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.