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.