The Cup of Fury Part 59

The car was not ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads were sleety and skiddy, and required careful driving.

Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found it closed to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected to live.

It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get to Washington was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a detour of miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to the marble pages of the Arlington epic.

The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of eternal anonymity--dead from all our wars, and many of them with their wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.

But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached the hotel, she was just one hour late.

Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous.

And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.

In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her amazement.

"Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with you and go to the theater."

"Oh!" said the befuddled Davidge. "Oh, of course! Silly of me!

Good-by!"

Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in vain.

When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or hated her the more.

But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too short for her to risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back for a suit-case, in view of the Alexandria detour. She must, therefore, travel without baggage.

Therefore she must return the same night. She found, to her immense relief, that this could be done. The seven-o'clock train to Baltimore reached there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.

She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but now an inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that she was dining out with Polly somewhere; consequently it would be safe to tell Polly that she was dining out with Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to compare notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One cannot be seen to blush.

She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by what Widdicombe called "the ebony maid with the ivory head." Mamise told her not to summon her lame mistress to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss Webling was dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him.

She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then rang off.

This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted to Davidge for his bewilderment.

To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could leave, Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows that keep going without interruption. Public benefactors maintain them for the salvation of women who have no homes or do not want to go to them yet.

The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly, as usual leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects shown were selected from all the fascinating events of the time. Then followed a doleful imitation of Mr. Charles Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the artistry of the original.

The _cinema de resistance_ was a long and idiotic vampire picture in which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to impossible ruin by wiles and att.i.tudes that would have driven any actual male to flight, laughter, or a call for the police. But the audience seemed to enjoy it, as a subst.i.tute, no doubt, for the old-fashioned gruesome fairy-stories that one accepts because they are so unlike the tiresome realities. Mamise wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She was tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment, if ever opportunity offered.

In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled away the dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her dinner on the train, remembering vividly how her heart history with Davidge had begun on a train. She missed him now, and his self-effacing gallantry.

The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive was ill concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn't quite exist.

Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she had never paid Davidge for that chair he gave up to her. She vowed again that she would not forget. She felt a deep remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks.

She regretted especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was her privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no right to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she belonged to him.

She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too, as well as her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible and subjecting herself to a self-immolation among hardships. After the war--a.s.suming that the war would soon end and that she would come out of it alive--afterward she could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.

Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was startled to find Baltimore already gathering round the train. And she had not even begun to organize her stratagems against Nicky Easton. She made a hasty exit from the car and sought the cab-ranks outside.

From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself, lifted his hat, and motioned her to an open door. She bent her head down and her knees up and entered a little room on wheels.

Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for as soon as Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself the limousine moved off--into what adventures? Mamise was wondering.

BOOK VI

IN BALTIMORE

[Ill.u.s.tration: "So I have already done something more for Germany. That's splendid. Now tell me what else I can do." Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.]

CHAPTER I

Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.

Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out as anonymously as she had sneaked in.

Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on.

They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy he thrust one c.u.mbrous arm about her the insulation was complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.

But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted his arms away and muttered:

"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the gla.s.s and tell the driver to let me out?"

"_Nein doch_!"

"Then let me alone or I will."

Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her, and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.

They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:

"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."

Nicky fidgeted and sulked:

"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is no use."

"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."

"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."

Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could not imagine how to coax him out of silence.