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Davidge pondered but did not speak.
With all the superiority of the Kultured German for the untutored Yankee, Nicky said, “Vell?”
Perhaps it was the V that did it. For Davidge, without a word, went for him.
317CHAPTER VI
The most tremendous explosives refuse to explode unless some detonator like fulminate of mercury is set off first. Each of us has his own fulminate, and the snap of a little cap of it brings on our cataclysm.
It was a pity, seeing how many Germans were alienated from their country by the series of its rulers’ crimes, and seeing how many German names were in the daily lists of our dead, that the word and the accent grew so hateful to the American people. It was a pity, but the Americans were not to blame if the very intonation of a Teutonism made their ears tingle.
Davidge prized life and had no suicidal inclinations or temptations. No imaginable crisis in his affairs could have convinced him to self-slaughter. He was brave, but cautious.
Even now, if Nicky Easton, poising the bombshell with its appalling threat, had murmured a sardonic “Well?” Davidge would probably have smiled, shrugged, and said:
“You’ve got the bead on me, partner. I’m yours.” He would have gone along as Nicky’s prisoner, waiting some better chance to recover his freedom.
But the mal-pronunciation of the shibboleth strikes deep centers of racial feeling and makes action spring faster than thought. The Sicilians at vespers asked the Frenchmen to pronounce “cheecheree,” and slew them when they said “sheesheree.” So Easton snapped a fulminate in Davidge when his Prussian tongue betrayed him into that impertinent, intolerable alien “Vell?”
Davidge was helpless in his own frenzy. He leaped.
Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant’s consideration. As a football-player hesitates a sixteenth of a second too long before he passes the ball or punts it, and so forfeits his opportunity, so Nicky Easton stood and stared for the length of time it takes the eyes to widen.
That was just too long for him and just long enough for318Davidge, who went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky’s grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge’s hundred-and-eighty-pound weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him collapsing backward, staggering, wavering, till he, too, went overboard.
Davidge hit the deck like a ball-player sliding for a base, and he went slithering to the edge. He would have followed Nicky over the hundred-foot steel precipice if Mamise had not flung herself on him and caught his heel. He was stopped with his right arm dangling out in space and his head at the very margin of the deck.
In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been panic-stricken at the sight of the bomb in Nicky’s hand, had been backing away slowly. He would have backed into the abyss if he had not struck a stanchion and clutched it desperately.
And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted on the huge blade of the ship’s anchor lying on a wharf waiting to be hoisted into place. The shell burst with an all-rending roar and sprayed rags of steel in every direction. The upward stream caught Nicky in midair and shattered him to shreds.
Nuddle’s whole back was obliterated and half a corpse fell forward, headless, on the deck. Davidge’s right arm was ripped from the shoulder and his hat vanished, all but the brim.
Mamise was untouched by the bombardment, but the downward rain of fragments tore her flesh as she lay sidelong.
The bomb, exploding in the open air, lost much of its efficiency, but the part of the ship nearest was crumpled like an old tomato-can that a boy has placed on a car track to be run over.
The crash with its reverberations threw the throngs about the speakers’ stands into various panics, some running away from the volcano, some toward it. Many people were knocked down and trampled.
Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They found Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging319as the torn arteries in Davidge’s shoulder spouted his life away. A quick application of first aid saved him until the surgeon attached to the shipyard could reach him.
Mamise’s injuries were painful and cruel, but not dangerous. Of Jake Nuddle there was not enough left to assure Larrey of his identification. Of Nicky Easton there was so little trace that the first searchers did not know that he had perished.
Davidge and Mamise were taken to the hospital, and when Davidge was restored to consciousness his first words were a groan of awful satisfaction:
“I got a German!”
When he learned that he had no longer a right arm he smiled again and muttered:
“It’s great to be wounded for your country.”
Which was a rather inelegant paraphrase of the classic “Dulce et decorum,” but caught its spirit admirably.
Of Jake Nuddle he knew nothing and forgot everything till some days later, when he was permitted to speak to Mamise, in whose welfare he was more interested than his own, and the story of whose unimportant wounds harrowed him more than his own.
Her voice came to him over the bedside telephone. After an exchange of the inevitable sympathies and regrets and tendernesses, Mamise sighed:
“Well, we’re luckier than poor Jake.”
“We are? What happened to him?”
“He was killed, horribly. His pitiful wife! Abbie has been here and she is inconsolable. He was her idol––not a very pretty one, but idols are not often pretty. It’s too terribly bad, isn’t it?”
Davidge’s bewildered silence was his epitaph for Jake. Even though he were dead, one could hardly praise him, though, now that he was dead, Davidge felt suddenly that he must have been indeed the first and the eternal victim of his own qualities.
Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from his cradle on––indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly kicked her to death before he was born.
Mamise had hated and loathed him, but she felt now that Abbie had been righter than she in loving the wretch who had been dowered with no beauty of soul or body.
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She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long silence, she asked:
“Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t say anything about poor Jake.”
“I––I don’t know what to say.”
He felt it hateful to withhold praise from the dead, and yet a kind of honesty forced him to oppose the habit of lauding all who have just died, since it cheapened the praise of the dead who deserve praise––or what we call “deserve.”
Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: “It was noble of poor Jake to give his life trying to save the ship, wasn’t it?”
“What’s that?” said Davidge, and she spoke with labored precision.
“I say that you and I, who were the only witnesses, feel sorry that poor Jake had to be killed in the struggle with Easton.”
“Oh, I see! Yes––yes,” said Davidge, understanding.
Mamise went on: “Mr. Larrey was here and he didn’t know who Jake was till I told him how he helped you try to disarm Nicky. It will be a fine thing for poor Abbie and her children to remember that, won’t it?”
Davidge’s heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the sweet purpose of Mamise’s falsehood.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I’ll give Abbie a pension on his account.”
“That’s beautiful of you!”
And so it was done. It pleased a sardonic fate to let Jake Nuddle pose in his tomb as the benefactor he had always pretended to be.
The operative, Larrey, had made many adverse reports against him, but in the blizzard of reports against hundreds of thousands of suspects that turned the Department of Justice files into a huge snowdrift these earlier accounts of Nuddle’s treasonable utterances and deeds were forgotten.
The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief space in the newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was all but forgotten.
When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call upon Davidge in her wheeled chair, she found him strangely321lacking in cordiality. She was bitterly hurt at first, until she gleaned from his manner that he was trying to remove himself gracefully from her heart because of his disability.
She amazed him by her sudden laughter. He was always slow to understand why his most solemn or angry humor gave her so much amusement.
While her nurse and his were talking at a little distance it pleased her to lean close to Davidge and tease him excruciatingly with a flirtatious manner.
“Before very long I’m going to take up that bet we made.”
“What bet?”
“That the next proposal would come from me. I’m going to propose the first of next week.”
“If you do, I’ll refuse you.”
Though she understood him perfectly, it pleased her to assume a motive he had never dreamed of.
“Oh, you mustn’t think that I’m going to be an invalid for life. The doctor says I’ll be as well as ever in a little while.”
Davidge could not see how he was to tell her that he didn’t mean that without telling her just what he did mean. In his tormented petulance he turned his back on her and groaned.
“Oh, go away and let me alone.”
She was laughing beyond the limits called ladylike as she began to wheel her chair toward the door. The nurse ran after her, asking:
“What on earth?”
Mamise assured, “Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven,” and would not explain the riddle.
322CHAPTER VII
Davidge was the modern ideal of an executive. He appeared never to do any work. He kept an empty desk and when he was away no one missed him. He would not use a roll-top desk, but sat at a flat table with nothing on it but a memorandum-pad, a calendar, an “in” and an “out” basket, both empty most of the time.
He had his work so organized that it went on in his absence as if he were there. He insisted that the executives of the departments should follow the same rule. If they were struck down in battle their places were automatically supplied as in the regular army.
So when Davidge went to the hospital the office machine went on as if he had gone to lunch.
Mamise called on him oftener than he had called on her. She left the hospital in a few days after the explosion, but she did not step into his office and run the corporation for him as a well-regulated heroine of recent fiction would have done. She did not feel that she knew enough. And she did not know enough. She kept to her job with the riveting-gang and expected to be discharged any day for lack of pull with the new boss.
But while she lasted she was one of the gang, and proud of it. She was neither masculine nor feminine, but human. As Vance Thompson has said, the lioness is a lion all but a little of the time, and so Mamise put off sexlessness with her overalls and put it on with her petticoats. She put off the coarseness at the same time as she scrubbed away the grime.
The shipyard was still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to her. She had not known what “pneumatic” or “hydraulic” really meant. The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing in the323Grimms’ stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air and water and their dumfounding transformations.
She learned that machinery can be as beautiful as any other human structure. Fools and art-snobs had said that machinery is ugly, and some of it is indeed nearly as ugly as some canvases, verses, and cathedrals. Other small-pates chattered of how the divine works of nature shamed the crudities of man. They spoke of the messages of the mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to give them praise without slandering man’s creations, for a God that could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a better God than one who could merely make a work of art himself.
But machinery has its messages, too. It enables the little cave-dweller to pulverize the mountain; to ship it to Mohammed in Medina; to pick it up and shoot it at his enemies.
Mamise, at any rate, was so enraptured by the fine art of machinery that when she saw a traveling-crane pick up a mass of steel and go down the track with it to its place, she thought that no poplar-tree was ever so graceful. And the rusty hulls of the new ships showing the sky through the steel lace of their rivetless sides were fairer than the sky.
Surgeons in steel operated on the battered epidermis of theMamiseand sewed her up again. It was slow work and it had all the discouraging influence of work done twice for one result. But the toil went on, and when at last Davidge left the hospital he was startled by the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost finished ship where he had left a patchwork of iron plates.
It thrilled him to be back at work again. The silence of the hospital had irked his soul. Here the air was full of the pneumatic riveter. They called it the gun that would win the war. The shipyard atmosphere was shattered all day long as if with machine-gun fire and the riveters were indeed firing at Germany. Every red-hot rivet was a bullet’s worth.
The cry grew louder for ships. The submarine was cutting down the world’s whole fleet by a third. In February the Germans sank theTuscania, loaded with American soldiers,324and 159 of them were lost. Uncle Sam tightened his lips and added theTuscania’sdead soldiers to theLusitania’smen and women and children on the invoice against Germany. He tightened his belt, too, and cut down his food for Europe’s sake. He loosened his purse-strings and poured out gold and bonds and war-savings stamps, borrowing, lending, and spending with the desperation of a gambler determined to break the bank.
While Davidge was still in the hospital the German offensive broke. It succeeded beyond the scope of the blackest prophecy. It threw the fear of hell into the stoutest hearts. All over the country people were putting pins in maps, always putting them farther back. Everybody talked strategy, and geography became the most dreadful of topics.
On March 29th Pershing threw what American troops were abroad into the general stock, gave them to Haig and Foch to use as they would.
On the same day the mysterious giant cannon of the Germans sent a shell into Paris, striking a church and killing seventy-five worshipers. And it was on a Good Friday that the men ofGottsent this harbinger of good-will.
The Germans began to talk of the end of Great Britain, the erasure of France, and the reduction of America to her proper place.
Spring came to the dismal world again with a sardonic smile. In Washington the flower-duel was renewed between the Embassy terrace and the Louise Home. The irises made a drive and the forsythia sent up its barrage. The wistaria and the magnolia counterattacked. The Senator took off his wig again to give official sanction to summer and to rub his bewildered head the better.
The roving breezes fluttered tragic newspapers everywhere––in the parks, on the streets, on the scaffolds of the buildings, along the tented lanes, and in the barrack-rooms.
This wind was a love-zephyr as of old. But the world was frosted with a tremendous fear. What if old England fell? Empires did fall. Nineveh, Babylon, and before them Ur and Nippur, and, after, Persia and Alexander’s Greece and Rome. Germany was making the great try to renew Rome’s sway; her Emperor called himself the Cæsar. What if he should succeed?
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Distraught by so many successes, the Germans grew frantic. They were diverted from one prize to another.
The British set their backs to the wall. The French repeated their Verdun watchword, “No thoroughfare,” and the Americans began to come up. The Allies were driven finally to what they had always realized to be necessary, but had never consented to––a unified command. They put all their destinies into the hands of Foch.
Instantly and melodramatically the omens changed. Foch could live up to his own motto now, “Attack, attack, attack.” He had been like a man gambling his last francs. Now he had word that unlimited funds were on the way from his Uncle Sam. He did not have to count his money over and over. He could squander it regardless.
In every direction he attacked, attacked, attacked. The stupefied world saw the German hordes checked, driven rearward, here, there, the other place.
Towns were redeemed, rivers regained, prisoners scooped up by the ten thousand. The pins began a great forward march along the maps. People fought for the privilege of placing them. Geography became the most fascinating sport ever known.
Davidge had come from the hospital minus one arm just as the bulletins changed from grave to gay. He was afraid now that the war would be over before his ships could share the glorious part that ships played in all this victory. The British had turned all their hulls to the American shores and the American troops were pouring into them in unbelievable floods.
Secrecy lost its military value. The best strategy that could be devised was to publish just how many Americans were landing in France.
General March would carry the news to Secretary Baker and he would scatter it broadcast through George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, using telegraph, wireless, telephone, cable, post-office, placard, courier.
Davidge had always said that the war would be over as soon as the Germans got the first real jolt. With them war was a business and they would withdraw from it the moment they foresaw a certain bankruptcy ahead.
But there was the war after the war to be considered––the326war for commerce, the postponed war with disgruntled labor and the impatient varieties of socialists and with the rabid Bolshevists frankly proclaiming their intention to destroy civilization as it stood.
Like a prudent skipper, Davidge began to trim his ship for the new storm that must follow the old. He took thought of the rivalries that would spring up inevitably between the late Allies, like brothers now, but doomed to turn upon one another with all the greater bitterness after war. For peace hath her wickedness no less renowned than war.
What would labor do when the spell of consecration to the war was gone and the pride of war wages must go before a fall? The time would come abruptly when the spectacle of employers begging men to work at any price would be changed to the spectacle of employers having no work for men––at any price.
The laborers would not surrender without a battle. They had tasted power and big money and they would not be lulled by economic explanations.
Mamise came upon Davidge one day in earnest converse with a faithful old toiler who had foreseen the same situation and wanted to know what his boss thought about it.
Iddings had worked as a mechanic all his life. He had worked hard, had lived sober, had turned his wages over to his wife, and spent them on his home and his children.
He was as good a man as could be found. Latterly he had been tormented by two things, the bitterness of increasing infirmities and dwindling power and the visions held out to him by Jake Nuddle and the disciples Jake had formed before he was taken away.
As Mamise came up in her overalls Iddings was saying:
“It ain’t right, boss, and you know it. When a man like me works as hard as I done and cuts out all the fun and the booze and then sees old age comin’ on and nothin’ saved to speak of and no chance to save more’n a few hundred dollars, whilst other men has millions––why, I’m readin’ the other day of a woman spendin’ eighty thousand dollars on a fur coat, and my old woman slavin’ like a horse all her life and goin’ round in a plush rag––I tell you it ain’t right and you can’t prove it is.”
“I’m not going to try to,” said Davidge. “I didn’t build327the world and I can’t change it much. I see nothing but injustice everywhere I look. It’s not only among men, but among animals and insects and plants. The weeds choke out the flowers; the wolves eat up the sheep unless the dogs fight the wolves; the gentle and the kind go under unless they’re mighty clever. They call it the survival of the fittest, but it’s really the survival of the fightingest.”
“That’s what I’m comin’ to believe,” said Iddings. “The workman will never get his rights unless he fights for ’em.”
“Never.”
“And if he wants to get rich he’s got to fight the rich.”
“No. He wants to make sure he’s fighting his real enemies and fighting with weapons that won’t be boomerangs.”
“I don’t get that last.”
“Look here, Iddings, there are a lot of damned fools filling workmen’s heads with insanity, telling them that their one hope of happiness is to drag down the rich, to blow up the factories or take control of ’em, to bankrupt the bankers and turn the government upside down. If they can’t get a majority at the polls they won’t pay any attention to the polls or the laws. They’ll butcher the police and assassinate the big men. But that game can’t win. It’s been tried again and again by discontented idiots who go out and kill instead of going out to work.
“You can’t get rich by robbing the rich and dividing up their money. If you took all that Rockefeller is said to have and divided it up among the citizens of the country you’d get four or five dollars apiece at most, and you’d soon lose that.
“Rockefeller started as a laboring-man at wages you wouldn’t look at to-day. The laboring-men alongside could have made just as much as he did if they’d a mind to. Somebody said he could have written Shakespeare’s plays if he had a mind to, and Lamb said, ‘Yes, if you’d a mind to.’ The thing seems to be to be born with a mind to and to cultivate a mind to.
“You take Rockefeller’s money away and he’ll make more while you’re fumbling with what you’ve got. Take Shakespeare’s plays away and he’ll write others while you’re scratching your head.
“Don’t let ’em fool you, Iddings, into believing that rich328men get rich by stealing. We all cheat more or less, but no man ever built up a big fortune by plain theft. Men make money by making it.
“Karl Marx, who wrote your ‘Workmen’s Bible,’ called capital a vampire. Well, there aren’t any vampires except in the movies.
“Speaking of vamping wealth, did you ever hear how I got where I am?––not that it’s so very far and not that I like to talk about myself––but just to show you how true your man Marx is.
“I was a working-man and worked hard. I put by a little out of what I made. Of nights I studied. I learned all ends of the ship-building business in a way. But I needed money to get free. It never occurred to me to claim somebody else’s money as mine. I thought the rich would help me to get rich if I helped them to get richer. My idea of getting capital was to go get it. I was a long time finding where there was any.
“By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast––a steamer had run aground and the hull was abandoned after they took out what machinery they could salvage. The hull stood up in the storms and the sand began to bury it. It would have been ‘dead capital’ then for sure.
“The timbers were sound, though, and I found I could buy it cheap. I put in all I had saved in all my life, eight thousand dollars, for the hull. I got a man to risk something with me.
“We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in six masts, and made a big schooner of her.
“She cost us sixty thousand dollars all told. Before she was ready to sail we sold her for a hundred and twenty thousand. The buyers made big money out of her. The schooner is carrying food now and giving employment to sailors.
“Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did ‘dead labor suck the life out of living labor,’ as Karl Marx says? You could do the same. You could if you would. There’s plenty of old hulls lying around on the sands of the world.”
Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.
“That’s all very fine,” he growled, “but where would I get my start? I got no eight thousand or anybody to lend me ten dollars.”
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“The banks will lend to men who will make money make money. It’s not the guarantee they want so much as inspiration. Pierpont Morgan said he lent on character, not on collateral.”
“Morgan, humph!”
“The trouble isn’t with Morgan, but with you. What do you do with your nights? Study? study? beat your brains for ideas? No, you go home, tired, play with the children, talk with the wife, smoke, go to bed. It’s a beautiful life, but it’s not a money-making life. You can’t make money by working eight hours a day for another man’s money. You’ve got to get out and find it or dig it up.
“That business with the old hull put me on my feet, put dreams in my head. I looked about for other chances, took some of them and wished I hadn’t. But I kept on trying. The war in Europe came. The world was crazy for ships. They couldn’t build ’em fast enough to keep ahead of the submarines. On the Great Lakes there was a big steamer not doing much work. I heard of her. I went up and saw her. The job was to get her to the ocean. I managed it on borrowed money, bought her, and brought her up the Saint Lawrence to the sea––and down to New York. I made a fortune on that deal. Then did I retire and smoke my pipe of peace? No. I looked for another chance.
“When our country went into the war she needed ships of her own. She had to have shipyards first to build ’em in. My lifelong ambition was to make ships from the keel-plate up. I looked for the best place to put a shipyard, picked on this spot because other people hadn’t found it. My partners and I got the land cheap because it was swamp. We worked out our plans, sitting up all night over blue-prints and studying how to save every possible penny and every possible waste motion.
“And now look at the swamp. It’s one of the prettiest yards in the world. The Germans sank myClara. Did I stop or go to making speeches about German vampires? No. I went on building.
“The Germans tried to get my next boat. I fought for her as I’ll fight the Germans, the I. W. W., the Bolshevists, or any other sneaking coyotes that try to destroy my property.
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“I lost this right arm trying to save that ship. And now that I’m crippled, am I asking for a pension or an admission to an old folks’ home? Am I passing the hat to you other workers? No. I’m as good as ever I was. I made my left arm learn my right arm’s business. If I lose my left arm next I’ll teach my feet to write. And if I lose those, by God! I’ll write with my teeth, or wigwag my ears.
“The trouble with you, Iddings, and the like of you is you brood over your troubles, instead of brooding over ways to improve yourself. You spend time and money on quack doctors. But I tell you, don’t fight your work or your boss. Fight nature, fight sleep, fight fatigue, fight the sky, fight despair, and if you want money hunt up a place where it’s to be found.”
If Iddings had had brains enough to understand all this he would not have been Iddings working by the day. His stubborn response was:
“Well, I’ll say the laboring-man is being bled by the capitalists and he’ll never get his rights till he grabs ’em.”
“And I’ll say be sure that you’re grabbing your rights and not grabbing your own throat.
“I’m for all the liberty in the world, for the dignity of labor, the voice of labor, the labor-union, the profit-sharing basis, the republic of labor. I think the workers ought to have a voice in running the work––all the share they can handle, all the control that won’t hurt the business. But the business has got to come first, for it’s business that makes comfort. I’ll let any man run this shop who can run it as well as I can or better.
“What I’m against is letting somebody run my business who can’t run his own. Talk won’t build ships, old man. And complaints and protests won’t build ships, or make any important money.
“Poor men are just as good as rich men and ought to have just the same rights, votes, privileges. But the first right a poor man ought to preserve is the right to become a rich man. Riches are beautiful things, Iddings, and they’re worth working for. And they’ve got to be worked for.
“A laboring-man is a man that labors, whether he labors for two dollars a day or a thousand; and a loafer is a loafer, whether he has millions or dimes. Well, I’ve talked longer331than I ever did before or ever will again. Do you believe anything I say?”
“No.”
Davidge had to laugh. “Well, Iddings, I’ve got to hand it to you for obstinacy; you’ve got an old mule skinned to death. But old mules can’t compete with race-horses. Balking and kicking won’t get you very far.”
He walked away, and Mamise went along. Davidge was in a somber mood.
“Poor old fellow, he’s got no self-starter, no genius, no ideas, and he’s doomed to be a drudge. It’s the rotten cruelty of the world that most people are born without enough get-up-and-get to bring them and their work together without a whistle and a time-clock and an overseer. What scheme could ever be invented to keep poor old Iddings up to the level of a Sutton or a Sutton down to his?”
Mamise had heard a vast amount of discontented talk among the men.
“There’s an awful lot of trouble brewing.”
“Trouble is no luxury to me,” said Davidge. “Blessed is he that expects trouble, for he shall get it. Wait till this war is over and then you’ll see a real war.”
“Shall we all get killed or starved?”
“Probably. But in the mean while we had better sail on and on and on. The storm will find us wherever we are, and there’s more danger close ashore than out at sea. Let’s make a tour of theMamiseand see how soon she’ll be ready to go overboard.”
332CHAPTER VIII
Nicky Easton’s attempt to assassinate the ship had failed, but the wounds he dealt her had retarded her so that she missed by many weeks the chance of being launched on the Fourth of July with the other ships that made the Big Splash on that holy day. The first boat took her dive at one minute after midnight and eighty-one ships followed her into the astonished sea.
While the damaged parts of theMamisewere remade, Davidge pushed the work on other portions of the ship’s anatomy, so that when at length she was ready for the dip she was farther advanced than steel ships usually are before they are first let into the sea.
Her upper works were well along, her funnel was in, and her mast and bridge. She looked from a distance like a ship that had run ashore.
There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the ships that grew alongside theMamise, and each gang strove to put its boat overboard in record time. The “Mamisers,” as they called themselves, fought against time and trouble to redeem her from the “jinx” that had set her back again and again. During the last few days the heat was furious and the hot plates made an inferno of the work. Then an icy rain set in. The workers would not stop for mean weather, hot or cold.
Mamise, the rivet-passer, stood to her task in a continual shower-bath. The furnace was sheltered, but the hot rivets must be passed across the rain curtain. Sutton urged her to lay off and give way to Snotty or somebody whose health didn’t matter a damn. Davidge ordered her home, but her pride in her sex and her zest for her ship kept her at work.
And then suddenly she sneezed!
She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken with a great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely333the little explosion of tickled surfaces or a forewarning of a slight cold. It was the alarum of the new Great Death, the ravening lion under the sheep’s wool of influenza.
The world that had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza swept the world with recurrent violences.
Men who had feared to go to the trenches were snatched from their offices and from their homes. Men who had tried in vain to get into the fight died in their beds. Women and children perished innumerably. Hearse-horses were overworked. The mysterious, invisible all-enemy did not spare the soldiers; it sought them in the dugouts, among the reserves, at the ports of embarkation and debarkation, at the training-camps. In the hospitals it slew the convalescent wounded and killed the nurses.
From America the influenza took more lives than the war itself.
It baffled science and carried off the doctors. Masks appeared and people in offices were dressed in gauze muzzles. In some of the cities the entire populace went with bandaged mouths, and a man who would steal a furtive puff of a cigarette stole up a quiet street and kept his eyes alert for the police.
Whole families were stricken down and brave women who dared the pestilence found homes where father, mother, and children lay writhing and starving in pain and delirium.
At the shipyard every precaution was taken, and Davidge fought the unseen hosts for his men and for their families. Mamise had worn herself down gadding the workmen’s row with medicines and victuals in her basket. And yet the death-roll mounted and strength was no protection.
In Washington and other cities the most desperate experiments in sanitation were attempted. Offices were closed or dismissed early. Stenographers took dictation in masks. It was forbidden to crowd the street-cars. All places of public assembly were closed, churches no less than theaters and moving-picture shows. It was as illegal to hold prayer-meetings as dances.
This was the supreme blow at religion. The preachers who had confessed that the Church had failed to meet the334war problems were dazed. Mankind had not recovered from the fact that the world had been made a hell by the German Emperor, who was the most pious of rulers and claimed to take his crown from God direct. The German Protestants and priests had used their pulpits for the propaganda of hate. The Catholic Emperor of Austria had aligned his priests. Catholic and Protestants fought for the Allies in the trenches, unfrocked or in their pulpits. The Bishop of London was booed as a slacker. The Pope wrung his hands and could not decide which way to turn. One British general frivolously put it, “I am afraid that the dear old Church has missed the bus this trip.”
All religions were split apart and, as Lincoln said of the Civil War, both sides sent up their prayers to the same God, demanding that He crush the enemy.
For all the good the Y. M. C. A. accomplished, it ended the war with the contempt of most of the soldiers. Individual clergymen won love and crosses of war, but as men, not as saints.
The abandoned world abandoned all its gods, and men fought men in the name of mankind.
Even against the plague the churchfolk were refused permission to pray together. Christian Scientists published full pages of advertising protesting against the horrid situation, but nobody heeded.
The ship of state lurched along through the mingled storms, mastless, rudderless, pilotless, priestless, and everybody wondered which would live the longer, the ship or the storm.
And then Mamise sneezed. And the tiny at-choo! frightened her to the soul of her soul. It frightened the riveting-crew as well. The plague had come among them.
“Drop them tongs and go home!” said Sutton.
“I’ve got to help finish my ship,” Mamise pleaded.
“Go home, I tell you.”
“But she’s to be launched day after to-morrow and I’ve got to christen her.”
“Go home or I’ll carry you,” said Sutton, and he advanced on her. She dropped her tongs and ran through the gusty rain, across the yard, out of the gate, and down the muddy paths as if a wolf pursued.
She flung into her cottage, lighted the fires, heated water,335drank a quart of it, took quinine, and crept into her bed. Her tremors shook the covers off. Sweat rained out of her pores and turned to ice-water with the following ague.
The doctor came. Sutton had gone for him and threatened to beat him up if he delayed. The doctor had nothing to give her but orders to stay in bed and wait. Davidge came, and Abbie, and they tried to pretend that they were not in a worse panic than Mamise.
There were no nurses to be spared and Abbie was installed. In spite of her malministrations or because of them, Mamise grew better. She stayed in bed all that day and the next, and when the morning of the launching dawned, she felt so well that Abbie could not prevent her from getting up and putting on her clothes.
She was to be woman again to-day and to wear the most fashionable gown in her wardrobe and the least masculine hat.
She felt a trifle giddy as she dressed, but she told Abbie that she never felt better. Her only alarm was the difficulty in hooking her frock at the waist. Abbie fought them together with all her might and main.
“If being a workman is going to take away my waistline, here’s where I quit work,” said Mamise. “As Mr. Dooley says, I’m a pathrite, but I’m no bigot.”
Davidge had told her to keep to her room. He had telephoned to Polly Widdicombe to come down and christen the ship. Polly was delayed and Davidge was frantic. In fact, the Widdicombe motor ran off the road into a slough of despond, and Polly did not arrive until after the ship was launched from the ways and the foolhardy Mamise was in the hospital.
When Davidge saw Mamise climbing the steps to the launching-platform he did not recognize her under her big hat till she paused for breath and looked up, counting the remaining steep steps and wondering if her tottering legs would negotiate the height.
He ran down and haled her up, scolding her with fury. He had been on the go all night, and he was raw with uneasiness.
“I’m all right,” Mamise pleaded. “I got caught in the jam at the gate and was nearly crushed. That’s all. It’s glorious up here and I’d rather die than miss it.”
336
It was a sight to see. The shipyard was massed with workmen and their families, and every roof was crowded. On a higher platform in the rear the reporters of the moving-picture newspapers were waiting with their cameras. On the roof of a low shed a military band was tootling merrily.
And the sky had relented of its rain. The day was a masterpiece of good weather. A brilliant throng mounted to the platform, an admiral, sea-captains and lieutenants, officers of the army, a Senator, Congressmen, judges, capitalists, the jubilant officers of the ship-building corporation. And Mamise was the queen of the day. She was the “sponsor” for the ship and her name stood out on both sides of the prow, high overhead where the launching-crew grinned down on her and called her by hernom de guerre, “Moll.”
The moving-picture men yelled at her and asked her to pose. She went to the rail and tried to smile, feeling as silly as a Sunday-school girl repeating a golden text, and looking it.
Once more she would appear in the Sunday supplements, and her childish confusion would make throngs in moving-picture theaters laugh with pleasant amusement. Mamise was news to-day.
The air was full of the hubbub of preparation. Underneath the upreared belly of the ship gnomes crouched, pounding the wedges in to lift the hull so that other gnomes could knock the shoring out.
There was a strange fascination in the racket of the shores falling over, the dull clatter of a vast bowling-alley after a ten-strike.
Painters were at work brushing over the spots where the shores had rested.
Down in the tanks inside the hull were a few luckless anonymities with search-lights, put there to watch for leaks from loose rivet-heads. They would be in the dark and see nothing of the festival. Always there has to be some one in the dark at such a time.
The men who would saw the holding-blocks stood ready, as solemn as clergymen. The cross-saws were at hand for their sacred office. The sawyers and the other workmen were overdoing their unconcern. Mamise caught sight of Sutton,337lounging in violent indifference, but giving himself away by the frenzy of his jaws worrying his quid and spurting tobacco juice in all directions.
There was reason, too, for uneasiness. Sometimes a ship would not start when the blocks were sawed through. There would be a long delay while hydraulic jacks were sought and put to work to force her forward. Such a delay had a superstitious meaning. Nobody liked a ship that was afraid of her element. They wanted an eagerness in her get-away. Or suppose she shot out too impetuously and listed on the ways, ripping the scaffolding to pieces like a whale thrashing a raft apart. Suppose she careened and stuck or rolled over in the mud. Such things had happened and might happen again. TheMamisehad suffered so many mishaps that the other ship crews called her a hoodoo.
At last the hour drew close. Davidge was a fanatic on schedules. He did not want his ship to be late to her engagement.
“She’s named after me, poor thing,” said Mamise. “She’s bound to be late.”
“She’ll be on time for once,” Davidge growled.
In the older days with the old-fashioned ships the boats had gone to the sea like brides with trousseaux complete. The launching-guests had made the journey with her; a dinner had been served aboard, and when the festivities were ended the waiting tugs had taken the new ship to the old sea for the honeymoon.
But nowadays only hulls were launched, as a rule. The mere husk was then brought to the equipping-dock to receive her engines and all her equipment.
TheMamisewas farther advanced, but she would have to tie up for sixty days at least. The carpenters had her furniture all ready and waiting, but she could not put forth under her own steam for two months more.
The more reason for impatience at any further delay. Davidge went along the launching-platform rails, like a captain on the bridge, eager to move out of the slip.
“Make ready!” he commanded. “Stand by! Where’s the bottle? Good Lord! Where’s the bottle?”
That precious quart of champagne was missing now. The bottle had been prepared by an eminent jeweler with silver338decoration and a silken net. The neck would be a cherished souvenir thereafter, made into a vase to hold flowers.
The bottle was found, a cable was lowered from aloft and the bottle fastened to it.
Davidge explained to Mamise for the tenth time just what she was to do. He gave the signal to the sawyers. The snarl of the teeth in the holding-blocks was lost in the noise of the band. The great whistle on the fabricating-plant split the air. The moving-picture camera-men cranked their machines. The last inches of the timbers that held the ship ashore were gnawed through. The sawyers said they could feel the ship straining. She wanted to get to her sea. They loved her for it.
Suddenly she was “sawed off.” She was moving. The rigid mountain was an avalanche of steel departing down a wooden hill.
Mamise stared, gasped, paralyzed with launch-fright. Davidge nudged her. She hurled the bottle at the vanishing keel. It broke with a loud report. The wine splashed everywhichway. Some of it spattered Mamise’s new gown.
Her muscles went to work in womanly fashion to brush off the stain.
When she looked up, ashamed of her homely misbehavior, she cried:
“O Lord! I forgot to say, ‘I christen theeMamise.’”
“Say it now,” said Davidge.
She shouted the words down the channel opening like an abyss as the vast hulk diminished toward the river. Far below she could see the water leap back from the shock of the new-comer. Great, circling ripples retreated outward. Waves fought and threw up bouquets of spume.
The chute smoked with the heat of the ship’s passage and a white cloud of steam flew up and followed her into the river.
She was launched, beautifully, perfectly. She sailed level. She was water-borne.
People were cheering, the band was pounding all out of time, every eye following the ship, the leader forgetting to lead.
Mamise wept and Davidge’s eyes were wet. Something surged in him like the throe of the river where the ship went in. It was good to have built a good ship.