Читать книгу Lost Island - James Norman Hall - Страница 3

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Chance, in a benevolent mood, had consented that the pathways of three old friends and former comrades in World War I should cross for the first time in twenty years. The boon deserved to be enjoyed at leisure, and they had gone from San Francisco, the place of the unexpected meeting, across the bay to Berkeley, where Philip Marsh, Professor of History in the University of California, had his home, high up in the Berkeley hills. After dinner, Mrs. Marsh, an understanding woman, had left her husband alone for the evening with his guests, and now they were seated in the library whose great west window framed a magnificent panorama of the bay to the Golden Gate and beyond. The bridge between the heads, clearly etched at first against the afterglow, faded slowly from view until it could be seen no more.

All three men were in their middle fifties. Professor Marsh was a tall spare fellow somewhat frail in appearance, but the alert keen glance of the gray eyes was that which his friends remembered in the infantry lieutenant of a generation before. Charles Webber, a New Englander, had recently come to the West Coast to fill a post in a federal office connected with civilian defense. George Dodd, the only one of them again in uniform, was an officer of Engineers. He was sturdily built, slow of speech and slow of movement, and he had the odd habit of frequently passing his open fingers over the top of his bald head as though to ruffle the hair he had forgotten was no longer there.

Webber, slumped comfortably down in his chair, was speaking with a kind of wry humor of his share in the second phase of a world war that seemed destined never to have an end.

“A fifth wheel,” he was saying; “rolling around to no conceivable purpose so far as I can see. Thousands of my kind have been set in motion from Washington, and the lot of us are not worth one of the fifth wheels clamped to the rear end of a motorcar.”

“Don’t be so modest, Charlie,” Professor Marsh replied. “I’ll bet you think no end of yourself and of what you’re doing, if the truth were known.”

“No,” said Webber, with some heat. “Honestly, I can’t see that my work has the slightest value for anyone, anywhere. It’s mere busyness without a justifiable end in view.... George, what kind of a wheel are you, if it’s fair to ask? An essential part of Juggernaut? Crushing and grinding to some purpose?”

“I’m supposed to be,” Dodd replied.

“And yet you don’t seem particularly happy about it.”

“I didn’t know that happiness was concerned here.”

“Of course not,” said Webber. “But satisfaction is—a kind of grim satisfaction, if one has something essential to do.” He turned to Professor Marsh. “Phil, you have a try. See if you can break through this engineer’s iron reserve. Have you noticed? All through dinner he edged away from any mention of his part in the war effort. Shouldn’t wonder if the engineer’s insignia were pure camouflage. He’s probably connected with the F.B.I.”

“What are you doing, George?” Marsh asked. “Engineers, surely, have nothing to be reticent about.”

“Loafing, for this one night, at least,” said Dodd. “I’m down from Alaska for a few days. I’ve been out there, too,” he added, with a vague wave of the hand to the westward.

“ ‘Out there’!” said Webber. “How hard it is to pin the man down! ‘Out there’ has large dimensions in a planetary war. What particular part of it are you concerned with?”

Dodd was silent for a moment. “ ‘Were,’ ” he corrected, with a touch of grimness. “That job is finished.”

“That’s where men of your profession are so lucky,” said Webber. “You always have something definite to do, with clear-cut beginnings and ends. Well, what job? Why not tell us and be done with it?”

“You don’t know what you may be letting yourselves in for in asking that question,” the other replied, slowly. “Of course, I could tell you the whole business in half a minute ... but in that case I’d have to leave the significance out. And that’s all this experience had, as I see it: significance. There’s no story; at least, none of the kind to make you say: ‘Go on! What happened next?’ No one killed, or torpedoed and cast adrift on a raft. And what was killed would not be considered worth a two-inch obituary in any newspaper. Whether you’d be interested or not ...”

“We’re willing to chance that,” said Marsh.

“Yes, fire away,” said Webber. “If you bore us we’ll stand on no ceremony in letting you know about it.”

“Don’t scare me off before I start,” said Dodd, with a faint smile. “I’m no raconteur. I’ll be obliged to fumble and grope my way along. I tell you, I learned something on this assignment. It opened my eyes to ... to what the whole world may be coming to if we go on as we’re going now. And how are we to go otherwise? I see no possibility of turning back or changing direction. But ... well, after the war I’d like to see parts of the planet walled off, so to speak: out of bounds to engineers and all their allied tribes. Above all, out of bounds to machines. And I don’t see that coming,” he added, soberly. “The Atlantic Charter had nothing to say of that kind of freedom unless it was implied in freedom of worship. Leave worship aside, if you like. Call it freedom to enjoy life on the human scale, on a planet not wholly wrecked and desolated by machines. Queer talk, isn’t it, to be coming from the lips of an engineer? But, as I say, I’ve had my eyes opened. I’m not the fellow who went out there just a year ago this month. I was away six weeks. The job I was sent out to do required scarcely half the time.”