FAIR WINDS
Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where
yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft
lies along narrow slips, with the green woods of Stanley Park for a
background. Thompson knew Coal Harbor well. He knew the slips and the
boats and many of the men who owned them. He had gone on many a week-end
cruise out of that basin with young fellows who looked their last on the
sea when they crossed the English Channel. So he had picked up a working
fund of nautical practice, a first-hand knowledge of the sea and the
manner of handling small sail.
From the Granada he went straight to Coal Harbor. While the afternoon
was yet young he had chartered a yawl, a true one-man craft, carrying
plenty of canvas for her inches, but not too much. She had a small, snug
cabin, was well-found as to gear, and was equipped with a sturdy
single-cylinder gas engine to kick her along through calm and tideway.
Before six he had her ready for sea, his dunnage bag aboard, grub in the
lockers, gas in the tanks, clearance from the customhouse. He slept
aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to
his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly
through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of
Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and
sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half
north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.
He blew through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale,
with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank.
As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and
whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of
the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore
her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a
green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in
the trough again.
But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye
to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be
there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the
ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas
that had no power to harm him. Peace rode with him. His body rested, and
the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the
gut on a violin.
Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full
fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a
wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes
among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.
He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet
wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where
the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.
He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling
rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and
the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky
water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes
of darting fish.
Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the
seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy
batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a
whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their
mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which
they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and
was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his
bunk.
Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling,
falling swiftly from a great height in the air. On the tail of his plane
rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the
Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar--boom--boom--boom--boom!
Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given
place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put
his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon
brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond. Back
of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running
lights laid dead for him. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked
out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the
murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse
pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug. A man
leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl.
Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.
Thompson emerged into the cockpit. The air was cool and he was fully
dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar
the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in
the military salute--the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson
saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have
been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had
plowed.
"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the
conversational ice.
"It was a wild night outside and no mistake," the man replied. "We took
cover about midnight--got tired of plowing into it, and wasn't too keen
for wallowing through them rips off the Cape. Say, are you back long
from over there?"
"Not long," Thompson replied. "I left England two weeks ago."
"How's it going?"
"We're over the hump," Thompson told him. "They're outgunned now. The
Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at
last. You know what that means if you've been across."
"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me
that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I
was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there
was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I
hope they give Fritz hell. He gave it to us."
"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of
the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.
"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named
Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is
operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."
"Sam Carr? Sure. The _Squalla_ here belongs to him--or to the
Company--and Carr is just about the Company himself."
A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."
"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire
yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay
alongside."
The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. The _Squalla_
went her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a
small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in
the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he
made the Redonda Islands and passed between them far up the narrow gut
of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that
deep pass when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he
had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his
yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.
Thanks to meeting the _Squalla_ he knew his ground. Also he knew
something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the
stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the
shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the
boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed
astern in lieu of a dinghy.
He sat on his cushions in the cockpit that evening looking up at a calm,
star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like
quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range,
tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation and the
open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed
between, silvered by a moon-path, shimmering under the same pale rays
that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern
side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba
River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and
clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window
of a cabin on shore. The silence was thick, uncanny. But it was a
comforting silence to Thompson. He felt no loneliness, he whom the
lonely places had once appalled. But that was a long time ago. Sitting
there thinking of that, he smiled.
No man lives by, for, or because of love alone. Nor does a woman,
although the poets and romancers have very nearly led us to believe a
woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many
natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the passion Sophie
Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure
or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and woke betimes.
The last two years had rather blotted out those periods of eruption. He
had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and
everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he
saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the
shelf. In the fierce usages of aërial warfare distracted thought, any
relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant
death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore,
wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. Pride spurs him.
To come off victorious over a concrete enemy, to uphold the traditions
of his race, to be of service--these things will carry any man over
desperate places without faltering, if he feels them.
And Wes Thompson had experienced that sort of vision rather keenly. It
had driven him, a man of peaceful tendency, to blood-drenched fields.
For two years he had been in another world, in a service that demanded
of a man all that was in him. He was just beginning to be conscious
that for so long he had been detached from life that flowed in natural,
normal channels.
He was conscious too, of a queer, impersonal manner of thinking about
things and people, now that he was back. He wondered about himself. What
particular motive, for instance, had driven him up here? To be sure
there was the very plausible one of obeying a physician's order about
living in the open, of keeping decent hours, of avoiding crowds and
excitement until he was quite himself again. But he could have done that
without coming to Toba Inlet.
Of course he wanted to see Sam Carr again. Also he wanted to see Sophie.
_Why_ he wished to see her was not so readily answered. He wanted to see
her again, that was all--just as he had wanted to see Canada and his
aunts, and the green slopes of the Pacific again. Because all these
things and people were links with a past that was good and kindly by
comparison with the too-vivid recent days. Yes, surely, he would be glad
to see Sam Carr--and Sophie. When he recalled the last time he spoke
with her he could smile a little wryly. It had been almost a tragedy
then. It did not seem much now. The man who had piloted a battle-plane
over swaying armies in France could smile reminiscently at being called
a rabbit by an angry girl.
It was queer Sophie had never married. His thought took that turn
presently. She was--he checked the years on his fingers--oh, well, she
was only twenty-four. Still, she was no frail, bloodless creature, but a
woman destined by nature for mating, a beautiful woman well fit to
mother beautiful daughters and strong sons, to fill a lover with joy and
a husband with pride.
A queer warmth flushed Thompson's cheek when he thought of Sophie this
wise. A jealous feeling stabbed at him. The virus was still in his
blood, he became suddenly aware. And then he laughed out loud, at his
own camouflaging. He had known it all the time. And this trip it would
be kill or cure, he said to himself whimsically.
Still it _was_ odd, now he came to think of it, that Sophie had never in
those years found a man quite to her liking. She had had choice enough,
Thompson knew. But it was no more strange, after all, than for himself
never to have looked with tender eyes on any one of the women he had
known. He had liked them, but he hadn't ever got past the stage of
comparing them with Sophie Carr. She had always been the standard he set
to judge the others. Thompson realized that he was quite a hopeless case
in this respect.
"I must be a sort of a freak," he muttered to himself when he was stowed
away in his blankets. "I wonder if I _could_ like another woman, as
well, if I tried? Well, we'll see, we'll see."