Burned Bridges Part 20

"New blood counts," John P. rumbled in confidence to his son. "Keeps us from going stale, Fred."

When a twelvemonth had elapsed from the day Sophie Carr's red roadster blew a tire on the San Mateo road and set up that sequence of events which had landed him where he was, Thompson had left his hall bedroom at the Globe for quarters in a decent bachelor apartment. He had a well-stocked wardrobe, a dozen shelves of miscellaneous books, and three thousand dollars in the bank. Considering his prospects he should have been a fairly sanguine and well-contented young man.

As a matter of fact he had become so, within certain limits. A man whose time is continuously and profitably occupied does not brood. Thompson had found a personal satisfaction in living up to John P. Henderson's first judgment of him. Through Fred Henderson and through his business activities he had formed a little group of pleasant acquaintances.

Sophie Carr was growing shadowy--a shadow that sometimes laid upon him certain regrets, it is true, but the mere memory of her no longer produced the old overpowering reactions, the sense of sorry failure, of a dear treasure lost because he lacked a man's full stature in all but physical bulk.

It could easily have happened that Thompson would have embraced with enthusiasm a future bounded by San Francisco, a future in which he would successfully sell Groya cars until his ama.s.sed funds enabled him to expand still further his material success. If that future embraced a comfortable home, if a mate and affection suggested themselves as possibilities well within his reach, the basis of those tentative yearnings rested upon the need that dwells within every normal human being, and upon what he saw happening now and then to other young men--and young women--within the immediate radius of his observation.

But upon this particular May morning his mind was questing far afield.

The prime cause of that mental projection was a letter in his hand, a letter from Tommy Ashe. Thompson had a lively imagination, tempered by the sort of worldly experience no moderately successful man can escape. And Tommy's letter--the latest in a series of renewed correspondence--opened up certain desirable eventualities. The first page of Tommy's screed was devoted to personal matters. The rest ran thus:

Candidly, old man, your description of the contemplated Henderson car makes a hit with me. The line I handle now is a fair seller.

But fair isn't good enough for me. I really need--in addition--to have a smaller machine, to supply a pretty numerous cla.s.s of prospects. I should like to get hold of just such a car as you describe. I am feeling around for the agency of a small, _good_ car. Send me all the dope on this one, and when it will be on the market. There is a tremendous market here for something like that.

I'd prefer to take up a line with an established reputation behind it. But the main thing is to have a car that will sell when you push it. And this listens good.

Aren't you about due for a vacation? Why don't you take a run up here? I'd enjoy a chin-fest. The fis.h.i.+ng's good, too--and we are long on rather striking scenery. Do come up for a week, when you can get off. Meantime, by-by.

Tommy

Thompson laid down the letter and stared out over the roof-tops. He couldn't afford to be a philanthropist. A rather sweeping idea had flashed into his mind as he read that missive. His horizon was continually expanding. Money, beyond cavil, was the key to many doors, a necessity if a man's eyes were fixed upon much that was desirable. If he could make money selling machines for Groya Motors Inc., why not for himself? Why not?

The answer seemed too obvious for argument. The new car which had taken final form in Fred Henderson's drafting room and in the Groya shop was long past the experimental stage. All it required was financing and John P. Henderson had attended efficiently to that. There was a plant rising swiftly across the bay, a modern plant with railway service, big yards, and a testing track, in which six months hence would begin an estimated annual production of ten thousand cars a year. John P. had remarked once to his son that for the Henderson family to design, produce, manufacture and market successfully a car they could be proud of would be the summit of his ambition. And the new car was named the Summit.

It was a good car, a quality car in everything but sheer bulk. Thompson knew that. He knew, too, that people were buying motor cars on performance, not poundage, now. He knew too that he could sell Summits--if he could get territory in which to make sales.

He had thought about this before. He knew that in the Groya files lay dealers' contracts covering the cream of California, Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton. These dealers would handle Summits. There had not seemed an opening wide enough to justify plans. But now Tommy's letter focused his vision upon a specific point.

If he could get that Vancouver territory! Vancouver housed a hundred thousand people. A Vancouver agency for the Summit, with a live man at the helm, would run to big figures.

No, he decided, he would not hastily grasp his fountain pen and say to Tommy Ashe, "Jump in and contract for territory and allotment, old boy.

The Summit is the goods." Not until he had looked over the ground himself.

He had two weeks' vacation due when it pleased him. And it pleased him to ask John P. as soon as he reached the office that very morning if it was convenient to the firm to do without him for the ensuing fortnight.

CHAPTER XX

THE SHADOW

Thompson went to Vancouver to spy out the land. He made no confidants.

He went about the Terminal City with his mouth shut and his ears and eyes open. What he saw and heard soon convinced him that like the Israelites of old he stood upon the border of a land which--for his business purpose--flowed with milk and honey. It was easy to weave air castles. He could visualize a future for himself in Vancouver that loomed big--if he could but make the proper arrangements at the other end; that is to say, with Mr. John P. Henderson, President of the Summit Motors Corporation. Thompson had faith enough in himself to believe he could make such an arrangement, daring as it seemed when he got down to actual figures.

It gave him a curious sense of relief to find Tommy Ashe flirting with the Pet.i.t Six people, apparently forgetful of the Summit specifications.

Thompson hadn't quite taken as his gospel the sound business ethic that you must look out for number one first, last and always. If Tommy had broached the subject personally, if he had shown anxiety to acquire selling rights in the Summit, Thompson would have felt impelled by sheer loyalty of friends.h.i.+p to help Tommy secure the agency. That would have been quixotic, of course. Nevertheless, he would have done it, because not to do it would have seemed like taking a mean advantage. As it was--

For the rest he warmed to the sheer beauty of the spot. Vancouver spreads largely over rolling hills and little peninsular juttings into the sea. From its eminences there sweep unequalled views over the Gulf of Georgia and northwestward along towering mountain ranges upon whose lower slopes the firs and cedars marshal themselves in green battalions.

From his hotel window he would gaze in contented abstraction over the tidal surges through the First Narrows and the tall masts of s.h.i.+pping in a s.p.a.cious harbor, landlocked and secure, stretching away like a great blue lagoon with motor craft and ferries and squat tugs for waterfowl.

Thompson loved the forest as a man loves pleasant, familiar things, and next to the woods his affection turned to the sea. Here, at his hand, were both in all their primal grandeur. He was very sure he would like Vancouver.

Whether the fact that he encountered the Carrs before he was three days in town, had dinner at their home, and took Sophie once to luncheon at the Granada Grill, had anything to do with this conclusion deponent sayeth not. To be sure he learned with the first frank gleam in Sophie's gray eyes that she still held for him that mysterious pulse-quickening lure, that for him her presence was sufficient to stir a glow no other woman had ever succeeded in kindling ever so briefly. But he had acquired poise, confidence, a self-mastery not to be disputed. He said to himself that he could stand the gaff now. He could face facts. And he said to himself further, a little wistfully, that Sophie Carr was worth all the pangs she had ever given him--more.

He could detect no change in her. That was one of the queer, personal characteristics she possessed--that she could pa.s.s beyond his ken for months, for years he almost believed, and when he met her again she would be the same, voice, manner, little tricks of speech and gesture unchanged. Meeting Sophie after that year was like meeting her after a week. Barring the clothes and the surroundings that spoke of ample means tastefully expended, the general background of her home and a.s.sociates, she seemed to him unchanged. Yet when he reflected, he was not so sure of this. Sophie was gracious, friendly, frankly interested when he talked of himself. When their talk ran upon impersonal things the old nimbleness of mind functioned. But under these superficialities he could only guess, after all, what the essential woman of her was now. He could not say if she were still the queer, self-disciplined mixture of cold logic and primitive pa.s.sion the Sophie Carr of Lone Moose had revealed to him. He was not sure if he desired to explore in that direction. The old scars remained. He shrank from acquiring new ones, yet perforce let his thought dwell upon her with reviving concentration. After all, he said to himself, it was on the knees of the G.o.ds.

At any rate he was not to be deterred from his project. He had served his apprentices.h.i.+p in the game. He was eager to try his own wings in a flight of his own choosing.

Since he had evolved a definite plan of going about that, he entered decisively upon the first step. Upon reaching San Francisco he bearded John P. Henderson in his mahogany den and outlined a scheme which made that worthy gentleman's eyes widen. He heard Thompson to an end, however, with a growing twinkle in those same, shrewd, worldly-wise orbs, and at the finish thumped a plump fist on his desk with a force that made the pen-rack jingle.

"d.a.m.ned if I don't go you," he exclaimed. "I said in the beginning you'd make a salesman, and you've made good. You'll make good in this. If you don't it isn't for lack of vision--and nerve."

"Nerve," he chuckled over the word. "You know it isn't good business for me. I'll be losing a valuable man off my staff, and I'll be taking longer chances than it has ever been my policy to take. Your only real a.s.set is--yourself. That isn't a negotiable security."

"Not exactly," Thompson returned. "Still in your business you are compelled--every big business is compelled--to place implicit trust in certain men. From a commercial point of view this move of mine should prove even more profitable to you than if I remain on your staff as a salesman--provided your estimate of me, and my own estimate of myself, is approximately correct. You must have an outlet for your product. I will still be making money for you. In addition I shall be developing a market that will, perhaps before so very long, absorb a tremendous number of cars."

"Oh, there's no argument. I'm committed to the enterprise," Henderson declared. "I believe in _you_, Thompson. Otherwise I couldn't see your proposition with a microscope. Well, I'll embody the various points in a contract. Come in this afternoon and sign up."

As easily as that. Thompson went down the half-flight of stairs still a trifle incredible over the ease with which he had accomplished a stroke that meant--oh, well, to his sanguine vision there was no limit.

He felt pretty much as he had felt when he sold his first Groya to an apparently hopeless prospect, elated, a little astonished at his success, brimful of confidence to cope with the next problem.

The ego in him clamored to be about this bigger business. But that was not possible. He came back to earth presently with the recollection that the Summits would not be ready for distribution before late October--and for the next five months the more Groyas he sold the better position he would be in when he went on his own.

So when he finally had in his hands a dealer's contract covering the Province of British Columbia he put the matter out of his mind--except for occasional day-dreamings upon it in idle moments--and gave himself whole-heartedly to serving the house of Henderson.

Time pa.s.sed uneventfully enough. June went its way with its brides and flowers. July drove folk upon vacations to the seaside resorts.

And in August there burst upon an incredulous world the jagged lightnings and cannon-thunder of war.

It would be waste words to describe here the varying fortunes of the grappling armies during the next few months. The newspapers and current periodicals and countless self-appointed historians have attended to that. It is all recorded, so that one must run to read it all. It is as terribly vivid to us now as it was distant and shadowy then--a madness of slaughter and destruction that raged on the other side of the earth, a terror from which we stood comfortably aloof.

There was something in the war unseen by Thompson and the Hendersons and a countless host of intelligent, well-dressed, comfortable people who bought extras wet from the press to read of that merciless thrust through Belgium, the shock and recoil and counter-shock of armies, of death dealt wholesale with scientific precision, of 42-centimeter guns and poison gas and all the rest of that b.l.o.o.d.y nightmare--they did not see the dread shadow that hung over Europe lengthening and spreading until its murky pall should span the Atlantic.

Thompson was a Canadian. He knew by the papers that Canada was at war, a voluntary partic.i.p.ant. But it did not strike him that he was at war. He felt no call to arms. In San Francisco there was no common ferment in the public mind, no marching troops, no military bands making a man's feet tingle to follow as they pa.s.sed by. Men discussed the war in much the same tone as they discussed the stock market. If there was any definite feeling in the matter it was that the European outbreak was strictly a European affair. When the German spearhead blunted its point against the Franco-British legions and the gray hosts recoiled upon the Marne, the Amateur Board of Strategy said it would be over in six months.

In any case, American tradition explicitly postulated that what occurred in Europe was not, could not, be vital to Americans. But in the last test blood proves thicker than water. Sentimentally, the men Thompson knew were pro-Ally. Only, in practice there was no apparent reason why they should do otherwise than as they had been doing. And in effect San Francisco only emulated her sister cities when she proceeded about "business as usual"--just as in those early days, before the war had bitten deep into their flesh and blood, British merchants flung that slogan in the face of the enemy.

So that to Wes Thompson, concentrated upon his personal affairs, the war never became more than something akin to a bad dream recalled at midday, an unreal sort of thing. Something that indubitably existed without making half the impression upon him that seeing a pedestrian mangled under a street car made upon him during that summer. The war aroused his interest, but left his emotions unstirred. There was nothing martial about him. He dreamed no dreams of glory on the battlefield. He had never thought of the British Empire as something to die for. The issue was not clear to him, just as it failed to clarify itself to a great many people in those days. The maiden aunts and all his early environment had shut off the bigger vision that was sending a steady stream of Canadian battalions overseas.

When the Battle of the Marne was past history and the opposing armies had dug themselves in and the ghastly business of the trenches had begun, Thompson was more than ever immersed in pursuit of the main chance, for he was then engaged in organizing Summit Motors in Vancouver. There had been a period when his optimism about his prospects had suffered a relapse. He had half-expected that Canada's partic.i.p.ation in that devil's dance across the sea would spoil things commercially.

There had been a sort of temporary demoralization on both sides of the line, at first. But that was presently adjusted. Through Tommy Ashe and other sources he learned that business in Vancouver was actually looking up because of the war.

He was a little surprised that Tommy was not off to the war. Tommy loved his England. He was forever singing England's praises. England was "home" to Tommy Ashe always. It was only a name to Thompson. And he thought, when he thought about it at all, that if England's need was not great enough to call her native-born, that the Allies must have the situation well in hand; as the papers had a way of stating.

He had other fish to fry, himself, without rus.h.i.+ng off to the front. As a matter of fact he never consciously considered the question of going to the front. That never occurred to him. When he did think of the war he thought of it impersonally, as a busy man invariably does think of matters which do not directly concern him.

What did concern him most vitally was the project he had in hand. And next to those ambitions, material considerations, his fancy touched shyly now and then upon Sophie Carr.