200
“I’m not half as angry as I’d like to be. Don’t you abominate ’em, too?”
“Oh yes––I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to––where they belong.”
This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for the Germans, and he added, “Amen!” with a little nervous reaction into uncouth laughter.
But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions, and to run among them like a frantic child.
Davidge’s next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.
Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship’s cargo would have relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian––what word or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?
He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky wilderness––old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of their mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles. The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned aloud:
“If they’d only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody––to anybody! But to pour it into the sea!”
He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:
“I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the fool ship.”
He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.
“The blithering idiot I’ve been! To go and work and work and work, and drive my men and all the machinery for months and months to make a ship and put in the engines and send it down and load it, and all for some”––a gesture expressed201his unspeakable thought––“of a German to blow it to hell and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!”
In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we all revolve around ourselves as well as our suns.
“What’s the use,” he maundered––“what’s the use of trying to do anything while they’re alive and at work right here in our country? They’re everywhere! They swarm like cockroaches out of every hole as soon as the light gets low! We’ve got to blister ’em all to death with rough-on-rats before we can build anything that will last. There’s no stopping them without wiping ’em off the earth.”
She did not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute fellowship to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to contempt for himself.
“It’s time I quit out of this and went to work with the army. It makes me sick to be here making ships for Germans to sink. The thing to do is to kill the Germans first and build the ships when the sea is safe for humanity. I’m ashamed of myself sitting in an office shooting with a telephone and giving out plans and contracts and paying wages to a gang of mechanics. It’s me for a rifle and a bayonet.”
Mamise had to oppose this:
“Who’s going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you when you get there if all the ship-builders turn soldier?”
“Let somebody else do it.”
“But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said that America could never put an army across or feed it if she got it there. If you go on strike you’ll prove the truth of that.”
Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes to hear his nobler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources a woman has. Mamise was speaking for him as well as for herself when she said:
“Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all the ships you would build. You said it was the greatest poem ever written, the idea of making ships faster than the Germans202could sink them. It was that that made me want to be a ship-builder. It was the first big ambition I ever had. And now you tell me it’s useless and foolish!”
He saw the point without further pressure.
“You’re right,” he said. “My job’s here. It would be selfish and showy to knock off this work and grab a gun. I’ll stick. It’s hard, though, to settle down here when everybody else is bound for France.”
Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not continue to argue a case that has already been won. She added only the warm personal note to help out the cold generality.
“There’s my ship to finish, you know. You couldn’t leave poorMamiseout there on the stocks unfinished.”
The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her. He needed her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and knew for the first time the feel of her body against his, the sweet compliance of her form to his embrace.
But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She was in one of those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism, that women were rising to more and more as a new religion. She was feeling terribly American, and, though she had no anger for him and saw no insult in his violence, she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and kissing. She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away, yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had saved him from himself and to himself. She had brought him back to his east again, and the morning is always wonderful.
She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he did not despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people were postponing everything beautiful and lovable “for the duration of the war.”
He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its rattlesnake clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers as he stammered:
“We’ve gone through this together, and you’ve helped me––I can’t tell you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go through a lot more trouble together. There’s plenty of it ahead.”
She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed his big hand again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:
“I hope so.”
203
Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the door with suspicious promptitude. Davidge said:
“Mr. Avery, please––and the others––all the others right away. Ask them to come here; and you might come back, Miss Gabus.”
Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers, gathered, wondering what was about to happen. Some of them came grinning, for when they had asked Miss Gabus what was up she had guessed: “I reckon he’s goin’ to announce his engagement.”
The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera chorus. Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting. Then he said:
“Folks, I’ve just had bad news. TheClara––they got her! The Germans got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She was two days out and going like a greyhound when she sank with all on board except six of the crew who got away in a life-boat and were picked up by a tramp.”
There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths, of incredulous protests.
Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:
“My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin’ to do about it?”
They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:
“We’ll build some more ships. And if they sink those we’ll––build some more.”
He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt, and so can steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and, thanks to Mamise, Davidge was recalled to himself, though he was too shrewd or too tactful to give her the credit for redeeming him.
His resolute words gave the office people back to their own characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each had something to say. One, “She was such a pretty boat!” another, “Was she insured, d’you suppose?” a third, a fourth, and the rest: “The poor engineer––and the sailors!” “All that work for nothin’!” “The money she cost!” “The Belgians could ’a’ used that wheat!” “Those Germans! Is there anything they won’t do?”
The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks. Davidge took up the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise renewed the cheerfulrap-rap-rapof her typewriter.
204
The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the yard. There was no lack of messengers to go among the men with the bad word that the first of the Davidge ships had been destroyed. It was a personal loss to nearly everybody, as it had been to Davidge, for nearly everybody had put some of his soul and some of his sweat into that slow and painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of the wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers was both loud and ferocious.
Jake Nuddle was one of the few who did not revile the German plague. He was not in the least excited over the dead sailors. They did not belong to his union. Besides, Jake did not love work or the things it made. He claimed to love the workers and the money they made.
He was tactless enough to say to a furious orator:
“Ah, what’s it to you? The more ships the Germans sink the more you got to build and the more they’ll have to pay you. If Davidge goes broke, so much the better. The sooner we bust these capitalists the sooner the workin’-man gets his rights.”
The orator retorted: “This is war-times. We got to make ships to win the war.”
Jake laughed. “Whose war is it? The capitalists’. You’re fightin’ for Morgan and Rockefeller to save their investments and to help ’em to grind you into the dirt. England and France and America are all land-grabbers. They’re no better ’n Germany.”
The workers wanted a scapegoat, and Jake unwittingly volunteered. They welcomed him with a bloodthirsty roar. They called him vigorous shipyard names and struck at him. He backed off. They followed. He made a crucial mistake; he whirled and ran. They ran after him. Some of them threw hammers and bolts. Some of these struck him as he fled. Workmen ahead of him were roused by the noise and headed him off.
He darted through an opening in the side of theMamise. The crowd followed him, chased him out on an upper deck.
“Throw him overboard! Kill him!” they shouted.
He took refuge behind Sutton the riveter, whose gun had made such noise that he had heard none of the clamor. Seeing Jake’s white face and the mark of a thrown monkey-wrench205on his brow, Sutton shut off the compressed air and confronted the pursuers. He was naked to the waist, and he had no weapon, but he held them at bay while he demanded:
“What’s the big idea? What you playin’? Puss in a corner? How many of yous guys does it take to lick this one gink?”
A burly patriot, who forgot that his name and his accent were Teutonic, roared:
“Der sneagin’ Sohn off a peach ain’t sorrydie Clarais by dose tam Chermansgesunken!”
“What!” Sutton howled. “TheClarasunk? Whatya mean––sunk?”
Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven thousands of rivets into the frame of the ship, and a little explosive had opened all the seams and ended her days! When at last he understood theClara’sfate and Nuddle’s comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:
“And you thought it was good business, did you? And these fellers was thinkin’ about lynchin’ you, was they? Well, they’re all wrong––they’re all wrong: we’d ought to save lynchin’ for real guys. What you need is somethin’ like––this!”
His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye. Jake in a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward; his head struck the steel deck, and his soul went out. When it came back he lay still for a while, pretending to be unconscious until the gang had dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton was making ready to begin riveting again. Then he picked himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:
“I’ll fix you for this, you––”
Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold. He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words––hunched back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow and disperse his enemies.
206CHAPTER VI
The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to conform. Then she paused.
On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers, it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.
Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a ship’s frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters at rest and in motion––stresses in still water, with cargo and without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile, compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions, oscillations, running aground––stresses that crumpled steel or scissored the rivets in two.
It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds; some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory, degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps.
People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as207little on their pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen emergency.
Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages.
He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at all.
Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted no steel in a ship’s hull or in any part of her that had not behaved well in the shop tests, in the various machines that put the metal under bending stress, cross-breaking, hammering, drifting, shearing, elongation, contraction, compression, deflection, tension, and torsion stresses. The best of the steels had their elastic limits; there was none that did not finally snap.
Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed according to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being only a tenth of its proved capacity. That ought to have been enough of a margin of safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.
People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand. A reference or two, a snap judgment based on first impressions, ushered a man or a woman into a place where weakness or malice could do incalculable harm. In every institution, as in every structure, these danger-spots exist. Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people, could only take the best he could get.
Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous ease and had contrived already the ruin of one ship. His program, which included all the others, had had a little setback, but he could easily regain his lost ground, for the mob had vented its rage against him and was appeased.
Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge’s shop and his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was208drifting toward a supreme stress that should try her inmost fiber. And at the moment she felt an almost unbearable strain in the petty decision of whether to go with the clerks or stop with the boss.
Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would say of her. It was Davidge that she was protecting. She did not want to have them talking about him––as if anything could have stopped them from that!
While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave him unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent so much time that the outer office was empty, anyway.
Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the door. Miss Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:
“Was you goin’ in?”
“No––oh no!” said Mamise. “I left something in my desk.”
She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried away, ostentatiously passing the other clerks as they struggled across the yard to the gate.
She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles. She was so desperate that she went to see her sister.
Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing buttons on the extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom she washed for in spite of Jake’s high earnings––from which she benefited no more than before. If Jake had come into a million, or shattered the world to bits and then rebuilt it nearer to his heart’s desire, he would not have had enough to make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or at least got Abbie no farther along the road to contentment or grace.
Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to theClara. She drew Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who were playing in the kitchen because it was full of the savor of the forthcoming supper.
“Abbie dear, have you heard the news?”
Abbie gasped, “Oh God, is anything happened to Jake––killed or arrested or anything?”
“No, no––butClara––theClara––”
“Clara who?”
“The ship, the first ship we built, she’s destroyed.”
209
“For the land’s sake! I want to know! Well, what you know about that!”
Abbie could not rise to very lofty heights of emotion or language over anything impersonal. She made hardly so much noise over this tragedy as a hen does over the delivery of an egg.
Mamise was distressed by her stolidity. She understood with regret why Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational companion. She hated to think well of Jake or ill of her sister, but one cannot help receiving impressions.
She did her best to stimulate Abbie to a decent warmth, but Abbie was as immune to such appeals as those people were who were still wondering why America went to war with Germany.
Abbie was entirely perfunctory in her responses to Mamise’s pictures of the atrocity. She grew really indignant when she looked at the clock and saw that Jake was late to dinner. She broke in on Mamise’s excitement with a distressful:
“And we got steak ’n’ cab’ge for supper.”
“I must hurry back to my own shack,” said Mamise, rising.
“You stay right where you are. You’re goin’ to eat with us.”
“Not to-night, thanks, dear.”
She kept no servant of her own. She enjoyed the circumstance of getting her meals. She was camping out in her shanty. To-night she wanted to be busy about something especially about a kitchen––the machine-shop of the woman who wants to be puttering at something.
She was dismally lonely, but she was not equal to a supper at Jake’s. She would have liked a few children of her own, but she was glad that she did not own the Nuddle children, especially the elder two.
The Nuddles had given three hostages to Fortune. Jake cared little whether Fortune kept the hostages or not, or whether or not she treated them as the Germans treated Belgian hostages.
Little Sister was the oldest of the trio completed by Little Brother and a middle-sized bear named Sam. Sis and Sam were juvenile anarchists born with those gifts of mischief, envy, indolence, and denunciation that Jake and the literary press-agents of the same spirit flattered as philosophy or even210as philanthropy. Little Brother was a quiet, patient gnome with quaint instincts of industry and accumulation. He was always at work at something. His mud-pie bakery was famous for two blocks. He gathered bright pebbles and shells. In the marble season he was a plutocrat in taws and agates. Being always busy, he always had time to do more things. He even volunteered to help his mother. When he got an occasional penny he hoarded it in hiding. He had need to, for Sam borrowed what he could and stole what he could not wheedle.
Little Brother was not stingy, but he saved; he bought his mother petty gifts once in a while when he had enough to pay for something.
Little Sister and Sam were capable in emotional crises of sympathy or hatred to express themselves volubly. Little Brother had no gifts of speech. He made gifts of pebbles or of money awkwardly, shyly, with few words. Mamise, as she tried to extricate herself from Abbie’s lassoing hospitality, paused in the door and studied the children, contrasting them with the Webling grandchildren who had been born with gold spoons in their mouths and somebody to take them out, fill them, and put them in again. But luxury seemed to make small difference in character.
She mused upon the three strange beings that had come into the world as a result of the chance union of Jake and Abbie. Without that they would never have existed and the world would have never known the difference, nor would they.
Sis and Sam were quarreling vigorously. Little Brother was silent upon the hearth. He had collected from the gutter many small stones and sticks. They were treasures to him and he was as important about them as a miser about his shekels. Again and again he counted them, taking a pleasure in their arithmetic. Already he was advanced in mathematics beyond the others and he loved to arrange his wealth for the sheer delight of arrangement; orderliness was an instinct with him already.
For a time Mamise noted how solemnly he kept at work, building a little stone house and painfully making it stand. He was a home-builder already.
Sam had paid no heed to the work. But, wondering what Mamise was looking at, he turned and saw his brother. A211grin stretched his mouth. Little Brother grew anxious. He knew that when something he had builded interested Sam its doom was close.
“Whass ’at?” said Sam.
“None yer business,” said Little Brother, as spunky as Belgium before the Kaiser.
“’S’ouse, ain’t it?”
“You lea’ me ’lone, now!”
“Where d’you git it at?”
“I built it.”
“Gimme’t!”
“You build you one for your own self now.”
“’At one’s good enough for me.”
“Maw! You make Sam lea’ my youse alone.”
Mrs. Nuddle moaned: “Sammie, don’t bother Little Brother now. You go on about your own business.”
Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with the side of his foot.
Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had darted at him and smacked him with violence. Instantly she was ashamed of herself. Sam began to rub his face and yowl:
“Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me, so she did.”
Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She had accepted too much of Mamise’s money to be very indignant, but she did rise to a wail:
“Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just couldn’t help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his brother’s house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he’ll be just as much of a nuisance as Jake and he’ll call it syndicalism or internationalism or something, just as Jake does.”
Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white story.
When Abbie gasped, “What on earth’s the matter?” he growled: “I bumped into a girder. Whatya s’pose?”
Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction,212but she knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the home champion.
She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was earning––or at least receiving––the family was eating high.
Little Sister told her brother Sam, “It’s a shame to waste good meat on his old black lamp.” And Sam’s regret was, “I wisht I’d ’a’ gave it to um.”
Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have time to be kind to them in particular.
Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made her mad.
To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of anxiety for him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:
“But, oh, did you hear of the destruction of theClara?”
“Yes, I heard of the destruction of theClara,” he echoed, with a sneer. “If I had my way the whole rotten fleet would follow her to the bottom of the ocean!”
“Why, Jake!” was Abbie’s best.
Jake went on: “And it will, too, or I’m a liar. The Germans will get them boats as fast as they build ’em.” He laughed. “I tell you them Kaiser-boys just eats ships.”
“But how were they able to destroy theClara?” Mamise demanded.
“Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk they just put a bomb into her.”
“But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?”
“Oh, we––they have ways.”
The little slip from “we” to “they” caught Mamise’s ear. Her first intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her amazement the first words that leaped were:
“Poor Abbie!”
Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from cloud to ground. Mamise’s whole thought was213from zig to zag in some such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.
“We––they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake must have been involved in the wreck of theClara. That means that he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!”
This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake grumbling:
“What ya mean––‘poor Abbie!’?”
Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was thinking––or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through Mamise, though Mamise did not know this––that is, he hoped she did not. And yet perhaps she did.
And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid thoughtlessness.
Jake, suspecting Mamise’s suspicion of him, was moved to justify himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant nothing to her bovine soul. She was thinking of something else, usually, throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess she was hunting through her work-basket for a good thread to patch Sam’s pants with.
Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was her first encounter with the abysmal hatred of which some of these loud lovers of mankind are capable. Jake’s theories had been merely absurd or annoying before, but now they grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed by an actual crime.
Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of214Jake or attack him. She despised him too well to argue with him, and she rose to go.
Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She would not be persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow and cooked herself a little meal of her own. She felt stained once more with vicarious guilt, and wondered what she had done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes of others.
She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself of Sir Joseph Webling’s guilt by keeping his secret. If she had gone to the British authorities with her first suspicion of Sir Joseph and Nicky Easton she would have escaped from sharing their guilt. She would have been branded as an informer, but only by the conspirators; and Sir Joseph himself and Lady Webling might have been saved from self-destruction.
Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again she had only suspicion for her guide. But in England she had been a foreigner and Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here she was in her own country, and she owed nothing to Jake Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to his wife as to his flag.
It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one clear duty was to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake. It was not a pretty duty, but it was a definite. She resolved that the first thing she did in the morning would be to go to Davidge with what facts she had. The resolution brought her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper with a sense of pleasant righteousness.
Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted a cigarette, and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned evening of spinsterial respectability. Then the door opened and Abbie walked in. Abbie did not think it sisterly to knock. She paused to register her formal protest against Mamise’s wicked addiction to tobacco.
“I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you’d break yourself of that horbul habbut.”
Mamise laughed tolerantly. “You were cooking cabbage when I was at your house. Why can’t I cook this vegetable?”
“But I wa’n’t cooking the cabbage in my face.”
“You were cooking it in mine. But let’s not argue about botany or ethics.”
215
Abbie was not aware of mentioning either of those things, but she had other matters to discuss. She dropped into a chair, sighing:
“Jake’s went out to telephone, and I thought I’d just run over for a few words. You see, I––”
“Where was Jake telephoning?”
“I d’know. He’s always long-distancin’ somebody. But what I come for––”
“Doesn’t it ever occur to you to wonder?”
“Long as it ain’t some woman––or if it is, as long as it’s long distance––why should I worry my head about it? The thing I wanted to speak of is––”
“Didn’t it rather make your blood run cold to hear Jake speak as he did of the lost ship?”
“Oh, I’m so used to his rantin’ it goes in one ear and out the other.”
“You’d better keep a little of it in your brain. I’m worried about your husband, even if you’re not, Abbie dear.”
“What call you got to worry?”
“I have a ghastly feeling that my brother-in-law is mixed up in the sinking of theClara.”
“Don’t be foolish!”
“I’m trying not to be. But do you remember the night I told you both that theClarawas going to Norfolk to take on her cargo? Well, he went out to get cigars, though he had a lot, and he let it slip that he had been talking on the long-distance telephone. When theClarais sunk, he is not surprised. He says, ‘We––they have ways.’ He prophesies the sinking of all the ships Mr. Davidge––”
Abbie seized this name as a weapon of self-defense and mate-defense.
“Oh, you’re speakin’ for Mr. Davidge now.”
“Perhaps. He’s my employer, and Jake’s, too. I feel under some obligations to him, even though Jake doesn’t. I feel some obligations to the United States, and Jake doesn’t. I distrust and abhor Germany, and Jake likes her as well as he does us. The background is perfect. When such crimes are being done as Germany keeps doing, condoning them is as bad as committing them.”
“Big words!” sniffed Abbie. “Can’t you talk United States?”
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“All right, my dear. I say that since Jake is glad theClarawas sunk and hopes that more ships will be sunk, he is as bad as the men that sank her. And what’s more, I have made up my mind that Jake helped to sink her, and that he works in this yard simply for a chance to sink more ships. Do you get those words of one syllable?”
“No,” said Abbie. Ideas of one syllable are as hard to grasp as words of many. “I don’t know what you’re drivin’ at a tall.”
“Poor Abbie!” sighed Mamise. “Dream on, if you want to. But I’m going to tell Mr. Davidge to keep a watch on Jake. I’m going to warn him that Jake is probably mixed up in the sinking of that beautiful ship he named after his mother.”
Even Abbie could not miss the frightful meaning of this. She was one of those who never trust experience, one of those who think that, in spite of all the horrible facts of the past, horrible things are impossible in the future. Higher types of the same mind had gone about saying that war was impossible, later insisting that it was impossible that the United States should be dragged into this war because it was so horrible, and next averring that since this war was so horrible there could never be another.
Even Abbie could imagine what would happen if Mamise denounced Jake as an accomplice in the sinking of the Clara. It would be so terrible that it must be impossible. The proof that Jake was innocent was the thought of what would happen to him and to her and their children if he were found guilty. She summed it all up in a phrase:
“Mamise, you’re plumb crazy!”
“I hope so, but I’m also crazy enough to put Mr. Davidge on his guard.”
“And have him fire Jake, or get him arrested?”
“Perhaps.”
“Ain’t you got any sense of decency or dooty a tall?”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“Well, I always knew a woman who’d smoke cigarettes would do anything.”
“I’ll do this.”
“O’ course you won’t; but if you did, I’d––why, I’d––why, I just don’t know what I’d do.”
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“Would you give up Jake?”
“Give up Jake? Divorce him or something?”
Mamise nodded.
Abbie gasped: “Why, you’re positively immor’l! Posi-tive-ly! He’s the father of my childern! I’ll stick to Jake through thick and thin.”
“Through treason and murder, too? You were an American, you know, before you ever met him. And I was an American before he became my brother-in-law. And I don’t intend to let him make me a partner in his guilt just because he made you give him a few children.”
“I won’t listen to another word,” cried Abbie. “You’re too indecent to talk to.” And she slammed the door after her.
“Poor Abbie!” said Mamise, and closed her book, rubbed the light out of her cigarette, and went to bed.
But not to sleep. Abbie had not argued well, but sometimes that is best for the arguments, for then the judge becomes their attorney. Mamise tossed on a grid of perplexities. Neither her mind nor her body could find comfort.
She rose early to escape her thoughts. It was a cold, raw morning, and Abbie came dashing through the drizzle with her shawl over her head and her cheeks besprent with tears and rain. She flung herself on Mamise and sobbed:
“I ain’t slep’ a wink all night. I been thinkin’ of Jake and the childern. I was mad at you last night, but I’m sorry for what I said. You’re my own sister––all I got in the world besides the three childern. And I’m all you got, and I know it ain’t in you to go and send the father o’ my childern to jail and ruin my life. I’ve had a hard life, and so’ve you, Mamise honey, but we got to be friends and love one another, for we’re all that’s left of our fambly, and it couldn’t be that one sister would drive the other to distraction and drag the family name in the mud. It couldn’t be, could it, Mamise? Tell me you was only teasin’ me! I didn’t mean what I said last night about you bein’ indecent, and you didn’t mean what you said about Jake, did you, Mamise? Say you didn’t, or I’ll just die right here.”
She had left the door open, and a gust of windy rain came lashing in. The world outside was cold and wet, and Abbie was warm and afraid and irresistibly pitiful.
Mamise could only hug and kiss her and say:
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“I’ll see! I’ll see!”
When people do not know what their chief mysteries, themselves, will do they say, “I’ll see.”
Mamise thought of Davidge, and she could not promise to leave him in ignorance of the menace imminent above him. But when at last she tore herself from Abbie’s clutching hands and hurried away to the office she looked back and saw Abbie out in the rain, staring after her in terror and shaking her head helplessly. She could not promise herself that she would tell Davidge.
219CHAPTER VII
She reached the office late in spite of her early start. Davidge had gone. He had gone to Pittsburgh to try to plead for more steel for more ships.
The head clerk told her this. He was in an ugly mood, sarcastic about Mamise’s tardiness, and bitter with the knowledge that all the work of building anotherClarahad to be carried through with its endless detail and the chance of the same futility. He was as sick about it as a Carlyle who must rewrite a burned-up history, an Audubon who must repaint all his pictures.
Davidge had left no good-by for Mamise. This hurt her. She wished that she had stopped to tell him good night the afternoon before.
In his prolonged absence Mamise wondered if he were really in Pittsburgh or in Washington with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She experienced the first luxury of jealousy; it was aggravated by alarm. She was left alone, a prey to the appeals of Abbie, who could not persuade her to promise silence.
But the next night Jake was gone. Abbie explained that he had been called out of town to a meeting of a committee of his benevolent insurance order. Mamise wondered and surmised.
Jake went to meet Nicky Easton and claim his pay for his share in the elimination of theClara. Nicky paid him so handsomely that Jake lost his head and imagined himself already a millionaire. Strangely, he did not at once set about dividing his wealth among his beloved “protelariat.” He made a royal progress from saloon to saloon, growing more and more haughty, and pounding on successive bars with a vigor that increased as his articulation effervesced. His secret would probably have bubbled out of him if he had not been so offensive that he was bounced out of every barroom before he had time to get to the explanation of his wealth. In one220“poor man’s club” he fell asleep and rolled off his chair to a comfortable berth among the spittoons.
Next morning Jake woke up with his head swollen and his purse vanished. He sought out Nicky and demanded another fee. Nicky laughed at his claim; but Jake grew threatening, and Nicky was frightened into offering him a chance to win another fortune by sinking another ship. He staked Jake to the fare for his return and promised to motor down some dark night and confer with him. Jake rolled home in state.
On the same train went a much interested sleuth who detached himself from the entourage of Nicky and picked up Jake.
Jake had attracted some attention when he first met Nicky in Washington, but the sadly overworked Department of Justice could not provide a squad of escorts for every German or pro-German suspect. Before the war was over the secret army under Mr. Bielaski reached a total of two hundred and fifty thousand, but the number of suspects reached into the millions. From Nicky Easton alone a dozen activities radiated; and studying him and his communicants was a slow and complex task.
Mr. Larrey decided that the best way to get a line on Jake would be to take a job alongside him and “watch his work.” It was the easiest thing in the world to get a job at Davidge’s shipyard; and it was another of the easiest things in the world to meet Jake, for Jake was eager to meet workmen, particularly workmen like Larrey, who would listen to reason, and take an interest in the gentle art of slowing up production. Larrey was all for sabotage.
One evening Jake invited him to his house for further development. On that evening Mamise dropped in. She did not recognize Larrey, but he remembered her perfectly.
He could hardly believe his camera eyes at first when he saw the great Miss Webling enter a workman’s shanty and accept Jake Nuddle’s introduction:
“Larrey, old scout, this is me sister-in-law. Mamise, shake hands with me pal Larrey.”
Larrey had been the first of her shadows in New York, but had been called off when she proved unprofitable and before she met Easton. And now he found her at work in a shipyard where strange things were happening! He was all afire221with the covey of spies he had flushed. His first impulse was to shoot off a wire in code to announce his discovery. Then he decided to work this gold-mine himself. It would be pleasanter to cultivate this pretty woman than Jake Nuddle, and she would probably fall for him like a thousand of brick. But when he invited himself to call on her her snub fell on him like a thousand of brick. She would not let him see her home, and he was furious till Jake explained, “She’s sweet on the boss.”
Larrey decided that he had better call on Davidge and tip him off to the past of his stenographer and get him to place her under observation.
The next day Davidge came back from his protracted journey. He had fought a winning battle for an allotment of steel. He was boyish with the renewal of battle ardor, and boyish in his greeting of Mamise. He made no bones of greeting her before all the clerks with a horribly embarrassing enthusiasm:
“Lord! but I’ve been homesick to see you!”
Miss Gabus was disgusted. Mamise was silly with confusion.
Those people who are always afraid of new customs have dreaded public life for women lest it should destroy modesty and rob them of the protection of guardians, duennas, and chaperons. But the world seems to have to have a certain amount of decency to get along on, at all, and provides for it among humans about as well as it provides for the protection of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish and some prosper.
The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in spasms of anxiety over other people’s souls would have given up Mamise and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them, their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances and crowds.
Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these anguishes were as futile as prayers for the222moon. Outside of office hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.
These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more than a mother’s vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls oryashmakswill infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good deal of time––and very dolefully.
Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy, the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing human was alien to her.
Davidge had spoken of marriage––had told her that he was a candidate for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.
When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man’s to crush. But fate provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood by, and the day’s work was waiting to be done.
Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter. She hammered out a devil’s tattoo on it, and he devoured estimates and commercial correspondence, while an aromatic haze enveloped them both as truly as if they had been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.
Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon hour made a noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity to cast an evil spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women have a wonderful pity for men that other women cultivate! Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling was: