Isabel Wall, the pert and pretty sister-in-law of Mr. Grove Norquay,
became at last the cause of Rod's first definite breach in the fences.
When summer full-blown came tripping on the heels of spring, Rod left
the Valdez camp for good. It had been a wholesome experience. One
year in the woods had shown him quite fully the technique of big
timber operations. It had shed an unreckoned light, moreover, upon
the nature and mental processes of the men who handled the timber,
which Rod was sure seldom appeared to the owners of the woods as a
matter of any particular importance. He knew himself duly qualified
as a practical logger. He was egotist enough to believe himself more
capable of getting results without friction than most logging bosses.
But he had not set out to qualify in timber so much as to get outside
the shell of his class and see how and why man in general functioned
both in and out of industry. He had covered the first phase that
occurred to him. His own individual job, his book, began to nag him
again, to assume form, proportion, to cry out for embodiment. So he
laid aside calked boots and Mackinaws for canvas shoes and flannels,
and took up the pleasant ways of Hawk's Nest when June brought the
first coho salmon into the rapids and a chair in the shade was a
comfortable thing.
Perhaps, as Phil put it in fraternal raillery, Isabel thought that if
one Norquay in the Wall family was a good thing, two would be better.
The truth is that Isabel suddenly became aware of Rod as a man and
characteristically sought to annex him by the usual methods. She had
finished her education in a presumably fashionable school on the
Atlantic seaboard that spring, coincident with Mary Thorn's
graduation from the University of B.C. Isabel's social experience
had been judicially expanded in the intervals of education. She was
twenty now, a sophisticated young person, accustomed to associating
with other sophisticated young persons of both sexes. She had seen
little of Rod except during summer vacations. For a year she had not
seen him at all. Now she seemed to discover him anew and to mark him
for her own.
Rod granted her uncommon charm. She was pretty and petite and
modish, and she spoke the current lingo with effortless facility.
But while she pleased his eye she failed to stir his blood. There
was a sufficient reason for Rod's immunity, which of course Isabel
did not know.
It became obvious that Isabel was in deadly earnest. And when it
became equally obvious to Rod that both families were complacently
agreeable to Isabel's maneuverings he grinned first, then grew sober
as the remedies he used to cure Isabel merely aggravated the disease.
It wasn't a simple flirtatious liking Isabel had for him. Rod was
too keen to make such a mistake. It seemed that this dainty
doll-like creature was capable of intense feeling and not too sure in
her control of the emotional disturbance. Rod began by being amused.
Then he felt sorry. In the end he grew a little alarmed over the net
result of being sympathetic. It is highly discomforting to a young
man to have a girl weep spontaneously on his chest, unless he
conceives it to be his special mission and blessed privilege to
soothe this particular damsel's tears. Isabel did that one evening
in the shadow of a hoary old cedar in Hawk's Nest grounds. She
couldn't help it, she said, after a long embarrassed silence during
which she dabbed the tears away. She was a fool and she knew it, but
it couldn't be helped. One wasn't responsible for one's feelings,
was one?
And Rod, with a little ache in his breast, a great deal of wordless
sympathy for Isabel, because he had for a long time suffered that
queer state of stifled longing, that seemed sometimes as if it would
drive him mad, agreed that one was not. They let it go at that.
Rod sat with elbows on the sill of his bedroom window late that
night, staring out over a moon-bathed landscape, silver barred with
black, where the shadows of great trees lay across the lawn. He
looked down a shimmering moon-path that seemed to offer a bright
highway across the channel where Mary Thorn lay sleeping,--if indeed
she slept. Rod wondered if something in her breast ever drove her to
a window to stare across the tide and think of him. She was home
now. He had his own sources of information. To-morrow he would see
her. To-night the querulous imps that make a man question his
destiny and desire bade him consider if he did well to let his heart
abide so constantly with Mary Thorn when there were other desirable
women to be had for the asking. Isabel, for instance? All clear
sailing. No questions asked or answered. The dual family blessing,
and any little material wants cheerfully attended to. On the
personal side,--well, he was flesh and blood, sexual tinder. When
Isabel put her face against his breast and sobbed in that stifled,
choking fashion he had been deeply moved, thrilled, conscious of her
physical nearness, the sweet fragrant odor of her tousled hair, the
trembling of her small, soft body. Wasn't that good enough? What
did a man want of a woman when he took her to wife?
Rod shook himself impatiently. What rot he had been thinking.
Whatever it was in Mary Thorn that so imperatively promised to fulfil
his every need, it didn't reside in Isabel Wall. He was sure of
that. He could let himself slide into a temporary infatuation with
Isabel--perhaps. He could conceive of possessing her. But he
couldn't behold her down a long vista of years playing the game
fairly and bravely, taking the cards dealt from the deck of life,
good, bad and indifferent, with courage and fortitude. He couldn't
picture Isabel doing that any more than he could picture her, _aetat_
sixteen, shooting the Euclataw Rapids in a dugout, eyes shining in
sheer ecstasy of swift movement, hair streaming in the wind. Isabel
would either have been frightened or wildly, dangerously excited.
That was as far as Rod carried his analogy. It was sufficient. He
had not tried his hand at creative fiction without a sense of
character, of form, proportion. He egotistically assumed that he
could accurately gauge personal values, that he did it intuitively as
well as rationally. If his prescience did not clearly account for
the depth and tenacity of his affection for Mary Thorn it quickly and
thoroughly disposed of Isabel as a substitute.
A light flashed from a window in Oliver Thorn's house. Rod rested
his chin on cupped palms. Unrest, longing blew through the spaces of
his being like a hot wind. The bright moon and the dusky woods
beckoned him into their restful silences, and the light across the
channel seemed to blink a message. It drew him like a magnet. Over
there his heart lay. If Isabel's unheralded breakdown had served no
other purpose, it had filled him with a wild impatience, revived a
fever that burned him. The madness of a lover's moon! The coursing
blood of youth clamoring for the fulfilment of life's promise,--life
that promises so much and often gives so little. The impulse to
translate dreams into realities. _Quien sabe?_
He rose and went softly downstairs and out a side door to the pale
emptiness of the lawn crossed with inky bands of shadow, and so
sauntering, head bowed and hands sunk deep in his pockets, presently
brought up on the float. The _Haida_ lay moored on one side, the
_Kowloon_ on the other. A profusion of canoes and rowboats lay
hauled out on the planks.
Rod stood awhile, like a man in two minds. His eyes lingered on the
moon-path. His ears took note of the lessening monotone between the
Gillard Islands on the east and the choked westward passage inside
Little Dent. A still night and a slackening tide.
He got into a dinghy, shipped the oars, rowed slowly out into the
channel. Halfway, an eddy setting toward the Valdez shore took him
in its sweep. He let the oars rest and lighted a cigarette, gazing
at the tranquil, silvery beauty.
"What a night," he whispered. "What a night for fairies and
mermaids--and lovers."
Then the current slid him into the deep shadow cast by the high
forested ridge behind Oliver Thorn's house, and as his boat touched
the float and he sat in a moment of indecision, a voice spoke softly:
"Hello, Rod."
He looked sharply over the float. The shadow of the hills lay on it
like folds of crepe. But in a moment he made out a dim figure. He
went over, still holding the painter in his hand. It was Mary,
wrapped in a gray coat, sitting on a box.
"I thought you'd be in your little trundle bed," he greeted her.
"Then why did you come?" she asked.
"I don't quite know. Just on the chance. I was restless. Moon
madness, maybe."
He sat down beside her. One hand shone white in the gloom where it
stretched on her knee. Rod possessed himself of that. He bent,
peering into her face. Her eyes glowed at him.
"All by your lonesome out here in the dark," he murmured. "How come,
Brownie? Did you sit yourself down here to put the come-hither on
me?"
She shook her head.
"Well, I came."
He put his arms around her, drew her close, felt her settle against
him unresistingly.
"Glad?"
She nodded.
A solitary loon lifted his harsh, complaining cry somewhere in the
shining channel.
"Calling his mate. And I've found mine. Or have I?"
He knew, or thought he knew. There was an attitude of surrender,
unmistakable, complete, that filled him with a strange delight. But
he wanted the verification of that voiceless pledge.
"I don't know. How can one account for a mood, a longing? I came
down here to sit in the moonlight. It was so radiant. Then after a
little the shadow crept out from shore, and it was just as if
something black and gloomy had settled over me. I felt small and
forlorn and lonely. And all at once I wanted you, Rod. I wished you
were here. I wanted you. And you're here. That's all."
"It's enough," he said tenderly.