267
Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in vain.
When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or hated her the more.
But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too short for her to risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back for a suit-case, in view of the Alexandria détour. She must, therefore, travel without baggage. Therefore she must return the same night. She found, to her immense relief, that this could be done. The seven-o’clock train to Baltimore reached there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.
She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but now an inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that she was dining out with Polly somewhere; consequently it would be safe to tell Polly that she was dining out with Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to compare notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One cannot be seen to blush.
She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by what Widdicombe called “the ebony maid with the ivory head.” Mamise told her not to summon her lame mistress to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss Webling was dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him. She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then rang off.
This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted to Davidge for his bewilderment.
To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could leave, Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows that keep going without interruption. Public benefactors maintain them for the salvation of women who have no homes or do not want to go to them yet.
The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly, as usual leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects shown were selected from all the fascinating events of the268time. Then followed a doleful imitation of Mr. Charles Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the artistry of the original.
Thecinema de résistancewas a long and idiotic vampire picture in which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to impossible ruin by wiles and attitudes that would have driven any actual male to flight, laughter, or a call for the police. But the audience seemed to enjoy it, as a substitute, no doubt, for the old-fashioned gruesome fairy-stories that one accepts because they are so unlike the tiresome realities. Mamise wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She was tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment, if ever opportunity offered.
In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled away the dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her dinner on the train, remembering vividly how her heart history with Davidge had begun on a train. She missed him now, and his self-effacing gallantry.
The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive was ill concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn’t quite exist. Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she had never paid Davidge for that chair he gave up to her. She vowed again that she would not forget. She felt a deep remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks. She regretted especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was her privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no right to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she belonged to him.
She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too, as well as her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible and subjecting herself to a self-immolation among hardships. After the war––assuming that the war would soon end and that she would come out of it alive––afterward she could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.
Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was startled to find Baltimore already gathering round the train. And she had not even begun to organize her stratagems against Nicky Easton. She made a hasty exit from the car and sought the cab-ranks outside.
From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself, lifted his hat, and motioned her to an open door. She bent269her head down and her knees up and entered a little room on wheels.
Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for as soon as Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself the limousine moved off––into what adventures? Mamise was wondering.
BOOK VI
IN BALTIMORE
270“So I have already done something more for Germany. That’s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do.” Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.
“So I have already done something more for Germany. That’s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do.” Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.
271CHAPTER I
Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.
Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out as anonymously as she had sneaked in.
Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on. They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.
But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin––buffeted his arms away and muttered:
“You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the driver to let me out?”
“Nein doch!”
“Then let me alone or I will.”
Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her, and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.
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They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:
“You said you wanted to see me. I’m here.”
Nicky fidgeted and sulked:
“I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is no use.”
“If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something.”
“I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk.”
Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could not imagine how to coax him out of silence.
His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:
“Ach Gott, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf myVaterland. But the time comes soon, and I must make patience.Eile mit Weile!”
“You’d better tell me what’s on your mind,” Mamise suggested, but he shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized that she could not extort Nicky’s secret from him by asserting her own dignity.
She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had “vamped” for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark was all the better for her purpose.
At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought Nicky’s, as she cooed:
“Come along, Nicky, don’t be so cantankerous.”
His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its clutch:
“But you are so colt!”
She insinuated, “You couldn’t expect me to make love to you the very first thing, could you?”
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“You mean you do like me?”
Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And he, encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her, flung his arm about her again and drew her, resisting only in her soul, close to him.
274CHAPTER II
But when his lips hunted hers she hid them in her fur collar; and he, imputing it to coquetry, humored her, finding her delicate timidity enhancing and inspiring. He chuckled:
“You shall kiss me yet.”
“Not till you have told me what you sent for me for.”
“No, feerst you must give me one to proof your good fate––your good face––” He was trying to say “good faith.”
She was stubborn, but he was more obstinate still, and he had the advantage of the secret.
And so at last she sighed “All right,” and put up her cheek to pay the price. His arms tightened about her, and his lips were not content with her cheek. He fought to win her lips, but she began to tear off her gloves to scratch his eyes out if need be for release.
She was revolted, and she would have marred his beauty if he had not let her go. Once freed, she regained her self-control, for the sake of her mission, and said, with a mock seriousness:
“Now, be careful, or I won’t listen to you at all.”
Sighing with disappointment, but more determined than ever to make her his, he said:
“Feerst I must esk you, how is your feelink about Chermany?”
“Just as before.”
“Chust as vich ‘before’? Do you loaf Chermany or hate?”
She was permitted to say only one thing. It came hard:
“I love her, of course.”
“Ach, behüt’ dich, Gott!” he cried, and would have clasped her again, but she insisted on discipline. He began his explanation.
“I did told you how, to safe my life in England, I confessed somethings. Many of our people here will not forgive. My275only vay to get back vere I have been is to make––as Americans say––to make myself skvare by to do some big vork. I have done a little, not much, but more can be if you help.”
“What could I do?”
“Much things, but the greatest––listen once: our Chermany has no fear of America so long America is on this side of the Atlentic Ozean. Americans build ships; Chermany must destroy fester as they build. Already I have made one ship less for America. I cannot pooblish advertisink, but my people shall one day know, and that day comes soon;Der Tagis almost here––you shall see! Our army grows alvays, in France; and England and France can get no more men. Ven all is ready, Chermany moves like a––a avalenche down a mountain and covers France to the sea.
“On that day our fleet––our glorious ships––comes out from Kiel Canal, vere man holds them beck like big dogs in leash. Oh those beautiful day, Chermany conquers on lent and on sea. France dies, and England’s navy goes down into the deep and comes never back.
“Ach Gott, such a day it shall be––when old England’s empire goes into history, into ancient history vit Roossia and Rome and Greece and Bebylonia.
“England gone, France gone, Italy gone––who shall safe America and her armies and her unborn ships, and her cannon and shell and air-ships not yet so much as begun?
“Der Tagshall be like the lest day venGottmakes the graves open and the dead come beck to life. The Americans shall fall on knees before our Kaiser, and he shall render chudgment. Such a payink!
“Now the Yenkees despise us Chermans. Ve cannot go to this city, to that dock. Everywhere is dead-lines and permissions and internment camps and persecutions, and all who are not in prison are afraid. They change their names from Cherman to English now, but soon they shall lift their heads and it shall be the Americans who shall know the dead-lines, the licenses, the internment camps.
“So, Marie Louise, my sveetheart, if you can show and I can show that in the dark night ve did not forget theVaterland, ve shall be proud and safe.
“It is to make you safe ven comesDer TagI speak to you now. I vish you should share my vork now, so you276can share my life efterwards. Now do I loaf you, Marie Louise? Now do I give you proof?”
Mamise was all ashudder with the intensity of his conviction. She imagined an all-conquering Germany in America. She needed but to multiply the story of Belgium, of Serbia, of prostrate Russia. The Kaiser had put in the shop-window of the world samples enough of the future as it would be made by Germany.
And in the mood of that day, with defeatism rife in Europe, and pessimism miasmatic in America, there was reason enough for Nicky to believe in his prophecy and to inspire belief in its possibility. The only impossible thing about it was that the world should ever endure the dominance of Germany. Death would seem better to almost everybody than life in such a civilization as she promised.
Mamise feared the Teutonic might, but she could not for a moment consent to accept it. There was only one thing for her to do, and that was to learn what plans she could, and thwart them. Here within her grasp was the long-sought opportunity to pay off the debt she had incurred. She could be a soldier now, at last. There was no price that Nicky might have demanded too great, too costly, too shameful for her to pay. To denounce him or defy him would be a criminal waste of opportunity.
She said: “I understand. You are right, of course. Let me help in any way I can. I only wish there were something big for me to do.”
Nicky was overjoyed. He had triumphed both as patriot and as lover.
“There is a big think for you to do,” he said. “You can all you vill.”
“Tell me,” she pleaded.
“You are in shipyard. This man Davidge goes on building ships. I gave him fair warning. I sinked one ship for him, but he makes more.”
“You sank his ship?” Mamise gasped.
“Sure! TheClara, he called her. I find where she goes to take cargo. I go myself. I row up behind the ship in little boat, and I fasten by the rudder-post under the water, where no one sees, a bomb. It is all innocent till ship moves. Then every time the rudder turns a little screw turns in the machine.
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“It turns for two, three days; then––boom! It makes explosion, tears ship to pieces, and down she goes. And so goes all the next ships if you help again.”
“Again? What do you mean by again?”
“It is you, Marie Louise, who sinks theClara.”
Her laugh of incredulity was hardly more than a shiver of dread.
“Ja wohl!You did told Chake Nuttle vat Davidge tells you. Chake Nuttle tells me. I go and make sink the ship!”
“Jake Nuddle! It was Jake that told you!” Mamise faltered, seeing her first vague suspicions damnably confirmed.
“Sure! Chake Nuttle is myLeutnant. He has had much money. He gets more. He shall be rich man after comesDer Tag. It might be we make him von Nuttle! and you shall be Gräfin von Oesten.”
Mamise was in an abject terror. The thick trees of the park were spooky as the dim light of the car elicited from the black wall of dark faint details of tree-trunks and naked boughs stark with winter. She was in a hurry to learn the rest and be gone. She spoke with a poor imitation of pride:
“So I have already done something more for Germany. That’s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do, for I want to––to get busy right away.”
Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.
“You are close by Davidge. Chake Nuttle tells me he is sveet on you. You have his confidence. You can learn what secrets he has. Next time we do not vait for ship to be launched and to go for cargo. It might go some place ve could not find.
“So now ve going blow up those ships before they touch vater––ve blow up his whole yard. You shall go beck and take up again your vork, and ven all is right I come down and get a job. I dress like vorkman and get into the yard. And I bring in enough bombs to blow up all the ships and the cranes and the machines.
“Chake Nuttle tells me Davidge just gets a plate-bending machine. Forty-five t’ousand dollars it costs him, and long time to get. In one minute––poof! Ve bend that plate-bender!”
He laughed a great Teutonic laugh and supposed that278she was laughing, too. When he had subsided a little, he said:
“So now you know vat you are to make! You like to do so much for Chermany, yes?”
“Oh yes! Yes!” said Mamise.
“You promise to do vat I send you vord?”
“Yes.” She would have promised to blow up the Capitol.
“Ach, how beautiful you are even in the dark! Kiss me!”
Remembering Judith, she paid that odious price, wishing that she might have the beast’s infamous head with a sword. It was a kiss of betrayal, but she felt that it was no Judas-kiss, since Nicky was no Christ.
He told her more of his plans in detail, and was so childishly proud of his superb achievements, past and future, that she could hardly persuade him to take her back to the station. He assured her that there was abundant time, but she would not trust his watch. She explained how necessary it was for her to return to Washington and to Polly Widdicombe’s house before midnight. And at last he yielded to her entreaties, opened the door, and leaned out to tell the driver to turn back.
Mamise was uneasy till they were out of the park and into the lighted streets again. But there was no safety here, for as they glided down Charles Street a taxicab going with the reckless velocity of taxicabs tried to cut across their path.
There was a swift fencing for the right of way, and then the two cars came together with a clash and much crumpling of fenders.
The drivers descended to wrangle over the blame, and Mamise had visions of a trip to the police station, with a consequent exposure. But Nicky was alive to the danger of notoriety. He got out and assumed the blame, taking the other driver’s part and offering to pay the damages.
The taxicab-driver assessed them liberally at fifty dollars, and Nicky filled his palm with bills, ordering his own driver to proceed. The car limped along with a twisted steering-gear, and Nicky growled thanksgivings over the narrow escape the German Empire had had from losing two of its most valuable agents.
Mamise was sick with terror of what might have been. She saw the collision with a fatal result, herself and Nicky killed and flung to the street, dead together. It was not the279fear of dying that froze her soul; it was the posthumous blow she would have given to Davidge’s trust in her and all women, the pain she would have inflicted on his love. For to his dying day he would have believed her false to him, a cheap and nasty trickster, sneaking off to another town to a rendezvous with another man. And that man a German!
The picture of his bitter disillusionment and of her own unmerited and eternal disgrace was intolerably real in spite of the fact that she knew it to be untrue, for our imaginations are far more ancient and more irresistible than our late and faltering reliance on the truth; the heavens and hells we fancy have more weight with our credulities than any facts we encounter. We can dodge the facts or close our eyes to them, but we cannot escape our dreams, whether our eyes are wide or sealed.
Mamise could not free herself of this nightmare till she had bidden Nicky good-by the last time and left him in the cab outside the station.
Further nightmares awaited her, for in the waiting-room she could not fight off the conviction that the train would never arrive. When it came clanging in on grinding wheels and she clambered aboard, she knew that it would be wrecked, and the finding of her body in the débris, or its disappearance in the flames, would break poor Davidge’s heart and leave her to the same ignominy in his memory.
While the train swung on toward Washington, she added another torment to her collection: how could she save Davidge from Nicky without betraying her sister’s husband into the hands of justice? What right had she to tell Davidge anything when her sacred duty to her family and her poor sister must first be heartlessly violated?
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BOOK VII
AT THE SHIPYARD
282Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton’s elbow.
Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton’s elbow.
283CHAPTER I
Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own soul, for people can on occasion accomplish what the familiar Irish drillmaster invited his raw recruits to do––“Step out and take a look at yourselves.”
Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts were cut off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with incredulity and exclaimed:
“Can this be I?”
If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.
What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings, of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them. Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister’s husband of disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would involve her sister’s ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced that her sister’s husband was in a plot against her lover and her country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have something at last to give up for her nation.
The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was threatened by her sister’s husband, and her vague patriotism had been stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the blood of its votaries.284Men were offering themselves, casting from them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they were missing from the beadroll of contributors.
Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer’s share in the process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and offer what gift she had––the poor little gift of entertaining the soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would be the liberty and what little good name her sister’s husband had; it would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had dealt with harshly enough already.
But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy. She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country. Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.
She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never known.
She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her lips, voicing the words:
“You owe me something, old capital. You’ll never put up any statues to me or carve my name on any tablets, but I’m doing something for you that will mean more than anybody will ever realize.”
She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily285and wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so.
Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise’s room to demand an accounting.
“I was just on the point of telephoning the police to see if you had been found in the river.”
Mamise did not bother either to explain her past lies or tell any new ones. She majestically answered:
“Polly darling, I have been engaged in affairs of state, which I am not at liberty to divulge to the common public.”
“Rot!” said Polly. “I believe the ‘affairs,’ but not the ‘state.’”
Mamise was above insult. “Some day you will know. You’ve heard of Helen of Troy, the lady with the face that launched a thousand ships? Well, this face of mine will launch at least half a dozen freight-boats.”
Polly yawned. “I’ll call my doctor in the morning and have you taken away quietly. Your mind’s wandering, as well as the rest of you.”
Mamise chuckled like a child with a great secret, and Polly waddled back to her bed.
Next morning Mamise woke into a world warm with her own importance, though the thermometer was farther down than Washington’s oldest records. She called Davidge on the long-distance telephone, and there was a zero in his voice that she had never heard before.
“This is Mamise,” she sang.
“Yes?” Simply that and nothing more.
She laughed aloud, glad that he cared enough for her to be so angry at her. She forgot the decencies of telephone etiquette enough to sing out:
“Do you really love me so madly?”
He loathed sentimentalities over the telephone, and she knew it, and was always indulging in them. But the fat was on the wire now, and he came back at her with a still icier tone:
“There’s only one good excuse for what you’ve done. Are you telephoning from a hospital?”
“No, from Polly’s.”
“Then I can’t imagine any excuse.”
286
“But you’re a business man, not an imaginator,” she railed. “You evidently don’t know me. I’m ‘Belle Boyd, the Rebel Spy,’ and also ‘Joan of Arkansas,’ and a few other patriots. I’ve got news for you that will melt the icicles off your eyebrows.”
“News?” he answered, with no curiosity modifying his anger.
“War news. May I come down and tell you about it?”
“This is a free country.”
“Fine! You’re simply adorable when you try to sulk. What time would be most convenient?”
“I make no more appointments with you, young woman.”
“All right. Then I’ll wait at my shanty till you come.”
“I was going to rent it.”
“You just dare! I am coming back to work. The strike is over.”
“You’d better come to the office as soon as you get here.”
“All right. Give my love to Miss Gabus.”
She left the telephone and set about packing her things in a fury. Polly reminded her that she had appointments for fittings at dressmakers’.
“I never keep appointments,” said Mamise. “You can cancel them for me till this cruel war is over. Have the bills sent to me at the shipyard, will you, dear? Sorry to bother you, but I’ve barely time to catch my train.”
Polly called her a once unmentionable name that was coming into fashionable use after a long exile. Women had draped themselves in a certain animal’s pelt with such freedom and grace for so many years that its name had lost enough of its impropriety to be spoken, and not too much to express disapproval.
“You skunk!” said Polly. And Mamise laughed. Everything made her laugh now; she was so happy that she began to cry.
“Why the crocodiles?” said Polly. “Because you’re leaving me?”
“No, I’m crying because I didn’t realize how unhappy I had always been before I am as happy as I am now. I’m going to be useful at last, Polly. I’m going to do something for my country.”
She was sharing in that vast national ecstasy which is called287patriotism and which turns the flames of martyrdom into roses.
When Mamise reached the end of her journey she found Davidge waiting for her at the railroad station with a limousine.
His manner was studiously insulting, but he was helplessly glad to see her, and the humiliation he had suffered from her failure to keep her engagements with him in Washington was canceled by the tribute of her return to him. The knot of his frown was solved by the mischief of her smile. He had to say:
“Why didn’t you meet me at luncheon?”
“How could I prevent the Potomac from putting the old bridge out of commission?” she demanded. “I got there in time, but they wouldn’t let me across, and by the time I reached the hotel you had gone, and I didn’t know where to find you. Heaven knows I tried.”
The simplicity of this explanation deprived him of every excuse for further wrath, and he was not inspired to ask any further questions. He was capable of nothing better than a large and stupid:
“Oh!”
“Wait till you hear what I’ve got to tell you.”
But first he disclosed a little plot of his own with a comfortable guiltiness:
“How would you like,” he stammered, “since you say you have news––how would you like––instead of going to your shanty––I’ve had a fire built in it––but––how would you like to take a ride in the car––out into the country, you know? Then you could tell me, and nobody would hear or interrupt.”
She was startled by the similarity of his arrangement to that of Nicky Easton, but she approached it with different dread.
She regretted the broad daylight and the disconcerting landscape. In the ride with Nicky she had been enveloped in the dark. Now the sky was lined with unbleached wool. The air was thick with snow withheld, and the snow on the ground took the color of the sky. But the light was searching, cynical, and the wayside scenes were revealed with the despondent starkness of a Russian novel. In this romanceless, colorless dreariness it was not easy for Mamise to gloss over the details of her meeting with Nicky Easton.
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There was no escaping this part of the explanation, however, and she could see how little comfort Davidge took from the news that she had gone so far to be alone with a former devotee. A man does not want his sweetheart to take risks for him beyond a certain point, and he would rather not be saved at all than be saved by her at too high a price. The modern man has a hard time living down the heritage from the ten-thousand-year habitude of treating his women like children who cannot be trusted to take care of themselves.
Mamise had such poor success with the part of her chronicle she wished to publish that she boggled miserably the part she wanted to handle with most discretion. As is usual in such cases, the most conspicuous thing about her message was her inability to conceal the fact that she was concealing something. Davidge’s imagination was consequently so busy that he paid hardly any attention to the tremendous facts she so awkwardly delivered.
She might as well have told him flat that Nicky would not divulge his plot except with his arms about her and his lips at her cheeks. That would not have been easy telling, but it was all too easy imagining for Davidge. He was thrown into an utter wretchedness by the vision he had of her surrender to the opportunity and to the undoubted importunity of her companion. He had a morbid desire to make her confess, and confessors have a notorious appetite for details.
“You weren’t riding with Easton alone in the dark all that time––without––”
She waited for the question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse thesaurus of his vocabulary he found nothing subtle. He groaned:
“Without his––his making love to you?”
“I wish you wouldn’t ask me,” said Mamise.
“I don’t need to. You’ve answered,” Davidge snarled. “And so will he.”
Mamise’s heart was suddenly a live coal, throbbing with fire and keenly painful––yet very warm. She had a man who loved her well enough to hate for her and to avenge her. That was something gained.
Davidge brooded. It was inconceivably hideous that he289should have given his heart to this pretty thing at his side only to have her ensconce herself in the arms of another man and give him the liberty of her cheeks––Heaven knew, hell knew, what other liberties. He vowed that he would never put his lips where another man’s had been.
Mamise seemed to feel soiled and fit only for the waste-basket of life. She had delivered her “message to Garcia,” and Garcia rewarded her with disgust. She waited shame-fast for a moment before she could even falter:
“Did you happen to hear the news I brought you? Or doesn’t it interest you?”
Davidge answered with repugnance:
“Agh!”
In her meekness she needed some insult to revive her, and this sufficed. She flared instantly:
“I’m sorry I told you. I hope that Nicky blows up your whole damned shipyard and you with it; and I’d like to help him!”
Nothing less insane could have served the brilliant effect of that outburst. It cleared the sultry air like a crackling thunderbolt. A gentle rain followed down her cheeks, while the overcharged heart of Davidge roared with Jovian laughter.
There is no cure for these desperate situations like such an explosion. It burns up at once the litter of circumstance and leaves hardly an ash. It fuses elements that otherwise resist welding, and it annihilates all minor fears in one great terror that ends in a joyous relief.
Mamise was having a noble cry now, and Davidge was sobbing with laughter––the two forms of recreation most congenial to their respective sexes.
Davidge caught her hands and cooed with such noise that the driver outside must have heard the reverberations through the glass:
“You blessed child! I’m a low-lived brute, and you’re an angel.”
A man loves to call himself a brute, and a woman loves to be called an angel, especially when it is untrue in both cases.
The sky of their being thus cleansed with rain and thunder, and all blue peace again, they were calm enough by and by to consider the main business of the session––what was to be done to save the shipyard from destruction?
290
Mamise had to repeat most of what she had told, point by point:
Nicky was not going to wait till the ships were launched or even finished. He was impatient to strike a resounding blow at the American program. Nicky was going to let Mamise know just when the blow was to be struck, so that she might share in the glory of it when triumphant Germany rewarded her faithful servants in America. Jake Nuddle was to take part in the ship-slaughter for the double privilege of protesting against this capitalistic war and of crippling those cruel capitalists to whom he owed all his poverty––to hear him tell it.
When Mamise had finished this inventory of the situation Davidge pondered aloud:
“Of course, we ought to turn the case over to the Department of Justice and the Military and Naval Intelligence to handle, but––”
“But I’d like to shelter my poor sister if I could,” said Mamise. “Of course, I wouldn’t let any tenderness for Jake Nuddle stand in the way of my patriotic duty, for Heaven knows he’s as much of a traitor to my poor sister as he is to everything else that’s decent, but I’d like to keep him out of it somehow. Something might happen to make it possible, don’t you suppose?”
“I might cripple him and send him to a hospital to save his life,” said Davidge.
“Anything to keep him out of it,” said Mamise. “If I should tell the authorities, though, they’d put him in jail right away, wouldn’t they?”
“Probably. And they’d run your friend Nicky down and intern him. Then I’d lose my chance to lay hands on him as––”
“As he did on you,” was what he started to say, but he stopped in time.
This being Davidge’s fierce desire, he found plenty of justification for it in other arguments. In the first place, there was no telling where Nicky might be. He had given Mamise no hint of his headquarters. She had neglected to ask where she could reach him, and had been instructed simply to wait till he gave her the signal. No doubt he could be picked up somewhere in the enormous, ubiquitous net with which America had been gradually covered by the secret services and by the291far-flung line of the American Protective League made up of private citizens. But there would be a certain unsatisfactoriness about nipping his plot so far from even the bud. Prevention is wisdom, but it lacks fascination.
And supposing that they found Nicky, what evidence had they against him, except Mamise’s uncorroborated statement that he had discussed certain plots with her? Enemy aliens could be interned without trial, but that meant a halcyon existence for Nicky and every comfort except liberty. This was not to be considered. Davidge had a personal grudge, too, to satisfy. He owed Nicky punishment for sinking the ship named after Davidge’s mother and for planning to sink the ship he was naming after the woman he hoped to make his wife.
Davidge was eager to seize Nicky in the very act of planting his torpedo and hoist him with his own petard. So he counseled a plan of waiting further developments. Mamise was the more willing, since it deferred the hateful moment when Jake Nuddle would be exposed. She had a hope that things might so happen as to leave him out of the dénouement entirely.
And now Davidge and Mamise were in perfect agreement, conspirators against a conspiracy. And there was the final note of the terrible in their compact: their failure meant the demolition of all those growing ships, the nullification of Davidge’s entire contribution to the war; their success would mean perhaps the death of Easton and the blackening of the name of Mamise’s sister and her sister’s children.
The solemnity of the outlook made impossible any talk of love. Davidge left Mamise at her cottage and rode back to his office, feeling like the commander of a stockade in the time of an Indian uprising. Mamise found that his foresight had had the house warmed for her; and there were flowers in a jar. She smiled at his tenderness even in his wrath. But the sight of the smoke rolling from the chimney had caught the eye of her sister, and she found Abbie waiting to welcome her.
The two rushed to each other with the affection of blood-kin, but Mamise felt like a Judas when she kissed the sister she was planning to betray. Abbie began at once to recite a catalogue of troubles. They were sordid and petty, but Mamise shivered to think how real a tragedy impended. She wondered how right she was to devastate her sister’s life for292the sake of a cause which, after all, was only the imagined welfare of millions of total strangers. She could not see the nation for the people, but her sister was her sister, and pitifully human. That was the worst wrench of war, the incessant compulsions to tear the heart away from its natural moorings.