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On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction.
Marie Louise’s response to the mood of the place was conversion, a passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments of toil and wield the––she did not even know the names of the tools. She only knew that they were sacred implements.
She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation.
As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh intolerable staccato.
Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the ship.
In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.
“That’s the great Sutton,” Davidge remarked, presently. “He’s our prima donna. He’s the champion riveter of this part of the country. Like to meet him?”
Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.
Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn. Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere manager.
Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:
“Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling.”
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Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his muscles a little tauter.
Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked, stupidly:
“So that’s a riveter?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sutton confessed, “this is a riveter.”
“Oh!” said Marie Louise.
“Well, I guess we’ll move on,” said Davidge. As conversation, it was as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value, since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a rivetress.
She said, “Thank you,” and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up his work again, as a man does after a woman has passed by, pretending to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.
At a distance Davidge paused to say: “He’s a great card, Sutton. He gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he’s my ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal laborers have only one ideal––to do the least possible work and earn enough to loaf most of the time.”
Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle’s principles and wondered if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge’s pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded short hours for his conspiracies.
At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat sheet of perforated steel––the homeliest contraption imaginable.
181
“Whatever is all this,” she asked,––“the beginning of a bridge?”
“Yes and no. It’s the beginning of part of the bridge we’re building across the Atlantic.”
“I don’t believe that I quite follow you.”
“This is the keel of a ship.”
“No!”
“Yep!”
“And was theClaralike this once?”
“No.Clara’san old-fashioned creature like mother. This is a newfangled thing like––like you.”
“Like me! This isn’t––”
“This is to be theMamise.”
She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.
“I must confess she’s not very beautiful to start with.”
“Neither were you at first, I suppose. I––I beg your pardon. I mean––”
He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated ships, the standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture at distances by various steel plants, the absence of curved lines, the advantage of all the sacrifice of the old art for the new speed.
In spite of what she had read she could not make his information her own. And yet it was thrilling to look at. She broke out:
“I’ve just got to learn how to build ships. It’s the one thing on earth that will make me happy.”
“Then I’ll have to get it for you.”
“You mean it?”
“If anything I could do could make you happy––cutting off my right arm, or––”
“That’s no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I’m wretchedly unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy, are most of us just where boys are when they have outgrown boyhood and haven’t reached manhood––when they are crazy to be at something, and can’t even decide where to begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to work. Here’s my job, and I want it!”
He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him, and he smiled. She protested:
“I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the182roughest sort of farmwork. I’m stronger than I look. I think I’d rather play one of those rat-tat-tat instruments than––than a harp in New Jerusalem.”
Davidge shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re not quite strong enough. It takes a lot of power to hold the gun against the hull. The compressed air kicks and shoves so hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton himself has all he can do to keep alive.”
“Give me a hammer, then, and let me––smite something.”
“Don’t you think you’d rather begin in the office? You could learn the business there first. Besides, I don’t like the thought of your roughing up those beautiful hands of yours.”
“If men would only quit trying to keep women’s hands soft and clean, the world would be the better for it.”
“Well, come down and learn the business first––you’d be nearer me.”
She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical left hook:
“But you’d teach me ship-building?”
“I’d rather teach you home-building.”
“If you mean a home on the bounding main, I’ll get right to work.”
He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and he took her to the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled by her own ignorance of what had come to be the most important of all knowledge.
She sighed. “I’ve always been such a smatterer. I never have really known anything about anything. Most women are so astonishingly ignorant and indifferent about the essentials of men’s life.”
She secretly resolved that she would study some of the basic principles of male existence––bookkeeping, drafting, letter-writing, filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new mischief to take a course of business instruction on the sly and report for duty not as an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress in office practice. It was at least a refreshing novelty in duplicity.
She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy. The old song, “Trust Her Not––She Is Fooling Thee,” occurred to her in a fantastic parody: “Trust her not––she is fooling thee; she is clandestine at the business college; she is183leading a double-entry life. She writes you in longhand, but she is studying shorthand. She is getting to be very fast––on the typewriter.”
Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not divulge her plot. She was impatient to spring it. She wondered if in a week she could learn all she had to learn––if she worked hard. It would be rather pleasant to sit at his desk-leaf and take dictation from him––confidential letters that he would intrust to no one else, letters written in a whisper and full of dark references. She hoped she could learn stenographic velocity in a few days.
As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the workmen’s shanties.
“If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new bungalettes?”
“Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town.”
“I’m sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next war millions of women will live in tents the way the men do. Those shanties would be considered palaces in Belgium and northern France. In fact, any number of women are over there now building huts for the poor souls.”
Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not understand such a twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not want jewels and luxuries and a life of wealthy ease. Her only interest in him seemed to be that he would let her live in a shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day for union wages.
184CHAPTER III
An eloquent contrast with Marie Louise was furnished by Jake Nuddle. He was of the ebb type. He was degenerating into a shirker, a destroyer, a money-maniac, a complainer of other men’s successes. His labor was hardly more than a foundation for blackmailing. He loved no country, had not even a sense of following the crowd. He called the Star-spangled Banner a dirty rag, and he wanted to wipe his feet on it. He was useless, baneful, doomed.
Marie Louise was coming into a new Canaan. What she wanted was work for the work’s sake, to be building something and thereby building herself, to be helping her country forward, to be helping mankind, poor and rich. The sight of the flag made her heart ache with a rapture of patriotism. She had the urge to march with an army.
Marie Louise was on the up grade, Jake on the down. They met at the gate of the shipyard.
Jake and Abbie had come over by train. Jake was surly in his tone to Davidge. His first question was, “Where do we live?”
Marie Louise answered, “In one of those quaint little cottages.”
Jake frowned before he looked. He was one of those who hate before they see, feel nausea before they taste, condemn the unknown, the unheard, the unoffending.
By the time Jake’s eyes had found the row of shanties his frown was a splendid thing.
“Quaint little hog-pens!” he growled. “Is this company the same as all the rest––treatin’ its slaves like swine?”
Davidge knew the type. For the sake of Marie Louise he restrained his first impulses and spoke with amiable acidity:
“There are better houses in town, some of them very handsome.”
“Yah––but what rent?”
185
“Rather expensive. Rather distant, too, but you can make it easily in an automobile.”
“Where would I git a nautomobile?”
“I can introduce you to the man who sold me mine.”
“How would I get the price?”
“Just where I did.”
“Whurr’s that?”
“Oh, all over the place. I used to be a common unskilled laborer like you. And now I own a good part of this business. Thousands of men who began poorer than I did are richer than I am. The road’s just as open to you as to me.”
Jake had plenty of answers for this. He had memorized numbers of them from the tracts; but also he had plans that would not be furthered by quarreling with Davidge the first day. He could do Davidge most harm by obeying him and outwardly catering to him. He solaced his pride with a thought of what Davidge’s business would look like when he got through with it.
He laughed: “All right, boss. I was just beefin’, for the fun of beefin’. Them shanties suit me elegant.”
Then his fool wife had to go and bust in, “Oh, Jake, if you would do like Mr. Davidge done, and git rich and live easy!”
Jake gave her a pantomimic rebuke that reduced her to a pulpy silence.
Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie’s spirits a little by saying that she herself was coming down to work and to live in one of those very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as hopeless. Why any one should want to leave a house like what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and no call to lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get somebody to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a squatter and actually work––well, it did beat all how foolish some folks could be in the world nowadays.
Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves. She had to get back to Washington. Davidge had planned to go with her, but a long-distance telephone-call, and a visit from a group of prospective strikers, and a warning that a consignment of long-expected machinery had not yet arrived, took him out of the car. He was tempted to go with Marie Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his business186for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old Wakefield phrase, “If I don’t see you again, hello!”
She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her thoughts smoked through her brain like a dust-cloud of shining particles, each radiant atom a great idea. The road home was through the sky; the villages and groves were vague pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of sunlight, the ridges rainbows.
It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries of stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some of the people that practised the art. She would study ship-building, and drafting, too. Her water-color landscapes had been highly praised by certain young men and old ladies in England. She would learn how to keep her own bank-account and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light bookkeeping; and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium so that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one. She would offer her home in Washington for rent. With the mobs pouring in, it would not be untenanted long.
Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after she reached home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered. With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.
Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard, and that was always to-morrow––the movable to-morrow which like the horizon is always just beyond.
She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten, and it was not easy to recapture it.
On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will at all.
Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature187as: “Dear customer,––Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would say––”
At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them increased to a respect verging on awe.
They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back hair with the free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the keyboard like rain, and their letters were exquisitely neat. They had studied for a long time, and had acquired proficiency. And it is no easy thing to acquire proficiency in any task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or moving armies.
Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not know how to spell some of the simplest words. When she wrote with running pen she never stopped to spell. She just sketched the words and let them go. She wrote, “I beleive I recieved,” so that nobody could tellefromi; and she put the dot where it might apply to either. Her punctuation was all dashes.
The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word stood out in its stark reality, howling “Illiterate!” at her. Her punctuation simply would not do.
Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an invitation to a street-car conductors’ dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection, while Marie Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under the criticisms of her teacher. She was back in school again, the dunce of the class, and abject discouragements alternated with spurts of zeal.
In the mean while the United States was also learning the rudiments of war and the enormous office-practice it required. Before the war was over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000 officers in February, 1917, would be an army of over 3,000,000, and of these over 2,000,000 would have been carried to Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of these would be killed to Russia’s 1,700,000 dead, Germany’s 1,600,000, France’s 1,385,000, England’s 706,200, Italy’s 406,000, and Belgium’s 102,000. The wounded Americans would be three times the total present army. Everybody was ignorant, blunderful. Externally and internally the United States was as busy as a trampled ant-hill.
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Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies made drives; the financiers made drives; the charities made drives. The world-heart was never so driven. And this was all on top of the ordinary human suffering, which did not abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth ached just as fiercely; jealousy was just as sickly green; empires crackled; people starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army after army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated atom in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.
Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She was lonely, love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally ashamed of her general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington’s infamous hot weeks supervened. In the daytime the heat stung like a cat-o’-nine-tails. The nights were suffocation. She “slept,” gasping as a fish flounders on dry land. After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for rest, the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of drudgery at the loathly necessities of her stupid work.
Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees the mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, “That is my goal!” But the feet must cross every ditch, wade every swamp, scramble across every ledge. The peak is the harder to see the nearer it comes; the last cliffs hide it altogether, and when it is reached it is only a rough crag surrounded by higher crags. The glory that lights it is glory in distant eyes alone.
So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid home to the gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that the stage also is squalid and slavish, and that the will-o’-the-wisp of gorgeous freedom had jumped back to home life. She left the cheap theaters for the expensive luxury of Sir Joseph’s mansion. But that had its squalors and slaveries, too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous America, only to find in America a thousand distresses.
Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true freedom. She would be a builder of ships––cast off the restraint of womanhood and be a magnificent builder of ships! And now she was finding that this dream was also a nightmare.
Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The hot wave found her an easy victim. A frightened servant189who did not know the difference between sunstroke and heat prostration nearly killed her before a doctor came.
The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed. It was her trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge regretting that she could not come to the launching of theClara. Abbie was not present, either. She came up to be with Marie Louise. This was not the least of Marie Louise’s woes.
She was quite childish about missing the great event. She wept because another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle against the bow as it lurched down the toboggan-slide.
Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business man’s letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that there had been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster––an unexploded infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to wreck the launching-ways had been detected on the final inspection.
Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even though she knew the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still in jeopardy. Her shaken faith in humanity was still capable of feeling bewilderment at the extremes of German savagery. She cried out to her sister:
“How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got into the yard?”
“It didn’t have to have been a German,” said Abbie, bitterly.
“Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly trick? No American would!”
“Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican,” said Abbie. “There’s some them Independent workmen so independent they ain’t got any country any more ’n what Cain had.”
“You can’t suppose that Mr. Davidge has enemies among his own people?”
“O’ course he has! Slews of ’em. Some them workmen can’t forgive the man that gives ’em a job.”
“But he pays big wages. Think of what Jake gets.”
“Oh, him! If he got all they was, he’d holler he was bein’ cheated. Hollerin’ and hatin’ always come easy to Jake. If they wasn’t easy, he wouldn’t do ’em.”
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Marie Louise gasped: “Abbie! In Heaven’s name, you don’t imply––”
“No, I don’t!” snapped Abbie. “I never implied in my life, and don’t you go sayin’ I did.”
Abbie was at bay now. She had to defend her man from outside suspicion. Suspicion of her husband is a wife’s prerogative
Marie Louise was too much absorbed in the general vision of man’s potential villainy to follow up the individual clue. She was frightened away from considering Jake as a candidate for such infamy. Her wildest imaginings never put him in association with Nicky Easton.
There were so many excursions and alarms in the world of 1917 that the riddle of who tried to sink the ship on dry land joined a myriad others in the riddle limbo.
When Marie Louise was well enough to go back to her business school she found riddles enough in trying to decide where this letter or that had got to on the crazy keyboard, or what squirmy shorthand symbol it was that represented this syllable or that.
She had lost the little speed she had had, and it was double drudgery regaining the forgotten lore. But she stood the gaff and found herself on the dizzy height of graduation from a lowly business school. She had traveled a long way from the snobbery of her recent years.
Davidge recognized her face and her voice when she presented herself before him. But her soul was an utter stranger. She did not invite him to call on her or warn him that she was coming to call on him.
She appeared in his anteroom and bribed one of the clerks to go to him with a message:
“A young lady’s outside––wants a position––as a stenogerpher.”
Davidge growled without looking up:
“Why bother me? Send her to the chief clerk.”
“She wants to see you specially.”
“I’m out.”
“Said Miss Webling sent her.”
“O Lord!––show her in.”
Marie Louise entered. Davidge looked up, leaped up.
She did not come in with the drawing-room, train-dragging191manner of Miss Webling. She did not wear the insolent beauty of Mamise of the Musical Mokes. She was a white-waisted, plain-skirted office-woman, a businessette. She had a neat little hat and gave him a secretarial bow.
He rushed to her hand, and they had a good laugh like two children playing pretend. Then he said:
“Why the camouflage?”
The word was not very new even then, or he would not have used it.
She explained, with royal simplicity:
“I want a job.”
She brought out her diploma and a certificate giving her a civil-service status. She was quite conceited about it.
She insisted on displaying her accomplishments.
“Give me some dictation,” she dictated.
He nodded, pummeled his head for an idea while she took from her hand-bag, not a vanity-case, but a stenographer’s notebook and a sheaf of pencils.
He noted that she sat down stenographically––very concisely. She perched her notebook on the desk of one crossed knee and perked her eyes up as alertly as a sparrow.
All this professionalism sat so quaintly on the two Marie Louises he had known that he roared with laughter as at a child dressed up.
She smiled patiently at his uproar till it subsided. Then he sobered and began to dictate:
“Ready? ‘Miss Mamise’––cross that out––‘Miss Marie Louise Webling’––you know the address; I don’t. ‘Dear––My dear’––no, just ‘Dear Miss Webling. Reference is had to your order of recent date that this house engage you as amanuensis.’ Dictionary in the bookcase outside––comma––no, period. ‘In reply I would––I wish to––I beg to––we beg to say that we should––I should just as soon engage Mona Lisa for a stenographer as you.’ Period and paragraph.
“‘We have,’––comma,––‘however,’––comma,––‘another position to offer you,’––comma,––‘that is, as wife to the senior member of this firm.’ Period. ‘The best wages we can––we can offer you are––is the use of one large,’––comma,––‘slightly damaged heart and a million thanks a minute.’ Period. ‘Trusting that we may be favored with a prompt and favorable reply, we am––I are––am––yours very sincerely,192truly yours,’––no, just say ‘yours,’ and I’ll sign it. By the way, do you know what the answer will be?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean it?”
“I mean that I know the answer.”
“Let me have it.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“‘Yes’?”
“No.”
“Oh!”
A long glum pause till she said, “Am I fired?”
“Of course not.”
More pause. She intervened in his silence.
“What do I do next, please?”
He said, of habit, “Why, sail on, and on, and on.”
He reached for his basket of unanswered mail. He said:
“I’ve given you a sample of my style, now you give me a sample of yours, and then I’ll see if I can afford to keep you as a stenographer instead of a wife.”
She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office, and seated herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart pit-a-patted as fast as her fingers, but she drew up the letter in a handsome style while he sat and stared at her and mused upon the strange radiance she brought into the office in a kind of aureole.
He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer, entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma, suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very rasping “I beg your pardon,” and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily accurate version of his letter.
And now he had two women on his hands and one on his heart. He dared not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss Webling. He dared not show his devotion to Marie Louise, though as a matter of fact it made him glow like a lighthouse.
He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk’s office. It was noted that he made many more trips to that office than ever before. Instead of pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer, he usually came out himself on all sorts of errands. His buzzer did not buzz, but the gossip did.
Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till193she grew furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not being deft enough to conceal his affection that she began to resent it as an offense and not a compliment.
The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence in one of the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging her to live at a hotel or at some of the more comfortable homes she snubbed him bluntly. When he desperately urged her to take lunch or dinner with him she drew herself up and mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie stenographer and said:
“Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist shall loor me to lunch with him. You’d probably drug the wine.”
“Then will you––”
“No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!”
“May I call, then?”
More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:
“Yessir––the fourteenth house on the left side of the road is me.”
The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched up the street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an imbecility. The whole village was eying the boss on his way to spark a stenog. His little love-affair was as clandestine as Lady Godiva’s famous bareback ride.
He cut his call short after an age-long half-hour of enduring the ridicule twinkling in Mamise’s eyes. He stayed just late enough for it to get dark enough to conceal his return through that street. He was furious at the situation and at Mamise for teasing him so. But she became all the dearer for her elusiveness.
194CHAPTER IV
After the novelty of the joke wore off Mamise grew as uncomfortable as he. She was beginning to love him more and her job less. But she was determined not to throw away her independence. Pride was her duenna, and a ruthless one. She tried to feed her pride on her ambition and on an occasional visit to the ship that was to wear her name.
She met Sutton, the prima donna riveter. He was always clattering away like a hungry woodpecker, but he always had time to stop and discuss his art with her.
Once or twice he let her try the riveter––the “gun,” he called it; but her thumb was not strong enough to hold the trigger against that hundred-and-fifty-pound pressure per square inch.
One day Marie Louise came on Jake Nuddle and Sutton in a wrangle. She caught enough of the parley to know that Jake was sneering at Sutton’s waste of energy and enthusiasm, his long hours and low pay. Sutton earned a very substantial income, but all pay was low pay to Jake, who was spreading the gospel of sabotage through the shipyard.
Meanwhile the good shipClara, weaned from the dock, floated in the basin and received her equipment. And at last the day came when she was ready for her trial trip.
That morning the smoke rolled from her funnels in a twisted skein. What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a soul, a name, a fate.
It was impossible to think now that theClarawas merely an iron box with an engine to push it about.Clarawas somebody, a personality, a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature. She was “she” to everybody. And at last one morning she kicked up her heels and took a long white bone in her teeth and went her ways.
The next dayClaracame back. There was something195about her manner of sweeping into the bay, about the proud look of her as she came to a halt, that convinced all the watchers in the shipyard of her success.
When they learned that she had exceeded all her contract stipulations there was a tumult of rejoicing; for her success was the success of every man and lad in the company’s employ––at least so thought all who had any instinct of team-play and collective pride. A few soreheads were glum, or sneered at the enthusiasm of the others. It was strange that Jake Nuddle was associated with all of these groups.
Clarawas not permitted to linger and rest on her laurels. She had work to do. Every ship in the world was working overtime except the German Kiel Canal boats.Clarawas gone from the view the next morning. Mamise missed her as she looked from the office window. She mentioned this to Davidge, for fear he might not know. Somebody might have stolen her. He explained:
“She’s going down to Norfolk to take on a cargo of food for England––wheat for the Allies. I’m glad she’s going to take breadstuffs to people. My mother used to be always going about to hungry folks with a basket of food on her arm.”
Mamise had Jake and Abbie in to dinner that night. She was all agog about the success ofClara, and hoped thatMamisewould one day do as well.
Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. “Did the boss tell you where theClarawas goin’ to?”
“Yes––Norfolk.”
Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes, then rose and mumbled:
“Goin’ out to get some more cigars.”
Abbie called after him, “Hay, you got a whole half-box left.” But Jake did not seem to hear the recall.
He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.
“I thought you went out to git some,” said Abbie, who felt it necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some blunder he had made. Jake laughed very amiably.
“Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that. But I hadda telephone a certain party, long-distance––and I forgot.”
Abbie broke in, “Who you got to long-distance to?”
196
Jake did not answer.
Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out into the main office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.
“They loaded theClarain record time with wheat for England. She sails to-day.”
At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:
“You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood––remember? Well, she’s starting out through the big woods with a lot of victuals for old Granny England. If only the wolves don’t get her!”
He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her as if she were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an errand of mercy.
Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the dangers they run and because of the pluck they show in storms and fires, and the unending fights they make against wind and wave. But of late they had had unheard-of enemies to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine placed inside the cargo.
Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:
“To think, with so little food in the world and so many starving to death, people could sink ships full of wheat!”
On the second day after theClaraset forth on the ocean Marie Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her letters as fast as she could. In the afternoon she took the typewritten transcripts into Davidge’s office to drop them into his “in” basket.
The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she heard him say:
“Mr. Davidge speaking.... Hello, Ed.... What? You’re too close to the ’phone.... That’s better.... You’re too far away––start all over.... I don’t get that.... Yes––a life-boat picked up with what––oh, six survivors. Yes––from what ship? I say, six survivors from what ship?... TheClara? She’s gone?Clara?”
He reeled and wavered in his chair. “What happened––many lost? And the boat––cargo––everything––everybody but those six! They got her, then! The Germans got her––on her first voyage! God damn their guts! Good-by, Ed.”
He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the197receiver groped for the hook with a pitiful blind man’s gesture.
Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She ran forward and took his hand and set the receiver in place.
He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His mother was dead. The ship he had named for her was dead. He needed mothering.
Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them as if to hold them together under their burden. She said:
“I heard. I can’t tell you how–– Oh, what can we do in such a world!”
He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:
“I’ll get a German for this––somehow!”
198CHAPTER V
Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge’s agony.
She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children. She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob his own heart out.
She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard him groan, “I’ll get a German for this!” somehow it horrified her, coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole nation.
America had stood by for three years feeding Europe’s hungry and selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them. America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters; the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing––that torture never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.
America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further notice.
The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their199desks, women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams, business men across their counters, “Kill Germans!”
It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken over civilization.
They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing that grew with the butchery.
Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations, German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.
It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy. The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride. Peaceful Belgium––invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled, mulcted, deported, enslaved––was the first sample of German work.
Davidge had hated Germany’s part in the war from the first, for the world’s sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and omnipresence of the German menace––for the land filled with graves, the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.
Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated; the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea. Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a blood-feud of his own with Germany.
He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her with a sudden demand:
“Does it shock you to have me hate ’em?”
“No! No, indeed!” she cried. “I wasn’t thinking of them, but of you. I never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn’t know you could be so angry.”