The Man Who Lost the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

bank.
    She said timidly, “I do beg your pardon. But I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I shared this table with you. There are no other seats in the restaurant …”
    He got up hastily and made room at the little table and saw that she had the salt and he even stacked her cafeteria tray on top of his out of the way. When she was organized she looked at him with a wan thank-you smile that became recognition. “Why, it’s Mr. Llewellyn!”
    He didn’t say anything more to her that evening—he couldn’t. But the next night she was there ahead of him and when he came along with his tray, she called out to him and patted the table across from her. After that they always had dinner together. She was quiet and nice, and she let him be silent for as long as he wanted to be.
    Six or seven weeks later something happened at the hospital that made a deep impression on Lulu. A furious young female face appeared at his wicket and demanded: “Where is George Hickenwaller? Where is he? I got to see him right away.”
    Lulu stared dumbly until she banged the palm of her hand on the shelf by the wicket, and repeated the question. Her face started darkening ominously and the blood-vessels on the sides of her neck began to stand out in the most alarming fashion.
    He remembered then. George Hickenwaller was the married orderly who had annoyed him more than most of the others—although he wasn’t quite sure why. “I’ll find him. Just wait a minute,” he promised. He got up, and went over to the doorway of the locker room, and saw at once that George Hickenwaller was in there with his back to the wall. He was making wild signals of distress and prayer, and moving his mouth strangely, giving vent to some exaggerated, silent, pleading syllables which Lulu could not understand.
    He went back to his wicket. “He’s in there,” he said, thumbing at the door.
    “In there, is he?” said the young woman. She turned angrily to the man behind her. Lulu saw that the man was a policeman. “He’s in there,” she relayed.
    “In there, is he?” the policeman countered. He ran around to the front, to the general office door, and went sprinting across behind Lulu and into the locker room.
    There came sounds of the chase and a cry for mercy, and then poor Hickenwaller was walked abjectly out by the policeman. The big, red-faced cop had a meaty hand on his collar and another in the back of his belt.
    Quite a crowd had gathered by this time and Lulu found himself standing next to Hickenwaller’s friend, the other orderly. This man shook his head sadly. “I tol’ him he wasn’t goin’ to get away with it. ‘I know what I’m doin’,’ he says. ‘I got it made.’ ” The orderly shook his head again. “He got it made
now
all right, but good.”
    “What did he do?” Lulu asked.
    “Got married.”
    “To that one?” Lulu pointed at the angry woman, who was ducking under the policeman’s guard to punch Hickenwaller solidly on the ear.
    “Yeah, an’ another one too. I tol’ him she’d find out.”
    “Two wives?”
    “Bigamy,” said the orderly knowledgeably.
    “Is that very bad?” Lulu asked, really wanting to know.
    The orderly cocked his head and squinted at him. “Lew old man, let me tell you.
One
is very bad.”
    “Yes, but this—uh—bigamy. It’s
really
bad, huh.”
    “No way to get to heaven.”
    “Well,” said Lulu, and got back to work.
    Dinnertime, comfortable with Miss Fisher in the booth. He wondered why she seemed so glad to have dinner with him all the time. What did she get out of it. He didn’t ask her. But he continued to wonder.
    “Oh,
there
you are!” someone said at his elbow. It was the manager.He half-filled the booth and loomed over them. “I thought I had all the trouble with you I was goin’ to,” he growled at Lulu.
    Lulu went speechless. He made himself smaller in his seat, while Miss Fisher looked frightened at the manager and anxious at Lulu.
    The manager banged a check with a