CHAPTER 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_!"

"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.

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 the _Vaterland_. 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 Marie Louise. 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

[Illustration: There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It

had a cathedral majesty.]

CHAPTER 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:

"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."

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.

"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 and stacks 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."

"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.

"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."

"Oh! Well, if you--I say, _if_ you 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--"

"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 wrangling like 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.

CHAPTER 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 the ship 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.

On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established

they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to

make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and

coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of

people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction.

Marie Louise's response to the mood of the place was conversion, a

passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments

of toil and wield the--she did not even know the names of the tools.

She only knew that they were sacred implements.

She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this

world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old

space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to

be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation.

As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting

which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh

intolerable staccato.

Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull

they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution

across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the

ship.

In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening

in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against

reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman

velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own

inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.

"That's the great Sutton," Davidge remarked, presently. "He's our

prima donna. He's the champion riveter of this part of the country.

Like to meet him?"

Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to

the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the

muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.

Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn.

Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the

impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere

manager.

Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:

"Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling."

Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion

confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his

muscles a little tauter.

Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a

rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared

not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked,

stupidly:

"So that's a riveter?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sutton confessed, "this is a riveter."

"Oh!" said Marie Louise.

"Well, I guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was

as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value,

since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a

rivetress.

She said, "Thank you," and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up

his work again, as a man does after a woman has passed by, pretending

to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.

At a distance Davidge paused to say: "He's a great card, Sutton. He

gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he's my

ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the

traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in

being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal

laborers have only one ideal--to do the least possible work and earn

enough to loaf most of the time."

Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle's principles and wondered

if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge's

pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he

would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded

short hours for his conspiracies.

At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave

her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He

led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps

of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very

important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She

saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat

sheet of perforated steel--the homeliest contraption imaginable.

"Whatever is all this," she asked,--"the beginning of a bridge?"

"Yes and no. It's the beginning of part of the bridge we're building

across the Atlantic."

"I don't believe that I quite follow you."

"This is the keel of a ship."

"No!"

"Yep!"

"And was the _Clara_ like this once?"

"No. _Clara's_ an old-fashioned creature like mother. This is a

newfangled thing like--like you."

"Like me! This isn't--"

"This is to be the _Mamise_."

She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.

"I must confess she's not very beautiful to start with."

"Neither were you at first, I suppose. I--I beg your pardon. I

mean--"

He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated ships, the

standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture at distances by

various steel plants, the absence of curved lines, the advantage of

all the sacrifice of the old art for the new speed.

In spite of what she had read she could not make his information her

own. And yet it was thrilling to look at. She broke out:

"I've just got to learn how to build ships. It's the one thing on

earth that will make me happy."

"Then I'll have to get it for you."

"You mean it?"

"If anything I could do could make you happy--cutting off my right

arm, or--"

"That's no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I'm wretchedly

unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy, are most of us just where

boys are when they have outgrown boyhood and haven't reached

manhood--when they are crazy to be at something, and can't even decide

where to begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to

work. Here's my job, and I want it!"

He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him, and he

smiled. She protested:

"I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the roughest sort

of farmwork. I'm stronger than I look. I think I'd rather play one of

those rat-tat-tat instruments than--than a harp in New Jerusalem."

Davidge shook his head. "I'm afraid you're not quite strong enough. It

takes a lot of power to hold the gun against the hull. The compressed

air kicks and shoves so hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton

himself has all he can do to keep alive."

"Give me a hammer, then, and let me--smite something."

"Don't you think you'd rather begin in the office? You could learn the

business there first. Besides, I don't like the thought of your

roughing up those beautiful hands of yours."

"If men would only quit trying to keep women's hands soft and clean,

the world would be the better for it."

"Well, come down and learn the business first--you'd be nearer me."

She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical

left hook:

"But you'd teach me ship-building?"

"I'd rather teach you home-building."

"If you mean a home on the bounding main, I'll get right to work."

He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and he took her to

the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled by her own ignorance of

what had come to be the most important of all knowledge.

She sighed. "I've always been such a smatterer. I never have really

known anything about anything. Most women are so astonishingly

ignorant and indifferent about the essentials of men's life."

She secretly resolved that she would study some of the basic

principles of male existence--bookkeeping, drafting, letter-writing,

filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new mischief to take a

course of business instruction on the sly and report for duty not as

an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress in office practice. It was at

least a refreshing novelty in duplicity.

She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy. The old

song, "Trust Her Not--She Is Fooling Thee," occurred to her in a

fantastic parody: "Trust her not--she is fooling thee; she is

clandestine at the business college; she is leading a double-entry

life. She writes you in longhand, but she is studying shorthand. She

is getting to be very fast--on the typewriter."

Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not divulge her

plot. She was impatient to spring it. She wondered if in a week she

could learn all she had to learn--if she worked hard. It would be

rather pleasant to sit at his desk-leaf and take dictation from

him--confidential letters that he would intrust to no one else,

letters written in a whisper and full of dark references. She hoped

she could learn stenographic velocity in a few days.

As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the workmen's

shanties.

"If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new bungalettes?"

"Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town."

"I'm sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next war millions

of women will live in tents the way the men do. Those shanties would

be considered palaces in Belgium and northern France. In fact, any

number of women are over there now building huts for the poor souls."

Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not understand such a

twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not want jewels and luxuries and

a life of wealthy ease. Her only interest in him seemed to be that he

would let her live in a shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day

for union wages.

CHAPTER III

An eloquent contrast with Marie Louise was furnished by Jake Nuddle.

He was of the ebb type. He was degenerating into a shirker, a

destroyer, a money-maniac, a complainer of other men's successes. His

labor was hardly more than a foundation for blackmailing. He loved no

country, had not even a sense of following the crowd. He called the

Star-spangled Banner a dirty rag, and he wanted to wipe his feet on

it. He was useless, baneful, doomed.

Marie Louise was coming into a new Canaan. What she wanted was work

for the work's sake, to be building something and thereby building

herself, to be helping her country forward, to be helping mankind,

poor and rich. The sight of the flag made her heart ache with a

rapture of patriotism. She had the urge to march with an army.

Marie Louise was on the up grade, Jake on the down. They met at the

gate of the shipyard.

Jake and Abbie had come over by train. Jake was surly in his tone to

Davidge. His first question was, "Where do we live?"

Marie Louise answered, "In one of those quaint little cottages."

Jake frowned before he looked. He was one of those who hate before

they see, feel nausea before they taste, condemn the unknown, the

unheard, the unoffending.

By the time Jake's eyes had found the row of shanties his frown was a

splendid thing.

"Quaint little hog-pens!" he growled. "Is this company the same as all

the rest--treatin' its slaves like swine?"

Davidge knew the type. For the sake of Marie Louise he restrained his

first impulses and spoke with amiable acidity:

"There are better houses in town, some of them very handsome."

"Yah--but what rent?"

"Rather expensive. Rather distant, too, but you can make it easily in

an automobile."

"Where would I git a nautomobile?"

"I can introduce you to the man who sold me mine."

"How would I get the price?"

"Just where I did."

"Whurr's that?"

"Oh, all over the place. I used to be a common unskilled laborer like

you. And now I own a good part of this business. Thousands of men who

began poorer than I did are richer than I am. The road's just as open

to you as to me."

Jake had plenty of answers for this. He had memorized numbers of them

from the tracts; but also he had plans that would not be furthered by

quarreling with Davidge the first day. He could do Davidge most harm

by obeying him and outwardly catering to him. He solaced his pride

with a thought of what Davidge's business would look like when he got

through with it.

He laughed: "All right, boss. I was just beefin', for the fun of

beefin'. Them shanties suit me elegant."

Then his fool wife had to go and bust in, "Oh, Jake, if you would do

like Mr. Davidge done, and git rich and live easy!"

Jake gave her a pantomimic rebuke that reduced her to a pulpy

silence.

Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie's spirits a little by saying

that she herself was coming down to work and to live in one of those

very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as hopeless. Why any one should

want to leave a house like what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and

no call to lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get

somebody to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a

squatter and actually work--well, it did beat all how foolish some

folks could be in the world nowadays.

Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves. She had to

get back to Washington. Davidge had planned to go with her, but a

long-distance telephone-call, and a visit from a group of prospective

strikers, and a warning that a consignment of long-expected machinery

had not yet arrived, took him out of the car. He was tempted to go

with Marie Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his

business for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old

Wakefield phrase, "If I don't see you again, hello!"

She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her thoughts smoked

through her brain like a dust-cloud of shining particles, each radiant

atom a great idea. The road home was through the sky; the villages and

groves were vague pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of

sunlight, the ridges rainbows.

It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries of

stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some of the people

that practised the art. She would study ship-building, and drafting,

too. Her water-color landscapes had been highly praised by certain

young men and old ladies in England. She would learn how to keep her

own bank-account and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light

bookkeeping; and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium so

that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one. She would offer

her home in Washington for rent. With the mobs pouring in, it would

not be untenanted long.

Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after she reached

home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her

mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying

rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered.

With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.

Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who

wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would

not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard,

and that was always to-morrow--the movable to-morrow which like the

horizon is always just beyond.

She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In

arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten,

and it was not easy to recapture it.

On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a

new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system

with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her

deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will

at all.

Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in

shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature as: "Dear

customer,--Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would

say--"

At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the

pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them

increased to a respect verging on awe.

They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back hair with the

free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the keyboard like rain,

and their letters were exquisitely neat. They had studied for a long

time, and had acquired proficiency. And it is no easy thing to acquire

proficiency in any task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or

moving armies.

Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not know how

to spell some of the simplest words. When she wrote with running pen

she never stopped to spell. She just sketched the words and let them

go. She wrote, "I beleive I recieved," so that nobody could tell _e_

from _i_; and she put the dot where it might apply to either. Her

punctuation was all dashes.

The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word stood out in

its stark reality, howling "Illiterate!" at her. Her punctuation

simply would not do.

Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an

ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an invitation to a street-car

conductors' dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection, while Marie

Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under the criticisms of her

teacher. She was back in school again, the dunce of the class, and

abject discouragements alternated with spurts of zeal.

In the mean while the United States was also learning the rudiments of

war and the enormous office-practice it required. Before the war was

over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000 officers in February, 1917,

would be an army of over 3,000,000, and of these over 2,000,000 would

have been carried to Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of

these would be killed to Russia's 1,700,000 dead, Germany's 1,600,000,

France's 1,385,000, England's 706,200, Italy's 406,000, and Belgium's

102,000. The wounded Americans would be three times the total present

army. Everybody was ignorant, blunderful. Externally and internally

the United States was as busy as a trampled ant-hill.

Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies made drives;

the financiers made drives; the charities made drives. The world-heart

was never so driven. And this was all on top of the ordinary human

suffering, which did not abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth

ached just as fiercely; jealousy was just as sickly green; empires

crackled; people starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army

after army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated atom

in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.

Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She was lonely,

love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally ashamed of her

general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington's infamous hot weeks

supervened. In the daytime the heat stung like a cat-o'-nine-tails.

The nights were suffocation. She "slept," gasping as a fish flounders

on dry land. After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for

rest, the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had

come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of drudgery at the

loathly necessities of her stupid work.

Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees the

mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, "That is my goal!" But

the feet must cross every ditch, wade every swamp, scramble across

every ledge. The peak is the harder to see the nearer it comes; the

last cliffs hide it altogether, and when it is reached it is only a

rough crag surrounded by higher crags. The glory that lights it is

glory in distant eyes alone.

So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid home to the

gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that the stage also is

squalid and slavish, and that the will-o'-the-wisp of gorgeous freedom

had jumped back to home life. She left the cheap theaters for the

expensive luxury of Sir Joseph's mansion. But that had its squalors

and slaveries, too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous

America, only to find in America a thousand distresses.

Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true freedom. She

would be a builder of ships--cast off the restraint of womanhood and

be a magnificent builder of ships! And now she was finding that this

dream was also a nightmare.

Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The hot wave

found her an easy victim. A frightened servant who did not know the

difference between sunstroke and heat prostration nearly killed her

before a doctor came.

The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed. It was her

trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge regretting that she

could not come to the launching of the _Clara_. Abbie was not present,

either. She came up to be with Marie Louise. This was not the least of

Marie Louise's woes.

She was quite childish about missing the great event. She wept because

another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle against the bow as it

lurched down the toboggan-slide.

Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business man's

letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that there had

been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster--an unexploded

infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to wreck the launching-ways

had been detected on the final inspection.

Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even though she knew

the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still in jeopardy. Her

shaken faith in humanity was still capable of feeling bewilderment at

the extremes of German savagery. She cried out to her sister:

"How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy

that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got

into the yard?"

"It didn't have to have been a German," said Abbie, bitterly.

"Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly trick? No

American would!"

"Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican," said Abbie. "There's

some them Independent workmen so independent they ain't got any

country any more 'n what Cain had."

"You can't suppose that Mr. Davidge has enemies among his own

people?"

"O' course he has! Slews of 'em. Some them workmen can't forgive the

man that gives 'em a job."

"But he pays big wages. Think of what Jake gets."

"Oh, him! If he got all they was, he'd holler he was bein' cheated.

Hollerin' and hatin' always come easy to Jake. If they wasn't easy, he

wouldn't do 'em."

Marie Louise gasped: "Abbie! In Heaven's name, you don't imply--"

"No, I don't!" snapped Abbie. "I never implied in my life, and don't

you go sayin' I did."

Abbie was at bay now. She had to defend her man from outside

suspicion. Suspicion of her husband is a wife's prerogative

Marie Louise was too much absorbed in the general vision of man's

potential villainy to follow up the individual clue. She was

frightened away from considering Jake as a candidate for such infamy.

Her wildest imaginings never put him in association with Nicky

Easton.

There were so many excursions and alarms in the world of 1917 that the

riddle of who tried to sink the ship on dry land joined a myriad

others in the riddle limbo.

When Marie Louise was well enough to go back to her business school

she found riddles enough in trying to decide where this letter or that

had got to on the crazy keyboard, or what squirmy shorthand symbol it

was that represented this syllable or that.

She had lost the little speed she had had, and it was double drudgery

regaining the forgotten lore. But she stood the gaff and found herself

on the dizzy height of graduation from a lowly business school. She

had traveled a long way from the snobbery of her recent years.

Davidge recognized her face and her voice when she presented herself

before him. But her soul was an utter stranger. She did not invite him

to call on her or warn him that she was coming to call on him.

She appeared in his anteroom and bribed one of the clerks to go to him

with a message:

"A young lady's outside--wants a position--as a stenogerpher."

Davidge growled without looking up:

"Why bother me? Send her to the chief clerk."

"She wants to see you specially."

"I'm out."

"Said Miss Webling sent her."

"O Lord!--show her in."

Marie Louise entered. Davidge looked up, leaped up.

She did not come in with the drawing-room, train-dragging manner of

Miss Webling. She did not wear the insolent beauty of Mamise of the

Musical Mokes. She was a white-waisted, plain-skirted office-woman, a

businessette. She had a neat little hat and gave him a secretarial

bow.

He rushed to her hand, and they had a good laugh like two children

playing pretend. Then he said:

"Why the camouflage?"

The word was not very new even then, or he would not have used it.

She explained, with royal simplicity:

"I want a job."

She brought out her diploma and a certificate giving her a civil-service

status. She was quite conceited about it.

She insisted on displaying her accomplishments.

"Give me some dictation," she dictated.

He nodded, pummeled his head for an idea while she took from her

hand-bag, not a vanity-case, but a stenographer's notebook and a sheaf

of pencils.

He noted that she sat down stenographically--very concisely. She

perched her notebook on the desk of one crossed knee and perked her

eyes up as alertly as a sparrow.

All this professionalism sat so quaintly on the two Marie Louises he

had known that he roared with laughter as at a child dressed up.

She smiled patiently at his uproar till it subsided. Then he sobered

and began to dictate:

"Ready? 'Miss Mamise'--cross that out--'Miss Marie Louise Webling'--you

know the address; I don't. 'Dear--My dear'--no, just 'Dear Miss

Webling. Reference is had to your order of recent date that this

house engage you as amanuensis.' Dictionary in the bookcase

outside--comma--no, period. 'In reply I would--I wish to--I beg to--we

beg to say that we should--I should just as soon engage Mona Lisa for

a stenographer as you.' Period and paragraph.

"'We have,'--comma,--'however,'--comma,--'another position to offer

you,'--comma,--'that is, as wife to the senior member of this firm.'

Period. 'The best wages we can--we can offer you are--is the use of

one large,'--comma,--'slightly damaged heart and a million thanks a

minute.' Period. 'Trusting that we may be favored with a prompt and

favorable reply, we am--I are--am--yours very sincerely, truly

yours,'--no, just say 'yours,' and I'll sign it. By the way, do you

know what the answer will be?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean it?"

"I mean that I know the answer."

"Let me have it."

"Can't you guess?"

"'Yes'?"

"No."

"Oh!"

A long glum pause till she said, "Am I fired?"

"Of course not."

More pause. She intervened in his silence.

"What do I do next, please?"

He said, of habit, "Why, sail on, and on, and on."

He reached for his basket of unanswered mail. He said:

"I've given you a sample of my style, now you give me a sample of

yours, and then I'll see if I can afford to keep you as a stenographer

instead of a wife."

She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office, and seated

herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart pit-a-patted as fast as

her fingers, but she drew up the letter in a handsome style while he

sat and stared at her and mused upon the strange radiance she brought

into the office in a kind of aureole.

He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer,

entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma,

suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very

rasping "I beg your pardon," and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose

from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily

accurate version of his letter.

And now he had two women on his hands and one on his heart. He dared

not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss Webling. He dared not show

his devotion to Marie Louise, though as a matter of fact it made him

glow like a lighthouse.

He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk's office. It was noted that

he made many more trips to that office than ever before. Instead of

pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer, he usually came out

himself on all sorts of errands. His buzzer did not buzz, but the

gossip did.

Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till she grew

furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not being deft enough to

conceal his affection that she began to resent it as an offense and

not a compliment.

The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence in one of

the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging her to live at a

hotel or at some of the more comfortable homes she snubbed him

bluntly. When he desperately urged her to take lunch or dinner with

him she drew herself up and mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie

stenographer and said:

"Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist shall loor

me to lunch with him. You'd probably drug the wine."

"Then will you--"

"No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!"

"May I call, then?"

More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:

"Yessir--the fourteenth house on the left side of the road is me."

The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched up the

street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an

imbecility. The whole village was eying the boss on his way to spark a

stenog. His little love-affair was as clandestine as Lady Godiva's

famous bareback ride.

He cut his call short after an age-long half-hour of enduring the

ridicule twinkling in Mamise's eyes. He stayed just late enough for it

to get dark enough to conceal his return through that street. He was

furious at the situation and at Mamise for teasing him so. But she

became all the dearer for her elusiveness.

CHAPTER IV

After the novelty of the joke wore off Mamise grew as uncomfortable as

he. She was beginning to love him more and her job less. But she was

determined not to throw away her independence. Pride was her duenna,

and a ruthless one. She tried to feed her pride on her ambition and on

an occasional visit to the ship that was to wear her name.

She met Sutton, the prima donna riveter. He was always clattering away

like a hungry woodpecker, but he always had time to stop and discuss

his art with her.

Once or twice he let her try the riveter--the "gun," he called it; but

her thumb was not strong enough to hold the trigger against that

hundred-and-fifty-pound pressure per square inch.

One day Marie Louise came on Jake Nuddle and Sutton in a wrangle. She

caught enough of the parley to know that Jake was sneering at Sutton's

waste of energy and enthusiasm, his long hours and low pay. Sutton

earned a very substantial income, but all pay was low pay to Jake, who

was spreading the gospel of sabotage through the shipyard.

Meanwhile the good ship _Clara_, weaned from the dock, floated in the

basin and received her equipment. And at last the day came when she

was ready for her trial trip.

That morning the smoke rolled from her funnels in a twisted skein.

What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had

become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the

flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a soul, a name, a fate.

It was impossible to think now that the _Clara_ was merely an iron box

with an engine to push it about. _Clara_ was somebody, a personality,

a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature. She was "she" to everybody.

And at last one morning she kicked up her heels and took a long white

bone in her teeth and went her ways.

The next day _Clara_ came back. There was something about her manner

of sweeping into the bay, about the proud look of her as she came to a

halt, that convinced all the watchers in the shipyard of her success.

When they learned that she had exceeded all her contract stipulations

there was a tumult of rejoicing; for her success was the success of

every man and lad in the company's employ--at least so thought all who

had any instinct of team-play and collective pride. A few soreheads

were glum, or sneered at the enthusiasm of the others. It was strange

that Jake Nuddle was associated with all of these groups.

_Clara_ was not permitted to linger and rest on her laurels. She had

work to do. Every ship in the world was working overtime except the

German Kiel Canal boats. _Clara_ was gone from the view the next

morning. Mamise missed her as she looked from the office window. She

mentioned this to Davidge, for fear he might not know. Somebody might

have stolen her. He explained:

"She's going down to Norfolk to take on a cargo of food for

England--wheat for the Allies. I'm glad she's going to take

breadstuffs to people. My mother used to be always going about to

hungry folks with a basket of food on her arm."

Mamise had Jake and Abbie in to dinner that night. She was all agog

about the success of _Clara_, and hoped that _Mamise_ would one day do

as well.

Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. "Did the boss tell you

where the _Clara_ was goin' to?"

"Yes--Norfolk."

Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes, then rose and

mumbled:

"Goin' out to get some more cigars."

Abbie called after him, "Hay, you got a whole half-box left." But Jake

did not seem to hear the recall.

He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.

"I thought you went out to git some," said Abbie, who felt it

necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some blunder he

had made. Jake laughed very amiably.

"Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that. But I hadda

telephone a certain party, long-distance--and I forgot."

Abbie broke in, "Who you got to long-distance to?"

Jake did not answer.

Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out into the main

office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.

"They loaded the _Clara_ in record time with wheat for England. She

sails to-day."

At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:

"You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood--remember? Well, she's

starting out through the big woods with a lot of victuals for old

Granny England. If only the wolves don't get her!"

He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her as if she

were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an errand of mercy.

Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the dangers they

run and because of the pluck they show in storms and fires, and the

unending fights they make against wind and wave. But of late they had

had unheard-of enemies to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine

placed inside the cargo.

Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:

"To think, with so little food in the world and so many starving to

death, people could sink ships full of wheat!"

On the second day after the _Clara_ set forth on the ocean Marie

Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her letters as fast as

she could. In the afternoon she took the typewritten transcripts into

Davidge's office to drop them into his "in" basket.

The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she heard him say:

"Mr. Davidge speaking.... Hello, Ed.... What? You're too close to the

'phone.... That's better.... You're too far away--start all over.... I

don't get that.... Yes--a life-boat picked up with what--oh, six

survivors. Yes--from what ship? I say, six survivors from what

ship?... The _Clara_? She's gone? _Clara_?"

He reeled and wavered in his chair. "What happened--many lost? And the

boat--cargo--everything--everybody but those six! They got her, then!

The Germans got her--on her first voyage! God damn their guts!

Good-by, Ed."

He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the receiver groped

for the hook with a pitiful blind man's gesture.

Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She ran forward

and took his hand and set the receiver in place.

He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His mother was

dead. The ship he had named for her was dead. He needed mothering.

Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them as if to hold

them together under their burden. She said:

"I heard. I can't tell you how-- Oh, what can we do in such a world!"

He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:

"I'll get a German for this--somehow!"

CHAPTER V

Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge's

agony.

She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as

the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children.

She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her

slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some

woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob

his own heart out.

She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard

him groan, "I'll get a German for this!" somehow it horrified her,

coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole

nation.

America had stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and

selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them.

America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the

Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel

ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters;

the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing--that torture

never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most

expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and

megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.

America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind

charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood

was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill

enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their

glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further

notice.

The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were

thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their desks,

women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams,

business men across their counters, "Kill Germans!"

It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the

Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was

fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from

that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken

over civilization.

They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that

pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not

Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular

battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing

that grew with the butchery.

Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the

Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all

did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations,

German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.

It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a

duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy.

The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride.

Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled,

mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work.

Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the

world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved

and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and

omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves,

the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.

Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated;

the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea.

Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a

blood-feud of his own with Germany.

He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her

with a sudden demand:

"Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?"

"No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I

never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know

you could be so angry."

"I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em,

too?"

"Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on

board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they

belong."

This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for

the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into

uncouth laughter.

But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the

distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions,

and to run among them like a frantic child.

Davidge's next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead

engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the

sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without

water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.

Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship's cargo would have

relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian--what word

or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of

the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?

He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky

wilderness--old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies

withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of their

mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He

thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles.

The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned

aloud:

"If they'd only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody--to anybody!

But to pour it into the sea!"

He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul

broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:

"I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the

fool ship."

He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.

"The blithering idiot I've been! To go and work and work and work, and

drive my men and all the machinery for months and months to make a

ship and put in the engines and send it down and load it, and all for

some"--a gesture expressed his unspeakable thought--"of a German to

blow it to hell and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!"

In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He

burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we

all revolve around ourselves as well as our suns.

"What's the use," he maundered--"what's the use of trying to do

anything while they're alive and at work right here in our country?

They're everywhere! They swarm like cockroaches out of every hole as

soon as the light gets low! We've got to blister 'em all to death with

rough-on-rats before we can build anything that will last. There's no

stopping them without wiping 'em off the earth."

She did not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments

or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute

fellowship to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped

Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to

contempt for himself.

"It's time I quit out of this and went to work with the army. It makes

me sick to be here making ships for Germans to sink. The thing to do

is to kill the Germans first and build the ships when the sea is safe

for humanity. I'm ashamed of myself sitting in an office shooting with

a telephone and giving out plans and contracts and paying wages to a

gang of mechanics. It's me for a rifle and a bayonet."

Mamise had to oppose this:

"Who's going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you when you

get there if all the ship-builders turn soldier?"

"Let somebody else do it."

"But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said that America

could never put an army across or feed it if she got it there. If you

go on strike you'll prove the truth of that."

Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes to hear his

nobler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources a woman has.

Mamise was speaking for him as well as for herself when she said:

"Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all the ships

you would build. You said it was the greatest poem ever written, the

idea of making ships faster than the Germans could sink them. It was

that that made me want to be a ship-builder. It was the first big

ambition I ever had. And now you tell me it's useless and foolish!"

He saw the point without further pressure.

"You're right," he said. "My job's here. It would be selfish and showy

to knock off this work and grab a gun. I'll stick. It's hard, though,

to settle down here when everybody else is bound for France."

Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not continue to

argue a case that has already been won. She added only the warm

personal note to help out the cold generality.

"There's my ship to finish, you know. You couldn't leave poor _Mamise_

out there on the stocks unfinished."

The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her. He needed

her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and knew for the first

time the feel of her body against his, the sweet compliance of her

form to his embrace.

But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She was in one of

those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism, that women were

rising to more and more as a new religion. She was feeling terribly

American, and, though she had no anger for him and saw no insult in

his violence, she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and

kissing. She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away,

yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had saved him

from himself and to himself. She had brought him back to his east

again, and the morning is always wonderful.

She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he did not

despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people were postponing

everything beautiful and lovable "for the duration of the war."

He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its rattlesnake

clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers as he stammered:

"We've gone through this together, and you've helped me--I can't tell

you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go through a lot more trouble

together. There's plenty of it ahead."

She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed his big hand

again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:

"I hope so."

Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the door with

suspicious promptitude. Davidge said:

"Mr. Avery, please--and the others--all the others right away. Ask

them to come here; and you might come back, Miss Gabus."

Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers,

gathered, wondering what was about to happen. Some of them came

grinning, for when they had asked Miss Gabus what was up she had

guessed: "I reckon he's goin' to announce his engagement."

The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera chorus.

Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting. Then he said:

"Folks, I've just had bad news. The _Clara_--they got her! The Germans

got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She was two days out and going

like a greyhound when she sank with all on board except six of the

crew who got away in a life-boat and were picked up by a tramp."

There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths, of

incredulous protests.

Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:

"My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin' to do about it?"

They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:

"We'll build some more ships. And if they sink those we'll--build some

more."

He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt, and so can

steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and, thanks to Mamise,

Davidge was recalled to himself, though he was too shrewd or too

tactful to give her the credit for redeeming him.

His resolute words gave the office people back to their own

characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each

had something to say. One, "She was such a pretty boat!" another, "Was

she insured, d'you suppose?" a third, a fourth, and the rest: "The

poor engineer--and the sailors!" "All that work for nothin'!" "The

money she cost!" "The Belgians could 'a' used that wheat!" "Those

Germans! Is there anything they won't do?"

The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks. Davidge took up

the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise renewed the cheerful

_rap-rap-rap_ of her typewriter.

The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the yard.

There was no lack of messengers to go among the men with the bad word

that the first of the Davidge ships had been destroyed. It was a

personal loss to nearly everybody, as it had been to Davidge, for

nearly everybody had put some of his soul and some of his sweat into

that slow and painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of

the wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers was

both loud and ferocious.

Jake Nuddle was one of the few who did not revile the German plague.

He was not in the least excited over the dead sailors. They did not

belong to his union. Besides, Jake did not love work or the things it

made. He claimed to love the workers and the money they made.

He was tactless enough to say to a furious orator:

"Ah, what's it to you? The more ships the Germans sink the more you

got to build and the more they'll have to pay you. If Davidge goes

broke, so much the better. The sooner we bust these capitalists the

sooner the workin'-man gets his rights."

The orator retorted: "This is war-times. We got to make ships to win

the war."

Jake laughed. "Whose war is it? The capitalists'. You're fightin' for

Morgan and Rockefeller to save their investments and to help 'em to

grind you into the dirt. England and France and America are all

land-grabbers. They're no better 'n Germany."

The workers wanted a scapegoat, and Jake unwittingly volunteered. They

welcomed him with a bloodthirsty roar. They called him vigorous

shipyard names and struck at him. He backed off. They followed. He

made a crucial mistake; he whirled and ran. They ran after him. Some

of them threw hammers and bolts. Some of these struck him as he fled.

Workmen ahead of him were roused by the noise and headed him off.

He darted through an opening in the side of the _Mamise_. The crowd

followed him, chased him out on an upper deck.

"Throw him overboard! Kill him!" they shouted.

He took refuge behind Sutton the riveter, whose gun had made such

noise that he had heard none of the clamor. Seeing Jake's white face

and the mark of a thrown monkey-wrench on his brow, Sutton shut off

the compressed air and confronted the pursuers. He was naked to the

waist, and he had no weapon, but he held them at bay while he

demanded:

"What's the big idea? What you playin'? Puss in a corner? How many of

yous guys does it take to lick this one gink?"

A burly patriot, who forgot that his name and his accent were

Teutonic, roared:

"Der sneagin' Sohn off a peach ain't sorry _die Clara_ is by dose tam

Chermans _gesunken_!"

"What!" Sutton howled. "The _Clara_ sunk? Whatya mean--sunk?"

Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven thousands of rivets

into the frame of the ship, and a little explosive had opened all the

seams and ended her days! When at last he understood the _Clara's_

fate and Nuddle's comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:

"And you thought it was good business, did you? And these fellers

was thinkin' about lynchin' you, was they? Well, they're all

wrong--they're all wrong: we'd ought to save lynchin' for real

guys. What you need is somethin' like--this!"

His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye. Jake in

a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward; his head

struck the steel deck, and his soul went out. When it came back he lay

still for a while, pretending to be unconscious until the gang had

dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton was making ready to begin riveting

again. Then he picked himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:

"I'll fix you for this, you--"

Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big

foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop

that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold.

He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words--hunched

back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe

hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow and

disperse his enemies.

CHAPTER VI

The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted

that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to

conform. Then she paused.

On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too

weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of

Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the

brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his

friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers,

it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from

foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.

Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a

ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She

had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters

at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and

without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile,

compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions,

oscillations, running aground--stresses that crumpled steel or

scissored the rivets in two.

It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or

death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home

with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some

limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in

fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died

dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds;

some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led

long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory,

degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps.

People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and

destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as little on their

pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the

ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen

emergency.

Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before

he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past

performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the

recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the

national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one

and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages.

He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little

except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he

had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he

had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at

all.

Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted no steel in

a ship's hull or in any part of her that had not behaved well in the

shop tests, in the various machines that put the metal under bending

stress, cross-breaking, hammering, drifting, shearing, elongation,

contraction, compression, deflection, tension, and torsion stresses.

The best of the steels had their elastic limits; there was none that

did not finally snap.

Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed according

to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being only a tenth of

its proved capacity. That ought to have been enough of a margin of

safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.

People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand. A

reference or two, a snap judgment based on first impressions, ushered

a man or a woman into a place where weakness or malice could do

incalculable harm. In every institution, as in every structure, these

danger-spots exist. Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people,

could only take the best he could get.

Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous ease and had

contrived already the ruin of one ship. His program, which included

all the others, had had a little setback, but he could easily regain

his lost ground, for the mob had vented its rage against him and was

appeased.

Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge's shop and

his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was drifting toward a

supreme stress that should try her inmost fiber. And at the moment she

felt an almost unbearable strain in the petty decision of whether to

go with the clerks or stop with the boss.

Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would say of her. It

was Davidge that she was protecting. She did not want to have them

talking about him--as if anything could have stopped them from that!

While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave him

unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent so much time

that the outer office was empty, anyway.

Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the door. Miss

Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:

"Was you goin' in?"

"No--oh no!" said Mamise. "I left something in my desk."

She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried away,

ostentatiously passing the other clerks as they struggled across the

yard to the gate.

She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles. She was so

desperate that she went to see her sister.

Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing buttons on the

extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom she washed for

in spite of Jake's high earnings--from which she benefited no more

than before. If Jake had come into a million, or shattered the world

to bits and then rebuilt it nearer to his heart's desire, he would not

have had enough to make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many

handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or at least got

Abbie no farther along the road to contentment or grace.

Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to the _Clara_. She drew

Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who were playing in

the kitchen because it was full of the savor of the forthcoming

supper.

"Abbie dear, have you heard the news?"

Abbie gasped, "Oh God, is anything happened to Jake--killed or

arrested or anything?"

"No, no--but _Clara_--the _Clara_--"

"Clara who?"

"The ship, the first ship we built, she's destroyed."

"For the land's sake! I want to know! Well, what you know about

that!"

Abbie could not rise to very lofty heights of emotion or language over

anything impersonal. She made hardly so much noise over this tragedy

as a hen does over the delivery of an egg.

Mamise was distressed by her stolidity. She understood with regret why

Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational companion. She hated to

think well of Jake or ill of her sister, but one cannot help receiving

impressions.

She did her best to stimulate Abbie to a decent warmth, but Abbie was

as immune to such appeals as those people were who were still

wondering why America went to war with Germany.

Abbie was entirely perfunctory in her responses to Mamise's pictures

of the atrocity. She grew really indignant when she looked at the

clock and saw that Jake was late to dinner. She broke in on Mamise's

excitement with a distressful:

"And we got steak 'n' cab'ge for supper."

"I must hurry back to my own shack," said Mamise, rising.

"You stay right where you are. You're goin' to eat with us."

"Not to-night, thanks, dear."

She kept no servant of her own. She enjoyed the circumstance of

getting her meals. She was camping out in her shanty. To-night she

wanted to be busy about something especially about a kitchen--the

machine-shop of the woman who wants to be puttering at something.

She was dismally lonely, but she was not equal to a supper at Jake's.

She would have liked a few children of her own, but she was glad that

she did not own the Nuddle children, especially the elder two.

The Nuddles had given three hostages to Fortune. Jake cared little

whether Fortune kept the hostages or not, or whether or not she

treated them as the Germans treated Belgian hostages.

Little Sister was the oldest of the trio completed by Little Brother

and a middle-sized bear named Sam. Sis and Sam were juvenile

anarchists born with those gifts of mischief, envy, indolence, and

denunciation that Jake and the literary press-agents of the same

spirit flattered as philosophy or even as philanthropy. Little

Brother was a quiet, patient gnome with quaint instincts of industry

and accumulation. He was always at work at something. His mud-pie

bakery was famous for two blocks. He gathered bright pebbles and

shells. In the marble season he was a plutocrat in taws and agates.

Being always busy, he always had time to do more things. He even

volunteered to help his mother. When he got an occasional penny he

hoarded it in hiding. He had need to, for Sam borrowed what he could

and stole what he could not wheedle.

Little Brother was not stingy, but he saved; he bought his mother

petty gifts once in a while when he had enough to pay for something.

Little Sister and Sam were capable in emotional crises of sympathy or

hatred to express themselves volubly. Little Brother had no gifts of

speech. He made gifts of pebbles or of money awkwardly, shyly, with

few words. Mamise, as she tried to extricate herself from Abbie's

lassoing hospitality, paused in the door and studied the children,

contrasting them with the Webling grandchildren who had been born with

gold spoons in their mouths and somebody to take them out, fill them,

and put them in again. But luxury seemed to make small difference in

character.

She mused upon the three strange beings that had come into the world

as a result of the chance union of Jake and Abbie. Without that they

would never have existed and the world would have never known the

difference, nor would they.

Sis and Sam were quarreling vigorously. Little Brother was silent upon

the hearth. He had collected from the gutter many small stones and

sticks. They were treasures to him and he was as important about them

as a miser about his shekels. Again and again he counted them, taking

a pleasure in their arithmetic. Already he was advanced in mathematics

beyond the others and he loved to arrange his wealth for the sheer

delight of arrangement; orderliness was an instinct with him already.

For a time Mamise noted how solemnly he kept at work, building a little

stone house and painfully making it stand. He was a home-builder

already.

Sam had paid no heed to the work. But, wondering what Mamise was

looking at, he turned and saw his brother. A grin stretched his

mouth. Little Brother grew anxious. He knew that when something he had

builded interested Sam its doom was close.

"Whass 'at?" said Sam.

"None yer business," said Little Brother, as spunky as Belgium before

the Kaiser.

"'S'ouse, ain't it?"

"You lea' me 'lone, now!"

"Where d'you git it at?"

"I built it."

"Gimme't!"

"You build you one for your own self now."

"'At one's good enough for me."

"Maw! You make Sam lea' my youse alone."

Mrs. Nuddle moaned: "Sammie, don't bother Little Brother now. You go

on about your own business."

Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with the side of

his foot.

Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had darted at him and

smacked him with violence. Instantly she was ashamed of herself. Sam

began to rub his face and yowl:

"Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me, so she did."

Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it

was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She

had accepted too much of Mamise's money to be very indignant, but she

did rise to a wail:

"Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern."

"I'm sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just

couldn't help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his

brother's house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he'll be just

as much of a nuisance as Jake and he'll call it syndicalism or

internationalism or something, just as Jake does."

Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white

story.

When Abbie gasped, "What on earth's the matter?" he growled: "I bumped

into a girder. Whatya s'pose?"

Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction, but she

knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the

home champion.

She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the

steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was

earning--or at least receiving--the family was eating high.

Little Sister told her brother Sam, "It's a shame to waste good meat

on his old black lamp." And Sam's regret was, "I wisht I'd 'a' gave it

to um."

Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but

it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public

welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to

expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have

time to be kind to them in particular.

Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every

time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made

her mad.

To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of anxiety for

him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:

"But, oh, did you hear of the destruction of the _Clara_?"

"Yes, I heard of the destruction of the _Clara_," he echoed, with a

sneer. "If I had my way the whole rotten fleet would follow her to the

bottom of the ocean!"

"Why, Jake!" was Abbie's best.

Jake went on: "And it will, too, or I'm a liar. The Germans will get

them boats as fast as they build 'em." He laughed. "I tell you them

Kaiser-boys just eats ships."

"But how were they able to destroy the _Clara_?" Mamise demanded.

"Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk they just put a

bomb into her."

"But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?"

"Oh, we--they have ways."

The little slip from "we" to "they" caught Mamise's ear. Her first

intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her amazement the first

words that leaped were:

"Poor Abbie!"

Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from

cloud to ground. Mamise's whole thought was from zig to zag in some

such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.

"We--they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German

organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake

must have been involved in the wreck of the _Clara_. That means that

he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means

that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister

is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!"

This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake

grumbling:

"What ya mean--'poor Abbie!'?"

Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the

lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was

thinking--or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his

own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through

Mamise, though Mamise did not know this--that is, he hoped she did

not. And yet perhaps she did.

And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie

was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and

her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid

thoughtlessness.

Jake, suspecting Mamise's suspicion of him, was moved to justify

himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who

had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy

country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had

become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant

nothing to her bovine soul. She was thinking of something else,

usually, throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole

nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess she was

hunting through her work-basket for a good thread to patch Sam's pants

with.

Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was her first encounter

with the abysmal hatred of which some of these loud lovers of mankind

are capable. Jake's theories had been merely absurd or annoying

before, but now they grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed

by an actual crime.

Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of Jake or attack

him. She despised him too well to argue with him, and she rose to go.

Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She would not be

persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow and cooked herself a little

meal of her own. She felt stained once more with vicarious guilt, and

wondered what she had done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes

of others.

She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself of Sir

Joseph Webling's guilt by keeping his secret. If she had gone to the

British authorities with her first suspicion of Sir Joseph and Nicky

Easton she would have escaped from sharing their guilt. She would

have been branded as an informer, but only by the conspirators; and

Sir Joseph himself and Lady Webling might have been saved from

self-destruction.

Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again she had only

suspicion for her guide. But in England she had been a foreigner and

Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here she was in her own country, and

she owed nothing to Jake Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to

his wife as to his flag.

It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one clear duty was

to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake. It was not a pretty duty,

but it was a definite. She resolved that the first thing she did in

the morning would be to go to Davidge with what facts she had. The

resolution brought her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper

with a sense of pleasant righteousness.

Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted a cigarette,

and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned evening of spinsterial

respectability. Then the door opened and Abbie walked in. Abbie did

not think it sisterly to knock. She paused to register her formal

protest against Mamise's wicked addiction to tobacco.

"I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you'd break yourself of that horbul

habbut."

Mamise laughed tolerantly. "You were cooking cabbage when I was at

your house. Why can't I cook this vegetable?"

"But I wa'n't cooking the cabbage in my face."

"You were cooking it in mine. But let's not argue about botany or

ethics."

Abbie was not aware of mentioning either of those things, but she had

other matters to discuss. She dropped into a chair, sighing:

"Jake's went out to telephone, and I thought I'd just run over for a

few words. You see, I--"

"Where was Jake telephoning?"

"I d'know. He's always long-distancin' somebody. But what I come

for--"

"Doesn't it ever occur to you to wonder?"

"Long as it ain't some woman--or if it is, as long as it's long

distance--why should I worry my head about it? The thing I wanted to

speak of is--"

"Didn't it rather make your blood run cold to hear Jake speak as he

did of the lost ship?"

"Oh, I'm so used to his rantin' it goes in one ear and out the

other."

"You'd better keep a little of it in your brain. I'm worried about

your husband, even if you're not, Abbie dear."

"What call you got to worry?"

"I have a ghastly feeling that my brother-in-law is mixed up in the

sinking of the _Clara_."

"Don't be foolish!"

"I'm trying not to be. But do you remember the night I told you both

that the _Clara_ was going to Norfolk to take on her cargo? Well, he

went out to get cigars, though he had a lot, and he let it slip that

he had been talking on the long-distance telephone. When the _Clara_

is sunk, he is not surprised. He says, 'We--they have ways.' He

prophesies the sinking of all the ships Mr. Davidge--"

Abbie seized this name as a weapon of self-defense and mate-defense.

"Oh, you're speakin' for Mr. Davidge now."

"Perhaps. He's my employer, and Jake's, too. I feel under some

obligations to him, even though Jake doesn't. I feel some obligations

to the United States, and Jake doesn't. I distrust and abhor Germany,

and Jake likes her as well as he does us. The background is perfect.

When such crimes are being done as Germany keeps doing, condoning them

is as bad as committing them."

"Big words!" sniffed Abbie. "Can't you talk United States?"

"All right, my dear. I say that since Jake is glad the _Clara_ was

sunk and hopes that more ships will be sunk, he is as bad as the men

that sank her. And what's more, I have made up my mind that Jake

helped to sink her, and that he works in this yard simply for a chance

to sink more ships. Do you get those words of one syllable?"

"No," said Abbie. Ideas of one syllable are as hard to grasp as words

of many. "I don't know what you're drivin' at a tall."

"Poor Abbie!" sighed Mamise. "Dream on, if you want to. But I'm going

to tell Mr. Davidge to keep a watch on Jake. I'm going to warn him

that Jake is probably mixed up in the sinking of that beautiful ship

he named after his mother."

Even Abbie could not miss the frightful meaning of this. She was one

of those who never trust experience, one of those who think that, in

spite of all the horrible facts of the past, horrible things are

impossible in the future. Higher types of the same mind had gone about

saying that war was impossible, later insisting that it was impossible

that the United States should be dragged into this war because it was

so horrible, and next averring that since this war was so horrible

there could never be another.

Even Abbie could imagine what would happen if Mamise denounced Jake as

an accomplice in the sinking of the Clara. It would be so terrible

that it must be impossible. The proof that Jake was innocent was the

thought of what would happen to him and to her and their children if

he were found guilty. She summed it all up in a phrase:

"Mamise, you're plumb crazy!"

"I hope so, but I'm also crazy enough to put Mr. Davidge on his

guard."

"And have him fire Jake, or get him arrested?"

"Perhaps."

"Ain't you got any sense of decency or dooty a tall?"

"I'm trying to find out."

"Well, I always knew a woman who'd smoke cigarettes would do

anything."

"I'll do this."

"O' course you won't; but if you did, I'd--why, I'd--why, I just don't

know what I'd do."

"Would you give up Jake?"

"Give up Jake? Divorce him or something?"

Mamise nodded.

Abbie gasped: "Why, you're positively immor'l! Posi-_tive_-ly! He's

the father of my childern! I'll stick to Jake through thick and

thin."

"Through treason and murder, too? You were an American, you know,

before you ever met him. And I was an American before he became my

brother-in-law. And I don't intend to let him make me a partner in his

guilt just because he made you give him a few children."

"I won't listen to another word," cried Abbie. "You're too indecent to

talk to." And she slammed the door after her.

"Poor Abbie!" said Mamise, and closed her book, rubbed the light out

of her cigarette, and went to bed.

But not to sleep. Abbie had not argued well, but sometimes that is

best for the arguments, for then the judge becomes their attorney.

Mamise tossed on a grid of perplexities. Neither her mind nor her body

could find comfort.

She rose early to escape her thoughts. It was a cold, raw morning, and

Abbie came dashing through the drizzle with her shawl over her head

and her cheeks besprent with tears and rain. She flung herself on

Mamise and sobbed:

"I ain't slep' a wink all night. I been thinkin' of Jake and the

childern. I was mad at you last night, but I'm sorry for what I said.

You're my own sister--all I got in the world besides the three

childern. And I'm all you got, and I know it ain't in you to go and

send the father o' my childern to jail and ruin my life. I've had a

hard life, and so've you, Mamise honey, but we got to be friends and

love one another, for we're all that's left of our fambly, and it

couldn't be that one sister would drive the other to distraction and

drag the family name in the mud. It couldn't be, could it, Mamise?

Tell me you was only teasin' me! I didn't mean what I said last night

about you bein' indecent, and you didn't mean what you said about

Jake, did you, Mamise? Say you didn't, or I'll just die right here."

She had left the door open, and a gust of windy rain came lashing in.

The world outside was cold and wet, and Abbie was warm and afraid and

irresistibly pitiful.

Mamise could only hug and kiss her and say:

"I'll see! I'll see!"

When people do not know what their chief mysteries, themselves, will

do they say, "I'll see."

Mamise thought of Davidge, and she could not promise to leave him in

ignorance of the menace imminent above him. But when at last she tore

herself from Abbie's clutching hands and hurried away to the office

she looked back and saw Abbie out in the rain, staring after her in

terror and shaking her head helplessly. She could not promise herself

that she would tell Davidge.

CHAPTER VII

She reached the office late in spite of her early start. Davidge had

gone. He had gone to Pittsburgh to try to plead for more steel for

more ships.

The head clerk told her this. He was in an ugly mood, sarcastic about

Mamise's tardiness, and bitter with the knowledge that all the work of

building another _Clara_ had to be carried through with its endless

detail and the chance of the same futility. He was as sick about it as

a Carlyle who must rewrite a burned-up history, an Audubon who must

repaint all his pictures.

Davidge had left no good-by for Mamise. This hurt her. She wished that

she had stopped to tell him good night the afternoon before.

In his prolonged absence Mamise wondered if he were really in

Pittsburgh or in Washington with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She experienced

the first luxury of jealousy; it was aggravated by alarm. She was left

alone, a prey to the appeals of Abbie, who could not persuade her to

promise silence.

But the next night Jake was gone. Abbie explained that he had been

called out of town to a meeting of a committee of his benevolent

insurance order. Mamise wondered and surmised.