“Oh, thank Gawd you’re marrit at last, Mamise! You’ve been such a worrit to me. I hope you’ll be as happy as poor Jake and me was. If he only hadn’t ’a’ had to gave his life for you, you wouldn’t ’a’ been. But he’s watchin’ you from up there and–– Oh dear! Oh dear!”
Jake was already a tradition of increasing beauty. So may we all of us be!
Mamise insisted on dragging Davidge away from the shipyard for a brief honeymoon.
“You’re such a great executive, they’ll never miss you. But I shall. I decline to take my honeymoon or live my married life alone.”
They went up to Washington for a while of shopping. The city was already reverting to type. The heart had gone out of the stay-at-home war-workers and the tide was on the ebb save for a new population of returned soldiers, innumerably marked with the proofs of sacrifice, not only by their service chevrons, their wound stripes, but also by the parts of their brave bodies that they had left in France.
They were shy and afraid of themselves and of the world, and especially of their women. But, as Adelaide wrote of the new task of rehabilitation, “a merciful Providence sees to it that we become, in time, used to anything. If we had all been born with one arm or one leg our lives and loves would have gone on just the same.”
To many another woman, as to Mamise, was given the privilege of adding herself to her wounded lover to complete him.
Polly Widdicombe, seeing Mamise and Davidge dancing together, smiled through her tears, almost envying her her husband. Davidge danced as well with one arm as with two, but Mamise, as she clasped that blunt shoulder and that pocketed sleeve, was given the final touch of rapture made perfect with regret: she had the aching pride of a soldier’s sweetheart, for she could say:
“I am his right arm.”
THE END