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.