Poor Man's Rock Part 27

Late in March Jack MacRae came down to Vancouver and quartered himself at the Granada again. He liked the quiet luxury of that great hostelry.

It was a trifle expensive, but he was not inclined to worry about expense. At home, or aboard his carriers in the season, living was a negligible item. He found a good deal of pleasure in swinging from one extreme to the other. Besides, a man stalking big game does not arm himself with a broomstick.

He had not come to town solely for his pleasure, although he was not disposed to shy from any diversion that offered. He had business in hand, business of prime importance since it involved spending a little matter of twelve thousand dollars. In brief, he had to replace the _Blackbird_, and he was replacing her with a carrier of double the capacity, of greater speed, equipped with special features of his own choosing. The new boat was designed to carry ten thousand salmon. There was installed in her holds an ammonia refrigerating plant which would free him from the labor and expense and uncertainty of crushed ice.

Science bent to the service of money-making. MacRae grinned to himself when he surveyed the coiled pipes, the pumping engine. His new boat was a floating, self-contained cold-storage plant. He could maintain a freezing temperature so long as he wished by chemico-mechanical means.

That meant a full load every trip, since he could follow the trollers till he got a load, if it took a week, and his salmon would still be fresh.

He wondered why this had not been done before. Stubby enlightened him.

"Partly because it's a costly rig to install. But mostly because salmon and ice have always been both cheap and plentiful, and people have got into a habit of doing things in the same old way. You know. Until the last season or two salmon have been so cheap that neither canneries nor buyers bothered about anything so up-to-date. If they lost their ice in hot weather and the fish rotted--why, there were plenty more fish. There have been times when the Fraser River stunk with rotten salmon. They used to pay the fishermen ten cents apiece for six-pound sockeyes and limit them to two hundred fish to the boat if there was a big run. The gill-netter would take five hundred in one drift, come in to the cannery loaded to the guards, find himself up against a limit. He would sell the two hundred and dump more than that overboard. And the Fraser River canneries wonder why sockeye is getting scarce. My father used to rave about the waste. Criminal, he used to say."

"When the fishermen were getting only ten cents apiece for sockeyes, salmon was selling at fifteen cents a pound tin," MacRae observed.

"Oh, the canneries made barrels of money." Stubby shrugged his shoulders. "They thought the salmon would always run in millions, no matter how many they destroyed. Some of 'em think so yet."

"We're a nation of wasters, compared to Europe," MacRae said thoughtfully. "The only thing they are prodigal with over there is human flesh and blood. That is cheap and plentiful. But they take care of their natural resources. We destroy as much as we use, fish, timber--everything. Everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost."

"Well, I don't know what _we_ can do about it," Stubby drawled.

"Keep from being the hindmost," MacRae answered. "But I sometimes feel sorry for those who are."

"Man," Stubby observed, "is a predatory animal. You can't make anything else of him. n.o.body develops philanthropy and the public spirit until he gets rich and respectable. Social service is nothing but a theory yet.

G.o.d only helps those who help themselves."

"How does he arrange it for those who _can't_ help themselves?" MacRae inquired.

Stubby shrugged his shoulders.

"Search me," he said.

"Do you even believe in this anthropomorphic G.o.d of the preachers?"

MacRae asked curiously.

"Well, there must be something, don't you think?" Stubby hedged.

"There may be," MacRae pursued the thought. "I read a book by Wells not long ago in which he speaks of G.o.d as the Great Experimenter. If there is an all-powerful Deity, it strikes me that in his att.i.tude toward humanity he is a good deal like a referee at a football game who would say to the teams, 'Here is the ball and the field and the two goals. Go to it,' and then goes off to the side lines to smoke his pipe while the players foul and gouge and trip and generally run amuck in a frenzied effort to win the game."

"You're a pessimist," Stubby declared.

"What is a pessimist?" MacRae demanded.

But Stubby changed the subject. He was not concerned with abstractions.

And he was vitally concerned with the material factors of his everyday life, believing that he was able to dominate those material factors and bend them to his will if only he were clever enough and energetic enough.

Stubby wanted to get in on the blueback salmon run again. He had put a big pack through Crow Harbor and got a big price for the pack. In a period of mounting prices canned salmon was still ascending. Food in any imperishable, easily transported form was sure of a market in Europe.

There was a promise of even bigger returns for Pacific salmon packers in the approaching season. But Stubby was not sure enough yet of where he stood to make any definite arrangement with MacRae. He wanted to talk things over, to feel his way.

There were changes in the air. For months the industrial pot had been spasmodically boiling over in strikes, lockouts, boycotts, charges of profiteering, loud and persistent complaints from consumers, organized labor and rapidly organizing returned soldiers. Among other things the salmon packers' monopoly and the large profits derived therefrom had not escaped attention.

From her eight millions of population during those years of war effort Canada had withdrawn over six hundred thousand able-bodied men. Yet the wheels of industry turned apace. She had supplied munitions, food for armies, s.h.i.+ps, yet her people had been fed and clothed and housed,--all their needs had been liberally supplied.

And in a year these men had come back. Not all. There were close on to two hundred thousand to be checked off the lists. There was the lesser army of the slightly and totally disabled, the partially digested food of the war machine. But there were still a quarter of a million men to be reabsorbed into a civil and industrial life which had managed to function tolerably well without them.

These men, for the most part, had somehow conceived the idea that they were coming back to a better world, a world purged of dross by the b.l.o.o.d.y sweat of the war. And they found it pretty much the same old world. They had been uprooted. They found it a little difficult to take root again. They found living costly, good jobs not so plentiful, masters as exacting as they had been before. The Golden Rule was no more a common practice than it had ever been. Yet the country was rich, bursting with money. Big business throve, even while it howled to high heaven about ruinous, confiscatory taxation.

The common man himself lifted up his voice in protest and backed his protest with such action as he could take. Besides the parent body of the Great War Veterans' a.s.sociation other kindred groups of men who had fought on both sea and land sprang into being. The labor organizations were strengthened in their campaign for shorter hours and longer pay by thousands of their own members returned, all semi-articulate, all more or less belligerent. The war had made fighters of them. War does not teach men sweet reasonableness. They said to themselves and to each other that they had fought the greatest war in the world's history and were worse off than they were before. From coast to coast society was infiltrated with men who wore a small bronze b.u.t.ton in the left lapel of their coats, men who had acquired a new sense of their relation to society, men who asked embarra.s.sing questions in public meetings, in clubs, in legislative a.s.semblies, in Parliament, and who demanded answers to the questions.

British Columbia was no exception. The British Columbia coast fishermen did not escape the influence of this general unrest, this critical inquiry. Wealthy, respectable, middle-aged citizens viewed with alarm and denounced pernicious agitation. The common man retorted with the epithet of "d.a.m.ned profiteer" and worse. Army scandals were aired.

Ancient political graft was exhumed. Strident voices arose in the wilderness of contention crying for a fresh deal, a clean-up, a new dispensation.

When MacRae first began to run bluebacks there were a few returned soldiers fis.h.i.+ng salmon, men like the Ferrara boys who had been fishermen before they were soldiers, who returned to their old calling when they put off the uniform. Later, through the season, he came across other men, frankly neophytes, trying their hand at a vocation which at least held the lure of freedom from a weekly pay check and a boss. These men were not slow to comprehend the cannery grip on the salmon grounds and the salmon fishermen. They chafed against the restrictions which, they said, put them at the canneries' mercy. They growled about the swarms of j.a.panese who could get privileges denied a white man because the j.a.ps catered to the packers. They swelled with their voices the feeble chorus that white fishermen had raised long before the war.

All of this, like wavering gusts, before the storm, was informing the sentient ears of politicians who governed by grace of electoral votes.

Soldiers, who had been citizens before they became soldiers, who were frankly critical of both business and government, won in by-elections.

In the British Columbia legislature there was a major from an Island district and a lieutenant from North Vancouver. They were exponents of a new deal, enemies of the profiteer and the professional politician, and they were thorns in the side of a provincial government which yearned over vested rights as a mother over her ailing babe. In the Dominion capital it was much the same as elsewhere,--a government which had grasped office on a win-the-war platform found its grasp wavering over the knotty problems of peace.

The British Columbia salmon fisheries were controlled by the Dominion, through a department political in its scope. Whether the Macedonian cry penetrated through bureaucratic swaddlings, whether the fact that fishermen had votes and might use them with scant respect for personages to whom votes were a prerequisite to political power, may remain a riddle. But about the time Jack MacRae's new carrier was ready to take the water, there came a shuffle in the fishery regulations which fell like a bomb in the packers' camp.

The ancient cannery monopoly of purse-seining rights on given territory was broken into fine large fragments. The rules which permitted none but a cannery owner to hold a purse-seine license and denied all other men that privilege were changed. The new regulations provided that any male citizen of British birth or naturalization could fish if he paid the license fee. The cannery men shouted black ruin,--but they girded up their loins to get fish.

MacRae was still in Vancouver when this change of policy was announced.

He heard the roaring of the cannery lions. Their spokesmen filled the correspondence columns of the daily papers with their views. MacRae had not believed such changes imminent or even possible. But taking them as an accomplished fact, he foresaw strange developments in the salmon industry. Until now the packers could always be depended upon to stand shoulder to shoulder against the fishermen and the consumer, to dragoon one another into the line of a general policy. The American buyers, questing adventurously from over the line, had alone saved the individual fisherman from eating humbly out of the British Columbia canner's hand.

The fishermen had made a living, such as it was. The cannery men had dwelt in peace and amity with one another. They had their own loosely knit organization, held together by the ties of financial interest. They sat behind mahogany desks and set the price of salmon to the fishermen and very largely the price of canned fish to the consumer, and their most arduous labor had been to tot up the comfortable balance after each season's operations. All this pleasantness was to be done away with, they mourned. Every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry was to be turned loose on the salmon with deadly gear and greedy intent to exterminate a valuable species of fish and wipe out a thriving industry. The salmon would all be killed off, so did the packers cry. What few small voices arose, suggesting that the deadly purse seine had never been considered deadly when only canneries had been permitted to use such gear and that _they_ had not worried about the extermination of the salmon so long as they did the exterminating themselves and found it highly profitable,--these few voices, alas, arose only in minor strains and were for the most part drowned by the anvil chorus of the cannery men.

MacRae observed, listened, read the papers, and prophesied to himself a scramble. But he did not see where it touched him,--not until Robbin-Steele Senior asked him to come to his office in the Bond Building one afternoon.

MacRae faced the man over a broad table in an office more like the library of a well-appointed home than a place of calculated profit-mongering. Robbin-Steele, Senior, was tall, thin, sixty years of age, sandy-haired, with a high, arched nose. His eyes, MacRae thought, were disagreeably like the eyes of a dead fish, l.u.s.terless and sunken; a cold man with a suave manner seeking his own advantage. Robbin-Steele was a Scotchman of tolerably good family who had come to British Columbia with an inherited fortune and made that fortune grow to vast proportions in the salmon trade. He had two pretty and clever daughters, and three of his sons had been notable fighters overseas. MacRae knew them all, liked them well enough. But he had never come much in contact with the head of the family. What he had seen of Robbin-Steele, Senior, gave him the impression of cold, calculating power.

"I wonder," MacRae heard him saying after a brief exchange of courtesies, "if we could make an arrangement with you to deliver all the salmon you can get this season to our Fraser River plant."

"Possibly," MacRae replied. "But there is no certainty that I will get any great number of salmon."

"If you were as uncertain as that," Robbin-Steele said dryly, "you would scarcely be putting several thousand dollars into an elaborately equipped carrier. We may presume that you intend to get the salmon--as you did last year."

"You seem to know a great deal about my business," MacRae observed.

"It is our policy to know, in a general way, what goes on in the salmon industry," Robbin-Steele a.s.sented.

MacRae waited for him to continue.

"You have a good deal of both energy and ability," Robbin-Steele went on. "It is obvious that you have pretty well got control of the blueback situation around Squitty Island. You must, however, have an outlet for your fish. We can use these salmon to advantage. On what basis will you deliver them to us on the Fraser if we give you a contract guaranteeing to accept all you can deliver?"

"Twenty per cent, over Folly Bay prices," MacRae answered promptly.

The cannery man shook his head.

"No. We can't afford to boost the cost of salmon like that. It'll ruin the business, which is in a bad enough way as it is. The more you pay a fisherman, the more he wants. We must keep prices down. That is to your interest, too."

"No," MacRae disagreed. "I think it is to my interest to pay the fishermen top prices, so long as I make a profit on the deal. I don't want the earth--only a moderate share of it."