For a time Marie Louise had the solace of being busy and of nibbling
at the edge of great occasions. The nation was reconstituting its
whole life, and Washington was the capital of all the Allied peoples,
their brazen serpent and their promise of salvation. Almost everybody
was doing with his or her might what his or her hand found to do.
Repetition and contradiction of effort abounded; there was every
confusion of counsel and of action. But the Republic was gathering
itself for a mighty leap into the arena. For the first time women were
being not merely permitted, but pleaded with, to lend their aid.
Marie Louise rolled bandages at a Red Cross room presided over by a
pleasant widow, Mrs. Perry Merithew, with a son in the aviation, who
was forever needing bandages. Mamise tired of these, bought a car and
joined the Women's Motor Corps. She had a collision with a reckless
wretch named "Pet" Bettany, and resigned. She helped with big
festivals, toiled day and night at sweaters, and finally bought
herself a knitting-machine and spun out half a dozen pairs of socks a
day, by keeping a sweatshop pace for sweatshop hours. She was trying
to find a more useful job. The trouble was that everybody wanted to be
at something, to get into a uniform of some sort, to join the
universal mobilization.
She went out little of evenings, preferring to keep herself in
the seclusion of the Rosslyn home. Gradually her fears subsided
and she felt that her welcome was wearing through. She began to
look for a place to live. Washington was in a panic of rentals.
Apartments cost more than houses. A modest creature who had paid
seventy-five dollars a month for a little flat let it for five
hundred a month for the duration of the war. A gorgeous Sultana
who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment rented it
for a thousand dollars a month "for the duration." Marie Louise had
money enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would
buy.
She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices. She took
up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books on system and
efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.
Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an intermittent
fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was trying to do his bit, but
he was lost in the maelstrom swirling through the channels of official
life. He would come to town for a few days, wait about, fuming, and
return in disgust to his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism
that pulled him back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he
lost several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because
their hours clashed with Marie Louise's.
On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel an
invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero's. Little as he knew of the
eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the famous name of
Prothero. He had spoken with reverence always of her late husband, one
of the rebuilders of the American navy, a voice crying in the
wilderness for a revival of the ancient glories of the merchant
marine. Davidge had never met him or his widow. He felt that he could
not refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects to
the relict of his idol.
But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom everybody had heard
of, had heard of him. When he entered her door on the designated
evening his riddle was answered.
The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on the console
a little envelope which he proffered on his tray. The envelope was
about the size of those that new-born parents use to inclose the
proclamation of the advent of a new-born infant. The card inside
Davidge's envelope carried the legend, "Miss Webling."
The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced him. There
indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a majestic granddam in a
coronet of white hair.
Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it. She clasped his
and passed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a character:
"This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright."
Mrs. Prothero pressed his hand and kept it while she said: "It is
like Marie Louise to bring youth to cheer up an old crone like me."
Davidge muffed the opening horribly. Instead of saying something
brilliant about how young Mrs. Prothero looked, he said:
"Youth? I'm a hundred years old."
"You are!" Mrs. Prothero cried. "Then how old does that make me, in
the Lord's name--a million?"
Davidge could not even recover the foot he had put in it. By looking
foolish and keeping silent he barely saved himself from adding the
other foot. Mrs. Prothero smiled at his discomfiture.
"Don't worry. I'm too ancient to be caught by pretty speeches--or to
like the men who have 'em always ready."
She pressed his hand again and turned to welcome the financial
Cyclops, James Dyckman, and his huge wife, and Captain Fargeton, a
foreign military attaché with service chevrons and wound-chevrons and
a _croix de guerre_, and a wife, who had been Mildred Tait.
"All that and an American spouse!" said Davidge to Marie Louise.
"Have you never had an American spouse?" she asked, brazenly.
"Not one!" he confessed.
Major and Polly Widdicombe had come in with Marie Louise, and Davidge
drifted into their circle. The great room filled gradually with men of
past or future fame, and the poor women who were concerned in enduring
its acquisition.
Marie Louise was radiant in mood and queenly in attire. Davidge was
startled by the magnificence of her jewelry. Some of it was of old
workmanship, royal heirloomry. Her accent was decidedly English, yet
her race was undoubtedly American. The many things about her that had
puzzled him subconsciously began to clamor at least for the attention
of curiosity. He watched her making the best of herself, as a skilful
woman does when she is all dressed up in handsome scenery among
toplofty people.
Polly was describing the guests as they came in:
"That's Colonel Harvey Forbes. His name has been sent to Congress for
approval as a brigadier-general. I knew him in the midst of the
wildest scandal--remind me to tell you. He was only a captain then.
He'll probably end as a king or something. This war is certainly good
to some people."
Davidge watched Marie Louise studying the somber officer. He was a bit
jealous, shamed by his own civilian clothes. Suddenly Marie Louise's
smile at Polly's chatter stopped short, shriveled, then returned to
her face with a look of effort. Her muscles seemed to be determined
that her lips should not droop.
Davidge heard the butler announce:
"Lady Clifton-Wyatt and General Sir Hector Havendish."
Davidge wondered which of the two names could have so terrified
Marie Louise. Naturally he supposed that it was the man's. He turned
to study the officer in his British uniform. He saw a tall,
loose-jointed, jovial man of horsy look and carriage, and no hint of
mystery--one would say an intolerance of mystery.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt was equally amiable. She laughed and wrung the
hands of Mrs. Prothero. They were like two school-girls met in another
century.
Davidge noted that Marie Louise turned her back and listened with
extraordinary interest to Major Widdicombe's old story about an
Irishman who did or said something or other. Davidge heard Mrs.
Prothero say to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, with all the joy in the world:
"Who do you suppose is here but our Marie Louise?"
"Our Marie Louise?" Lady Clifton-Wyatt echoed, with a slight chill.
"Yes, Marie Louise Webling. It was at her house that I met you. Where
has the child got to? There she is."
Without raising her voice she focused it between Marie Louise's
shoulder-blades.
"Marie Louise, my dear!"
Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled
forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's limber
attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she
would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she
evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs.
Prothero's home; so she bowed and murmured:
"Ah, yis! How are you?"
To Davidge's amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting the rebuff
in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to
Davidge's confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of
cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas.
She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen
his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new
fleet.
Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had
passed through so many women's wars that she had learned to
ignore them even when--especially when--her drawing-room was the
battleground.
Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the
butler.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the
dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the
current at the elbow of the pretty young girl, said to Davidge:
"Are you taking me out or--"
It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he mumbled:
"I--I am sorry, but--er--Miss Webling--"
"Oh! Ah!" said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. It was a very short "Oh!" and a
very long "Ah!" a sort of gliding, crushing "Ah!" It went over him
like a tank, leaving him flat.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt reached Sir Hector's arm in a few strides and
unhooked him from the girl--also the girl from him. The girl was
grateful. Sir Hector was used to disappointments.
Davidge went to Marie Louise, who stood lonely and distraught. He felt
ashamed of his word "sorry" and hoped she hadn't heard it. Silently
and crudely he angled his arm, and she took it and went along with him
in a somnambulism.
Davidge, manlike, tried to cheer up his elbow-mate by a compliment. A
man's first aid to a woman in distress is a compliment or a few pats
of the hand. He said:
"This is the second big dinner you and I have attended. There were
bushels of flowers between us before, but I'd rather see your face
than a ton of roses."
The compliment fell out like a ton of coal. He did not like it at all.
She seemed not to have heard him, for she murmured:
"Yis, isn't it?"
Then, as the occultists say, he went into the silence. There is
nothing busier than a silence at a dinner. The effort to think with no
outlet in speech kept up such a roaring in his head that he could
hardly grasp what the rest were saying.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt sat at Davidge's right and kept invading his quiet
communion with Marie Louise by making remarks of the utmost
graciousness somehow fermented--like wine turned vinegar.
"I wonder if you remember when we met in London, Mr. Davidge? It was
just after the poor _Lusitania_ was sunk."
"So it was," said Davidge.
"It was at Sir Joseph Webling's. You knew he was dead, didn't you? Or
did you?"
"Yes, Miss Webling told me."
"Oh, did she! I was curious to know."
She cast a look past him at Marie Louise and saw that the girl was
about ready to make a scene. She smiled and deferred further torture.
Mrs. Prothero supervened. She had the beautiful theory that the way to
make her guests happy was to get them to talking about themselves. She
tried to draw Davidge out of his shell. But he talked about her
husband instead, and of the great work he had done for the navy. He
turned the tables of graciousness on her. Her nod recognized the
chivalry; her lips smiled with pride in her husband's praise; her eyes
glistened with an old regret made new. "He would have been useful
now," she sighed.
"He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new navy," said
Davidge. "The thing we haven't got and have got to get is a merchant
marine."
He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself. He was
still going strong when the dinner was finished.
Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women away with
her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone.
Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind
of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that
seemed to cry "Help!" He wondered what the feud could be that threw
Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the
thought that she had a yellow streak in her.