Burned Bridges
Page 137The Royal Flying Corps arrives at its ends slowly. Perhaps not too
slowly for the niceness of choice that must be made. Presently there
came to Wesley Thompson a brief order to report at a training camp in
Eastern Canada.
When he held this paper in his hand and knew himself committed
irrevocably to the greatest game of all, he felt a queer, inner glow, a
quiet satisfaction such as must come to a man who succeeds in some high
enterprise. Thompson felt this in spite of desperate facts. He had no
illusions as to what he had set about. He knew very well that in the
R.F.C. it was a short life and not always a merry one. Of course a man
might be lucky. He might survive by superior skill. In any case it had
But he was moved likewise by a strange loneliness, and with his orders
in his hand he understood at last the source of that peculiar regret
which latterly had assailed him in stray moments. There were a few
friends to bid good-by. And chief, if she came last on his round of
calls that last day, was Sophie Carr.
He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big
living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when
he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this
from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that
sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be
He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the
Flying Corps the man who lost in aërial combat needed little besides a
coffin--and sometimes not even that.
Sophie looked at him almost somberly.
"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.
He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her
to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and
speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did
want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he
was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then
to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in
Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no
intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero.
But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her--if
it should be his last--to be a pleasant one.
And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray
eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off
her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.