A day or two later Rod came back to that conversation.
"I keep thinking of Laska," he said to Isabel. "Is she really so
soured on things as you declared? Is she deliberately hitting the
high spots just for the kick there's in it?"
"I'll tell the listening world she is," Isabel replied.
"I wonder why?" Rod mused. "She's free, young, and well-off. At
least, she has all the advantages of wealth."
"Several whys," Isabel answered. "Her mind isn't healthy. It's
twisted, or tainted or something. She started out several years ago
with a lot of sentimental illusions. Matrimony, as she experienced
it, was--well, unsatisfactory. Laska backed the wrong horse in the
marriage race, and didn't discover it until too late. You don't mind
my saying that Grove was a good deal of a mucker in his private life?"
Rod shook his head.
"I'm not particularly sensitive about what you say of him."
"Well, it's true. Did you know that Laska was really in love, very
much so, with Phil?"
"I suspected it."
"She was always rather a queer fish," Isabel continued. "Good,
generous impulses mixed up with very uncertain ones. She liked them
both at first, about fifty-fifty, I think. She may have married
Grove simply because he asked her first. He did have a way of making
women like him--all kinds of women--for awhile. Perhaps the fact
that he was elected to be the biggest toad in the Norquay puddle
influenced her. I don't know. I'm sure she thought it a fine thing
to be mistress of Hawk's Nest and all it implied. Being chatelaine
of a place with dignity, the permanence of age, all the indefinable
things that Hawk's Nest makes you feel are part of it, must have
appealed to her. But when she found what she was really up against
as Grove's wife, how very different it turned out from the thing she
dreamed it would be, well, it was the most natural thing in the world
for her to look back longingly at Phil and to be intensely sorry for
herself. Self-pity is a very demoralizing sort of thing. Phil
looked like pure gold alongside what she'd chosen--no woman who lived
with one man and knew the other could help seeing and feeling that.
To know that she could have had Phil if she'd so chosen made it worse.
"Of course there was no turning back. It isn't done, you know--short
of open scandal, or a perfectly insufferable outbreak of some sort.
She had cooked her goose. In an extreme she might have divorced
Grove. But she couldn't possibly marry his brother afterward.
Nobody would have stood for that. So she just had to sweat. And
that makes any woman sour, or hard, or reckless.
"You know how Grove performed," Isabel pointed out. "He was a very
untidy person--morally."
Rod nodded assent.
"A man like that should never marry," Isabel continued sagely. "He
was like a small, very headstrong boy with toys. Women were toys.
When he got tired playing with one, he chucked her away and got
another. He did that before he married Laska, I suppose. As soon as
the novelty of her wore off he went right on--as usual. Everybody
knew it. No one could do anything about it. He was fairly adept at
keeping his affairs _de c[oe]ur_ out of sight. There were a few
explosions, to my personal knowledge. Then Laska finally settled
back into a state of contemptuous resentful indifference, and let him
go his own gait.
"But it made her suffer intensely, and it has given her a nasty taste
in her mouth--and she has all the conventional reactions. If she had
kids or work, anything real to take her mind off herself, she might
come back to normal. As it is, I shouldn't be surprised at anything
that sister of mine might do. She's all tension. She goes on
hitting the high spots because she's got to do something. It's
rotten, but so long as she can't get a kick out of anything else, why
I expect she'll go on. I don't mean that she's dabbling in muck.
Her instincts are fairly decent. But she's hovering on the ragged
edge."
"Pity, isn't it?" Rod commented. "One can't take people by the
scruff of the neck and set them right; even if one is sure of one's
own standards and profound wisdom, which no one ever really is. When
it comes to a showdown most of us have to dance according to our
bent, and pay the piper when he presents his bill."
"That's the devil of it; that inconvenient bill," Isabel said
lightly. "That's why I've got fussy about how and with whom I dance.
There's not much fun dancing alone, but there's nothing but grief in
dancing with a death's head wished on you for a permanent partner.
That," she confessed naïvely, "is one of the reasons I like Andy
Hall. You couldn't conceive of Andy being a bore, or a failure at
whatever he undertook--or cheating. I hate cheats. Even the
unconscious ones. And there's a lot of 'em about."
Rod forgot this under pressure of other things. It was all true,
even if unpleasant, and he had more pertinent affairs in hand, keener
problems that involved himself, people who were still entangled in
the Norquay Trust, the men in his employ who labored faithfully
because they had somehow acquired the assurance that he could keep
the wheels turning when other camps shut down. They seemed to
proceed on the assumption that being on the Norquay pay roll bestowed
upon them immunity from the paralysis that crept over the body of
industry.
To go on as he had begun was more than a material necessity. It had
become a matter of pride as well as a necessity. He had fashioned a
productive machine that worked now with automatic precision. But
without continuous operation this machine would fall to pieces with
his first task a little more than half-done, and his second task,
which had been forming in his mind nebulously from the
beginning--that of perpetuating this machine for the benefit of every
unit therein, himself included--receded into nothingness. He had no
philanthropic experiments in mind, but he did have an economic and
industrial theory which he believed would work. Unless he could
shake off the deadly weight of the Norquay Trust, it would crush him
financially. To disband the organization now would destroy what he
had been at great pains to create. His men wouldn't understand
failure. They would classify him as another false alarm, another
promiser who failed to perform unless it was to his own advantage.
He knew that once he got the white elephant off his hands, all he
needed was his men and machinery to go on indefinitely, to build up
slowly on a solid basis. But the price of continued and unquestioned
leadership was victory in this first battle. And the chance of
continuous progress to victory began to seem more remote.
The bottom had fallen out of everything. The brief post-war orgy of
production had run its artificial course. The industrial war babies
had died of inanition. Exchange that fluttered like a wounded bird
killed international trade. Europe was steeped in poverty. The
waste of war could not be repaired until the wrangles of peace
subsided. Instead of subsiding, the quarrels over peace became more
acute. While the politicians thrust and parried industry languished.
In the domain of timber only first grades and pulp wood commanded a
sale; and both on a falling market. The camps were shut down, the
mills were silent. Neither camps nor mills would operate unless a
profit seemed sure, a good safe margin. Few of them had the
incentive to go on, such as drove Rod Norquay. He had to go on so
long as he could clear a dollar, even fifty cents a thousand. He was
butchering his holdings, but every dollar that went into the Norquay
Trust brought him nearer a clean slate.
But even Rod's narrow margin was vanishing. Second-grade stuff
accumulated on his hands. He could only renew his pulp contracts at
a loss. And he was fighting to make good a loss. Unless he could
hang on for the turn in the market tide that must come-- His dilemma
was very real.
He could do two things. He could shut down. Six months'
non-production and he could say good-by to every hope of a passable
end to this adventure. Hawk's Nest and the ultimate sale of his
standing timber might square the Norquay obligation. It would leave
him picked to a skeleton. Or he could revise his established policy,
cut wages to the bone, drive labor with a whip, fight them when they
protested, go through the ugly stages of strikes, sabotage, hatreds,
clashes, diminished output; in a word precipitate the industrial
warfare which had made the coast a Bedlam for the single-track minds
on both sides. And that also would ruin him.
September brought him to the stone wall. He came back from a
business trip to town, depressed, uneasy. He knew that a good many
people would consider his scruples unfounded. But he hated to cut
wages. He had made such enormous profits on the labor of these men.
He knew it. He knew that they knew it. It was not the way an
employer should feel. It was not in line with the common conception
of property rights. Nevertheless that was how he felt. However he
came by it, his instinct was patriarchal. His men had become an
aggregation of human beings for whose welfare he was to a certain
degree responsible. He didn't know whether or not they shared such a
feeling. He was too sensible to expect that sort of response. But
certainly loyalty of a definite sort had manifested itself during an
unsettled period in complete absence of friction. They had never
made an unreasonable demand.
To keep going necessitated drastic reductions. Would they stand it?
Rod had very few illusions about men of any sort. They might not be
able to envisage what he did,--a permanent benefit to be derived by
all who stood by the ship if the ship weathered the storm. He could
not mislead them by promises. He was fundamentally incapable of
making promises he could not guarantee to keep.
He called Andy Hall into conference, explained in further detail just
what conditions they were faced with. In the midst of this he saw
Andy's attention waver, his eyes turn. Rod's gaze followed the
direction. Isabel Wall had been at the Euclataws two weeks. She was
walking now slowly along the beach, bare-headed, her yellow hair
glinting in the sun like spun gold, her skirt fluttering in the wind.
A queer expression hovered on Andy's face.
Rod uttered another sentence softly; asked a question. Andy did not
seem to hear.
"Damn it, never mind Isabel!" he broke out in exasperation. "Any
time you want her you can have her, so for God's sake come out of
that trance and listen to what I'm saying."
Andy glared at him, not so much in anger at the outburst as in sheer
amazement, tinged with hopeful eagerness.
"What did you say?"
Rod began where he left off.
"I heard _that_," Andy told him bluntly. "I know it anyway without
telling. I asked what you said about _her_."
"Oh, hell!" Rod threw up his hands. Then he got hold of himself.
Something in Andy's eyes--a curious illuminating recollection of
himself sitting in the stern of his canoe long ago, staring back
through a moonlit night at Oliver Thorn's house with a strange fever
in his blood, a dull ache in his heart.
"Lord, Andy," he said with rough kindness. "Does that knock you all
in a heap? You're not generally so slow." He paused an instant,
then repeated Isabel's own words. "If you weren't stupid you'd see
that all you have to do is to open your hands and she'll fall into
'em like a ripe plum."
Andy matched glances with him for ten silent seconds. Rod smiled
wearily. His impatience had burned out. Then a flush dyed Andy's
fair, freckled skin.
"Shoot," he said presently. "I'm listening."
Rod continued.
"Simple. Leave it to the men," Andy counseled. "Don't make any
arbitrary statements about either hours or wages. This bunch is
wiser to conditions in general than you'd think. Show 'em your hand
and give them the option of deciding what they want to do. Better
let me handle them myself. Will you back up whatever I say or do?"
"Yes, your judgment is as good as mine where they're concerned."
Andy wrinkled his brows for a minute.
"I have a hunch they'll stand for pretty nearly anything you want to
do, if they know your reasons," he said at last. "Be a pity to bust
up a crack crew. I think they kinda feel that way themselves. It's
a cut or a shutdown anyway."
Rod confirmed this.
"Well, we'll see to-night."
Hall went away. Rod watched him follow alongshore after Isabel.
They disappeared together over a mossy point. His glance came back
along the booming ground, followed the shore. Rod junior played on
the gravel with the small son of a hook-tender and the equally small
daughter of a high-rigger. A dozen houses where married men lived
with their families faced that strip of shore. Clothes fluttered
from taut lines. It neared five o'clock. Supper fires flung blue
pennants from various chimneys. Over in the messhouse a flunky sang
at his work and dishes clinked. From far up on the wooded slopes
came shrill whistle blasts, the throb of machinery, all muffled in
the deep cool forest over which was spreading a blight of raw stumps,
broken branches, a litter of destruction.
He went into the house. Mary sat with a few letters in her lap, the
gleanings of that steamer's mail. She looked up at him expectantly.
He shook his head.
"Can't tell yet where we'll come out," he said.
"It's getting to be a sort of a nightmare with you, isn't it, Rod?"
she said wistfully. "The whole thing."
"Oh, well," he replied absently, "another year, maybe sooner, it'll
be finished--win, lose, or draw."
He lit a cigarette, drew a whiff or two, sat with it forgotten in his
fingers till the stub burned him.
The long quitting blast went echoing up and down the channel. Men
came pouring off the hill. The supper gong clanged, a prolonged and
resonant metallic vibration, like an anvil under quick strokes of a
hammer. Rod and his wife and boy walked to the small dining room set
apart for their use. And still Andy and Isabel remained somewhere
beyond that mossy point jutting like a green tongue into the sea.
Not until Rod and his wife were back on the porch and the last logger
long since smoking in the bunk house amid a drone of talk did the
twain appear. Andy walked straight on to the camp. Isabel perched
herself on the top step. She regarded them with a heightened color,
an obvious repression, a look in her eyes as if she had beheld
wonders.
Mary looked after Andy, back at Isabel.
"I'll go along to keep you company," she suggested.
"I'm not the least bit hungry."
"Are you ill?" Mary inquired teasingly.
Isabel shook her head until the bobbed yellow hair stood out like an
aureole.
"I never felt better in my life," she declared.
"I shouldn't be surprised," Rod ventured, "if you acted on the
suggestion I made a few days ago."
Isabel looked blank for a second. Then she remembered.
"I didn't have to, Mr. Roderick," she said defiantly. "So there."
"Ah," Rod declared. "I perceive something has happened."
"Sagacious man," Isabel retorted. "Marvel of penetration, aren't
you? What do you suppose happened, now?"
"Tell us," Mary suggested. "You're bursting with something."
Isabel arose, spread wide her short skirt, made an elaborate curtsey.
"Dear friends, I wish to announce my engagement to Mr. Andrew Hall,"
she said with adorable whimsicality. "Wedding gifts of articles
useful in housekeeping on a small scale will be appreciated."
Then quite suddenly in the midst of her smiles a bright wetness
welled up in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Mary put both arms around
her.
"I'm gladder than any Pollyanna that ever blithered gladness," Isabel
blubbered from this shelter. "And I don't care who knows it. Say,
Mary, did it affect you this way?"
The two women disappeared within. Young Rod climbed on his father's
knee and demanded to be told the story of Paul Bunyan and his famous
camp in Michigan where the loggers were ninety feet high and
twenty-four feet across the shoulders, and the cook coasted over the
top of his kitchen range on roller skates of a morning to fry acres
of hot cakes for the breakfast of these lusty men. Young Rod grew
heavy-eyed listening to this gorgeous embroidery of fertile fancy on
commonplace facts and presently went his way to bed.
Rod sat alone on the porch in a twilight that filled his eyes with a
vista of pearl sky and purple hills, his ears with the song of the
rapids that had crooned him to sleep when he was little like his son.
There was a grateful hush, as if the mountains said their evening
prayers, and the smell of the forest mingled with the dank kelp smell
as the falling tide bared a weedy shore.
Andy's voice called to him in the dusk.
"Come on over to the office. There's a delegation to talk to you."
In the plain room where during working hours the bookkeeper cast up
the camp accounts four men sat at a table. They greeted Rod
pleasantly and came at once to the point.
"We've talked this over," one said. "Hall's told us how things
stand. We don't want a shutdown. We want to keep workin'. For
pretty near two years now we've set wages and hours. Whatever we
asked we got without any argument. Now that times are bad again,
we're willin' to leave it to you. We figure that eight hours is a
long enough day. You set the pay."
"That's good enough," Rod answered. "But the cut may jar you.
Things are at rock bottom. Nothing that we use, food, supplies,
machinery parts, has come down a nickel. It seems a shame to cut
wages, but unless timber prices go up, there's no choice."
"Uh-huh," one grunted. "How much of a cut do you figure will let you
get by?"
"Twenty per cent," Rod told them bluntly.
"Well, that _is_ pretty stiff," the chief spokesman commented.
"Still--we won't go back on our word. Times _are_ bad."
"I want to keep the outfit running," Rod said. "I can't do it on a
losing scale. I'll post up a new wage schedule to-morrow. If a turn
for the better comes, wages will go up again. I can't go any farther
than that."
"That's fair enough. Guess that's all. Good night."
They nodded and filed out. Andy and Rod stood looking at each other.
"I figured that was about the line they'd take," Andy said. "I
simply gave them the facts. Told them it was up to them whether the
camp shut down to-morrow--the best camp in the country. And that if
it did shut down for any length of time, it might never open again
under the same management. Then they barred me out of the meeting,
and chewed it over themselves. And there you are."
"Isabel came home manifesting unmistakable symptoms," Rod said
slowly. "This seems to have been your big day all around, Andy."
They shook hands on that.