FAIR WINDS
Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft lies along narrow slips, with the green woods of Stanley Park for a background. Thompson knew Coal Harbor well. He knew the slips and the boats and many of the men who owned them. He had gone on many a week-end cruise out of that basin with young fellows who looked their last on the sea when they crossed the English Channel. So he had picked up a working fund of nautical practice, a first-hand knowledge of the sea and the manner of handling small sail.
From the Granada he went straight to Coal Harbor. While the afternoon was yet young he had chartered a yawl, a true one-man craft, carrying plenty of canvas for her inches, but not too much. She had a small, snug cabin, was well-found as to gear, and was equipped with a sturdy single-cylinder gas engine to kick her along through calm and tideway.
Before six he had her ready for sea, his dunnage bag aboard, grub in the lockers, gas in the tanks, clearance from the customhouse. He slept aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.
He blew through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank. As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in the trough again.
But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas that had no power to harm him. Peace rode with him. His body rested, and the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the gut on a violin.
Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.
He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.
He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes of darting fish.
Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.
Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling, falling swiftly from a great height in the air. 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. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug. A man leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl. Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.
Thompson emerged into the cockpit. The air was cool and he was fully dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in the military salute—the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had plowed.
"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the conversational ice.
"It was a wild night outside and no mistake," the man replied. "We took cover about midnight—got tired of plowing into it, and wasn't too keen for wallowing through them rips off the Cape. Say, are you back long from over there?"
"Not long," Thompson replied. "I left England two weeks ago."
"How's it going?"
"We're over the hump," Thompson told him. "They're outgunned now. The Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at last. You know what that means if you've been across."
"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I hope they give Fritz hell. He gave it to us."
"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.
"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."
"Sam Carr? Sure. The Squalla here belongs to him—or to the Company—and Carr is just about the Company himself."
A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."
"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay alongside."
The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. The Squalla went her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he made the Redonda Islands and passed between them far up the narrow gut of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that deep pass when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.
Thanks to meeting the Squalla he knew his ground. Also he knew something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed astern in lieu of a dinghy.
He sat on his cushions in the cockpit that evening looking up at a calm, star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range, tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation and the open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed between, silvered by a moon-path, shimmering under the same pale rays that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window of a cabin on shore. The silence was thick, uncanny. But it was a comforting silence to Thompson. He felt no loneliness, he whom the lonely places had once appalled. But that was a long time ago. Sitting there thinking of that, he smiled.
No man lives by, for, or because of love alone. Nor does a woman, although the poets and romancers have very nearly led us to believe a woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the passion Sophie Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and woke betimes.
The last two years had rather blotted out those periods of eruption. 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. Pride spurs him. To come off victorious over a concrete enemy, to uphold the traditions of his race, to be of service—these things will carry any man over desperate places without faltering, if he feels them.
And Wes Thompson had experienced that sort of vision rather keenly. It had driven him, a man of peaceful tendency, to blood-drenched fields. For two years he had been in another world, in a service that demanded of a man all that was in him. He was just beginning to be conscious that for so long he had been detached from life that flowed in natural, normal channels.
He was conscious too, of a queer, impersonal manner of thinking about things and people, now that he was back. He wondered about himself. What particular motive, for instance, had driven him up here? To be sure there was the very plausible one of obeying a physician's order about living in the open, of keeping decent hours, of avoiding crowds and excitement until he was quite himself again. But he could have done that without coming to Toba Inlet.
Of course he wanted to see Sam Carr again. Also he wanted to see Sophie. Why he wished to see her was not so readily answered. He wanted to see her again, that was all—just as he had wanted to see Canada and his aunts, and the green slopes of the Pacific again. Because all these things and people were links with a past that was good and kindly by comparison with the too-vivid recent days. Yes, surely, he would be glad to see Sam Carr—and Sophie. When he recalled the last time he spoke with her he could smile a little wryly. It had been almost a tragedy then. It did not seem much now. The man who had piloted a battle-plane over swaying armies in France could smile reminiscently at being called a rabbit by an angry girl.
It was queer Sophie had never married. His thought took that turn presently. She was—he checked the years on his fingers—oh, well, she was only twenty-four. Still, she was no frail, bloodless creature, but a woman destined by nature for mating, a beautiful woman well fit to mother beautiful daughters and strong sons, to fill a lover with joy and a husband with pride.
A queer warmth flushed Thompson's cheek when he thought of Sophie this wise. A jealous feeling stabbed at him. The virus was still in his blood, he became suddenly aware. And then he laughed out loud, at his own camouflaging. He had known it all the time. And this trip it would be kill or cure, he said to himself whimsically.
Still it was odd, now he came to think of it, that Sophie had never in those years found a man quite to her liking. She had had choice enough, Thompson knew. But it was no more strange, after all, than for himself never to have looked with tender eyes on any one of the women he had known. He had liked them, but he hadn't ever got past the stage of comparing them with Sophie Carr. She had always been the standard he set to judge the others. Thompson realized that he was quite a hopeless case in this respect.
"I must be a sort of a freak," he muttered to himself when he was stowed away in his blankets. "I wonder if I could like another woman, as well, if I tried? Well, we'll see, we'll see."