Grove's guests danced, drank, sang, tennised, gossiped and played
cards during their waking intervals for forty-eight hours. Then the
white yacht fled down the sea lanes to bring her owner to his
mahogany desk on Monday morning rejuvenated by a quiet week-end at
his country house, as the social page of the Vancouver _Province_
duly chronicled.
Perhaps the item was correct enough in one particular. Possibly Mr.
Grove Norquay was rejuvenated, or refreshed. Quietness would not so
have restored his force. Next to display, Grove liked action.
Whatever else he might lack, he was endowed with abundant energy. He
was a big man, like most of the Norquays, handsome, with an engaging
manner. It was scarcely correct for Phil to say that Grove never
fooled men. If he did not fool them he had a faculty of influencing
them favorably to himself. That faculty had made men like Arthur
Richston and John P. Wall willing to let him stir the financial pot
in which their money bubbled as well as his own. A young man in
search of a career would not have commended himself to them simply by
reason of his search. Even with the Norquay prestige behind him he
would still need that indescribable quality which is called magnetism
for lack of a more definite term,--that personal power of suasion
which successful motor-car salesmen and old-world diplomats alike
exercise to secure signatures on the dotted line. Good men have that
persuasiveness, that ability to compel confidence, and bad ones also.
To which category Grove Norquay belonged it would be difficult to
say. There is the blind power of circumstance to consider.
In this year of our Lord, 1911, Grove was a brilliantly successful
young man in a city where success was most completely estimated by
the noise a man and his money made. Grove was as well satisfied with
himself as any young man could be whose career was assuming meteoric
aspects. Everything he touched turned out well. The Norquay Trust
Company seemed to exercise a hypnotic drawing power over investors
with loose funds. There was a speculative movement in land rising to
a climax in Vancouver, a something that was to assume gigantic
proportions in the following eighteen months. Already shoe clerks
were beginning to go without lunch to make payments on plots of land
in distant suburbs, and to go about their duties dreaming of the
quick turn-over and the long profit.
All of which, when it occurs in a seaport in conjunction with the
building of two transcontinental railway terminals, an expansion of
shipping, an upturn in mining and timber, breeds that phenomenon of
Western America, the "boom." Great is the confidence of the
participants,--and the entire community participates. For the time
being it is forgotten that whatever goes up must come down. It is a
great game while it lasts. Better than draw poker. Better than
playing the ponies. It is legitimate, respectable, as well as
thrilling. It isn't gambling. It isn't even speculation. It is
investment.
Of course a trust company with a well-defined and legally restricted
field of operations was not actively participating in this frenetic
exchange of land titles, notes, mortgages, options and hand-to-hand
agreements of sale. But the rapidity and number of such transactions
created a business which Grove's company absorbed so thriftily that
its growth shamed the furious beanstalk.
The Norquay Trust occupied the first two floors of a new building
named after itself, on the roof of which rose a steel skeleton
covered with incandescent bulbs, the sign Rod had marked on his
return.
Here Mr. Grove Norquay appeared to feel that he moved at last in his
proper sphere. He loved the sound and echo of huge sums, of
complicated transactions, of facing men over a massive desk and
deciding matters that involved much money. He liked noise,
action--it gave him a sense of power, of irresistibility--just as he
liked being master on his own yacht and host to a crowd of people who
talked a little louder and faster and drank a little oftener and
danced with a trifle more abandon than was really necessary. He
could have a "whale of a time" with a lively crowd, whether the party
was stag or mixed. On dead ones, either social or financial, Grove
wasted no moment of his valuable time. A man with money and a
sporting inclination, a woman with any pretensions to youth and
beauty, could be reasonably sure of Grove Norquay's
consideration,--at any rate for a time. He esteemed the good mixers
as the salt of the earth. But they had to be the "right" sort of
people. By his birth, training and antecedents Grove held himself
duly qualified to judge of that beyond dispute.
He was attempting to convey the weight of this mature judgment to Rod
one forenoon some days later. Rod and Phil had come down with the
_Haida_ to meet their father on his return from a trip South. A mild
curiosity to see Grove's shop had led Rod into the Norquay Trust
Building. Grove had shown him about and explained the scope of the
undertaking with what interested Rod as ill-concealed pride.
"I believe you're all puffed up about this thing," he said amusedly,
when they sat down at last in Grove's private office.
"Well, why not?" Grove conceded. "I organized it. It's a pretty big
show, and it's my show."
"After all, it's only a money-making scheme, isn't it? You don't
make anything or do anything, do you? You just handle sums of money
and grab off a percentage. Eh?" Rod said innocently. He was
thinking of Phil's phrase: glorified pawnbroking.
"Oh, tush--you don't understand." Grove dismissed that.
Then he proceeded to fraternal advice, slightly tinged with
remonstrance.
"Didn't I see you walking along Beach Avenue with that Thorn girl
after dinner last night? I understand she's down here going to
school."
"Probably you did," Rod answered indifferently.
Grove frowned.
"It's hardly the thing for you to cultivate her publicly," he
observed. "A fellow can't carry on these country kid acquaintances
in town. Aren't there girls enough in your own crowd for you to
stroll along the beach with?"
"Look here," Rod challenged earnestly, "with your record in the
female line you're barking up the wrong tree when you start advising
me to keep within bounds. My own taste and judgment are quite as
good as yours."
Grove eyed him coolly.
"_My_ record in the female line," he murmured. "I didn't know I had
one."
"No? You mean you didn't know I knew. Do you think I've been deaf,
dumb and blind for the last six years? Even if I had been, you must
remember you went to McGill before me. There are still a few
lingering odors of you on the campus, and in some of the downtown
joints."
"Well, well," Grove said cynically. "You aren't so slow as you seem,
after all. So far as Mary Thorn is concerned, your taste is good
enough--but your judgment is damned poor. I always told the pater he
kept you cloistered too much, Rod. If you have a crush on the Thorn
person, go to it. But do keep her out of sight. Saves talk. These
nobodies from nowhere always mess things up by trying to horn into
your own crowd if they get half a chance. You understand?"
Rod looked at him soberly.
"You're a piggy sort of creature, d'ye know it, Grove?" he said with
icy deliberation. "I sometimes wonder what induced Laska Wall to
marry you."
A faint tinge of color crept into Grove's face.
"I sometimes wonder myself," he said slowly, as if the thrust had set
him thinking. "However, that's beside the point. If I made an ass
of myself on certain occasions, that's no reason you should. Of
course," he waxed sarcastic, "if you are like Phil, a youth of
virginal purity, all I need to say is that it's advisable for you to
seek your chemically pure companionship in your own class, on the
streets or off."
"Your idea of virginal purity doesn't interest me," Rod said as he
rose. "If Phil and I happen to have certain ideas about common
decency which you can't understand, why, that's your misfortune. But
if you want to get along with me, eldest brother, you'll leave my
moral and social training alone. If you don't like my associates,
you can ignore them. Keep your homiletics for your customers."
"All right, kiddo," Grove agreed ironically. "You're a Norquay and
you can do no wrong. But I can tell you from experience, Roderick,
old kid, that these poor men's daughters generally figure on getting
something out of traveling with fellows like us. Believe me, they
do."
Rod didn't answer. He was angry, both at Grove's advice and
insinuation. In another second he would have been ready to blow up.
So he walked to the door. In a square mirror let into a panel he got
a glimpse of Grove, half-turned in his chair, looking after him with
a slightly puzzled expression.
Laska had asked Rod to luncheon at the house. Grove lunched at his
club. Phil had vanished about his own affairs after declining
Laska's invitation. He wondered if Phil suffered from constancy; if
love were a thing that endured beyond hope. He couldn't say. There
was a difference in Phil. But there was a subtle sort of change
manifest in everything Rod knew. At any rate he, himself, had no
reason to find anything but pleasure in lunching with his
sister-in-law.
So he went alone. He walked the twenty blocks that lay between the
downtown traffic roar and Grove's home in the West End, thinking of
his brother's cynical advice. In so far as it bore upon Mary Thorn,
Rod dismissed it contemptuously. He had met Mary by such chance as
brings people together in any town. She was on her way to keep an
engagement and he had walked with her the length of the beach along
English Bay. But Rod had foresightedly provided himself with her
telephone number. Now in a spirit closely akin to defiance he
stopped at a pay station and called her up. Yes, she was free that
afternoon. Yes, she would go for a walk with him.
Rod went on, more placidly. She was the same Mary Thorn who used to
run the rapids with him, but a little taller. She had attained
womanhood and bore herself accordingly. Rod had never been able to
make invidious class distinctions between himself and her. He
couldn't now. Along with Phil she had a place in his affection which
she had preëmpted long before either was aware of sex. Rod's active
and analytical mind had lately come to the conclusion that of all the
people young and old in this land of his birth there were only two
who could stir him to any warmth,--Phil and Mary. That puzzled him.
He supposed he must be an emotional freak. He had chums in Montreal.
He knew men, women and girls by the score here in Vancouver. He
regarded girls here and elsewhere with sophomoric condescension. He
never missed them when they were absent. And he had missed Mary
Thorn. How much he didn't realize until he met her again, after two
years. It was very odd. The emotional and intellectual experience
of twenty couldn't account for such facts.
Rod soon gave over trying. He found himself turning in at Grove's
gate, and Laska coming forward in a hall to greet him.
Late June had ushered in a burst of heat. Their luncheon was served
on a porch screened by wistaria. The purple clusters of bloom
scented the cool shade. A seven-foot ivy-grown wall enclosed the
grounds, shutting away everything but the neighboring upper stories
and the high, green timber of Stanley Park on the west. It was
almost as quiet there as in the woods. The downtown rumble was a far
surflike mutter that made a tonal background for the hum of bees
foraging in the wistaria.
Laska talked at intervals. She had grown up in Montreal. She asked
Rod about places and people there, grew briefly reminiscent about her
childhood. Curled in a hammock after luncheon, she was silent for a
time.
"Rod," she said abruptly, "when your father comes--he's due
to-morrow, isn't he?--do something for me, will you?"
"Of course," Rod answered. "What shall it be?"
"Suggest to him that it would be pleasant to have me up at Hawk's
Nest for a few weeks."
She regarded him thoughtfully, her lips slightly parted. Rod was
puzzled. He hesitated.
"Will you, Rod?"
"Certainly. But--but why don't you just come? Simply say you want
to--and come."
"It isn't quite so simple as that," she explained. "I couldn't go
unless your father rather made a point of it to Grove. Grove's
funny. He isn't at all keen on me going there, except when we cruise
up on a week-end. And I'd like to go there and stay awhile, quietly.
I'm fed up with Vancouver. I'm tired. I want to rest."
"You can't think what a giddy whirl we live in," she went on
presently. "Dinner parties, general hilarity; just one thing after
another. One has to go whether one feels up to it or not. One gets
so weary of it. Get your father to have me come to Hawk's Nest, Rod
dear."
Rod promised.
She went off on another tack after that. With a touch of malice she
brightly recounted the quasi-scandal pertaining to certain people in
their set, people Rod knew slightly. It seemed to afford her ironic
amusement.
"But," Rod observed in comment on a rather piquant anecdote
concerning a pretty widow and a man of family who cut a big figure in
local industry, "that's pretty raw if it's true. And if it's just
gossip, it's rotten nasty gossip."
"I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite true," she said
indifferently. "Some people do what they like. Others have to toe
the line. It's a queer, queer world, Rod."
He left about two-thirty. Striding up Robson Street to Mary's
boarding place, he shook off a half-formed impression that Laska was
bored and discontented, that she found the only world she knew a
rather hollow affair. There was a vague fretfulness about her. It
was just an impression. And it was not his concern. Mary Thorn was
decidedly his concern, for that afternoon at least. Laska, Grove,
the Norquay Trust vanished out of his mind at sight of Mary Thorn.
For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy
foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself
stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his
mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty
girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a
white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the
floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire
nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? Rod's brain
registered flashes of himself holding her close, of her face smiling
into his,--unwelcome visions like that while his lips uttered
sentences about Montreal, continental Europe, books, plays he had
seen, such _pronunciamento_ generally as the conversation required of
a second-year university man who had been abroad.
"I wonder if this is the way a man starts in getting foolish over
some particular girl?" Rod thought to himself, "Or am I just like
Grove and some fellows I know?"
This while he told her of a quaint old place in Scotland, where he
had visited a branch of distant kin, the summer before.
Mary listened, talked in her normal quiet way, turning to him
occasionally with a smile that fluttered briefly across her face and
made her eyes light up.
There was no provocative suggestion about her. It was nothing she
did or said that stirred and puzzled Rod. It was merely herself, her
presence, a pleasant-faced girl with a low, throaty note in her voice
and a slender well-formed body which had a peculiar grace of
movement. Magnetic? That overworked term to define the indefinable.
What was there about her to stir a man so? Rod asked himself that
after he had said good-by to her at five o'clock.
And there flitted across his consciousness a faint, troublesome
perception of dynamic forces in human relations of which a man must
acquire knowledge empirically, concerning which all the textbooks are
silent.
Rod spent the months of July and August very much as he had spent all
the Julys and Augusts of earlier years. That is to say, he paddled a
canoe, swam, sailed, fished trout and salmon, made himself agreeable
to sundry guests, male and female. About Hawk's Nest no material
change appeared, however Rod might vainly wrinkle his brows over a
subtle transformation which he could not analyze, but which he felt
as a blind man feels the nearness of some insensate mass. He was
free from the tutorial direction. Mr. Spence had definitely retired
into a pensioned leisure, having done his full duty by this
generation of Norquays. Rod was twenty, his brain and his beard both
in training for manhood. He could lounge or play as he elected, come
and go as he desired.
Not so long before, measured by seasons, life had seemed to him the
simplest sort of affair. One took it perforce as it came. Certain
things were ordered, irrevocable; other things a matter of choice; a
few, a very few transitory phases of existence, a matter of chance.
McGill, Mary Thorn, Grove, his grandfather, and the old, old journal
of Roderick Sylvester Norquay began to make him question this
definitely limited philosophy of living. The element of chance
loomed larger. It even invaded the sacred precincts of choice.
He looked at Mary Thorn as they sat on the porch of her father's
house, as they ate a pocket lunch beside the Granite Pool with their
rods and creels beside them, as they slipped in the dugout alongshore
with the open diapason of the rapids welling up, and he wondered by
what necromancy of body or spirit she could so effortlessly set his
blood racing, drew his flesh toward her as a magnet draws steel,
until his resistance was stoutly tested. How? Why? Rod could
explain it simply,--but his explanation failed to satisfy. It rode
his imagination as something that transcended mere fleshly instinct,
which he understood well enough, of which in his sophisticated world
he had observed sundry manifestations.
Rod had once said to himself that the family had become static. He
had felt a regret for this grooved state; all the great adventuring
done; all the great efforts and endurings and activities
accomplished. Ease flowed about them in a wide stream. And Grove
was the fine flower of it all--a comet flashing across the local
heavens, with a tail of yachts, mistresses, vulgar display spreading
luminously behind him.
Grandfather Norquay sat in his chair by a sunny window or walked with
his stick slowly about the grounds,--a tall, spare, silent old man,
thinking his contained, regressive thoughts. Rod would look at him
and wonder. He would look at Mary Thorn and wonder. He would look
at Grove, when that kinetic gentleman marshaled his house parties
down the _Kowloon's_ gangplank, and wonder. Then he would entrench
in a library chair, fortified by cigarettes, and read the typed copy
of his great-great-grandfather's journal, and his wonder,--which was
no more than the vital curiosity of an inquiring mind--would turn
from the general to the particular.
He would lay down that hundred-year-old document, clasp his hands
behind his head, and strive to construct imaginatively for himself a
future based on the known factors of the present and the past.
Strangely enough he always came out of these spells of day-dreaming
with a sense of futility, with an envy of his forbears, with a
regretful sense of having been born too late. Romance might still be
a lusty godlet but he moved beyond Rod's ken. He would visualize old
Roderick on the poop of the _Hermes_, pistol in belt, peering out
from under a three-cornered hat, one eye on the beauty of a
mountainous, thick-forested coast, the other keenly on pelts of sea
otter and the profitable risks of barter with savages. Battles with
the sea, with a hostile environment, a fine courage, and a far,
future-piercing vision. Rod saw the log stockade ringed about by
painted Chilcotins, arrows flying, muskets cracking; the battle
fought and the dead buried; life continuing in armed watchfulness;
the slow weaving of the planned pattern.
"The old fellows had all this in mind," Rod murmured once. "Order
and security and well-being. I wonder if they saw everything so
firmly established that it has become rigid? That all the Norquays
can do now is to live and die like gentlemen. I wonder if old
Roderick would have been such a keen, far-sighted old blade if he
could have seen the fifth generation as it is? Maybe he would regard
us with pride. I wonder? Anyway, they had a whale of a time those
days. The Trojans and Spartans had nothing on them. And there has
been no Homer to write an Odyssey. No Iliad of the pioneers. The
epic of fur and timber and the conquering of a wilderness peopled
with savages. I wonder if I could?"
Rod nursed that idea from the f[oe]tal stage to a lusty infancy. He
bore it, still in its swaddling clothes, back with him to the
university when hot August wore into cool September, and the smoke
haze of forest fires vanished before the autumn rains.
He would never become a financial generalissimo like Grove. Unlikely
that he would ever be called upon to step into Phil's executive
shoes. Unless he voluntarily embarked upon a voyage toward some
material port, he would never have to buckle on armor and joust for
dollars in the commercial tourney. But--if he were able, if he had
the gift and the patience to develop it--he might do these
adventuring progenitors a service by making them live again for their
descendants--a generation, Rod held, deprived of romance and bold
enterprise, limited and circumscribed and in danger of stifling
spiritually in the midst of a material plenty.
This fascinating project in the field of creative effort he kept to
himself--even from Mary Thorn, who had always aided and abetted him
in fanciful undertakings, whose moods and reactions seemed
mysteriously yet infallibly to keep step with his own.