CHAPTER XXV
Across the channel, in the green bank of timber bisected by the path that ran from Oliver Thorn's old house to the Granite Pool, rose white puffs of steam, intermittent, like sporadic geysers. Those were donkey engines at work. They tooted shrill response to the signal pull. The woods were full of prodigious shudderings and rumblings. The powerful machines snaked fallen trees, sawn to lengths, from where they were felled to the last splashing plunge into the tidal booming ground close by a group of new camp buildings not far from Oliver Thorn's abandoned house. A "sky line" lifted its long, aerial cable far up that hill. Down this logs came at the rate of two hundred a day. The shore was lined with floating logs, new cut, exhaling the odor of pitch, a pleasant pungent smell. The Granite Pool itself echoed the clack of axes and the thin twanging of saws, and mirrored the downward swoop of great trees. The falling crews were stripping the shores about the Pool, destroying its seclusion, shattering its restful silence, obliterating its cool shade. Farther east the Valdez camp, in which Rod had served his apprenticeship, bit deep into these heavy woods. Three hundred and fifty men, a dozen donkey engines, a logging railway in the making, miles of steel cable were chewing the heart out of the forest. Far beyond sight and sound of Hawk's Nest another crew slashed at the last of their timber on Hardwicke Island.
There was no picking of prime trees and care to conserve the younger growth, nor far-sighted culling of the forest crop. It was complete destruction. Within the boundaries of each limit the earth was stripped to its primal nakedness. Sky-line and high-lead gear ripped strings of logs over the surface, plowing deep furrows in the scant soil, tearing up saplings, shouldering aside rotten trunks and small boulders, bursting into dusty clouds the dead snags in the way. When the loggers shifted to a fresh stand they left desolation behind. Timber great and small was money. Every stick landed in tidewater went for something; number one export, number two, the broken cedar for shingles, the poorer grades of spruce and hemlock for pulpwood that the mills chewed up and spat forth in tons of news print.
Rod sat over his breakfast at Hawk's Nest one morning in early summer of '19. The far, faint sounds of the machinery he had set in motion reached now and then into that quiet room. But he was not thinking particularly of this organized effort which filled the woods over there with crashings and rumblings and whining cable. He was watching the tall, somewhat stooped figure of the butler who had served in that house ever since Rod could remember, and he was thinking that in connection with this man he faced another of the many disagreeable tasks he must perform.
He rose, walked to the door, turned back. It was no great matter, and still—— Like a modern Atropos he must go on snipping threads. If the hand that held the shears shook a little now and then, it could not for that reason be stayed. He had not much choice. He was too deeply committed.
"Come up to the library in a few minutes, Stagg," he said.
"Yes, sir."
Rod sat down by a window that overlooked Mermaid Bay. A Kern tug lay against one shore beside a million board feet of Norquay cedar, waiting for the fierce tiderace to go slack before she eased her boom through the south narrows for the long Gulf tow. In a little while she would pass out, dragging astern a brown comet's tail of slaughtered trees.
His eyes turned back to the interior of the room, came to rest on a portrait of his great-grandfather,—the Norquay who had prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle.
"Even an eagle could hardly hold his own against a flock of buzzards," Rod muttered.
No. One slip was sufficient to invalidate, even to destroy such families as his, in this day and age. Perhaps there had been a time when people of the equivalent class would have seen in the Norquay difficulty something besides a chance to participate in the loot. Out of his intimate knowledge of the family history as revealed in sundry documents and half-recalled conversations, Rod knew that every Norquay, from the original Roderick down to his father, had put out his hand and opened his purse to save other men from ruin, sometimes out of friendship, sometimes out of generosity, often from a clear sense of class interest. At least friendship and social intimacy had bred something more than mere lip-fealty. Other generations did not break bread and drink wine under each others' roofs to go forth planning how they could filch each others' possessions. The generation to which his father belonged would have understood quite clearly the Norquay obligation in regard to Grove's blundering.
His, Rod's generation, didn't understand. At least, if it understood, it cynically denied his code. It laughed at him behind his back, looked with disbelief on the course he was taking. It was, they held, purely quixotic to sacrifice so much, to risk all in repairing a misguided man's folly. Childishness. What were bankruptcy laws for? Why had sound commercial brains devised the Limited Liability Act if not to save the enterprising bourgeois from loss when one of his undertakings failed? What simpleton would unhesitatingly accept a moral responsibility when no legal compulsion existed?
Rod smiled grimly. He had become more closely acquainted with the ethics of modern business. It struck him that if corporations were in the nature of things soulless and dehumanized in matters of money, that attribute tended to spread to individuals. He wondered if that were possible. It was a disagreeable conclusion; one he hesitated to accept. But he knew this: that both his father and himself had aroused a strange combination of antagonism and contempt by merely doing what they felt in honor bound to do.
The antagonism was the fiercer for being grounded in cupidity. It smoldered under the surface, ready to blaze out if he left an opening. There were those who would like to pick his bones. He was aware of this attitude. It burgeoned forth in many aspects of his affairs.
If he had looted the Norquay Trust within the law and let the plucked victims pick themselves bewildered out of the ruin, while he sat back with his share of the plunder and the great Norquay estate still firm in his grasp, these contemporaries of his would have esteemed him as a clever man, almost a great man, certainly a man with a genius for affairs. A man of affairs; a man who could safely and expeditiously get possession of large sums of money. What was the difference?
He might have been execrated by some who lost their money. The losers, they said cynically, always squeal. But if he had shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, his own class would have backed him to a man. They would have rallied round his standard. They would have upheld him in the press, socially, by every means within their power. Their admiration would have been tinctured with envy. They would have understood so clearly that genuine greatness was involved in making such a coup and getting clear when the crash came. His own people,—no, by God, the Walls and Deanes and Richstons were not his kind of people, not one of the whole pushing caravan, the petty tradesmen swollen to greatness with one generation of a rich country's development, grown greater with exorbitant profits derived from a war which had been fought for them but not by them. They were Grove's kind of people. And Grove had been a—a——
Well, he didn't like to ponder on Grove. There was no encouragement in that. He found his brother's memory depressing. Grove reminded him of a joyous diver plunging headfirst into the troubled waters of life and coming up, not with a pearl but with a handful of slimy ooze. Grove, he reflected, would probably not have given a second thought to discharging Stagg. And he was compelled to give several regretful thoughts to that unfortunate necessity.
Stagg knocked and entered, stood waiting. Rod motioned him to a chair.
"How long have you and Mrs. Stagg been with us?" he asked.
"Twenty-seven years next November, sir."
The man was proud of his length of service. It showed in his tone. Twenty-seven years. Rod looked at him. He had been an infant in arms when this man entered his father's service. For twenty-seven years Stagg had waited on them and theirs, arranging their tables, polishing their silver, serving their food, ministering deftly to their every want, expressed or implied.
"Have you saved any money?" Rod pursued. He had no false delicacy about asking such a question. He had to know whether he was about to chuck a penniless man out into a world that would be far harsher to William Stagg than Hawk's Nest had ever been, even in its most exacting moments. Rod had been taught, not as a lesson but as a principle of living, that faithful service begets an obligation. It seemed to him a natural corollary. His instincts inherited, acquired, however he came by them were more or less patriarchal.
"We've saved a good bit, sir."
"That's fortunate," Rod continued. "Because I shall have to close this house. I shall have to let everybody go."
"Yes, sir," Stagg murmured. He clasped his fingers across his knees and stared at the rug.
"I hate to do it," Rod went on. "But the way things stand, keeping up this place is more of a drain than I can afford. For a time I'm only a—a sort of steward of the Norquay estate. If I get out of the hole with anything left, you shall certainly have the pension to which you are entitled, Stagg. I'm acting under a very disagreeable necessity."
"Yes, sir," the man nodded. "I've been hoping it wouldn't be necessary, sir. Still, I've expected it."
"Oh, you have? How's that?"
"There's been talk, sir. It gets up here, sir, from town."
"Servants' talk?" Rod inquired.
"The kind of talk servants hears, sir," Stagg replied. "People are saying that you are a fool to ruin yourself over the Norquay Trust Company."
"I don't agree with them," Rod said impassively. "But they may be right. What do you think about it yourself, Stagg?"
"I had eleven thousand dollars on deposit in the Norquay Trust, sir," Stagg returned calmly. "About all we've saved in a lifetime of work, the missus and me. You can fancy what I think, Mr. Rod."
"Eh? Well, I hope you got it out while the getting was good; although it's reasonably safe if you didn't," Rod smiled. "Unless the heavens fall or some such catastrophe occurs, the Norquay Trust will pay interest and principal in full on every account before I close its doors—which I intend to do as soon as I can turn our timber into cash."
"I feel safe enough," Stagg assured him. "But you can imagine how I would have felt if the Company'd failed, sir. So I'm bound to be prejudiced in your favor. If you'll excuse me, sir, I've known the Norquay family a long time, and it wouldn't have seemed natural for it to let a thing like that happen. People like you, Mr. Rod, may get in a hole; but you can't be kept there. You always get up somehow. I'll be awfully sorry to leave. I really will. This place is like home to me. I'll hope to come back as soon as you get things straightened out, Mr. Rod."
Rod sat thinking for a few seconds.
"Thank you, Stagg," he said then, very gently. "I appreciate what you have said. You seem to understand quite well some things that other people, who should, don't see at all."
"Now," he continued, after a pause, "I want you to put everything in order this week. Cover the furniture and put away china and silver and linen and so on. Fix the house properly. It never was closed before, but you will know what should be done. When you're finished I'll pay you all off. Cook, I understand, has relatives living on the other side of Valdez. The gardeners can work for me in the woods, if they wish. The housemaids are flappers who haven't had time to get attached either to us or the place. That'll be all, Stagg. Thanks."
The man got up. He seemed to hesitate, took a step or two, stopped.
"May I ask if you're going to sell Hawk's Nest, sir?" he finally blurted out.
Rod shook his head.
"No, Stagg. They may take it away from me eventually. But it is not for sale."
"Thank you, sir. I couldn't believe you'd think of selling Hawk's Nest, sir."
Stagg bowed and closed the door softly behind him.