A certain percentage of the younger men, with good money burning their pockets, went to town, victims of the inevitable reaction from the grind of work. But most of the crew followed a wiser counsel and stayed in the camp, played poker in the bunk houses, read books and magazines, organized stag dances. Some of the married men built float houses on rafts which could be moved when the camp changed, and brought their families there to live away from rent and fuel costs in town. Their joint efforts persuaded the provincial government to establish a temporary school. So by degrees the camp began to take on the aspect of a community.
The shutdown was comparatively brief,—five weeks. Then rains wiped out the drifts, banished the frost. In the dripping forest where fog wraiths hung like smoke among the tree tops, axes clacked, saws whined, cables hummed, and the logs came down to the sea.
Where the logging industry in great part had stopped dead before the barrier of unprofitable operation, Rod did not even slow down. It was not a question of a profit. It was simply a matter of turning trees into cash to replenish the plundered coffers of the Norquay Trust. Every boom that sold in the market lessened somewhat his obligations, once his men agreed cheerfully that a lowered wage was better than idleness. The reddest radical among them believed in him sufficiently to go ahead on the assurance that wages would automatically keep step with prices for the product of their labor.
In few other organizations that Rod knew did such a feeling prevail. Where it had play there was a minimum of dispute, a maximum of production. But it was rare. His affairs took him into Vancouver a great deal. He had kept up membership in a club to which his father and grandfather had belonged. And in the club quarters which served him as a hotel he came into casual contact with sundry pillars of British Columbia industry. The amount of invective poured on the head of things in general was a revelation.
These worthy gentlemen over their wine and cigars affected to believe the State, the home, the nation, reeled to ruin before union wage scales. The rancor in their voices when they spoke of working-class demands amazed Rod sometimes. But as he listened, he perceived that this rancor was impartially distributed over many things, upon the government, upon taxation, upon affairs in Europe, upon the gaunt specter of the Lenine-Trotsky régime; there seemed no end to their grievances. And he perceived further that this uneasy spirit lay in the fact that the sweeping tide of war prosperity had slacked suddenly where they had childishly believed it would surge on to greater heights,—and that this slackening was unprofitable. If the stagnation kept up long enough, they must shrink to a lesser stature; some to ruin. They were uneasy. Some, committed to great undertakings, were palpably afraid.
If they could keep wages down and prices up! They did not say so openly. They did not correlate the two objectives. They merely brightened at any prospect of better selling prices for their various products, greater demand, and frowned in distress over labor costs. They said labor would have to come off its high horse, and they said it with a good deal of unnecessary vehemence. Quite unanimously, almost instinctively, they were bitter against any man who did not agree with them.
They said, "Men won't work." That was a lie. Rod Norquay had proved it. His men had worked; and he had in his crew a score of agitators black-listed in other camps. No. Men who had seen war-time wages easily over-lapped by war-time living costs would not work for a driving employer under conditions arbitrarily dictated; not unless the whip of necessity lashed them to the task. And when they had to, inevitably they laid down on the job. That was the root of the trouble.
"You could open your camps and start your mills tomorrow," Rod broke into a conversation at his elbow one day, "if you'd base your tactics on the fact that men are men and not beasts of burden. I'm doing it and making money. I've done it right along. There's no magic about it. I simply accept present-day conditions, instead of mourning for the good old days when a logger was something less than a dog in a kennel. The trouble with you people is that you're hogs by nature. You're not satisfied to have your snouts in the trough. You want both feet in."
He walked out on the street, leaving them insulted and indignant. But he did not care. He was in one of his moods, in one of those momentary surges of passion that overtake the hard-pressed man. He saw everything in such moments with a distorted clarity. The motives and aspirations of such men seemed mean beyond words. If it had been possible for him to stay long at such a pitch of emotion, he would have hated them as heartily as they hated him.
They did hate him. Chiefly because they distrusted him, because they couldn't understand his motives. For a long time they had believed that he was a fool about money, a sentimentalist who was sinking a great fortune into a bottomless pit. Then because they saw no sign of collapse, they credited him with ambitious schemes which aroused their cupidity, and finally their antagonism when he continued to play a lone hand and succeed where they, with their little combinations, either failed or were afraid to run a risk of failing. He would enter no arrangement designed to put labor in its place. He would have nothing to do with employers' associations. He stood out a lone figure, carrying on his shoulders the burden of the Norquay Trust and in his hands a producing organization whose efficiency they envied and could not duplicate by their methods.