The Cup of Fury: A Novel of Cities and Shipyards

by Rupert Hughes

Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman, of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman’s stories were always long, and people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was 252 seated sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm rested. Davidge’s eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.

Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light that satin shimmers with.

In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had removed the ban on extravagance.

The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking, laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through the deeps of color.

The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied steel.

He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed 253 it in platinum. He contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other. The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet somehow worth more than anything useful.

He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture, transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.

He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.

It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task. It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.

Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.