Burned Bridges Part 15

But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites, syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous quant.i.ties of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every sort of ground--from biological complexities which he could not understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society. He found himself a.s.senting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was ent.i.tled to what he produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr had first aroused.

In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once started along this road he became an habitue, spending in a particular chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically into the fields of scientific conclusions.

He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple, concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a woman pa.s.sing his seat.

Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of dimly heard noises, so now Thompson's eyes lifted from his book, and, with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.

There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman's skirt in pa.s.sing, the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his attention. He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day. He pa.s.sed thousands on the streets. This one, now, upon whom he gazed with a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height, slender, well-dressed.

That was all--until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library a.s.sistant. She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat. And Thompson thought there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn. He was just as sure that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table. And he rose impulsively to go to her.

She turned away in the same instant and walked quickly down a pa.s.sage between the rows of shelved books. Thompson could not drive himself to hurry, nor to call. He was sure--yet not too sure. He hated to make himself appear ridiculous. Nor was he overconfident that if it were indeed Sophie Carr she would be either pleased or willing to renew their old intimacy. And so, lagging faint-heartedly, he lost her in the maze of books.

But he did not quite give up. He was on the second floor. The windows on a certain side overlooked the main entrance. He surmised that she would be leaving. So he crossed to a window that gave on the library entrance and waited for an eternity it seemed, but in reality a scant five minutes, before he caught sight of a mauve suit on the broad steps.

Looking from above he could be less sure than when she stood at the desk. But the girl halted at the foot of the steps and standing by a red roadster turned to look up at the library building. The sun fell full upon her upturned face. The distance was one easily to be spanned by eyes as keen as his. Thompson was no longer uncertain. He was suddenly, acutely unhappy. The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.

Sophie got into the machine. The red roadster slid off with gears singing their metallic song as she s.h.i.+fted through to high. Thompson watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a book. He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk the streets in aimless, restless fas.h.i.+on, full of vivid, painful memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so long dormant he had supposed them dead.

Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the enjoyment of her good fortune. Yet there was no reason why she should not be here. Thompson d.a.m.ned under his breath the blind chance which had set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.

But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter? In a city of half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose and she G.o.d only knew where. That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is impregnable--these things served to intensify the gulf between them which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened. No, Sophie Carr's presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any difference to him. He repeated this emphatically--with rather more emphasis than seemed necessary.

CHAPTER XVI

A MEETING BY THE WAY

But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing difference. He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic north pulls on the compa.s.s needle. He had grown free of both thought and hope of her. There had been too many other vital things pressing upon him these months of adventure in toil, too many undeniable, everyday factors of living present at every turn, hourly insistent upon being coped with, for him to nurse old sad dreams and longings. So he had come at last to think of that pa.s.sionate yearning as a disease which had run its course.

Now, to his dismay, it recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere glimpse of Sophie. The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon him, to make his heart heavy and spoil his days of pa.s.sive content. It angered him to be so hopelessly troubled. But he could not gainsay the fact.

It made San Francisco a dreary waste. Try as he would he could not keep Sophie Carr from being the sun around which the lesser nebulae of his thought continually revolved. He could no more help a wistful lookout for her upon San Francisco's streets than he could help breathing. Upon the rolling phalanxes of motor cars his gaze would turn with watchful expectation, and he took to scanning the faces of the pa.s.sing thousands, a lonely, shy man with a queer glow in his eyes. That, of course, was only in moments of forgetfulness. Then he would pull himself together with a resentful irritation and tax himself with being a weak fool and stalk along about his business.

But his business had lost its savor, just as his soul had lost its slowly-won serenity. His business had no importance to any save himself.

It had been merely to winter decently and economically with an eye c.o.c.ked for such opportunities of self-betterment as came his way, and failing material opportunity in this Bagdad of the Pacific coast to make the most of his enforced idleness.

And now the magic of the colorful city had departed along with the magic of the books. The downtown streets ceased to be a wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch. The hushed reading room where he had pa.s.sed so many contented hours was haunted by a presence that obscured the printed page. He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, gun in hand, of old Sam Carr in his moosehide chair, of the Indians, the forest, of all that goes to make the northern wilderness--and of himself moving through it all, an unheroic figure, a man who had failed in his work, in his love, in everything.

That, chiefly, was what stirred him anew to action, a suddenly acute sense of failure, of a consciousness that he was drifting instead of doing. He found himself jarred out of the even tenor of his way. San Francisco filled him with dissatisfaction now, knowing that she was there. If the mere knowledge that Sophie Carr dwelt somewhere within the city boundaries had power to make a mooning idiot of him, he said to himself testily, then he had better get out, go somewhere, get down to work, be at his fixed purpose of proving his mettle upon an obdurate world, and get her out of his mind in the process. He couldn't tune his whole existence to a sentimental craving for any woman--even such a woman as Sophie. He would, in the moment of such emotional genuflexions, have dissented with cynical bitterness from the poetic dictum that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Spurred by this mood he acted instinctively rather than with reasoned purpose. He gave up his room, packed his clothes and betook himself upon a work-seeking pilgrimage among the small, interior towns.

He left San Francisco in March. By May he had circulated all through the lower San Joaquin and farther abroad to the San Juan, and had turned his face again toward San Francis...o...b..y. At various jobs he had tried his hand, making a living such as it was, acquiring in addition thereto a store of first-hand experience in the social and monetary values of itinerant labor. He conceded that such experience might somehow be of use to a man. But he had had enough of it. He had a feeling of having tested California for his purposes--and of finding it wanting.

He had made up his mind to double on his tracks, to go north again, specifically to British Columbia, partly because Tommy was there, chiefly because Vancouver was a growing place on the edge of a vast, newly opened interior. He knew that if no greater thing offered, from that center there was always the avenue of the woods. He could qualify in that line. And in the woods even a common axeman exacted and received more democratic treatment than in this older region where industry ran in fixed channels, where cla.s.s lines were more rigidly drawn, where common labor was cheap and unprivileged.

He hadn't been getting on in those three months. He had less money than when he started out--about enough now to get him up North and leave a hundred dollars or so for emergencies. No, decidedly he wasn't getting on--he was going down, he told himself. It dismayed him a little. It wasn't enough to be big and strong and willing. A mule could be that.

The race was not to the swift or the strong. Not in modern industry, with its bewildering complexities. No, it fell to the trained, the specialist in knowledge, the man who could do something more efficiently, with greater precision than his fellows.

He could not do that--not yet. And so there was nothing in California for him, he decided. A man could no longer go West and grow up with the country--but he could go North.

Thompson was sitting on the border of a road that runs between San Mateo and the city when he definitely committed himself to doubling on his tracks, to counteracting the trick of fate which had sent him to a place where he did not wish to go. He was looking between the trees and out over an undulating valley floored with emerald fields, studded with oaks, backed by the bare Hamiltons to the east, and westward by the redwood-clad ruggedness of the Santa Cruz range. And he was not seeing this loveliness of landscape at all. He was looking far beyond and his eyes were full of miles upon miles of untrodden forest, the sanctuary of silence and furtive living things, of mountains that lifted snowy spires to heaven high over the glaciers that scarred their sides. And the smells that for a moment rose strongly in his nostrils were not the smells of palm and gum and poppy-dotted fields, but odors of pine and spruce and the smell of birchwood burning in campfires. He came out of that queer projection of mind into great distance with a slight shake of his head and a feeling of wonder. It had been very vivid. And it dawned upon him that for a minute he had grown sentimentally lonely for that grim, unconquered region where he had first learned the pangs of loneliness, where he had suffered in body and spirit until he had learned a lesson he would never forget while he lived.

The road itself, ab.u.t.ting upon stately homes and modest bungalows behind a leafy screen of Australian gums, ran straight as an arrow down the peninsula toward the city and the bay, a broad, smoothly asphalted highway upon that road where the feet of the Franciscan priests had traced the _Camino Real_. And down this highway both north and south there pa.s.sed many motor cars swiftly and silently or with less speed and more noise, according to their quality and each driver's mood.

Thompson rested, watching them from the gra.s.sy level beneath a tree. He rather regretted now the impulse which had made him s.h.i.+p his bag and blanket roll from the last town, and undertake this solitary hike. He had merely humored a whim to walk through orchards and green fields in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on, to be a careless trudger for a day. True, he was saving carfare, but he observed dryly that he was expending many dollars' worth of energy--to say nothing of shoe leather. The pleasure of walking, paradoxically, was best achieved by sitting still in the shade. A midday sun was softening the asphalt with its fierce blaze. He looked idly at pa.s.sing machines and wondered what the occupants thereof would say if he halted one and demanded a ride. He smiled.

He stared after a pa.s.sing sedan driven by a uniformed chauffeur, one half the rear seat occupied by a fat, complacent woman, the other half of the ten-inch upholstery given over to an equally fat and complacent bulldog. And while he reflected in some little amus.e.m.e.nt at the circ.u.mstance which gave a pampered animal the seat of honor in a six-thousand-dollar car and sent an able-bodied young man trudging down the road in the heat and the dust, another machine came humming up from the south.

It was a red car, crowding the state limit for speed, and it swept down on Thompson with a subdued purr like a great cat before a fire. When it was almost abreast of him there burst from it a crack like the report of a shotgun. There was just a perceptible wabble of the machine. Its hot pace slackened abruptly. It rolled past and came to a stop beside the road fifty yards along--a ma.s.sive brute of a red roadster driven by a slim girl in a pongee suit, a girl whose bare head was bound about with heavy braids of corn-yellow hair.

Thompson half rose--then sank back in momentary indecision. Perhaps it were wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Then he smiled at the incongruity of that proverb applied to Sophie Carr.

He sat watching the machine for a minute. The halting of its burst of speed was no mystery to Thompson. Miss Carr proceeded with calm deliberation. She first resurrected a Panama hat from somewhere in the seat beside her and pinned it atop of her head. Then she got out, walked around to the front wheel, poked it tentatively once or twice, and proceeded about the business of getting out a jack and a toolkit.

By the time Thompson decided that in common decency he should offer to lend a hand and thus was moved to rise and approach the disabled car she had the jack under the front axle and was applying a brace wrench to the rim bolts. But the rim bolts that hold on a five-inch tire are not designed to unscrew too easily. Sophie had started one with an earnest tug and was twisting stoutly at the second when he reached her. He knew by the impersonal glance she gave him that he was to her merely a casual stranger.

"May I help you?" he said politely. "A big tire is rather hard to handle."

Sophie bestowed another level look upon him as she straightened up from her task. A puzzled expression showed briefly in her gray eyes. But she handed him the wrench without parley.

"Thanks, if you will," she said. "These rim bolts are fearfully stiff. I daresay I could manage it though. I've done it on a lighter car. But it's a man's job, really."

Thompson laid off his coat and set to work silently, withholding speech for a double reason. He could not trust his tongue, and he was not given to inconsequential chatter. If she did not recognize him--well, there was no good reason why she should remember, if she chose not to remember. He could lend a hand and go his way, just as he would have been moved to lend a hand to any one in like difficulty.

He twisted out the bolt-heads, turned the lugs, pulled the rim clear of the wheel. He stood up to get the spare tire from its place behind. And he caught Sophie staring at him, astonishment, surprise, inquiry all blended in one frank stare. But still she did not speak.

He trundled the blow-out casing to the rear, took off the one ready inflated, and speedily had it fast in its appointed position on the wheel.

And still Sophie Carr did not speak. She leaned against the car body. He felt her eyes upon him, questioning, appraising, critical, while he released the jack, gathered up the tools, and tied them up in the roll on the running board.

"There you are," he found himself facing her, his tongue giving off commonplace statements, while his heart thumped heavily in his breast.

"Ready for the road again."

"Do you remember what Donald Lachlan used to say?" Sophie answered irrelevantly. "Long time I see you no. Eh, Mr. Thompson?"

She held out one gloved hand with just the faintest suggestion of a smile hovering about her mouth. Thompson's work-roughened fingers closed over her small soft hand. He towered over her, looking down wistfully.

"I didn't think you knew me," he muttered.

Sophie laughed. The smile expanded roguishly. The old, quizzical twinkle flickered in her eyes.

"You must think my memory poor," she replied. "You're not one of the peas in a pod, you know. I knew you, and still I wasn't sure. It seemed scarcely possible. It's a long, long way from the Santa Clara Valley to Lone Moose."

"Yes," he answered calmly. "A long way--the way I came."