CHAPTER XII
Isabel Wall, the pert and pretty sister-in-law of Mr. Grove Norquay, became at last the cause of Rod's first definite breach in the fences.
When summer full-blown came tripping on the heels of spring, Rod left the Valdez camp for good. It had been a wholesome experience. One year in the woods had shown him quite fully the technique of big timber operations. It had shed an unreckoned light, moreover, upon the nature and mental processes of the men who handled the timber, which Rod was sure seldom appeared to the owners of the woods as a matter of any particular importance. He knew himself duly qualified as a practical logger. He was egotist enough to believe himself more capable of getting results without friction than most logging bosses. But he had not set out to qualify in timber so much as to get outside the shell of his class and see how and why man in general functioned both in and out of industry. He had covered the first phase that occurred to him. His own individual job, his book, began to nag him again, to assume form, proportion, to cry out for embodiment. So he laid aside calked boots and Mackinaws for canvas shoes and flannels, and took up the pleasant ways of Hawk's Nest when June brought the first coho salmon into the rapids and a chair in the shade was a comfortable thing.
Perhaps, as Phil put it in fraternal raillery, Isabel thought that if one Norquay in the Wall family was a good thing, two would be better. The truth is that Isabel suddenly became aware of Rod as a man and characteristically sought to annex him by the usual methods. She had finished her education in a presumably fashionable school on the Atlantic seaboard that spring, coincident with Mary Thorn's graduation from the University of B.C. Isabel's social experience had been judicially expanded in the intervals of education. She was twenty now, a sophisticated young person, accustomed to associating with other sophisticated young persons of both sexes. She had seen little of Rod except during summer vacations. For a year she had not seen him at all. Now she seemed to discover him anew and to mark him for her own.
Rod granted her uncommon charm. She was pretty and petite and modish, and she spoke the current lingo with effortless facility. But while she pleased his eye she failed to stir his blood. There was a sufficient reason for Rod's immunity, which of course Isabel did not know.
It became obvious that Isabel was in deadly earnest. And when it became equally obvious to Rod that both families were complacently agreeable to Isabel's maneuverings he grinned first, then grew sober as the remedies he used to cure Isabel merely aggravated the disease.
It wasn't a simple flirtatious liking Isabel had for him. Rod was too keen to make such a mistake. It seemed that this dainty doll-like creature was capable of intense feeling and not too sure in her control of the emotional disturbance. Rod began by being amused. Then he felt sorry. In the end he grew a little alarmed over the net result of being sympathetic. It is highly discomforting to a young man to have a girl weep spontaneously on his chest, unless he conceives it to be his special mission and blessed privilege to soothe this particular damsel's tears. Isabel did that one evening in the shadow of a hoary old cedar in Hawk's Nest grounds. She couldn't help it, she said, after a long embarrassed silence during which she dabbed the tears away. She was a fool and she knew it, but it couldn't be helped. One wasn't responsible for one's feelings, was one?
And Rod, with a little ache in his breast, a great deal of wordless sympathy for Isabel, because he had for a long time suffered that queer state of stifled longing, that seemed sometimes as if it would drive him mad, agreed that one was not. They let it go at that.
Rod sat with elbows on the sill of his bedroom window late that night, staring out over a moon-bathed landscape, silver barred with black, where the shadows of great trees lay across the lawn. He looked down a shimmering moon-path that seemed to offer a bright highway across the channel where Mary Thorn lay sleeping,—if indeed she slept. Rod wondered if something in her breast ever drove her to a window to stare across the tide and think of him. She was home now. He had his own sources of information. To-morrow he would see her. To-night the querulous imps that make a man question his destiny and desire bade him consider if he did well to let his heart abide so constantly with Mary Thorn when there were other desirable women to be had for the asking. Isabel, for instance? All clear sailing. No questions asked or answered. The dual family blessing, and any little material wants cheerfully attended to. On the personal side,—well, he was flesh and blood, sexual tinder. When Isabel put her face against his breast and sobbed in that stifled, choking fashion he had been deeply moved, thrilled, conscious of her physical nearness, the sweet fragrant odor of her tousled hair, the trembling of her small, soft body. Wasn't that good enough? What did a man want of a woman when he took her to wife?
Rod shook himself impatiently. What rot he had been thinking. Whatever it was in Mary Thorn that so imperatively promised to fulfil his every need, it didn't reside in Isabel Wall. He was sure of that. He could let himself slide into a temporary infatuation with Isabel—perhaps. He could conceive of possessing her. But he couldn't behold her down a long vista of years playing the game fairly and bravely, taking the cards dealt from the deck of life, good, bad and indifferent, with courage and fortitude. He couldn't picture Isabel doing that any more than he could picture her, aetat sixteen, shooting the Euclataw Rapids in a dugout, eyes shining in sheer ecstasy of swift movement, hair streaming in the wind. Isabel would either have been frightened or wildly, dangerously excited.
That was as far as Rod carried his analogy. It was sufficient. He had not tried his hand at creative fiction without a sense of character, of form, proportion. He egotistically assumed that he could accurately gauge personal values, that he did it intuitively as well as rationally. If his prescience did not clearly account for the depth and tenacity of his affection for Mary Thorn it quickly and thoroughly disposed of Isabel as a substitute.
A light flashed from a window in Oliver Thorn's house. Rod rested his chin on cupped palms. Unrest, longing blew through the spaces of his being like a hot wind. The bright moon and the dusky woods beckoned him into their restful silences, and the light across the channel seemed to blink a message. It drew him like a magnet. Over there his heart lay. If Isabel's unheralded breakdown had served no other purpose, it had filled him with a wild impatience, revived a fever that burned him. The madness of a lover's moon! The coursing blood of youth clamoring for the fulfilment of life's promise,—life that promises so much and often gives so little. The impulse to translate dreams into realities. Quien sabe?
He rose and went softly downstairs and out a side door to the pale emptiness of the lawn crossed with inky bands of shadow, and so sauntering, head bowed and hands sunk deep in his pockets, presently brought up on the float. The Haida lay moored on one side, the Kowloon on the other. A profusion of canoes and rowboats lay hauled out on the planks.
Rod stood awhile, like a man in two minds. His eyes lingered on the moon-path. His ears took note of the lessening monotone between the Gillard Islands on the east and the choked westward passage inside Little Dent. A still night and a slackening tide.
He got into a dinghy, shipped the oars, rowed slowly out into the channel. Halfway, an eddy setting toward the Valdez shore took him in its sweep. He let the oars rest and lighted a cigarette, gazing at the tranquil, silvery beauty.
"What a night," he whispered. "What a night for fairies and mermaids—and lovers."
Then the current slid him into the deep shadow cast by the high forested ridge behind Oliver Thorn's house, and as his boat touched the float and he sat in a moment of indecision, a voice spoke softly:
"Hello, Rod."
He looked sharply over the float. The shadow of the hills lay on it like folds of crepe. But in a moment he made out a dim figure. He went over, still holding the painter in his hand. It was Mary, wrapped in a gray coat, sitting on a box.
"I thought you'd be in your little trundle bed," he greeted her.
"Then why did you come?" she asked.
"I don't quite know. Just on the chance. I was restless. Moon madness, maybe."
He sat down beside her. One hand shone white in the gloom where it stretched on her knee. Rod possessed himself of that. He bent, peering into her face. Her eyes glowed at him.
"All by your lonesome out here in the dark," he murmured. "How come, Brownie? Did you sit yourself down here to put the come-hither on me?"
She shook her head.
"Well, I came."
He put his arms around her, drew her close, felt her settle against him unresistingly.
"Glad?"
She nodded.
A solitary loon lifted his harsh, complaining cry somewhere in the shining channel.
"Calling his mate. And I've found mine. Or have I?"
He knew, or thought he knew. There was an attitude of surrender, unmistakable, complete, that filled him with a strange delight. But he wanted the verification of that voiceless pledge.
"I don't know. How can one account for a mood, a longing? I came down here to sit in the moonlight. It was so radiant. Then after a little the shadow crept out from shore, and it was just as if something black and gloomy had settled over me. I felt small and forlorn and lonely. And all at once I wanted you, Rod. I wished you were here. I wanted you. And you're here. That's all."
"It's enough," he said tenderly.