Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ On the tail of his plane rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar—boom—boom—boom—boom!
Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond. Back of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running lights laid dead for him. ”

“ If he could have been as sure of a sound, working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he would have been well satisfied. Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like a carthorse. Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?
Having never learned dissipation as a form of amusement, nor having yet been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous labor, Thompson was able to save his money. ”

“ He had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the shelf. In the fierce usages of aërial warfare distracted thought, any relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore, wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. ”

“ Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.
Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was lonely still—but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the woodsman to his woods, and the boulevardier to his beloved avenues! Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. ”

“ At once—with a haste prudery and lovers of formalism might term indecent.
Whether they live happily who can say? Somewhere between the day he first looked on Sophie Carr at Lone Moose and the day he fell five thousand feet to earth in a flaming battle-plane, keeping his life by one of war's miracles, Wes Thompson lived and loved and suffered perhaps a little more than falls to the common lot. He sloughed off prejudices and cant and ignorance and narrowness in those six years as a tree sheds its foliage in autumn.
A man may come to doubt the omnipotence of God without denying his Maker. ”

“ He had still to learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism.
He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his for the asking. ”

“ This was an age of specialists—and he had no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.
Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. ”

“ 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 may hate greed and oppression, and injustice and intolerance, and ruthless exploitation of man by man—and still hold firm faith in humanity, still yearn to love his neighbor as himself.
To do good, to fight hard and play fair, to love faithfully and to desire love, to go out of the world when his time should come with the knowledge of having at least tried to make it a little better for those who were in it, and for those who should come after. That was Wes Thompson's working philosophy of life—if he might be said to have a philosophy—although he certainly never formulated it in words. ”

“ Thompson returned. "I've been through hell for four months, and I've lost something—some of that sublime faith that a man must have. I'm not certain about a lot of things I have always taken for granted. I'm not certain I have an immortal soul which is worth saving, let alone considering myself peculiarly fitted to save other people's souls. I'd be like a blind man leading people with good eyes. It has come to seem to me that I've been trained for the ministry as a carpenter is trained for his trade. ”

“ But his business had lost its savor, just as his soul had lost its slowly-won serenity. His business had no importance to any save himself. It had been merely to winter decently and economically with an eye cocked for such opportunities of self-betterment as came his way, and failing material opportunity in this Bagdad of the Pacific coast to make the most of his enforced idleness.
And now the magic of the colorful city had departed along with the magic of the books. The downtown streets ceased to be a wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch. ”

“ Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger he felt sorry for Tommy.
The next instant the two of them stood alone, Sophie's hand caught fast in his. She tried to withdraw it. The red leaped into her cheeks. But there was still that queer glow in her eyes.
Thompson looked down at the imprisoned hand.
"You'll never get that away from me again," he said whimsically. "You see, I am not a rabbit, but a man, no matter what you thought once. And when a man really wants a thing, he takes it if he can. ”

“ A few battered, smoke-blackened pots and pans stood on a shelf and hung upon nails driven in the walls. A rough bedstead of peeled spruce poles stood in a corner. The remains of a bedtick moldered on the slats, its grass stuffing given over to the nests of the birds and rodents.
It was so utterly and dishearteningly foreign to the orderly arrangement, the meticulous neatness of the home wherein Thompson had grown to young manhood under the tutelage of the prim spinsters that he could scarcely accept as a reality that this, henceforth, was to be his abode. ”

“ He said to himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel—a crass materialist—an intellectual Circe. Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man. ”

“ Thompson suffered a more grievous injury to his heart. Sophie Carr affected him much as strong drink affects men with weak heads. The more he saw of her the more he desired to see, to feast his eyes on her loveliness—and invariably, when alone, to berate himself for such a weakness. He had never dreamed that a man could feel that way about a woman. He did not see why he, of all men, should succumb to the fascination of a girl like Sophie Carr. ”

“ San Francisco—is San Francisco—a melting-pot of peoples, blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a great pace.
It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any source whatever. ”

“ But you seemed always so unconcerned. It maddened me to think I cared so much for a man who cared nothing about wrongs and injustices, who could sit contentedly at home while other men sacrificed themselves. My dear, I'm afraid I'm an erratic person, a woman whose heart and head are nearly always at odds."
Thompson laughed, looking down at her with an air of pride.
"That is to say you would always rather be sure than sorry," he remarked. "Well, you can be sure of one thing, Sophie. You can't admit that you really do care for me and then run away, as you did at Lone Moose. ”

“ Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python—a python that rested its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and hushed lakes far northward.
The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is lord of those watery roads ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers. ”

“ Thompson had heard that men who fought shook hands when the struggle was ended—a little ceremony that served to restore the status quo. He had not the least rancor against Tommy Ashe. It had all seeped away in the blind fury of that clash. He thrust out a hand upon which the knuckles were cut and bloody. And the man upon whose countenance he had bruised those knuckles took it with a wry self-conscious smile. ”

“ Carr answered gently. "You have never yet run foul of circumstances over which you have no more power than man has over the run of the tides. But we'll let that pass. I'm trying to help you, Sophie, not to discourage you. There are some situations in which, and some natures to whom, half a loaf is worse than no bread. Do you feel, have you ever for an hour felt that you simply couldn't face an existence in which Tommy Ashe had no part?" ”

“ He had struggled for money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. ”

“ He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the spinster aunts, through the successive steps of education and his ultimate training for the ministry as a profession, the theological note had been the note in which he reasoned and thought and felt. His environment had grounded him in the belief that all the world vibrated in unison with the theological harmonies. He had never had any doubts or equivocations. Faith was everything, and he had abundance of faith. ”

“ The little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him with a force he could not understand. He could not, for instance, tell why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his attention focussing sharply upon the people, their manner of speech, their surroundings, even upon so minor a detail as a smudge of flour upon the hand that Mrs. Lachlan extended to him. She was a fat, dusky-skinned woman, apparently regarding Thompson with a feeling akin to awe. ”

“ Faith may move mountains, but chiefly through the medium of a shovel. When a man is hungry his need is for food. When he is lonely he craves companionship. When he grieves he desires sympathy. And the Providence Mr. Thompson had been taught to lean so hard upon did not chop his wood, cook his meals, furnish him with congenial society, comfort him when he was sad. ”