Jake went to meet Nicky Easton and claim his pay for his share in the

elimination of the _Clara_. Nicky paid him so handsomely that Jake

lost his head and imagined himself already a millionaire. Strangely,

he did not at once set about dividing his wealth among his beloved

"protelariat." He made a royal progress from saloon to saloon, growing

more and more haughty, and pounding on successive bars with a vigor

that increased as his articulation effervesced. His secret would

probably have bubbled out of him if he had not been so offensive that

he was bounced out of every barroom before he had time to get to the

explanation of his wealth. In one "poor man's club" he fell asleep

and rolled off his chair to a comfortable berth among the spittoons.

Next morning Jake woke up with his head swollen and his purse

vanished. He sought out Nicky and demanded another fee. Nicky laughed

at his claim; but Jake grew threatening, and Nicky was frightened into

offering him a chance to win another fortune by sinking another ship.

He staked Jake to the fare for his return and promised to motor down

some dark night and confer with him. Jake rolled home in state.

On the same train went a much interested sleuth who detached himself

from the entourage of Nicky and picked up Jake.

Jake had attracted some attention when he first met Nicky in

Washington, but the sadly overworked Department of Justice could not

provide a squad of escorts for every German or pro-German suspect.

Before the war was over the secret army under Mr. Bielaski reached a

total of two hundred and fifty thousand, but the number of suspects

reached into the millions. From Nicky Easton alone a dozen activities

radiated; and studying him and his communicants was a slow and complex

task.

Mr. Larrey decided that the best way to get a line on Jake would be to

take a job alongside him and "watch his work." It was the easiest

thing in the world to get a job at Davidge's shipyard; and it was

another of the easiest things in the world to meet Jake, for Jake was

eager to meet workmen, particularly workmen like Larrey, who would

listen to reason, and take an interest in the gentle art of slowing up

production. Larrey was all for sabotage.

One evening Jake invited him to his house for further development. On

that evening Mamise dropped in. She did not recognize Larrey, but he

remembered her perfectly.

He could hardly believe his camera eyes at first when he saw the great

Miss Webling enter a workman's shanty and accept Jake Nuddle's

introduction:

"Larrey, old scout, this is me sister-in-law. Mamise, shake hands with

me pal Larrey."

Larrey had been the first of her shadows in New York, but had been

called off when she proved unprofitable and before she met Easton. And

now he found her at work in a shipyard where strange things were

happening! He was all afire with the covey of spies he had flushed.

His first impulse was to shoot off a wire in code to announce his

discovery. Then he decided to work this gold-mine himself. It would be

pleasanter to cultivate this pretty woman than Jake Nuddle, and she

would probably fall for him like a thousand of brick. But when he

invited himself to call on her her snub fell on him like a thousand of

brick. She would not let him see her home, and he was furious till

Jake explained, "She's sweet on the boss."

Larrey decided that he had better call on Davidge and tip him off to

the past of his stenographer and get him to place her under

observation.

The next day Davidge came back from his protracted journey. He had

fought a winning battle for an allotment of steel. He was boyish with

the renewal of battle ardor, and boyish in his greeting of Mamise. He

made no bones of greeting her before all the clerks with a horribly

embarrassing enthusiasm:

"Lord! but I've been homesick to see you!"

Miss Gabus was disgusted. Mamise was silly with confusion.

Those people who are always afraid of new customs have dreaded public

life for women lest it should destroy modesty and rob them of the

protection of guardians, duennas, and chaperons. But the world seems

to have to have a certain amount of decency to get along on, at all,

and provides for it among humans about as well as it provides for the

protection of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish

and some prosper.

The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in

spasms of anxiety over other people's souls would have given up Mamise

and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached

bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them,

their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of

temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances

and crowds.

Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of

longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these

anguishes were as futile as prayers for the moon. Outside of office

hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.

These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more

than a mother's vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls or

_yashmaks_ will infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good

deal of time--and very dolefully.

Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry

for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly

he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first

ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy,

the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She

remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had

wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that

communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal

of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing

human was alien to her.

Davidge had spoken of marriage--had told her that he was a candidate

for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been

full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning

after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own

loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses

combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.

When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of

her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he

had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that

womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man's to crush. But fate

provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood

by, and the day's work was waiting to be done.

Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter. She

hammered out a devil's tattoo on it, and he devoured estimates and

commercial correspondence, while an aromatic haze enveloped them both

as truly as if they had been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.

Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon hour made a

noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity to cast an evil

spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women have a wonderful pity for men that

other women cultivate! Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling

was:

"Goin' to lunch now, Mi' Swebling?"

And all that Miss Webling said was:

"Not just yet--thank you."

Both were almost swooning with the tremendous significance of the

moment.

Miss Webling felt that she was defying all the powers of espionage and

convention when she made so brave as to linger while Miss Gabus left

the room in short twitches, with the painful reluctance of one who

pulls off an adhesive plaster by degrees. When at last she was really

off, Miss Webling went to Davidge's door, feeling as wicked as the

maid in Ophelia's song, though she said no more than:

"Well, did you have a successful journey?"

Davidge whirled in his chair.

"Bully! Sit down, won't you?"

He thought that no goddess had ever done so divine a thing so

ambrosially as she when she smiled and shook her incredibly exquisite

head. He rose to his feet in awe of her. His restless hands, afraid to

lay hold of their quarry, automatically extracted his watch from his

pocket and held it beneath his eyes. He stared at it without

recognizing the hour, and stammered:

"Will you lunch with me?"

"No, thank you!"

This jolted an "Oh!" out of him. Then he came back with:

"When am I going to get a chance to talk to you?"

"You know my address."

"Yes, but--" He thought of that horrible evening when he had marched

through the double row of staring cottages. But he was determined.

"Going to be home this evening?"

"By some strange accident--yes."

"By some strange accident, I might drop round."

"Do."

They laughed idiotically, and she turned and glided out.

She went to the mess-hall and moved about, selecting her dishes.

Pretending not to see that Miss Gabus was pretending not to see her,

she took her collation to another table and ate with the relish of a

sense of secret guilt--the guilt of a young woman secretly betrothed.

Davidge kept away from the office most of the afternoon because Mamise

was so intolerably sweet and so tantalizingly unapproachable. He made

a pretext of inspecting the works. She had a sugary suspicion of his

motive, and munched it with strange comfort.

What might have happened if Davidge had called on her in her then mood

and his could easily be guessed. But there are usually interventions.

The chaperon this time was Mr. Larrey, the operative of the Department

of Justice. He also had his secret.

He arrived at Davidge's home just as Davidge finished the composition

of his third lawn tie and came down-stairs to go. When he saw Larrey

he was a trifle curt with his visitor. Thinking him a workman and

probably an ambassador from one of the unions on the usual mission of

such ambassadors--more pay, less hours, or the discharge of some

unorganized laborer--Davidge said:

"Better come round to the office in the morning."

"I can't come to your office," said Larrey.

"Why not? It's open to everybody."

"Yeh, but I can't afford to be seen goin' there."

"Good Lord! Isn't it respectable enough for you?"

"Yeh, but--well, I think it's my duty to tip you off to a little slick

work that's goin' on in your establishment."

"Won't it keep till to-morrow evening?"

"Yeh--I guess so. It's only one of your stenographers."

This checked Davidge. By a quaint coincidence he was about to call on

one of his stenographers. Larrey amended his first statement:

"Leastways, I'll say she calls herself a stenographer. But that's only

her little camouflage. She's not on the level."

Davidge realized that the stenographer he was wooing was not on the

level. She was in the clouds. But his curiosity was piqued. He

motioned Larrey to a chair and took another.

"Shoot," he said.

"Well, it's this Miss Webling. Know anything about her?"

"Something," said Davidge. He was too much amused to be angry. He

thought that Larrey was another of those amateur detectives who

flattered Germany by crediting her with an omnipresence in evil. He

was a faithful reader of Ellis Parker Butler's famous sleuth, and he

grinned at Larrey. "Well, Mr. Philo Gubb, go on. Your story interests

me."

Larrey reddened. He spoke earnestly, explained who he was, showed his

credentials, and told what he knew of Miss Webling. He added what he

imagined Davidge knew.

Davidge found the whole thing too preposterous to be insolent. His

chivalry in Mamise's behalf was not aroused, because he thought that

the incident would make a good story to tell her. He drew Larrey out

by affecting amazed incredulity.

Larrey explained: "She's an old friend of ours. We got the word from

the British to pick the lady up when she first landed in this country.

She was too slick for us, I guess, because we never got the goods on

her. We gave her up after a couple of weeks. Then her trail crossed

Nicky Easton's once more."

"And who is Nicky Easton?"

"He's a German agent she knew in London--great friend of her adopted

father's. The British nabbed him once, but he split on the gang, and

they let him off. Whilst I was trailin' him I ran into a feller named

Nuddle--he come up to see Easton. I followed him here, and lo and

behold! Miss Webling turns up, too! And passin' herself off for

Nuddle's sister-in-law! Nuddle's a bad actor, but she's worse. And she

pretends to be a poor workin'-girl. Cheese! You should have seen her

in New York all dolled up!"

Davidge ignored the opportunity to say that he had had the privilege

of seeing Miss Webling all dolled up. He knew why Mamise was living as

she did. It was a combination of lark and crusade. He nursed Larrey's

story along, and asked with patient amusement:

"What's your theory as to her reason for playing such a game?"

He smiled as he said this, but sobered abruptly when Larrey

explained:

"You lost a ship not long ago, didn't you? You got other ships on the

ways, ain't you? Well, I don't need to tell you it's good business for

the Huns to slow up or blow up all the ships they can. Every boat they

stop cuts down the supplies of the Allies just so much. This Miss

Webling's adopted father was in on the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and

this girl was, too, probably. She carried messages between old Webling

and Easton, and walked right into a little trap the British laid for

her. She put up a strong fight, and, being an American, was let go.

But her record got to this country before she did. You ask me what

she's up to. Well, what should she be up to but the Kaiser's work?

She's no stenographer, and she wouldn't be here playin' tunes on a

typewriter unless she had some good business reason. Well, her

business is--she's a ship-wrecker."

The charge was ridiculous, yet there were confirmations or seeming

confirmations of it. The mere name of Nicky Easton was a thorn in

Davidge's soul. He remembered Easton in London at Mamise's elbow, and

in Washington pursuing her car and calling her "Mees Vapelink."

Davidge promised Larrey that he would look into the matter, and bade

him good night with mingled respect and fear.

When he set out at length to call on Mamise he was grievously troubled

lest he had lost his heart to a clever adventuress. He despised his

suspicions, and yet--somebody had destroyed his ship. He remembered

how shocked she had been by the news. Yet what else could the worst

spy do but pretend to be deeply worried? Davidge had never liked Jake

Nuddle; Mamise's alleged relationship by marriage did not gain

plausibility on reconsideration. The whim to live in a workman's

cottage was even less convincing.

Mr. Larrey had spoiled Davidge's blissful mood and his lover's program

for the evening. Davidge moved slowly toward Mamise's cottage, not as

a suitor, but as a student.

Larrey shadowed him from force of habit, and saw him going with

reluctant feet, pausing now and then, irresolute. Davidge was thinking

hard, calling himself a fool, now for trusting Mamise and now for

listening to Larrey. To suspect Mamise was to be a traitor to his

love: not to suspect her was to be a traitor to his common sense and

to his beloved career.

And the Mamise that awaited the belated Davidge was also in a state of

tangled wits. She, too, had dressed with a finikin care, as Davidge

had, neither of them stopping to think how quaint a custom it is for

people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes

every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening

like Christmas parcels for each other's examination. Nature dresses

the birds in the mating season. Mankind with the aid of the

dressmaker and the haberdasher plumes up at will.

But as Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and Davidge his

Larrey, so Mamise had her sister Abbie.

Abbie came in unexpectedly and regarded Mamise's costume with no

illusions except her own cynical ones:

"What you all diked up about?"

Mamise shrugged her eyebrows, her lips, and her shoulders.

Abbie guessed. "That man comin'?"

Mamise repeated her previous business.

"Kind of low neck, don't you think? And your arms nekked."

Mamise drew over her arms a scarf that gave them color rather than

concealment. Abbie scorned the subterfuge.

"Do you think it's proper to dress like that for a man to come

callin'?"

"I did think so till you spoke," snapped Mamise in all the bitterness

of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed and unlovely shame.

Abbie felt unwelcome. "Well, I just dropped over because Jake's went

out to some kind of meetin'."

"With whom? Where?"

"Oh, some of the workmen--a lot of soreheads lookin' for more wages."

Mamise was indignant: "The soldiers get thirty dollars a month on a

twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets more than that a week for

loafing round the shop about seven hours a day. How on earth did you

ever tie yourself up to such a rotten bounder?"

Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:

"Well, I ain't seen you marryin' anything better. I guess I'll go

home. I don't seem to be wanted here."

This was one of those exact truths that decent people must immediately

deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and said:

"Forgive me, dear--I'm a beast. But Jake is such a--" She felt Abbie

wriggling ominously and changed to: "He's so unworthy of you. These

are such terrible times, and the world is in such horrible need of

everybody's help and especially of ships. It breaks my heart to see

anybody wasting his time and strength interfering with the builders

instead of joining them. It's like interfering with the soldiers.

It's a kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and the

children."

This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears of

self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of suffering

for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a world. She was

like so many of the air-ships the United States was building then: she

could not be induced to leave the ground or, if she got up, to glide

back safely.

She tried now to love her country, but she hardly rose before she

fell.

"Oh, I know it's tur'ble what folks are sufferin', but--well, the

Lord's will be done, I say."

"And I say it's mainly the devil's will that's being done!" said

Mamise.

This terrified Abbie. "I wisht you'd be a little careful of your

language, Mamise. Swearin' and cigarettes both is pretty much of a

load for a lady to git by with."

"O Lord!" sighed Mamise, in despair. She was capable of long, high

flights, but she could not carry such a passenger.

Abbie continued: "And do you think it's right, seein' men here all by

yourself?"

"I'm not seeing men--but a man."

"But all by yourself."

"I'm not all by myself when he's here."

"You'll get the neighbors talkin'--you'll see!"

"A lot I care for their talk!"

"Why don't you marry him and settle down respectable and have childern

and--"

"Why don't you go home and take care of your own?"

"I guess I better." And she departed forthwith.

CHAPTER VIII

The two sisters had managed to fray each other's nerves raw. The mere

fact that Abbie advocated marriage and maternity threw Mamise into a

cantankerous distaste for her own dreams.

Larrey had delayed Davidge long enough for Mamise to be rid of Abbie,

but the influence of both Larrey and Abbie was manifest in the

strained greetings of the caller and the callee. Instead of the

eagerness to rush into each other's arms that both had felt in the

morning, Davidge entered Mamise's presence with one thought dominant:

"Is she really a spy? I must be on my guard." And Mamise was thinking,

"If he should be thinking what Abbie thought, how odious!"

Thus once more their moods chaperoned them. Love could not attune

them. She sat; he sat. When their glances met they parted at once.

She mistook his uncertainty for despondency. She assumed that he was

brooding over his lost ship. Out of a long silence she spoke:

"I wonder if the world will ever forget and forgive?"

"Forget and forgive who--whom, for what?"

"Germany for all she's done to this poor world--Belgium, the

_Lusitania_, the _Clara_?"

He smiled sadly. "The _Clara_ was a little slow tub compared to the

_Lusitania_, but she meant a lot to me."

"And to me. So did the _Lusitania_. She nearly cost me my life."

He was startled. "You didn't plan to sail on her?"

"No, but--" She paused. She had not meant to open this subject.

But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had told.

"How do you mean--she nearly cost you your life?"

"Oh, that's one of the dark chapters of my past."

"You never told me about it."

"I'd rather not."

"Please!" He said it with a surprising earnestness. He had a sudden

hope that her confession might be an absolving explanation.

She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire to release

that old secret. She began, recklessly:

"Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on the stage, and

Sir Joseph Webling--"

"You told me that much, but not what happened before you met him."

"No, I didn't tell you that, and I'm not going to now, but--well, Sir

Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of my own--to know and

remember. Sir Joseph was German born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was

contagious, for he--well, I can't tell you."

"Please!"

"I swore not to."

"You gave your oath to a German?"

"No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I'm always

forgetting and starting to tell."

"Why did you take your oath?"

"I traded secrecy for freedom."

"You mean you turned state's evidence?"

"Oh no, I didn't tell on them. I didn't know what they were up to when

they used me for-- But I'm skidding now. I want to tell you--terribly.

But I simply must not. I made an awful mistake that night at Mrs.

Prothero's in pretending to be ill."

"You only pretended?"

"Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got after me,

accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that resulted in the

sinking of ships and the killing of men. She said that the police came

to our house, and Sir Joseph tried to kill one of them and killed his

own wife and then was shot by an officer and that they gave out the

story that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She

said Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story she told,

and I was afraid she'd tell you, so I spirited you away on the pretext

of illness."

Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey's story. He

said:

"But it wasn't true what Lady C.-W. told?"

"Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact, and I

couldn't explain it without breaking my oath. And now I've pretty

nearly broken it, after all. I've sprained it badly."

"Don't you want to go on and--finish it off?"

"I want to--oh, how I want to! but I've got to save a few shreds of

respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were going to tea with

Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish now I'd let you go. Then you'd

have known the worst of me--or worse than the worst."

She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her bewilderment,

that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized her hands and felt a need

to gather her home to his arms.

She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him. Studying his

radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had known part of her story

before and was glad to hear her confess it, but her intuition missed

fire when she guessed at the source of his information.

"You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!"

"Not since I saw her with you."

"Then who told you?"

He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her read his heart

so true.

"The main thing is that you told me. And now once more I ask you: will

you marry me?"

This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her brusquerie:

"Certainly not."

"And why not?"

"I'll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are."

CHAPTER IX

The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love

a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a

womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.

But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It

offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of

her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She

wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her

sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous

impatience and returned to her theme.

"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some

atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many

ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I

met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened

a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards

and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."

"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.

She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys

from the clutch of a child, and went on:

"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office

work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a

typewriter."

"It keeps you nearer to me."

"But I don't want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me

go out in the yard. Please give me a real job."

He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for

such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at

length she said:

"Please go on home. It's getting late, and I don't like you at all."

"I know you don't like me, but couldn't you love me?"

"That's more impossible than liking you, since you won't let me have

my only wish."

"It's too brutal, I tell you. And it's getting too cold. It would

simply ruin your perfect skin. I don't want to marry a longshoreman,

thank you."

"Then I'll thank you to go on home. I'm tired out. I've got to get up

in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly

drudgery again."

"If you'll marry me you won't have to work at all."

"But work is the one thing I want. So if you'll kindly take yourself

off I'll be much obliged. You've no business here, anyway, and it's

getting so late that you'll have all the neighbors talking."

"A lot I care!"

"Well, I care a lot," she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie.

"I've got to live among them."

It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as

sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl's house by a sleepy

parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into

his overcoat, and growled:

"Good night!"

She sighed "Good night!" and wished that she were not so cantankerous.

The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step

forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with

the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical

problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be

quite squared.

She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and

womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be

nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it

was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.

Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone,

imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would

marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed

single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could

only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when

he was away or when he was at home.

When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely cottage she

stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into

a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little

cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all

these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that

lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to

begin moiling again.

Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the

pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into

the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and

organized they would not have had their wages at all.

But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but

everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the

idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not

imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease.

Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the

mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the

steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers

and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce

the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in

bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in

vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would

revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books

straight.

Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to

go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at

his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He

had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took

their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of

their families or the barrooms of idleness.

Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could

not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only

by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war

was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what

could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all

that the German horror might spare.

Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of

love.

BOOK V

IN WASHINGTON

[Illustration: How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other

well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up

with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each

other's examination.]

CHAPTER I

The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People

thought of the gales that would harass the poor souls in the clammy

trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in

camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and

on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless

persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not

enough for themselves.

To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in

the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold

bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house

grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an

office not half warm enough.

The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded

them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives

along. The dour autumn seemed to wrench hopes from the heart like

shriveled leaves, and to fill the air with swirling discouragements.

The men at work about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow

upon their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that

threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.

The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other stirring

things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly battle and

accept Davidge's offer of a wedding-ring. She had, of course, her

Webling inheritance to fall back upon, but she had come to hate it so

as tainted money that she would not touch it or its interest. She put

it all into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various

charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had been

her emancipation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder had spoken of

as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph Webling.

A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery, a

thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have servants

to wait on her and build her fires. She would go out only when she

wished, and sleep late of mornings. She would have multitudinous furs

and a closed and heated limousine to carry her through the white

world. She could salve her conscience by taking up some of the more

comfortable forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross

bandage-factory or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy

canteen.

At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward matrimony,

as many another woman has done. These craven moods alternated with

periods of self-rebuke. She told herself that such a marriage would

dishonor her and cheat Davidge.

Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it had its

gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America marriage still

possesses for women a certain finality. Only one marriage in nine

ended in divorce that year.

Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt. She was far,

indeed, from that more or less imaginary character so frequent in

fiction and so rare in reality, the young woman who knows nothing of

life and mankind. Like every other woman that ever lived, she knew a

good deal more than she would confess, and had had more experience

than she would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she

knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had found her very

tantalizing about just how much her experience totaled up.

She had observed the enormous difference between a man and a woman who

meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably.

Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously

intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever

good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially

refreshing as bread and butter. The maddening thing about marriage is

what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do

exist, and some people get them.

Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she

coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared

in plenty and in privation.

Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any other man.

She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind

of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a

husband, of what she would be like as a wife.

Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and

everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an

office by the fascinating advertisements of freedom, a career,

achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that

business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home,

commerce its treadmills and its oakum-picking no less than the jail.

The cozy little cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to

nag her soul.

The destruction of the good ship _Clara_ had dealt her a heavier blow

than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal

injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what

bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch,

the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many

an Æschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus

chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his

profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly

awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the

infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and competition.

The blowing up of the _Clara_ had revealed the pitiful truth that men

may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only

to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger.

The _Clara_ served as a warning that the ship _Mamise_ now on the

stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or

destroyed as soon as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about

her. It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather was

conspiring with the inner November.

The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend upon the

blackest year in human annals. Everybody was unhappy; there was a

frightful shortage of food among all nations, a terrifying shortage of

coal, and the lowest temperature ever known would be recorded.

America, less unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly

disappointed in herself.

There was food in plenty for America, but not for her confederates.

The prices were appalling. Wages went up and up, but never quite

caught the expenses. It was necessary to send enormous quantities of

everything to our allies lest they perish before we could arrive with

troops. And Germany went on fiendishly destroying ships, foodstuffs,

and capital, displaying in every victory a more insatiable cruelty, a

more revolting cynicism toward justice, mercy, or truth.

The Kaiserly contempt for America's importance seemed to be justified.

People were beginning to remember Rome, and to wonder if, after all,

Germany might not crush France and England with the troops that had

demolished Russia. And then America would have to fight alone.

At this time Mamise stumbled upon an old magazine of the ancient date

of 1914. It was full of prophecies that the Kaiser would be dethroned,

exiled, hanged, perhaps. The irony of it was ghastly. Nothing was more

impossible than the downfall of the Kaiser--who seemed verifying his

boasts that he took his crown from God. He was praising the strong

sword of the unconquerable Germany. He was marshaling the millions

from his eastern front to throw the British troops into the sea and

smother the France he had bled white. The best that the most hopeful

could do was to mutter: "Hurry! hurry! We've got to hurry!"

Mamise grew fretful about the delay to the ship that was to take her

name across the sea. She went to Davidge to protest: "Can't you hurry

up my ship? If she isn't launched soon I'm going to go mad."

Davidge threw back his head and emitted a noise between laughter and

profanity. He picked up a letter and flung it down.

"I've just got orders changing the specifications again. This is the

third time, and the third time's the charm; for now we've got to take

out all we've put in, make a new set of drawings and a new set of

castings and pretty blamed near tear down the whole ship and rebuild

it."

"In the name of Heaven, why?"

"In the name of hades, because we've got to get a herd of railroad

locomotives to France, and sending them over in pieces won't do. They

want 'em ready to run. So the powers that be have ordered me to

provide two hatchways big enough to lower whole locomotives through,

and pigeonholes in the hold big enough to carry them. As far as the

_Mamise_ is concerned, that means we've just about got to rub it out

and do it over again. It's a case of back to the mold-loft for

_Mamise_."

"And about how much more delay will this mean?"

"Oh, about ninety days or thereabouts. If we're lucky we'll launch her

by spring."

This was almost worse than the death of the _Clara_. That tragedy had

been noble; it dealt a noble blow and woke the heart to a noble grief

and courage. But deferment made the heart sick, and the brain and

almost the stomach.

Davidge liked the disappointment no better than Mamise did, but he was

used to it.

"And now aren't you glad you're not a ship-builder? How would you feel

if you had got your wish to work in the yard and had turned your

little velvet hands into a pair of nutmeg-graters by driving about ten

thousand rivets into those plates, only to have to cut 'em all out

again and drive 'em into an entirely new set of plates, knowing that

maybe they'd have to come out another time and go back? How'd you like

that?"

Mamise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

Davidge went on:

"That's a business man's life, my dear--eternally making things that

won't sell, putting his soul and his capital and his preparation into

a pile of stock that nobody will take off his hands. But he has to go

right on, borrowing money and pledging the past for the future and

never knowing whether his dreams will turn out to be dollars

or--junk!"

Mamise realized for the first time the pathos, the higher drama of the

manufacturer's world, that world which poets and some other literary

artists do not describe because they are too ignorant, too petty, too

bookish. They sneer at the noble word _commercial_ as if it were a

reproach!

Mamise, however, looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of

despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to

rise beyond a poetical height to the clouds of the practical.

"What will you do with all the workmen who are on that job?"

Davidge grinned. "They're announcing their monthly strike for higher

wages--threatening to lay off the force. It'd serve 'em right to take

'em at their word for a while. But you simply can't fight a labor

union according to Queensbery rules, so I'll give 'em the raise and

put 'em on another ship."

"And the _Mamise_ will be idle and neglected for three months."

"Just about."

"The Germans couldn't have done much worse by her, could they?"

"Not much."

"I think I'll call it a day and go home," said Mamise.

"Better call it a quarter and go to New York or Palm Beach or

somewhere where there's a little gaiety."

"Are you sick of seeing me round?"

"Since you won't marry me--yes."

Mamise sniffed at this and set her little desk in order, aligned the

pencils in the tray, put the carbons back in the box and the rubber

cover on the typewriter. Then she sank it into its well and put on her

hat.

Davidge held her heavy coat for her and could not resist the

opportunity to fold her into his arms. Just as his arms closed about

her and he opened his lips to beg her not to desert him he saw over

her shoulder the door opening.

He had barely time to release her and pretend to be still holding her

coat when Miss Gabus entered. His elaborate guiltlessness confirmed

her bitterest suspicions, and she crossed the room to deposit a sheaf

of letters in Davidge's "in" basket and gather up the letters in his

"out" basket. She passed across the stage with an effect of absolute

refrigeration, like one of Richard III's ghosts.

Davidge was furious at Miss Gabus and himself. Mamise was furious at

them both--partly for the awkwardness of the incident, partly for the

failure of Davidge's enterprise against her lips.

When Miss Gabus was gone the ecstatic momentum was lost. Davidge

grumbled:

"Shall I see you to-morrow?"

"I don't know," said Mamise.

She gave him her hand. He pressed it in his two palms and shook his

head. She shook her head. They were both rebuking the bad behavior of

the fates.

Mamise trudged homeward--or at least houseward. She was in another of

her irresolute states, and irresolution is the most disappointing of

all the moods to the irresolute ones and all the neighbors. It was

irresolution that made "Hamlet" a five-act play, and only a

Shakespeare could have kept him endurable.

Mamise was becoming unendurable to herself. When she got to her

cottage she found it as dismal as an empty ice-box. When she had

started the fire going she had nothing else to do. In sheer

desperation she decided to answer a few letters. There was an old one

from Polly Widdicombe. She read it again. It contained the usual

invitation to come back to reason and Washington.

Just for something positive to do she resolved to go. There was a

tonic in the mere act of decision. She wrote a letter. She felt that

she could not wait so long as its answer would require. She resolved

to send a telegram.

This meant hustling out into the cold again, but it was something to

do, somewhere to go, some excuse for a hope.

Polly telegraphed:

Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal

if you can.

Mamise showed Davidge the telegram. He was very plucky about letting

her go. For her sake he was so glad that he concealed his own

loneliness. That made her underestimate it. He confirmed her belief

that he was glad to be rid of her by making a lark of her departure.

He filled an old suit-case with coal and insisted on her taking it.

The porter who lugged it along the platform at Washington gave Mamise

a curious look. He supposed that this was one of those suit-cases full

of bottled goods that were coming into Washington in such multitudes

since the town had been decreed absolutely dry. He shook it and was

surprised when he failed to hear the glug-glug of liquor.

But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of that other

form of carbon which women wear in rings and necklaces. The whole

country was underheated. To the wheatless, meatless, sweetless days

there were added the heatless months. Major Widdicombe took his

breakfasts standing up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in

bed, and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.

There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices of the

Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the shops and

theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country clubs were closed. Every

device to save a lump of coal was put into legal effect so that the

necessary war factories might run and the ships go over the sea. Soon

there would be gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people

would obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated by

law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than one meat to one

person. Grocers would be fined for selling too much sugar to a family.

Placards, great billboards, and all the newspapers were filled with

counsels to save, save, save, and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds.

People grew depressed at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so

little show of accomplishment.

American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and

apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics,

for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The

Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every

advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any

one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without

warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the

reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what

could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no

reserves worth the name. France and England were literally "all in."

Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They

credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron

Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future.

Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful

Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out

now to confess--or rather to boast--that they had planned this triumph

all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up

reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a

German planet.

The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching

day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up

to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of

incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities

sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war

openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the

bills.

In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never

so many fowls counted before they were hatched--and in the final

outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.

But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The

strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in

Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was

counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh

against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian résistance in the

Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own

mountainsides.

Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German

collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break.

So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who

had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before

America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a

great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.

The premonition of the dawning of _Der Tag_ stirred the heart of Nicky

Easton, of course. He had led for months the life of a fox in a

hunt-club county. Every time he put his head out he heard the bay of

the hounds. He had stolen very few chickens, and he expected every

moment to be pounced on. But now that he felt assured of a German

triumph in a little while, he began to think of the future. His heart

turned again to Mamise.

His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place had

compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had been used to.

His German accent did not help him, and he had found that even those

heavy persons known as light women, though they had no other virtue,

had patriotism enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility.

His dialect insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being

insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with German-stained

money.

In his alliance with Jake Nuddle for the blowing up of the _Clara_,

and their later communications looking toward the destruction of other

ships, he kept informed of Mamise. He always asked Jake about her. He

was bitterly depressed by the news that she was "sweet on" Davidge. He

was exultant when he learned from Jake that she had given up her work

in the office and had gone to Washington. Jake learned her address

from Abbie, and passed it on to Nicky.

Nicky was tempted to steal into Washington and surprise her. But enemy

aliens were forbidden to visit the capital, and he was afraid to go by

train. He had wild visions of motoring thither and luring her to a

ride with him. He wanted to kidnap her. He might force her to marry

him by threatening to kill her and himself. At least he might make her

his after the classic manner of his fellow-countrymen in Belgium. But

he had not force enough to carry out anything so masterful. He was a

sentimental German, not a warrior.

In his more emotional moods he began to feel a prophetic sorrow for

Marie Louise after the Germans had conquered the world. She would be

regarded as a traitress. She had been adopted by Sir Joseph Webling

and had helped him, only to abandon the cause and go over to the

enemy.

If Nicky could convert her again to loyalty, persuade her to do some

brave deed for the Fatherland in redemption of her blacksliding, then

when _Der Tag_ came he could reveal what she had done. When in that

resurrection day the graves opened and all the good German spies and

propagandists came forth to be crowned by _Gott_ and the Kaiser, Nicky

could lead Marie Louise to the dual throne, and, describing her

reconciliation to the cause, claim her as his bride. And the Kaiser

would say, "_Ende gut, alles gut!_"

Never a missionary felt more sanctity in offering salvation to a lost

soul by way of repentance than Nicky felt when he went to the house of

an American friend and had Mamise called on the long-distance

telephone.

Mamise answered, "Yes, this is Miss Webling," to the faint-voiced

long-distance operator, and was told to hold the wire. She heard:

"All ready with Washington. Go ahead." Then she heard a timid query:

"Hallow, hallow! Iss this Miss Vapelink?"

She was shocked at the familiar dialect. She answered:

"This is Miss Webling, yes. Who is it?"

"You don'd know my woice?"

"Yes--yes. I know you--"

"Pleass to say no names."

"Where are you?"

"In Philadelphia."

"All right. What do you want?"

"To see you."

"You evidently know my address."

"You know I cannot come by Vashington."

"Then how can I see you?"

"You could meet me some place, yes?"

"Certainly not."

"It is important, most important."

"To whom?"

"To you--only to you. It is for your sake."

She laughed at this; yet it set her curiosity on fire, as he hoped it

would. He could almost hear her pondering. But what she asked was:

"How did you find my address?"

"From Chake--Chake Nuttle."

He could not see the wild look that threw her eyes and lips wide. She

had never dreamed of such an acquaintance. The mere possibility of it

set her brain whirling. It seemed to explain many things, explain them

with a horrible clarity. She dared not reveal her suspicions to Nicky.

She said nothing till she heard him speak again:

"Vell, you come, yes?"

"Where?"

"You could come here best?"

"No, it's too far."

"By Baltimore we could meet once?"

"All right. Where? When?"

"To-morrow. I do not know Baltimore good. Ve could take ride by

automobile and talk so. Yes?"

"All right." This a little anxiously.

"To-morrow evening. I remember it is a train gets there from

Vashington about eight. I meet you. Make sure nobody sees you take

that train, yes?"

"Yes."

"You know people follow people sometimes."

"Yes."

"I trust you alvays, Marie Louise."

"All right. Good-by."

"Goot-py, Marie Louise."

CHAPTER II

While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered several sharp

and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes had wakened in the

receiver.

The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that Nicky had some

postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again. Her ear was as

bewildered as your tongue when it expects to taste one thing and

tastes another, for it was Davidge's voice that spoke, asking for her.

She called him by name, and he growled:

"Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger who kept me

waiting so long?"

"Don't you wish you knew?" she laughed. "Where are you now? At the

shipyard?"

"No, I'm in Washington--ran up on business. Can I see you to-night?"

"I hope so--unless we're going out--as I believe we are. Hold the

wire, won't you, while I ask." She came back in due season to say,

"Polly says you are to come to dinner and go to a dance with us

afterward."

"A dance? I'm not invited."

"It's a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right to take

you--no end of big bugs will be there."

"I'm rusty on dancing, but with you--"

"Thanks. We'll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight. Wrap up well.

It's cold, isn't it?"

He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of

her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he

dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the

new musical insanity known as "jazz"--so pestilential a music that

even the fiddlers capered and writhed.

The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old Rosslyn bridge

squealed with cold under the motor. It was good to see the lights of

the Hall at last, and to thaw himself out at the huge fireplace.

"Lucky to get a little wood," said Major Widdicombe. "Don't know what

we'll do when it's gone. Coal is next to impossible."

Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two or three other

house guests, and some wives of important people. They laid off their

wraps and then decided to keep them on.

Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly clad,

discouraged office-hack that when she descended the stairs and paused

on the landing a few steps from the floor, to lift her eyebrows and

her lip-corners at him, he was glad of the pause.

"Break it to me gently," he called across the balustrade.

She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed in her

complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was dazed by her

unimagined splendor.

As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the tribute in

his, she said:

"Break what to you gently?"

"You!" he groaned. "Good Lord! Talk about 'the glory that was Greece

and the grandeur that was Rome'!"

With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on his evening

finery.

"The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning in

décolleté. For a pair of common laborers, we are certainly gaudy."

Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, "So you're the fascinating

brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary of that awful

ship-factory."

Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: "Never again. She's

fired! We can't afford her."

"Bully for you," said Polly. "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned,

grandmotherly sort of person, but I'll be damned if I can see why a

woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie Louise here should be

pounding typewriter keys in an office. Of course, if she had to-- But

even then, I should say that it would be her solemn religious duty to

sell her soul for a lot of glad-rags.

"A lot of people are predicting that women will never go back to the

foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but--well, I'm no

prophetess, but all I can say is that if this war puts an end to the

dressmaker's art, it will certainly put civilization on the blink.

Now, honestly, what could a woman accomplish in the world if she

worked in overalls twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four years--what

could she make that would be more worth while than getting herself all

dressed up and looking her best?"

Davidge said: "You're talking like a French aristocrat before the

Revolution; but I wish you could convince her of it."

Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she was thrilled,

thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in her best clothes--in and

out of her best clothes, and liberally illuminated with jewelry. She

was now something like a great singer singing the highest note of her

master-aria in her best rôle--herself at once the perfect instrument

and the perfect artist.

Marie Louise went in on Davidge's arm. The dining-room was in gala

attire, the best silver and all of it out--flowers and candles. But

the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women,

who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no

apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to

the chill.

Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise

was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.

"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She

is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up

stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!"

The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of

amazement.

"What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary."

This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise

admitted that it took management.

Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own

breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes?

And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and

eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?"

Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have

to. Nobody's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without

giving me the same excuse."

Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly

affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her

daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her

element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of

luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent

people.

"I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go

back to honest work again."

She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred

to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife

and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.

When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while,

talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was

heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of

the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front,

the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that

they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would

take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in

getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The

astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry

and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order

to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great

battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner's

inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said:

"I get enough of this in the shop, and I'm frozen through. Let's go in

and jaw the women."

Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the

majestic languor of lions well fed.

Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that

concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman,

of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman's stories were always long, and

people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute

all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a

chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of

mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was seated

sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm

rested. Davidge's eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline

described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a

shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the

head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder

carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a

sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one

quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a

stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.

Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her

where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the

gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all

those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with

their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light

that satin shimmers with.

In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and

brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled

bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his

prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown

so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with

much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had

removed the ban on extravagance.

The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise

wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the

safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad

to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking,

laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through

the deeps of color.

The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge

sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the

curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and

polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals

of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied

steel.

He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it

into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a

lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed it in platinum. He

contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the

goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other.

The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as

large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like

sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet

somehow worth more than anything useful.

He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their

patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture,

transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.

He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were

to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their

plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.

It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend

his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task.

It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the

toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces

about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their

fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.

Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few

should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be

allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.

And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich

and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor?

When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the

reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the

same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to

learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would

contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing

of comfort to one's children rendered impossible, the establishment

of one's destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would

there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted "universal happiness."

It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the

next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.

He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from these

nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve

in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work

out their hearts' desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even

more hateful middle class at their mercy.

It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel,

and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous

sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many

men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every

privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might

ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but

little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed

the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city

shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men

who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did

not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not

create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all

for their voyage.

A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry,

was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought

that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor

problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools

they worked with most.

The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head

of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.

CHAPTER III

Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected

the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set

steps.

Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much

of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan

and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a practised skill. There was a

startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and

swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping,

now limping, now running.

He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his

whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus

intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in

a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_.

She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them,

and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of

jealousy in what she murmured:

"You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships,

young man!"

"No?"

"What cabarets have you graduated from?"

He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?"

"No."

"One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a

feather as you."

"Are you referring to my head or my feet?"

"Your blessed feet!"

His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a

delirium of motion.

"That's unfair!" she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire

of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him

dizzily while he applauded with the other dancers till the band

renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily

equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the

crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.

The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from

his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. "I wish we could sail on and

on and on forever."

"Forever is a long time," she smiled.

"May I have the next dance?"

"Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But

don't--"

"Don't what?"

"I don't know."

Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he

suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young

officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered

if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she

responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be

so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy

smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous,

an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for

the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a

temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism plus athleticism.

Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise comported

herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that desperate condition in

which men are made ready to commit monogamy. He felt that he could not

endure to have Mamise free any longer.

He presented himself to her for the next dance.

She laughed. "I'm booked."

He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the dance

out--stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men on the

side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed him at seeing

still a fourth stranger with his arms about Mamise, her breast to his

and her procedure obedient to his. Worse yet, when a fifth insolent

stranger cut in on the twin stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth

temporary husband for another with a levity that amounted to

outrageous polyandry.

Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so intensely

that he wanted to put an end to the abomination, reform it altogether.

He did not want to dance between those white arms so easily forsworn.

He wanted to rescue Mamise from this place of horror and hale her away

to a cave with no outlook on mankind.

It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she understood

him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the proof of her sway

over him and still sane enough to take a joy in her triumph.

She introduced her partner--Davidge would almost have called the

brute a paramour. He did not get the man's name and was glad of

it--especially as the hunter deserted her and went after his next

Sabine.

"You've lost your faithful stenographer," was the first phrase of

Mamise's that Davidge understood.

"Why so?" he grumbled.

"Because this is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a war-worker

about as long as I can. I'm for the fleshpots and the cold-cream jars

and the light fantastic. Aren't you going to dance with me any more?"

"Just as you please," Davidge said, with a singularly boyish

sulkiness, and wondered why Mamise laughed so mercilessly:

"Of course I please."

The music struck up an abandoned jig, but he danced with great dignity

till his feet ran away with him. Then he made off with her again in

one of his frenzies, and a laughter filled his whole being.

She heard him growl something.

"What did you say?" she said.

"I said, 'Damn you!'"

She laughed so heartily at this that she had to stop dancing for a

moment. She astonished him by a brazen question:

"Do you really love me as much as that?"

"More," he groaned, and they bobbed and ducked and skipped as he

muttered a wild anachronism:

"If you don't marry me I'll murder you."

"You're murdering me now. May I breathe, please?"

He was furious at her evasion of so solemn a proposal. Yet she was so

beautifully alive and aglow that he could not exactly hate her. But he

said:

"I won't ask you again. Next time you can ask me."

"All right; that's a bet. I'll give you fair warning."

And then that dance was over, and Mamise triumphant in all things. She

was tumultuously hale and happy, and her lover loved her.

To her that hath--for now, whom should Mamise see but Lady Clifton-Wyatt?

Her heart ached with a reminiscent fear for a moment; then a malicious

hope set it going again. Major Widdicombe claimed Mamise for the next

dance, and extracted her from Davidge's possession. As they danced

out, leaving Davidge stranded, Mamise noted that Lady C.-W. was

regarding Davidge with a startled interest.

The whirl of the dance carried her close to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and

she knew that Lady C.-W. had seen her. Broken glimpses revealed to her

that Lady C.-W. was escorting her escort across the ballroom floor

toward Davidge.

She saw the brazen creature tap Davidge's elbow and smile, putting out

her hand with coquetry. She saw her debarrass herself of her

companion, a French officer whose exquisite horizon-blue uniform was

amazingly crossed with the wound and service chevrons of three years'

warfaring. Nevertheless, Lady Clifton-Wyatt dropped him for the

civilian Davidge. Mamise, flitting here and there, saw that Davidge

was being led to the punch-altar, thence to a lonely strip of chairs,

where Lady C.-W. sat herself down and motioned him to drop anchor

alongside.

Mamise longed to be near enough to hear what she could guess: her

enemy's artless prelude followed by gradual modulations to her main

theme--Mamise's wicked record.

Mamise wished that she had studied lip-reading to get the details. But

this was a slight vexation in the exultance of her mood. She was

serene in the consciousness that Davidge already knew the facts about

her, and that Lady Clifton-Wyatt's gossip would fall with the dreary

thud of a story heard before. So Mamise's feet flew, and her heart

made a music of its own to the tune of:

"Thank God, I told him!"

She realized, as never before, the tremendous comfort and convenience

of the truth. She had been by instinct as veracious as a politely bred

person may be, but now she understood that the truth is mighty good

business. She resolved to deal in no other wares.

This resolution lasted just long enough for her to make a hasty

exception: she would begin her exclusive use of the truth as soon as

she had told Polly a neat lie in explanation of her inexplicable

journey to Baltimore.

Lady C.-W. was doing Mamise the best turn in her power. Davidge was

still angry at Mamise's flippancy in the face of his ardor. But Lady

C.-W.'s attack gave the flirt the dignity of martyrdom. When Lady

C.-W. finished her subtly casual account of all that Mamise had done

or been accused of doing, Davidge crushed her with the quiet remark:

"So she told me."

"She told you that!"

"Yes, and explained it all!"

"She would!" was the best that Lady Clifton-Wyatt could do, but she

saw that the case was lost. She saw that Davidge's gaze was following

Mamise here and there amid the dancers, and she was sportswoman enough

to concede:

"She is a beauty, anyway--there's no questioning that, at least."

It was the canniest thing she could have done to re-establish herself

in Davidge's eyes. He felt so well reconciled with the world that he

said:

"You wouldn't care to finish this dance, I suppose?"

"Why not?"

Lady Clifton-Wyatt was democratic--in the provinces and the

States--and this was as good a way of changing the subject as any. She

rose promptly and entered the bosom of Davidge. The good American who

did not believe in aristocracies had just time to be overawed at

finding himself hugging a real Lady with a capital L when the music

stopped.

It is an old saw that what is too foolish to be said can be sung.

Music hallows or denatures whatever it touches. It was quite proper,

because quite customary, for Davidge and Lady Clifton-Wyatt to stand

enfolded in each other's embrace so long as a dance tune was in the

air. The moment the musicians quit work the attitude became indecent.

Amazing and eternal mystery, that custom can make the same thing mean

everything, or nothing, or all the between-things. The ancient

Babylonians carried the idea of the permissible embrace to the

ultimate intimacy in their annual festivals, and the good women

doubtless thought no more of it than a woman of to-day thinks of

waltzing with a presentable stranger. They went home to their husbands

and their housework as if they had been to church. Certain Bolsheviki,

even in the year 1918, put up placards renewing the ancient

Mesopotamian custom, under the guise of a community privilege and a

civic duty.

And yet some people pretend to differentiate between fashions and

morals!

But nobody at this dance was foolish enough to philosophize. Everybody

was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from the British embassy came

up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hand and body for the next dance.

Davidge had been mystically attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her

in a mood for reconciliation. She liked him so well that when the

Italian aviator to whom she had pledged the "Tickle Toe" came to

demand it, she perjured herself calmly and eloped with Davidge. And

Davidge, instead of being alarmed by her easy morals, was completely

reassured.

But he found her unready with another perjury when he abruptly asked

her:

"What are you doing to-morrow?"

"Let me see," she temporized in a flutter, thinking of Baltimore and

Nicky.

"If you've nothing special on, how about a tea-dance? I'm getting

addicted to this."

"I'm afraid I'm booked up for to-morrow," she faltered. "Polly keeps

the calendar. Yes, I know we have some stupid date--I can't think just

what. How about the day after?"

The deferment made his amorous heart sick, and to-morrow's to-morrow

seemed as remote as Judgment Day. Besides, as he explained:

"I've got to go back to the shipyard to-morrow evening. Couldn't you

give me a lunch--an early one at twelve-thirty?"

"Yes, I could do that. In fact, I'd love it!"

"And me too?"

"That would be telling."

At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs cut in and

would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to use his fists, but Mamise,

though she longed to tarry with Davidge, knew the value of tantalism,

and consented to the abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly

and danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close that

the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to swipe Polly

across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.

She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for support, mixing

astonishing profanity with her smothered groans. The cub showered

apologies on her, and reviled "Regulations" which compelled him to

wear spurs with his boots, though he had only a desk job.

Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing. But Mamise

saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal and gave Polly

her arm, as she limped through the barrage of hurtling couples. Polly

asked Davidge to retrieve her husband from the sloe-eyed ambassadress

who was hypnotizing him. She wailed to Mamise:

"I know I'm marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron for this.

I've got to go home and put my ankle in splints. I'll probably have to

wear it in a sling for a month. I'd like to kill the rotten hound that

put me out of business. And I had the next dance with that beautiful

Rumanian devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!"

Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding good night

to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride out home with her, but

Polly refused. She wanted to have a good cry in the car.

Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she was plighted to

luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the house of the friend he was

stopping with, the hotels being booked solid for weeks ahead. He was

nursing a stern determination to endure bachelordom no longer.

Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her brains, while

another segment condoled with Polly. But most of her wits were engaged

in hunting a good excuse for her Baltimore escapade the next

afternoon, and in discarding such implausible excuses as occurred to

her.

Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were

a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.

"I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is all icicles. I

know I'll die of pneumonia."

He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle of Polly,

who was snuggling to him for warmth.

She yowled: "My Gawd! My yankle! You'll not last long enough for

pneumonia if you touch me again."

He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to

embrace her, she would none of him.

When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac.

It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and

battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets

clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an

attack on a walled town.

The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under

the flight.

The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise's room was like a

storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as

she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a

heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice

between the all-too-snowy sheets.

She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and

she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied

bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front.

She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent

bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the

shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at

Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow

barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get

new shoes across.

Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German

offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be

combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter.

America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to

shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women,

too--thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the

clothes, to warm men's hearts _via_ their stomachs, and to take their

minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would

furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage.

Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now.

Later they would be going across to play in France--one-night stands,

two a day in Picardy.

Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of burlesque of

the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as

by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a

wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a

dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad

in draughty halls.

She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of

it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful

as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those

poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along

the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a

blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial

misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the

soldiers.

The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the

impulse. It would be her atonement.

She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise

it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the

altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister

of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over--if he

had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return

to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final

atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be

nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do

that most of all.

She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him

farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or

another--and then set about her destiny.

She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears

refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell

asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.

CHAPTER IV

The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a

colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray

in mittened hands.

Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if

you'll turn on the hot water, please."

"Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this

mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again.

No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's

half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee

nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew."

Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at

eleven-thirty.

"Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!"

"Yessum, that's the raht tahm."

"Great heavens!"

"Yes, ma'am."

Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted

with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.

She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern

history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the

heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless

day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two

baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in

the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire.

This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for

they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're

going to commit suicide, anyway?")

But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the

very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an

extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as

ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an

Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of

helpless holy living.

Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew

rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their

stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance,

they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable

fetor.

And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had

once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these

slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and

shared their glorious loathsomeness.

The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise's one skip-bath day

must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left

unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure

enough when she was dressed.

Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as

an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise's inspection, and Mamise

pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.

Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain the soldiers.

Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier scheme than

ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone her husband to look

into the matter of a passport for her.

Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and Mamise had

not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge would be miffed. Polly

suggested telephoning the hotel.

Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as crowded as

everything else.

"It will take an hour to get the hotel," said Mamise, "another hour to

page the man. I'll make a dash for it. He'll give me a little grace, I

know."

The car was not ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky

and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads

were sleety and skiddy, and required careful driving.

Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found it closed

to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer

Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and

piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old

aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected to live.

It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the

distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get to Washington

was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a détour of

miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort

Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the

soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to

the marble pages of the Arlington epic.

The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in

Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand

dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of

eternal anonymity--dead from all our wars, and many of them with their

wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.

But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this

occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the

Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past

the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached

the hotel, she was just one hour late.

Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to

reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them

all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous.

And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He

had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result

of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a

haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.

In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly

Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her

amazement.

"Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with

you and go to the theater."

"Oh!" said the befuddled Davidge. "Oh, of course! Silly of me!

Good-by!"

Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement

to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase

after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking

the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in

vain.

When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless

confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had

befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or

hated her the more.

But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry

into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too short for her to

risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back for a suit-case, in view

of the Alexandria détour. She must, therefore, travel without baggage.

Therefore she must return the same night. She found, to her immense

relief, that this could be done. The seven-o'clock train to Baltimore

reached there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.

She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but now an

inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that she was dining out

with Polly somewhere; consequently it would be safe to tell Polly that

she was dining out with Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to

compare notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One

cannot be seen to blush.

She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by what Widdicombe

called "the ebony maid with the ivory head." Mamise told her not to

summon her lame mistress to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss

Webling was dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him.

She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then rang

off.

This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted to

Davidge for his bewilderment.

To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could leave,

Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows that keep going

without interruption. Public benefactors maintain them for the

salvation of women who have no homes or do not want to go to them

yet.

The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly, as usual

leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects shown were selected from

all the fascinating events of the time. Then followed a doleful

imitation of Mr. Charles Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the

artistry of the original.

The _cinema de résistance_ was a long and idiotic vampire picture in

which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to impossible ruin by

wiles and attitudes that would have driven any actual male to flight,

laughter, or a call for the police. But the audience seemed to enjoy

it, as a substitute, no doubt, for the old-fashioned gruesome

fairy-stories that one accepts because they are so unlike the tiresome

realities. Mamise wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She

was tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment, if

ever opportunity offered.

In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled away the

dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her dinner on the train,

remembering vividly how her heart history with Davidge had begun on a

train. She missed him now, and his self-effacing gallantry.

The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive was ill

concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn't quite exist.

Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she had never paid Davidge

for that chair he gave up to her. She vowed again that she would not

forget. She felt a deep remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks.

She regretted especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was

her privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no right

to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she belonged to

him.

She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too, as well as

her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible and subjecting

herself to a self-immolation among hardships. After the war--assuming

that the war would soon end and that she would come out of it

alive--afterward she could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.

Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was startled to

find Baltimore already gathering round the train. And she had not even

begun to organize her stratagems against Nicky Easton. She made a

hasty exit from the car and sought the cab-ranks outside.

From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself, lifted his hat,

and motioned her to an open door. She bent her head down and her

knees up and entered a little room on wheels.

Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for as soon as

Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself the limousine moved

off--into what adventures? Mamise was wondering.

BOOK VI

IN BALTIMORE

[Illustration: "So I have already done something more for Germany. That's

splendid. Now tell me what else I can do." Nicky was too intoxicated with

his success to see through her thin disguise.]

CHAPTER I

Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young

vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her

own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some

lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had

forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.

Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had

been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in

the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees

whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule

would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out

as anonymously as she had sneaked in.

Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her

hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on.

They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was

fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a

kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was

complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.

But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled

against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted

his arms away and muttered:

"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the

driver to let me out?"

"_Nein doch_!"

"Then let me alone or I will."

Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her,

and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble

stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its

statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.

They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she

was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:

"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."

Nicky fidgeted and sulked:

"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is

no use."

"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have

stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."

"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."

Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could

not imagine how to coax him out of silence.

His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:

"_Ach Gott_, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These

Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my _Vaterland_.

But the time comes soon, and I must make patience. _Eile mit Weile!_"

"You'd better tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he

shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom

rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized

that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him by asserting her own

dignity.

She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly

schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She

hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they

kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might

accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had

"vamped" for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her

fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark

was all the better for her purpose.

At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a

struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought

Nicky's, as she cooed:

"Come along, Nicky, don't be so cantankerous."

His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its clutch:

"But you are so colt!"

She insinuated, "You couldn't expect me to make love to you the very

first thing, could you?"

"You mean you do like me?"

Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And he,

encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her, flung his arm

about her again and drew her, resisting only in her soul, close to

him.

CHAPTER II

But when his lips hunted hers she hid them in her fur collar; and he,

imputing it to coquetry, humored her, finding her delicate timidity

enhancing and inspiring. He chuckled:

"You shall kiss me yet."

"Not till you have told me what you sent for me for."

"No, feerst you must give me one to proof your good fate--your good

face--" He was trying to say "good faith."

She was stubborn, but he was more obstinate still, and he had the

advantage of the secret.

And so at last she sighed "All right," and put up her cheek to pay the

price. His arms tightened about her, and his lips were not content

with her cheek. He fought to win her lips, but she began to tear off

her gloves to scratch his eyes out if need be for release.

She was revolted, and she would have marred his beauty if he had not

let her go. Once freed, she regained her self-control, for the sake of

her mission, and said, with a mock seriousness:

"Now, be careful, or I won't listen to you at all."

Sighing with disappointment, but more determined than ever to make her

his, he said:

"Feerst I must esk you, how is your feelink about Chermany?"

"Just as before."

"Chust as vich 'before'? Do you loaf Chermany or hate?"

She was permitted to say only one thing. It came hard:

"I love her, of course."

"_Ach, behüt' dich, Gott!_" he cried, and would have clasped her

again, but she insisted on discipline. He began his explanation.

"I did told you how, to safe my life in England, I confessed

somethings. Many of our people here will not forgive. My only vay to

get back vere I have been is to make--as Americans say--to make myself

skvare by to do some big vork. I have done a little, not much, but

more can be if you help."

"What could I do?"

"Much things, but the greatest--listen once: our Chermany has no fear

of America so long America is on this side of the Atlentic Ozean.

Americans build ships; Chermany must destroy fester as they build.

Already I have made one ship less for America. I cannot pooblish

advertisink, but my people shall one day know, and that day comes

soon; _Der Tag_ is almost here--you shall see! Our army grows alvays,

in France; and England and France can get no more men. Ven all is

ready, Chermany moves like a--a avalenche down a mountain and covers

France to the sea.

"On that day our fleet--our glorious ships--comes out from Kiel Canal,

vere man holds them beck like big dogs in leash. Oh those beautiful

day, Chermany conquers on lent and on sea. France dies, and England's

navy goes down into the deep and comes never back.

"_Ach Gott_, such a day it shall be--when old England's empire goes

into history, into ancient history vit Roossia and Rome and Greece and

Bebylonia.

"England gone, France gone, Italy gone--who shall safe America and her

armies and her unborn ships, and her cannon and shell and air-ships

not yet so much as begun?

"_Der Tag_ shall be like the lest day ven _Gott_ makes the graves open

and the dead come beck to life. The Americans shall fall on knees

before our Kaiser, and he shall render chudgment. Such a payink!

"Now the Yenkees despise us Chermans. Ve cannot go to this city, to

that dock. Everywhere is dead-lines and permissions and internment

camps and persecutions, and all who are not in prison are afraid. They

change their names from Cherman to English now, but soon they shall

lift their heads and it shall be the Americans who shall know the

dead-lines, the licenses, the internment camps.

"So, Marie Louise, my sveetheart, if you can show and I can show that

in the dark night ve did not forget the _Vaterland_, ve shall be proud

and safe.

"It is to make you safe ven comes _Der Tag_ I speak to you now. I vish

you should share my vork now, so you can share my life efterwards.

Now do I loaf you, Marie Louise? Now do I give you proof?"

Mamise was all ashudder with the intensity of his conviction. She

imagined an all-conquering Germany in America. She needed but to

multiply the story of Belgium, of Serbia, of prostrate Russia. The

Kaiser had put in the shop-window of the world samples enough of the

future as it would be made by Germany.

And in the mood of that day, with defeatism rife in Europe, and

pessimism miasmatic in America, there was reason enough for Nicky to

believe in his prophecy and to inspire belief in its possibility. The

only impossible thing about it was that the world should ever endure

the dominance of Germany. Death would seem better to almost everybody

than life in such a civilization as she promised.

Mamise feared the Teutonic might, but she could not for a moment

consent to accept it. There was only one thing for her to do, and that

was to learn what plans she could, and thwart them. Here within her

grasp was the long-sought opportunity to pay off the debt she had

incurred. She could be a soldier now, at last. There was no price that

Nicky might have demanded too great, too costly, too shameful for her

to pay. To denounce him or defy him would be a criminal waste of

opportunity.

She said: "I understand. You are right, of course. Let me help in any

way I can. I only wish there were something big for me to do."

Nicky was overjoyed. He had triumphed both as patriot and as lover.

"There is a big think for you to do," he said. "You can all you

vill."

"Tell me," she pleaded.

"You are in shipyard. This man Davidge goes on building ships. I gave

him fair warning. I sinked one ship for him, but he makes more."

"You sank his ship?" Mamise gasped.

"Sure! The _Clara_, he called her. I find where she goes to take

cargo. I go myself. I row up behind the ship in little boat, and I

fasten by the rudder-post under the water, where no one sees, a bomb.

It is all innocent till ship moves. Then every time the rudder turns a

little screw turns in the machine.

"It turns for two, three days; then--_boom_! It makes explosion, tears

ship to pieces, and down she goes. And so goes all the next ships if

you help again."

"Again? What do you mean by again?"

"It is you, Marie Louise, who sinks the _Clara_."

Her laugh of incredulity was hardly more than a shiver of dread.

"_Ja wohl!_ You did told Chake Nuttle vat Davidge tells you. Chake

Nuttle tells me. I go and make sink the ship!"

"Jake Nuddle! It was Jake that told you!" Mamise faltered, seeing her

first vague suspicions damnably confirmed.

"Sure! Chake Nuttle is my _Leutnant_. He has had much money. He gets

more. He shall be rich man after comes _Der Tag_. It might be we make

him von Nuttle! and you shall be Gräfin von Oesten."

Mamise was in an abject terror. The thick trees of the park were

spooky as the dim light of the car elicited from the black wall of

dark faint details of tree-trunks and naked boughs stark with winter.

She was in a hurry to learn the rest and be gone. She spoke with a

poor imitation of pride:

"So I have already done something more for Germany. That's splendid.

Now tell me what else I can do, for I want to--to get busy right

away."

Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin

disguise.

"You are close by Davidge. Chake Nuttle tells me he is sveet on you.

You have his confidence. You can learn what secrets he has. Next time

we do not vait for ship to be launched and to go for cargo. It might

go some place ve could not find.

"So now ve going blow up those ships before they touch vater--ve blow

up his whole yard. You shall go beck and take up again your vork, and

ven all is right I come down and get a job. I dress like vorkman and

get into the yard. And I bring in enough bombs to blow up all the

ships and the cranes and the machines.

"Chake Nuttle tells me Davidge just gets a plate-bending machine.

Forty-five t'ousand dollars it costs him, and long time to get. In one

minute--poof! Ve bend that plate-bender!"

He laughed a great Teutonic laugh and supposed that she was laughing,

too. When he had subsided a little, he said:

"So now you know vat you are to make! You like to do so much for

Chermany, yes?"

"Oh yes! Yes!" said Mamise.

"You promise to do vat I send you vord?"

"Yes." She would have promised to blow up the Capitol.

"_Ach_, how beautiful you are even in the dark! Kiss me!"

Remembering Judith, she paid that odious price, wishing that she might

have the beast's infamous head with a sword. It was a kiss of

betrayal, but she felt that it was no Judas-kiss, since Nicky was no

Christ.

He told her more of his plans in detail, and was so childishly proud

of his superb achievements, past and future, that she could hardly

persuade him to take her back to the station. He assured her that

there was abundant time, but she would not trust his watch. She

explained how necessary it was for her to return to Washington and to

Polly Widdicombe's house before midnight. And at last he yielded to

her entreaties, opened the door, and leaned out to tell the driver to

turn back.

Mamise was uneasy till they were out of the park and into the lighted

streets again. But there was no safety here, for as they glided down

Charles Street a taxicab going with the reckless velocity of taxicabs

tried to cut across their path.

There was a swift fencing for the right of way, and then the two cars

came together with a clash and much crumpling of fenders.

The drivers descended to wrangle over the blame, and Mamise had

visions of a trip to the police station, with a consequent exposure.

But Nicky was alive to the danger of notoriety. He got out and assumed

the blame, taking the other driver's part and offering to pay the

damages.

The taxicab-driver assessed them liberally at fifty dollars, and Nicky

filled his palm with bills, ordering his own driver to proceed. The

car limped along with a twisted steering-gear, and Nicky growled

thanksgivings over the narrow escape the German Empire had had from

losing two of its most valuable agents.

Mamise was sick with terror of what might have been. She saw the

collision with a fatal result, herself and Nicky killed and flung to

the street, dead together. It was not the fear of dying that froze

her soul; it was the posthumous blow she would have given to Davidge's

trust in her and all women, the pain she would have inflicted on his

love. For to his dying day he would have believed her false to him, a

cheap and nasty trickster, sneaking off to another town to a

rendezvous with another man. And that man a German!

The picture of his bitter disillusionment and of her own unmerited and

eternal disgrace was intolerably real in spite of the fact that she

knew it to be untrue, for our imaginations are far more ancient and

more irresistible than our late and faltering reliance on the truth;

the heavens and hells we fancy have more weight with our credulities

than any facts we encounter. We can dodge the facts or close our eyes

to them, but we cannot escape our dreams, whether our eyes are wide or

sealed.

Mamise could not free herself of this nightmare till she had bidden

Nicky good-by the last time and left him in the cab outside the

station.

Further nightmares awaited her, for in the waiting-room she could not

fight off the conviction that the train would never arrive. When it

came clanging in on grinding wheels and she clambered aboard, she knew

that it would be wrecked, and the finding of her body in the débris,

or its disappearance in the flames, would break poor Davidge's heart

and leave her to the same ignominy in his memory.

While the train swung on toward Washington, she added another torment

to her collection: how could she save Davidge from Nicky without

betraying her sister's husband into the hands of justice? What right

had she to tell Davidge anything when her sacred duty to her family

and her poor sister must first be heartlessly violated?

BOOK VII

AT THE SHIPYARD

[Illustration: Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in

the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow.]

CHAPTER I

Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own soul, for people

can on occasion accomplish what the familiar Irish drillmaster invited

his raw recruits to do--"Step out and take a look at yourselves."

Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts were cut

off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with incredulity and

exclaimed:

"Can this be I?"

If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in

unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.

What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding

either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In

London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings,

of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred

the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them.

Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister's husband of

disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would

involve her sister's ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced

that her sister's husband was in a plot against her lover and her

country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the

sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn

duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have

something at last to give up for her nation.

The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in

her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was

threatened by her sister's husband, and her vague patriotism had been

stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was

undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining

white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the

blood of its votaries. Men were offering themselves, casting from

them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love

and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile

hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the

slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the

trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they

were missing from the beadroll of contributors.

Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build

ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer's share in the

process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and

offer what gift she had--the poor little gift of entertaining the

soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she

waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found

at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save

ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would

be the liberty and what little good name her sister's husband had; it

would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had

dealt with harshly enough already.

But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy.

She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner

being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to

adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country.

Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both

by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she

could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at

the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade

in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.