George carried the pessimistic question back to the city unanswered.
July sweltered away, and George hunched at his desk late into the evenings. He seldom saw Stanley, but he saw Lincoln often. The storklike, vaguely comical Chief Executive was always dashing from one government office to another with bundles of plans and papers and memoranda and a spare joke or two, some very bawdy. Gossip said the dumpy little woman to whom he was married refused to hear the stories repeated in her presence.
Occasionally Lincoln turned up at the Winder Building in the late afternoon, wanting one of the staff to join him in target practice over at Treasury Park. Once George was tempted to volunteer, but he held back, not because he was in awe of the Chief Executive — Lincoln was usually gregarious and eminently approachable — but because he feared he would let his frustrations spill out. As long as he worked for Ripley, he owed him silence as a measure of loyalty.
Although procedure outweighed performance in the departmental scheme of things, Ripley's record was not all bad. George discovered the old man had pleaded for purchase of a hundred thousand European shoulder weapons more than three months ago to supplement the antiquated stores in federal warehouses. Cameron had insisted the army use only American-made weapons, which suggested to cynical George that some of the secretary's cronies must have firearms contracts. The Manassas debacle darkened the cloud over Cameron, and his purchasing decision was now being denounced as a blunder. The war wouldn't end with the summer, and there weren't enough guns to train and arm recruits who had already reported to camps of instruction from the East Coast to the Mississippi.
George was pulled from drafting a mortar contract and assigned to rewrite and polish a new Ripley proposal for purchase of a hundred thousand foreign-made weapons. The proposal went to the War Department bearing half a dozen signatures, the most prominent after Ripley's being George's. After three days of silence, he walked over personally to check on the fate of the proposal.
'I found it sitting on some desk,' he reported when he returned. 'Marked rejected.'
Without stopping his eternal movement of papers, Maynadier snapped, 'On what grounds?'
'The secretary wants the proposal resubmitted with the quantity cut in half.'
Ripley overheard. 'What? Only fifty thousand pieces?' He exploded into invective that made his typical tantrums pale; work was impossible for nearly an hour.
That night, George told Constance, 'Cameron authorized the rejection, but Stanley signed it. I'm sure he took great pleasure in it.'
'George, you mustn't sink into feelings of persecution.'
'What I'm sinking into is regret that I took the damn job. I was a fool to ignore the warning signs.'
She was sympathetic and tried to tease him out of his mood. 'See here, you're not the only one suffering. Look at my waist. If I don't stop gaining, I'll soon be bigger than one of Professor Lowe's balloons. You must help me, George. You must remind me to hold back at mealtimes.' The problem wasn't fictitious, but it was certainly a less significant worry than his. He replied with a mumbled promise and a vague look that made her fret about him all the more.
Ripley informed George and certain others that they would all receive brevets in August, Ripley himself rising to brigadier. George would be wearing three loops of black silk braid on his coat-cloak and the gold star of a major. The department's crimes of omission and commission, unfolding daily like the petals of a rose, left him too disheartened to care.
Ripley let contracts to virtually any middleman who said he could obtain 'foreign arms.' The mere claim was enough to induce faith and an outpouring of funds. 'You should see the frauds who pass themselves off as arms merchants,' George exclaimed to Constance during another late-evening complaint session; they were becoming chronic. 'Stable owners, apothecaries, relatives of congressmen — they all promise on the Bible to deliver European arms overnight. Ripley doesn't even question them about sources.'
'Do you have similar problems with artillery?'
'I do not. I interview at least one would-be contractor a day, and I weed out the charlatans with a few questions. Ripley's in such a panic, he never bothers.'
Duties frequently took George to the Washington Arsenal on Greenleaf's Point, a jut of mud flats at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia south of the center of town. There, neatly ranked beneath the trees around the old buildings, were artillery pieces of all sorts and sizes. Prowling the arsenal storage rooms in search of ammunition, George discovered a curiously designed gun with a crank on the side and a hopper on top. He asked Colonel Ramsay, the arsenal commandant, about it.
'Three inventors brought it here early this year. The official name on our records is .58-caliber Union Repeating Gun. The President christened it the coffee mill. It fires rapidly — the ammunition's loaded into that hopper — and after the initial tests, Mr. Lincoln wanted to adopt it. I'm told he sent memoranda on the subject to your commanding officer,' Ramsay finished pointedly.
'With what result?'
'There was no result.'
'Any more tests?'
'Not to my knowledge.'
'Why not?' George already suspected the answer, which Ramsay provided in a vicious imitation of the new brigadier general:
'Han't got time!'
Discussing the gun, George said to Constance, 'So a promising weapon molders while we waste our time with lunatic schemes and their equally deranged proponents.' He said this because he was often diverted from important tasks and forced to interview inventors.
One August afternoon when he was already late for a mortar test at the arsenal, Maynadier insisted he speak with the cousin of some congressman from Iowa.
The man wanted to sell a protective vest. Unfortunately, his sample had been delayed in shipment. 'But it should be here tomorrow. I know you'll be impressed, General.'
'Major.'
'Yes, your excellency. Major.'
'Tell me about your vest,' George snarled.
'It's crafted of the finest blued steel and certified to stop any projectile fired by an enemy's shoulder or hand weapon.'
With a feline smile, George smoothed his mustache. 'Oh, you're a steelmaker. Delighted to hear it. That's my trade also. Tell me about your facility in Iowa.'
'Well, Gen — Major — actually — the prototype was crafted by a supplier in Dubuque. I am —' the man swallowed — 'a hatter by profession.'
Faint with fury, George repeated, 'A hatter. I see.'
'But the prototype was made to my specifications, which I assure you are metallurgicaly precise. The vest will do everything I claim. One test will prove it.'
George experienced déjà vu. Vendors of body armor visited the department in regiments these days. 'Would you be willing to stay in Washington until a test can be arranged?'
The encouraged hatter beamed. 'I might, if the omens for a contract were favorable.'
'And, of course, since you're confident of the performance of your prototype, I presume you're willing to wear it personally during the test, allowing a sharpshooter to fire several rounds at you, so we may verify —'
The hatter, with hat and diagrams, was gone.
'What a terrible thing to do, George,' Constance said that night. But she giggled.
'Nonsense. I have learned one of the primary lessons of Washington. One of the surest remedies for the madness of the place is laughter.'
Laughter was no antidote for the next bad news to reach Ripley's office. Cameron's decision against foreign arms had given Confederate purchasing agents some ninety days in which to snatch up all the best weapons for sale in Britain and on the Continent. When a few samples of what remained arrived at the Winder Building, gloom was instantaneous.
In the steamy dusk, George took one sample down to the arsenal. The weapon was a .54-caliber percussion rifle carried by Austrian jaeger battalions. Designed on the Lorenz pattern of 1854, it was ugly, cumbersome, and
