Burned Bridges Part 25

"Eh? What the devil!"

Tommy looked all the astonishment his tone expressed.

"Well, _what_ the devil?" Thompson returned tartly. "Is there anything strange about that? A good many men have gone. A good many more will have to go before this thing is settled. Why not?"

"Oh, if a man feels that he _should_," Tommy began. He seemed at a loss for words, and ended lamely: "There's plenty of cannon-fodder in the country without men of your caliber wasting themselves in the trenches.

You haven't the military training nor the pull to get a commission."

Thompson's lips opened to retort with a sentence he knew would sting like a whiplash. But he thought better of it. He would not try plucking the mote out of another man's eye, when he had so recently got clear of the beam in his own.

Tommy did not tarry long after that. He wished Thompson good luck, but he left behind him the impression that he privately considered it a poor move. Thompson was willing to concede that from a purely material standpoint it was a poor move. But he could no longer adopt the purely materialistic view. It had suddenly become clear to him that he must go--and _why_ he must go. Just as the citizen whose house gets on fire knows beyond peradventure that he must quench the flames if it lies in his power.

The Royal Flying Corps arrives at its ends slowly. Perhaps not too slowly for the niceness of choice that must be made. Presently there came to Wesley Thompson a brief order to report at a training camp in Eastern Canada.

When he held this paper in his hand and knew himself committed irrevocably to the greatest game of all, he felt a queer, inner glow, a quiet satisfaction such as must come to a man who succeeds in some high enterprise. Thompson felt this in spite of desperate facts. He had no illusions as to what he had set about. He knew very well that in the R.F.C. it was a short life and not always a merry one. Of course a man might be lucky. He might survive by superior skill. In any case it had to be done.

But he was moved likewise by a strange loneliness, and with his orders in his hand he understood at last the source of that peculiar regret which latterly had a.s.sailed him in stray moments. There were a few friends to bid good-by. And chief, if she came last on his round of calls that last day, was Sophie Carr.

He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be used on him.

He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the Flying Corps the man who lost in aerial combat needed little besides a coffin--and sometimes not even that.

Sophie looked at him almost somberly.

"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.

He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero.

But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her--if it _should_ be his last--to be a pleasant one.

And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.

"What is the matter with you--and dozens of men like you that I know?"

she demanded in a choked voice. "You stay at home living easy and getting rich in the security that other men are buying with their blood and their lives, over there. Fighting against odds and dying like dogs in a ditch so that we can live here in peace and comfort. You don't even do anything useful here. There doesn't seem to be anything that can make you work or fight. They can sink pa.s.senger ships and bomb undefended towns and sh.e.l.l hospitals, and you don't seem to resent it. I've heard you prate about service--when you thought you walked with G.o.d and had a mission from G.o.d to show other men the way. Why don't you serve now?

What is the matter with you? Is your skin so precious? If you can't fight, can't you make ammunition or help to build ships? Are you a man, or just a rabbit? I wish to G.o.d _I_ were a man."

Thompson rose to his feet. The lash of her tongue had not lost its power to sting since those far-off Lone Moose days. Yet, though it stabbed like a spear, he was more conscious of a pa.s.sionate craving to gather her into his arms than of anger and resentment. There were tears in Sophie's eyes--but there was no softness in her tone. Her red lips curled as Thompson looked at her in dazed silence. There did not seem to be anything he could say--not with Sophie looking at him like that.

"If you feel that way about it--"

He broke off in the middle of the muttered sentence, turned on his heel, walked out of the room. And he went down the street suffering from a species of shock, saying desperately to himself that it did not matter, nothing mattered.

But he knew that was a lie, a lie he told himself to keep his soul from growing sick.

He went back to his rooms for the last time, and tried with pen and paper to set down some justification of himself for Sophie's eyes. But he could not satisfy himself with that. His pride revolted against it.

Why should he plead? Or rather, what was the use of pleading? Why should he explain? He had a case for the defence, but defence avails nothing after sentence has been p.r.o.nounced. He had waited too long. He had been tried and found wanting.

He tore the letter into strips, and having sent his things to the station long before, put on his hat now and walked slowly there himself, for it lacked but an hour of train-time.

At the corner of Pender and Hastings he met Sam Carr.

"Welcome, youthful stranger," Carr greeted heartily. "I haven't seen you for a long time. Walk down to the Strand with me and have a drink. I've been looking over the Vancouver Construction Company's yard, and it's a very dry place."

Thompson a.s.sented. He had time and it was on his way. He reacted willingly to the suggestion. He needed something to revive his spirit, but he had not thought of the stimulus of John Barleycorn until Carr spoke.

In the Strand bar he poured himself half a gla.s.s of Scotch whisky. Carr regarded him meditatively over port wine.

"That's the first time I ever saw you touch the hard stuff," he observed.

"It will probably be the last," Thompson replied.

"Why?"

"I'm off," Thompson explained. "I have sold out my business and have been accepted for the Royal Flying Corps. I'm taking the train at six to report at Eastern headquarters."

Carr fingered the stem of his empty gla.s.s a second. "I hate to see you go, and still I'm glad you're going," he said with an odd, wistful note in his voice. "I'd go too, Thompson, if I weren't too old to be any use over there."

"Eh?" Thompson looked at him keenly. "Have you been revising your philosophy of life?"

"No. Merely bringing it up to date," Carr replied soberly. "We have what we have in the way of government, economic practice, principles of justice, morality--so forth and so on. I'm opposed to a lot of it. Too much that's obsolete. A lot that's downright bad. But bad as it is in spots, it is not a circ.u.mstance to what we should have to endure if the Germans win this war. I believe in my people and my country. I don't believe in the German system of dominating by sheer force and planned terror. The militarists and the market hunters have brought us to this.

But we have to destroy the bogey they have raised before we can deal with them. And a man can't escape nationalism. It's bred in us. What the tribe thinks, the individual thinks. This thing is in the air. We are getting unanimous. Whether or not we approve the cause, we are too proud to consider getting whipped in a war that was forced on us. One way and another, no matter what we privately think of our politicians and industrial barons and our inst.i.tutions generally, it is becoming unthinkable to the Anglo-Saxon that the German shall stalk rough-shod over us. We are beginning--we common people--to hate him and his works.

Look at you and me. We were aloof at first. We are intelligent. We have learned to saddle feeling with logic. We have not been stampeded by military bands and oratory. Yet there is something in the air. I wish I could fight. You are going to fight. Not because you like fighting, but because you see something to fight for. And before long those who cannot see will be very few. Isn't that about right?"

"I think so," Thompson replied.

"There you are," Carr went on. "Myself, I have put philosophic consideration in abeyance for the time. I've got primitive again. d.a.m.n the Central Powers! If I had seven sons I'd send them all to the front."

They had another drink.

"Did you go and say good-by to Sophie?" Carr demanded suddenly.

"I saw her, but I don't think I said good-by," Thompson said absently.

He was thinking about Carr's surprising outburst. He agreed precisely with what the old man said. But he had not suspected the old radical of such intensity. "I didn't tell her I was going."

"You didn't tell her," Carr persisted. "Why not?"

"For a variety of reasons." He found it hard to a.s.sume lightness with those shrewd old eyes searchingly upon him. "You can tell her good-by for me. Well, let's have a last one. It'll be a good many moons before you and I look over a gla.s.s at each other again. If I don't come back I'll be in honorable company. And I'll give them h.e.l.l while I last."

Carr walked with him down to the train.

"When the war broke out," he said to Thompson at the coach steps, "if you had proposed to go I should privately have considered you a d.a.m.ned idealistic fool. Now I envy you. You will never have to make apologies to yourself for yourself, nor to your fellows. If I strike a blow that a free people may remain free to work out their destiny in their own fashion, I must do it by proxy. I wish you all the luck there is, Wes Thompson. I hope you come back safe to us again."

They shook hands. A voice warned all and sundry that the train was about to leave, and over the voice rose the strident notes of a gong. Thompson climbed the steps, pa.s.sed within, thrust his head through an open window as the Imperial Limited gathered way. His last glimpse of a familiar face was of Carr standing bareheaded, looking wistfully after the gliding coaches.

The grandfather clock in the hall was striking nine when Sam Carr came home. He hung his hat on the hall-tree and pa.s.sed with rather unsteady steps into the living room. He moved circ.u.mspectly, with the peculiar caution of the man who knows that he is intoxicated and governs his movements accordingly. Carr's legs were very drunk and he was aware of this, but his head was perfectly clear. He managed to negotiate pa.s.sage to a seat near his daughter.

Sophie was sitting in a big chair, engulfed therein, one might say. A reading lamp stood on the table at her elbow. A book lay in her lap. But she was staring at the wall absently, and beyond a casual glance at her father she neither moved nor spoke, nor gave any sign of being stirred out of this profound abstraction.