Читать книгу When the War Ends – Book Set - Bertrand William Sinclair - Страница 11

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Mr. Thompson slept fitfully that night. A hard day's paddling had left him tired and sleepy, but the swarm of pain-devils in his slashed foot destroyed his rest. When he got up at daylight and examined the wound again he found himself afflicted with a badly swollen foot and ankle, and a steady dull ache that extended upward past the knee. He was next to helpless since every movement produced the most acute sort of pain—sufficiently so that when he had made shift to get some breakfast he could scarcely eat. In the course of his experiments in self-aid he discovered that to lie flat on his back with the slashed foot raised higher than his body gave a measure of ease. So he adopted this position and stoically set out to endure the hurt. He lay in that position the better part of the day—until, in fact, four in the afternoon brought Sam Carr, shotgun in hand, to his door.

Carr had seldom been in the cabin. This evening, for some reason, he put his head in the door, and whistled softly at sight of Thompson's bandaged foot cocked up on a folded overcoat.

"Well, well," he said, standing his gun against the door casing and coming in. "What have you done to yourself now?"

"Oh, I cut my foot with the axe last night, worse luck," Thompson responded petulantly.

"Bad?" Carr inquired.

"Bad enough."

"Let me see it," Carr suggested. "It's a long way to a sawbones, and Providence never seems quite able to cope with germs of infection. Have you any sort of antiseptic dressing on it?"

Thompson shook his head. He would not confess that the pain and swelling had caused him certain misgivings, brought to his mind uneasily a good deal that he had read and heard of blood-poisoning from cuts and scratches. He was secretly glad to let Carr undo the rude bandage and examine the wound. A man who had spent fifteen years in the wilderness must have had to cope with similar cases.

"You did give yourself a nasty nick and no mistake," Carr observed. "You won't walk on that foot comfortably for two or three weeks. Just grazed a bone. No carbolic, no peroxide, or anything like that, I suppose?"

Thompson shook his head. He had not reckoned on cuts and bruises. Carr put back the wrapping and sat whittling shavings of tobacco off a brown plug, while Thompson got up, hopped on one foot across to the stove and began to lay a fire. He had eaten nothing since morning, and was correspondingly hungry. In addition, a certain unministerial pride stirred him to action. He was ashamed to lie supinely enduring, to seem helpless before another man's eyes. But the effort showed in his face.

Carr lit his pipe and watched silently. His gaze took in every detail of the cabin's interior, of Thompson's painful movements, of the poorly cooked remains of breakfast that he was warming up.

"You'll put that foot in a bad way if you try to use it much," he said at last. "The best thing you can do is to come home with me and lie around till you can walk again. I've got stuff to dress it properly. Think you can hobble across the clearing if I make you a temporary crutch?"

Thompson at first declined to be such a source of trouble. He was grateful enough, but reluctant. Carr, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr. Thompson found himself, with a crutch made of a forked willow, crossing the meadow to Sam Carr's house.

His instincts had more or less subconsciously warned him that it would not be well for his peace of mind or the good of his soul to be in intimate daily contact with Sophie Carr. But his general inability to cope with emergencies—which was patent enough to a practical man if not wholly so to himself—culminating in this misadventure with a sharp axe, had brought about that very circumstance.

He had not looked for such a kindly office on the part of Sam Carr. That individual's caustic utterances and critical attitude toward theology had not forewarned Thompson that sympathy and kindliness were fundamental attributes with Sam Carr. If he had an acid tongue his heart was tender enough. But Carr was no sentimentalist. When he had bestowed Thompson in a comfortable room and painstakingly dressed the injured foot he left his patient much to his own devices—and to the ministrations of his daughter.

As a consequence, while the wound in his foot healed rapidly, Mr. Thompson suffered a more grievous injury to his heart. Sophie Carr affected him much as strong drink affects men with weak heads. The more he saw of her the more he desired to see, to feast his eyes on her loveliness—and invariably, when alone, to berate himself for such a weakness. He had never dreamed that a man could feel that way about a woman. He did not see why he, of all men, should succumb to the fascination of a girl like Sophie Carr.

But the emotion was undeniable. Perhaps Sophie would have been surprised if she could have known the amount of repression Mr. Thompson gradually became compelled to practice when she was with him.

That was frequently enough. They were all good to him. From Carr's Indian woman—who could, he now learned, speak passable English—down to the sloe-eyed youngest Carr of mixed blood, they accepted him as one of themselves. However, it happened to be Sophie who waited on him most, who impishly took the greatest liberties with him, who was never averse to an argument on any subject Thompson cared to touch. He had never supposed there was a normal being with views on religion and economics, upon any manifestation of human problems, with views so contrary to his own. The maddening part of it was her ability to cite facts and authorities whose existence he was not aware of, to confute him with logic and compel him to admit that he did not know, that much of what he asserted so emphatically was based on mere belief rather than demonstrable fact or rational processes of arriving at a conclusion. Sometimes both Sam Carr and Tommy Ashe were present at these oral tilts, sitting back in silent amusement at Mr. Thompson's intellectual floundering.

A clean cut in the flesh of a healthy man heals quickly. In two weeks Thompson could put his full weight on the injured member without pain or any tendency to reopening the wound. Whereupon he repaired to his cabin again, in a state of mind that was very disturbing. Without accepting any of the Carr dictums upon theology and theological activities, he was fast growing doubtful of his fitness for the job of herding other people into the fold. He found himself with a growing disinclination for such a task as his life work. Since that was the only thing he had any aptitude for or training in, when he thought of cutting loose and facing the world at large without the least idea of what he should do or how he should do it, he perceived himself in a good deal of a dilemma.

He was growing sure of one thing. Over and above the good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking God that he was not, like the Pharisees, as other men. Sitting moodily by his rusty stove he confessed to himself that a man who would gladly give up his hopes of eternal salvation for the privilege of folding Sophie Carr close in his arms had no business in the ministry—unless he simply wanted to hold down an easy, salaried job.

Whatever other sorts of a fool he might have been Thompson was no hypocrite. He had never consciously looked upon the ministry as a man looks upon a business career—a succession of steps to success, to an assured social and financial position. Yet when he turned the searchlight of analysis upon his motives he could not help seeing that this was the very thing he had unwittingly been doing—that he had expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field—a call which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary. And Thompson could see that he had been looking forward to these things as a just reward, and he could see too how the material benefits in them were the lure. He had been coached and primed for that. His inclination had been sedulously directed into that channel. His enthusiasm had been the enthusiasm of one who seeks to serve and feels wholly competent.

But he doubted both his fitness and his inclination now. He said to himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel—a crass materialist—an intellectual Circe. Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man.

Mr. Thompson had not as yet discovered what a highly important factor that last was.

He managed to get a partial insight into that some three days later, and the vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although to him at the time it seemed the most wonderful and unaccountable thing in the world.