Burned Bridges Part 6

That exultant sense of physical power was quite new and rather puzzling to him. He could not understand why he enjoyed chopping logs and moving them about, and yet was p.r.o.ne to grow moody, to be full of disquieting perplexities when he sat down to think.

He had been at work for perhaps two hours. He was resting. To be explicit, he was standing on a fallen tree. Between his feet there was a notch cut half-way through the wood. In this white gash the blade of his axe was driven solidly, and he rested his hands on the rigid haft while he stood drawing gulps of forest-scented air into his lungs.

Mr. Thompson was not gifted with eyes in the back of his head. His hearing was keen enough, but the soft, turfy earth absorbed footfalls, especially when that foot was shod with a buckskin moccasin. So he did not see Sophie Carr, nor hear her until a thought that was running in his mind slipped off the end of his tongue.

"This is going to make a terrible amount of labor."

He said this aloud, in a matter-of-fact tone.

"And a terrible waste of labor," Sophie answered him.

He looked quickly over one shoulder, saw her standing there, got down off his log--blushing a little at his comparative nakedness. It seemed to him that he must appear shockingly nude, since the upper part of his body was but thinly covered by a garment that opened wide over his breast. He felt a good deal like a shy girl first appearing on the beach in an abbreviated bathing suit. But Sophie seemed unconscious of his embarra.s.sment, or the cause of it. However, Mr. Thompson picked up his coat, and felt more at ease when he had slipped it on. He sat down, still breathing heavily from his recent exertions.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Oh, well," she said--and left the sentence unfinished, save by an outward motion of her hands that might have meant anything. But she smiled, and Mr. Thompson observed that she had fine, white, even teeth.

Each time he saw her some salient personal feature seemed to claim his attention. To be sure he had seen other girls with good teeth and red lips and other physical charms perhaps as great as Sophie Carr's. But these things had never riveted his attention. There was something about this girl that quickened every fiber of his being. And even while she made him always acutely conscious of her bodily presence, he was a little bit afraid of her. He had swift, discomforting visions of her standing afar beckoning to him, and of himself unable to resist, no matter what the penalty. She stirred up things in his mind that made him blush. He was conscious of a desire to touch her hand, to kiss her. He found himself totally unable to close the gates of his mind against such thoughts when she was near him. And it was self-generated within him.

Sophie Carr was never more than impersonally pleasant to him. Sometimes she was utterly indifferent. Often she said things about his calling that made him wince.

"Tell me," Thompson said abruptly, after a momentary silence, "how it happens that the men who have been here before me left no trace of any--any--well, anything? There have been other missionaries. They had funds. They were stationed here. What did they do? I have been going to ask your father. I daresay you can tell me yourself."

The girl laughed, whether at the question or at his earnestness he could not say.

"They did nothing," she answered in an amused tone. "What could they do?

You haven't begun to realize yet what a difficult job you've tackled.

The others came here, stayed awhile, threw up their hands and went away.

Their idea of doing good seemed to consist of having a ready-made church and a ready-made congregation, and to preach nice little, ready-made religiosities on a Sunday. You can't preach anything to a people who don't understand a word you say, and who are mostly too busy with more pressing affairs to listen if they did understand. And you see for yourself there's no church."

"But what did these fellows do?" he persisted. That had been puzzling him.

"Nothing," she said scornfully "nothing but sit around and complain about the loneliness and the coa.r.s.e food and the discouraging outlook.

Then they'd finally go away--go back to where they came from, I suppose."

"The last man," Thompson ventured doubtfully. "The factor at Pachugan told me Mr. Carr a.s.saulted him. That seems rather odd to me, after what I've seen of your father. Was it so?"

"The last missionary wasn't what you'd call a good man, in any sense,"

Sophie answered frankly. "He was here most of one summer, and toward the last he showed himself up pretty badly. He developed a nasty trick of annoying little native girls. Dad thrashed him properly. Dad took it as a sort of reflection on us. Even the Indians don't approve of that sort of thing. He left in a hurry, after that."

Thompson felt his face burn.

"Things like that made a bad impression," he returned diffidently. "I suppose in all walks of life there are wolves in sheep's clothing. I hope it hasn't prejudiced you against churchmen in general."

"One single incident?" she smiled. "That wouldn't be very logical, would it? No. We're not so intolerant. I don't suppose dad would actually have gone the length of thrashing him, if the preacher hadn't taken a high and mighty tone as a sort of bluff. That particular preacher happened to be a local nuisance. I suppose in a settled, well-organized community, public opinion and convention is a check on such men. They keep within bounds because there's a heavy penalty if they don't. Up here where law and conventions and so on practically don't exist, men of a certain stamp aren't long in reverting to pure animalism. It's natural enough, I dare say. Dad would be the last one to set himself up as a critic of any one's personal morality. But it isn't very nice, especially for preachers, who come here posing as the representatives of all that is good and pure and holy."

"You get terribly sarcastic at times, Miss Carr," Thompson complained.

"A man can preach the Gospel without losing his manhood."

"If he had any clear conception of manhood I don't see how he could devote himself to preaching as a profession," she said composedly. "Of course, it's perhaps an excellent means of livelihood, but rather a parasitic means, don't you think?"

"When Christ came among men He was reviled and despised," Mr. Thompson declared impressively.

"Do you consider yourself the prototype of Christ?" the girl inquired mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity, with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking.

The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out reactionary."

"How do you know?" he challenged boldly. "According to your own account of your life so far, you have never had opportunity to find the truth or falsity of such a sweeping statement. You've always lived--" he looked about the enfolding woods--"how can one know what the world outside of Lake Athabasca is, if one has never been there?"

She laughed.

"One can't know positively," she said. "Not from personal experience.

But one can read eagerly, and one can think about what one reads, and one can draw pretty fair conclusions from history, from what wise men, real thinkers, have written about this big world one has never seen. And the official exponents of theology show up rather poorly as helpful social factors, so far as my study of sociology has gone."

"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a shrewd guess. "I wonder why?"

"I'll tell you why," the girl said--and she laughed a little self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same dispa.s.sionate plane that dad can. There's a foolish sense of personal grievance. Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago. I never have. Perhaps you'll understand if I tell you. My mother was a vain, silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity for attracting men. Dad was pa.s.sionately fond of her. When I was about three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister. After living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place, she drowned herself."

Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so intimate. She stopped a second.

"Dad was all broken up about it," she continued. "He loved my mother with all her weaknesses--and he's a man with a profound knowledge of and tolerance for human weaknesses. I daresay he would have been quite willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most for him, and had come back. But, as I said, she drowned herself. We lived in the eastern States. It simply unrooted dad. He took me and came away up here and buried himself. Incidentally he buried me too. And I don't want to be buried. I resent being buried. I hope I shall not always be a prisoner in these woods. And I grow more and more resentful against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of him. Don't you see? That one thing has colored my personal att.i.tude toward preachers as a cla.s.s. I can never meet a minister without thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see another white woman, and very seldom a man. It's really a weak spot in me, holding a grudge like that. One wouldn't condemn carpenters as a body because one carpenter botched a house. And still--"

She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed before. And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly inconsistency with the att.i.tude she had just been explaining she held toward ministers.

"One gets such silly notions," she remarked. "Just like your idea that you can come here and do good. You can't, you know--not for others--not by your method. It's absurd. One can help others most, I really believe, by helping oneself. I've noticed in reading of the phenomena of human relations that the most p.r.o.nounced idealists are frequently a sad burden to others."

Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply. It was a trifle less direct, more subtle than he liked. It opened hazily paths of speculation he had never explored because generalizations of that sort had never been propounded to him--certainly never by a young woman whose very physical presence disturbed him sadly.

And while he was turning that last sentence over uncomfortably in his mind a hail sounded across the meadow. Sophie stood up and waved the tin bucket she had in her hand. Tommy Ashe came striding toward them. He, too, carried a tin bucket.

"We're going to a blackberry patch down the creek," Sophie answered Thompson's involuntary look of inquiry. "Get a pail and come along."

"I must work," Thompson shook his head.

"Berry-picking's work, if work is what you want," she retorted. "You'd think so by the time you'd picked a hundred quarts or more and preserved them for winter use. But then I suppose _your_ winter supply will emanate from some mysterious, beneficent source, without any effort on your part. How fortunate that will be."

She tempered this sally with a laugh, and being presently joined by Tommy Ashe, set off toward the bank of Lone Moose, leaving Mr. Thompson sitting on his log, indulging in some very mixed reflections.

The task he was engaged upon seemed suddenly to have lost its savor.

Whether this arose from a depressing sense of inability to deny the truth of much that Sophie Carr had just said, or from the fact that as he sat there looking after them he found himself envying Tommy Ashe's pleasant intimacy with the girl, he could not say. Indeed, he did not inquire too closely of himself. Some of the conclusions he was latterly arriving at were so radically different from what he was accustomed to accepting that he was a little bit afraid of them.

It took him a considerable time to get back into a proper working frame of mind. The progress of his wooden edifice suffered by that much. When he went trudging home at last, sweaty and tired, with his axe over one shoulder, he was wondering frankly if, after all, it was either wise or necessary to establish a mission at Lone Moose. What good could he or any other man possibly do there? The logical and proper answer to that did not spring as readily to his lips as it would have done at the time of his appointment by the Board of Home Missions.

Along with that he was troubled by a constant recurrence of his thoughts to Sophie Carr. Nor was it a matter of wonder at her bookish knowledge, her astonishing vocabulary, her ability to think and to express her thoughts concisely. He conceded that she was a remarkable young woman in that respect. It was not her intellectual capacity which concerned him greatly, but the sunny aureole of her hair, the smiling curve of her lips, the willowy pliancy of her well-developed body. Just to think of her meant a colorful picture, a vision that filled him with uneasy restlessness, with vague dissatisfaction, with certain indefinable longings.

He was quite unable to define to himself the purport of these remarkable symptoms.

CHAPTER VII