Late summer of 1920 pricked to utter collapse the prosperity balloon
which had been deflating ever since the Armistice. Europe still
stewed in the choice juices of local punitive expeditions, reparation
snarls, gyrating exchange, so that North American commerce lagged by
the way with heavy feet. Here and there industry somehow kept going.
It couldn't stop altogether, even lacking foreign markets. Crops
were sowed and reaped; people were fed; life went on. But capital
ventured timidly. Wages fell, even though commodities seemed
reluctant to cheapen. The stress came particularly hard on the
Pacific Coast. The bottom dropped out of the lumber market. A
thousand loggers walked the streets of Vancouver, hungry, bewildered,
as soon as their savings gave out. Only here and there a few
companies and individuals, fortunately situated, well-managed, or
filled with bowels of compassion for their men, were enabled to
continue. They could log cheaply. They were willing to risk a
little loss rather than disband crews and let machinery rust; and
they hoped for the upturn, the revival of "confidence," that talisman
which commends itself to Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce.
Rod owned his timber. He neither leased, paid royalty, stumpage, nor
interest on borrowed capital. It was choice timber, picked long ago
when his forefathers had the cream of coastal forests to choose from.
If a tree could be cut and sold at a profit by any one, he was the
one. So long as he could operate without loss, he meant to keep on.
He had to keep on, until the cost of production overtook the market
price.
And because he kept on along the lines he had laid down in the
beginning, he found himself in disfavor with people who had once
considered it a privilege to know a Norquay. He did not suffer from
that. They could not hurt him. If he had not been deeply troubled
because he saw the nearing end of his own rope, he would have been
amused.
To know that there were men who damned him heartily for paying labor
so much a day when labor could be had for less. To be aware that a
certain clique looked forward to the weight of the Norquay Trust
crushing him, and that there might be pickings on the bones, because
he was young and inexperienced in business. To be regarded as a
quixotic fool. To have certain men freeze up when he met them in
clubs, hotels, on coastwise steamers. To have others draw him aside
for earnest remonstrance. It was strange what an interest they took
in his welfare; how eager they were to point out that he was hurting
himself and demoralizing the labor market, making it hard for them to
readjust their business to changed conditions, to deflate properly.
Labor had to come down off its high horse and his tactics delayed the
unseating. And so forth. None of it troubled Rod.
He did not want their friendship. He set no store by their opinions.
He had been a solitary animal all his life, too self-contained for
superficial friendships. He had dreamed in and out of books as a
youngster while some of these others were already up and doing. As a
man he played a lone hand, acted with resolution, brooded over his
own problems, disregarded the non-essential.
He had his wife and his son. He had a given task to accomplish. He
had a friend or two to lean on if he needed to lean, Andy Hall,
Oliver Thorn, his brother-in-law who wrestled with the Norquay Trust
as the angel of the Lord wrestled with Apollyon. In the city office
he had two men he could rely on, two heirlooms, two old, very wise,
white-mustached men who had handled accounts, costs, sales, during
his father's régime and Phil's. And there was Stagg, the butler, and
his wife, who elected to remain at Hawk's Nest for the sake of house
room and a sentiment Rod understood, valued, was moved by. They
were, Stagg said, too old to go into service elsewhere. They had a
bit of money put by. Enough to live rent free, but not enough to
cope with the cost of town living. They would like to stay at Hawk's
Nest and keep it aired and dry, to care for such part of the grounds
as Stagg could keep from going to rack. Rod thanked them and let
them have their wish. It gave himself and Mary a room always ready
when they wanted to spend a day or two there, which they did at
times. It was pleasant to sit on those wide porches in blazing
August, to watch Rod junior prance across the lawn astride a stick.
Hawk's Nest was home in a very dear and intimate sense, even if it
could no longer be maintained in the old opulent state. Rod never
passed down the channel in the _Haida_ about his business without a
lingering, regretful look at that red roof glowing against a
background of green timber and great mountains.
There remained only one link--apart from his sister Dorothy who came
to Hawk's Nest each summer for a month, and in whose Vancouver home
the diminished Norquay clan gathered at Christmas--between Rod and
the numerous folk who had haunted that place in the old days, the
girls he had danced with, the young fellows who had been his
contemporaries. That link was Isabel Wall.
It seemed a strange friendship. He had always regarded Isabel with a
feeling of patient tolerance. She had fallen in love with him once,
in her doll-like fashion, to his great embarrassment. She appeared
to have no recollection of that episode. She seemed firmly attached
to Mary. Between them, diverse as they were, there did exist an
intimacy, an understanding, an affection that Rod was slow to fathom,
which he did not fathom at all until he began to take serious stock
of Isabel and discovered that for all her unchanged pink-and-white
prettiness, this diminutive person was really not at all the Isabel
Wall of his original conception.
It seemed to him in the beginning to be incongruous that his wife's
greatest, almost her only intimate, should be the frivolous daughter
of a man who, next to Grove Norquay, was chiefly responsible for the
evil days upon which the Norquay family had fallen. But because his
faith in his wife's judgment was a vital thing, he let that pass. If
at first glance it seemed incomprehensible it was an accomplished
fact. Isabel lived in his house as much as she did her own. She
seemed absolute mistress of her comings and goings. If she had once
had no mark to shoot at save dress and parties and men, she did not
seem to care greatly now whether she danced and played and flirted.
Yet she seldom uttered a serious thought. She remained a charming
irresponsible, given to slang and cigarettes. She descended upon
them in town, at the Euclataws, whether they were at Hawk's Nest or
in the logging camp on Valdez, when the mood took her. She was
always welcome. Isabel was a gloom-dispeller. Rod used to wonder at
first if she did not come chiefly for the joy she got in devilling
the life out of Andy Hall. But presently he found himself with a
sneaking fondness for Isabel and her quaint pertness. And when he
reached that stage and admitted it, Mary laughed.
"Isabel's a jewel, Rod. She's sound and sweet and true as steel.
She's been pampered and petted all her life. Yet it hasn't spoiled
her in any of the various ways in which that sort of thing does spoil
girls. She sticks to us because she says we're about the only real
people she knows. That tiny blonde head contains some very sound
wisdom. She hasn't many illusions left, and still she hasn't got
cynical or hard and calculating. Laska made a hash of her life and
has reacted accordingly. Their mother's hopelessly society-mad. Her
idea of heaven is to be presented at Court sometime. Bob drinks like
a fish and goes on the loose just as Grove used to do. Her father
knows only the money game and plays that to the exclusion of
everything else. The poor kid's only chance in the world, she says
herself, is to find and marry a man who can stand on his own feet."
Shortly after that conversation Rod went in search of a logging boss,
thinking, as he walked beside a chute in which hummed a steel "main
line" that quivered under the strain of a heavy load, of Isabel and
her astonishing metamorphosis. Or was it merely a cropping out of
something latent? Undeniably that did happen. By all the rules of
the game, Isabel should continue as she had begun, a butterfly, a
dainty parasitical creature who had never toiled, spun, or concerned
herself with anything but each day's pleasure as it came her way. He
hadn't credited Isabel with perception to fathom the futility of the
pursuit of pleasure as a life work, without duties, responsibilities,
or any creative passion. But he could understand her instinctive
revolt. He wondered what John P. Wall thought of this daughter who
found dissatisfaction in a life that was all pleasure and no purpose.
His errand took him far up into the workings. The daily routine of a
logging boss is an active one. The man Rod sought moved always ahead
of him, giving his overseeing eye to various spots where separate
gangs of men busied themselves with powerful and noisy machinery,
devoted to localized and violent struggle with logs of enormous
tonnage. A stranger to logging as it proceeds in the forests of the
Pacific Coast invariably gets a first impression of desperate effort
and grave danger in his approach to a donkey engine at work. The
black, round-bellied monster shudders and strains on anchored skids.
The inch and a quarter main line reels up on the drums with a grind
of gears, a behemothic sputtering of exhaust steam. Continuous
vibrations disturb the air and communicate themselves to the earth
over a wide radius. The cable runs away into the shadowy places of
the forest. It recedes therein, chattering, whining; it comes forth
dragging the huge sticks to the base of the sky-line pole; and the
logs go thence, dangling, sliding, gouging holes in the hillside: It
is all noise, effort, confusion, humming of lines, hiss of steam,
bull-blocks screaming; a deafening uproar until a stop signal brings
a hush that by contrast is solemn, as if that powerful machinery were
a heart that had suddenly stopped beating.
Rod found his man at last and returned. They were living in the old
Thorn house, taking their meals in a small room off the main
messhouse, where the crew bolted its collective food in occupied
silence, putting all its energy into the business of eating, and
reserving a free and unrestrained mode of conversation for the ease
of the bunkhouse. A steamer had touched and gone while he was
absent, passing north through the rapids on the afternoon slack. He
found Isabel Wall on the calk-splintered steps, teaching young
Roderick a whimsy she had picked up somewhere:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe!
What made the poor man do so?
He was a Robinson I know
But that's no reason he should crow.
I wonder why he Crusoe?"
She was making the boy letter-perfect in this. Andy Hall sat on the
step below her, smoking a cigarette in contemplative silence.
"They'll be through at Valdez to-morrow," he informed Rod.
"So soon? I thought they had a week to go."
"They made time," Andy commented tersely.
"Well, better load the working gear on floats and get it up here,"
Rod told him. "Have 'em begin on the cedar hollow."
"I put the fallers in there this afternoon."
Rod smiled. It was almost unnecessary to tell Andy Hall what should
be done. Sometimes it seemed as if Andy had a mysterious prescience.
Then Rod would recollect that they had discussed such a move long
before. Or it was the logical move which Andy merely anticipated.
In either case Andy always knew what he was doing, and why; nor did
he ever hesitate to take the initiative.
Rod leaned back in a grass chair, clasped his hands behind his head,
stared across the channel at the flash of the sun on the windows of
Hawk's Nest. Behind him, in a west-facing room, he could hear the
staccato of typewriter keys, tapping out the last chapter of Mary's
second novel. He wondered, if things had been different, if he would
have succeeded in that outlet. No, he decided. It would have been a
splendid thing to try. He had been eager to embody and interpret the
spirit of the pioneers. But he doubted now if he had the peculiar
creative gift of making words transform his imaginings into a reality
that would convey stark passion and stirring deeds. And Mary had
that gift, beyond a doubt; not only the inborn faculty of perceiving,
but the torturing necessity to transmit, to release through patient
drudgery at her chosen medium, that sense of life as a vast conflict
in which man struggles with his fellows, his gods, and his passions,
sometimes to victory and often to defeat.
No, he had the vision, the perceptive faculty, but not that uncanny
power to capture and pass it on. Such vision as he had must find its
outlet in action less subtle, more practical. He would never write
the stories he had dreamed; he knew that now. But Mary would; she
had her wings. He was proud of her flight. Only, sometimes, when
her work took her into a brooding remoteness, a spiritual detachment
that thrust not only himself but every material consideration
temporarily aside, he wondered if the artist could ever function
except as the supreme egotist, if the true artist must not by some
obscure compulsion subordinate everything to the imperative demands
of his art. Even so, he knew that he would rather have only such
portion of his wife as he could share than the most complete
possession--body, soul and brain--of any other woman he knew. Mary
would always understand. In any crisis she would always have courage
and confidence. She was his windward anchor. He loved her not for
what she did and said but for what she was--herself.
Young Roderick picked up a stick from one corner of the porch.
"Gotta go to work," he informed them gravely.
"What at?" Isabel inquired.
"Scalin' timber," he replied. He danced off down the path to the
beach, chanting:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe,
What made the poor man do so?"
Already incorporating the reality of his environment into the
child-world of make-believe. Rod smiled; he had done the same thing
himself, alone, happily, through just such hot, smoky, August days
long ago. The boy clambered over a heap of stovewood, measuring with
his stick, making marks on a bit of notepaper just as the scaler did
who walked the boom with pad and pencil and a six-foot scaling rule.
For a time the murmur of Isabel's and Andy's conversation accompanied
Rod's thoughts. He continued to stare across at Hawk's Nest. A
problem pressed him for solution, a question which involved closely
that gray house with its glowing roof of red tiles, from behind which
rose the conical top of the great cedar, in the shadow of which so
many Norquays took their last rest.
He was approaching a critical stage in his affairs. He did not know
how much longer he could carry on. Producing costs overtook market
prices, would soon pass them. Only by a foresighted contract with a
Puget Sound pulp mill had he kept going so long. In a month that
would expire. It could not be renewed on the same terms. The great
pulp plant in Phillips Arm which the Norquay Trust had financed and
which had never ground a ton of pulp until Rod forced it into
production, offered him prices he couldn't take on the wages paid and
hours worked. He wouldn't know where to turn soon, unless he
abandoned his present policy, cut wages to the bone, got into line
with the other employers. That seemed to him like a breach of faith.
He had made a fortune on the labor of his men already; that he was
poorer in funds than at the beginning did not alter the case. The
Norquay Trust had swallowed the profits. It would swallow a vast sum
yet before its appetite was glutted. It hurt him to think of these
men paying for Grove's mismanagement by lengthened hours and
shortened pay. Nor did he wish to shut down and wait a turn in the
market. A shutdown meant a cessation of revenue; that in turn might
precipitate the disaster he had struggled so hard to avert. It was a
very real difficulty.
He was stirred out of these reflections by a silence which had all
the effect of a disturbing sound. He came back to the immediate
present. Isabel still sat on the step, a dainty figure in a blue
sweater and pleated tan skirt, staring after Andy's retreating figure.
"Your right bower," she said complainingly, turning to meet Rod's
gaze, "is the stupidest man I know."
"You're a mile off the mark," Rod contradicted.
"He is," she repeated. "He's afraid of me."
"Andy Hall," Rod answered dryly, "is not afraid of anything or any
one, least of all a harmless person like you."
"He's in love with me," Isabel said coolly. "And he's so afraid of
me that he hasn't sense enough to see that all he has to do is to
hold out his hands and I'll fall into 'em like a--a ripe plum. Can't
you give him a hint, Rod?"
"Haven't you scalps enough at your belt without Andy's?"
"If I give him mine in exchange, that's fair enough," Isabel murmured.
"Do you really mean that?" Rod asked.
Isabel got out her cigarette case and deliberately blew smoke rings
before she replied.
"I don't know for sure," she said at last. "Sometimes I think so,
and again I'm not so sure. I could tell better if he'd ask me. It
isn't that I wouldn't like to. It's simply that I have qualms of
conscience sometimes about wishing myself on a man like that. I'm so
damned useless, Rod."
"I don't think that men as a rule love women and marry them on the
basis of their usefulness," he returned. "I'm certain Andy wouldn't.
I must say it's rather odd to see you taking that slant at it."
"Oh, yes," she drawled petulantly. "I suppose you've got me labelled
fragile, too. Just because a fellow's been brought up gilt-edged and
has acted accordingly, is she to be credited with neither heart nor
conscience, nor even common sense? I have come to the conclusion
that I don't want to be a canary in anybody's cage, Rod. When I size
up some of the horrible examples of how not to do it in my own crowd,
I get afraid. I'm twenty-six years old, Roderick. Does it never
strike you that a girl like me doesn't play a lone hand so long
without good reasons?"
"What's that got to do with Andy?" Rod inquired.
"I'll tell you in words of one syllable and maybe you'll get it," she
retorted. "Some years ago, if you recall the occasion, I was very
much in love with your own distinguished self. I hope," she smile
impishly, "it doesn't embarrass you to be reminded. It doesn't me,
because I still think my judgment was good, even if I was out of
luck. I've been in love probably half a dozen times since. And I
always drew back at what the novelists call the psychological moment.
Why? God knows. I don't. Something lacking, I suppose. Perhaps in
spite of my giddiness I had a hunch that being in love with love
isn't quite the same as being in love with a person. Then the war
took all the likely ones away, and a good many of the best of them
didn't come back. And something has happened to those who did come
back. They're either so keen on the make they daren't take a girl
seriously, or--or they've gone bad; the bloom's off 'em. Not one of
them looks good to me. Nor the life they live. I hope I don't sound
preachy. But some people who are rotten with money--especially those
who've made it so fast they haven't had time to grow up to it--are
rotten with other things, too. I may look like what Andy calls a
charming, innocent parasite. I like to think of myself as charming.
My instincts at any rate are innocent. But I do object to the role
of parasite. I don't want to be one. I've never done anything
useful, even for myself, but that isn't saying I don't want to--even
if it's no more than to comfort and pet some man and hearten him for
whatever sort of job he has in hand. I've never worked, but that's
no sign I wouldn't if I knew where to start in. I'm not lazy, nor am
I too fastidious for workaday life. That's what it's got to do with
Andy Hall. I like him. I'd hate to tell you just how much; you'd
blush. And he likes me. I know that, although he's the best little
sentiment-represser I've come across. He's afraid of me, or he's
afraid of what I am. I mean I think he doesn't see me just as a
woman but as part of and more or less inseparable from a certain
background--a background he doesn't like and doesn't trust.
"You see," she went on more hurriedly, her voice becoming a little
uncertain, her eyes turned steadfastly on the swirls and foaming
overfalls the flood now made strongly in the rapids, "I get so
infernally lonesome and discouraged sometimes. I'm tired of froth.
I don't like the giddy pace most of 'em go. I don't want to be like
Laska, soured on everything, so that she lives on cocktails and
cigarettes and jazz. If she sits still long enough to think, she's
apt to cry. If I don't find myself happy in the jazz age, Rod, at
least I belong to it sufficiently not to be afraid or ashamed of my
own thoughts and feelings and desires. I'm a normal female person.
A woman can't escape the implication of a man, nor vice versa. Most
of 'em go it blind. I'm not made that way. I don't know why, but
it's a fact. Long ago I made up my mind that if I couldn't find the
real thing in my own crowd, I'd go outside, just as you did."
"And then," she made a little gesture with her hands, "remember the
day Andy showed Mrs. Hector Emmert his medals and made that
passionate little speech that she said was sedition? Well, I warmed
up to Andy Hall right then and there. Two years. I'm no nearer him
now. He holds himself in. He won't let go. What can I do?"
"I'll tell you," Rod said impulsively. "Andy doesn't know you. You
don't let go yourself."
"Fiddlesticks," she retorted. "Two years. I think I'm shamelessly
transparent."
"Two years? I've known you more than ten," Rod countered. "I've
learned more about you in ten minutes than I did in all the time
before. So imagine his handicap. You're a rich man's daughter.
You've had every social advantage. You belong to a class that taken
by and large Andy Hall not only dislikes but despises for its
stupidity and arrogance in so far as it deals with working people."
"Oh, yes, the well-known capitalist class," Isabel said impatiently.
"But you're one and he likes you."
"I come in a different category," Rod answered grimly. "I despise
the tin-horn capitalist whose only god is capital more than Andy Hall
does. It's part of a social theory with Andy. It's a personal feud
with me. I'm suffering from the manipulations of that type of
gold-digger. It has just about ruined me and has caused me to risk
all that several generations of honest, generous-minded men built up,
including a home many of us love--and a reputation for integrity
besides. But Andy happens to know me as a man apart from my present
dubious position as a capitalist. He doesn't really know you as a
woman. He may be in love with you. Probably is, because you are an
attractive little devil--"
"I thank you very much, kind sir," Isabel interrupted mockingly.
"But," Rod went on unheeding, "unless he were absolutely sure you
would, as Christ told the man who wanted to be saved, 'Leave all that
thou hast and follow Me,' a donkey engine couldn't pull a declaration
of any sort out of him. Don't you see? Andy's full of sinful pride.
He's class-conscious. He knows your kind of people better than you
do, and he knows they regard him as belonging to an inferior order.
He would chew his heart up and spit it out in little pieces before
he'd let any flirtatious daughter of the idle rich have it for a
curio in her collection. You've talked and laughed with him here in
our house. You call him Andy and he calls you Isabel. But remember
that he knows what manners are, and that being genial, even
pleasantly intimate to the point of plaguing him the way you do,
doesn't really mean anything. He's my trusted superintendent, and he
draws a corking good salary which he faithfully earns, but he knows
that wouldn't prevent a person like you from cutting him dead if he
met you in, say the Vancouver Hotel Dubarry Room, hanging on the arm
of, well, Sir Earnest Staples of Government House, Victoria."
"Never," Isabel protested. "I'm no snob."
"I didn't say you would. But it's been done. You've seen that sort
of thing pulled," Rod continued. "Andy knows he doesn't belong in
your crowd. What's more, he doesn't want to. He has seen quite
clearly from the outside what you've seen from the inside, and come
to the same conclusion. But he doesn't know you've arrived at such a
conclusion. I didn't know it myself. You poke fun at them, of
course. But you play the game with them right along, and you
camouflage your real attitude toward life with Andy, with me, with us
all. In fact, you'd have a hard time convincing any one, offhand,
that you ever had a serious thought in your life. So how do you
expect Andy to take you seriously?"
"But must one pull a long face and go about spreading the philosophy
of disillusion and appealing for sympathy?" Isabel protested. "I
can't help it if I'm mostly a cheerful idiot. How am I to make Andy
understand that--that I--that--"
She choked up. And Rod felt intensely sorry for her at that moment.
But he knew of no way to help.
"I said I'd tell you, and I'll try," he went on gently. "If you
really do love Andy Hall and want him, you had better sometime just
put your arms around his neck and tell him so."
Isabel looked away. A deep flush colored her white neck and spread
upward until it was lost in the roots of her yellow fluff of bobbed
hair.
"Oh," she whispered, "I couldn't do that."
"That's the best way," he said kindly. "Andy has all the finer
instincts. But he has a lot of inhibitions you don't know anything
about. I don't think you really understand class feeling, Isabel.
You seem to be free of it altogether. But it exists. Believe me, I
speak both from experience and observation. It is next to impossible
to build a bridge across a definite social gulf. You have to jump
it--from one side or the other. People are apt to deny this in a
supposedly democratic country. But it's truer than they think. You
put Andy in dress clothes and turn him loose in your own crowd, and
he'd get by with very little coaching. But he wouldn't stick. He'd
say it was shoddy. Which you and I and Mary are agreed it is. But
in contact with intellect, art, real achievement in the best sense,
Andy not only asserts his equality, but would get a glow of enjoyment
out of the association. Andy Hall's character is sterling, and
that's above any class distinction. If Andy really cares for you,
Isabel, I'd say you were justified in going to extremes to let him
know where _you_ stand."
"I can't go all the way myself," she whispered, and fell silent,
staring moodily over the channel waters. Then she got up and went
inside.