Burned Bridges. Bertrand W. Sinclair
cabin. The man was certainly still in his twenties, of medium height, compactly muscular, a good-looking specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon manhood. The girl was a flower in perfect bloom, fresh-colored, slender and pliant as a willow, with all of the willow's grace in every movement. For all the twenty-odd years between them, and the gulf of sex differentiation, there was in her glance and bearing much of the middle-aged man who sat on the porch with a book across his knees and a clay pipe in his mouth. It did not lie in facial resemblance. It was more subtle than likeness of feature. Perhaps it was because of their eyes, alike deep gray, wide and expressive, lifted always to meet another's in level unembarrassed frankness.
They halted at the edge of the porch. The girl sat down. The young man nodded to Carr. Though they had but lately been fair in the path of the thunderstorm they had escaped a wetting. The girl's eyes followed her father's glance, seemed to read his thought.
"We happened to find a spruce thick enough to shed the rain," she smiled. "Or I suppose we'd have been soaked properly."
The young fellow tarried only till she was seated. He had no more than greeted Carr before he lifted his old felt hat to her.
"I'll be paddling back while the coolness lasts," said he. "Good-by."
"Good-by, Tommy," the girl answered.
"So long," Carr followed suit. "Don't give us the go-by too long."
"Oh, no danger."
He walked to the creek bank, stepped into a red canoe that lay nose on to the landing, and backed it free with his paddle. Ten strokes of the blade drove him out of sight around the first brushy bend upstream.
The girl looked thoughtfully after him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with some queer repressed feeling. Carr sat gazing silently at her while she continued to look after the vanished canoe whose passing left tiny swirls on the dark, sluggish current of Lone Moose. Presently Carr gave the faintest shrug of his lean shoulders and resumed the reading of his book.
When he looked up from the page again after a considerable interval the girl's eyes were fixed intently upon his face, with a queer questioning expression in them, a mute appeal. He closed his book with a forefinger inserted to mark the place, and leaned forward a trifle.
"What is it, Sophie?" he asked gently. "Eh?"
The girl, like her father, and for that matter the majority of those who dwelt in that region, wore moccasins. She sat now, rubbing the damp, bead-decorated toe of one on top of the other, her hands resting idle in the lap of her cotton dress. She seemed scarcely to hear, but Carr waited patiently. She continued to look at him with that peculiar, puzzled quality in her eyes.
"Tommy Ashe wants me to marry him," she said at last.
The faint flush on her smooth cheeks deepened. The glow in her eyes gave way altogether to that vaguely troubled expression.
Carr stroked his short beard reflectively.
"Well," he said at length, "seeing that human nature's what it is, I can't say I'm surprised any more than I would be surprised at the trees leafing out in spring. And, as it happens, Tommy observed the conventions of his class in this matter. He asked me about it a few days ago. I referred him to you. Are you going to?"
"I don't know, Dad," she murmured.
"Do you want to?" he pursued the inquiry in a detached, impersonal tone.
"I don't know," she repeated soberly. "I like Tommy a lot. When I'm with him I feel sure I'd be perfectly happy to be always with him. When I'm away from him, I'm not so sure."
"In other words," Carr observed slowly, "your reason and your emotions are not in harmony on that subject. Eh? So far as Tommy Ashe goes, your mind and your body pull you two different ways."
She looked at him a little more keenly.
"Perhaps," she said. "I know what you mean. But I don't clearly see why it should be so. Either I love Tommy Ashe, or I don't, and I should know which, shouldn't I? The first and most violent manifestation of love is mostly physical, isn't it? I've always understood that. You've pointed it out. I do like Tommy. Why should my mind act as a brake on my feelings?"
"Because you happen to be made the way you are," Carr returned thoughtfully. "As I've told you a good many times, you've grown up a good deal different from the common run of girls. We've been isolated. Lacking the time-occupying distractions and pleasures of youth in a more liberal environment, Sophie, you've been thrown back on yourself and me and books, and as a result you've cultivated a natural tendency to think. Most young women don't. They're seldom taught any rational process of arriving at conclusions. You have developed that faculty. It has been my pride and pleasure to cultivate in you what I believed to be a decided mentality. I've tried to show you how to get down to fundamentals, to work out a philosophy of life that's really workable. Knowledge is worth having for its own sake. Once you find yourself in contact with the world—and for you that time is bound to come—you'll apply all the knowledge you've absorbed to problems as they arise. If there's a rational solution to any situation that faces you, you'll make an effort to find that solution. You'll do it almost instinctively. You can't help it. Your brain is too alert ever to let you act blindly. At the present your lack of experience probably handicaps you a little. In human relations you have nothing much but theory, got from the books you've digested and the way we've always discussed every possible angle of life. Take Tommy Ashe. He's practically the first young, attractive white man you've ever met, the very first possibility as a lover. Tommy's a nice boy, a pleasant, sunny-natured young fellow. Personally he's just the sort of fellow that would sweep a simple country girl clean off her feet. With you, your mind, as you just put it, acts as a brake on your feelings. Can't you guess why?"
"No," she said quietly. "I can't. I don't understand myself and my shifts of feeling. It makes me miserable."
"Look here, Sophie girl," Carr reached over and taking her by the hand drew her up on the low arm of his chair, "you're asking yourself a more or less important question directly, and you're asking it of me indirectly. Maybe I can help you. At least I can tell how I see it. You have all your life before you. You want to be happy. That's a universal human attribute. Sometime or other you're going to mate with a man. That too is a universal experience. Ordinary mating is based on sex instinct. Love is mostly an emotional disturbance generated by natural causes for profoundly natural and important ends. But marriage and the intimate associations of married life require something more substantial than a mere flare-up of animal instinct. Lots of men and women aren't capable of anything else, and consequently they make the best of what's in them. But there are natures far more complex. You, Sophie, are one of those complex natures. With you, a union based on sex alone wouldn't survive six months. Now, in this particular case, leaving out the fact that you can't compare Tommy Ashe with any other man, because you don't know any other man, can you conceive yourself living in a tolerable state of contentment with Tommy if, say, you didn't feel any more passion for him than you feel for, say, old Standing Wolf over there?"
"But that's absurd," the girl declared. "Because I have got that feeling for Tommy Ashe, and therefore I can't imagine myself in any other state. I can't look at it the cold-blooded way you do, Daddy dear."
"I'm stating a hypothetical case," Carr went on patiently. "You do now. We'll take that for granted. Would you still have anything fundamental in common with Tommy with that part left out? Suppose you got so you didn't care whether he kissed you or not? Suppose it were no longer a physical pleasure just to be near him. Would you enjoy his daily and hourly presence then, in the most intimate relation a man and a woman can hold to each other?"
"Why, I wouldn't live with him at all," the girl said positively. "I simply couldn't. I know."
"You might have to," Carr answered gently. "You have never yet run foul of circumstances over which you have no more power than man has over the run of the tides. But we'll let that pass. I'm trying to help you, Sophie, not to discourage you. There are some situations in which, and some natures to whom, half a loaf is worse than no bread. Do you feel, have you ever for an hour felt that you simply couldn't face an existence in which Tommy Ashe