On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a
cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party
had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's
Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken the _Haida_ and departed for a point
up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight
hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing,
in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly
hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see the _Kowloon_
clear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive,
more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things
and persons outside his own sphere.
Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the
affairs of B.C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that
moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all
he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The
Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the
ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he
cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically
observed.
Rod eyed his father, sitting on the other side of a periodical-strewn
table. He wondered what his father thought of Grove now. But he
knew that his father was thinking of quite another matter,--for which
he was himself responsible. He continued to look at Norquay senior
with a mildly expectant curiosity. The library was the council
chamber of the family, the place chosen for edicts, discussions of
policy, admonition. From childhood Rod and his brothers had, so to
speak, taken their medicine in that pleasant book-lined room. His
father now bent a placid eye, slightly quizzical, on his youngest
son. Rod waited.
"I really don't see the necessity," Norquay senior remarked at last.
"Of course a gentleman need not necessarily be a drone. On the other
hand one doesn't need to do a laborer's work in order to acquire
knowledge of labor. You've finished school, of course. You have
seen a little of the world and as time passes you will undoubtedly
see a great deal more. Still, if you're keen on this, I'll speak to
Phil. He can give you charge of a camp."
"I don't want to take charge of a camp," Rod said. "I'm not
competent, for one thing. I'd either make a hash of it, or leave it
all to a foreman--which is not what I'm after. What I mean by going
into the woods is to go in and work; take over jobs as I master them.
I want to know all there is to be known about timber, from the
standing tree to the finished product."
His father continued to eye him.
"What's the idea for such thoroughness--this starting in at the
bottom and getting blisters and experience together?"
The root of this expressed resolve lay in a folio of notepaper on a
stool beside Rod's chair. But it was not a matter he could make
clear, or even discuss with his father. At least, that was how he
felt.
"I want to see the wheels go round," he answered lightly.
"Very well," his father agreed. "You shall. I'll speak to Phil.
He'll see that you get a job. I take it that's what you want."
"The job's incidental," Rod replied. "I've been thinking about this
for some time. I'm not dull. I have an idea I'll pick things up
quickly. I want to know something about timber, about methods of
handling it, about the men who actually do the handling. I want to
get it first-hand. Even a university training should be an advantage
in that."
"No doubt," Norquay senior permitted himself an indulgent smile. "If
you're so interested in timber, it's a wonder you didn't take a
forestry course. The Lord knows we need forestry experts in B.C."
"Why?" Rod inquired. It had no bearing on his purpose, but the
remark aroused his curiosity.
"To teach them how to get one prime stick to the booming ground
without destroying twice as much more," his father snorted. "To
inaugurate a campaign of necessary reforestation. Outside of two or
three concerns, logging in B.C. to-day is an orgy of waste. They're
skimming the cream of the forest, spilling half of it. Kicking the
milkpail over now and then, refusing to feed the cow they milk.
However, _we_ don't do that. I can show you limits we logged when I
was a young man that will bear merchantable timber by the time your
children are grown, my boy. But to get back to our sheep. You
surprise me. If you'd gone in for wild-eyed art, it would have
seemed more natural. I never could make you out, my son. You were
always a bit dreamy. Sure this isn't just a whim? Want to see what
makes the wheels go round, eh?"
"Precisely," Rod agreed. It was as far as he would go.
"Well, it won't do you any harm," his father rambled on, "and you may
acquire a useful technique. We are expanding more or less, in spite
of a conservative policy. Phil would undoubtedly appreciate a
second-in-command before long. He has his hands pretty full. On the
whole, I'm rather glad you've taken this notion. I won't last
forever, and I'd like to see you and Phil solidly established before
my mantle descends on Grove. Timber and land are good, solid
foundations."
"What about finance?" Rod asked idly. "That seems pretty gorgeously
productive, pater. Does it ever strike you that Grove may outgrow
the regulation Norquay mantle?"
"If he does, it will be because he has made a more capacious one for
himself," Norquay senior smiled complacently. "I imagine Grove's
well able to run his own show and live up to the Norquay tradition,
too. He has a genius for affairs."
"So it seems," Rod commented dryly,--and the "affairs" he was
thinking of were not the ones his father had in mind. "I wouldn't
fancy it myself."
"As a matter of fact, no youngster knows quite what he fancies," his
father drawled. "I had a fancy for the law and politics. Two years
of reading Blackstone and a term in the Legislature cured me of both.
Take your Uncle Mark. He was past thirty before he found his real
bent. Follow your natural bent, Rod, whatever it is. You have
plenty of time and backing. This beginning on the ground floor may
work out. Knowledge of any sort never comes amiss."
So that was settled.
When his father presently left the zoom Rod picked up and opened the
folio. He read over forty or fifty closely-written sheets, knitting
his smooth young brow over the phrasing.
"Won't do---only in spots. It's dead. I've got to breathe the
breath of life into these people. And I don't seem to know how."
He sprang to his feet, paced the floor.
"All I know is what somebody has told me, what I've read in books,"
he grumbled. "Cobwebby stuff. Pretty--lots of it--moving--but no
substance. All I got out of school was a mass of unclassified facts.
I'm crammed with 'em. I know what a lot of great men did--but not
how they did it--why they did it. And language. What's the good of
a 'steen-thousand-word vocabulary if you've got no peg to hang it on,
only the old pegs other people have used till they're all worn and
shiny? I'm like a man with a craving to paint beautiful things he
can see, with a whole box of color-tubes, and no idea how to apply
his colors to get the effects he wants. Or a finely made steam
engine all ready to run, greased and oiled and water in the boilers,
but no fuel to make steam. I don't know people, humanity, only one
kind. I don't know life; only one comfortable groove of it. I don't
know anything that really counts, except that I don't know much. I
wouldn't be stuck with this, if I did." He faced about, frowning on
the pile of written sheets. "I'd be able to make a thing go the way
I wanted it, whether it was a story or a girl. I can't do either. I
don't know how--and I've got to find out how. As long as I stay in a
nice, fenced pasture I never will find out. It's all too cut and
dried. Too many taboos. Too many fences. I've got to break
through. I'm too much like the pea in the pod--I am green, the pod
is green, all the world is green."
He sat down in a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and lost
himself in concentrated thought.
The history of Rod's family was part of the history of his native
land, in so far as Anglo-Saxon occupancy had made history. The
Norquay foothold had been the first individual one established by a
white man on the Pacific between Spain to the south and Russia to the
north. That century and more of far-seeing purposeful struggle had
culminated in the possession of every material benefit men live and
work and sometimes vainly die to grasp. Blood had been spilled,
storms braved, great risks faced to win that security. To Rod, ever
since he could remember, these things had been real, vividly colored
episodes enacted under the auspices of the high gods of adventure.
He was imaginative, creatively imaginative. Old Roderick Sylvester,
the barque _Hermes_, the sea-otter trading, the bride who fled her
English home to fare into strange seas for love, the Chilcotins on
their bloody forays, the wooden blockhouse, the first course of
masonry, the vast influx of gold-seekers in the Cariboo rush of '58,
the completion of Hawk's Nest in all its comfortable
permanence,--these were not simply things he knew as part of his
antecedents. They were realities, as if they had happened but
yesterday under his own eyes. They moved him strangely, deeply. He
could reconstruct in his mind all that crowded century. In his
mind's eye all the men and women whose bones lay underground about
the great red cedar lived and moved and had being once more. He
could see them as clearly as he saw Phil and his father and Laska or
Mary Thorn.
He had been trying to capture those visions, those personalities,
those old stirring times so crowded with pregnant action. He had
been trying more or less earnestly for a year and a half. And he had
failed. He was aware of his failure. The human equation somehow
evaded him when he put pen to paper. He couldn't put his finger with
surety on the well-spring of human motive. He hadn't the key to
character. Rod had more than a casual acquaintance with literature
in two languages. He knew Balzac and O. Henry alike, Homer and
George Ade, De Maupassant and the Brontes, Flaubert and Anatole
France, Ibsen and Tolstoi and Gorky, Kipling and Hardy and Dickens
and Poe. He read these writers, and he saw that they created men and
women, creatures of pain and passion, even as God created them. He
perceived that they did it, that with deft strokes they clothed their
skeletons with flesh and blood and breathed the breath of life into
them, so that they strutted and sighed and fought with an
emotion-compelling intensity. But he could not do it himself. And
he passionately desired to catch and transfix those gorgeous pictures
his brain evoked from that pioneering past.
It could be done. It wanted doing. Rod had always wanted to do it.
Unconsciously he had been preparing for the task. He had meant to do
something like that ever since a day when he had laid down his book
and told his tutor that some one ought to write the Iliad of the
pioneers, an epic of the men and women who with vision and high
courage had tamed a wild land for their children's children, those
bold spirits who shrank from nothing by land or sea that promised a
reward for enterprise.
Rod thought he knew why there was no magic in his pen, why these
magnificent visions eluded capture. It was not a reasoned
conviction. He felt his lack instinctively. The first faint labor
pains of creative effort apprised him of his need: to plunge into the
agitated pool of life instead of viewing it from a distant eminence.
That was how the manner of life he had led from childhood struck him
now,--as a view from afar. Rod was sophisticated enough to realize
that his world was one exclusively occupied by a limited number of
fortunate people, holding their preëminence largely by sheer inertia.
Statistics, observation, his university delving in economics and
sociology, had informed him that for one very wealthy family there
were a hundred subsisting in various degrees of comfort, a thousand
but a step beyond poverty. Accident of birth, or inherent
superiority? How was he to know? How could he know unless he got
outside the fences, inhibitions, the unyielding rigidity of his own
class? It was rigid, Rod perceived; although that perception had
only become clear to him through Mary Thorn's eyes. It had a fetich
of superiority which might or might not be valid. Even aside from
that, how could he fathom things that were universal above and apart
from class and even race--men's hopes and fears and
aspirations--unless he established a contact with men? And Rod's
instinct, the wise, fundamental instinct of an unwarped nature, urged
him to make that contact first among the lowly, where the sweat and
strain was greatest. There was the raw material. The Norquays--a
little more perhaps than any of their circle--were the finished
product. Rod wanted to know the process--and the by-products.
That was why he chose the woods. It might be well to know timber.
But it was better to know men. And the way to know men was to live
among them, to work with them, to stand with them--if such a thing
were possible--upon a common ground. Afterward--he would know what
he knew.
So for himself Rod, at the age of twenty-two, defined the approach to
knowledge: through experience--plus imagination. And to him it
seemed that with the first rebuff life had dealt him, it had also
given him a clarified purpose, a definite mark to shoot at.