Burned Bridges Part 21

CHAPTER XXI

THE RENEWED TRIANGLE

Even after Thompson reached Vancouver and the visible signs of a nation at war confronted him he experienced no patriotic thrill. After all, there was no great difference, on the surface, between San Francisco and Vancouver, save that Vancouver accepted as a matter of course the principle that when the mother country was at war Canada was also a belligerent and committed to support. Barring the recruiting offices draped in the Allied colors, squads of men drilling on certain public squares, successive tag days for the Red Cross, the Patriotic fund and such organizations, the war did not flaunt itself in men's faces. The first hot wave of feeling had pa.s.sed. The thing had become a grim business to be gone about in grim determination. And side by side with those unostensible preparations that kept a stream of armed men pa.s.sing quietly overseas, the normal business of a city waxed and throve in the old accustomed way. Thompson's most vivid impression was of accelerating business activity, and that was his chief concern. The other thing, which convulsed a far-off continent, was too distant to be a reality--like an earthquake in j.a.pan, a reported famine in India.

He went about his business circ.u.mspectly, without loss of time. He leased a good location, wired the factory to ship at once, began a modest advertising campaign in the local papers, and as a business coup collared--at a fat salary and liberal commission--the best salesman on the staff of the concern doing the biggest motor-car business in town.

Thompson had learned certain business lessons well. He had perceived long since that it was a cutthroat game when compet.i.tion grew keen. And this matter of the salesman was his first blood in that line. The man brought with him a list of prospects as long as his arm, and a wide acquaintance in the town, both a.s.sets of exceeding value. Altogether Thompson got off to a flying start. The arrangement whereby Henderson consigned cars to him enabled him to concentrate all his small capital on a sales campaign. He paid freight and duty. His cars he paid for when they were sold--and the discount was his profit.

When his salesroom was formally opened to the public, with five Summits on the floor and twice as many en route, when his undertaking and his car models had received the unqualified approval of a surprising number of callers, Thompson left the place to his salesman and went to see Sophie Carr.

That was a visit born of sudden impulse, a desire to talk about something besides automobiles and making money. But Sophie was out. Her father, however, made him welcome, supplementing his welcome with red wine that carried a kick. Thompson sat down before a fireplace, gla.s.s in hand, stretched his feet to the fire, and listened to his host talk.

"Considering your early handicaps you have certainly shown some speed in adapting yourself to conditions," Carr observed facetiously. "There was a time when I didn't believe you could. Which shows that even wise men err. Material factors loom bigger and bigger on your horizon, don't they? Don't let 'em obscure everything though, Thompson. That's a blunder plenty of smart men make. Well, we've progressed since Lone Moose days, haven't we--the four of us that foregathered there that last summer?"

Thompson smiled. He liked to hear Carr in a philosophic vein. And their talk ran thence for an hour. At the end of which time Sophie came home.

She walked into the room, shook hands with Thompson, flung her coat, hat, and furs across a chair, and drew another up to the crackling fire.

Outside, the long Northern twilight was deepening. Carr rose and switched on a cl.u.s.ter of lights in frosted globes. In the mellow glow he resumed his seat, and his glance came to rest upon his daughter with a curious fixity, as if he subtly divined something that troubled her.

"What is it?" he asked, after a minute of unbroken silence. "You look--"

"Out of sorts?" she interrupted. "Showing up poorly as a hostess?"

Her look included Thompson with a faint, impersonal smile, and her gaze went back to the fire. Sam Carr held his peace, toying with the long-stemmed gla.s.s in his hand.

"I went to a Belgian Relief Fund lecture in the Granada ballroom this afternoon," she said at last. "A Belgian woman--a refugee--spoke in broken English. The things she told. It was horrible. I wonder if they could be true?"

"Atrocities?" Carr questioned.

Sophie nodded.

"That's propaganda," her father declared judicially. "We're being systematically stimulated to ardent support of the war in men and money through the press and public speaking, through every available avenue that clever minds can devise. We are not a martial nation, so we have to be spurred, our emotions aroused. Of course there are atrocities. Is there an instance in history where an invading army did not commit all sorts of excesses on enemy soil?"

"I know," Sophie said absently. "But this woman's story--she wasn't one of your glib platform spouters, flag-waving and calling the Germans names. She just talked, groping now and then for the right word. And if a t.i.the of what she told is true--well, she made me wish I were a man."

One small, soft hand, outstretched over the chair-arm toward the fire, shut suddenly into a hard little fist. And for a moment Thompson felt acutely uncomfortable, without knowing why.

Carr eyed his daughter impa.s.sively. In a few seconds she went on.

"Of course I know that in any large army there is bound to be a certain percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity, of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of thing the papers have been publishing--and worse."

"Discount that, Sophie," Carr remarked calmly. "The Germans are reckoned in the civilized scale the same as ourselves. I'm not ready to d.a.m.n sixty-five million human beings outright because certain members of the group act like brutes. The chances are that a German soldier would be shot by his own command, for robbery or rape or any of these brutalities, as promptly as one of our own offenders. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of hysterical people loose among us who seem to think they can kill German soldiers by calling them bad names.

The Allies will win this war with cannon and bayonets, but up to the present we seem to think we must supplement our bullets with epithets.

Doubtless the Germans do the same at home. It's part of the game."

"Oh, I suppose so," Sophie admitted. "But what a horror this war must be for those helpless people who are caught in its sweep."

"If it affects you like that, be thankful it isn't over here," Carr said lightly. "War is all that Sherman said it was. As a matter of fact modern warfare with every scientific and chemical means of destruction at its hand can't result in anything but horror piled on horror. I look for some startling--"

The faint whirr of a buzzer and the patter of a maid's feet along the hall, checked Carr's speech. He did not resume. Instead he reached for a box of cigars, and lighted one. By that time Tommy Ashe was being ushered in.

Tommy exuded geniality from every pore of his ruddy countenance. He accepted the drink Carr rose to offer. He lifted the gla.s.s and smiled at Thompson.

"Here's to success," he toasted. "I believe," he went on between sips of wine, "that things are going to look up finely for us. I sold a truck and two touring cars this afternoon. People seem to be loosening up for some reason. You ought to get your share with the Summit, Wes. Snappy little machine, that."

"You rising business men," Carr drawled, "want to learn to leave your business at the office when you come to my house. Now, we were just discussing the war. What sort of a prophet are you, Tommy? How long will it last? Sophie was wondering if it would be over before all the eligible young men depart across the sea."

"Well," Tommy grinned cheerfully, "I'm no prophet. Not being in the confidence of the Allied command, I can't say. I'd hazard a guess, though, that there'll be plenty of good men left for Sophie to make a choice among. I can pa.s.s on another man's prophecy, though. Had a letter from one of my brothers yesterday. He was at Mons, got pinked in the leg, and is now training Territorials. He is sure the grand finale will come about midsummer next. The way he put it sounds logical. Neither side can make headway this winter. Germany has made her maximum effort.

If she couldn't beat us when she took the field equipped to the last b.u.t.ton she never can. By spring we'll be organized. France and England on the west front. The Russian steam roller on the east. The fleet maintaining the blockade. They can't stand the pressure. It isn't possible. The Hun--confound him--will blow up with a loud bang about next July. That's Ned's say-so, and these line officers are pretty conservative as a rule. War's their business, and they don't nurse illusions about it."

"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather, anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a b.u.t.ton on the wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because I'm going out."

Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that lat.i.tude when the year is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds, and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the war.

Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw through them and into vast distances beyond.

And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and laughter--and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate, that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague, unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical reason, against any emotional appeal--just as he, himself, was learning to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.

And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near her. Some day--

Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly.

"I was thinking of you," he answered truthfully.

He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that rose slowly over Sophie's face. Indeed all the high resolve that had been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the board. It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue, to break through the ice that Sophie used as a shield--for the instant he felt sure of that--and dare what fires burned beneath.

While he stood, poised as it were, upon the tip-toe of indecision, Carr and Tommy Ashe came back.

Afterward, on his way home, Thompson wondered at the swift challenging glance Tommy shot at Sophie in that moment. As if Tommy detected some tensity of feeling that he resented.

CHAPTER XXII

SUNDRY REFLECTIONS

That winter and the summer which followed, and the period which carried him into the spring of 1916, was materially a triumphal procession for Wes Thompson. Tommy's forecast of the war's ending had fallen short as so many other forecasts did. The war went on, developing its own particular horrors as it spread. But the varying tides of war, and the manifold demands of war, bestowed upon Vancouver a heaping measure of prosperity, and Vancouver, in the person of its business men, was rather too far from the sweat and blood of the struggle to be distracted by the issues of that struggle from its own immediate purposes. Business men were in business to make money. They supported the war effort. Every one could not go to the trenches. Workers were as necessary to victory as fighters. People had to be fed and clothed. The army had to be fed and clothed, transported and munitioned. And the fact that the supplying and equipping and transporting was highly profitable to those engaged in such pursuits did not detract from the essentially patriotic and necessary performance of these tasks.

The effect on Vancouver was an industrial rejuvenation. Money flowed in all sorts of channels. .h.i.therto nearly dry. A lot of it flowed to Wesley Thompson in exchange for Summit cars. Thompson was like many other men in Vancouver. He was very busy. The business stood on its feet by virtue of his direction. If he dropped it and rushed off to the war--well there was no lack of men, men who had no particular standing, men who could not subscribe to war charities, to Dominion war-bond issues. There was plenty of man-power. There was never a surplus of brain-power. Business was necessary. So a man with a live, thriving business was fighting in his own way--doing his bit to keep the wheels turning--standing stoutly behind the fellow with a bayonet. And a lot of them let it go at that. A lot of them saw no pressing need to don khaki and let everything else go to pot. A lot of them were so intent upon making the most of their opportunities that they never brought their innermost thoughts out on the table and asked themselves point-blank: "Should I go? Why shouldn't I?" And there were some who saw dimly--as the months slid by with air raids and submarine sinkings and all the new, terrible devices of death and destruction which transgressed the old usages of war--there were some who were troubled without knowing why. There were men who hated bloodshed, who hated violence, who wished to live and love and go their ways in peace, but who began uneasily to question whether these things they valued were of such high value after all.

And Wes Thompson was one of these. Deep in him his emotions were stirring. The old tribal instinct--which sent a man forth to fight for the tribe no matter the cause--was functioning under the layer of stuff that civilization imposes on every man. His reason gainsaid these stirrings, those instinctive urgings, but there was a stirring and it troubled him. He did not desire to die in a trench, nor vanish in fragments before a bursting sh.e.l.l, nor lie face to the stars in No Man's Land with a bayonet hole in his middle. He would not risk these fatalities for any such academic idea as saving the world for democracy.