Chapter XVI: En Famille

Horace Gower's town house straddled the low crest of a narrow peninsula which juts westward into the Gulf from the heart of the business section of Vancouver. The tip of this peninsula ends in the green forest of Stanley Park, which is like no other park in all North America, either in its nature or its situation. It is a sizable stretch of ancient forest, standing within gunshot of skyscrapers, modern hotels, great docks where China freighters unload tea and silk. Hard on the flank of a modern seaport this area of primitive woodland broods in the summer sun and the winter rains not greatly different from what it must have been in those days when only the Siwash Indians penetrated its shadowy depths.

The rear of Gower's house abutted against the park, neighbor to great tall firs and massive, branchy cedars and a jungle of fern and thicket bisected by a few paths and drives, with the sea lapping all about three sides of its seven-mile boundary. From Gower's northward windows the Capilano canyon opened between two mountains across the Inlet. Southward other windows gave on English Bay and beach sands where one could count a thousand swimmers on a summer afternoon.

The place was only three blocks from Abbott's. The house itself was not unlike Abbott's, built substantially of gray stone and set in ample grounds. But it was a good deal larger, and both within and without it was much more elaborate, as befitted the dwelling of a successful man whose wife was socially a leader instead of a climber,--like so many of Vancouver's newly rich. There was order and system and a smooth, unobtrusive service in that home. Mrs. Horace A. Gower rather prided herself on the noiseless, super-efficient operation of her domestic machinery. Any little affair was sure to go off without a hitch, to be quite charming, you know. Mrs. Gower had a firmly established prestige along certain lines. Her business in life was living up to that prestige, not only that it might be retained but judiciously expanded.

Upon a certain March morning, however, Mrs. Gower seemed to be a trifle shaken out of her usual complacency. She sat at a rather late breakfast, facing her husband, flanked on either hand by her son and daughter. There was an injured droop to Mrs. Gower's mouth, a slightly indignant air about her. The conversation had reached a point where Mrs. Gower felt impelled to remove her pince-nez and polish them carefully with a bit of cloth. This was an infallible sign of distress.

"I cannot see the least necessity for it, Norman," she resumed in a slightly agitated, not to say petulant tone. "It's simply ridiculous for a young man of your position to be working at common labor with such terribly common people. It's degrading."

Norman was employing himself upon a strip of bacon.

"That's a mere matter of opinion," he replied at length. "Somebody has to work. I have to do something for myself sometime, and it suits me to begin now, in this particular manner which annoys you so much. I don't mind work. And those copper claims are a rattling good prospect. Everybody says so. We'll make a barrel of money out of them yet. Why shouldn't I peel off my coat and go at it?"

"By the way," Gower asked bluntly, "what occasioned this flying trip to England?"

Norman pushed back his chair a trifle, thrust his hands in his trousers pockets and looked straight at his father.

"My own private business," he answered as bluntly.

"You people," he continued after a brief interval, "seem to think I'm still in knee breeches."

But this did not serve to turn his mother from her theme.

"It is quite unnecessary for you to attempt making money in such a primitive manner," she observed. "We have plenty of money. There is plenty of opportunity for you in your father's business, if you must be in business."

"Huh!" Norman grunted. "I'm no good in my father's business, nor anywhere else, in his private opinion. It's no good, mamma. I'm on my own for keeps. I'm going through with it. I've been a jolly fizzle so far. I'm not even a blooming war hero. You just stop bothering about me."

"I really can't think what's got into you," Mrs. Gower complained in a tone which implied volumes of reproach. "It's bad enough for your father and Betty to be running off and spending so much time at that miserable cottage when so much is going on here. I'm simply exhausted keeping things up without any help from them. But this vagary of yours--I really can't consider it anything else--is most distressing. To live in a dirty little cabin and cook your own food, to associate with such men--it's simply dreadful! Haven't you any regard for our position?"

"I'm fed up with our position," Norman retorted. A sullen look was gathering about his mouth. "What does it amount to? A lot of people running around in circles, making a splash with their money. You, and the sort of thing you call our position, made a sissy of me right up till the war came along. There was nothing I was good for but parlor tricks. And you and everybody else expected me to react from that and set things afire overseas. I didn't. I didn't begin to come up to your expectations at all. But if I didn't split Germans with a sword or do any heroics I did get some horse sense knocked into me--unbelievable as that may appear to you. I learned that there was a sort of satisfaction in doing things. I'm having a try at that now. And you needn't imagine I'm going to be wet-nursed along by your money.

"As for my associates, and the degrading influences that fill you with such dismay," Norman's voice flared into real anger, "they may not have much polish--but they're human. I like them, so far as they go. I've been frostbitten enough by the crowd I grew up with, since I came home, to appreciate being taken for what I am, not what I may or may not have done. Since I have discovered myself to have a funny sort of feeling about living on your money, it behooves me to get out and make what money I need for myself--in view of the fact that I'm going to be married quite soon. I am going to marry"--Norman rose and looked down at his mother with something like a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he exploded his final bombshell--"a fisherman's daughter. A poor but worthy maiden," he finished with unexpected irony.

"Norman!" His mother's voice was a wail. "A common fisherman's daughter? Oh, my son, my son."

She shed a few beautifully restrained tears.

"A common fisherman's daughter. Exactly," Norman drawled. "Terrible thing, of course. Funny the fish scales on the family income never trouble you."

Mrs. Gower glared at him through her glasses.

"Who is this--this woman?" she demanded.

"Dolly," Betty whispered under her breath.

"Miss Dolores Ferrara of Squitty Cove," Norman answered imperturbably.

"A foreigner besides. Great Heavens! Horace," Mrs. Gower appealed to her husband, "have you no influence whatever with your son?"

"Mamma," Betty put in, "I assure you you are making a tremendous fuss about nothing. I can tell you that Dolly Ferrara is really quite a nice girl. _I_ think Norman is rather lucky."

"Thanks, Bet," Norman said promptly. "That's the first decent thing I've heard in this discussion."

Mrs. Gower turned the battery of her indignant eyes on her daughter.

"You, I presume," she said spitefully, "will be thinking of marrying some fisherman next?"

"If she did, Bessie," Gower observed harshly, "it would only be history repeating itself."

Mrs. Gower flushed, paled a little, and reddened again. She glared--no other word describes her expression--at her husband for an instant. Then she took refuge behind her dignity.

"There is a downright streak of vulgarity in you, Horace," she said, "which I am sorry to see crop out in my children."

"Thank you, mamma," Betty remarked evenly.

Mrs. Gower whirled on Norman.

"I wash my hands of you completely," she said imperiously. "I am ashamed of you."

"I'd rather you'd be ashamed of me," Norman retorted, "than that I should be ashamed of myself."

"And you, sir,"--he faced his father, speaking in a tone of formal respect which did not conceal a palpable undercurrent of defiance--"you also, I suppose, wash your hands of me?"

Gower looked at him for a second. His face was a mask, devoid of expression.

"You're a man grown," he said. "Your mother has expressed herself as she might be expected to. I say nothing."

Norman walked to the door.

"I don't care a deuce of a lot what you say or what you don't say, nor even what you think," he flung at them angrily, with his hand on the knob. "I have my own row to hoe. I'm going to hoe it my own style. And that's all there is to it. If you can't even wish me luck, why, you can go to the devil!"

"Norman!" His mother lifted her voice in protesting horror. Gower himself only smiled, a bit cynically. And Betty looked at the door which closed upon her brother with a wistful sort of astonishment.

Gower first found occasion for speech.

"While we are on the subject of intimate family affairs, Bessie," he addressed his wife casually, "I may as well say that I shall have to call on you for some funds--about thirty thousand dollars. Forty thousand would be better."

Mrs. Gower stiffened to attention. She regarded her husband with an air of complete disapproval, slightly tinctured with surprise.

"Oh," she said, "really?"

"I shall need that much properly to undertake this season's operations," he stated calmly, almost indifferently.

"Really?" she repeated. "Are you in difficulties again?"

"Again?" he echoed. "It is fifteen years since I was in a corner where I needed any of your money."

"It seems quite recent to me," Mrs. Gower observed stiffly.

"Am I to understand from that that you don't care to advance me whatever sum I require?" he asked gently.

"I don't see why I should," Mrs. Gower replied after a second's reflection, "even if I were quite able to do so. This place costs something to keep up. I can't very well manage on less than two thousand a month. And Betty and I must be clothed. You haven't contributed much recently, Horace."

"No? I had the impression that I had been contributing pretty freely for thirty years," Gower returned dryly. "I paid the bills up to December. Last season wasn't a particularly good one--for me."

"That was chiefly due to your own mismanagement, I should say," Mrs. Gower commented tartly. "Putting the whole cannery burden on Norman when the poor boy had absolutely no experience. Really, you must have mismanaged dreadfully. I heard only the other day that the Robbin-Steele plants did better last season than they ever did. I'm sure the Abbotts made money last year. If the banks have lost faith in your business ability, I--well, I should consider you a bad risk, Horace. I can't afford to gamble."

"You never do. You only play cinches," Gower grunted. "However, your money will be safe enough. I didn't say the banks refuse me credit. I have excellent reasons for borrowing of you."

"I really do not see how I can possibly let you have such a sum," she said. "You already have twenty thousand dollars of my money tied up in your business, you know."

"You have an income of twelve thousand a year from the Maple Point place," Gower recited in that unchanging, even tone. "You have over twenty thousand cash on deposit. And you have eighty thousand dollars in Victory Bonds. You mean you don't want to, Bessie."

"You may accept that as my meaning," she returned.

"There are times in every man's career," Gower remarked dispassionately, "when the lack of a little money might break him."

"That is all the more reason why I should safeguard my funds," Mrs. Gower replied. "You are not as young as you were, Horace. If you should fail now, you would likely never get on your feet again. But we could manage, I dare say, on what I have. That is why I do not care to risk any of it."

"You refuse then, absolutely, to let me have this money?" he asked.

"I do," Mrs. Gower replied, with an air of pained but conscious rectitude. "I should consider myself most unwise to do so."

"All right," Gower returned indifferently. "You force me to a showdown. I have poured money into your hands for years for you to squander in keeping up your position--as you call it. I'm about through doing that. I'm sick of aping millionaires. All I need is a comfortable place where I can smoke a pipe in peace. This house is mine. I shall sell it and repay you your twenty thousand. You--"

"Horace! Sell this house. Our home! _Horace._"

"Our home?" Gower continued inflexibly. "The place where we eat and sleep and entertain, you mean. We never had a home, Bessie. You will have your ancestral hall at Maple Point. You will be quite able to afford a Vancouver house if you choose. But this is mine, and it's going into the discard. I shall owe you nothing. I shall still have the cottage at Cradle Bay, if I go smash, and that is quite good enough for me. Do I make myself clear?"

Mrs. Gower was sniffing. She had taken refuge with the pince-nez and the polishing cloth. But her fingers were tremulous, and her expression was that of a woman who feels herself sadly abused and who is about to indulge in luxurious weeping.

"But, Horace, to sell this house over my head--what will p-people say?"

"I don't care two whoops what people say," Mr. Gower replied unfeelingly.

"This is simp-ply outrageous! How is Betty going to m-meet p-people?"

"You mean," her husband retorted, "how are you going to contrive the proper background against which Betty shall display her charms to the different varieties of saphead which you hit upon as being eligible to marry her? Don't worry. With the carefully conserved means at your disposal you will still be able to maintain yourself in the station in which it has pleased God to place you. You will be able to see that Betty has the proper advantages."

This straw broke the camel's back, if it is proper so to speak of a middle-aged, delicate-featured lady, delightfully gowned and coiffed and manicured. Mrs. Gower's grief waxed crescendo. Whereupon her husband, with no manifest change of expression beyond an unpleasant narrowing of his eyes, heaved his short, flesh-burdened body out of the chair and left the room.

Betty had sat silent through this conversation, a look of profound distaste slowly gathering on her fresh young face. She gazed after her father. When the door closed upon him Betty's gray eyes came to rest on her mother's bowed head and shaking shoulders. There was nothing in Betty Gower's expression which remotely suggested sympathy. She said nothing. She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her pretty chin in her cupped palms.

Mrs. Gower presently became aware of this detached, observing, almost critical attitude.

"Your f-father is p-positively b-brutal," she found voice to declare.

"There are various sorts of brutality," Betty observed enigmatically. "I don't think daddy has a corner on the visible supply. Are you going to let him have that money?"

"No. Never," Mrs. Gower snapped.

"You may lose a great deal more than the house by that," Betty murmured.

But if Mrs. Gower heard the words they conveyed no meaning to her agitated mind. She was rapidly approaching that incomprehensible state in which a woman laughs and cries in the same breath, and Betty got up with a faintly contemptuous curl to her red lips. She went out into the hall and pressed a button. A maid materialized.

"Go into the dining room and attend to mamma, if you please, Mary," Betty said.

Then she skipped nimbly upstairs, two steps at a time, and went into a room on the second floor, a room furnished something after the fashion of a library in which her father sat in a big leather chair chewing on an unlighted cigar.

Betty perched on the arm of his chair and ran her fingers through a patch on top of his head where the hair was growing a bit thin.

"Daddy," she asked, "did you mean that about going smash?"

"Possibility," he grunted.

"Are you really going to sell this house and live at Cradle Bay?"

"Sure. You sorry?"

"About the house? Oh, no. It's only a place for mamma to make a splash, as Norman said. If you hibernate at the cottage I'll come and keep house for you."

Gower considered this.

"You ought to stay with your mother," he said finally. "She'll be able to give you a lot I wouldn't make an effort to provide. You don't know what it means really to work. You'd find it pretty slow at Squitty."

"Maybe," Betty said. "But we managed very well last winter, just you and me. If there is going to be a break-up of the family I shall stay with you. I'm a daddy's girl."

Gower drew her face down and kissed it.

"You are that," he said huskily. "You're all Gower. There's real stuff in you. You're free of that damned wishy-washy Morton blood. She made a poodle dog of Norman, but she couldn't spoil you. We'll manage, eh, Betty?"

"Of course," Betty returned. "But I don't know that Norman is such a hopeless case. Didn't he rather take your breath away with his declaration of independence?"

"It takes more than a declaration to win independence," Gower answered grimly. "Wait till the going gets hard. However, I'll say there's a chance for Norman. Now, you run along, Betty. I've got some figuring to do."