"I have seen some financial muddles in my time and some manipulation that was on the borderline of pure theft," Charlie Hale said to Rod, "but this is a little the worst mess I ever had to do with."
They were going over the situation in Hale's private office, which had once been Grove's sanctum, sitting by the same table upon which Grove had leaned his elbows long ago, when he remonstrated with Rod for walking Beach Avenue with Mary Thorn. Beyond its walls the faint murmur of voices arose, and the remote tapping of typewriters.
"Take this Spruce Supplies Limited for an example," Hale continued. "One of the apparently honest failures that left the Norquay Trust in the lurch. Spruce Supplies was organized by Richston and Wall. There were other stockholders—all dummies. Once incorporated, Wall and Richston apparently dispose of all interest in the company. Then Spruce Supplies proceeds to issue three hundred thousand dollars' worth of five-year, seven per cent bonds against their holdings, which consist of timber limits, camp equipment, and logging machinery, valued at seven hundred thousand dollars. The Norquay Trust takes these bonds as security for a loan of three hundred thousand, recommended and authorized by Wall, Richston, etc., in their capacity as directors. The concern is supposed to create a sinking fund to retire these bonds at maturity. They begin timber operations with a flourish. For two years they pay the bond interest. But after two years they cease payments. In the fullness of time the Norquay Trust forecloses and acquires all the assets. But, in my investigation of these assets, I discover that Spruce Supplies operated on a tremendous scale while they did work. The timber is practically all cut, the equipment is pretty well worn out. The men who cruised the limits for me estimate seven or eight hundred thousand dollars' worth of timber removed—prices went rocketing for airplane spruce, you know. A liberal estimate of what we have to show for three hundred thousand cash is less than sixty thousand in real value.
"There were seven shareholders. Five owned two shares apiece. Two are clerks who disappeared in the draft. Three are bond salesmen—forty-dollar-a-week men. The two who owned the bulk of the stock—well, one's a sort of confidential man in Richston's office. The other was for ten years in Wall's employment. They're both out of the country; with a few thousand dollars apiece, I imagine. Dummies—pure and simple. You can guess who got the money. But you can't prove anything. I doubt if you could take legal action against those foxy old birds if you had proof that the pair of them looted Spruce Supplies. It was ostensibly a legal transaction. The Norquay Trust Company should have protected itself, you see."
"And that's only one of several such," Hale concluded. "They made a milk cow of this business. They saw that funds were invested where they would do the most good—for them. They simply made a goat of Grove."
Rod stared at the figures on a sheet of paper before him.
"Liabilities practically four hundred thousand in excess of available assets," he murmured. "That's a hump to get over. How long can we reasonably expect to go on—I mean how much grace will we have to meet everything without going into forced liquidation?"
"With a fair amount of revenue from some outside source—say eighty or a hundred thousand every six months—we can go right along as usual," Hale replied. "There's no immediate call for funds. All the pressing obligations your father provided funds to meet. There's only a dead loss that this concern can't shake off by its own efforts. We can—we have—cut operating expenses to the bone. But as a trust company we can't—legitimately—make money fast enough ever to get even."
"There's only one outside source of revenue available, you know," Rod reminded.
"Is it wise to go any farther?" Hale shifted uneasily. "You'll beggar yourself."
"Between beggaring myself and beggaring other people, there doesn't seem to be much choice."
"Do you consider yourself personally responsible for Grove's actions?" Hale asked earnestly.
"You know what the governor's idea was," Rod answered. "Grove put this over pretty much on the strength of the family standing. So we were tacitly involved. We'll be a public stink if we sit back. We aren't legally responsible; we are morally. That was his idea. I'm inclined to agree."
"That's drawing it pretty fine," Hale responded. "Grove was his son. Individually you are not to blame at all. It's easy to make a grand gesture and go down. Heroic sort of thing. But once you're down everybody'll walk on you."
"What are you getting at?" Rod demanded impatiently. "Do you want me to cut and run with the swag—like a burglar? It amounts to pretty much the same. I keep the estate intact, and these people all lose their money. I don't quite see why you should try to dissuade me."
"I'm rather anxious to know just how far you will go with it," Hale returned. "Suppose you change your mind when the going gets rough? I've got involved in this myself through connection by marriage."
"What would you do if you were in my place?" Rod asked softly.
"I don't know," Hale twisted uneasily in his seat. "I'd hate to be faced with such a decision, Rod. Your family has cut quite a figure in this country for a long time. Hate to see it peter out. Moneyisessential. Without money," he made a gesture of dismissal. "I went over the whole thing with your father. Probably take your last dollar to see it through."
"Are you thinking about Dorothy's share of the estate?" Rod asked his brother-in-law point-blank.
Hale didn't resent the question. He answered frankly.
"Well, yes and no. I wasn't a rich man to begin with and four years in the army didn't improve my finances. Still, I can get by comfortably on my profession. I didn't marry Dot for her income. It would be convenient to have it continue. But that is not what disturbs me. I don't like to think of the family fortune all shot to pieces, the old place up the coast passing into the hands of some damned profiteer—some pot-bellied swab who made a barrel of money building useless ships or selling bacon to the government. The rallying point of the whole clan will be gone. You'll be like a feudal baron without a castle, without a single man-at-arms.
"Still, you see my position, don't you?" Rod persisted.
"Surely," Hale admitted. "I'm not dense—or unsympathetic.Noblesse oblige. Only it's a pity. People won't care one way or the other a year after it's over. Everybody's too busy whipping his own particular devil around the stump. When your wife has to wear cotton stockings and do her own cooking, the very people you're protecting will only think of you with contemptuous pity."
"I would rather incur their contempt than my own," Rod answered that: the last had stung him a little. "Well, I'll keep in touch. So-long."
He went home, back to the rented house which they kept on for convenience. Six weeks at Hawk's Nest had revived the old feeling of its being the only place he could ever truly regard as home. That fierce possessive pride rose stronger than ever in his breast when he walked about the grounds, when he stood among those massive trees rising in brown-trunked ranks over Big Dent, when he lay in his bed at night and looked drowsily up at the high, beamed ceiling. It was as permanent as the hills—or it should be made so. And it was his, his own, to keep and pass on to another generation of Norquays—if he could. If he could? There had never been a question of that nature to harass a Norquay since the cornerstone was levered into place in 1809. If he could!
Why shouldn't he? It was simply assured. He had only to stand back with his hands in his pockets, aloof, unmoved, while Grove's white elephant died for lack of the nourishment he alone could supply. Hadn't his father done enough? The figures had staggered Rod at the time. Although every active productive undertaking of the estate had stopped for the duration of the war, yet their fortune had not shrunk appreciably. Not until Rod's father began to pour it into those looted coffers. Every liquid asset, bonds, gilt-edged securities, real estate,—all hypothecated to raise funds.
Hopeless to think of ever redeeming them. But there was still timber which with labor and machinery he could transform into money. He owned that clear of all encumbrance, thousands of acres of it, the finest virgin timber on the Pacific coast. With Hawk's Nest and standing timber he still had firm grasp of the old, comfortable security for himself and all the collateral branches of the Norquay clan.
Why should he voluntarily give that up?
To organize his forces, to live under the pressure of a struggle for more and more revenue, to drive labor, to watch markets and prices with a feverish intensity, to live and breathe and think in terms of money and more money was hateful to him. To whip up a sick heart day after day. Suppose it laid down on him? Who would carry on?
He looked back from his own doorstep at the square roof and the skeleton sign of the Norquay Trust looming on the jagged downtown skyline. It was like an inverted pyramid resting on his shoulders, crushing him.
He walked through the living room with a glance. He knew Mary would be upstairs where she had arranged a workshop for herself with a desk, a shelf of books, a typewriter. She sat there making aimless marks on the margin of a pad on which she had written a few sentences.
He had explained the situation to her roughly long ago. Now he sat down to explain in detail, to outline his personal relation to an inherited problem.
"There it is," he concluded. "What do you think? I can go through with it, or I can let it go. It may beat me even if I do my best. At most we'll only have Hawk's Nest and some machinery. I can hardly hope to salvage more than that."
She looked at him for a second with an enigmatical smile.
"Why ask me, Rod?" she said finally. "You're going to do what one would naturally expect you to do. You've made up your mind. You don't really consider that you have much choice, do you?"
"No," he admitted. "I can't see that I have. I hate the job. I don't like cutting my own throat. I don't like paying for a dead horse that somebody else killed. But I simply can't do the other thing."
"I don't like poverty," Mary said presently. "I've known comparative poverty, though, and I'm not much the worse for it. I'm quite confident that between us we could manage very well if we had nothing but the clothes we stand in. One can sometimes turn dreams into dollars. No, I'm not much afraid of anything the world can do to us. Rod junior will manage to grow up into something of a man on considerably less than 'steen thousand a year. If you feel that something more vital to you than money is involved in this—— One has to be guided in such matters by one's convictions. A profound conviction, right or wrong, is a tremendous driving force. If you throttle it to grasp a material advantage— People do sometimes. And they suffer for it."
She sat tapping the pad with her pencil.
"Queer complications crop up over such a question," she said at last. "I wonder if you know that practically all my father's money is in the Norquay Trust. The few thousands that are to keep him and mamma in comfort while they live—all he saved out of a lifetime of work."
"Good Lord, no, I didn't know that," Rod said. "He didn't get it out when the scramble was on?"
She shook her head.
"He laughed when I asked him. I did. I telephoned him when you told me what was happening downtown. He hasn't even thought of revoking the trust. You see," she explained, "he made a trust fund of it and draws only the income. He said that people could make damned fools of themselves on the strength of a rumor, but that he was sure anything the Norquay family backed was as solid as Gibraltar."
"Well, you have there the key to why Grove shot himself, and to why my father died of grief as much as of the flu," he said quietly. "It may be a sinful pride, but by God it's a reality I have to abide by. If we go down, we go down with our flag flying."
"But we won't go down," she said cheerfully. She came and put her arms encouragingly about him. "We may lose materially, but there are precious things that can't be taken away from us. Only you'll have to be careful of yourself. You'll have to relax. You've been strung up for weeks, brooding over this mess. I don't like that. You mustn't. We'll play the cards we hold, and if we lose, why we'll have played without cheating. Eh? Smile, Roderick Dhu."
"You're a jewel," Rod whispered. "I won't brood any more. Won't have time. I'm going to get under way. May I have a man in to dinner if I can get hold of him?"
"Half a dozen, if you like," Mary smiled.
They went downstairs. Rod called a regimental headquarters at Hastings Park. He got some information there, and called another number. Yes, Mr. Hall was in. In another minute Rod had him on the wire. Yes, he could come out to the house.
In the broad mirror of Rod's imagination, as he sat waiting, there stood forth successive images of what he meant to accomplish and how. His mind had a faculty of projecting ways and means, not as skeleton ideas, but as extraordinarily vivid pictures of the actual proceeding. He meant to make Andy Hall a commanding officer, the chief of his labor staff. His program took form in flashes, glimpses of men, machinery, stretches of forest, booming grounds,—all energized, dynamic. There was a simplicity that he appreciated in such an undertaking. It was not a matter of finessing, of juggling with pawns and tokens on the commercial chessboard. It was not an affair or stratagems and artifice and cunning. It was honest productive effort, men and machinery moving purposefully under a directing force to supply human needs. He liked that aspect of what he meant to do.
Hall was ushered in by Yick Sing. He was in civilian clothes, a small bronze button in his left lapel. Rod led him upstairs to Mary's den.
"How long since you were demobbed?"
"About two weeks," Hall answered.
"Good. I'm going to start a pretty extensive logging show. Will you help me organize it?"
"Why pick on me?" Andy inquired languidly.
"I know you," Rod replied. "You know logging and loggers. I want a man who will understand what I'm driving at; a man I can trust."
"How do you know you can trust me?"
"I don't know it. I feel it."
A queer expression flickered across Andy's face.
"A rebel like me?" he said. "You know what I think about your class—you masters of my class. You people who have control of all the sources of power. Who give us jobs or take them away, according to the dictates of your interest. You understand and believe in class distinctions, don't you?"
"I understand them, yes. But character is more important than class."
"What is character?" Hall demanded.
"Indefinable, in most cases. But it's recognizable. Whatever your situation in life, without this thing we call character you're a dud. It exists independent of class. A leisured environment, quickened intelligence, liberal education, a tradition of uprightness, is supposed to form it. But it crops out, regardless of all these things. It's inherent in some people. It's an individual quality, not a class hall-mark. But I'm getting away from the point. Your social and economic theories have very little to do with your individual function in society as it stands. You don't imagine there's a working-class movement for general betterment on foot in this country that will be imperiled by your working for me as a well-paid assistant in a job I'm undertaking? Do you?"
Andy grinned broadly.
"Hardly. So long as industry supplies jobs at living wages, everything'll be lovely. Give 'em jobs. That's all they want. They're uncomfortable in their minds unless there's somebody to tell 'em what to do. Tchk!"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"A soggy lump of dough," he grumbled. "Still, such as they are, I belong to 'em. I know what they're up against better than they do. And I'm sorry for 'em, without being able to change things."
"You find your people, the workers," Rod said, "a soggy lump of dough that the active brains of the world rather ruthlessly knead into such shapes as they require. And I find greediness, thoughtlessness, arrogance and waste outstanding features among a considerable portion of my own class, which we agree controls and directs industry. Neither of us likes the prospect, but what can we do about it? Not much. We didn't create this state of affairs. But our actions are shaped by it. Even if a certain humane instinct in us revolts at being mixed up in an unseemly scramble where everybody is grabbing what he can, we have to accept that condition. If we have to fight for what we want—whether it's merely to exist or to pursue an ideal—why not fight with the best weapon that offers? I'm offering you a commission in industry instead of enlistment in the ranks. It's neither philanthropy, nor a bribe on my part."
"You pay me a compliment," Andy said gravely. "It's true I know logging and loggers. But I don't know that I'd make a good boss—from the employer's point of view. It would not be possible for me to drive men."
"I don't want to drive men," Rod broke out impulsively. "I want to lead 'em, if it can be done. If I can give men just a little more security in their jobs, a little better conditions under which to work, a little more return in wages, that's more to them than all the theory in a thousand books. So long as men must work for wages they'll choose to work where they get the most for their effort. That's the sort of condition I want to create. Circumstances compel me to log for a profit like every other logger. But I'm neither a hog nor a parasite. I'm willing to share profits with the men who make them for me."
"All right, I'm your man," Andy said abruptly. "I never intended to look at a pay check again. I can be a free and unfettered beachcomber and make a living and still be my own boss. But this looks interesting to me. If you don't like my style, or I yours, I can quit on short notice."
"Yes," Rod smiled. "That's where you have the best of the bargain. You can quit. I can't."
"That's rather stretching it a bit," Andy observed dryly. "I can't see that."
"You will presently," Rod informed him.
He sketched for Andy's benefit the situation in which he stood, the necessity for creating revenue, the obligation which he felt to rest heavily upon him.
"If I can pull out in a couple of years with Hawk's Nest, some machinery and a well-organized crew, I'll be lucky," he said. "If I can do that, men and machinery is all I need to build up a permanent structure of industry that will take care of my wants and the wants of every man in the organization."
"Your own crowd will be saying what a damned fool you are," Andy mused. "You're an idealist, Norquay. And I didn't think there were any left. I didn't believe idealism existed as a practical working force in any possible employer's mind. I'd got so lately that I didn't think there was anybody left in the world to whom a square deal meant anything but a convenient phrase. After all, that's what you're after, isn't it? Trying to live up to your notion of what constitutes a square deal?"
"Yes, I think that's about it," Rod agreed.
"Well, if you don't find the going too hard, if too many practical difficulties don't trip you," Andy prophesied, "I'll say that if you tackle the logging game in the same spirit you'll go a long way. It's a damned scarce sort of spirit. The stupidest husky in the woods cansabea square deal. This is going to be very interesting. When do I start in, and what's the program?"
"I want you to begin to-morrow looking up a woods' boss and getting together a crew. We'll shoot 'em up to the old Valdez camp, start the falling gangs, and begin overhauling the machinery that's stored at the old camp. There's a watchman in charge, and everything's in good shape. We'll have to frame up a wage schedule. There will have to be some renovating on the camp. All sorts of details arranged. If you can meet me at the office in the Pacific Building about nine in the morning, we'll tackle the first arrangements."
"I'll be there," Andy promised.
"Meantime," said Rod, "let's go downstairs where it's more comfortable. If you have no other engagement you may as well stay to dinner."
"Thanks, I will," Andy accepted. "You won't mind, I suppose, having the cook serve square peas for me?"
They chuckled and so managed to dissipate the last trace of stiffness between them. Rod considered that he had won a minor victory. He knew that Andy Hall was one of those occasional beings who sprang from obscure 'sources with brains, courage, a pertinacious diligence in whatever he undertook, with infinite capacities for loyalty to either a person or an idea; the sort of man who leads forlorn proletarian hopes and is sometimes crucified by his own kind for fighting their battles. He could trust Andy Hall. Rod would have found it difficult to say, offhand, just why. But he knew that he could. And he had to have about him men whom he could trust, men who could understand that he was not simply another exploiter seeking ruthlessly his own advantage.
It was easy for men like Hall to lubricate the wheels of industry, or to set up frictions that produced minor disasters. Men like Andy thought in terms beyond themselves, beyond their personal ends. They rose up out of the low ground of their origins, looming above the common ruck like tall trees above a thicket. Rod was very glad to have Andy Hall's paid services. But he appreciated even more Andy's instant grasp of a difficult situation met in the only possible fashion.
A murmur of voices sounded in the living room. Rod was a trifle surprised to see Isabel Wall's piquant face turn to him over the back of a Chesterfield. She had been in the south all winter. Almost five years had left Isabel unchanged in appearance, except that her fair hair was thicker and bobbed in the prevailing mode so that it stood out around her head like a fluffy aureole, making her seem, with her big blue eyes and delicate pink-and-white skin, more like a charming doll than ever. Rod's mind revived that embarrassing scene under a high moon among the great tree shadows on Big Dent. He had not seen Isabel since. She put out her hand now with frank friendliness. It was all a little unexpected. Isabel so patently belonged in the camp of the enemy. Yet she seemed very sure of her ground here in his house, very much at home.
He introduced Andy to his wife, to Isabel, to a plump matron with two chins and a positive, not to say emphatic manner of speaking; a Mrs. Emmert whom Rod vaguely remembered.
He fell into conversation with Isabel, or rather Isabel talked and he listened. Isabel prattled as of old. Rod lost himself in speculation as to how any one could possibly talk so much and say so little. It was an art. He came out of this semi-absorption. Isabel ceased talking. Her face turned aside with a new quality of fixed attention. Rod looked and became aware that Andy was speaking to Mrs. Emmert with a bitter, gibing note in his usually pleasant voice. The whimsical, good-natured expression of his face had vanished. His face had hardened; his eyes had narrowed.
"You may consider it a notable distinction," he was saying. "But possibly your son has his doubts."
The lady made a sound in the nature of a gasp.
"You see," Andy continued in that frozen tone, "people whose knowledge of war is based on what they read in the papers don't know anything about war at all. The front-line men do. Most of 'em don't care to talk much about it. Being a person of no discrimination, I do talk about it. There is no glory in war—particularly this war—for the men who actually carry on the war. All the benefits of this ruction (if there are any benefits, which I doubt) are derived by people who stayed at home and did their patriotic duty by knitting socks and buying bonds and selling supplies to the War Department. You can't tell a soldier that it was anything but a dirty, dangerous job which he hated."
"That's the most unpatriotic thing I ever heard," Mrs. Emmert sputtered.
"I paid two fingers and a hole in one leg for the privilege of saying things like that," Andy observed tartly. "They're true. Your attitude is common enough. You've got one of these hermetically sealed minds that conceives of war as some sort of international game played by young men with guns; a game in which your son distinguished himself by winning a medal. A medal!" he snorted,—and plunged his good hand into an inner pocket.
"Look, madam," he said ironically. "Three of 'em, Military Medal, Military Cross,Croix de Guerre. They don't give you these trinkets for looking wise and talking about other people's patriotic duty. They give them to you for killing men, as a rule. That's all war is, just killing. For the stunt by which I earned this French thing I should be execrated in any civilized community. And I didn't do it to earn a decoration, nor in any spirit of heroism, I can assure you. I was caught like a rat in a trap. I was responsible for the lives of other men. I was frantic with rage and fear. I won't shock you by describing what I did. It made me sick afterward. I tell you I have a strong stomach and it made me sick to think about it. And they gave me a medal. Pah!" he snorted contemptuously. "People like you talking about the great privilege of having participated in the war. You're as bad as the Germans. Go to some slaughter-house and watch pigs and sheep die with squeals and bleats and blood spurting out of their throats. Substitute men for pigs and sheep, and you have war. Of course, if you have a butcher's instincts, you take to it as a pastime."
Mrs. Emmert was evidently making one of those formal calls which do not permit the visiting female to lay aside her wraps. She rose now, fully caparisoned in her furs; and her dignity.
"I have never been so insulted in my life," she declared. "I consider your remarks to be positively seditious."
And with that she swept majestically to the door,—not, however, without a sidelong glance at Isabel Wall. That young lady, to Rod's surprise merely smiled, shook her head, and murmured:
"Sorry. But it doesn't arouse my righteous indignation."
The door closed with a slam. Mary, who had risen, resumed her seat and smiled. Andy Hall stood up. He pocketed the decorations. His face was slightly flushed.
"I expect," he said, "I'd better be on my way. You see, when I come across such persons, I blow up. I can't help it. I'm on one side of the fence. People like that are on the other. When some silk-upholstered fool starts drooling sentimental tosh about the war and mouthing intellectual abc's as positive wisdom, I simply get red-eyed. I don't really belong on your side of the fence, and I'm just bone-headed enough to be glad I don't, if many people like that graze in your pastures."
"Sit down, Andy, and be calm," Rod laughed. "There isn't any fence so far as we're concerned. Sit down and have a cigarette. Dinner will be ready soon. Forget the fat woman. She doesn't know any better."
"Room for one more at the festive board?" Isabel inquired.
"Of course," Mary replied. "There always is."
"I wonder," Isabel turned her bland, childlike prettiness on Andy Hall. "I wonder if Mr. Hall knows how fierce he looks when he is angry? Is that an expression you cultivate in the army, Mr. Hall?"
"No." Andy replied with unexpected acidity. "I cultivated it to protect myself against idiotic questioning by London flappers."
"Entirely useless here," Isabel said sweetly. "This isn't London, and I'm not a flapper. Or at least, I'm a sort of a graduate flapper, if anything."
Andy stared at her in some slight puzzlement.
"I'm afraid," he said more politely, "that I don't quite get your drift."
"Oh, you will presently," she assured him with mock gravity. "It's really important that you should. You see, you certainly did browbeat Mrs. Emmert. And when I find a man browbeating my sex, I consider it my duty to subjugate him."
"You speak a language I don't understand," Andy retorted,—but he said it with a smile.
"I'd be pleased to teach you," Isabel replied demurely. "I'm sure you wouldn't be a backward pupil."
Rod leaned over the back of a chair silent, amused. Mary sat on a low stool, her hands clasped over her knees, egging them on with brief sentences. And the other two, who had never seen each other before, whose orbits were as diverse as the separate paths of the Dog Star and Halley's comet, turned upon each other batteries of light-hearted chaffing. They ended up on the Chesterfield together, comparing their favorite drinks, dances and cigarettes, in all three of which they seemed to have had a comprehensive experience. They were at any rate congenial in banter. Mary drew her husband out of the room on some pretext.
"Is that your revolutionary rigging-slinger?" she asked.
"Yes. He is going to be my superintendent of works."
"I like him," Mary said. "Apparently so does Isabel."
"Everybody who knows Andy Hall likes him," Rod informed her. "But that little feather-brain is only interested in him as a new specimen. She probably never encountered anybody quite like him."
"Feather-brain? You don't know Isabel," Mary declared.
"I know her better than you do."
"Oh, no," Mary smiled. "You may have known her longer. But not better. Isabel outgrew the fluffy-ruffles stage while you were away at the war."
Across the channel, in the green bank of timber bisected by the path that ran from Oliver Thorn's old house to the Granite Pool, rose white puffs of steam, intermittent, like sporadic geysers. Those were donkey engines at work. They tooted shrill response to the signal pull. The woods were full of prodigious shudderings and rumblings. The powerful machines snaked fallen trees, sawn to lengths, from where they were felled to the last splashing plunge into the tidal booming ground close by a group of new camp buildings not far from Oliver Thorn's abandoned house. A "sky line" lifted its long, aerial cable far up that hill. Down this logs came at the rate of two hundred a day. The shore was lined with floating logs, new cut, exhaling the odor of pitch, a pleasant pungent smell. The Granite Pool itself echoed the clack of axes and the thin twanging of saws, and mirrored the downward swoop of great trees. The falling crews were stripping the shores about the Pool, destroying its seclusion, shattering its restful silence, obliterating its cool shade. Farther east the Valdez camp, in which Rod had served his apprenticeship, bit deep into these heavy woods. Three hundred and fifty men, a dozen donkey engines, a logging railway in the making, miles of steel cable were chewing the heart out of the forest. Far beyond sight and sound of Hawk's Nest another crew slashed at the last of their timber on Hardwicke Island.
There was no picking of prime trees and care to conserve the younger growth, nor far-sighted culling of the forest crop. It was complete destruction. Within the boundaries of each limit the earth was stripped to its primal nakedness. Sky-line and high-lead gear ripped strings of logs over the surface, plowing deep furrows in the scant soil, tearing up saplings, shouldering aside rotten trunks and small boulders, bursting into dusty clouds the dead snags in the way. When the loggers shifted to a fresh stand they left desolation behind. Timber great and small was money. Every stick landed in tidewater went for something; number one export, number two, the broken cedar for shingles, the poorer grades of spruce and hemlock for pulpwood that the mills chewed up and spat forth in tons of news print.
Rod sat over his breakfast at Hawk's Nest one morning in early summer of '19. The far, faint sounds of the machinery he had set in motion reached now and then into that quiet room. But he was not thinking particularly of this organized effort which filled the woods over there with crashings and rumblings and whining cable. He was watching the tall, somewhat stooped figure of the butler who had served in that house ever since Rod could remember, and he was thinking that in connection with this man he faced another of the many disagreeable tasks he must perform.
He rose, walked to the door, turned back. It was no great matter, and still—— Like a modern Atropos he must go on snipping threads. If the hand that held the shears shook a little now and then, it could not for that reason be stayed. He had not much choice. He was too deeply committed.
"Come up to the library in a few minutes, Stagg," he said.
"Yes, sir."
Rod sat down by a window that overlooked Mermaid Bay. A Kern tug lay against one shore beside a million board feet of Norquay cedar, waiting for the fierce tiderace to go slack before she eased her boom through the south narrows for the long Gulf tow. In a little while she would pass out, dragging astern a brown comet's tail of slaughtered trees.
His eyes turned back to the interior of the room, came to rest on a portrait of his great-grandfather,—the Norquay who had prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle.
"Even an eagle could hardly hold his own against a flock of buzzards," Rod muttered.
No. One slip was sufficient to invalidate, even to destroy such families as his, in this day and age. Perhaps there had been a time when people of the equivalent class would have seen in the Norquay difficulty something besides a chance to participate in the loot. Out of his intimate knowledge of the family history as revealed in sundry documents and half-recalled conversations, Rod knew that every Norquay, from the original Roderick down to his father, had put out his hand and opened his purse to save other men from ruin, sometimes out of friendship, sometimes out of generosity, often from a clear sense of class interest. At least friendship and social intimacy had bred something more than mere lip-fealty. Other generations did not break bread and drink wine under each others' roofs to go forth planning how they could filch each others' possessions. The generation to which his father belonged would have understood quite clearly the Norquay obligation in regard to Grove's blundering.
His, Rod's generation, didn't understand. At least, if it understood, it cynically denied his code. It laughed at him behind his back, looked with disbelief on the course he was taking. It was, they held, purely quixotic to sacrifice so much, to risk all in repairing a misguided man's folly. Childishness. What were bankruptcy laws for? Why had sound commercial brains devised the Limited Liability Act if not to save the enterprising bourgeois from loss when one of his undertakings failed? What simpleton would unhesitatingly accept a moral responsibility when no legal compulsion existed?
Rod smiled grimly. He had become more closely acquainted with the ethics of modern business. It struck him that if corporations were in the nature of things soulless and dehumanized in matters of money, that attribute tended to spread to individuals. He wondered if that were possible. It was a disagreeable conclusion; one he hesitated to accept. But he knew this: that both his father and himself had aroused a strange combination of antagonism and contempt by merely doing what they felt in honor bound to do.
The antagonism was the fiercer for being grounded in cupidity. It smoldered under the surface, ready to blaze out if he left an opening. There were those who would like to pick his bones. He was aware of this attitude. It burgeoned forth in many aspects of his affairs.
If he had looted the Norquay Trust within the law and let the plucked victims pick themselves bewildered out of the ruin, while he sat back with his share of the plunder and the great Norquay estate still firm in his grasp, these contemporaries of his would have esteemed him as a clever man, almost a great man, certainly a man with a genius for affairs. A man of affairs; a man who could safely and expeditiously get possession of large sums of money. What was the difference?
He might have been execrated by some who lost their money. The losers, they said cynically, always squeal. But if he had shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, his own class would have backed him to a man. They would have rallied round his standard. They would have upheld him in the press, socially, by every means within their power. Their admiration would have been tinctured with envy. They would have understood so clearly that genuine greatness was involved in making such a coup and getting clear when the crash came. His own people,—no, by God, the Walls and Deanes and Richstons were not his kind of people, not one of the whole pushing caravan, the petty tradesmen swollen to greatness with one generation of a rich country's development, grown greater with exorbitant profits derived from a war which had been fought for them but not by them. They were Grove's kind of people. And Grove had been a—a——
Well, he didn't like to ponder on Grove. There was no encouragement in that. He found his brother's memory depressing. Grove reminded him of a joyous diver plunging headfirst into the troubled waters of life and coming up, not with a pearl but with a handful of slimy ooze. Grove, he reflected, would probably not have given a second thought to discharging Stagg. And he was compelled to give several regretful thoughts to that unfortunate necessity.
Stagg knocked and entered, stood waiting. Rod motioned him to a chair.
"How long have you and Mrs. Stagg been with us?" he asked.
"Twenty-seven years next November, sir."
The man was proud of his length of service. It showed in his tone. Twenty-seven years. Rod looked at him. He had been an infant in arms when this man entered his father's service. For twenty-seven years Stagg had waited on them and theirs, arranging their tables, polishing their silver, serving their food, ministering deftly to their every want, expressed or implied.
"Have you saved any money?" Rod pursued. He had no false delicacy about asking such a question. He had to know whether he was about to chuck a penniless man out into a world that would be far harsher to William Stagg than Hawk's Nest had ever been, even in its most exacting moments. Rod had been taught, not as a lesson but as a principle of living, that faithful service begets an obligation. It seemed to him a natural corollary. His instincts inherited, acquired, however he came by them were more or less patriarchal.
"We've saved a good bit, sir."
"That's fortunate," Rod continued. "Because I shall have to close this house. I shall have to let everybody go."
"Yes, sir," Stagg murmured. He clasped his fingers across his knees and stared at the rug.
"I hate to do it," Rod went on. "But the way things stand, keeping up this place is more of a drain than I can afford. For a time I'm only a—a sort of steward of the Norquay estate. If I get out of the hole with anything left, you shall certainly have the pension to which you are entitled, Stagg. I'm acting under a very disagreeable necessity."
"Yes, sir," the man nodded. "I've been hoping it wouldn't be necessary, sir. Still, I've expected it."
"Oh, you have? How's that?"
"There's been talk, sir. It gets up here, sir, from town."
"Servants' talk?" Rod inquired.
"The kind of talk servants hears, sir," Stagg replied. "People are saying that you are a fool to ruin yourself over the Norquay Trust Company."
"I don't agree with them," Rod said impassively. "But they may be right. What do you think about it yourself, Stagg?"
"I had eleven thousand dollars on deposit in the Norquay Trust, sir," Stagg returned calmly. "About all we've saved in a lifetime of work, the missus and me. You can fancy whatIthink, Mr. Rod."
"Eh? Well, I hope you got it out while the getting was good; although it's reasonably safe if you didn't," Rod smiled. "Unless the heavens fall or some such catastrophe occurs, the Norquay Trust will pay interest and principal in full on every account before I close its doors—which I intend to do as soon as I can turn our timber into cash."
"I feel safe enough," Stagg assured him. "But you can imagine how I would have felt if the Company'd failed, sir. So I'm bound to be prejudiced in your favor. If you'll excuse me, sir, I've known the Norquay family a long time, and it wouldn't have seemed natural for it to let a thing like that happen. People like you, Mr. Rod, may get in a hole; but you can't be kept there. You always get up somehow. I'll be awfully sorry to leave. I really will. This place is like home to me. I'll hope to come back as soon as you get things straightened out, Mr. Rod."
Rod sat thinking for a few seconds.
"Thank you, Stagg," he said then, very gently. "I appreciate what you have said. You seem to understand quite well some things that other people, who should, don't see at all."
"Now," he continued, after a pause, "I want you to put everything in order this week. Cover the furniture and put away china and silver and linen and so on. Fix the house properly. It never was closed before, but you will know what should be done. When you're finished I'll pay you all off. Cook, I understand, has relatives living on the other side of Valdez. The gardeners can work for me in the woods, if they wish. The housemaids are flappers who haven't had time to get attached either to us or the place. That'll be all, Stagg. Thanks."
The man got up. He seemed to hesitate, took a step or two, stopped.
"May I ask if you're going to sell Hawk's Nest, sir?" he finally blurted out.
Rod shook his head.
"No, Stagg. They may take it away from me eventually. But it is not for sale."
"Thank you, sir. I couldn't believe you'd think of selling Hawk's Nest, sir."
Stagg bowed and closed the door softly behind him.
Sometimes Rod's heart troubled him so that he would turn in his ascent of a hill to some part of the works and go down again, stamp, stamp, joggling it from that enfeebled flutter back to its normal beat. And afterward he would sit on a log for awhile, struggling against a wave of depression. So much depended on him alone. He was the mainspring. If he broke or ran down, the job must go unfinished; people, his own people and many others, must suffer. And yet, when he faced the prospect of going on and on like that, flogging a weak heart to its work, keeping his brain alert to direct a big undertaking and the mass of detail involved, making money and more money and pouring it like water into an endless pipe, he felt a profound weariness, an unutterable distaste for this game of profit-creating which other men played with such gusto.
The sum that passed through his hands in any calendar month of 1919 would have been sufficient to give him everything he wanted for years to come. He lived no better than his loggers. He was separated from Mary most of the time. He became a peripatetic. Something always required his presence in a camp, and immediately thereafter in town,—some new phase of the timber market or the Norquay Trust affairs.
"I'm almost a widow," Mary said to him once. "It's as bad as the war. About all we get a chance to say to each other these days is 'Hello' and 'Good-by.'"
Some day there would be an end to that, of course. A clean slate and a chance to draw his breath, to sit idly, contentedly, on the beach while Rod junior hunted crabs among the rocks, to talk with Mary about things that were not measured in money values.
He had never been hungry to grasp material substance out of life so much as to understand life, the absorbing spectacle of the universe, to fathom its strange manifestations of beauty and terror. All his life he had loved the sight and smell of forests, the sound of running water, the majesty of the hills. He had loved peace and beauty and harmony. He loved them more than ever, but the beloved trinity had vanished out of his days. He was become an engineer, his hand on the levers, his ears full of the roar and grind of machinery. Only for a few hours now and then in the privacy of his own home could he achieve rest and content; or when for a moment he could stand forgetful and look up at the mainland palisades, rising tier on tier to far heights behind Little Dent and the Euclataws.
Yet in spite of struggling with a formidable task, irritating problems, planning, directing, moving with sure purpose to an end the value of which he sometimes doubted, he began to get little glows of satisfaction when he was not too tired, more especially as that first year closed and he knew that the heart which had been organically perfect but functionally weak was regaining strength, slowly attaining functional perfection once more. Perhaps that lessened his moodiness, made him quicker to respond to external stimulus. He had gone for a year on his nerve. He had followed a light that sometimes seemed no more than a will-o'-the-wisp. With bodily soundness he began to feel a touch of pride in the work of his hands and brain.
He had made no costly mistakes, either in men or tactics. It was odd, he reflected sometimes, as he went about the workings, that other men, corporations, were carrying on various private wars with labor, and that he should be free of those clashes that arose so often and so unexpectedly in the years following the war. It was even more odd that he should be regarded with suspicion by these other men and corporation heads for maintaining production without strikes, disputes, clashes, antagonisms.
They had years of experience. He had started with more theory than experience. He was beating them at their own game; largely, he believed, because he came to it with a fresher point of view, a policy based on an understanding, partly reasoned, partly intuitive, of how the logger working for a day's pay feels about his work and the man he works for.
For years before the war, loggers in B.C. coast camps had lived and worked under conditions they were powerless to change. Any sort of accommodation, any sort of food, the lowest wages they could be compelled to accept; that was the logger's portion. The Norquay camps had been better than most, but Rod knew they were bad enough. The logger was hardy, strong, patient, skilful, by a process of elimination.
The war changed conditions without changing the logger's essential qualities. With labor scarce, with timber production a military as well as an economic necessity, with organization in the air, the B.C. logger took the whip hand. His memory was tenacious of old wrongs. He did not ask, he demanded, and his demands were grudgingly conceded because his employers were taking huge profits in airplane spruce, in exportable fir and cedar, in shipbuilding material. And although the timber market took little count of the Armistice, the employers did. With the first demobilization, with the first infiltration of discharged soldiers into the labor market, industrial war was secretly declared. They set out to tame the militant logger who thought that he was entitled to bathtubs, clean sleeping quarters, grapefruit for breakfast if he desired it, and the maximum wage for an eight-hour day.
But the logger did not tame easily. Individually he was a wide-shouldered person with language and spirit to match the muscles developed in the woods. He did not submit without a struggle. Collectively he was organized to fight, and he fought with the only weapons available. The season of 1919 was a period of disputes, grievances, abortive wage cuts, strikes, sabotage, all that goes with a labor war,—a war that in 1919 and well into the next year was a series of lost battles for the employers and corresponding bitterness on their part.
Into this troubled arena Rod Norquay had stepped with his pressing need of continuous operation. He was wise and generous impulses went with his wisdom. He believed that the logger was a simple man who could be led where no man could drive him save under the sharp, spur of acute need. He had believed that the logger was a man and not a mechanism long before he took a year in the woods himself to see what made the common man laugh, weep, fight, play, drink to debauchery and rise sometimes to heroic proportion under stress. He had learned then that man is not so completely the perfect product of class and environment as he superficially seems. Mary Thorn had unconsciously shown him that first. This one and that,—Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, old Jim Handy the logging boss, even Grove before the war and after, and the crucible of war itself,—had taught him that however the human unit is outwardly shaped by place and circumstance, each is flesh and desire and a creature of passion.
So that it was impossible for him ever to regard his men as so many tools to be used or laid aside as he willed. He was free of the curious detachment of the captains of industry from the lesser ranks. He neither locked himself in the ivory tower of the contemplative spirit, nor fortified himself behind the golden wall of material security. He remained a man in a man's world, directing and shaping the cutting edge of his human tools without once forgetting their essential humanity,—so that they admired him for his deftness of touch.
He had been fortunate in his choice of Andy Hall. Even old Oliver Thorn voluntarily came out of his retirement and directed one part of his operations. Rod did not always know by what occult process he judged men, but he made no mistakes in men. And men are always the prime levers. Machines, powerful, complex, will not operate themselves. They do not create themselves. If mechanism seems to overshadow men, it is only because of a distorted sense of proportion. Hands and brains come first; everything else in the world of men is a by-product. The energy of hand and brain is as necessary as directive force; without that energy, however rude, uncouth, unskilled, there would be nothing to direct; and its reward should be liberal and ungrudging, a right, not a concession. Until Utopia comes in the millennial dawn men must exist under a social and industrial system that is not the creation of a class or a period, but is the slow growth of centuries. Under it the strong, the acquisitive, the self-disciplined, the men of force and character somehow get to the top. But having got to the top, being secure in their power, if they were wise they neither despised nor trampled on those at the bottom.
That was a creed which Rod Norquay, Andy Hall, and Oliver Thorn held in common. These diverse men—Andy, a fiery proletarian rebel, whose steel-trap logic picked fallacies and blunders wholesale in the modern economic system, yet whose inherited instincts drove him to fight with the clan when the clan went to war, and from which he had returned with a touch of bitterness and a tinge of cynicism; Rod himself, a patrician by birth, training, environment, a gentleman in the amplest meaning of that much-abused term; Oliver Thorn, the gentle, contemplative, kindly, shrewd old man—they shared that conviction. It was more than a conviction; it was an article of faith.
"I may be wrong. If I am it will break me instead of getting me what I want," Rod had said to Andy in the beginning. "But this is my idea: men will work faithfully if they are even reasonably satisfied with their job. Men are still capable of loyalty even to a boss and a job, although a lot of propaganda denies it, and the intellectual radicals say it's a slave attitude. I don't mean to fall back on the insincere platitude that the interests of the employer and employee are identical. But I, as well as the men who will work for me, will be faced with a condition, as somebody put it, and not a theory. So long a& they must work for a wage and I must make a profit to keep them employed, anything that will reduce possible friction is worth considering on its merits. So we start on this basis; we forestall agitation for better conditions by setting an example in the way of conditions. We provide first-class living quarters. We serve the best food available. We pay top wages, with the added inducement of a bonus based on production. No man is to be fired for any sort of economic heresy. They are free to do their own thinking, to express their individual opinions about the outfit, about working conditions, about industry in general. They can agitate and discuss any social theory whatever without risking discharge. I don't care whether they are Reds, Syndicalists, Socialists, Free Thinkers, Single Taxers, theorists of any description whatever,—so long as they will devote their working hours to doing the work. That's a general policy. I think it will go. The surest way to breed fantastic theories is to muzzle men through fear. The surest way to make men dissatisfied is to be arbitrary over trifles. The coöperative commonwealth may be a million miles away, but coöperation on the job with benefit to us both is not an impossibility. I think that will work."
It did work. It had an effect beyond mere efficiency on the job. It did away with inhibitions that bred sullenness. When a man was well-fed, well-housed, well-paid, where it was easy for him to see that he was regarded as a human being with certain rights and privileges, an atmosphere of good feeling soon developed.
It became a mark of distinction to work for the Norquay estate. Rod's fallers, buckers, loaders, his minor bosses, his donkey engineers, began to take an active pride in what they did. They boasted of what they could do, and made good their boasts. They walked with a swagger. A good many of them called him by name when he went among them. It dawned upon Rod finally that they liked him, that they were working for him as no other logging crews on the B.C. coast worked in those uncertain days when the union organizations of wartime were fighting tooth and toenail to hold their own against organizations of reactionary employers, who affected tremblingly to see in the struggle for wages and hours the horrid specter of Bolshevism.
In so much he gained success. Sometimes he would feel a profound resentment because there loomed always the possibility of failure, of collapse, of material ruin. With the estate intact he could have tested, experimented in a field that interested him. He had no illusions about industry, about the competitive scramble. He had no visionary schemes for speedy remodelling of the economic structure. But with the means to work, he could have worked with a sense of security; he was quite sure that he could effect a change for the better in a field he knew and force others to follow his lead.
It was not, he saw, political power or vengeance on a class that labor cried out for. It was security of livelihood, a recognition of their rights as human beings,—two things that were everywhere acknowledged in theory but frequently disregarded in practice. If political power, direct action, accentuated class struggle were the only ways to secure these two essentials, as some held, then the industrial clashes must go on, must grow more bitter. Rod not only believed that society should, in its own interest, guarantee labor a decent livelihood as its rightful share in mass production, but he believed it could be done—he believed he could do it himself—he believed it could be done in any industry—he believed that sometime it must be done to avoid a greater evil.
The test of anything is its workability. Rod's policy worked, with almost four hundred men on his pay roll. And if he had not been compelled to pour his profits into that moribund Trust Company he could have built up a reserve strong enough to carry his working force over any possible non-productive period. At the worst now, he could square the Norquay account with the world at large. But a little thing might leave him with no resources whatever. And he regretted that. He knew what he could do, if he once had a free hand.
That uncertainty bore on him hard. He was doing his best. His men were doing their best. Logs came down to tidewater in a marvellous flow, as if the trees were handled by intelligent automatons with legs and fingers of steel. He had no labor difficulty that was not solved on such occasions as it arose by a half-hour's dispassionate talk over a table with the spokesmen of his crews. The walking delegates of the Logger's Union approached him as confidently as if he had been a member of the union.
But there was always that cursed pit into which he was flinging his trees. It yawned bottomless. It loomed before him distressingly; an Augean stable that he must clean. He had his weak moments, his hours of utter discouragement. But he could neither stop nor turn aside. Sometimes in the streets of Vancouver, after a checking up with Charlie Hale in the Norquay Trust office, he would have the morbid fancy that the deep traffic roar of the city was like the roar of the rapids by Little Dent, and that he was in a frail craft shooting that fierce economic tiderace to disaster in the financial whirlpools.
What a price to pay for one man's purblind ambition! He would look back at the chaste white square of the Norquay Trust Building, at the black iron skeleton of the great electric sign, and his lips would mutter a curse.
Late summer of 1920 pricked to utter collapse the prosperity balloon which had been deflating ever since the Armistice. Europe still stewed in the choice juices of local punitive expeditions, reparation snarls, gyrating exchange, so that North American commerce lagged by the way with heavy feet. Here and there industry somehow kept going. It couldn't stop altogether, even lacking foreign markets. Crops were sowed and reaped; people were fed; life went on. But capital ventured timidly. Wages fell, even though commodities seemed reluctant to cheapen. The stress came particularly hard on the Pacific Coast. The bottom dropped out of the lumber market. A thousand loggers walked the streets of Vancouver, hungry, bewildered, as soon as their savings gave out. Only here and there a few companies and individuals, fortunately situated, well-managed, or filled with bowels of compassion for their men, were enabled to continue. They could log cheaply. They were willing to risk a little loss rather than disband crews and let machinery rust; and they hoped for the upturn, the revival of "confidence," that talisman which commends itself to Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce.
Rod owned his timber. He neither leased, paid royalty, stumpage, nor interest on borrowed capital. It was choice timber, picked long ago when his forefathers had the cream of coastal forests to choose from. If a tree could be cut and sold at a profit by any one, he was the one. So long as he could operate without loss, he meant to keep on. He had to keep on, until the cost of production overtook the market price.
And because he kept on along the lines he had laid down in the beginning, he found himself in disfavor with people who had once considered it a privilege to know a Norquay. He did not suffer from that. They could not hurt him. If he had not been deeply troubled because he saw the nearing end of his own rope, he would have been amused.
To know that there were men who damned him heartily for paying labor so much a day when labor could be had for less. To be aware that a certain clique looked forward to the weight of the Norquay Trust crushing him, and that there might be pickings on the bones, because he was young and inexperienced in business. To be regarded as a quixotic fool. To have certain men freeze up when he met them in clubs, hotels, on coastwise steamers. To have others draw him aside for earnest remonstrance. It was strange what an interest they took in his welfare; how eager they were to point out that he was hurting himself and demoralizing the labor market, making it hard for them to readjust their business to changed conditions, to deflate properly. Labor had to come down off its high horse and his tactics delayed the unseating. And so forth. None of it troubled Rod.
He did not want their friendship. He set no store by their opinions. He had been a solitary animal all his life, too self-contained for superficial friendships. He had dreamed in and out of books as a youngster while some of these others were already up and doing. As a man he played a lone hand, acted with resolution, brooded over his own problems, disregarded the non-essential.
He had his wife and his son. He had a given task to accomplish. He had a friend or two to lean on if he needed to lean, Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, his brother-in-law who wrestled with the Norquay Trust as the angel of the Lord wrestled with Apollyon. In the city office he had two men he could rely on, two heirlooms, two old, very wise, white-mustached men who had handled accounts, costs, sales, during his father's régime and Phil's. And there was Stagg, the butler, and his wife, who elected to remain at Hawk's Nest for the sake of house room and a sentiment Rod understood, valued, was moved by. They were, Stagg said, too old to go into service elsewhere. They had a bit of money put by. Enough to live rent free, but not enough to cope with the cost of town living. They would like to stay at Hawk's Nest and keep it aired and dry, to care for such part of the grounds as Stagg could keep from going to rack. Rod thanked them and let them have their wish. It gave himself and Mary a room always ready when they wanted to spend a day or two there, which they did at times. It was pleasant to sit on those wide porches in blazing August, to watch Rod junior prance across the lawn astride a stick. Hawk's Nest was home in a very dear and intimate sense, even if it could no longer be maintained in the old opulent state. Rod never passed down the channel in theHaidaabout his business without a lingering, regretful look at that red roof glowing against a background of green timber and great mountains.
There remained only one link—apart from his sister Dorothy who came to Hawk's Nest each summer for a month, and in whose Vancouver home the diminished Norquay clan gathered at Christmas—between Rod and the numerous folk who had haunted that place in the old days, the girls he had danced with, the young fellows who had been his contemporaries. That link was Isabel Wall.
It seemed a strange friendship. He had always regarded Isabel with a feeling of patient tolerance. She had fallen in love with him once, in her doll-like fashion, to his great embarrassment. She appeared to have no recollection of that episode. She seemed firmly attached to Mary. Between them, diverse as they were, there did exist an intimacy, an understanding, an affection that Rod was slow to fathom, which he did not fathom at all until he began to take serious stock of Isabel and discovered that for all her unchanged pink-and-white prettiness, this diminutive person was really not at all the Isabel Wall of his original conception.
It seemed to him in the beginning to be incongruous that his wife's greatest, almost her only intimate, should be the frivolous daughter of a man who, next to Grove Norquay, was chiefly responsible for the evil days upon which the Norquay family had fallen. But because his faith in his wife's judgment was a vital thing, he let that pass. If at first glance it seemed incomprehensible it was an accomplished fact. Isabel lived in his house as much as she did her own. She seemed absolute mistress of her comings and goings. If she had once had no mark to shoot at save dress and parties and men, she did not seem to care greatly now whether she danced and played and flirted. Yet she seldom uttered a serious thought. She remained a charming irresponsible, given to slang and cigarettes. She descended upon them in town, at the Euclataws, whether they were at Hawk's Nest or in the logging camp on Valdez, when the mood took her. She was always welcome. Isabel was a gloom-dispeller. Rod used to wonder at first if she did not come chiefly for the joy she got in devilling the life out of Andy Hall. But presently he found himself with a sneaking fondness for Isabel and her quaint pertness. And when he reached that stage and admitted it, Mary laughed.
"Isabel's a jewel, Rod. She's sound and sweet and true as steel. She's been pampered and petted all her life. Yet it hasn't spoiled her in any of the various ways in which that sort of thing does spoil girls. She sticks to us because she says we're about the only real people she knows. That tiny blonde head contains some very sound wisdom. She hasn't many illusions left, and still she hasn't got cynical or hard and calculating. Laska made a hash of her life and has reacted accordingly. Their mother's hopelessly society-mad. Her idea of heaven is to be presented at Court sometime. Bob drinks like a fish and goes on the loose just as Grove used to do. Her father knows only the money game and plays that to the exclusion of everything else. The poor kid's only chance in the world, she says herself, is to find and marry a man who can stand on his own feet."
Shortly after that conversation Rod went in search of a logging boss, thinking, as he walked beside a chute in which hummed a steel "main line" that quivered under the strain of a heavy load, of Isabel and her astonishing metamorphosis. Or was it merely a cropping out of something latent? Undeniably that did happen. By all the rules of the game, Isabel should continue as she had begun, a butterfly, a dainty parasitical creature who had never toiled, spun, or concerned herself with anything but each day's pleasure as it came her way. He hadn't credited Isabel with perception to fathom the futility of the pursuit of pleasure as a life work, without duties, responsibilities, or any creative passion. But he could understand her instinctive revolt. He wondered what John P. Wall thought of this daughter who found dissatisfaction in a life that was all pleasure and no purpose.
His errand took him far up into the workings. The daily routine of a logging boss is an active one. The man Rod sought moved always ahead of him, giving his overseeing eye to various spots where separate gangs of men busied themselves with powerful and noisy machinery, devoted to localized and violent struggle with logs of enormous tonnage. A stranger to logging as it proceeds in the forests of the Pacific Coast invariably gets a first impression of desperate effort and grave danger in his approach to a donkey engine at work. The black, round-bellied monster shudders and strains on anchored skids. The inch and a quarter main line reels up on the drums with a grind of gears, a behemothic sputtering of exhaust steam. Continuous vibrations disturb the air and communicate themselves to the earth over a wide radius. The cable runs away into the shadowy places of the forest. It recedes therein, chattering, whining; it comes forth dragging the huge sticks to the base of the sky-line pole; and the logs go thence, dangling, sliding, gouging holes in the hillside: It is all noise, effort, confusion, humming of lines, hiss of steam, bull-blocks screaming; a deafening uproar until a stop signal brings a hush that by contrast is solemn, as if that powerful machinery were a heart that had suddenly stopped beating.
Rod found his man at last and returned. They were living in the old Thorn house, taking their meals in a small room off the main messhouse, where the crew bolted its collective food in occupied silence, putting all its energy into the business of eating, and reserving a free and unrestrained mode of conversation for the ease of the bunkhouse. A steamer had touched and gone while he was absent, passing north through the rapids on the afternoon slack. He found Isabel Wall on the calk-splintered steps, teaching young Roderick a whimsy she had picked up somewhere:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe!What made the poor man do so?He was a Robinson I knowBut that's no reason he should crow.I wonder why he Crusoe?"
She was making the boy letter-perfect in this. Andy Hall sat on the step below her, smoking a cigarette in contemplative silence.
"They'll be through at Valdez to-morrow," he informed Rod.
"So soon? I thought they had a week to go."
"They made time," Andy commented tersely.
"Well, better load the working gear on floats and get it up here," Rod told him. "Have 'em begin on the cedar hollow."
"I put the fallers in there this afternoon."
Rod smiled. It was almost unnecessary to tell Andy Hall what should be done. Sometimes it seemed as if Andy had a mysterious prescience. Then Rod would recollect that they had discussed such a move long before. Or it was the logical move which Andy merely anticipated. In either case Andy always knew what he was doing, and why; nor did he ever hesitate to take the initiative.
Rod leaned back in a grass chair, clasped his hands behind his head, stared across the channel at the flash of the sun on the windows of Hawk's Nest. Behind him, in a west-facing room, he could hear the staccato of typewriter keys, tapping out the last chapter of Mary's second novel. He wondered, if things had been different, if he would have succeeded in that outlet. No, he decided. It would have been a splendid thing to try. He had been eager to embody and interpret the spirit of the pioneers. But he doubted now if he had the peculiar creative gift of making words transform his imaginings into a reality that would convey stark passion and stirring deeds. And Mary had that gift, beyond a doubt; not only the inborn faculty of perceiving, but the torturing necessity to transmit, to release through patient drudgery at her chosen medium, that sense of life as a vast conflict in which man struggles with his fellows, his gods, and his passions, sometimes to victory and often to defeat.
No, he had the vision, the perceptive faculty, but not that uncanny power to capture and pass it on. Such vision as he had must find its outlet in action less subtle, more practical. He would never write the stories he had dreamed; he knew that now. But Mary would; she had her wings. He was proud of her flight. Only, sometimes, when her work took her into a brooding remoteness, a spiritual detachment that thrust not only himself but every material consideration temporarily aside, he wondered if the artist could ever function except as the supreme egotist, if the true artist must not by some obscure compulsion subordinate everything to the imperative demands of his art. Even so, he knew that he would rather have only such portion of his wife as he could share than the most complete possession—body, soul and brain—of any other woman he knew. Mary would always understand. In any crisis she would always have courage and confidence. She was his windward anchor. He loved her not for what she did and said but for what she was—herself.