Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"No?" MacRae said incredulously. "You didn't break up a logging venture on the Claha when he had a chance to make a stake? You didn't show your fine Italian hand in that marble quarry undertaking on Texada? Nor other things that I could name as he named them. Why crawl now? It doesn't matter. I'm not swinging a club over your head."

Gower shook himself.

"No," he declared slowly. "He interfered with the Morton interests in that Claha logging camp, and they did whatever was done. The quarry business I know nothing about, except that I had business dealings with the people whom he ran foul of. I tell you, MacRae, after the first short period of time when I was afire with the fury of jealousy, I did not do these things. I didn't even want to do them. I wish you would get that straight. I wanted Bessie Morton and I got her. That was an issue between us, I grant. I gained my point there. I would have gone farther to gain that point. But I paid for it. It was not so long before I knew that I was going to pay dearly for it. I tell you I came to envy Donald MacRae. I don't know if he nursed a disappointment—which I came to know was an illusion. Perhaps he did. But he had nothing real to regret, nothing to prick, prick him all the time. He married a woman who seemed to care for him. At any rate, she respected him and was a mate, living his life while she did live.

"Look, MacRae. I married Bessie Morton because I wanted her, wanted her on any terms. She didn't want me. She wanted Donald MacRae. But she had wanted other men. That was the way she was made. She was facile. And she never loved any one half so much as she loved herself. She was only a beautiful peacock preening her feathers and sighing for homage. She was—she is—the essence of self from the top of her head to her shoes. Her feelings, her wants, her wishes, her whims, her two-by-four outlook, nothing else counted. She couldn't comprehend anything outside of herself. She would have made Donald MacRae's life a misery to him when the novelty of that infatuation wore off. The Mortons are like that. They want everything. They give nothing.

"She was cowardly too. Do you think two old men and myself would have taken her, or anything else, from your father out in the middle of the Gulf, if she had had any spirit? You knew your father. He wasn't a tame man. He would have fought—fought like a tiger. We might have killed him. It is more likely that he would have killed us. But we could not have beaten him. But she had to knuckle down—take the easy way for her. She cried; and he promised."

Gower lay back in his chair. His chin sunk on his breast. He spoke slowly, groping for his words. MacRae did not interrupt. Something compelled him to listen. There was a pained ring in Gower's voice that held him. The man was telling him these things with visible reluctance, with a simple dignity that arrested him, even while he felt that he should not listen.

"She used to taunt me with that," he went on, "taunt me with striking Donald MacRae. For years after we were married she used to do that. Long after—and that wasn't so long—she had ceased to care if such a man as your father existed. That was only an episode to her, of which she was snobbishly ashamed in time. But she often reminded me that I had struck him like a hardened butcher, because she knew she could hurt me with that. So that I used to wish to God I had never followed her out into the Gulf.

"For thirty years I've lived and worked and never known any real satisfaction in living—or happiness. I've played the game, played it hard. I've been hard, they say. Probably I have. I didn't care. A man had to walk on others or be walked on himself. I made money. Money—I poured it into her hands, like pouring sand in a rat-hole. She lived for herself, her whims, her codfish-aristocracy standards, spending my money like water to make a showing, giving me nothing in return, nothing but whining and recrimination if I crossed her ever so little. She made a lap dog of her son the first twenty-five years of his life. She would have made Betty a cheap imitation of herself. But she couldn't do that."

He stopped a moment and shook his head gently.