For a few days Rod went about a little, picking up threads of old
acquaintance with places and people. The uneasy consciousness of a
heart which might fail him at any moment troubled him now and then.
Once or twice he felt that strange faltering. But it did not
stop--not quite. He wondered if he had passed a crisis that first
night at home when he felt himself locked in a grapple with death
itself. And so he was very careful. It was easy to be apathetic, to
be completely acquiescent. Nothing, he thought, would ever again
make his heart swell with such repressed passion as the sights and
sounds of the western front, the carnival of non-combatants in Paris
and London, the bitterness with which for so long he had seen the
agonies and endurances and destructiveness of war as sheer
waste--blind, blundering waste, the offspring of cupidity wedded to
arrogant ignorance.
He wanted to forget what could not be changed. Here it was easy to
forget, at least to thrust it all into the background, now that he
was home. For a time he would rest. When his heart strengthened he
would take stock of his resources and move with determined purpose in
some direction, toward some as yet indefinite goal.
In the meantime, free from military discipline, interminable parades,
orders, red tape that fettered the hands of initiative and bound up a
man's mouth so that he needed only two phrases in his vocabulary,
"Yes, sir" and "No, sir," he went about in his native city observing,
noting, listening in clubs, homes, on the streets, in hotel lobbies
where he went to meet other men who had just come back.
If the landscape endured and the outstanding architectural features,
many things had changed, contrary to his first glad impression, were
still changing at an accelerated pace in this winter of 1919. In
four years and a half his native city, when he came to examine it
closely, presented a transformed physiognomy. Its lifeblood, people
and money, flowed in a heavier stream through complicated arteries.
Vancouver was bigger and better, he heard on every hand. New
industries, shipyards, shipping, more elaborate affairs. The war had
done a great deal for British Columbia, an elderly banker naïvely
remarked to him.
Rod conceded that it probably had. But it had also done something
"to" British Columbia. He couldn't say just what. It wasn't clear
enough in his mind. But he could feel it. Or perhaps it was only
himself. He could not be sure. He could dimly apprehend a
difference. His world was changed. Phil was dead. Grandfather
Norquay took his long sleep beside other dead Norquays in the plot at
Hawk's Nest. Grove flourished largely, a scintillating comet,
streaming across the moneyed spaces.
Rod sometimes paused after dark in some distant part of the city to
look at the flamboyant sign with a speculative interest, without the
old resentment, but with a shade of disapproval. Grove was become a
big man--Rod couldn't escape that conclusion--a big man in his chosen
field. Scarcely a day but some newspaper quoted him. He figured in
local print co-equal with the Peace Conference and the latest
authentic report of Lenine's death. Nearly nine years now of waxing
great in the financial firmament. Grove bade fair to win greater
fame and fortune than that old forebear of his who beat around the
Horn to found a family in the wilderness because the land filled his
eyes with pleasure and his soul with peace.
Would old Roderick have found pleasure and profit in discounting
notes, clipping coupons at so much per cent, buying and selling bonds
and mortgages, squeezing little debtors and bolstering up big ones
for a consideration? Rod smiled at the quaint notion.
But he had evidently underestimated Grove's capacity. Grove had his
community behind him. His finger was in every pie. His skill at
extracting plums was envied and admired.
"He's what they mean when they talk about the greatness of our
country," Rod thought cynically. "That sort of thing."
Oliver Thorn had sold his timber to the Norquay Estate and retired to
live in a cottage on the Capilano slope fronting on the city, where
he could, as he told Rod, spend his last years seeing the sun rise
from behind the Coast range and set behind the far, blue rampart of
Vancouver Island. John P. Wall, Grove's father-in-law, had made a
fortune in building wooden ships and another in airplane spruce.
Wall's youngest son had been killed overseas, but his eldest had been
too precious an asset to the community to risk his life in war.
Isabel was a beauty, still unmarried. (It seemed to Rod an
astonishing thing when Mary told him Isabel was her dearest friend.)
The Deanes and Richstons flourished, with one or two gaps in the
younger ranks. They had grown richer with the war, vastly more sure
of themselves, setting a pace in the social parade that lesser folk
found hard to follow.
There were two avenues open along which Rod could saunter to exercise
this detached observance of his own people: the homes which
automatically opened to him, and brief daily contacts with men
downtown. Socially things seemed a little more feverish, people just
a trifle keener in the futile pursuit of futile diversion, the
dancing just a little more frankly sensuous, the drinking a little
freer, the talk looser. If one couldn't or wouldn't keep the pace
one was "slow." It amused Rod and it vaguely troubled him. These
people seemed so remote from so many things of importance that
pressed close on them, matters that constituted both a warning and a
threat. Downtown it was worse. Uptown rested on downtown. The
economic link--the strongest link in the invisible chain--shackled
them together whether they knew it or not.
And downtown was frankly on the make, with the most shrewd and
far-seeing already privately dubious about a let-down in the swift
flow of affairs that followed the close of European hostilities.
Perhaps it had always been the same. He had not been aware how
consistently material, how harshly practical, the world of commerce
must be. But he couldn't get used to hearing them tot up Canada's
share in the reparations, the gloating on what enlarged African and
Asiatic possession meant to trade, their chesty pride in having swept
the Hun from the seas (as if they had done it in their office
chairs). He couldn't get used to that, because it was invariably
accompanied by an undertone of growling about confiscatory taxation,
enormous pension bills.
Here and there some elderly hardshell solemnly viewed with alarm
three items debited to the war: first, the growing demand of labor
for shorter hours, increased pay, and a voice in the conduct of
industries for which they furnished the motive power; second, the
Bolshevik upheaval in Russia which constituted a horrific menace to
the sacred rights of private property; third, the military strength
and insistent demands of France.
The war as a business proposition! Rod got up and walked away from a
group of men in a club who rather vindictively discussed these
important phases of the European _débâcle_. If that were
all--commerce--shipping--iron--coal--territory--indemnities. If that
were all! His heart wouldn't stand his talking to those bankers and
merchants and manufacturers and brokers as he wished to talk. He
left them. What was held as piracy and brigandage for the individual
became somehow the unchallenged privilege of a nation, if only the
scale of operations were large enough. The Barbary corsairs were at
least open in their deeds. They flew the Jolly Roger and their
victims walked the plank without ado. Nor did the pirates get their
fighting done by proxy and then grumble because they found it
expensive.
Yes the world, his world, had changed. Of all that he had known
through youth and early manhood only his wife--like the sea and the
mountains--remained steadfast, a desirable reality. Now, more than
ever, he was filled with gratitude and wonder that she had stood
loyal, devoted, staunch as a rock in the bewildering flux of a period
that seemed to him, in occasional somber moods, to have quickened the
disintegration of men and the cherished works of men to a degree that
made him apprehensive.
This couldn't be the reality of things, he assured himself. He had
somehow got them twisted. His vision and his understanding must be
askew. He had to stop pondering about it all. It was difficult for
him to do this. He had always been a thinking being. That faculty
had cursed him in France. On duty in trenches, in action, in long
lonely vigils, his mind had hammered him with insistent questions and
speculations on the why and the wherefore of human activities. Many
an answer that came like the answer to a sum saddened him. One
should not see too clearly.
He found it so now. But at least he, as an individual, was not too
deeply involved to stand clear of all this feverish hurrying and
scurrying to nowhere after nothing. There must be something a man
could do in the world that would bring him dividends in satisfaction
of accomplishment, as well as dollars. For him, because his forbears
had been both adventurous and far-seeing, there was no immediate
economic pressure. He had no great responsibilities, beyond himself
and Mary and their boy. If he needed more than the minor share which
he held in the Norquay estate, he could surely get it without bowing
his head and twisting his moral sense awry before the Moloch of
commerce.
The more he saw of town the more he desired to turn his back on it.
Not because it was town but because for so long he had had his fill
of noise and motion. To sit amid a great silence, the strange,
restful hush of a forest, in the shadow of great mountains,--that
calm, secure peace; to hear only the sighing of wind in high
interlaced branches, the muted song of running water, the whistle of
birds' wings,--that was his wish.
Practical wisdom forbade. There was really one place where he longed
to be with Mary and his son, and they could not go there. Hawk's
Nest was no longer his home. It was Grove's. His road and Grove's
diverged too sharply for him to go there even as a guest. Elsewhere
they could not find comfort at that season. It was a winter of sleet
and snow, of alternate frosts and rains. A half-sick man couldn't go
camping like a pioneer with a woman and a child. And it was not
camping as such that Rod longed for, he knew, as the spacious
background and comfortable security of his birthplace.
Whereupon, as a sensible man eschews the unattainable, he put it out
of his mind. In the spring,--he and Mary lay awake nights planning
what they would do in the spring.
He came home from one of these desultory excursions abroad a little
before dinner one evening.
"Your father has phoned twice since five o'clock," Mary told him.
"He asked to have you call him up when you came in."
Rod got his connection.
"You telephoned, pater," he said. "Was it anything of importance?"
"Well, yes. Can you come down to the club after dinner, Rod? If not
to-night, then by nine in the morning?"
"I'll come to-night. Say eight o'clock."
He hung up the receiver. As he got ready for dinner his mind was
divided between the playful squeals of his son romping in the living
room and the almost plaintive note in his father's voice over the
wire. Norquay senior had changed with everything else. He had aged.
Losing Phil had been a blow. But he was a proud man--and he had two
sons left. That grief had not put care lines in his face, or caused
the abstracted brooding into which he sometimes relapsed. Rod
understood, of course, that the war had completed the break-up of the
old family life at Hawk's Nest which Grove's embarkation on a career
had begun, or Grove's personality had begun. His father admitted
that he no longer cared to live at Hawk's Nest.
"One doesn't like to be alone all the time," he had put it quite
simply. "Too many ghosts haunt those corridors for an old man. And
at one's age one doesn't care to set up an establishment in town.
When any of the others find occasion in summer, I go to Hawk's Nest.
Otherwise I live at the club."
Yet the place was kept up. Stagg, the butler, his wife who ranked as
housekeeper, a cook, two maids, and two gardeners held a sinecure.
One could, Rod assumed, step in and find Hawk's Nest quite as of old.
He came back to his father. What bothered him? It couldn't be money
or affairs. The Norquay estate was rock-ribbed. Timber, land,
gilt-edged securities. It must simply be that he was getting old and
lonely. When a man is past sixty and all his life has been spent in
a well-appointed home, surrounded by a fairly numerous family and
still more numerous relatives, he can hardly reconcile himself to the
empty shell of a house, or the artificial atmosphere of even the most
elaborately appointed club. Rod felt sorry for him. But if Grove
hadn't failed to carry on the family tradition, Hawk's Nest would
still be the year-around rendezvous of the clan, as it had always
been. No effect without a cause. Rod put aside the thought that his
elder brother could be blamed for a great deal if one chose to be
critical.
His father sat smoking a cigar in a chair that commanded the club
entrance, and he led the way to his rooms as soon as Rod appeared.
He took some papers off a table and sat fussing with them. He didn't
seem inclined to talk at first, beyond a few casual remarks. Rod
waited. He knew his father. He felt that something was
coming,--something that rested with a great weight on the elder man's
mind. Since Rod came home there seemed to have arisen between them a
more keenly sympathetic understanding than had ever existed before.
It wasn't a matter of words. It was a feeling. Rod divined
intuitively that his father had some deep trouble to share with him.
He could not have defined any reason for this belief. It existed as
a belief. In that conviction he waited.
"Five years ago," Norquay senior began abruptly, "I looked forward to
sitting back with a pipe and slippers and a book while my sons
carried on in the old way. For a hundred and thirty years, to speak
precisely, we have gone ahead solidifying our position, doing well by
ourselves and all connected with us. We seemed--as a family--to have
acquired a permanence, a solidarity, beyond that of any family in
this province. We have become a sort of institution. We were here
first. Of the exploring adventurers, we were the first to take root.
You know the family history. We have helped to make this country
what it is. We have acquired a great deal of material power, yet I
do not recall that we have ever abused it. In each generation we
have had a lot of faithful service, and we have had it because we
have scrupulously observed some form of obligation to those who
served us. Men have trusted us as being persons entirely
trustworthy. We have not been Shylocks. We have not been arrogant.
We have never been greedy for more."
Five years earlier Rod would have assented, as a matter of course.
Now he stirred slightly in his chair, as his father paused, and
observed dispassionately:
"Would you include Grove in that last?"
"I am coming to Grove," Norquay senior answered. "To arrive at Grove
by a logical sequence is the reason for this summing-up of ourselves.
A few weeks before your grandfather died he said to me, '_My_ father
once prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle.
What's the last hatching? Sparrows. Sparrows!' Quite apropos of
nothing. We hadn't even been talking. He grew very uncertain in his
mind at the last. A great age, Rod. Nearly ninety. He scarcely
comprehended the war. Grove was there with a house party. I think
their high spirits annoyed him. Sparrows!"
He contemplated the rug with a fixed frown.
"I wonder if he were right," he said at last.
"I must confess," he continued, "that I have spent my life in a state
of inertia compared to his, and to the energy his father worked with.
They were actively constructive. Looking back, I seem to have done
nothing but maintain a sort of _status quo_. Indeed, lacking any
necessity or any great personal ambition, with a disinclination for
politics, a distaste for anything in the way of business outside of
estate affairs, there seemed nothing upon which to expend great
energy. I've moved along pleasant lines of least resistance.
Looking back, it doesn't seem so satisfactory. Avoiding boredom,
keeping up a moderate revenue without being a taskmaster to
labor--that about expresses it.
"It seemed to me, however, that my sons must inherit some of the
abounding energy, the creativeness, that I somehow lacked. Your
eldest brother, whom you were named after, was a vigorous,
high-spirited boy. That venturesomeness resulted in his death at an
early age. That left Grove next in line. For many years I watched
the three of you develop from sturdy youngsters into young men.
Phil, it seemed to me, was something like myself. You were always a
puzzle, an odd sort of boy, somewhat given to precocious remarks and
unexpected actions. Lovable, but erratic, probably brilliant but not
entirely dependable, I used sometimes to say to myself: How wide one
can go of the mark.
"So you see it was natural that Grove, being the eldest, should be
looked to for able carrying on of that which has become a tradition
since old Roderick outlined his plan to hold compactly for the entire
family that which he had built up out of nothing himself.
"It is a good plan. I have no fault to find with it. The stability,
the working power of a large fortune is always depleted by being
broken into fragments by division among each generation. The Norquay
estate, as he outlined it in his journal, would be a tree ample
enough to shelter all under its branches, so long as the trunk was
kept intact.
"And it seemed to me Grove had all the qualifications to carry on
with honor and profit. He had personality. He had energy and
resource. He had ambition, which determined him on a career. I took
his ability for granted; his character as a sure inheritance. His
faults I conceded as the faults of lusty young manhood, minor
failings to be put away in the face of responsibility.
"Yet you and Phil never had such convictions about your brother.
Why?"
He paused on the interrogation.
"His weaknesses seemed fundamental. To us some of the things he did
were despicable. He did things we would have been ashamed to do.
Where his appetites and passions and desires were concerned, he had
no consideration for any one or anything, nor any scruple about what
he did if it suited him to do it--and it was in his power. That was
very clear to both Phil and myself. That was how he seemed to us.
We used to wonder why you never had any inkling of what we considered
his real character--or lack of it."
Rod was in no mood to be charitable, to mince words, to evade a frank
answer to the direct question.
His father pondered briefly.
"You were right and I was wrong," he observed sadly. "All wrong.
Phil put himself on record before he went overseas. He warned me not
to trust Grove too far. It angered me at the time. It made our
parting cool. That's one of my keenest regrets. He was right; you
were both right. How can a man make such a blunder in reading his
own son? Perhaps because he was his son, I have prided myself on a
knowledge of men, too. Ah, well."
He nursed his chin in one palm.
"The Norquay Trust is insolvent," he announced presently. "Gutted,
looted from within. It is about to topple over with a resounding
crash. I have an outline of the position here," he ruffled the
papers in his hand. "It seems incredible, but it is true."
"You're involved? The estate is involved, eh?" Rod asked calmly. It
seemed nowise incredible to him. It seemed, in fact, an entirely
logical outcome--unlimited power in uncertain hands, increasing
momentum, a grand smash. There was not a single element of the
unexpected. He had anticipated such a finale. So had Phil.
"Not technically. Not yet."
"Very well. Let it smash," Rod said indifferently. "Let him pick
himself up out the debris and take stock of himself. May do him
good."
"If that were all. But it isn't so simple," his father sighed.
"Don't you see, Rod? Our name, the prestige of the family, the
confidence of the public in us as well-known, wealthy people has been
the chief foundation on which this tottering Colossus was built. A
great many people of whom we never heard, as well as our friends and
families to whom we are related by blood and marriage, have put their
money into this. It means loss to all, complete ruin to many, I'm
afraid. If it were merely a question of Grove--"
He made a gesture of dismissal.
"But it isn't," he went on. "In the public eye and mind we stand or
fall as a family. We have a reputation for integrity. If one of the
family trades on that, the rest of us can't escape the consequences
of his acts. I gave Grove his head and encouraged him, and I can't
shirk my individual responsibility. I have no knowledge of a Norquay
ever shirking an obligation. I'm an old man. I may not have many
years left. I'll admit self-interest. I feel that I must straighten
this thing out so that no one will ever say with an angry sneer that
we saved our own skins after making a mess of theirs. The reason I
asked you to come and see me to-night was to know if you will stand
by me and help me see it through? It's got to be done."
"There's only one answer to that, isn't there, pater?" Rod said
slowly. "I've outgrown any active antagonism toward Grove. It was
more contempt than antagonism, except for the time he went out of his
way to annoy my wife. At the same time I wouldn't lift a finger to
save him from ever so hard a cropper. Only if you put it as
something to be done for the family reputation--that probably means
as much to me as it does to you. I'm willing to undertake anything I
can handle. No use banking on me too strong, though. I don't know
either business or finance."
"Half our wealth is in standing timber," his father replied, "and you
know timber. Phil told me that you knew more of logging and loggers
than he would ever learn. The woods will have to be our salvation.
That will be your job, Rod. You've been through a hard mill. I wish
you could have had a long rest. But this matter won't delay. I know
law and I know something of affairs. I have had accountants checking
up this infernal mess. Dorothy's husband has agreed to take charge.
It will take nearly all our available capital to plug holes. The
important end, the producing end, must be our timber. That I'll
leave to you. We must begin operations at the first break in the
weather. You'll have an absolutely free hand."
The ghost of a smile flitted across Rod's face. A free hand to
ravage and destroy the forest to make money which would be poured
like sand into a rathole! And he uncertain of any definite tenure on
life. What of his heart? That overstrained, vital part of
him,--which was organically perfect but functionally weak. A heart
that was slacking up now, so that he rose and paced back and forth
across the floor to stir it up.
"Well," he said at last, halting in his stride. "That's understood."
His father nodded.
"It may not be so bad as it seems," he said, with the first hopeful
note Rod had heard him utter. "Though I'm doubtful of quarreling
with figures. Grove hasn't been dishonest. That's the only
redeeming feature of the nasty mess. But his associates have. I
didn't think it of them. But I have moral if not legal proof of
their crookedness--cunning financial piracy on a considerable scale.
I may be able to make 'em disgorge, and I may not. They've feathered
their nests and left Grove, the poor fool, holding the empty sack.
The intent is to throw the thing into a receiver's hands. But I'm
prepared to checkmate that. There's to be a directors' meeting
to-morrow at ten-thirty. I'd like you to go with me. You may find
it illuminating. Suppose I pick you up on my way?"
"Why not drive out and have breakfast with us at eight or half-past?"
Rod suggested.
"Better still. I'll do that, thanks."
He had never been a demonstrative man. But he shook hands at the
door, and Rod's fingers were still tingling with the grip when he
walked down the stairs.
As the wheels of the retreating taxi crunched the gravel on his
driveway, Rod stood a moment with his foot on the first step. The
night was clear, tinged with frost. Above the city roofs that
curious lucence from a million lights dimmed the stars. And as his
gaze embraced the down-town silhouette he marked for the first time
from the house in which he lived the blazing sign of the Norquay
Trust, as if it were something from which he could not escape,--and
for a moment he was tempted to a childish shaking of his fist at that
glowing emblem of a corroded and tottering edifice.