Burned Bridges Part 12

Sam say he go--don't know when come back. Leave me house, plenty blanket, plenty grub. Next spring he say he send more grub. That all.

Sophie go too."

Thompson stared at her. Perhaps he was not alone in facing something that numbed him.

"Your man go away. Not come back. You sorry? You feel bad?" he asked.

Her lips parted in a wide smile.

"Sam he good man," she said evenly. "Leave good place for me. I plenty warm, plenty to eat. I no care he go. Sam, pretty soon he get old. I want ketchum man, I ketchum. No feel bad. No."

She shook her head, as if the idea amused her. And Mr. Thompson, perceiving that a potential desertion which moved him to sympathy did not trouble her at all, turned his attention to the letter in his hand.

He opened the envelope. There were half a dozen closely written sheets within.

Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered.

Too much feeling--a sort of inward choking. And the last few days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and familiar with the details of the astonis.h.i.+ng change which has taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come back--of course I think you will or I should not write.

But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to give you when you do come.

Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor brother who--it seems--knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and beautiful things of all sorts--and men.

You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher--if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital--I--but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.

It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you--but it was under protest--under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own pa.s.sion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same pa.s.sion stirred me--I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands--yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."

There is a streak of my poor weak and pa.s.sionate mother in me.

But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection--as he has often made plain--to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong--I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can a.s.sure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.

Even if you were not a minister--if you were just plain man--and I wish you were--I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (_vide_ Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of s.e.x among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits--but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately--and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective pa.s.sion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you--and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.

And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.

Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a b.u.t.terfly emerging from its coc.o.o.n. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity.

I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.

I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself--looking at it from your own peculiar angle--you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still--knowing all this--I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you--and that is often.

I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death--unless it is nurtured by a.s.sociation, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.

Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different.

But--a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.

Sophie.

P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.

Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books, orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books, roused him to a swelling fury of anger.

The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leac.o.c.ks, the tribe of Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual realm--and which generally leave G.o.ds and religions out of account except to a.n.a.lyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those d.a.m.nable doc.u.ments which he had never read, but which he had been taught to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!

He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon, and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat within.

The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst of wrath against Sophie, a pa.s.sionate protest at her desertion. She had loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil--tempted by a fortune untimely directed to her hands.

He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.

A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure.

He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically--set his teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much the same.

He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky black and white like a sketch in charcoal.

"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.

He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, pa.s.sing near the walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance of an unrealizable, impractical dream.

Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs s.h.i.+fted furtively about at his approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity as to who, in the accustomed fas.h.i.+on of the North, had stopped and made himself at home.

When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of surprise, that his visitor was Tommy Ashe.

CHAPTER XIII

PARTNERS

"h.e.l.lo, old man," Tommy greeted cheerfully. "How goes it?"

If it occurred to either of them that the last time they faced each other it had been in hot anger and in earnest endeavor to inflict bodily damage, they were not embarra.s.sed by that recollection, nor did either man hold rancor. Their hands gripped st.u.r.dily. It seemed to Thompson, indeed, that a face had never been so welcome. He did not want to sit alone and think. Even apart from that he was uncommonly glad to see Tommy Ashe.

"It doesn't go much at all," he said. "As a matter of fact, I just got back to Lone Moose to-night after being away for weeks."

"Same here," Tommy responded. "I've been trapping. Heard you'd gone to Pachugan, but thought it was only for supplies. I got in to my own diggings to-night, and the shack was so infernally cold and dismal I mushed on down here on the off chance that you'd have a fire and wouldn't mind chinning awhile. Lord, but a fellow surely gets fed up with his own company, back here. At least I do."

Thompson awoke to hospitable formalities.

"Have you had supper?" he asked.

"Stopped and made tea about sundown," Tommy replied. "Thanks just the same. Gad, but it was cold this afternoon. The air fairly crackled."

"Yes," Thompson agreed. "It was very cold."

He drew a stool up to the stove and sat down. Tommy got out his pipe and began whittling shavings of tobacco off a plug.

"Did you know that Carr and his daughter have gone away?" Thompson asked abruptly.

Tommy nodded.

"Donald Lachlan--I've been trapping partners with him, y'know--Donald was home a month or so since. Told me when he came back that the Carrs were gone. I wasn't surprised."