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She looked curiously round her at the furniture of the office, at the machinery in which she had taken so much pride, and marveled to think that once the copying-presses, the card-index, the files of documents, had all been shrouded, wrapped in some mist which gave them a unity and a general dignity and purpose independently of their separate significance.
None in his senses, I say, would emit such sophistries, for Christmas is a law unto itself and is not conducted by card-index. Even the postmen and shopgirls, severe though their labors, would not have matters altered. There is none of us who does not enjoy hardship and bustle that contribute to the happiness of others.
"I was here yesterday; bought a pistol from Rivers. That's how I noticed this card-index system. Of course, I didn't look at everything, while I was here, but I can't see where any quantity of arms have been removed, and Rivers didn't have any single item that was worth a murder. Fact is, no old firearm is.
Reflecting upon these things, Lidgerwood's comment fell into speech over his cup of coffee and crisp breakfast bacon. "About the first man we need is an engineer who won't be too exalted to get down and squint curves with the section bosses," he mused, and from that on he was searching patiently through the memory card-index for the right man.
Quite without conscious effort his brain registered and filed away in the card-index of his subconscious mind the picture presented by the passing of Luke Tweezy, the impression made thereby, and the inference drawn therefrom. The inference was almost trivial merely that Luke Tweezy had come from Marysville, the town where he lived and had his being.
So I was already in the card-index class. Then briefly he looked over the manifest that Doctor X had sent him. It may not have been a manifest it may have been an invoice or a bill of lading. Anyhow I was in the assignee's hands. I could only hope it would not eventually become necessary to call in a receiver. Then he spoke: "Yes, yes-yes," he said; "yes-yes-yes! Operation required.
Not for nothing had he sat from seven to ten in the office of a shipping agent at Alicante. Here was a card-index, and of an amazing volume. But his interlocutor still barred the way. "Have you an appointment with Commodore Graham?" she asked, still with that suggestion that he had lunched too well and had lost his way. "No. But he sent for me across half the world."
Thus when someone in England mistakenly, and before sufficient German prisoners were in their hands, treated certain submarine marauders differently from other prisoners, the German Government speedily referred to this card-index, picked out a number of officers with connections in the House of Lords and House of Commons, and treated them as convicts.
"Ah, yes, I recall you now." She thought there was an inimical note in his voice, and to pay him for it, she said with a final smiling nod: "Oh, I am so pleased!" Her little sarcasm passed miles over his head. She had touched the spring of the automatic card-index system known as his memory and the ingenious machinery worked on.
For this is a card-index war, a colossal business of files and classifications and ledgers and statistics and registrations, an undertaking on a scale beside which Harrod's and Whiteley's and Selfridge's and Wanamaker's and the Magazin du Louvre, all rolled into one, would be a fleabite of simplicity.
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