From a folding chair on the after deck of the _Haida_ Rod looked back
at Hawk's Nest. The cruiser's screw churned up bubbles and foam
astern. Dent Island and the gray stone house with its red roof, the
pale green of grass and the duskier hue of the woods behind were
receding fast. They vanished altogether as they rounded the Gillard
light and stood away south.
"I was born there," Rod said simply. "I never went home but I was
glad to be there. I never left it before without being sorry to go."
"Aren't you sorry now?" Mary asked.
"No. Are you?"
"No," she said frankly. "It was lovely--it is lovely. Everybody was
good to me. I was quite happy there until--"
"Precisely. It's Grove's bailiwick when it comes to a show-down.
That being so, it's no place for us. I'm glad to be on the wing.
I'd rather paddle my own canoe than be a guest on somebody's ship.
It won't perhaps be quite so pleasant for you, old thing."
"The only unpleasantness I dread," Mary rejoined, "is your beginning
to wonder if it was worth while, after all. A lot of people aren't
going to be able to see me with a microscope, Rod. You don't seem to
get that yet. I can't play the game the way they do. They're so
chesty and cocksure. All their lives they've lived well, dressed
well, gone where they chose with perfect assurance, accepted by their
equals and deferred to by their inferiors. They have me at a
disadvantage. I don't speak their favorite shibboleths, or see life
from the same angle. I'm not sure," she hesitated wistfully, "that I
will ever want to. But it would be dreadful if you found that you
were being severely penalized for marrying out of your class, as they
probably put it. That's the only thing I have any reason to dread.
All the other possibilities," she made a quick inclusive gesture,
"being poor; making the most of a little, longing for the
unattainable, a great effort for a few simple pleasures--I know them
all. They aren't so very terrible. They don't frighten me. But for
you, because of me, to cut loose from everything and every one that
has made up your life and then begin to chafe under it--that does."
Rod glanced over his shoulder. The deck was empty. He put one arm
around her, shook her gently.
"I'll pull some caveman stuff on you," he threatened tenderly, "if I
ever hear you talk like that again. In the first place, you mean
more to me than anything or anybody. In the second place, nobody is
going to penalize me. They won't try. There's no real reason they
should. You'll see. While the governor is horribly annoyed about
what he calls a disgraceful quarrel, he doesn't even dream of blaming
you. He lays it to his sons' fiery tempers and shameful lack of
self-control. He'll cool off. And having known you, he'd never
dream of following Grove's lead. I know him. He's fair. If we
should happen to live in Vancouver this winter, and we care to go
out, you'll see that most of these high-flying friends of Grove's
will conveniently forget, and be very nice to us--because we are what
we are. There are enough people of some consequence to accept us as
such and the rest will follow suit. Oh, I know them. They're just
like sheep. That's a side issue. It can't make any difference to
us."
Mary snuggled her hand in his.
"I hope not," she murmured.
"It can't," he declared. "It wouldn't make much difference if it
worked out the other way. No," he grew reflective, "I'm like you. I
don't see things from the same angle as most of the sleek,
comfortably insulated people I know, nor do I want to. I want to
know where I'm going, and why. It isn't just enough to eat, drink
and be merry. I'm lucky in a material way, perhaps. I happened to
be well-born, and I've had security wrapped about me like a blanket.
Still, I doubt the value and permanence of a lot of things that many
people--my own people included--take for granted. I run true to
form, just as Grove does. Only I think his form is rotten. That's
why we don't hitch. I know we should have come to an open break
sometime, if you had never been a factor. I despise him because he
is what he is and does what he does. And he hates me because he's
impressionable enough to feel that contempt. Anybody or anything
that Grove can't dominate he dislikes. You know, I have a fancy that
he sometimes feels he's shoddy, and tries to bolster himself up with
the high-and-mighty pose. But after all that doesn't matter, either.
I'm what I am and I shouldn't be cocky about it, I suppose."
Rod sat silent, recalling that scene in the library. All the hot
anger had evaporated long ago. He was not sorry. No. But he was
sobered. It had given him food for thought. His mind was so made
that it fed upon, digested for good or evil, every crisis, each
outstanding event, the significance of whatever stirred him deeply.
Certain phases of a conversation with his father kept recurring to
him. Certain things had been said--some calmly enough--some with a
touch of passion. Rod thought again with impatience that his father
had a blind spot where Grove was concerned. But it didn't matter
much now. He had taken the only reasonable course open to him after
that encounter with Grove, the simplest, most dignified solution. He
could not remain at Hawk's Nest and preserve peace and dignity. He
recognized that there lurked in him an eagerness to clash with Grove
on almost any provocation. They were fundamentally antagonistic;
they had always been. The gulf between them grew wider as they
matured; the deep-rooted distrust and dislike of motive and action
became more profound.
"It's as well the break came," he said aloud. "It was bound to come
over something. I've simply been marking time. Now I can
do--whatever I can do. Both of us. We don't have to follow copy any
more. We can make our own copy. I rather like the idea."
"It listens good to me," Mary said gayly. And they smiled in
understanding.
"For the first time in my life I feel like a free man," Rod said
abruptly. "Isn't that queer? Free in the sense that I am absolutely
at liberty to work out my own destiny, in so far as any man can do
that."
Phil came up from below. He sat on the low cabin roof, dangling his
long legs.
"Well, children," he said cheerfully, "what's your program? Going to
stay in town awhile?"
"Not long," Rod answered. "We're going to resume our interrupted
honeymoon. For a month or so. After that--well, I'm not making any
cast-iron plans."
"When you get ready to do something, let me know," Phil remarked.
"This blow-up has sort of opened my eyes. It made me realize that
our family solidarity is badly shot. Grove feels his oats more and
more. If I weren't more or less passive, and if I didn't get a
certain amount of satisfaction out of carrying on the show--and
there's the governor to consider; he is a good sort--I'd quit. I may
have to by and by. I won't stand interference. If I have to drop
the reins, I'd like to take a whirl at something that might grow. We
could make a go of it in timber, I think. We both know our ground
there. I've got some money put aside. Think it over, Rod."
"I surely will. Only, as I said, I've no cast-iron plan. If you
want to make money, why not try finance? _Á la_ Grove. That seems
to be gorgeously productive."
"Finance. Huh!" Phil snorted. "I'd rather play poker. I don't want
so much to get something as to _do_ something."
"Andy Hall said to me once that the fundamental principle of modern
business is to do everybody and do 'em first," Rod drawled. "That
ought to give you scope enough."
They laughed. It was a quaint notion. As such it amused them.
Rod's expressed intention of resuming their honeymoon was based on an
impulse with which, when he defined it, he found Mary in complete
accord. She was no echo. So that with her interest assured he
proceeded to act.
A week later they debarked from a coastwise steamer on a float
landing before a logging camp halfway up Bute Inlet. They had
doubled on their course and come back to a point within thirty miles
of Hawk's Nest to go on a voyage of exploration and discovery, as Rod
whimsically defined their object. It was indeed a whim, based
soundly on appreciation of natural beauty, of dusky still forests, of
the sound of running water, the indefinable charm of wooded
loveliness in which they could move untrammeled together, that had
brought them here with a sturdy rowboat, a tent and bedding, fishing
tackle and a supply of food. Camp fires and wood smoke at twilight
amid these cathedral stillnesses that filled the untouched forest.
This was what they desired, for the time.
A fisherman's motor boat carried them across the inlet for a sum,
towing their loaded skiff astern.
"That's the place," Rod pointed. "Let us off here."
The fisherman chugged away. They sat in the boat, oars in hand,
gazing up at cliffy slopes where the forest opened about mossy
knolls, where ledges of bare rock barred the hillside, rising up and
up from a short reach of gravelly shore where tiny wavelets broke at
spaced intervals. The inlet ran northwest, curved away among high
mountains. Far above and on either side of this great arm of the sea
low hills rose to cliffs, cliffs ran up to precipices, and a jumble
of cliff, gorge, precipice and virgin forest lifted far above to
high, aloof peaks, domed with snow and studded with glaciers. The
afternoon wind was but a sigh. All that sweep of sea and mountain
range brooded in the sun as voiceless and changeless as when the
first Norquay sailed the _Hermes_ to Dent Island more than a century
before.
"This is something like, eh?" Rod murmured.
Mary nodded.
"It makes me _feel_," she said. "I can't quite express it. I might
if I had wings."
"I have a feeling too," Rod confessed. "But it's mostly one of
emptiness in my tummy. Let's get ashore and make a pot of tea. The
Hiding Place is just around the corner. Give way, men! I'll show
you a sight."
They turned a jutting point and met a slow outsetting current.
Against this Rod made his way straight for a cliff which, as they
drew near, opened like a great window chiselled in solid granite.
Through this the stream flowed, sluggish, deep, a pale-green
translucence between high, damp walls. Somewhere within rose the
monotone of a waterfall. The square framed broad-leaved maple tops.
Higher up the pointed crests of cedar and the tufted plumes of fir
stood sharp against the sky.
They rowed into the cleft, worked upstream between high,
flood-scoured walls. In that chasm the sun touched only for an hour
at noon. It was dark and cool. Mosses and maidenhair fern lightened
black crevices with streaks and clusters of green. There was a
beauty about this gloomy cleft floored with liquid emerald, but it
was not a beauty one wished to embrace or linger with too long,--too
cavernous, a little grim. Mary drew closer to Rod in that
hundred-yard passage. But she clapped her hands when the boat drew
clear. They came out into sunlight. They had passed through the
canyon as if it were a door which led to a tiny flat cupped in the
hills, all clear of dense forest, almost free from thickets, clothed
with bracken. The creek wimpled between low, gravelly banks.
Between two maples on one side stood a small cabin of split cedar.
Fireweed lifted blazing heads in a mass on one bank. A small grassy
plot surrounded the cabin and the two trees. Rod sidled the boat in
to the bank.
"Isn't this some little retreat?" he asked. "I came in here once
long ago when we were cruising up the Inlet. Only had half an hour
or so to spare. The crowd was in a hurry. I've always wanted to
come back and camp awhile. This creek comes out of a lake in the
woods about two miles inland. They say it's a gem. A trapper built
the cabin. He's supposed to have made a blazed line to the lake."
"Lovely, lovely," his wife murmured. "And this country of ours has
so many of these beauty spots. Sometimes I think we were so
fortunate to be born here, Rod. If one could paint this. If one
were a combination of Corot and Turner."
"Maybe one is," Rod commented genially. "How do we know what we can
do? We've never had a chance to try. But you'd have to splash this
'on a seven-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair.' There are
some things man can't reduce to his own dimensions; can't reproduce
in miniature. How could you get the effect of this? Lofty heights.
Sweeping distances. Big forests of big trees. It's all too--too
superlative. Nature was in the mood for a grand gesture when she
fashioned this part of the world, Mary mine."
They made camp under the maples after a look at the moldy cabin
interior. The stars came out to speckle a cloudless sky as they sat
over their evening fire. Before they turned into blankets spread on
a layer of fern and hemlock boughs, a moon sailed up from behind the
Coast range. It touched all the hills with a silver glow, filled
every hollow with ebony shade. They fell asleep to the lullaby of
falling water and wakened with the sun on their faces.
They had no definite object beyond an impulse to be alone, to live
awhile in those peaceful solitudes, to fish or loaf or climb as the
spirit moved them. But that eagerness of spirit which has sent men
alike to the Poles and into equatorial jungles to look on the face of
new lands touched them both. They spent a day setting their camp to
rights after the fashion of the woodwise. Then they sought and found
the trapper's blazed line. It led them by dim marks through dense
thickets, across lowlands where cedars stood like brown columns
supporting the sky itself, their feet planted in thick mosses and
sunless shade, over fir-clad ridges where a west wind made a faint
sighing among branches a hundred feet above their heads, and brought
them at last out on the shore of the lake.
The numerous lakes bordering close on the heavily wooded, mountainous
coast of British Columbia have two characteristic features. They lie
in granite pockets with steep-to, rocky shores. Or they spread in
low basins shrouded in dense forest, and the margins of such lakes
are a marshy jungle. In either case they are difficult of approach.
One must clamber over jagged rocks, or work up through crabapple,
devil's club, and sedgy grass.
The Granite Pool on Valdez was one exception. This nameless lake
proved another. Rod and Mary came to it through a heavy stand of
cedar, massive old trees which had killed all the lesser growth in
their centuries of possession. No sapling grew there, or bush or
fern or vine. The level ground was carpeted with moss, which alone
could thrive in that sunless place. Over this soft footing Rod and
his wife walked by the little creek, flowing with faint murmurs in
its bed of worn pebbles, till they stepped suddenly out of that
semi-gloom into the brightness of open water rippling in the sun.
A low, gravelly beach at their feet; wooded points jutting into the
lake; an island lifting a green mound of trees a little distance
offshore; the lake itself bending away out of sight behind the base
of a great mountain five miles distant,--this they saw.
"You never know what you're going to find back in these hills." Rod
sat down on the gravel. "Let's sit and look. It's worth a look."
"If we just had a boat up here," Mary observed, after a little.
"We'll have one," Rod answered promptly. "I have an ax. There are
plenty of cedars. I can make a dugout of some sort in three or four
days. Let's move camp up here. There'll be trout umpty-inches long
in here, and I would like to see what's behind that mountain. We'll
certainly explore _this_."
He made good his word, in sweat and strain. It was not a light task
to shoulder-pack their food, bedding and tent over that pathless two
miles. Nor was the shaping of a rude canoe from a cedar log and the
hollowing of it by ax and fire so easy and simple as it seemed. But
they accomplished these things. And having done so, they viewed
their works with sinful pride, blessing the wilderness for what it
bestowed upon them.
They meant to stay two or three weeks. Their food was reckoned on
that basis. But they had been liberal in their estimate of supplies.
There were trout in lake and stream. The blue grouse hooted on every
hillside, and when they wanted meat they hunted these toothsome
birds. Three weeks lengthened to four, to five--six. It became an
amiable contest, a matter of achievement, to see how long they could
live off the wilderness. They were completely happy there. It was
as if some invisible barrier stood between them and the world of
their fellows, where griefs and pains and irritations, hopes and
fears and joys and ambitions ran their course. They did not know
what went on beyond the rampart of their seclusion. And they did not
care. They were too absorbed in what each day might bring forth as
it passed. They experienced deep, ecstatic satisfactions in the
simplest things. Rod began to work on his book again, in the
intervals of hunting, fishing, exploring. He would lift his head,
stirred out of concentration on imaginary things, at the sound of
Mary singing as she moved about certain tasks. And he would smile.
It was good; it was what he wanted. Peace to dream, to catch and
transfix incident, character, a colorful background for heroic
undertakings, as they mysteriously took form in his brain. To love
and be loved; to get something more out of life than just a leisurely
existence; to create something of worth above the measure of money.
He was aware that this was just an interlude. They would have to go
back to the business of living along more conventional lines. They
were both too much the normal product of society even to wish
complete withdrawal from their kind. That would only be an evasion.
But it was an experience they found to their liking. They promised
themselves to repeat it often.
"We're barbarians at heart," Mary said once. "Our so-called culture
is only skin-deep. Otherwise we couldn't sit over a camp fire and be
content. Nor lie in the sun on a mossy rock and feel that blissful
sense of complete well-being. People with instincts like those
should survive more or less complacently almost anything but loss of
freedom. What do shops and streetcars, cities and frontiers mean to
us here?" She waved a hand at the ring of mountains, the enclosing
forest. "People handicap themselves when they grow too civilized."
"I wonder if they do?" Rod mused. "Perhaps. I know people who would
be very uncomfortable here--where we have been quite at our ease. It
seems to be instinctive with us. We get quite a kick out of it too.
Maybe we're throwbacks. Why shouldn't hereditary impressions crop
out?"
"Maybe," Mary said reflectively. "By all accounts Roderick the first
was a man who didn't mind long journeys or isolation. He must have
felt at home here, or he wouldn't have made his home in a savage
country. Certainly it wasn't compulsory with him. You don't have to
throw back very far, Rod, to the self-sufficient type."
"And my people," she continued presently. "They were originally New
York--upstate, not Manhattan--before the Boston Tea Party. Then they
went across the Alleghanies. Then they went to Illinois. Then to
Minnesota. Both my grandfathers fought in the Civil War. When they
came back from that Minnesota was too crowded for them. With half a
dozen other families they trekked across the plains--in '67. They
drove their stakes in southern Idaho on the banks of the Snake.
Always restless. Always striking out into new territory. Wanting
elbow room. Determined to have it. Never taking root for more than
one generation. They went into virgin country with their cattle and
horses, their tools and rifles, and made homes where there had never
been homes. They didn't get rich, but they were always independent,
always competent to fend for themselves. Why shouldn't we have an
instinct for this, Rod? It's in our blood."
"Well, we'll do it again," Rod prophesied. "This is a good retreat.
We'll come back."
With that as a mark to shoot at when summer came again, they left the
Hiding Place one cool September morning. By the coasting schedule
Rod knew a steamer should touch at the logging camp across the Inlet
that afternoon. They were leaving reluctantly. Their supplies had
stretched to the elastic limit, but the limit had been reached. Time
had accelerated his pace. It seemed but yesterday that they had
come, in burning July. Now the mornings were touched with autumn
chill. The vine maples showed glints of russet, streaks of burnished
copper. The alders were growing yellow. Frost touched the leaves at
night. New snow had fallen on the high peaks. Rain threatened. It
was time to go.
They rowed across the inlet and tied up to the logger's landing. Two
men worked on the floating logs, making up a tow. Far in the woods,
in a deep valley, they could hear the toot of donkey engines. A
train rumbled out on a trestle, dumped five cars of logs with a
terrific splash. A clutter of raw, unpainted buildings stood about
the shore end of the trestle.
"I'll go see if the storekeeper knows what time the steamer's due,"
Rod said. "May be able to get a newspaper. Funny. So long as we
were in there, I never thought about papers. Old habits revive."
He walked the trestle ashore, disappeared among the buildings.
Presently he came into view again, walking slowly, an opened news
sheet in his hands, reading as he stepped from timber to timber.
Midway, still two hundred yards from the float, he sat down on an
abutting platform, and remained there, the paper before his face,
until the minutes lengthened to half an hour and Mary grew impatient.
She left the float. She neared her husband without him giving a
sign, so deep was his absorption. He only looked up when she spoke.
There was a strange bewilderment on his face, a look of mingled anger
and incredulity.
"Why, Rod," she exclaimed. "What is it?"
He thrust another paper at her.
"Read," he said. "The world's gone crazy. There's a war. There's
been war in Europe since early August. And we're in it up to our
necks. Read."