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That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician’s “Abracadabra!”
Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her sister’s charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: “Abbie darling! My darling Abbie!” while Abbie wept: “Mamise! Oh, my poor little Mamise!”
A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim, round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife’s arms for a sister-in-law.
Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
“Mamise!” she said. “I want you should meet my husbin’.”
“I’m delighted!” said Mamise, before she saw her sister’s fate. She was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock without reeling.
Jake’s hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his cordiality was sincere as he growled:
“Pleaster meecher, Mamise.”
He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle, and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and piece it together.
Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked:
“Where are you living––here in Washington?”
“Laws, no!” said Abbie; and that reminded her of the bundles she had dropped at the sight of Mamise. They had played havoc with the sidewalk traffic, but she hurried to regain them.
Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody looking who counted. So he checked his wife with amazement at the preposterousness of her carrying bundles while Sir Walter Raleigh was at hand. He picked them up and brought159them to Marie Louise’s feet, disgusted at the stupid amazement of his wife, who did not have sense enough to conceal it. Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for noticing such things, but the eye is not to blame for what it can’t help seeing, nor the ear for what is forced upon it. She had a feeling that the first thing to do was to get her sister in out of the rain of glances from the passers-by.
“You must come to me at once,” she said. “I’ve just taken a house. I’ve got no servants in yet, and you’ll have to put up with it as it is.”
Abbie gasped at the “servants.” She noted the authority with which Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed to the bundles, which he hastened to seize.
Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile and showed it on her face. She saw many palaces on the way and expected Marie Louise to stop at any of them. When the car drew up at Marie Louise’s home Abbie was bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she found her dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie’s loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This distress caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.
Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent enough to take off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch himself out on a divan whose ulterior maroon did not disturb his repose in the least.
“This is what I call something like,” he said; and then, “And now, Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself.”
This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she evaded with a plea:
“I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling. How are you, and how long have you been married, and where do you live?”
“Goin’ on eight years come next October, and we got three childern. I been right poorly lately. Don’t seem to take as much interest in worshin’ as I useter.”
“Washing!” Marie Louise exclaimed. “You don’t wash, do you? That is, I mean to say––professionally?”
“Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too.”
Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred160thousand dollars, and her sister was a––washerwoman! It was intolerable. She glanced at Jake.
“But Mr.––your husband––”
“Oh, Jake, he works––off and on. But he ain’t got what you might call a hankerin’ for it. He can take work or let it alone. I can’t say as much for him when it comes to licker. Fact is, some the women say, ‘Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do you ever––’”
“Your name isn’t––it isn’t Nuddle, is it?” Marie Louise broke in.
“Sure it is. What did you think it was?”
So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer. That solved one of her day’s puzzles and solved it very tamely. So many of life’s mysteries, like so many of fiction’s, peter out at the end. They don’t sustain.
Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation that believed it a husband’s duty to support his wife by his own labor. The thought of her sister supporting a worthless husband by her own toil was odious. The first task was to get Jake to work. It was only natural that she should think of her own new mania.
She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said: “I have it! Why doesn’t your husband go in for ship-building?”
Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge had said of the need of men. She was sure that she could get him a splendid job, and that Mr. Davidge would do anything for her.
Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved, but a thought struck him, and he chewed it over. Among the gang of idealists he consorted with, or at least salooned with, the dearest ambition of all was to turn America’s dream of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare of failure. In order to secure “just recognition” for the workman they would cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor––that was their ideal of labor.
As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the shipyard Jake’s interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing, and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, to wreck launching-ways so that hulls161that escaped all other attacks would crack through and stick––it was a Golconda of opportunities for this modern conquistador. He could hardly keep his face straight till he heard Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor; and when he asked, “Do you think your gentleman friend, this man Davidge, would really give me a job?” she cried, with more enthusiasm than tact:
“I know he would. He’d give anybody a job. Besides, I’m going to take one myself. And, Abbie honey, what would you say to your becoming a ship-builder, too? It would be immensely easier and pleasanter than washing clothes.”
Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture of herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie peeked and whispered:
“It’s a man.”
“Do you suppose it’s that feller Davidge?” said Jake.
“No, it’s––it’s––somebody else,” said Marie Louise, who knew who it was without looking.
She was at her wit’s end now. Nicky Easton was at the door, and a sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she had not suspected were in the parlor.
162CHAPTER XI
If anything is anybody’s very own, it is surely his past, or hers––particularly hers. But Nicky Easton was bringing one of the most wretched chapters of Marie Louise’s past to her very door. She did not want to reopen it, especially not before her new-found family. One likes to have a few illusions left for these reunions. So she said:
“Abbie darling, would you forgive me if I saw this––person alone? Besides, you’ll be wanting to get settled in your room, if Mr.––Ja––your husband doesn’t mind taking your things up.”
Abbie had not been used to taking dismissals graciously. She had never been to court and been permitted to retire. Besides, people who know how to take an eviction gracefully usually know enough to get out before they are put out. But Abbie had to be pushed, and she went, heartbroken, disgraced, resentful. Jake sulked after her. They moved like a couple of old flea-bitten mongrels spoken to sharply.
And of course they stole back to the head of the stairs and listened.
Nicky had his face made up for a butler, or at least a maid. When he saw Marie Louise he had to undo his features, change his opening oration, and begin all over again.
“It is zhoo yourself, then,” he said.
“Yes. Come in, do. I have no servants yet.”
“Ah!” he cooed, encouraged at once.
She squelched his hopes. “My sister and her husband are here, however.”
This astounded him so that he spoke in two languages at once: “Your schwister! Since how long do you have a sester? And where did you get?”
“I have always had her, but we haven’t seen each other for years.”
He gasped, “Was Sie nicht sagen!”
163
“And if you wouldn’t mind not talking German––”
“Recht so. Excuse. Do I come in––no?”
She stepped back, and he went into the drawing-room. He smiled at what he saw, and was polite, if cynical.
“You rent foornished?”
“Yes.”
He waved her to a chair so that he might sit down.
“Was giebt’s neues––er––what is the noose?”
“I have none. What is yours?”
“You mean you do not wish to tell. If I should commence once, I should never stop. But we are both alife yet. That is always somethink. I was never so nearly not.”
Marie Louise could not withhold the protest:
“You saved yourself by betraying your friends.”
“Well, I telled––I told only what the English knew already. If they let me go for it, it was no use to kill everybody, should I?”
He was rather miserable about it, for he could see that she despised him more for being an informer than for having something to inform. He pleaded in extenuation:
“But I shall show how usefool I can be to my country. Those English shall be sorry to let me go, and my people glad. And so shall you.”
She studied him, and dreaded him, loathing his claim on her, longing to order him never to speak again to her, yet strangely interested in his future power for evil. The thought occurred to her that if she could learn his new schemes she might thwart them. That would be some atonement for what she had not prevented before. This inspiration brightened her so suddenly and gave such an eagerness to her manner that he saw the light and grew suspicious––a spy has to be, for he carries a weapon that has only one cartridge in it.
Marie Louise waited for him to explain his purpose till the suspense began to show; then she said, bluntly:
“What mischief are you up to now?”
“Mitschief––me?” he asked, all innocently.
“You said you wanted to see me.”
“I always want to see you. You interest––my eyes––my heart––”
“Please don’t.” She said it with the effect of slamming a door.
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She looked him full in the eyes angrily, then remembered her curiosity. He saw her gaze waver with a double motive.
It is strange how people can fence with their glances, as if they were emanations from the eyes instead of mere reflections of light back and forth. But however it is managed, this man and this woman played their stares like two foils feeling for an opening. At length he surrendered and resolved to appeal:
“How do you feel about––about us?”
“Who are us?”
“We Germans.”
“We are not Germans. I’m American.”
“Then England is your greater enemy than Germany.”
She wanted to smile at that, but she said:
“Perhaps.”
He pleaded for his cause. “America ought not to have joined the war against theVaterland. It is only a few Americans––bankers who lended money to England––who wish to fight us.”
Up-stairs Jake’s heart bounded. Here was a fellow-spirit. He listened for Marie Louise’s response; he caught the doubt in her tone. She could not stomach such an absurdity:
“Bosh!” she said.
It sounded like “Boche!” And Nicky flushed.
“You have been in this Washington town too long. I think I shall go now.”
Marie Louise made no objection. She had not found out what he was up to, but she was sick of duplicity, sick of the sight of him and all he stood for. She did not even ask him to come again. She went to the door with him and stood there a moment, long enough for the man who was shadowing Nicky to identify her. She watched Nicky go and hoped that she had seen the last of him. But up-stairs the great heart of Jake Nuddle was seething with excitement. He ran to the front window, caught a glimpse of Nicky, and hurried back down the stairs.
Abbie called out, “Where you goin’?”
Jake did not answer such a meddlesome question, but he said to Marie Louise, as he brushed past her on the stairs:
“I’m going to the drug-store to git me some cigars.”
Nicky paused on the curb, looking for a cab. He had dismissed his own, hoping to spend a long while with Marie165Louise. He saw that he was not likely to pick up a cab in such a side-street, and so he walked on briskly.
He was furious with Marie Louise. He had had hopes of her, and she had fooled him. These Americans were no longer dependable.
And then he heard footsteps on the walk, quick footsteps that spelled hurry. Nicky drew aside to let the speeder pass; but instead he heard a constabular “Hay!” and his shoulder-blades winced.
It was only Jake Nuddle. Jake had no newspaper to sell, but he had an idea for a collaboration which would bring him some of that easy money the Germans were squandering like drunken sailors.
“You was just talkin’ to my sister-in-law,” said Jake.
“Ah, you are then the brother of Marie Louise?”
“Yep, and I couldn’t help hearin’ a little of what passed between you.”
Jake’s slyness had a detective-like air in Nicky’s anxious eyes. He warned himself to be on guard. Jake said:
“I’m for Germany unanimous. I think it’s a rotten shame for America to go into this war. And some of us Americans are sayin’ we won’t stand for it. We don’t own no Congersmen; we’re only the protelarriat, as the feller says; but we’re goin’ to put this country on the bum, and that’s what old Kaiser Bill wants we should do, or I miss my guess, hay?”
Nicky was cautious:
“How do you propose to help the All Highest?”
“Sabotodge.”
“You interest me,” said Nicky.
They had come to one of the circles that moon the plan of Washington. Nicky motioned Jake to a bench, where they could command the approach and be, like good children, seen and not heard. Jake outlined his plan.
When Nicky Easton had rung Marie Louise’s bell he had not imagined how much help Marie Louise would render him in giving him the precious privilege of meeting her unprepossessing brother-in-law; nor had she dreamed what peril she was preparing for Davidge in planning to secure for him and his shipyard the services of this same Jake, as lazy and as amiable as any side-winder rattlesnake that ever basked in the sunlit sand.
BOOK IV
AT THE SHIPYARD
166There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral majesty.
There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral majesty.
167CHAPTER I
Davidge despised a man who broke his contracts. He broke one with himself and despised himself. He broke his contract to ignore the existence of Marie Louise. The next time he came to Washington he sought her out. He called up the Widdicombe home and learned that she had moved. She had no telephone yet, for it took a vast amount of time to get any but a governmental telephone installed. So he noted her address, and after some hesitation decided to call. If she did not want to see him, her butler could tell him that she was out.
He called. Marie Louise had tried in vain to get in servants who would stay. Abbie talked to them familiarly––and so did Jake. The virtuous ones left because of Jake, and the others left because of Abbie.
So Abbie went to the door when Davidge called. He supposed that the butler was having a day off and the cook was answering the bell. He offered his card to Abbie.
She wiped her hand on her apron and took it, then handed it back to him, saying:
“You’ll have to read it. I ain’t my specs.”
Davidge said, “Please ask Miss Webling if she can see Mr. Davidge.”
“You’re not Mr. Davidge!” Abbie gasped, remembering the importance Marie Louise gave him.
“Yes,” said Davidge, with proper modesty.
“Well, I want to know!”
Abbie wiped her hand again and thrust it forward, seizing his questioning fingers in a practised clench, and saying, “Come right on in and seddown.” She haled the befuddled Davidge to a chair and regarded him with beaming eyes. He regarded her with the eyes of astonishment––and the ears, too, for the amazing servant, forever wiping her hands, went to the stairs and shrieked:
168
“Mamee-eese! Oh, Ma-mee-uz! Mist’ Davidge is shere.”
Poor Mamise! She had to come down upon such a scene, and without having had any chance to break the news that she had a sister she had to introduce the sister. She had no chance to explain her till a fortunate whiff of burning pastry led Abbie to groan, “My Lord, them pies!” and flee.
If ever Marie Louise had been guilty of snobbery, she was doing penance for it now. She was too loyal to what her family ought to have been and was not to apologize for Abbie, but she suffered in a social purgatory.
Worse yet, she had to ask Davidge to give her brother-in-law a job. And Davidge said he would. He said it before he saw Jake. And when he saw him, though he did not like him, he did not guess what treachery the fellow planned. He invited him to come to the shipyard––by train.
He invited Mamise to ride thither in her own car the next day to see his laboratory for ships, never dreaming that the German menace was already planning its destruction.
Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in perplexities that one question and one answer would put an end to. In real life we incessantly dread to ask the answers to conundrums that we cannot solve, and persist in misery for lack of a little frankness.
For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a torment. So stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter! Yet he was unable to bring himself to the point of solving his curiosity. The car had covered forty miles, perhaps, while his thoughts ran back and forth, lacing the road like a dog accompanying a carriage. A mental speedometer would have run up a hundred miles before he made the plunge and popped the subject.
“Mamise is an unusual name,” he remarked.
Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that his long silence had been devoted to her.
“Like it?” she asked.
“You bet.” The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and made her laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred yards of road that went up and down and up and down in huge billows. Then he broke out again:
“It’s an unusual name.”
169
She laughed patiently. “So I’ve heard.”
The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.
“I only knew one other––er––Mamise.”
This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique. The chill woods seemed to be rather glum about it, too. The road abandoned them and flung into a sun-bathed plain.
“Really? You really knew another––er––Mamise?”
“Yes. Years ago.”
“Was she nice?”
“Very.”
“Oh!” She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped across a loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some jealousy she asked, “What was she like?”
“You.”
“That’s odd.” A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard glided by, reverting to oblivion. “Tell me about her.”
A big motor charged past so fast that the passengers were only blurs, a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence.
“It was funny,” said Davidge. “I was younger than I am. I went to a show one night. A musical team played that everlasting ‘Poet and Peasant’ on the xylophones. They played nearly everything on nearly everything––same old stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jokes by the same fool clown and the solemn dubs. But they had a girl with ’em––a young thing. She didn’t play very well. She had a way with her, though––seemed kind of disgusted with life and the rest of the troupe and the audience. And she had a right to be disgusted, for she was as pretty as––I don’t know what. She was just beautiful––slim and limber and long––what you might imagine a nymph would look like if she got loose in a music-hall.
“I was crazy about her. If I could ever have written a poem about anybody, it would have been about her. She struck me as something sort of––well, divine. She wore the usual, and not much of it––low neck, bare arms, and––tights. But I kind of revered her; she was so dog-on pretty.
170
“When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan for true. I couldn’t rest till I saw the manager and asked him to take me back and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty grin and said he didn’t run that kind of a theater, and I said I’d knock his face off if he thought I thought he did. Well, he gave in finally and took me back. I fell down the side-aisle steps and sprawled along the back of the boxes and stumbled up the steps to the stage.
“And then I met Mamise––that was her name on the program––Mamise. She was pretty and young as ever, but she wasn’t a nymph any longer. She was just a young, painted thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was feeding a big monkey––a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a bicycle and smoking a cigar––getting ready to go on the stage.
“It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful, that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said, ‘Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.’ She looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me, and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in the big electric lights.
“She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I agreed with her then––and since. She said, ‘Much obliged’ in a contemptuous contralto and––and turned to the other monkey.
“The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric lights in my––my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She may be dead now.
“It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came along she––well, as she didn’t, she must have been a good girl, don’t you suppose?”
The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and171stacks of corn, with pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.
“What do you call a good girl?” she asked.
“That’s a hard question to answer nowadays.”
“Why nowadays?”
“Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas of girls are so much more––complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said, that’s my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can you forgive her for wearing your name?”
“I could forgive that Mamise anything,” she sighed. “But this Mamise I can’t forgive at all.”
This puzzled him. “I don’t quite get that.”
She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what helpless writers call “a shady dell”; its tenderness won from him a timid confession.
“You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other.”
“Somehow we are each other.”
He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance from the road. She was blushing.
He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, “It’s a small world, after all.” He nearly swung to the other extreme. “Well, I’ll be––” He settled like a dying pendulum on, “Well––well!” They both laughed, and he put out his hand. “Pleased to meet you again.”
She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.
The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine stopped. The car sailed softly.
He was eager for news of the years between then and now. It was so wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the working of such social machinery. He urged:
“Tell me all about yourself.”
“No, thanks.”
“But what happened to you after I saw you? You don’t remember me, of course.”
172
“I remember the monkey.”
They both laughed at the unconscious brutality of this. He turned solemn and asked:
“You mean that so many men came back to call on you?”
“No, not so many––too many, but not many. But––well, the monkey was more unusual, I suppose. He traveled with us several weeks. He was very jealous. He had a fight with a big trained dog that I petted once. They nearly killed each other before they could be separated. And such noises as they made! I can hear them yet. The manager of the monkey wanted to marry me. I was unhappy with my team, but I hated that man––he was such a cruel beast with the monkey that supported him. He’d have beaten me, too, I suppose, and made me support him.”
Davidge sighed with relief as if her escape had been just a moment before instead of years ago.
“Lord! I’m glad you didn’t marry him! But tell me what did happen after I saw you.”
The road led them into a sizable town, street-car tracks, bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen’s little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, and the country again.
Davidge noted that she had not answered his question. He repeated it:
“What happened after you and the monkey-trainer parted?”
“Oh, years later I was in Berlin with a team called the Musical Mokes, and Sir Joseph and Lady Webling saw me and thought I looked like their daughter, and they adopted me––that’s all.”
She had grown a bit weary of her autobiography. Abbie had made her tell it over and over, but had tried in vain to find out what went on between her stage-beginnings and her last appearance in Berlin.
Davidge was fascinated by her careless summary of such great events; for to one in love, all biography of the beloved becomes important history. But having seen her as a member of Sir Joseph’s household, he was more interested in the interregnum.
173
“But between your reaching Berlin and the time I saw you what happened?”
“That’s my business.”
She saw him wince at the abrupt discourtesy of this. She apologized:
“I don’t mean to be rude, but––well, it wouldn’t interest you.”
“Oh yes, it would. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but––”
“But––”
“Oh, nothing!”
“You mean you’ll think that if I don’t tell you it’s because I’m ashamed to.”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“Oh yes, at all. Well, what if I were?”
“I can’t imagine your having done anything to be ashamed of.”
“O Lord! Am I as stupid as that comes to?”
“No! But I mean, you couldn’t have done anything to be really ashamed of.”
“That’s what I mean. I’ve done numberless things I’d give my right arm not to have done.”
“I mean really wicked things.”
“Such as––”
“Oh––well, I mean being bad.”
“Woman-bad or man-bad?”
“Bad for a woman.”
“So what’s bad for one is not bad for another.”
“Well, not exactly, but there is a difference.”
“If I told you that I had been very, very wicked in those mysterious years, would it seem important to you?”
“Of course! Horribly! It couldn’t help it, if a man cared much for a woman.”
“And if a woman cared a lot for a man, ought it to make a difference what he had done before he met her?”
“Well, of course––but that’s different.”
“Why?”
“Oh, because it is.”
“Men say ‘Because!’ too, I see.”
“It’s just shorthand with us. It means you know it so well there’s no need of explaining.”
174
“Oh! Well, if you––I say,ifyou were very much in love with me––”
“Which I––”
“Don’t be odiously polite. I’m arguing, not fishing. If you were deeply in love with me, would it make a good deal of difference to you if several years ago I had been––oh, loose?”
“It would break my heart.”
Marie Louise liked him the better for this, but she held to her argument.
“All right. Now, still supposing that we loved each other, ought I to inquire of you if the man of my possible choice had been perfectly––well, spotless, all that time? Ought I expect that he was saving himself up for me, feeling himself engaged to me, you might say, long before he met me, and keeping perfectly true to his future fiancée––ought I to expect that?”
He flushed a little as he mumbled:
“Hardly!”
She laughed a trifle bitterly:
“So we’re there already?”
“Where?”
“At the double standard. What’s crime for the goose is pastime for the gander.”
He did not intend to give up man’s ancient prerogative.
“Well, it’s better to have almost any standard than none, isn’t it?”
“I wonder.”
“The single standard is better than the sixteen to one––silver for men and gold for women.”
“Perhaps! But you men seem to believe in a sixteen to none. Mind you, I’m not saying I’ve been bad.”
“I knew you couldn’t have been.”
“Oh yes, I could have been––I’m not saying I wasn’t. I’m not saying anything at all. I’m saying that it’s nobody’s business but my own.”
“Even your future husband has no right to know?”
“None whatever. He has the least right of all, and he’d better not try to find out.”
“You women are changing things!”
“We have to, if we’re going to live among men. When you’re in Rome––”
175
“You’re going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?”
“We’ve always done that more or less, and nobody ever could stop us, from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained that with all our modern science we hadn’t invented one new deadly sin. We go on using the same old seven––well, indecencies. It will be the same with women. It’s bound to be. You can’t keep women unfree. You’ve simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and it’s dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed circus to-day.
“When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social success, as the case might be. She’ll go on doing much the same––just as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others go right along about their business, whether it’s in a bank, a church, a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.
“But in the new marriage––for marriage is really changing, though the marrying people are the same old folks––in the new marriage a man must do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better or worse and no questions asked.”
He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with. “In other words, we’ll take our women as is.”
“That’s the expression––as is. A man will take his sweetheart ‘as is’ or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she’ll get along somehow.”
“The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?”
“That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one, and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old times and the Middle Ages and nowadays, and there’ll be all kinds forever. But we’re wrangling176like a pair of lovers instead of getting along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances.”
“Aren’t we going to be more than that?”
“I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I’m not asking for a job as your wife.”
“You can have it.”
“Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the world and can support you in the style you’re accustomed to, I may come and ask for your hand.”
Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did not often argue abstrusely, and she was already fagged out mentally. She broke off the debate.
“Now let’s think of something else, if you don’t mind.”
They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of her and his second.
In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached the town where his shipyard lay.
177CHAPTER II
From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess of land and riverscape––a large steel shed, a bewilderment of scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty water.
A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the neighborhood were numbers of workmen’s huts––some finished, and long rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of raw biscuits.
She saw it all as it was, with a stranger’s eyes. Davidge saw it with the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly accepting future possibilities as realities.
Davidge said, with repressed pride:
“Well, thar she blows!”
“What?”
“My shipyard!” This with depressed pride.
“Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!” This with forced enthusiasm.
“You don’t like it,” he groaned.
“I’m crazy about it.”
“If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and weeds and mud-holes and sluices you’d appreciate what we’ve reclaimed and the work that has been done.”
The motor pitched down a badly bruised road.
“Where’s the ship that’s nearly done––your mother’s ship?”
“Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding.”
“Don’t tell me there’s a ship in there!”
“Yep, and she’s just bursting to come out.”
They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if a bottle of beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough to blow off the froth would blow him over.
Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the178ship that Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did not believe Marie Louise ready to understand it.
“Let’s begin at the beginning,” he said. “See those railroad tracks over there? Well, that’s where the timber comes from the forests and the steel from the mills. Now we’ll see what happens to ’em in the shop.”
He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it across the long room like a captured beetle.
“Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It’s our dressmaking-shop. We lay down the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact size, and then make templates of wood to match––those are the patterns. It’s something like making a gown, I suppose.”
“I see,” said Marie Louise. “Then you fit the dress together out in the yard.”
“Exactly,” said Davidge. “You’ve mastered the whole thing already. It’s a long climb up there. Will you try it?”
“Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-’ems first.”
She watched the men at work, each group about its own machine, like priests at their various altars. Davidge explained to her the cruncher that manicured thick plates of steel sheets as if they were finger-nails, or beveled their edges; the puncher that needled rivet-holes through them as if they were silk, the ingenious Lysholm tables with rollers for tops.
Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop, understanding nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden to touch anything. In her ignorance of technical matters, the simplest device was miraculous. The whole place was a vast laboratory of mysteries and magic.
There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness, another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and so did she, but embarrassment caused a common silence.