It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. There was something rotten in such an arrangement. In so far as this clear-eyed girl sitting beside him was concerned, Rod felt that he must do something about it. Why, he didn't pause to consider. He simply felt the compulsion to act, as he would have been impelled to act if some unfairness had been practiced toward himself.
They dropped that subject as if it were a live coal, as if they had both become suddenly wary of self-revelation. And as they continued to speak casually of other things, Rod mentally registered the fact that by some occult process they two, from their divergent poles, seemed to converge always. Six months, a year, two years: the separation in lapsed time didn't seem to matter. When they met again they did not so much begin where they left off, as at once find themselves on common ground, breathing a natural air of intimacy. Girls in Rod's experience were either provocative, kittenish, silly, or rare, lofty-minded creatures whose worship at the shrine of pure intellect was almost an affectation. He had been in the last four years so often between the devil of jazzy damozels and the deep sea of the female highbrow, alternating between amusement and impatience. Mary Thorn came nearest to qualifying as a chum, with the added factor of an elusive personal charm.
They were sitting on the calk-punctured board steps of Oliver Thorn's house. For a minute or two Mary's gaze turned on the slope that ran up to the Granite Pool. Whenever Rod tried to analyze his liking for her, he stressed that quality of self-containedness. She could think her own thoughts as if he were not there. She was thinking them now. He wondered what they were. He had a retentive memory; he was tenacious of impressions. Looking at her, he wondered if she were thinking of the day they sat on the log watching the rapids boil in their pent channel; if she were thinking of that unpremeditated kiss. Recalling it, Rod felt his heart quicken. And, as if some invisible thread linked their minds for an instant, Mary's eyes turned to his with a reminiscent gleam. A faint flush tinted her cheeks. She looked away.
Rod covered her hand with his. She let it lie passive. The touch warmed his blood, filled him with a quick glow. For a moment all the world was shut away, all but himself and her and the hot sunlight on the shining channel water.
He shook off that swift rush of emotion, startled, astonished, a little dismayed. He sat testing the strength of his resolution, wondering at the thing that stirred him so deeply, trying to grasp its substance. Her hand was warm and soft. Faint tremors shook it slightly.
"What a damned shame things are so badly arranged," he said. "Let's fix 'em to suit ourselves, Mary."
She looked at him with a straight, unwinking gaze. Her mouth quivered, then shut tight, lips compressed. The flush that had tinged her creamy skin faded into a pallor on which tiny freckles stood out across the bridge of her nose in pin-points of tan. She tried to withdraw her hand. Rod's grip tightened.
"No," he said. "You can't get away."
"Don't be silly," she whispered. "I hate sentimental men."
"Am I?"
"Well, you're manifesting symptoms."
The color came back to her face with a rush.
"Perhaps you're right."
Rod's fingers relaxed. The words that hovered on the tip of his tongue failed of utterance. Sentimental. It was like cold water on him. He had rather prided himself on his freedom from sentimental episodes.
"Yes, perhaps you're right," he repeated. "I'd have been asking you to marry me in another breath. I have a mind to propose formally, just to see how ruthlessly you would turn me down."
"The ruthless turn-down would come from another source—not from me," she answered somberly.
"You'd be marrying me," Rod repossessed himself of her hand, of both hands, "not my family or my acquaintances. They don't count so much as you think. We could have a whale of a time together, Mary. You're the only girl I know that's real, honest-to-God girl. You always were. I wonder if you have the same queer sort of feeling about me that I have for you?"
"I expect I have," she owned. "I'm not a fool, or a liar, or inclined to be evasive, Rod. I don't care for you in a cool, quiet, calculating fashion. I'm not made that way, any more than you are. But, oh, Rod, I've had a lot of unpleasant wisdom forced on me since you went away four years ago. It won't do. It won't do!"
"Why not?" Rod demanded. "If we choose to say it will, who's to stop us? We're ourselves, and living our lives is our own affair."
"Living our lives isn't just a matter of doing whatever a passionate impulse may urge us to do," she answered slowly. "What do you suppose your family would do and say when you announced your intention of playing King Cophetua to the beggar maid?"
"Whatever they jolly well pleased," Rod growled his defiance. "Besides I'm no king, neither are you a beggar. You exaggerate. Surely you haven't so humble an opinion of yourself?"
"It isn't humility. Far from it," the girl flashed back. "I may dislike the station in life in which it has pleased God to place me. But don't ever think I'm humble or diffident about it, or myself, or my people. Oh, no, Mr. Roderick Sylvester Norquay. But I don't wear blinkers. I see a lot of things I used to be unconscious of. One of them is that men like you are regarded as one class of beings, and girls like me quite another. Isn't it so?"
Rod sat silent. He was clear-sighted enough to see what she meant. His people—and by his "people" he embraced the whole category of his class—would say quite frankly and emphatically that Mary Thorn "wouldn't do." She wasn't anybody. She had never been anywhere or met any one. In a courteous, matter-of-fact manner they would make an issue of that. They would never countenance and accept Mary Thorn without a tussle. He saw all that, but it did not seem to him vital or final. And he merely sat silent while he sought cogent reasons to show her why these harsh facts she mentioned did not matter so far as they two were concerned. Why should they be governed by exterior restraints, taboos, penalties, if they had a burning need of each other?
He tried to put that into words. But the devils of perversity had entered into Mary. He could not drive them out. He sat there holding her hands, persuading, reasoning, pleading. He had a conviction that emotionally some flame in her leaped to the passionate fire within himself, and that she resisted only by some intellectual force that was stronger than his own. He could master her heart but not her will.
"What do you want out of life that we can't get together better than if you go after it single-handed?" he demanded savagely, "Am I not man enough for you? Why drag in class and money and all that sort of thing. You know that doesn't count between us. We've got something—there's something in us—that pulls us together. It was there long ago when we were kids paddling around together. It's grown stronger, through four years of almost complete separation. The peculiar magic of that—whatever it is—begins to work as soon as we come together. We don't have to tell each other. We know. Don't we? Isn't it true?"
She nodded, lips parted, eyes bright, looking out over the channel as if she saw more there than the running tide.
"Then," he continued, "if it seems good to us to plan a future in which we shall be partners as well as lovers, why shouldn't we?"
"Too soon, for one thing," she said. "You're twenty-two, Rod; I'm nineteen. I have another year in school. How do we know that what we seem to want so badly to-day will satisfy us completely to-morrow? And even if we were sure, we can't dodge facts. You couldn't just by marrying me make me a Norquay, with all the rights, privileges, and standing of the clan. Neither your family nor your friends would accept me as one of themselves. Certainly not at first. Perhaps never. Look," she continued sadly, "I don't know any one you know. Your people don't know my people—don't want to know them. It would be a struggle. You'd have to pull me up to your level, or be dragged down to mine. They'd say you were marrying out of your class, and they'd punish you in so many subtle ways. You knew Marty Graham, didn't you? Have you seen him and his wife since you came back?"
Rod shook his head.
"I heard he cut school to get married. What about him?"
"You see, it works automatically," Mary said. "He married a girl I knew rather well. She was a senior when I entered the U. They were very much in love. Are yet, for that matter. But they're not very happy about it. Marty's people accept her so grudgingly. His friends have dropped him more or less. Marty had always been used to plenty of money. His father gave him a job in the office at the regular beginner's salary and cut off his allowance. His pay is less than Grace herself is capable of earning. Marty's pride won't permit her to work. She is clever and ambitious, and probably has more real culture than some of the people who either patronize or snub her because she's a nobody—her people are poor as church mice and rather commonplace. The whole thing has got Marty's goat, and it's getting Grace's. Marty can't see why he should be deprived of everything he had been taught to regard as his right. Grace resents the way he's being penalized for marrying her. She is proud, too, and the invisible wall that's thrown up in her face hurts. I can see lots of breakers ahead for them. In fact, they're in them now."
"Marty Graham's a nut," Rod declared. "Can't a man make his own way without his people's backing, if he has to? You don't put me in Marty's class as a husband, I hope."
"He's a nice boy," she sighed. "He can't adjust himself to a way of living for which he had no training, that's all. After a while he'll begin to see so clearly what he's lost by marrying out of his class, as they say. Then the fat will be in the fire. They'll both suffer."
"But I tell you Graham's a nut. A footless ass. He always was," Rod protested earnestly. "Don't his actions prove it? Would I grieve if the family got rather miffed over me marrying the girl I wanted? Not much. I'm not quite so dependent financially as he is, anyhow. That's one of the good points about our affairs. There is no arbitrary cutting off of my small share in the inherited income. Even if there were, I'm quite sure we could play the game so they'd have to take us at our face value—which is quite good enough. Why, you chump," he tried to rally her, "is that all that worries you?"
"It doesn't worry me," Mary said straightforwardly, "because I'm not going to be tied or bound, or tie you, Rod. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way—through school and whatever comes after. I don't know whether my destiny leads to a job or a profession, to art or dishwashing, but it must lead somewhere that I want to go, where I'm qualified to go. I have to find out where."
"It leads here," Rod drew her up close to him for one unresisting moment. "You know it does. I've often wondered if it did—but now I know."
He kissed her. She rested against him a second or two, her eyes shut, hot color flooding her smooth cheeks. Then abruptly she pushed herself away, sat plucking with nervous fingers at the folds of cloth across her knees.
"It doesn't lead there yet," she said shakily. "Perhaps not at all."
She rose to her feet. Rod followed up across the porch, cornered her against the wall.
"You do love me?" he challenged.
"Yes."
"Then why don't you marry me?"
"Because I do love you, Rod," she whispered. "Can't you see? It won't do. Oh, I can't explain. I haven't the words. But the unanswerable logic of it is clear in my mind. I knew we'd come to this. I've dreaded it. We can't go any farther. We'd both lose."
"That's not true. You know it isn't," he shook her roughly. "We're both thoroughbreds. It isn't class that counts. It's character. All the rest is just trimmings. If accident of birth made me a rich man's son, is that any reason why I shouldn't make my own way and my own place in the world if I have to choose between that and conforming to class prejudice in so important a thing as picking a wife? What sort of weak saphead do you think I am?"
"It's no good, Rod," she answered doggedly. "You simply don't understand. You've never had any experience of poverty, of struggle, of sordidness. You'd lose a lot that even money can't buy. And after a while you'd begin to wonder if it were worth while. The world well lost for love is a fine poetic fancy, but nothing more. I tell you quite frankly I'm afraid of love. It brings pain. It brings all sorts of bitter things to men and women, this mating passion. I have an instinct about these things. I won't marry you. I won't be carried away by any sort of feeling for you. I don't even want to see you again. What's the use? Oh, what's the use of our even thinking about it?"
She broke away from him with a wrench of her body. The door slammed behind her. He heard the quick patter of her feet on the uncarpeted floor. Then silence. Rod had a clairvoyant vision of her flinging herself on her bed, of her shoulders shaking, of sobs strangled in her throat. And he stood bewildered. What had seemed so simple had become disastrously complex, bearing implications of grief and pain and loneliness beyond his comprehension.
But there seemed a note of finality in that scene. He could not break down her defences, tenuous as they were.
And so, his heart filled with a strange, heavy ache, Rod walked down to his canoe and put out into the channel. Across the way the red roof and gray gables of Hawk's Nest beckoned him home. Home,—where there were no problems that could not be solved by the writing of a check, Rod thought sardonically.
The inevitable reaction set in. A passionate resentment against Mary Thorn began to burn in him. She was a fool, he said. He himself a greater fool to abase himself before her.
But neither objurgation nor self-bestowed epithets could rid him of that heavy feeling in his breast.
On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken theHaidaand departed for a point up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing, in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see theKowloonclear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive, more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things and persons outside his own sphere.
Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the affairs of B.C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically observed.
Rod eyed his father, sitting on the other side of a periodical-strewn table. He wondered what his father thought of Grove now. But he knew that his father was thinking of quite another matter,—for which he was himself responsible. He continued to look at Norquay senior with a mildly expectant curiosity. The library was the council chamber of the family, the place chosen for edicts, discussions of policy, admonition. From childhood Rod and his brothers had, so to speak, taken their medicine in that pleasant book-lined room. His father now bent a placid eye, slightly quizzical, on his youngest son. Rod waited.
"I really don't see the necessity," Norquay senior remarked at last. "Of course a gentleman need not necessarily be a drone. On the other hand one doesn't need to do a laborer's work in order to acquire knowledge of labor. You've finished school, of course. You have seen a little of the world and as time passes you will undoubtedly see a great deal more. Still, if you're keen on this, I'll speak to Phil. He can give you charge of a camp."
"I don't want to take charge of a camp," Rod said. "I'm not competent, for one thing. I'd either make a hash of it, or leave it all to a foreman—which is not what I'm after. What I mean by going into the woods is to go in and work; take over jobs as I master them. I want to know all there is to be known about timber, from the standing tree to the finished product."
His father continued to eye him.
"What's the idea for such thoroughness—this starting in at the bottom and getting blisters and experience together?"
The root of this expressed resolve lay in a folio of notepaper on a stool beside Rod's chair. But it was not a matter he could make clear, or even discuss with his father. At least, that was how he felt.
"I want to see the wheels go round," he answered lightly.
"Very well," his father agreed. "You shall. I'll speak to Phil. He'll see that you get a job. I take it that's what you want."
"The job's incidental," Rod replied. "I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm not dull. I have an idea I'll pick things up quickly. I want to know something about timber, about methods of handling it, about the men who actually do the handling. I want to get it first-hand. Even a university training should be an advantage in that."
"No doubt," Norquay senior permitted himself an indulgent smile. "If you're so interested in timber, it's a wonder you didn't take a forestry course. The Lord knows we need forestry experts in B.C."
"Why?" Rod inquired. It had no bearing on his purpose, but the remark aroused his curiosity.
"To teach them how to get one prime stick to the booming ground without destroying twice as much more," his father snorted. "To inaugurate a campaign of necessary reforestation. Outside of two or three concerns, logging in B.C. to-day is an orgy of waste. They're skimming the cream of the forest, spilling half of it. Kicking the milkpail over now and then, refusing to feed the cow they milk. However,wedon't do that. I can show you limits we logged when I was a young man that will bear merchantable timber by the time your children are grown, my boy. But to get back to our sheep. You surprise me. If you'd gone in for wild-eyed art, it would have seemed more natural. I never could make you out, my son. You were always a bit dreamy. Sure this isn't just a whim? Want to see what makes the wheels go round, eh?"
"Precisely," Rod agreed. It was as far as he would go.
"Well, it won't do you any harm," his father rambled on, "and you may acquire a useful technique. We are expanding more or less, in spite of a conservative policy. Phil would undoubtedly appreciate a second-in-command before long. He has his hands pretty full. On the whole, I'm rather glad you've taken this notion. I won't last forever, and I'd like to see you and Phil solidly established before my mantle descends on Grove. Timber and land are good, solid foundations."
"What about finance?" Rod asked idly. "That seems pretty gorgeously productive, pater. Does it ever strike you that Grove may outgrow the regulation Norquay mantle?"
"If he does, it will be because he has made a more capacious one for himself," Norquay senior smiled complacently. "I imagine Grove's well able to run his own show and live up to the Norquay tradition, too. He has a genius for affairs."
"So it seems," Rod commented dryly,—and the "affairs" he was thinking of were not the ones his father had in mind. "I wouldn't fancy it myself."
"As a matter of fact, no youngster knows quite what he fancies," his father drawled. "I had a fancy for the law and politics. Two years of reading Blackstone and a term in the Legislature cured me of both. Take your Uncle Mark. He was past thirty before he found his real bent. Follow your natural bent, Rod, whatever it is. You have plenty of time and backing. This beginning on the ground floor may work out. Knowledge of any sort never comes amiss."
So that was settled.
When his father presently left the zoom Rod picked up and opened the folio. He read over forty or fifty closely-written sheets, knitting his smooth young brow over the phrasing.
"Won't do—-only in spots. It's dead. I've got to breathe the breath of life into these people. And I don't seem to know how."
He sprang to his feet, paced the floor.
"All I know is what somebody has told me, what I've read in books," he grumbled. "Cobwebby stuff. Pretty—lots of it—moving—but no substance. All I got out of school was a mass of unclassified facts. I'm crammed with 'em. I know what a lot of great men did—but not how they did it—why they did it. And language. What's the good of a 'steen-thousand-word vocabulary if you've got no peg to hang it on, only the old pegs other people have used till they're all worn and shiny? I'm like a man with a craving to paint beautiful things he can see, with a whole box of color-tubes, and no idea how to apply his colors to get the effects he wants. Or a finely made steam engine all ready to run, greased and oiled and water in the boilers, but no fuel to make steam. I don't know people, humanity, only one kind. I don't know life; only one comfortable groove of it. I don't know anything that really counts, except that I don't know much. I wouldn't be stuck with this, if I did." He faced about, frowning on the pile of written sheets. "I'd be able to make a thing go the way I wanted it, whether it was a story or a girl. I can't do either. I don't know how—and I've got to find out how. As long as I stay in a nice, fenced pasture I never will find out. It's all too cut and dried. Too many taboos. Too many fences. I've got to break through. I'm too much like the pea in the pod—I am green, the pod is green, all the world is green."
He sat down in a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and lost himself in concentrated thought.
The history of Rod's family was part of the history of his native land, in so far as Anglo-Saxon occupancy had made history. The Norquay foothold had been the first individual one established by a white man on the Pacific between Spain to the south and Russia to the north. That century and more of far-seeing purposeful struggle had culminated in the possession of every material benefit men live and work and sometimes vainly die to grasp. Blood had been spilled, storms braved, great risks faced to win that security. To Rod, ever since he could remember, these things had been real, vividly colored episodes enacted under the auspices of the high gods of adventure. He was imaginative, creatively imaginative. Old Roderick Sylvester, the barqueHermes, the sea-otter trading, the bride who fled her English home to fare into strange seas for love, the Chilcotins on their bloody forays, the wooden blockhouse, the first course of masonry, the vast influx of gold-seekers in the Cariboo rush of '58, the completion of Hawk's Nest in all its comfortable permanence,—these were not simply things he knew as part of his antecedents. They were realities, as if they had happened but yesterday under his own eyes. They moved him strangely, deeply. He could reconstruct in his mind all that crowded century. In his mind's eye all the men and women whose bones lay underground about the great red cedar lived and moved and had being once more. He could see them as clearly as he saw Phil and his father and Laska or Mary Thorn.
He had been trying to capture those visions, those personalities, those old stirring times so crowded with pregnant action. He had been trying more or less earnestly for a year and a half. And he had failed. He was aware of his failure. The human equation somehow evaded him when he put pen to paper. He couldn't put his finger with surety on the well-spring of human motive. He hadn't the key to character. Rod had more than a casual acquaintance with literature in two languages. He knew Balzac and O. Henry alike, Homer and George Ade, De Maupassant and the Brontes, Flaubert and Anatole France, Ibsen and Tolstoi and Gorky, Kipling and Hardy and Dickens and Poe. He read these writers, and he saw that they created men and women, creatures of pain and passion, even as God created them. He perceived that they did it, that with deft strokes they clothed their skeletons with flesh and blood and breathed the breath of life into them, so that they strutted and sighed and fought with an emotion-compelling intensity. But he could not do it himself. And he passionately desired to catch and transfix those gorgeous pictures his brain evoked from that pioneering past.
It could be done. It wanted doing. Rod had always wanted to do it. Unconsciously he had been preparing for the task. He had meant to do something like that ever since a day when he had laid down his book and told his tutor that some one ought to write the Iliad of the pioneers, an epic of the men and women who with vision and high courage had tamed a wild land for their children's children, those bold spirits who shrank from nothing by land or sea that promised a reward for enterprise.
Rod thought he knew why there was no magic in his pen, why these magnificent visions eluded capture. It was not a reasoned conviction. He felt his lack instinctively. The first faint labor pains of creative effort apprised him of his need: to plunge into the agitated pool of life instead of viewing it from a distant eminence. That was how the manner of life he had led from childhood struck him now,—as a view from afar. Rod was sophisticated enough to realize that his world was one exclusively occupied by a limited number of fortunate people, holding their preëminence largely by sheer inertia. Statistics, observation, his university delving in economics and sociology, had informed him that for one very wealthy family there were a hundred subsisting in various degrees of comfort, a thousand but a step beyond poverty. Accident of birth, or inherent superiority? How was he to know? How could he know unless he got outside the fences, inhibitions, the unyielding rigidity of his own class? It was rigid, Rod perceived; although that perception had only become clear to him through Mary Thorn's eyes. It had a fetich of superiority which might or might not be valid. Even aside from that, how could he fathom things that were universal above and apart from class and even race—men's hopes and fears and aspirations—unless he established a contact with men? And Rod's instinct, the wise, fundamental instinct of an unwarped nature, urged him to make that contact first among the lowly, where the sweat and strain was greatest. There was the raw material. The Norquays—a little more perhaps than any of their circle—were the finished product. Rod wanted to know the process—and the by-products.
That was why he chose the woods. It might be well to know timber. But it was better to know men. And the way to know men was to live among them, to work with them, to stand with them—if such a thing were possible—upon a common ground. Afterward—he would know what he knew.
So for himself Rod, at the age of twenty-two, defined the approach to knowledge: through experience—plus imagination. And to him it seemed that with the first rebuff life had dealt him, it had also given him a clarified purpose, a definite mark to shoot at.
Rod found work in a logging camp a thing that tried his vigorous young body to the utmost until he hardened somewhat to the task and learned what every manual laborer must learn,—to strike a gait he could hold all day and not one that sapped his energy in two hours. He found a relief he had not expected in physical exertion. He could stop thinking about Mary Thorn. He took to work as some men take to whisky when a dumb ache oppresses them or some haunting memory will not let them be. And Mary Thorn did haunt him so long as he could look across from Hawk's Nest at that weathered cedar house. He told himself that he was a fool to feel that way. But logic had nothing to do with feeling. Irrational or not, it existed. Something in him had burned up full flame. Love, the mating instinct, whatever it was, had settled upon an object and refused to be directed elsewhere. There was more than sex involved. He did not know precisely what else, but he was sure of something above and beyond the urge of the flesh, however strong that might be. Because he couldn't say to himself that there were other girls and be consoled. Another girl wouldn't do.
He couldn't rid himself of the notion that he and Mary Thorn were made for each other. His mind went questing forward and backward and verified the emotional prompting. They had been shaping their own destiny for years. Or was it being shaped for them? He couldn't decide. But he could trace some indefinable influence drawing them together since childhood. There had always been a subtle pleasure in being together, a community of personal interest, a flowing of thoughts and feelings along the same channel that transcended the material factors in their lives. The material factors were prying them apart now. Rod saw that. He knew Mary's inflexibility once she determined on a given course. He had beaten his will against that in simple, childish matters. She would not be driven. She would walk her own road. She had always been a silently determined, lovable little devil, Rod told himself sadly. She was herself uniquely, neither a pattern nor an echo, and he would have loved her for that alone in a world where girls were very largely patterns or echoes, armed for conquest in the arena of men with the sole weapon of their sex.
Rod would say to himself that she was wrong, that money and caste and social privilege made no difference. But his mind was too acute not to see that she was right. Where he differed from her, what he resented most was her conviction of the importance of these things to him. That resentment kept him away from Mary Thorn as much as her positive refusal. He was too much the youthful egotist not to believe he could ultimately break that down. But he did not wish to coerce her, even through her own affection, until he saw a breach in the Norquay wall through which they could walk together.
Meantime he sweated through the last of a hot July. Phil had obligingly supplied him with a "job."
"This working up from the bottom doesn't strike my fancy," Phil had observed. "But if you're keen on it, old kid, have your way. They're apt to give you a rather rough time, though."
Rod grinned at that. He stood now five foot eleven in his socks. One hundred and seventy pounds of bone, muscle and nerves perfectly coördinated. He had made every team in school that he tried for, and he knew what it was to undergo discipline, to withstand punishment. It only amused him (when it did not irritate)—this solicitude for his comfort—as if he were something to be marked "fragile," "handle with care," whenever he stepped outside his own well-ordered environment, where rights and privileges and precedence were so clearly defined they went unquestioned. His father's admonitions, Grove's unsolicited counsel about girls, Phil's prudent objection to his getting down to a logger's level. It was the first and only time Rod heard Phil voice the old caste shibboleth. It surprised him, but he made no comment. He had his own program. He did not mind what they said so long as they did not actively oppose. And if the loggers undertook to give him a "rough" time because he happened to be the owner's son, he expected both to learn and teach in the process.
His work began in a camp fifty miles northwest of the Euclataws, on Hardwicke Island. For a month he worked as a bucker, following up a falling crew to saw the felled trees into standard length logs. He pulled all day on the end of a crosscut saw. The woods about him resounded with the clink of axes, the whine of steel cable in iron blocks, the shrill tooting of donkey whistles, the shudder and thrash of great machines spooling up half a mile of twisted steel rope on revolving drums, dragging enormous logs as if they were toothpicks on a thread, shooting them down to salt water, whence by raft and towline they passed to the hungry saws of the town mills.
Rod loved the cool green forest. It made him a little sad sometimes to see it so ravished. Wherever the logger went with his axes and saws and donkey engines he left behind a desolation of stumps and broken saplings and torn earth. But Rod was no sentimentalist. He knew that humanity does not survive by beauty alone. Timber is a utility. It must serve its turn. Nevertheless the artist in him suffered now and then at the havoc,—as a sensitive man turned butcher may perhaps occasionally revolt at his killing trade, despite the fact that man is a meat-eating animal.
In this first month Rod found little of note beyond hard work and monotony. The camp was well-established, well-equipped, moving along an efficient routine. The crew was disciplined and orderly. They let Rod alone. Insensibly they seemed to realize that while he was among them he was not of them, and they neither rode him nor made him one of themselves. In this camp he learned something of logging operations, but little or nothing of the logger that was new.
With the dog days, however, Phil transferred him to a new camp nearer home, a new operation—lock, stock, and barrel—from the gray-mustached logging boss to the cookhouse flunkys. They were mustered on the Valdez shore a mile below Little Dent when Rod joined. A hundred men, half a dozen donkey engines on floats, drums and drums of flexible steel cable, scow-loads of lumber, tools, all the machinery and personnel gathered for a raid on the fir and cedar spreading over that hillside to the Granite Pool and beyond.
"You can get all the dope you want on logging here, and be at home too," Phil pointed out. "This camp will run for years. We may have to put in a railroad to reach the farther limits."
"Are you going to cut all this Valdez timber?" Rod asked.
"That's the idea, I believe."
"We seem to be speeding up all around for some reason," he remarked, after a little. "I don't see why we should, but we are. This show very near doubles our force."
Nor could Rod see why, but he suspected Grove's financial expansion as the cause. Grove was shooting at millions. He talked quite casually now of major and minor operations, as if he were treating the body of commerce like a surgeon. The Norquay Trust was getting its fingers into every industrial pie from which a money plum could be extracted. Before the new camp had cut a stick Rod learned that ground was being broken in Phillips Arm for a pulp mill capitalized at two millions. The Norquay Trust was helping to finance the thing, handling the pulp company's bonds. It was to furnish an outlet for low-grade timber,—cheaply made newsprint. To Rod it seemed chiefly an excuse for some financial juggling and to strip a lovely valley of timber, to pollute a beautiful stretch of sea-floored inlet with waste from sulphurous acid bleaching vats.
It was all one to Rod, a part of the inevitability of things. He would have preferred to let Phillips Arm retain its beauty and solitude, its forested valley a home for deer and bear and coveys of grouse, its shining river the highway of salmon to their spawning grounds. He would have cut the Valdez timber last of all, because he liked to look south from Hawk's Nest on a slope of unbroken green. But he had no voice in the matter. If they chose to strip the granite ribs of the earth to their primal nakedness, not of necessity but for an ambitious man's profit, he could only shrug his shoulders. He had his own row to hoe. Rod was beginning to suspect that if Grove were a throwback to some coarse, high-handed animalistic type, he himself was something of a variation from the true Norquay strain. Like did not always produce like.
Here about him work went forward with a swing. A dozen carpenters wrought marvels of construction on shore, transforming raw lumber into bunk houses, cook shacks, office, blacksmith shop, commissary. The falling gangs kept intermittent shudders running through the hillsides above, where they threw down their daily score of great trees. The donkey engines hitched cables to stumps ashore, slid off their floats, hauled themselves puffing and grunting into the shadowy woods, black-bellied mechanical spiders drawing themselves along by a thread of twisted steel wire. A pile-driver crew with a two-ton steam hammer drove rows of sticks alongshore to enclose a booming ground. Another crew built a chute from tide-water to the first benchland. Men and powerful machinery directed with skill and energy wrought this transformation. In two weeks logs were plunging down the chute,—one hundred thousand board feet per diem.
It was all new; machinery from Washington shops—steel cable from England—tools from Welland Vale—a logging boss from Oregon—men from every corner of the earth. To Rod there was a dual advantage in this. He saw the technique of preparation pass through every stage, emerge from apparent confusion to orderly, foreseen results. On the personal side he was merely one man in a crew. There were no old hands to make it easier or harder for him because he was a Norquay. The logging boss was a man with a reputation for getting out timber. It was almost a religion with him. Rod marked him shrewdly. If Jim Handy had any hopes or ambitions beyond so many thousand feet per day brought to tide-water Rod never learned what they were. The man was a human logging machine. Other men commended themselves to him only in so far as they were efficient in the woods. To Handy, owners and owners' sons were subordinate to the job itself. He was the most perfect example of a single-track mind Rod Norquay had ever encountered.
But the crew as a whole had no such limitations. Rod fitted among them easily, discovering in himself new phases of adaptability, finding in the conglomerate mass as many angles of human interest as there are facets on a diamond. They were literate and illiterate, talkative and silent, coarse and fine. The bunk house echoed with everything from downright obscenity to analytical discussions of the entire social order. One didn't, he perceived with some surprise, have to graduate from a university to have ideas, to express them comprehensively, to examine life critically in its spiritual as well as in its material aspects. And out of the few who stood intellectually head and shoulders above the non-thinking ruck Rod came to know best and to like genuinely a man but two or three years older than himself.
Andy Hall was a high-rigger, an expert on steel cable, the manner of its placing, splicing, its capacity for strain, and its life in the humming blocks. He was short and compactly muscular with sandy hair and a clear blue eye that could be both quizzical and cold. His work was his work. He was paid to rig cable, and he did so, and did it well. But he was what he termed a class-conscious proletarian. Andy flew no red flags. He kept his nose between the covers of a book when he was through his work. But whosoever dragged him into discussion was apt to encounter the deluge. He had convictions which he voiced in unequivocal terms. His vocabulary was equally rich in terse colloquialisms and pure English.
"Where did you go to school, Andy?" Rod asked him one Sunday morning. They were lounging in the shade of a branchy maple left standing beside the bunk house. Rod had been listening to Andy outline the theory of evolution to an argumentative Swede with a Lutheran complex.
Andy grinned.
"School of experience," said he. "University of life and books. Never graduated. Never will. Always be a student—gettin' plucked now and then. No," he hunched up his knees and smiled amiably at Rod, "I never had the advantage of being formally labelled as an educated man. You're a McGill man, I understand. Find it helps much on the job?"
"Not on the job as a job," Rod answered. "Still, it helps to give me a certain slant at things which pertain to the job. For sheer physical labor you might say a university training is waste. At the same time—"
"What are you doing on the job, anyway?" Andy inquired with blunt directness, although good-naturedly. "You don't have to. Why don't you go play with the rest of the butterflies?"
"I want to see what makes the wheels go round," Rod repeated the only reason he ever gave.
The high-rigger jolted him with his reply.
"We do," he said calmly. "Me and old Jim Handy, And the Christian Swede, and Blackstrap Collins on the boom, and all these Danes and Norskys and old rivermen from Michigan. We make the wheels go round and the master class—to which you belong—lives soft off the proceeds. It must be great to ride always on the band wagon, and to feel the conviction that you are ordained by God to do so, eh? To pop your whip and make the plug lean hard against the collar. What would happen to you if they all balked?"
Rod clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the maple trunk. He had finished a creditable week under an exacting hook-tender. It was good just to rest, to look lazily up at a blue September sky through quivering leaves. Sufficient unto the day—
"I don't know," he said unperturbed, "and right now I don't care a hoot. Master class and serving class is all one to me at this particular moment. However, I don't want to ride on the back of the working class—as you put it, as the parlor radicals at school used to declaim—without paying for my ride. I'm not quite so sure of these economic fetiches as some of you fellows. A man can sell his labor, if that's all he has to sell, without selling his soul to the buyer. And that's what counts most. You can hire somebody to cook your food and make your clothes and keep your house in order. But you can't hire anybody to live your life for you, to suffer your pains and dream your dreams. Rich or poor, a man must live his own life. Maybe you fellows are right about the intensity of the class struggle, about the importance of the economic basis being better adjusted. But the fact remains that a man's existence is as much a matter of purely individual longings and visions and strivings as it is of getting his daily bread. It isn't all a matter of material interests, Andy. You can't perfectly adjust human society on a purely material basis. We're all egoists, most of us thoroughgoing egotists as well. We all want to do and be for ourselves. That seems to be fundamental. We can't help it. We're made that way. And there is one thing the altruists and social reformers seem to overlook, so far as the class struggle within any national group is concerned: the crowd that has the greatest driving force, the most cohesion, will always be in the saddle. It doesn't matter whether we like this conclusion or not. If there is anything in evolution, in the whole history of mankind, that is a fact."
"Good enough—you got something in the old bean, after all," Andy smiled. "You will have light in your darkness when some of your crowd are fumbling around bewildered, wondering what has happened to them. Yes, you're dead right, Norquay. You put it very well. The group with the greatest cohesion, the greatest driving force—it isn't a question of moral judgments—it's a question of power. But the real power lies in the men who do the world's work and the brains that are hired by capital to direct the work. Only they lack cohesion. If they ever learn the value of coöperation, of community of interest—look out! Your crowd learned that lesson long ago. It's a scream when you look at it cold-blooded. We cut down trees and saw them into lumber and build houses—and you own the houses. We build motor cars—but the men who build 'em seldom have one to ride in. You know," he laughed amusedly, "when I look at our industrial system in its entirety, it seems to me like a huge, unwieldy machine that we've built up hit-and-miss, and the damned thing is operating us instead of us operating it. Even the men who are supposed to control it aren't sure they have the thing in hand. Some day this machine will become so complicated it won't work at all. You can hear friction squeaks in a good many of the joints now. It's liable to break down."
"Then what?" Rod prompted.
"Then we'll have to devise a new industrial mechanism that will be the servant of society and not society's master."
"How will you do it?" Rod asked.
"I don't know," Hall answered. "So far as America is concerned, the present machine seems good for many generations—with a little patching and lubrication. But sometime it will have to be done. It will not be done by the group in the saddle. They're only interested in maintaining thestatus quo. If it is done at all it will be forced along by visionaries, damn fools like me, who dream of a perfect, harmonious society of mankind—and get called names because we talk about our dreams. Ain't it queer," his tone became tinged with contempt, "that the man who has beautiful visions and translates 'em in terms of sculpture or music or painting or literature is hailed as an artist, while the fellow who has an equally beautiful vision of a human society strong and healthy, purged of poverty and dirt and injustice, is frowned upon as a dangerous agitator? It's a giddy world when you stand off and look. Eh?"
Rod nodded. He was more interested in Andy Hall than in Andy's theories. Yet there was a bone in the meat of Andy's statement that Rod's mind chewed on long after Andy had gone into the bunk house to shave and take his Sunday bath in a washtub by the creek.
The man with a vision and a dream was never so comfortable as the man who merely had an objective. But he had more within him to stay his soul in the time of stress, Rod believed. Also it was a trifle surprising to find so nimble-minded a youth as the high-rigger working for a daily wage in a logging camp. True, his wage was six dollars per diem, which was equal to the stipend of some professors Rod knew. Nevertheless Rod considered that Andy, with his obvious intellectual ability, was misplaced at manual labor, even labor that called for a high degree of skill. He rather admired Andy's radicalism. There was a stout honesty of conviction in him. Rod was not go sure himself that all was for the best in the best of possible worlds,—that comfortable illusion which sustains so many worthy people.
When he pondered Andy's simile of the complex machine gradually getting out of hand, proceeding to the ultimate smash, he couldn't help thinking of Grove's accelerated pace. That was merely a casual impression. Probably Grove had the levers firmly in hand.
He had half a notion to go fishing, to wet a line in the Granite Pool. Or walk over the hill to Oliver Thorn's. Mary had probably gone back to town now. Still—it was very pleasant to lie there under the maple, to rest his body, to let his nostrils be titillated by a smell of doughnuts frying in the cook house. He ought to drop down on the slack and see Phil.
Thus Rod, resting against the earth, two days' growth of beard on his chin, calked logger's boots on his feet, a gaudy mackinaw folded behind his head, cogitated idly, drowsily, until at last he fell into a doze from which the noon meal gong awakened him.
The quality of persistence in the face of difficulties is one that men are variously endowed with. Hope revives in some breasts sooner than in others. To some the spur of a desire, a need, a conviction, never ceases wholly to rowel them into action. They cannot for long accept defeat or frustration as final. For such, the line of least resistance is closed. Reason, logic, all the chances of success may be against them, but they strive with infinite patience and unflagging courage toward a given end.
Rod Norquay had quite clearly defined Mary Thorn as a given end. Sometimes in analytical mood he took stock of his feelings about her and marveled at the depth and intensity, the consistent urge of this desire. A flare of impatience would burn up. He would be angry with Mary awhile, then sorry for himself. It was, he held, a strange way for a woman to feel—to love a man, to admit frankly that he satisfied her ideal of a man, that her flesh yearned to his after the law of nature—yet to fear, to hold back from the decisive step because of—— What? Social differences? Rod dismissed them with a gesture. They existed, but they did not matter. What then? An unexplained reluctance to give up her freedom? Some undivulged ambition? A secret desire to try her own individual wings before they were clipped by marriage?
"You have some queer ideas about the business of living," he said to her impatiently, one day. He had blazed a trail from the upper workings on Valdez to join the path that ran from the Granite Pool to Oliver Thorn's. He had made several journeys over that ridge before Mary went back to town, sometimes in the evening, sometimes of a Sunday afternoon. It was pleasant to see the momentary glow in her eyes when he came in.
"I like you in mackinaw and calked boots, Rod," she said irrelevantly. "Are you going to make a profession of logging?"
"I said you have some queer ideas about this business of living," he persisted.
"No, you only think them queer," she said. "They're sound enough. I don't want to make a blunder."
"You think marrying me might be a blunder?" he asked a little stiffly.
"I don't want to marry anybody, Rod," she repeated, a statement that never failed to anger him. "Is it so important that one should marry?"
"It's important to me," he said.
"Are you the only one whose will or desire counts?" she inquired. "It isn't like you to take that position about anything."
"Mary, Mary, you know what I mean," he exclaimed. "Life doesn't seem more than half-complete without you in the picture. When we were kids playing together we lived from day to day. But we can't do that now. I can't, anyway. I've either got to be sure of you, or give up all idea of you. All this stuff that seems to stick you—my people and money, and what they'll do to me in disapproval, and all that—it doesn't really amount to anything. If I didn't know how you feel about me I'd say it wasn't worth while combatting such fool impressions."
"Ah. If you found yourself cut off from a great many things you unconsciously value; deprived of things you've accepted as your birthright, you'd begin to change your tune, I think. You wouldn't be human if you didn't," Mary commented. "Anyway, that isn't all, and you know it isn't, Rod," she broke out with unexpected heat. "I'm not so sure as you are that marriage is an end in itself. It's just a step. Probably instinct tends to drive a man and a woman into each other's arms. It seems so. But I can see things ahead of us in such a step that I rather shrink from. And what is just as important, I happen also to see things ahead of me that I rather anticipate, things I want to try and do. I want—oh, what's the use, Rod? We don't get anywhere talking about this. Why can't we just be friends and let it go at that?"
"Could you be just friends with me now?" he challenged.
And when the girl's fundamental truthfulness brought a thoughtful look and a touch of color to her face Rod was answered without words.
It was like swimming upstream, he thought to himself, halting on his way to look down on the tide roaring and foaming through its narrow passage by Little Dent. Manhood wasn't proving quite the careless easy way of his youthful fancy. It had sometimes seemed to him then, with preternatural vision for a boy, that for well-born people the chief trouble lay not in getting things they wanted, but in wanting anything much. His life had seemed to him then a matter of absolute certainties.
And it wasn't. Not by a long shot. He wanted Mary Thorn. He wanted very much to write brilliantly and acceptably about his native land, which he loved for its bigness and rugged beauty as well as for what it had so generously bestowed on him and his. He could neither have one nor accomplish the other. But he would! Oh, yes. He pursed his lips and set his teeth upon that determination, as he lingered on the ridge where the old trail pitched down to the Granite Fool on one side and the new one slanted to the camp at tidewater.
The autumn haze hung like a diaphanous veil over mountains and waterways. Vine maple and alder shone brick-red and pale gold in the low ground. Hawk's Nest lifted its flaming roof across the channel. He wondered if there were a week-end party there. He wondered how they would look at him, these sons and daughters of the well-to-do, if he came stalking up the porch steps in calked boots and Mackinaw shirt. Rod smiled. Even Phil considered him a little too thoroughgoing in his logging career. To the rest, to Grove's crowd, it would simply be a joke. They all believed in work—in getting it done, not in doing it—and most of them were a little tainted with the idea that labor, especially such labor as is hard and poorly paid, was the exclusive privilege of the laboring class. Rod, who had learned a great many astonishing things in two months among men who were not in the least dismayed by sweat and dust and noise, found himself for the moment viewing Grove, the fast crowd Grove traveled with, very much from the logger's point of view.
"If you neither feed yourself, nor clothe yourself, nor direct the production of anything useful, nor create anything beautiful, what the hell justification have you for existing?" Andy Hall had once attacked the idea of a leisure class. He had outlined a theory of the leisure class very much in the manner of Veblen. Then he proceeded to attack it, first on moral grounds, then on the basis of its social utility.
Rod found himself half in agreement just then. There was not and had never been in his mind any doubt of the courage, energy, and usefulness of the first Norquays. The original Roderick had reaped for himself and his followers the reward of enterprise initiated by himself. He had handed on his winnings. So far as Rod could see, there was no great virtue in merely standing pat and holding on,—resting on dead men's accomplishments. That was a bog he determined his feet should never sink into. Grove, for instance, was not standing pat. Yet curiously, he had always thought of Grove and the Norquay Trust as a dubious undertaking,—dubious in character and uncertain as to outcome. By all the conventional signs and tokens he was wrong. Grove was certainly moving with purposeful intent. He was a dynamo for energy. Already he was credited with stupendous achievements. But to Rod that seemed a great deal worse than the gentlemanlylaissez fairewhich his father had set as a standard.
"Oh, damn, I wish it were spring again," Rod muttered as he strode down the hill.
Spring was at hand almost before he realized that the vernal equinox had come and gone. But winter had to precede spring. In October the fall rains broke in bitter earnest. The sodden drip of eaves lulled him to sleep at night and greeted him on awakening. He went to work in the morning with his fellows and trudged back at night soaked through heavy clothing. The bunk house reeked with steam from sodden garments festooned above a red-hot stove. Day and night, for weeks on end, gray clouds and drifting mist hovered above the trees. Every gully discharged a stream seaward. To step through a clump of brush meant a shower bath. Everything a man touched, tools, gear, timber, was damp and clammy cold. The thin soil squashed into mud under their boots. The moss was saturated. The great firs dripped like weeping giants. Even the old hands on the coast began to remark profanely that there had never been such rains.
Yet the logs came down. The falling gangs went grumbling into the wet thickets about the base of the trees they must fell. The rigging-slingers and hook tenders cursed as they fumbled the slippery cables. Donkey engineers scowled from beneath the tin shelter over each machine. And Jim Handy prowled in oilskins from gang to gang, silent, eagle-eyed, on the job. Rain or shine the timber came log by log to the booming ground, the boom men with their pikes arranged it in sections, and when the sections grew to a thirty-swifter raft, a tug hauled in, hooked on her towline and the cedar and fir of Valdez began its journey to the mills.
During those sodden weeks Rod Norquay put by all that he had ever been. His work, that opus which had led him to forswear, however briefly, the ease and comfort of Hawk's Nest, was laid away. Not forgotten. He sat sometimes in the evening, dreaming. He had wanted to see what made the wheels go round, to know how and why men labored and endured privation, to see what life was like in the raw. And he was getting insight with a vengeance. He saw men throw down their tools in a passion and quit at a word. He saw new men reel drunkenly down a steamer's gangplank and go to work next morning with aching heads and bloodshot eyes. He saw a snap phrase bring a blow, a fight to a finish. The whole panorama of the timber, trees, men, machinery, shifted before his eyes that winter, gave him food for thought as well as sometimes a flash of something that stirred his pulse. For there were heroic moments, risks, long chances taken and skilfully avoided. A flying limb, a snapped cable, a rolling log. A man had to be alert. It was no place for a dullard. The logger had his pride of calling. It was borne in upon Rod that only tried men followed the woods. It was something of a satisfaction that he qualified as one of them on the job.
It was not so regarded in the family circle, he discovered to his secret amusement. Grove openly disliked the idea of any Norquay mixing with the men. Norquay senior observed dryly that Rod need not make quite so close a contact with logging and loggers. Phil frankly invited him on different occasions to come in out of the wet.
At the Christmas shutdown, foregathered at Grove's house in town, Rod noted the growing concern on his behalf. There was a hint of protest in the jocular remarks about his devotion to logging as a vocation. Grove's thinly veiled contempt, Laska's mild wonder that he should go in for "that sort of thing" nettled Rod.
He sat back, appraising his father, his brothers, the friends of the family, the train of people who came within range of his observation, all well-to-do, all thoroughly insulated against material discomfort, able to command and have their commands obeyed without question. They were as supreme in their respective positions as Jim Handy was on the Valdez job,—more so, because Handy's power was only delegated to him, and these people Rod knew, wealthy merchants, financiers, propertied magnates of various sorts, held their power in their own individual right.
He wondered if they knew their power and how far the roots of such power penetrated the social soil, if they had grasped it with clear purpose and sure intent; and if they would have the resource and determination to keep it when they were challenged by what they called the "rabble"? Rod wondered. There might never be such a challenge. Andy Hall doubted the possibility within several generations. But Rod himself was not so sure. He had none of the purblind middle-class hatred of and contempt for labor agitators, those sometimes sincere and sometimes hypocritical mouthpieces of the muddled aspirations of the wage-workers. Rod had a working knowledge of economics, a trained understanding of cause and effect in the world of industry, in the field of production and distribution. He was without prejudice, and he knew what he knew. Men like Andy Hall, when they did not claw up out of the class where they originated, remained within it and festered. They could never be servilely contented. They had too much force, too positive a character. Their perception was too keen.
It amused Rod to speculate on how his father and Grove, the Deanes, Walls, Richstons,et alwould fare if they were ever faced with a situation in which they would have to black their own boots, prepare and serve their own food, wear overalls instead of tailored clothes. They couldn't. That was his cynical conclusion. They wouldn't know how. And they had an attitude which could only be translated as contempt for those who did know how. Somehow, by the grace of God, or chance, or skilful management, they had become entrenched behind material fortifications, their hands grasping the strings of an ample purse. And from behind these fortifications they looked out with narrowed eyes upon lesser folk.
That, it struck Rod all in a heap, was the thing that confronted Mary Thorn when he talked to her of love and marriage. She had grasped the essence of class distinctions. She doubted his—their—power to overcome an idée fixé.
Whereupon he straightway hunted up the place where she boarded and haled her forth to a show and afterward to supper in the Exeter Grill, where he was most likely to encounter some of his own crowd. His cogitations had put him in a defiant mood. He would show them.
He looked across the table into her eyes and wondered if she had always been as keenly aware of the invisible fences about him as he was fast becoming himself. Well, he promised himself lightly, some of those fences were due to be smashed.
Isabel Wall, the pert and pretty sister-in-law of Mr. Grove Norquay, became at last the cause of Rod's first definite breach in the fences.
When summer full-blown came tripping on the heels of spring, Rod left the Valdez camp for good. It had been a wholesome experience. One year in the woods had shown him quite fully the technique of big timber operations. It had shed an unreckoned light, moreover, upon the nature and mental processes of the men who handled the timber, which Rod was sure seldom appeared to the owners of the woods as a matter of any particular importance. He knew himself duly qualified as a practical logger. He was egotist enough to believe himself more capable of getting results without friction than most logging bosses. But he had not set out to qualify in timber so much as to get outside the shell of his class and see how and why man in general functioned both in and out of industry. He had covered the first phase that occurred to him. His own individual job, his book, began to nag him again, to assume form, proportion, to cry out for embodiment. So he laid aside calked boots and Mackinaws for canvas shoes and flannels, and took up the pleasant ways of Hawk's Nest when June brought the first coho salmon into the rapids and a chair in the shade was a comfortable thing.
Perhaps, as Phil put it in fraternal raillery, Isabel thought that if one Norquay in the Wall family was a good thing, two would be better. The truth is that Isabel suddenly became aware of Rod as a man and characteristically sought to annex him by the usual methods. She had finished her education in a presumably fashionable school on the Atlantic seaboard that spring, coincident with Mary Thorn's graduation from the University of B.C. Isabel's social experience had been judicially expanded in the intervals of education. She was twenty now, a sophisticated young person, accustomed to associating with other sophisticated young persons of both sexes. She had seen little of Rod except during summer vacations. For a year she had not seen him at all. Now she seemed to discover him anew and to mark him for her own.
Rod granted her uncommon charm. She was pretty and petite and modish, and she spoke the current lingo with effortless facility. But while she pleased his eye she failed to stir his blood. There was a sufficient reason for Rod's immunity, which of course Isabel did not know.
It became obvious that Isabel was in deadly earnest. And when it became equally obvious to Rod that both families were complacently agreeable to Isabel's maneuverings he grinned first, then grew sober as the remedies he used to cure Isabel merely aggravated the disease.
It wasn't a simple flirtatious liking Isabel had for him. Rod was too keen to make such a mistake. It seemed that this dainty doll-like creature was capable of intense feeling and not too sure in her control of the emotional disturbance. Rod began by being amused. Then he felt sorry. In the end he grew a little alarmed over the net result of being sympathetic. It is highly discomforting to a young man to have a girl weep spontaneously on his chest, unless he conceives it to be his special mission and blessed privilege to soothe this particular damsel's tears. Isabel did that one evening in the shadow of a hoary old cedar in Hawk's Nest grounds. She couldn't help it, she said, after a long embarrassed silence during which she dabbed the tears away. She was a fool and she knew it, but it couldn't be helped. One wasn't responsible for one's feelings, was one?
And Rod, with a little ache in his breast, a great deal of wordless sympathy for Isabel, because he had for a long time suffered that queer state of stifled longing, that seemed sometimes as if it would drive him mad, agreed that one was not. They let it go at that.
Rod sat with elbows on the sill of his bedroom window late that night, staring out over a moon-bathed landscape, silver barred with black, where the shadows of great trees lay across the lawn. He looked down a shimmering moon-path that seemed to offer a bright highway across the channel where Mary Thorn lay sleeping,—if indeed she slept. Rod wondered if something in her breast ever drove her to a window to stare across the tide and think of him. She was home now. He had his own sources of information. To-morrow he would see her. To-night the querulous imps that make a man question his destiny and desire bade him consider if he did well to let his heart abide so constantly with Mary Thorn when there were other desirable women to be had for the asking. Isabel, for instance? All clear sailing. No questions asked or answered. The dual family blessing, and any little material wants cheerfully attended to. On the personal side,—well, he was flesh and blood, sexual tinder. When Isabel put her face against his breast and sobbed in that stifled, choking fashion he had been deeply moved, thrilled, conscious of her physical nearness, the sweet fragrant odor of her tousled hair, the trembling of her small, soft body. Wasn't that good enough? What did a man want of a woman when he took her to wife?
Rod shook himself impatiently. What rot he had been thinking. Whatever it was in Mary Thorn that so imperatively promised to fulfil his every need, it didn't reside in Isabel Wall. He was sure of that. He could let himself slide into a temporary infatuation with Isabel—perhaps. He could conceive of possessing her. But he couldn't behold her down a long vista of years playing the game fairly and bravely, taking the cards dealt from the deck of life, good, bad and indifferent, with courage and fortitude. He couldn't picture Isabel doing that any more than he could picture her,aetatsixteen, shooting the Euclataw Rapids in a dugout, eyes shining in sheer ecstasy of swift movement, hair streaming in the wind. Isabel would either have been frightened or wildly, dangerously excited.
That was as far as Rod carried his analogy. It was sufficient. He had not tried his hand at creative fiction without a sense of character, of form, proportion. He egotistically assumed that he could accurately gauge personal values, that he did it intuitively as well as rationally. If his prescience did not clearly account for the depth and tenacity of his affection for Mary Thorn it quickly and thoroughly disposed of Isabel as a substitute.
A light flashed from a window in Oliver Thorn's house. Rod rested his chin on cupped palms. Unrest, longing blew through the spaces of his being like a hot wind. The bright moon and the dusky woods beckoned him into their restful silences, and the light across the channel seemed to blink a message. It drew him like a magnet. Over there his heart lay. If Isabel's unheralded breakdown had served no other purpose, it had filled him with a wild impatience, revived a fever that burned him. The madness of a lover's moon! The coursing blood of youth clamoring for the fulfilment of life's promise,—life that promises so much and often gives so little. The impulse to translate dreams into realities.Quien sabe?
He rose and went softly downstairs and out a side door to the pale emptiness of the lawn crossed with inky bands of shadow, and so sauntering, head bowed and hands sunk deep in his pockets, presently brought up on the float. TheHaidalay moored on one side, theKowloonon the other. A profusion of canoes and rowboats lay hauled out on the planks.
Rod stood awhile, like a man in two minds. His eyes lingered on the moon-path. His ears took note of the lessening monotone between the Gillard Islands on the east and the choked westward passage inside Little Dent. A still night and a slackening tide.
He got into a dinghy, shipped the oars, rowed slowly out into the channel. Halfway, an eddy setting toward the Valdez shore took him in its sweep. He let the oars rest and lighted a cigarette, gazing at the tranquil, silvery beauty.
"What a night," he whispered. "What a night for fairies and mermaids—and lovers."
Then the current slid him into the deep shadow cast by the high forested ridge behind Oliver Thorn's house, and as his boat touched the float and he sat in a moment of indecision, a voice spoke softly:
"Hello, Rod."
He looked sharply over the float. The shadow of the hills lay on it like folds of crepe. But in a moment he made out a dim figure. He went over, still holding the painter in his hand. It was Mary, wrapped in a gray coat, sitting on a box.
"I thought you'd be in your little trundle bed," he greeted her.
"Then why did you come?" she asked.
"I don't quite know. Just on the chance. I was restless. Moon madness, maybe."
He sat down beside her. One hand shone white in the gloom where it stretched on her knee. Rod possessed himself of that. He bent, peering into her face. Her eyes glowed at him.
"All by your lonesome out here in the dark," he murmured. "How come, Brownie? Did you sit yourself down here to put the come-hither on me?"
She shook her head.
"Well, I came."
He put his arms around her, drew her close, felt her settle against him unresistingly.
"Glad?"
She nodded.
A solitary loon lifted his harsh, complaining cry somewhere in the shining channel.
"Calling his mate. And I've found mine. Or have I?"
He knew, or thought he knew. There was an attitude of surrender, unmistakable, complete, that filled him with a strange delight. But he wanted the verification of that voiceless pledge.
"I don't know. How can one account for a mood, a longing? I came down here to sit in the moonlight. It was so radiant. Then after a little the shadow crept out from shore, and it was just as if something black and gloomy had settled over me. I felt small and forlorn and lonely. And all at once I wanted you, Rod. I wished you were here. I wanted you. And you're here. That's all."
"It's enough," he said tenderly.