293CHAPTER II
Davidge thought it only fair to take the Department of Justice operative, Larrey, into his confidence. Larrey was perfectly willing to defer reporting to his office chief until the more dramatic conclusion; for he had an easily understandable ambition to share in the glory of it. It was agreed that a closer watch than ever should be kept on the shipyard and its approaches. Easton had promised to notify Mamise of his arrival, but he might grow suspicious of her and strike without warning.
The period of waiting was as maddening as the suspense of the poor insomniac who implored the man next door to “drop the other shoe.” Mamise suffered doubly from her dual interest in Abbie and in Davidge. She dared not tell Abbie what was in the wind, though she tried to undermine gradually the curious devotion Abbie bore to her worthless husband. But Mamise’s criticisms of Jake only spurred Abbie to new defenses of him and a more loyal affection.
Day followed day, and Mamise found the routine of the office intolerably monotonous. Time gnawed at her resolution, and she began to hope to be away when Easton made his attempt. It occurred to her that it would be pleasant to have an ocean between her and the crisis. She said to Davidge:
“I wish Nicky would come soon, for I have applied for a passport to France. Major Widdicombe got me the forms to fill out, and he promised to expedite them. I ought to go the minute they come.”
This information threw Davidge into a complex dismay. Here was another of Mamise’s long-kept secrets. The success of her plan meant the loss of her, or her indefinite postponement. It meant more yet. He groaned.
“Good Lord! everybody in the United States is going to France except me. Even the women are all emigrating. I294think I’ll just turn the shipyard over to the other officers of the corporation and go with you. Let Easton blow it up then, if he wants to, so long as I get into the uniform and into the fighting.”
This new commotion was ended by a shocking and unforeseen occurrence. The State Department refused to grant Mamise a passport, and dazed Widdicombe by letting him know confidentially that Mamise was on the red list of suspects because of her Germanized past. This was news to Widdicombe, and he went to Polly in a state of bewilderment.
Polly had never told him what Mamise had told her, but she had to let out a few of the skeletons in Mamise’s closet now. Widdicombe felt compromised in his own loyalty, but Polly browbeat him into submission. She wrote to Mamise and broke the news to her as gently as she could, but the rebuff was cruel. Mamise took her sorrow to Davidge.
He was furious and proposed to “go to the mat” with the State Department. Mamise, however, shook her head; she saw that her only hope of rehabilitation lay in a positive proof of her fidelity.
“I got my name stained in England because I didn’t have the pluck to do something positive. I was irresolution personified, and I’m paying for it. But for once in my life I learned a lesson, and when I learned what Nicky planned I ran right to you with it. Now if we catch Nicky red-handed, and I turn over my own brother-in-law to justice, that ought to redeem me, oughtn’t it?”
Davidge had a better idea for her protection. “Marry me, and then they can’t say anything.”
“Then they’ll suspect you,” she said. “Too many good Americans have been dragged into hot water by pro-German wives, and I’m not going to marry you till I can bring you some other dower than a spotted reputation.”
“I’d take you and be glad to get you if you were as polka-dotted as a leopardess,” said Davidge.
“Just as much obliged; but no, thank you,” said Mamise. “Furthermore, if we were married, the news would reach Nicky Easton through Jake Nuddle, and then Nicky would lose all trust in me, and come down on us without warning.”
“This makes about the fifteenth rejection I’ve had,” said Davidge. “And I’d sworn never to ask you again.”
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“I promised to ask you when the time was ripe,” said Mamise.
“Don’t forget. Barkis is always willin’ and waitin’.”
“While we’re both waiting,” Mamise went on, “there’s one thing you’ve got to do for me, or I’ll never propose to you.”
“Granted, to the half my shipyard.”
“It’s only a job in your shipyard. I can’t stand this typewriter-tapping any longer. I’m going mad. I want to swing a hammer or something. You told me that women could build a whole ship if they wanted to, and I want to build my part of one.”
“But––”
“If you speak of my hands, I’ll prove to you how strong they are. Besides, if I were out in the yard at work, I could keep a better watch for Nicky, and I could keep you better informed as to the troubles always brewing among the workmen.”
“But––”
“I’m strong enough for it, too. I’ve been taking a lot of exercise recently to get in trim. If you don’t believe me, feel that muscle.”
She flexed her biceps, and he took hold of it timidly in its silken sleeve. It amazed him, for it was like marble. Still, he hated to lose her from the neighborliness of the office; he hated to send her out among the workmen with their rough language and their undoubted readiness to haze her and teach her her place. But she was stubborn and he saw that her threat was in earnest when she said:
“If you don’t give me a job, I’ll go to some other company.”
Then he yielded and wrote her a note to the superintendent of the yard, and said:
“You can begin to-morrow.”
She smiled in her triumph and made the very womanly comment: “But I haven’t a thing to wear. Do you know a good ladies’ tailor who can fit me out with overalls, some one who has been ‘Breeches-maker to the Queen’ and can drape a baby-blue denim pant modishly?”
The upshot of it was that she decided to make her own trousseau, and she went shopping for materials and patterns. She ended by visiting an emporium for “gents’ furnishings.”296The storekeeper asked her what size her husband wore, and she said:
“Just about my own.”
He gave her the smallest suit in stock, and she held it up against her. It was much too brief, and she was heartened to know that there were workmen littler than she.
She bought the garment that came nearest to her own dimensions, and hurried home with it joyously. It proved to be a perfect misfit, and she worked over it as if it were a coming-out gown; and indeed it was her costume for her début into the world of manual labor.
Abbie dropped in and surprised her in her attitudes and was handsomely scandalized:
“When’s the masquerade?” she asked.
Mamise told her of her new career.
Abbie was appalled. “It’s against the Bible for a woman to wear a man’s things!” she protested. Abbie could quote the Scripture for every discouraging purpose.
“I’d rather wear them than wash them,” said Mamise; “and if you’ll take my advice you’ll get a suit of overalls yourself and earn an honest living and five times as much money as Jake would give you––if he ever gave you any.”
But Abbie wailed that Mamise had gone indecent as well as crazy, and trembled at the thought of what the gossips along the row would do with the family reputation. The worst of it was that Mamise had money in the bank and did not have to work.
That was the incomprehensible thing to Jake Nuddle. He accepted the familiar theory that all capital is stolen goods, and he reproached Mamise with the double theft of poor folks’ money and now of poor folks’ work. Mamise’s contention that there were not enough workmen for the country’s needs fell on deaf ears, for Jake believed that work was a crime against the sacred cause of the laboring-man. His ideal of a laboring-man was one who seized the capital from the capitalists and then ceased to labor.
But Jake’s too familiar eyes showed that he regarded Mamise as a very interesting spectacle. The rest of the workmen seemed to have the same opinion when she went to the yard in her overalls next morning. She was the first woman to take up man’s work in the neighborhood, and she had to297endure the most searching stares, grins, frowns, and comments that were meant to be overheard.
She struck all the men as immodest; some were offended and some were delighted. As usual, modesty was but another name for conformity. Mamise had to face the glares of the conventional wives and daughters in their bodices that followed every contour, their light skirts that blew above the knees, and their provocative hats and ribbons. They made it plain to her that they were outraged by this shapeless passer-by in the bifurcated potato-sack, with her hair tucked up under a vizored cap and her hands in coarse mittens.
Mamise had studied the styles affected by the workmen as if they were fashion-plates from Paris, and she had equipped herself with a slouchy cap, heavy brogans, a thick sweater, a woolen shirt, and thick flannels underneath.
She was as well concealed as she could manage, and yet her femininity seemed to be emphasized by her very disguise. The roundness of bosom and hip and the fineness of shoulder differed too much from the masculine outline to be hidden. And somehow there was more coquetry in her careful carelessness than in all the exaggerated womanishness of the shanty belles. She had been a source of constant wonder to the community from the first. But now she was regarded as a downright menace to the peace and the morals of society.
Mamise reported to the superintendent and gave him Davidge’s card. The old man respected Davidge’s written orders and remembered the private instructions Davidge had given him to protect Mamise from annoyance at all costs. The superintendent treated her as if she were a child playing at salesmanship in a store. And this was the attitude of all the men except a few incorrigible gallants, who tried to start flirtations and make movie dates with her.
Sutton, the master riveter, alone received her with just the right hospitality. He had no fear that she would steal his job or his glory or that any man would. He had talked with her often and let her practise at his riveting-gun. He had explained that her ambition to be a riveter was hopeless, since it would take at least three month’s apprenticeship before she could hope to begin on such a career. But her sincere longings to be a builder and not a loafer won his respect.
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When she expressed a shy wish to belong to his riveting-gang he said:
“Right you are, miss––or should I say mister?”
“I’d be proud if you’d call me bo,” said Mamise.
“Right you are, bo. We’ll start you in as a passer-boy. I’ll be glad to get rid of that sleep-walker. Hay, Snotty!” he called to a grimy lad with an old bucket. The youth rubbed the back of his greasy glove across the snub of nose that had won him his name, and, shifting his precocious quid, growled:
“Ah, what!”
“Ah, go git your time––or change to another gang. Tell the supe. I’m not fast enough for you. Go on––beat it!”
Mamise saw that she already had an enemy. She protested against displacing another toiler, but Sutton told her that there were jobs enough for the cub.
He explained the nature of Mamise’s duties, talking out of one side of his mouth and using the other for ejaculations of an apparently inexhaustible supply of tobacco-juice. Seeing that Mamise’s startled eyes kept following these missiles, he laughed:
“Do you use chewin’?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mamise, not quite sure of his meaning.
“Well, you’ll have to keep a wad of gum goin’, then, for you cert’n’y need a lot of spit in this business.”
Mamise found this true enough, and the next time Davidge saw her she kept her grinders milling and used the back of her glove with a professional air. For the present, however, she had no brain-cells to spare for mastication. Sutton introduced her to his crew.
“This gink here with the whiskers is Zupnik; he’s the holder-on; he handles the dolly and hangs on to the rivets while I swat ’em. The pill over by the furnace is the heater; his name is Pafflow, and his job is warming up the rivets. Just before they begin to sizzle he yanks ’em out with the tongs and throws ’em to you. You ketch ’em in the bucket––I hope, and take ’em out with your tongs and put ’em in the rivet-hole, and then Zupnik and me we do the rest. And what do we call you? Miss Webling is no name for a workin’-man.”
“My name is Marie Louise.”
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“Moll is enough.”
And Moll she was thenceforth.
The understanding of Mamise’s task was easier than its performance. Pafflow sent the rivets to her fast and fleet, and they were red-hot. The first one passed her and struck Sutton. His language blistered. The second sizzled against her hip. The third landed in the pail with a pleasant clink, but she was so slow in getting her tongs about it, and fitting it into its place, that it was too cold for use. This threw her into a state of hopelessness. She was ready to resign.
“I think I’d better go back to crocheting,” she sighed.
Sutton gave her a playful shove that almost sent her off the platform:
“Nah, you don’t, Moll. You made me chase Snotty off the job, and you’re goin’ t’rough wit’ it. You ain’t doin’ no worse ’n I done meself when I started rivetin’. Cheese! but I spoiled so much work I got me tail kicked offen me a dozen times!”
This was politer language than some that he used. His conversation was interspersed with words that no one prints. They scorched Mamise’s ears like red-hot rivets at first, but she learned to accept them as mere emphasis. And, after all, blunt Anglo-Saxon never did any harm that Latin paraphrase could prevent.
The main thing was Sutton’s rough kindliness, his splendid efficiency, and his infinite capacity for taking pains with each rivet-head, hammering it home, then taking up his pneumatic chipping-tool to trim it neat. That is the genius and the glory of the artisan, to perfect each detailad unguem, like a poet truing up a sonnet.
Sutton was putting in thousands on thousands of rivets a month, and every one of them was as important to him as every other. He feared the thin knife-blade of the rivet-tester as the scrupulous writer dreads the learned critic’s scalpel.
Mamise was dazed to learn that the ship named after her would need nearly half a million rivets, each one of them necessary to the craft’s success. The thought of the toil, the noise, the sweat, the money involved made the work a sort of temple-building, and the thought of Nicky Easton’s ability to annul all that devout accomplishment in an instant nauseated her300like a blasphemy. She felt herself a priestess in a holy office and renewed her flagging spirits with prayers for strength and consecration.
But few of the laborers had Sutton’s pride or Mamise’s piety in the work. Just as she began to get the knack of catching and placing the rivets Pafflow began to register his protest against her sex. He took a low joy in pitching rivets wild, and grinned at her dancing lunges after them.
Mamise would not tattle, but she began again to lose heart. Sutton’s restless appetite for rivets noted the new delay, and he grasped the cause of it at once. His first comment was to walk over to the furnace and smash Pafflow in the nose.
“You try any of that I. W. W. sabotodge here, you–––, and I’ll stuff you in a rivet-hole and turn the gun loose on you.”
Pafflow yielded first to force and later to the irresistible power of Mamise’s humility. Indeed, her ardor for service warmed his indifferent soul at last, and he joined with her to make a brilliant team, hurtling the rivets in red arcs from the coke to the pail with the precision of a professional baseball battery.
Mamise eventually acquired a womanly deftness in plucking up the rivet and setting it in place, and Davidge might have seen grounds for uneasiness in her eager submissiveness to Sutton as she knelt before him, watched his eye timidly, and glowed like coke under the least breath of his approval.
301CHAPTER III
Sutton was a mighty man in his way, and earning a wage that would have been accounted princely a year before. All the workers were receiving immense increase of pay, but the champion riveters were lavishly rewarded.
The whole shipyard industry was on a racing basis. Plans were being laid to celebrate the next Fourth of July with an unheard-of number of launchings. Every boat-building company was trying to put overboard an absolute maximum of hulls on that day.
“Hurry-up” Hurley, who had driven the first rivets into a steel ship pneumatically, and Charles M. Schwab, of Bethlehem, were the inspiring leaders in the rush, and their ambition was to multiply the national output by ten. The spirit of emulation thrilled all the thrillable workmen, but the riveters were the spectacular favorites. Their names appeared in the papers as they topped each other’s scores, and Sutton kept outdoing himself. For special occasions he groomed himself like a race-horse, resting the day before the great event and then giving himself up to a frenzy of speed.
On one noble day of nine hours’ fury he broke the world’s record temporarily. He drove four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five three-quarter-inch rivets into place. Then he was carried away to a twenty-four-hour rest, like an exhausted prizefighter.
That was one of the great days in Mamise’s history, for she was permitted to assist in the achievement, and she was not entirely grateful to Davidge for suppressing the publication of her name alongside Sutton’s. Her photograph appeared with his in many of the supplements, but nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton’s elbow. The publication of her photograph as an English belle had made history302for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but this picture had no follow-up except in her own pride.
This rapture, however, long postdated her first adventure into the shipyard. That grim period of eight hours was an alternation of shame, awkwardness, stupidity, failure, fatigue, and despair.
She did not even wash up for lunch, but picked her fodder from her pail with her companions. She smoked a convivial cigarette with the gang and was proud as a boy among grown-ups. She even wanted to be tough and was tempted to use ugly words in a swaggering pride.
But after her lunch it was almost impossible for her to get up and go back to her task, and she would have fainted from sheer weariness except that she had forsworn such luxuries as swoons.
The final whistle found her one entire neuralgia. The unending use of the same muscles, the repetition of the same rhythmic series, the cranium-shattering clatter of all the riveting-guns, the anxiety to be sure of each successive rivet, quite burned her out. And she learned that the reward for this ordeal was, according to the minimum wage-scale adopted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, thirty cents an hour for eight hours, with a ten-per-cent. increase for a six-day week. This would amount to all of two dollars and sixty-four cents for the day, and fifteen dollars for the week!
It was munificent for a passer-boy, but it was ruinous for a young woman of independent fortune and an ambition to look her best. She gasped with horror when she realized the petty reward for such prolonged torment. She was too weary to contrast the wage with the prices of food, fuel, and clothing. While wages climbed expenses soared.
She understood as never before, and never after, why labor is discontent and why it is so easily stirred to rebellion, why it feels itself the exploited slave of imaginary tyrants. She went to bed at eight and slept in the deeps of sweat-earned repose.
The next morning, getting up was like scourging a crowd of fagged-out children to school. All her limbs and sundry muscles whose existence she had never realized before were like separate children, each aching and wailing: “I can’t! I won’t!”
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But the lameness vanished when she was at work again, and her sinews began to learn their various trades and to manage them automatically. She grew strong and lusty, and her task grew easy. She began to understand that while the employee has troubles enough and to spare, he has none of the torments of leadership; he is not responsible for the securing of contracts and materials, for borrowings of capital from the banks, or for the weekly nightmare of meeting the pay-roll. There are two hells in the cosmos of manufacture: the dark pit where the laborer fights the tiny worms of expense and the dizzy crags where the employer battles with the dragons of aggregates.
Mamise saw that most of the employees were employees because they lacked the self-starter of ambition. They were lazy-minded, and even their toiling bodies were lazy. For all their appearance of effort they did not ordinarily attain an efficiency of thirty per cent. of their capabilities. The turnover in employment was three times what it should have been. Three hundred men were hired for every hundred steadily at work, and the men at work did only a third of the work they could have done. The total wastefulness of man rivaled the ghastly wastefulness of nature with spawn and energy.
The poor toilers were more reckless, more shiftless, relatively more dissipated, than the idle rich, for the rich ordinarily squandered only the interest on their holdings, while the laborer wasted his capital in neglecting to make full use of his muscle. The risks they took with life and limb were amazing.
On Saturdays great numbers quit work and waited for their pay. On Mondays the force was greatly reduced by absentees nursing the hang-over from the Sunday drunk, and of those that came to work so many were unfit that the Monday accident increase was proverbial.
The excuse of slavery or serfdom was no longer legitimate, though it was loudly proclaimed by the agitators, the trade-union editors, and the parlor reformers. For, say what they would, labor could resign or strike at will; the laborer had his vote and his equality of opportunity. He was free even from the ordinary obligations, for nobody expected the workman to make or keep a contract for his services after it became inconvenient to him.
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There were bad sports among them, as among the rich and the classes between. There were unions and individuals that were tyrants in power and cry-babies in trouble. There was much cruelty, trickery, and despotism inside the unions––ferocious jealousy of union against union, and mutual destructiveness.
This was, of course, inevitable, and it only proved that lying, cheating, and bullying were as natural to the so-called “laborer” as to the so-called “capitalist.” The folly is in making the familiar distinction between them. Mamise saw that the majority of manual laborers did not do a third of the work they might have done and she knew that many of the capitalists did three times as much as they had to.
It is the individual that tells the story, and Mamise, who had known hard-working, firm-muscled men, and devoted mothers and pure daughters among the rich, found them also among the poor, but intermingled here, as above, with sots, degenerates, child-beaters, and wantons.
Mamise learned to admire and to be fond of many of the men and their families. But she had adventures with blackguards, rakes, and brutes. She was lovingly entreated by many a dear woman, but she was snubbed and slandered by others who were as extravagant, indolent, and immoral as the wives and daughters of the rich.
But all in all, the ship-builders loafed horribly in spite of the poetic inspiration of their calling and the prestige of public laudation; in spite of the appeals for hulls to carry food to the starving and troops to the anxious battle-front of Europe. In spite also of the highest wages ever paid to a craft, they kept their efficiency at a lower point than lower paid workmen averaged in the listless pre-war days. Yet there was no lack of outcry that the workman was throttled and enslaved by the greed of capital. There was no lack of outcry that profiteers were bleeding the nation to death and making martyrs of the poor.
Most of the capitalists had been workmen themselves and had risen from the lethargic mass by the simple expedient of using their brains for schemes and making their muscles produce more than the average output. The laborers who failed failed because when they got their eight-hour day they did not turn their leisure to production. And some of305them dared to claim that the manual toilers alone produced the wealth and should alone be permitted to enjoy it, as if it were possible or desirable to choke off initiative and adventure or to devise a society in which the man whose ambition is to avoid work will set the pace for the man who loves it for itself and whose discontent goads him on to self-improvement! As if it were possible or desirable for the man who works half-heartedly eight hours a day to keep down the man who works whole-souledly eighteen hours a day! For time is power.
Even the benefits the modern laborer enjoys are largely the result of intervention in his behalf by successful men of enterprise who thrust upon the toiler the comforts, the safeguards, and the very privileges he will not or cannot seek for himself.
During the war the employers of labor, the generals of these tremendous armies, were everlastingly alert to find some means to stimulate them to do themselves justice. The best artists of the country devised eloquent posters, and these were stuck up everywhere, reminding the laborer that he was the partner of the soldier. Orators visited the yards and harangued the men. After each appeal there was a brief spurt of enthusiasm that showed what miracles could be accomplished if they had not lapsed almost at once into the usual sullen drudgery.
There were appeals to thrift also. The government needed billions of dollars, needed them so badly that the pennies of the poorest man must be sought for. Few of the workmen had the faintest idea of saving. The wives of some of them were humbly provident, but many of them were debt-runners in the shops and wasters in the kitchens.
A gigantic effort was put forth to teach the American people thrift. The idea of making small investments in government securities was something new. Bonds were supposed to be for bankers and plutocrats. Vast campaigns of education were undertaken, and the rich implored the poor to lay aside something for a rainy day. The rich invented schemes to wheedle the poor to their own salvation. So huge had been the wastefulness before that the new fashion produced billions upon billions of investments in Liberty Bonds, and hundreds of millions in War Savings Stamps.
Bands of missionaries went everywhere, to the theaters,306the moving-picture houses, the schools, the shops, the factories, preaching the new gospel of good business and putting it across in the name of patriotism.
One of these troupes of crusaders marched upon Davidge’s shipyard. And with it came Nicky Easton at last.
Easton had deferred his advent so long that Mamise and Davidge had come almost to yearn for him with heartsick eagerness. The first inkling of the prodigal’s approach was a visit that Jake Nuddle paid to Mamise late one evening. She had never broached to him the matter of her talk with Easton, waiting always for him to speak of it to her. She was amazed to see him now, and he brought amazement with him.
“I just got a call on long distance,” he said, “and a certain party tells me you was one of us all this time. Why didn’t you put a feller wise?”
Mamise was inspired to answer his reproach with a better: “Because I don’t trust you, Jake. You talk too much.”
This robbed Jake of his bluster and convinced him that the elusive Mamise was some tremendous super-spy. He became servile at once, and took pride in being the lackey of her unexplained and unexplaining majesty. Mamise liked him even less in this rôle than the other.
She took his information with a languid indifference, as if the terrifying news were simply a tiresome confirmation of what she had long expected. Jake was tremulous with excitement and approval.
“Well, well, who’d ’a’ thought our little Mamise was one of them slouch-hounds you read about? I see now why you’ve been stringin’ that Davidge boob along. You got him eatin’ out your hand. And I see now why you put them jumpers on and went out into the yards. You just got to know everything, ain’t you?”
Mamise nodded and smiled felinely, as she imagined a queen of mystery would do. But as soon as she could get rid of Jake she was like a child alone in a graveyard.
Jake had told her that Nicky would be down in a few days, and not to be surprised when he appeared. She wanted to get the news to Davidge, but she dared not go to his rooms so late. And in the morning she was due at her job of passing rivets. She crept into bed to rest her dog-tired bones against the morrow’s problems. Her dreams were all of death and307destruction, and of steel ships crumpled like balls of paper thrown into a waste-basket.
If she had but known it, Davidge was making the rounds of his sentry-line. The guard at one gate was sound asleep. He found two others playing cards, and a fourth man dead drunk.
Inside the yards the great hulls rose up to the moon like the buttresses of a cliff. Only, they were delicately vulnerable, and Europe waited for them.
308CHAPTER IV
True sleep came to Mamise so late that her alarm-clock could hardly awaken her. It took all her speed to get her to her post. She dared not keep Sutton waiting, and fear of the time-clock had become a habit with her. As she caught the gleaming rivets and thrust them into their sconces, she wondered if all this toil were merely a waste of effort to give the sarcastic gods another laugh at human folly.
She wanted to find Davidge and took at last the desperate expedient of pretended sickness. The passer-boy Snotty was found to replace her, and she hurried to Davidge’s office.
Miss Gabus stared at her and laughed. “Tired of your rivetin’ a’ready? Come to get your old job back?”
Mamise shook her head and asked for Davidge. He was out––no, not out of town, but out in the yard or the shop or up in the mold-loft or somewheres, she reckoned.
Mamise set out to find him, and on the theory that among places to look for anything or anybody the last should be first she climbed the long, long stairs to the mold-loft.
He was not among the acolytes kneeling at the templates; nor was he in the cathedral of the shop. She sought him among the ships, and came upon him at last talking to Jake Nuddle, of all people!
Nuddle saw Mamise first and winked, implying that he also was making a fool of Davidge. Davidge looked sheepish, as he always did when he was caught in a benevolent act.
“I was just talking to your brother-in-law, Miss Webling,” he said, “trying to drive a few rivets into that loose skull. I don’t want to fire him, on your account, but I don’t see why I should pay an I. W. W. or a Bolshevist to poison my men.”
Davidge had been alarmed by the indifference of his sentinels. He thought it imbecile to employ men like Nuddle to309corrupt the men within, while the guards admitted any wanderer from without. He was making a last attempt to convert Nuddle to industry for Mamise’s sake, trying to pluck this dingy brand from the burning.
“I was just showing Nuddle a little bookkeeping in patriotism,” he said. “The Liberty Loan people are coming here, and I want the yard to do itself proud. Some of the men and women are going without necessities to help the government, while Nuddle and some others are working for the Kaiser. This is the record of Nuddle and his crew:
“‘Wages, six to ten dollars a day guaranteed by the government. Investment in Liberty Bonds, nothing; purchases of War Savings Stamps, nothing; contributions to Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., K. of C., J. W. B., Salvation Army, nothing; contributions to relief funds of the Allies, nothing. Time spent at drill, none; time spent in helping recruiting, none. A clean sheet, and a sheet full of time spent in interfering with other men’s work, sneering at patriotism, saying the Kaiser is no worse than the Allies, pretending that this is a war to please the capitalists, and that a soldier is a fool.’
“In other words, Nuddle, you are doing the Germans’ business, and I don’t intend to pay you American money any longer unless you do more work with your hands and less with your jaw.”
Nuddle was stupid enough to swagger.
“Just as you say, Davidge. You’ll change your tune before long, because us workin’-men, bein’ the perdoocers, are goin’ to take over all these plants and run ’em to soot ourselves.”
“Fine!” said Davidge. “And will you take over my loans at the banks to meet the pay-rolls?”
“We’ll take over the banks!” said Jake, majestically. “We’ll take over everything and let the workin’-men git their doos at last.”
“What becomes of us wicked plutocrats?”
“We’ll have you workin’ for us.”
“Then we’ll be the workin’-men, and it will be our turn to take over things and set you plutocrats to workin’ for us, I suppose. And we’ll be just where we are now.”
This was growing too seesawy for Nuddle, and he turned surly.
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“Some of you won’t be in no shape to take over nothin’.”
Davidge laughed. “It’s as bad as that, eh? Well, while I can, I’ll just take over your button.”
“You mean I’m fired?”
“Exactly,” said Davidge, holding out his hand for the badge that served as a pass to the yards and the pay-roll. “Come with me, and you’ll get what money’s coming to you.”
This struck through Nuddle’s thick wits. He cast a glance of dismay at Mamise. If he were discharged, he could not help Easton with the grand blow-up. He whined:
“Ain’t you no regard for a family man? I got a wife and kids dependent on me.”
“Well, do what Karl Marx did––let them starve or live on their own money while you prove that capital is as he said, ‘a vampire of dead labor sucking the life out of living labor.’ Or feed them on the wind you try to sell me.”
“Aw, have a heart! I talk too much, but I’m all right,” Jake pleaded.
Davidge relented a little. “If you’ll promise to give your mouth a holiday and your hands a little work I’ll keep you to the end of the month. And then, on your way!”
“All right, boss; much obliged,” said Jake, so relieved at his respite that he bustled away as if victorious, winking shrewdly at Mamise––who winked back, with some difficulty.
She waited till he was a short distance off, then she murmured, quickly:
“Don’t jump––but Nicky Easton is coming here in the next few days; I don’t know just when. He told Jake; Jake told me. What shall we do?”
Davidge took the blow with a smile:
“Our little guest is coming at last, eh? He promised to see you first. I’ll have Larrey keep close to you, and the first move he makes we’ll jump him. In the mean while I’ll put some new guards on the job and––well, that’s about all we can do but wait.”
“I mustn’t be seen speaking to you too friendly. Jake thinks I’m fooling you.”
“God help me, if you are, for I love you. And I want you to be careful. Don’t run any risks. I’d rather have the whole shipyard smashed than your little finger.”
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“Thanks, but if I could swap my life for one ship it would be the best bargain I ever bought. Good-by.”
As she ran back to her post Davidge smiled at the womanishness of her gait, and thought of Joan of Arc, never so lovably feminine as in her armor.
312CHAPTER V
Days of harrowing restiveness followed, Mamise starting at every word spoken to her, leaping to her feet at every step that passed her cottage, springing from her sleep with a cry, “Who’s there!” at every breeze that fumbled a shutter.
But nothing happened; nobody came for her.
The afternoon of the Liberty Loan drive was declared a half-holiday. The guards were doubled at the gates, and watchmen moved among the crowds; but strangers were admitted if they looked plausible, and several motor-loads of them rolled in. Some of them carried bundles of circulars and posters and application blanks. Some of them were of foreign aspect, since a large number of the workmen had to be addressed in other languages than English.
Mamise drifted from one audience to another. She encountered her team-mate Pafflow and tried to find a speaker who was using his language.
At length a voice of an intonation familiar to him threw him into an ecstasy. What was jargon to Mamise was native music to him, and she lingered at his elbow, pretending to share his thrill in order to increase it.
She felt a twitch at her sleeve, and turned idly.
Nicky Easton was at her side. Her mind, all her minds, began to convene in alarm like the crew of a ship attacked.
“Nicky!” she gasped.
“No names, pleass! But to follow me quick.”
“I’m right with you.” She turned to follow him. “One minute.” She stepped back and spoke fiercely to Pafflow. “Pafflow, find Mr. Davidge. Tell him Nicky is here. Remember,Nicky is here. It’s life and death. Find him.”
Pafflow mumbled, “Nicky is here!” and Mamise ran after Nicky, who was lugging a large suit-case. He was quivering with excitement.
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“I didn’t knew you in pentaloons, but Chake Nuttle pointet you owit,” he laughed.
“Wh-where is Jake?”
“He goes ahead vit a boondle of bombs. Nobody is on theSchiff. Ve could not have so good a chence again.”
Mamise might have, ought to have, seized him and cried for help; but she could not somehow throw off the character she had assumed with Nicky. She obeyed him in a kind of automatism. Her eyes searched the crowd for Larrey, who had kept all too close to her of recent days and nights. But he had fallen under the hypnotism of some too eloquent spellbinder.
Mamise felt the need of doing a great heroic feat, but she could not imagine what it might be. Pending the arrival from heaven of some superfeminine inspiration, she simply went along to be in at the death.
Pafflow was a bit stupid and two bits stubborn. He puzzled over Mamise’s peculiar orders. He wanted to hear the rest of that fiery speech. He turned and stared after Mamise and noted the way she went, with the foppish stranger carrying the heavy baggage. But he was used to obeying orders after a little balking, and in time his slow brain started him on the hunt for Davidge. He quickened his pace and asked questions, being put off or directed hither and yon.
At last he saw the boss sitting on a platform behind whose fluttering bunting a white-haired man was hurling noises at the upturned faces of the throng. Pafflow supposed that his jargon was English.
Getting to Davidge was not easy. But Pafflow was stubborn. He pushed as close to the front as he could, and there a wall of bodies held him.
The orator was checked in full career with almost fatal results by the sudden bellowing of a voice from the crowd below. He supposed that he was being heckled. He paused among the ruins of his favorite period, and said:
“Well, my friend, what is it?”
Pafflow ignored him and shouted: “Meesta Davutch! O-o-h, Meesta Davutch. Neecky is here.”
Davidge, hearing his name bruited, rose and called into the mob, “What’s that?”
“Neecky is here.”
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When Davidge understood he was staggered. For a moment he stood in a stupor. Then he apologized to the speaker. “An emergency call. Please forgive me and go right on!”
He bowed to the other distinguished guests and left the platform. Pafflow found him and explained.
“Moll, the passer-boy, my gang, she say find you, life and death, and say Neecky is here! I doan’ know what she means, but now I find you.”
“Which way––where––did you––have you an idea where she went?”
“She go over by new shipMamise––weeth gentleman all dressy up.”
Davidge ran toward the scaffolding surrounding the almost finished hull. He recognized one or two of his plain-clothes guards and stopped just long enough to tell them to get together and search every ship at once, and to make no excitement about it.
The scaffolding was like a jungle, and he prowled through it with caution and desperate speed, up and down the swaying, cleated planks and in and out of the hull.
He searched the hold first, expecting that Nicky would naturally plant his explosives there. That indeed was his scheme, but Mamise had found among her tumbled wits one little idea only, and that was to delay Nicky as long as possible.
She suggested to him that before he began to lay his train of wires he ought to get a general view of the string of ships. The best point was the top deck, where they were just about to hoist the enormous rudder to the stern-post.
Nicky accepted the suggestion, and Mamise guided him through the labyrinth. They had met Jake at the base of the falsework, and he came along, leaving his bundle. Nicky carried his suit-case with him. He did not intend to be separated from it. Jake was always glad to be separated from work.
They made the climb, and Nicky’s artistic soul lingered to praise the beautiful day for the beautiful deed. In a frenzy of talk, Mamise explained to him what she could. She pointed to the great hatchway for the locomotives and told him:
“The ship would have been in the water now if it weren’t315for that big hatch. It set us––the company back ninety days.”
“And now the ship goes to be in the sky in about nine minutes. Come along once.”
“Look down here, how deep it is!” said Mamise, and led him to the edge. She was ready to thrust him into the pit, but he kept a firm grip on a rope, and she sighed with regret.
But Davidge, looking up from the depth of the well, saw Nicky and Mamise peering over the edge. His face vanished.
“Who iss?” said Nicky. “Somebody is below dere. Who iss?”
Mamise said she did not know, and Jake had not seen.
Nicky was in a flurry. The fire in Davidge’s eyes told him that Davidge was looking for him. There was a dull sound in the hitherto silent ship of some one running.
Nicky grew hysterical with wrath. To be caught at the very outset of his elaborate campaign was maddening. He opened his suit-case, took out from the protecting wadding a small iron death-machine and held it in readiness. A noble plan had entered his brain for rescuing his dream.
Nuddle, glancing over the side, recognized Davidge and told Nicky who it was that came. When Davidge reached the top deck, he found Nicky smiling with the affability of a floorwalker.
“Meester Davitch––please, one momend. I holt in my hant a little machine to blow us all high-sky if you are so unkind to be impolite. You move––I srow. We all go up togedder in much pieces. Better it is you come with me and make no trouble, and then I let you safe your life. You agree, yes? Or must I srow?”
Davidge looked at the bomb, at Nicky, at Nuddle, then at Mamise. Life was sweet here on this high steel crag, with the cheers of the crowds about the stands coming faintly up on the delicious breeze. He knew explosives. He had seen them work. He could see what that handful of lightning in Nicky’s grasp would do to this mountain he had built.
Life was sweet where the limpid river spread its indolent floods far and wide. And Mamise was beautiful. The one thing not sweet and not beautiful was the triumph of this sardonic Hun.