CHAPTER X
Rod found work in a logging camp a thing that tried his vigorous young body to the utmost until he hardened somewhat to the task and learned what every manual laborer must learn,—to strike a gait he could hold all day and not one that sapped his energy in two hours. He found a relief he had not expected in physical exertion. He could stop thinking about Mary Thorn. He took to work as some men take to whisky when a dumb ache oppresses them or some haunting memory will not let them be. And Mary Thorn did haunt him so long as he could look across from Hawk's Nest at that weathered cedar house. He told himself that he was a fool to feel that way. But logic had nothing to do with feeling. Irrational or not, it existed. Something in him had burned up full flame. Love, the mating instinct, whatever it was, had settled upon an object and refused to be directed elsewhere. There was more than sex involved. He did not know precisely what else, but he was sure of something above and beyond the urge of the flesh, however strong that might be. Because he couldn't say to himself that there were other girls and be consoled. Another girl wouldn't do.
He couldn't rid himself of the notion that he and Mary Thorn were made for each other. His mind went questing forward and backward and verified the emotional prompting. They had been shaping their own destiny for years. Or was it being shaped for them? He couldn't decide. But he could trace some indefinable influence drawing them together since childhood. There had always been a subtle pleasure in being together, a community of personal interest, a flowing of thoughts and feelings along the same channel that transcended the material factors in their lives. The material factors were prying them apart now. Rod saw that. He knew Mary's inflexibility once she determined on a given course. He had beaten his will against that in simple, childish matters. She would not be driven. She would walk her own road. She had always been a silently determined, lovable little devil, Rod told himself sadly. She was herself uniquely, neither a pattern nor an echo, and he would have loved her for that alone in a world where girls were very largely patterns or echoes, armed for conquest in the arena of men with the sole weapon of their sex.
Rod would say to himself that she was wrong, that money and caste and social privilege made no difference. But his mind was too acute not to see that she was right. Where he differed from her, what he resented most was her conviction of the importance of these things to him. That resentment kept him away from Mary Thorn as much as her positive refusal. He was too much the youthful egotist not to believe he could ultimately break that down. But he did not wish to coerce her, even through her own affection, until he saw a breach in the Norquay wall through which they could walk together.
Meantime he sweated through the last of a hot July. Phil had obligingly supplied him with a "job."
"This working up from the bottom doesn't strike my fancy," Phil had observed. "But if you're keen on it, old kid, have your way. They're apt to give you a rather rough time, though."
Rod grinned at that. He stood now five foot eleven in his socks. One hundred and seventy pounds of bone, muscle and nerves perfectly coördinated. He had made every team in school that he tried for, and he knew what it was to undergo discipline, to withstand punishment. It only amused him (when it did not irritate)—this solicitude for his comfort—as if he were something to be marked "fragile," "handle with care," whenever he stepped outside his own well-ordered environment, where rights and privileges and precedence were so clearly defined they went unquestioned. His father's admonitions, Grove's unsolicited counsel about girls, Phil's prudent objection to his getting down to a logger's level. It was the first and only time Rod heard Phil voice the old caste shibboleth. It surprised him, but he made no comment. He had his own program. He did not mind what they said so long as they did not actively oppose. And if the loggers undertook to give him a "rough" time because he happened to be the owner's son, he expected both to learn and teach in the process.
His work began in a camp fifty miles northwest of the Euclataws, on Hardwicke Island. For a month he worked as a bucker, following up a falling crew to saw the felled trees into standard length logs. He pulled all day on the end of a crosscut saw. The woods about him resounded with the clink of axes, the whine of steel cable in iron blocks, the shrill tooting of donkey whistles, the shudder and thrash of great machines spooling up half a mile of twisted steel rope on revolving drums, dragging enormous logs as if they were toothpicks on a thread, shooting them down to salt water, whence by raft and towline they passed to the hungry saws of the town mills.
Rod loved the cool green forest. It made him a little sad sometimes to see it so ravished. Wherever the logger went with his axes and saws and donkey engines he left behind a desolation of stumps and broken saplings and torn earth. But Rod was no sentimentalist. He knew that humanity does not survive by beauty alone. Timber is a utility. It must serve its turn. Nevertheless the artist in him suffered now and then at the havoc,—as a sensitive man turned butcher may perhaps occasionally revolt at his killing trade, despite the fact that man is a meat-eating animal.
In this first month Rod found little of note beyond hard work and monotony. The camp was well-established, well-equipped, moving along an efficient routine. The crew was disciplined and orderly. They let Rod alone. Insensibly they seemed to realize that while he was among them he was not of them, and they neither rode him nor made him one of themselves. In this camp he learned something of logging operations, but little or nothing of the logger that was new.
With the dog days, however, Phil transferred him to a new camp nearer home, a new operation—lock, stock, and barrel—from the gray-mustached logging boss to the cookhouse flunkys. They were mustered on the Valdez shore a mile below Little Dent when Rod joined. A hundred men, half a dozen donkey engines on floats, drums and drums of flexible steel cable, scow-loads of lumber, tools, all the machinery and personnel gathered for a raid on the fir and cedar spreading over that hillside to the Granite Pool and beyond.
"You can get all the dope you want on logging here, and be at home too," Phil pointed out. "This camp will run for years. We may have to put in a railroad to reach the farther limits."
"Are you going to cut all this Valdez timber?" Rod asked.
"That's the idea, I believe."
"We seem to be speeding up all around for some reason," he remarked, after a little. "I don't see why we should, but we are. This show very near doubles our force."
Nor could Rod see why, but he suspected Grove's financial expansion as the cause. Grove was shooting at millions. He talked quite casually now of major and minor operations, as if he were treating the body of commerce like a surgeon. The Norquay Trust was getting its fingers into every industrial pie from which a money plum could be extracted. Before the new camp had cut a stick Rod learned that ground was being broken in Phillips Arm for a pulp mill capitalized at two millions. The Norquay Trust was helping to finance the thing, handling the pulp company's bonds. It was to furnish an outlet for low-grade timber,—cheaply made newsprint. To Rod it seemed chiefly an excuse for some financial juggling and to strip a lovely valley of timber, to pollute a beautiful stretch of sea-floored inlet with waste from sulphurous acid bleaching vats.
It was all one to Rod, a part of the inevitability of things. He would have preferred to let Phillips Arm retain its beauty and solitude, its forested valley a home for deer and bear and coveys of grouse, its shining river the highway of salmon to their spawning grounds. He would have cut the Valdez timber last of all, because he liked to look south from Hawk's Nest on a slope of unbroken green. But he had no voice in the matter. If they chose to strip the granite ribs of the earth to their primal nakedness, not of necessity but for an ambitious man's profit, he could only shrug his shoulders. He had his own row to hoe. Rod was beginning to suspect that if Grove were a throwback to some coarse, high-handed animalistic type, he himself was something of a variation from the true Norquay strain. Like did not always produce like.
Here about him work went forward with a swing. A dozen carpenters wrought marvels of construction on shore, transforming raw lumber into bunk houses, cook shacks, office, blacksmith shop, commissary. The falling gangs kept intermittent shudders running through the hillsides above, where they threw down their daily score of great trees. The donkey engines hitched cables to stumps ashore, slid off their floats, hauled themselves puffing and grunting into the shadowy woods, black-bellied mechanical spiders drawing themselves along by a thread of twisted steel wire. A pile-driver crew with a two-ton steam hammer drove rows of sticks alongshore to enclose a booming ground. Another crew built a chute from tide-water to the first benchland. Men and powerful machinery directed with skill and energy wrought this transformation. In two weeks logs were plunging down the chute,—one hundred thousand board feet per diem.
It was all new; machinery from Washington shops—steel cable from England—tools from Welland Vale—a logging boss from Oregon—men from every corner of the earth. To Rod there was a dual advantage in this. He saw the technique of preparation pass through every stage, emerge from apparent confusion to orderly, foreseen results. On the personal side he was merely one man in a crew. There were no old hands to make it easier or harder for him because he was a Norquay. The logging boss was a man with a reputation for getting out timber. It was almost a religion with him. Rod marked him shrewdly. If Jim Handy had any hopes or ambitions beyond so many thousand feet per day brought to tide-water Rod never learned what they were. The man was a human logging machine. Other men commended themselves to him only in so far as they were efficient in the woods. To Handy, owners and owners' sons were subordinate to the job itself. He was the most perfect example of a single-track mind Rod Norquay had ever encountered.
But the crew as a whole had no such limitations. Rod fitted among them easily, discovering in himself new phases of adaptability, finding in the conglomerate mass as many angles of human interest as there are facets on a diamond. They were literate and illiterate, talkative and silent, coarse and fine. The bunk house echoed with everything from downright obscenity to analytical discussions of the entire social order. One didn't, he perceived with some surprise, have to graduate from a university to have ideas, to express them comprehensively, to examine life critically in its spiritual as well as in its material aspects. And out of the few who stood intellectually head and shoulders above the non-thinking ruck Rod came to know best and to like genuinely a man but two or three years older than himself.
Andy Hall was a high-rigger, an expert on steel cable, the manner of its placing, splicing, its capacity for strain, and its life in the humming blocks. He was short and compactly muscular with sandy hair and a clear blue eye that could be both quizzical and cold. His work was his work. He was paid to rig cable, and he did so, and did it well. But he was what he termed a class-conscious proletarian. Andy flew no red flags. He kept his nose between the covers of a book when he was through his work. But whosoever dragged him into discussion was apt to encounter the deluge. He had convictions which he voiced in unequivocal terms. His vocabulary was equally rich in terse colloquialisms and pure English.
"Where did you go to school, Andy?" Rod asked him one Sunday morning. They were lounging in the shade of a branchy maple left standing beside the bunk house. Rod had been listening to Andy outline the theory of evolution to an argumentative Swede with a Lutheran complex.
Andy grinned.
"School of experience," said he. "University of life and books. Never graduated. Never will. Always be a student—gettin' plucked now and then. No," he hunched up his knees and smiled amiably at Rod, "I never had the advantage of being formally labelled as an educated man. You're a McGill man, I understand. Find it helps much on the job?"
"Not on the job as a job," Rod answered. "Still, it helps to give me a certain slant at things which pertain to the job. For sheer physical labor you might say a university training is waste. At the same time—"
"What are you doing on the job, anyway?" Andy inquired with blunt directness, although good-naturedly. "You don't have to. Why don't you go play with the rest of the butterflies?"
"I want to see what makes the wheels go round," Rod repeated the only reason he ever gave.
The high-rigger jolted him with his reply.
"We do," he said calmly. "Me and old Jim Handy, And the Christian Swede, and Blackstrap Collins on the boom, and all these Danes and Norskys and old rivermen from Michigan. We make the wheels go round and the master class—to which you belong—lives soft off the proceeds. It must be great to ride always on the band wagon, and to feel the conviction that you are ordained by God to do so, eh? To pop your whip and make the plug lean hard against the collar. What would happen to you if they all balked?"
Rod clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the maple trunk. He had finished a creditable week under an exacting hook-tender. It was good just to rest, to look lazily up at a blue September sky through quivering leaves. Sufficient unto the day—
"I don't know," he said unperturbed, "and right now I don't care a hoot. Master class and serving class is all one to me at this particular moment. However, I don't want to ride on the back of the working class—as you put it, as the parlor radicals at school used to declaim—without paying for my ride. I'm not quite so sure of these economic fetiches as some of you fellows. A man can sell his labor, if that's all he has to sell, without selling his soul to the buyer. And that's what counts most. You can hire somebody to cook your food and make your clothes and keep your house in order. But you can't hire anybody to live your life for you, to suffer your pains and dream your dreams. Rich or poor, a man must live his own life. Maybe you fellows are right about the intensity of the class struggle, about the importance of the economic basis being better adjusted. But the fact remains that a man's existence is as much a matter of purely individual longings and visions and strivings as it is of getting his daily bread. It isn't all a matter of material interests, Andy. You can't perfectly adjust human society on a purely material basis. We're all egoists, most of us thoroughgoing egotists as well. We all want to do and be for ourselves. That seems to be fundamental. We can't help it. We're made that way. And there is one thing the altruists and social reformers seem to overlook, so far as the class struggle within any national group is concerned: the crowd that has the greatest driving force, the most cohesion, will always be in the saddle. It doesn't matter whether we like this conclusion or not. If there is anything in evolution, in the whole history of mankind, that is a fact."
"Good enough—you got something in the old bean, after all," Andy smiled. "You will have light in your darkness when some of your crowd are fumbling around bewildered, wondering what has happened to them. Yes, you're dead right, Norquay. You put it very well. The group with the greatest cohesion, the greatest driving force—it isn't a question of moral judgments—it's a question of power. But the real power lies in the men who do the world's work and the brains that are hired by capital to direct the work. Only they lack cohesion. If they ever learn the value of coöperation, of community of interest—look out! Your crowd learned that lesson long ago. It's a scream when you look at it cold-blooded. We cut down trees and saw them into lumber and build houses—and you own the houses. We build motor cars—but the men who build 'em seldom have one to ride in. You know," he laughed amusedly, "when I look at our industrial system in its entirety, it seems to me like a huge, unwieldy machine that we've built up hit-and-miss, and the damned thing is operating us instead of us operating it. Even the men who are supposed to control it aren't sure they have the thing in hand. Some day this machine will become so complicated it won't work at all. You can hear friction squeaks in a good many of the joints now. It's liable to break down."
"Then what?" Rod prompted.
"Then we'll have to devise a new industrial mechanism that will be the servant of society and not society's master."
"How will you do it?" Rod asked.
"I don't know," Hall answered. "So far as America is concerned, the present machine seems good for many generations—with a little patching and lubrication. But sometime it will have to be done. It will not be done by the group in the saddle. They're only interested in maintaining the status quo. If it is done at all it will be forced along by visionaries, damn fools like me, who dream of a perfect, harmonious society of mankind—and get called names because we talk about our dreams. Ain't it queer," his tone became tinged with contempt, "that the man who has beautiful visions and translates 'em in terms of sculpture or music or painting or literature is hailed as an artist, while the fellow who has an equally beautiful vision of a human society strong and healthy, purged of poverty and dirt and injustice, is frowned upon as a dangerous agitator? It's a giddy world when you stand off and look. Eh?"
Rod nodded. He was more interested in Andy Hall than in Andy's theories. Yet there was a bone in the meat of Andy's statement that Rod's mind chewed on long after Andy had gone into the bunk house to shave and take his Sunday bath in a washtub by the creek.
The man with a vision and a dream was never so comfortable as the man who merely had an objective. But he had more within him to stay his soul in the time of stress, Rod believed. Also it was a trifle surprising to find so nimble-minded a youth as the high-rigger working for a daily wage in a logging camp. True, his wage was six dollars per diem, which was equal to the stipend of some professors Rod knew. Nevertheless Rod considered that Andy, with his obvious intellectual ability, was misplaced at manual labor, even labor that called for a high degree of skill. He rather admired Andy's radicalism. There was a stout honesty of conviction in him. Rod was not go sure himself that all was for the best in the best of possible worlds,—that comfortable illusion which sustains so many worthy people.
When he pondered Andy's simile of the complex machine gradually getting out of hand, proceeding to the ultimate smash, he couldn't help thinking of Grove's accelerated pace. That was merely a casual impression. Probably Grove had the levers firmly in hand.
He had half a notion to go fishing, to wet a line in the Granite Pool. Or walk over the hill to Oliver Thorn's. Mary had probably gone back to town now. Still—it was very pleasant to lie there under the maple, to rest his body, to let his nostrils be titillated by a smell of doughnuts frying in the cook house. He ought to drop down on the slack and see Phil.
Thus Rod, resting against the earth, two days' growth of beard on his chin, calked logger's boots on his feet, a gaudy mackinaw folded behind his head, cogitated idly, drowsily, until at last he fell into a doze from which the noon meal gong awakened him.