Burned Bridges Part 9

"I hardly think she would," Thompson returned. "It couldn't have been the sort of spectacle a woman would care to watch."

"You never can tell about a woman," Ashe observed thoughtfully. "Nor,"

he added, "a man. I could never have imagined myself going off half-c.o.c.ked like that. I suppose the primitive brute in us is never really far from the surface. Especially in this country. There's something," he looked up at the surrounding depths of forest, down along the dusky channel of Lone Moose, curving away among the spruce, "there's something about this infernal solitude that brings out the savage. I've noticed it in little things. We're loosed, in a way, from all restraint, except what we put upon ourselves. Funny world, eh? You couldn't imagine two chaps like us mauling each other like a pair of bruisers in Mrs. Grundy's drawing-room, could you? Over a girl--oh, well, it'll be all the same a hundred years from now."

There was nothing apologetic in either Tommy's tone or words. Thompson understood. Tommy Ashe was thinking out loud, that was all. And presently, after another silent interval, he stood up.

"I think I'll be getting back to my own diggings," he said. "So long, old man."

He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard. In a minute he was gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate strokes.

Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and att.i.tude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his earlier life and the code he had a.s.similated during that formative period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not determine. It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the weight of his body behind it. Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle uncertain. His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very tender in spots to touch. He knew that he must be a sight. There was a grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his ribs, as his heated body began to cool. But he was not sorry for anything. He experienced no regrets. Only a heady feeling that for once in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.

Perhaps the sweet memory of Sophie Carr's warm lips on his had something to do with this.

At any rate he rose after a little and followed the creek bank to a point well down stream, whence he crossed through the fringe of timber to his cabin.

CHAPTER X

THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted, and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men, the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-G.o.ds in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet c.o.c.ked up on the stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it seemed to him that he was pa.s.sing a portentous milestone. To his unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon that--to him--most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of "parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has been written upon philosophy and theology.

Sophie didn't believe in his G.o.d, nor his work; he stopped short of asking if he himself any longer had full and implicit belief in these things, or if he had simply accepted them without question as he had accepted so many other things in his brief career. But she believed in _him_ and cared for him. He took that for granted too. And love covers a mult.i.tude of sins. He had often had occasion to discourse upon various sorts of love--fatherly love and brotherly love and maternal affection and so on. But this flare of pa.s.sionate tenderness focussing upon one slender bit of a girl was something he could not quite fathom. He would have contradicted with swift anger any suggestion that perhaps it was merely wise old Nature's ancient method efficiently at work for an appointed end. He had been so thoroughly grounded in the convention of decrying physical impulses, of putting everything upon a pure and spiritual plane, that in this first emotional crisis of his life he could no more help dodging first principles than a spaniel pup can help swimming when he is first tossed into deep water.

Still--he was not a fool. He knew that his concern was not for Sophie Carr's immortal soul, nor for the beauty and sweetness of her spirit, when he was near her, when he touched her hand, nor even in that supreme moment when he crushed her close to his unquiet heart and pressed that hot kiss on her lips. It was the sheer flesh and blood womanliness of her that made his heart beat faster, the sweet curve of her lips, the willowy grace of her body, the odd little gestures of her hands, the melody of her voice and the gray pools of her eyes, eyes full of queer gleams and curious twinkles--all these things were indescribably beautiful to him. He loved her--just the girl herself. He wanted her, craved her presence; not the pleasant memory of her, but the forthright physical nearness of her he desired with an intensity that was like a fever.

Just the excitement of feeling--as according to his lights he had a right to feel--that they stood pledged, made it hard for him to get down to fundamentals and consider rationally the question of marriage, of their future, of how his appointed work could be made to dovetail with the union of two such diverse personalities as himself and Sophie Carr.

A hodge podge of this sort was turning over in his mind as he sat there, now and then absently feeling the dusky puffiness under one eye and the tender spot on the bridge of his nose where Tommy Ashe's hard knuckles had peeled away the skin. He still had a most un-Christian satisfaction in the belief that he had given as good as he had got. He was not ashamed of having fought. He would fight again, any time, anywhere, for Sophie Carr. He did not ask himself whether the combative instinct once aroused might not function for lesser cause.

He came out of this reverie at the faint rustle of footsteps beyond his door--which was open because of the hot fire he had built.

He did not suspect that the source of those footsteps might be Sophie Carr until she stood unmistakably framed in the doorway. He rose to his feet with a glad cry of welcome, albeit haltingly articulated. He was suddenly reluctant to face her with the marks of conflict upon his face.

"May I come in?" she asked coolly--and suited her action to the request before he made reply.

She sat down on a box just within the door and looked soberly at him, scanning his face. Her hands lay quietly in her lap and she did not seem to see Thompson's involuntarily extended arms. There was about her none of the glowing witchery of yesterday. She lifted to him a face thoughtful, even a little sad. And Thompson's hands fell, his heart keeping them company. It was as if the somberness of those wind-swept woods had crept into his cabin. It stilled the rush of words that quivered on his lips. Sophie, indeed, found utterance first.

"I'm sorry that you and Tommy fought," she said constrainedly. "I didn't know until this morning. It was cowardly of me to run away. But it was foolish to fight. It didn't occur to me that you two would. I suppose you wonder what brought me here. I was worried for fear you had been hurt. I saw Tommy, but he wouldn't talk."

"I daresay I'm not a pretty object to look at," Thompson admitted. "But I'm really not much the worse."

"No. I can see that," she said. "Tommy is very quick and very strong--I was a little afraid."

The contrition, the hint of pity in her voice stirred up the queer personal pride he had lately acquired.

"I don't suppose Ashe has any monopoly of strength and quickness," he remarked. "That--but there, I don't want to talk about that."

He came over close beside her and looked down with all his troubled heart in his clear blue eyes--so that the girl turned her gaze away and her fingers wove nervously together.

"My dear," the unaccustomed phrase broke abruptly, with a fierce tenderness, from his lips. "I love you--which I think you know without my saying so. I want you. Will you marry me? I--"

Sophie warded off the impetuous outstretching of his arms and sprang to her feet, facing him with all the delicate color gone out of her cheeks, a sudden heave to her breast. She shook her head. "No," she said. "I won't penalize myself to that extent--nor you. I won't bind myself by any such promise. I won't even admit that I might."

He caught her by the shoulders and shook her roughly.

"Yesterday," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "you let me kiss you--your lips burned me--you rested your head against me as if it belonged there. What sort of a woman are you? Sophie! Sophie!"

"I know," she returned. "But yesterday was yesterday. This is another day. Yesterday--oh, you wouldn't understand if I told you. Yesterday I was bursting with happiness, like a bird in the spring. I like you, big man with the freckled face. You came down here and stood beside me and smiled at me. And--and that's all--a minute's madness. We can't marry on _that_. I can't. I _won't_."

His fingers tightened on the rounded arms. He shook her again with a restrained savagery. If he hurt her she did not flinch, nor did her gray eyes, cloudy now and wistful, waver before the pa.s.sionate fire in his.

"Sophie," he went on, "you don't know what this means to me. Don't you care a little?"

"Yes," she answered slowly. "Perhaps more than a little. I'm made that way, I suppose. It isn't hard for me to love. But one doesn't--"

"Then why," he demanded, "why refuse to give me a hope? Why, if you care in the least, is there no chance for me? It isn't just a sudden fancy.

I've been feeling it grow and struggling to repress it, ever since I first saw you. You say you care--yet you won't even think of marrying me. I can't understand that at all. Why?"

"Do you want to know? Can't you see good grounds why we two, of all people, should _not_ marry?" she asked evenly. "Can you see anything to make it desirable except a--a welling up of natural pa.s.sion? Don't hold my arms so tight. You hurt."

He released his unthinking grip and stepped back a pace, his expression one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie's admission and refusal.

"We're at opposite poles in everything," she went on. "I don't believe in the things you believe in. I don't see life with your vision at all.

I never shall. We'd be in a continual clash. I like you but I couldn't possibly live with you--you couldn't live with me. I rebel at the future I can see for us. Apart from yourself, the things you'd want to share with me I despise. If I had to live in an atmosphere of sermons and shams, of ministerial sanctimoniousness and material striving for a bigger church and a bigger salary, I'd suffocate--I'd hate myself--and in the end I'd hate you too."

A little note of scorn crept into her voice, and she stopped. When she spoke again her tone had changed, deepened into uncertainty, freighted with wistfulness.

"I'm not good--not in your sense of the word," she said. "I don't even want to be. It would take all the joy out of living. I want to sing and dance and be vibrantly alive. I want to see far countries and big cities, to go about among people whose outlook isn't bounded by a forest and a lake sh.o.r.e, nor by the things you set store by. And I'll be a discontented pendulum until I do.

"Why," she burst out pa.s.sionately, "I'd be the biggest little fool on earth to marry you just because--just because I like you, because you kissed me and for a minute made me feel that life could be bounded by you and kisses. You're only the second possible man I've ever seen. You and Tommy Ashe. And before you came I could easily have persuaded myself that I loved Tommy."

"Now you think perhaps you love me, but that you might perhaps care in the same way for the next attractive man who comes along? Is that it?"

Thompson asked with a touch of bitterness.

"I might _think_ so--how can one tell?" she sighed. "But I'm very sure my impulses will never plunge me into anything headlong, as you would have me plunge. Don't you see," she made an impatient gesture, "we're just like a couple of fledgling birds trying our wings. And you want to proceed on the a.s.sumption that we're equal to anything, sure of everything. I _know_ I'm not. You--"

She made again that quick, expressive gesture with her hands. Something about it made Thompson suddenly feel hopeless and forlorn, the airy castles reared overnight out of the stuff of dreams a tumbled heap about him. He sat down on one of the rude chairs, and turned his face to look out the window, a lump slowly gathering in his throat.

"All right," he said. "Good-by."