SUNDRY REFLECTIONS
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 he is a 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.