The quality of persistence in the face of difficulties is one that
men are variously endowed with. Hope revives in some breasts sooner
than in others. To some the spur of a desire, a need, a conviction,
never ceases wholly to rowel them into action. They cannot for long
accept defeat or frustration as final. For such, the line of least
resistance is closed. Reason, logic, all the chances of success may
be against them, but they strive with infinite patience and
unflagging courage toward a given end.
Rod Norquay had quite clearly defined Mary Thorn as a given end.
Sometimes in analytical mood he took stock of his feelings about her
and marveled at the depth and intensity, the consistent urge of this
desire. A flare of impatience would burn up. He would be angry with
Mary awhile, then sorry for himself. It was, he held, a strange way
for a woman to feel--to love a man, to admit frankly that he
satisfied her ideal of a man, that her flesh yearned to his after the
law of nature--yet to fear, to hold back from the decisive step
because of---- What? Social differences? Rod dismissed them with a
gesture. They existed, but they did not matter. What then? An
unexplained reluctance to give up her freedom? Some undivulged
ambition? A secret desire to try her own individual wings before
they were clipped by marriage?
"You have some queer ideas about the business of living," he said to
her impatiently, one day. He had blazed a trail from the upper
workings on Valdez to join the path that ran from the Granite Pool to
Oliver Thorn's. He had made several journeys over that ridge before
Mary went back to town, sometimes in the evening, sometimes of a
Sunday afternoon. It was pleasant to see the momentary glow in her
eyes when he came in.
"I like you in mackinaw and calked boots, Rod," she said
irrelevantly. "Are you going to make a profession of logging?"
"I said you have some queer ideas about this business of living," he
persisted.
"No, you only think them queer," she said. "They're sound enough. I
don't want to make a blunder."
"You think marrying me might be a blunder?" he asked a little stiffly.
"I don't want to marry anybody, Rod," she repeated, a statement that
never failed to anger him. "Is it so important that one should
marry?"
"It's important to me," he said.
"Are you the only one whose will or desire counts?" she inquired.
"It isn't like you to take that position about anything."
"Mary, Mary, you know what I mean," he exclaimed. "Life doesn't seem
more than half-complete without you in the picture. When we were
kids playing together we lived from day to day. But we can't do that
now. I can't, anyway. I've either got to be sure of you, or give up
all idea of you. All this stuff that seems to stick you--my people
and money, and what they'll do to me in disapproval, and all that--it
doesn't really amount to anything. If I didn't know how you feel
about me I'd say it wasn't worth while combatting such fool
impressions."
"Ah. If you found yourself cut off from a great many things you
unconsciously value; deprived of things you've accepted as your
birthright, you'd begin to change your tune, I think. You wouldn't
be human if you didn't," Mary commented. "Anyway, that isn't all,
and you know it isn't, Rod," she broke out with unexpected heat.
"I'm not so sure as you are that marriage is an end in itself. It's
just a step. Probably instinct tends to drive a man and a woman into
each other's arms. It seems so. But I can see things ahead of us in
such a step that I rather shrink from. And what is just as
important, I happen also to see things ahead of me that I rather
anticipate, things I want to try and do. I want--oh, what's the use,
Rod? We don't get anywhere talking about this. Why can't we just be
friends and let it go at that?"
"Could you be just friends with me now?" he challenged.
And when the girl's fundamental truthfulness brought a thoughtful
look and a touch of color to her face Rod was answered without words.
It was like swimming upstream, he thought to himself, halting on his
way to look down on the tide roaring and foaming through its narrow
passage by Little Dent. Manhood wasn't proving quite the careless
easy way of his youthful fancy. It had sometimes seemed to him then,
with preternatural vision for a boy, that for well-born people the
chief trouble lay not in getting things they wanted, but in wanting
anything much. His life had seemed to him then a matter of absolute
certainties.
And it wasn't. Not by a long shot. He wanted Mary Thorn. He wanted
very much to write brilliantly and acceptably about his native land,
which he loved for its bigness and rugged beauty as well as for what
it had so generously bestowed on him and his. He could neither have
one nor accomplish the other. But he would! Oh, yes. He pursed his
lips and set his teeth upon that determination, as he lingered on the
ridge where the old trail pitched down to the Granite Fool on one
side and the new one slanted to the camp at tidewater.
The autumn haze hung like a diaphanous veil over mountains and
waterways. Vine maple and alder shone brick-red and pale gold in the
low ground. Hawk's Nest lifted its flaming roof across the channel.
He wondered if there were a week-end party there. He wondered how
they would look at him, these sons and daughters of the well-to-do,
if he came stalking up the porch steps in calked boots and Mackinaw
shirt. Rod smiled. Even Phil considered him a little too
thoroughgoing in his logging career. To the rest, to Grove's crowd,
it would simply be a joke. They all believed in work--in getting it
done, not in doing it--and most of them were a little tainted with
the idea that labor, especially such labor as is hard and poorly
paid, was the exclusive privilege of the laboring class. Rod, who
had learned a great many astonishing things in two months among men
who were not in the least dismayed by sweat and dust and noise, found
himself for the moment viewing Grove, the fast crowd Grove traveled
with, very much from the logger's point of view.
"If you neither feed yourself, nor clothe yourself, nor direct the
production of anything useful, nor create anything beautiful, what
the hell justification have you for existing?" Andy Hall had once
attacked the idea of a leisure class. He had outlined a theory of
the leisure class very much in the manner of Veblen. Then he
proceeded to attack it, first on moral grounds, then on the basis of
its social utility.
Rod found himself half in agreement just then. There was not and had
never been in his mind any doubt of the courage, energy, and
usefulness of the first Norquays. The original Roderick had reaped
for himself and his followers the reward of enterprise initiated by
himself. He had handed on his winnings. So far as Rod could see,
there was no great virtue in merely standing pat and holding
on,--resting on dead men's accomplishments. That was a bog he
determined his feet should never sink into. Grove, for instance, was
not standing pat. Yet curiously, he had always thought of Grove and
the Norquay Trust as a dubious undertaking,--dubious in character and
uncertain as to outcome. By all the conventional signs and tokens he
was wrong. Grove was certainly moving with purposeful intent. He
was a dynamo for energy. Already he was credited with stupendous
achievements. But to Rod that seemed a great deal worse than the
gentlemanly _laissez faire_ which his father had set as a standard.
"Oh, damn, I wish it were spring again," Rod muttered as he strode
down the hill.
Spring was at hand almost before he realized that the vernal equinox
had come and gone. But winter had to precede spring. In October the
fall rains broke in bitter earnest. The sodden drip of eaves lulled
him to sleep at night and greeted him on awakening. He went to work
in the morning with his fellows and trudged back at night soaked
through heavy clothing. The bunk house reeked with steam from sodden
garments festooned above a red-hot stove. Day and night, for weeks
on end, gray clouds and drifting mist hovered above the trees. Every
gully discharged a stream seaward. To step through a clump of brush
meant a shower bath. Everything a man touched, tools, gear, timber,
was damp and clammy cold. The thin soil squashed into mud under
their boots. The moss was saturated. The great firs dripped like
weeping giants. Even the old hands on the coast began to remark
profanely that there had never been such rains.
Yet the logs came down. The falling gangs went grumbling into the
wet thickets about the base of the trees they must fell. The
rigging-slingers and hook tenders cursed as they fumbled the slippery
cables. Donkey engineers scowled from beneath the tin shelter over
each machine. And Jim Handy prowled in oilskins from gang to gang,
silent, eagle-eyed, on the job. Rain or shine the timber came log by
log to the booming ground, the boom men with their pikes arranged it
in sections, and when the sections grew to a thirty-swifter raft, a
tug hauled in, hooked on her towline and the cedar and fir of Valdez
began its journey to the mills.
During those sodden weeks Rod Norquay put by all that he had ever
been. His work, that opus which had led him to forswear, however
briefly, the ease and comfort of Hawk's Nest, was laid away. Not
forgotten. He sat sometimes in the evening, dreaming. He had wanted
to see what made the wheels go round, to know how and why men labored
and endured privation, to see what life was like in the raw. And he
was getting insight with a vengeance. He saw men throw down their
tools in a passion and quit at a word. He saw new men reel drunkenly
down a steamer's gangplank and go to work next morning with aching
heads and bloodshot eyes. He saw a snap phrase bring a blow, a fight
to a finish. The whole panorama of the timber, trees, men,
machinery, shifted before his eyes that winter, gave him food for
thought as well as sometimes a flash of something that stirred his
pulse. For there were heroic moments, risks, long chances taken and
skilfully avoided. A flying limb, a snapped cable, a rolling log. A
man had to be alert. It was no place for a dullard. The logger had
his pride of calling. It was borne in upon Rod that only tried men
followed the woods. It was something of a satisfaction that he
qualified as one of them on the job.
It was not so regarded in the family circle, he discovered to his
secret amusement. Grove openly disliked the idea of any Norquay
mixing with the men. Norquay senior observed dryly that Rod need not
make quite so close a contact with logging and loggers. Phil frankly
invited him on different occasions to come in out of the wet.
At the Christmas shutdown, foregathered at Grove's house in town, Rod
noted the growing concern on his behalf. There was a hint of protest
in the jocular remarks about his devotion to logging as a vocation.
Grove's thinly veiled contempt, Laska's mild wonder that he should go
in for "that sort of thing" nettled Rod.
He sat back, appraising his father, his brothers, the friends of the
family, the train of people who came within range of his observation,
all well-to-do, all thoroughly insulated against material discomfort,
able to command and have their commands obeyed without question.
They were as supreme in their respective positions as Jim Handy was
on the Valdez job,--more so, because Handy's power was only delegated
to him, and these people Rod knew, wealthy merchants, financiers,
propertied magnates of various sorts, held their power in their own
individual right.
He wondered if they knew their power and how far the roots of such
power penetrated the social soil, if they had grasped it with clear
purpose and sure intent; and if they would have the resource and
determination to keep it when they were challenged by what they
called the "rabble"? Rod wondered. There might never be such a
challenge. Andy Hall doubted the possibility within several
generations. But Rod himself was not so sure. He had none of the
purblind middle-class hatred of and contempt for labor agitators,
those sometimes sincere and sometimes hypocritical mouthpieces of the
muddled aspirations of the wage-workers. Rod had a working knowledge
of economics, a trained understanding of cause and effect in the
world of industry, in the field of production and distribution. He
was without prejudice, and he knew what he knew. Men like Andy Hall,
when they did not claw up out of the class where they originated,
remained within it and festered. They could never be servilely
contented. They had too much force, too positive a character. Their
perception was too keen.
It amused Rod to speculate on how his father and Grove, the Deanes,
Walls, Richstons, _et al_ would fare if they were ever faced with a
situation in which they would have to black their own boots, prepare
and serve their own food, wear overalls instead of tailored clothes.
They couldn't. That was his cynical conclusion. They wouldn't know
how. And they had an attitude which could only be translated as
contempt for those who did know how. Somehow, by the grace of God,
or chance, or skilful management, they had become entrenched behind
material fortifications, their hands grasping the strings of an ample
purse. And from behind these fortifications they looked out with
narrowed eyes upon lesser folk.
That, it struck Rod all in a heap, was the thing that confronted Mary
Thorn when he talked to her of love and marriage. She had grasped
the essence of class distinctions. She doubted his--their--power to
overcome an idée fixé.
Whereupon he straightway hunted up the place where she boarded and
haled her forth to a show and afterward to supper in the Exeter
Grill, where he was most likely to encounter some of his own crowd.
His cogitations had put him in a defiant mood. He would show them.
He looked across the table into her eyes and wondered if she had
always been as keenly aware of the invisible fences about him as he
was fast becoming himself. Well, he promised himself lightly, some
of those fences were due to be smashed.