CHAPTER VI
"When I went away you were talking about going on your own," Rod said. "What kind of a twist have things taken here? You seem to be pretty much the whole works now."
"Only by proxy," Phil answered. "Somebody has to be on the job more or less. I don't mind so long as they give me a fairly free hand. Matters here have become secondary in the Norquay scheme of things, but they're still quite a handful for somebody."
"Loosen up," Rod commanded. "You weren't at all explicit in any of your letters, and the governor confined himself mostly to checks and a few casual admonitions. Has Grove quit Hawk's Nest for a career in business? What does this trust company thing amount to?"
"Lord knows. Did you go and see the plant?"
"I wasn't interested. Seeing the governor was away I only stayed in town overnight. I saw an electric sign in huge letters on a roof downtown."
"The sign of progress. The oriflamme of a budding financier, a comet flashing athwart the financial firmament," Phil intoned with ironic inflection. "That's Grove. Hawk's Nest and timber was too cramped a field for his vaulting ambition. He couldn't be satisfied with the one-horse show that was started here a century back. Our brother is by way of shedding a golden luster on the name, Rod."
Rod snorted.
"What's he after?"
"That's what I ask," Phil replied. "Echo answers what? Money, is one's natural answer. But that doesn't follow. He could live here and run things in the same offhand manner that we're used to, and have more money than he would ever need. There's always been a surplus. Do you know what the income of this estate runs for the last twenty-five years?"
Rod shook his head.
"Over a hundred thousand on the average. It could be doubled, trebled, if one cared to go at the timber rough-shod. So it isn't money," Phil continued. "The governor would have been perfectly satisfied to turn everything over to him as soon as he married. On the contrary, he persuaded the gov. to set him up in this blatant money-grabbing scheme. Personally, I think private banking and trust fund operations are just a glorified sort of pawnbroking. We've always made our money out of productive enterprises. I can understand Christ's indignation at the money changers. They're damned parasites. Grove, however, has no such peculiar ideas. He's become a man of affairs. The two years he spent in New York and London financial circles have turned his head, I think. Talks in millions. A wizard of finance. A wizard! Grove could always fool women. He never fooled a man of keen perception—outside of his own father. Grove's actually proud of this trust company thing, you know. Nailed our name to his financial flag-pole. And he has associated with him five or six of the shrewdest business buccaneers on the coast,—Deane, Arthur Richston, Mark Sherburne, and his father-in-law, John Wall. I don't like it, Rod."
"It's his funeral," Rod answered carelessly, "if they pluck him."
"I wasn't thinking about him," Phil drawled. "It's the rest of us. We wouldn't like a smash. Maybe I'm pessimistic."
"What does the pater think of it?"
"Oh, backs him stoutly. Keeps all his loose change in the Norquay Trust. Believes Grove is launched on a wonderful career. Maybe he is. But I don't think our beloved brother has the necessary grip for that sort of career. He loves power; he's the chesty sort. He revels in big affairs. And I don't think he really knows what power consists of, nor how skilfully and wisely to direct affairs."
"Did you ever like Grove, or trust him?" Rod asked bluntly. "Did you ever get on with him?"
"No." Phil answered as bluntly. "I wouldn't admit it to any one but you, old kid. But I don't. I never did. I never will. We'll always be secretly at odds in everything."
"Same here. I wonder why?" Rod uttered reflectively. "Suppose we're subconsciously resentful—jealous because he's first and entitled to the lion's share?"
"No, no. Nothing so petty. It's fundamental. Grove looks like us. But he isn't like us, only outside. Inside he's different. They can talk all they damn please about heredity, environment, cultural influences. They don't account for some people. Grove's a snob at heart. He's gross. He's a fairly clever—or cunning—good-looking healthy animal, with a purely animal psychology under a veneer of good manners. And I suppose one should view him with a degree of tolerance, because he was certainly born what he is. But one doesn't like that type of man as the chief representative of one's family."
"And you think the governor fondly imagines Grove is quite a decent sort and plays the game like a gentleman—a bit masterfully, but still according to Hoyle?" Rod mused.
"Absolutely." Phil frowned. "To me, that's the devil of it. He's honest, the governor is, and a bit old-fashioned in some notions. And he's fairly tolerant and pretty blind to certain obvious defects of character close home. The fact is, old kid, he's rather proud of his three sons. He'd wink at almost anything one of us did—in reason. And Grove comes first. He simply can't see Grove with critical eyes. It's quite natural, Rod."
Rod would have pursued the subject farther, but there now approached them in a body, where they sat dangling their legs over the Haida's cabin, their male house guests armed with gear for salmon fishing at the upper narrows.
That evening, as they drew clear of a nook in Stuart Island at slack water, a long, lean, cruising yacht, canopied, mahogany tenders shining in boat chocks on deck, her bow wave curling out with a hissing sound, swept by the Haida.
Young Deane's eyes followed her enviously.
"Classy packet that," he said to Rod. "I was out on her a couple of week-ends. She's a dream inside. Fast, too; shows her heels to everything in Vancouver Harbor."
Rod smiled. Grove's yacht interested him less than the owner. Grove was expanding. Decidedly. Rod had a fanciful vision of his brother as a balloon, swelling and swelling to the ultimate overstrain and collapse. A whimsy, of course. Finance was profitable. Money bred money. Yet it seemed strange that a Norquay could turn his back on Hawk's Nest, its ordered comfort, its atmosphere of security, its leisure and its peaceful beauty, to sweat over making a barrel of money only to spend it on such costly toys. It was even more strange to think that their father abetted and encouraged Grove in this departure from the old accepted way.
"Makes this look like small potatoes, eh?" Rod found Phil grinning at his elbow as they rolled in the Kowloon's wash.
"Must be money in trust companies," Rod observed sardonically. "That's bigger than the Hermes, which old R.S.N. sailed around the Horn."
"I wonder what he'd think of Grove?" Phil murmured.
"I wonder," Rod echoed.
He repeated that mordant query to himself in the course of the evening. Grove brought a dozen people on the Kowloon, a further installment of Deans and Richstons, and several young men and women whom Rod met for the first time, but whose names were familiar enough as people who were "somebody" in B.C. They had dinner aboard, but afterward they took possession of Hawk's Nest, hauled a piano outside and danced on the wide verandah or wandered over the grounds in pairs. Rod detected a livelier tempo than had been common to Hawk's Nest gatherings. They drank a little more freely than he remembered as the usual thing there. By eleven o'clock two or three of the men were quite comfortably "lit up." Rod noticed that, even before Laska drew his attention to them.
"Young Deane and Tommy Richston are tight," she said amusedly. "Look at their eyes. See how very solemn Tommy is."
They were sitting by an open window in the living room, watching the glide and dip and sway of the dancing couples.
"Yes, rather," he replied. "Time to turn off the tap when the guests get pickled."
"It won't hurt them," Laska remarked indifferently. "They generally behave well. Isn't it lovely here, Rod? So clean and fragrant with the woods all about and the sea at your door. I love this old place."
"You ought to," Rod smiled. "You belong to it now."
"Do I?" she said. "I hadn't thought of it in just that way."
It struck Rod that he might find it difficult to explain just what he meant. He felt that he belonged to this old gray house. Some indefinable bond existed between him and it, something woven about him by heredity, usage, affection, by the generations of his blood who had belonged there before him. Could any one else feel that way about Hawk's Nest? He didn't know.
He looked at Laska with frank admiration. She was one of them now, in a special sense. One of the clan. She was a beautiful woman. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat straw, her eyes a very dark blue, luminous, expressive. She had grace and dignity. Rod had a feeling that she must be innately kind and generous. He wondered why in the name of God such a woman preferred a man like Grove to a man like Phil.
"I hoped we'd live here," she said presently. "But Grove has to be in town."
"Has to be?"
Rod could not help the inflection. Laska looked more keenly at him.
"Do you also disapprove of Grove?" she inquired.
"I also?" Rod countered. "I don't get you, sister-in-law."
"I don't really know you very well, Rod," she said softly. "But I'm quite sure you're not stupid."
She eyed him with a tantalizing smile that made Rod uncomfortable.
"You're just as well pleased we don't live here, aren't you now?" she went on. "And you aren't the only one with that attitude, are you?"
Rod considered a moment. He thought he understood her. And he retaliated, in so far as his breeding permitted him to retaliate. He had a retentive memory to draw on.
"I told you once that only the oldest son counted for much in this family," he replied, with a short laugh. "You drew the lucky number. Isn't that good enough?"
She sat silent for a few seconds.
"I am answered," she said briefly.
The subject ended there. Some one came to get Laska for a dance. Rod, who was tired of dancing, a little bored with the high spirits which had originated chiefly in various decanters, betook himself upstairs to bed.
Something had gone wrong with Hawk's Nest. The old sense of cohesion, of the family as a unit, seemed lacking. Rod missed that atmosphere of solidarity. Until now he had in a vague fashion regarded his brothers, his father and grandfather, his sister Dorothy, the little groups of first and second cousins as links in a chain. There might possibly be a weak link or two—he considered Grove such a one—nevertheless it had been a chain forged of kinship, common aspirations, interests, traditions. For each of them and for all of the fairly numerous brood descended collaterally from that adventurous fur-trader, Hawk's Nest and the Norquay estate had formed a cherished background, a guarantee of certain rights and privileges, a sure wellspring of reasonable opportunity to make the best of the business of living.
Materially it was still that. But Rod had a curious impression of the old spirit having subtly withdrawn, of them all having become individualistic, separate entities with conflicting desires, ambitions, both active and potential,—individual egos unleashed, clashing, bent head-long on each his own ends, without regard to the others.
He blamed Grove for this,—and his father for letting Grove make it so. Grove was the disturbing element. He was turning everything inside out. Rod didn't like the people Grove surrounded himself with. He resented Hawk's Nest being subject at Grove's pleasure to an invasion by free-drinking, slang-slinging people, whose pursuit was not so much pleasure as excitement.
He grew drowsy in the midst of such reflections. After all, it didn't matter much. Especially to him. Probably this crowd was not much different from the general run of people who had money to spend and time to burn. He supposed that he was hypersensitive, too damned particular, finicky,—too infernally quick on the hair trigger of an impression.
And so he fell asleep.