"Timber"/Chapter 12

by Harold Titus

CHAPTER XII

It was Sunday, on a clear, still, June morning. The men's shanty was deserted, the mill silent, the teams at White's camp stamping lazily in the stable.

The world was a glory of vivid life. All about growth had replaced the dormant grayness which had prevailed when John Taylor arrived in the country. Out on the plains June grass blades of heavy green had hidden the tufts of last season's dead stalks; brakes thrust their tender, curled fronds through the moss, and sweet-fern and sedge, those useless growths of the barrens, were, for the fortnight, things of beauty. Aspens and birch were in tremulous leaf, oak and maple had burst from their maroon buds and flaunted polished foliage to the sun. Within the forest the pines were stirring, terminal buds had opened and new, light needles were stretching for air and light. A company of birds made the somber shadows joyous and the Blueberry, wandering through the forest, sped crystal clear over golden sand or dark depths, reflecting the graceful ranks of spruce and balsam which edged it, taking on a border of luscious green where reeds shot through the surface.

Over on the Au Sable, forty miles away, Marcia Murray and a dozen or more of Taylor's Detroit friends were gathered at Dick Mason's Windigo Lodge for one of the protracted house parties which had given the place a name. John had half promised Marcia that he would be there for the first Sunday, but somehow his interest in her was steadily waning. He was unconscious of change until some necessity for decision brought it home to him, as on that first night when he had no interest in a letter to her, as on other nights which followed when he could write only of himself and his job, and on those rare occasions when he could not even bring out his writing materials. He had believed that he was as eager to see her as he ever had been, but while he planned the trip across country he had half consciously sought an excuse which would keep him in the forest, and when a man who wanted his hemlock bark telephoned that he would come to the mill at Seven Mile soon, John interpreted that "soon" to suit his own strongest desires. He would wait over Sunday for the buyer, and all the time he secretly hoped the man would not show up, that he would have the day to himself—and that he might see something of Helen Foraker when her eyes were not on the men who worked for her and her mind not on the forest or his logs—

In such a subtle manner the change crept through him. He told himself that he was as fond of Marcia as ever, told himself that, but a voice deep in his heart soberly, steadily denied—and when on this Sabbath morning of gold and blue and green he thought of the Marcia he was not to see that day, slender, small, cool Marcia Murray, she seemed to him peculiary unsatisfactory and inconsequential.

This was the first time he had not reacted to her without at least a superficial thrill and the realization was something of a shock. He had come to the Blueberry to find easy money; he had fchosen to discard the easy way and help produce his own wealth. He had gone that far from the reasonable creature he had been and he had gone as far, perhaps farther, in his very impulses!

On the river bank near the house Helen sat with Bobby and Bessy Kildare. Pauguk, freed from her kennel, was chained to a stump, nose between her paws, orange eyes on the face of her mistress as Helen talked to the children.

John approached slowly. The wolf dog turned and muttered under her breath, throwing a venomous glance at him, but Helen was occupied with Bobby and did not notice.

"Look!" she cried suddenly, indicating a flitting bird. "What is it?"

The boy looked sharply.

"Fly-catcher," he said. "Olive-sided fly-catcher!" very positive in tone, but his eyes searched hers with query.

"Are you sure? Listen!"

The bird had lighted in a tree and his thin, plaintive see-a-wee floated out over the river.

Bobby laughed. "Nope! Wood peewee," he said and showed confusion for his cocksureness of the moment before.

"And what does the olive fly-catcher say?"

"This," puckering his small lips and whistling a hip-pee-wee. "Like the pipin' plover," he added and laughed in delight at her smiling nod of favor.

"There's another bird! See him, Bobby?"

"He's easy! He's a flicker. An' there's a whiskey jack! See him lookin' for scraps?"

He pointed excitedly to the jay near the kitchen door.

"I seen a pine finch today, too. I knowed him because he had yellow only on his wings an' tail."

"You what? And you knowed!"

"I saw him, and I knew him," Bobby answered slowly, much abashed.

There was perspiration on his lip and the hair about his temples was damp; the vigorous color of his cheeks was stained by the flush which followed her correction, and he swallowed with his small soft throat in such a way that she leaned forward and dragged him close to her, stroking his head, laughing to cover the tenderness in her eyes.

Aunty May appeared in the doorway and called the children. Bessy started at once, waddling on her shapeless little legs, but the boy lingered and said:

"I try to learn the things you teach me, Aunt Helen. If I learn as much as you do, will you marry me when I grow up?"

"Oh, Bobby, if you're as nice a man as you are a little boy, if you try to learn always, if you are as kind then as you are now, you'd make any girl happy."

"But you!" slapping her knee insistently and looking into her face with a frown which told that he would not be put off. "Not any girl! You!"

"I'll be an old woman, then. But if I should ever have a little girl I don't know any boy I'd like to have her love except you."

Bobby eyed her with sober skepticism a moment and started away complaining:

"But you won't ever promise!"

Taylor had approached, overheard and watched, struck by the quality that was in the girl's face and voice and manner as she talked with the child; a tenderness was there, a strength of maternal feeling that he had never seen reflected in the face of any girl before; perhaps it had been in others and escaped his notice, but, as he stood there watching Bobby go and listening to Helen's casual comment on the glory of the day, he was thinking this: That the face of Marcia Murray would never yield itself to a look like that.

He sat down beside her and drew lightly on his pipe. Against the far bank a trout was feeding, breaking the velvet surface of the pool by his frisky rises.

"So I'm not the only one who learns things from you," he said watching for the fish. She laughed disparagingly and said something about having little to teach. "Oh, no! Don't say that," he interrupted. "You have everything to teach children and—men. Do all boys who learn things from you want to marry you—when they've learned enough?"

She mistook his gravity for a form of banter and laughed in protest.

"Don't laugh," he said, and then leaning forward impulsively: "Maybe I'm not so different from other boys who learn things from you—and want to learn more so they—"

A flush rushed into her cheeks, the first he had seen there, the first time he had seen her unpoised; it startled him, and her brown eyes, very wide, fast on his, startled him also and for a moment they sat there, staring at one another while words surged upward to the man's lips—

And then a house wren, perched in a pine, tail at its pert angle, began his breathless spring song; the notes poured from his throat, fast and faster, liquid and mellow and infinitely lovely, and he twitched his tail and darted his small head and moved his feet on the branch as though the thing he had to say could not be stayed, as though he must cram those precious seconds with his love-making—

Helen looked away and Taylor put the pipe stem between his teeth, relaxing, confused by what he had said, confused as well by the love song of the bird who had put into music the words that frothed to his lips and which he did not have the courage to speak—nor the right to speak, he suddenly remembered, and stirred uncomfortably.

Embarrassment held them mute until Pauguk, who had watched John ceaselessly, moved against her chain and muttered a threat.

"The men tell me you raised her from a pup," he said, because he felt that he must say something and this was all he could think to say.

Helen stretched her hand toward the dog.

"She must have been a month old when I took her. A collie of ours went wild and disappeared and was gone a year; men kept telling my father that they had seen her with the last wolf that was left in this country. Father didn't believe it until we found her in one of Black Joe's traps. The puppy was by her; they'd been traveling evidently.

"Joe killed the dog—she was very dangerous then—and brought the pup in to show us. They were all for killing her, but somehow the little thing, backed in a corner, ready to fight with its milk teeth, seemed so pathetic and helpless and courageous that I couldn't let them—Too, I thought it would be quite a triumph to make her my friend. It was; and a very hard job."

"You like to do the difficult things."

"Perhaps. That is vanity. Nothing that is easy seems worth while."

He watched the trout rising and smoked thoughtfully. "Is that why you buried yourself here in this forest? Because it is hard?"

"I haven't buried myself. I belong to it. I'm a part of it."

"And you've never wanted anything else?"

"I've never had the time."

"It satisfied all your impulses?"

"No. Not all. What aren't satisfied will have to wait—a while."

Pause. Helen's mind was not wholly on what she had been saying; the flush still lingered in her cheeks and she did not look at Taylor. The pause grew to a moment of silence and then, as though to overcome the confusion that he had put upon her, or as if fearful that he would commence again where the wren had ended, she began:

"My father used to say that want was entirely a matter of environment. This has been my environment, so I've never wanted anything very strongly that couldn't be had here. I was born here. I grew up along with the trees, though most of them had a big start on me. I never knew my mother. I never knew many people except my father, and those few men who came here because they were interested in—my environment. I think my father would rather I'd been a boy. He never said that; he was very kind. But he trained me as he would have trained a boy.

"I ramble," she said laughing and more at ease.

"No—please tell me about him. I've been here weeks and I know nothing about this forest he started. I think your father must have been a remarkable man."

"He was—in many ways. When I knew him, though, his life revolved around one thing: this forest. Reforestation was a religion with him, land economics his theology. He infected everybody who came near him with that religion—that is, all who were intelligent enough to understand. I was down with the disease before I could wholly comprehend. I played with baby trees instead of dolls; I planted tiny forests of my own instead of keeping playhouse; I learned to fight fire before I learned to sew. I put in the years learning log scales that most girls spend learning scales on a piano. When I could read I read books on silviculture instead of stories; I knew more about chemistry that I did about clothes; more about soil than I did about boys.

"You see, we were a sort of joke in this community and had to be quite self-sufficient. After I was more than a little girl we stayed here always because we were too poor to get out. The first years took all my father's money; then came debt, and he was very conscientious. We never went anywhere to meet people; they came here: teachers of forestry, foresters from Europe.

"And then when my father died I didn't have time to feel the shock or to be lonely because responsibility all came on me, so the other things I might want to do have had to wait."

"A big burden!"

She shook her head. "Not a burden, unless the urge to paint a great picture or write a great book is a burden. It's something bigger than you are; one is helpless before an ideal."

"But now that you've put it over—"

"Put it over? Oh, no!" shaking her head slowly. "No, not yet."

"You have grown a forest."

"That's only a part. It is all Foraker's Folly for most people and the end is to make all people understand that—Foolish Foraker was not foolish."

"I see," he said vaguely.

"Are you sure that you do?" Pause. "I'm not. You're too young," flushing slightly again, "in experience, I mean. You're only weeks old in this; some men are life old in the same experience and they won't see.

"It's not this tract, not these few thousand acres my father wanted men to see. It's something else: he wanted to show what all this land might be that they call waste land, that they look on as a burden and an eye-sore. Those plains down the river are useless now; they are a burden and horrible to look at. It's not the fault of the land; it's the fault of men."

She sat up and her manner became a bit more vehement.

"Did you see Louvain?"

"No. But I got to Rheims."

"Do you see any parallel? No—of course you don't. You don't see the heel of the Him on these pine barrens. You don't visualize the devastator, the leveler of all that was beautiful and useful. Oh, we were Prussians, we Americans! We were ruthless, heedless. All we saw was forests and a market for their products, so we butchered. We only saw the hour, only thought about personal gain. It wasn't the conscious Prussian, the deliberate destroyer; it was the Hun in our hearts, the spirit of the age: thoughtless youth, my father used to say. Our pine went out to build the country where cheap lumber for cities was needed. They stripped the forests so a country might grow, just as the Prussian needed to grow and would grow quickly at the cost of his own future, even."

Taylor watched her closely and she saw the bewilderment in his face.

"Your father cut millions of feet of this pine; he bought it and paid for it and his energy made it into homes. But it was his fortune that was made, too, and it was his men who left these barrens behind; and their children are living in a country spotted with great acres of waste land, and his grandchildren will face a timber famine. Do you know that in Michigan there are millions of acres which are considered useless for all time? And not only in Michigan, but in all the Lake States; in New England, in the South, in the West.

"There's over a quarter billion acres of land that once grew forest which now lie idle between the two oceans. A lot of it can never be farmed or grazed, but in that lies our national future. Logs, lumber, forest products are the foundation of national life! Ties for railroads, and charcoal to make the iron that goes into equipment; timbers for the mines that yield coal for the locomotives and metals for every use. The shoes you wear were probably tanned with oak bark. Your necktie is silk, probably artificial silk, made from spruce pulp. The cloth in your coat was woven in wooden looms with a dog-wood shuttle; the pencil in your pocket is made from Tennessee juniper, likely, and the note book behind it came from northern spruce and balsam."

She watched a swamp sparrow perch for a moment on the telephone wire near her house.

"Take the telephone: Again, your mine timbers to get the copper, the converter poles in the smelter where the ore was reduced, the poles under the wires, the paper around the wires in the underground cables of your own city, the wooden desk for the instrument, the turpentine in its varnish and even the rubber mouthpiece you talk into and the rubber receiver came from the trees!

"Civilization can't make a move without using forest products and our forests are going and we are doing nothing with our billions of acres of idle land that once grew forests. This land that is waste is waste in the worst sense. It won't grow food crops, won't fatten cattle or sheep, but it will grow timber!" She waved her hand downstream toward the miles of desolation that stretched between them and Pancake.

"And while we are turning our backs on it, our supply of wood is shutting down. National forests? They're remote; much of their area is inaccessible. They give us only three per cent of the timber we use now. The men that own virgin forest are butchering and have a leg to stand on because there are other men like Sim Burns using taxation as a goad. We've torn down and we have not rebuilt. We can build, and that was my father's idea; to show that we can create as fast as we destroy.

"Less than fifty, years ago this land was stripped of its pine; today it m maturing another crop. The same could have been done with any other piece that grew good trees: Just keep the fire out and nature would have done much in time. Fire, fire, fire, without end! Every summer it eats across the plains country; every summer it does its damage on cutover lands in all the timber States. It not only destroys trees, but it takes the seed bearers and the seeds that lie ready to sprout and the life of the soil itself.

"To exist as a nation, we must have forests; to have forests all we need to do for a beginning is to give this worthless land a chance. We can speed up its work by helping—by keeping out fire, by planting trees by good forest practice. Can't you see all these Michigan plains growing pine again? And in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New England, the South, and everywhere where hills and valleys have become blackened eyesores? Don't you see what it would mean to people, not only in cheaper homes and steel and railroads, but something else? Fish and game and a chance to play as men were intended to play! It is so simple to do; to show people that it is simple is such a task!"

She stopped with a smile and Taylor rapped the ash from his pipe.

"That's a head-full," he said soberly.

Helen drew a deep breath.

"I'm glad I don't bore you," she said. "There are few people who will listen, few who realize their dependence on forests."

"But they must listen to you, now. You've succeeded."

"I have only commenced. You can grow the trees and that will satisfy the people who love trees. Sentiment doesn't get far; it's necessary to show profit. Is reforestation an economic possibility? men will ask. That is the question to answer."

"But you have! Look at what you have produced!"

Again she shook her head.

"There are trees, yes, but think what it has cost to grow them."

"Cost? Of course it cost, but you began with such a little capital. Your land must have been so cheap."

She shrugged.

"My father was impractical. His first costs were away higher than necessary. Compounding interest will double the investment in your land every ten years, remember; some years it has cost nearly fifty cents an acre to keep the fires out, and there are ten thousand acres of pine here. We have almost a hundred miles of fire lines that cost a lot of money, and those are only the big items. There's replanting and a hundred other things.

"For twenty years there was no income except from the scattering Norway pine which wasn't good enough to take when the first loggers went through here. After twenty years the young trees were beginning to crowd and slowing down growth, but thinning cost money and there was no return from it then. Meanwhile debts piled up and interest went marching on.

"The value of stumpage went marching on, too, which saved us. It is high now; lumber is higher than it will be six months from now, but it won't drop back to where it was before the war to stay. Never again, because the forests aren't here. The cut of Southern pine has passed its peak—did ten years ago; it will dwindle and then all that America has left will be the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

"Enough there to last forever? No. They said that of New England; they said that of Pennsylvania and New York; they said it of the Lake States. Your father must have said it: that there was enough pine in Michigan to last forever. All those men believed that except my father and when they'd cut thirty years there was no Lake State pine; so they went south, where they thought there was enough to last forever—and those forests will go out with our generation.

"In the woods when a saw gang has cut into a tree until it commences to sag and snap they stand back and cry 'Timber!' It is the warning cry of the woods; it means that trees are coming down, that men within range should stand clear. My father used to say that the cry of Timber!' was ringing in the country's ears, that the loggers had given the warning, that the last of our trees were commencing to fall—but we haven't heard! Our ears are shut to the cry, our backs are turned and unless we look sharp we'll be caught!"

She paused a moment and lifted a hand and let it fall.

"We're caught now," she said. "It's too late to grow enough in time to avoid the hurt. There will be a shortage; there is now over great regions, and it will be worse before you and I have lived a normal lifetime, in spite of all that men can do. A few years more of doing nothing and the pinch will hurt, hurt, John Taylor! Roosevelt said it again and again, ten years ago; other men have said it; government departments have said it officially. Think of Michigan, a great timber-growing state with millions of acres that will never grow anything else, paying millions of dollars every year in freight bills on lumber! And your father probably said that there was enough-pine here to last the country forever! We can make good a grain shortage in less than a year; we can overcome a meat shortage in three or four seasons, but you can't hurry timber. It needs fifty to a hundred years to reproduce itself and nothing that men know about can hurry it—and men are doing nothing adequate now, this year, this spring, this morning!"

Taylor had a flashing memory of old Luke, staring at a white moon through the plume of a yellow pine, a counterfeit pine, longing for Michigan forests again, hopeless and cynical. And he looked at this girl, sitting up cross-legged now, gazing at the river, cheeks glowing, eyes far away, and he remembered that Humphrey Bryant had said of her—that in her heart was something of Joan of Arc, of Catharine of Russia, and something of the Blessed Damosel—

She looked back at him and went on.

"That has helped my forest—the available supply pinching down. We've gotten along somehow with box lumber and lath and pulp wood from our thinnings, but the pinch is coming and we are not ready to cut now. We could cut, we could make money, but it would prove only half the argument. My father's whole object was to get his capital turning its full interest return each year and then to take that interest while maintaining the capital—not eating it up, not making the forest a temporary property. It's in the waiting period now, just as a fruit grower is with a young orchard. Our thinnings and their income are like the first few apples or cherries, just enough to stall off some of the interest accumulations. The fruit grower realizes on the increasing bearing area of the trees; we realize on the quality growth of these pines and the climbing lumber values.

"Foraker's Folly is at the turning point. The value of the standing timber is commencing to overtake the interest which has been compounding away all these years, but neither the timber nor the investment is quite ripe. To cut now would be to over-cut the rate of growth, but in a few years, a very few years, we can harvest a part of what is here and that part will about equal the growth on the rest of the tract; it will take care of all the investment, cover all these years of compounding interest, and show that the forest is a sound, going, moneymaking venture, that it can go on forever, that there will always be something to cut, that there will always be white pine here, that there never will be useless red-oak brush and gnarled poplar, blackened snags, lifeless soil, and Thad Parkers and Jim Harrises!

"That is what my father started to prove and they called him Foolish Foraker—and I loved my father, I believe in him—and I want men to believe in him as I do!"

She stopped, breathing rapidly. Taylor was thrilled, stirred by her enthusiasm, by the glow of a crusader which was in her eyes and for a moment he looked into her face with a feeling of reverence—and then he saw her as a girl again, laughed at, whispered about by foul-mouthed yokels, fighting stupidity and small-minded men!

"A terrible load for you!" he muttered. "Why—Why doesn't the State do this? Isn't it the State's job?" She smiled tolerantly.

"My father used to say that in the history of civilization every just function of the State has followed individual enterprise. The State is thick-headed. It is the individual who lightens burdens, the individual who blazes the way that States may follow—and as for Lansing!" she laughed sadly. "Waste land has meant only a page of tabulated figures to most men there!

"My father used to say that we had an over-supply of office holders and a shortage of leaders. Michigan has done a lot, comparatively; we have state forests that are almost models in some ways, we handle our fires better than lots of other states, but, much as we've done, we haven't scratched the possibilities or made more than a feeble step in meeting a necessary problem.

"Of course, it's a job for the state. Everything, location, soil, climate, circumstances, favored this forest or it never would have had a chance of proving out. It was the one place in ten thousand where one person had even a chance of success. Individuals can't do the job for the country. It will take the state—the big state—the federal government, not twenty or thirty little governments fussing inadequately with a problem that involves all of us.

"And it needs men who can think and will think; who are men of action and not afraid of action. Not a crowd whose virtues are mostly negative!"

"And how much longer," he asked, "will you have to carry on?"

She shook her head rather wearily. "That depends on markets, on demand. Three, four—maybe a half dozen years."

"But what about—Sim Burns?"

A shadow fell across her features.

"I don't know, Humphrey Bryant is the rock on which I've stood in trouble, He has worked for years to change the timber tax laws so that ventures like this will not be driven to the wall. He has worked—he is still working. Without him there would be no chance—

"Oh, for the present, anyhow, I'm at their mercy!" She said that rather desperately and rose abruptly as though the fact excited her. "But we'll try to keep on, we'll try to keep going—"

She took Pauguk back to her kennel and Taylor started away through the forest. Until dark he walked and came out at the mill, ate with Raymer, the mill foreman, smoked and started back through the night and the forest.

The gash of the fire line let down the light from an avenue of stars to give the road beneath his feet a grayness in the flat black which was all about. No individual trees were discernible; here and there against the sky could be seen the motionless reach of tufted limb but on either side the pine was an unbroken wall, silent, motionless—And yet as he went through it that forest seemed to have the powers of speech and motion, for Helen Foraker had breathed life into it that day for him. It was no more fleshless, no more without consciousness for him than would have been a company of silent, unmoving men ranked under the stars. It was dynamic, powerful, capable of great manifestations, waiting—waiting—waiting for the word to stir—

It was an eerie feeling which enveloped him there, alone in the gloom and the silence. He felt like an intruder, like an unwelcome stranger—and small, mean, low-spirited. He, the seeker after possessions, after honest possessions, won by his own skill and effort, felt mean, because that day he had realized that he had not even sensed the example that had been all about him for weeks, had dragged it down to the level of his feeble appreciation, thought and spoken of it in his own inadequate terms.

Foraker's Folly tonight represented something that had never entered his ken: an idea beyond material gain, no matter how heroically won. Not once in her talk had Helen spoken of what it meant to her in wealth, in profit. It was an adventure in practical creation for the sake of building, designed for the benefit of no individual, developed for those who were not yet born and for their children of all time. He had been aware of men and women who had struggled unselfishly that others might find living easier, but those people had always worked among men, had stood in range of the public eye, had been of cities, of great, spectacular movements. But here, lost in this country which had been laid waste, a girl, backed only by an aged politician and a group of laborers, carried on her fight, ridiculed, unattended, that homes might be built and cities might grow, that a forest might yield and renew itself for all time!

Taylor felt as small as he had felt before Helen when he first entered her house, a searcher for an easy road to fortune. He had come far; he had done the thing which astonished even his exacting father, but tonight that was as nothing. Sight had been given him and his emulation was roused, not by possible personal triumph but by the thought that perhaps it lay in his power to help carry on this forest, the forest which had become emblematic of all that is most worthy. It was fundamental, it stood next to the supply of food, it was a bulwark against privation and the insurance of national life itself.

He stopped at a juncture of fire lines and looked at the stars. The dipper hung above him and the northern lights, shooting their green spires far toward the zenith, moved behind the treetops, setting the staunch banners of pine in bold silhouette.

"I wanted to help because it meant profit for me," he said in a thin voice. "Profit for me—and to open the way for more profit—But, no longer—not now!"

He watched the spires of restless light creep up and upward, sweeping in from right and left, seeming to come from east and west as well as from beneath the north star until they converged above his head, forming a cone, tremulous and fading swiftly.

He clasped one hand with the other and worked at its fingers slowly.

"And Marcia?" He shook his head and one knee gave suddenly. "I can't keep my promise—unless you find happiness—with me—" He started on slowly but his pace grew rapid and within a half mile of the men's shanty he burst out:

"God, Marcia—I don't want to make you happy—any more!"