Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their
cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off
the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the
alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists
to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none
stranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock
off work early.
Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife's prerogatives.
On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the
black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven
of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the
curtains, "S'em o'clock, please!" did not please Jake at all.
He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then
began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small
wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were
dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got
in each other's way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found
his wife's stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings
seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her
corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out
of it sputtering:
"That's your damned shimmy. Where's my damned shirt?"
Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left
the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had
breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the
Capitol. It inspired in Jake's heart no national reverence. He said to
his awestruck wife:
"There's where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet and agree
on their hold-ups. They're all the hirelings of the capitalists.
"They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They
didn't dare consult 'em. They knew the people wasn't in favor of no
such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and
them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that
wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States
joined the Allies and collected for 'em off Germany."
It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of
horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept
rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was
thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium,
the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British
dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed
on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage,
took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche
across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and
ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable,
immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there
was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate,
croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot
of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real working-men.
Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to him who has
the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its
ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what
he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not
feel, he grew maudlin:
"So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves and send 'em
off to the slaughter-house in France--all for money! Anything to grind
down the honest workman into the dust, no matter how many mothers'
hearts they break!"
Jake was one of those who never express sympathy for anybody except in
the course of a tirade against somebody else. He had small use for
wives, mothers, or children except as clubs to pound rich men with.
His wife, who knew him all too well, was not impressed by his
eloquence. Her typical answer to his typical tirade was, "I wonder how
on earth we're goin' to find Mamise."
Jake groaned at the anticlimax to his lofty flight, but he realized
that the main business before the house was what his wife propounded.
He remembered seeing an Information Bureau sign in the station. He had
learned from the newspaper in which he had seen Mamise's picture that
she was visiting Major Widdicombe. He had written the name down on the
tablets of his memory, and his first plan was to find Major
Widdicombe. Jake had a sort of wolfish cunning in tracing people he
wanted to meet. He could always find anybody who might lend him money.
He had mysterious difficulties in tracing some one who could give him
work.
He left his wife to simmer in the station while he set forth on a
scouting expedition. After much travel he found at last the office of
the Ordnance Department, in which Major Widdicombe toiled, and he
appeared at length at Major Widdicombe's desk.
Jake was cautious. He would not state his purpose. He hardly dared to
claim relationship with Miss Webling until he was positive that she
was his sister-in-law. Noting Jake's evasiveness, the Major discreetly
evaded the request for his guest's address. He would say no more
than:
"Miss Webling is coming down to lunch with me at the--that is with my
wife. I'll tell her you're looking for her; if she wants to meet you,
I'll tell you, if you come back here."
"All right, mucher bliged," said Jake. Baffled and without further
recourse, he left the Major's presence, since there seemed to be
nothing else to do. But once outside, he felt that there had been
something highly unsatisfactory about the parley. He decided to
imitate Mary's little lamb and to hang about the building till the
Major should appear. In an hour or two he was rewarded by seeing
Widdicombe leave the door and step into an automobile. Jake heard him
tell the driver, "The Shoreham."
Jake walked to the hotel and saw Marie Louise seated at a table by a
window. He recognized her by her picture and was duly triumphant. He
was ready to advance and demand recognition. Then he realized that he
could make no claim on her without his awful wife's corroboration. He
took a street-car back to the station and found his nominal helpmeet
sitting just where he had left her.
Abbie had bought no newspaper, book, or magazine to while away the
time with. She was not impatient of idleness. It was luxury enough
just not to be warshin' clo'es, cookin' vittles, or wrastlin' dishes.
She took a dreamy content in studying the majesty of the architecture,
but her interest in it was about that of a lizard basking on a fallen
column in a Greek peristyle. It was warm and spacious and nobody
disturbed her drowsy beatitude.
When Jake came and summoned her she rose like a rheumatic old
househound and obeyed her master's voice.
Jake gave her such a vote of confidence as was implied in letting her
lug the luggage. It was cheaper for her to carry it than for him to
store it in the parcel-room. It caused the fellow-passengers in the
street-car acute inconvenience, but Jake was superior to public
opinion of his wife. In such a homely guise did the fates approach
Miss Webling.