Poor Man's Rock Part 29

MacRae suggested; "same as they have on the sockeye."

"No chance. They've tried, and it can't be done," Stubby grinned. "There aren't going to be any special privileges for British Columbia salmon packers any more. I know, because I'm on the inside. The fishermen have made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing, there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year, you'll make some money."

"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked.

"Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three hundred thousand fish. I'm going to buy everything and start half a dozen retail stores at the same time. Just imagine the situation in this burg of a hundred and fifty thousand people with waters that swarm with fish right at our doors--salmon selling for thirty cents a pound, hardly ever below twenty, other fish in about the same proportion. It's a d.a.m.ned scandal, and I don't much blame a man who works for four dollars a day thinking he might as well turn Bolshevik. I know that I can pay twelve cents for salmon and make a good profit selling for sixteen. Can you make money supplying me with bluebacks at twelve cents a pound?"

"Yes, more money than I made last year," MacRae replied--"unless Folly Bay boosts prices to the sky in an effort to drive me out of business."

"I don't think there's much danger of that," Stubby said. "I doubt if Folly Bay opens this season. It's reported that Gower is broke."

"Eh?" MacRae looked his doubt.

"That's what they say," Stubby went on. "It's common talk. He sold his place in town a short while ago. He has the cannery on the market. And there are no takers. Folly Bay used to be a little gold mine. But Gower rode the fishermen too hard. And you balled things up last season. He lost his grip. I suppose he was involved other ways, too. Lots of these old-timers are, you know. Anyway, he seems to be trying to get out from under. But n.o.body wants to take over a plant that has a black eye among the men who catch the fish, in a territory where you appear to have a pretty strong hold."

"At the same time, if I can pay so much for salmon, haul them up the coast and make a profit on that, and if you can pay this advanced price and pack them at a still bigger profit, why in blazes can't a plant right there on the grounds pay top price and still make money?" MacRae asked impatiently.

"Could," Stubby declared. "Certainly. But most men in the salmon canning business aren't like you and me, Jack. They are used to big returns on a three months' season. They simply can't stand the idea of paying out big gobs of money to a sulky, un-shaven bohunk whose whole equipment isn't worth a thousand dollars. They think any man in sea boots ought to be d.a.m.n well satisfied if he makes a living. They say high wages, or returns, spoil fishermen. On top of these new regulations n.o.body hankers to buy a plant where they might have to indulge in a price war with a couple of crazy young fools like you and me--that's what they call us, you know. That is why no experienced cannery man will touch Folly Bay the way things stand now. It's a fairly good plant, too. I don't know how Gower has managed to get in a hole. I don't believe one poor season could do that to him. But he sure wants to get rid of Folly Bay. It is a forty-thousand-dollar plant, including the gas boats. He has been nibbling at an offer of twenty-five thousand. I know, because I made it myself."

"What'll you do with it if you get it?" MacRae asked curiously. "It's no good unless you get the fish. You'd have to put me out of business."

"Well, I wasn't exactly figuring on that," Stubby grinned. "In the first place, the machinery and equipment is worth that much in the open market. And if I get it, we'll either make a deal for collecting the fish, or you can take a half-interest in the plant at the ground-floor price. Either way, we can make it a profitable investment for both of us."

"You really think Gower is in a bad way?" Jack asked reflectively.

"I know it," Stubby replied emphatically. "Oh, I don't mean to say that abject poverty is staring him in the face, or anything like that. But it looks to me as if he had lost a barrel of money somehow and was anxious to get Folly Bay off his hands before it sets him further in the hole.

You could make Folly Bay pay big dividends. So could I. But so long as you cover his ground with carriers, every day he operates is a dead loss. I haven't much sympathy for him. He has made a fortune out of that place and those fishermen and spent it making a big splurge in town.

Anyway, his wife has all kinds of kale, so we should worry about old Horace A."

MacRae lit a cigarette and listened to the flow of Stubby's talk, with part of his mind mulling over this information about Horace Gower. He wondered if that was why Robbin-Steele was so keen on getting a contract for those Squitty bluebacks, why Hurley of the Northwest wanted to make a deal for salmon; if they reckoned that Gower had ceased to be a factor and that Jack MacRae held the Squitty Island business in the hollow of his hand. MacRae smiled to himself. If that were true it was an advantage he meant to hold for his own good and the good of all those hard-driven men who labored at the fishing. In a time that was economically awry MacRae's sympathy turned more to those whose struggle was to make a living, or a little more if they could, than to men who already had more than they needed, men who had no use for more money except to pile it up, to keep piling it up. MacRae was neither an idealist nor a philanthropic dreamer. But he knew the under dog of the great industrial scramble. In his own business he would go out of his way to add another hundred dollars a year to a fisherman's earnings. He did not know quite clearly why he felt like that. It was more or less instinctive. He expected to make money out of his business, he was eager to make money, but he saw very clearly that it was only in and through the tireless labor of the fishermen that he could reap a profit. And he was young enough to be generous in his impulses. He was not afraid, like the older men, that if those who worked with their hands got a little more than sufficient to live on from season to season they would grow fat and lazy and arrogant, and refuse to produce.

Money was a necessity. Without it, without at least a reasonable amount of money, a man could not secure any of the things essential to well-being of either body or mind. The moneyless man was a slave so long as he was moneyless. MacRae smiled at those who spoke slightingly of the power of money. He knew they were mistaken. Money was king. No amount of it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes. Without money a man was less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley and Gower, because their criterion of another man's worth was his ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.

MacRae put himself and Stubby Abbott in a different category. They wanted to get on. They were determined to get on. But their programme of getting on, MacRae felt, was a better one for themselves and for other men than the mere instinct to grab everything in sight. MacRae was not exactly a student of economics or sociology, but he had an idea that the world, and particularly his group-world, was suffering from the grab-instinct functioning without control. He had a theory that society would have to modify that grab-instinct by legislation and custom before the world was rid of a lot of its present ills. And both his reason and his instinct was to modify it himself, in his dealings with his fellows, more particularly when those he dealt with were simple, uneducated men who worked as hard and complained as little as salmon fishermen.

He talked with Stubby in the den until late in the afternoon, and then walked downtown. When he reached the Granada he loafed uneasily in the billiard room until dinner. His mind persistently turned from material considerations of boats and gear and the season's prospects to dwell upon Betty Gower. This wayward questing of his mind irritated him. But he could not help it. Whenever he met her, even if it were only a brief, casual contact, for hours afterward he could not drive her out of his mind. And he was making a conscious effort to do that. It was a matter of sheer self-defense. Only when he shut Betty resolutely out of the chambers of his brain could he be free of that hungry longing for her.

While he suffered from that vain longing there was neither peace nor content in his life; he could get no satisfaction out of working or planning or anything that he undertook.

That would wear off, he a.s.sured himself. But he did not always have complete confidence in this a.s.surance. He was aware of a tenacity of impressions and emotions and ideas, once they took hold of him. Old Donald MacRae had been afflicted with just such characteristics, he remembered. It must be in the blood, that stubborn constancy to either an affection or a purpose. And in him these two things were at war, pulling him powerfully in opposite directions, making him unhappy.

Sitting deep in a leather chair, watching the white and red b.a.l.l.s roll and click on the green cloth, MacRae recalled one of the maxims of Hafiz:

"'Two things greater than all things are And one is Love and the other is War.'"

MacRae doubted this. He had had experience of both. At the moment he could see nothing in either but vast acc.u.mulations of futile anguish both of the body and the soul.

CHAPTER XVIII

A Renewal of Hostilities

The p.u.s.s.y willows had put out their fuzzy catkins and shed them for delicate foliage when MacRae came back to Squitty Cove. The alder, the maple and the wild cherry, all the spring-budding trees and shrubs, were making thicket and foresh.o.r.e dainty green and full of pleasant smells.

Jack wakened the first morning at daybreak to the muted orchestration of mating birds, the song of a thousand sweet-voiced, unseen warblers. The days were growing warm, full of sunshine. Distant mountain ranges stood white-capped and purple against sapphire skies. The air was full of the ancient magic of spring.

Yet MacRae himself, in spite of these pleasant sights and sounds and smells, in spite of his books and his own rooftree, found the Cove haunted by the twin ghosts he dreaded most, discontent and loneliness.

He was more isolated than he had ever been in his life. There was no one in the Cove save an old, unkempt Swede, Doug Sproul, who slept eighteen hours a day in his cabin while he waited for the salmon to run again, a withered Portuguese who sat in the sun and muttered while he mended gear. They were old men, human driftwood, beached in their declining years, crabbed and sour, looking always backward with unconscious regret.

Vin Ferrara was away with the _Bluebird_, still plying his fish venture.

Dolly and Norman Gower were married, and Dolly was back on the k.n.o.b in the middle of Squitty Island, keeping house for her husband and Uncle Peter and Long Tom Spence while they burrowed in the earth to uncover a copper-bearing lead that promised a modest fortune for all three. Peter Ferrara's house at the Cove stood empty and deserted in the spring sun.

People had to shift, to grasp opportunities as they were presented, MacRae knew. They could not take root and stand still in one spot like the great Douglas firs. But he missed the familiar voices, the sight of friendly faces. He had nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company.

A man of twenty-five, a young and l.u.s.ty animal of abounding vitality, needs more than his own reflections to fill his days. Denied the outlet of purposeful work in which to release pent-up energy, MacRae brooded over shadows, suffered periods of unaccountable depression. Nature had not designed him for either a hermit or a celibate. Something in him cried out for affection, for companionship, for a woman's tenderness bestowed unequivocally. The mating instinct was driving him, as it drove the birds. But its urge was not the general, unspecified longing which turns a man's eyes upon any desirable woman. Very clearly, imperiously, this dominant instinct in MacRae had centered upon Betty Gower.

He was at war with his instincts. His mind stipulated that he could not have her without a revolutionary overturning of his convictions, inhibitions, soundly made and pa.s.sionately cherished plans of reprisal for old injustices. That peculiar tenacity of idea and purpose which was inherent with him made him resent, refuse soberly to consider any deviation from the purpose which had taken form with such bitter intensity when he kindled to his father's account of those drab years which Horace Gower had laid upon him.

Jack MacRae was no angel. Under his outward seeming his impulses were primitive, like the impulses of all strong men. He nursed a vision of beating Gower at Gower's own game. He hugged to himself the ultimate satisfaction of that. Even when he was dreaming of Betty, he was mentally setting her aside until he had beaten her father to his knees under the only sort of blows he could deal. Until he had made Gower know grief and disappointment and helplessness, and driven him off the south end of Squitty landless and powerless, he would go on as he had elected.

When he got this far Jack would sometimes say to himself in a spirit of defiant recklessness that there were plenty of other women for whom ultimately he could care as much. But he knew also that he would not say that, nor even think it, whenever Betty Gower was within reach of his hand or sound of his voice.

He walked sometimes over to Point Old and stared at the cottage, snowy white against the tender green, its lawn growing rank with uncut gra.s.s, its chimney dead. There were times when he wished he could see smoke lifting from that chimney and know that he could find Betty somewhere along the beach. But these were only times when his spirits were very low.

Also he occasionally wondered if it were true, as Stubby Abbott declared, that Gower had fallen into a financial hole. MacRae doubted that. Men like Gower always got out of a hole. They were fierce and remorseless pursuers of the main chance. When they were cast down they climbed up straightway over the backs of lesser men. He thought of Robbin-Steele. A man like that would die with the harness of the money-game on his back, reaching for more. Gower was of the same type, skillful in all the tricks of the game, ruthless, greedy for power and schooled to grasp it in a bewildering variety of ways.

No, he rather doubted that Gower was broke, or even in any danger of going broke. He hoped this might be true, in spite of his doubts, for it meant that Gower would be compelled to sacrifice this six hundred acres of MacRae land. The sooner the better. It was a pain to MacRae to see it going wild. The soil Donald MacRae had cleared and turned to meadow, to small fields of grain, was growing up to ferns and scrub. It had been a source of pride to old Donald. He had visualized for his son more than once great fields covered with growing crops, a rich and fruitful area, with a big stone house looking out over the cliffs where ultimate generations of MacRaes should live. If luck had not gone against old Donald he would have made this dream come true. But life and Gower had beaten him.

Jack MacRae knew this. It maddened him to think that this foundation of a dream had become the plaything of his father's enemy, a neglected background for a summer cottage which he only used now and then.

There might, however, be something in the statements Stubby had made.

MacRae recalled that Gower had not replaced the _Arrow_. The underwriters had raised and repaired the mahogany cruiser, and she had pa.s.sed into other hands. When Betty and her father came to Cradle Bay they came on a cannery tender or a hired launch. MacRae hoped it might be true that Gower was slipping, that he had helped to start him on this decline.

Presently the loneliness of the Cove was broken by the return of Vincent Ferrara. They skidded the _Bluebird_ out on the beach at the Cove's head and overhauled her inside and out, hull and machinery. That brought them well into April. The new carrier was complete from truck to keelson. She had been awaiting only MacRae's pleasure for her maiden sea-dip. So now, with the _Bluebird_ sleeked with new paint, he went down for the launching.

There was a little ceremony over that.

"It's bad luck, the very worst sort of luck, to launch a boat without christening her in the approved manner," Nelly Abbott declared. "I insist on being sponsor. Do let me, Jack."

So the new sixty-footer had a bottle of wine from the Abbott cellar broken over her bra.s.s-bound stemhead as her bows sliced into the salt water, and Nelly's clear treble chanted:

"I christen thee _Agua Blanco_."

Vin Ferrara's dark eyes gleamed, for _agua blanco_ means "white water"

in the Spanish tongue.

The Terminal Fish Company's new coolers were yawning for fish when the first blueback run of commercial size showed off Gray Rock and the Ballenas. All the Squitty boats went out as soon as the salmon came.

MacRae skippered the new and shining _Blanco_, brave in white paint and polished bra.s.s on her virgin trip. He followed the main fleet, while the _Bluebird_ scuttled about to pick up stray trollers' catches and to tend the rowboat men. She would dump a day's gathering on the _Blanco's_ deck, and the two crews would dress salmon till their hands were sore.

But it saved both time and fuel to have that great carrying capacity, and the freezing plant which automatically chilled the fish. MacRae could stay on the grounds till he was fully loaded. He could slash through to Vancouver at nine knots instead of seven. A sea that would toss the old wrecked _Blackbird_ like a dory and keep her low decks continually awash let the _Blanco_ pa.s.s with only a moderate pitch and roll.