Poor Man's Rock Part 22

"How much?" he demanded.

"Oh--well--"

The ballroom was suddenly shrouded in darkness, saved only from a cavelike black by diffused street light through the upper windows. A blown fuse. A mis-pulled switch. One of those minor accidents common to electric lighting systems. The orchestra hesitated, went on. From a momentary silence the dancers broke into chuckles, amused laughter, a buzz of exclamatory conversation. But no one moved, lest they collide with other unseen couples.

Jack and Betty stood still. They could not see. But MacRae could feel the quick beat, of Betty's heart, the rise and fall of her breast, a trembling in her fingers. There was a strange madness stirring in him.

His arm tightened about her. He felt that she yielded easily, as if gladly. Their mouths sought and clung in the first real kiss Jack MacRae had ever known. And then, as they relaxed that impulse-born embrace, the lights flashed on again, blazed in a thousand globes in great frosted cl.u.s.ters high against the gold-leaf decorations of the ceiling. The dancers caught step again. MacRae and Betty circled the polished floor silently. She floated in his arms like thistledown, her eyes like twin stars, a deeper color in her cheeks.

Then the music ceased, and they were swept into a chattering group, out of which presently materialized another partner to claim Betty. So they parted with a smile and a nod.

But MacRae had no mind for dancing. He went out through the lobby and straight to his room. He flung off his coat and sat down in a chair by the window and blinked out into the night. He had looked, it seemed to him, into the very gates of paradise,--and he could not go in.

It wasn't possible. He sat peering out over the dusky roofs of the city, d.a.m.ning with silent oaths the coil in which he found himself inextricably involved. History was repeating itself. Like father, like son.

There was a difference though. MacRae, as he grew calmer, marked that.

Old Donald had lost his sweetheart by force and trickery. His son must forego love--if it were indeed love--of his own volition. He had no choice. He saw no way of winning Betty Gower unless he stayed his hand against her father. And he would not do that. He could not. It would be like going over to the enemy in the heat of battle. Gower had wronged and persecuted his father. He had beaten old Donald without mercy in every phase of that thirty-year period. He had taken Donald MacRae's woman from him in the beginning and his property in the end. Jack MacRae had every reason to believe Gower merely sat back awaiting a favorable opportunity to crush him.

So there could be no compromising there; no inter-marrying and sentimental burying of the old feud. Betty would tie his hands. He was afraid of her power to do that. He did not want to be a Samson shorn.

His ego revolted against love interfering with the grim business of everyday life. He bit his lip and wished he could wipe out that kiss. He cursed himself for a slavish weakness of the flesh. The night was old when MacRae lay down on his bed. But he could find no ease for the throbbing ferment within him. He suffered with a pain as keen as if he had been physically wounded, and the very fact that he could so suffer filled him with dismay. He had faced death many times with less emotion than he now was facing life.

He had no experience of love. Nothing remotely connected with women had ever suggested such possibilities of torment. He had known first-hand the pangs of hunger and thirst, of cold and weariness, of anger and hate, of burning wounds in his flesh. He had always been able to grit his teeth and endure; none of it had been able to wring his soul. This did. He had come to manhood, to a full understanding of s.e.x, at a time when he played the greatest game of all, when all his energies were fiercely centered upon preservation for himself and certain destruction for other men. Perhaps because he had come back clean, having never wasted himself in complaisant liaisons overseas, the inevitable focusing of pa.s.sion stirred him more profoundly. He was neither a varietist nor a male prude. He was aware of s.e.x. He knew desire. But the flame Betty Gower had kindled in him made him look at women out of different eyes.

Desire had been revealed to him not as something casual, but as an imperative. As if nature had pulled the blinkers off his eyes and shown him his mate and the aim and object and law and fiery urge of the mating instinct all in one blinding flash.

He lay hot and fretful, cursing himself for a fool, yet unable to find ease, wondering dully if Betty Gower must also suffer as he should, or if it were only an innocent, piquant game that Betty played. Always in the background of his mind lurked a vision of her father, sitting back complacently, fat, smug, plump hands on a well-rounded stomach, chuckling a brutal satisfaction over another MacRae beaten.

MacRae wakened from an uneasy sleep at ten o'clock. He rose and dressed, got his breakfast, went out on the streets. But Vancouver had all at once grown insufferable. The swarming streets irritated him. He smoldered inside, and he laid it to the stir and bustle and noise. He conceived himself to crave hushed places and solitude, where he could sit and think.

By mid-afternoon he was far out in the Gulf of Georgia, aboard a coasting steamer sailing for island ports. If it occurred to him that he was merely running away from temptation, he did not admit the fact.

CHAPTER XV

Hearts are Not Always Trumps

If MacRae reckoned on tranquillity in his island seclusion he failed in his reckoning. A man may fly from temptation, run from a threatening danger, but he cannot run away from himself. He could not inhibit thought, reflection, surges of emotion generated mysteriously within himself.

He did his best. He sought relief in action. There were a great many things about his freehold upon which he bestowed feverish labor for a time. He cleared away all the underbrush to the outer limits of his shrunken heritage. He built a new enclosing fence of neatly split cedar, installed a pressure system of water in the old house.

"You goin' to get married?" old Peter inquired artlessly one day. "You got all the symptoms--buzzin' around in your nest like a b.u.mblebee."

And Dolly smiled her slow, enigmatic smile.

Whereupon MacRae abandoned his industry and went off to Blackfish Sound with Vincent in the _Bluebird_. The salmon run was long over, but the coastal waters still yielded a supply of edible fish. There were always a few spring salmon to be taken here and there. Ling, red and rock cod knew no seasons. Nor the ground fish, plaice, sole, flounders, halibut.

Already the advance guard of the great run of mature herring began to show. For a buyer there was no such profit in running these fish to market as the profit of the annual salmon run. Still it paid moderately.

So MacRae had turned the _Bluebird_ over to Vin to operate for a time on a share basis. It gave Vin, who was ambitious and apparently tireless, a chance to make a few hundred dollars in an off season.

Wherefore MacRae, grown suddenly restless beyond all restraining upon his island, made a trip or two north with Vin--a working guest on his own vessel--up where the Gulf of Georgia is choked to narrow pa.s.sages through which the tidal currents race like mountain streams pent in a gorge, up where the sea is a maze of waterways among wooded islands.

They anch.o.r.ed in strange bays. They fared once into Queen Charlotte Sound and rode the great ground swell that heaves up from the far coast of j.a.pan to burst against the rocky outpost of Cape Caution. They doubled on their tracks and gathered their toll of the sea from fishing boats here and there until the _Bluebird_ rode deep with cargo, fresh fish to be served on many tables far inland. MacRae often wondered if the housewife who ordered her weekly ration of fish and those who picked daintily at the savory morsels with silver forks ever thought how they came by this food. Men till the sea with pain and risk and infinite labor, as they till the land; only the fisherman with his nets and hooks and gear does not sow, he only reaps. Nature has attended diligently to the sowing, from the Cape of Good Hope to Martha's Vineyard, from Bering Strait to Botany Bay.

But MacRae soon had enough of that and came back to Squitty, to his fireplace and his books. He had been accustomed to enjoy the winters, the clear crisp mornings that varied weeks of drenching rain which washed the land clean; to prowl about in the woods with a gun when he needed meat; to bask before a bed of coals in the fireplace through long evenings when the wind howled and the rain droned on the roof and the sea snored along the rocky beaches. That had been in days before he learned the weight of loneliness, when his father had been there to sit quietly beside the fire smoking a pipe, when Dolly Ferrara ran wild in the woods with him or they rode for pure sport the tumbling seas in a dugout canoe.

Now winter was a dull inaction, a period of discontent, in which thought gnawed at him like an ingrowing toenail. Everything seemed out of joint.

He found himself feverishly anxious for spring, for the stress and strain of another tilt with Folly Bay. Sometimes he asked himself where he would come out, even if he won all along the line, if he made money, gained power, beat Gower ultimately to his knees, got back his land. He did not try to peer too earnestly into the future. It seemed a little misty. He was too much concerned with the immediate present, looming big with possibilities of good or evil for himself. Things did not seem quite so simple as at first. A great many complications, wholly unforeseen, had arisen since he came back from France. But he was committed to certain undertakings from which he neither wished nor intended to turn aside,--not so long as he had the will to choose.

Christmas came again, and with it the gathering of the Ferraras for their annual reunion,--Old Manuel and Joaquin, young Manuel and Ambrose and Vincent. Steve they could speak of now quite casually. He had died in his sea boots like many another Ferrara. It was a pity, of course, but it was the chance of his calling. And the gathering was stronger in numbers, even with Steve gone. Ambrose had taken himself a wife, a merry round-cheeked girl whose people were coaxing Ambrose to quit the sea for a more profitable undertaking in timber. And also Norman Gower was there.

MacRae did not quite know how to take that young man. He had had stray contacts with Norman during the last few weeks. For a rich man's son he was not running true to form. He and Long Tom Spence had struck up a partnership in a group of mineral claims on the k.n.o.b, that conical mountain which lifted like one of the pyramids out of the middle of Squitty Island. There had been much talk of those claims. Years ago Bill Munro--he who died of the flu in his cabin beside the Cove--had staked those claims. Munro was a young man then, a prospector. He had inveigled other men to share his hopes and labors, to grubstake him while he drove the tunnel that was to cut the vein. MacRae's father had taken a hand in this. So had Peter Ferrara. But these informal partnerships had always lapsed. Old Bill Munro's prospects had never got beyond the purely prospective stage. The copper was there, ample traces of gold and silver. But he never developed a showing big enough to lure capital.

When Munro died the claims had been long abandoned.

Long Tom Spence had suddenly relocated them. Some working agreement had included Uncle Peter and young Gower. Long Tom went about hinting mysteriously of fortunes. Peter Ferrara even admitted that there was a good showing. Norman had been there for weeks, living with Spence in a shack, sweating day after day in the tunnel. They were all beginning to speak of it as "the mine."

Norman had rid himself of that grouchy frown. He was always singing or whistling or laughing. His fair, rather florid face glowed with a perpetual good nature. He treated MacRae to the same cheerful, careless air that he had for everything and everybody. And when he was about Uncle Peter's house at the Cove he monopolized Dolly, an att.i.tude which Dolly herself as well as her uncle seemed to find agreeable and proper.

MacRae finally found himself compelled to accept Norman Gower as part of the group. He was a little surprised to find that he harbored no decided feeling about young Gower, one way or the other. If he felt at all, it was a mild impatience that another man had established a relation with Dolly Ferrara which put aside old friendships. He found himself constrained more and more to treat Dolly like any other pleasant young woman of his acquaintance. He did not quite like that. He and Dolly Ferrara had been such good chums. Besides, he privately considered that Dolly was throwing herself away on a man weak enough to make the tragic blunder young Gower had made in London. But that was their own affair.

Altogether, MacRae found it quite impossible to muster up any abiding grudge against young Gower on his own account.

So he let matters stand and celebrated Christmas with them. Afterward they got aboard the _Bluebird_ and went to a dance at Potter's Landing, where for all that Jack MacRae was the local hero, both of the great war and the salmon war of the past season, both Dolly and Norman, he privately conceded, enjoyed themselves a great deal more than he did.

Their complete absorption in each other rather irritated him.

They came back to the Cove early in the morning. The various Ferraras disposed themselves about Peter's house to sleep, and MacRae went on to his own place. About an hour after daybreak he saw Norman Gower pa.s.s up the bush trail to the mine with a heavy pack of provisions on his back.

And MacRae wondered idly if Norman was bucking the game in earnest, strictly on his own, and why?

Late in January the flash of a white skirt and a sky-blue sweater past his dooryard apprised MacRae that Betty was back. And he did not want to see Betty or talk with her. He hoped her stay would be brief. He even asked himself testily why people like that wanted to come to a summer dwelling in the middle of winter. But her sojourn was not so brief as he hoped. At divers times thereafter he saw her in the distance, faring to and fro from Peter Ferrara's house, out on the trail that ran to the k.n.o.b, several times when the sea was calm paddling a canoe or rowing alongsh.o.r.e. Also he had glimpses of the thickset figure of Horace Gower walking along the cliffs. MacRae avoided both. That was easy enough, since he knew every nook and bush and gully on that end of the island.

But the mere sight of Gower was an irritation. He resented the man's presence. It affected him like a challenge. It set him always pondering ways and means to secure ownership of those acres again and forever bar Gower from walking along those cliffs with that masterful air of possession. Only a profound distaste for running away from anything kept him from quitting the island while they were there, those two, one of whom he was growing to hate far beyond the original provocation, the other whom he loved,--for MacRae admitted reluctantly, resentfully, that he did love Betty, and he was afraid of where that emotion might lead him. He recognized the astonishing power of pa.s.sion. It troubled him, stirred up an amazing conflict at times between his reason and his impulses. He fell back always upon the conclusion that love was an irrational thing anyway, that it should not be permitted to upset a man's logical plan of existence. But he was never very sure that this conclusion would stand a practical test.

The southern end of Squitty was not of such vast scope that two people could roam here and there without sometime coming face to face, particularly when these two were a man and a woman, driven by a spirit of restlessness to lonely wanderings. MacRae went into the woods with his rifle one day in search of venison. He wounded a buck, followed him down a long canyon, and killed his game within sight of the sea. He took the carca.s.s by a leg and dragged it through the bright green salal brush. As he stepped out of a screening thicket on to driftwood piled by storm and tide, he saw a rowboat hauled up on the shingle above reach of short, steep breakers, and a second glance showed him Betty sitting on a log close by, looking at him.

"Stormbound?" he asked her.

"Yes. I was rowing and the wind came up."

She rose and came over to look at the dead deer.

"What beautiful animals they are!" she said. "Isn't it a pity to kill them?"

"It's a pity, too, to kill cattle and sheep and pigs, to haul fish by the gills out of the sea," MacRae replied; "to trap marten and mink and fox and beaver and bear for their skins. But men must eat and women must wear furs."

"How horribly logical you are," Betty murmured. "You make a natural sympathy appear wishy-washy sentimentalism."

She reseated herself on the log. MacRae sat down beside her. He looked at her searchingly. He could not keep his eyes away. A curious inconsistency was revealed to him. He sat beside Betty, responding to the potent stimuli of her nearness and wishing pettishly that she were a thousand miles away, so that he would not be troubled by the magic of her lips and eyes and unruly hair, the musical cadences of her voice.

There was a subtle quality of expectancy about her, as if she sat there waiting for him to say something, do something, as if her mere presence were powerful to compel him to speak and act as she desired. MacRae realized the fantasy of those impressions. Betty sat looking at him calmly, her hands idle in her lap. If there were in her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarra.s.sment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his arms, which he must resist.

"There are times," Betty said at last, "when you live up to your nickname with a vengeance."

"There are times," MacRae replied slowly, "when that is the only wise thing for a man to do."