him thoughtfully, her lips slightly parted. Rod was puzzled. He hesitated.
"Will you, Rod?"
"Certainly. But—but why don't you just come? Simply say you want to—and come."
"It isn't quite so simple as that," she explained. "I couldn't go unless your father rather made a point of it to Grove. Grove's funny. He isn't at all keen on me going there, except when we cruise up on a week-end. And I'd like to go there and stay awhile, quietly. I'm fed up with Vancouver. I'm tired. I want to rest."
"You can't think what a giddy whirl we live in," she went on presently. "Dinner parties, general hilarity; just one thing after another. One has to go whether one feels up to it or not. One gets so weary of it. Get your father to have me come to Hawk's Nest, Rod dear."
Rod promised.
She went off on another tack after that. With a touch of malice she brightly recounted the quasi-scandal pertaining to certain people in their set, people Rod knew slightly. It seemed to afford her ironic amusement.
"But," Rod observed in comment on a rather piquant anecdote concerning a pretty widow and a man of family who cut a big figure in local industry, "that's pretty raw if it's true. And if it's just gossip, it's rotten nasty gossip."
"I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite true," she said indifferently. "Some people do what they like. Others have to toe the line. It's a queer, queer world, Rod."
He left about two-thirty. Striding up Robson Street to Mary's boarding place, he shook off a half-formed impression that Laska was bored and discontented, that she found the only world she knew a rather hollow affair. There was a vague fretfulness about her. It was just an impression. And it was not his concern. Mary Thorn was decidedly his concern, for that afternoon at least. Laska, Grove, the Norquay Trust vanished out of his mind at sight of Mary Thorn.
For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? Rod's brain registered flashes of himself holding her close, of her face smiling into his,—unwelcome visions like that while his lips uttered sentences about Montreal, continental Europe, books, plays he had seen, suchpronunciamentogenerally as the conversation required of a second-year university man who had been abroad.
"I wonder if this is the way a man starts in getting foolish over some particular girl?" Rod thought to himself, "Or am I just like Grove and some fellows I know?"
This while he told her of a quaint old place in Scotland, where he had visited a branch of distant kin, the summer before.
Mary listened, talked in her normal quiet way, turning to him occasionally with a smile that fluttered briefly across her face and made her eyes light up.
There was no provocative suggestion about her. It was nothing she did or said that stirred and puzzled Rod. It was merely herself, her presence, a pleasant-faced girl with a low, throaty note in her voice and a slender well-formed body which had a peculiar grace of movement. Magnetic? That overworked term to define the indefinable. What was there about her to stir a man so? Rod asked himself that after he had said good-by to her at five o'clock.
And there flitted across his consciousness a faint, troublesome perception of dynamic forces in human relations of which a man must acquire knowledge empirically, concerning which all the textbooks are silent.
Rod spent the months of July and August very much as he had spent all the Julys and Augusts of earlier years. That is to say, he paddled a canoe, swam, sailed, fished trout and salmon, made himself agreeable to sundry guests, male and female. About Hawk's Nest no material change appeared, however Rod might vainly wrinkle his brows over a subtle transformation which he could not analyze, but which he felt as a blind man feels the nearness of some insensate mass. He was free from the tutorial direction. Mr. Spence had definitely retired into a pensioned leisure, having done his full duty by this generation of Norquays. Rod was twenty, his brain and his beard both in training for manhood. He could lounge or play as he elected, come and go as he desired.
Not so long before, measured by seasons, life had seemed to him the simplest sort of affair. One took it perforce as it came. Certain things were ordered, irrevocable; other things a matter of choice; a few, a very few transitory phases of existence, a matter of chance.
McGill, Mary Thorn, Grove, his grandfather, and the old, old journal of Roderick Sylvester Norquay began to make him question this definitely limited philosophy of living. The element of chance loomed larger. It even invaded the sacred precincts of choice.
He looked at Mary Thorn as they sat on the porch of her father's house, as they ate a pocket lunch beside the Granite Pool with their rods and creels beside them, as they slipped in the dugout alongshore with the open diapason of the rapids welling up, and he wondered by what necromancy of body or spirit she could so effortlessly set his blood racing, drew his flesh toward her as a magnet draws steel, until his resistance was stoutly tested. How? Why? Rod could explain it simply,—but his explanation failed to satisfy. It rode his imagination as something that transcended mere fleshly instinct, which he understood well enough, of which in his sophisticated world he had observed sundry manifestations.
Rod had once said to himself that the family had become static. He had felt a regret for this grooved state; all the great adventuring done; all the great efforts and endurings and activities accomplished. Ease flowed about them in a wide stream. And Grove was the fine flower of it all—a comet flashing across the local heavens, with a tail of yachts, mistresses, vulgar display spreading luminously behind him.
Grandfather Norquay sat in his chair by a sunny window or walked with his stick slowly about the grounds,—a tall, spare, silent old man, thinking his contained, regressive thoughts. Rod would look at him and wonder. He would look at Mary Thorn and wonder. He would look at Grove, when that kinetic gentleman marshaled his house parties down theKowloon'sgangplank, and wonder. Then he would entrench in a library chair, fortified by cigarettes, and read the typed copy of his great-great-grandfather's journal, and his wonder,—which was no more than the vital curiosity of an inquiring mind—would turn from the general to the particular.
He would lay down that hundred-year-old document, clasp his hands behind his head, and strive to construct imaginatively for himself a future based on the known factors of the present and the past. Strangely enough he always came out of these spells of day-dreaming with a sense of futility, with an envy of his forbears, with a regretful sense of having been born too late. Romance might still be a lusty godlet but he moved beyond Rod's ken. He would visualize old Roderick on the poop of theHermes, pistol in belt, peering out from under a three-cornered hat, one eye on the beauty of a mountainous, thick-forested coast, the other keenly on pelts of sea otter and the profitable risks of barter with savages. Battles with the sea, with a hostile environment, a fine courage, and a far, future-piercing vision. Rod saw the log stockade ringed about by painted Chilcotins, arrows flying, muskets cracking; the battle fought and the dead buried; life continuing in armed watchfulness; the slow weaving of the planned pattern.
"The old fellows had all this in mind," Rod murmured once. "Order and security and well-being. I wonder if they saw everything so firmly established that it has become rigid? That all the Norquays can do now is to live and die like gentlemen. I wonder if old Roderick would have been such a keen, far-sighted old blade if he could have seen the fifth generation as it is? Maybe he would regard us with pride. I wonder? Anyway, they had a whale of a time those days. The Trojans and Spartans had nothing on them. And there has been no Homer to write an Odyssey. No Iliad of the pioneers. The epic of fur and timber and the conquering of a wilderness peopled with savages. I wonder if I could?"
Rod nursed that idea from the f[oe]tal stage to a lusty infancy. He bore it, still in its swaddling clothes, back with him to the university when hot August wore into cool September, and the smoke haze of forest fires vanished before the autumn rains.
He would never become a financial generalissimo like Grove. Unlikely that he would ever be called upon to step into Phil's executive shoes. Unless he voluntarily embarked upon a voyage toward some material port, he would never have to buckle on armor and joust for dollars in the commercial tourney. But—if he were able, if he had the gift and the patience to develop it—he might do these adventuring progenitors a service by making them live again for their descendants—a generation, Rod held, deprived of romance and bold enterprise, limited and circumscribed and in danger of stifling spiritually in the midst of a material plenty.
This fascinating project in the field of creative effort he kept to himself—even from Mary Thorn, who had always aided and abetted him in fanciful undertakings, whose moods and reactions seemed mysteriously yet infallibly to keep step with his own.
Time bridges many a gap in the life of a man, periods that have no substance in them, no matter how occupied, how filled with minor incident; stretches of days, months, years flow as unctuously as syrup from a tilted spout, as straight and open as a white road across a level plain. Then all at once comes a divergence, a break in the flow, new vistas and compelling actions. Something leaps lancewise at the heart or brain out of the peaceful monotony. Something to be attained looms suddenly like a flame in the dark. Or he finds himself catapulted into some unforeseen clash, tingling to the shock of conflict.
Rod Norquay finished the formal education of a gentleman's son in the next two years. He acquitted himself according to the family tradition, escaping high honors without being plucked. He came home in 1913 with a B.A., a few lettered sweaters, a miscellaneous assortment of classical and scientific and philosophical odds and ends imprinted on a fairly retentive memory,—and a half-formed doubt of the utility or advantage of formal education. Having been officially labelled as the finished product of the educational machine he supposed that he would somehow be expected to justify the pains and expense of the cultural process. But where or how he had no idea. He was finished with school. He was home again. Everything was as before. If he were trained for any specific purpose, that purpose was as yet hidden from him. The desire to write an epic novel scarcely qualified as a purpose. In the outwardly simple but internally complicated affairs of the Norquay establishment he was a superfluous unit. Apart from the family he was, as yet, of less consequence than any logger on the Norquay pay roll.
"What's the use of being brought into the world, fed, clothed, and educated, if you're of no use or consequence to anybody?" he observed to Mary Thorn. "Nobody needs me to help solve their problems. I have none of my own—none that amount to much. That was all attended to before I was born."
"You don't know how lucky you are," Mary retorted. "You can do whatever you want to do. You've got everything that most men have to struggle for all their lives—and then don't get."
"But I don't seem to want to do anything that amounts to a hill of beans," Rod replied. "It's like a football game against a third-rate team. No fun in a walkaway. I have the instincts of a—a—what shall I say? Buccaneer? Pioneer? Adventurer? I don't see much chance for anything but a money-making adventure. I don't need to do that, even if it were to my taste. I couldn't get much kick out of making two dollars grow where only one flourished. Can't you show me a windmill or two, Mary?" he ended whimsically. "I'll mount Rosinante and knock 'em over."
"Every avenue is open for you," Mary declared. "You can map out any sort of career you choose."
"What, for instance?" he inquired. "There has to be a motive. Most of 'em are financial. There's the law, and science, and the arts. I don't warm up to a career as a matter of duty. I've talked to the governor, seeking light in my darkness. He blandly observes, 'Suit yourself, my boy. There's really no hurry,' and goes on reading his book or paper, as the case may be. I'm inclined to believe the radicals at school were right. They claimed that economic urges lay at the root of all purposeful action in the world of affairs. Hence, I lack the strongest motive of all toforceme to action."
"Haven't you any secret ambition of any sort whatever?" Mary inquired.
Rod reflected a second.
"Well, I won't commit myself," he replied. "Have you?"
"Yes," she answered demurely. "To be successful, beautiful and beloved."
"Successful—what do you define as success?"
"Act of succeeding; consequence, issue, outcome or result of an undertaking, whether good or bad," she laughed.
"Oh, hang Webster," he returned. "What's your real, honest-to-goodness idea of success? What do you want most of all? What do you want to do? What do you live for? What's your heart set on as an objective?"
And Mary, sobered a little by the sudden earnestness of his tone, could only shake her head.
"I'm not quite sure," she confessed. "There must be something over the hill—but I don't know what it is."
"Funny," he ruminated. "We're both in the same boat."
"How absurd," she protested instantly. "You give me a pain, Rod. Born to the purple and growling about it! In the same boat, indeed. The only point of similarity is that we're both dissatisfied with what—with what's in sight. You're sighing because no new worlds beckon you to conquer. Everything's at your hand. All you have to do is select your weapon and choose your field. All the prestige of wealth, good family, is at your back. You go somewhere, you want to do something; you mention your name; somebody says, 'Oh, one of the Norquays,' and the way is made easy."
"What's the use of an easy road if there's nothing at the end of it?" Rod asked impatiently.
"Oh, your breakfast must have disagreed with you," she flung back.
"I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair,A road that is an ordered road, like a nun's evening prayer;But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where,"
Rod quoted. "Perhaps that expresses it best. If there is anything in heredity the original Roderick's restlessness has cropped out in me—without either his capacity or his opportunity for doing things. Think of the resolution, the spirit of that old fish, the vision. He saw far beyond himself. He must have had a dynamic energy. Whatever he wanted he went after, tooth and toenail. And look at the result—in the fifth generation—of his pains and planning. The governor's idea of life is as rigid as granite: good food, efficient service, genteel restraint in all things, taboos and forms of all sorts. Grove's a glorified shopkeeper, with all a vulgar shop-keeper's love of display. Phil's the official watchdog of the family's material interests. And I'm a negligible quantity. Rum lot. And I'm the only one who isn't perfectly satisfied with everything. Even old Phil would just grin if I talked to him the way I'm talking to you."
"He'd be right," the girl replied slowly. "You've got what everybody's after,—ease, security, leisure. You aren't chafed by anything sordid. You ought to realize how fortunate you are and be satisfied. You find life pleasant. Isn't that good enough?"
"Why, yes, so far as it goes," Rod admitted. "Only nobody who gets beyond purely superficial thinking is ever satisfied with mere pleasantness. I'm not a cow to lie down in a clover field and chew my cud forever."
"I give you up," Mary said. "You're a discontented pendulum."
"It's the fault of my education," Rod returned with mock humility.
"Education is a mixed blessing sometimes," Mary said in a tone that brought him to surprised attention. "It shouldn't be bestowed indiscriminately on those who can't live up to it, who can't gratify any of the cravings and dreams that education breeds. Education, if it's thorough, destroys too many illusions—illusions that one must hold as realities, if one is poor, a nobody, and without a chance to be anything else."
"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "you don't feel that way about it, surely?"
"Now and then—not always," she murmured. "It's like loving a thing and hating it, too. There are times when Euripides, and Housman's lyrics, and Thomas Hardy don't fit in with cooking and cotton stockings—when poetic and artistic visions of what-might-be tantalize like glimpses of a cloud-hidden moon. Why should one sharpen one's perception of beauties that are beyond one's reach? I should have been trained in domestic science or nursing, or selling fripperies to rich women, instead of being put through the cultural hotbed of a university. They meant well. But unless a girl has a ready-made: social background, or a decided talent, the so-called higher education is only a handicap."
"Oh, come now. Hardly," Rod protested.
"No? You don't know anything about people outside of your own comfortable, spoon-fed class, Rod. That's the trouble. I do. I know my own kind of people first-hand. Three years in the U.B.C. has taught me something about your kind. I've been an outsider—looking in. Money, clothes and manners. Manners are an asset; money is a necessity. If you've got both you can go anywhere, do anything. If you haven't, there's the deadline, and you can't cross. Pretty much everything that a university training fits one for, especially a girl, is across that deadline. It's rather depressing—sometimes."
Rod was dumb for the moment,—because he was not stupid, and he knew what she said was true. He had seen the working out of those unpleasant truths during his own university career. He knew youngsters at McGill sweating and scraping through—boys with steel-bright minds, struggling against the fearful handicap of poverty. He had an inkling now of what old Mark Sherburne meant when he ironically retorted to some one across a dinner table that he didn't need brains—he could buy 'em by the gross. Rod hated the idea of Mary Thorn being embraced in such a category. He reviewed in one panoramic flash her situation and his own. He compared her with girls he knew. Isabel Wall, for instance. Less mind—oh, much less. Isabel was a doll-like creature still. An impractical, useless young woman, even if highly ornamental. Clothes, dances, parties, sports, and men about comprised Isabel's desire of and knowledge of life. Yet she had everything money could buy. She had the entrée everywhere.
Mary had neither money nor more than a glancing acquaintance with those who had. He recalled with a touch of shame that although they had played together from childhood, despite the fact that they had lived within sight of each other for ten years, Mary had never set foot within Hawk's Nest. And he had a swift, disconcerting vision of how difficult it would be for her to get a foothold in the Norquay circle,—or its equivalent.