"All I know is what somebody has told me, what I've read in books," he grumbled. "Cobwebby stuff. Pretty—lots of it—moving—but no substance. All I got out of school was a mass of unclassified facts. I'm crammed with 'em. I know what a lot of great men did—but not how they did it—why they did it. And language. What's the good of a 'steen-thousand-word vocabulary if you've got no peg to hang it on, only the old pegs other people have used till they're all worn and shiny? I'm like a man with a craving to paint beautiful things he can see, with a whole box of color-tubes, and no idea how to apply his colors to get the effects he wants. Or a finely made steam engine all ready to run, greased and oiled and water in the boilers, but no fuel to make steam. I don't know people, humanity, only one kind. I don't know life; only one comfortable groove of it. I don't know anything that really counts, except that I don't know much. I wouldn't be stuck with this, if I did." He faced about, frowning on the pile of written sheets. "I'd be able to make a thing go the way I wanted it, whether it was a story or a girl. I can't do either. I don't know how—and I've got to find out how. As long as I stay in a nice, fenced pasture I never will find out. It's all too cut and dried. Too many taboos. Too many fences. I've got to break through. I'm too much like the pea in the pod—I am green, the pod is green, all the world is green."
He sat down in a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and lost himself in concentrated thought.
The history of Rod's family was part of the history of his native land, in so far as Anglo-Saxon occupancy had made history. The Norquay foothold had been the first individual one established by a white man on the Pacific between Spain to the south and Russia to the north. That century and more of far-seeing purposeful struggle had culminated in the possession of every material benefit men live and work and sometimes vainly die to grasp. Blood had been spilled, storms braved, great risks faced to win that security. To Rod, ever since he could remember, these things had been real, vividly colored episodes enacted under the auspices of the high gods of adventure. He was imaginative, creatively imaginative. Old Roderick Sylvester, the barque Hermes, the sea-otter trading, the bride who fled her English home to fare into strange seas for love, the Chilcotins on their bloody forays, the wooden blockhouse, the first course of masonry, the vast influx of gold-seekers in the Cariboo rush of '58, the completion of Hawk's Nest in all its comfortable permanence,—these were not simply things he knew as part of his antecedents. They were realities, as if they had happened but yesterday under his own eyes. They moved him strangely, deeply. He could reconstruct in his mind all that crowded century. In his mind's eye all the men and women whose bones lay underground about the great red cedar lived and moved and had being once more. He could see them as clearly as he saw Phil and his father and Laska or Mary Thorn.
He had been trying to capture those visions, those personalities, those old stirring times so crowded with pregnant action. He had been trying more or less earnestly for a year and a half. And he had failed. He was aware of his failure. The human equation somehow evaded him when he put pen to paper. He couldn't put his finger with surety on the well-spring of human motive. He hadn't the key to character. Rod had more than a casual acquaintance with literature in two languages. He knew Balzac and O. Henry alike, Homer and George Ade, De Maupassant and the Brontes, Flaubert and Anatole France, Ibsen and Tolstoi and Gorky, Kipling and Hardy and Dickens and Poe. He read these writers, and he saw that they created men and women, creatures of pain and passion, even as God created them. He perceived that they did it, that with deft strokes they clothed their skeletons with flesh and blood and breathed the breath of life into them, so that they strutted and sighed and fought with an emotion-compelling intensity. But he could not do it himself. And he passionately desired to catch and transfix those gorgeous pictures his brain evoked from that pioneering past.
It could be done. It wanted doing. Rod had always wanted to do it. Unconsciously he had been preparing for the task. He had meant to do something like that ever since a day when he had laid down his book and told his tutor that some one ought to write the Iliad of the pioneers, an epic of the men and women who with vision and high courage had tamed a wild land for their children's children, those bold spirits who shrank from nothing by land or sea that promised a reward for enterprise.
Rod thought he knew why there was no magic in his pen, why these magnificent visions eluded capture. It was not a reasoned conviction. He felt his lack instinctively. The first faint labor pains of creative effort apprised him of his need: to plunge into the agitated pool of life instead of viewing it from a distant eminence. That was how the manner of life he had led from childhood struck him now,—as a view from afar. Rod was sophisticated enough to realize that his world was one exclusively occupied by a limited number of fortunate people, holding their preëminence largely by sheer inertia. Statistics, observation, his university delving in economics and sociology, had informed him that for one very wealthy family there were a hundred subsisting in various degrees of comfort, a thousand but a step beyond poverty. Accident of birth, or inherent superiority? How was he to know? How could he know unless he got outside the fences, inhibitions, the unyielding rigidity of his own class? It was rigid, Rod perceived; although that perception had only become clear to him through Mary Thorn's eyes. It had a fetich of superiority which might or might not be valid. Even aside from that, how could he fathom things that were universal above and apart from class and even race—men's hopes and fears and aspirations—unless he established a contact with men? And Rod's instinct, the wise, fundamental instinct of an unwarped nature, urged him to make that contact first among the lowly, where the sweat and strain was greatest. There was the raw material. The Norquays—a little more perhaps than any of their circle—were the finished product. Rod wanted to know the process—and the by-products.
That was why he chose the woods. It might be well to know timber. But it was better to know men. And the way to know men was to live among them, to work with them, to stand with them—if such a thing were possible—upon a common ground. Afterward—he would know what he knew.
So for himself Rod, at the age of twenty-two, defined the approach to knowledge: through experience—plus imagination. And to him it seemed that with the first rebuff life had dealt him, it had also given him a clarified purpose, a definite mark to shoot at.