CHAPTER XVI

A MEETING BY THE WAY

But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing difference.  He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic north pulls on the compass needle.  He had grown free of both thought and hope of her.  There had been too many other vital things pressing upon him these months of adventure in toil, too many undeniable, everyday factors of living present at every turn, hourly insistent upon being coped with, for him to nurse old sad dreams and longings.  So he had come at last to think of that passionate yearning as a disease which had run its course.

Now, to his dismay, it recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere glimpse of Sophie.  The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon him, to make his heart heavy and spoil his days of passive content.  It angered him to be so hopelessly troubled.  But he could not gainsay the fact.

It made San Francisco a dreary waste.  Try as he would he could not keep Sophie Carr from being the sun around which the lesser nebulae of his thought continually revolved.  He could no more help a wistful lookout for her upon San Francisco’s streets than he could help breathing.  Upon the rolling phalanxes of motor cars his gaze would turn with watchful expectation, and he took to scanning the faces of the passing thousands, a lonely, shy man with a queer glow in his eyes.  That, of course, was only in moments of forgetfulness.  Then he would pull himself together with a resentful irritation and tax himself with being a weak fool and stalk along about his business.

But his business had lost its savor, just as his soul had lost its slowly-won serenity.  His business had no importance to any save himself.  It had been merely to winter decently and economically with an eye cocked for such opportunities of self-betterment as came his way, and failing material opportunity in this Bagdad of the Pacific coast to make the most of his enforced idleness.

And now the magic of the colorful city had departed along with the magic of the books.  The downtown streets ceased to be a wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch.  The hushed reading room where he had passed so many contented hours was haunted by a presence that obscured the printed page.  He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, gun in hand, of old Sam Carr in his moosehide chair, of the Indians, the forest, of all that goes to make the northern wilderness—­and of himself moving through it all, an unheroic figure, a man who had failed in his work, in his love, in everything.