Burned Bridges
Page 166Sophie felt the small tremor run through him.
"What is it?" she whispered anxiously.
"It is beautiful, and I can appreciate its beauty all the more from
seeing it with you. I'd like to take a hand in this," he said quietly.
"I was just comparing it with other things--and wondering."
"Wondering what?"
"If I'll get back to this--and you," he said, with his arms around her.
"Oh, well, I've got three months' leave. That's a lot."
Sophie looked at him out of troubled eyes. Her voice shook.
"You will be ordered to the front again?"
He nodded. "Very likely."
"I don't want you to go," she broke out passionately. "You mustn't. Oh,
Wes, Wes!"
am an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, and the war is not over yet.
Buck up, sweetheart. I had six months' training, a year in fighting
planes, six months in hospital, and barring an occasional spell of
uncertain nerves, I am still as good as ever. Don't worry. I was silly
to say what I thought, I suppose."
"Nevertheless, it is true," she said. "You may go again and never come
back. But I suppose one must face that. Thousands of women have had to
face it. Why should I be exempt?"
She wiped her eyes and smiled uncertainly.
"We shall simply have to keep that in the background. I want to forget
everything but that you are here and that I'm happy," she whispered,
with her arms about his neck. "I want to forget everything else--until
"Amen," Thompson replied, and kissed her, and then they went silently,
hand in hand down to the swinging bridge with the sun gone to rest below
the western sky-line, and dusk creeping softly up over the valley
floor.
* * * * * There will be those who, having followed so far, will desire further
light. They will ask naïvely: Did Wes Thompson go back to the front and
get killed? Did they marry and find lasting happiness?
To these curious folk who seek explicit detail, I can only point out
that Wes Thompson had three months' leave which ran into November, and
that to Sophie that ninety days loomed like a stay of execution. I would
ask them further to recall the eleventh of November, 1918--and so the
first question is duly answered.
Most certainly they married. At once--with a haste prudery and lovers of
formalism might term indecent.
Whether they live happily who can say? Somewhere between the day he
first looked on Sophie Carr at Lone Moose and the day he fell five
thousand feet to earth in a flaming battle-plane, keeping his life by
one of war's miracles, Wes Thompson lived and loved and suffered perhaps
a little more than falls to the common lot. He sloughed off prejudices
and cant and ignorance and narrowness in those six years as a tree sheds
its foliage in autumn.