Burned Bridges

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort

of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted,

and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a

consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of

the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray

clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy

song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men,

the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy

day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the

sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at

that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere

leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable

touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the

air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning

to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten

breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet cocked up on the

stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it

seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone. To his

unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him

to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of

yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond

between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together

that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon

that--to him--most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of

gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize

Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He

could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of

"parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of

the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in

its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and

startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical

thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has

been written upon philosophy and theology.

Sophie didn't believe in his God, nor his work; he stopped short of

asking if he himself any longer had full and implicit belief in these

things, or if he had simply accepted them without question as he had

accepted so many other things in his brief career. But she believed in

him and cared for him. He took that for granted too. And love covers

a multitude of sins. He had often had occasion to discourse upon various

sorts of love--fatherly love and brotherly love and maternal affection

and so on. But this flare of passionate tenderness focussing upon one

slender bit of a girl was something he could not quite fathom. He would

have contradicted with swift anger any suggestion that perhaps it was

merely wise old Nature's ancient method efficiently at work for an

appointed end. He had been so thoroughly grounded in the convention of

decrying physical impulses, of putting everything upon a pure and

spiritual plane, that in this first emotional crisis of his life he

could no more help dodging first principles than a spaniel pup can help

swimming when he is first tossed into deep water.