"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.