Still Jim Part 33

"It would be greater cowardice to stay. Pen, shall you and I die as Iron Skull did? I can marry no other woman feeling as I do about you. Sara's life is useless. Let the world say what it will. Marry me, Penelope."

"Jim, I can't."

"Why not, Penelope?"

"I love you very dearly, but I've had enough of marriage. I've done my duty. I don't see how I could keep on loving a man after I married him, even if he weren't a cripple. The process of adjustment is simply frightful. Marriage is just a contract binding one to do the impossible!"

Jim scowled. More and more he was realizing how Sara had hurt Pen.

"You don't care a rap about me, Pen. Why don't you admit it?"

Pen gave a sudden tearful smile. "You know better, Jim. But just to prove to you what a silly goose I am, I'll show you something. Girls in real life do this even more than they do it in novels!"

Pen opened a flat locket she always wore. A folded bit of paper and a tiny photograph fluttered into her lap. She gave both to Jim. The picture was a snapshot of Jim in his football togs. The bit of paper, unfolded, showed in Pen's handwriting a verse from Christina Rossetti:

"Too late for love, too late for joy; Too late! Too late!

You loitered on the road too long, You trifled at the gate: The enchanted dove upon her branch Died without a mate: The enchanted princess in her tower Slept, died, behind the grate: Her heart was starving all this time You made it wait."

Jim put the bit of paper into his pocket and gave Pen the picture. His eyes were full of tears.

"Pen! Pen!" he cried. "Let me make it up to you! We care so much!

Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery of marriage!"

White to the lips, Pen answered once more: "Jim, I will never leave Sara. There is such a thing as honor. It's the last foundation that the whole social fabric rests on. I promised to stay with Sara, in the marriage service. He's kept his word. It's my business to keep mine, until he breaks his."

Jim stood with set face. "Is this final, Penelope?"

"It's final, Still."

"Do you mind if I go on alone, Pen?"

Pen shook her head and Jim turned down the mountainside. And Pen, being a woman, put her head down on her knees and cried her heart out. Then she went back to Sara.

That night Jim answered the Secretary's letter:

"My work has always been technical. I know that the Projects are not the success their sponsors in Congress hoped they would be, but I feel that you ask too much of your engineers when you ask them not only to make the dam but to administer it. I have about concluded that an engineer is a futile beast of triangles and _n_-th powers, unfitted by his very talents for a.s.sociating with other human beings. I suppose that this letter must be interpreted as my admission of inefficiency."

It was late when Jim had finished this letter. He was, he thought, alone in the house. He laid down his pen. A sudden overpowering desire came upon him for Exham, for the old haunts of his childhood. There it seemed to him that some of his old confidence in life might return to him. He dropped his arm along the back of his chair and with his forehead on his wrist he gave a groan of utter desolation.

Mrs. Flynn, coming in at the open door, heard the groan and saw the beautiful brown head bowed as if in despair. She stopped aghast.

"Oh, my Lord!" she gasped under her breath. "Him, too! Mrs. Penelope ain't the only one that's broken up, then! Ain't it fierce! I wonder what's happened to the poor young ones! I'd like to go to Mr. Sara's wake. I would that! Oh, my Lord! Let's see. He's had two baths today. I can't get him into another. I'll make him some tea. You have to cheer up either to eat or take a bath."

She slipped into the kitchen and there began to bang the range and rattle teacups. When she came in, Jim was sitting erect and stern-faced, sorting papers. Mrs. Flynn set the tray down on the desk with a thud.

She was going to take no refusal.

"Drink that tea, Boss Still Jim, and eat them toasted crackers. You didn't eat any supper to speak of and you're as pindlin' as a knitting needle. Don't slop on your clean suit. That khaki is hard to iron."

She stood close beside him and made an imaginary thread an excuse for laying her hand caressingly on Jim's shoulder. "You're a fine lad," she said, uncertainly. "I wish I'd been your mother."

The touch was too much for Jim. He dropped the teacup and, turning, laid his face against Mrs. Flynn's shoulder.

"I could pretend you were tonight, very easily," he said brokenly, "if you'd smooth my hair for me."

Mrs. Flynn hugged the broad shoulders to her and smoothed back Jim's hair.

"I've been wanting to get my hands on it ever since I first saw it, lad.

G.o.d knows it's as soft as silk and just the color of oak leaves in winter. There, now, hold tight a bit, my boy. We can weather any storm if we have a friend to lean on, and I'm that, G.o.d knows. It's a fearful cold I've caught, G.o.d knows. You'll have to excuse my snuffing. There now! There! G.o.d knows that in my waist I've got a letter for you from Mrs. Penelope. She seemed used up tonight. Her jewel of a husband took dope tonight, so she and I sat in peace while she wrote this. I'll leave it on your tray. Good-night to you, Boss. Don't slop on your suit."

CHAPTER XVIII

JIM MAKES A SPEECH

"I am permanent so I cannot fully understand the tragedy that haunts humans from their birth, the tragedy of their own transitoriness."

MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

Jim drank his tea, staring the while at the envelope that lay on the tray. Then he opened the envelope and read:

"DEAR STILL: Don't say that I must go away. I want to stay and help you. I promised Iron Skull that I would. I don't want to add one breath to your pain--nor to my own!--and yet I feel as if we ought to forget ourselves and think only of the dam. No one knows you as I do, dear Jim. Iron Skull felt, and so do I, that somehow, sometime I can help you to be the big man you were meant to be. I have grown to feel that it was for that purpose I have lived through the last eight years. If it will not hurt you too much, please, Jim, let me stay.

PENELOPE."

Jim answered the note immediately.

"DEAREST PEN: Give me a day or so to get braced and we will go on as before. Stand by me, Pen. I need you, dear.

JIM."

But it was nearly two weeks before Jim talked with Pen again. For a number of days he devoted himself day and night to the preparations for starting the second section of the dam in the completed excavation. Then formal notice came that the Congressional committee would arrive at the dam nearly a week before it had been expected and Jim was overwhelmed in preparations for its reception. The first three days of the investigation were to be devoted to inspecting the dam. Jim brought the committee to the dam from the station himself.

There were five men on the committee, two New Englanders and three far westerners. They were the same five men who a year before had investigated Arthur Freet's projects and they were baffled and suspicious. And Jim's silence irritated them far more than Arthur Freet's loquacity. The members from the West and from Ma.s.sachusetts were, in spite of this, open-minded, eager for information and interested in the actual work of the dam building. The member from Vermont pursued Jim with the bitterness of a fanatic.

"A Puritan hang-over is what ails him," Jim remarked to Henderson. "He would burn a woman for a witch for having three moles on her back, as easy as--as he'd fire me!"

Henderson snorted: "I wish he was fat. I'd take him to ride in Bill Evans' machine. But, gee! he's so thin he'd stick in the seat like a sliver!"

Henderson had devoted himself to the entertainment of the visitors. He had organized a picnic to a far canyon where the "officers" and their wives offered the committee a wonderful camp supper, by a camp fire that lighted the desert for miles. He had induced the Mexicans in the lower camp to give one of their religious plays for the second night's entertainment. The moving picture hall was turned into a theater and the play, in queer Spanish, a strange mixture of miracle-play and buffoonery, delighted the hombres and astounded the whites. But the consummation of Henderson's art as an entertainment provider was to be the Mask Ball. This was to take place after the hearing at Cabillo was finished.

Jim gave all his time to the committee. He turned the office and its force over to them; gave them the freedom of the account books and the safe. Let them rummage the warehouse and its system. Explained his engineering mistakes to them. Went over and over the details of the flood, of the weathering abutments, of the concrete that did not come up to specifications, of the new system of concrete mixture that he and his cement engineer were evolving and which Jim believed in so ardently that he was using it on the dam. But in regard to Freet or to any graft in the Service he was persistently silent.

The Hearing was like and yet unlike the May hearing. It lacked the dignity of the first occasion and the Vermont member who presided was not the calm, inscrutable judge that the Secretary had been. The hall in Cabillo was packed with farmers and their wives and sweethearts and with Del Norte citizens.

The main effort of the speakers at the Hearing was to prove the inordinate extravagance and incompetence of Jim and his a.s.sociates. For three days Jim answered questions quietly and as briefly as possible.