CHAPTER XXVI
Sometimes Rod's heart troubled him so that he would turn in his ascent of a hill to some part of the works and go down again, stamp, stamp, joggling it from that enfeebled flutter back to its normal beat. And afterward he would sit on a log for awhile, struggling against a wave of depression. So much depended on him alone. He was the mainspring. If he broke or ran down, the job must go unfinished; people, his own people and many others, must suffer. And yet, when he faced the prospect of going on and on like that, flogging a weak heart to its work, keeping his brain alert to direct a big undertaking and the mass of detail involved, making money and more money and pouring it like water into an endless pipe, he felt a profound weariness, an unutterable distaste for this game of profit-creating which other men played with such gusto.
The sum that passed through his hands in any calendar month of 1919 would have been sufficient to give him everything he wanted for years to come. He lived no better than his loggers. He was separated from Mary most of the time. He became a peripatetic. Something always required his presence in a camp, and immediately thereafter in town,—some new phase of the timber market or the Norquay Trust affairs.
"I'm almost a widow," Mary said to him once. "It's as bad as the war. About all we get a chance to say to each other these days is 'Hello' and 'Good-by.'"
Some day there would be an end to that, of course. A clean slate and a chance to draw his breath, to sit idly, contentedly, on the beach while Rod junior hunted crabs among the rocks, to talk with Mary about things that were not measured in money values.
He had never been hungry to grasp material substance out of life so much as to understand life, the absorbing spectacle of the universe, to fathom its strange manifestations of beauty and terror. All his life he had loved the sight and smell of forests, the sound of running water, the majesty of the hills. He had loved peace and beauty and harmony. He loved them more than ever, but the beloved trinity had vanished out of his days. He was become an engineer, his hand on the levers, his ears full of the roar and grind of machinery. Only for a few hours now and then in the privacy of his own home could he achieve rest and content; or when for a moment he could stand forgetful and look up at the mainland palisades, rising tier on tier to far heights behind Little Dent and the Euclataws.
Yet in spite of struggling with a formidable task, irritating problems, planning, directing, moving with sure purpose to an end the value of which he sometimes doubted, he began to get little glows of satisfaction when he was not too tired, more especially as that first year closed and he knew that the heart which had been organically perfect but functionally weak was regaining strength, slowly attaining functional perfection once more. Perhaps that lessened his moodiness, made him quicker to respond to external stimulus. He had gone for a year on his nerve. He had followed a light that sometimes seemed no more than a will-o'-the-wisp. With bodily soundness he began to feel a touch of pride in the work of his hands and brain.
He had made no costly mistakes, either in men or tactics. It was odd, he reflected sometimes, as he went about the workings, that other men, corporations, were carrying on various private wars with labor, and that he should be free of those clashes that arose so often and so unexpectedly in the years following the war. It was even more odd that he should be regarded with suspicion by these other men and corporation heads for maintaining production without strikes, disputes, clashes, antagonisms.
They had years of experience. He had started with more theory than experience. He was beating them at their own game; largely, he believed, because he came to it with a fresher point of view, a policy based on an understanding, partly reasoned, partly intuitive, of how the logger working for a day's pay feels about his work and the man he works for.
For years before the war, loggers in B.C. coast camps had lived and worked under conditions they were powerless to change. Any sort of accommodation, any sort of food, the lowest wages they could be compelled to accept; that was the logger's portion. The Norquay camps had been better than most, but Rod knew they were bad enough. The logger was hardy, strong, patient, skilful, by a process of elimination.
The war changed conditions without changing the logger's essential qualities. With labor scarce, with timber production a military as well as an economic necessity, with organization in the air, the B.C. logger took the whip hand. His memory was tenacious of old wrongs. He did not ask, he demanded, and his demands were grudgingly conceded because his employers were taking huge profits in airplane spruce, in exportable fir and cedar, in shipbuilding material. And although the timber market took little count of the Armistice, the employers did. With the first demobilization, with the first infiltration of discharged soldiers into the labor market, industrial war was secretly declared. They set out to tame the militant logger who thought that he was entitled to bathtubs, clean sleeping quarters, grapefruit for breakfast if he desired it, and the maximum wage for an eight-hour day.
But the logger did not tame easily. Individually he was a wide-shouldered person with language and spirit to match the muscles developed in the woods. He did not submit without a struggle. Collectively he was organized to fight, and he fought with the only weapons available. The season of 1919 was a period of disputes, grievances, abortive wage cuts, strikes, sabotage, all that goes with a labor war,—a war that in 1919 and well into the next year was a series of lost battles for the employers and corresponding bitterness on their part.
Into this troubled arena Rod Norquay had stepped with his pressing need of continuous operation. He was wise and generous impulses went with his wisdom. He believed that the logger was a simple man who could be led where no man could drive him save under the sharp, spur of acute need. He had believed that the logger was a man and not a mechanism long before he took a year in the woods himself to see what made the common man laugh, weep, fight, play, drink to debauchery and rise sometimes to heroic proportion under stress. He had learned then that man is not so completely the perfect product of class and environment as he superficially seems. Mary Thorn had unconsciously shown him that first. This one and that,—Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, old Jim Handy the logging boss, even Grove before the war and after, and the crucible of war itself,—had taught him that however the human unit is outwardly shaped by place and circumstance, each is flesh and desire and a creature of passion.
So that it was impossible for him ever to regard his men as so many tools to be used or laid aside as he willed. He was free of the curious detachment of the captains of industry from the lesser ranks. He neither locked himself in the ivory tower of the contemplative spirit, nor fortified himself behind the golden wall of material security. He remained a man in a man's world, directing and shaping the cutting edge of his human tools without once forgetting their essential humanity,—so that they admired him for his deftness of touch.
He had been fortunate in his choice of Andy Hall. Even old Oliver Thorn voluntarily came out of his retirement and directed one part of his operations. Rod did not always know by what occult process he judged men, but he made no mistakes in men. And men are always the prime levers. Machines, powerful, complex, will not operate themselves. They do not create themselves. If mechanism seems to overshadow men, it is only because of a distorted sense of proportion. Hands and brains come first; everything else in the world of men is a by-product. The energy of hand and brain is as necessary as directive force; without that energy, however rude, uncouth, unskilled, there would be nothing to direct; and its reward should be liberal and ungrudging, a right, not a concession. Until Utopia comes in the millennial dawn men must exist under a social and industrial system that is not the creation of a class or a period, but is the slow growth of centuries. Under it the strong, the acquisitive, the self-disciplined, the men of force and character somehow get to the top. But having got to the top, being secure in their power, if they were wise they neither despised nor trampled on those at the bottom.
That was a creed which Rod Norquay, Andy Hall, and Oliver Thorn held in common. These diverse men—Andy, a fiery proletarian rebel, whose steel-trap logic picked fallacies and blunders wholesale in the modern economic system, yet whose inherited instincts drove him to fight with the clan when the clan went to war, and from which he had returned with a touch of bitterness and a tinge of cynicism; Rod himself, a patrician by birth, training, environment, a gentleman in the amplest meaning of that much-abused term; Oliver Thorn, the gentle, contemplative, kindly, shrewd old man—they shared that conviction. It was more than a conviction; it was an article of faith.
"I may be wrong. If I am it will break me instead of getting me what I want," Rod had said to Andy in the beginning. "But this is my idea: men will work faithfully if they are even reasonably satisfied with their job. Men are still capable of loyalty even to a boss and a job, although a lot of propaganda denies it, and the intellectual radicals say it's a slave attitude. I don't mean to fall back on the insincere platitude that the interests of the employer and employee are identical. But I, as well as the men who will work for me, will be faced with a condition, as somebody put it, and not a theory. So long a& they must work for a wage and I must make a profit to keep them employed, anything that will reduce possible friction is worth considering on its merits. So we start on this basis; we forestall agitation for better conditions by setting an example in the way of conditions. We provide first-class living quarters. We serve the best food available. We pay top wages, with the added inducement of a bonus based on production. No man is to be fired for any sort of economic heresy. They are free to do their own thinking, to express their individual opinions about the outfit, about working conditions, about industry in general. They can agitate and discuss any social theory whatever without risking discharge. I don't care whether they are Reds, Syndicalists, Socialists, Free Thinkers, Single Taxers, theorists of any description whatever,—so long as they will devote their working hours to doing the work. That's a general policy. I think it will go. The surest way to breed fantastic theories is to muzzle men through fear. The surest way to make men dissatisfied is to be arbitrary over trifles. The coöperative commonwealth may be a million miles away, but coöperation on the job with benefit to us both is not an impossibility. I think that will work."
It did work. It had an effect beyond mere efficiency on the job. It did away with inhibitions that bred sullenness. When a man was well-fed, well-housed, well-paid, where it was easy for him to see that he was regarded as a human being with certain rights and privileges, an atmosphere of good feeling soon developed.
It became a mark of distinction to work for the Norquay estate. Rod's fallers, buckers, loaders, his minor bosses, his donkey engineers, began to take an active pride in what they did. They boasted of what they could do, and made good their boasts. They walked with a swagger. A good many of them called him by name when he went among them. It dawned upon Rod finally that they liked him, that they were working for him as no other logging crews on the B.C. coast worked in those uncertain days when the union organizations of wartime were fighting tooth and toenail to hold their own against organizations of reactionary employers, who affected tremblingly to see in the struggle for wages and hours the horrid specter of Bolshevism.
In so much he gained success. Sometimes he would feel a profound resentment because there loomed always the possibility of failure, of collapse, of material ruin. With the estate intact he could have tested, experimented in a field that interested him. He had no illusions about industry, about the competitive scramble. He had no visionary schemes for speedy remodelling of the economic structure. But with the means to work, he could have worked with a sense of security; he was quite sure that he could effect a change for the better in a field he knew and force others to follow his lead.
It was not, he saw, political power or vengeance on a class that labor cried out for. It was security of livelihood, a recognition of their rights as human beings,—two things that were everywhere acknowledged in theory but frequently disregarded in practice. If political power, direct action, accentuated class struggle were the only ways to secure these two essentials, as some held, then the industrial clashes must go on, must grow more bitter. Rod not only believed that society should, in its own interest, guarantee labor a decent livelihood as its rightful share in mass production, but he believed it could be done—he believed he could do it himself—he believed it could be done in any industry—he believed that sometime it must be done to avoid a greater evil.
The test of anything is its workability. Rod's policy worked, with almost four hundred men on his pay roll. And if he had not been compelled to pour his profits into that moribund Trust Company he could have built up a reserve strong enough to carry his working force over any possible non-productive period. At the worst now, he could square the Norquay account with the world at large. But a little thing might leave him with no resources whatever. And he regretted that. He knew what he could do, if he once had a free hand.
That uncertainty bore on him hard. He was doing his best. His men were doing their best. Logs came down to tidewater in a marvellous flow, as if the trees were handled by intelligent automatons with legs and fingers of steel. He had no labor difficulty that was not solved on such occasions as it arose by a half-hour's dispassionate talk over a table with the spokesmen of his crews. The walking delegates of the Logger's Union approached him as confidently as if he had been a member of the union.
But there was always that cursed pit into which he was flinging his trees. It yawned bottomless. It loomed before him distressingly; an Augean stable that he must clean. He had his weak moments, his hours of utter discouragement. But he could neither stop nor turn aside. Sometimes in the streets of Vancouver, after a checking up with Charlie Hale in the Norquay Trust office, he would have the morbid fancy that the deep traffic roar of the city was like the roar of the rapids by Little Dent, and that he was in a frail craft shooting that fierce economic tiderace to disaster in the financial whirlpools.
What a price to pay for one man's purblind ambition! He would look back at the chaste white square of the Norquay Trust Building, at the black iron skeleton of the great electric sign, and his lips would mutter a curse.