Time bridges many a gap in the life of a man, periods that have no
substance in them, no matter how occupied, how filled with minor
incident; stretches of days, months, years flow as unctuously as
syrup from a tilted spout, as straight and open as a white road
across a level plain. Then all at once comes a divergence, a break
in the flow, new vistas and compelling actions. Something leaps
lancewise at the heart or brain out of the peaceful monotony.
Something to be attained looms suddenly like a flame in the dark. Or
he finds himself catapulted into some unforeseen clash, tingling to
the shock of conflict.
Rod Norquay finished the formal education of a gentleman's son in the
next two years. He acquitted himself according to the family
tradition, escaping high honors without being plucked. He came home
in 1913 with a B.A., a few lettered sweaters, a miscellaneous
assortment of classical and scientific and philosophical odds and
ends imprinted on a fairly retentive memory,--and a half-formed doubt
of the utility or advantage of formal education. Having been
officially labelled as the finished product of the educational
machine he supposed that he would somehow be expected to justify the
pains and expense of the cultural process. But where or how he had
no idea. He was finished with school. He was home again.
Everything was as before. If he were trained for any specific
purpose, that purpose was as yet hidden from him. The desire to
write an epic novel scarcely qualified as a purpose. In the
outwardly simple but internally complicated affairs of the Norquay
establishment he was a superfluous unit. Apart from the family he
was, as yet, of less consequence than any logger on the Norquay pay
roll.
"What's the use of being brought into the world, fed, clothed, and
educated, if you're of no use or consequence to anybody?" he observed
to Mary Thorn. "Nobody needs me to help solve their problems. I
have none of my own--none that amount to much. That was all attended
to before I was born."
"You don't know how lucky you are," Mary retorted. "You can do
whatever you want to do. You've got everything that most men have to
struggle for all their lives--and then don't get."
"But I don't seem to want to do anything that amounts to a hill of
beans," Rod replied. "It's like a football game against a third-rate
team. No fun in a walkaway. I have the instincts of a--a--what
shall I say? Buccaneer? Pioneer? Adventurer? I don't see much
chance for anything but a money-making adventure. I don't need to do
that, even if it were to my taste. I couldn't get much kick out of
making two dollars grow where only one flourished. Can't you show me
a windmill or two, Mary?" he ended whimsically. "I'll mount
Rosinante and knock 'em over."
"Every avenue is open for you," Mary declared. "You can map out any
sort of career you choose."
"What, for instance?" he inquired. "There has to be a motive. Most
of 'em are financial. There's the law, and science, and the arts. I
don't warm up to a career as a matter of duty. I've talked to the
governor, seeking light in my darkness. He blandly observes, 'Suit
yourself, my boy. There's really no hurry,' and goes on reading his
book or paper, as the case may be. I'm inclined to believe the
radicals at school were right. They claimed that economic urges lay
at the root of all purposeful action in the world of affairs. Hence,
I lack the strongest motive of all to _force_ me to action."
"Haven't you any secret ambition of any sort whatever?" Mary inquired.
Rod reflected a second.
"Well, I won't commit myself," he replied. "Have you?"
"Yes," she answered demurely. "To be successful, beautiful and
beloved."
"Successful--what do you define as success?"
"Act of succeeding; consequence, issue, outcome or result of an
undertaking, whether good or bad," she laughed.
"Oh, hang Webster," he returned. "What's your real,
honest-to-goodness idea of success? What do you want most of all?
What do you want to do? What do you live for? What's your heart set
on as an objective?"
And Mary, sobered a little by the sudden earnestness of his tone,
could only shake her head.
"I'm not quite sure," she confessed. "There must be something over
the hill--but I don't know what it is."
"Funny," he ruminated. "We're both in the same boat."
"How absurd," she protested instantly. "You give me a pain, Rod.
Born to the purple and growling about it! In the same boat, indeed.
The only point of similarity is that we're both dissatisfied with
what--with what's in sight. You're sighing because no new worlds
beckon you to conquer. Everything's at your hand. All you have to
do is select your weapon and choose your field. All the prestige of
wealth, good family, is at your back. You go somewhere, you want to
do something; you mention your name; somebody says, 'Oh, one of the
Norquays,' and the way is made easy."
"What's the use of an easy road if there's nothing at the end of it?"
Rod asked impatiently.
"Oh, your breakfast must have disagreed with you," she flung back.
"I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair,
A road that is an ordered road, like a nun's evening prayer;
But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where,"
Rod quoted. "Perhaps that expresses it best. If there is anything
in heredity the original Roderick's restlessness has cropped out in
me--without either his capacity or his opportunity for doing things.
Think of the resolution, the spirit of that old fish, the vision. He
saw far beyond himself. He must have had a dynamic energy. Whatever
he wanted he went after, tooth and toenail. And look at the
result--in the fifth generation--of his pains and planning. The
governor's idea of life is as rigid as granite: good food, efficient
service, genteel restraint in all things, taboos and forms of all
sorts. Grove's a glorified shopkeeper, with all a vulgar
shop-keeper's love of display. Phil's the official watchdog of the
family's material interests. And I'm a negligible quantity. Rum
lot. And I'm the only one who isn't perfectly satisfied with
everything. Even old Phil would just grin if I talked to him the way
I'm talking to you."
"He'd be right," the girl replied slowly. "You've got what
everybody's after,--ease, security, leisure. You aren't chafed by
anything sordid. You ought to realize how fortunate you are and be
satisfied. You find life pleasant. Isn't that good enough?"
"Why, yes, so far as it goes," Rod admitted. "Only nobody who gets
beyond purely superficial thinking is ever satisfied with mere
pleasantness. I'm not a cow to lie down in a clover field and chew
my cud forever."
"I give you up," Mary said. "You're a discontented pendulum."
"It's the fault of my education," Rod returned with mock humility.
"Education is a mixed blessing sometimes," Mary said in a tone that
brought him to surprised attention. "It shouldn't be bestowed
indiscriminately on those who can't live up to it, who can't gratify
any of the cravings and dreams that education breeds. Education, if
it's thorough, destroys too many illusions--illusions that one must
hold as realities, if one is poor, a nobody, and without a chance to
be anything else."
"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "you don't feel that way about it, surely?"
"Now and then--not always," she murmured. "It's like loving a thing
and hating it, too. There are times when Euripides, and Housman's
lyrics, and Thomas Hardy don't fit in with cooking and cotton
stockings--when poetic and artistic visions of what-might-be
tantalize like glimpses of a cloud-hidden moon. Why should one
sharpen one's perception of beauties that are beyond one's reach? I
should have been trained in domestic science or nursing, or selling
fripperies to rich women, instead of being put through the cultural
hotbed of a university. They meant well. But unless a girl has a
ready-made: social background, or a decided talent, the so-called
higher education is only a handicap."
"Oh, come now. Hardly," Rod protested.
"No? You don't know anything about people outside of your own
comfortable, spoon-fed class, Rod. That's the trouble. I do. I
know my own kind of people first-hand. Three years in the U.B.C. has
taught me something about your kind. I've been an outsider--looking
in. Money, clothes and manners. Manners are an asset; money is a
necessity. If you've got both you can go anywhere, do anything. If
you haven't, there's the deadline, and you can't cross. Pretty much
everything that a university training fits one for, especially a
girl, is across that deadline. It's rather depressing--sometimes."
Rod was dumb for the moment,--because he was not stupid, and he knew
what she said was true. He had seen the working out of those
unpleasant truths during his own university career. He knew
youngsters at McGill sweating and scraping through--boys with
steel-bright minds, struggling against the fearful handicap of
poverty. He had an inkling now of what old Mark Sherburne meant when
he ironically retorted to some one across a dinner table that he
didn't need brains--he could buy 'em by the gross. Rod hated the
idea of Mary Thorn being embraced in such a category. He reviewed in
one panoramic flash her situation and his own. He compared her with
girls he knew. Isabel Wall, for instance. Less mind--oh, much less.
Isabel was a doll-like creature still. An impractical, useless young
woman, even if highly ornamental. Clothes, dances, parties, sports,
and men about comprised Isabel's desire of and knowledge of life.
Yet she had everything money could buy. She had the entrée
everywhere.
Mary had neither money nor more than a glancing acquaintance with
those who had. He recalled with a touch of shame that although they
had played together from childhood, despite the fact that they had
lived within sight of each other for ten years, Mary had never set
foot within Hawk's Nest. And he had a swift, disconcerting vision of
how difficult it would be for her to get a foothold in the Norquay
circle,--or its equivalent.
It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. There was something rotten in such
an arrangement. In so far as this clear-eyed girl sitting beside him
was concerned, Rod felt that he must do something about it. Why, he
didn't pause to consider. He simply felt the compulsion to act, as
he would have been impelled to act if some unfairness had been
practiced toward himself.
They dropped that subject as if it were a live coal, as if they had
both become suddenly wary of self-revelation. And as they continued
to speak casually of other things, Rod mentally registered the fact
that by some occult process they two, from their divergent poles,
seemed to converge always. Six months, a year, two years: the
separation in lapsed time didn't seem to matter. When they met again
they did not so much begin where they left off, as at once find
themselves on common ground, breathing a natural air of intimacy.
Girls in Rod's experience were either provocative, kittenish, silly,
or rare, lofty-minded creatures whose worship at the shrine of pure
intellect was almost an affectation. He had been in the last four
years so often between the devil of jazzy damozels and the deep sea
of the female highbrow, alternating between amusement and impatience.
Mary Thorn came nearest to qualifying as a chum, with the added
factor of an elusive personal charm.
They were sitting on the calk-punctured board steps of Oliver Thorn's
house. For a minute or two Mary's gaze turned on the slope that ran
up to the Granite Pool. Whenever Rod tried to analyze his liking for
her, he stressed that quality of self-containedness. She could think
her own thoughts as if he were not there. She was thinking them now.
He wondered what they were. He had a retentive memory; he was
tenacious of impressions. Looking at her, he wondered if she were
thinking of the day they sat on the log watching the rapids boil in
their pent channel; if she were thinking of that unpremeditated kiss.
Recalling it, Rod felt his heart quicken. And, as if some invisible
thread linked their minds for an instant, Mary's eyes turned to his
with a reminiscent gleam. A faint flush tinted her cheeks. She
looked away.
Rod covered her hand with his. She let it lie passive. The touch
warmed his blood, filled him with a quick glow. For a moment all the
world was shut away, all but himself and her and the hot sunlight on
the shining channel water.
He shook off that swift rush of emotion, startled, astonished, a
little dismayed. He sat testing the strength of his resolution,
wondering at the thing that stirred him so deeply, trying to grasp
its substance. Her hand was warm and soft. Faint tremors shook it
slightly.
"What a damned shame things are so badly arranged," he said. "Let's
fix 'em to suit ourselves, Mary."
She looked at him with a straight, unwinking gaze. Her mouth
quivered, then shut tight, lips compressed. The flush that had
tinged her creamy skin faded into a pallor on which tiny freckles
stood out across the bridge of her nose in pin-points of tan. She
tried to withdraw her hand. Rod's grip tightened.
"No," he said. "You can't get away."
"Don't be silly," she whispered. "I hate sentimental men."
"Am I?"
"Well, you're manifesting symptoms."
The color came back to her face with a rush.
"Perhaps you're right."
Rod's fingers relaxed. The words that hovered on the tip of his
tongue failed of utterance. Sentimental. It was like cold water on
him. He had rather prided himself on his freedom from sentimental
episodes.
"Yes, perhaps you're right," he repeated. "I'd have been asking you
to marry me in another breath. I have a mind to propose formally,
just to see how ruthlessly you would turn me down."
"The ruthless turn-down would come from another source--not from me,"
she answered somberly.
"You'd be marrying me," Rod repossessed himself of her hand, of both
hands, "not my family or my acquaintances. They don't count so much
as you think. We could have a whale of a time together, Mary.
You're the only girl I know that's real, honest-to-God girl. You
always were. I wonder if you have the same queer sort of feeling
about me that I have for you?"
"I expect I have," she owned. "I'm not a fool, or a liar, or
inclined to be evasive, Rod. I don't care for you in a cool, quiet,
calculating fashion. I'm not made that way, any more than you are.
But, oh, Rod, I've had a lot of unpleasant wisdom forced on me since
you went away four years ago. It won't do. It won't do!"
"Why not?" Rod demanded. "If we choose to say it will, who's to stop
us? We're ourselves, and living our lives is our own affair."
"Living our lives isn't just a matter of doing whatever a passionate
impulse may urge us to do," she answered slowly. "What do you
suppose your family would do and say when you announced your
intention of playing King Cophetua to the beggar maid?"
"Whatever they jolly well pleased," Rod growled his defiance.
"Besides I'm no king, neither are you a beggar. You exaggerate.
Surely you haven't so humble an opinion of yourself?"
"It isn't humility. Far from it," the girl flashed back. "I may
dislike the station in life in which it has pleased God to place me.
But don't ever think I'm humble or diffident about it, or myself, or
my people. Oh, no, Mr. Roderick Sylvester Norquay. But I don't wear
blinkers. I see a lot of things I used to be unconscious of. One of
them is that men like you are regarded as one class of beings, and
girls like me quite another. Isn't it so?"
Rod sat silent. He was clear-sighted enough to see what she meant.
His people--and by his "people" he embraced the whole category of his
class--would say quite frankly and emphatically that Mary Thorn
"wouldn't do." She wasn't anybody. She had never been anywhere or
met any one. In a courteous, matter-of-fact manner they would make
an issue of that. They would never countenance and accept Mary Thorn
without a tussle. He saw all that, but it did not seem to him vital
or final. And he merely sat silent while he sought cogent reasons to
show her why these harsh facts she mentioned did not matter so far as
they two were concerned. Why should they be governed by exterior
restraints, taboos, penalties, if they had a burning need of each
other?
He tried to put that into words. But the devils of perversity had
entered into Mary. He could not drive them out. He sat there
holding her hands, persuading, reasoning, pleading. He had a
conviction that emotionally some flame in her leaped to the
passionate fire within himself, and that she resisted only by some
intellectual force that was stronger than his own. He could master
her heart but not her will.
"What do you want out of life that we can't get together better than
if you go after it single-handed?" he demanded savagely, "Am I not
man enough for you? Why drag in class and money and all that sort of
thing. You know that doesn't count between us. We've got
something--there's something in us--that pulls us together. It was
there long ago when we were kids paddling around together. It's
grown stronger, through four years of almost complete separation.
The peculiar magic of that--whatever it is--begins to work as soon as
we come together. We don't have to tell each other. We know. Don't
we? Isn't it true?"
She nodded, lips parted, eyes bright, looking out over the channel as
if she saw more there than the running tide.
"Then," he continued, "if it seems good to us to plan a future in
which we shall be partners as well as lovers, why shouldn't we?"
"Too soon, for one thing," she said. "You're twenty-two, Rod; I'm
nineteen. I have another year in school. How do we know that what
we seem to want so badly to-day will satisfy us completely to-morrow?
And even if we were sure, we can't dodge facts. You couldn't just by
marrying me make me a Norquay, with all the rights, privileges, and
standing of the clan. Neither your family nor your friends would
accept me as one of themselves. Certainly not at first. Perhaps
never. Look," she continued sadly, "I don't know any one you know.
Your people don't know my people--don't want to know them. It would
be a struggle. You'd have to pull me up to your level, or be dragged
down to mine. They'd say you were marrying out of your class, and
they'd punish you in so many subtle ways. You knew Marty Graham,
didn't you? Have you seen him and his wife since you came back?"
Rod shook his head.
"I heard he cut school to get married. What about him?"
"You see, it works automatically," Mary said. "He married a girl I
knew rather well. She was a senior when I entered the U. They were
very much in love. Are yet, for that matter. But they're not very
happy about it. Marty's people accept her so grudgingly. His
friends have dropped him more or less. Marty had always been used to
plenty of money. His father gave him a job in the office at the
regular beginner's salary and cut off his allowance. His pay is less
than Grace herself is capable of earning. Marty's pride won't permit
her to work. She is clever and ambitious, and probably has more real
culture than some of the people who either patronize or snub her
because she's a nobody--her people are poor as church mice and rather
commonplace. The whole thing has got Marty's goat, and it's getting
Grace's. Marty can't see why he should be deprived of everything he
had been taught to regard as his right. Grace resents the way he's
being penalized for marrying her. She is proud, too, and the
invisible wall that's thrown up in her face hurts. I can see lots of
breakers ahead for them. In fact, they're in them now."
"Marty Graham's a nut," Rod declared. "Can't a man make his own way
without his people's backing, if he has to? You don't put me in
Marty's class as a husband, I hope."
"He's a nice boy," she sighed. "He can't adjust himself to a way of
living for which he had no training, that's all. After a while he'll
begin to see so clearly what he's lost by marrying out of his class,
as they say. Then the fat will be in the fire. They'll both suffer."
"But I tell you Graham's a nut. A footless ass. He always was," Rod
protested earnestly. "Don't his actions prove it? Would I grieve if
the family got rather miffed over me marrying the girl I wanted? Not
much. I'm not quite so dependent financially as he is, anyhow.
That's one of the good points about our affairs. There is no
arbitrary cutting off of my small share in the inherited income.
Even if there were, I'm quite sure we could play the game so they'd
have to take us at our face value--which is quite good enough. Why,
you chump," he tried to rally her, "is that all that worries you?"
"It doesn't worry me," Mary said straightforwardly, "because I'm not
going to be tied or bound, or tie you, Rod. I don't know where I'm
going, but I'm on my way--through school and whatever comes after. I
don't know whether my destiny leads to a job or a profession, to art
or dishwashing, but it must lead somewhere that I want to go, where
I'm qualified to go. I have to find out where."
"It leads here," Rod drew her up close to him for one unresisting
moment. "You know it does. I've often wondered if it did--but now I
know."
He kissed her. She rested against him a second or two, her eyes
shut, hot color flooding her smooth cheeks. Then abruptly she pushed
herself away, sat plucking with nervous fingers at the folds of cloth
across her knees.
"It doesn't lead there yet," she said shakily. "Perhaps not at all."
She rose to her feet. Rod followed up across the porch, cornered her
against the wall.
"You do love me?" he challenged.
"Yes."
"Then why don't you marry me?"
"Because I do love you, Rod," she whispered. "Can't you see? It
won't do. Oh, I can't explain. I haven't the words. But the
unanswerable logic of it is clear in my mind. I knew we'd come to
this. I've dreaded it. We can't go any farther. We'd both lose."
"That's not true. You know it isn't," he shook her roughly. "We're
both thoroughbreds. It isn't class that counts. It's character.
All the rest is just trimmings. If accident of birth made me a rich
man's son, is that any reason why I shouldn't make my own way and my
own place in the world if I have to choose between that and
conforming to class prejudice in so important a thing as picking a
wife? What sort of weak saphead do you think I am?"
"It's no good, Rod," she answered doggedly. "You simply don't
understand. You've never had any experience of poverty, of struggle,
of sordidness. You'd lose a lot that even money can't buy. And
after a while you'd begin to wonder if it were worth while. The
world well lost for love is a fine poetic fancy, but nothing more. I
tell you quite frankly I'm afraid of love. It brings pain. It
brings all sorts of bitter things to men and women, this mating
passion. I have an instinct about these things. I won't marry you.
I won't be carried away by any sort of feeling for you. I don't even
want to see you again. What's the use? Oh, what's the use of our
even thinking about it?"
She broke away from him with a wrench of her body. The door slammed
behind her. He heard the quick patter of her feet on the uncarpeted
floor. Then silence. Rod had a clairvoyant vision of her flinging
herself on her bed, of her shoulders shaking, of sobs strangled in
her throat. And he stood bewildered. What had seemed so simple had
become disastrously complex, bearing implications of grief and pain
and loneliness beyond his comprehension.
But there seemed a note of finality in that scene. He could not
break down her defences, tenuous as they were.
And so, his heart filled with a strange, heavy ache, Rod walked down
to his canoe and put out into the channel. Across the way the red
roof and gray gables of Hawk's Nest beckoned him home. Home,--where
there were no problems that could not be solved by the writing of a
check, Rod thought sardonically.
The inevitable reaction set in. A passionate resentment against Mary
Thorn began to burn in him. She was a fool, he said. He himself a
greater fool to abase himself before her.
But neither objurgation nor self-bestowed epithets could rid him of
that heavy feeling in his breast.