Through that disastrous autumn of 1920--when the logging camps of
B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent
storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of both sat in clubs
and homes, cursing labor, the government, that vague entity called
the consumer who had mysteriously ceased to consume, raving about
confiscatory taxation, bewildered and resentful in the face of a
retrograde swing of the commercial pendulum--the Norquay machine
functioned without a single creaking joint, on into the winter season
through sodden weeks of mist and rain until a deep snow in January
buried the gear and froze the water pipes that fed the donkey
engines. Then even the hardiest logger was glad to stay indoors.
A certain percentage of the younger men, with good money burning
their pockets, went to town, victims of the inevitable reaction from
the grind of work. But most of the crew followed a wiser counsel and
stayed in the camp, played poker in the bunk houses, read books and
magazines, organized stag dances. Some of the married men built
float houses on rafts which could be moved when the camp changed, and
brought their families there to live away from rent and fuel costs in
town. Their joint efforts persuaded the provincial government to
establish a temporary school. So by degrees the camp began to take
on the aspect of a community.
The shutdown was comparatively brief,--five weeks. Then rains wiped
out the drifts, banished the frost. In the dripping forest where fog
wraiths hung like smoke among the tree tops, axes clacked, saws
whined, cables hummed, and the logs came down to the sea.
Where the logging industry in great part had stopped dead before the
barrier of unprofitable operation, Rod did not even slow down. It
was not a question of a profit. It was simply a matter of turning
trees into cash to replenish the plundered coffers of the Norquay
Trust. Every boom that sold in the market lessened somewhat his
obligations, once his men agreed cheerfully that a lowered wage was
better than idleness. The reddest radical among them believed in him
sufficiently to go ahead on the assurance that wages would
automatically keep step with prices for the product of their labor.
In few other organizations that Rod knew did such a feeling prevail.
Where it had play there was a minimum of dispute, a maximum of
production. But it was rare. His affairs took him into Vancouver a
great deal. He had kept up membership in a club to which his father
and grandfather had belonged. And in the club quarters which served
him as a hotel he came into casual contact with sundry pillars of
British Columbia industry. The amount of invective poured on the
head of things in general was a revelation.
These worthy gentlemen over their wine and cigars affected to believe
the State, the home, the nation, reeled to ruin before union wage
scales. The rancor in their voices when they spoke of working-class
demands amazed Rod sometimes. But as he listened, he perceived that
this rancor was impartially distributed over many things, upon the
government, upon taxation, upon affairs in Europe, upon the gaunt
specter of the Lenine-Trotsky régime; there seemed no end to their
grievances. And he perceived further that this uneasy spirit lay in
the fact that the sweeping tide of war prosperity had slacked
suddenly where they had childishly believed it would surge on to
greater heights,--and that this slackening was unprofitable. If the
stagnation kept up long enough, they must shrink to a lesser stature;
some to ruin. They were uneasy. Some, committed to great
undertakings, were palpably afraid.
If they could keep wages down and prices up! They did not say so
openly. They did not correlate the two objectives. They merely
brightened at any prospect of better selling prices for their various
products, greater demand, and frowned in distress over labor costs.
They said labor would have to come off its high horse, and they said
it with a good deal of unnecessary vehemence. Quite unanimously,
almost instinctively, they were bitter against any man who did not
agree with them.
They said, "Men won't work." That was a lie. Rod Norquay had proved
it. His men had worked; and he had in his crew a score of agitators
black-listed in other camps. No. Men who had seen war-time wages
easily over-lapped by war-time living costs would not work for a
driving employer under conditions arbitrarily dictated; not unless
the whip of necessity lashed them to the task. And when they had to,
inevitably they laid down on the job. That was the root of the
trouble.
"You could open your camps and start your mills tomorrow," Rod broke
into a conversation at his elbow one day, "if you'd base your tactics
on the fact that men are men and not beasts of burden. I'm doing it
and making money. I've done it right along. There's no magic about
it. I simply accept present-day conditions, instead of mourning for
the good old days when a logger was something less than a dog in a
kennel. The trouble with you people is that you're hogs by nature.
You're not satisfied to have your snouts in the trough. You want
both feet in."
He walked out on the street, leaving them insulted and indignant.
But he did not care. He was in one of his moods, in one of those
momentary surges of passion that overtake the hard-pressed man. He
saw everything in such moments with a distorted clarity. The motives
and aspirations of such men seemed mean beyond words. If it had been
possible for him to stay long at such a pitch of emotion, he would
have hated them as heartily as they hated him.
They did hate him. Chiefly because they distrusted him, because they
couldn't understand his motives. For a long time they had believed
that he was a fool about money, a sentimentalist who was sinking a
great fortune into a bottomless pit. Then because they saw no sign
of collapse, they credited him with ambitious schemes which aroused
their cupidity, and finally their antagonism when he continued to
play a lone hand and succeed where they, with their little
combinations, either failed or were afraid to run a risk of failing.
He would enter no arrangement designed to put labor in its place. He
would have nothing to do with employers' associations. He stood out
a lone figure, carrying on his shoulders the burden of the Norquay
Trust and in his hands a producing organization whose efficiency they
envied and could not duplicate by their methods.
All that winter Rod heard hints, snatches of conversation; he
watched, listened, made mental notes. He heard the complaining of
the pinched industrial barons. They blamed the war now. _C'est la
guerre!_
But it was not the war. They were reaping, all civilization was
reaping, only seed that had been sown long before the war. The
worthy bourgeois learned nothing; but he did forget many things.
Chiefly he forgot, or perhaps had never learned, that the war did not
create greed, ineptitude, blundering, injustice; the war didn't endow
man with a tendency to snatch at chestnuts in the fire and complain
loudly when he burned his fingers. It seemed to Rod utterly childish
to blame the war for individual or even national folly. The war had
its own burden of iniquity to bear. The war created nothing and
destroyed nothing that had its root in the human heart. At the worst
it had only deflected certain things, released pent forces and
passions.
He considered. Grove would have made as great a mess of his
ambitious schemes if no cannon had waked echoes in Flanders. He had
been a victim of his own weakness. A weak, vain man with great power
in his hands, and a group of strong, predatory men filching it from
him on the old principle that "he shall take who has the power and he
shall keep who can."
This was the law that seemed to rule modern industrial society.
Right has always rested on power; it cannot be otherwise. Very well
then. Let them live by the law. Rod could not help a sneer when he
saw these aspiring minor plutocrats wince as the shoe pinched them;
the shoe which they would have fitted on other feet without a qualm,
if they could.
Nevertheless the muttered growling of various influential persons
echoed in his ears now and then. He heard it directly. He noted the
effect of it in different aspects of his more or less complicated
affairs. There were influential cliques in Vancouver who took it as
a personal grievance that the Norquay estate--which was Rod
himself--would neither heed their Jeremiads concerning labor, nor
deviate from a settled policy.
It takes so little to arouse the ugly devils that lurk in men. They
tried to make a feud of what was only a feeling of irritation. They
attacked him. When they went that length, Rod struck back with
whatever weapon lay to hand, and he had not a few in his arsenal.
They couldn't hurt him; they could at most annoy. And so presently,
Rod, finding no cracks in his material armor through which a spear
could be thrust, ceased to be troubled by their futile activities.
He despised their stratagems, and mocked at them, and confounded them
with a waspish sarcasm whenever he encountered them in person.
Undoubtedly in that year he earned something close to hatred from a
certain group of men who five years earlier would have been aghast at
such a state of affairs.
About certain phases of this Isabel Wall kept him duly informed. But
in the spring of that year she married Andy Hall,--and was herself
immediately cast out from among the chosen people. Which
circumstance only moved Isabel to amused laughter. But it stirred
Rod and Mary to admiration. In this final step Isabel seemed ta have
burned all her bridges with a high heart. They were quietly married
and came to live with Rod and Mary for company's sake,--since the two
husbands were necessarily absent a great deal of the time.
Not long after that the last stick of the last Norquay timber on
Valdez, that noble stretch of fir and cedar Oliver Thorn had
husbanded so long, found its way to the boomsticks. When the first
crew was ready to shift its donkey engines and coils of cable, Rod
said to Andy Hall:
"Have that outfit loaded on floats. Take it over to Mermaid Bay and
make a high-lead setting a little back from shore to the right of the
landing. Better start getting these camp buildings over there too."
Andy stared at him.
"You're not going to cut that timber?" He waved a hand across the
channel, where the dusky forest massed behind the red roof of Hawk's
Nest.
"Why not?" Rod asked. He wondered if Andy shared a feeling that
stirred, he believed, in no breast save his own and Mary's.
"It's a damned shame," Andy muttered.
"No choice."
It was the simple truth. Rod looked across at Valdez often in the
next few weeks--perhaps to turn his eyes from the desecration at
hand. He did not expect any save himself to feel such a sentiment,
to feel a physical shrinking every time a faller lifted his
long-drawn cry of "Tim-_br-r-r-r_," and the sobbing swish of lofty
boughs sweeping in a great arc and the crashing thud marked another
tree prone. Valdez was a waste. Where living green had clothed the
hills there lifted stumps, torn earth, bald rock ledges. Desolation.
The Granite Pool lay in its cliffy hollow, bared to the hot eye of
the sun. The deer and the birds had withdrawn to the farther woods.
Animal life banished, vegetation destroyed. Barren. Bleak.
Ugliness spread over square miles. Soon Dent Island would be like
that. Hawk's Nest would stand bleak and bare on a stripped
promontory. If man were immortal, surely the troubled spirits of his
dead kinsmen must hover dumbly about the spot. But they were as
powerless as he.
He had walked out to see the first tree thrown down, and he had
overheard one faller say to his mate, looking up at the stone house
and lifting his face to sniff the sweet smell of lilac blown to him
across the lawns by a June breeze:
"By God, it's almost a crime to cut these trees."
But, as he had said to Andy Hall--no choice. Upon that twelve
hundred acres the trees stood bough to bough,--clean, straight, tall,
enormous of girth and sound to the core. From the level center of
the island an easy slope fell away to the water on every side. For a
mile back from Hawk's Nest to walk abroad was like walking in the
nave of a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps the Goths in their northern
fastnesses first saw those pointed arches in the lofty symmetry of
fir and pine. For a hundred years the Norquays had warred on the
thickets and undergrowth. They had cleared away the dead trunks and
the rotten windfalls. The floor of that forest was the floor of a
park. Bough to bough the trees stood in endless ranks. Man was a
pygmy among them. Dim aisles ran out into shadowy perspective. Only
on the southern fringe bordering the house and lawn had the forest
been thinned to let in sunshine and become clothed with grass. All
the rest was carpeted with moss.
No logging crew on the Pacific Coast ever put their gear into such a
logging chance. Twelve hundred acres of fir and cedar, few less than
four foot thick at the base, thousands that three men touching
fingertips could not span, clean straight trees that lifted a hundred
feet without a knot or limb, and another hundred above that bared
their heads to the sun. Their feet in perpetual shadow; their heads
upholding the sky.
Except on two or three hundred acres of jungle at the northern end
there was nothing in all that stretch to hamper a rigging-slinger
with his snaky cables. The fallers could lay a tree where they
wished. The high-lead gear could snatch the logs out at top speed.
Rod could imagine old Jim Handy, the human logging machine, looking
with glad eyes on such ground and such timber. Records would be made
there. Big days that the loggers would talk about in years to come;
days when more timber would go down to float within the boomsticks
than ever was moved by a crew of men between sun and sun.
And that was why they were there now. He had hoped to save a part of
this. But the pressure was too great. He had to have a given amount
of revenue within a given time. Only by this means could it be
secured. It was fortunate for him that he had this resource, doubly
fortunate that it would go out on a rising market; for 1921 marked
the turn of the tide.
All lost save honor! He smiled at the self-righteous expression. He
could strike an attitude and utter that worn phrase. It was true.
But was it valid,--either the attitude or the phrase? Yes, for
himself. He was throwing away every material advantage that men
live, work, fight for, plan and scheme and struggle to attain. And
he did not do it because it was a reasonable, logical course. He did
it to gain peace with himself, to retain his own self-respect. He
was so made that he could endure anything but the thought of meeting
an enemy and skulking away in the face of danger, of treachery to a
trust, of taking an unfair advantage. Yet there were times when he
felt that it was too great a price to pay for another man's blunder.
And then he would feel as if he had done something, or contemplated
doing something, of which he was ashamed. He began to realize that
the cheerful giver gives nothing of value compared to the glow he
gets in giving; and that the man who can cheerfully sacrifice his
dearest possessions has never yet been born.
They were living once more in the old house. For how long Rod did
not know and he tried not to think. The outcome was still uncertain;
and where uncertainty lingers so does hope. At least, it was very
pleasant to be there.
Late one afternoon when the Dent Island operation had got well under
way, a fog swept like a wet smoke through the Euclataw Passage. It
lifted, broke, opened and closed as if it were of two minds whether
to lay over the channel a veil of obscurity or disperse in torn
fragments. While it hovered and shifted thus uncertain, and the
tiderace in the rapids slacked, a white yacht nosed into Mermaid Bay
and felt her way alongside the float.
It was the _Kowloon_, come back like a ghost of other days. From the
porch Rod, Mary, and Isabel recognized her through the fog haze as
Grove's old yacht, which Laska had come into as the major portion of
her husband's estate, and sold to her father.
"I wonder if they've come to hold out the olive branch to an erring
daughter?" Isabel said lightly. "Dad might--possibly. Still, I
don't think he'd care to trespass on your bailiwick, Rod, even for
that."
"What has very likely happened," Rod shrewdly surmised, "is that
she's on her way somewhere north and has simply taken shelter on
account of the fog. This passage is dangerous in thick weather."
He sauntered away to the workings after a little. The _Kowloon_ was
of no interest to him, save as a reminder of old days. At the inner
end of the bay already a widening field of stumps lifted flat heads
among a litter of discarded tops and broken boughs over many acres.
With tools and machinery his loggers were eating into the heart of
that ancient forest as a mouse gnaws into a slice of cheese.
The fog lifted and closed intermittently. Rod came back in the
course of an hour to find a stout figure with a cigar jutting from
its teeth standing in the edge of the logging watching the high-lead
donkey spit smoke and steam and shudder under enormous strains.
John P. Wall greeted him impassively. His small gray eyes met Rod's
for a second, wandered off among the stumps, the dimly seen men, the
black iron monsters huffing and puffing, the reddish-brown logs
floating by hundreds in the bay, swept over the unkept grounds rank
with grass, the gray stone house casting a great shadow, and came
back to Rod.
"Damn shame to do this," Wall flirted one hand toward the untidy
logged-off ground.
Rod shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll give you two hundred thousand for Dent Island just as it
stands," Wall offered abruptly. "Take your outfit and go log
somewhere else. Two hundred thousand cash."
Rod looked at him. A hundred and fifty thousand would shift his last
burden. That was the maximum he could realize from his timber, if he
sheared Dent Island as a farmer shears his sheep's fleece in the
spring. And with the forest stripped, Dent Island had no money
value. It would consist only of an old stone house standing gaunt
amid a few acres of grass, its background a stony stump-littered
waste. Whatever associations Hawk's Nest had for him and his could
be less than nothing to John P. Wall. What stirred the man? Had his
iron bowels been moved to compassion? Was he obliquely trying to
make amends? Or did he think that by purchase he could put on the
intangible mantle the Norquays had woven about themselves in five
generations?
Rod smiled wanly.
"Why should you wish to buy Hawk's Nest at more than its market
value? Does your conscience hurt?"
"Conscience?" A flicker of expression crossed Wall's heavy face.
"No. Don't use it in my business. Took a notion to the place.
Always did like it. That's all. You're destroying it."
A glow of anger began to burn in Rod, and mixed with it a detached
wonder at the type of man before him. He could imagine Wall viewing
him with impersonal pity, and brushing him aside in pursuit of his
own ends. There was a pachydermous quality in the man. He couldn't
be hurt. He had no qualms. For him the world of humanity was not
made up of men and women who had good impulses or bad ones, wisdom
and folly, conditioned by many things. No, to him the world was made
up of two kinds of people; those who could get what they wanted and
those who couldn't. For Wall there were no fine distinctions, no
ethical hazards in which a man might lose his soul. The firm grasp,
the unrelenting hold, justified itself. Anything profitable was good
business; anything unprofitable was bad business. Rod looked at him
and wondered if Wall carried that remorseless philosophy into his
social life, his family life; if he applied it to his pleasure, and
in what degree. And if he did whether he found the balance in his
life's ledger to lie on the credit or the debit side.
"You're reckoned wealthy, aren't you?" Rod said to him. "Three or
four millions?"
"Something like that," Wall answered indifferently.
"I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that there are things money
can't get you?" Rod said quietly. "This place happens to be one of
those things."
Wall chewed his cigar, impassively reflecting. Rod turned away.
"Three hundred thousand," Wall said suddenly.
Rod shook his head.
"No use. I wouldn't sell Hawk's Nest any more than you'd sell one of
your ears. I was born here. My people have been born and lived and
died and are buried here. Very old-fashioned notion, of course, but
it happens to mean something to me. And please remember this, Wall.
If it had to pass out of my hands, you would be the last man in the
world I'd care to have hang up your hat here and call it home."
He left Wall to reflect on that.
A shrill blast from the high-lead donkey put an end to the day's
work. Men came stringing out of the woods. In twenty minutes more
the supper gong clanged.
As they sat at dinner Rod told Isabel of her father's offer. Isabel
smiled cynically.
"Don't ever think the idea of any sort of restitution occurred to
him, Rod," she declared. "He wouldn't even understand the idea of
such a thing. He has always admired this place, secretly longed to
have something like it, and he has discrimination enough to know he
couldn't create it in his lifetime. He'd buy Hawk's Nest like a
shot. He has dreams of founding a Wall dynasty, I really believe. A
place like this, made to order, with its history--why, he'd gloat
over it. The parvenu idea of acquiring prestige by purchase--by
proxy. I know I sound horrid, but it's true. He thinks the Norquays
have gone to seed. And that the Walls only require a proper
background to be somebody. It's amusing and sometimes almost
tragic--this social pushing, this itch to be thought something you
aren't, to make a big splash. Did he seem keen on it, Rod?"
"Rather."
"Mamma's been priming him," Isabel nodded. "I've heard her talk
about the possibility--since you've been supposed to be in deep
water. She thinks Bob's a perfect gentleman--even if his father
isn't quite--when Robert's merely a good little spender. Poor old
daddy. He's the best of the lot, because he just naturally can't
help being a ruthless old pirate, and he never held a grudge in his
life against any one who beat him at his own game. He's a bear at
making money and mom's a bear in society, and they've raised Bob and
Laska and me to be bearcats of one sort and another too. Some
combination."
Isabel applied herself to the salad for half a minute.
"Suppose you go aboard the yacht with me and I'll introduce you to
dad," she proposed mischievously to Andy.
"I have no objection," he returned calmly. "Neither have I the
slightest desire to meet your male parent--whose only merit in my
eyes is that he is your parent. I couldn't use him in my business,
and it's a cinch he couldn't use me in his."
"He might," Isabel teased. "He has lots of irons in the fire and
loads of money. You sure did marry money, Andy, old scout."
"Well, I have irons in the fire myself," Andy retorted imperturbably.
"And without any hankering for loads of money I expect to get all I
need."
The pair of them sauntered off after dinner, still facetiously
debating what they called the possibilities of a Hall-Wall entente.
Rod and Mary went out on the porch. The rapids murmured in a rising
key. Young Rod, who had learned to read under his mother's tutelage,
curled up in a chair with a book of fairy tales. The sun dipped
below the jagged backbone of Vancouver Island and the afterglow
lingered, a radiant tinge over the blurred slopes that lifted to high
mountains on the mainland shore.
About the head of the bay were clustered compactly the numerous
portable buildings of the camp,--bunk houses, messhouses, storeroom,
isolated small dwellings. A short slope bright with low salal brush
dipped to the water. On that gentle pitch numbers of the men often
clustered in the evening, sitting on their haunches, lying stretched
on their backs, spinning Rabelaisian yarns, Homeric tales out of
their woods experience, talking about their work, the war,
economics,--all the infinite variety of futile gabble and profound
wisdom that is embodied in a group of skilled men following a risky
outdoor calling. The Pacific Coast logger is no mere beast of
burden. He is master of an intricate technique as applied to the
handling of enormous timbers by powerful and complicated machinery.
The B.C. woods is no place for the sluggish of brain or hand.
Wall himself was heavily interested in timber and had been for years.
There were probably fifty men in Rod's crew who had drawn Wall pay
checks in their time. And there was not a man there but knew the
Wall camps and knew little good of them. They had an evil
reputation. Probably Wall himself had never seen the interior of a
single one of his camps. He had no personal interest in such
matters,--only in results. He got results through superintendents,
who in turn passed the buck to logging bosses. And these again,
because their jobs depended on high average production, drove without
mercy so long as they could hold the job. There was a sardonic
saying along the coast that every Wall camp always had three crews:
one coming, one going, and one on the job.
The loggers frankly hated Wall and all his works. Whereas they liked
Rod Norquay. Moreover, now in the third year of Rod's régime, very
nearly every man there understood the situation. They were for him,
to a man. Rod represented to them the very antithesis of everything
John P. Wall stood for. And no mean portion of Rod's crew were
intellectually capable and emotionally impelled to make out a very
black case against the John P. Walls of industry.
A little cluster gathered on this slope between camp and tidemark.
The cluster grew till the limited area was black with men in calked
boots and mackinaw clothing, men with unshaven stubble on their chins
and strong calloused hands. They sat and stood there without the
customary shouting and laughter. It seemed as if every man in the
camp had been drawn to look silently down on the white yacht.
The _Kowloon_ stretched her graceful length along the landing. Her
paint was like virgin snow, and from stem to stern she glistened with
brass and copper and varnished teak. On her forward deck two or
three of her crew in spotless white ducks leaned on the rail, looking
at the men ashore. Aft a gramophone exhaled the latest jazz. There
were guests present, and now that the fog had gone with the sun, they
were on deck, dipping and swaying and gyrating to the music.
Suddenly a man on the bank began to sing. A solitary voice, a rich
baritone, it cut across the canned syncopation and lifted with the
diapason of the rapids as a tonal background.
There was nothing strange in that. Men often sang there, soloists
and impromptu quartettes. They sang to amuse themselves, or because
they were happy, for any or all the reasons that move men to song.
It was not the fact of the man singing. It was his song.
"Ye sons of freedom awake to glory.
Hark! Hark! What myriads bid you rise."
The third line came with a volume that burst the evening hush like
the roll of drums. From a hundred-odd throats it poured in rhythmic
unison, with a passionate earnestness, and something akin to a threat.
"Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding
With hireling hosts a ruffian band
Affright and desolate the land,
While truth and liberty lie bleeding?
To arms, to arms! Ye brave.
The avenging sword unsheathe.
March on. March on. All hearts resolved
On liberty ... or death!"
The last word struck like the blow of a ponderous hammer falling on
muffled iron. Then silence,--as if it had been halted by some
invisible conducting baton which had welded that impromptu chorus
into a single harmonious whole to chant that old, old song of revolt
against oppression.
Who that has ever heard a marching regiment sing the Marseillaise but
knows the clang of its ending, like the snick of a breech-bolt or a
great sword clashed home in its scabbard.
No one moved. No voices lifted in words or laughter. Rod, sitting
with his chin in his palms, listened with a curious tension for a
break in that sudden hush. The massed group on the bank remained
immobile, very quiet, as if something profoundly sobering had come
over them.
And in the midst of this strange quiescence a gong struck faintly,
deep in the bowels of the _Kowloon_, and when the deckhands flicked
off the mooring lines she backed slowly out into the channel, out
into the gathering dusk, the jazz tunes stilled, her guests standing
quietly in a group by the after rail.