Burned Bridges
Page 60No, he did not blame Sophie Carr for refusing to allow her judgment to
be fogged with sentiment. He only marvelled that she could do it where
he had failed. He could not blame her--not if his speech and activities
since he came to Lone Moose were the measure of his possible
achievement.
He was taking grim, unsparing stock of himself, of what he had, of what
he had accomplished altogether, by this time. It was not much. It was
not even promising. A theological education, which, compared to the sort
of culture Sam Carr and his daughter had managed to acquire, seemed
rather inadequate and one-sided. They knew more about the principles he
was supposed to teach than he knew himself. And their knowledge extended
to fields where he could not follow. When he compared himself with Tommy
indelibly stamped him, still it had left its mark.
These people had covered all his ground--and they had gone exploring
further in fields of general knowledge while he sat gazing smugly at
his own reflection in a theological mirror. Upon that score certainly
the count was badly against him.
As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically
considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit
that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a
salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that
the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank
and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.
looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the
trees the uncompleted bulk of his church--and he set down a mental
cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart
that he would never finish it. What was the use?
He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church,
to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he
could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in
many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.
Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in
which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed
desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson
formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was
forcing itself upon his consciousness--not as he had hitherto conceived
life to be.
But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not
evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And
in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in
introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare--that was
gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by
long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone
Moose Creek.