223
“Goin’ to lunch now, Mi’ Swebling?”
And all that Miss Webling said was:
“Not just yet––thank you.”
Both were almost swooning with the tremendous significance of the moment.
Miss Webling felt that she was defying all the powers of espionage and convention when she made so brave as to linger while Miss Gabus left the room in short twitches, with the painful reluctance of one who pulls off an adhesive plaster by degrees. When at last she was really off, Miss Webling went to Davidge’s door, feeling as wicked as the maid in Ophelia’s song, though she said no more than:
“Well, did you have a successful journey?”
Davidge whirled in his chair.
“Bully! Sit down, won’t you?”
He thought that no goddess had ever done so divine a thing so ambrosially as she when she smiled and shook her incredibly exquisite head. He rose to his feet in awe of her. His restless hands, afraid to lay hold of their quarry, automatically extracted his watch from his pocket and held it beneath his eyes. He stared at it without recognizing the hour, and stammered:
“Will you lunch with me?”
“No, thank you!”
This jolted an “Oh!” out of him. Then he came back with:
“When am I going to get a chance to talk to you?”
“You know my address.”
“Yes, but––” He thought of that horrible evening when he had marched through the double row of staring cottages. But he was determined. “Going to be home this evening?”
“By some strange accident––yes.”
“By some strange accident, I might drop round.”
“Do.”
They laughed idiotically, and she turned and glided out.
She went to the mess-hall and moved about, selecting her dishes. Pretending not to see that Miss Gabus was pretending not to see her, she took her collation to another table and ate with the relish of a sense of secret guilt––the guilt of a young woman secretly betrothed.
Davidge kept away from the office most of the afternoon because Mamise was so intolerably sweet and so tantalizingly224unapproachable. He made a pretext of inspecting the works. She had a sugary suspicion of his motive, and munched it with strange comfort.
What might have happened if Davidge had called on her in her then mood and his could easily be guessed. But there are usually interventions. The chaperon this time was Mr. Larrey, the operative of the Department of Justice. He also had his secret.
He arrived at Davidge’s home just as Davidge finished the composition of his third lawn tie and came down-stairs to go. When he saw Larrey he was a trifle curt with his visitor. Thinking him a workman and probably an ambassador from one of the unions on the usual mission of such ambassadors––more pay, less hours, or the discharge of some unorganized laborer––Davidge said:
“Better come round to the office in the morning.”
“I can’t come to your office,” said Larrey.
“Why not? It’s open to everybody.”
“Yeh, but I can’t afford to be seen goin’ there.”
“Good Lord! Isn’t it respectable enough for you?”
“Yeh, but––well, I think it’s my duty to tip you off to a little slick work that’s goin’ on in your establishment.”
“Won’t it keep till to-morrow evening?”
“Yeh––I guess so. It’s only one of your stenographers.”
This checked Davidge. By a quaint coincidence he was about to call on one of his stenographers. Larrey amended his first statement: “Leastways, I’ll say she calls herself a stenographer. But that’s only her little camouflage. She’s not on the level.”
Davidge realized that the stenographer he was wooing was not on the level. She was in the clouds. But his curiosity was piqued. He motioned Larrey to a chair and took another.
“Shoot,” he said.
“Well, it’s this Miss Webling. Know anything about her?”
“Something,” said Davidge. He was too much amused to be angry. He thought that Larrey was another of those amateur detectives who flattered Germany by crediting her with an omnipresence in evil. He was a faithful reader of Ellis Parker Butler’s famous sleuth, and he grinned at Larrey. “Well, Mr. Philo Gubb, go on. Your story interests me.”
Larrey reddened. He spoke earnestly, explained who he225was, showed his credentials, and told what he knew of Miss Webling. He added what he imagined Davidge knew.
Davidge found the whole thing too preposterous to be insolent. His chivalry in Mamise’s behalf was not aroused, because he thought that the incident would make a good story to tell her. He drew Larrey out by affecting amazed incredulity.
Larrey explained: “She’s an old friend of ours. We got the word from the British to pick the lady up when she first landed in this country. She was too slick for us, I guess, because we never got the goods on her. We gave her up after a couple of weeks. Then her trail crossed Nicky Easton’s once more.”
“And who is Nicky Easton?”
“He’s a German agent she knew in London––great friend of her adopted father’s. The British nabbed him once, but he split on the gang, and they let him off. Whilst I was trailin’ him I ran into a feller named Nuddle––he come up to see Easton. I followed him here, and lo and behold! Miss Webling turns up, too! And passin’ herself off for Nuddle’s sister-in-law! Nuddle’s a bad actor, but she’s worse. And she pretends to be a poor workin’-girl. Cheese! You should have seen her in New York all dolled up!”
Davidge ignored the opportunity to say that he had had the privilege of seeing Miss Webling all dolled up. He knew why Mamise was living as she did. It was a combination of lark and crusade. He nursed Larrey’s story along, and asked with patient amusement:
“What’s your theory as to her reason for playing such a game?”
He smiled as he said this, but sobered abruptly when Larrey explained:
“You lost a ship not long ago, didn’t you? You got other ships on the ways, ain’t you? Well, I don’t need to tell you it’s good business for the Huns to slow up or blow up all the ships they can. Every boat they stop cuts down the supplies of the Allies just so much. This Miss Webling’s adopted father was in on the sinking of theLusitania, and this girl was, too, probably. She carried messages between old Webling and Easton, and walked right into a little trap the British laid for her. She put up a strong fight, and, being an226American, was let go. But her record got to this country before she did. You ask me what she’s up to. Well, what should she be up to but the Kaiser’s work? She’s no stenographer, and she wouldn’t be here playin’ tunes on a typewriter unless she had some good business reason. Well, her business is––she’s a ship-wrecker.”
The charge was ridiculous, yet there were confirmations or seeming confirmations of it. The mere name of Nicky Easton was a thorn in Davidge’s soul. He remembered Easton in London at Mamise’s elbow, and in Washington pursuing her car and calling her “Mees Vapelink.”
Davidge promised Larrey that he would look into the matter, and bade him good night with mingled respect and fear.
When he set out at length to call on Mamise he was grievously troubled lest he had lost his heart to a clever adventuress. He despised his suspicions, and yet––somebody had destroyed his ship. He remembered how shocked she had been by the news. Yet what else could the worst spy do but pretend to be deeply worried? Davidge had never liked Jake Nuddle; Mamise’s alleged relationship by marriage did not gain plausibility on reconsideration. The whim to live in a workman’s cottage was even less convincing.
Mr. Larrey had spoiled Davidge’s blissful mood and his lover’s program for the evening. Davidge moved slowly toward Mamise’s cottage, not as a suitor, but as a student.
Larrey shadowed him from force of habit, and saw him going with reluctant feet, pausing now and then, irresolute. Davidge was thinking hard, calling himself a fool, now for trusting Mamise and now for listening to Larrey. To suspect Mamise was to be a traitor to his love: not to suspect her was to be a traitor to his common sense and to his beloved career.
And the Mamise that awaited the belated Davidge was also in a state of tangled wits. She, too, had dressed with a finikin care, as Davidge had, neither of them stopping to think how quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other’s examination. Nature dresses the birds in the mating season. Mankind with the227aid of the dressmaker and the haberdasher plumes up at will.
But as Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and Davidge his Larrey, so Mamise had her sister Abbie.
Abbie came in unexpectedly and regarded Mamise’s costume with no illusions except her own cynical ones:
“What you all diked up about?”
Mamise shrugged her eyebrows, her lips, and her shoulders.
Abbie guessed. “That man comin’?”
Mamise repeated her previous business.
“Kind of low neck, don’t you think? And your arms nekked.”
Mamise drew over her arms a scarf that gave them color rather than concealment. Abbie scorned the subterfuge.
“Do you think it’s proper to dress like that for a man to come callin’?”
“I did think so till you spoke,” snapped Mamise in all the bitterness of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed and unlovely shame.
Abbie felt unwelcome. “Well, I just dropped over because Jake’s went out to some kind of meetin’.”
“With whom? Where?”
“Oh, some of the workmen––a lot of soreheads lookin’ for more wages.”
Mamise was indignant: “The soldiers get thirty dollars a month on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets more than that a week for loafing round the shop about seven hours a day. How on earth did you ever tie yourself up to such a rotten bounder?”
Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:
“Well, I ain’t seen you marryin’ anything better. I guess I’ll go home. I don’t seem to be wanted here.”
This was one of those exact truths that decent people must immediately deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and said:
“Forgive me, dear––I’m a beast. But Jake is such a––” She felt Abbie wriggling ominously and changed to: “He’s so unworthy of you. These are such terrible times, and the world is in such horrible need of everybody’s help and especially of ships. It breaks my heart to see anybody wasting his time and strength interfering with the builders instead of228joining them. It’s like interfering with the soldiers. It’s a kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and the children.”
This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears of self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of suffering for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a world. She was like so many of the air-ships the United States was building then: she could not be induced to leave the ground or, if she got up, to glide back safely.
She tried now to love her country, but she hardly rose before she fell.
“Oh, I know it’s tur’ble what folks are sufferin’, but––well, the Lord’s will be done, I say.”
“And I say it’s mainly the devil’s will that’s being done!” said Mamise.
This terrified Abbie. “I wisht you’d be a little careful of your language, Mamise. Swearin’ and cigarettes both is pretty much of a load for a lady to git by with.”
“O Lord!” sighed Mamise, in despair. She was capable of long, high flights, but she could not carry such a passenger.
Abbie continued: “And do you think it’s right, seein’ men here all by yourself?”
“I’m not seeing men––but a man.”
“But all by yourself.”
“I’m not all by myself when he’s here.”
“You’ll get the neighbors talkin’––you’ll see!”
“A lot I care for their talk!”
“Why don’t you marry him and settle down respectable and have childern and––”
“Why don’t you go home and take care of your own?”
“I guess I better.” And she departed forthwith.
229CHAPTER VIII
The two sisters had managed to fray each other’s nerves raw. The mere fact that Abbie advocated marriage and maternity threw Mamise into a cantankerous distaste for her own dreams.
Larrey had delayed Davidge long enough for Mamise to be rid of Abbie, but the influence of both Larrey and Abbie was manifest in the strained greetings of the caller and the callee. Instead of the eagerness to rush into each other’s arms that both had felt in the morning, Davidge entered Mamise’s presence with one thought dominant: “Is she really a spy? I must be on my guard.” And Mamise was thinking, “If he should be thinking what Abbie thought, how odious!”
Thus once more their moods chaperoned them. Love could not attune them. She sat; he sat. When their glances met they parted at once.
She mistook his uncertainty for despondency. She assumed that he was brooding over his lost ship. Out of a long silence she spoke:
“I wonder if the world will ever forget and forgive?”
“Forget and forgive who––whom, for what?”
“Germany for all she’s done to this poor world––Belgium, theLusitania, theClara?”
He smiled sadly. “TheClarawas a little slow tub compared to theLusitania, but she meant a lot to me.”
“And to me. So did theLusitania. She nearly cost me my life.”
He was startled. “You didn’t plan to sail on her?”
“No, but––” She paused. She had not meant to open this subject.
But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had told.
“How do you mean––she nearly cost you your life?”
230
“Oh, that’s one of the dark chapters of my past.”
“You never told me about it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Please!” He said it with a surprising earnestness. He had a sudden hope that her confession might be an absolving explanation.
She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire to release that old secret. She began, recklessly:
“Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on the stage, and Sir Joseph Webling––”
“You told me that much, but not what happened before you met him.”
“No, I didn’t tell you that, and I’m not going to now, but––well, Sir Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of my own––to know and remember. Sir Joseph was German born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was contagious, for he––well, I can’t tell you.”
“Please!”
“I swore not to.”
“You gave your oath to a German?”
“No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I’m always forgetting and starting to tell.”
“Why did you take your oath?”
“I traded secrecy for freedom.”
“You mean you turned state’s evidence?”
“Oh no, I didn’t tell on them. I didn’t know what they were up to when they used me for–– But I’m skidding now. I want to tell you––terribly. But I simply must not. I made an awful mistake that night at Mrs. Prothero’s in pretending to be ill.”
“You only pretended?”
“Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got after me, accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that resulted in the sinking of ships and the killing of men. She said that the police came to our house, and Sir Joseph tried to kill one of them and killed his own wife and then was shot by an officer and that they gave out the story that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She said Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story she told, and I was afraid she’d tell you, so I spirited you away on the pretext of illness.”
231
Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey’s story. He said:
“But it wasn’t true what Lady C.-W. told?”
“Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact, and I couldn’t explain it without breaking my oath. And now I’ve pretty nearly broken it, after all. I’ve sprained it badly.”
“Don’t you want to go on and––finish it off?”
“I want to––oh, how I want to! but I’ve got to save a few shreds of respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were going to tea with Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish now I’d let you go. Then you’d have known the worst of me––or worse than the worst.”
She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her bewilderment, that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized her hands and felt a need to gather her home to his arms.
She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him. Studying his radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had known part of her story before and was glad to hear her confess it, but her intuition missed fire when she guessed at the source of his information.
“You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!”
“Not since I saw her with you.”
“Then who told you?”
He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her read his heart so true.
“The main thing is that you told me. And now once more I ask you: will you marry me?”
This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her brusquerie:
“Certainly not.”
“And why not?”
“I’ll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are.”
232CHAPTER IX
The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.
But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience and returned to her theme.
“Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don’t know how many ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun.”
“With those hands?” He laughed and reached for them.
She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys from the clutch of a child, and went on:
“But you wouldn’t let me. So I took up the next best thing, office work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a typewriter.”
“It keeps you nearer to me.”
“But I don’t want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me go out in the yard. Please give me a real job.”
He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at length she said:
“Please go on home. It’s getting late, and I don’t like you at all.”
“I know you don’t like me, but couldn’t you love me?”
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“That’s more impossible than liking you, since you won’t let me have my only wish.”
“It’s too brutal, I tell you. And it’s getting too cold. It would simply ruin your perfect skin. I don’t want to marry a longshoreman, thank you.”
“Then I’ll thank you to go on home. I’m tired out. I’ve got to get up in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly drudgery again.”
“If you’ll marry me you won’t have to work at all.”
“But work is the one thing I want. So if you’ll kindly take yourself off I’ll be much obliged. You’ve no business here, anyway, and it’s getting so late that you’ll have all the neighbors talking.”
“A lot I care!”
“Well, I care a lot,” she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie. “I’ve got to live among them.”
It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl’s house by a sleepy parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into his overcoat, and growled:
“Good night!”
She sighed “Good night!” and wished that she were not so cantankerous. The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be quite squared.
She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.
Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone, imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when he was away or when he was at home.
When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely234cottage she stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to begin moiling again.
Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and organized they would not have had their wages at all.
But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease. Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books straight.
Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of their families or the barrooms of idleness.
Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all that the German horror might spare.
Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of love.
BOOK V
IN WASHINGTON
235How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other’s examination.
How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other’s examination.
236CHAPTER I
The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People thought of the gales that would harass the poor souls in the clammy trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not enough for themselves.
To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an office not half warm enough.
The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives along. The dour autumn seemed to wrench hopes from the heart like shriveled leaves, and to fill the air with swirling discouragements. The men at work about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow upon their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.
The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other stirring things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly battle and accept Davidge’s offer of a wedding-ring. She had, of course, her Webling inheritance to fall back upon, but she had come to hate it so as tainted money that she would not touch it or its interest. She put it all into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had been her emancipation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder had spoken of as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph Webling.
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A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery, a thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have servants to wait on her and build her fires. She would go out only when she wished, and sleep late of mornings. She would have multitudinous furs and a closed and heated limousine to carry her through the white world. She could salve her conscience by taking up some of the more comfortable forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross bandage-factory or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy canteen.
At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward matrimony, as many another woman has done. These craven moods alternated with periods of self-rebuke. She told herself that such a marriage would dishonor her and cheat Davidge.
Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it had its gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America marriage still possesses for women a certain finality. Only one marriage in nine ended in divorce that year.
Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt. She was far, indeed, from that more or less imaginary character so frequent in fiction and so rare in reality, the young woman who knows nothing of life and mankind. Like every other woman that ever lived, she knew a good deal more than she would confess, and had had more experience than she would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had found her very tantalizing about just how much her experience totaled up.
She had observed the enormous difference between a man and a woman who meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably. Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially refreshing as bread and butter. The maddening thing about marriage is what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do exist, and some people get them.
Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared in plenty and in privation.
Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any238other man. She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a husband, of what she would be like as a wife.
Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an office by the fascinating advertisements of freedom, a career, achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home, commerce its treadmills and its oakum-picking no less than the jail. The cozy little cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to nag her soul.
The destruction of the good shipClarahad dealt her a heavier blow than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many an Æschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his profits; the Œdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and competition.
The blowing up of theClarahad revealed the pitiful truth that men may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger. TheClaraserved as a warning that the shipMamisenow on the stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or destroyed as soon as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about her. It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather was conspiring with the inner November.
The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend upon the blackest year in human annals. Everybody was unhappy; there was a frightful shortage of food among all nations, a terrifying shortage of coal, and the lowest temperature ever known would be recorded. America, less unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly disappointed in herself.
239
There was food in plenty for America, but not for her confederates. The prices were appalling. Wages went up and up, but never quite caught the expenses. It was necessary to send enormous quantities of everything to our allies lest they perish before we could arrive with troops. And Germany went on fiendishly destroying ships, foodstuffs, and capital, displaying in every victory a more insatiable cruelty, a more revolting cynicism toward justice, mercy, or truth.
The Kaiserly contempt for America’s importance seemed to be justified. People were beginning to remember Rome, and to wonder if, after all, Germany might not crush France and England with the troops that had demolished Russia. And then America would have to fight alone.
At this time Mamise stumbled upon an old magazine of the ancient date of 1914. It was full of prophecies that the Kaiser would be dethroned, exiled, hanged, perhaps. The irony of it was ghastly. Nothing was more impossible than the downfall of the Kaiser––who seemed verifying his boasts that he took his crown from God. He was praising the strong sword of the unconquerable Germany. He was marshaling the millions from his eastern front to throw the British troops into the sea and smother the France he had bled white. The best that the most hopeful could do was to mutter: “Hurry! hurry! We’ve got to hurry!”
Mamise grew fretful about the delay to the ship that was to take her name across the sea. She went to Davidge to protest: “Can’t you hurry up my ship? If she isn’t launched soon I’m going to go mad.”
Davidge threw back his head and emitted a noise between laughter and profanity. He picked up a letter and flung it down.
“I’ve just got orders changing the specifications again. This is the third time, and the third time’s the charm; for now we’ve got to take out all we’ve put in, make a new set of drawings and a new set of castings and pretty blamed near tear down the whole ship and rebuild it.”
“In the name of Heaven, why?”
“In the name of hades, because we’ve got to get a herd of railroad locomotives to France, and sending them over in pieces won’t do. They want ’em ready to run. So the powers that be have ordered me to provide two hatchways240big enough to lower whole locomotives through, and pigeonholes in the hold big enough to carry them. As far as theMamiseis concerned, that means we’ve just about got to rub it out and do it over again. It’s a case of back to the mold-loft forMamise.”
“And about how much more delay will this mean?”
“Oh, about ninety days or thereabouts. If we’re lucky we’ll launch her by spring.”
This was almost worse than the death of theClara. That tragedy had been noble; it dealt a noble blow and woke the heart to a noble grief and courage. But deferment made the heart sick, and the brain and almost the stomach.
Davidge liked the disappointment no better than Mamise did, but he was used to it.
“And now aren’t you glad you’re not a ship-builder? How would you feel if you had got your wish to work in the yard and had turned your little velvet hands into a pair of nutmeg-graters by driving about ten thousand rivets into those plates, only to have to cut ’em all out again and drive ’em into an entirely new set of plates, knowing that maybe they’d have to come out another time and go back? How’d you like that?”
Mamise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.
Davidge went on:
“That’s a business man’s life, my dear––eternally making things that won’t sell, putting his soul and his capital and his preparation into a pile of stock that nobody will take off his hands. But he has to go right on, borrowing money and pledging the past for the future and never knowing whether his dreams will turn out to be dollars or––junk!”
Mamise realized for the first time the pathos, the higher drama of the manufacturer’s world, that world which poets and some other literary artists do not describe because they are too ignorant, too petty, too bookish. They sneer at the noble wordcommercialas if it were a reproach!
Mamise, however, looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to rise beyond a poetical height to the clouds of the practical.
“What will you do with all the workmen who are on that job?”
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Davidge grinned. “They’re announcing their monthly strike for higher wages––threatening to lay off the force. It’d serve ’em right to take ’em at their word for a while. But you simply can’t fight a labor union according to Queensbery rules, so I’ll give ’em the raise and put ’em on another ship.”
“And theMamisewill be idle and neglected for three months.”
“Just about.”
“The Germans couldn’t have done much worse by her, could they?”
“Not much.”
“I think I’ll call it a day and go home,” said Mamise.
“Better call it a quarter and go to New York or Palm Beach or somewhere where there’s a little gaiety.”
“Are you sick of seeing me round?”
“Since you won’t marry me––yes.”
Mamise sniffed at this and set her little desk in order, aligned the pencils in the tray, put the carbons back in the box and the rubber cover on the typewriter. Then she sank it into its well and put on her hat.
Davidge held her heavy coat for her and could not resist the opportunity to fold her into his arms. Just as his arms closed about her and he opened his lips to beg her not to desert him he saw over her shoulder the door opening.
He had barely time to release her and pretend to be still holding her coat when Miss Gabus entered. His elaborate guiltlessness confirmed her bitterest suspicions, and she crossed the room to deposit a sheaf of letters in Davidge’s “in” basket and gather up the letters in his “out” basket. She passed across the stage with an effect of absolute refrigeration, like one of Richard III’s ghosts.
Davidge was furious at Miss Gabus and himself. Mamise was furious at them both––partly for the awkwardness of the incident, partly for the failure of Davidge’s enterprise against her lips.
When Miss Gabus was gone the ecstatic momentum was lost. Davidge grumbled:
“Shall I see you to-morrow?”
“I don’t know,” said Mamise.
She gave him her hand. He pressed it in his two palms242and shook his head. She shook her head. They were both rebuking the bad behavior of the fates.
Mamise trudged homeward––or at least houseward. She was in another of her irresolute states, and irresolution is the most disappointing of all the moods to the irresolute ones and all the neighbors. It was irresolution that made “Hamlet” a five-act play, and only a Shakespeare could have kept him endurable.
Mamise was becoming unendurable to herself. When she got to her cottage she found it as dismal as an empty ice-box. When she had started the fire going she had nothing else to do. In sheer desperation she decided to answer a few letters. There was an old one from Polly Widdicombe. She read it again. It contained the usual invitation to come back to reason and Washington.
Just for something positive to do she resolved to go. There was a tonic in the mere act of decision. She wrote a letter. She felt that she could not wait so long as its answer would require. She resolved to send a telegram.
This meant hustling out into the cold again, but it was something to do, somewhere to go, some excuse for a hope.
Polly telegraphed:
Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal if you can.
Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal if you can.
Mamise showed Davidge the telegram. He was very plucky about letting her go. For her sake he was so glad that he concealed his own loneliness. That made her underestimate it. He confirmed her belief that he was glad to be rid of her by making a lark of her departure. He filled an old suit-case with coal and insisted on her taking it. The porter who lugged it along the platform at Washington gave Mamise a curious look. He supposed that this was one of those suit-cases full of bottled goods that were coming into Washington in such multitudes since the town had been decreed absolutely dry. He shook it and was surprised when he failed to hear the glug-glug of liquor.
But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of that other form of carbon which women wear in rings and necklaces. The whole country was underheated. To the243wheatless, meatless, sweetless days there were added the heatless months. Major Widdicombe took his breakfasts standing up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in bed, and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.
There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices of the Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the shops and theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country clubs were closed. Every device to save a lump of coal was put into legal effect so that the necessary war factories might run and the ships go over the sea. Soon there would be gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people would obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated by law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than one meat to one person. Grocers would be fined for selling too much sugar to a family. Placards, great billboards, and all the newspapers were filled with counsels to save, save, save, and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds. People grew depressed at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so little show of accomplishment.
American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics, for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no reserves worth the name. France and England were literally “all in.”
Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future. Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out now to confess––or rather to boast––that they had planned this triumph all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a German planet.