Burned Bridges Part 27

At this p.r.o.nunciamento of Aunt Lavina's a swift glance pa.s.sed between the two old women. Thompson caught it, measured the doubt and uneasiness of the mutual look, and was puzzled thereby.

But he did not fathom its source for a day or two, and only then by a process of deduction. They treated him handsomely, they demonstrated an affection which moved him deeply because he had never suspected its existence. (They had always been so precise, almost harsh with him as a youngster.) But their living was intolerably meager. Disguise it with every artifice, a paucity of resource--or plain n.i.g.g.ardliness--betrayed itself at every meal. Thompson discarded the theory of n.i.g.g.ardliness.

And proceeding thence on the first conclusion stood his two aunts in a corner--figuratively, of course--and wrung from them a statement of their financial status.

They were proud and reluctant. But Thompson had not moved among and dealt with men of the world to be baffled by two old women, so presently he was in possession of certain facts.

They had not been able to support themselves, to rear and educate him, on their income alone, and gradually their small capital had been consumed. They were about to negotiate the sale of their home, the proceeds of which would keep them from want--if they did not live too long. They tried to make light of it, but Thompson grasped the tragedy.

They had been born in that brick cottage with the silver birch before the door.

"Well," he said at length, "I don't want to preempt the Lord's prerogative of providing. But I can't permit this state of affairs. I wish you had taken me into your confidence, aunties, when I was a youngster. However, that doesn't matter now. Can you live comfortably on eleven hundred dollars a year?"

Aunt Harriet held up her hands.

"My dear boy," she said, "such a sum would give us luxuries, us two old women. But that is out of the question. If we get five thousand for the place we shall have to live on a great deal less than that."

"Forget that nonsense about selling this place," Thompson said roughly.

That grated on him. He felt a sense of guilt, of responsibility too long neglected. "Where I'm going I shall be supplied by the government with all I need. I've made some money. I own war-bonds sufficient to give you eleven hundred a year in interest. I'll turn them over to you. If I come back with a whole skin when the war's over, I'll be able to use the capital in a way to provide for all of us. If I don't come back, you'll be secure against want as long as you live."

He made good his word before his leave was up. He had very nearly lost faith in the value of money, of any material thing. He had struggled for money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and helpless.

He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he would have sold his soul to feel _her_ arms around his neck and her lips on his before he went.

"Oh, well," he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the sh.o.r.e,"

this is likely to be the finish of _that_. I think I've burned my last bridge. And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes so or not."

CHAPTER XXVII

THOMPSON'S RETURN

"Anon we return, being gathered again Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."

On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.

Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the train below.

It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious, facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, ga.s.sed and shrapnel-scarred--and some who bore no visible sign only the white face and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of the flesh, as many a man can testify.

From one coach there alighted a youngish man in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps. He carried a black bag. He walked a little stiffly. Beyond that he bore no outward trace of disablement. His step and manner suggested no weakness. One had to look close to discern pallor and a peculiar roving habit of the eyes, a queer tensity of the body. A neurologist, versed in the by-products of war, could have made a fair guess at this man's medical-history sheet. But the folk on the platform that night were not specialists in subtle diagnosis of the nervous system. Nor were the committees. They were male and female of those who had done their bit at home, were doing it now, welcoming their broken heroes. The sight of a man with a scarred face, a mutilated limb, elicited their superficial sympathy, while the hidden sickness of racked nerves in an unmaimed body they simply could not grasp.

So this man with the black bag and the wings on his left arm walked the length of the platform, gained the steel stairway which led to the main floor of the depot, and when he had climbed half-way stopped to rest and to look down over the rail.

Below, the ma.s.s of humanity was gravitating into little groups here and there about a khaki center. There was laughter, and shrill voices, with an occasional hysterical note. There were men surrounded by women and children, and there were others by twos and threes and singly who looked enviously at these little groups of the reunited, men who moved haltingly on their way to the city above, perfunctorily greeted, perfunctorily handshaken, and perfunctorily smiled upon by the official welcomers.

He looked at this awhile, with a speculative, pitying air, and continued his climb, pa.s.sing at last through great doors into a waiting-room, a place of high, vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, beautiful tiled floors.

He evaded welcoming matrons on the watch for unattached officers, to hale them into an anteroom reserved for such, to feed them sandwiches and doubtful coffee, and to elicit tales of their part in the grim business overseas. This man avoided the cordial clutches of the socially elect by the simple expedient of saying that his people expected him. He uttered this polite fiction in self-defense. He did not want to talk or be fed. He was sick of noise, weary of voices, irritated by raucous sounds. All he desired was a quiet place away from the confusion of which he had been a part for many days, to get speedily beyond range of the medley of voices and people that reminded him of nothing so much as a great flock of seagulls swooping and crying over a school of herring.

He pa.s.sed on to the outer door which gave on the street where taxi drivers and hotel runners bawled their wares, and here in the entrance met the first face he knew. A man about his own age, somewhat shorter, a great deal thicker through the waist, impeccably dressed, shouldered his way through a group at the exit.

Their eyes met. Into the faces of both leaped instant recognition. The soldier pressed forward eagerly. The other stood his ground. There was a look which approached unbelief on his round, rather florid features. But he grasped the extended hand readily enough.

"By jove, it _is_ you, Wes," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. So you're back alive, eh? You were reported killed, you know. Shot down behind the German lines. You made quite a record, didn't you? How's everything over there?"

There was a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe's tone, a something that was neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could immediately cla.s.sify. But it was there, a something Tommy tried to suppress and still failed to suppress. His words were hearty, but his manner was not. And this he confirmed by his actions. Thompson said that things over there were going well, and let it go at that. He was more vitally concerned just then with over here. But before he could fairly ask a question Tommy seized his hand and wrung it in farewell.

"Pardon my rush, old man," he said. "I've got an appointment I can't afford to pa.s.s up, and I'm late already. Look me up to-morrow, will you?"

Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others. In Thompson those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives. He had quickened at sight of Tommy's familiar face, albeit that face was a trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to behold it. He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time. But Tommy had not been glad to see him. Thompson felt that under the outward cordiality.

He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily ma.s.sive against the paler sky.

He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm light of shipping in the stream. He could smell the sea, the brown kelp bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide. And he fancied that even at that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the mountain flank.

"By G.o.d," he whispered. "It's good to be back."

He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer. All this that he saw now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to see it again. For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive where so many others had perished. It was just a whimsey of Fate. And he was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.

Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had left him very tired. Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved insistently. Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his clothes and went to bed.

In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.

But when he went out into Vancouver's highways and met people, his uniform gave them a conversational cue. And he found that here, six thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic. He did not want to talk about fighting and killing. He had lived those things and that was enough. So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.

He had learned casually that morning that Tommy's company had more than made good Tommy's prophecy of swift work. Tommy Ashe and Joe Hedley were rising young men.

"Oh, yes, they've got a mint," a broker he knew said to Thompson, with an unconcealed note of envy. "By gad, it's a marvel how a pair of young cubs like that can start on a shoestring and make half a million apiece in two years."

"How did they both manage to escape the draft?" Thompson asked. "I'm sure Ashe is a Cla.s.s A man."

"Huh!" the broker snorted. "Necessary government undertakings.

Necessary h.e.l.l! All they had to do with the shipbuilding was to bank their rake-off. I tell you, Thompson, this country has supported the war in great style--but there's been a lot of raw stuff in places where you wouldn't suspect it. I'm not knocking, y' understand. This is no time to knock. But when the war's over, we've got to do some house-cleaning."

Thompson called the shipyard first. In the glow of a sunny September morning he felt that he must have imagined Tommy's att.i.tude. He was a fair-minded man, and he gave Tommy the benefit of the doubt.

But he failed to get in touch with Tommy. A voice informed him politely that Mr. Ashe had left town that morning and would be gone several days.

Thompson hung up the receiver. For at least five minutes he sat debating with himself. Then he took it down again.

"Give me Seymour 365L," he said to Central.

"h.e.l.lo."

"Is Mr. Carr at home?"

"You have the wrong number," he was answered, and he heard the connection break.