THOMPSON'S RETURN
"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."
On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific
train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves
and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging
imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt
beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of
a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.
Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few
whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome
for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper
and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from
the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered
with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the
train below.
It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But
it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely
heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious,
facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly
the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, gassed and
shrapnel-scarred--and some who bore no visible sign only the white face
and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and
suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of
the flesh, as many a man can testify.
From one coach there alighted a youngish man in the uniform of the Royal
Flying Corps. He carried a black bag. He walked a little stiffly. Beyond
that he bore no outward trace of disablement. His step and manner
suggested no weakness. One had to look close to discern pallor and a
peculiar roving habit of the eyes, a queer tensity of the body. A
neurologist, versed in the by-products of war, could have made a fair
guess at this man's medical-history sheet. But the folk on the platform
that night were not specialists in subtle diagnosis of the nervous
system. Nor were the committees. They were male and female of those who
had done their bit at home, were doing it now, welcoming their broken
heroes. The sight of a man with a scarred face, a mutilated limb,
elicited their superficial sympathy, while the hidden sickness of racked
nerves in an unmaimed body they simply could not grasp.
So this man with the black bag and the wings on his left arm walked the
length of the platform, gained the steel stairway which led to the main
floor of the depot, and when he had climbed half-way stopped to rest and
to look down over the rail.
Below, the mass of humanity was gravitating into little groups here and
there about a khaki center. There was laughter, and shrill voices, with
an occasional hysterical note. There were men surrounded by women and
children, and there were others by twos and threes and singly who looked
enviously at these little groups of the reunited, men who moved
haltingly on their way to the city above, perfunctorily greeted,
perfunctorily handshaken, and perfunctorily smiled upon by the official
welcomers.
He looked at this awhile, with a speculative, pitying air, and continued
his climb, passing at last through great doors into a waiting-room, a
place of high, vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, beautiful tiled floors.
He evaded welcoming matrons on the watch for unattached officers, to
hale them into an anteroom reserved for such, to feed them sandwiches
and doubtful coffee, and to elicit tales of their part in the grim
business overseas. This man avoided the cordial clutches of the socially
elect by the simple expedient of saying that his people expected him. He
uttered this polite fiction in self-defense. He did not want to talk or
be fed. He was sick of noise, weary of voices, irritated by raucous
sounds. All he desired was a quiet place away from the confusion of
which he had been a part for many days, to get speedily beyond range of
the medley of voices and people that reminded him of nothing so much as
a great flock of seagulls swooping and crying over a school of herring.
He passed on to the outer door which gave on the street where taxi
drivers and hotel runners bawled their wares, and here in the entrance
met the first face he knew. A man about his own age, somewhat shorter, a
great deal thicker through the waist, impeccably dressed, shouldered
his way through a group at the exit.
Their eyes met. Into the faces of both leaped instant recognition. The
soldier pressed forward eagerly. The other stood his ground. There was a
look which approached unbelief on his round, rather florid features. But
he grasped the extended hand readily enough.
"By jove, it _is_ you, Wes," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. So
you're back alive, eh? You were reported killed, you know. Shot down
behind the German lines. You made quite a record, didn't you? How's
everything over there?"
There was a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe's tone, a something that was
neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could
immediately classify. But it was there, a something Tommy tried to
suppress and still failed to suppress. His words were hearty, but his
manner was not. And this he confirmed by his actions. Thompson said that
things over there were going well, and let it go at that. He was more
vitally concerned just then with over here. But before he could fairly
ask a question Tommy seized his hand and wrung it in farewell.
"Pardon my rush, old man," he said. "I've got an appointment I can't
afford to pass up, and I'm late already. Look me up to-morrow, will
you?"
Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others. In Thompson
those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives. He had
quickened at sight of Tommy's familiar face, albeit that face was a
trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to
behold it. He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time. But
Tommy had not been glad to see him. Thompson felt that under the outward
cordiality.
He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least
vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada
Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a
bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the
sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above
the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor
traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and
the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily massive against the
paler sky.
He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm
light of shipping in the stream. He could smell the sea, the brown kelp
bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide. And he fancied that even at
that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the
mountain flank.
"By God," he whispered. "It's good to be back."
He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer. All this that he saw
now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as
something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to
see it again. For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive
where so many others had perished. It was just a whimsey of Fate. And he
was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to
outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.
Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had
left him very tired. Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved
insistently. Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his
clothes and went to bed.
In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he
knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.
But when he went out into Vancouver's highways and met people, his
uniform gave them a conversational cue. And he found that here, six
thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the
hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic. He did not
want to talk about fighting and killing. He had lived those things and
that was enough. So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and
had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.
He had learned casually that morning that Tommy's company had more than
made good Tommy's prophecy of swift work. Tommy Ashe and Joe Hedley were
rising young men.
"Oh, yes, they've got a mint," a broker he knew said to Thompson, with
an unconcealed note of envy. "By gad, it's a marvel how a pair of young
cubs like that can start on a shoestring and make half a million apiece
in two years."
"How did they both manage to escape the draft?" Thompson asked. "I'm
sure Ashe is a Class A man."
"Huh!" the broker snorted. "Necessary government undertakings.
Necessary hell! All they had to do with the shipbuilding was to bank
their rake-off. I tell you, Thompson, this country has supported the war
in great style--but there's been a lot of raw stuff in places where you
wouldn't suspect it. I'm not knocking, y' understand. This is no time to
knock. But when the war's over, we've got to do some house-cleaning."
Thompson called the shipyard first. In the glow of a sunny September
morning he felt that he must have imagined Tommy's attitude. He was a
fair-minded man, and he gave Tommy the benefit of the doubt.
But he failed to get in touch with Tommy. A voice informed him politely
that Mr. Ashe had left town that morning and would be gone several days.
Thompson hung up the receiver. For at least five minutes he sat debating
with himself. Then he took it down again.
"Give me Seymour 365L," he said to Central.
"Hello."
"Is Mr. Carr at home?"
"You have the wrong number," he was answered, and he heard the
connection break.
He tried again, and once more the same voice, this time impatiently,
said, "Wrong number."
"Wait," Thompson said quickly. "Is this Seymour 365L, corner of Larch
and First?"
"Yes."
"I beg pardon for bothering you. I'm just back from overseas and I'm
rather anxious to locate Mr. Carr--Samuel A. Carr. This was his home
two years ago."
"Just a minute," the feminine voice had recovered its original
sweetness. "Perhaps I can help you. Hold the line."
Thompson waited. Presently he was being addressed again.
"My husband believes Mr. Carr still owns this place. We lease through an
agent, however, Lyng and Salmon, Credit Foncier Building. Probably they
will be able to give you the required information."
"Thanks," Thompson said.
He found Lyng and Salmon's number in the telephone book. But the lady
was mistaken. Carr had sold the place. Nor did Lyng and Salmon know his
whereabouts.
Tommy would know. But Tommy was out of town. Still there were other
sources of information. A man like Carr could not make his home in a
place no larger than Vancouver and drop out of sight without a ripple.
Thompson stuck doggedly to the telephone, sought out numbers and called
them up. In the course of an hour he was in possession of several facts.
Sam Carr was up the coast, operating a timber and land undertaking for
returned soldiers. The precise location he could not discover, beyond
the general one of Toba Inlet.
They still maintained a residence in town, an apartment suite. From the
caretaker of that he learned that Sophie spent most of her time with her
father, and that their coming and going was uncertain and unheralded.
The latter facts were purely incidental, save one. Tommy Ashe had that
morning cleared the _Alert_ for a coastwise voyage.
Sam Carr and Sophie were up the coast. Tommy was up the coast. Thompson
sat for a time in deep study. Very well, then. He, too, would journey up
the coast. He had not come six thousand miles to loaf in a hotel lobby
and wear out shoe leather on concrete walks.