Poor Man's Rock Part 20

"Being a rich man's son has proved a considerable handicap in my case,"

he continued at last. "I was petted and coddled all my life. Then the war came along. Everybody expected a lot of me. And I am as good as excommunicated for not coming up to expectations. Beautiful irony. If my eyes had been normal, I should be another of Vancouver's heroes,--alive or dead. The spirit doesn't seem to count. The only thing that matters, evidently, is that I stayed on the safe side of the Channel. They take it for granted that I did so because I valued my own skin above everything. Idiots."

"You can easily explain," MacRae suggested.

"I won't. I'd see them all in Hades first," Norman growled. "I'll admit it stings me to have people think so and rub it in, in their polite way.

But I'm getting more or less indifferent. There are plenty of real people in England who know I did the only work I could do and did it well. Do you imagine I fancied sitting on the side lines when all the fellows I knew were playing a tough game? But I can't go about telling that to people at home. I'll be d.a.m.ned if I will. A man has to learn to stand the gaff sometime, and the last year or so seems to be my period of schooling."

"Why tell all this to me?" MacRae asked quietly.

Norman rose from the log. He chucked the b.u.t.t of his cigarette away. He looked directly, rather searchingly, at MacRae.

"Really, I don't know," he said in a flat, expressionless. Then he walked on.

MacRae watched him pa.s.s out of sight among the thickets. Young Gower had succeeded in dispelling the pa.s.sive contentment of basking in the sun.

He had managed to start buzzing trains of not too agreeable reflection.

MacRae got to his feet before long and tramped back around the Cove's head. He had known, of course, that the Gowers still made more or less use of their summer cottage. But he had not come in personal contact with any of them since the night Betty had given him that new, disturbing angle from which to view her. He had avoided her purposely.

Now he was afflicted with a sudden restlessness, a desire for other voices and faces besides his own, and so, as he was in the habit of doing when such a mood seized him, he went on to Peter Ferrara's house.

He walked in through a wide-open door, unannounced by aught save his footsteps, as he was accustomed to do, and he found Dolly Ferrara and Betty Gower laughing and chatting familiarly in the kitchen over teacups and little cakes.

"Oh, I beg pardon," said he. "I didn't know you were entertaining."

"I don't entertain, and you know it," Dolly laughed. "Come down from that lofty alt.i.tude and I'll give you a cup of tea."

"Mr. MacRae, being an aviator of some note," Betty put in, "probably finds himself at home in the high alt.i.tudes."

"Do I seem to be up in the air?" MacRae inquired dryly. "I shall try to come down behind my own lines, and not in enemy territory."

"You might have to make a forced landing," Dolly remarked.

Her great dusky eyes rested upon him with a singular quality of speculation. MacRae wondered if those two had been talking about him, and why.

There was an astonishing contrast between these two girls, MacRae thought, his mind and his eyes busy upon them while his tongue uttered idle words and his hands coped with a teacup and cakes. They were the product of totally dissimilar environments. They were the physical ant.i.thesis of each other,--in all but the peculiar feline grace of young females who are healthily, exuberantly alive. Yet MacRae had a feeling that they were sisters under their skins, wonderfully alike in their primary emotions. Why, then, he wondered, should one be capable of moving him to violent emotional reactions (he had got that far in his self-admissions concerning Betty Gower), and the other move him only to a friendly concern and latterly a certain pity?

Certainly either one would quite justify a man in seeking her for his mate, if he found his natural instincts urging him along ways which MacRae was beginning to perceive no normal man could escape traveling.

And if he had to tread that road, why should it not have been his desire to tread it with Dolly Ferrara? That would have been so much simpler.

With unconscious egotism he put aside Norman Gower as a factor. If he had to develop an unaccountable craving for some particular woman, why couldn't it have centered upon a woman he knew as well as he knew Dolly, whose likes and dislikes, little tricks of speech and manner, habits of thought, all the inconsiderable traits that go to make up what we call personality, were pleasantly familiar?

Strange thoughts over a teacup, MacRae decided. It seemed even more strange that he should be considering such intimately personal things in the very act of carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; as if there were two of him present, one being occupied in the approved teacup manner while the other sat by speculating with a touch of moroseness upon distressingly important potentialities. This duality persisted in functioning even when Betty looked at her watch and said, "I must go."

He walked with her around to the head of the Cove. He had not wanted to do that,--and still he did. He found himself filled with an intense and resentful curiosity about this calm, self-possessed young woman. He wondered if she really had any power to hurt him, if there resided in her any more potent charm than other women possessed, or if it were a mere sentimental befogging of his mind due to the physical propinquity of her at a time when he was weak and bruised and helpless. He could feel the soft warmth of her hands yet, and without even closing his eyes he could see her reddish-brown hair against the white of his bed covers and the tired droop of her body as she slept that night.

Curiously enough, before they were well clear of the Ferrara house they had crossed swords. Courteously, to be sure. MacRae could not afterward recall clearly how it began,--something about the war and the after-effect of the war. British Columbia nowise escaped the muddle into which the close of the war and the wrangle of the peacemakers had plunged both industry and politics. There had been a recent labor disturbance in Vancouver in which demobilized soldiers had played a part.

"You can't blame these men much. They're bewildered at some of the things they get up against, and exasperated by others. A lot of them have found the going harder at home than it was in France. A lot of promises and preachments don't fit in with performance since the guns have stopped talking. I suppose that doesn't seem reasonable to people like you," MacRae found himself saying. "You don't have to gouge and claw a living out of the world. Or at least, if there is any gouging and clawing to be done, you are not personally involved in it. You get it done by proxy."

Betty flushed slightly.

"Do you always go about with a chip on your shoulder?" she asked. "I should think you did enough fighting in France."

"I learned to fight there," he said. "I was a happy-go-lucky kid before that. Rich and poor looked alike to me. I didn't covet anything that anybody had, and I didn't dream that any one could possibly wish to take away from me anything that I happened to have. I thought the world was a kind and pleasant place for everybody. But things look a little different to me now. They sent us fellows to France to fight Huns. But there are a few at home, I find. Why shouldn't I fight them whenever I see a chance?"

"But _I'm_ not a Hun," Betty said with a smile.

"I'm not so sure about that."

The words leaped out before he was quite aware of what they might imply.

They had come to a point on the path directly in front of his house.

Betty stopped. Her gray eyes flashed angrily. Storm signals blazed in her cheeks, bright above the delicate white of her neck.

"Jack MacRae," she burst out hotly, "you are a--a--a first-cla.s.s idiot!"

Then she turned her back on him and went off up the path with a quick, springy step that somehow suggested extreme haste.

MacRae stood looking after her fully a minute. Then he climbed the steps, went into the front room and sat himself down in a deep, cushioned chair. He glowered into the fireplace with a look as black as the charred remains of his morning fire. He uttered one brief word after a long period of fixed staring.

"d.a.m.n!" he said.

It seemed a very inadequate manner of expressing his feelings, but it was the best he could do at the moment.

He sat there until the chill discomfort of the room stirred him out of his abstraction. Then he built a fire and took up a book to read. But the book presently lay unheeded on his knees. He pa.s.sed the rest of the short forenoon sprawled in that big chair before the fireplace, struggling with chaotic mental processes.

It made him unhappy, but he could not help it. A tremendous a.s.sortment of mental images presented themselves for inspection, flickering up unbidden out of his brain-stuff,--old visions and new, familiar things and vague, troublesome possibilities, all strangely jumbled together.

His mind hopped from Squitty Cove to Salisbury Plain, to the valley of the Rhone, to Paris, London, Vancouver, turned up all sorts of recollections, cameralike flashes of things that had happened to him, things he had seen in curious places, bits of his life in that somehow distant period when he was a youngster chumming about with his father.

And always he came back to the Gowers,--father, son and daughter, and the delicate elderly woman with the faded rose-leaf face whom he had seen only once. Whole pa.s.sages of Donald MacRae's written life story took form in living words. He could not disentangle himself from these Gowers.

And he hated them!

Dark came down at last. MacRae went out on the porch. The few scattered clouds had vanished completely. A starry sky glittered above horizons edged by mountain ranges, serrated outlines astonishingly distinct. The sea spread duskily mysterious from duskier sh.o.r.es. It was very still, to MacRae suddenly very lonely, empty, depressing.

The knowledge that just across a narrow neck of land the Gowers, father, daughter and son, went carelessly, securely about their own affairs, made him infinitely more lonely, irritated him, stirred up a burning resentment against the lot of them. He lumped them all together, despite a curious tendency on the part of Betty's image to separate itself from the others. He hated them, the whole d.a.m.ned, profiteering, arrogant, b.u.t.terfly lot. He nursed an unholy satisfaction in having made some inroad upon their comfortable security, in having "sunk his harpoon" into their only vulnerable spot.

But that satisfaction did not give him relief or content as he stood looking out into the clear frost-tinged night. Squitty had all at once become a ghostly place, haunted with sadness. Old Donald MacRae was living over again in him, he had a feeling, reliving those last few cheerless, hopeless years which, MacRae told himself savagely, Horace Gower had deliberately made more cheerless and hopeless.

And he was in a fair way to love that man's flesh and blood? MacRae sneered at himself in the dark. Never to the point of staying his hand, of foregoing his purpose, of failing to strike a blow as chance offered.

Not so long as he was his father's son.

"Hang it, I'm getting morbid," MacRae muttered at last. "I've been sticking around here too close. I'll pack a bag to-morrow and go to town for a while."

He closed the door on the crisp, empty night, and set about getting himself something to eat.

CHAPTER XIV

The Swing of the Pendulum