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.