THE RENEWED TRIANGLE
Even after Thompson reached Vancouver and the visible signs of a nation
at war confronted him he experienced no patriotic thrill. After all,
there was no great difference, on the surface, between San Francisco and
Vancouver, save that Vancouver accepted as a matter of course the
principle that when the mother country was at war Canada was also a
belligerent and committed to support. Barring the recruiting offices
draped in the Allied colors, squads of men drilling on certain public
squares, successive tag days for the Red Cross, the Patriotic fund and
such organizations, the war did not flaunt itself in men's faces. The
first hot wave of feeling had passed. The thing had become a grim
business to be gone about in grim determination. And side by side with
those unostensible preparations that kept a stream of armed men passing
quietly overseas, the normal business of a city waxed and throve in the
old accustomed way. Thompson's most vivid impression was of accelerating
business activity, and that was his chief concern. The other thing,
which convulsed a far-off continent, was too distant to be a
reality--like an earthquake in Japan, a reported famine in India.
He went about his business circumspectly, without loss of time. He
leased a good location, wired the factory to ship at once, began a
modest advertising campaign in the local papers, and as a business coup
collared--at a fat salary and liberal commission--the best salesman on
the staff of the concern doing the biggest motor-car business in town.
Thompson had learned certain business lessons well. He had perceived
long since that it was a cutthroat game when competition grew keen. And
this matter of the salesman was his first blood in that line. The man
brought with him a list of prospects as long as his arm, and a wide
acquaintance in the town, both assets of exceeding value. Altogether
Thompson got off to a flying start. The arrangement whereby Henderson
consigned cars to him enabled him to concentrate all his small capital
on a sales campaign. He paid freight and duty. His cars he paid for when
they were sold--and the discount was his profit.
When his salesroom was formally opened to the public, with five Summits
on the floor and twice as many en route, when his undertaking and his
car models had received the unqualified approval of a surprising number
of callers, Thompson left the place to his salesman and went to see
Sophie Carr.
That was a visit born of sudden impulse, a desire to talk about
something besides automobiles and making money. But Sophie was out. Her
father, however, made him welcome, supplementing his welcome with red
wine that carried a kick. Thompson sat down before a fireplace, glass in
hand, stretched his feet to the fire, and listened to his host talk.
"Considering your early handicaps you have certainly shown some speed
in adapting yourself to conditions," Carr observed facetiously. "There
was a time when I didn't believe you could. Which shows that even wise
men err. Material factors loom bigger and bigger on your horizon, don't
they? Don't let 'em obscure everything though, Thompson. That's a
blunder plenty of smart men make. Well, we've progressed since Lone
Moose days, haven't we--the four of us that foregathered there that last
summer?"
Thompson smiled. He liked to hear Carr in a philosophic vein. And their
talk ran thence for an hour. At the end of which time Sophie came home.
She walked into the room, shook hands with Thompson, flung her coat,
hat, and furs across a chair, and drew another up to the crackling fire.
Outside, the long Northern twilight was deepening. Carr rose and
switched on a cluster of lights in frosted globes. In the mellow glow he
resumed his seat, and his glance came to rest upon his daughter with a
curious fixity, as if he subtly divined something that troubled her.
"What is it?" he asked, after a minute of unbroken silence. "You look--"
"Out of sorts?" she interrupted. "Showing up poorly as a hostess?"
Her look included Thompson with a faint, impersonal smile, and her gaze
went back to the fire. Sam Carr held his peace, toying with the
long-stemmed glass in his hand.
"I went to a Belgian Relief Fund lecture in the Granada ballroom this
afternoon," she said at last. "A Belgian woman--a refugee--spoke in
broken English. The things she told. It was horrible. I wonder if they
could be true?"
"Atrocities?" Carr questioned.
Sophie nodded.
"That's propaganda," her father declared judicially. "We're being
systematically stimulated to ardent support of the war in men and money
through the press and public speaking, through every available avenue
that clever minds can devise. We are not a martial nation, so we have to
be spurred, our emotions aroused. Of course there are atrocities. Is
there an instance in history where an invading army did not commit all
sorts of excesses on enemy soil?"
"I know," Sophie said absently. "But this woman's story--she wasn't one
of your glib platform spouters, flag-waving and calling the Germans
names. She just talked, groping now and then for the right word. And if
a tithe of what she told is true--well, she made me wish I were a man."
One small, soft hand, outstretched over the chair-arm toward the fire,
shut suddenly into a hard little fist. And for a moment Thompson felt
acutely uncomfortable, without knowing why.
Carr eyed his daughter impassively. In a few seconds she went on.
"Of course I know that in any large army there is bound to be a certain
percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever
they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history
of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a
different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't
isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity,
of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of
thing the papers have been publishing--and worse."
"Discount that, Sophie," Carr remarked calmly. "The Germans are reckoned
in the civilized scale the same as ourselves. I'm not ready to damn
sixty-five million human beings outright because certain members of the
group act like brutes. The chances are that a German soldier would be
shot by his own command, for robbery or rape or any of these
brutalities, as promptly as one of our own offenders. The fact of the
matter is that there are a lot of hysterical people loose among us who
seem to think they can kill German soldiers by calling them bad names.
The Allies will win this war with cannon and bayonets, but up to the
present we seem to think we must supplement our bullets with epithets.
Doubtless the Germans do the same at home. It's part of the game."
"Oh, I suppose so," Sophie admitted. "But what a horror this war must be
for those helpless people who are caught in its sweep."
"If it affects you like that, be thankful it isn't over here," Carr said
lightly. "War is all that Sherman said it was. As a matter of fact
modern warfare with every scientific and chemical means of destruction
at its hand can't result in anything but horror piled on horror. I look
for some startling--"
The faint whirr of a buzzer and the patter of a maid's feet along the
hall, checked Carr's speech. He did not resume. Instead he reached for a
box of cigars, and lighted one. By that time Tommy Ashe was being
ushered in.
Tommy exuded geniality from every pore of his ruddy countenance. He
accepted the drink Carr rose to offer. He lifted the glass and smiled at
Thompson.
"Here's to success," he toasted. "I believe," he went on between sips of
wine, "that things are going to look up finely for us. I sold a truck
and two touring cars this afternoon. People seem to be loosening up for
some reason. You ought to get your share with the Summit, Wes. Snappy
little machine, that."
"You rising business men," Carr drawled, "want to learn to leave your
business at the office when you come to my house. Now, we were just
discussing the war. What sort of a prophet are you, Tommy? How long will
it last? Sophie was wondering if it would be over before all the
eligible young men depart across the sea."
"Well," Tommy grinned cheerfully, "I'm no prophet. Not being in the
confidence of the Allied command, I can't say. I'd hazard a guess,
though, that there'll be plenty of good men left for Sophie to make a
choice among. I can pass on another man's prophecy, though. Had a letter
from one of my brothers yesterday. He was at Mons, got pinked in the
leg, and is now training Territorials. He is sure the grand finale will
come about midsummer next. The way he put it sounds logical. Neither
side can make headway this winter. Germany has made her maximum effort.
If she couldn't beat us when she took the field equipped to the last
button she never can. By spring we'll be organized. France and England
on the west front. The Russian steam roller on the east. The fleet
maintaining the blockade. They can't stand the pressure. It isn't
possible. The Hun--confound him--will blow up with a loud bang about
next July. That's Ned's say-so, and these line officers are pretty
conservative as a rule. War's their business, and they don't nurse
illusions about it."
"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather,
anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a button on the
wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued
almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because
I'm going out."
Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and
beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with
a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to
the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely
five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year
is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of
twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light
intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds,
and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and
drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the
war.
Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal
technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back
in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw
through them and into vast distances beyond.
And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her
coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and
laughter--and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was
beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate,
that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be
wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that
spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her
too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire
to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once
for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and
would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The
time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague,
unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware
intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical
reason, against any emotional appeal--just as he, himself, was learning
to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he
felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.
And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near
her. Some day--
Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her
to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.
"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly.
"I was thinking of you," he answered truthfully.
He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that
rose slowly over Sophie's face. Indeed all the high resolve that had
been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the
board. It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along
the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue,
to break through the ice that Sophie used as a shield--for the instant
he felt sure of that--and dare what fires burned beneath.
While he stood, poised as it were, upon the tip-toe of indecision, Carr
and Tommy Ashe came back.
Afterward, on his way home, Thompson wondered at the swift challenging
glance Tommy shot at Sophie in that moment. As if Tommy detected some
tensity of feeling that he resented.