_ BOOK VII. AT THE SHIPYARD
CHAPTER VI
The most tremendous explosives refuse to explode unless some detonator like fulminate of mercury is set off first. Each of us has his own fulminate, and the snap of a little cap of it brings on our cataclysm.
It was a pity, seeing how many Germans were alienated from their country by the series of its rulers' crimes, and seeing how many German names were in the daily lists of our dead, that the word and the accent grew so hateful to the American people. It was a pity, but the Americans were not to blame if the very intonation of a Teutonism made their ears tingle.
Davidge prized life and had no suicidal inclinations or temptations. No imaginable crisis in his affairs could have convinced him to self-slaughter. He was brave, but cautious.
Even now, if Nicky Easton, poising the bombshell with its appalling threat, had murmured a sardonic "Well?" Davidge would probably have smiled, shrugged, and said:
"You've got the bead on me, partner. I'm yours." He would have gone along as Nicky's prisoner, waiting some better chance to recover his freedom.
But the mal-pronunciation of the shibboleth strikes deep centers of racial feeling and makes action spring faster than thought. The Sicilians at vespers asked the Frenchmen to pronounce "cheecheree," and slew them when they said "sheesheree." So Easton snapped a fulminate in Davidge when his Prussian tongue betrayed him into that impertinent, intolerable alien "Vell?"
Davidge was helpless in his own frenzy. He leaped.
Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant's consideration. As a football-player hesitates a sixteenth of a second too long before he passes the ball or punts it, and so forfeits his opportunity, so Nicky Easton stood and stared for the length of time it takes the eyes to widen.
That was just too long for him and just long enough for Davidge, who went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky's grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge's hundred-and-eighty-pound weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him collapsing backward, staggering, wavering, till he, too, went overboard.
Davidge hit the deck like a ball-player sliding for a base, and he went slithering to the edge. He would have followed Nicky over the hundred-foot steel precipice if Mamise had not flung herself on him and caught his heel. He was stopped with his right arm dangling out in space and his head at the very margin of the deck.
In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been panic-stricken at the sight of the bomb in Nicky's hand, had been backing away slowly. He would have backed into the abyss if he had not struck a stanchion and clutched it desperately.
And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted on the huge blade of the ship's anchor lying on a wharf waiting to be hoisted into place. The shell burst with an all-rending roar and sprayed rags of steel in every direction. The upward stream caught Nicky in midair and shattered him to shreds.
Nuddle's whole back was obliterated and half a corpse fell forward, headless, on the deck. Davidge's right arm was ripped from the shoulder and his hat vanished, all but the brim.
Mamise was untouched by the bombardment, but the downward rain of fragments tore her flesh as she lay sidelong.
The bomb, exploding in the open air, lost much of its efficiency, but the part of the ship nearest was crumpled like an old tomato-can that a boy has placed on a car track to be run over.
The crash with its reverberations threw the throngs about the speakers' stands into various panics, some running away from the volcano, some toward it. Many people were knocked down and trampled.
Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They found Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging as the torn arteries in Davidge's shoulder spouted his life away. A quick application of first aid saved him until the surgeon attached to the shipyard could reach him.
Mamise's injuries were painful and cruel, but not dangerous. Of Jake Nuddle there was not enough left to assure Larrey of his identification. Of Nicky Easton there was so little trace that the first searchers did not know that he had perished.
Davidge and Mamise were taken to the hospital, and when Davidge was restored to consciousness his first words were a groan of awful satisfaction:
"I got a German!"
When he learned that he had no longer a right arm he smiled again and muttered:
"It's great to be wounded for your country."
Which was a rather inelegant paraphrase of the classic "
Dulce et decorum," but caught its spirit admirably.
Of Jake Nuddle he knew nothing and forgot everything till some days later, when he was permitted to speak to Mamise, in whose welfare he was more interested than his own, and the story of whose unimportant wounds harrowed him more than his own.
Her voice came to him over the bedside telephone. After an exchange of the inevitable sympathies and regrets and tendernesses, Mamise sighed:
"Well, we're luckier than poor Jake."
"We are? What happened to him?"
"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 noble 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 space 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 amusement.
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 assume 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 assured, "Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven," and would not explain the riddle. _