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 grassy
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 naïve
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 hoarsely. "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 ashore, 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 sex 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 bloody. 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
assent.
"I hope Sophie didn't see us making such asses of ourselves," Tommy
continued ruefully.
"I hardly think she would," Thompson returned. "It couldn't have been
the sort of spectacle a woman would care to watch."
"You never can tell about a woman," Ashe observed thoughtfully. "Nor,"
he added, "a man. I could never have imagined myself going off
half-cocked like that. I suppose the primitive brute in us is never
really far from the surface. Especially in this country. There's
something," he looked up at the surrounding depths of forest, down along
the dusky channel of Lone Moose, curving away among the spruce, "there's
something about this infernal solitude that brings out the savage. I've
noticed it in little things. We're loosed, in a way, from all restraint,
except what we put upon ourselves. Funny world, eh? You couldn't
imagine two chaps like us mauling each other like a pair of bruisers in
Mrs. Grundy's drawing-room, could you? Over a girl--oh, well, it'll be
all the same a hundred years from now."
There was nothing apologetic in either Tommy's tone or words. Thompson
understood. Tommy Ashe was thinking out loud, that was all. And
presently, after another silent interval, he stood up.
"I think I'll be getting back to my own diggings," he said. "So long,
old man."
He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard. In a minute he was
gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate
strokes.
Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and
attitude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that
Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his
earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative
period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of
shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more
than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not
determine. It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take
blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his
bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the
weight of his body behind it. Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle
uncertain. His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very
tender in spots to touch. He knew that he must be a sight. There was a
grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his
ribs, as his heated body began to cool. But he was not sorry for
anything. He experienced no regrets. Only a heady feeling that for once
in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.
Perhaps the sweet memory of Sophie Carr's warm lips on his had something
to do with this.
At any rate he rose after a little and followed the creek bank to a
point well down stream, whence he crossed through the fringe of timber
to his cabin.