"Pardon my rush, old man," he said. "I've got an appointment I can't
afford to pass up, and I'm late already. Look me up to-morrow, will
you?"
Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others. In Thompson
those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives. He had
quickened at sight of Tommy's familiar face, albeit that face was a
trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to
behold it. He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time. But
Tommy had not been glad to see him. Thompson felt that under the outward
cordiality.
He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least
vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada
Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a
bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the
sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above
the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor
traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and
the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily massive against the
paler sky.
He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm
light of shipping in the stream. He could smell the sea, the brown kelp
bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide. And he fancied that even at
that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the
mountain flank.
"By God," he whispered. "It's good to be back."
He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer. All this that he saw
now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as
something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to
see it again. For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive
where so many others had perished. It was just a whimsey of Fate. And he
was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to
outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.
Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had
left him very tired. Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved
insistently. Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his
clothes and went to bed.
In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he
knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.
But when he went out into Vancouver's highways and met people, his
uniform gave them a conversational cue. And he found that here, six
thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the
hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic. He did not
want to talk about fighting and killing. He had lived those things and
that was enough. So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and
had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.