Late that evening Thompson walked into his room at the Globe. He seated himself in a rickety chair under a fly-specked incandescent lamp, beside a bed that was clean and comfortable if neither stylish nor massive. Over against the opposite wall stood a dresser which had suffered at the hands of many lodgers. Altogether it was a cheap and cheerless abode, a place where a man was protected from the weather, where he could lie down and sleep. That was all.
Thompson smiled sardonically. With hands clasped behind his head he surveyed the room deliberately, and the survey failed to please him.
"Hell," he exploded suddenly. "I'd ten times rather be out in the woods with a tent than have to live like this—always."
He had spent a pleasant three hours in surroundings that approximated luxury. He had been graciously received and entertained. However, it was easy to be gracious and entertaining when one had the proper setting. A seven-room suite and two servants were highly desirable from certain angles. Oh, well—what the devil was the difference!
Thompson threw off his clothes and got into bed. But he could not escape insistent thought. Against his dull walls, on which the street light cast queer patterns through an open window, he could see, through drowsy eyes, Sophie half-buried in a great chair, listening attentively while he and her father talked. Of course they had fallen into argument, sometimes triangular, more often solely confined to himself and Carr. Thompson was glad that the Grant Street orators had driven him to the city library that winter. A man needed all the weapons he could command against that sharp-tongued old student who precipitated himself joyfully into controversy.
But of course they did not spend three hours discussing abstract theories. There was a good deal of the personal. Thompson had learned that they were in San Francisco for the winter only. Their home was in Vancouver. And Tommy Ashe was still in Vancouver, graduated from an automobile salesman to an agency of his own, and doing well in the venture. Tommy, Carr said, had the modern business instinct. He did not specify what that meant. Carr did not dwell much on Tommy. He appeared to be much more interested in Thompson's wanderings, his experiences, the shifts he had been put to, how the world impressed him, viewed from the angle of the ordinary man instead of the ministerial.
"If you wish to achieve success as modern society defines success, you've been going at it all wrong," he remarked sagely. "The big rewards do not lie in producing and creating, but in handling the results of creation and production—at least so it seems to me. Get hold of something the public wants, Thompson, and sell it to them. Or evolve a sure method of making big business bigger. They'll fall on your neck and fill your pockets with money if you can do that. Profitable undertakings—that's the ticket. Anybody can work at a job."
That sounded rather cynical and Thompson said so. Carr laughed genially. One couldn't escape obvious conclusions, he declared. Perhaps youth and enthusiasm saw it differently.
Thompson, through sleep-heavy eyes, saw Carr hold a glass of port wine, glowing like a ruby, up between himself and the light and sip it slowly. Carr was partial to that wine. Wonder if the old chap didn't get properly lit up sometimes? He looked as if—well, as if he enjoyed easy living—easy drinking. There was brandy and soda and a bottle of Scotch on the sideboard too.—And Sophiewasbeautiful. All the little feminine artifices of civilization accentuated the charm that had been potent enough in the woods. Silk instead of gingham. Dainty shoes instead of buckskin moccasins.—What an Aladdin's lamp money was, anyway. Funny that they had settled upon Vancouver for a home. Tommy was there too. Of course. Should a fellow stick to his hunch? Vancouver might give birth to an opportunity. Profitable undertakings.—At any rate he would see her now and then. But would he—working? Did he want to? Would a cat continue to stare at a king if the king's crown rather dazzled the cat's eyes? Suppose—just suppose—
Thompson sat up in bed with a start. It seemed to him that he had just lain down, that the train of his thought was still racing. But it was broad day, a dull morning, gloomy with that high fog which in spring often rides over the city and the bay till near noon.
He stretched his arms, yawning. All at once he recollected that he had something to do, a call to make upon Mr. John P. Henderson at ten o'clock. Groya Motors—he wondered what significance that held. At any rate he proposed to see.
It lacked just forty minutes of the appointed time. Thompson bounced out of bed. Within twenty minutes he had swallowed a cup of coffee at a near-by lunch counter and was on his way up Van Ness.
The corner of Van Ness and Potter revealed a six-story concrete building, its plate-glass frontage upon the sidewalk displaying three or four beautifully finished automobiles upon a polished oak floor. The sign across the front bore the heraldry of the card. He walked in, accosted the first man he saw, and was waved to a flight of stairs reaching a mezzanine floor. Gaining that he discovered in a short corridor a door bearing upon its name-plate the legend:
Mr. John P. Henderson.
Private.
Thompson looked at his watch. It lacked but two minutes of ten. He knocked, and a voice bade him enter. He found himself face to face with the master of the gray car. Mr. John P. Henderson looked more imposing behind a mahogany desk than he did on the street. He had a heavy jaw and a forehead-crinkling way of looking at a man. And—although Thompson knew nothing of the fact and at the moment would not have cared a whoop—John P. was just about the biggest toad in San Francisco's automobile puddle. He had started in business on little but his nerve and made himself a fortune. It was being whispered along the Row that John P. was organizing to manufacture cars as well as sell them—and that was a long look ahead for the Pacific coast.
He nodded to Thompson, bade him be seated. And Thompson sank into a chair, facing John P. across the desk. He wanted nothing, expected nothing. He was simply smitten with a human curiosity to know what this stout, successful man of affairs had to propose to him.
"My name is Thompson," he stated cheerfully. "It is ten o'clock. I have called—as you suggested."
Henderson smiled.
"I have been accused of hastiness in my judgment of men, but it is admitted that I seldom make mistakes," he said complacently. "In this organization there is always a place for able, aggressive young men. Some men have ability without any force. Some men are aggressive with no ability whatever. How about you? Think you could sell motor-cars?"
"How the deuce do I know?" Thompson replied frankly. "I have never tried. I'm handicapped to begin. I know nothing about either cars or salesmanship."
"Would you like to try?"
Thompson considered a minute.
"Yes," he declared. "I've tried several things. I'm willing to try anything once. Only I do not see how I can qualify."
"We'll see about that," John P.'s eyes kept boring into him. "D'ye mind a personal question or two?"
Thompson shook his head.
He did not quite know how it came about, but he passed under Henderson's deft touch from reply to narration, and within twenty minutes had sketched briefly his whole career.
Henderson sat tapping the blotter on his desk with a pencil for a silent minute.
"You have nothing to unlearn," he announced abruptly. "All big commercial organizations must to a certain extent train their own men. A man who appears to possess fundamental qualifications is worth his training. I have done it repeatedly. I am going to proceed on the assumption that you will become a useful member of my staff, ultimately with much profit to yourself. I propose that you apply yourself diligently to mastering the sale of motor cars to individual purchasers. I shall pay you twenty-five dollars a week to begin. That's a mechanic's wages. If you make good on sales—there's no limit to your earning power."
"But, look here," Thompson made honest objection. "I appreciate the opportunity. At the same time I wonder if you realize what a lot I have to learn. I don't know a thing about cars beyond how to change a tire and fill grease cups. I've never driven, never even started a motor. How can I sell cars unless I know cars?"
"You overestimate your handicap," John P. smiled. "Knowing how to build and repair cars and knowing how to sell cars are two entirely different propositions. The first requires a high degree of technical knowledge and a lot of practical experience. Selling is a matter of personality—of the power to convince. You can learn to drive in two or three days. In a month you will handle a machine as well as the other fellow, and you will learn enough about the principal parts and their functions—not only of our line, but of other standard machines—to enable you to discuss and compare them intelligently. The rest will depend upon a quality within yourself that has nothing to do with the mechanical end."
"You should know." Thompson could not help a shade of doubt in his tone. "But I must say I could approach a man with a proposition to sell him an article with more confidence if I knew that article inside and out, top and bottom. If I really knew a thing was good, andwhy, I could sell it, I believe."
"He has the right hunch, Dad."
Thompson had not heard young Henderson come in. He saw him now a step behind his chair, garbed in overalls that bore every sign of intimate contact with machinery.
He nodded to Thompson and continued to address his father.
"It's true. Take two men of equal selling force. On the year's business the one who can drive mechanical superiority home because he knows wherein it lies will show the biggest sales, and the most satisfied customers. I believe six months' shop work would just about double the efficiency of half our sales staff."
John P. gazed good-naturedly at his son.
"I know, Fred," he drawled. "I've heard those sentiments before. There's some truth in it, of course. But Simons and Sam Eppel and Monk White are products ofmymethod. You cannot deny their efficiency in sales. What's the idea, anyway?"
Young Henderson grinned.
"The fact is," he said, "since I listened in on this conversation I have come to the conclusion that you've good material here. I need a helper. He'll get a thorough grounding. Whenever you and he decide that he has absorbed sufficient mechanics he can join the sales end. I'd like to train one man for you, properly."
"Well," John P. remarked judicially, "I can't waste the whole morning discussing methods of training salesmen in the way they should go. I've made Mr. Thompson a proposition. What do you say?"
He turned abruptly on Thompson.
"Or," young Henderson cut in. "You have the counter proposition of an indefinite mechanical grind in my department—which is largely experimental. If you take to it at all I guarantee that in six months you will know more about the internal combustion motor and automobile design in general than any two salesmen on my father's staff. And that," he added, with a boyish grimace at his father, "is saying a lot."
It seemed to Thompson that both men regarded him with a considerable expectancy. It perplexed him, that embarrassment of opportunity. He was a little dazed at the double chance. Here was Opportunity clutching him by the coat collar. He had nothing but impulse, and perhaps a natural craving for positive knowledge, to guide his choice. He wasted few seconds, however, in deciding. Among other things, he had outgrown vacillation.
"It is just as I said," he addressed Henderson senior. "I'd feel more competent to sell cars if I knew them. I'd rather start in the shop."
"All right," Henderson grunted. "You're the doctor. Be giving Fred a chance to prove one of his theories. Personally I believe you'd make a go of selling right off the bat, and a good salesman is wasted in the mechanical line. When you feel that you've saturated your system with valve clearances and compression formulas and gear ratios and all the rest of the shop dope, come and see me. I'll give you a try-out on the selling end. For the present, report to Fred."
He reached for some papers on the desk. His manner, no less than his words, ended the interview. Thompson rose.
"When can you start in?" young Henderson inquired.
"Any time," Thompson responded quickly. He was, in truth, a trifle eager to see what made the wheels go round in that establishment. "I only have to change my clothes."
"Come after lunch then," young Henderson suggested. "Take the elevator to the top floor. Ask one of the men where you'll find me. Bring your overalls with you. We have a dressing room and lockers on each floor."
He nodded good-by and turned to his father. Thompson made his exit.
Half a block away he turned to look back at the house of Henderson. It was massive, imposing, the visible sign of a prosperous concern, the manifestation of business on a big scale. Groya Motors, Inc. It was lettered in neat gilt across the front. It stood forth in four-foot skeleton characters atop of the flat roof—an electric sign to burn like a beacon by night. And he was about to become a part of that establishment, a humble beginner, true, but a beginner with uncommon prospects. He wondered if Henderson senior was right, if there resided in him that elusive essence which leads some men to success in dealings with other men. He was not sure about it himself. Still, the matter was untried. Henderson might be right.
But it was all a fluke. It seemed to him he was getting an entirely disproportionate reward for mauling an insolent chauffeur. That moved him to wonder what became of Pebbles. He felt sorry for Pebbles. The man had probably lost his job for good measure. Poor devil!
As he walked his thought short-circuited to Sophie Carr. Whereat he turned into a drugstore containing a telephone booth and rang her up.
Sophie herself answered.
"I guess my saying good-by last night was a little premature," he told her. "I'm not going north after all. In fact, if things go on all right I may be in San Francisco indefinitely. I've got a job."
"What sort of a job?" Sophie inquired.
He hadn't told her about the ten o'clock appointment with Henderson. Nor did he go into that now.
"I've been taken on in an automobile plant on Van Ness," he said. "A streak of real luck. I'm to have a chance to learn the business. So I won't see you in Vancouver. Remember me to Tommy. I suppose you'll be busy getting ready to go, so I'll wish you a pleasant voyage."
"Thanks," she answered. "Wouldn't it be more appropriate if you wished that on us in person before we sail?"
"I don't know," he mumbled. "I—"
A perfectly mad impulse seized him.
"Sophie," he said sharply into the receiver.
"Yes."
He heard the quick intake of her breath at the other end, almost a gasp. And the single word was slightly uncertain.
"What did you mean by a man standing on his own feet?"
She did not apparently have a ready answer. He pictured her, receiver in hand, and he did not know if she were startled, or surprised—or merely amused. That last was intolerable. And suddenly he felt like a fool. Before that soft, sweet voice could lead him into further masculine folly he hung up and walked out of the booth. For the next twenty minutes his opinion of John P. Henderson's judgment of men was rather low. He did not feel himself to be an individual with any force of character. In homely language he said to himself that he, Wesley Thompson, was nothing but a pot of mush.
However, there in the offing loomed the job. He turned into the first clothing store he found, and purchased one of those all-covering duck garments affected by motor-car workers. By that time he had recovered sufficiently to note that an emotional disturbance does not always destroy a man's appetite for food.
This is not a history of the motor car business, nor even of the successive steps Wes Thompson took to win competent knowledge of that Beanstalk among modern industries. If it were there might be sound reasons for recounting the details of his tutelage under Fred Henderson. No man ever won success without knowing pretty well what he was about. No one is born with a workable fund of knowledge. It must be acquired.
That, precisely, is what Thompson set out to do in the Groya shop. In which purpose he was aided, abetted, and diligently coached by Fred Henderson. The measure of Thompson's success in this endeavor may be gauged by what young Henderson said casually to his father on a day some six months later.
"Thompson soaks up mechanical theory and practice as a dry sponge soaks up water."
"Wasted talent," John P. rumbled. "I suppose you'll have him a wild-eyed designer before you're through."
"No," Henderson junior observed thoughtfully. "He'll never design. But he will know design when he sees it. Thompson is learning for a definite purpose—to sell cars—to make money. Knowing motor cars thoroughly is incidental to his main object."
John P. cocked his ears.
"Yes," he said. "That so? Better send that young man up to me, Fred."
"I've been expecting that," young Henderson replied. "He's ripe. I wish you hadn't put that sales bug in his ear to start with. He'd make just the man I need for an understudy when we get that Oakland plant going."
"Tush," Henderson snorted inelegantly. "Salesmen are born, not made—the real high-grade ones. And the factories are turning out mechanical experts by the gross."
"I know that," his son grinned. "But I like Thompson. He gives you the feeling that you can absolutely rely on him."
"Send him up to me," John P. repeated—and when John P. issued a fiat like that, even his son did not dispute it.
And Thompson was duly sent up. He did not go back to the shop on the top floor where for six months he had been an eager student, where he had learned something of the labor of creation—for Fred Henderson was evolving a new car, a model that should have embodied in it power and looks and comfort at the minimum of cost. And in pursuance of that ideal he built and discarded, redesigned and rebuilt, putting his motors to the acid test on the block and his assembled chassis on the road. Indeed, many a wild ride he and Thompson had taken together on quiet highways outside of San Francisco during that testing process.
No, Thompson never went back to that after his interview with John P. Henderson. He was sorry, in a way. He liked the work. It was fascinating to put shafting and gears and a motor and a set of insentient wheels together and make the assembled whole a thing of pulsing power that leaped under the touch of a finger. But—a good salesman made thousands where a good mechanic made hundreds. And money was the indispensable factor—to such as he, who had none.
Fred Henderson had the satisfaction of seeing his theory verified. Thompson made good from the start. In three months his sales were second in volume only to Monk White, who was John P.'s one best bet in the selling line. Henderson chuckled afresh over this verification of his original estimate of a man, and Fred Henderson smiled and said nothing. From either man's standpoint Wes Thompson was a credit to the house. An asset, besides, of reckonable value in cold cash.
"New blood counts," John P. rumbled in confidence to his son. "Keeps us from going stale, Fred."
When a twelvemonth had elapsed from the day Sophie Carr's red roadster blew a tire on the San Mateo road and set up that sequence of events which had landed him where he was, Thompson had left his hall bedroom at the Globe for quarters in a decent bachelor apartment. He had a well-stocked wardrobe, a dozen shelves of miscellaneous books, and three thousand dollars in the bank. Considering his prospects he should have been a fairly sanguine and well-contented young man.
As a matter of fact he had become so, within certain limits. A man whose time is continuously and profitably occupied does not brood. Thompson had found a personal satisfaction in living up to John P. Henderson's first judgment of him. Through Fred Henderson and through his business activities he had formed a little group of pleasant acquaintances. Sophie Carr was growing shadowy—a shadow that sometimes laid upon him certain regrets, it is true, but the mere memory of her no longer produced the old overpowering reactions, the sense of sorry failure, of a dear treasure lost because he lacked a man's full stature in all but physical bulk.
It could easily have happened that Thompson would have embraced with enthusiasm a future bounded by San Francisco, a future in which he would successfully sell Groya cars until his amassed funds enabled him to expand still further his material success. If that future embraced a comfortable home, if a mate and affection suggested themselves as possibilities well within his reach, the basis of those tentative yearnings rested upon the need that dwells within every normal human being, and upon what he saw happening now and then to other young men—and young women—within the immediate radius of his observation.
But upon this particular May morning his mind was questing far afield. The prime cause of that mental projection was a letter in his hand, a letter from Tommy Ashe. Thompson had a lively imagination, tempered by the sort of worldly experience no moderately successful man can escape. And Tommy's letter—the latest in a series of renewed correspondence—opened up certain desirable eventualities. The first page of Tommy's screed was devoted to personal matters. The rest ran thus:
Candidly, old man, your description of the contemplated Henderson car makes a hit with me. The line I handle now is a fair seller. But fair isn't good enough for me. I really need—in addition—to have a smaller machine, to supply a pretty numerous class of prospects. I should like to get hold of just such a car as you describe. I am feeling around for the agency of a small,goodcar. Send me all the dope on this one, and when it will be on the market. There is a tremendous market here for something like that. I'd prefer to take up a line with an established reputation behind it. But the main thing is to have a car that will sell when you push it. And this listens good.Aren't you about due for a vacation? Why don't you take a run up here? I'd enjoy a chin-fest. The fishing's good, too—and we are long on rather striking scenery. Do come up for a week, when you can get off. Meantime, by-by.Tommy
Candidly, old man, your description of the contemplated Henderson car makes a hit with me. The line I handle now is a fair seller. But fair isn't good enough for me. I really need—in addition—to have a smaller machine, to supply a pretty numerous class of prospects. I should like to get hold of just such a car as you describe. I am feeling around for the agency of a small,goodcar. Send me all the dope on this one, and when it will be on the market. There is a tremendous market here for something like that. I'd prefer to take up a line with an established reputation behind it. But the main thing is to have a car that will sell when you push it. And this listens good.
Aren't you about due for a vacation? Why don't you take a run up here? I'd enjoy a chin-fest. The fishing's good, too—and we are long on rather striking scenery. Do come up for a week, when you can get off. Meantime, by-by.
Tommy
Thompson laid down the letter and stared out over the roof-tops. He couldn't afford to be a philanthropist. A rather sweeping idea had flashed into his mind as he read that missive. His horizon was continually expanding. Money, beyond cavil, was the key to many doors, a necessity if a man's eyes were fixed upon much that was desirable. If he could make money selling machines for Groya Motors Inc., why not for himself? Why not?
The answer seemed too obvious for argument. The new car which had taken final form in Fred Henderson's drafting room and in the Groya shop was long past the experimental stage. All it required was financing and John P. Henderson had attended efficiently to that. There was a plant rising swiftly across the bay, a modern plant with railway service, big yards, and a testing track, in which six months hence would begin an estimated annual production of ten thousand cars a year. John P. had remarked once to his son that for the Henderson family to design, produce, manufacture and market successfully a car they could be proud of would be the summit of his ambition. And the new car was named the Summit.
It was a good car, a quality car in everything but sheer bulk. Thompson knew that. He knew, too, that people were buying motor cars on performance, not poundage, now. He knew too that he could sell Summits—if he could get territory in which to make sales.
He had thought about this before. He knew that in the Groya files lay dealers' contracts covering the cream of California, Oregon and Washington. These dealers would handle Summits. There had not seemed an opening wide enough to justify plans. But now Tommy's letter focused his vision upon a specific point.
If he could get that Vancouver territory! Vancouver housed a hundred thousand people. A Vancouver agency for the Summit, with a live man at the helm, would run to big figures.
No, he decided, he would not hastily grasp his fountain pen and say to Tommy Ashe, "Jump in and contract for territory and allotment, old boy. The Summit is the goods." Not until he had looked over the ground himself.
He had two weeks' vacation due when it pleased him. And it pleased him to ask John P. as soon as he reached the office that very morning if it was convenient to the firm to do without him for the ensuing fortnight.
Thompson went to Vancouver to spy out the land. He made no confidants. He went about the Terminal City with his mouth shut and his ears and eyes open. What he saw and heard soon convinced him that like the Israelites of old he stood upon the border of a land which—for his business purpose—flowed with milk and honey. It was easy to weave air castles. He could visualize a future for himself in Vancouver that loomed big—if he could but make the proper arrangements at the other end; that is to say, with Mr. John P. Henderson, President of the Summit Motors Corporation. Thompson had faith enough in himself to believe he could make such an arrangement, daring as it seemed when he got down to actual figures.
It gave him a curious sense of relief to find Tommy Ashe flirting with the Petit Six people, apparently forgetful of the Summit specifications. Thompson hadn't quite taken as his gospel the sound business ethic that you must look out for number one first, last and always. If Tommy had broached the subject personally, if he had shown anxiety to acquire selling rights in the Summit, Thompson would have felt impelled by sheer loyalty of friendship to help Tommy secure the agency. That would have been quixotic, of course. Nevertheless, he would have done it, because not to do it would have seemed like taking a mean advantage. As it was—
For the rest he warmed to the sheer beauty of the spot. Vancouver spreads largely over rolling hills and little peninsular juttings into the sea. From its eminences there sweep unequalled views over the Gulf of Georgia and northwestward along towering mountain ranges upon whose lower slopes the firs and cedars marshal themselves in green battalions. From his hotel window he would gaze in contented abstraction over the tidal surges through the First Narrows and the tall masts of shipping in a spacious harbor, landlocked and secure, stretching away like a great blue lagoon with motor craft and ferries and squat tugs for waterfowl. Thompson loved the forest as a man loves pleasant, familiar things, and next to the woods his affection turned to the sea. Here, at his hand, were both in all their primal grandeur. He was very sure he would like Vancouver.
Whether the fact that he encountered the Carrs before he was three days in town, had dinner at their home, and took Sophie once to luncheon at the Granada Grill, had anything to do with this conclusion deponent sayeth not. To be sure he learned with the first frank gleam in Sophie's gray eyes that she still held for him that mysterious pulse-quickening lure, that for him her presence was sufficient to stir a glow no other woman had ever succeeded in kindling ever so briefly. But he had acquired poise, confidence, a self-mastery not to be disputed. He said to himself that he could stand the gaff now. He could face facts. And he said to himself further, a little wistfully, that Sophie Carr was worth all the pangs she had ever given him—more.
He could detect no change in her. That was one of the queer, personal characteristics she possessed—that she could pass beyond his ken for months, for years he almost believed, and when he met her again she would be the same, voice, manner, little tricks of speech and gesture unchanged. Meeting Sophie after that year was like meeting her after a week. Barring the clothes and the surroundings that spoke of ample means tastefully expended, the general background of her home and associates, she seemed to him unchanged. Yet when he reflected, he was not so sure of this. Sophie was gracious, friendly, frankly interested when he talked of himself. When their talk ran upon impersonal things the old nimbleness of mind functioned. But under these superficialities he could only guess, after all, what the essential woman of her was now. He could not say if she were still the queer, self-disciplined mixture of cold logic and primitive passion the Sophie Carr of Lone Moose had revealed to him. He was not sure if he desired to explore in that direction. The old scars remained. He shrank from acquiring new ones, yet perforce let his thought dwell upon her with reviving concentration. After all, he said to himself, it was on the knees of the gods.
At any rate he was not to be deterred from his project. He had served his apprenticeship in the game. He was eager to try his own wings in a flight of his own choosing.
Since he had evolved a definite plan of going about that, he entered decisively upon the first step. Upon reaching San Francisco he bearded John P. Henderson in his mahogany den and outlined a scheme which made that worthy gentleman's eyes widen. He heard Thompson to an end, however, with a growing twinkle in those same, shrewd, worldly-wise orbs, and at the finish thumped a plump fist on his desk with a force that made the pen-rack jingle.
"Damned if I don't go you," he exclaimed. "I said in the beginning you'd make a salesman, and you've made good. You'll make good in this. If you don't it isn't for lack of vision—and nerve."
"Nerve," he chuckled over the word. "You know it isn't good business for me. I'll be losing a valuable man off my staff, and I'll be taking longer chances than it has ever been my policy to take. Your only real asset is—yourself. That isn't a negotiable security."
"Not exactly," Thompson returned. "Still in your business you are compelled—every big business is compelled—to place implicit trust in certain men. From a commercial point of view this move of mine should prove even more profitable to you than if I remain on your staff as a salesman—provided your estimate of me, and my own estimate of myself, is approximately correct. You must have an outlet for your product. I will still be making money for you. In addition I shall be developing a market that will, perhaps before so very long, absorb a tremendous number of cars."
"Oh, there's no argument. I'm committed to the enterprise," Henderson declared. "I believe inyou, Thompson. Otherwise I couldn't see your proposition with a microscope. Well, I'll embody the various points in a contract. Come in this afternoon and sign up."
As easily as that. Thompson went down the half-flight of stairs still a trifle incredible over the ease with which he had accomplished a stroke that meant—oh, well, to his sanguine vision there was no limit.
He felt pretty much as he had felt when he sold his first Groya to an apparently hopeless prospect, elated, a little astonished at his success, brimful of confidence to cope with the next problem.
The ego in him clamored to be about this bigger business. But that was not possible. He came back to earth presently with the recollection that the Summits would not be ready for distribution before late October—and for the next five months the more Groyas he sold the better position he would be in when he went on his own.
So when he finally had in his hands a dealer's contract covering the Province of British Columbia he put the matter out of his mind—except for occasional day-dreamings upon it in idle moments—and gave himself whole-heartedly to serving the house of Henderson.
Time passed uneventfully enough. June went its way with its brides and flowers. July drove folk upon vacations to the seaside resorts.
And in August there burst upon an incredulous world the jagged lightnings and cannon-thunder of war.
It would be waste words to describe here the varying fortunes of the grappling armies during the next few months. The newspapers and current periodicals and countless self-appointed historians have attended to that. It is all recorded, so that one must run to read it all. It is as terribly vivid to us now as it was distant and shadowy then—a madness of slaughter and destruction that raged on the other side of the earth, a terror from which we stood comfortably aloof.
There was something in the war unseen by Thompson and the Hendersons and a countless host of intelligent, well-dressed, comfortable people who bought extras wet from the press to read of that merciless thrust through Belgium, the shock and recoil and counter-shock of armies, of death dealt wholesale with scientific precision, of 42-centimeter guns and poison gas and all the rest of that bloody nightmare—they did not see the dread shadow that hung over Europe lengthening and spreading until its murky pall should span the Atlantic.
Thompson was a Canadian. He knew by the papers that Canada was at war, a voluntary participant. But it did not strike him that he was at war. He felt no call to arms. In San Francisco there was no common ferment in the public mind, no marching troops, no military bands making a man's feet tingle to follow as they passed by. Men discussed the war in much the same tone as they discussed the stock market. If there was any definite feeling in the matter it was that the European outbreak was strictly a European affair. When the German spearhead blunted its point against the Franco-British legions and the gray hosts recoiled upon the Marne, the Amateur Board of Strategy said it would be over in six months.
In any case, American tradition explicitly postulated that what occurred in Europe was not, could not, be vital to Americans. But in the last test blood proves thicker than water. Sentimentally, the men Thompson knew were pro-Ally. Only, in practice there was no apparent reason why they should do otherwise than as they had been doing. And in effect San Francisco only emulated her sister cities when she proceeded about "business as usual"—just as in those early days, before the war had bitten deep into their flesh and blood, British merchants flung that slogan in the face of the enemy.
So that to Wes Thompson, concentrated upon his personal affairs, the war never became more than something akin to a bad dream recalled at midday, an unreal sort of thing. Something that indubitably existed without making half the impression upon him that seeing a pedestrian mangled under a street car made upon him during that summer. The war aroused his interest, but left his emotions unstirred. There was nothing martial about him. He dreamed no dreams of glory on the battlefield. He had never thought of the British Empire as something to die for. The issue was not clear to him, just as it failed to clarify itself to a great many people in those days. The maiden aunts and all his early environment had shut off the bigger vision that was sending a steady stream of Canadian battalions overseas.
When the Battle of the Marne was past history and the opposing armies had dug themselves in and the ghastly business of the trenches had begun, Thompson was more than ever immersed in pursuit of the main chance, for he was then engaged in organizing Summit Motors in Vancouver. There had been a period when his optimism about his prospects had suffered a relapse. He had half-expected that Canada's participation in that devil's dance across the sea would spoil things commercially. There had been a sort of temporary demoralization on both sides of the line, at first. But that was presently adjusted. Through Tommy Ashe and other sources he learned that business in Vancouver was actually looking up because of the war.
He was a little surprised that Tommy was not off to the war. Tommy loved his England. He was forever singing England's praises. England was "home" to Tommy Ashe always. It was only a name to Thompson. And he thought, when he thought about it at all, that if England's need was not great enough to call her native-born, that the Allies must have the situation well in hand; as the papers had a way of stating.
He had other fish to fry, himself, without rushing off to the front. As a matter of fact he never consciously considered the question of going to the front. That never occurred to him. When he did think of the war he thought of it impersonally, as a busy man invariably does think of matters which do not directly concern him.
What did concern him most vitally was the project he had in hand. And next to those ambitions, material considerations, his fancy touched shyly now and then upon Sophie Carr.
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 passed. 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 passing 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 Japan, a reported famine in India.
He went about his business circumspectly, 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 competition 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 assets 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, glass 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 cluster 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 glass 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 tithe 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 impassively. 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 damn 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 glass 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 pass 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 button 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 button 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 latitude 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.