CHAPTER IX
On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken the Haida and departed for a point up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing, in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see the Kowloon clear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive, more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things and persons outside his own sphere.
Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the affairs of B.C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically observed.
Rod eyed his father, sitting on the other side of a periodical-strewn table. He wondered what his father thought of Grove now. But he knew that his father was thinking of quite another matter,—for which he was himself responsible. He continued to look at Norquay senior with a mildly expectant curiosity. The library was the council chamber of the family, the place chosen for edicts, discussions of policy, admonition. From childhood Rod and his brothers had, so to speak, taken their medicine in that pleasant book-lined room. His father now bent a placid eye, slightly quizzical, on his youngest son. Rod waited.
"I really don't see the necessity," Norquay senior remarked at last. "Of course a gentleman need not necessarily be a drone. On the other hand one doesn't need to do a laborer's work in order to acquire knowledge of labor. You've finished school, of course. You have seen a little of the world and as time passes you will undoubtedly see a great deal more. Still, if you're keen on this, I'll speak to Phil. He can give you charge of a camp."
"I don't want to take charge of a camp," Rod said. "I'm not competent, for one thing. I'd either make a hash of it, or leave it all to a foreman—which is not what I'm after. What I mean by going into the woods is to go in and work; take over jobs as I master them. I want to know all there is to be known about timber, from the standing tree to the finished product."
His father continued to eye him.
"What's the idea for such thoroughness—this starting in at the bottom and getting blisters and experience together?"
The root of this expressed resolve lay in a folio of notepaper on a stool beside Rod's chair. But it was not a matter he could make clear, or even discuss with his father. At least, that was how he felt.
"I want to see the wheels go round," he answered lightly.
"Very well," his father agreed. "You shall. I'll speak to Phil. He'll see that you get a job. I take it that's what you want."
"The job's incidental," Rod replied. "I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm not dull. I have an idea I'll pick things up quickly. I want to know something about timber, about methods of handling it, about the men who actually do the handling. I want to get it first-hand. Even a university training should be an advantage in that."
"No doubt," Norquay senior permitted himself an indulgent smile. "If you're so interested in timber, it's a wonder you didn't take a forestry course. The Lord knows we need forestry experts in B.C."
"Why?" Rod inquired. It had no bearing on his purpose, but the remark aroused his curiosity.
"To teach them how to get one prime stick to the booming ground without destroying twice as much more," his father snorted. "To inaugurate a campaign of necessary reforestation. Outside of two or three concerns, logging in B.C. to-day is an orgy of waste. They're skimming the cream of the forest, spilling half of it. Kicking the milkpail over now and then, refusing to feed the cow they milk. However, we don't do that. I can show you limits we logged when I was a young man that will bear merchantable timber by the time your children are grown, my boy. But to get back to our sheep. You surprise me. If you'd gone in for wild-eyed art, it would have seemed more natural. I never could make you out, my son. You were always a bit dreamy. Sure this isn't just a whim? Want to see what makes the wheels go round, eh?"
"Precisely," Rod agreed. It was as far as he would go.
"Well, it won't do you any harm," his father rambled on, "and you may acquire a useful technique. We are expanding more or less, in spite of a conservative policy. Phil would undoubtedly appreciate a second-in-command before long. He has his hands pretty full. On the whole, I'm rather glad you've taken this notion. I won't last forever, and I'd like to see you and Phil solidly established before my mantle descends on Grove. Timber and land are good, solid foundations."
"What about finance?" Rod asked idly. "That seems pretty gorgeously productive, pater. Does it ever strike you that Grove may outgrow the regulation Norquay mantle?"
"If he does, it will be because he has made a more capacious one for himself," Norquay senior smiled complacently. "I imagine Grove's well able to run his own show and live up to the Norquay tradition, too. He has a genius for affairs."
"So it seems," Rod commented dryly,—and the "affairs" he was thinking of were not the ones his father had in mind. "I wouldn't fancy it myself."
"As a matter of fact, no youngster knows quite what he fancies," his father drawled. "I had a fancy for the law and politics. Two years of reading Blackstone and a term in the Legislature cured me of both. Take your Uncle Mark. He was past thirty before he found his real bent. Follow your natural bent, Rod, whatever it is. You have plenty of time and backing. This beginning on the ground floor may work out. Knowledge of any sort never comes amiss."
So that was settled.
When his father presently left the zoom Rod picked up and opened the folio. He read over forty or fifty closely-written sheets, knitting his smooth young brow over the phrasing.
"Won't do—-only in spots. It's dead. I've got to breathe the breath of life into these people. And I don't seem to know how."
He sprang to his feet, paced the floor.
"All I know is what somebody has told me, what I've read in books," he grumbled. "Cobwebby stuff. Pretty—lots of it—moving—but no substance. All I got out of school was a mass of unclassified facts. I'm crammed with 'em. I know what a lot of great men did—but not how they did it—why they did it. And language. What's the good of a 'steen-thousand-word vocabulary if you've got no peg to hang it on, only the old pegs other people have used till they're all worn and shiny? I'm like a man with a craving to paint beautiful things he can see, with a whole box of color-tubes, and no idea how to apply his colors to get the effects he wants. Or a finely made steam engine all ready to run, greased and oiled and water in the boilers, but no fuel to make steam. I don't know people, humanity, only one kind. I don't know life; only one comfortable groove of it. I don't know anything that really counts, except that I don't know much. I wouldn't be stuck with this, if I did." He faced about, frowning on the pile of written sheets. "I'd be able to make a thing go the way I wanted it, whether it was a story or a girl. I can't do either. I don't know how—and I've got to find out how. As long as I stay in a nice, fenced pasture I never will find out. It's all too cut and dried. Too many taboos. Too many fences. I've got to break through. I'm too much like the pea in the pod—I am green, the pod is green, all the world is green."
He sat down in a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and lost himself in concentrated thought.
The history of Rod's family was part of the history of his native land, in so far as Anglo-Saxon occupancy had made history. The Norquay foothold had been the first individual one established by a white man on the Pacific between Spain to the south and Russia to the north. That century and more of far-seeing purposeful struggle had culminated in the possession of every material benefit men live and work and sometimes vainly die to grasp. Blood had been spilled, storms braved, great risks faced to win that security. To Rod, ever since he could remember, these things had been real, vividly colored episodes enacted under the auspices of the high gods of adventure. He was imaginative, creatively imaginative. Old Roderick Sylvester, the barque Hermes, the sea-otter trading, the bride who fled her English home to fare into strange seas for love, the Chilcotins on their bloody forays, the wooden blockhouse, the first course of masonry, the vast influx of gold-seekers in the Cariboo rush of '58, the completion of Hawk's Nest in all its comfortable permanence,—these were not simply things he knew as part of his antecedents. They were realities, as if they had happened but yesterday under his own eyes. They moved him strangely, deeply. He could reconstruct in his mind all that crowded century. In his mind's eye all the men and women whose bones lay underground about the great red cedar lived and moved and had being once more. He could see them as clearly as he saw Phil and his father and Laska or Mary Thorn.
He had been trying to capture those visions, those personalities, those old stirring times so crowded with pregnant action. He had been trying more or less earnestly for a year and a half. And he had failed. He was aware of his failure. The human equation somehow evaded him when he put pen to paper. He couldn't put his finger with surety on the well-spring of human motive. He hadn't the key to character. Rod had more than a casual acquaintance with literature in two languages. He knew Balzac and O. Henry alike, Homer and George Ade, De Maupassant and the Brontes, Flaubert and Anatole France, Ibsen and Tolstoi and Gorky, Kipling and Hardy and Dickens and Poe. He read these writers, and he saw that they created men and women, creatures of pain and passion, even as God created them. He perceived that they did it, that with deft strokes they clothed their skeletons with flesh and blood and breathed the breath of life into them, so that they strutted and sighed and fought with an emotion-compelling intensity. But he could not do it himself. And he passionately desired to catch and transfix those gorgeous pictures his brain evoked from that pioneering past.
It could be done. It wanted doing. Rod had always wanted to do it. Unconsciously he had been preparing for the task. He had meant to do something like that ever since a day when he had laid down his book and told his tutor that some one ought to write the Iliad of the pioneers, an epic of the men and women who with vision and high courage had tamed a wild land for their children's children, those bold spirits who shrank from nothing by land or sea that promised a reward for enterprise.
Rod thought he knew why there was no magic in his pen, why these magnificent visions eluded capture. It was not a reasoned conviction. He felt his lack instinctively. The first faint labor pains of creative effort apprised him of his need: to plunge into the agitated pool of life instead of viewing it from a distant eminence. That was how the manner of life he had led from childhood struck him now,—as a view from afar. Rod was sophisticated enough to realize that his world was one exclusively occupied by a limited number of fortunate people, holding their preëminence largely by sheer inertia. Statistics, observation, his university delving in economics and sociology, had informed him that for one very wealthy family there were a hundred subsisting in various degrees of comfort, a thousand but a step beyond poverty. Accident of birth, or inherent superiority? How was he to know? How could he know unless he got outside the fences, inhibitions, the unyielding rigidity of his own class? It was rigid, Rod perceived; although that perception had only become clear to him through Mary Thorn's eyes. It had a fetich of superiority which might or might not be valid. Even aside from that, how could he fathom things that were universal above and apart from class and even race—men's hopes and fears and aspirations—unless he established a contact with men? And Rod's instinct, the wise, fundamental instinct of an unwarped nature, urged him to make that contact first among the lowly, where the sweat and strain was greatest. There was the raw material. The Norquays—a little more perhaps than any of their circle—were the finished product. Rod wanted to know the process—and the by-products.
That was why he chose the woods. It might be well to know timber. But it was better to know men. And the way to know men was to live among them, to work with them, to stand with them—if such a thing were possible—upon a common ground. Afterward—he would know what he knew.
So for himself Rod, at the age of twenty-two, defined the approach to knowledge: through experience—plus imagination. And to him it seemed that with the first rebuff life had dealt him, it had also given him a clarified purpose, a definite mark to shoot at.