Burned Bridges Part 8

Sometimes both Sam Carr and Tommy Ashe were present at these oral tilts, sitting back in silent amus.e.m.e.nt at Mr. Thompson's intellectual floundering.

A clean cut in the flesh of a healthy man heals quickly. In two weeks Thompson could put his full weight on the injured member without pain or any tendency to reopening the wound. Whereupon he repaired to his cabin again, in a state of mind that was very disturbing. Without accepting any of the Carr dictums upon theology and theological activities, he was fast growing doubtful of his fitness for the job of herding other people into the fold. He found himself with a growing disinclination for such a task as his life work. Since that was the only thing he had any apt.i.tude for or training in, when he thought of cutting loose and facing the world at large without the least idea of what he should do or how he should do it, he perceived himself in a good deal of a dilemma.

He was growing sure of one thing. Over and above the good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat--to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr.

Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary pa.s.sions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking G.o.d that he was not, like the Pharisees, as other men. Sitting moodily by his rusty stove he confessed to himself that a man who would gladly give up his hopes of eternal salvation for the privilege of folding Sophie Carr close in his arms had no business in the ministry--unless he simply wanted to hold down an easy, salaried job.

Whatever other sorts of a fool he might have been Thompson was no hypocrite. He had never consciously looked upon the ministry as a man looks upon a business career--a succession of steps to success, to an a.s.sured social and financial position. Yet when he turned the searchlight of a.n.a.lysis upon his motives he could not help seeing that this was the very thing he had unwittingly been doing--that he had expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field--a call which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary. And Thompson could see that he had been looking forward to these things as a just reward, and he could see too how the material benefits in them were the lure. He had been coached and primed for that. His inclination had been sedulously directed into that channel. His enthusiasm had been the enthusiasm of one who seeks to serve and feels wholly competent.

But he doubted both his fitness and his inclination now. He said to himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her.

And she was a rank infidel--a cra.s.s materialist--an intellectual Circe.

Why, in the name of G.o.d, he asked himself pa.s.sionately, must _he_ lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man.

Mr. Thompson had not as yet discovered what a highly important factor that last was.

He managed to get a partial insight into that some three days later, and the vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although to him at the time it seemed the most wonderful and unaccountable thing in the world.

CHAPTER IX

UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was on his way to Carr's house, driven thither by pure pressure of loneliness, born of three days' solitary communion within the limits of his own shack. He wanted to hear a human voice again. And it was a vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of directing him straight to Carr's living room, where her father would probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.

He hurried with long strides after Sophie. She dipped below the sloping bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the gra.s.sy bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of Lone Moose.

He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishness to the teasingly mischievous. But he had never seen her in quite the same pitch of spirits that caught his attention as soon as he reached her side.

There was something bubbling within her, some repressed excitement that kindled a glow in her gray eyes, kept a curiously happy smile playing about her lips.

And that magnetic something that drew the heart out of Thompson, afflicting him with a maddening surge of impulses, had never functioned so strongly.

"What is it?" he asked abruptly. "You seem--you look--"

He stopped short. It was not what he meant to say. He tried to avoid the intimately personal when he was with her. He knew the danger of those sweet familiarities--to himself. But he had blurted out the question before he was aware. He was standing so close to her that a little whirling breeze blew a strand of her yellow hair across his face. That tenuous contact made him quiver, gave him a queer intoxicating thrill.

"Does it show so plainly as that?" she smiled. "It's a secret. A really wonderful secret. I'm just bursting to talk about it, but I mustn't.

Talking might break the spell. Do you--along with your other nave beliefs--believe in spells, Mr. Thompson?"

"Yes," he answered simply. "In yours."

Her eyes danced. She laughed softly, deep in her throat, like a meadow lark in spring.

"That's the first time I ever knew you to indulge in irony," she said.

"It isn't irony," he answered moodily. "It's the honest truth."

"Poor man," she said gaily. "I'd be flattered to death to think a simple backwoods maiden could make such a profound impression on a young man from the city--but it isn't so."

She turned her head sidewise, like a saucy bird, regarding him with mock gravity, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Mr. Thompson had a long arm and he stood close to her, tantalizingly close. She was smiling. Her lips parted redly over white, even teeth, and as Thompson bent that moody somber gaze on her, her breath seemed to come suddenly a little faster, making her round breast flutter--and a faint tinge of pink stole up to color the soft whiteness of her neck, up into the smooth round of her cheeks.

Thompson's arm closed about her, his lips grazed her cheek as she twisted her head to evade him. That minor show of resistance stirred all the primitive instincts that active or dormant lurk in every strong man.

He twisted her head roughly, and as naturally as water flows down hill their lips met. He felt the girl's body nestle with a little tremor closer to his, felt with an odd exaltation the quick hammer of her heart against his breast. He held her tight, and her face slowly drew away from him, and turned shyly against his shoulder.

"It is so, and you know it's so," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "Sophie, I wish--"

She freed herself from his embrace with a sudden twist. Her breath went out in a little gasp. She looked over her shoulder once, and up at Thompson, and a wave of red swept up over her fresh young face and dyed it to the roots of her sunny hair. For a brief instant her hand lingered in Thompson's, bestowing a quick and tender pressure. Then she was gone up the bank with a bound like a startled deer.

Thompson turned. Ten yards out in the stream Tommy Ashe's red canoe drifted, and Tommy sat in the stern, his wet paddle poised as if he had halted it midway of a stroke, his body bent forward, tense as that of a beast crouched to spring.

The bow of the canoe grounded. Ashe laid down his paddle, stepped forward and ash.o.r.e, hauling the craft's nose high with one hand. His gaze never left Thompson's face. He came slowly up, his round, boyish countenance white and hard and ugly, his eyes smoldering. Thompson felt his own face hardening into the same ugly lines. He felt himself threatened. Without being fully aware of his act he had dropped into a belligerent pose, head and shoulders thrust forward, one foot drawn back, hands clenched. This was purely instinctive. That Tommy Ashe had seen him kiss Sophie Carr and was advancing upon him in jealous fury did not occur to Thompson at all.

"You beggar," Ashe gritted, "is it part of your system of saving souls to kiss a girl as if--"

The quality of his tone would have stung a less sensitive man. With Sophie Carr's lip-pressure fresh and warm upon his own Thompson was in that exalted mood wherein a man is like an open powder keg. And Tommy Ashe had supplied the spark. A most unchristian flash of anger shot through him. His reply was an earnest, if ill-directed blow. This Tommy dodged by the simplest expedient of twisting his head sidewise without moving his body, and launched at the same time a return jab which neatly smacked against Thompson's jaw.

Tommy Ashe was wonderfully quick on his feet and a powerful man to boot.

Moreover he had a certain dexterity with his fists. He was in deadly earnest, as a man is when matters of s.e.x lead him to a personal clash.

But he found pitted against him a man equally powerful, a man whose extra reach and weight offset the advantage in skill, a man who gave and took blows with silent ferocity.

Thompson, in all his carefully ordered life, had never fought. He fought now as if his life depended upon it. Each blow he gave and took brought to the surface a furious determination. He was not conscious of real pain, although he knew that his lips were cut and bleeding, that his cheeks were bruised and cut where Tommy Ashe's hard-knuckled fists landed with impressive force, that his heart pounded sickeningly against his ribs, and that every breath was a rasping gasp. Nor was he conscious of pity when he saw that Tommy Ashe was in no better case. It seemed fit and proper that they should struggle like that. There was a strange sort of pleasure in it. It seemed natural, as natural an act as he had ever performed. The shock of his clenched fist driven with all his force against the other man's body thrilled him, gave him a curious satisfaction. And that satisfaction took on a keener edge when Ashe clinched and they fell to the earth a struggling, squirming heap--for Thompson felt a tremendous power in his arms, in those arms covered with flat elastic bands of muscle hardened by weeks of axe-slinging, of heaving on heavy logs. He wrapped his arms about Ashe and tried to crush him.

One trial of that fierce grip enlightened Tommy Ashe. He broke loose from Thompson by a trick known to every man who has ever wrestled, and clawed away to his feet. Thereafter he kept clear of grips. Quick, with some skill at boxing, he could get home two blows to Thompson's one. But he could not down his man. Nor could Thompson. They struck and parried, circling and dodging, till their lungs were on fire, and neither had strength enough left to strike a telling blow.

The rage had gone out of them by then. It had become a dogged struggle for mastery. And failing that, there came a moment when they staggered apart and stood glaring at each other, choking for breath. As they stood, Tommy Ashe spoke first.

"You're a tough bird--for a parson."

He gasped the words.

With the dying out of that senseless fury a peculiar feeling of elation came to Thompson, as if he had proved himself upon a doubtful matter. He was ready to go on. But why? That question urged itself upon him. He recalled that he had struck the first blow.

"I think--I started this, didn't I?" he said. "I'm willing to finish it, if you want to--but isn't it--isn't it rather foolish?"

"No end foolish. Don't think we'd ever finish," Ashe said with a gleam of his old humor. "Let's call it a draw. I feel a bit ashamed of myself by now."

Somewhere, sometime, Mr. Thompson had heard that men who fought shook hands when the struggle was ended--a little ceremony that served to restore the _status quo_. He had not the least rancor against Tommy Ashe. It had all seeped away in the blind fury of that clash. He thrust out a hand upon which the knuckles were cut and b.l.o.o.d.y. And the man upon whose countenance he had bruised those knuckles took it with a wry self-conscious smile.

Then they drew a little apart and squatted on the bank of the creek to lave their battered faces in the cold water.

For a period of possibly five minutes they sat dabbling water-soaked handkerchiefs upon their faces. The blood ceased to ooze from Thompson's nostrils. Tommy Ashe looked over at his late antagonist and remarked casually.

"We're a pair of capital idiots, eh, Thompson?"

Mr. Thompson tried to smile. But his countenance was swelling rapidly and was in no condition for smiling. He mustered up a grimace, nodding a.s.sent.

"I hope Sophie didn't see us making such a.s.ses of ourselves," Tommy continued ruefully.