Poor Man's Rock Part 35

"Many things. Why did you tell me this?"

"Why should the anger and bitterness of two old men be pa.s.sed on to their children?" Gower asked him gently.

MacRae stared at him. Did he know? Had he guessed? Had Betty told him?

He wondered. It was not like Betty to have spoken of what had pa.s.sed between them. Yet he did not know how close a bond might exist between this father and daughter, who were, MacRae was beginning to perceive, most singularly alike. And this was a shrewd old man, sadly wise in human weaknesses, and much more tolerant than MacRae had conceived possible. He felt a little ashamed of the malice with which he had fought this battle of the salmon around Squitty Island. Yet Gower by his own admission was a hard man. He had lived with a commercial sword in his hand. He knew what it was to fall by that weapon. He had been hard on the fishermen. He had exploited them mercilessly. Therein lay his weakness, whereby he had fallen, through which MacRae had beaten him.

But had he beaten him? MacRae was not now so sure about that. But it was only a momentary doubt. He struggled a little against the reaction of kindliness, this curious sympathy for Gower which moved him now. He hated sentimentalism, facile yielding to shallow emotions. He wanted to talk and he was dumb. Dumb for appropriate words, because his mind kept turning with pa.s.sionate eagerness upon Betty Gower.

"Does Betty know what you have just told me?" he asked at last.

Gower shook his head.

"She knows there is something. I can't tell her. I don't like to. It isn't a nice story. I don't s.h.i.+ne in it--nor her mother."

"Nor do I," MacRae muttered to himself.

He stood looking over the porch rail down on the sea where the _Blanco_ swung at her anchor chain. There seemed nothing more to say. Yet he was aware of Gower's eyes upon him with something akin to expectancy. An uncertain smile flitted across MacRae's face.

"This has sort of put me on my beam ends," he said, using a sailor's phrase. "Don't you feel as if I'd rather done you up these two seasons?"

Gower's heavy features lightened with a grimace of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Well," he said, "you certainly cost me a lot of money, one way and another. But you had the nerve to go at it--and you used better judgment of men and conditions than anybody has manifested in the salmon business lately, unless it's young Abbott. So I suppose you are ent.i.tled to win on your merits. By the way, there is one condition tacked to selling you this ranch. I hesitated about bringing it up at first. I would like to keep this cottage and a strip of ground a hundred and fifty feet wide running down to the beach."

"All right," MacRae agreed. "We can arrange that later. I'll come again."

He set foot on the porch steps. Then he turned back. A faint flush stole up in his sun-browned face. He held out his hand.

"Shall we cry quits?" he asked. "Shall we shake hands and forget it?"

Gower rose to his feet. He did not say anything, but the grip in his thick, stubby fingers almost made Jack MacRae wince,--and he was a strong-handed man himself.

"I'm glad you came to-day," Gower said huskily. "Come again--soon."

He stood on the porch and watched MacRae stride down to the beach and put off in his dinghy. Then he took out a handkerchief and blew his nose with a tremendous amount of unnecessary noise and gesture. There was something suspiciously like moisture brightening his eyes.

But when he saw MacRae stand in the dinghy alongside the _Blanco_ and speak briefly to his men, then row in under Point Old behind Poor Man's Rock which the tide was slowly baring, when he climbed up over the Point and took the path along the cliff edge, that suspicious brightness in Gower's keen old eyes was replaced by a twinkle. He sat down in his gra.s.s chair and hummed a little tune, the while one slippered foot kept time, rat-a-pat, on the floor of the porch.

CHAPTER XXI

As it Was in the Beginning

MacRae followed the path along the cliffs. He did not look for Betty.

His mind was on something else, engrossed in considerations which had little to do with love. If it be true that a man keeps his loves and hates and hobbies and ambitions and appet.i.tes in separate chambers, any of which may be for a time so locked that what lies therein neither troubles nor pleases him, then that chamber in which he kept Betty Gower's image was hermetically sealed. Her figure was obscured by other figures,--his father and Horace Gower and himself.

Not until he had reached the Cove's head and come to his own house did he recall that Betty had gone along the cliffs, and that he had not seen her as he pa.s.sed. But that could easily happen, he knew, in that mile stretch of trees and thickets, those deep clefts and pockets in the rocky wall that frowned upon the sea.

He went into the house. Out of a box on a shelf in his room he took the message his father had left him and sitting down in the shadowy coolness of the outer room began to read it again, slowly, with infinite care for the reality his father had meant to convey.

All his life, as Jack remembered him, Donald MacRae had been a silent man, who never talked of how he felt, how things affected him, who never was stricken with that irresistible impulse to explain and discuss, to relieve his troubled soul with words, which afflicts so many men. It seemed as if he had saved it all for that final summing-up which was to be delivered by his pen instead of his lips. He had become articulate only at the last. It must have taken him weeks upon weeks to write it all down, this autobiography which had been the mainspring of his son's actions for nearly two years. There was wind and sun in it, and blue sky and the gray Gulf heaving; somber colors, pa.s.sion and grief, an apology and a justification.

MacRae laid down the last page and went outside to sit on the steps.

Shadows were gathering on the Cove. Far out, the last gleam of the sun was touching the Gulf. A slow swell was rising before some far, unheralded wind. The _Blanco_ came gliding in and dropped anchor.

Trollers began to follow. They cl.u.s.tered about the big carrier like chickens under the mother wing. By these signs MacRae knew that the fish had stopped biting, that it was lumpy by Poor Man's Rock. He knew there was work aboard. But he sat there, absent-eyed, thinking.

He was full of understanding pity for his father, and also for Horace Gower. He was conscious of being a little sorry for himself. But then he had only been troubled a short two years by this curious aftermath of old pa.s.sions, whereas they had suffered all their lives. He had got a new angle from which to approach his father's story. He knew now that he had reacted to something that was not there. He had been filled with a thirst for vengeance, for reprisal, and he had declared war on Gower, when that was not his father's intent. Old Donald MacRae had hated Gower profoundly in the beginning. He believed that Gower hated him and had put the weight of his power against him, wherever and whenever he could. But life itself had beaten him,--and not Gower. That was what he had been trying to tell his son.

And life itself had beaten Gower in a strangely similar fas.h.i.+on. He too was old, a tired, disappointed man. He had reached for material success with one hand and happiness with the other. One had always eluded him.

The other Jack MacRae had helped wrest from him. MacRae could see Gower's life in detached pictures, life that consisted of making money and spending it, life with a woman who whined and sniffled and complained. These things had been a slow torture. MacRae could no longer regard this man as a squat ogre, merciless, implacable, ready and able to crush whatsoever opposed him. He was only a short, fat, oldish man with tired eyes, who had been bruised by forces he could not understand or cope with until he had achieved a wistful tolerance for both things and men.

Both these old men, MacRae perceived, had made a terrible hash of their lives. Neither of them had succeeded in getting out of life much that a man instinctively feels that he should get. Both had been capable of happiness. Both had struggled for happiness as all men struggle. Neither had ever securely grasped any measure of it, nor even much of content.

MacRae felt a chilly uncertainty as he sat on his doorstep considering this. He had been traveling the same road for many months,--denying his natural promptings, stifling a natural pa.s.sion, surrendering himself to an obsession of vindictiveness, planning and striving to return evil for what he conceived to be evil, and being himself corrupted by the corrosive forces of hatred.

He had been diligently bestowing pain on Betty, who loved him quite openly and frankly as he desired to be loved; Betty, who was innocent of these old coils of bitterness, who was primitive enough in her emotions, MacRae suspected, to let nothing stand between her and her chosen mate when that mate beckoned.

But she was proud. He knew that he had puzzled her to the point of anger, hurt her in a woman's most vital spot.

"I've been several kinds of a fool," MacRae said to himself. "I have been fooling myself."

He had said to himself once, in a somber mood, that life was nothing but a d.a.m.ned dirty scramble in which a man could be sure of getting hurt.

But it struck him now that he had been sedulously inflicting those hurts upon himself. Nature cannot be flouted. She exacts terrible penalties for the stifling, the inhibition, the deflection of normal instincts, fundamental impulses. He perceived the operation of this in his father's life, in the thirty years of petty conflict between Horace Gower and his wife. And he had unconsciously been putting himself and Betty in the way of similar penalties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs above that strange magnetic something which drew them together.

Twilight was at hand. Looking through the maple and alder fringe before his house MacRae saw the fis.h.i.+ng boats coming one after the other, cl.u.s.tering about the _Blanco_. He went down and slid the old green dugout afloat and so gained the deck of his vessel. For an hour thereafter he worked steadily until all the salmon were delivered and stowed in the _Blanco's_ chilly hold.

He found it hard to keep his mind on the count of salmon, on money to be paid each man, upon these common details of his business. His thought reached out in wide circles, embracing many things, many persons: Norman Gower and Dolly, who had had courage to put the past behind them and reach for happiness together; Stubby Abbott and Etta Robbin-Steele, who were being flung together by the same inscrutable forces within them. Love might not truly make the world go round, but it was a tremendous motive power in human actions. Like other dynamic forces it had its dangerous phases. Love, as MacRae had experienced it, was a curious mixture of affection and desire, of flaming pa.s.sion and infinite tenderness. Betty Gower warmed him like a living flame when he let her take possession of his thought. She was all that his fancy could conjure as desirable. She was his mate. He had felt that, at times, with a conviction beyond reason or logic ever since the night he kissed her in the Granada. If fate, or the circ.u.mstances he had let involve him, should juggle them apart, he felt that the years would lead him down long, drab corridors.

And he was suddenly determined that should not happen. His imagination flung before him kinetoscopic flashes of what his father's life had been and Horace Gower's. That vision appalled MacRae. He would not let it happen,--not to him and Betty.

He washed, ate his supper, lay on his bunk in the pilot house and smoked a cigarette. Then he went out on deck. The moon crept up in a cloudless sky, dimming the stars. There was no wind about the island. But there was wind loose somewhere on the Gulf. The gla.s.s was falling. The swells broke more heavily along the cliffs. At the mouth of the Cove white sheets of spray lifted as each comber reared and broke in that narrow place.

He recollected that he had left the _Blanco's_ dinghy hauled up on the beach on the tip of Point Old. He got ash.o.r.e now in the green dugout and walked across to the Point.

A man is seldom wholly single-track in his ideas, his impulses. MacRae thought of the dinghy. He had a care for its possible destruction by the rising sea. But he thought also of Betty. There was a pleasure in simply looking at the house in which she lived. Lights glowed in the windows.

The cottage glistened in the moonlight.

When he came out on the tip of the Point the dinghy, he saw, lay safe where he had dragged it up on the rocks. And when he had satisfied himself of this he stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking down on Poor Man's Rock, watching the swirl and foam as each swell ran over its sunken head.

MacRae had a subconscious perception of beauty, beauty of form and color. It moved him without his knowing why. He was in a mood to respond to beauty this night. He had that buoyant, grateful feeling which comes to a man when he has escaped some great disaster, when he is suddenly freed from some grim apprehension of the soul.

The night was one of wonderful beauty. The moon laid its silver path across the sea. The oily swells came up that moon-path in undulating folds to break in silver fragments along the sh.o.r.e. The great island beyond the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the mainland far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky. From the southeast little fluffs of cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin snow, sailed before the wind that mothered the swells. But there was no wind on Squitty yet. There was breathless stillness except for the low, s.p.a.ced mutter of the surf.

He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it all,--the sea and the moon-path, and the hushed, dark woods behind.

Then his gaze, turning slowly, fell on something white in the shadow of a bushy, wind-distorted fir a few feet away. He looked more closely. His eyes gradually made out a figure in a white sweater sitting on a flat rock, elbows on knees, chin resting in cupped palms.