—AND THE BOMB THE FUSE FIRED
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, what the 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 he should," 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—and why he 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 it should be 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 God I were 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. We were happy 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.