CHAPTER XXIX
Through that disastrous autumn of 1920—when the logging camps of B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of both sat in clubs and homes, cursing labor, the government, that vague entity called the consumer who had mysteriously ceased to consume, raving about confiscatory taxation, bewildered and resentful in the face of a retrograde swing of the commercial pendulum—the Norquay machine functioned without a single creaking joint, on into the winter season through sodden weeks of mist and rain until a deep snow in January buried the gear and froze the water pipes that fed the donkey engines. Then even the hardiest logger was glad to stay indoors.
A certain percentage of the younger men, with good money burning their pockets, went to town, victims of the inevitable reaction from the grind of work. But most of the crew followed a wiser counsel and stayed in the camp, played poker in the bunk houses, read books and magazines, organized stag dances. Some of the married men built float houses on rafts which could be moved when the camp changed, and brought their families there to live away from rent and fuel costs in town. Their joint efforts persuaded the provincial government to establish a temporary school. So by degrees the camp began to take on the aspect of a community.
The shutdown was comparatively brief,—five weeks. Then rains wiped out the drifts, banished the frost. In the dripping forest where fog wraiths hung like smoke among the tree tops, axes clacked, saws whined, cables hummed, and the logs came down to the sea.
Where the logging industry in great part had stopped dead before the barrier of unprofitable operation, Rod did not even slow down. It was not a question of a profit. It was simply a matter of turning trees into cash to replenish the plundered coffers of the Norquay Trust. Every boom that sold in the market lessened somewhat his obligations, once his men agreed cheerfully that a lowered wage was better than idleness. The reddest radical among them believed in him sufficiently to go ahead on the assurance that wages would automatically keep step with prices for the product of their labor.
In few other organizations that Rod knew did such a feeling prevail. Where it had play there was a minimum of dispute, a maximum of production. But it was rare. His affairs took him into Vancouver a great deal. He had kept up membership in a club to which his father and grandfather had belonged. And in the club quarters which served him as a hotel he came into casual contact with sundry pillars of British Columbia industry. The amount of invective poured on the head of things in general was a revelation.
These worthy gentlemen over their wine and cigars affected to believe the State, the home, the nation, reeled to ruin before union wage scales. The rancor in their voices when they spoke of working-class demands amazed Rod sometimes. But as he listened, he perceived that this rancor was impartially distributed over many things, upon the government, upon taxation, upon affairs in Europe, upon the gaunt specter of the Lenine-Trotsky régime; there seemed no end to their grievances. And he perceived further that this uneasy spirit lay in the fact that the sweeping tide of war prosperity had slacked suddenly where they had childishly believed it would surge on to greater heights,—and that this slackening was unprofitable. If the stagnation kept up long enough, they must shrink to a lesser stature; some to ruin. They were uneasy. Some, committed to great undertakings, were palpably afraid.
If they could keep wages down and prices up! They did not say so openly. They did not correlate the two objectives. They merely brightened at any prospect of better selling prices for their various products, greater demand, and frowned in distress over labor costs. They said labor would have to come off its high horse, and they said it with a good deal of unnecessary vehemence. Quite unanimously, almost instinctively, they were bitter against any man who did not agree with them.
They said, "Men won't work." That was a lie. Rod Norquay had proved it. His men had worked; and he had in his crew a score of agitators black-listed in other camps. No. Men who had seen war-time wages easily over-lapped by war-time living costs would not work for a driving employer under conditions arbitrarily dictated; not unless the whip of necessity lashed them to the task. And when they had to, inevitably they laid down on the job. That was the root of the trouble.
"You could open your camps and start your mills tomorrow," Rod broke into a conversation at his elbow one day, "if you'd base your tactics on the fact that men are men and not beasts of burden. I'm doing it and making money. I've done it right along. There's no magic about it. I simply accept present-day conditions, instead of mourning for the good old days when a logger was something less than a dog in a kennel. The trouble with you people is that you're hogs by nature. You're not satisfied to have your snouts in the trough. You want both feet in."
He walked out on the street, leaving them insulted and indignant. But he did not care. He was in one of his moods, in one of those momentary surges of passion that overtake the hard-pressed man. He saw everything in such moments with a distorted clarity. The motives and aspirations of such men seemed mean beyond words. If it had been possible for him to stay long at such a pitch of emotion, he would have hated them as heartily as they hated him.
They did hate him. Chiefly because they distrusted him, because they couldn't understand his motives. For a long time they had believed that he was a fool about money, a sentimentalist who was sinking a great fortune into a bottomless pit. Then because they saw no sign of collapse, they credited him with ambitious schemes which aroused their cupidity, and finally their antagonism when he continued to play a lone hand and succeed where they, with their little combinations, either failed or were afraid to run a risk of failing. He would enter no arrangement designed to put labor in its place. He would have nothing to do with employers' associations. He stood out a lone figure, carrying on his shoulders the burden of the Norquay Trust and in his hands a producing organization whose efficiency they envied and could not duplicate by their methods.
All that winter Rod heard hints, snatches of conversation; he watched, listened, made mental notes. He heard the complaining of the pinched industrial barons. They blamed the war now. C'est la guerre!
But it was not the war. They were reaping, all civilization was reaping, only seed that had been sown long before the war. The worthy bourgeois learned nothing; but he did forget many things. Chiefly he forgot, or perhaps had never learned, that the war did not create greed, ineptitude, blundering, injustice; the war didn't endow man with a tendency to snatch at chestnuts in the fire and complain loudly when he burned his fingers. It seemed to Rod utterly childish to blame the war for individual or even national folly. The war had its own burden of iniquity to bear. The war created nothing and destroyed nothing that had its root in the human heart. At the worst it had only deflected certain things, released pent forces and passions.
He considered. Grove would have made as great a mess of his ambitious schemes if no cannon had waked echoes in Flanders. He had been a victim of his own weakness. A weak, vain man with great power in his hands, and a group of strong, predatory men filching it from him on the old principle that "he shall take who has the power and he shall keep who can."
This was the law that seemed to rule modern industrial society. Right has always rested on power; it cannot be otherwise. Very well then. Let them live by the law. Rod could not help a sneer when he saw these aspiring minor plutocrats wince as the shoe pinched them; the shoe which they would have fitted on other feet without a qualm, if they could.
Nevertheless the muttered growling of various influential persons echoed in his ears now and then. He heard it directly. He noted the effect of it in different aspects of his more or less complicated affairs. There were influential cliques in Vancouver who took it as a personal grievance that the Norquay estate—which was Rod himself—would neither heed their Jeremiads concerning labor, nor deviate from a settled policy.
It takes so little to arouse the ugly devils that lurk in men. They tried to make a feud of what was only a feeling of irritation. They attacked him. When they went that length, Rod struck back with whatever weapon lay to hand, and he had not a few in his arsenal. They couldn't hurt him; they could at most annoy. And so presently, Rod, finding no cracks in his material armor through which a spear could be thrust, ceased to be troubled by their futile activities. He despised their stratagems, and mocked at them, and confounded them with a waspish sarcasm whenever he encountered them in person. Undoubtedly in that year he earned something close to hatred from a certain group of men who five years earlier would have been aghast at such a state of affairs.
About certain phases of this Isabel Wall kept him duly informed. But in the spring of that year she married Andy Hall,—and was herself immediately cast out from among the chosen people. Which circumstance only moved Isabel to amused laughter. But it stirred Rod and Mary to admiration. In this final step Isabel seemed ta have burned all her bridges with a high heart. They were quietly married and came to live with Rod and Mary for company's sake,—since the two husbands were necessarily absent a great deal of the time.
Not long after that the last stick of the last Norquay timber on Valdez, that noble stretch of fir and cedar Oliver Thorn had husbanded so long, found its way to the boomsticks. When the first crew was ready to shift its donkey engines and coils of cable, Rod said to Andy Hall:
"Have that outfit loaded on floats. Take it over to Mermaid Bay and make a high-lead setting a little back from shore to the right of the landing. Better start getting these camp buildings over there too."
Andy stared at him.
"You're not going to cut that timber?" He waved a hand across the channel, where the dusky forest massed behind the red roof of Hawk's Nest.
"Why not?" Rod asked. He wondered if Andy shared a feeling that stirred, he believed, in no breast save his own and Mary's.
"It's a damned shame," Andy muttered.
"No choice."
It was the simple truth. Rod looked across at Valdez often in the next few weeks—perhaps to turn his eyes from the desecration at hand. He did not expect any save himself to feel such a sentiment, to feel a physical shrinking every time a faller lifted his long-drawn cry of "Tim-br-r-r-r," and the sobbing swish of lofty boughs sweeping in a great arc and the crashing thud marked another tree prone. Valdez was a waste. Where living green had clothed the hills there lifted stumps, torn earth, bald rock ledges. Desolation. The Granite Pool lay in its cliffy hollow, bared to the hot eye of the sun. The deer and the birds had withdrawn to the farther woods. Animal life banished, vegetation destroyed. Barren. Bleak. Ugliness spread over square miles. Soon Dent Island would be like that. Hawk's Nest would stand bleak and bare on a stripped promontory. If man were immortal, surely the troubled spirits of his dead kinsmen must hover dumbly about the spot. But they were as powerless as he.
He had walked out to see the first tree thrown down, and he had overheard one faller say to his mate, looking up at the stone house and lifting his face to sniff the sweet smell of lilac blown to him across the lawns by a June breeze:
"By God, it's almost a crime to cut these trees."
But, as he had said to Andy Hall—no choice. Upon that twelve hundred acres the trees stood bough to bough,—clean, straight, tall, enormous of girth and sound to the core. From the level center of the island an easy slope fell away to the water on every side. For a mile back from Hawk's Nest to walk abroad was like walking in the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps the Goths in their northern fastnesses first saw those pointed arches in the lofty symmetry of fir and pine. For a hundred years the Norquays had warred on the thickets and undergrowth. They had cleared away the dead trunks and the rotten windfalls. The floor of that forest was the floor of a park. Bough to bough the trees stood in endless ranks. Man was a pygmy among them. Dim aisles ran out into shadowy perspective. Only on the southern fringe bordering the house and lawn had the forest been thinned to let in sunshine and become clothed with grass. All the rest was carpeted with moss.
No logging crew on the Pacific Coast ever put their gear into such a logging chance. Twelve hundred acres of fir and cedar, few less than four foot thick at the base, thousands that three men touching fingertips could not span, clean straight trees that lifted a hundred feet without a knot or limb, and another hundred above that bared their heads to the sun. Their feet in perpetual shadow; their heads upholding the sky.
Except on two or three hundred acres of jungle at the northern end there was nothing in all that stretch to hamper a rigging-slinger with his snaky cables. The fallers could lay a tree where they wished. The high-lead gear could snatch the logs out at top speed. Rod could imagine old Jim Handy, the human logging machine, looking with glad eyes on such ground and such timber. Records would be made there. Big days that the loggers would talk about in years to come; days when more timber would go down to float within the boomsticks than ever was moved by a crew of men between sun and sun.
And that was why they were there now. He had hoped to save a part of this. But the pressure was too great. He had to have a given amount of revenue within a given time. Only by this means could it be secured. It was fortunate for him that he had this resource, doubly fortunate that it would go out on a rising market; for 1921 marked the turn of the tide.
All lost save honor! He smiled at the self-righteous expression. He could strike an attitude and utter that worn phrase. It was true. But was it valid,—either the attitude or the phrase? Yes, for himself. He was throwing away every material advantage that men live, work, fight for, plan and scheme and struggle to attain. And he did not do it because it was a reasonable, logical course. He did it to gain peace with himself, to retain his own self-respect. He was so made that he could endure anything but the thought of meeting an enemy and skulking away in the face of danger, of treachery to a trust, of taking an unfair advantage. Yet there were times when he felt that it was too great a price to pay for another man's blunder. And then he would feel as if he had done something, or contemplated doing something, of which he was ashamed. He began to realize that the cheerful giver gives nothing of value compared to the glow he gets in giving; and that the man who can cheerfully sacrifice his dearest possessions has never yet been born.
They were living once more in the old house. For how long Rod did not know and he tried not to think. The outcome was still uncertain; and where uncertainty lingers so does hope. At least, it was very pleasant to be there.
Late one afternoon when the Dent Island operation had got well under way, a fog swept like a wet smoke through the Euclataw Passage. It lifted, broke, opened and closed as if it were of two minds whether to lay over the channel a veil of obscurity or disperse in torn fragments. While it hovered and shifted thus uncertain, and the tiderace in the rapids slacked, a white yacht nosed into Mermaid Bay and felt her way alongside the float.
It was the Kowloon, come back like a ghost of other days. From the porch Rod, Mary, and Isabel recognized her through the fog haze as Grove's old yacht, which Laska had come into as the major portion of her husband's estate, and sold to her father.
"I wonder if they've come to hold out the olive branch to an erring daughter?" Isabel said lightly. "Dad might—possibly. Still, I don't think he'd care to trespass on your bailiwick, Rod, even for that."
"What has very likely happened," Rod shrewdly surmised, "is that she's on her way somewhere north and has simply taken shelter on account of the fog. This passage is dangerous in thick weather."
He sauntered away to the workings after a little. The Kowloon was of no interest to him, save as a reminder of old days. At the inner end of the bay already a widening field of stumps lifted flat heads among a litter of discarded tops and broken boughs over many acres. With tools and machinery his loggers were eating into the heart of that ancient forest as a mouse gnaws into a slice of cheese.
The fog lifted and closed intermittently. Rod came back in the course of an hour to find a stout figure with a cigar jutting from its teeth standing in the edge of the logging watching the high-lead donkey spit smoke and steam and shudder under enormous strains.
John P. Wall greeted him impassively. His small gray eyes met Rod's for a second, wandered off among the stumps, the dimly seen men, the black iron monsters huffing and puffing, the reddish-brown logs floating by hundreds in the bay, swept over the unkept grounds rank with grass, the gray stone house casting a great shadow, and came back to Rod.
"Damn shame to do this," Wall flirted one hand toward the untidy logged-off ground.
Rod shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll give you two hundred thousand for Dent Island just as it stands," Wall offered abruptly. "Take your outfit and go log somewhere else. Two hundred thousand cash."
Rod looked at him. A hundred and fifty thousand would shift his last burden. That was the maximum he could realize from his timber, if he sheared Dent Island as a farmer shears his sheep's fleece in the spring. And with the forest stripped, Dent Island had no money value. It would consist only of an old stone house standing gaunt amid a few acres of grass, its background a stony stump-littered waste. Whatever associations Hawk's Nest had for him and his could be less than nothing to John P. Wall. What stirred the man? Had his iron bowels been moved to compassion? Was he obliquely trying to make amends? Or did he think that by purchase he could put on the intangible mantle the Norquays had woven about themselves in five generations?
Rod smiled wanly.
"Why should you wish to buy Hawk's Nest at more than its market value? Does your conscience hurt?"
"Conscience?" A flicker of expression crossed Wall's heavy face. "No. Don't use it in my business. Took a notion to the place. Always did like it. That's all. You're destroying it."
A glow of anger began to burn in Rod, and mixed with it a detached wonder at the type of man before him. He could imagine Wall viewing him with impersonal pity, and brushing him aside in pursuit of his own ends. There was a pachydermous quality in the man. He couldn't be hurt. He had no qualms. For him the world of humanity was not made up of men and women who had good impulses or bad ones, wisdom and folly, conditioned by many things. No, to him the world was made up of two kinds of people; those who could get what they wanted and those who couldn't. For Wall there were no fine distinctions, no ethical hazards in which a man might lose his soul. The firm grasp, the unrelenting hold, justified itself. Anything profitable was good business; anything unprofitable was bad business. Rod looked at him and wondered if Wall carried that remorseless philosophy into his social life, his family life; if he applied it to his pleasure, and in what degree. And if he did whether he found the balance in his life's ledger to lie on the credit or the debit side.
"You're reckoned wealthy, aren't you?" Rod said to him. "Three or four millions?"
"Something like that," Wall answered indifferently.
"I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that there are things money can't get you?" Rod said quietly. "This place happens to be one of those things."
Wall chewed his cigar, impassively reflecting. Rod turned away.
"Three hundred thousand," Wall said suddenly.
Rod shook his head.
"No use. I wouldn't sell Hawk's Nest any more than you'd sell one of your ears. I was born here. My people have been born and lived and died and are buried here. Very old-fashioned notion, of course, but it happens to mean something to me. And please remember this, Wall. If it had to pass out of my hands, you would be the last man in the world I'd care to have hang up your hat here and call it home."
He left Wall to reflect on that.
A shrill blast from the high-lead donkey put an end to the day's work. Men came stringing out of the woods. In twenty minutes more the supper gong clanged.
As they sat at dinner Rod told Isabel of her father's offer. Isabel smiled cynically.
"Don't ever think the idea of any sort of restitution occurred to him, Rod," she declared. "He wouldn't even understand the idea of such a thing. He has always admired this place, secretly longed to have something like it, and he has discrimination enough to know he couldn't create it in his lifetime. He'd buy Hawk's Nest like a shot. He has dreams of founding a Wall dynasty, I really believe. A place like this, made to order, with its history—why, he'd gloat over it. The parvenu idea of acquiring prestige by purchase—by proxy. I know I sound horrid, but it's true. He thinks the Norquays have gone to seed. And that the Walls only require a proper background to be somebody. It's amusing and sometimes almost tragic—this social pushing, this itch to be thought something you aren't, to make a big splash. Did he seem keen on it, Rod?"
"Rather."
"Mamma's been priming him," Isabel nodded. "I've heard her talk about the possibility—since you've been supposed to be in deep water. She thinks Bob's a perfect gentleman—even if his father isn't quite—when Robert's merely a good little spender. Poor old daddy. He's the best of the lot, because he just naturally can't help being a ruthless old pirate, and he never held a grudge in his life against any one who beat him at his own game. He's a bear at making money and mom's a bear in society, and they've raised Bob and Laska and me to be bearcats of one sort and another too. Some combination."
Isabel applied herself to the salad for half a minute.
"Suppose you go aboard the yacht with me and I'll introduce you to dad," she proposed mischievously to Andy.
"I have no objection," he returned calmly. "Neither have I the slightest desire to meet your male parent—whose only merit in my eyes is that he is your parent. I couldn't use him in my business, and it's a cinch he couldn't use me in his."
"He might," Isabel teased. "He has lots of irons in the fire and loads of money. You sure did marry money, Andy, old scout."
"Well, I have irons in the fire myself," Andy retorted imperturbably. "And without any hankering for loads of money I expect to get all I need."
The pair of them sauntered off after dinner, still facetiously debating what they called the possibilities of a Hall-Wall entente. Rod and Mary went out on the porch. The rapids murmured in a rising key. Young Rod, who had learned to read under his mother's tutelage, curled up in a chair with a book of fairy tales. The sun dipped below the jagged backbone of Vancouver Island and the afterglow lingered, a radiant tinge over the blurred slopes that lifted to high mountains on the mainland shore.
About the head of the bay were clustered compactly the numerous portable buildings of the camp,—bunk houses, messhouses, storeroom, isolated small dwellings. A short slope bright with low salal brush dipped to the water. On that gentle pitch numbers of the men often clustered in the evening, sitting on their haunches, lying stretched on their backs, spinning Rabelaisian yarns, Homeric tales out of their woods experience, talking about their work, the war, economics,—all the infinite variety of futile gabble and profound wisdom that is embodied in a group of skilled men following a risky outdoor calling. The Pacific Coast logger is no mere beast of burden. He is master of an intricate technique as applied to the handling of enormous timbers by powerful and complicated machinery. The B.C. woods is no place for the sluggish of brain or hand.
Wall himself was heavily interested in timber and had been for years. There were probably fifty men in Rod's crew who had drawn Wall pay checks in their time. And there was not a man there but knew the Wall camps and knew little good of them. They had an evil reputation. Probably Wall himself had never seen the interior of a single one of his camps. He had no personal interest in such matters,—only in results. He got results through superintendents, who in turn passed the buck to logging bosses. And these again, because their jobs depended on high average production, drove without mercy so long as they could hold the job. There was a sardonic saying along the coast that every Wall camp always had three crews: one coming, one going, and one on the job.
The loggers frankly hated Wall and all his works. Whereas they liked Rod Norquay. Moreover, now in the third year of Rod's régime, very nearly every man there understood the situation. They were for him, to a man. Rod represented to them the very antithesis of everything John P. Wall stood for. And no mean portion of Rod's crew were intellectually capable and emotionally impelled to make out a very black case against the John P. Walls of industry.
A little cluster gathered on this slope between camp and tidemark. The cluster grew till the limited area was black with men in calked boots and mackinaw clothing, men with unshaven stubble on their chins and strong calloused hands. They sat and stood there without the customary shouting and laughter. It seemed as if every man in the camp had been drawn to look silently down on the white yacht.
The Kowloon stretched her graceful length along the landing. Her paint was like virgin snow, and from stem to stern she glistened with brass and copper and varnished teak. On her forward deck two or three of her crew in spotless white ducks leaned on the rail, looking at the men ashore. Aft a gramophone exhaled the latest jazz. There were guests present, and now that the fog had gone with the sun, they were on deck, dipping and swaying and gyrating to the music.
Suddenly a man on the bank began to sing. A solitary voice, a rich baritone, it cut across the canned syncopation and lifted with the diapason of the rapids as a tonal background.
There was nothing strange in that. Men often sang there, soloists and impromptu quartettes. They sang to amuse themselves, or because they were happy, for any or all the reasons that move men to song. It was not the fact of the man singing. It was his song.
"Ye sons of freedom awake to glory.
Hark! Hark! What myriads bid you rise."
The third line came with a volume that burst the evening hush like the roll of drums. From a hundred-odd throats it poured in rhythmic unison, with a passionate earnestness, and something akin to a threat.
"Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding
With hireling hosts a ruffian band
Affright and desolate the land,
While truth and liberty lie bleeding?
To arms, to arms! Ye brave.
The avenging sword unsheathe.
March on. March on. All hearts resolved
On liberty ... or death!"
The last word struck like the blow of a ponderous hammer falling on muffled iron. Then silence,—as if it had been halted by some invisible conducting baton which had welded that impromptu chorus into a single harmonious whole to chant that old, old song of revolt against oppression.
Who that has ever heard a marching regiment sing the Marseillaise but knows the clang of its ending, like the snick of a breech-bolt or a great sword clashed home in its scabbard.
No one moved. No voices lifted in words or laughter. Rod, sitting with his chin in his palms, listened with a curious tension for a break in that sudden hush. The massed group on the bank remained immobile, very quiet, as if something profoundly sobering had come over them.
And in the midst of this strange quiescence a gong struck faintly, deep in the bowels of the Kowloon, and when the deckhands flicked off the mooring lines she backed slowly out into the channel, out into the gathering dusk, the jazz tunes stilled, her guests standing quietly in a group by the after rail.