When the deck hands had dumped a trunk, a bag, a suitcase and sundry
bundles on the float and the _Camosun_ had backed into the stream,
Rod still stood looking about him, trying to mark changes and finding
none. He had been away almost two years. He might have been gone
only overnight for all the external difference in what he saw.
Time's scythe had mowed no grass, felled no trees, had left untouched
the bold contours of his native hills, had neither added to nor taken
away from the well-remembered tintings of sky and sea, the delicate
shadings of the green forest which seemed to hold its own on every
hand against the continuous onslaught of the logger. It was as if
the puny axes and saws of man could no more than make tiny openings
in that incredible stretch of coastal forest. Pygmies attacking a
giant in the vast amphitheater of the changeless hills!
Except for the stone house with a roof that gleamed like burnished
copper in its setting of lawn against the deep olive of massed
boughs, all that Rod Norquay could see by turning on his heel must
have been bared to his eye much as it was bared to the gaze of his
great-great-grandfather on the poop of the _Hermes_ in 1797. Earth
and water, air and sky. The changeless elements. Life was a flux,
but the hills endured, and the sea. Man could ravage the forests in
the name of industry. But the forest would grow again. Those high
aloof mountains, with glaciers clinging on their shoulders, held out
welcoming hands to Rod as they had seemed to welcome the first of his
name a century before. They would be there, flinging vast shadows at
sunrise and sundown, bearing their robes of dusky green and royal
purple and virgin white long after he was gone.
Rod felt a keen, deeply personal appreciation of this background. He
had looked at the Alps and the Pyrenees and the Highlands since he
last saw The Needles looming over Bute Inlet. And he loved his own
hills best. He did not care if that stamped him as a provincial.
There was something here that stirred him. His native fir and cedar,
the maples that flamed along the beaches in autumn, were dearer to
him than English oaks. The grassed area about Hawk's Nest, with
thick-trunked, lofty trees rooted in noble hundreds, was more
beautiful to him that the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was home, and
he had never imagined he would be so glad to get home. And he was
quite aware that it was neither persons nor things that filled him
with this keen satisfaction.
In four semesters he had listened to and taken part in many a
sophomoric discussion where Art and Beauty went on the dissecting
table. To himself he had once defined beauty as such perfection of
form, tone, color, expression, as touched human heartstrings to a
responsive vibration. It did not matter, he sagely decided, whether
this perfection lay in sculpture, architecture, painting, music,
literature, in the everlasting hills or the shifting scroll of the
sea. The sense of it, the response to it, wherever found, alone
differentiated man from the animals. The attempt, more or less
successful, to capture something of this beauty, to interpret it, to
visualize it in marble, in colors, in words, he took to be the
function of art. What art was he did not know. But beauty he could
see and feel. He smiled to himself now, recalling bits of discussion
between classmen about Art and Beauty. They could become so serious
over abstractions. Here a man could forget abstractions. He was
like his great-great-grandfather. _This_ fitted him as a glove fits
the hand.
He glanced across the channel. Oliver Thorn's weathered house stood
blended with the forest, the west wind trailing a blue pennant from
the chimney. Then he turned to meet Stagg, the butler, who had
recognized the single debarkee and come down to welcome him and see
about his things.
"Who's here, Stagg?" Rod inquired, as they walked up the path.
"Your grandfather, Mr. Rod, of course," Stagg answered. "Mrs. Wall,
Miss Isabel, Miss Monty Deane, Miss Joe Richston, Mr. Sam Deane, Mr.
Harold Collier of Seattle. Mr. Philip has taken them all down to
Rock Bay on the _Haida_. We're expecting Mr. Grove and some people
on his yacht for the week-end, sir."
Rod sought his grandfather in the library. He found the old man with
his chair by a French window opening on a small balcony, his thin
hands nursing a long-stemmed pipe.
Rod felt the firm pressure of his hand-clasp, wondered at the
extraordinary vitality of the man. From this same vantage he had
once fired a muzzle-loader at the painted Chilcotins. Down that same
channel his eyes had beheld the historic _Beaver_, the first steamer
to furrow the Pacific. He had seen the Anglo-Saxon and industry lay
the firm foundation of a new commonwealth. He had seen steam
supplant sail. And his eyes were keen yet, although he was
eighty-three and walked slowly, leaning on a stick.
"You've filled out," the old man eyed him critically. "Did you get
anything out of McGill besides girls and athletics? I understand you
are being noticed in sport. I take the queening for granted."
"Why, gran'pere," Rod laughed, "does it run in the family? I haven't
heard that the Norquays who attended McGill were outstanding
cavaliers."
He made a mental reservation about Grove. Echoes of that young man's
affairs still reverberated faintly along the St. Lawrence.
Grandfather Norquay smiled.
"In my day we were wild perhaps, but not wanton," he said. "I don't
know the present generation very well, my boy. But it has curious
aspects--what I see of it now and then."
"Are we much different from other generations, do you think?" Rod
asked.
"In certain features," the old man answered slowly. "Yes. Very
much. But I may be wrong--and it doesn't matter. I have seen a
great deal of change. Some things go on unchanged. Others--my
father, I recollect once--"
He went off upon a tangent of reminiscence. Rod listened, wondering
if there would come a time when he would sit with snow-white hair and
withered skin, telling his grandson of the now, which would then be
fifty years under the horizon of time.
He went downstairs presently to have a bite of lunch, then outside to
walk here and there. The warm June hush filled the parked spaces,
that languorous stillness with an undertone of humming insects
and--when one sat perfectly still to listen--the flutter and rustle
of foraging birds. Under the drowsiness invisible growth, vegetable
growth, responding vigorously to the warmth of sun on moist, fecund
earth. One could almost hear the murmur of countless inorganic
changes, expansions, all the old forms renewing themselves in the
appointed way.
Rod went about from spot to spot, observing the lilacs, the
rhododendrons, the bloom-hidden rockeries, all the fragrant beauty of
the grounds and the sanctuary of the massed woods running back of Big
Dent. He brought up at last on the float. He looked into a
commodious boat-house. His dugout, the brilliant paint a trifle
faded, sat on blocks, wide checks in the wood from long drouth. He
shoved it into the water, let it fill to soak and swell tight. Then
he took a rowboat and pushed out of the bay. A short run of tide
made a slow current in the channel. He was well pleased to feel and
smell salt water again, to have the sharp odor of kelp in his
nostrils, to sniff the aromatic pungence wafted by faint airs out of
the banked forest across the cool sea.
He had no particular purpose, no explicit destination. Perhaps for
that reason, or lack of it, he landed an hour or so later at Oliver
Thorn's float.
Your natural patrician is alone able to practice democracy without
condescension, to meet his fellows on any common ground available.
It made no difference to Rod Norquay that Oliver Thorn and his family
were completely outside the Norquay orbit socially, financially,
perhaps even intellectually,--although the last count was highly
debatable. It merely amused Rod to recall that Norquay senior had
once frowned on Thorn as a "dreamy-eyed incompetent." Rod knew these
people, no matter how or why. He knew them. He liked them. That
was sufficient.
And there was Mary besides, a stimulus to his adolescent curiosity.
He quite frankly wanted to see her again. She had been almost the
only real playmate he could associate with the later and most
important part of his youth. He had vivid and pleasant memories of
her, which had not grown less by two years during which she might
have died or married or gone to a far country, for all he knew.
There had been one or two stiff little letters, then silence. Rod
easily accounted for that. Too many things pressing in on them both.
Too acute a self-consciousness. Rod never thought of the manner of
their parting without a slight wonder at that queer surge of feeling.
He supposed it was the same with Mary Thorn,--a something that made
for restraint between them, that could not be overcome by letters.
He knew girls without number. He danced with them, rode with them,
drove them about in motor cars. Two years of Montreal and three
months in Europe had tremendously expanded his experience of
femininity. And Mary stood out against this background of girls like
an oil portrait among a group of half-tone prints.
Rod didn't attempt to account for this. He hadn't cast a sentimental
halo about her. His pulse did not quicken when he thought of her.
He simply remembered her vividly as a girl he knew and liked better
than all the rest. The nearest he came to an analysis of the "why"
was to wonder if it were not because he remembered Mary in her look
and words, in her person and manner, as supremely natural. He had an
ingrained dislike for the artificial. He had been born with that
predisposition. So had Phil. He liked to think that was a Norquay
characteristic. And the generation of girls and young women Rod knew
seemed like exotic flowers,--with their lipsticks and powder, their
exaggeration of speech, their startling frankness. They were easy to
admire. Upon occasion their provocative sex might trumpet a
challenge. But in the main rouge and talcum, pert slang, the
assurance of complete sophistication amused Rod without greatly
interesting him.
He took it for granted Mary would be at home. But the Thorn world
had moved as well as his own. He found Oliver Thorn sitting on the
porch looking over a newspaper. They shook hands. Mrs. Thorn came
out to greet him. And freshly she impressed Rod with a sense of
serenity, of kindliness, of a motherly quality he could not remember
in his own life.
"Where's Mary?" he asked.
"Still in town. She'll be home soon, though, I hope. She cut a year
in high school and entered the U.B.C. last summer," Mrs. Thorn told
him. "She's quite grown up, Rod. I don't believe you'd know her.
She's changed, like you."
"But I don't think I've changed much," Rod demurred.
"Of course you wouldn't see it yourself, but I can," Mrs. Thorn
smiled.
She went back into the house. Rod sat talking to Thorn.
Trout-fishing, the salmon run, timber, matters current along the B.C.
coast. Westward of the float a set of boomsticks enclosed a floating
mass of fresh-cut cedar in four-foot lengths, split to a
size,--shingle bolts for the mills.
Oliver Thorn had owned for years a square mile of the finest timber
on Valdez; magnificent fir close-ranked on the ridges, cool groves of
cedar in shadowy lowlands. He held it indefeasibly, under a Crown
grant. Rod knew that because he had once heard his father and Grove
comment impatiently on the man's clear title, and wonder why in his
circumstances he would neither sell nor cut the timber himself.
Grove had observed caustically that some one had blundered. That
particular stretch of woods was almost surrounded by the Norquay
holdings. His father had merely shrugged his shoulders. Rod
wondered idly now why a poor man did not turn those trees into useful
cash. He uttered a modification of this thought.
Thorn smiled.
"I follow the wise course of greater folk," he said musingly. "Your
people own miles and miles of timber, for instance. Yet they don't
fill the woods with loggers and market every stick that can be cut.
They log enough each year to bring in the necessary revenue. Isn't
that about it?"
"Probably. I really don't know the family policy about timber,
though."
"That's about it, I'd say," Thorn went on. "And mine, although it
looks like a lazy man's tactics, is much the same. I bought this
stretch of timber cheaply. By and by, when the time is ripe, I'll
log it off or sell it to a logger. I'm doing just what the founder
of your family did, Rod, and what your family continues to do. I'm
holding property that will steadily increase in value."
He stopped to pick up his pipe and put a match to it. Then he
continued in his slow, drawling voice.
"People have often thought me either a sluggard or a fool to sit
tight here, as I've done. Some men would throw a crew of loggers in
here, rip the heart out of this limit in a season, make twenty or
thirty thousand dollars, and go somewhere else to do the same thing.
Your pushing, bustling kind of man who doesn't see anything in the
woods but so many thousand board feet per acre--that kind of man
thinks I'm a damned fool."
"The fact is," he resumed, after a brief pause in this, the longest
speech Rod ever heard him make, "I have no expensive social position
to maintain, and I'm not keen to pile up a fortune. A reasonable
amount of work is good for my liver. But working under pressure,
driving other men, worrying over deals and prices and costs and
contracts is not only distasteful to me, but I'm not good at it. I
know because I did it for fifteen years. I not only didn't like it,
but I didn't make money."
"You see," he turned to Rod, with a deprecating sort of smile, "men
are born different. Some have a beak and claws to rend and tear, and
they do rend and tear with the best. Some are bound to kick and
gouge their way to the top of the dollar pile. For them that's the
real object in life. Others have great foresight to grasp a great
opportunity whenever it comes within reach. I imagine the first
Norquay was that kind of man. And finally there's the fellow like
me; more a dreamer than a doer; inclined to be contemplative rather
than actively constructive--or destructive; more apt to take pleasure
in seeing a tree grow than in cutting it down; able to work and plan
and think clearly in respect of his individual acts, but somehow
incapable of herding and driving and compelling other men to function
for him. That's me. I pioneered in logging here on the coast. I
was one of the first to introduce powerful machinery to handle this
big timber. I made a little for myself now and then. But mostly I
made money for some one else. And I got tired of going ahead under
full steam. My wants are simple. My family's wants are simple. A
reasonable amount of leisure. A reasonable amount of security. A
chance to read and think. Freedom from hurry and worry. That seemed
good enough for me. And this," he waved his hand toward the timber
banked thick on the slopes behind his house, "has given it to me for
several years. Each season I cut a few hundred dollars' worth of
cedar,--without making a dent in the total. Each year the value of
the stand increases. There's twenty-two million feet on my ground.
When I choose to sell, it will bring me enough for a decent living as
long as I'm likely to live, and something left over for Mary. That's
good enough."
Half an hour later Rod heard the _Haida_ whistle far down channel.
The tide had gone slack. He rowed back, a little keen to see Phil.
And as he crossed he looked back at Oliver Thorn's timber and thought
to himself that Thorn was doing precisely what the earlier Norquays
had done. He had shrewdly based his material security on possession
of a natural resource. There was no accident in Oliver Thorn's
ownership. The man had a sound design that differed in scope but not
in kind from the design whereby the Norquays had become what they
were and held what they had.
This was the man Norquay senior had termed a dreamy-eyed incompetent.
Rod smiled. It wasn't like his father to make blunders in estimating
men. Then he fell to thinking of Grove,--and he was not so sure of
the paternal judgment. Or, was it that his own distaste for his
elder brother blinded him to excellent qualities and abilities easily
visible to a father's eye?