That winter and the summer which followed, and the period which carried him into the spring of 1916, was materially a triumphal procession for Wes Thompson. Tommy's forecast of the war's ending had fallen short as so many other forecasts did. The war went on, developing its own particular horrors as it spread. But the varying tides of war, and the manifold demands of war, bestowed upon Vancouver a heaping measure of prosperity, and Vancouver, in the person of its business men, was rather too far from the sweat and blood of the struggle to be distracted by the issues of that struggle from its own immediate purposes. Business men were in business to make money. They supported the war effort. Every one could not go to the trenches. Workers were as necessary to victory as fighters. People had to be fed and clothed. The army had to be fed and clothed, transported and munitioned. And the fact that the supplying and equipping and transporting was highly profitable to those engaged in such pursuits did not detract from the essentially patriotic and necessary performance of these tasks.
The effect on Vancouver was an industrial rejuvenation. Money flowed in all sorts of channels hitherto nearly dry. A lot of it flowed to Wesley Thompson in exchange for Summit cars. Thompson was like many other men in Vancouver. He was very busy. The business stood on its feet by virtue of his direction. If he dropped it and rushed off to the war—well there was no lack of men, men who had no particular standing, men who could not subscribe to war charities, to Dominion war-bond issues. There was plenty of man-power. There was never a surplus of brain-power. Business was necessary. So a man with a live, thriving business was fighting in his own way—doing his bit to keep the wheels turning—standing stoutly behind the fellow with a bayonet. And a lot of them let it go at that. A lot of them saw no pressing need to don khaki and let everything else go to pot. A lot of them were so intent upon making the most of their opportunities that they never brought their innermost thoughts out on the table and asked themselves point-blank: "Should I go? Why shouldn't I?" And there were some who saw dimly—as the months slid by with air raids and submarine sinkings and all the new, terrible devices of death and destruction which transgressed the old usages of war—there were some who were troubled without knowing why. There were men who hated bloodshed, who hated violence, who wished to live and love and go their ways in peace, but who began uneasily to question whether these things they valued were of such high value after all.
And Wes Thompson was one of these. Deep in him his emotions were stirring. The old tribal instinct—which sent a man forth to fight for the tribe no matter the cause—was functioning under the layer of stuff that civilization imposes on every man. His reason gainsaid these stirrings, those instinctive urgings, but there was a stirring and it troubled him. He did not desire to die in a trench, nor vanish in fragments before a bursting shell, nor lie face to the stars in No Man's Land with a bayonet hole in his middle. He would not risk these fatalities for any such academic idea as saving the world for democracy.
Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked the impulse. He would not fight for a political abstraction. He had read history. It is littered with broken treaties. If he fought it would be because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous. And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still unfired. He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring guns.
But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might be—remotely—that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting. He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who had it and wondered privately how they came by it.
If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have been the problem of Sophie Carr.
Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical sense—although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely physical sense. But it went deeper than that. During the eighteen months following Thompson's motor-sales début he never succeeded in establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr's home on the way he opened his salesroom.
There was Tommy, for instance. Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried. He and Tommy were friends. They had apartments in the same house. They saw each other constantly. The matter of competition in business was purely nominal. They were both too successful in business to be envious of each other in that respect. But where Sophie Carr was concerned it was a conflict, no less existent because neither man ever betrayed his consciousness of such a conflict. Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe's serenity came from an understanding with her. But he doubted that. Tommy had not won—yet. That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising about Sophie was built of other, sterner stuff.
She seldom touched on the war, never more than a casual sentence or two. Perhaps a phrase would flash like a sword, and then her lips would close. Carr would discuss the war from any angle whatsoever, at any time. It became an engrossing topic with him, as if there were phases that puzzled him, upon which he desired light. He ceased to be positive. But his daughter shunned war talk.
Yet the war levied high toll on her waking hours, and for that reason Thompson seldom saw her save in company. His vision of little dinners, of drives together, of impromptu luncheons, of a steady siege in which the sheer warmth of that passion in him should force capitulation to his love—all those pleasant dreams went a-glimmering. Sophie was always on some committee, directing some activity growing out of the war, Red Cross work, Patriotic Fund, all those manifold avenues through which the women fought their share of Canada's fight. For a pleasure-loving creature Sophie Carr seemed to have undergone an astonishing metamorphosis. She spent on these things, quietly, without parade or press-agenting, all the energy in her, and she had no reserve left for play. War work seemed to mean something to Sophie besides write-ups in the society column and pictures of her in sundry poses. These things besides, surrounded her with all sorts of fussy people, both male and female, and through this cordon Thompson seldom broke for confidential talk with her. When he did Sophie baffled him with her calm detachment, a profound and ever-increasing reserve—as if she had ceased to be a woman and become a mere, coldly beautiful mechanism for seeing about shipments of bandage stuff, for collecting funds, and devising practical methods of raising more funds and creating more supplies.
Thompson said as much to her one day. She looked at him unmoved, unsmiling. And something that lurked in her clear gray eyes made him uncomfortable, sent him away wondering. It was as if somehow she disapproved. A shadowy impression at best. He wondered if Tommy fared any better, and he was constrained to think Tommy did because Tommy went in for patriotic work a good deal, activities that threw him in pretty close contact with Sophie.
"I can spare the time," he confided to Thompson one day. "And it's good business. I meet some pretty influential people. Why don't you spread yourself a little more, Wes? They'll be saying you're a slacker if you don't make a noise."
"I don't fight the Germans with my mouth," Thompson responded shortly. And Tommy laughed.
"That's a popular weapon these days," he returned lightly. "It does no harm to go armed with it."
Thompson refrained from further speech. That very morning in the lobby of the Granada Thompson had heard one man sneer at another for a slacker—and get knocked down for his pains. He did not want to inflict that indignity on Tommy, and he felt that he would if Tommy made any more cynical reflections.
Of course, that was a mere flaring-up of resentment at the fact that, to save his soul, he could not get off the fence. He could not view the war as a matter vital to himself; nor could he do like Tommy Ashe, play patriotic tunes with one hand while the other reached slyly forth to grasp power and privilege of whatever degree came within reach.
And in the meantime both men, and other men likewise, went about their daily affairs. Vancouver grew and prospered, and the growth of Summit sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his mind on the business. It worked out—his business preoccupation—much in the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact that heisa dog.
So, save for the fact that he continued to make money and was busy and realized now and then that he had come to a disheartening impasse with Sophie, the late spring of 1916 found Thompson mentally, morally and spiritually holding fast by certain props.
He had come a long way, and he had yet a long way to go. He had come to Lone Moose very much after the fashion of St. Simeon Stylites all prepared to mount a spiritual pillar and make a bid for sainthood. But pillar hermits, he discovered, when harsh, material facts tore the evangelistic blinkers off his eyes, were neither useful in the world nor acceptable on high. He had been in a very bad way for awhile. When a man loses his own self-respect and the faith of his fathers at one stroke he is apt to suffer intensely. Thompson had not quite reached that pass, when he came down to Wrangel by the sea, but he was not far off. When he looked back, he could scarcely trace by what successive steps he had traveled. But he had got up out of that puddle into which a harsh environment and wounded egotism had cast him. He was in a way to be what the world called a success.
He was not so sure of that himself. But he stayed himself with certain props, as before mentioned. The base of more than one of these useful supports had been undermined some time before by a sequence of events which presented the paradox of being familiar to him and still beyond his comprehension.
He was a long way from being aware, in those early summer days of 1916, that before long some of the aforementioned props were to buckle under him with strange and disturbing circumstance.
It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on its stomach, but it is true, and it is no less a verity that nations function primarily on food. The submarine was waxing to its zenith now, and Europe saw the gaunt wolf at its door. Men cried for more ships. Cost became secondary. A vessel paid for herself if she landed but two cargoes in an Allied port.
Every demand in the economic field produces a supply. On this side of the Atlantic great shipbuilding plants arose by some superior magic of construction in ports where the building of ships had been a minor industry. In this Vancouver did not lag. Wooden ships could be built quickly. Virgin forests of fir and cedar stood at Vancouver's very door. Wherefore yards, capable of turning out a three-thousand-ton wooden steamer in ninety days, rose on tidewater, and an army of labor sawed and hammered and shaped to the ultimate confusion of the Hun.
Thompson had seen these yards in the distance. He read newspapers and he knew that local shipbuilding was playing the dual purpose of confounding the enemy and adding a huge pay-roll to Vancouver's other material advantages. Both of which were highly desirable.
But few details of this came personally to his attention until an evening when he happened to foregather with Tommy Ashe and two or three others at Carr's home—upon one of those rare evenings when Sophie was free of her self-imposed duties and in a mood to play the hostess.
They had dined, and were gathered upon a wide verandah watching the sun sink behind the rampart of Vancouver Island in a futurist riot of yellow and red that died at last to an afterglow which lingered on the mountain tops like a benediction. A bit of the Gulf opened to them, steel-gray, mirror-smooth, more like a placid, hill-ringed lake than the troubled sea.
But there was more in the eye's cast than beauty of sea and sky and setting sun. From their seats they could look down on the curious jumble of long sheds and giant scaffolding that was the great Coughlan steel shipyard in False Creek. Farther distant, on the North Shore, there was the yellowish smudge of what a keen vision discerned to be six wooden schooners in a row, sister ships in varying stages of construction.
Some one said something about wooden shipbuilding.
"There's another big yard starting on the North Shore," Sophie said. "One of our committee was telling me to-day. Her husband has something to do with it."
"Yes. I can verify that," Tommy Ashe smiled. "That's my contribution—the Vancouver Construction Company. I organized it. We have contracted to supply the Imperial Munitions Board with ten auxiliary schooners, three thousand tons burden each."
The fourth man of the party, the lean, suave, enterprising head of a local trust company, nodded approval, eyeing Tommy with new interest.
"Good business," he commented. "We've got to beat those U-boats."
"Yes," Tommy agreed, "and until the Admiralty devises some effectual method of coping with them, the only way we can beat the subs is to build ships faster than they can sink them. It's quite some undertaking, but it has to be done. If we fail to keep supplies pouring into England and France. Well—"
He spread his hands in an expressive gesture. Tommy was that type of Englishman in which rugged health and some generations of breeding and education have combined to produce what Europe calls a "gentleman." He was above middle height, very stoutly and squarely built, ruddy faced—the sort of man one may safely prophesy will acquire a paunch and double chin with middle age. But Tommy was young and vigorous yet. He looked very capable, almost aggressive, as he sat there speaking with the surety of patriotic conviction.
"We're all in it now," he said simply. "It's no longer our army and navy against their army and navy and the rest of us looking on from the side lines. It's our complete material resources and man power against their complete resources and man power. Iftheywin, the world won't be worth living in, for the Anglo-Saxon. So we've got to beat them. Every man's job from now on is going to be either fighting or working. We've got to have ships. I'm organizing that yard to work top-speed. I'm trying to set a pace. Watch us on the North Shore. The man in the trenches won't say we didn't back him up."
It sounded well. To Thompson it gave a feeling of dissatisfaction which was nowise lessened by the momentary gleam in Sophie's eyes as they rested briefly on Tommy and passed casually to him—and beyond.
He was growing slowly to understand that the war had somehow—in a fashion beyond his comprehension—bitten deep into Sophie Carr's soul. She thought about it, if she seldom talked. What was perhaps more vital, shefeltabout it with an intensity Thompson could not fathom, because he had not experienced such feeling himself. He only divined this. Sophie never paraded either her thoughts or her feelings. And divining this uneasily he foresaw a shortening of his stature in her eyes by comparison with Tommy Ashe—who had become a doer, a creator in the common need, whileheremained a gleaner in the field of self-interest. Thompson rather resented that imputation. Privately he considered Tommy's speech a trifle grandiloquent. He began to think he had underestimated Tommy, in more ways than one.
Nor did he fail to wonder at the dry smile that hovered about Sam Carr's lips until that worthy old gentleman put his hand over his mouth to hide it, while his shrewd old eyes twinkled with inner amusement. There was something more than amusement, too. If Wes Thompson had not known that Sam Carr liked Tommy, rather admired his push and ability to hold his own in the general scramble, he would have said Carr's smile and eyes tinged the amusement with something like contempt.
That puzzled Thompson. The Dominion, as well as the Empire, was slowly formulating the war-doctrine that men must either fight or work. Tommy, with his executive ability, his enthusiasm, was plunging into a needed work. Tommy had a right to feel that he was doing a big thing. Thompson granted him that. Why, then, should Carr look at him like that?
He was still recurring to that when he drove down town with Tommy later in the evening. He was not surprised that Tommy sauntered into his rooms after putting up his machine. He had been in the habit of doing that until lately, and Thompson knew now that Tommy must have been very busy on that shipyard organization. It had been easy for them to drop into the old intimacy which had grown up between them on that hard, long trail between Lone Moose and the Stikine. They had a lot of common ground to meet on besides that.
This night Tommy had something on his mind besides casual conversation. He wasted little time in preliminaries.
"Would you be interested in taking over my car agencies on a percentage basis, Wes?" he asked point-blank, when he had settled himself in a chair with a cigar in his mouth. "I have worked up a good business with the Standard and the Petit Six. I don't like to let it go altogether. I shall have to devote all my time to the ship plant. That looms biggest on the horizon. But I want to hold these agencies as an anchor to windward. You could run both places without either suffering, I'm confident. Ill make you a good proposition."
Thompson reflected a minute.
"What is your proposition?" he asked at length. "I daresay I could handle it. But I can't commit myself offhand."
"Of course not," Tommy agreed. "You can go over my books from the beginning, and see for yourself what the business amounts to. I'd be willing to allow you seventy-five per cent. of the net. Based on last year's business you should clear twelve thousand per annum. Sales are on the up. You might double that. I would hold an option of taking over the business on ninety days' notice."
"It sounds all right," Thompson admitted. "I'll look into it."
"I want quick action," Tommy declared. "Say, to-morrow you arrange for some certified accountant to go over my books and make out a balance sheet. I'll pay his fee. I'm anxious to be free to work on the ship end."
"All right. I'll do that. We can arrange the details later if I decide to take you up," Thompson said.
Tommy stretched his arms and yawned.
"By jove," said he, "I'm going to be the busiest thing on wheels for awhile. It's no joke running a big show."
"I didn't know you were a shipbuilder," Thompson commented.
"I'm not," Tommy admitted, stifling another yawn. "But I can hire 'em—both brains and labor. The main thing is I've got the contracts. That's the chief item in this war business. The rest is chiefly a matter of business judgment. It's something of a jump, I'll admit, but I can negotiate it, all right."
"As a matter of fact," he continued presently, and with a highly self-satisfied note in his voice, "apart from the executive work it's what the Americans call a lead-pipe cinch. We can't lose. I've been fishing for this quite a while, and I put it over by getting in touch with the right people. It's wonderful what you can do in the proper quarter. The Vancouver Construction Company consists of Joe Hedley and myself. Joe is a very clever chap. Has influential people, too. We have contracts with the I.M.B. calling for ten schooners estimated to cost three hundred thousand dollars per. We finance the construction, but we don't really risk a penny. The contracts are on a basis of cost, plus ten per cent. You see? If we go above or under the estimate it doesn't matter much. Our profit is fixed. The main consideration is speed. The only thing we can be penalized for is failure to launch and deliver within specified dates."
Thompson did a rough bit of mental figuring.
"I should say it was a cinch," he said dryly. "Nobody can accuse you of profiteering. Yet your undertaking is both patriotic and profitable. I suppose you had no trouble financing a thing like that?"
"I should say not. The banks," Tommy replied with cynical emphasis, "would fall over themselves to get their finger in our pie. But they won't. Hedley and I have some money. Sam Carr is letting us have fifty thousand dollars at seven per cent. No bank is going to charge like the Old Guard at Waterloo on overdrafts and advances—and dictate to us besides. I'm too wise for that. I'm not in the game for my health. I see a big lump of money, and I'm after it."
"I suppose we all are," Thompson reflected absently.
"Certainly," Tommy responded promptly. "And we'd be suckers if we weren't."
He took a puff or two at his cigar and rose.
"Run over to the plant on the North Shore with me to-morrow if you have the time. We'll give it the once over, and take a look at the Wallace yard too. They're starting on steel tramps there now. I'm going over about two o'clock. Will you?"
"Sure. I'll take time," Thompson agreed.
"Come down to MacFee's wharf and go over with me on theAlert," Tommy went on. "That's the quickest and easiest way to cross the Inlet. Two o'clock. Well, I'm off to bed. Good night, old man."
"Good night."
The hall door clicked behind Ashe. Thompson sat deep in thought for a long time. Then he fished a note pad out of a drawer and began pencilling figures.
Ten times three hundred thousand was three million. Ten per cent. on three million was three hundred thousand dollars. And no chance to lose. The ten per cent. on construction cost was guaranteed by the Imperial Munitions Board, behind which stood the British Empire.
Didn't Tommy say the ten schooners were to be completed in eight months? Then in eight months Tommy Ashe was going to be approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars richer.
Thompson wondered if that was why Sam Carr looked at Tommy with that ambiguous expression when Tommy was chanting his work or fight philosophy. Carr knew the ins and outs of the deal if he were loaning money on it.
And Thompson did not like to think he had read Carr's look aright, because he was uncomfortably aware that he, Wes Thompson, was following pretty much in Ashe's footsteps, only on a smaller scale.
He tore the figured sheet into little strips, and went to bed.
At a minute or two of ten the next morning Thompson stopped his car before the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The bolt-studded doors were still closed, and so he kept his seat behind the steering column, glancing idly along Hastings at the traffic that flowed about the gray stone pile of the post-office, while he waited the bank's opening for business.
A tall young man, a bit paler-faced perhaps than a normal young fellow should be, but otherwise a fine-looking specimen of manhood, sauntered slowly around the corner of the bank, and came to a stop on the curb just abreast the fore end of Thompson's motor. He took out a cigarette and lighted it with slow, deliberate motions. And as he stood there, gazing with a detached impersonal air at the front of the Summit roadster, there approached him a recruiting sergeant.
"How about joining up this morning?" he inquired briskly.
"Oh, I don't know," the young man responded casually. "I hadn't thought about it."
"Every man should be thinking about it," the sergeant declared. "The army needs men. Now a well-set-up young fellow like you would get on capitally at soldiering. It's a great life. When we get the Germans whipped every man will be proud to say he had a hand in it. If a man struck you you wouldn't stand back and let some other fellow do your fighting for you, now would you? More than that, between you and me, it won't be long before an able-bodied man can't walk these streets in civvies, without the girls hooting him. It's a man's duty to get into this war. Better walk along with me to headquarters and sign on."
The young man gazed across the street with the same immobility of expression.
"What's the inducement?" he asked presently.
The sergeant, taking his cue from this, launched forth upon a glowing description of army life, the pay, the glory, the manifold advantages that would certainly accrue. He painted a rosy picture, a gallant picture. One gathered from his talk that a private in khaki was greater than a captain of industry in civilian clothes. He dwelt upon the brotherhood, the democracy of arms. He spilled forth a lot of the buncombe that is swallowed by those who do not know from bitter experience that war, at best, is a ghastly job in its modern phases, a thing that the common man may be constrained to undertake if need arises, but which brings him little pleasure and less glory—beyond the consciousness that he has played his part as a man should.
The young man heard the recruiting sergeant to an end. And when that worthy had finished he found fixed steadily upon him a pair of coldly speculative gray-green eyes.
"How long have you been in the army?" he asked.
"About eighteen months," the sergeant stated.
"Have you been over there?"
"No," the sergeant admitted. "I expect to go soon, but for the present I'm detailed to recruiting."
The young man had a flower in the lapel of his coat. He removed it, the flower, and thrust the lapel in the sergeant's face. The flower had concealed a bronze button.
"I've been over there," the young man said calmly. "There's my button, and my discharge is in my pocket—with the names of places on it that you'll likely never see. I was in the Princess Pats—you know what happened to the Pats. You have hinted I was a slacker, that every man not in uniform is a slacker. Let me tell you something. I know your gabby kind. The country's full of such as you. So's England. The war's gone two years and you're still here, going around telling other men to go to the front. Go there yourself, and get a taste of it. When you've put in fourteen months in hell like I did, you won't go around peddling the brand of hot air you've shot into me, just now."
"I didn't know you were a returned man," the sergeant said placatingly. A pointed barb of resentment had crept into the other's tone as he spoke.
"Well, I am," the other snapped. "And I'd advise you to get a new line of talk. Don't talk to me, anyway. Beat it. I've done my bit."
The sergeant moved on without another word, and the other man likewise went his way, with just the merest suggestion of a limp. And simultaneously the great doors of the bank swung open. Thompson looked first after one man then after the other, and passed into the bank with a thoughtful look on his face.
He finished his business there. Other things occupied his attention until noon. He lunched. After that he drove to Coal Harbor where the yachts lie and motor boats find mooring, and having a little time to spare before Tommy's arrival, walked about the slips looking over the pleasure craft berthed thereat. Boats appealed to Thompson. He had taken some pleasant cruises with friends along the coast. Some day he intended to have a cruising launch. Tommy had already attained that distinction. He owned a trim forty-footer, theAlert. Thompson's wanderings presently brought him to this packet.
A man sat under the awning over the after deck. Thompson recognized in him the same individual upon whom the recruiting sergeant's eloquence had been wasted that morning. He was in clean overalls, a seaman's peaked cap on his head. Thompson had felt an impulse to speak to the man that morning. If any legitimate excuse had offered he would have done so. To find the man apparently at home on the boat in which he himself was taking brief passage was a coincidence of which Thompson proceeded to take immediate advantage. He climbed into the cockpit. The man looked at him questioningly.
"I'm going across the Inlet with Mr. Ashe," Thompson explained. "Are you on theAlert?"
"Engineer, skipper, and bo'sun too," the man responded whimsically. "Cook, captain, and the whole damn crew."
They fell into talk. The man was intelligent, but there was a queer abstraction sometimes in his manner. Once the motor of a near-by craft fired with a staccato roar, and he jumped violently. He looked at Thompson unsmiling.
"I'm pretty jumpy yet," he said—but he did not explain why. He did not say he had been overseas. He did not mention the war. He talked of the coast, and timber, and fishing, and the adjacent islands, with all of which he seemed to be fairly familiar.
"I heard that recruiting sergeant tackle you this morning," Thompson said at last. "You were standing almost beside my machine. What was it like over there?"
"What was it like?" the man repeated. He shook his head. "That's a big order. I couldn't tell you in six months. It wasn't nice."
He seemed to reflect a second or two.
"I suppose some one has to do it. It has to be done. But it's a tough game. You don't know where you're going nor what you're up against most of the time. The racket gets a man, as well as seeing fellows you know getting bumped off now and then. Some of the boys get hardened to it. I never did. I try to forget it now, mostly. But I dream things sometimes, and any sudden noise makes me jump. A fellow had better finish over there than come home crippled. I'm lucky to hold down a job like this, lucky that I happen to know gas engines and boats. I look all right, but I'm not much good. All chewed up with shrapnel. And my nerve's gone. I wouldn't have got my discharge if they could have used me any more. Aw, hell, if you haven't been in it you can't imagine what it's like. I couldn't tell you."
"Tell me one thing," Thompson asked quickly, spurred by an impulse for light upon certain matters which had troubled him. He wanted the word of an eye-witness. "Did you ever see, personally, any of those atrocities that have been laid to the Germans in Belgium?"
"Well, I don't know," the man replied. "The papers have printed a lot of stuff. Mind you, over there you hear about a lot of things you never see. The only thingIsaw was children with their hands hacked off at the wrist."
"Good God," Thompson uttered. "You actually saw that with your own eyes."
"Sure," the man responded. "Nine of 'em in one village.
"Why, in the name of God, would men do such a thing?" Thompson demanded. "Was any reason ever given?"
"No. I suppose they were drunk or something. Fritz was pretty bad in spots, all right. Maybe they just wanted to put the fear of God in their hearts. A pal of mine in Flanders told me of a woman—in a place they took by a night raid—she had her breast slashed open. She said a Boche officer did it with his sword."
The man spoke of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when Thompson ceased to question him he ceased to talk.
But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress. His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved, now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders.
The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside. Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the other's passivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no fit name for such deeds.
And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be. He wasn't interested in that now.
Sitting under the awning, brooding over these things, he remembered how Sophie Carr had reacted to the story of the Belgian refugee that afternoon a year and a half ago. He understood at last. He divined how Sophie felt that day. And he had blandly discounted those things. He had gone about his individual concerns insulated against any call to right wrongs, to fight oppression, to abolish that terror which loomed over Europe—and which might very well lay its sinister hand on America, if the Germans were capable of these things, and if the German's military power prevailed over France and England. When he envisaged Canada as another Belgium his teeth came together with a little click.
He clambered out of theAlert'scockpit to the float.
"Tell Mr. Ashe I changed my mind about going over with him," he said abruptly, and walked off the float, up the sloping bank to the street, got in his car and drove away.
As he drove he felt that he had failed to keep faith with something or other. He felt bewildered. Those little children, shorn of their hands—so that they could never lift a sword against Germany—cried aloud to him. They held up their bloody stumps for him to see.
It took Thompson approximately forty-eight hours to arrange his affairs. He managed things with a precipitancy that would have shocked a sound, practical business man, for he put out no anchors to windward nor troubled himself about the future. He paid his bills, transferred the Summit agency to his head salesman—who had amassed sufficient capital to purchase the stock of cars and parts at cost. Thus, having deliberately sacrificed a number of sound assets for the sake of being free of them without delay, Thompson found himself upon the morning of the third day without a tie to bind him to Vancouver, and a cash balance of twenty thousand dollars to his credit in the bank.
He did not know how, or in what capacity he was going to the front, but he was going, and the manner of his going did not concern him greatly. It mattered little how he went, so long as he went in the service of his country. A little of his haste was born of the sudden realization that he had a country which needed his services—and that he desired to serve. It had passed an emotional phase with him. He saw it very clearly as a duty. He did not foresee or anticipate either pleasure or glory in the undertaking. He had no illusions about war. It was quite on the cards that he might never come back. But he had to go.
So then he had only to determine how he should go.
That problem, which was less a problem than a matter of making choice, was solved that very day at luncheon. As he sat at a table in a downtown café there came to him a figure in khaki, wearing a short, close-fitting jacket with an odd emblem on the left sleeve—a young fellow who hailed Thompson with a hearty grip and a friendly grin. He sat himself in a chair vis-à-vis, laying his funny, wedge-shaped cap on the table.
"I've been wondering what had become of you, Jimmie," Thompson said. "I see now. Where have you been keeping yourself?"
"East," the other returned tersely. "Training. Got my wings. Off to England day after to-morrow. How's everything with you, these days?"
Thompson looked his man over thoroughly. Jimmie Wells was the youngest of the four sons of a wealthy man. The other three were at the front, one of them already taking his long rest under a white, wooden cross somewhere in France. Jimmie looked brown and fit. A momentary pang of regret stung Thompson. He wished he too were standing in uniform, ready for overseas.
"I've just wound up my business," he said. "I'm going to the front myself, Jimmie."
"Good," Wells approved. "What branch?"
"I don't know yet," Thompson replied. "I made up my mind in a hurry. I'm just setting out to find where I'll fit in best."
"Why don't you try aviation?" Jimmie Wells suggested. "You ought to make good in that. There are a lot of good fellows flying. If you want action, the R.F.C. is the sportiest lot of all."
"I might. I didn't think of that," Thompson returned slowly. "Yes, I believe I could fly."
"If you can fly like you drive, you'll be the goods," Jimmie asserted cheerfully. "Tell you what, Thompson. Come on around to the Flying Corps headquarters with me. I know a fellow there rather well, and I'll introduce you. Not that that will get you anything, only Holmes will give you a lot of unofficial information."
Thompson rose from the table.
"Lead me to it," said he. "I'm your man."
Getting accepted as a cadet in the Royal Flying Corps was not so simple a matter as enlisting in the infantry. The requirements were infinitely more rigid. The R.F.C. took only the cream of the country's manhood. They told Thompson his age was against him—and he was only twenty-eight. It was true. Ninety per cent. of the winged men were five years younger. But he passed all their tests by grace of a magnificent body that housed an active brain and steady nerves.
All this did not transpire overnight. It took days. He told no one of his plans in the meantime, no one but Tommy Ashe, who was a trifle disappointed when Thompson declined to handle Tommy's exceedingly profitable motor business. Tommy seemed hurt. To make it clear that he had a vital reason, Thompson explained tersely.
"I can't do it because I'm going to the front."
"Eh? What the devil!"
Tommy looked all the astonishment his tone expressed.
"Well,whatthe devil?" Thompson returned tartly. "Is there anything strange about that? A good many men have gone. A good many more will have to go before this thing is settled. Why not?"
"Oh, if a man feels that heshould," Tommy began. He seemed at a loss for words, and ended lamely: "There's plenty of cannon-fodder in the country without men of your caliber wasting themselves in the trenches. You haven't the military training nor the pull to get a commission."
Thompson's lips opened to retort with a sentence he knew would sting like a whiplash. But he thought better of it. He would not try plucking the mote out of another man's eye, when he had so recently got clear of the beam in his own.
Tommy did not tarry long after that. He wished Thompson good luck, but he left behind him the impression that he privately considered it a poor move. Thompson was willing to concede that from a purely material standpoint it was a poor move. But he could no longer adopt the purely materialistic view. It had suddenly become clear to him that he must go—andwhyhe must go. Just as the citizen whose house gets on fire knows beyond peradventure that he must quench the flames if it lies in his power.
The Royal Flying Corps arrives at its ends slowly. Perhaps not too slowly for the niceness of choice that must be made. Presently there came to Wesley Thompson a brief order to report at a training camp in Eastern Canada.
When he held this paper in his hand and knew himself committed irrevocably to the greatest game of all, he felt a queer, inner glow, a quiet satisfaction such as must come to a man who succeeds in some high enterprise. Thompson felt this in spite of desperate facts. He had no illusions as to what he had set about. He knew very well that in the R.F.C. it was a short life and not always a merry one. Of course a man might be lucky. He might survive by superior skill. In any case it had to be done.
But he was moved likewise by a strange loneliness, and with his orders in his hand he understood at last the source of that peculiar regret which latterly had assailed him in stray moments. There were a few friends to bid good-by. And chief, if she came last on his round of calls that last day, was Sophie Carr.
He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be used on him.
He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the Flying Corps the man who lost in aërial combat needed little besides a coffin—and sometimes not even that.
Sophie looked at him almost somberly.
"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.
He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero. But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her—if itshouldbe his last—to be a pleasant one.
And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.
"What is the matter with you—and dozens of men like you that I know?" she demanded in a choked voice. "You stay at home living easy and getting rich in the security that other men are buying with their blood and their lives, over there. Fighting against odds and dying like dogs in a ditch so that we can live here in peace and comfort. You don't even do anything useful here. There doesn't seem to be anything that can make you work or fight. They can sink passenger ships and bomb undefended towns and shell hospitals, and you don't seem to resent it. I've heard you prate about service—when you thought you walked with God and had a mission from God to show other men the way. Why don't you serve now? What is the matter with you? Is your skin so precious? If you can't fight, can't you make ammunition or help to build ships? Are you a man, or just a rabbit? I wish to GodIwere a man."
Thompson rose to his feet. The lash of her tongue had not lost its power to sting since those far-off Lone Moose days. Yet, though it stabbed like a spear, he was more conscious of a passionate craving to gather her into his arms than of anger and resentment. There were tears in Sophie's eyes—but there was no softness in her tone. Her red lips curled as Thompson looked at her in dazed silence. There did not seem to be anything he could say—not with Sophie looking at him like that.
"If you feel that way about it—"
He broke off in the middle of the muttered sentence, turned on his heel, walked out of the room. And he went down the street suffering from a species of shock, saying desperately to himself that it did not matter, nothing mattered.
But he knew that was a lie, a lie he told himself to keep his soul from growing sick.
He went back to his rooms for the last time, and tried with pen and paper to set down some justification of himself for Sophie's eyes. But he could not satisfy himself with that. His pride revolted against it. Why should he plead? Or rather, what was the use of pleading? Why should he explain? He had a case for the defence, but defence avails nothing after sentence has been pronounced. He had waited too long. He had been tried and found wanting.
He tore the letter into strips, and having sent his things to the station long before, put on his hat now and walked slowly there himself, for it lacked but an hour of train-time.
At the corner of Pender and Hastings he met Sam Carr.
"Welcome, youthful stranger," Carr greeted heartily. "I haven't seen you for a long time. Walk down to the Strand with me and have a drink. I've been looking over the Vancouver Construction Company's yard, and it's a very dry place."
Thompson assented. He had time and it was on his way. He reacted willingly to the suggestion. He needed something to revive his spirit, but he had not thought of the stimulus of John Barleycorn until Carr spoke.
In the Strand bar he poured himself half a glass of Scotch whisky. Carr regarded him meditatively over port wine.
"That's the first time I ever saw you touch the hard stuff," he observed.
"It will probably be the last," Thompson replied.
"Why?"
"I'm off," Thompson explained. "I have sold out my business and have been accepted for the Royal Flying Corps. I'm taking the train at six to report at Eastern headquarters."
Carr fingered the stem of his empty glass a second. "I hate to see you go, and still I'm glad you're going," he said with an odd, wistful note in his voice. "I'd go too, Thompson, if I weren't too old to be any use over there."
"Eh?" Thompson looked at him keenly. "Have you been revising your philosophy of life?"
"No. Merely bringing it up to date," Carr replied soberly. "We have what we have in the way of government, economic practice, principles of justice, morality—so forth and so on. I'm opposed to a lot of it. Too much that's obsolete. A lot that's downright bad. But bad as it is in spots, it is not a circumstance to what we should have to endure if the Germans win this war. I believe in my people and my country. I don't believe in the German system of dominating by sheer force and planned terror. The militarists and the market hunters have brought us to this. But we have to destroy the bogey they have raised before we can deal with them. And a man can't escape nationalism. It's bred in us. What the tribe thinks, the individual thinks. This thing is in the air. We are getting unanimous. Whether or not we approve the cause, we are too proud to consider getting whipped in a war that was forced on us. One way and another, no matter what we privately think of our politicians and industrial barons and our institutions generally, it is becoming unthinkable to the Anglo-Saxon that the German shall stalk rough-shod over us. We are beginning—we common people—to hate him and his works. Look at you and me. We were aloof at first. We are intelligent. We have learned to saddle feeling with logic. We have not been stampeded by military bands and oratory. Yet there is something in the air. I wish I could fight. You are going to fight. Not because you like fighting, but because you see something to fight for. And before long those who cannot see will be very few. Isn't that about right?"
"I think so," Thompson replied.
"There you are," Carr went on. "Myself, I have put philosophic consideration in abeyance for the time. I've got primitive again. Damn the Central Powers! If I had seven sons I'd send them all to the front."
They had another drink.
"Did you go and say good-by to Sophie?" Carr demanded suddenly.
"I saw her, but I don't think I said good-by," Thompson said absently. He was thinking about Carr's surprising outburst. He agreed precisely with what the old man said. But he had not suspected the old radical of such intensity. "I didn't tell her I was going."
"You didn't tell her," Carr persisted. "Why not?"
"For a variety of reasons." He found it hard to assume lightness with those shrewd old eyes searchingly upon him. "You can tell her good-by for me. Well, let's have a last one. It'll be a good many moons before you and I look over a glass at each other again. If I don't come back I'll be in honorable company. And I'll give them hell while I last."
Carr walked with him down to the train.
"When the war broke out," he said to Thompson at the coach steps, "if you had proposed to go I should privately have considered you a damned idealistic fool. Now I envy you. You will never have to make apologies to yourself for yourself, nor to your fellows. If I strike a blow that a free people may remain free to work out their destiny in their own fashion, I must do it by proxy. I wish you all the luck there is, Wes Thompson. I hope you come back safe to us again."
They shook hands. A voice warned all and sundry that the train was about to leave, and over the voice rose the strident notes of a gong. Thompson climbed the steps, passed within, thrust his head through an open window as the Imperial Limited gathered way. His last glimpse of a familiar face was of Carr standing bareheaded, looking wistfully after the gliding coaches.
The grandfather clock in the hall was striking nine when Sam Carr came home. He hung his hat on the hall-tree and passed with rather unsteady steps into the living room. He moved circumspectly, with the peculiar caution of the man who knows that he is intoxicated and governs his movements accordingly. Carr's legs were very drunk and he was aware of this, but his head was perfectly clear. He managed to negotiate passage to a seat near his daughter.
Sophie was sitting in a big chair, engulfed therein, one might say. A reading lamp stood on the table at her elbow. A book lay in her lap. But she was staring at the wall absently, and beyond a casual glance at her father she neither moved nor spoke, nor gave any sign of being stirred out of this profound abstraction.
Carr sank into his chair with a sigh of relief.
"I am just about pickled, I do believe," he observed to the room at large.
"So I see," Sophie commented impersonally. "Is there anything uncommon about that? I am beginning to think prohibition will be rather a blessing to you, Dad, when it comes."
"Huh!" Carr grunted. "I suppose one drink does lead to another. But I don't need to be legally safe-guarded yet, thank you. My bibulosity is occasional. When it becomes chronic I shall take to the woods."
"Sometimes I find myself wishing we had never come out of the woods," Sophie murmured.
"What?" Carr exclaimed. Then: "That's rich. You with a sure income beyond your needs, in your own right, with youth and health and beauty, with all your life before you, wishing to revert to what you used to say was a living burial? That's equivalent to holding that the ostrich philosophy is the true one—what you cannot see does not exist. That ignorance is better than knowledge—that—that—Hang it, my dear, are you going to turn reactionary? But that's a woman. Now why should—"
"Oh, don't begin one of your interminable, hair-splitting elucidations," Sophie protested. "I know it's showing weakness to desire to run away from trouble. I don't know that I have any trouble to run from. I'm not sure I should dodge trouble if I could. I was just voicing a stray thought. Wewerehappy at Lone Moose, weren't we, Dad?"
"After a fashion," Carr replied promptly. "As the animal is happy with a full belly and a comfortable place to sleep. But we both craved a great deal more than that of life."
"And we are not getting more," Sophie retorted. "When you come right down to fundamentals we eat a greater variety of food, wear better clothes, live on a scale that by our former standards is the height of luxury. But not one of my dreams has come true. And you find solace in a wine glass where you used to find it in books. Over in Europe men are destroying each other like mad beasts. At home, while part of the nation plays the game square, there's another part that grafts and corrupts and profiteers and slacks to no end. It's a rotten world."
"By gad, you have got the blue glasses on to-night, and no mistake," Carr mused. "That's unmitigated pessimism, Sophie. What you need is a vacation. Let somebody else run this women's win-the-war show for awhile, and you take a rest. That's nerves."
"I can't. There is too much to do," Sophie said shortly. "I don't want to. If I sat down and folded my hands these days I'd go crazy."
Carr grunted. For a minute neither spoke. Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes half closed, fingers beating a slow rat-a-tat on the chair-arm.
"Have you seen Wes Thompson lately?" Carr inquired at last.
"I saw him this afternoon," Sophie replied.
"Did he tell you he was going overseas?"
"No." Sophie's interest seemed languid, judged by her tone.
"You saw him this afternoon, eh?" Carr drawled. "That's queer."
"What's queer?" Sophie demanded.
"That he would see you and not tell you where he was off to," Carr went on. "I saw him away on the Limited at six-o'clock. He told me to tell you good-by. He's gone to the front."
Sophie sat upright.
"How could he do that?" she said impatiently. "A man can't get into uniform and leave for France on two hours' notice. He called here about four. Don't be absurd."
"I don't see anything absurd except your incredulous way of taking it," Carr defended stoutly. "I tell you he's gone. I saw him take the train. Who said anything about two hours' notice? I should imagine he has been getting ready for some time. You know Wes Thompson well enough to know that he doesn't chatter about what he's going to do. He sold out his business two weeks ago, and has been waiting to be passed in his tests. He has finally been accepted and ordered to report East for training in aviation. He joined the Royal Flying Corps."
Carr did not know that in the circle of war workers where Sophie moved so much the R.F.C. was spoken of as the "Legion of Death." No one knew the percentage of casualties in that gallant service. Such figures were never published. All that these women knew was that their sons and brothers and lovers, clean-limbed children of the well-to-do, joined the Flying Corps, and that their lives, if glorious, were all too brief once they reached the Western front. Only the supermen, the favored of God, survived a dozen aërial combats. To have a son or a brother flying in France meant mourning soon or late. So they spoke sometimes, in bitter pride, of their birdmen as the "Legion of Death", a gruesome phrase and apt.
Carr knew the heavy casualties of aërial fighting. But he had never seen a proud woman break down before the ominous cablegram, he had never seen a girl sit dry-eyed and ashy-white, staring dumbly at a slip of yellow paper. And Sophie had—many a time. To her, a commission in the Royal Flying Corps had come to mean little short of a death warrant.
She sat now staring blankly at her father.
"He closed up his business and joined the Flying Corps two weeks ago."
She repeated this stupidly, as if she found it almost impossible to comprehend.
"That's what I said," Carr replied testily. "What the devil did you do to him that he didn't tell you, if he was here only two hours before he left? Why, he must have come to say good-by."
"What did I do?" Sophie whispered. "My God, how was I to know what I was doing?"
She sat staring at her father. But she was not seeing him, and Carr knew she did not see him. Some other vision filled those wide-pupiled eyes. Something that she saw or felt sent a shudder through her. Her mouth quivered. And suddenly she gave a little, stifled gasp, and covered her face with her hands.