CHAPTER XXII
The three, father and two sons, remained seated at the table without speaking for a few seconds after Wall's parting shot.
Then Grove heaved a sigh.
"Well, that's finished," he said with a return of his old briskness. "I can't say that I like the idea of draining the estate to protect this concern. But it won't take me long to pull it out of the hole. It's really better to have it entirely in our own hands. I didn't believe that crowd would ever get cold feet and leave me in the lurch. Good riddance."
"No," his father answered slowly, "it is not finished. I want your formal resignation as president. I want an assignment of your entire holding in this corporation. At once. When you have done that, it will be finished, so far as you're concerned."
"Pater! For God's sake! Have you gone mad?" Grove's eyes bulged. His mouth opened roundly. "You're not going to put me out?"
"That is precisely my intention."
"But you can't. Nobody knows this thing as I do. It won't run without me. I made it, I tell you. The complexity of—"
"You made it!" his father said wearily. "What have you made of it? A hash. A shaky, unwieldy thing that will fall to pieces if I don't plaster it up with money. Listen to me, Grove."
He leaned forward, pointing an index finger pistol-fashion, and Rod had an impression of hearing sentence passed on a delinquent, a sentence from which there could be no appeal. He had never thought of his father as a harsh, merciless man. He was harsh now. There was an acid bitterness in his tone.
"Listen to me," he repeated. "You have had your head for nine years. You have sunk a sizable fortune in this, and it is nothing but a gutted shell. You have not only wasted your own money, allowed these men to filch it from you, but you have taken the money of people who trusted you and put it in jeopardy. Not because you were a crook or a thief—but because you associated with crooks and thieves without recognizing them as such. You should have known what constitutes business integrity. You have disregarded the highest obligation of a public trust. So you can't remain in control here. You should never have been in control. That was my mistake—for which we must all pay—all of us, do you hear? I should have seen through you long ago. Your private life is a scandal and your public life a sham. You're morally as well as financially bankrupt. You've misled me. I've had to learn for myself about things. You can be of no service in clearing up the mess you've made. I can't trust you. I have no confidence in you. So you must step aside."
Grove's chin sank on his breast.
"You ought to give me a chance," he mumbled. "I've made mistakes. Everybody does. But nobody can handle this thing without me."
Rod marveled at the fixity of this idea.
"No," his father repeated inflexibly. "From now on you make your own chances. Charlie Hale will take full charge here. You will be at hand for a few days to give him such information as he requires. But you will have no authority. I want this attended to this afternoon. At once. See that you do it immediately."
Grove rose. He slouched through the doorway, all the sprightliness gone out of him. Rod felt a sudden twinge of pity. Grove had been broken on his own wheel. Norquay senior sat staring blankly at the table. A wistful sadness shadowed his face. It pained Rod. He was an old man and Grove was his son,—and he had been proud of him. Rod understood.
"Don't take it to heart so, pater," he tried to cheer him. "It'll come out all right."
"The limits of human folly are only exceeded by human blindness," his father answered moodily, "and sometimes it is a little difficult to adjust one's vision to a merciless flash of light."
He sat tapping his fingertips on the polished wood.
"I really wanted you with me for moral support this afternoon, I think, Rod," he confessed, with a faint smile. "I'm sure it has been illuminating, if somewhat disagreeable. I think all the fireworks are touched off. Now I shall be here all afternoon with my solicitor attending to dry business matters. So I won't keep you. There are certain things I want to talk over with you, but to-morrow or another day will do as well."
Rod left the Trust building and walked along Hastings Street without a definite aim. There was an uncomfortable heaviness in his breast, a physical discomfort, which drove him to motion. And his brain was busy in a detached impersonal fashion. All the battles were not fought with guns and poison gas. Struggle seemed inherent in the very process of living, no matter how one lived, what precautions one took. Struggle was all very well,—until it became edged with pain and bitterness. Prides, ambitions, frantic strivings for this and that,—and defeats, reprisals, disasters close in their wake. He wondered what Grove would do now. He wondered if this unstable edifice of Grove's creation would go down in spite of all effort and bury the Norquay family in its collapse. He ruminated upon Grove's eagerly pursued career, slipping away now into sordid futility. A matter of dollars. No question of honor or duty, no sacrifice for anything resembling an ideal, no vision of usefulness to his family, his friends, or his country had illuminated Grove's headlong way. Grove had made a bid for neither respect nor affection in all his dealings with men. Only power, the purely material aspect of power, was a thing he valued. He had lost it. What would he do without it? A brigadier reduced to a K.P.
Rod's most conscious desire, as he moved along a street sodden with a drizzle of cold rain, was to be on the porch at Hawk's Nest, looking at high, aloof mountains deep in winter snow, hiding their heads in wisps of frost-fog, hearing the voice of the rapids lift up its ancient song. He craved rest and quiet, a surcease of incessant street noise, which was to him a faint echo of the sound and fury of the Western Front. He wanted freedom from clash and struggle until he could at least draw his breath and give his heart a chance. He believed he was past a physical crisis, that his heart would strengthen if he could withdraw from crowds and noise, from the swirl of acquisitiveness which bred the mean passions of which he had that day seen some manifestation. He didn't want to be chewed up in the machine which had got beyond Grove's control. He wanted no hand on those levers. Yet he seemed to see obscure forces thrusting upon him tasks he shrank from.
On the surface it was simple enough. They couldn't let a smash come. That was clear. To brace up that swaying structure unlimited funds must be created out of the raw material they controlled, that which had been the backbone of the Norquay estate,—those lordly firs which clothed granite ridges and mountain sides, those ancient cedars that masked gorge and hollow and swamp. That would be his job. One well enough to his liking. Even the destruction of a thing Rod loved as he did his native forest could have an element of the constructive, too, if it were not dictated by a necessity born of human folly and greed. Still, that couldn't be helped now.
It was a curious feeling of the Norquay Trust Company looming over his personal life as it loomed over the adjacent buildings that depressed Rod most. It seemed rather fantastic to imagine that as threatening his peace and welfare, but the feeling was real.
He drifted along the street. People passed him singly, in groups, in pairs, in little droves, hurrying or sauntering, rich and poor, men, women and children, an endlessly flowing stream, of humanity. A sprinkling of khaki showed among them. The majority were the last sweepings of the draft not yet demobilized. Others, he saw at a glance, were returned men. He wondered what they thought of it all now they were back.
He was to have that question partially answered before long. Within a block of the Province office where he had last met him Rod encountered Andy Hall. From the hand which grasped Rod's extended one the index and second fingers were missing. He wore a lieutenant's uniform; four wound stripes marked one sleeve. His freckled face had lost some of the old ruddy color, but his eyes flickered as brightly quizzical as in those days when he rigged high-lead spars in the Valdez camp. Rod took this all in at a glance.
Where were you? What division? When did you get back? How many times over the length and breadth of North America were those questions being asked and answered in 1919?
"Months ago—last of September," Andy said. "The idea was that I should bear a hand getting draftees into shape at Hastings Park, since I was classified as unfit for front-line service. But I haven't done much. Flu knocked me out in November. They'll can me pretty soon, I hope. It's easy to get into the army, but hell to get out, even when they don't need you any longer."
"The tribal instinct won out, eh?" Rod smiled. "For a downright rebel you seem to have got on in the army."
"I'm still a rebel," Andy returned. "The war would have made me one if I hadn't been before. Still, when you are fool enough to volunteer for a job, you can't very well lie down on it. There were times when I felt like it, though. It was a dirty job, eh?"
"Rather," Rod agreed. "Remember the time we had a drink in the Strand and talked about the big show?"
Andy nodded.
"I was thinking about that as I came past the Province," he drawled. "If it were worth while expressing an opinion, I'd say the same—only more so."
"Let's stroll up to the Vancouver and sit down and gas awhile?" Rod suggested.
They found comfortable chairs in a quiet corner of the great hotel. Their talk covered Europe, politics, certain phases of trench fighting, and came back at last from generalities tinged with pessimism to the particular, to themselves.
"What are you going to do after you're demobilized?" Rod asked. It was not, on his part, an idle question.
"I don't know." Andy shook his head. "I'll never sling cable again, that's sure. You need all your fingers for that."
His eyes rested speculatively on the mutilated hand.
"Long before I lost my fingers," he continued, "I used to say to myself that if I got out of it alive, I'd never work for any man again—I'd never have anybody's collar round my neck. The army put that into me. It jarred my old idea of men voluntarily coöperating for the common good or any other purpose. The army—all the armies—were made up of picked men. Eighty per cent. of 'em fell into two categories; they had to be led, or they had to be driven. If there was no one to lead or drive, they ran round in circles when anything happened. So I made up my mind to be a leader or a driver—to play the game the way the rest do, who manage to beat the game. I was so damned sick of orders and discipline. Orders that were stupid, or vicious, or simply issued as an exhibition of authority. Discipline that went beyond its logical purpose of securing cohesive action and became merely a whip to lash a lot of tired unhappy men. Nobody minded the actual fighting so much. That's what you were there for; you expected it; you got used to it. You took your chances without making a fuss, even if now and then your stomach sort of turned. No, the dirt and drudgery were worse than the danger. And to a fellow like me the sight and sound of fussy brass hats laying more stress on recognition of their rank and dignity, the unanimity with which they implied that they were It—hell, you know how everybody below the rank of a battalion commander felt about that. They could do anything they liked to you, say the worst they could think, punish you for somebody else's mistakes. And you couldn't say a damned word. You couldn't even look sour. That was insubordination. No. I didn't mind the war so much—it was the army—the whole fabric of the military system.
"I passed up a chance at a commission in '15—because I was still too class-conscious. But I grabbed the next chance. That's what I'm going to do in civil life—grab chances. I don't know how, yet. I don't think much. I'm still in the army, and in the army you're not supposed to think. But I didn't run wild in France, except for brief spells, so I've saved most of my pay. And I hear talk of a gratuity to us heroes," he smiled broadly. "I'll probably come out with a couple of thousand dollars. After that—well, you see before you a man who has had a bayonet stuck through his leg, his carcass lightly punctured with shrapnel, one or two faint whiffs of gas. None of which did him more harm than to give him long spells of lying still and thinking. And he thought himself into a condition of mind that will prevent him from ever again working hard—for other people. No, Norquay, I will never again labor faithfully to make two dollars grow—for some one else—where only one grew before. I don't believe I could feel the slightest obligation toward a job again, or an atom of pride in doing a job well. You see, I can't lose sight of the job-owners—I don't like 'em. I despise 'em. They got us all into this mix-up. They called us to arms in the name of all the old gods that man has been taught to reverence. And then they laid down on us, and went to making money out of our necessities. No, whenever a man offers me a job, I'll think of war contracts, of seventeen prices for clothes and food, of the bonds they've salted away, of shoddy boots and defective ammunition—and the fact that some of them are secretly sorry the war is over and the big, easy money at an end. No, I couldn't be loyal to a job, with all that in my mind."
"Fiddlesticks," Rod answered this last. "If I had a stand of timber and I said to you, 'Here's a crew and machinery—go to it; you've got a free hand,' you'd get it out for me as if you were getting it out for yourself."
"Well," Andy hesitated, "if you bring yourself into it, that's different. You don't come in any of the categories I mentioned, or I'm very much mistaken. Operating a real job for a man you could like and respect. That is different."
"You see, you haven't lost a capacity for loyalty," Rod pointed out. "It's only been deflected. I understand that. Psychologically I've traveled pretty much the same road you have. All that you say is true. Only it isn't all the truth, Andy. Just one side of the shield; the side that's turned to us; that's hard for us to get our eyes off. Fellows like you and me are a little up in the air right now. We feel like tramping savagely on the toes of a lot of smug, comfortable persons. That wouldn't get us anywhere. Nor would it change them—because they simply don't understand. What we'll probably get down to after awhile—those of us who have a sense of order and any touch of creativeness—will be some sort of activity that won't set the world on fire or turn it into a Bedlam, but that will possibly do some little good in the immediate radius of our own activity. Sabe? A man has to do what he can, before he can do what he wants."
"A man," Andy observed thoughtfully, "generally has to solve his material problems before he can tackle spiritual ones. Yet the two are interwoven. It's very difficult. I'm a rampant individualist, by nature. Man is. But if you didn't have some check on individualism the world would be a regular Kilkenny. Rampageous individualism in big affairs is what started the big scrap. The same thing will start another. It may even start hellish struggles between individual exploiters here at home and the masses they're keen to exploit. You can't have order and peace and security in a society where everybody is straining every nerve to get what he wants, and to hell with the other fellow. I'm no Utopian any longer, but I do know that if evolution doesn't speed up the process of industrial reorganization, there are going to be some corking rows, and a lot of material and spiritual uncertainty for everybody. I may not seem very consistent in what I say or do, but I'm consistent in my perception of certain things. We've built up a complex mechanism of affairs. The machine is our master instead of our servant."
Rod thought of the Norquay Trust Company as a vast creaking mechanism exacting unrewarded service, sacrifice, claiming the vital substance of himself, his father, the estate. Grove's Frankenstein creation!
"It may be so," he conceded. "But we are not yet automatons."
They continued to talk until the dusk of the short winter's day closed in. When the lights began to blink along the street they separated, Andy to his barracks, Rod to his home.
A taxi stand fronted the hotel, looking across Georgia Street. Rod crossed the way. As he did so a newsboy passed crying "ex-x-x-truh" in a shrill treble. In the distance he could hear other voices wailing the same cry. The Peace Conference, a fresh outbreak in Europe. Anything was possible in that welter of political, racial, and economic antagonisms across the Atlantic. He beckoned the boy.
In the glare of a white-globed light standard he read the headlines:
PRESIDENT NORQUAY TRUST INSTANTLY KILLED
SHOTGUN ACCIDENTALLY DISCHARGED