The Inverted Pyramid
CHAPTER I
Item: one boy aged eighteen, name Roderick Norquay; one girl aged fifteen, named Mary Thorn; one gaudy cedar dugout canoe got up in the Siwash style of high-curving bow and stern, both ends grotesquely carved and brilliantly colored in flaming red, blinding yellow, piercing blue; one stretch of tiderace running swiftly between an island shore and a forbidding rock-strewn point.
The tides of Fundy and the maelstroms of the Scandinavian coast have been variously hymned since Jules Verne vulgarized holy science and proved himself an unwitting prophet with Captain Nemo's submersible. But there are tides and maelstroms on the Pacific seaboard as worthy as these others, which have as yet no place in literature save through the dull medium of admiralty charts and blue-bound North Pacific pilot books. These sheets and tomes are thumbed and conned by men nowise concerned with that color, form, and substance which imparts magic to the written word. They seek therein only knowledge of reef and shoal, of anchorages, currents, depths, for the safe passage of their sea-borne keels.
Rod Norquay, sitting on the shore of Little Dent, waiting for the flood tide to wax strong and the race of it through the choked pass to grow swifter, found himself wondering why no poet had sung the song of this swirling water; why no novelist had lovingly portrayed this land as a back drop for his comic and tragic puppets? Why was there no Iliad of the pioneers, no Human Comedy of men and manners peculiar to the North Coast? If McAndrews sighed for a Burns to sing the song of steam, so young Norquay found himself wishing that some one with the gift of living words could catch and transfix the beauty and majesty, the invisible yet pulsing spirit of his native land. That it deserved a Homer and a Burns he did not doubt. Rod had been reading Homer with his tutor that morning. Perhaps the thought in his mind now was only the reflex of a question put then.
"Why should a fellow have to learn all about these frowsy old Greeks?" he had demanded, as much in mild mischief, to scandalize his tutor, as for any reason. Yet he was suddenly earnest when he followed up this by saying, "It would be much more interesting to read poetry about our own people. How they sailed this coast in small ships, how they fought Indians and settled the country and founded families, and all that sort of thing."
He could not quite comprehend when Mr. Spence shook his gray head and gravely stated in a precise, tutorial voice:
"There is, my dear Rod, no epic literature dealing with the pioneers. That is merely in the nature of things. It takes leisure and culture to embody a tradition in language that will live. American civilization has been too occupied with grasping material power, with cutting trees and digging mines, making machinery and so on. This country has tradition, but little culture. It is too young and lusty, too new and crude—raw, one might say."
Rod Norquay had muttered "rats!" under his breath. He did not accept as gospel all that his elderly tutor vouchsafed. Young? Four generations of men had been born in the house where they sat. Its stone walls had been fabricated by English masons who rounded the Horn before the day of steam. Rod believed the Anglo-Saxon took his culture with him—in so far as he possessed culture—wherever he went. It was not something indigenous to the soil in which he planted his roots.