244
The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the bills.
In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never so many fowls counted before they were hatched––and in the final outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.
But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The strategical experts protested against the wasteful “side-shows” in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian résistance in the Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own mountainsides.
Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break.
So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.
The premonition of the dawning ofDer Tagstirred the heart of Nicky Easton, of course. He had led for months the life of a fox in a hunt-club county. Every time he put his head out he heard the bay of the hounds. He had stolen very few chickens, and he expected every moment to be pounced on. But now that he felt assured of a German triumph in a little while, he began to think of the future. His heart turned again to Mamise.
His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place had compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had been used to. His German accent did not help him, and he had found that even those heavy persons known as light women, though they had no other virtue, had patriotism245enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility. His dialect insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with German-stained money.
In his alliance with Jake Nuddle for the blowing up of theClara, and their later communications looking toward the destruction of other ships, he kept informed of Mamise. He always asked Jake about her. He was bitterly depressed by the news that she was “sweet on” Davidge. He was exultant when he learned from Jake that she had given up her work in the office and had gone to Washington. Jake learned her address from Abbie, and passed it on to Nicky.
Nicky was tempted to steal into Washington and surprise her. But enemy aliens were forbidden to visit the capital, and he was afraid to go by train. He had wild visions of motoring thither and luring her to a ride with him. He wanted to kidnap her. He might force her to marry him by threatening to kill her and himself. At least he might make her his after the classic manner of his fellow-countrymen in Belgium. But he had not force enough to carry out anything so masterful. He was a sentimental German, not a warrior.
In his more emotional moods he began to feel a prophetic sorrow for Marie Louise after the Germans had conquered the world. She would be regarded as a traitress. She had been adopted by Sir Joseph Webling and had helped him, only to abandon the cause and go over to the enemy.
If Nicky could convert her again to loyalty, persuade her to do some brave deed for the Fatherland in redemption of her blacksliding, then whenDer Tagcame he could reveal what she had done. When in that resurrection day the graves opened and all the good German spies and propagandists came forth to be crowned byGottand the Kaiser, Nicky could lead Marie Louise to the dual throne, and, describing her reconciliation to the cause, claim her as his bride. And the Kaiser would say, “Ende gut, alles gut!”
Never a missionary felt more sanctity in offering salvation to a lost soul by way of repentance than Nicky felt when he went to the house of an American friend and had Mamise called on the long-distance telephone.
Mamise answered, “Yes, this is Miss Webling,” to the faint-voiced long-distance operator, and was told to hold the246wire. She heard: “All ready with Washington. Go ahead.” Then she heard a timid query:
“Hallow, hallow! Iss this Miss Vapelink?”
She was shocked at the familiar dialect. She answered:
“This is Miss Webling, yes. Who is it?”
“You don’d know my woice?”
“Yes––yes. I know you––”
“Pleass to say no names.”
“Where are you?”
“In Philadelphia.”
“All right. What do you want?”
“To see you.”
“You evidently know my address.”
“You know I cannot come by Vashington.”
“Then how can I see you?”
“You could meet me some place, yes?”
“Certainly not.”
“It is important, most important.”
“To whom?”
“To you––only to you. It is for your sake.”
She laughed at this; yet it set her curiosity on fire, as he hoped it would. He could almost hear her pondering. But what she asked was:
“How did you find my address?”
“From Chake––Chake Nuttle.”
He could not see the wild look that threw her eyes and lips wide. She had never dreamed of such an acquaintance. The mere possibility of it set her brain whirling. It seemed to explain many things, explain them with a horrible clarity. She dared not reveal her suspicions to Nicky. She said nothing till she heard him speak again:
“Vell, you come, yes?”
“Where?”
“You could come here best?”
“No, it’s too far.”
“By Baltimore we could meet once?”
“All right. Where? When?”
“To-morrow. I do not know Baltimore good. Ve could take ride by automobile and talk so. Yes?”
“All right.” This a little anxiously.
“To-morrow evening. I remember it is a train gets there247from Vashington about eight. I meet you. Make sure nobody sees you take that train, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You know people follow people sometimes.”
“Yes.”
“I trust you alvays, Marie Louise.”
“All right. Good-by.”
“Goot-py, Marie Louise.”
248CHAPTER II
While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered several sharp and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes had wakened in the receiver.
The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that Nicky had some postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again. Her ear was as bewildered as your tongue when it expects to taste one thing and tastes another, for it was Davidge’s voice that spoke, asking for her. She called him by name, and he growled:
“Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger who kept me waiting so long?”
“Don’t you wish you knew?” she laughed. “Where are you now? At the shipyard?”
“No, I’m in Washington––ran up on business. Can I see you to-night?”
“I hope so––unless we’re going out––as I believe we are. Hold the wire, won’t you, while I ask.” She came back in due season to say, “Polly says you are to come to dinner and go to a dance with us afterward.”
“A dance? I’m not invited.”
“It’s a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right to take you––no end of big bugs will be there.”
“I’m rusty on dancing, but with you––”
“Thanks. We’ll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight. Wrap up well. It’s cold, isn’t it?”
He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as “jazz”––so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers capered and writhed.
The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old Rosslyn bridge squealed with cold under the motor. It was249good to see the lights of the Hall at last, and to thaw himself out at the huge fireplace.
“Lucky to get a little wood,” said Major Widdicombe. “Don’t know what we’ll do when it’s gone. Coal is next to impossible.”
Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two or three other house guests, and some wives of important people. They laid off their wraps and then decided to keep them on.
Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly clad, discouraged office-hack that when she descended the stairs and paused on the landing a few steps from the floor, to lift her eyebrows and her lip-corners at him, he was glad of the pause.
“Break it to me gently,” he called across the balustrade.
She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed in her complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was dazed by her unimagined splendor.
As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the tribute in his, she said:
“Break what to you gently?”
“You!” he groaned. “Good Lord! Talk about ‘the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome’!”
With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on his evening finery.
“The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning in décolleté. For a pair of common laborers, we are certainly gaudy.”
Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, “So you’re the fascinating brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary of that awful ship-factory.”
Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: “Never again. She’s fired! We can’t afford her.”
“Bully for you,” said Polly. “I suppose I’m an old-fashioned, grandmotherly sort of person, but I’ll be damned if I can see why a woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie Louise here should be pounding typewriter keys in an office. Of course, if she had to–– But even then, I should say that it would be her solemn religious duty to sell her soul for a lot of glad-rags.
“A lot of people are predicting that women will never go250back to the foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but––well, I’m no prophetess, but all I can say is that if this war puts an end to the dressmaker’s art, it will certainly put civilization on the blink. Now, honestly, what could a woman accomplish in the world if she worked in overalls twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four years––what could she make that would be more worth while than getting herself all dressed up and looking her best?”
Davidge said: “You’re talking like a French aristocrat before the Revolution; but I wish you could convince her of it.”
Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she was thrilled, thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in her best clothes––in and out of her best clothes, and liberally illuminated with jewelry. She was now something like a great singer singing the highest note of her master-aria in her best rôle––herself at once the perfect instrument and the perfect artist.
Marie Louise went in on Davidge’s arm. The dining-room was in gala attire, the best silver and all of it out––flowers and candles. But the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women, who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to the chill.
Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.
“To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She is, though––the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!”
The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of amazement.
“What’s more,” said Mamise, “I live on my salary.”
This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise admitted that it took management.
Mamise said: “Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes? And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?”
Polly shook her head in despair of her. “Let those do it251that have to. Nobody’s going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without giving me the same excuse.”
Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent people.
“I’m beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to honest work again.”
She thought she saw in Davidge’s eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.
When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while, talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was heaping into mountains––the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front, the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner’s inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said:
“I get enough of this in the shop, and I’m frozen through. Let’s go in and jaw the women.”
Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the majestic languor of lions well fed.
Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman, of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman’s stories were always long, and people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was252seated sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm rested. Davidge’s eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.
Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light that satin shimmers with.
In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had removed the ban on extravagance.
The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking, laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through the deeps of color.
The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied steel.
He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed253it in platinum. He contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other. The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet somehow worth more than anything useful.
He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture, transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.
He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.
It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task. It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.
Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.
And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor? When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing of comfort to one’s children rendered impossible, the establishment of one’s destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted “universal happiness.” It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.
He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from254these nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work out their hearts’ desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even more hateful middle class at their mercy.
It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel, and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all for their voyage.
A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry, was beyond Davidge’s imagining. He comforted himself with the thought that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools they worked with most.
The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.
255CHAPTER III
Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set steps.
Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan and could “shake a sugar-heel” with a practised skill. There was a startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping, now limping, now running.
He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in a way that he could think of only one word for––terrible.
She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them, and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of jealousy in what she murmured:
“You haven’t spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships, young man!”
“No?”
“What cabarets have you graduated from?”
He quoted her own words, “Don’t you wish you knew?”
“No.”
“One thing is certain. I’ve never found in any of ’em as light a feather as you.”
“Are you referring to my head or my feet?”
“Your blessed feet!”
His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a delirium of motion.
“That’s unfair!” she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him dizzily while he applauded with the other256dancers till the band renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.
The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. “I wish we could sail on and on and on forever.”
“Forever is a long time,” she smiled.
“May I have the next dance?”
“Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But don’t––”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t know.”
Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous, an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism plus athleticism.
Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise comported herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that desperate condition in which men are made ready to commit monogamy. He felt that he could not endure to have Mamise free any longer.
He presented himself to her for the next dance.
She laughed. “I’m booked.”
He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the dance out––stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men on the side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed him at seeing still a fourth stranger with his arms about Mamise, her breast to his and her procedure obedient to his. Worse yet, when a fifth insolent stranger cut in on the twin stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth temporary husband for another with a levity that amounted to outrageous polyandry.
Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so257intensely that he wanted to put an end to the abomination, reform it altogether. He did not want to dance between those white arms so easily forsworn. He wanted to rescue Mamise from this place of horror and hale her away to a cave with no outlook on mankind.
It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she understood him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the proof of her sway over him and still sane enough to take a joy in her triumph.
She introduced her partner––Davidge would almost have called the brute a paramour. He did not get the man’s name and was glad of it––especially as the hunter deserted her and went after his next Sabine.
“You’ve lost your faithful stenographer,” was the first phrase of Mamise’s that Davidge understood.
“Why so?” he grumbled.
“Because this is the life for me. I’ve been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can. I’m for the fleshpots and the cold-cream jars and the light fantastic. Aren’t you going to dance with me any more?”
“Just as you please,” Davidge said, with a singularly boyish sulkiness, and wondered why Mamise laughed so mercilessly:
“Of course I please.”
The music struck up an abandoned jig, but he danced with great dignity till his feet ran away with him. Then he made off with her again in one of his frenzies, and a laughter filled his whole being.
She heard him growl something.
“What did you say?” she said.
“I said, ‘Damn you!’”
She laughed so heartily at this that she had to stop dancing for a moment. She astonished him by a brazen question:
“Do you really love me as much as that?”
“More,” he groaned, and they bobbed and ducked and skipped as he muttered a wild anachronism:
“If you don’t marry me I’ll murder you.”
“You’re murdering me now. May I breathe, please?”
He was furious at her evasion of so solemn a proposal. Yet she was so beautifully alive and aglow that he could not exactly hate her. But he said:
“I won’t ask you again. Next time you can ask me.”
258
“All right; that’s a bet. I’ll give you fair warning.”
And then that dance was over, and Mamise triumphant in all things. She was tumultuously hale and happy, and her lover loved her.
To her that hath––for now, whom should Mamise see but Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Her heart ached with a reminiscent fear for a moment; then a malicious hope set it going again. Major Widdicombe claimed Mamise for the next dance, and extracted her from Davidge’s possession. As they danced out, leaving Davidge stranded, Mamise noted that Lady C.-W. was regarding Davidge with a startled interest.
The whirl of the dance carried her close to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and she knew that Lady C.-W. had seen her. Broken glimpses revealed to her that Lady C.-W. was escorting her escort across the ballroom floor toward Davidge.
She saw the brazen creature tap Davidge’s elbow and smile, putting out her hand with coquetry. She saw her debarrass herself of her companion, a French officer whose exquisite horizon-blue uniform was amazingly crossed with the wound and service chevrons of three years’ warfaring. Nevertheless, Lady Clifton-Wyatt dropped him for the civilian Davidge. Mamise, flitting here and there, saw that Davidge was being led to the punch-altar, thence to a lonely strip of chairs, where Lady C.-W. sat herself down and motioned him to drop anchor alongside.
Mamise longed to be near enough to hear what she could guess: her enemy’s artless prelude followed by gradual modulations to her main theme––Mamise’s wicked record.
Mamise wished that she had studied lip-reading to get the details. But this was a slight vexation in the exultance of her mood. She was serene in the consciousness that Davidge already knew the facts about her, and that Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s gossip would fall with the dreary thud of a story heard before. So Mamise’s feet flew, and her heart made a music of its own to the tune of:
“Thank God, I told him!”
She realized, as never before, the tremendous comfort and convenience of the truth. She had been by instinct as veracious as a politely bred person may be, but now she understood that the truth is mighty good business. She resolved to deal in no other wares.
259
This resolution lasted just long enough for her to make a hasty exception: she would begin her exclusive use of the truth as soon as she had told Polly a neat lie in explanation of her inexplicable journey to Baltimore.
Lady C.-W. was doing Mamise the best turn in her power. Davidge was still angry at Mamise’s flippancy in the face of his ardor. But Lady C.-W.’s attack gave the flirt the dignity of martyrdom. When Lady C.-W. finished her subtly casual account of all that Mamise had done or been accused of doing, Davidge crushed her with the quiet remark:
“So she told me.”
“She told you that!”
“Yes, and explained it all!”
“She would!” was the best that Lady Clifton-Wyatt could do, but she saw that the case was lost. She saw that Davidge’s gaze was following Mamise here and there amid the dancers, and she was sportswoman enough to concede:
“She is a beauty, anyway––there’s no questioning that, at least.”
It was the canniest thing she could have done to re-establish herself in Davidge’s eyes. He felt so well reconciled with the world that he said:
“You wouldn’t care to finish this dance, I suppose?”
“Why not?”
Lady Clifton-Wyatt was democratic––in the provinces and the States––and this was as good a way of changing the subject as any. She rose promptly and entered the bosom of Davidge. The good American who did not believe in aristocracies had just time to be overawed at finding himself hugging a real Lady with a capital L when the music stopped.
It is an old saw that what is too foolish to be said can be sung. Music hallows or denatures whatever it touches. It was quite proper, because quite customary, for Davidge and Lady Clifton-Wyatt to stand enfolded in each other’s embrace so long as a dance tune was in the air. The moment the musicians quit work the attitude became indecent.
Amazing and eternal mystery, that custom can make the same thing mean everything, or nothing, or all the between-things. The ancient Babylonians carried the idea of the permissible embrace to the ultimate intimacy in their annual festivals, and the good women doubtless thought no more of it260than a woman of to-day thinks of waltzing with a presentable stranger. They went home to their husbands and their housework as if they had been to church. Certain Bolsheviki, even in the year 1918, put up placards renewing the ancient Mesopotamian custom, under the guise of a community privilege and a civic duty.
And yet some people pretend to differentiate between fashions and morals!
But nobody at this dance was foolish enough to philosophize. Everybody was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from the British embassy came up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s hand and body for the next dance. Davidge had been mystically attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her in a mood for reconciliation. She liked him so well that when the Italian aviator to whom she had pledged the “Tickle Toe” came to demand it, she perjured herself calmly and eloped with Davidge. And Davidge, instead of being alarmed by her easy morals, was completely reassured.
But he found her unready with another perjury when he abruptly asked her:
“What are you doing to-morrow?”
“Let me see,” she temporized in a flutter, thinking of Baltimore and Nicky.
“If you’ve nothing special on, how about a tea-dance? I’m getting addicted to this.”
“I’m afraid I’m booked up for to-morrow,” she faltered. “Polly keeps the calendar. Yes, I know we have some stupid date––I can’t think just what. How about the day after?”
The deferment made his amorous heart sick, and to-morrow’s to-morrow seemed as remote as Judgment Day. Besides, as he explained:
“I’ve got to go back to the shipyard to-morrow evening. Couldn’t you give me a lunch––an early one at twelve-thirty?”
“Yes, I could do that. In fact, I’d love it!”
“And me too?”
“That would be telling.”
At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs cut in and would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to use his fists, but Mamise, though she longed to tarry with Davidge, knew the value of tantalism, and consented to the abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly and261danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close that the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to swipe Polly across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.
She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for support, mixing astonishing profanity with her smothered groans. The cub showered apologies on her, and reviled “Regulations” which compelled him to wear spurs with his boots, though he had only a desk job.
Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing. But Mamise saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal and gave Polly her arm, as she limped through the barrage of hurtling couples. Polly asked Davidge to retrieve her husband from the sloe-eyed ambassadress who was hypnotizing him. She wailed to Mamise:
“I know I’m marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron for this. I’ve got to go home and put my ankle in splints. I’ll probably have to wear it in a sling for a month. I’d like to kill the rotten hound that put me out of business. And I had the next dance with that beautiful Rumanian devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!”
Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding good night to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride out home with her, but Polly refused. She wanted to have a good cry in the car.
Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she was plighted to luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the house of the friend he was stopping with, the hotels being booked solid for weeks ahead. He was nursing a stern determination to endure bachelordom no longer.
Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her brains, while another segment condoled with Polly. But most of her wits were engaged in hunting a good excuse for her Baltimore escapade the next afternoon, and in discarding such implausible excuses as occurred to her.
Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.
“I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is all icicles. I know I’ll die of pneumonia.”
He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle of Polly, who was snuggling to him for warmth.
262
She yowled: “My Gawd! My yankle! You’ll not last long enough for pneumonia if you touch me again.”
He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to embrace her, she would none of him.
When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac. It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an attack on a walled town.
The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under the flight.
The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise’s room was like a storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice between the all-too-snowy sheets.
She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front. She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get new shoes across.
Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter. America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women, too––thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the clothes, to warm men’s heartsviatheir stomachs, and to take their minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage. Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now. Later they would be going across to play in France––one-night stands, two a day in Picardy.
Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of263burlesque of the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad in draughty halls.
She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the soldiers.
The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the impulse. It would be her atonement.
She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over––if he had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do that most of all.
She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky’s secret, thwart it one way or another––and then set about her destiny.
She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.
264CHAPTER IV
The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray in mittened hands.
Mamise said: “Oh, good morning, Martha. I’ll bathe before breakfast if you’ll turn on the hot water, please.”
“Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an’ bus’ loose this mo’nin’, and fill the kitchen range with water an’ bus’ loose again. No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That’s half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma’am, you’re lucky to git your coffee nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew.”
Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at eleven-thirty.
“Did the clock freeze, too? That can’t be the right time!”
“Yessum, that’s the raht tahm.”
“Great heavens!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.
She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the heroine––even such a dubious heroine as Mamise––to have a bathless day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire. This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for they never bathe. (“Why should they,” my wife puts in, “since they’re going to commit suicide, anyway?”)
But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity,265that the very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of helpless holy living.
Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable fetor.
And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and shared their glorious loathsomeness.
The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise’s one skip-bath day must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure enough when she was dressed.
Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise’s inspection, and Mamise pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.
Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain the soldiers. Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier scheme than ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone her husband to look into the matter of a passport for her.
Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and Mamise had not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge would be miffed. Polly suggested telephoning the hotel.
Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as crowded as everything else.
“It will take an hour to get the hotel,” said Mamise, “another hour to page the man. I’ll make a dash for it. He’ll give me a little grace, I know.”
The car was not ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads were sleety and skiddy, and required careful driving.
Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found266it closed to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected to live.
It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get to Washington was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a détour of miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to the marble pages of the Arlington epic.
The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of eternal anonymity––dead from all our wars, and many of them with their wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.
But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached the hotel, she was just one hour late.
Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous. And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.
In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her amazement.
“Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with you and go to the theater.”
“Oh!” said the befuddled Davidge. “Oh, of course! Silly of me! Good-by!”