CHAPTER XXVII
Late summer of 1920 pricked to utter collapse the prosperity balloon which had been deflating ever since the Armistice. Europe still stewed in the choice juices of local punitive expeditions, reparation snarls, gyrating exchange, so that North American commerce lagged by the way with heavy feet. Here and there industry somehow kept going. It couldn't stop altogether, even lacking foreign markets. Crops were sowed and reaped; people were fed; life went on. But capital ventured timidly. Wages fell, even though commodities seemed reluctant to cheapen. The stress came particularly hard on the Pacific Coast. The bottom dropped out of the lumber market. A thousand loggers walked the streets of Vancouver, hungry, bewildered, as soon as their savings gave out. Only here and there a few companies and individuals, fortunately situated, well-managed, or filled with bowels of compassion for their men, were enabled to continue. They could log cheaply. They were willing to risk a little loss rather than disband crews and let machinery rust; and they hoped for the upturn, the revival of "confidence," that talisman which commends itself to Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce.
Rod owned his timber. He neither leased, paid royalty, stumpage, nor interest on borrowed capital. It was choice timber, picked long ago when his forefathers had the cream of coastal forests to choose from. If a tree could be cut and sold at a profit by any one, he was the one. So long as he could operate without loss, he meant to keep on. He had to keep on, until the cost of production overtook the market price.
And because he kept on along the lines he had laid down in the beginning, he found himself in disfavor with people who had once considered it a privilege to know a Norquay. He did not suffer from that. They could not hurt him. If he had not been deeply troubled because he saw the nearing end of his own rope, he would have been amused.
To know that there were men who damned him heartily for paying labor so much a day when labor could be had for less. To be aware that a certain clique looked forward to the weight of the Norquay Trust crushing him, and that there might be pickings on the bones, because he was young and inexperienced in business. To be regarded as a quixotic fool. To have certain men freeze up when he met them in clubs, hotels, on coastwise steamers. To have others draw him aside for earnest remonstrance. It was strange what an interest they took in his welfare; how eager they were to point out that he was hurting himself and demoralizing the labor market, making it hard for them to readjust their business to changed conditions, to deflate properly. Labor had to come down off its high horse and his tactics delayed the unseating. And so forth. None of it troubled Rod.
He did not want their friendship. He set no store by their opinions. He had been a solitary animal all his life, too self-contained for superficial friendships. He had dreamed in and out of books as a youngster while some of these others were already up and doing. As a man he played a lone hand, acted with resolution, brooded over his own problems, disregarded the non-essential.
He had his wife and his son. He had a given task to accomplish. He had a friend or two to lean on if he needed to lean, Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, his brother-in-law who wrestled with the Norquay Trust as the angel of the Lord wrestled with Apollyon. In the city office he had two men he could rely on, two heirlooms, two old, very wise, white-mustached men who had handled accounts, costs, sales, during his father's régime and Phil's. And there was Stagg, the butler, and his wife, who elected to remain at Hawk's Nest for the sake of house room and a sentiment Rod understood, valued, was moved by. They were, Stagg said, too old to go into service elsewhere. They had a bit of money put by. Enough to live rent free, but not enough to cope with the cost of town living. They would like to stay at Hawk's Nest and keep it aired and dry, to care for such part of the grounds as Stagg could keep from going to rack. Rod thanked them and let them have their wish. It gave himself and Mary a room always ready when they wanted to spend a day or two there, which they did at times. It was pleasant to sit on those wide porches in blazing August, to watch Rod junior prance across the lawn astride a stick. Hawk's Nest was home in a very dear and intimate sense, even if it could no longer be maintained in the old opulent state. Rod never passed down the channel in the Haida about his business without a lingering, regretful look at that red roof glowing against a background of green timber and great mountains.
There remained only one link—apart from his sister Dorothy who came to Hawk's Nest each summer for a month, and in whose Vancouver home the diminished Norquay clan gathered at Christmas—between Rod and the numerous folk who had haunted that place in the old days, the girls he had danced with, the young fellows who had been his contemporaries. That link was Isabel Wall.
It seemed a strange friendship. He had always regarded Isabel with a feeling of patient tolerance. She had fallen in love with him once, in her doll-like fashion, to his great embarrassment. She appeared to have no recollection of that episode. She seemed firmly attached to Mary. Between them, diverse as they were, there did exist an intimacy, an understanding, an affection that Rod was slow to fathom, which he did not fathom at all until he began to take serious stock of Isabel and discovered that for all her unchanged pink-and-white prettiness, this diminutive person was really not at all the Isabel Wall of his original conception.
It seemed to him in the beginning to be incongruous that his wife's greatest, almost her only intimate, should be the frivolous daughter of a man who, next to Grove Norquay, was chiefly responsible for the evil days upon which the Norquay family had fallen. But because his faith in his wife's judgment was a vital thing, he let that pass. If at first glance it seemed incomprehensible it was an accomplished fact. Isabel lived in his house as much as she did her own. She seemed absolute mistress of her comings and goings. If she had once had no mark to shoot at save dress and parties and men, she did not seem to care greatly now whether she danced and played and flirted. Yet she seldom uttered a serious thought. She remained a charming irresponsible, given to slang and cigarettes. She descended upon them in town, at the Euclataws, whether they were at Hawk's Nest or in the logging camp on Valdez, when the mood took her. She was always welcome. Isabel was a gloom-dispeller. Rod used to wonder at first if she did not come chiefly for the joy she got in devilling the life out of Andy Hall. But presently he found himself with a sneaking fondness for Isabel and her quaint pertness. And when he reached that stage and admitted it, Mary laughed.
"Isabel's a jewel, Rod. She's sound and sweet and true as steel. She's been pampered and petted all her life. Yet it hasn't spoiled her in any of the various ways in which that sort of thing does spoil girls. She sticks to us because she says we're about the only real people she knows. That tiny blonde head contains some very sound wisdom. She hasn't many illusions left, and still she hasn't got cynical or hard and calculating. Laska made a hash of her life and has reacted accordingly. Their mother's hopelessly society-mad. Her idea of heaven is to be presented at Court sometime. Bob drinks like a fish and goes on the loose just as Grove used to do. Her father knows only the money game and plays that to the exclusion of everything else. The poor kid's only chance in the world, she says herself, is to find and marry a man who can stand on his own feet."
Shortly after that conversation Rod went in search of a logging boss, thinking, as he walked beside a chute in which hummed a steel "main line" that quivered under the strain of a heavy load, of Isabel and her astonishing metamorphosis. Or was it merely a cropping out of something latent? Undeniably that did happen. By all the rules of the game, Isabel should continue as she had begun, a butterfly, a dainty parasitical creature who had never toiled, spun, or concerned herself with anything but each day's pleasure as it came her way. He hadn't credited Isabel with perception to fathom the futility of the pursuit of pleasure as a life work, without duties, responsibilities, or any creative passion. But he could understand her instinctive revolt. He wondered what John P. Wall thought of this daughter who found dissatisfaction in a life that was all pleasure and no purpose.
His errand took him far up into the workings. The daily routine of a logging boss is an active one. The man Rod sought moved always ahead of him, giving his overseeing eye to various spots where separate gangs of men busied themselves with powerful and noisy machinery, devoted to localized and violent struggle with logs of enormous tonnage. A stranger to logging as it proceeds in the forests of the Pacific Coast invariably gets a first impression of desperate effort and grave danger in his approach to a donkey engine at work. The black, round-bellied monster shudders and strains on anchored skids. The inch and a quarter main line reels up on the drums with a grind of gears, a behemothic sputtering of exhaust steam. Continuous vibrations disturb the air and communicate themselves to the earth over a wide radius. The cable runs away into the shadowy places of the forest. It recedes therein, chattering, whining; it comes forth dragging the huge sticks to the base of the sky-line pole; and the logs go thence, dangling, sliding, gouging holes in the hillside: It is all noise, effort, confusion, humming of lines, hiss of steam, bull-blocks screaming; a deafening uproar until a stop signal brings a hush that by contrast is solemn, as if that powerful machinery were a heart that had suddenly stopped beating.
Rod found his man at last and returned. They were living in the old Thorn house, taking their meals in a small room off the main messhouse, where the crew bolted its collective food in occupied silence, putting all its energy into the business of eating, and reserving a free and unrestrained mode of conversation for the ease of the bunkhouse. A steamer had touched and gone while he was absent, passing north through the rapids on the afternoon slack. He found Isabel Wall on the calk-splintered steps, teaching young Roderick a whimsy she had picked up somewhere:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe!
What made the poor man do so?
He was a Robinson I know
But that's no reason he should crow.
I wonder why he Crusoe?"
She was making the boy letter-perfect in this. Andy Hall sat on the step below her, smoking a cigarette in contemplative silence.
"They'll be through at Valdez to-morrow," he informed Rod.
"So soon? I thought they had a week to go."
"They made time," Andy commented tersely.
"Well, better load the working gear on floats and get it up here," Rod told him. "Have 'em begin on the cedar hollow."
"I put the fallers in there this afternoon."
Rod smiled. It was almost unnecessary to tell Andy Hall what should be done. Sometimes it seemed as if Andy had a mysterious prescience. Then Rod would recollect that they had discussed such a move long before. Or it was the logical move which Andy merely anticipated. In either case Andy always knew what he was doing, and why; nor did he ever hesitate to take the initiative.
Rod leaned back in a grass chair, clasped his hands behind his head, stared across the channel at the flash of the sun on the windows of Hawk's Nest. Behind him, in a west-facing room, he could hear the staccato of typewriter keys, tapping out the last chapter of Mary's second novel. He wondered, if things had been different, if he would have succeeded in that outlet. No, he decided. It would have been a splendid thing to try. He had been eager to embody and interpret the spirit of the pioneers. But he doubted now if he had the peculiar creative gift of making words transform his imaginings into a reality that would convey stark passion and stirring deeds. And Mary had that gift, beyond a doubt; not only the inborn faculty of perceiving, but the torturing necessity to transmit, to release through patient drudgery at her chosen medium, that sense of life as a vast conflict in which man struggles with his fellows, his gods, and his passions, sometimes to victory and often to defeat.
No, he had the vision, the perceptive faculty, but not that uncanny power to capture and pass it on. Such vision as he had must find its outlet in action less subtle, more practical. He would never write the stories he had dreamed; he knew that now. But Mary would; she had her wings. He was proud of her flight. Only, sometimes, when her work took her into a brooding remoteness, a spiritual detachment that thrust not only himself but every material consideration temporarily aside, he wondered if the artist could ever function except as the supreme egotist, if the true artist must not by some obscure compulsion subordinate everything to the imperative demands of his art. Even so, he knew that he would rather have only such portion of his wife as he could share than the most complete possession—body, soul and brain—of any other woman he knew. Mary would always understand. In any crisis she would always have courage and confidence. She was his windward anchor. He loved her not for what she did and said but for what she was—herself.
Young Roderick picked up a stick from one corner of the porch.
"Gotta go to work," he informed them gravely.
"What at?" Isabel inquired.
"Scalin' timber," he replied. He danced off down the path to the beach, chanting:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe,
What made the poor man do so?"
Already incorporating the reality of his environment into the child-world of make-believe. Rod smiled; he had done the same thing himself, alone, happily, through just such hot, smoky, August days long ago. The boy clambered over a heap of stovewood, measuring with his stick, making marks on a bit of notepaper just as the scaler did who walked the boom with pad and pencil and a six-foot scaling rule.
For a time the murmur of Isabel's and Andy's conversation accompanied Rod's thoughts. He continued to stare across at Hawk's Nest. A problem pressed him for solution, a question which involved closely that gray house with its glowing roof of red tiles, from behind which rose the conical top of the great cedar, in the shadow of which so many Norquays took their last rest.
He was approaching a critical stage in his affairs. He did not know how much longer he could carry on. Producing costs overtook market prices, would soon pass them. Only by a foresighted contract with a Puget Sound pulp mill had he kept going so long. In a month that would expire. It could not be renewed on the same terms. The great pulp plant in Phillips Arm which the Norquay Trust had financed and which had never ground a ton of pulp until Rod forced it into production, offered him prices he couldn't take on the wages paid and hours worked. He wouldn't know where to turn soon, unless he abandoned his present policy, cut wages to the bone, got into line with the other employers. That seemed to him like a breach of faith. He had made a fortune on the labor of his men already; that he was poorer in funds than at the beginning did not alter the case. The Norquay Trust had swallowed the profits. It would swallow a vast sum yet before its appetite was glutted. It hurt him to think of these men paying for Grove's mismanagement by lengthened hours and shortened pay. Nor did he wish to shut down and wait a turn in the market. A shutdown meant a cessation of revenue; that in turn might precipitate the disaster he had struggled so hard to avert. It was a very real difficulty.
He was stirred out of these reflections by a silence which had all the effect of a disturbing sound. He came back to the immediate present. Isabel still sat on the step, a dainty figure in a blue sweater and pleated tan skirt, staring after Andy's retreating figure.
"Your right bower," she said complainingly, turning to meet Rod's gaze, "is the stupidest man I know."
"You're a mile off the mark," Rod contradicted.
"He is," she repeated. "He's afraid of me."
"Andy Hall," Rod answered dryly, "is not afraid of anything or any one, least of all a harmless person like you."
"He's in love with me," Isabel said coolly. "And he's so afraid of me that he hasn't sense enough to see that all he has to do is to hold out his hands and I'll fall into 'em like a—a ripe plum. Can't you give him a hint, Rod?"
"Haven't you scalps enough at your belt without Andy's?"
"If I give him mine in exchange, that's fair enough," Isabel murmured.
"Do you really mean that?" Rod asked.
Isabel got out her cigarette case and deliberately blew smoke rings before she replied.
"I don't know for sure," she said at last. "Sometimes I think so, and again I'm not so sure. I could tell better if he'd ask me. It isn't that I wouldn't like to. It's simply that I have qualms of conscience sometimes about wishing myself on a man like that. I'm so damned useless, Rod."
"I don't think that men as a rule love women and marry them on the basis of their usefulness," he returned. "I'm certain Andy wouldn't. I must say it's rather odd to see you taking that slant at it."
"Oh, yes," she drawled petulantly. "I suppose you've got me labelled fragile, too. Just because a fellow's been brought up gilt-edged and has acted accordingly, is she to be credited with neither heart nor conscience, nor even common sense? I have come to the conclusion that I don't want to be a canary in anybody's cage, Rod. When I size up some of the horrible examples of how not to do it in my own crowd, I get afraid. I'm twenty-six years old, Roderick. Does it never strike you that a girl like me doesn't play a lone hand so long without good reasons?"
"What's that got to do with Andy?" Rod inquired.
"I'll tell you in words of one syllable and maybe you'll get it," she retorted. "Some years ago, if you recall the occasion, I was very much in love with your own distinguished self. I hope," she smile impishly, "it doesn't embarrass you to be reminded. It doesn't me, because I still think my judgment was good, even if I was out of luck. I've been in love probably half a dozen times since. And I always drew back at what the novelists call the psychological moment. Why? God knows. I don't. Something lacking, I suppose. Perhaps in spite of my giddiness I had a hunch that being in love with love isn't quite the same as being in love with a person. Then the war took all the likely ones away, and a good many of the best of them didn't come back. And something has happened to those who did come back. They're either so keen on the make they daren't take a girl seriously, or—or they've gone bad; the bloom's off 'em. Not one of them looks good to me. Nor the life they live. I hope I don't sound preachy. But some people who are rotten with money—especially those who've made it so fast they haven't had time to grow up to it—are rotten with other things, too. I may look like what Andy calls a charming, innocent parasite. I like to think of myself as charming. My instincts at any rate are innocent. But I do object to the role of parasite. I don't want to be one. I've never done anything useful, even for myself, but that isn't saying I don't want to—even if it's no more than to comfort and pet some man and hearten him for whatever sort of job he has in hand. I've never worked, but that's no sign I wouldn't if I knew where to start in. I'm not lazy, nor am I too fastidious for workaday life. That's what it's got to do with Andy Hall. I like him. I'd hate to tell you just how much; you'd blush. And he likes me. I know that, although he's the best little sentiment-represser I've come across. He's afraid of me, or he's afraid of what I am. I mean I think he doesn't see me just as a woman but as part of and more or less inseparable from a certain background—a background he doesn't like and doesn't trust.
"You see," she went on more hurriedly, her voice becoming a little uncertain, her eyes turned steadfastly on the swirls and foaming overfalls the flood now made strongly in the rapids, "I get so infernally lonesome and discouraged sometimes. I'm tired of froth. I don't like the giddy pace most of 'em go. I don't want to be like Laska, soured on everything, so that she lives on cocktails and cigarettes and jazz. If she sits still long enough to think, she's apt to cry. If I don't find myself happy in the jazz age, Rod, at least I belong to it sufficiently not to be afraid or ashamed of my own thoughts and feelings and desires. I'm a normal female person. A woman can't escape the implication of a man, nor vice versa. Most of 'em go it blind. I'm not made that way. I don't know why, but it's a fact. Long ago I made up my mind that if I couldn't find the real thing in my own crowd, I'd go outside, just as you did."
"And then," she made a little gesture with her hands, "remember the day Andy showed Mrs. Hector Emmert his medals and made that passionate little speech that she said was sedition? Well, I warmed up to Andy Hall right then and there. Two years. I'm no nearer him now. He holds himself in. He won't let go. What can I do?"
"I'll tell you," Rod said impulsively. "Andy doesn't know you. You don't let go yourself."
"Fiddlesticks," she retorted. "Two years. I think I'm shamelessly transparent."
"Two years? I've known you more than ten," Rod countered. "I've learned more about you in ten minutes than I did in all the time before. So imagine his handicap. You're a rich man's daughter. You've had every social advantage. You belong to a class that taken by and large Andy Hall not only dislikes but despises for its stupidity and arrogance in so far as it deals with working people."
"Oh, yes, the well-known capitalist class," Isabel said impatiently. "But you're one and he likes you."
"I come in a different category," Rod answered grimly. "I despise the tin-horn capitalist whose only god is capital more than Andy Hall does. It's part of a social theory with Andy. It's a personal feud with me. I'm suffering from the manipulations of that type of gold-digger. It has just about ruined me and has caused me to risk all that several generations of honest, generous-minded men built up, including a home many of us love—and a reputation for integrity besides. But Andy happens to know me as a man apart from my present dubious position as a capitalist. He doesn't really know you as a woman. He may be in love with you. Probably is, because you are an attractive little devil—"
"I thank you very much, kind sir," Isabel interrupted mockingly.
"But," Rod went on unheeding, "unless he were absolutely sure you would, as Christ told the man who wanted to be saved, 'Leave all that thou hast and follow Me,' a donkey engine couldn't pull a declaration of any sort out of him. Don't you see? Andy's full of sinful pride. He's class-conscious. He knows your kind of people better than you do, and he knows they regard him as belonging to an inferior order. He would chew his heart up and spit it out in little pieces before he'd let any flirtatious daughter of the idle rich have it for a curio in her collection. You've talked and laughed with him here in our house. You call him Andy and he calls you Isabel. But remember that he knows what manners are, and that being genial, even pleasantly intimate to the point of plaguing him the way you do, doesn't really mean anything. He's my trusted superintendent, and he draws a corking good salary which he faithfully earns, but he knows that wouldn't prevent a person like you from cutting him dead if he met you in, say the Vancouver Hotel Dubarry Room, hanging on the arm of, well, Sir Earnest Staples of Government House, Victoria."
"Never," Isabel protested. "I'm no snob."
"I didn't say you would. But it's been done. You've seen that sort of thing pulled," Rod continued. "Andy knows he doesn't belong in your crowd. What's more, he doesn't want to. He has seen quite clearly from the outside what you've seen from the inside, and come to the same conclusion. But he doesn't know you've arrived at such a conclusion. I didn't know it myself. You poke fun at them, of course. But you play the game with them right along, and you camouflage your real attitude toward life with Andy, with me, with us all. In fact, you'd have a hard time convincing any one, offhand, that you ever had a serious thought in your life. So how do you expect Andy to take you seriously?"
"But must one pull a long face and go about spreading the philosophy of disillusion and appealing for sympathy?" Isabel protested. "I can't help it if I'm mostly a cheerful idiot. How am I to make Andy understand that—that I—that—"
She choked up. And Rod felt intensely sorry for her at that moment. But he knew of no way to help.
"I said I'd tell you, and I'll try," he went on gently. "If you really do love Andy Hall and want him, you had better sometime just put your arms around his neck and tell him so."
Isabel looked away. A deep flush colored her white neck and spread upward until it was lost in the roots of her yellow fluff of bobbed hair.
"Oh," she whispered, "I couldn't do that."
"That's the best way," he said kindly. "Andy has all the finer instincts. But he has a lot of inhibitions you don't know anything about. I don't think you really understand class feeling, Isabel. You seem to be free of it altogether. But it exists. Believe me, I speak both from experience and observation. It is next to impossible to build a bridge across a definite social gulf. You have to jump it—from one side or the other. People are apt to deny this in a supposedly democratic country. But it's truer than they think. You put Andy in dress clothes and turn him loose in your own crowd, and he'd get by with very little coaching. But he wouldn't stick. He'd say it was shoddy. Which you and I and Mary are agreed it is. But in contact with intellect, art, real achievement in the best sense, Andy not only asserts his equality, but would get a glow of enjoyment out of the association. Andy Hall's character is sterling, and that's above any class distinction. If Andy really cares for you, Isabel, I'd say you were justified in going to extremes to let him know where you stand."
"I can't go all the way myself," she whispered, and fell silent, staring moodily over the channel waters. Then she got up and went inside.