CHAPTER VII
Grove's guests danced, drank, sang, tennised, gossiped and played cards during their waking intervals for forty-eight hours. Then the white yacht fled down the sea lanes to bring her owner to his mahogany desk on Monday morning rejuvenated by a quiet week-end at his country house, as the social page of the Vancouver Province duly chronicled.
Perhaps the item was correct enough in one particular. Possibly Mr. Grove Norquay was rejuvenated, or refreshed. Quietness would not so have restored his force. Next to display, Grove liked action. Whatever else he might lack, he was endowed with abundant energy. He was a big man, like most of the Norquays, handsome, with an engaging manner. It was scarcely correct for Phil to say that Grove never fooled men. If he did not fool them he had a faculty of influencing them favorably to himself. That faculty had made men like Arthur Richston and John P. Wall willing to let him stir the financial pot in which their money bubbled as well as his own. A young man in search of a career would not have commended himself to them simply by reason of his search. Even with the Norquay prestige behind him he would still need that indescribable quality which is called magnetism for lack of a more definite term,—that personal power of suasion which successful motor-car salesmen and old-world diplomats alike exercise to secure signatures on the dotted line. Good men have that persuasiveness, that ability to compel confidence, and bad ones also. To which category Grove Norquay belonged it would be difficult to say. There is the blind power of circumstance to consider.
In this year of our Lord, 1911, Grove was a brilliantly successful young man in a city where success was most completely estimated by the noise a man and his money made. Grove was as well satisfied with himself as any young man could be whose career was assuming meteoric aspects. Everything he touched turned out well. The Norquay Trust Company seemed to exercise a hypnotic drawing power over investors with loose funds. There was a speculative movement in land rising to a climax in Vancouver, a something that was to assume gigantic proportions in the following eighteen months. Already shoe clerks were beginning to go without lunch to make payments on plots of land in distant suburbs, and to go about their duties dreaming of the quick turn-over and the long profit.
All of which, when it occurs in a seaport in conjunction with the building of two transcontinental railway terminals, an expansion of shipping, an upturn in mining and timber, breeds that phenomenon of Western America, the "boom." Great is the confidence of the participants,—and the entire community participates. For the time being it is forgotten that whatever goes up must come down. It is a great game while it lasts. Better than draw poker. Better than playing the ponies. It is legitimate, respectable, as well as thrilling. It isn't gambling. It isn't even speculation. It is investment.
Of course a trust company with a well-defined and legally restricted field of operations was not actively participating in this frenetic exchange of land titles, notes, mortgages, options and hand-to-hand agreements of sale. But the rapidity and number of such transactions created a business which Grove's company absorbed so thriftily that its growth shamed the furious beanstalk.
The Norquay Trust occupied the first two floors of a new building named after itself, on the roof of which rose a steel skeleton covered with incandescent bulbs, the sign Rod had marked on his return.
Here Mr. Grove Norquay appeared to feel that he moved at last in his proper sphere. He loved the sound and echo of huge sums, of complicated transactions, of facing men over a massive desk and deciding matters that involved much money. He liked noise, action—it gave him a sense of power, of irresistibility—just as he liked being master on his own yacht and host to a crowd of people who talked a little louder and faster and drank a little oftener and danced with a trifle more abandon than was really necessary. He could have a "whale of a time" with a lively crowd, whether the party was stag or mixed. On dead ones, either social or financial, Grove wasted no moment of his valuable time. A man with money and a sporting inclination, a woman with any pretensions to youth and beauty, could be reasonably sure of Grove Norquay's consideration,—at any rate for a time. He esteemed the good mixers as the salt of the earth. But they had to be the "right" sort of people. By his birth, training and antecedents Grove held himself duly qualified to judge of that beyond dispute.
He was attempting to convey the weight of this mature judgment to Rod one forenoon some days later. Rod and Phil had come down with the Haida to meet their father on his return from a trip South. A mild curiosity to see Grove's shop had led Rod into the Norquay Trust Building. Grove had shown him about and explained the scope of the undertaking with what interested Rod as ill-concealed pride.
"I believe you're all puffed up about this thing," he said amusedly, when they sat down at last in Grove's private office.
"Well, why not?" Grove conceded. "I organized it. It's a pretty big show, and it's my show."
"After all, it's only a money-making scheme, isn't it? You don't make anything or do anything, do you? You just handle sums of money and grab off a percentage. Eh?" Rod said innocently. He was thinking of Phil's phrase: glorified pawnbroking.
"Oh, tush—you don't understand." Grove dismissed that.
Then he proceeded to fraternal advice, slightly tinged with remonstrance.
"Didn't I see you walking along Beach Avenue with that Thorn girl after dinner last night? I understand she's down here going to school."
"Probably you did," Rod answered indifferently.
Grove frowned.
"It's hardly the thing for you to cultivate her publicly," he observed. "A fellow can't carry on these country kid acquaintances in town. Aren't there girls enough in your own crowd for you to stroll along the beach with?"
"Look here," Rod challenged earnestly, "with your record in the female line you're barking up the wrong tree when you start advising me to keep within bounds. My own taste and judgment are quite as good as yours."
Grove eyed him coolly.
"My record in the female line," he murmured. "I didn't know I had one."
"No? You mean you didn't know I knew. Do you think I've been deaf, dumb and blind for the last six years? Even if I had been, you must remember you went to McGill before me. There are still a few lingering odors of you on the campus, and in some of the downtown joints."
"Well, well," Grove said cynically. "You aren't so slow as you seem, after all. So far as Mary Thorn is concerned, your taste is good enough—but your judgment is damned poor. I always told the pater he kept you cloistered too much, Rod. If you have a crush on the Thorn person, go to it. But do keep her out of sight. Saves talk. These nobodies from nowhere always mess things up by trying to horn into your own crowd if they get half a chance. You understand?"
Rod looked at him soberly.
"You're a piggy sort of creature, d'ye know it, Grove?" he said with icy deliberation. "I sometimes wonder what induced Laska Wall to marry you."
A faint tinge of color crept into Grove's face.
"I sometimes wonder myself," he said slowly, as if the thrust had set him thinking. "However, that's beside the point. If I made an ass of myself on certain occasions, that's no reason you should. Of course," he waxed sarcastic, "if you are like Phil, a youth of virginal purity, all I need to say is that it's advisable for you to seek your chemically pure companionship in your own class, on the streets or off."
"Your idea of virginal purity doesn't interest me," Rod said as he rose. "If Phil and I happen to have certain ideas about common decency which you can't understand, why, that's your misfortune. But if you want to get along with me, eldest brother, you'll leave my moral and social training alone. If you don't like my associates, you can ignore them. Keep your homiletics for your customers."
"All right, kiddo," Grove agreed ironically. "You're a Norquay and you can do no wrong. But I can tell you from experience, Roderick, old kid, that these poor men's daughters generally figure on getting something out of traveling with fellows like us. Believe me, they do."
Rod didn't answer. He was angry, both at Grove's advice and insinuation. In another second he would have been ready to blow up. So he walked to the door. In a square mirror let into a panel he got a glimpse of Grove, half-turned in his chair, looking after him with a slightly puzzled expression.
Laska had asked Rod to luncheon at the house. Grove lunched at his club. Phil had vanished about his own affairs after declining Laska's invitation. He wondered if Phil suffered from constancy; if love were a thing that endured beyond hope. He couldn't say. There was a difference in Phil. But there was a subtle sort of change manifest in everything Rod knew. At any rate he, himself, had no reason to find anything but pleasure in lunching with his sister-in-law.
So he went alone. He walked the twenty blocks that lay between the downtown traffic roar and Grove's home in the West End, thinking of his brother's cynical advice. In so far as it bore upon Mary Thorn, Rod dismissed it contemptuously. He had met Mary by such chance as brings people together in any town. She was on her way to keep an engagement and he had walked with her the length of the beach along English Bay. But Rod had foresightedly provided himself with her telephone number. Now in a spirit closely akin to defiance he stopped at a pay station and called her up. Yes, she was free that afternoon. Yes, she would go for a walk with him.
Rod went on, more placidly. She was the same Mary Thorn who used to run the rapids with him, but a little taller. She had attained womanhood and bore herself accordingly. Rod had never been able to make invidious class distinctions between himself and her. He couldn't now. Along with Phil she had a place in his affection which she had preëmpted long before either was aware of sex. Rod's active and analytical mind had lately come to the conclusion that of all the people young and old in this land of his birth there were only two who could stir him to any warmth,—Phil and Mary. That puzzled him. He supposed he must be an emotional freak. He had chums in Montreal. He knew men, women and girls by the score here in Vancouver. He regarded girls here and elsewhere with sophomoric condescension. He never missed them when they were absent. And he had missed Mary Thorn. How much he didn't realize until he met her again, after two years. It was very odd. The emotional and intellectual experience of twenty couldn't account for such facts.
Rod soon gave over trying. He found himself turning in at Grove's gate, and Laska coming forward in a hall to greet him.
Late June had ushered in a burst of heat. Their luncheon was served on a porch screened by wistaria. The purple clusters of bloom scented the cool shade. A seven-foot ivy-grown wall enclosed the grounds, shutting away everything but the neighboring upper stories and the high, green timber of Stanley Park on the west. It was almost as quiet there as in the woods. The downtown rumble was a far surflike mutter that made a tonal background for the hum of bees foraging in the wistaria.
Laska talked at intervals. She had grown up in Montreal. She asked Rod about places and people there, grew briefly reminiscent about her childhood. Curled in a hammock after luncheon, she was silent for a time.
"Rod," she said abruptly, "when your father comes—he's due to-morrow, isn't he?—do something for me, will you?"
"Of course," Rod answered. "What shall it be?"
"Suggest to him that it would be pleasant to have me up at Hawk's Nest for a few weeks."
She regarded him thoughtfully, her lips slightly parted. Rod was puzzled. He hesitated.
"Will you, Rod?"
"Certainly. But—but why don't you just come? Simply say you want to—and come."
"It isn't quite so simple as that," she explained. "I couldn't go unless your father rather made a point of it to Grove. Grove's funny. He isn't at all keen on me going there, except when we cruise up on a week-end. And I'd like to go there and stay awhile, quietly. I'm fed up with Vancouver. I'm tired. I want to rest."
"You can't think what a giddy whirl we live in," she went on presently. "Dinner parties, general hilarity; just one thing after another. One has to go whether one feels up to it or not. One gets so weary of it. Get your father to have me come to Hawk's Nest, Rod dear."
Rod promised.
She went off on another tack after that. With a touch of malice she brightly recounted the quasi-scandal pertaining to certain people in their set, people Rod knew slightly. It seemed to afford her ironic amusement.
"But," Rod observed in comment on a rather piquant anecdote concerning a pretty widow and a man of family who cut a big figure in local industry, "that's pretty raw if it's true. And if it's just gossip, it's rotten nasty gossip."
"I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite true," she said indifferently. "Some people do what they like. Others have to toe the line. It's a queer, queer world, Rod."
He left about two-thirty. Striding up Robson Street to Mary's boarding place, he shook off a half-formed impression that Laska was bored and discontented, that she found the only world she knew a rather hollow affair. There was a vague fretfulness about her. It was just an impression. And it was not his concern. Mary Thorn was decidedly his concern, for that afternoon at least. Laska, Grove, the Norquay Trust vanished out of his mind at sight of Mary Thorn.
For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? Rod's brain registered flashes of himself holding her close, of her face smiling into his,—unwelcome visions like that while his lips uttered sentences about Montreal, continental Europe, books, plays he had seen, such pronunciamento generally as the conversation required of a second-year university man who had been abroad.
"I wonder if this is the way a man starts in getting foolish over some particular girl?" Rod thought to himself, "Or am I just like Grove and some fellows I know?"
This while he told her of a quaint old place in Scotland, where he had visited a branch of distant kin, the summer before.
Mary listened, talked in her normal quiet way, turning to him occasionally with a smile that fluttered briefly across her face and made her eyes light up.
There was no provocative suggestion about her. It was nothing she did or said that stirred and puzzled Rod. It was merely herself, her presence, a pleasant-faced girl with a low, throaty note in her voice and a slender well-formed body which had a peculiar grace of movement. Magnetic? That overworked term to define the indefinable. What was there about her to stir a man so? Rod asked himself that after he had said good-by to her at five o'clock.
And there flitted across his consciousness a faint, troublesome perception of dynamic forces in human relations of which a man must acquire knowledge empirically, concerning which all the textbooks are silent.
Rod spent the months of July and August very much as he had spent all the Julys and Augusts of earlier years. That is to say, he paddled a canoe, swam, sailed, fished trout and salmon, made himself agreeable to sundry guests, male and female. About Hawk's Nest no material change appeared, however Rod might vainly wrinkle his brows over a subtle transformation which he could not analyze, but which he felt as a blind man feels the nearness of some insensate mass. He was free from the tutorial direction. Mr. Spence had definitely retired into a pensioned leisure, having done his full duty by this generation of Norquays. Rod was twenty, his brain and his beard both in training for manhood. He could lounge or play as he elected, come and go as he desired.
Not so long before, measured by seasons, life had seemed to him the simplest sort of affair. One took it perforce as it came. Certain things were ordered, irrevocable; other things a matter of choice; a few, a very few transitory phases of existence, a matter of chance.
McGill, Mary Thorn, Grove, his grandfather, and the old, old journal of Roderick Sylvester Norquay began to make him question this definitely limited philosophy of living. The element of chance loomed larger. It even invaded the sacred precincts of choice.
He looked at Mary Thorn as they sat on the porch of her father's house, as they ate a pocket lunch beside the Granite Pool with their rods and creels beside them, as they slipped in the dugout alongshore with the open diapason of the rapids welling up, and he wondered by what necromancy of body or spirit she could so effortlessly set his blood racing, drew his flesh toward her as a magnet draws steel, until his resistance was stoutly tested. How? Why? Rod could explain it simply,—but his explanation failed to satisfy. It rode his imagination as something that transcended mere fleshly instinct, which he understood well enough, of which in his sophisticated world he had observed sundry manifestations.
Rod had once said to himself that the family had become static. He had felt a regret for this grooved state; all the great adventuring done; all the great efforts and endurings and activities accomplished. Ease flowed about them in a wide stream. And Grove was the fine flower of it all—a comet flashing across the local heavens, with a tail of yachts, mistresses, vulgar display spreading luminously behind him.
Grandfather Norquay sat in his chair by a sunny window or walked with his stick slowly about the grounds,—a tall, spare, silent old man, thinking his contained, regressive thoughts. Rod would look at him and wonder. He would look at Mary Thorn and wonder. He would look at Grove, when that kinetic gentleman marshaled his house parties down the Kowloon's gangplank, and wonder. Then he would entrench in a library chair, fortified by cigarettes, and read the typed copy of his great-great-grandfather's journal, and his wonder,—which was no more than the vital curiosity of an inquiring mind—would turn from the general to the particular.
He would lay down that hundred-year-old document, clasp his hands behind his head, and strive to construct imaginatively for himself a future based on the known factors of the present and the past. Strangely enough he always came out of these spells of day-dreaming with a sense of futility, with an envy of his forbears, with a regretful sense of having been born too late. Romance might still be a lusty godlet but he moved beyond Rod's ken. He would visualize old Roderick on the poop of the Hermes, pistol in belt, peering out from under a three-cornered hat, one eye on the beauty of a mountainous, thick-forested coast, the other keenly on pelts of sea otter and the profitable risks of barter with savages. Battles with the sea, with a hostile environment, a fine courage, and a far, future-piercing vision. Rod saw the log stockade ringed about by painted Chilcotins, arrows flying, muskets cracking; the battle fought and the dead buried; life continuing in armed watchfulness; the slow weaving of the planned pattern.
"The old fellows had all this in mind," Rod murmured once. "Order and security and well-being. I wonder if they saw everything so firmly established that it has become rigid? That all the Norquays can do now is to live and die like gentlemen. I wonder if old Roderick would have been such a keen, far-sighted old blade if he could have seen the fifth generation as it is? Maybe he would regard us with pride. I wonder? Anyway, they had a whale of a time those days. The Trojans and Spartans had nothing on them. And there has been no Homer to write an Odyssey. No Iliad of the pioneers. The epic of fur and timber and the conquering of a wilderness peopled with savages. I wonder if I could?"
Rod nursed that idea from the f[oe]tal stage to a lusty infancy. He bore it, still in its swaddling clothes, back with him to the university when hot August wore into cool September, and the smoke haze of forest fires vanished before the autumn rains.
He would never become a financial generalissimo like Grove. Unlikely that he would ever be called upon to step into Phil's executive shoes. Unless he voluntarily embarked upon a voyage toward some material port, he would never have to buckle on armor and joust for dollars in the commercial tourney. But—if he were able, if he had the gift and the patience to develop it—he might do these adventuring progenitors a service by making them live again for their descendants—a generation, Rod held, deprived of romance and bold enterprise, limited and circumscribed and in danger of stifling spiritually in the midst of a material plenty.
This fascinating project in the field of creative effort he kept to himself—even from Mary Thorn, who had always aided and abetted him in fanciful undertakings, whose moods and reactions seemed mysteriously yet infallibly to keep step with his own.