The Cup of Fury Part 69

"He was killed, horribly. His pitiful wife! Abbie has been here and she is inconsolable. He was her idol--not a very pretty one, but idols are not often pretty. It's too terribly bad, isn't it?"

Davidge's bewildered silence was his epitaph for Jake. Even though he were dead, one could hardly praise him, though, now that he was dead, Davidge felt suddenly that he must have been indeed the first and the eternal victim of his own qualities.

Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from his cradle on--indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly kicked her to death before he was born.

Mamise had hated and loathed him, but she felt now that Abbie had been righter than she in loving the wretch who had been dowered with no beauty of soul or body.

She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long silence, she asked:

"Are you there?"

"Yes."

"You don't say anything about poor Jake."

"I--I don't know what to say."

He felt it hateful to withhold praise from the dead, and yet a kind of honesty forced him to oppose the habit of lauding all who have just died, since it cheapened the praise of the dead who deserve praise--or what we call "deserve."

Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: "It was n.o.ble of poor Jake to give his life trying to save the ship, wasn't it?"

"What's that?" said Davidge, and she spoke with labored precision.

"I say that you and I, who were the only witnesses, feel sorry that poor Jake had to be killed in the struggle with Easton."

"Oh, I see! Yes--yes," said Davidge, understanding.

Mamise went on: "Mr. Larrey was here and he didn't know who Jake was till I told him how he helped you try to disarm Nicky. It will be a fine thing for poor Abbie and her children to remember that, won't it?"

Davidge's heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the sweet purpose of Mamise's falsehood.

"Yes, yes," he said. "I'll give Abbie a pension on his account."

"That's beautiful of you!"

And so it was done. It pleased a sardonic fate to let Jake Nuddle pose in his tomb as the benefactor he had always pretended to be.

The operative, Larrey, had made many adverse reports against him, but in the blizzard of reports against hundreds of thousands of suspects that turned the Department of Justice files into a huge snowdrift these earlier accounts of Nuddle's treasonable utterances and deeds were forgotten.

The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief s.p.a.ce in the newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was all but forgotten.

When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call upon Davidge in her wheeled chair, she found him strangely lacking in cordiality. She was bitterly hurt at first, until she gleaned from his manner that he was trying to remove himself gracefully from her heart because of his disability.

She amazed him by her sudden laughter. He was always slow to understand why his most solemn or angry humor gave her so much amus.e.m.e.nt.

While her nurse and his were talking at a little distance it pleased her to lean close to Davidge and tease him excruciatingly with a flirtatious manner.

"Before very long I'm going to take up that bet we made."

"What bet?"

"That the next proposal would come from me. I'm going to propose the first of next week."

"If you do, I'll refuse you."

Though she understood him perfectly, it pleased her to a.s.sume a motive he had never dreamed of.

"Oh, you mustn't think that I'm going to be an invalid for life. The doctor says I'll be as well as ever in a little while."

Davidge could not see how he was to tell her that he didn't mean that without telling her just what he did mean. In his tormented petulance he turned his back on her and groaned.

"Oh, go away and let me alone."

She was laughing beyond the limits called ladylike as she began to wheel her chair toward the door. The nurse ran after her, asking:

"What on earth?"

Mamise a.s.sured, "Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven," and would not explain the riddle.

CHAPTER VII

Davidge was the modern ideal of an executive. He appeared never to do any work. He kept an empty desk and when he was away no one missed him. He would not use a roll-top desk, but sat at a flat table with nothing on it but a memorandum-pad, a calendar, an "in" and an "out"

basket, both empty most of the time.

He had his work so organized that it went on in his absence as if he were there. He insisted that the executives of the departments should follow the same rule. If they were struck down in battle their places were automatically supplied as in the regular army.

So when Davidge went to the hospital the office machine went on as if he had gone to lunch.

Mamise called on him oftener than he had called on her. She left the hospital in a few days after the explosion, but she did not step into his office and run the corporation for him as a well-regulated heroine of recent fiction would have done. She did not feel that she knew enough. And she did not know enough. She kept to her job with the riveting-gang and expected to be discharged any day for lack of pull with the new boss.

But while she lasted she was one of the gang, and proud of it. She was neither masculine nor feminine, but human. As Vance Thompson has said, the lioness is a lion all but a little of the time, and so Mamise put off s.e.xlessness with her overalls and put it on with her petticoats.

She put off the coa.r.s.eness at the same time as she scrubbed away the grime.

The shipyard was still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to her. She had not known what "pneumatic" or "hydraulic" really meant.

The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing in the Grimms' stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air and water and their dumfounding transformations.

She learned that machinery can be as beautiful as any other human structure. Fools and art-sn.o.bs had said that machinery is ugly, and some of it is indeed nearly as ugly as some canvases, verses, and cathedrals. Other small-pates chattered of how the divine works of nature shamed the crudities of man. They spoke of the messages of the mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to give them praise without slandering man's creations, for a G.o.d that could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a better G.o.d than one who could merely make a work of art himself.

But machinery has its messages, too. It enables the little cave-dweller to pulverize the mountain; to ship it to Mohammed in Medina; to pick it up and shoot it at his enemies.

Mamise, at any rate, was so enraptured by the fine art of machinery that when she saw a traveling-crane pick up a ma.s.s of steel and go down the track with it to its place, she thought that no poplar-tree was ever so graceful. And the rusty hulls of the new ships showing the sky through the steel lace of their rivetless sides were fairer than the sky.

Surgeons in steel operated on the battered epidermis of the _Mamise_ and sewed her up again. It was slow work and it had all the discouraging influence of work done twice for one result. But the toil went on, and when at last Davidge left the hospital he was startled by the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost finished ship where he had left a patchwork of iron plates.