CHAPTER XX
For a few days Rod went about a little, picking up threads of old acquaintance with places and people. The uneasy consciousness of a heart which might fail him at any moment troubled him now and then. Once or twice he felt that strange faltering. But it did not stop—not quite. He wondered if he had passed a crisis that first night at home when he felt himself locked in a grapple with death itself. And so he was very careful. It was easy to be apathetic, to be completely acquiescent. Nothing, he thought, would ever again make his heart swell with such repressed passion as the sights and sounds of the western front, the carnival of non-combatants in Paris and London, the bitterness with which for so long he had seen the agonies and endurances and destructiveness of war as sheer waste—blind, blundering waste, the offspring of cupidity wedded to arrogant ignorance.
He wanted to forget what could not be changed. Here it was easy to forget, at least to thrust it all into the background, now that he was home. For a time he would rest. When his heart strengthened he would take stock of his resources and move with determined purpose in some direction, toward some as yet indefinite goal.
In the meantime, free from military discipline, interminable parades, orders, red tape that fettered the hands of initiative and bound up a man's mouth so that he needed only two phrases in his vocabulary, "Yes, sir" and "No, sir," he went about in his native city observing, noting, listening in clubs, homes, on the streets, in hotel lobbies where he went to meet other men who had just come back.
If the landscape endured and the outstanding architectural features, many things had changed, contrary to his first glad impression, were still changing at an accelerated pace in this winter of 1919. In four years and a half his native city, when he came to examine it closely, presented a transformed physiognomy. Its lifeblood, people and money, flowed in a heavier stream through complicated arteries. Vancouver was bigger and better, he heard on every hand. New industries, shipyards, shipping, more elaborate affairs. The war had done a great deal for British Columbia, an elderly banker naïvely remarked to him.
Rod conceded that it probably had. But it had also done something "to" British Columbia. He couldn't say just what. It wasn't clear enough in his mind. But he could feel it. Or perhaps it was only himself. He could not be sure. He could dimly apprehend a difference. His world was changed. Phil was dead. Grandfather Norquay took his long sleep beside other dead Norquays in the plot at Hawk's Nest. Grove flourished largely, a scintillating comet, streaming across the moneyed spaces.
Rod sometimes paused after dark in some distant part of the city to look at the flamboyant sign with a speculative interest, without the old resentment, but with a shade of disapproval. Grove was become a big man—Rod couldn't escape that conclusion—a big man in his chosen field. Scarcely a day but some newspaper quoted him. He figured in local print co-equal with the Peace Conference and the latest authentic report of Lenine's death. Nearly nine years now of waxing great in the financial firmament. Grove bade fair to win greater fame and fortune than that old forebear of his who beat around the Horn to found a family in the wilderness because the land filled his eyes with pleasure and his soul with peace.
Would old Roderick have found pleasure and profit in discounting notes, clipping coupons at so much per cent, buying and selling bonds and mortgages, squeezing little debtors and bolstering up big ones for a consideration? Rod smiled at the quaint notion.
But he had evidently underestimated Grove's capacity. Grove had his community behind him. His finger was in every pie. His skill at extracting plums was envied and admired.
"He's what they mean when they talk about the greatness of our country," Rod thought cynically. "That sort of thing."
Oliver Thorn had sold his timber to the Norquay Estate and retired to live in a cottage on the Capilano slope fronting on the city, where he could, as he told Rod, spend his last years seeing the sun rise from behind the Coast range and set behind the far, blue rampart of Vancouver Island. John P. Wall, Grove's father-in-law, had made a fortune in building wooden ships and another in airplane spruce. Wall's youngest son had been killed overseas, but his eldest had been too precious an asset to the community to risk his life in war. Isabel was a beauty, still unmarried. (It seemed to Rod an astonishing thing when Mary told him Isabel was her dearest friend.) The Deanes and Richstons flourished, with one or two gaps in the younger ranks. They had grown richer with the war, vastly more sure of themselves, setting a pace in the social parade that lesser folk found hard to follow.
There were two avenues open along which Rod could saunter to exercise this detached observance of his own people: the homes which automatically opened to him, and brief daily contacts with men downtown. Socially things seemed a little more feverish, people just a trifle keener in the futile pursuit of futile diversion, the dancing just a little more frankly sensuous, the drinking a little freer, the talk looser. If one couldn't or wouldn't keep the pace one was "slow." It amused Rod and it vaguely troubled him. These people seemed so remote from so many things of importance that pressed close on them, matters that constituted both a warning and a threat. Downtown it was worse. Uptown rested on downtown. The economic link—the strongest link in the invisible chain—shackled them together whether they knew it or not.
And downtown was frankly on the make, with the most shrewd and far-seeing already privately dubious about a let-down in the swift flow of affairs that followed the close of European hostilities. Perhaps it had always been the same. He had not been aware how consistently material, how harshly practical, the world of commerce must be. But he couldn't get used to hearing them tot up Canada's share in the reparations, the gloating on what enlarged African and Asiatic possession meant to trade, their chesty pride in having swept the Hun from the seas (as if they had done it in their office chairs). He couldn't get used to that, because it was invariably accompanied by an undertone of growling about confiscatory taxation, enormous pension bills.
Here and there some elderly hardshell solemnly viewed with alarm three items debited to the war: first, the growing demand of labor for shorter hours, increased pay, and a voice in the conduct of industries for which they furnished the motive power; second, the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia which constituted a horrific menace to the sacred rights of private property; third, the military strength and insistent demands of France.
The war as a business proposition! Rod got up and walked away from a group of men in a club who rather vindictively discussed these important phases of the European débâcle. If that were all—commerce—shipping—iron—coal—territory—indemnities. If that were all! His heart wouldn't stand his talking to those bankers and merchants and manufacturers and brokers as he wished to talk. He left them. What was held as piracy and brigandage for the individual became somehow the unchallenged privilege of a nation, if only the scale of operations were large enough. The Barbary corsairs were at least open in their deeds. They flew the Jolly Roger and their victims walked the plank without ado. Nor did the pirates get their fighting done by proxy and then grumble because they found it expensive.
Yes the world, his world, had changed. Of all that he had known through youth and early manhood only his wife—like the sea and the mountains—remained steadfast, a desirable reality. Now, more than ever, he was filled with gratitude and wonder that she had stood loyal, devoted, staunch as a rock in the bewildering flux of a period that seemed to him, in occasional somber moods, to have quickened the disintegration of men and the cherished works of men to a degree that made him apprehensive.
This couldn't be the reality of things, he assured himself. He had somehow got them twisted. His vision and his understanding must be askew. He had to stop pondering about it all. It was difficult for him to do this. He had always been a thinking being. That faculty had cursed him in France. On duty in trenches, in action, in long lonely vigils, his mind had hammered him with insistent questions and speculations on the why and the wherefore of human activities. Many an answer that came like the answer to a sum saddened him. One should not see too clearly.
He found it so now. But at least he, as an individual, was not too deeply involved to stand clear of all this feverish hurrying and scurrying to nowhere after nothing. There must be something a man could do in the world that would bring him dividends in satisfaction of accomplishment, as well as dollars. For him, because his forbears had been both adventurous and far-seeing, there was no immediate economic pressure. He had no great responsibilities, beyond himself and Mary and their boy. If he needed more than the minor share which he held in the Norquay estate, he could surely get it without bowing his head and twisting his moral sense awry before the Moloch of commerce.
The more he saw of town the more he desired to turn his back on it. Not because it was town but because for so long he had had his fill of noise and motion. To sit amid a great silence, the strange, restful hush of a forest, in the shadow of great mountains,—that calm, secure peace; to hear only the sighing of wind in high interlaced branches, the muted song of running water, the whistle of birds' wings,—that was his wish.
Practical wisdom forbade. There was really one place where he longed to be with Mary and his son, and they could not go there. Hawk's Nest was no longer his home. It was Grove's. His road and Grove's diverged too sharply for him to go there even as a guest. Elsewhere they could not find comfort at that season. It was a winter of sleet and snow, of alternate frosts and rains. A half-sick man couldn't go camping like a pioneer with a woman and a child. And it was not camping as such that Rod longed for, he knew, as the spacious background and comfortable security of his birthplace.
Whereupon, as a sensible man eschews the unattainable, he put it out of his mind. In the spring,—he and Mary lay awake nights planning what they would do in the spring.
He came home from one of these desultory excursions abroad a little before dinner one evening.
"Your father has phoned twice since five o'clock," Mary told him. "He asked to have you call him up when you came in."
Rod got his connection.
"You telephoned, pater," he said. "Was it anything of importance?"
"Well, yes. Can you come down to the club after dinner, Rod? If not to-night, then by nine in the morning?"
"I'll come to-night. Say eight o'clock."
He hung up the receiver. As he got ready for dinner his mind was divided between the playful squeals of his son romping in the living room and the almost plaintive note in his father's voice over the wire. Norquay senior had changed with everything else. He had aged. Losing Phil had been a blow. But he was a proud man—and he had two sons left. That grief had not put care lines in his face, or caused the abstracted brooding into which he sometimes relapsed. Rod understood, of course, that the war had completed the break-up of the old family life at Hawk's Nest which Grove's embarkation on a career had begun, or Grove's personality had begun. His father admitted that he no longer cared to live at Hawk's Nest.
"One doesn't like to be alone all the time," he had put it quite simply. "Too many ghosts haunt those corridors for an old man. And at one's age one doesn't care to set up an establishment in town. When any of the others find occasion in summer, I go to Hawk's Nest. Otherwise I live at the club."
Yet the place was kept up. Stagg, the butler, his wife who ranked as housekeeper, a cook, two maids, and two gardeners held a sinecure. One could, Rod assumed, step in and find Hawk's Nest quite as of old.
He came back to his father. What bothered him? It couldn't be money or affairs. The Norquay estate was rock-ribbed. Timber, land, gilt-edged securities. It must simply be that he was getting old and lonely. When a man is past sixty and all his life has been spent in a well-appointed home, surrounded by a fairly numerous family and still more numerous relatives, he can hardly reconcile himself to the empty shell of a house, or the artificial atmosphere of even the most elaborately appointed club. Rod felt sorry for him. But if Grove hadn't failed to carry on the family tradition, Hawk's Nest would still be the year-around rendezvous of the clan, as it had always been. No effect without a cause. Rod put aside the thought that his elder brother could be blamed for a great deal if one chose to be critical.
His father sat smoking a cigar in a chair that commanded the club entrance, and he led the way to his rooms as soon as Rod appeared.
He took some papers off a table and sat fussing with them. He didn't seem inclined to talk at first, beyond a few casual remarks. Rod waited. He knew his father. He felt that something was coming,—something that rested with a great weight on the elder man's mind. Since Rod came home there seemed to have arisen between them a more keenly sympathetic understanding than had ever existed before. It wasn't a matter of words. It was a feeling. Rod divined intuitively that his father had some deep trouble to share with him. He could not have defined any reason for this belief. It existed as a belief. In that conviction he waited.
"Five years ago," Norquay senior began abruptly, "I looked forward to sitting back with a pipe and slippers and a book while my sons carried on in the old way. For a hundred and thirty years, to speak precisely, we have gone ahead solidifying our position, doing well by ourselves and all connected with us. We seemed—as a family—to have acquired a permanence, a solidarity, beyond that of any family in this province. We have become a sort of institution. We were here first. Of the exploring adventurers, we were the first to take root. You know the family history. We have helped to make this country what it is. We have acquired a great deal of material power, yet I do not recall that we have ever abused it. In each generation we have had a lot of faithful service, and we have had it because we have scrupulously observed some form of obligation to those who served us. Men have trusted us as being persons entirely trustworthy. We have not been Shylocks. We have not been arrogant. We have never been greedy for more."
Five years earlier Rod would have assented, as a matter of course. Now he stirred slightly in his chair, as his father paused, and observed dispassionately:
"Would you include Grove in that last?"
"I am coming to Grove," Norquay senior answered. "To arrive at Grove by a logical sequence is the reason for this summing-up of ourselves. A few weeks before your grandfather died he said to me, 'My father once prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle. What's the last hatching? Sparrows. Sparrows!' Quite apropos of nothing. We hadn't even been talking. He grew very uncertain in his mind at the last. A great age, Rod. Nearly ninety. He scarcely comprehended the war. Grove was there with a house party. I think their high spirits annoyed him. Sparrows!"
He contemplated the rug with a fixed frown.
"I wonder if he were right," he said at last.
"I must confess," he continued, "that I have spent my life in a state of inertia compared to his, and to the energy his father worked with. They were actively constructive. Looking back, I seem to have done nothing but maintain a sort of status quo. Indeed, lacking any necessity or any great personal ambition, with a disinclination for politics, a distaste for anything in the way of business outside of estate affairs, there seemed nothing upon which to expend great energy. I've moved along pleasant lines of least resistance. Looking back, it doesn't seem so satisfactory. Avoiding boredom, keeping up a moderate revenue without being a taskmaster to labor—that about expresses it.
"It seemed to me, however, that my sons must inherit some of the abounding energy, the creativeness, that I somehow lacked. Your eldest brother, whom you were named after, was a vigorous, high-spirited boy. That venturesomeness resulted in his death at an early age. That left Grove next in line. For many years I watched the three of you develop from sturdy youngsters into young men. Phil, it seemed to me, was something like myself. You were always a puzzle, an odd sort of boy, somewhat given to precocious remarks and unexpected actions. Lovable, but erratic, probably brilliant but not entirely dependable, I used sometimes to say to myself: How wide one can go of the mark.
"So you see it was natural that Grove, being the eldest, should be looked to for able carrying on of that which has become a tradition since old Roderick outlined his plan to hold compactly for the entire family that which he had built up out of nothing himself.
"It is a good plan. I have no fault to find with it. The stability, the working power of a large fortune is always depleted by being broken into fragments by division among each generation. The Norquay estate, as he outlined it in his journal, would be a tree ample enough to shelter all under its branches, so long as the trunk was kept intact.
"And it seemed to me Grove had all the qualifications to carry on with honor and profit. He had personality. He had energy and resource. He had ambition, which determined him on a career. I took his ability for granted; his character as a sure inheritance. His faults I conceded as the faults of lusty young manhood, minor failings to be put away in the face of responsibility.
"Yet you and Phil never had such convictions about your brother. Why?"
He paused on the interrogation.
"His weaknesses seemed fundamental. To us some of the things he did were despicable. He did things we would have been ashamed to do. Where his appetites and passions and desires were concerned, he had no consideration for any one or anything, nor any scruple about what he did if it suited him to do it—and it was in his power. That was very clear to both Phil and myself. That was how he seemed to us. We used to wonder why you never had any inkling of what we considered his real character—or lack of it."
Rod was in no mood to be charitable, to mince words, to evade a frank answer to the direct question.
His father pondered briefly.
"You were right and I was wrong," he observed sadly. "All wrong. Phil put himself on record before he went overseas. He warned me not to trust Grove too far. It angered me at the time. It made our parting cool. That's one of my keenest regrets. He was right; you were both right. How can a man make such a blunder in reading his own son? Perhaps because he was his son, I have prided myself on a knowledge of men, too. Ah, well."
He nursed his chin in one palm.
"The Norquay Trust is insolvent," he announced presently. "Gutted, looted from within. It is about to topple over with a resounding crash. I have an outline of the position here," he ruffled the papers in his hand. "It seems incredible, but it is true."
"You're involved? The estate is involved, eh?" Rod asked calmly. It seemed nowise incredible to him. It seemed, in fact, an entirely logical outcome—unlimited power in uncertain hands, increasing momentum, a grand smash. There was not a single element of the unexpected. He had anticipated such a finale. So had Phil.
"Not technically. Not yet."
"Very well. Let it smash," Rod said indifferently. "Let him pick himself up out the debris and take stock of himself. May do him good."
"If that were all. But it isn't so simple," his father sighed. "Don't you see, Rod? Our name, the prestige of the family, the confidence of the public in us as well-known, wealthy people has been the chief foundation on which this tottering Colossus was built. A great many people of whom we never heard, as well as our friends and families to whom we are related by blood and marriage, have put their money into this. It means loss to all, complete ruin to many, I'm afraid. If it were merely a question of Grove—"
He made a gesture of dismissal.
"But it isn't," he went on. "In the public eye and mind we stand or fall as a family. We have a reputation for integrity. If one of the family trades on that, the rest of us can't escape the consequences of his acts. I gave Grove his head and encouraged him, and I can't shirk my individual responsibility. I have no knowledge of a Norquay ever shirking an obligation. I'm an old man. I may not have many years left. I'll admit self-interest. I feel that I must straighten this thing out so that no one will ever say with an angry sneer that we saved our own skins after making a mess of theirs. The reason I asked you to come and see me to-night was to know if you will stand by me and help me see it through? It's got to be done."
"There's only one answer to that, isn't there, pater?" Rod said slowly. "I've outgrown any active antagonism toward Grove. It was more contempt than antagonism, except for the time he went out of his way to annoy my wife. At the same time I wouldn't lift a finger to save him from ever so hard a cropper. Only if you put it as something to be done for the family reputation—that probably means as much to me as it does to you. I'm willing to undertake anything I can handle. No use banking on me too strong, though. I don't know either business or finance."
"Half our wealth is in standing timber," his father replied, "and you know timber. Phil told me that you knew more of logging and loggers than he would ever learn. The woods will have to be our salvation. That will be your job, Rod. You've been through a hard mill. I wish you could have had a long rest. But this matter won't delay. I know law and I know something of affairs. I have had accountants checking up this infernal mess. Dorothy's husband has agreed to take charge. It will take nearly all our available capital to plug holes. The important end, the producing end, must be our timber. That I'll leave to you. We must begin operations at the first break in the weather. You'll have an absolutely free hand."
The ghost of a smile flitted across Rod's face. A free hand to ravage and destroy the forest to make money which would be poured like sand into a rathole! And he uncertain of any definite tenure on life. What of his heart? That overstrained, vital part of him,—which was organically perfect but functionally weak. A heart that was slacking up now, so that he rose and paced back and forth across the floor to stir it up.
"Well," he said at last, halting in his stride. "That's understood."
His father nodded.
"It may not be so bad as it seems," he said, with the first hopeful note Rod had heard him utter. "Though I'm doubtful of quarreling with figures. Grove hasn't been dishonest. That's the only redeeming feature of the nasty mess. But his associates have. I didn't think it of them. But I have moral if not legal proof of their crookedness—cunning financial piracy on a considerable scale. I may be able to make 'em disgorge, and I may not. They've feathered their nests and left Grove, the poor fool, holding the empty sack. The intent is to throw the thing into a receiver's hands. But I'm prepared to checkmate that. There's to be a directors' meeting to-morrow at ten-thirty. I'd like you to go with me. You may find it illuminating. Suppose I pick you up on my way?"
"Why not drive out and have breakfast with us at eight or half-past?" Rod suggested.
"Better still. I'll do that, thanks."
He had never been a demonstrative man. But he shook hands at the door, and Rod's fingers were still tingling with the grip when he walked down the stairs.
As the wheels of the retreating taxi crunched the gravel on his driveway, Rod stood a moment with his foot on the first step. The night was clear, tinged with frost. Above the city roofs that curious lucence from a million lights dimmed the stars. And as his gaze embraced the down-town silhouette he marked for the first time from the house in which he lived the blazing sign of the Norquay Trust, as if it were something from which he could not escape,—and for a moment he was tempted to a childish shaking of his fist at that glowing emblem of a corroded and tottering edifice.