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.
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.