CHAPTER V
When the deck hands had dumped a trunk, a bag, a suitcase and sundry bundles on the float and the Camosun had backed into the stream, Rod still stood looking about him, trying to mark changes and finding none. He had been away almost two years. He might have been gone only overnight for all the external difference in what he saw. Time's scythe had mowed no grass, felled no trees, had left untouched the bold contours of his native hills, had neither added to nor taken away from the well-remembered tintings of sky and sea, the delicate shadings of the green forest which seemed to hold its own on every hand against the continuous onslaught of the logger. It was as if the puny axes and saws of man could no more than make tiny openings in that incredible stretch of coastal forest. Pygmies attacking a giant in the vast amphitheater of the changeless hills!
Except for the stone house with a roof that gleamed like burnished copper in its setting of lawn against the deep olive of massed boughs, all that Rod Norquay could see by turning on his heel must have been bared to his eye much as it was bared to the gaze of his great-great-grandfather on the poop of the Hermes in 1797. Earth and water, air and sky. The changeless elements. Life was a flux, but the hills endured, and the sea. Man could ravage the forests in the name of industry. But the forest would grow again. Those high aloof mountains, with glaciers clinging on their shoulders, held out welcoming hands to Rod as they had seemed to welcome the first of his name a century before. They would be there, flinging vast shadows at sunrise and sundown, bearing their robes of dusky green and royal purple and virgin white long after he was gone.
Rod felt a keen, deeply personal appreciation of this background. He had looked at the Alps and the Pyrenees and the Highlands since he last saw The Needles looming over Bute Inlet. And he loved his own hills best. He did not care if that stamped him as a provincial. There was something here that stirred him. His native fir and cedar, the maples that flamed along the beaches in autumn, were dearer to him than English oaks. The grassed area about Hawk's Nest, with thick-trunked, lofty trees rooted in noble hundreds, was more beautiful to him that the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was home, and he had never imagined he would be so glad to get home. And he was quite aware that it was neither persons nor things that filled him with this keen satisfaction.
In four semesters he had listened to and taken part in many a sophomoric discussion where Art and Beauty went on the dissecting table. To himself he had once defined beauty as such perfection of form, tone, color, expression, as touched human heartstrings to a responsive vibration. It did not matter, he sagely decided, whether this perfection lay in sculpture, architecture, painting, music, literature, in the everlasting hills or the shifting scroll of the sea. The sense of it, the response to it, wherever found, alone differentiated man from the animals. The attempt, more or less successful, to capture something of this beauty, to interpret it, to visualize it in marble, in colors, in words, he took to be the function of art. What art was he did not know. But beauty he could see and feel. He smiled to himself now, recalling bits of discussion between classmen about Art and Beauty. They could become so serious over abstractions. Here a man could forget abstractions. He was like his great-great-grandfather. This fitted him as a glove fits the hand.
He glanced across the channel. Oliver Thorn's weathered house stood blended with the forest, the west wind trailing a blue pennant from the chimney. Then he turned to meet Stagg, the butler, who had recognized the single debarkee and come down to welcome him and see about his things.
"Who's here, Stagg?" Rod inquired, as they walked up the path.
"Your grandfather, Mr. Rod, of course," Stagg answered. "Mrs. Wall, Miss Isabel, Miss Monty Deane, Miss Joe Richston, Mr. Sam Deane, Mr. Harold Collier of Seattle. Mr. Philip has taken them all down to Rock Bay on the Haida. We're expecting Mr. Grove and some people on his yacht for the week-end, sir."
Rod sought his grandfather in the library. He found the old man with his chair by a French window opening on a small balcony, his thin hands nursing a long-stemmed pipe.