Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go
fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked
the impulse. He would not fight for a political abstraction. He had read
history. It is littered with broken treaties. If he fought it would be
because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous.
And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still
unfired. He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only
a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring
guns.
But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The
Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might
be--remotely--that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting.
He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could
muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who
had it and wondered privately how they came by it.
If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would
have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have
been the problem of Sophie Carr.
Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical
sense--although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely
physical sense. But it went deeper than that. During the eighteen months
following Thompson's motor-sales début he never succeeded in
establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he
had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr's home on the way he
opened his salesroom.
There was Tommy, for instance. Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than
he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried. He and Tommy
were friends. They had apartments in the same house. They saw each other
constantly. The matter of competition in business was purely nominal.
They were both too successful in business to be envious of each other in
that respect. But where Sophie Carr was concerned it was a conflict, no
less existent because neither man ever betrayed his consciousness of
such a conflict. Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe's
serenity came from an understanding with her. But he doubted that. Tommy
had not won--yet. That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising
about Sophie was built of other, sterner stuff.
She seldom touched on the war, never more than a casual sentence or two.
Perhaps a phrase would flash like a sword, and then her lips would
close. Carr would discuss the war from any angle whatsoever, at any
time. It became an engrossing topic with him, as if there were phases
that puzzled him, upon which he desired light. He ceased to be
positive. But his daughter shunned war talk.