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For it was certain that Hilmer had been contemptuous. ... Afterward, standing before the north gate of Hilmer's shipyards, a man at his side confirmed his intuitions between irritating puffs from a blackened pipe: "Nobody can double-cross Hilmer ... and they'd better give up trying ... He said a launching at noon and it was at noon, you can bet your life on that! ... They say a woman tried to scare the old man this morning ... He just laughed in her face and came on over."
So some one was to get Hilmer, after all! Well, why not? Hilmer liked men with guts enough to fight rabbit drives were not to his taste... Among all the names brought up and discussed at these sinister gatherings about Storch's round table Hilmer's stood out as the ultimate prize.
No, Hilmer had made no demand, but he had advised Brauer to be firm through his lawyer, of course ... a hint, nothing more that some sort of example should be made of men who... Yes, that was just as it had happened. "And you knew where they were sending me?" Fred was moved to demand, harshly. "Well ... yes... But Hilmer's lawyer put it so convincingly... Everything was to be for the best."
She had become for him one of the definite, though unexplainable, facts of existence which he accepted with all the simplicity of a child of misfortune. She answered promptly, sending cigarettes and tobacco and a pipe. But her letter was devoid of news -except that she had passed Hilmer's again and found Helen wheeling Mrs. Hilmer back and forth in the sunshine at the appointed hour.
Hilmer carried to the grand stand, where she was to repeat the mystic formula, giving the ship a name at the moment when Helen Starratt brought the foaming bottle of champagne crashing against the vessel's side. The whole article, even down to this obvious dash of "sob stuff," was at once Hilmer's challenge to the strikers and his appeal to the gallery.
Hilmer's scant speech had the double-edged quality of most short weapons. Could it be that his guest was sneering by implication at the fare that Helen had provided? No, that was hardly it, because Helen had provided good fare, even if she had prepared most of it vicariously. Hilmer's covert disdain was more impersonal, yet it remained every whit as irritating, for all that.
Hilmer brought down a hat the two had picked out and which had been altered at Helen's suggestion. She tried it on for Helen's approval, and Fred stood back in a corner while Helen went into ecstasies over it. Even a man could not escape the fact that it was unbecoming. Somehow, in a subtle way, it seemed to accent all of Mrs. Hilmer's unprepossessing features.
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