Business as Usual
Late in March Jack MacRae came down to Vancouver and quartered himself
at the Granada again. He liked the quiet luxury of that great hostelry.
It was a trifle expensive, but he was not inclined to worry about
expense. At home, or aboard his carriers in the season, living was a
negligible item. He found a good deal of pleasure in swinging from one
extreme to the other. Besides, a man stalking big game does not arm
himself with a broomstick.
He had not come to town solely for his pleasure, although he was not
disposed to shy from any diversion that offered. He had business in
hand, business of prime importance since it involved spending a little
matter of twelve thousand dollars. In brief, he had to replace the
_Blackbird_, and he was replacing her with a carrier of double the
capacity, of greater speed, equipped with special features of his own
choosing. The new boat was designed to carry ten thousand salmon. There
was installed in her holds an ammonia refrigerating plant which would
free him from the labor and expense and uncertainty of crushed ice.
Science bent to the service of money-making. MacRae grinned to himself
when he surveyed the coiled pipes, the pumping engine. His new boat was
a floating, self-contained cold-storage plant. He could maintain a
freezing temperature so long as he wished by chemico-mechanical means.
That meant a full load every trip, since he could follow the trollers
till he got a load, if it took a week, and his salmon would still be
fresh.
He wondered why this had not been done before. Stubby enlightened him.
"Partly because it's a costly rig to install. But mostly because salmon
and ice have always been both cheap and plentiful, and people have got
into a habit of doing things in the same old way. You know. Until the
last season or two salmon have been so cheap that neither canneries nor
buyers bothered about anything so up-to-date. If they lost their ice in
hot weather and the fish rotted--why, there were plenty more fish. There
have been times when the Fraser River stunk with rotten salmon. They
used to pay the fishermen ten cents apiece for six-pound sockeyes and
limit them to two hundred fish to the boat if there was a big run. The
gill-netter would take five hundred in one drift, come in to the cannery
loaded to the guards, find himself up against a limit. He would sell the
two hundred and dump more than that overboard. And the Fraser River
canneries wonder why sockeye is getting scarce. My father used to rave
about the waste. Criminal, he used to say."
"When the fishermen were getting only ten cents apiece for sockeyes,
salmon was selling at fifteen cents a pound tin," MacRae observed.
"Oh, the canneries made barrels of money." Stubby shrugged his
shoulders. "They thought the salmon would always run in millions, no
matter how many they destroyed. Some of 'em think so yet."
"We're a nation of wasters, compared to Europe," MacRae said
thoughtfully. "The only thing they are prodigal with over there is human
flesh and blood. That is cheap and plentiful. But they take care of
their natural resources. We destroy as much as we use, fish,
timber--everything. Everybody for himself and the devil take the
hindmost."
"Well, I don't know what _we_ can do about it," Stubby drawled.
"Keep from being the hindmost," MacRae answered. "But I sometimes feel
sorry for those who are."
"Man," Stubby observed, "is a predatory animal. You can't make anything
else of him. Nobody develops philanthropy and the public spirit until he
gets rich and respectable. Social service is nothing but a theory yet.
God only helps those who help themselves."
"How does he arrange it for those who _can't_ help themselves?" MacRae
inquired.
Stubby shrugged his shoulders.
"Search me," he said.
"Do you even believe in this anthropomorphic God of the preachers?"
MacRae asked curiously.
"Well, there must be something, don't you think?" Stubby hedged.
"There may be," MacRae pursued the thought. "I read a book by Wells not
long ago in which he speaks of God as the Great Experimenter. If there
is an all-powerful Deity, it strikes me that in his attitude toward
humanity he is a good deal like a referee at a football game who would
say to the teams, 'Here is the ball and the field and the two goals. Go
to it,' and then goes off to the side lines to smoke his pipe while the
players foul and gouge and trip and generally run amuck in a frenzied
effort to win the game."
"You're a pessimist," Stubby declared.
"What is a pessimist?" MacRae demanded.
But Stubby changed the subject. He was not concerned with abstractions.
And he was vitally concerned with the material factors of his everyday
life, believing that he was able to dominate those material factors and
bend them to his will if only he were clever enough and energetic
enough.
Stubby wanted to get in on the blueback salmon run again. He had put a
big pack through Crow Harbor and got a big price for the pack. In a
period of mounting prices canned salmon was still ascending. Food in any
imperishable, easily transported form was sure of a market in Europe.
There was a promise of even bigger returns for Pacific salmon packers in
the approaching season. But Stubby was not sure enough yet of where he
stood to make any definite arrangement with MacRae. He wanted to talk
things over, to feel his way.
There were changes in the air. For months the industrial pot had been
spasmodically boiling over in strikes, lockouts, boycotts, charges of
profiteering, loud and persistent complaints from consumers, organized
labor and rapidly organizing returned soldiers. Among other things the
salmon packers' monopoly and the large profits derived therefrom had not
escaped attention.
From her eight millions of population during those years of war effort
Canada had withdrawn over six hundred thousand able-bodied men. Yet the
wheels of industry turned apace. She had supplied munitions, food for
armies, ships, yet her people had been fed and clothed and housed,--all
their needs had been liberally supplied.
And in a year these men had come back. Not all. There were close on to
two hundred thousand to be checked off the lists. There was the lesser
army of the slightly and totally disabled, the partially digested food
of the war machine. But there were still a quarter of a million men to
be reabsorbed into a civil and industrial life which had managed to
function tolerably well without them.
These men, for the most part, had somehow conceived the idea that they
were coming back to a better world, a world purged of dross by the
bloody sweat of the war. And they found it pretty much the same old
world. They had been uprooted. They found it a little difficult to take
root again. They found living costly, good jobs not so plentiful,
masters as exacting as they had been before. The Golden Rule was no more
a common practice than it had ever been. Yet the country was rich,
bursting with money. Big business throve, even while it howled to high
heaven about ruinous, confiscatory taxation.
The common man himself lifted up his voice in protest and backed his
protest with such action as he could take. Besides the parent body of
the Great War Veterans' Association other kindred groups of men who had
fought on both sea and land sprang into being. The labor organizations
were strengthened in their campaign for shorter hours and longer pay by
thousands of their own members returned, all semi-articulate, all more
or less belligerent. The war had made fighters of them. War does not
teach men sweet reasonableness. They said to themselves and to each
other that they had fought the greatest war in the world's history and
were worse off than they were before. From coast to coast society was
infiltrated with men who wore a small bronze button in the left lapel of
their coats, men who had acquired a new sense of their relation to
society, men who asked embarrassing questions in public meetings, in
clubs, in legislative assemblies, in Parliament, and who demanded
answers to the questions.
British Columbia was no exception. The British Columbia coast fishermen
did not escape the influence of this general unrest, this critical
inquiry. Wealthy, respectable, middle-aged citizens viewed with alarm
and denounced pernicious agitation. The common man retorted with the
epithet of "damned profiteer" and worse. Army scandals were aired.
Ancient political graft was exhumed. Strident voices arose in the
wilderness of contention crying for a fresh deal, a clean-up, a new
dispensation.
When MacRae first began to run bluebacks there were a few returned
soldiers fishing salmon, men like the Ferrara boys who had been
fishermen before they were soldiers, who returned to their old calling
when they put off the uniform. Later, through the season, he came across
other men, frankly neophytes, trying their hand at a vocation which at
least held the lure of freedom from a weekly pay check and a boss. These
men were not slow to comprehend the cannery grip on the salmon grounds
and the salmon fishermen. They chafed against the restrictions which,
they said, put them at the canneries' mercy. They growled about the
swarms of Japanese who could get privileges denied a white man because
the Japs catered to the packers. They swelled with their voices the
feeble chorus that white fishermen had raised long before the war.
All of this, like wavering gusts, before the storm, was informing the
sentient ears of politicians who governed by grace of electoral votes.
Soldiers, who had been citizens before they became soldiers, who were
frankly critical of both business and government, won in by-elections.
In the British Columbia legislature there was a major from an Island
district and a lieutenant from North Vancouver. They were exponents of a
new deal, enemies of the profiteer and the professional politician, and
they were thorns in the side of a provincial government which yearned
over vested rights as a mother over her ailing babe. In the Dominion
capital it was much the same as elsewhere,--a government which had
grasped office on a win-the-war platform found its grasp wavering over
the knotty problems of peace.
The British Columbia salmon fisheries were controlled by the Dominion,
through a department political in its scope. Whether the Macedonian cry
penetrated through bureaucratic swaddlings, whether the fact that
fishermen had votes and might use them with scant respect for personages
to whom votes were a prerequisite to political power, may remain a
riddle. But about the time Jack MacRae's new carrier was ready to take
the water, there came a shuffle in the fishery regulations which fell
like a bomb in the packers' camp.
The ancient cannery monopoly of purse-seining rights on given territory
was broken into fine large fragments. The rules which permitted none but
a cannery owner to hold a purse-seine license and denied all other men
that privilege were changed. The new regulations provided that any male
citizen of British birth or naturalization could fish if he paid the
license fee. The cannery men shouted black ruin,--but they girded up
their loins to get fish.
MacRae was still in Vancouver when this change of policy was announced.
He heard the roaring of the cannery lions. Their spokesmen filled the
correspondence columns of the daily papers with their views. MacRae had
not believed such changes imminent or even possible. But taking them as
an accomplished fact, he foresaw strange developments in the salmon
industry. Until now the packers could always be depended upon to stand
shoulder to shoulder against the fishermen and the consumer, to dragoon
one another into the line of a general policy. The American buyers,
questing adventurously from over the line, had alone saved the
individual fisherman from eating humbly out of the British Columbia
canner's hand.
The fishermen had made a living, such as it was. The cannery men had
dwelt in peace and amity with one another. They had their own loosely
knit organization, held together by the ties of financial interest. They
sat behind mahogany desks and set the price of salmon to the fishermen
and very largely the price of canned fish to the consumer, and their
most arduous labor had been to tot up the comfortable balance after each
season's operations. All this pleasantness was to be done away with,
they mourned. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was to be turned loose on the
salmon with deadly gear and greedy intent to exterminate a valuable
species of fish and wipe out a thriving industry. The salmon would all
be killed off, so did the packers cry. What few small voices arose,
suggesting that the deadly purse seine had never been considered deadly
when only canneries had been permitted to use such gear and that _they_
had not worried about the extermination of the salmon so long as they
did the exterminating themselves and found it highly profitable,--these
few voices, alas, arose only in minor strains and were for the most part
drowned by the anvil chorus of the cannery men.
MacRae observed, listened, read the papers, and prophesied to himself a
scramble. But he did not see where it touched him,--not until
Robbin-Steele Senior asked him to come to his office in the Bond
Building one afternoon.
MacRae faced the man over a broad table in an office more like the
library of a well-appointed home than a place of calculated
profit-mongering. Robbin-Steele, Senior, was tall, thin, sixty years of
age, sandy-haired, with a high, arched nose. His eyes, MacRae thought,
were disagreeably like the eyes of a dead fish, lusterless and sunken; a
cold man with a suave manner seeking his own advantage. Robbin-Steele
was a Scotchman of tolerably good family who had come to British
Columbia with an inherited fortune and made that fortune grow to vast
proportions in the salmon trade. He had two pretty and clever daughters,
and three of his sons had been notable fighters overseas. MacRae knew
them all, liked them well enough. But he had never come much in contact
with the head of the family. What he had seen of Robbin-Steele, Senior,
gave him the impression of cold, calculating power.
"I wonder," MacRae heard him saying after a brief exchange of
courtesies, "if we could make an arrangement with you to deliver all the
salmon you can get this season to our Fraser River plant."
"Possibly," MacRae replied. "But there is no certainty that I will get
any great number of salmon."
"If you were as uncertain as that," Robbin-Steele said dryly, "you would
scarcely be putting several thousand dollars into an elaborately
equipped carrier. We may presume that you intend to get the salmon--as
you did last year."
"You seem to know a great deal about my business," MacRae observed.
"It is our policy to know, in a general way, what goes on in the salmon
industry," Robbin-Steele assented.
MacRae waited for him to continue.
"You have a good deal of both energy and ability," Robbin-Steele went
on. "It is obvious that you have pretty well got control of the blueback
situation around Squitty Island. You must, however, have an outlet for
your fish. We can use these salmon to advantage. On what basis will you
deliver them to us on the Fraser if we give you a contract guaranteeing
to accept all you can deliver?"
"Twenty per cent, over Folly Bay prices," MacRae answered promptly.
The cannery man shook his head.
"No. We can't afford to boost the cost of salmon like that. It'll ruin
the business, which is in a bad enough way as it is. The more you pay a
fisherman, the more he wants. We must keep prices down. That is to your
interest, too."
"No," MacRae disagreed. "I think it is to my interest to pay the
fishermen top prices, so long as I make a profit on the deal. I don't
want the earth--only a moderate share of it."
"Twenty per cent. on Folly Bay prices is too uncertain a basis."
Robbin-Steele changed his tactics. "We can send our own carriers there
to buy at far less cost."
MacRae smiled.
"You can send your carriers," he drawled, "but I doubt if you would get
many fish. I don't think you quite grasp the Squitty situation."
"Yes, I think I do," Robbin-Steele returned. "Gower had things pretty
much his own way until you cut in on his grounds. You have undoubtedly
secured quite an advantage in a peculiar manner, and possibly you feel
secure against competition. But your hold is not so strong as Gower's
once was. Let me tell you, your hold on that business can be broken, my
young friend."
"Undoubtedly," MacRae readily admitted. "But there is a world-wide
demand for canned salmon, and I have not suffered for a market--even
when influence was used last season to close the home market against me,
on Folly Bay's behalf. And I am quite sure, from what I have seen and
heard, that many of the big British Columbia packers like yourself are
so afraid the labor situation will get out of hand that they would shut
down their plants rather than pay fishermen what they could afford to
pay if they would be content with a reasonable profit. So I am not at
all afraid of you seducing the Squitty trollers with high prices."
"You are laboring under the common error about cannery profits,"
Robbin-Steele declared pointedly. "Considering the capital invested, the
total of the pack, the risk and uncertainty of the business, our returns
are not excessive."
MacRae smiled amusedly.
"That all depends on what you regard as excessive. But there is nothing
to be gained by an argument on that subject. Canning salmon is a highly
profitable business, but it would not be the gold mine it has been if
canneries hadn't been fostered at the expense of the men who actually
catch the fish, if the government hadn't bestowed upon cannery men the
gift of a strangle hold on the salmon grounds, and license privileges
that gave them absolute control. I haven't any quarrel with cannery men
for making money. You only amuse me when you speak of doubtful returns.
I wish I could have your cinch for a season or two."
"You shouldn't have any quarrel with us. You started with nothing and
made twenty thousand dollars in a single season," Robbin-Steele
reminded.
"I worked like a dog. I took chances. And I was very lucky," MacRae
agreed. "I did make a lot of money. But I paid the fishermen more than
they ever got for salmon--a great deal more than they would have got if
I hadn't broken into the game. Abbott made money on the salmon I
delivered him. So everybody was satisfied, except Gower--who perhaps
feels that he is ordained by the Almighty to get cheap salmon."
"You're spoiling those men," Robbin-Steele declared irritably. "My
observation of that class of labor is that the more money they get the
less they will do and the more they will want. You can't carry on any
industry on that basis. But that's beside the point. We're getting away
from the question. We want you to deliver those fish to us, if you can
do so at a reasonable price. We should like to have some sort of
agreement, so that we may know what to expect."
"I can deliver the fish," MacRae asserted confidently. "But I don't care
to bind myself to anything. Not this far in advance. Wait till the
salmon run."
"You are a very shrewd young man, I should say." Robbin-Steele paid him
a reluctant compliment and let a gleam of appreciation flicker in his
dead-fish eyes. "I imagine you will get on. Come and see me when you
feel like considering this matter seriously."
MacRae went down the elevator wondering if the gentleman's agreement
among the packers was off, if there was going to be something in the
nature of competition among them for the salmon. There would be a few
more gill-net licenses issued. More important, the gill-netters would be
free to fish where they chose, for whosoever paid the highest price,
and not for the cannery which controlled their license. There would be
scores of independent purse seiners. Would the packers bid against one
another for the catch? It rather seemed to MacRae as if they must. They
could no longer sit back secure in the knowledge that the salmon from a
given area must come straight to their waiting cans. And British
Columbia packers had always dreaded American competition.
Following that, MacRae took train for Bellingham. The people he had
dealt with there at the close of the last season had dealt fairly.
American salmon packers had never suffered the blight of a monopoly.
They had established their industry in legitimate competition, without
governmental favors. They did not care how much money a fisherman made
so long as he caught fish for them which they could profitably can.
MacRae had no contract with them. He did not want a contract. If he made
hard and fast agreements with any one it would be with Stubby Abbott.
But he did want to fortify himself with all the information he could
get. He did not know what line Folly Bay would take when the season
opened. He was not sure what shifts might occur among the British
Columbia canneries. If such a thing as free and unlimited competition
for salmon took place he might need more than one outlet for his
carriers. MacRae was not engaged in a hazardous business for pastime. He
had an objective, and this objective was contingent upon making money.
From the American source he learned that a good season was anticipated
for the better grades of salmon. He found out what prices he could
expect. They were liberal enough to increase his confidence. These men
were anxious to get the thousands of British Columbia salmon MacRae
could supply.
MacRae returned to Vancouver. Before he had finished unpacking his bag
the telephone rang. Hurley, of the Northwest Cold Storage, spoke when he
took down the receiver. Could he drop into the Northwest office? MacRae
grinned to himself and went down to the grimy wharf where deep-sea
halibut schooners rubbed against the dock, their stubby top-hamper
swaying under the office windows as they rocked to the swell of passing
harbor craft.
He talked with Hurley,--the same gentleman whom he had once approached
with no success in the matter of selling salmon. The situation was
reversed now. The Northwest was eager to buy. They would pay him, _sub
rosa_, two cents a pound over the market price for fresh salmon if he
would supply them with the largest possible quantity from the beginning
of the blueback run.
As with Robbin-Steele, MacRae refused to commit himself. More clearly he
perceived that the scramble was beginning. The packers and the
cold-storage companies had lost control. They must have fish to
function, to make a profit. They would cut one another's throats for
salmon. So much the better, MacRae cynically reflected. He told Hurley,
at last, as he had told Robbin-Steele, to wait till the salmon began to
run.
He left the Northwest offices with the firm conviction that it was not
going to be a question of markets, but a question of getting the salmon.
And he rather fancied he could do that.
Last of all on the list of these men who approached him in this fashion
came Stubby Abbott. Stubby did not ask him to call. He came to the
Granada in search of Jack and haled him, nothing loth, out to the stone
house in the West End. It happened that Betty Gower, Etta Robbin-Steele,
and two gilded youths, whom MacRae did not know, were there. They had
been walking in the Park. Nelly and her mother were serving tea.
It happened, too, that as they chatted over the teacups, a blue-bodied
limousine drew up under the Abbott pergola and deposited Mrs. Horace A.
Gower for a brief conversation with Mrs. Abbott. It was MacRae's first
really close contact with the slender, wonderfully preserved lady whose
life had touched his father's so closely in the misty long ago. He
regarded her with a reflective interest. She must have been very
beautiful then, he thought. She was almost beautiful still. Certainly
she was a very distinguished person, with her costly clothing, her rich
furs, her white hair, and that faded rose-leaf skin. The petulant,
querulous droop of her mouth escaped MacRae. He was not a physiognomist.
But the distance of her manner did not escape him. She acknowledged the
introduction and thereafter politely overlooked MacRae. He meant nothing
at all to Mrs. Horace A. Gower, he saw very clearly. Merely a young man
among other young men; a young man of no particular interest. Thirty
years is a long time, MacRae reflected. But his father had not
forgotten. He wondered if she had; if those far-off hot-blooded days had
grown dim and unreal to her?
He turned his head once and caught Betty as intent upon him as he was
upon her mother, under cover of the general conversation. He gathered
that there was a shade of reproach, of resentment, in her eyes. But he
could not be sure. Certainly there was nothing like that in her manner.
But the manner of these people, he understood very well, was pretty much
a mask. Whatever went on in their secret bosoms, they smiled and joked
and were unfailingly courteous.
He made another discovery within a few minutes. Stubby maneuvered
himself close to Etta Robbin-Steele. Stubby was not quite so adept at
repression as most of his class. He was a little more naïve, more prone
to act upon his natural, instinctive impulses. MacRae was aware of that.
He saw now a swift by-play that escaped the rest. Nothing of any
consequence,--a look, the motion of a hand, a fleeting something on the
girl's face and Stubby's. Jack glanced at Nelly Abbott sitting beside
him, her small blonde head pertly inclined. Nelly saw it too. She smiled
knowingly.
"Has the brunette siren hooked Stubby?" MacRae inquired in a discreet
undertone.
"I think so. I'm not sure. Etta's such an outrageous flirt," Nelly said.
"I hope not, anyway. I'm afraid I can't quite appreciate Etta as a
prospective sister-in-law."
"No?"
"She's catty--and vain as a peacock. Stubby ought to marry a nice
sensible girl who'd mother him," Nelly observed with astonishing
conviction; "like Betty, for instance."
"Oh, you seem to have very definite ideas on that subject," MacRae
smiled. He did not commit himself further. But he resented the
suggestion. There was also an amusing phase of Nelly's declaration which
did not escape him,--the pot calling the kettle black. Etta
Robbin-Steele did flirt. She had dancing black eyes that flung a
challenge to men. But Nelly herself was no shrinking violet, for all her
baby face. She was like an elf. Her violet eyes were capable of
infinite shades of expression. She, herself, had a way of appropriating
men who pleased her, to the resentful dismay of other young women. It
pleased her to do that with Jack MacRae whenever he was available. And
until Betty had preëmpted a place in his heart without even trying, Jack
MacRae had been quite willing to let his fancy linger romantically on
Nelly Abbott.
As it was,--he looked across the room at Betty chatting with young Lane.
What a damned fool he was,--he, MacRae! All his wires were crossed. If
some inescapable human need urged him to love, how much better to love
this piquant bit of femininity beside him? But he couldn't do it. It
wasn't possible. All the old rebellion stirred in him. The locked
chambers of his mind loosed pictures of Squitty, memories of things
which had happened there, as he let his eyes drift from Betty, whom he
loved, to her mother, whom his father had loved and lost. She had made
his father suffer through love. Her daughter was making Donald MacRae's
son suffer likewise. Again, through some fantastic quirk of his
imagination, the stodgy figure of Horace Gower loomed in the background,
shadowy and sinister. There were moments, like the present, when he felt
hatred of the man concretely, as he could feel thirst or hunger.
"A penny for your thoughts," Nelly bantered.
"They'd be dear at half the price," MacRae said, forcing a smile.
He was glad when those people went their way. Nelly put on a coat and
went with them. Stubby drew Jack up to his den.
"I have bought up the controlling interest in the Terminal Fish Company
since I saw you last," Stubby began abruptly. "I'm going to put up a
cold-storage plant and do what my father started to do early in the
war--give people cheaper fish for food."
"Can you make it stick," MacRae asked curiously, "with the other
wholesalers against you? Their system seems to be to get all the traffic
will bear, to boost the price to the consumer by any means they can use.
And there is the Packers' Association. They are not exactly--well,
favorable to cheap retailing of fish. Everybody seems to think the
proper caper is to tack on a cent or two a pound wherever he can."
"I know I can," Stubby declared. "The pater would have succeeded only he
trusted too much to men who didn't see it his way. Look at Cunningham--"
Stubby mentioned a fish merchant who had made a resounding splash in
matters piscatorial for a year or two, and then faded, along with his
great cheap-fish markets, into oblivion--"he made it go like a house
afire until he saw a chance to make a quick and easy clean-up by
sticking people. It can be done, all right, if a man will be satisfied
with a small profit on a big turnover. I know it."
MacRae made no comment on that. Stubby was full of his plan, eager to
talk about its possibilities.
"I wanted to do it last year," he said, "but I couldn't. I had to play
the old game--make a bunch of money and make it quick. Between you and
Gower's pig-headedness, and the rest of the cannery crowd letting me go
till it was too late to stop me, and a climbing market, I made more
money in one season than I thought was possible. I'm going to use that
money to make more money and to squash some of these damned fish
pirates. I tell you it's jolly awful. We had baked cod for lunch to-day.
That fish cost twenty cents a pound. Think of it! When the fisherman
sells it for six cents within fifty miles of us. No wonder everybody is
howling. I don't know anything about other lines of food supply, but I
can sure put my finger on a bunch of fish profiteers. And I feel like
putting my foot on them. Anyway, I've got the Terminal for a starter;
also I have a twenty-five-year lease on the water frontage there. I have
the capital to go ahead and build a cold-storage plant. The wholesale
crowd can't possibly bother me. And the canneries are going to have
their hands full this season without mixing into a scrap over local
prices of fresh fish. You've heard about the new regulations?"
MacRae nodded assent.
"There's going to be a free-for-all," Stubby chuckled. "There'll be a
lot of independent purse seiners. If the canneries don't pay good prices
these independent fishermen, with their fast, powerful rigs, will seine
the salmon under the packers' noses and run their catch down to the
Puget Sound plants. This is no time for the British Columbia packers to
get uppish. Good-by, four hundred per cent."
"They'll wiggle through legislation to prevent export of raw salmon,"
MacRae suggested; "same as they have on the sockeye."
"No chance. They've tried, and it can't be done," Stubby grinned. "There
aren't going to be any special privileges for British Columbia salmon
packers any more. I know, because I'm on the inside. The fishermen have
made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing,
there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But
the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that
a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If
you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year,
you'll make some money."
"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked.
"Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough
to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that
cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks
I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three
hundred thousand fish. I'm going to buy everything and start half a
dozen retail stores at the same time. Just imagine the situation in this
burg of a hundred and fifty thousand people with waters that swarm with
fish right at our doors--salmon selling for thirty cents a pound, hardly
ever below twenty, other fish in about the same proportion. It's a
damned scandal, and I don't much blame a man who works for four dollars
a day thinking he might as well turn Bolshevik. I know that I can pay
twelve cents for salmon and make a good profit selling for sixteen. Can
you make money supplying me with bluebacks at twelve cents a pound?"
"Yes, more money than I made last year," MacRae replied--"unless Folly
Bay boosts prices to the sky in an effort to drive me out of business."
"I don't think there's much danger of that," Stubby said. "I doubt if
Folly Bay opens this season. It's reported that Gower is broke."
"Eh?" MacRae looked his doubt.
"That's what they say," Stubby went on. "It's common talk. He sold his
place in town a short while ago. He has the cannery on the market. And
there are no takers. Folly Bay used to be a little gold mine. But Gower
rode the fishermen too hard. And you balled things up last season. He
lost his grip. I suppose he was involved other ways, too. Lots of these
old-timers are, you know. Anyway, he seems to be trying to get out from
under. But nobody wants to take over a plant that has a black eye among
the men who catch the fish, in a territory where you appear to have a
pretty strong hold."
"At the same time, if I can pay so much for salmon, haul them up the
coast and make a profit on that, and if you can pay this advanced price
and pack them at a still bigger profit, why in blazes can't a plant
right there on the grounds pay top price and still make money?" MacRae
asked impatiently.
"Could," Stubby declared. "Certainly. But most men in the salmon canning
business aren't like you and me, Jack. They are used to big returns on a
three months' season. They simply can't stand the idea of paying out big
gobs of money to a sulky, un-shaven bohunk whose whole equipment isn't
worth a thousand dollars. They think any man in sea boots ought to be
damn well satisfied if he makes a living. They say high wages, or
returns, spoil fishermen. On top of these new regulations nobody hankers
to buy a plant where they might have to indulge in a price war with a
couple of crazy young fools like you and me--that's what they call us,
you know. That is why no experienced cannery man will touch Folly Bay
the way things stand now. It's a fairly good plant, too. I don't know
how Gower has managed to get in a hole. I don't believe one poor season
could do that to him. But he sure wants to get rid of Folly Bay. It is a
forty-thousand-dollar plant, including the gas boats. He has been
nibbling at an offer of twenty-five thousand. I know, because I made it
myself."
"What'll you do with it if you get it?" MacRae asked curiously. "It's
no good unless you get the fish. You'd have to put me out of business."
"Well, I wasn't exactly figuring on that," Stubby grinned. "In the first
place, the machinery and equipment is worth that much in the open
market. And if I get it, we'll either make a deal for collecting the
fish, or you can take a half-interest in the plant at the ground-floor
price. Either way, we can make it a profitable investment for both of
us."
"You really think Gower is in a bad way?" Jack asked reflectively.
"I know it," Stubby replied emphatically. "Oh, I don't mean to say that
abject poverty is staring him in the face, or anything like that. But it
looks to me as if he had lost a barrel of money somehow and was anxious
to get Folly Bay off his hands before it sets him further in the hole.
You could make Folly Bay pay big dividends. So could I. But so long as
you cover his ground with carriers, every day he operates is a dead
loss. I haven't much sympathy for him. He has made a fortune out of that
place and those fishermen and spent it making a big splurge in town.
Anyway, his wife has all kinds of kale, so we should worry about old
Horace A."
MacRae lit a cigarette and listened to the flow of Stubby's talk, with
part of his mind mulling over this information about Horace Gower. He
wondered if that was why Robbin-Steele was so keen on getting a contract
for those Squitty bluebacks, why Hurley of the Northwest wanted to make
a deal for salmon; if they reckoned that Gower had ceased to be a factor
and that Jack MacRae held the Squitty Island business in the hollow of
his hand. MacRae smiled to himself. If that were true it was an
advantage he meant to hold for his own good and the good of all those
hard-driven men who labored at the fishing. In a time that was
economically awry MacRae's sympathy turned more to those whose struggle
was to make a living, or a little more if they could, than to men who
already had more than they needed, men who had no use for more money
except to pile it up, to keep piling it up. MacRae was neither an
idealist nor a philanthropic dreamer. But he knew the under dog of the
great industrial scramble. In his own business he would go out of his
way to add another hundred dollars a year to a fisherman's earnings. He
did not know quite clearly why he felt like that. It was more or less
instinctive. He expected to make money out of his business, he was eager
to make money, but he saw very clearly that it was only in and through
the tireless labor of the fishermen that he could reap a profit. And he
was young enough to be generous in his impulses. He was not afraid, like
the older men, that if those who worked with their hands got a little
more than sufficient to live on from season to season they would grow
fat and lazy and arrogant, and refuse to produce.
Money was a necessity. Without it, without at least a reasonable amount
of money, a man could not secure any of the things essential to
well-being of either body or mind. The moneyless man was a slave so long
as he was moneyless. MacRae smiled at those who spoke slightingly of the
power of money. He knew they were mistaken. Money was king. No amount of
it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made
a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes. Without money a man was
less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley
and Gower, because their criterion of another man's worth was his
ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.
MacRae put himself and Stubby Abbott in a different category. They
wanted to get on. They were determined to get on. But their programme of
getting on, MacRae felt, was a better one for themselves and for other
men than the mere instinct to grab everything in sight. MacRae was not
exactly a student of economics or sociology, but he had an idea that the
world, and particularly his group-world, was suffering from the
grab-instinct functioning without control. He had a theory that society
would have to modify that grab-instinct by legislation and custom before
the world was rid of a lot of its present ills. And both his reason and
his instinct was to modify it himself, in his dealings with his fellows,
more particularly when those he dealt with were simple, uneducated men
who worked as hard and complained as little as salmon fishermen.
He talked with Stubby in the den until late in the afternoon, and then
walked downtown. When he reached the Granada he loafed uneasily in the
billiard room until dinner. His mind persistently turned from material
considerations of boats and gear and the season's prospects to dwell
upon Betty Gower. This wayward questing of his mind irritated him. But
he could not help it. Whenever he met her, even if it were only a brief,
casual contact, for hours afterward he could not drive her out of his
mind. And he was making a conscious effort to do that. It was a matter
of sheer self-defense. Only when he shut Betty resolutely out of the
chambers of his brain could he be free of that hungry longing for her.
While he suffered from that vain longing there was neither peace nor
content in his life; he could get no satisfaction out of working or
planning or anything that he undertook.
That would wear off, he assured himself. But he did not always have
complete confidence in this assurance. He was aware of a tenacity of
impressions and emotions and ideas, once they took hold of him. Old
Donald MacRae had been afflicted with just such characteristics, he
remembered. It must be in the blood, that stubborn constancy to either
an affection or a purpose. And in him these two things were at war,
pulling him powerfully in opposite directions, making him unhappy.
Sitting deep in a leather chair, watching the white and red balls roll
and click on the green cloth, MacRae recalled one of the maxims of
Hafiz:
"'Two things greater than all things are
And one is Love and the other is War.'"
MacRae doubted this. He had had experience of both. At the moment he
could see nothing in either but vast accumulations of futile anguish
both of the body and the soul.