Yes the world, his world, had changed. Of all that he had known through youth and early manhood only his wife—like the sea and the mountains—remained steadfast, a desirable reality. Now, more than ever, he was filled with gratitude and wonder that she had stood loyal, devoted, staunch as a rock in the bewildering flux of a period that seemed to him, in occasional somber moods, to have quickened the disintegration of men and the cherished works of men to a degree that made him apprehensive.
This couldn't be the reality of things, he assured himself. He had somehow got them twisted. His vision and his understanding must be askew. He had to stop pondering about it all. It was difficult for him to do this. He had always been a thinking being. That faculty had cursed him in France. On duty in trenches, in action, in long lonely vigils, his mind had hammered him with insistent questions and speculations on the why and the wherefore of human activities. Many an answer that came like the answer to a sum saddened him. One should not see too clearly.
He found it so now. But at least he, as an individual, was not too deeply involved to stand clear of all this feverish hurrying and scurrying to nowhere after nothing. There must be something a man could do in the world that would bring him dividends in satisfaction of accomplishment, as well as dollars. For him, because his forbears had been both adventurous and far-seeing, there was no immediate economic pressure. He had no great responsibilities, beyond himself and Mary and their boy. If he needed more than the minor share which he held in the Norquay estate, he could surely get it without bowing his head and twisting his moral sense awry before the Moloch of commerce.
The more he saw of town the more he desired to turn his back on it. Not because it was town but because for so long he had had his fill of noise and motion. To sit amid a great silence, the strange, restful hush of a forest, in the shadow of great mountains,—that calm, secure peace; to hear only the sighing of wind in high interlaced branches, the muted song of running water, the whistle of birds' wings,—that was his wish.
Practical wisdom forbade. There was really one place where he longed to be with Mary and his son, and they could not go there. Hawk's Nest was no longer his home. It was Grove's. His road and Grove's diverged too sharply for him to go there even as a guest. Elsewhere they could not find comfort at that season. It was a winter of sleet and snow, of alternate frosts and rains. A half-sick man couldn't go camping like a pioneer with a woman and a child. And it was not camping as such that Rod longed for, he knew, as the spacious background and comfortable security of his birthplace.
Whereupon, as a sensible man eschews the unattainable, he put it out of his mind. In the spring,—he and Mary lay awake nights planning what they would do in the spring.
He came home from one of these desultory excursions abroad a little before dinner one evening.
"Your father has phoned twice since five o'clock," Mary told him. "He asked to have you call him up when you came in."
Rod got his connection.
"You telephoned, pater," he said. "Was it anything of importance?"
"Well, yes. Can you come down to the club after dinner, Rod? If not to-night, then by nine in the morning?"
"I'll come to-night. Say eight o'clock."
He hung up the receiver. As he got ready for dinner his mind was divided between the playful squeals of his son romping in the living room and the almost plaintive note in his father's voice over the wire. Norquay senior had changed with everything else. He had aged. Losing Phil had been a blow. But he was a proud man—and he had two sons left. That grief had not put care lines in his face, or caused the abstracted brooding into which he sometimes relapsed. Rod understood, of course, that the war had completed the break-up of the old family life at Hawk's Nest which Grove's embarkation on a career had begun, or Grove's personality had begun. His father admitted that he no longer cared to live at Hawk's Nest.
"One doesn't like to be alone all the time," he had put it quite simply. "Too many ghosts haunt those corridors for an old man. And at one's age one doesn't care to set up an establishment in town. When any of the others find occasion in summer, I go to Hawk's Nest. Otherwise I live at the club."
Yet the place was kept up. Stagg, the butler, his wife who ranked as housekeeper, a cook, two maids, and two gardeners held a sinecure. One could, Rod assumed, step in and find Hawk's Nest quite as of old.
He came back to his father. What bothered him? It couldn't be money or affairs. The Norquay estate was rock-ribbed. Timber, land, gilt-edged securities. It must simply be that he was getting old and lonely. When a man is past sixty and all his life has been spent in a well-appointed home, surrounded by a fairly numerous family and still more numerous relatives, he can hardly reconcile himself to the empty shell of a house, or the artificial atmosphere of even the most elaborately appointed club. Rod felt sorry for him. But if Grove hadn't failed to carry on the family tradition, Hawk's Nest would still be the year-around rendezvous of the clan, as it had always been. No effect without a cause. Rod put aside the thought that his elder brother could be blamed for a great deal if one chose to be critical.
His father sat smoking a cigar in a chair that commanded the club entrance, and he led the way to his rooms as soon as Rod appeared.
He took some papers off a table and sat fussing with them. He didn't seem inclined to talk at first, beyond a few casual remarks. Rod waited. He knew his father. He felt that something was coming,—something that rested with a great weight on the elder man's mind. Since Rod came home there seemed to have arisen between them a more keenly sympathetic understanding than had ever existed before. It wasn't a matter of words. It was a feeling. Rod divined intuitively that his father had some deep trouble to share with him. He could not have defined any reason for this belief. It existed as a belief. In that conviction he waited.
"Five years ago," Norquay senior began abruptly, "I looked forward to sitting back with a pipe and slippers and a book while my sons carried on in the old way. For a hundred and thirty years, to speak precisely, we have gone ahead solidifying our position, doing well by ourselves and all connected with us. We seemed—as a family—to have acquired a permanence, a solidarity, beyond that of any family in this province. We have become a sort of institution. We were here first. Of the exploring adventurers, we were the first to take root. You know the family history. We have helped to make this country what it is. We have acquired a great deal of material power, yet I do not recall that we have ever abused it. In each generation we have had a lot of faithful service, and we have had it because we have scrupulously observed some form of obligation to those who served us. Men have trusted us as being persons entirely trustworthy. We have not been Shylocks. We have not been arrogant. We have never been greedy for more."
Five years earlier Rod would have assented, as a matter of course. Now he stirred slightly in his chair, as his father paused, and observed dispassionately:
"Would you include Grove in that last?"
"I am coming to Grove," Norquay senior answered. "To arrive at Grove by a logical sequence is the reason for this summing-up of ourselves. A few weeks before your grandfather died he said to me, 'Myfather once prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle. What's the last hatching? Sparrows. Sparrows!' Quite apropos of nothing. We hadn't even been talking. He grew very uncertain in his mind at the last. A great age, Rod. Nearly ninety. He scarcely comprehended the war. Grove was there with a house party. I think their high spirits annoyed him. Sparrows!"
He contemplated the rug with a fixed frown.
"I wonder if he were right," he said at last.
"I must confess," he continued, "that I have spent my life in a state of inertia compared to his, and to the energy his father worked with. They were actively constructive. Looking back, I seem to have done nothing but maintain a sort ofstatus quo. Indeed, lacking any necessity or any great personal ambition, with a disinclination for politics, a distaste for anything in the way of business outside of estate affairs, there seemed nothing upon which to expend great energy. I've moved along pleasant lines of least resistance. Looking back, it doesn't seem so satisfactory. Avoiding boredom, keeping up a moderate revenue without being a taskmaster to labor—that about expresses it.
"It seemed to me, however, that my sons must inherit some of the abounding energy, the creativeness, that I somehow lacked. Your eldest brother, whom you were named after, was a vigorous, high-spirited boy. That venturesomeness resulted in his death at an early age. That left Grove next in line. For many years I watched the three of you develop from sturdy youngsters into young men. Phil, it seemed to me, was something like myself. You were always a puzzle, an odd sort of boy, somewhat given to precocious remarks and unexpected actions. Lovable, but erratic, probably brilliant but not entirely dependable, I used sometimes to say to myself: How wide one can go of the mark.
"So you see it was natural that Grove, being the eldest, should be looked to for able carrying on of that which has become a tradition since old Roderick outlined his plan to hold compactly for the entire family that which he had built up out of nothing himself.
"It is a good plan. I have no fault to find with it. The stability, the working power of a large fortune is always depleted by being broken into fragments by division among each generation. The Norquay estate, as he outlined it in his journal, would be a tree ample enough to shelter all under its branches, so long as the trunk was kept intact.
"And it seemed to me Grove had all the qualifications to carry on with honor and profit. He had personality. He had energy and resource. He had ambition, which determined him on a career. I took his ability for granted; his character as a sure inheritance. His faults I conceded as the faults of lusty young manhood, minor failings to be put away in the face of responsibility.
"Yet you and Phil never had such convictions about your brother. Why?"
He paused on the interrogation.
"His weaknesses seemed fundamental. To us some of the things he did were despicable. He did things we would have been ashamed to do. Where his appetites and passions and desires were concerned, he had no consideration for any one or anything, nor any scruple about what he did if it suited him to do it—and it was in his power. That was very clear to both Phil and myself. That was how he seemed to us. We used to wonder why you never had any inkling of what we considered his real character—or lack of it."
Rod was in no mood to be charitable, to mince words, to evade a frank answer to the direct question.
His father pondered briefly.
"You were right and I was wrong," he observed sadly. "All wrong. Phil put himself on record before he went overseas. He warned me not to trust Grove too far. It angered me at the time. It made our parting cool. That's one of my keenest regrets. He was right; you were both right. How can a man make such a blunder in reading his own son? Perhaps because he was his son, I have prided myself on a knowledge of men, too. Ah, well."
He nursed his chin in one palm.
"The Norquay Trust is insolvent," he announced presently. "Gutted, looted from within. It is about to topple over with a resounding crash. I have an outline of the position here," he ruffled the papers in his hand. "It seems incredible, but it is true."
"You're involved? The estate is involved, eh?" Rod asked calmly. It seemed nowise incredible to him. It seemed, in fact, an entirely logical outcome—unlimited power in uncertain hands, increasing momentum, a grand smash. There was not a single element of the unexpected. He had anticipated such a finale. So had Phil.
"Not technically. Not yet."
"Very well. Let it smash," Rod said indifferently. "Let him pick himself up out the debris and take stock of himself. May do him good."
"If that were all. But it isn't so simple," his father sighed. "Don't you see, Rod? Our name, the prestige of the family, the confidence of the public in us as well-known, wealthy people has been the chief foundation on which this tottering Colossus was built. A great many people of whom we never heard, as well as our friends and families to whom we are related by blood and marriage, have put their money into this. It means loss to all, complete ruin to many, I'm afraid. If it were merely a question of Grove—"
He made a gesture of dismissal.
"But it isn't," he went on. "In the public eye and mind we stand or fall as a family. We have a reputation for integrity. If one of the family trades on that, the rest of us can't escape the consequences of his acts. I gave Grove his head and encouraged him, and I can't shirk my individual responsibility. I have no knowledge of a Norquay ever shirking an obligation. I'm an old man. I may not have many years left. I'll admit self-interest. I feel that I must straighten this thing out so that no one will ever say with an angry sneer that we saved our own skins after making a mess of theirs. The reason I asked you to come and see me to-night was to know if you will stand by me and help me see it through? It's got to be done."
"There's only one answer to that, isn't there, pater?" Rod said slowly. "I've outgrown any active antagonism toward Grove. It was more contempt than antagonism, except for the time he went out of his way to annoy my wife. At the same time I wouldn't lift a finger to save him from ever so hard a cropper. Only if you put it as something to be done for the family reputation—that probably means as much to me as it does to you. I'm willing to undertake anything I can handle. No use banking on me too strong, though. I don't know either business or finance."
"Half our wealth is in standing timber," his father replied, "and you know timber. Phil told me that you knew more of logging and loggers than he would ever learn. The woods will have to be our salvation. That will be your job, Rod. You've been through a hard mill. I wish you could have had a long rest. But this matter won't delay. I know law and I know something of affairs. I have had accountants checking up this infernal mess. Dorothy's husband has agreed to take charge. It will take nearly all our available capital to plug holes. The important end, the producing end, must be our timber. That I'll leave to you. We must begin operations at the first break in the weather. You'll have an absolutely free hand."
The ghost of a smile flitted across Rod's face. A free hand to ravage and destroy the forest to make money which would be poured like sand into a rathole! And he uncertain of any definite tenure on life. What of his heart? That overstrained, vital part of him,—which was organically perfect but functionally weak. A heart that was slacking up now, so that he rose and paced back and forth across the floor to stir it up.
"Well," he said at last, halting in his stride. "That's understood."
His father nodded.
"It may not be so bad as it seems," he said, with the first hopeful note Rod had heard him utter. "Though I'm doubtful of quarreling with figures. Grove hasn't been dishonest. That's the only redeeming feature of the nasty mess. But his associates have. I didn't think it of them. But I have moral if not legal proof of their crookedness—cunning financial piracy on a considerable scale. I may be able to make 'em disgorge, and I may not. They've feathered their nests and left Grove, the poor fool, holding the empty sack. The intent is to throw the thing into a receiver's hands. But I'm prepared to checkmate that. There's to be a directors' meeting to-morrow at ten-thirty. I'd like you to go with me. You may find it illuminating. Suppose I pick you up on my way?"
"Why not drive out and have breakfast with us at eight or half-past?" Rod suggested.
"Better still. I'll do that, thanks."
He had never been a demonstrative man. But he shook hands at the door, and Rod's fingers were still tingling with the grip when he walked down the stairs.
As the wheels of the retreating taxi crunched the gravel on his driveway, Rod stood a moment with his foot on the first step. The night was clear, tinged with frost. Above the city roofs that curious lucence from a million lights dimmed the stars. And as his gaze embraced the down-town silhouette he marked for the first time from the house in which he lived the blazing sign of the Norquay Trust, as if it were something from which he could not escape,—and for a moment he was tempted to a childish shaking of his fist at that glowing emblem of a corroded and tottering edifice.
Rod followed his father along a strip of thick carpet laid over a floor tiled in precise geometric patterns, looking about him at the dukes and duchesses of the counting room administering their high estate of correspondence and ledgers. Delicately fingered typewriters and computing machines woke faint, staccato tappings in that lofty room. He passed a row of ground-glass partitioned cubicles, each gilt-lettered with the name of some petty satrap of higher degree than those without such privacy. There was a decorous stir, an air of activity, persons moving about from desk to desk, discreet consultation. If, as an institution, it was moribund, coma had not set in. Or perhaps the stir and bustle was but the accentuated flutter of a financial heart struggling to force impoverished blood through a body approaching dissolution. He smiled at the fancy.
The directors' room, specially fitted up for deliberate and august discussion, opened off a mezzanine floor overlooking the main body of the offices. Norquay senior led the way. They left their hats and coats in a cloak room. Without ceremony, Mr. Norquay pushed open a door and entered.
They were a few minutes early, but they were not first. Grove sat at one end of a huge oval table, a massive creation of mahogany surrounded by a dozen equally massive chairs. He was flanked by his father-in-law and Arthur Deane.
The capacity for imagining a man in relation to his circumstances and surroundings was one which neither war, wounds, nor the passage of time had atrophied in Rod. This had given him a mental picture of his brother as a haggard man facing ruin with some degree of trepidation. He saw at once that this was a misconception. He perceived the well-remembered features. A cigar outthrust from one corner of Grove's mouth. There were faint, pouchy discolorations under his eyes. He was older, and he showed his age. Otherwise he had changed less than Rod expected. He had simply become a thicker-bodied edition of his earlier self. Rod marked the familiar malicious flicker in his eyes upon recognition, and wondered with an inner sardonic amusement how Grove would take this invasion of his holy of holies by a younger brother whose parting act had been to inflict the severest bodily punishment Grove had ever suffered in his life.
But Grove merely nodded with a casual "how d'do, pater," and a careless "Hello, Rod," and motioned them to chairs. Thereafter he sat quiescent. Only the too-frequent puffing at his cigar, an occasional aimless movement of the hand resting on the table, heralded a strain. Beside him John Wall sat with hands clasped over his rotund paunch, impassive as a Chinaman. Deane pencilled interminable figures on a pad.
At intervals other men came in. A hushed atmosphere seemed the most outstanding quality of the high-ceilinged, beautifully paneled room. Voices sank to discreet murmurings there.
A moon-faced clock against the north wall struck a soft, silvery chime. Grove straightened up.
"Meeting'll come to order," he slurred the words. "This, as you know, is a special meeting called to consider a difficult position. I have a report and some figures for which I desire your attention."
He paused a moment to glance about the ring of faces,—faces with bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls and many lines about the eyes, faces ruddy, saturnine, bearded, mustached. Hard and watchful faces converted by long practice into serviceable masks to hide feeling. Save Rod and his brother, not one was under fifty. Wary old birds, Rod thought, hard—hard as nails.
They represented collectively a sum in excess of ten millions.
Grove looked finally at Rod, then at his father. The tip of his tongue flicked across his full lips.
"This is a directors' meeting," he said. "It is slightly irregular for outsiders to be present. I—"
"If you can think of nothing more irregular than that, you may proceed," Norquay senior broke in. "I desire my son to be present."
John P. Wall rumbled deep in his broad chest.
"'S all right. 'S all in the family, Grove. Go ahead."
Grove began to read from a cluster of typed sheets. Ponderous phrases, heavy with the special terminology, the many-syllabled terms in which commerce and finance wraps its meaning when it seeks formal expression. Phrasing as difficult to the uninitiate as 'The Critique of Pure Reason' is to the average freshman. Fundings, refundings, liquid assets, unrealizable commitments, debit and credit balances, mingled with references to the European situation, the New York situation, exchange, debentures, interminable strings of figures. It created a hopeless confusion in Rod's mind. There was so much language and so many figures. It was not a living, colorful language such as he cared for, such as could move him by its subtlety or vigor. He gave over trying to follow Grove through the maze and watched the faces of these men of affairs. Evidently it was clear enough to them. He observed slight liftings of eyebrows, communicative glances, fixed unwavering attention, comprehending nods. But their faces remained Sphinxlike.
Grove finished. He leaned back in his chair. For a moment his guard dropped.
"There it is," he snarled at them.
A short, full-bodied man at the lower end of the table said in a pained tone:
"There is really nothing in that statement that we don't know, that we haven't discussed. As a result of mismanagement and unfortunate circumstances, the Norquay Trust Company is insolvent. The question is, what are we, the board of directors, going to do about it?"
"Liquidate—liquidate, I say," rumbled a man whom Rod recognized as the head of a well-known wholesale firm, a well-known man about town,—a gentleman with a taste for old, very old Scotch whisky, and a penchant for young, very young women. "Liquidate and be done with it," he repeated ponderously.
"How are you going to liquidate a two-million-dollar liability with assets of a million or less?" Arthur Deane inquired in his cold, precise voice.
An old man across the table, with horn-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose, leaned forward.
"Is it as bad as that?" he inquired indifferently. "I wasn't sure."
"A careful analysis of the statement shows about that," Deane answered.
"We've got to get out from under, that's all," Bartley Richston broke into speech for the first time. He was quite unmoved, matter of fact. "No use blinking facts. As a going concern the Norquay Trust is on its last legs. How long," he demanded of Grove, "can you carry on as you are? Suppose it got about that you're shaky and all these four per cent, depositors demand their money? How long would you last?"
"About half a day," Grove answered sullenly. "We can't stand a run. Damn it, you know that, Richston. I've told you a dozen times in the last month."
"Then a receivership is the only solution. A receivership and a winding-up."
Grove sprang to his feet.
"By the Lord," he cried in a passion, and his fist struck the table with a thud, "you shan't sink me like that. I tell you this thing can be pulled through. You've all made a fat thing out of it. You've got to back me up now. No use saying you can't. I know what your cash balances are in bank—every one of you. I know what Victory bonds you hold. This slump won't last. You've got to come through."
"Be sensible, Norquay," Arthur Deane put in. "No use throwing good money after bad. The war's over. The reaction's set in. The day of the quick turn and the long profit is past. It is unfortunate—but other concerns have gone bankrupt. It is not exceptional."
Burrows, the short, stout man at the lower end of the table, grunted audibly.
"I make a motion," he said, "that our solicitors be authorized to appear in court and ask for a winding-up order."
"Second the motion," Richston snapped.
"You shan't," Grove declared hoarsely. Tiny sweat-beads began to stand out on his forehead. "What's got into the lot of you? You're running to cover like a lot of whipped dogs. All the thing needs is fifty or sixty thousand from each of us to carry on until the assets that we hold recover value. What if the war is over? Timber and mining and pulp and transportation go on. This isn't a corner grocery to be closed up as soon as business slacks off."
"You are wrong," Richston informed him. "This business does not differ essentially from the corner grocery—except in scope. It was undertaken to make money. It no longer does so. Considering the state its affairs have arrived it, it can never be made to do so. Therefore let it be wound up—at once. We waste time in useless talk. Let us agree on the motion, and act."
"Oh, yes, you're willing," Grove flung at him. "You've had a good many slices out of the melon. What about our trust accounts? What about our depositors?"
"Circumstances are too strong for us," Richston replied imperturbably. "We can see now that accepting deposits was a mistake. We should never have undertaken private banking. It's unfortunate, I'll admit. I suppose there'll be a noise in the papers and all that sort of thing. But it isn't criminal to fail in business. Be sensible, Norquay. Step out of it as gracefully as possible. You're not faced with ruin. No more are we. It would be folly for us to get more deeply involved than we already are. Let it go. What's the Limited Liability Act for?"
Sagacious nods animated the several heads. Grove towered above them impotent, his face red with anger, shadowed by a trace of fear, his look indicating momentary bewilderment at attack from an unexpected quarter. There lifted a low confusion of voices. Several speaking at once. Querulous complaining. Rumbles of mismanagement, muttered disclaimers of responsibility.
Rod's father rose slowly to his feet. His thin, smooth-shaven face betrayed no particular feeling. Only Rod, who knew the faintest indication of his every mood, saw that his eyes burned, that there was a repressed disgust and scorn in them. He rapped on the table with his knuckles.
"Before you prematurely explode this well-laid mine," he enunciated clearly, "I wish to make a brief statement. My son, whom you evince a tendency to blame, is a heavy stockholder. I myself hold a limited interest, but between us we do have control. I do not wish to offer excuses for Mr. Grove Norquay. He bears his own responsibility. I am aware, however, that there is other responsibility for the insolvency of this concern. I have perfunctorily attended but few directors' meetings. But I have my own sources of information. For some weeks I have foreseen this move. It is just such an action as might be expected of a group of men like yourselves. Yourselves"—a bitter gibing note crept into his voice—"most of you liars, and half of you thieves."
The masks dropped. Those various elderly, respectable gentlemen gasped and rose to the attack. Their old voices, some thin and reedy, some thick with indignation, were leveled at him. They demanded apologies. They thumped the table. Their voices created a hubbub.
"I will not be insulted."
"I demand a retraction."
"Anybody who says I'm a thief is a damned liar!" Etc., etc.
Rod sat back, an onlooker at this minor Bedlam. He was an outsider, and looking in from the outside it made him, figuratively speaking, just a little bit sick. If this sort of thing was the accompaniment of big business and finance when it fell on evil days—He felt a mild sort of disgust with these yammering old men. He perceived that most of them were intent only on saving their financial hides. That they were callously indifferent to what happened, so long as it did not happen to them.
He marked also that Richston manifested no resentment at his father's personal thrust. Deane muttered to himself. His face was flushed. Richston only sneered, leaning back in his chair. Of them all John P. Wall remained unperturbed, his hands folded over his abdomen, blandly inert. And Norquay senior rested his finger tips on the table and looked at the sputtering, the gesticulations, the commotion he had aroused.
They subsided into mutterings. All but Burrows. He rose on his stodgy legs.
"I shall not remain here to be insulted," he announced with a ludicrous simulation of dignity.
"Sit down," Norquay senior's voice popped like a whiplash. And Burrows, after an uncertain glance about him for moral support, resumed his chair.
"I have not finished," Rod's father continued. "I am not going to reason with you. I am going to talk to you in the only language such men as you can understand, and be moved by. It is nothing to you that a thousand innocent people may be partially or wholly ruined by your manipulations. But it happens that my name is involved in this as well as my son and my money. I tell you flatly that if you proceed to sink this financial galleon which you built and launched and sailed on profitable voyages, and now propose to scuttle since there is no more chance for loot—I tell you if you do this, that three of you sitting at this table face the penitentiary. And, by God, I'll see that you go there!"
He stopped. A chilly silence, in which Rod could hear the sharp intake and slow exhalation of breath, seemed to hold them all fast.
"There has been mismanagement. Yes. There have also been illegal transactions, criminal acts. They were well covered, but I dug them up. I have had able men looking into the affairs of this corporation for some time. I repeat, if you throw it into involuntary liquidation, I will put at least three of you behind the bars."
To Rod it was like having a box seat at a melodrama. Again the masks failed these men. His father had stung them twice. First with an insult, then with a threat. They looked furtive; they seemed apprehensive. They remained silent, glancing sidelong at each other. All but John P. Wall. He took out a cigar, lit it very deliberately after biting off the end, while his gaze traveled slowly about the circle of perturbed faces. His own remained placid.
"What do you propose then, Norquay?" he asked casually.
"That we assess ourselves proportionately to replace the funds which have been—dissipated. Appoint a new manager. Replace this board of directors and carry on until such time as this concern can be wound up with every obligation discharged."
Wall shook his head.
"No," he said calmly. "Far as I'm concerned—not a bean. I'm through. Let 'er crash."
Sheeplike they followed his lead. They seemed to gather courage. Their money was their lifeblood. They would not spill it lightly. Other people's money, perhaps. Not their own.
They gathered voice. They protested that no sensible man would try to bolster up a tottering business. Why should they risk large sums when they could avoid risk by merely stepping aside?
"I can't step aside," Norquay senior answered them quietly. "You wouldn't understand if I told you why. So you refuse, then? Very well. I have told you what will follow an enforced receivership. I stand on that."
He kept the same position, fingertips resting on the polished wood, staring at them with open hostility, frank contempt. He remained silent after reaching this impasse.
"We are no more anxious for a receivership and a public outcry over a whopping failure than you are," Bartley Richston declared. "But neither are we to be stampeded into sinking more money. It would be lunacy. Most of us see clearly that to go ahead simply means a bigger smash later on. This is no matter for sentiment. We are practical men and we see no sound reason for making tremendous sacrifices. As an alternative I would suggest—since you seem to think, contrary to our judgment, that the Norquay Trust can be resuscitated—that you take it over, lock, stock and barrel, yourself. You can have my interest. I'm satisfied my shares aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Then you can use your own resources to bolster it up, and if you succeed any profit or glory will be your own."
"Very well," Norquay senior agreed, very gently and—to Rod—quite unexpectedly. "I will accept your shares, and your resignations. In the usual manner you will elect in your places such men as I name. Not to-morrow, nor next week, but now—at once. It is quarter to eleven. There are clerks and telephones. I shall be back at a quarter to twelve.
"Remember," he concluded harshly, "I am a wealthy man and not given to idle threats. If any of you at any time now or in the future takes a step by word or deed to precipitate a crisis which I am trying to avoid—then I step aside. The funds I propose to use in clearing up this mess of your making I shall then devote to seeing that such of you as I can reach shall get your just deserts for certain disbursements in connection with this trust company."
He turned his back on them. Rod followed him out to the cloak-room. They put on their coats in silence, walked out to the street where a closed motor car waited at the curb.
"The Western Club," Mr. Norquay told the chauffeur.
"I need a drink badly," he said to Rod, "to take the taste out of my mouth. Well, we're committed to a devil of an undertaking, Rod. You'll have to begin ripping the heart out our timber as soon as there's a break in the weather. It is our only salvation. I have turned everything else into cash the last few weeks against this emergency. I never believed we should ever get into so tight a corner. We've got a fighting chance. That's all."
"I wonder," Rod's mind envisaged certain passages in his great-great-grandfather's journal, "if it's as tight a corner as the Chilcotins had us in once or twice? There have been tight corners in the past, pater. Do you suppose we have lost our capacity for hard fighting? Gone soft? Eh?"
His father glanced at him. "God forbid," he said quietly, and relapsed into silence.
"It is my fault," he sighed, "I should have fathomed Grove long ago. Blind, blind! He's eaten up with vanity. Fancies himself a Napoleon on the field of affairs. They've played shrewdly on that. I can see it now. He doesn't realize yet what they've done to him, nor how. He's been bewildered for weeks—and still confident that if he could get enough money he could carry it off. A fool and his money! Power in weak hands. They made a tool of him, a common tool. And we've got to pay through the nose. There's no choice—unless we get down to their level and run to cover like jackals."
"If you have proof of criminal acts, why don't you club them with that;makethem disgorge?" Rod asked.
The older man shook his head.
"Only as a last resort. I'm not really sure I could. Moral certainty is not legal proof. There are moneys loaned to companies that are really dummies. It's rather complicated, and they are very clever. I hardly expected to make them contribute funds. The most I hoped for was to frighten them away from a receivership, force them out of the thing quietly. I shrink from a public scandal. They wouldn't, if they felt personally safe. They could make Grove a proper scapegoat. No, I've done the best that can be done."
The machine stopped before the club entrance. They went up to Norquay senior's rooms, and he produced a decanter and glasses and a siphon of soda.
He drained his glass and set it down. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.
"I have a strange feeling of some crisis at hand," he said gloomily. "I have taken the ultimate precaution. Their game is stopped, I'm sure. Still—I have that uneasy feeling. I'm not a fanciful man. I never took much stock in premonitions. Childish. Nevertheless—I can depend on you absolutely, Rod? Eh? If anything happens to me you'll see this thing through? Because there's no one else—you understand how I feel about it, don't you?"
"Yes, pater," Rod said quietly. "I understand. But nothing's going to happen to you."
"I'm an old man," his father said. "I can't stand much strain. What's the time? We'd better be getting back."
Sometime during the luncheon hour the original shareholders and directors of the Norquay Trust Company completed the last task they would ever perform in that capacity at that great table. They took their scowling faces one by one from the room. The final exit was made by John P. Wall, rotund-bellied, imperturbable, unmoved to the last.
He paused in the doorway to relight his cigar.
"Well, Norquay senior," he said casually, "I have to admire your nerve—but your judgment is damn poor. A man may lose his money. Only a bloomin' idiot gives it away."
The three, father and two sons, remained seated at the table without speaking for a few seconds after Wall's parting shot.
Then Grove heaved a sigh.
"Well, that's finished," he said with a return of his old briskness. "I can't say that I like the idea of draining the estate to protect this concern. But it won't take me long to pull it out of the hole. It's really better to have it entirely in our own hands. I didn't believe that crowd would ever get cold feet and leave me in the lurch. Good riddance."
"No," his father answered slowly, "it is not finished. I want your formal resignation as president. I want an assignment of your entire holding in this corporation. At once. When you have done that, it will be finished, so far as you're concerned."
"Pater! For God's sake! Have you gone mad?" Grove's eyes bulged. His mouth opened roundly. "You're not going to put me out?"
"That is precisely my intention."
"But you can't. Nobody knows this thing as I do. It won't run without me. I made it, I tell you. The complexity of—"
"You made it!" his father said wearily. "What have you made of it? A hash. A shaky, unwieldy thing that will fall to pieces if I don't plaster it up with money. Listen to me, Grove."
He leaned forward, pointing an index finger pistol-fashion, and Rod had an impression of hearing sentence passed on a delinquent, a sentence from which there could be no appeal. He had never thought of his father as a harsh, merciless man. He was harsh now. There was an acid bitterness in his tone.
"Listen to me," he repeated. "You have had your head for nine years. You have sunk a sizable fortune in this, and it is nothing but a gutted shell. You have not only wasted your own money, allowed these men to filch it from you, but you have taken the money of people who trusted you and put it in jeopardy. Not because you were a crook or a thief—but because you associated with crooks and thieves without recognizing them as such. You should have known what constitutes business integrity. You have disregarded the highest obligation of a public trust. So you can't remain in control here. You should never have been in control. That was my mistake—for which we must all pay—all of us, do you hear? I should have seen through you long ago. Your private life is a scandal and your public life a sham. You're morally as well as financially bankrupt. You've misled me. I've had to learn for myself about things. You can be of no service in clearing up the mess you've made. I can't trust you. I have no confidence in you. So you must step aside."
Grove's chin sank on his breast.
"You ought to give me a chance," he mumbled. "I've made mistakes. Everybody does. But nobody can handle this thing without me."
Rod marveled at the fixity of this idea.
"No," his father repeated inflexibly. "From now on you make your own chances. Charlie Hale will take full charge here. You will be at hand for a few days to give him such information as he requires. But you will have no authority. I want this attended to this afternoon. At once. See that you do it immediately."
Grove rose. He slouched through the doorway, all the sprightliness gone out of him. Rod felt a sudden twinge of pity. Grove had been broken on his own wheel. Norquay senior sat staring blankly at the table. A wistful sadness shadowed his face. It pained Rod. He was an old man and Grove was his son,—and he had been proud of him. Rod understood.
"Don't take it to heart so, pater," he tried to cheer him. "It'll come out all right."
"The limits of human folly are only exceeded by human blindness," his father answered moodily, "and sometimes it is a little difficult to adjust one's vision to a merciless flash of light."
He sat tapping his fingertips on the polished wood.
"I really wanted you with me for moral support this afternoon, I think, Rod," he confessed, with a faint smile. "I'm sure it has been illuminating, if somewhat disagreeable. I think all the fireworks are touched off. Now I shall be here all afternoon with my solicitor attending to dry business matters. So I won't keep you. There are certain things I want to talk over with you, but to-morrow or another day will do as well."
Rod left the Trust building and walked along Hastings Street without a definite aim. There was an uncomfortable heaviness in his breast, a physical discomfort, which drove him to motion. And his brain was busy in a detached impersonal fashion. All the battles were not fought with guns and poison gas. Struggle seemed inherent in the very process of living, no matter how one lived, what precautions one took. Struggle was all very well,—until it became edged with pain and bitterness. Prides, ambitions, frantic strivings for this and that,—and defeats, reprisals, disasters close in their wake. He wondered what Grove would do now. He wondered if this unstable edifice of Grove's creation would go down in spite of all effort and bury the Norquay family in its collapse. He ruminated upon Grove's eagerly pursued career, slipping away now into sordid futility. A matter of dollars. No question of honor or duty, no sacrifice for anything resembling an ideal, no vision of usefulness to his family, his friends, or his country had illuminated Grove's headlong way. Grove had made a bid for neither respect nor affection in all his dealings with men. Only power, the purely material aspect of power, was a thing he valued. He had lost it. What would he do without it? A brigadier reduced to a K.P.
Rod's most conscious desire, as he moved along a street sodden with a drizzle of cold rain, was to be on the porch at Hawk's Nest, looking at high, aloof mountains deep in winter snow, hiding their heads in wisps of frost-fog, hearing the voice of the rapids lift up its ancient song. He craved rest and quiet, a surcease of incessant street noise, which was to him a faint echo of the sound and fury of the Western Front. He wanted freedom from clash and struggle until he could at least draw his breath and give his heart a chance. He believed he was past a physical crisis, that his heart would strengthen if he could withdraw from crowds and noise, from the swirl of acquisitiveness which bred the mean passions of which he had that day seen some manifestation. He didn't want to be chewed up in the machine which had got beyond Grove's control. He wanted no hand on those levers. Yet he seemed to see obscure forces thrusting upon him tasks he shrank from.
On the surface it was simple enough. They couldn't let a smash come. That was clear. To brace up that swaying structure unlimited funds must be created out of the raw material they controlled, that which had been the backbone of the Norquay estate,—those lordly firs which clothed granite ridges and mountain sides, those ancient cedars that masked gorge and hollow and swamp. That would be his job. One well enough to his liking. Even the destruction of a thing Rod loved as he did his native forest could have an element of the constructive, too, if it were not dictated by a necessity born of human folly and greed. Still, that couldn't be helped now.
It was a curious feeling of the Norquay Trust Company looming over his personal life as it loomed over the adjacent buildings that depressed Rod most. It seemed rather fantastic to imagine that as threatening his peace and welfare, but the feeling was real.
He drifted along the street. People passed him singly, in groups, in pairs, in little droves, hurrying or sauntering, rich and poor, men, women and children, an endlessly flowing stream, of humanity. A sprinkling of khaki showed among them. The majority were the last sweepings of the draft not yet demobilized. Others, he saw at a glance, were returned men. He wondered what they thought of it all now they were back.
He was to have that question partially answered before long. Within a block of theProvinceoffice where he had last met him Rod encountered Andy Hall. From the hand which grasped Rod's extended one the index and second fingers were missing. He wore a lieutenant's uniform; four wound stripes marked one sleeve. His freckled face had lost some of the old ruddy color, but his eyes flickered as brightly quizzical as in those days when he rigged high-lead spars in the Valdez camp. Rod took this all in at a glance.
Where were you? What division? When did you get back? How many times over the length and breadth of North America were those questions being asked and answered in 1919?
"Months ago—last of September," Andy said. "The idea was that I should bear a hand getting draftees into shape at Hastings Park, since I was classified as unfit for front-line service. But I haven't done much. Flu knocked me out in November. They'll can me pretty soon, I hope. It's easy to get into the army, but hell to get out, even when they don't need you any longer."
"The tribal instinct won out, eh?" Rod smiled. "For a downright rebel you seem to have got on in the army."
"I'm still a rebel," Andy returned. "The war would have made me one if I hadn't been before. Still, when you are fool enough to volunteer for a job, you can't very well lie down on it. There were times when I felt like it, though. It was a dirty job, eh?"
"Rather," Rod agreed. "Remember the time we had a drink in the Strand and talked about the big show?"
Andy nodded.
"I was thinking about that as I came past theProvince," he drawled. "If it were worth while expressing an opinion, I'd say the same—only more so."
"Let's stroll up to the Vancouver and sit down and gas awhile?" Rod suggested.
They found comfortable chairs in a quiet corner of the great hotel. Their talk covered Europe, politics, certain phases of trench fighting, and came back at last from generalities tinged with pessimism to the particular, to themselves.
"What are you going to do after you're demobilized?" Rod asked. It was not, on his part, an idle question.
"I don't know." Andy shook his head. "I'll never sling cable again, that's sure. You need all your fingers for that."
His eyes rested speculatively on the mutilated hand.
"Long before I lost my fingers," he continued, "I used to say to myself that if I got out of it alive, I'd never work for any man again—I'd never have anybody's collar round my neck. The army put that into me. It jarred my old idea of men voluntarily coöperating for the common good or any other purpose. The army—all the armies—were made up of picked men. Eighty per cent. of 'em fell into two categories; they had to be led, or they had to be driven. If there was no one to lead or drive, they ran round in circles when anything happened. So I made up my mind to be a leader or a driver—to play the game the way the rest do, who manage to beat the game. I was so damned sick of orders and discipline. Orders that were stupid, or vicious, or simply issued as an exhibition of authority. Discipline that went beyond its logical purpose of securing cohesive action and became merely a whip to lash a lot of tired unhappy men. Nobody minded the actual fighting so much. That's what you were there for; you expected it; you got used to it. You took your chances without making a fuss, even if now and then your stomach sort of turned. No, the dirt and drudgery were worse than the danger. And to a fellow like me the sight and sound of fussy brass hats laying more stress on recognition of their rank and dignity, the unanimity with which they implied that they wereIt—hell, you know how everybody below the rank of a battalion commander felt about that. They could do anything they liked to you, say the worst they could think, punish you for somebody else's mistakes. And you couldn't say a damned word. You couldn't even look sour. That was insubordination. No. I didn't mind the war so much—it was the army—the whole fabric of the military system.
"I passed up a chance at a commission in '15—because I was still too class-conscious. But I grabbed the next chance. That's what I'm going to do in civil life—grab chances. I don't know how, yet. I don't think much. I'm still in the army, and in the army you're not supposed to think. But I didn't run wild in France, except for brief spells, so I've saved most of my pay. And I hear talk of a gratuity to us heroes," he smiled broadly. "I'll probably come out with a couple of thousand dollars. After that—well, you see before you a man who has had a bayonet stuck through his leg, his carcass lightly punctured with shrapnel, one or two faint whiffs of gas. None of which did him more harm than to give him long spells of lying still and thinking. And he thought himself into a condition of mind that will prevent him from ever again working hard—for other people. No, Norquay, I will never again labor faithfully to make two dollars grow—for some one else—where only one grew before. I don't believe I could feel the slightest obligation toward a job again, or an atom of pride in doing a job well. You see, I can't lose sight of the job-owners—I don't like 'em. I despise 'em. They got us all into this mix-up. They called us to arms in the name of all the old gods that man has been taught to reverence. And then they laid down on us, and went to making money out of our necessities. No, whenever a man offers me a job, I'll think of war contracts, of seventeen prices for clothes and food, of the bonds they've salted away, of shoddy boots and defective ammunition—and the fact that some of them are secretly sorry the war is over and the big, easy money at an end. No, I couldn't be loyal to a job, with all that in my mind."
"Fiddlesticks," Rod answered this last. "If I had a stand of timber and I said to you, 'Here's a crew and machinery—go to it; you've got a free hand,' you'd get it out for me as if you were getting it out for yourself."
"Well," Andy hesitated, "if you bring yourself into it, that's different. You don't come in any of the categories I mentioned, or I'm very much mistaken. Operating a real job for a man you could like and respect. That is different."
"You see, you haven't lost a capacity for loyalty," Rod pointed out. "It's only been deflected. I understand that. Psychologically I've traveled pretty much the same road you have. All that you say is true. Only it isn't all the truth, Andy. Just one side of the shield; the side that's turned to us; that's hard for us to get our eyes off. Fellows like you and me are a little up in the air right now. We feel like tramping savagely on the toes of a lot of smug, comfortable persons. That wouldn't get us anywhere. Nor would it change them—because they simply don't understand. What we'll probably get down to after awhile—those of us who have a sense of order and any touch of creativeness—will be some sort of activity that won't set the world on fire or turn it into a Bedlam, but that will possibly do some little good in the immediate radius of our own activity.Sabe? A man has to do what he can, before he can do what he wants."
"A man," Andy observed thoughtfully, "generally has to solve his material problems before he can tackle spiritual ones. Yet the two are interwoven. It's very difficult. I'm a rampant individualist, by nature. Man is. But if you didn't have some check on individualism the world would be a regular Kilkenny. Rampageous individualism in big affairs is what started the big scrap. The same thing will start another. It may even start hellish struggles between individual exploiters here at home and the masses they're keen to exploit. You can't have order and peace and security in a society where everybody is straining every nerve to get whathewants, and to hell with the other fellow. I'm no Utopian any longer, but I do know that if evolution doesn't speed up the process of industrial reorganization, there are going to be some corking rows, and a lot of material and spiritual uncertainty for everybody. I may not seem very consistent in what I say or do, but I'm consistent in my perception of certain things. We've built up a complex mechanism of affairs. The machine is our master instead of our servant."
Rod thought of the Norquay Trust Company as a vast creaking mechanism exacting unrewarded service, sacrifice, claiming the vital substance of himself, his father, the estate. Grove's Frankenstein creation!
"It may be so," he conceded. "But we are not yet automatons."
They continued to talk until the dusk of the short winter's day closed in. When the lights began to blink along the street they separated, Andy to his barracks, Rod to his home.
A taxi stand fronted the hotel, looking across Georgia Street. Rod crossed the way. As he did so a newsboy passed crying "ex-x-x-truh" in a shrill treble. In the distance he could hear other voices wailing the same cry. The Peace Conference, a fresh outbreak in Europe. Anything was possible in that welter of political, racial, and economic antagonisms across the Atlantic. He beckoned the boy.
In the glare of a white-globed light standard he read the headlines:
PRESIDENT NORQUAY TRUST INSTANTLY KILLEDSHOTGUN ACCIDENTALLY DISCHARGED
A northwest gale rattled a loose window in the library at Hawk's Nest. Beyond that the house stood solid to the blasts, as solid as a mountain mass of the granite that formed its walls. In the surrounding woods branchy cedar and tall, plumed firs bent before that gusty wind like bowed giants, giants that sighed in mournful cadences. Rod stuffed a folded bit of paper between sash and frame to silence the tremulous chatter of the wood.
He flattened his face against the pane for a few seconds. In the dark where the wind lashed at everything as if the Borean gods were in a towering passion, he could see faint, shifting flecks of white,—wind-whipped seas breaking in the channel. In brief lulls he could hear the rapids grumbling at full flood, the deep roar of agitated waters softened by distance. He could mark under that black canopy of sky a silver streak where straight current met back eddy in a foaming line, and the devil's dishpans spun about deep vortices.
He went back to his chair before a glowing fireplace. It was near midnight, and he was wakeful, his brain a simmering pot. A succession of images trooped by; he couldn't stop them. Thoughts, fancies, realities leaped out of nothingness, loomed before him, vanished before the crowding army of their fellows; as if he were engaged upon a review of the past and a projection of the future. He could no more stop that procession than he could check the tide roaring through the Euclataw Passage. It was as if he stood aside and watched the entity that was himself performing this and that action,—a single thread tracing a formless pattern in the warp and woof of persons and things. He could see it all very clearly up to the present. Beyond that the images were uncertain, tentative, sometimes blurred.
His youthful sense of the family as a permanent, imperishable force, in relation to which he as an individual was negligible, had been wiped out of his mind. The colossal stature of the Norquays had shrunk to his own dimension. The solid had become fluid, ready to trickle through his fingers if he did not have a care.
Five years ago to-night he had been at Hawk's Nest in a breathing spell from the Valdez camp. Out of all the permanences that surrounded him then, he was now only sure of one,—Mary, his wife. His grandfather was dead. Phil was dead, and Grove. Their father was dying here to-night, while the northwester swept the coast. Materially, their hold was now uncertain on all that had served to make them what they were.
In a little while there would be only himself to make decisions, to take action, to bear a responsibility for matters which no longer involved merely himself or his immediate family but embraced people he had never seen, would never know. Their welfare, resting in his hands, burdened him with an oppressive weight.
Why should he shoulder this burden. He began to understand why men here and there evade responsibility, or break down under it, when the shadow of such responsibility loomed darkly over himself.
He had had no preparation for responsibility. He had lived—he smiled at the platitude—a sheltered life. Except in one or two isolated instances, such as his marriage, he had never been compelled to make a momentous decision. His youth, with its romantic dreaming, its fastidiousness which had made him shun such physical grossness as Grove's, had been ordered and directed. So had his more formal education. Even his four years in the army, except in unimportant details, had never taken him into the realm of plan and execution. He had simply been a cog in the military machine, obeying orders, reissuing those orders to men bound to obey him, as he was himself bound to obey others. Responsibility rested always in other hands. He had been aware of that and fairly content to have it so.
But that was at an end. Very soon now, a matter of hours, when the unconscious old man in a room down the hallway breathed out his tired life he, Rod Norquay, would become the fulcrum and lever which should move enormous weights. He would be faced by a necessity to take up a task which offered little hope of reward save a sense of duty performed. Other men's welfare, other men's money, other men's sins. He could draw back from this, or see it through. He could evade it or grapple it stoutly. But there it was, waiting for him to decide.
Grove had evaded, when he faced the incontrovertible result of his handiwork. Or had he? No one would ever know. He had gone in mid-afternoon from the Norquay Trust office to his home. He had telephoned a friend to join him in a duck hunt at a gun club on the Ladner flats, had arranged to pick up his friend. He had come out from the house to the garage, bearing a shotgun, a bag and a shooting coat, whistling as he came. He spoke to the chauffeur genially. While the man attended to some detail of his machine the shotgun cracked and Grove Norquay fell against the running-board. He was dead before the man could cry for help.
And whether it was sheer accident, or whether he had killed himself in a moment of despair at the muddle he had wrought, Rod could not say. Publicly it went as a sad accident. But he knew what his father thought. He knew, too, what rumors ran like sly foxes in the street, rumors which did not have their origin in mere conjecture, but which nevertheless would have brought Grove's financial castle tumbling about their ears if his father had not been prepared.
Rod would never forget the crowd of people in the street an hour before the Norquay Trust Company opened its doors. People well and ill-dressed, shopclerks, business men, middle-aged women, people whose motors were parked at the curb. They strove and pushed and jostled for advantage, eager to be first, until policemen came and herded them into line,—a line that extended a block and curved around a corner up a side street like the tail of an uneasy, muttering serpent.
All that forenoon and well past the luncheon hour they filed past the paying tellers, presented checks, passbooks, demanding their money, withdrawing accounts. As the cash boxes of the Norquay Trust emptied into pockets that departed hastily through the front door they were replenished by sheafs of Norquay estate currency withdrawn from other banks in hundred-thousand-dollar lots.
From behind bronze grillwork Rod watched this scene. He marked the nervous eagerness of these people over their money. They were frightened, watchful, uneasy, until they had it in their hands. The air was charged with hostile currents, with a tension that communicated itself to department managers, the ledgerkeepers, the tellers. One man made a five-hundred-dollar mistake,—and broke under the strain. He sat in his cage and wept, and a murmuring that was like a growl swept through the lofty, pillared room until he was led away and another man took up his work of handing out cash.
Once Rod's father came to sit by him for a minute. He looked out at the anxious faces, the people crowding forward, pressing eagerly up to the wickets. After a little he said to Rod in a low, tense whisper:
"The coward. The damned coward! He couldn't face the music."
About one-thirty the run tapered off. Every certificate of deposit, every demand was met promptly, courteously. Human nature asserted itself. An institution that could disgorge an enormous total and still exhibit great bales of currency and gold behind each tellercouldn'tbe shaky. Who peddled the story that the Norquay Trust was broke, anyhow? Some damn fool. It was a false alarm. Fellow that started it ought to be shot—scaring people like that—making so much trouble. The Norquay estate's backing it. No chance of a concern like that being in the hole. What you think? Eh?
They stood out on the curb, repeating things like that. Men turned back at the very wickets. Some returned shamefacedly to redeposit their money, only to be told politely that the Norquay Trust declined to reopen closed accounts.
The ordinary cash depositors ceased from troubling long before the closing hour.
"That's that," Charlie Hale grunted. "We've pretty well disposed of the small fry. Fortunately a few big accounts can be met. And none of the trust accounts are at our heads like a pistol."
That was the end of a salient demonstration. Routine resumed its placid groove. Time and effort Norquay senior declared and his son-in-law, whose profession was accountancy, agreed, would bring order out of the chaos Grove had wrought.
Yes, he had somehow blundered into chaos. And no matter how many other clutching fingers might have been dipped into the trust coffers, Grove had failed to feather his own nest. His personal estate included only his house and his yacht. There was no record of his having ever withdrawn a dollar from trust funds, of receiving more than a liberal salary. His assets didn't include enough cash to bury him. Where, then, did the money go?
"Ask Wall, Richston, Deane—that crowd," Charlie Hale muttered, when Rod put the question. "I may be able to tell you after awhile. A few things look very, very fishy. The fact remains that half the so-called assets are junk. There's no mistake about the liabilities. If I can follow certain leads far enough, we may be able to make somebody disgorge. But they're pretty clever. They seem to have got Grove coming and going."
"You will have to get crews together soon," his father had told him after Grove's funeral. "I'd put the first crew in on that Horn limit. It's beautiful timber and easy logging. Also start up the old Valdez camp. There are two or three limits on Hardwicke yet, as well. In fact, timber's all we have left. I've hypothecated everything else. I'll look after the town end. The woods will be your field. The weather ought to break soon."
The weather had not permitted woods work. But the turn of affairs had sent Rod and his wife and boy almost immediately to Hawk's Nest. The elder Norquay urged them to go.
"That's the place for you," he said. "It's our home. It has always been our home. It will be yours, Rod. You can consider it yours now. When I feel my time coming, I shall want to be there too."
And his time had come, perhaps a little sooner than he expected, perhaps not sooner than he wished.
"My life has been a failure," he said to Rod one day. "I might have made a different man of Grove, if I hadn't been so comfortably secure in the egotistic belief that to be my son was guarantee enough. Oh, I've been blind with the sort of pride that goes before a fall. And I was too harsh. He was proud too. I killed him myself, Rod."
He would talk like that, full of grief. And he would go on to speak of expiation, of the obligation upon them to give a steward's account of their trust.
"You see," he would repeat, "it was not simply Grove, but what Grove represented, what he sprang from, that bred people's confidence. No casual promoter, no fly-by-night financier could have induced that simple trust on such a scale. People looked beyond him and they saw something that was solid as a rock, that couldn't fail. We must live up to that, somehow."
The library door opened. Mary beckoned silently.
"He wants to speak to you," she said in the hall.
But the momentary flash of consciousness lapsed before Rod reached the bedside. He had been sinking for days. He was going out now, like a guttering candle. A nurse stood at the foot of the bed. A doctor stood, watch in hand, his fingers on the faint pulse. Rod looked a question. The man shook his head. Rod sat down beside the bed. To his quickened imagination the room seemed full of the flutter of sable wings.
An hour later his father died.