Chapter XIV: The Swing of the Pendulum

MacRae did himself rather well, as the English say, when he reached Vancouver. This was a holiday, and he was disposed to make the most of it. He put up at the Granada. He made a few calls and presently found himself automatically relaunched upon Vancouver's social waters. There were a few maids and more than one matron who recalled pleasantly this straight up-standing youngster with the cool gray eyes who had come briefly into their ken the winter before. There were a few fellows he had known in squadron quarters overseas, home for good now that demobilization was fairly complete. MacRae danced well. He had the faculty of making himself agreeable without effort. He found it pleasant to fall into the way of these careless, well-dressed folk whose greatest labor seemed to be in amusing themselves, to keep life from seeming "slow." Buttressed by revenues derived from substantial sources, mines, timber, coastal fisheries, land, established industries, these sons and daughters of the pioneers, many but one degree removed from pioneering uncouthness, were patterning their lives upon the plan of equivalent classes in older regions. If it takes six generations in Europe to make a gentleman, western America quite casually dispenses with five, and the resulting product seldom suffers by comparison.

As the well-to-do in Europe flung themselves into revelry with the signing of the armistice, so did they here. Four years of war had corked the bottle of gayety. The young men were all overseas. Life was a little too cloudy during that period to be gay. Shadows hung over too many homes. But that was past. They had pulled the cork and thrown it away, one would think. Pleasure was king, to be served with light abandon.

It was a fairly vigorous place, MacRae discovered. He liked it, gave himself up to it gladly,--for a while. It involved no mental effort. These people seldom spoke of money, or of work, or politics, the high cost of living, international affairs. If they did it was jocularly, sketchily, as matters of no importance. Their talk ran upon dances, clothes, motoring, sports indoors and afield, on food,--and sometimes genially on drink, since the dry wave had not yet drained their cellars.

MacRae floated with this tide. But he was not wholly carried away with it. He began to view it impersonally, to wonder if it were the real thing, if this was what inspired men to plot and scheme and struggle laboriously for money, or if it were just the froth on the surface of realities which he could not quite grasp. He couldn't say. There was a dash and glitter about it that charmed him. He could warm and thrill to the beauty of a Granada ballroom, music that seduced a man's feet, beauty of silk and satin, of face and figure, of bright eyes and gleaming jewels, a blending of all the primary colors and every shade between, flashing over a polished floor under high, carved ceilings.

He had surrendered Nelly Abbott to a claimant and stood watching the swirl and glide of the dancers in the Granada one night. His eyes were on the brilliance a little below the raised area at one end of the floor, and so was his mind, inquiringly, with the curious concentration of which his mind was capable. Presently he became aware of some one speaking to him, tugging at his elbow.

"Oh, come out of it," a voice said derisively.

He looked around at Stubby Abbott.

"Regular trance. I spoke to you twice. In love?"

"Uh-uh. Just thinking," MacRae laughed.

"Deep thinking, I'll say. Want to go down to the billiard room and smoke?"

They descended to a subterranean chamber where, in a pit lighted by low-hung shaded globes, men in shirt sleeves clicked the red and white balls on a score of tables. Rows of leather-upholstered chairs gave comfort to spectators. They commandeered seats and lighted cigarettes. "Look," Stubby said. "There's Norman Gower."

Young Gower sat across a corner from them. He was in evening clothes. He slumped in his chair. His hands were limp along the chair arms. He was not watching the billiard players. He was staring straight across the room with the sightless look of one whose mind is far away.

"Another deep thinker," Stubby drawled. "Rather rough going for Norman these days."

"How?" MacRae asked.

"Funked it over across," Stubby replied. "So they say. Careful to stay on the right side of the Channel. Paying the penalty now. Girls rather rub it in. Fellows not too--well, cordial. Pretty rotten for Norman."

"Think he slacked deliberately?" MacRae inquired.

"That's the story. Lord, I don't know," Stubby answered. "He stuck in England four years. Everybody else that was fit went up the line. That's all I know. By their deeds ye shall judge them--eh?"

"Perhaps. What does he say about that himself?"

"Nothing, so far as I know. Keeps strictly mum on the war subject," Stubby said.

Young Gower did not alter his position during the few minutes they sat there. He sat staring straight ahead of him, unseeingly. MacRae suddenly felt sorry for him. If he had told the truth he was suffering a peculiarly distressing form of injustice, of misconception. MacRae recalled the passionate undertone in Gower's voice when he said, "I did the only thing I could do in the way I was told to do it." Yes, he was sorry for Norman. The poor devil was not getting a square deal.

But MacRae's pity was swiftly blotted out. He had a sudden uncomfortable vision of old Donald MacRae rowing around Poor Man's Rock, back and forth in sun and rain, in frosty dawns and stormy twilights, coming home to a lonely house, dying at last a lonely death, the sordid culmination of an embittered life.

Let him sweat,--the whole Gower tribe. MacRae was the ancient Roman, for the moment, wishing all his enemies had but a single head that he might draw his sword and strike it off. Something in him hardened against that first generous impulse to repeat to Stubby Abbott what Norman had told him on the cliff at Squitty. Let the beggar make his own defense. Yet that stubborn silence, the proud refusal to make words take the place of valiant deeds expected, wrung a gleam of reluctant admiration from MacRae. He would have done just that himself.

"Let's get back," Stubby suggested. "I've got the next dance with Betty Gower. I don't want to miss it."

"Is she here to-night? I haven't noticed her."

"Eyesight affected?" Stubby bantered. "Sure she's here. Looking like a dream."

MacRae felt a pang of envy. There was nothing to hold Stubby back,--no old scores, no deep, abiding resentment. MacRae had the conviction that Stubby would never take anything like that so seriously as he, Jack MacRae, did. He was aware that Stubby had the curious dual code common in the business world,--one set of inhibitions and principles for business and another for personal and social uses. A man might be Stubby's opponent in the market and his friend when they met on a common social ground. MacRae could never be quite like that. Stubby could fight Horace Gower, for instance, tooth and toenail, for an advantage in the salmon trade, and stretch his legs under Gower's dining table with no sense of incongruity, no matter what shifts the competitive struggle had taken or what weapons either had used. That was business; and a man left his business at the office. A curious thing, MacRae thought. A phenomenon in ethics which he found hard to understand, harder still to endorse.

He stood watching Stubby, knowing that Stubby would go straight to Betty Gower. Presently he saw her, marked the cut and color of her gown, watched them swing into the gyrating wave of couples that took the floor when the orchestra began. Indeed, MacRae stood watching them until he recalled with a start that he had this dance with Etta Robbin-Steele, who would, in her own much-used phrase, be "simply furious" at anything that might be construed as neglect; only Etta's fury would consist of showing her white, even teeth in a pert smile with a challenging twinkle in her very black eyes.

He went to Betty as soon as he found opportunity. He did not quite know why. He did not stop to ask himself why. It was a purely instinctive propulsion. He followed his impulse as the needle swings to the pole; as an object released from the hand at a great height obeys the force of gravity; as water flows downhill.

He took her programme.

"I don't see any vacancies," he said. "Shall I create one?"

He drew his pencil through Stubby Abbott's name. Stubby's signature was rather liberally inscribed there, he thought. Betty looked at him a trifle uncertainly.

"Aren't you a trifle--sweeping?" she inquired.

"Perhaps. Stubby won't mind. Do you?" he asked.

"I seem to be defenseless." Betty shrugged her shoulders. "What shall we quarrel about this time?"

"Anything you like," he made reckless answer.

"Very well, then," she said as they got up to dance. "Suppose we begin by finding out what there is to quarrel over. Are you aware that practically every time we meet we nearly come to blows? What is there about me that irritates you so easily?"

"Your inaccessibility."

MacRae spoke without weighing his words. Yet that was the truth, although he knew that such a frank truth was neither good form nor policy. He was sorry before the words were out of his mouth. Betty could not possibly understand what he meant. He was not sure he wanted her to understand. MacRae felt himself riding to a fall. As had happened briefly the night of the _Blackbird's_ wrecking, he experienced that feeling of dumb protest against the shaping of events in which he moved helpless. This bit of flesh and blood swaying in his arms in effortless rhythm to sensuous music was something he had to reckon with powerfully, whether he liked or not. MacRae was beginning dimly to see that. When he was with her--

"But I'm not inaccessible."

She dropped her voice to a cooing whisper. Her eyes glowed as they met his with steadfast concern. There was a smile and a question in them.

"What ever gave you that idea?"

"It isn't an idea; it's a fact."

The resentment against circumstances that troubled MacRae crept into his tone.

"Oh, silly!"

There was a railing note of tenderness in Betty's voice. MacRae felt his moorings slip. A heady recklessness of consequences seized him. He drew her a little closer to him. Irresistible prompting from some wellspring of his being urged him on to what his reason would have called sheer folly, if that reason had not for the time suffered eclipse, which is a weakness of rational processes when they come into conflict with a genuine emotion.

"Do you like me, Betty?"

Her eyes danced. They answered as well as her lips:

"Of course I do. Haven't I been telling you so plainly enough? I've been ashamed of myself for being so transparent--on such slight provocation."

"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 clusters 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, damning 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 sex, 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 passion stirred him more profoundly. He was neither a varietist nor a male prude. He was aware of sex. 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.