Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ A boy and a girl could play together without thinking of themselves as male and female. A man and a woman couldn't. His father had warned him that he was a man and should comport himself accordingly. As if a man's natural instinct was to run amuck! Perhaps that was the truth. Rod smiled uneasily at the notion. He was not precisely an unsophisticated youth, but he could scarcely comprehend that there is only a shadowy border between the frank, sexless affections of childhood and the uneasy glow of maturing passion. He had never nursed a libidinous thought about Mary Thorn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Except on two or three hundred acres of jungle at the northern end there was nothing in all that stretch to hamper a rigging-slinger with his snaky cables. The fallers could lay a tree where they wished. The high-lead gear could snatch the logs out at top speed. Rod could imagine old Jim Handy, the human logging machine, looking with glad eyes on such ground and such timber. Records would be made there. Big days that the loggers would talk about in years to come; days when more timber would go down to float within the boomsticks than ever was moved by a crew of men between sun and sun. ”

“ But all across the southern portion, the greater half of Big Dent, the thickets had been cut away, the patriarchal trees freed of the litter about their solidly planted feet, the sun let in, grass sowed, so that the eye could reach far down wooded corridors and get glimpses of sparkling sea; so that a Norquay or his guests could walk abroad in those friendly places and observe—if they were minded to observe—how man had imposed order and beauty upon the wasteful processes of nature by sweeping away all the detritus of the arboreal struggle to survive. ”

“ If he broke or ran down, the job must go unfinished; people, his own people and many others, must suffer. And yet, when he faced the prospect of going on and on like that, flogging a weak heart to its work, keeping his brain alert to direct a big undertaking and the mass of detail involved, making money and more money and pouring it like water into an endless pipe, he felt a profound weariness, an unutterable distaste for this game of profit-creating which other men played with such gusto. ”

“ Rod was a trifle surprised to see Isabel Wall's piquant face turn to him over the back of a Chesterfield. She had been in the south all winter. Almost five years had left Isabel unchanged in appearance, except that her fair hair was thicker and bobbed in the prevailing mode so that it stood out around her head like a fluffy aureole, making her seem, with her big blue eyes and delicate pink-and-white skin, more like a charming doll than ever. Rod's mind revived that embarrassing scene under a high moon among the great tree shadows on Big Dent. He had not seen Isabel since. ”

“ What sort of weak saphead do you think I am?"
"It's no good, Rod," she answered doggedly. "You simply don't understand. You've never had any experience of poverty, of struggle, of sordidness. You'd lose a lot that even money can't buy. And after a while you'd begin to wonder if it were worth while. The world well lost for love is a fine poetic fancy, but nothing more. I tell you quite frankly I'm afraid of love. It brings pain. It brings all sorts of bitter things to men and women, this mating passion. I have an instinct about these things. I won't marry you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He tied the gaudy dugout—which in its barbaric color scheme of Rod's own devising was alternately a joke and a provocation to his brothers—to the Hawk's Nest landing, after the lapse of an hour, which hour he spent coasting under the western shore of Big Dent, alone in the canoe, watching the herring flash in silver shoals among the kelp, the scuttle of crabs over the shingle, the deep purple and brick-red of starfish against flat rocks, in gazing up at a blue dome arched over the hurrying tide and the encircling mountains. ”

“ Power in weak hands had torn down the work of four generations. But it could be rebuilt. Like the saplings, he and his could grow slowly to the old stature. Place and prestige could be grasped again, if he wanted them—if they seemed worth reaching for. He was not sure he wished to grasp either in the accepted sense.
He rose and walked out a little way, turned to look at the house. That was built to endure. A pardonable pride, the glow of a fierce possessive affection warmed him. Hawk's Nest would hatch an eagle yet. Norquay children would still romp in those wainscoted hallways. ”

“ At ten in the morning they ran the south narrows of the Euclataw with the ebb an hour gone, rolling, twisting, yawing widely as they sheered off wicked swirls and were shot at last on a straight current between the two Gillards and into the mouth of Mermaid Bay.
The house was silent, empty. It was silent and empty enough at best, its quiet corridors flanked by rooms that were never opened, in which ghostly shapes of furniture stood in dim light like swathed mummies. But the rooms they did occupy were empty. Rod went out quietly and sat down on the porch steps. ”

“ He couldn't picture Isabel doing that any more than he could picture her, aetat sixteen, shooting the Euclataw Rapids in a dugout, eyes shining in sheer ecstasy of swift movement, hair streaming in the wind. Isabel would either have been frightened or wildly, dangerously excited.
That was as far as Rod carried his analogy. It was sufficient. He had not tried his hand at creative fiction without a sense of character, of form, proportion. He egotistically assumed that he could accurately gauge personal values, that he did it intuitively as well as rationally. ”

“ For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? ”

“ He could stop thinking about Mary Thorn. He took to work as some men take to whisky when a dumb ache oppresses them or some haunting memory will not let them be. And Mary Thorn did haunt him so long as he could look across from Hawk's Nest at that weathered cedar house. He told himself that he was a fool to feel that way. But logic had nothing to do with feeling. Irrational or not, it existed. Something in him had burned up full flame. Love, the mating instinct, whatever it was, had settled upon an object and refused to be directed elsewhere. ”

“ To brace up that swaying structure unlimited funds must be created out of the raw material they controlled, that which had been the backbone of the Norquay estate,—those lordly firs which clothed granite ridges and mountain sides, those ancient cedars that masked gorge and hollow and swamp. That would be his job. One well enough to his liking. Even the destruction of a thing Rod loved as he did his native forest could have an element of the constructive, too, if it were not dictated by a necessity born of human folly and greed. ”

“ All the prestige of wealth, good family, is at your back. You go somewhere, you want to do something; you mention your name; somebody says, 'Oh, one of the Norquays,' and the way is made easy."
"What's the use of an easy road if there's nothing at the end of it?" Rod asked impatiently.
"Oh, your breakfast must have disagreed with you," she flung back.
"I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair,
A road that is an ordered road, like a nun's evening prayer;
But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where,"
Rod quoted. ”

“ Andy smiled. "You will have light in your darkness when some of your crowd are fumbling around bewildered, wondering what has happened to them. Yes, you're dead right, Norquay. You put it very well. The group with the greatest cohesion, the greatest driving force—it isn't a question of moral judgments—it's a question of power. But the real power lies in the men who do the world's work and the brains that are hired by capital to direct the work. Only they lack cohesion. If they ever learn the value of coöperation, of community of interest—look out! ”

“ Rod said tartly. "I think I love Hawk's Nest as dearly as any of us. I have a pretty keen sense of what's due the family. I am perhaps a little proud of belonging to it. I'd a little rather be a great-great-grandson of that adventurous old fur trader than anything I know. But I have only one life to live, and I propose to live it according to my lights. I am not going to do anything that will reflect on us. I merely intend to marry a poor man's daughter because she seems to me the most perfect woman I know." ”

“ No logging crew on the Pacific Coast ever put their gear into such a logging chance. Twelve hundred acres of fir and cedar, few less than four foot thick at the base, thousands that three men touching fingertips could not span, clean straight trees that lifted a hundred feet without a knot or limb, and another hundred above that bared their heads to the sun. Their feet in perpetual shadow; their heads upholding the sky. ”

“ Rod felt a sudden twinge of pity. Grove had been broken on his own wheel. Norquay senior sat staring blankly at the table. A wistful sadness shadowed his face. It pained Rod. He was an old man and Grove was his son,—and he had been proud of him. Rod understood.
"Don't take it to heart so, pater," he tried to cheer him. "It'll come out all right."
"The limits of human folly are only exceeded by human blindness," his father answered moodily, "and sometimes it is a little difficult to adjust one's vision to a merciless flash of light."
He sat tapping his fingertips on the polished wood. ”

“ But some people who are rotten with money—especially those who've made it so fast they haven't had time to grow up to it—are rotten with other things, too. I may look like what Andy calls a charming, innocent parasite. I like to think of myself as charming. My instincts at any rate are innocent. But I do object to the role of parasite. I don't want to be one. I've never done anything useful, even for myself, but that isn't saying I don't want to—even if it's no more than to comfort and pet some man and hearten him for whatever sort of job he has in hand. ”

“ The donkey engines hitched cables to stumps ashore, slid off their floats, hauled themselves puffing and grunting into the shadowy woods, black-bellied mechanical spiders drawing themselves along by a thread of twisted steel wire. A pile-driver crew with a two-ton steam hammer drove rows of sticks alongshore to enclose a booming ground. Another crew built a chute from tide-water to the first benchland. Men and powerful machinery directed with skill and energy wrought this transformation. ”

“ It was as if having lived their span they were content to let their descendants have undisturbed possession.
Probably Rod was the only Norquay under that roof who had so clear a vision of all that had preceded him, and so faint a comprehension of his future. The normal youngster of that age is eagerly forward-looking. He has no retrospect. He is full of impatient hopes, dreams, desires, whenever he lifts his eyes beyond the absorbing present. Rod deliberately refrained from lifting the curtain of the future. ”

“ Rod junior played on the gravel with the small son of a hook-tender and the equally small daughter of a high-rigger. A dozen houses where married men lived with their families faced that strip of shore. Clothes fluttered from taut lines. It neared five o'clock. Supper fires flung blue pennants from various chimneys. Over in the messhouse a flunky sang at his work and dishes clinked. From far up on the wooded slopes came shrill whistle blasts, the throb of machinery, all muffled in the deep cool forest over which was spreading a blight of raw stumps, broken branches, a litter of destruction. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Only, sometimes, when her work took her into a brooding remoteness, a spiritual detachment that thrust not only himself but every material consideration temporarily aside, he wondered if the artist could ever function except as the supreme egotist, if the true artist must not by some obscure compulsion subordinate everything to the imperative demands of his art. Even so, he knew that he would rather have only such portion of his wife as he could share than the most complete possession—body, soul and brain—of any other woman he knew. ”

“ Phil answered as bluntly. "I wouldn't admit it to any one but you, old kid. But I don't. I never did. I never will. We'll always be secretly at odds in everything."
"Same here. I wonder why?" Rod uttered reflectively. "Suppose we're subconsciously resentful—jealous because he's first and entitled to the lion's share?"
"No, no. Nothing so petty. It's fundamental. Grove looks like us. But he isn't like us, only outside. Inside he's different. They can talk all they damn please about heredity, environment, cultural influences. They don't account for some people. Grove's a snob at heart. ”