McGill, Mary Thorn, Grove, his grandfather, and the old, old journal of Roderick Sylvester Norquay began to make him question this definitely limited philosophy of living. The element of chance loomed larger. It even invaded the sacred precincts of choice.
He looked at Mary Thorn as they sat on the porch of her father's house, as they ate a pocket lunch beside the Granite Pool with their rods and creels beside them, as they slipped in the dugout alongshore with the open diapason of the rapids welling up, and he wondered by what necromancy of body or spirit she could so effortlessly set his blood racing, drew his flesh toward her as a magnet draws steel, until his resistance was stoutly tested. How? Why? Rod could explain it simply,—but his explanation failed to satisfy. It rode his imagination as something that transcended mere fleshly instinct, which he understood well enough, of which in his sophisticated world he had observed sundry manifestations.
Rod had once said to himself that the family had become static. He had felt a regret for this grooved state; all the great adventuring done; all the great efforts and endurings and activities accomplished. Ease flowed about them in a wide stream. And Grove was the fine flower of it all—a comet flashing across the local heavens, with a tail of yachts, mistresses, vulgar display spreading luminously behind him.
Grandfather Norquay sat in his chair by a sunny window or walked with his stick slowly about the grounds,—a tall, spare, silent old man, thinking his contained, regressive thoughts. Rod would look at him and wonder. He would look at Mary Thorn and wonder. He would look at Grove, when that kinetic gentleman marshaled his house parties down the Kowloon's gangplank, and wonder. Then he would entrench in a library chair, fortified by cigarettes, and read the typed copy of his great-great-grandfather's journal, and his wonder,—which was no more than the vital curiosity of an inquiring mind—would turn from the general to the particular.
He would lay down that hundred-year-old document, clasp his hands behind his head, and strive to construct imaginatively for himself a future based on the known factors of the present and the past. Strangely enough he always came out of these spells of day-dreaming with a sense of futility, with an envy of his forbears, with a regretful sense of having been born too late. Romance might still be a lusty godlet but he moved beyond Rod's ken. He would visualize old Roderick on the poop of the Hermes, pistol in belt, peering out from under a three-cornered hat, one eye on the beauty of a mountainous, thick-forested coast, the other keenly on pelts of sea otter and the profitable risks of barter with savages. Battles with the sea, with a hostile environment, a fine courage, and a far, future-piercing vision. Rod saw the log stockade ringed about by painted Chilcotins, arrows flying, muskets cracking; the battle fought and the dead buried; life continuing in armed watchfulness; the slow weaving of the planned pattern.
"The old fellows had all this in mind," Rod murmured once. "Order and security and well-being. I wonder if they saw everything so firmly established that it has become rigid? That all the Norquays can do now is to live and die like gentlemen. I wonder if old Roderick would have been such a keen, far-sighted old blade if he could have seen the fifth generation as it is? Maybe he would regard us with pride. I wonder? Anyway, they had a whale of a time those days. The Trojans and Spartans had nothing on them. And there has been no Homer to write an Odyssey. No Iliad of the pioneers. The epic of fur and timber and the conquering of a wilderness peopled with savages. I wonder if I could?"
Rod nursed that idea from the f[oe]tal stage to a lusty infancy. He bore it, still in its swaddling clothes, back with him to the university when hot August wore into cool September, and the smoke haze of forest fires vanished before the autumn rains.
He would never become a financial generalissimo like Grove. Unlikely that he would ever be called upon to step into Phil's executive shoes. Unless he voluntarily embarked upon a voyage toward some material port, he would never have to buckle on armor and joust for dollars in the commercial tourney. But—if he were able, if he had the gift and the patience to develop it—he might do these adventuring progenitors a service by making them live again for their descendants—a generation, Rod held, deprived of romance and bold enterprise, limited and circumscribed and in danger of stifling spiritually in the midst of a material plenty.
This fascinating project in the field of creative effort he kept to himself—even from Mary Thorn, who had always aided and abetted him in fanciful undertakings, whose moods and reactions seemed mysteriously yet infallibly to keep step with his own.