Across the channel, in the green bank of timber bisected by the path
that ran from Oliver Thorn's old house to the Granite Pool, rose
white puffs of steam, intermittent, like sporadic geysers. Those
were donkey engines at work. They tooted shrill response to the
signal pull. The woods were full of prodigious shudderings and
rumblings. The powerful machines snaked fallen trees, sawn to
lengths, from where they were felled to the last splashing plunge
into the tidal booming ground close by a group of new camp buildings
not far from Oliver Thorn's abandoned house. A "sky line" lifted its
long, aerial cable far up that hill. Down this logs came at the rate
of two hundred a day. The shore was lined with floating logs, new
cut, exhaling the odor of pitch, a pleasant pungent smell. The
Granite Pool itself echoed the clack of axes and the thin twanging of
saws, and mirrored the downward swoop of great trees. The falling
crews were stripping the shores about the Pool, destroying its
seclusion, shattering its restful silence, obliterating its cool
shade. Farther east the Valdez camp, in which Rod had served his
apprenticeship, bit deep into these heavy woods. Three hundred and
fifty men, a dozen donkey engines, a logging railway in the making,
miles of steel cable were chewing the heart out of the forest. Far
beyond sight and sound of Hawk's Nest another crew slashed at the
last of their timber on Hardwicke Island.
There was no picking of prime trees and care to conserve the younger
growth, nor far-sighted culling of the forest crop. It was complete
destruction. Within the boundaries of each limit the earth was
stripped to its primal nakedness. Sky-line and high-lead gear ripped
strings of logs over the surface, plowing deep furrows in the scant
soil, tearing up saplings, shouldering aside rotten trunks and small
boulders, bursting into dusty clouds the dead snags in the way. When
the loggers shifted to a fresh stand they left desolation behind.
Timber great and small was money. Every stick landed in tidewater
went for something; number one export, number two, the broken cedar
for shingles, the poorer grades of spruce and hemlock for pulpwood
that the mills chewed up and spat forth in tons of news print.
Rod sat over his breakfast at Hawk's Nest one morning in early summer
of '19. The far, faint sounds of the machinery he had set in motion
reached now and then into that quiet room. But he was not thinking
particularly of this organized effort which filled the woods over
there with crashings and rumblings and whining cable. He was
watching the tall, somewhat stooped figure of the butler who had
served in that house ever since Rod could remember, and he was
thinking that in connection with this man he faced another of the
many disagreeable tasks he must perform.
He rose, walked to the door, turned back. It was no great matter,
and still---- Like a modern Atropos he must go on snipping threads.
If the hand that held the shears shook a little now and then, it
could not for that reason be stayed. He had not much choice. He was
too deeply committed.
"Come up to the library in a few minutes, Stagg," he said.
"Yes, sir."
Rod sat down by a window that overlooked Mermaid Bay. A Kern tug lay
against one shore beside a million board feet of Norquay cedar,
waiting for the fierce tiderace to go slack before she eased her boom
through the south narrows for the long Gulf tow. In a little while
she would pass out, dragging astern a brown comet's tail of
slaughtered trees.
His eyes turned back to the interior of the room, came to rest on a
portrait of his great-grandfather,--the Norquay who had prophesied
that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle.
"Even an eagle could hardly hold his own against a flock of
buzzards," Rod muttered.
No. One slip was sufficient to invalidate, even to destroy such
families as his, in this day and age. Perhaps there had been a time
when people of the equivalent class would have seen in the Norquay
difficulty something besides a chance to participate in the loot.
Out of his intimate knowledge of the family history as revealed in
sundry documents and half-recalled conversations, Rod knew that every
Norquay, from the original Roderick down to his father, had put out
his hand and opened his purse to save other men from ruin, sometimes
out of friendship, sometimes out of generosity, often from a clear
sense of class interest. At least friendship and social intimacy had
bred something more than mere lip-fealty. Other generations did not
break bread and drink wine under each others' roofs to go forth
planning how they could filch each others' possessions. The
generation to which his father belonged would have understood quite
clearly the Norquay obligation in regard to Grove's blundering.
His, Rod's generation, didn't understand. At least, if it
understood, it cynically denied his code. It laughed at him behind
his back, looked with disbelief on the course he was taking. It was,
they held, purely quixotic to sacrifice so much, to risk all in
repairing a misguided man's folly. Childishness. What were
bankruptcy laws for? Why had sound commercial brains devised the
Limited Liability Act if not to save the enterprising bourgeois from
loss when one of his undertakings failed? What simpleton would
unhesitatingly accept a moral responsibility when no legal compulsion
existed?
Rod smiled grimly. He had become more closely acquainted with the
ethics of modern business. It struck him that if corporations were
in the nature of things soulless and dehumanized in matters of money,
that attribute tended to spread to individuals. He wondered if that
were possible. It was a disagreeable conclusion; one he hesitated to
accept. But he knew this: that both his father and himself had
aroused a strange combination of antagonism and contempt by merely
doing what they felt in honor bound to do.
The antagonism was the fiercer for being grounded in cupidity. It
smoldered under the surface, ready to blaze out if he left an
opening. There were those who would like to pick his bones. He was
aware of this attitude. It burgeoned forth in many aspects of his
affairs.
If he had looted the Norquay Trust within the law and let the plucked
victims pick themselves bewildered out of the ruin, while he sat back
with his share of the plunder and the great Norquay estate still firm
in his grasp, these contemporaries of his would have esteemed him as
a clever man, almost a great man, certainly a man with a genius for
affairs. A man of affairs; a man who could safely and expeditiously
get possession of large sums of money. What was the difference?
He might have been execrated by some who lost their money. The
losers, they said cynically, always squeal. But if he had shrugged
his shoulders and stood aside, his own class would have backed him to
a man. They would have rallied round his standard. They would have
upheld him in the press, socially, by every means within their power.
Their admiration would have been tinctured with envy. They would
have understood so clearly that genuine greatness was involved in
making such a coup and getting clear when the crash came. His own
people,--no, by God, the Walls and Deanes and Richstons were not his
kind of people, not one of the whole pushing caravan, the petty
tradesmen swollen to greatness with one generation of a rich
country's development, grown greater with exorbitant profits derived
from a war which had been fought for them but not by them. They were
Grove's kind of people. And Grove had been a--a----
Well, he didn't like to ponder on Grove. There was no encouragement
in that. He found his brother's memory depressing. Grove reminded
him of a joyous diver plunging headfirst into the troubled waters of
life and coming up, not with a pearl but with a handful of slimy
ooze. Grove, he reflected, would probably not have given a second
thought to discharging Stagg. And he was compelled to give several
regretful thoughts to that unfortunate necessity.
Stagg knocked and entered, stood waiting. Rod motioned him to a
chair.
"How long have you and Mrs. Stagg been with us?" he asked.
"Twenty-seven years next November, sir."
The man was proud of his length of service. It showed in his tone.
Twenty-seven years. Rod looked at him. He had been an infant in
arms when this man entered his father's service. For twenty-seven
years Stagg had waited on them and theirs, arranging their tables,
polishing their silver, serving their food, ministering deftly to
their every want, expressed or implied.
"Have you saved any money?" Rod pursued. He had no false delicacy
about asking such a question. He had to know whether he was about to
chuck a penniless man out into a world that would be far harsher to
William Stagg than Hawk's Nest had ever been, even in its most
exacting moments. Rod had been taught, not as a lesson but as a
principle of living, that faithful service begets an obligation. It
seemed to him a natural corollary. His instincts inherited,
acquired, however he came by them were more or less patriarchal.
"We've saved a good bit, sir."
"That's fortunate," Rod continued. "Because I shall have to close
this house. I shall have to let everybody go."
"Yes, sir," Stagg murmured. He clasped his fingers across his knees
and stared at the rug.
"I hate to do it," Rod went on. "But the way things stand, keeping
up this place is more of a drain than I can afford. For a time I'm
only a--a sort of steward of the Norquay estate. If I get out of the
hole with anything left, you shall certainly have the pension to
which you are entitled, Stagg. I'm acting under a very disagreeable
necessity."
"Yes, sir," the man nodded. "I've been hoping it wouldn't be
necessary, sir. Still, I've expected it."
"Oh, you have? How's that?"
"There's been talk, sir. It gets up here, sir, from town."
"Servants' talk?" Rod inquired.
"The kind of talk servants hears, sir," Stagg replied. "People are
saying that you are a fool to ruin yourself over the Norquay Trust
Company."
"I don't agree with them," Rod said impassively. "But they may be
right. What do you think about it yourself, Stagg?"
"I had eleven thousand dollars on deposit in the Norquay Trust, sir,"
Stagg returned calmly. "About all we've saved in a lifetime of work,
the missus and me. You can fancy what _I_ think, Mr. Rod."
"Eh? Well, I hope you got it out while the getting was good;
although it's reasonably safe if you didn't," Rod smiled. "Unless
the heavens fall or some such catastrophe occurs, the Norquay Trust
will pay interest and principal in full on every account before I
close its doors--which I intend to do as soon as I can turn our
timber into cash."
"I feel safe enough," Stagg assured him. "But you can imagine how I
would have felt if the Company'd failed, sir. So I'm bound to be
prejudiced in your favor. If you'll excuse me, sir, I've known the
Norquay family a long time, and it wouldn't have seemed natural for
it to let a thing like that happen. People like you, Mr. Rod, may
get in a hole; but you can't be kept there. You always get up
somehow. I'll be awfully sorry to leave. I really will. This place
is like home to me. I'll hope to come back as soon as you get things
straightened out, Mr. Rod."
Rod sat thinking for a few seconds.
"Thank you, Stagg," he said then, very gently. "I appreciate what
you have said. You seem to understand quite well some things that
other people, who should, don't see at all."
"Now," he continued, after a pause, "I want you to put everything in
order this week. Cover the furniture and put away china and silver
and linen and so on. Fix the house properly. It never was closed
before, but you will know what should be done. When you're finished
I'll pay you all off. Cook, I understand, has relatives living on
the other side of Valdez. The gardeners can work for me in the
woods, if they wish. The housemaids are flappers who haven't had
time to get attached either to us or the place. That'll be all,
Stagg. Thanks."
The man got up. He seemed to hesitate, took a step or two, stopped.
"May I ask if you're going to sell Hawk's Nest, sir?" he finally
blurted out.
Rod shook his head.
"No, Stagg. They may take it away from me eventually. But it is not
for sale."
"Thank you, sir. I couldn't believe you'd think of selling Hawk's
Nest, sir."
Stagg bowed and closed the door softly behind him.