Young Roderick picked up a stick from one corner of the porch.
"Gotta go to work," he informed them gravely.
"What at?" Isabel inquired.
"Scalin' timber," he replied. He danced off down the path to the beach, chanting:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe,What made the poor man do so?"
Already incorporating the reality of his environment into the child-world of make-believe. Rod smiled; he had done the same thing himself, alone, happily, through just such hot, smoky, August days long ago. The boy clambered over a heap of stovewood, measuring with his stick, making marks on a bit of notepaper just as the scaler did who walked the boom with pad and pencil and a six-foot scaling rule.
For a time the murmur of Isabel's and Andy's conversation accompanied Rod's thoughts. He continued to stare across at Hawk's Nest. A problem pressed him for solution, a question which involved closely that gray house with its glowing roof of red tiles, from behind which rose the conical top of the great cedar, in the shadow of which so many Norquays took their last rest.
He was approaching a critical stage in his affairs. He did not know how much longer he could carry on. Producing costs overtook market prices, would soon pass them. Only by a foresighted contract with a Puget Sound pulp mill had he kept going so long. In a month that would expire. It could not be renewed on the same terms. The great pulp plant in Phillips Arm which the Norquay Trust had financed and which had never ground a ton of pulp until Rod forced it into production, offered him prices he couldn't take on the wages paid and hours worked. He wouldn't know where to turn soon, unless he abandoned his present policy, cut wages to the bone, got into line with the other employers. That seemed to him like a breach of faith. He had made a fortune on the labor of his men already; that he was poorer in funds than at the beginning did not alter the case. The Norquay Trust had swallowed the profits. It would swallow a vast sum yet before its appetite was glutted. It hurt him to think of these men paying for Grove's mismanagement by lengthened hours and shortened pay. Nor did he wish to shut down and wait a turn in the market. A shutdown meant a cessation of revenue; that in turn might precipitate the disaster he had struggled so hard to avert. It was a very real difficulty.
He was stirred out of these reflections by a silence which had all the effect of a disturbing sound. He came back to the immediate present. Isabel still sat on the step, a dainty figure in a blue sweater and pleated tan skirt, staring after Andy's retreating figure.
"Your right bower," she said complainingly, turning to meet Rod's gaze, "is the stupidest man I know."
"You're a mile off the mark," Rod contradicted.
"He is," she repeated. "He's afraid of me."
"Andy Hall," Rod answered dryly, "is not afraid of anything or any one, least of all a harmless person like you."
"He's in love with me," Isabel said coolly. "And he's so afraid of me that he hasn't sense enough to see that all he has to do is to hold out his hands and I'll fall into 'em like a—a ripe plum. Can't you give him a hint, Rod?"
"Haven't you scalps enough at your belt without Andy's?"
"If I give him mine in exchange, that's fair enough," Isabel murmured.
"Do you really mean that?" Rod asked.
Isabel got out her cigarette case and deliberately blew smoke rings before she replied.
"I don't know for sure," she said at last. "Sometimes I think so, and again I'm not so sure. I could tell better if he'd ask me. It isn't that I wouldn't like to. It's simply that I have qualms of conscience sometimes about wishing myself on a man like that. I'm so damned useless, Rod."
"I don't think that men as a rule love women and marry them on the basis of their usefulness," he returned. "I'm certain Andy wouldn't. I must say it's rather odd to see you taking that slant at it."
"Oh, yes," she drawled petulantly. "I suppose you've got me labelled fragile, too. Just because a fellow's been brought up gilt-edged and has acted accordingly, is she to be credited with neither heart nor conscience, nor even common sense? I have come to the conclusion that I don't want to be a canary in anybody's cage, Rod. When I size up some of the horrible examples of how not to do it in my own crowd, I get afraid. I'm twenty-six years old, Roderick. Does it never strike you that a girl like me doesn't play a lone hand so long without good reasons?"
"What's that got to do with Andy?" Rod inquired.
"I'll tell you in words of one syllable and maybe you'll get it," she retorted. "Some years ago, if you recall the occasion, I was very much in love with your own distinguished self. I hope," she smile impishly, "it doesn't embarrass you to be reminded. It doesn't me, because I still think my judgment was good, even if I was out of luck. I've been in love probably half a dozen times since. And I always drew back at what the novelists call the psychological moment. Why? God knows. I don't. Something lacking, I suppose. Perhaps in spite of my giddiness I had a hunch that being in love with love isn't quite the same as being in love with a person. Then the war took all the likely ones away, and a good many of the best of them didn't come back. And something has happened to those who did come back. They're either so keen on the make they daren't take a girl seriously, or—or they've gone bad; the bloom's off 'em. Not one of them looks good to me. Nor the life they live. I hope I don't sound preachy. But some people who are rotten with money—especially those who've made it so fast they haven't had time to grow up to it—are rotten with other things, too. I may look like what Andy calls a charming, innocent parasite. I like to think of myself as charming. My instincts at any rate are innocent. But I do object to the role of parasite. I don't want to be one. I've never done anything useful, even for myself, but that isn't saying I don't want to—even if it's no more than to comfort and pet some man and hearten him for whatever sort of job he has in hand. I've never worked, but that's no sign I wouldn't if I knew where to start in. I'm not lazy, nor am I too fastidious for workaday life. That's what it's got to do with Andy Hall. I like him. I'd hate to tell you just how much; you'd blush. And he likes me. I know that, although he's the best little sentiment-represser I've come across. He's afraid of me, or he's afraid of what I am. I mean I think he doesn't see me just as a woman but as part of and more or less inseparable from a certain background—a background he doesn't like and doesn't trust.
"You see," she went on more hurriedly, her voice becoming a little uncertain, her eyes turned steadfastly on the swirls and foaming overfalls the flood now made strongly in the rapids, "I get so infernally lonesome and discouraged sometimes. I'm tired of froth. I don't like the giddy pace most of 'em go. I don't want to be like Laska, soured on everything, so that she lives on cocktails and cigarettes and jazz. If she sits still long enough to think, she's apt to cry. If I don't find myself happy in the jazz age, Rod, at least I belong to it sufficiently not to be afraid or ashamed of my own thoughts and feelings and desires. I'm a normal female person. A woman can't escape the implication of a man, nor vice versa. Most of 'em go it blind. I'm not made that way. I don't know why, but it's a fact. Long ago I made up my mind that if I couldn't find the real thing in my own crowd, I'd go outside, just as you did."
"And then," she made a little gesture with her hands, "remember the day Andy showed Mrs. Hector Emmert his medals and made that passionate little speech that she said was sedition? Well, I warmed up to Andy Hall right then and there. Two years. I'm no nearer him now. He holds himself in. He won't let go. What can I do?"
"I'll tell you," Rod said impulsively. "Andy doesn't know you. You don't let go yourself."
"Fiddlesticks," she retorted. "Two years. I think I'm shamelessly transparent."
"Two years? I've known you more than ten," Rod countered. "I've learned more about you in ten minutes than I did in all the time before. So imagine his handicap. You're a rich man's daughter. You've had every social advantage. You belong to a class that taken by and large Andy Hall not only dislikes but despises for its stupidity and arrogance in so far as it deals with working people."
"Oh, yes, the well-known capitalist class," Isabel said impatiently. "But you're one and he likes you."
"I come in a different category," Rod answered grimly. "I despise the tin-horn capitalist whose only god is capital more than Andy Hall does. It's part of a social theory with Andy. It's a personal feud with me. I'm suffering from the manipulations of that type of gold-digger. It has just about ruined me and has caused me to risk all that several generations of honest, generous-minded men built up, including a home many of us love—and a reputation for integrity besides. But Andy happens to know me as a man apart from my present dubious position as a capitalist. He doesn't really know you as a woman. He may be in love with you. Probably is, because you are an attractive little devil—"
"I thank you very much, kind sir," Isabel interrupted mockingly.
"But," Rod went on unheeding, "unless he were absolutely sure you would, as Christ told the man who wanted to be saved, 'Leave all that thou hast and follow Me,' a donkey engine couldn't pull a declaration of any sort out of him. Don't you see? Andy's full of sinful pride. He's class-conscious. He knows your kind of people better than you do, and he knows they regard him as belonging to an inferior order. He would chew his heart up and spit it out in little pieces before he'd let any flirtatious daughter of the idle rich have it for a curio in her collection. You've talked and laughed with him here in our house. You call him Andy and he calls you Isabel. But remember that he knows what manners are, and that being genial, even pleasantly intimate to the point of plaguing him the way you do, doesn't really mean anything. He's my trusted superintendent, and he draws a corking good salary which he faithfully earns, but he knows that wouldn't prevent a person like you from cutting him dead if he met you in, say the Vancouver Hotel Dubarry Room, hanging on the arm of, well, Sir Earnest Staples of Government House, Victoria."
"Never," Isabel protested. "I'm no snob."
"I didn't say you would. But it's been done. You've seen that sort of thing pulled," Rod continued. "Andy knows he doesn't belong in your crowd. What's more, he doesn't want to. He has seen quite clearly from the outside what you've seen from the inside, and come to the same conclusion. But he doesn't know you've arrived at such a conclusion. I didn't know it myself. You poke fun at them, of course. But you play the game with them right along, and you camouflage your real attitude toward life with Andy, with me, with us all. In fact, you'd have a hard time convincing any one, offhand, that you ever had a serious thought in your life. So how do you expect Andy to take you seriously?"
"But must one pull a long face and go about spreading the philosophy of disillusion and appealing for sympathy?" Isabel protested. "I can't help it if I'm mostly a cheerful idiot. How am I to make Andy understand that—that I—that—"
She choked up. And Rod felt intensely sorry for her at that moment. But he knew of no way to help.
"I said I'd tell you, and I'll try," he went on gently. "If you really do love Andy Hall and want him, you had better sometime just put your arms around his neck and tell him so."
Isabel looked away. A deep flush colored her white neck and spread upward until it was lost in the roots of her yellow fluff of bobbed hair.
"Oh," she whispered, "I couldn't do that."
"That's the best way," he said kindly. "Andy has all the finer instincts. But he has a lot of inhibitions you don't know anything about. I don't think you really understand class feeling, Isabel. You seem to be free of it altogether. But it exists. Believe me, I speak both from experience and observation. It is next to impossible to build a bridge across a definite social gulf. You have to jump it—from one side or the other. People are apt to deny this in a supposedly democratic country. But it's truer than they think. You put Andy in dress clothes and turn him loose in your own crowd, and he'd get by with very little coaching. But he wouldn't stick. He'd say it was shoddy. Which you and I and Mary are agreed it is. But in contact with intellect, art, real achievement in the best sense, Andy not only asserts his equality, but would get a glow of enjoyment out of the association. Andy Hall's character is sterling, and that's above any class distinction. If Andy really cares for you, Isabel, I'd say you were justified in going to extremes to let him know whereyoustand."
"I can't go all the way myself," she whispered, and fell silent, staring moodily over the channel waters. Then she got up and went inside.
A day or two later Rod came back to that conversation.
"I keep thinking of Laska," he said to Isabel. "Is she really so soured on things as you declared? Is she deliberately hitting the high spots just for the kick there's in it?"
"I'll tell the listening world she is," Isabel replied.
"I wonder why?" Rod mused. "She's free, young, and well-off. At least, she has all the advantages of wealth."
"Several whys," Isabel answered. "Her mind isn't healthy. It's twisted, or tainted or something. She started out several years ago with a lot of sentimental illusions. Matrimony, as she experienced it, was—well, unsatisfactory. Laska backed the wrong horse in the marriage race, and didn't discover it until too late. You don't mind my saying that Grove was a good deal of a mucker in his private life?"
Rod shook his head.
"I'm not particularly sensitive about what you say of him."
"Well, it's true. Did you know that Laska was really in love, very much so, with Phil?"
"I suspected it."
"She was always rather a queer fish," Isabel continued. "Good, generous impulses mixed up with very uncertain ones. She liked them both at first, about fifty-fifty, I think. She may have married Grove simply because he asked her first. He did have a way of making women like him—all kinds of women—for awhile. Perhaps the fact that he was elected to be the biggest toad in the Norquay puddle influenced her. I don't know. I'm sure she thought it a fine thing to be mistress of Hawk's Nest and all it implied. Being chatelaine of a place with dignity, the permanence of age, all the indefinable things that Hawk's Nest makes you feel are part of it, must have appealed to her. But when she found what she was really up against as Grove's wife, how very different it turned out from the thing she dreamed it would be, well, it was the most natural thing in the world for her to look back longingly at Phil and to be intensely sorry for herself. Self-pity is a very demoralizing sort of thing. Phil looked like pure gold alongside what she'd chosen—no woman who lived with one man and knew the other could help seeing and feeling that. To know that she could have had Phil if she'd so chosen made it worse.
"Of course there was no turning back. It isn't done, you know—short of open scandal, or a perfectly insufferable outbreak of some sort. She had cooked her goose. In an extreme she might have divorced Grove. But she couldn't possibly marry his brother afterward. Nobody would have stood for that. So she just had to sweat. And that makes any woman sour, or hard, or reckless.
"You know how Grove performed," Isabel pointed out. "He was a very untidy person—morally."
Rod nodded assent.
"A man like that should never marry," Isabel continued sagely. "He was like a small, very headstrong boy with toys. Women were toys. When he got tired playing with one, he chucked her away and got another. He did that before he married Laska, I suppose. As soon as the novelty of her wore off he went right on—as usual. Everybody knew it. No one could do anything about it. He was fairly adept at keeping his affairsde c[oe]urout of sight. There were a few explosions, to my personal knowledge. Then Laska finally settled back into a state of contemptuous resentful indifference, and let him go his own gait.
"But it made her suffer intensely, and it has given her a nasty taste in her mouth—and she has all the conventional reactions. If she had kids or work, anything real to take her mind off herself, she might come back to normal. As it is, I shouldn't be surprised at anything that sister of mine might do. She's all tension. She goes on hitting the high spots because she's got to do something. It's rotten, but so long as she can't get a kick out of anything else, why I expect she'll go on. I don't mean that she's dabbling in muck. Her instincts are fairly decent. But she's hovering on the ragged edge."
"Pity, isn't it?" Rod commented. "One can't take people by the scruff of the neck and set them right; even if one is sure of one's own standards and profound wisdom, which no one ever really is. When it comes to a showdown most of us have to dance according to our bent, and pay the piper when he presents his bill."
"That's the devil of it; that inconvenient bill," Isabel said lightly. "That's why I've got fussy about how and with whom I dance. There's not much fun dancing alone, but there's nothing but grief in dancing with a death's head wished on you for a permanent partner. That," she confessed naïvely, "is one of the reasons I like Andy Hall. You couldn't conceive of Andy being a bore, or a failure at whatever he undertook—or cheating. I hate cheats. Even the unconscious ones. And there's a lot of 'em about."
Rod forgot this under pressure of other things. It was all true, even if unpleasant, and he had more pertinent affairs in hand, keener problems that involved himself, people who were still entangled in the Norquay Trust, the men in his employ who labored faithfully because they had somehow acquired the assurance that he could keep the wheels turning when other camps shut down. They seemed to proceed on the assumption that being on the Norquay pay roll bestowed upon them immunity from the paralysis that crept over the body of industry.
To go on as he had begun was more than a material necessity. It had become a matter of pride as well as a necessity. He had fashioned a productive machine that worked now with automatic precision. But without continuous operation this machine would fall to pieces with his first task a little more than half-done, and his second task, which had been forming in his mind nebulously from the beginning—that of perpetuating this machine for the benefit of every unit therein, himself included—receded into nothingness. He had no philanthropic experiments in mind, but he did have an economic and industrial theory which he believed would work. Unless he could shake off the deadly weight of the Norquay Trust, it would crush him financially. To disband the organization now would destroy what he had been at great pains to create. His men wouldn't understand failure. They would classify him as another false alarm, another promiser who failed to perform unless it was to his own advantage. He knew that once he got the white elephant off his hands, all he needed was his men and machinery to go on indefinitely, to build up slowly on a solid basis. But the price of continued and unquestioned leadership was victory in this first battle. And the chance of continuous progress to victory began to seem more remote.
The bottom had fallen out of everything. The brief post-war orgy of production had run its artificial course. The industrial war babies had died of inanition. Exchange that fluttered like a wounded bird killed international trade. Europe was steeped in poverty. The waste of war could not be repaired until the wrangles of peace subsided. Instead of subsiding, the quarrels over peace became more acute. While the politicians thrust and parried industry languished. In the domain of timber only first grades and pulp wood commanded a sale; and both on a falling market. The camps were shut down, the mills were silent. Neither camps nor mills would operate unless a profit seemed sure, a good safe margin. Few of them had the incentive to go on, such as drove Rod Norquay. He had to go on so long as he could clear a dollar, even fifty cents a thousand. He was butchering his holdings, but every dollar that went into the Norquay Trust brought him nearer a clean slate.
But even Rod's narrow margin was vanishing. Second-grade stuff accumulated on his hands. He could only renew his pulp contracts at a loss. And he was fighting to make good a loss. Unless he could hang on for the turn in the market tide that must come— His dilemma was very real.
He could do two things. He could shut down. Six months' non-production and he could say good-by to every hope of a passable end to this adventure. Hawk's Nest and the ultimate sale of his standing timber might square the Norquay obligation. It would leave him picked to a skeleton. Or he could revise his established policy, cut wages to the bone, drive labor with a whip, fight them when they protested, go through the ugly stages of strikes, sabotage, hatreds, clashes, diminished output; in a word precipitate the industrial warfare which had made the coast a Bedlam for the single-track minds on both sides. And that also would ruin him.
September brought him to the stone wall. He came back from a business trip to town, depressed, uneasy. He knew that a good many people would consider his scruples unfounded. But he hated to cut wages. He had made such enormous profits on the labor of these men. He knew it. He knew that they knew it. It was not the way an employer should feel. It was not in line with the common conception of property rights. Nevertheless that was how he felt. However he came by it, his instinct was patriarchal. His men had become an aggregation of human beings for whose welfare he was to a certain degree responsible. He didn't know whether or not they shared such a feeling. He was too sensible to expect that sort of response. But certainly loyalty of a definite sort had manifested itself during an unsettled period in complete absence of friction. They had never made an unreasonable demand.
To keep going necessitated drastic reductions. Would they stand it? Rod had very few illusions about men of any sort. They might not be able to envisage what he did,—a permanent benefit to be derived by all who stood by the ship if the ship weathered the storm. He could not mislead them by promises. He was fundamentally incapable of making promises he could not guarantee to keep.
He called Andy Hall into conference, explained in further detail just what conditions they were faced with. In the midst of this he saw Andy's attention waver, his eyes turn. Rod's gaze followed the direction. Isabel Wall had been at the Euclataws two weeks. She was walking now slowly along the beach, bare-headed, her yellow hair glinting in the sun like spun gold, her skirt fluttering in the wind. A queer expression hovered on Andy's face.
Rod uttered another sentence softly; asked a question. Andy did not seem to hear.
"Damn it, never mind Isabel!" he broke out in exasperation. "Any time you want her you can have her, so for God's sake come out of that trance and listen to what I'm saying."
Andy glared at him, not so much in anger at the outburst as in sheer amazement, tinged with hopeful eagerness.
"What did you say?"
Rod began where he left off.
"I heardthat," Andy told him bluntly. "I know it anyway without telling. I asked what you said abouther."
"Oh, hell!" Rod threw up his hands. Then he got hold of himself. Something in Andy's eyes—a curious illuminating recollection of himself sitting in the stern of his canoe long ago, staring back through a moonlit night at Oliver Thorn's house with a strange fever in his blood, a dull ache in his heart.
"Lord, Andy," he said with rough kindness. "Does that knock you all in a heap? You're not generally so slow." He paused an instant, then repeated Isabel's own words. "If you weren't stupid you'd see that all you have to do is to open your hands and she'll fall into 'em like a ripe plum."
Andy matched glances with him for ten silent seconds. Rod smiled wearily. His impatience had burned out. Then a flush dyed Andy's fair, freckled skin.
"Shoot," he said presently. "I'm listening."
Rod continued.
"Simple. Leave it to the men," Andy counseled. "Don't make any arbitrary statements about either hours or wages. This bunch is wiser to conditions in general than you'd think. Show 'em your hand and give them the option of deciding what they want to do. Better let me handle them myself. Will you back up whatever I say or do?"
"Yes, your judgment is as good as mine where they're concerned."
Andy wrinkled his brows for a minute.
"I have a hunch they'll stand for pretty nearly anything you want to do, if they know your reasons," he said at last. "Be a pity to bust up a crack crew. I think they kinda feel that way themselves. It's a cut or a shutdown anyway."
Rod confirmed this.
"Well, we'll see to-night."
Hall went away. Rod watched him follow alongshore after Isabel. They disappeared together over a mossy point. His glance came back along the booming ground, followed the shore. Rod junior played on the gravel with the small son of a hook-tender and the equally small daughter of a high-rigger. A dozen houses where married men lived with their families faced that strip of shore. Clothes fluttered from taut lines. It neared five o'clock. Supper fires flung blue pennants from various chimneys. Over in the messhouse a flunky sang at his work and dishes clinked. From far up on the wooded slopes came shrill whistle blasts, the throb of machinery, all muffled in the deep cool forest over which was spreading a blight of raw stumps, broken branches, a litter of destruction.
He went into the house. Mary sat with a few letters in her lap, the gleanings of that steamer's mail. She looked up at him expectantly. He shook his head.
"Can't tell yet where we'll come out," he said.
"It's getting to be a sort of a nightmare with you, isn't it, Rod?" she said wistfully. "The whole thing."
"Oh, well," he replied absently, "another year, maybe sooner, it'll be finished—win, lose, or draw."
He lit a cigarette, drew a whiff or two, sat with it forgotten in his fingers till the stub burned him.
The long quitting blast went echoing up and down the channel. Men came pouring off the hill. The supper gong clanged, a prolonged and resonant metallic vibration, like an anvil under quick strokes of a hammer. Rod and his wife and boy walked to the small dining room set apart for their use. And still Andy and Isabel remained somewhere beyond that mossy point jutting like a green tongue into the sea.
Not until Rod and his wife were back on the porch and the last logger long since smoking in the bunk house amid a drone of talk did the twain appear. Andy walked straight on to the camp. Isabel perched herself on the top step. She regarded them with a heightened color, an obvious repression, a look in her eyes as if she had beheld wonders.
Mary looked after Andy, back at Isabel.
"I'll go along to keep you company," she suggested.
"I'm not the least bit hungry."
"Are you ill?" Mary inquired teasingly.
Isabel shook her head until the bobbed yellow hair stood out like an aureole.
"I never felt better in my life," she declared.
"I shouldn't be surprised," Rod ventured, "if you acted on the suggestion I made a few days ago."
Isabel looked blank for a second. Then she remembered.
"I didn't have to, Mr. Roderick," she said defiantly. "So there."
"Ah," Rod declared. "I perceive something has happened."
"Sagacious man," Isabel retorted. "Marvel of penetration, aren't you? What do you suppose happened, now?"
"Tell us," Mary suggested. "You're bursting with something."
Isabel arose, spread wide her short skirt, made an elaborate curtsey.
"Dear friends, I wish to announce my engagement to Mr. Andrew Hall," she said with adorable whimsicality. "Wedding gifts of articles useful in housekeeping on a small scale will be appreciated."
Then quite suddenly in the midst of her smiles a bright wetness welled up in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Mary put both arms around her.
"I'm gladder than any Pollyanna that ever blithered gladness," Isabel blubbered from this shelter. "And I don't care who knows it. Say, Mary, did it affect you this way?"
The two women disappeared within. Young Rod climbed on his father's knee and demanded to be told the story of Paul Bunyan and his famous camp in Michigan where the loggers were ninety feet high and twenty-four feet across the shoulders, and the cook coasted over the top of his kitchen range on roller skates of a morning to fry acres of hot cakes for the breakfast of these lusty men. Young Rod grew heavy-eyed listening to this gorgeous embroidery of fertile fancy on commonplace facts and presently went his way to bed.
Rod sat alone on the porch in a twilight that filled his eyes with a vista of pearl sky and purple hills, his ears with the song of the rapids that had crooned him to sleep when he was little like his son. There was a grateful hush, as if the mountains said their evening prayers, and the smell of the forest mingled with the dank kelp smell as the falling tide bared a weedy shore.
Andy's voice called to him in the dusk.
"Come on over to the office. There's a delegation to talk to you."
In the plain room where during working hours the bookkeeper cast up the camp accounts four men sat at a table. They greeted Rod pleasantly and came at once to the point.
"We've talked this over," one said. "Hall's told us how things stand. We don't want a shutdown. We want to keep workin'. For pretty near two years now we've set wages and hours. Whatever we asked we got without any argument. Now that times are bad again, we're willin' to leave it to you. We figure that eight hours is a long enough day. You set the pay."
"That's good enough," Rod answered. "But the cut may jar you. Things are at rock bottom. Nothing that we use, food, supplies, machinery parts, has come down a nickel. It seems a shame to cut wages, but unless timber prices go up, there's no choice."
"Uh-huh," one grunted. "How much of a cut do you figure will let you get by?"
"Twenty per cent," Rod told them bluntly.
"Well, thatispretty stiff," the chief spokesman commented. "Still—we won't go back on our word. Timesarebad."
"I want to keep the outfit running," Rod said. "I can't do it on a losing scale. I'll post up a new wage schedule to-morrow. If a turn for the better comes, wages will go up again. I can't go any farther than that."
"That's fair enough. Guess that's all. Good night."
They nodded and filed out. Andy and Rod stood looking at each other.
"I figured that was about the line they'd take," Andy said. "I simply gave them the facts. Told them it was up to them whether the camp shut down to-morrow—the best camp in the country. And that if it did shut down for any length of time, it might never open again under the same management. Then they barred me out of the meeting, and chewed it over themselves. And there you are."
"Isabel came home manifesting unmistakable symptoms," Rod said slowly. "This seems to have been your big day all around, Andy."
They shook hands on that.
Through that disastrous autumn of 1920—when the logging camps of B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of both sat in clubs and homes, cursing labor, the government, that vague entity called the consumer who had mysteriously ceased to consume, raving about confiscatory taxation, bewildered and resentful in the face of a retrograde swing of the commercial pendulum—the Norquay machine functioned without a single creaking joint, on into the winter season through sodden weeks of mist and rain until a deep snow in January buried the gear and froze the water pipes that fed the donkey engines. Then even the hardiest logger was glad to stay indoors.
A certain percentage of the younger men, with good money burning their pockets, went to town, victims of the inevitable reaction from the grind of work. But most of the crew followed a wiser counsel and stayed in the camp, played poker in the bunk houses, read books and magazines, organized stag dances. Some of the married men built float houses on rafts which could be moved when the camp changed, and brought their families there to live away from rent and fuel costs in town. Their joint efforts persuaded the provincial government to establish a temporary school. So by degrees the camp began to take on the aspect of a community.
The shutdown was comparatively brief,—five weeks. Then rains wiped out the drifts, banished the frost. In the dripping forest where fog wraiths hung like smoke among the tree tops, axes clacked, saws whined, cables hummed, and the logs came down to the sea.
Where the logging industry in great part had stopped dead before the barrier of unprofitable operation, Rod did not even slow down. It was not a question of a profit. It was simply a matter of turning trees into cash to replenish the plundered coffers of the Norquay Trust. Every boom that sold in the market lessened somewhat his obligations, once his men agreed cheerfully that a lowered wage was better than idleness. The reddest radical among them believed in him sufficiently to go ahead on the assurance that wages would automatically keep step with prices for the product of their labor.
In few other organizations that Rod knew did such a feeling prevail. Where it had play there was a minimum of dispute, a maximum of production. But it was rare. His affairs took him into Vancouver a great deal. He had kept up membership in a club to which his father and grandfather had belonged. And in the club quarters which served him as a hotel he came into casual contact with sundry pillars of British Columbia industry. The amount of invective poured on the head of things in general was a revelation.
These worthy gentlemen over their wine and cigars affected to believe the State, the home, the nation, reeled to ruin before union wage scales. The rancor in their voices when they spoke of working-class demands amazed Rod sometimes. But as he listened, he perceived that this rancor was impartially distributed over many things, upon the government, upon taxation, upon affairs in Europe, upon the gaunt specter of the Lenine-Trotsky régime; there seemed no end to their grievances. And he perceived further that this uneasy spirit lay in the fact that the sweeping tide of war prosperity had slacked suddenly where they had childishly believed it would surge on to greater heights,—and that this slackening was unprofitable. If the stagnation kept up long enough, they must shrink to a lesser stature; some to ruin. They were uneasy. Some, committed to great undertakings, were palpably afraid.
If they could keep wages down and prices up! They did not say so openly. They did not correlate the two objectives. They merely brightened at any prospect of better selling prices for their various products, greater demand, and frowned in distress over labor costs. They said labor would have to come off its high horse, and they said it with a good deal of unnecessary vehemence. Quite unanimously, almost instinctively, they were bitter against any man who did not agree with them.
They said, "Men won't work." That was a lie. Rod Norquay had proved it. His men had worked; and he had in his crew a score of agitators black-listed in other camps. No. Men who had seen war-time wages easily over-lapped by war-time living costs would not work for a driving employer under conditions arbitrarily dictated; not unless the whip of necessity lashed them to the task. And when they had to, inevitably they laid down on the job. That was the root of the trouble.
"You could open your camps and start your mills tomorrow," Rod broke into a conversation at his elbow one day, "if you'd base your tactics on the fact that men are men and not beasts of burden. I'm doing it and making money. I've done it right along. There's no magic about it. I simply accept present-day conditions, instead of mourning for the good old days when a logger was something less than a dog in a kennel. The trouble with you people is that you're hogs by nature. You're not satisfied to have your snouts in the trough. You want both feet in."
He walked out on the street, leaving them insulted and indignant. But he did not care. He was in one of his moods, in one of those momentary surges of passion that overtake the hard-pressed man. He saw everything in such moments with a distorted clarity. The motives and aspirations of such men seemed mean beyond words. If it had been possible for him to stay long at such a pitch of emotion, he would have hated them as heartily as they hated him.
They did hate him. Chiefly because they distrusted him, because they couldn't understand his motives. For a long time they had believed that he was a fool about money, a sentimentalist who was sinking a great fortune into a bottomless pit. Then because they saw no sign of collapse, they credited him with ambitious schemes which aroused their cupidity, and finally their antagonism when he continued to play a lone hand and succeed where they, with their little combinations, either failed or were afraid to run a risk of failing. He would enter no arrangement designed to put labor in its place. He would have nothing to do with employers' associations. He stood out a lone figure, carrying on his shoulders the burden of the Norquay Trust and in his hands a producing organization whose efficiency they envied and could not duplicate by their methods.
All that winter Rod heard hints, snatches of conversation; he watched, listened, made mental notes. He heard the complaining of the pinched industrial barons. They blamed the war now.C'est la guerre!
But it was not the war. They were reaping, all civilization was reaping, only seed that had been sown long before the war. The worthy bourgeois learned nothing; but he did forget many things. Chiefly he forgot, or perhaps had never learned, that the war did not create greed, ineptitude, blundering, injustice; the war didn't endow man with a tendency to snatch at chestnuts in the fire and complain loudly when he burned his fingers. It seemed to Rod utterly childish to blame the war for individual or even national folly. The war had its own burden of iniquity to bear. The war created nothing and destroyed nothing that had its root in the human heart. At the worst it had only deflected certain things, released pent forces and passions.
He considered. Grove would have made as great a mess of his ambitious schemes if no cannon had waked echoes in Flanders. He had been a victim of his own weakness. A weak, vain man with great power in his hands, and a group of strong, predatory men filching it from him on the old principle that "he shall take who has the power and he shall keep who can."
This was the law that seemed to rule modern industrial society. Right has always rested on power; it cannot be otherwise. Very well then. Let them live by the law. Rod could not help a sneer when he saw these aspiring minor plutocrats wince as the shoe pinched them; the shoe which they would have fitted on other feet without a qualm, if they could.
Nevertheless the muttered growling of various influential persons echoed in his ears now and then. He heard it directly. He noted the effect of it in different aspects of his more or less complicated affairs. There were influential cliques in Vancouver who took it as a personal grievance that the Norquay estate—which was Rod himself—would neither heed their Jeremiads concerning labor, nor deviate from a settled policy.
It takes so little to arouse the ugly devils that lurk in men. They tried to make a feud of what was only a feeling of irritation. They attacked him. When they went that length, Rod struck back with whatever weapon lay to hand, and he had not a few in his arsenal. They couldn't hurt him; they could at most annoy. And so presently, Rod, finding no cracks in his material armor through which a spear could be thrust, ceased to be troubled by their futile activities. He despised their stratagems, and mocked at them, and confounded them with a waspish sarcasm whenever he encountered them in person. Undoubtedly in that year he earned something close to hatred from a certain group of men who five years earlier would have been aghast at such a state of affairs.
About certain phases of this Isabel Wall kept him duly informed. But in the spring of that year she married Andy Hall,—and was herself immediately cast out from among the chosen people. Which circumstance only moved Isabel to amused laughter. But it stirred Rod and Mary to admiration. In this final step Isabel seemed ta have burned all her bridges with a high heart. They were quietly married and came to live with Rod and Mary for company's sake,—since the two husbands were necessarily absent a great deal of the time.
Not long after that the last stick of the last Norquay timber on Valdez, that noble stretch of fir and cedar Oliver Thorn had husbanded so long, found its way to the boomsticks. When the first crew was ready to shift its donkey engines and coils of cable, Rod said to Andy Hall:
"Have that outfit loaded on floats. Take it over to Mermaid Bay and make a high-lead setting a little back from shore to the right of the landing. Better start getting these camp buildings over there too."
Andy stared at him.
"You're not going to cut that timber?" He waved a hand across the channel, where the dusky forest massed behind the red roof of Hawk's Nest.
"Why not?" Rod asked. He wondered if Andy shared a feeling that stirred, he believed, in no breast save his own and Mary's.
"It's a damned shame," Andy muttered.
"No choice."
It was the simple truth. Rod looked across at Valdez often in the next few weeks—perhaps to turn his eyes from the desecration at hand. He did not expect any save himself to feel such a sentiment, to feel a physical shrinking every time a faller lifted his long-drawn cry of "Tim-br-r-r-r," and the sobbing swish of lofty boughs sweeping in a great arc and the crashing thud marked another tree prone. Valdez was a waste. Where living green had clothed the hills there lifted stumps, torn earth, bald rock ledges. Desolation. The Granite Pool lay in its cliffy hollow, bared to the hot eye of the sun. The deer and the birds had withdrawn to the farther woods. Animal life banished, vegetation destroyed. Barren. Bleak. Ugliness spread over square miles. Soon Dent Island would be like that. Hawk's Nest would stand bleak and bare on a stripped promontory. If man were immortal, surely the troubled spirits of his dead kinsmen must hover dumbly about the spot. But they were as powerless as he.
He had walked out to see the first tree thrown down, and he had overheard one faller say to his mate, looking up at the stone house and lifting his face to sniff the sweet smell of lilac blown to him across the lawns by a June breeze:
"By God, it's almost a crime to cut these trees."
But, as he had said to Andy Hall—no choice. Upon that twelve hundred acres the trees stood bough to bough,—clean, straight, tall, enormous of girth and sound to the core. From the level center of the island an easy slope fell away to the water on every side. For a mile back from Hawk's Nest to walk abroad was like walking in the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps the Goths in their northern fastnesses first saw those pointed arches in the lofty symmetry of fir and pine. For a hundred years the Norquays had warred on the thickets and undergrowth. They had cleared away the dead trunks and the rotten windfalls. The floor of that forest was the floor of a park. Bough to bough the trees stood in endless ranks. Man was a pygmy among them. Dim aisles ran out into shadowy perspective. Only on the southern fringe bordering the house and lawn had the forest been thinned to let in sunshine and become clothed with grass. All the rest was carpeted with moss.
No logging crew on the Pacific Coast ever put their gear into such a logging chance. Twelve hundred acres of fir and cedar, few less than four foot thick at the base, thousands that three men touching fingertips could not span, clean straight trees that lifted a hundred feet without a knot or limb, and another hundred above that bared their heads to the sun. Their feet in perpetual shadow; their heads upholding the sky.
Except on two or three hundred acres of jungle at the northern end there was nothing in all that stretch to hamper a rigging-slinger with his snaky cables. The fallers could lay a tree where they wished. The high-lead gear could snatch the logs out at top speed. Rod could imagine old Jim Handy, the human logging machine, looking with glad eyes on such ground and such timber. Records would be made there. Big days that the loggers would talk about in years to come; days when more timber would go down to float within the boomsticks than ever was moved by a crew of men between sun and sun.
And that was why they were there now. He had hoped to save a part of this. But the pressure was too great. He had to have a given amount of revenue within a given time. Only by this means could it be secured. It was fortunate for him that he had this resource, doubly fortunate that it would go out on a rising market; for 1921 marked the turn of the tide.
All lost save honor! He smiled at the self-righteous expression. He could strike an attitude and utter that worn phrase. It was true. But was it valid,—either the attitude or the phrase? Yes, for himself. He was throwing away every material advantage that men live, work, fight for, plan and scheme and struggle to attain. And he did not do it because it was a reasonable, logical course. He did it to gain peace with himself, to retain his own self-respect. He was so made that he could endure anything but the thought of meeting an enemy and skulking away in the face of danger, of treachery to a trust, of taking an unfair advantage. Yet there were times when he felt that it was too great a price to pay for another man's blunder. And then he would feel as if he had done something, or contemplated doing something, of which he was ashamed. He began to realize that the cheerful giver gives nothing of value compared to the glow he gets in giving; and that the man who can cheerfully sacrifice his dearest possessions has never yet been born.
They were living once more in the old house. For how long Rod did not know and he tried not to think. The outcome was still uncertain; and where uncertainty lingers so does hope. At least, it was very pleasant to be there.
Late one afternoon when the Dent Island operation had got well under way, a fog swept like a wet smoke through the Euclataw Passage. It lifted, broke, opened and closed as if it were of two minds whether to lay over the channel a veil of obscurity or disperse in torn fragments. While it hovered and shifted thus uncertain, and the tiderace in the rapids slacked, a white yacht nosed into Mermaid Bay and felt her way alongside the float.
It was theKowloon, come back like a ghost of other days. From the porch Rod, Mary, and Isabel recognized her through the fog haze as Grove's old yacht, which Laska had come into as the major portion of her husband's estate, and sold to her father.
"I wonder if they've come to hold out the olive branch to an erring daughter?" Isabel said lightly. "Dad might—possibly. Still, I don't think he'd care to trespass on your bailiwick, Rod, even for that."
"What has very likely happened," Rod shrewdly surmised, "is that she's on her way somewhere north and has simply taken shelter on account of the fog. This passage is dangerous in thick weather."
He sauntered away to the workings after a little. TheKowloonwas of no interest to him, save as a reminder of old days. At the inner end of the bay already a widening field of stumps lifted flat heads among a litter of discarded tops and broken boughs over many acres. With tools and machinery his loggers were eating into the heart of that ancient forest as a mouse gnaws into a slice of cheese.
The fog lifted and closed intermittently. Rod came back in the course of an hour to find a stout figure with a cigar jutting from its teeth standing in the edge of the logging watching the high-lead donkey spit smoke and steam and shudder under enormous strains.
John P. Wall greeted him impassively. His small gray eyes met Rod's for a second, wandered off among the stumps, the dimly seen men, the black iron monsters huffing and puffing, the reddish-brown logs floating by hundreds in the bay, swept over the unkept grounds rank with grass, the gray stone house casting a great shadow, and came back to Rod.
"Damn shame to do this," Wall flirted one hand toward the untidy logged-off ground.
Rod shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll give you two hundred thousand for Dent Island just as it stands," Wall offered abruptly. "Take your outfit and go log somewhere else. Two hundred thousand cash."
Rod looked at him. A hundred and fifty thousand would shift his last burden. That was the maximum he could realize from his timber, if he sheared Dent Island as a farmer shears his sheep's fleece in the spring. And with the forest stripped, Dent Island had no money value. It would consist only of an old stone house standing gaunt amid a few acres of grass, its background a stony stump-littered waste. Whatever associations Hawk's Nest had for him and his could be less than nothing to John P. Wall. What stirred the man? Had his iron bowels been moved to compassion? Was he obliquely trying to make amends? Or did he think that by purchase he could put on the intangible mantle the Norquays had woven about themselves in five generations?
Rod smiled wanly.
"Why should you wish to buy Hawk's Nest at more than its market value? Does your conscience hurt?"
"Conscience?" A flicker of expression crossed Wall's heavy face. "No. Don't use it in my business. Took a notion to the place. Always did like it. That's all. You're destroying it."
A glow of anger began to burn in Rod, and mixed with it a detached wonder at the type of man before him. He could imagine Wall viewing him with impersonal pity, and brushing him aside in pursuit of his own ends. There was a pachydermous quality in the man. He couldn't be hurt. He had no qualms. For him the world of humanity was not made up of men and women who had good impulses or bad ones, wisdom and folly, conditioned by many things. No, to him the world was made up of two kinds of people; those who could get what they wanted and those who couldn't. For Wall there were no fine distinctions, no ethical hazards in which a man might lose his soul. The firm grasp, the unrelenting hold, justified itself. Anything profitable was good business; anything unprofitable was bad business. Rod looked at him and wondered if Wall carried that remorseless philosophy into his social life, his family life; if he applied it to his pleasure, and in what degree. And if he did whether he found the balance in his life's ledger to lie on the credit or the debit side.
"You're reckoned wealthy, aren't you?" Rod said to him. "Three or four millions?"
"Something like that," Wall answered indifferently.
"I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that there are things money can't get you?" Rod said quietly. "This place happens to be one of those things."
Wall chewed his cigar, impassively reflecting. Rod turned away.
"Three hundred thousand," Wall said suddenly.
Rod shook his head.
"No use. I wouldn't sell Hawk's Nest any more than you'd sell one of your ears. I was born here. My people have been born and lived and died and are buried here. Very old-fashioned notion, of course, but it happens to mean something to me. And please remember this, Wall. If it had to pass out of my hands, you would be the last man in the world I'd care to have hang up your hat here and call it home."
He left Wall to reflect on that.
A shrill blast from the high-lead donkey put an end to the day's work. Men came stringing out of the woods. In twenty minutes more the supper gong clanged.
As they sat at dinner Rod told Isabel of her father's offer. Isabel smiled cynically.
"Don't ever think the idea of any sort of restitution occurred to him, Rod," she declared. "He wouldn't even understand the idea of such a thing. He has always admired this place, secretly longed to have something like it, and he has discrimination enough to know he couldn't create it in his lifetime. He'd buy Hawk's Nest like a shot. He has dreams of founding a Wall dynasty, I really believe. A place like this, made to order, with its history—why, he'd gloat over it. The parvenu idea of acquiring prestige by purchase—by proxy. I know I sound horrid, but it's true. He thinks the Norquays have gone to seed. And that the Walls only require a proper background to be somebody. It's amusing and sometimes almost tragic—this social pushing, this itch to be thought something you aren't, to make a big splash. Did he seem keen on it, Rod?"
"Rather."
"Mamma's been priming him," Isabel nodded. "I've heard her talk about the possibility—since you've been supposed to be in deep water. She thinks Bob's a perfect gentleman—even if his father isn't quite—when Robert's merely a good little spender. Poor old daddy. He's the best of the lot, because he just naturally can't help being a ruthless old pirate, and he never held a grudge in his life against any one who beat him at his own game. He's a bear at making money and mom's a bear in society, and they've raised Bob and Laska and me to be bearcats of one sort and another too. Some combination."
Isabel applied herself to the salad for half a minute.
"Suppose you go aboard the yacht with me and I'll introduce you to dad," she proposed mischievously to Andy.
"I have no objection," he returned calmly. "Neither have I the slightest desire to meet your male parent—whose only merit in my eyes is that he is your parent. I couldn't use him in my business, and it's a cinch he couldn't use me in his."
"He might," Isabel teased. "He has lots of irons in the fire and loads of money. You sure did marry money, Andy, old scout."
"Well, I have irons in the fire myself," Andy retorted imperturbably. "And without any hankering for loads of money I expect to get all I need."
The pair of them sauntered off after dinner, still facetiously debating what they called the possibilities of a Hall-Wall entente. Rod and Mary went out on the porch. The rapids murmured in a rising key. Young Rod, who had learned to read under his mother's tutelage, curled up in a chair with a book of fairy tales. The sun dipped below the jagged backbone of Vancouver Island and the afterglow lingered, a radiant tinge over the blurred slopes that lifted to high mountains on the mainland shore.
About the head of the bay were clustered compactly the numerous portable buildings of the camp,—bunk houses, messhouses, storeroom, isolated small dwellings. A short slope bright with low salal brush dipped to the water. On that gentle pitch numbers of the men often clustered in the evening, sitting on their haunches, lying stretched on their backs, spinning Rabelaisian yarns, Homeric tales out of their woods experience, talking about their work, the war, economics,—all the infinite variety of futile gabble and profound wisdom that is embodied in a group of skilled men following a risky outdoor calling. The Pacific Coast logger is no mere beast of burden. He is master of an intricate technique as applied to the handling of enormous timbers by powerful and complicated machinery. The B.C. woods is no place for the sluggish of brain or hand.
Wall himself was heavily interested in timber and had been for years. There were probably fifty men in Rod's crew who had drawn Wall pay checks in their time. And there was not a man there but knew the Wall camps and knew little good of them. They had an evil reputation. Probably Wall himself had never seen the interior of a single one of his camps. He had no personal interest in such matters,—only in results. He got results through superintendents, who in turn passed the buck to logging bosses. And these again, because their jobs depended on high average production, drove without mercy so long as they could hold the job. There was a sardonic saying along the coast that every Wall camp always had three crews: one coming, one going, and one on the job.
The loggers frankly hated Wall and all his works. Whereas they liked Rod Norquay. Moreover, now in the third year of Rod's régime, very nearly every man there understood the situation. They were for him, to a man. Rod represented to them the very antithesis of everything John P. Wall stood for. And no mean portion of Rod's crew were intellectually capable and emotionally impelled to make out a very black case against the John P. Walls of industry.
A little cluster gathered on this slope between camp and tidemark. The cluster grew till the limited area was black with men in calked boots and mackinaw clothing, men with unshaven stubble on their chins and strong calloused hands. They sat and stood there without the customary shouting and laughter. It seemed as if every man in the camp had been drawn to look silently down on the white yacht.
TheKowloonstretched her graceful length along the landing. Her paint was like virgin snow, and from stem to stern she glistened with brass and copper and varnished teak. On her forward deck two or three of her crew in spotless white ducks leaned on the rail, looking at the men ashore. Aft a gramophone exhaled the latest jazz. There were guests present, and now that the fog had gone with the sun, they were on deck, dipping and swaying and gyrating to the music.
Suddenly a man on the bank began to sing. A solitary voice, a rich baritone, it cut across the canned syncopation and lifted with the diapason of the rapids as a tonal background.
There was nothing strange in that. Men often sang there, soloists and impromptu quartettes. They sang to amuse themselves, or because they were happy, for any or all the reasons that move men to song. It was not the fact of the man singing. It was his song.
"Ye sons of freedom awake to glory.Hark! Hark! What myriads bid you rise."
The third line came with a volume that burst the evening hush like the roll of drums. From a hundred-odd throats it poured in rhythmic unison, with a passionate earnestness, and something akin to a threat.
"Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,Behold their tears and hear their cries.Behold their tears and hear their cries.Shall hateful tyrants mischief breedingWith hireling hosts a ruffian bandAffright and desolate the land,While truth and liberty lie bleeding?To arms, to arms! Ye brave.The avenging sword unsheathe.March on. March on. All hearts resolvedOn liberty ... or death!"
The last word struck like the blow of a ponderous hammer falling on muffled iron. Then silence,—as if it had been halted by some invisible conducting baton which had welded that impromptu chorus into a single harmonious whole to chant that old, old song of revolt against oppression.
Who that has ever heard a marching regiment sing the Marseillaise but knows the clang of its ending, like the snick of a breech-bolt or a great sword clashed home in its scabbard.
No one moved. No voices lifted in words or laughter. Rod, sitting with his chin in his palms, listened with a curious tension for a break in that sudden hush. The massed group on the bank remained immobile, very quiet, as if something profoundly sobering had come over them.
And in the midst of this strange quiescence a gong struck faintly, deep in the bowels of theKowloon, and when the deckhands flicked off the mooring lines she backed slowly out into the channel, out into the gathering dusk, the jazz tunes stilled, her guests standing quietly in a group by the after rail.
As the reaping machines pass over a field of wheat at harvest time mowing swath after swath until there is nothing left but bristling stubble, so the men and machinery under Rod's direction mowed the forest, harvesting that great crop which the centuries had matured. Day by day the logs poured into the booming ground. Week by week tugs departed, towing enormous rafts. The mills chewed up these logs and spewed them forth as squared timbers, in wide boards and narrow, in beautifully finished materials out of which carpenters in far cities fashioned roofs over the heads of other men.
To Rod these trees had been living things, dumb giants brooding over the earth they shadowed. He had stood among them with a humbled spirit. As a child he had moved in that silence and shade with a strange awe, with a mysterious sense of possession and of being himself possessed. A childish fancy? Perhaps. But it lingered still, recurred often. He could imagine the spirit of the forest putting forth a voiceless protest at all this havoc. He could dismiss these fancies intellectually, but his mind was powerless to put aside emotion. His brain could support action with the stern logic of necessity; it could not always banish the pang from his heart.
If it were sentimentality to regret ravished beauty he pleaded guilty. He recalled the protest that burst from a million throats when the cathedral of Rheims crumbled under shell fire. Here was something as beautiful, as inspiring, as much a glorious monument of the centuries as anything of wood and stone wrought by the hands of man. Here was a majesty of form and a beauty of color man might copy but could never surpass. It was being obliterated with considered purpose.
Mary encompassed it in a sentence; with a sigh.
"It is like seeing a painting you have treasured in your home for a lifetime ripped out of its frame, defaced, torn to bits by some vandal."
Summer merged into autumn. September rains rolled up a veil of smoke from scattered forest fires. The coast line emerged clear and sharp from the blur. The maples put on their russet gowns. Equinoctial gales harried the coast briefly and left still days shot through with a waning sun. And whether in sun or storm the wheels on Dent Island turned unremittingly. With sweaty bodies and untiring tools of steel the loggers plied their trade. The booms accumulated and went their way. Money poured in. From the material angle Dent Island was a gold mine. But like mines that have been, the vein was pinching out.
On a day in October Rod saw the last of the great booms draw clear in the wake of a steam tug. Before it was out of the Narrows he passed it on theHaida, southward bound. Very soon now he could write finis to another chapter in the sequence. Slowly, with a pent eagerness, he was placing his levers to right the inverted pyramid.
He knew that before he returned the last tree would fall, would be snatched seaward by the shuddering main line. His crew would gather all their gear on the beach, coil the cables, blow down the donkey boilers. But he would not be there for those obsequies. He had other ghosts to lay.
He stood on the deck looking back. TheHaidahad not yet cleared the inner harbor. East and west the water front spread away for miles in a darkness thickened by the city smoke, a black pall jeweled with deck lights, emerald specks, ruby gleams, dots and squares of yellow, brilliant lines of arc lights, scintillating, imprisoned lightning. Behind that line of dusky wharves, where vessels from far ports disgorged their freight with groaning cargo winches, rose the banked and terraced lights of the town. Great electric signs blazed on warehouse roofs, on every vantage point, proclaiming to all and sundry that "Smith's Coffee," "Brown's Tobacco," "The House of Jones," "Your Credit is Good," were epochal affairs, worthy to be written in letters of fire against the sky.
But from that flaming galaxy one—that, like the name of Abou ben Adhem, had been above all the rest—was missing now. It had greeted the incoming mariner and the tired commuter on the grunting ferries for twelve years. It would never glow again.
The Norquay Trust Company was no more. It was as dead as the man whose futile ambition had given it birth. Its great seal would never again be affixed to any document. With a deep personal satisfaction Rod had wiped out its corporate existence. Legally, honorably, painlessly, he had put it to death.
He stared over the rail. The hive! He seemed to hear the drone of countless creatures armed with invisible stings which they plied upon each other vindictively, unthinkingly, often without knowing what they did, as they buzzed about their sustenance-seeking, marching antlike in the streets, dumb swarms driven by instinct. Ants in the streets, factories, shops, flies clinging in clusters upon motive things of wood and iron called street cars. They came out of nothing; they were bound nowhere. They desired only to be fed, to sleep, to be amused; and their food, their slumber, their amusements were not means to an end; they were the end in themselves. Spiders in offices, banks, above the swarm, yet seeking only what the swarm sought; spinning their webs, enmeshing material things beyond their utmost need, themselves becoming enmeshed and destroyed—their souls if not their bodies—in their own web.
The hive! The futile swarms buzzing in the market place. In a moment of despondency he wished that he might never see it again.
He smiled in the dark, a grimace of utter weariness. Why couldn't he think of them except as agitated insects? A mood—a mood.
His job—that job—was done. Looking back at the lucent glow above the city, that lingered as an impalpable sheen in the sky after theHaidaput the Brockton Point light abeam and the inner harbor was shut away, he felt a sudden relief. His life was his own once more, as much as any man's may ever be. He had shifted the weight off his shoulders. He was going home. After that—
Well, he wasn't certain. He had a plan, a program. It might come to something worth while. He hoped it would; he believed it would. If he had little faith in the value of much that men struggled for, he still believed in man. But whatever his future might be, it must be one of action. He could never be passive. To dream without doing? To contemplate, with contemplation as an end in itself? No. To be a passionately interested bystander, critical, puzzled, sympathetic, deprecating, uplifted or disgusted according to the momentary mood and impression, to the winnowing of events through the sieve of his intellect, but nevertheless a bystander aloof from the common, troubled stream of life—he could never be that again. He doubted now that he ever had been. He had only thought himself a watcher on the bank. He had been sweeping along in the current unaware. It couldn't be otherwise.
He was very tired. When theHaidacleared the outer harbor and met the full strength of a westerly swell in the Gulf he went below and turned in.
Daybreak in Ragged Island Pass! A wave of light and color spanning the Gulf, lighting up the snowy peaks oft Vancouver Island. A blend of misty shores, gray-green sea, hills that faded from olive to purple, from purple to delicate lilac and merged with the horizon as faint blue patches far off, on the edge of things. Then the sun stabbing in golden shafts through notches in the Coast Range, hunting black shadows out of every gorge, touching each wave crest with a sparkle. A morning breeze flicked the sea with touches of white, and set theHaidalurching, plunging, flinging fan-shaped bursts of foam off her bows, arching iridescent sheets of spray in which small, elusive rainbows gleamed.
At ten in the morning they ran the south narrows of the Euclataw with the ebb an hour gone, rolling, twisting, yawing widely as they sheered off wicked swirls and were shot at last on a straight current between the two Gillards and into the mouth of Mermaid Bay.
The house was silent, empty. It was silent and empty enough at best, its quiet corridors flanked by rooms that were never opened, in which ghostly shapes of furniture stood in dim light like swathed mummies. But the rooms they did occupy were empty. Rod went out quietly and sat down on the porch steps. Here presently came Stagg in overalls, his long dark face a healthy brown from self-appointed outdoor tasks.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Norquay went in the little launch on the morning slack to see the rapids run, sir," he informed Rod. "They weren't expecting you to-day."
Rod nodded. They had gone to watch the Devil's Dishpans spin, the great boils heave roaring up out of that cauldron, to listen to the loud song of pent waters released. He wondered idly if young Rod would some day run those rapids for sport with a girl in a canoe as a companion on the adventure, as he and Mary Thorn had done so long ago. Itwaslong ago. He didn't trouble to cast up the years. He had a feeling of being separated from that time by something more profound, more significant, than calendar years.