And in the meantime both men, and other men likewise, went about their
daily affairs. Vancouver grew and prospered, and the growth of Summit
sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's
ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his
mind on the business. It worked out--his business preoccupation--much in
the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number
of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact
that he is a dog.
So, save for the fact that he continued to make money and was busy and
realized now and then that he had come to a disheartening impasse with
Sophie, the late spring of 1916 found Thompson mentally, morally and
spiritually holding fast by certain props.
He had come a long way, and he had yet a long way to go. He had come to
Lone Moose very much after the fashion of St. Simeon Stylites all
prepared to mount a spiritual pillar and make a bid for sainthood. But
pillar hermits, he discovered, when harsh, material facts tore the
evangelistic blinkers off his eyes, were neither useful in the world nor
acceptable on high. He had been in a very bad way for awhile. When a man
loses his own self-respect and the faith of his fathers at one stroke he
is apt to suffer intensely. Thompson had not quite reached that pass,
when he came down to Wrangel by the sea, but he was not far off. When he
looked back, he could scarcely trace by what successive steps he had
traveled. But he had got up out of that puddle into which a harsh
environment and wounded egotism had cast him. He was in a way to be what
the world called a success.
He was not so sure of that himself. But he stayed himself with certain
props, as before mentioned. The base of more than one of these useful
supports had been undermined some time before by a sequence of events
which presented the paradox of being familiar to him and still beyond
his comprehension.
He was a long way from being aware, in those early summer days of 1916,
that before long some of the aforementioned props were to buckle under
him with strange and disturbing circumstance.