She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall

before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the

river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never

known.

She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her

lips, voicing the words:

"You owe me something, old capital. You'll never put up any statues to

me or carve my name on any tablets, but I'm doing something for you

that will mean more than anybody will ever realize."

She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily and

wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no

explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so.

Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise's room to

demand an accounting.

"I was just on the point of telephoning the police to see if you had

been found in the river."

Mamise did not bother either to explain her past lies or tell any new

ones. She majestically answered:

"Polly darling, I have been engaged in affairs of state, which I am

not at liberty to divulge to the common public."

"Rot!" said Polly. "I believe the 'affairs,' but not the 'state.'"

Mamise was above insult. "Some day you will know. You've heard of

Helen of Troy, the lady with the face that launched a thousand

ships? Well, this face of mine will launch at least half a dozen

freight-boats."

Polly yawned. "I'll call my doctor in the morning and have you taken

away quietly. Your mind's wandering, as well as the rest of you."

Mamise chuckled like a child with a great secret, and Polly waddled

back to her bed.

Next morning Mamise woke into a world warm with her own importance,

though the thermometer was farther down than Washington's oldest

records. She called Davidge on the long-distance telephone, and there

was a zero in his voice that she had never heard before.

"This is Mamise," she sang.

"Yes?" Simply that and nothing more.

She laughed aloud, glad that he cared enough for her to be so angry at

her. She forgot the decencies of telephone etiquette enough to sing

out:

"Do you really love me so madly?"

He loathed sentimentalities over the telephone, and she knew it, and

was always indulging in them. But the fat was on the wire now, and he

came back at her with a still icier tone:

"There's only one good excuse for what you've done. Are you

telephoning from a hospital?"

"No, from Polly's."

"Then I can't imagine any excuse."

"But you're a business man, not an imaginator," she railed. "You

evidently don't know me. I'm 'Belle Boyd, the Rebel Spy,' and also

'Joan of Arkansas,' and a few other patriots. I've got news for you

that will melt the icicles off your eyebrows."

"News?" he answered, with no curiosity modifying his anger.

"War news. May I come down and tell you about it?"

"This is a free country."

"Fine! You're simply adorable when you try to sulk. What time would be

most convenient?"

"I make no more appointments with you, young woman."

"All right. Then I'll wait at my shanty till you come."

"I was going to rent it."

"You just dare! I am coming back to work. The strike is over."

"You'd better come to the office as soon as you get here."

"All right. Give my love to Miss Gabus."

She left the telephone and set about packing her things in a fury.

Polly reminded her that she had appointments for fittings at

dressmakers'.

"I never keep appointments," said Mamise. "You can cancel them for me

till this cruel war is over. Have the bills sent to me at the

shipyard, will you, dear? Sorry to bother you, but I've barely time to

catch my train."

Polly called her a once unmentionable name that was coming into

fashionable use after a long exile. Women had draped themselves in a

certain animal's pelt with such freedom and grace for so many years

that its name had lost enough of its impropriety to be spoken, and not

too much to express disapproval.

"You skunk!" said Polly. And Mamise laughed. Everything made her laugh

now; she was so happy that she began to cry.

"Why the crocodiles?" said Polly. "Because you're leaving me?"

"No, I'm crying because I didn't realize how unhappy I had always been

before I am as happy as I am now. I'm going to be useful at last,

Polly. I'm going to do something for my country."

She was sharing in that vast national ecstasy which is called

patriotism and which turns the flames of martyrdom into roses.

When Mamise reached the end of her journey she found Davidge waiting

for her at the railroad station with a limousine.

His manner was studiously insulting, but he was helplessly glad to see

her, and the humiliation he had suffered from her failure to keep her

engagements with him in Washington was canceled by the tribute of her

return to him. The knot of his frown was solved by the mischief of her

smile. He had to say:

"Why didn't you meet me at luncheon?"

"How could I prevent the Potomac from putting the old bridge out of

commission?" she demanded. "I got there in time, but they wouldn't let

me across, and by the time I reached the hotel you had gone, and I

didn't know where to find you. Heaven knows I tried."

The simplicity of this explanation deprived him of every excuse for

further wrath, and he was not inspired to ask any further questions.

He was capable of nothing better than a large and stupid:

"Oh!"

"Wait till you hear what I've got to tell you."

But first he disclosed a little plot of his own with a comfortable

guiltiness:

"How would you like," he stammered, "since you say you have news--how

would you like--instead of going to your shanty--I've had a fire built

in it--but--how would you like to take a ride in the car--out into the

country, you know? Then you could tell me, and nobody would hear or

interrupt."

She was startled by the similarity of his arrangement to that of Nicky

Easton, but she approached it with different dread.

She regretted the broad daylight and the disconcerting landscape. In

the ride with Nicky she had been enveloped in the dark. Now the sky

was lined with unbleached wool. The air was thick with snow withheld,

and the snow on the ground took the color of the sky. But the light

was searching, cynical, and the wayside scenes were revealed with the

despondent starkness of a Russian novel. In this romanceless,

colorless dreariness it was not easy for Mamise to gloss over the

details of her meeting with Nicky Easton.

There was no escaping this part of the explanation, however, and she

could see how little comfort Davidge took from the news that she had

gone so far to be alone with a former devotee. A man does not want his

sweetheart to take risks for him beyond a certain point, and he would

rather not be saved at all than be saved by her at too high a price.

The modern man has a hard time living down the heritage from the

ten-thousand-year habitude of treating his women like children who

cannot be trusted to take care of themselves.

Mamise had such poor success with the part of her chronicle she wished

to publish that she boggled miserably the part she wanted to handle

with most discretion. As is usual in such cases, the most conspicuous

thing about her message was her inability to conceal the fact that she

was concealing something. Davidge's imagination was consequently so

busy that he paid hardly any attention to the tremendous facts she so

awkwardly delivered.

She might as well have told him flat that Nicky would not divulge his

plot except with his arms about her and his lips at her cheeks. That

would not have been easy telling, but it was all too easy imagining

for Davidge. He was thrown into an utter wretchedness by the vision he

had of her surrender to the opportunity and to the undoubted

importunity of her companion. He had a morbid desire to make her

confess, and confessors have a notorious appetite for details.

"You weren't riding with Easton alone in the dark all that

time--without--"

She waited for the question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some

trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words

were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse

thesaurus of his vocabulary he found nothing subtle. He groaned:

"Without his--his making love to you?"

"I wish you wouldn't ask me," said Mamise.

"I don't need to. You've answered," Davidge snarled. "And so will

he."

Mamise's heart was suddenly a live coal, throbbing with fire and

keenly painful--yet very warm. She had a man who loved her well enough

to hate for her and to avenge her. That was something gained.

Davidge brooded. It was inconceivably hideous that he should have

given his heart to this pretty thing at his side only to have her

ensconce herself in the arms of another man and give him the liberty

of her cheeks--Heaven knew, hell knew, what other liberties. He vowed

that he would never put his lips where another man's had been.

Mamise seemed to feel soiled and fit only for the waste-basket of

life. She had delivered her "message to Garcia," and Garcia rewarded

her with disgust. She waited shame-fast for a moment before she could

even falter:

"Did you happen to hear the news I brought you? Or doesn't it interest

you?"

Davidge answered with repugnance:

"Agh!"

In her meekness she needed some insult to revive her, and this

sufficed. She flared instantly:

"I'm sorry I told you. I hope that Nicky blows up your whole damned

shipyard and you with it; and I'd like to help him!"

Nothing less insane could have served the brilliant effect of that

outburst. It cleared the sultry air like a crackling thunderbolt. A

gentle rain followed down her cheeks, while the overcharged heart of

Davidge roared with Jovian laughter.

There is no cure for these desperate situations like such an

explosion. It burns up at once the litter of circumstance and leaves

hardly an ash. It fuses elements that otherwise resist welding, and it

annihilates all minor fears in one great terror that ends in a joyous

relief.

Mamise was having a noble cry now, and Davidge was sobbing with

laughter--the two forms of recreation most congenial to their

respective sexes.

Davidge caught her hands and cooed with such noise that the driver

outside must have heard the reverberations through the glass:

"You blessed child! I'm a low-lived brute, and you're an angel."

A man loves to call himself a brute, and a woman loves to be called an

angel, especially when it is untrue in both cases.

The sky of their being thus cleansed with rain and thunder, and all

blue peace again, they were calm enough by and by to consider the main

business of the session--what was to be done to save the shipyard from

destruction?

Mamise had to repeat most of what she had told, point by point:

Nicky was not going to wait till the ships were launched or even

finished. He was impatient to strike a resounding blow at the American

program. Nicky was going to let Mamise know just when the blow was to

be struck, so that she might share in the glory of it when triumphant

Germany rewarded her faithful servants in America. Jake Nuddle was to

take part in the ship-slaughter for the double privilege of protesting

against this capitalistic war and of crippling those cruel capitalists

to whom he owed all his poverty--to hear him tell it.

When Mamise had finished this inventory of the situation Davidge

pondered aloud:

"Of course, we ought to turn the case over to the Department of

Justice and the Military and Naval Intelligence to handle, but--"

"But I'd like to shelter my poor sister if I could," said Mamise. "Of

course, I wouldn't let any tenderness for Jake Nuddle stand in the way

of my patriotic duty, for Heaven knows he's as much of a traitor to my

poor sister as he is to everything else that's decent, but I'd like to

keep him out of it somehow. Something might happen to make it

possible, don't you suppose?"

"I might cripple him and send him to a hospital to save his life,"

said Davidge.

"Anything to keep him out of it," said Mamise. "If I should tell the

authorities, though, they'd put him in jail right away, wouldn't

they?"

"Probably. And they'd run your friend Nicky down and intern him. Then

I'd lose my chance to lay hands on him as--"

"As he did on you," was what he started to say, but he stopped in

time.

This being Davidge's fierce desire, he found plenty of justification

for it in other arguments. In the first place, there was no telling

where Nicky might be. He had given Mamise no hint of his headquarters.

She had neglected to ask where she could reach him, and had been

instructed simply to wait till he gave her the signal. No doubt he

could be picked up somewhere in the enormous, ubiquitous net with

which America had been gradually covered by the secret services and by

the far-flung line of the American Protective League made up of

private citizens. But there would be a certain unsatisfactoriness

about nipping his plot so far from even the bud. Prevention is wisdom,

but it lacks fascination.

And supposing that they found Nicky, what evidence had they against

him, except Mamise's uncorroborated statement that he had discussed

certain plots with her? Enemy aliens could be interned without trial,

but that meant a halcyon existence for Nicky and every comfort except

liberty. This was not to be considered. Davidge had a personal grudge,

too, to satisfy. He owed Nicky punishment for sinking the ship named

after Davidge's mother and for planning to sink the ship he was naming

after the woman he hoped to make his wife.

Davidge was eager to seize Nicky in the very act of planting his

torpedo and hoist him with his own petard. So he counseled a plan of

waiting further developments. Mamise was the more willing, since it

deferred the hateful moment when Jake Nuddle would be exposed. She had

a hope that things might so happen as to leave him out of the

dénouement entirely.

And now Davidge and Mamise were in perfect agreement, conspirators

against a conspiracy. And there was the final note of the terrible in

their compact: their failure meant the demolition of all those growing

ships, the nullification of Davidge's entire contribution to the war;

their success would mean perhaps the death of Easton and the

blackening of the name of Mamise's sister and her sister's children.

The solemnity of the outlook made impossible any talk of love. Davidge

left Mamise at her cottage and rode back to his office, feeling like

the commander of a stockade in the time of an Indian uprising. Mamise

found that his foresight had had the house warmed for her; and there

were flowers in a jar. She smiled at his tenderness even in his wrath.

But the sight of the smoke rolling from the chimney had caught the eye

of her sister, and she found Abbie waiting to welcome her.

The two rushed to each other with the affection of blood-kin, but

Mamise felt like a Judas when she kissed the sister she was planning

to betray. Abbie began at once to recite a catalogue of troubles. They

were sordid and petty, but Mamise shivered to think how real a tragedy

impended. She wondered how right she was to devastate her sister's

life for the sake of a cause which, after all, was only the imagined

welfare of millions of total strangers. She could not see the nation

for the people, but her sister was her sister, and pitifully human.

That was the worst wrench of war, the incessant compulsions to tear

the heart away from its natural moorings.

CHAPTER II

Davidge thought it only fair to take the Department of Justice

operative, Larrey, into his confidence. Larrey was perfectly willing

to defer reporting to his office chief until the more dramatic

conclusion; for he had an easily understandable ambition to share in

the glory of it. It was agreed that a closer watch than ever should be

kept on the shipyard and its approaches. Easton had promised to notify

Mamise of his arrival, but he might grow suspicious of her and strike

without warning.

The period of waiting was as maddening as the suspense of the poor

insomniac who implored the man next door to "drop the other shoe."

Mamise suffered doubly from her dual interest in Abbie and in Davidge.

She dared not tell Abbie what was in the wind, though she tried to

undermine gradually the curious devotion Abbie bore to her worthless

husband. But Mamise's criticisms of Jake only spurred Abbie to new

defenses of him and a more loyal affection.

Day followed day, and Mamise found the routine of the office

intolerably monotonous. Time gnawed at her resolution, and she began

to hope to be away when Easton made his attempt. It occurred to her

that it would be pleasant to have an ocean between her and the crisis.

She said to Davidge:

"I wish Nicky would come soon, for I have applied for a passport to

France. Major Widdicombe got me the forms to fill out, and he promised

to expedite them. I ought to go the minute they come."

This information threw Davidge into a complex dismay. Here was another

of Mamise's long-kept secrets. The success of her plan meant the loss

of her, or her indefinite postponement. It meant more yet. He

groaned.

"Good Lord! everybody in the United States is going to France except

me. Even the women are all emigrating. I think I'll just turn the

shipyard over to the other officers of the corporation and go with

you. Let Easton blow it up then, if he wants to, so long as I get into

the uniform and into the fighting."

This new commotion was ended by a shocking and unforeseen occurrence.

The State Department refused to grant Mamise a passport, and dazed

Widdicombe by letting him know confidentially that Mamise was on the

red list of suspects because of her Germanized past. This was news to

Widdicombe, and he went to Polly in a state of bewilderment.

Polly had never told him what Mamise had told her, but she had to let

out a few of the skeletons in Mamise's closet now. Widdicombe felt

compromised in his own loyalty, but Polly browbeat him into

submission. She wrote to Mamise and broke the news to her as gently as

she could, but the rebuff was cruel. Mamise took her sorrow to

Davidge.

He was furious and proposed to "go to the mat" with the State

Department. Mamise, however, shook her head; she saw that her only

hope of rehabilitation lay in a positive proof of her fidelity.

"I got my name stained in England because I didn't have the pluck to

do something positive. I was irresolution personified, and I'm paying

for it. But for once in my life I learned a lesson, and when I learned

what Nicky planned I ran right to you with it. Now if we catch Nicky

red-handed, and I turn over my own brother-in-law to justice, that

ought to redeem me, oughtn't it?"

Davidge had a better idea for her protection. "Marry me, and then they

can't say anything."

"Then they'll suspect you," she said. "Too many good Americans have

been dragged into hot water by pro-German wives, and I'm not going to

marry you till I can bring you some other dower than a spotted

reputation."

"I'd take you and be glad to get you if you were as polka-dotted as a

leopardess," said Davidge.

"Just as much obliged; but no, thank you," said Mamise. "Furthermore,

if we were married, the news would reach Nicky Easton through Jake

Nuddle, and then Nicky would lose all trust in me, and come down on us

without warning."

"This makes about the fifteenth rejection I've had," said Davidge.

"And I'd sworn never to ask you again."

"I promised to ask you when the time was ripe," said Mamise.

"Don't forget. Barkis is always willin' and waitin'."

"While we're both waiting," Mamise went on, "there's one thing you've

got to do for me, or I'll never propose to you."

"Granted, to the half my shipyard."

"It's only a job in your shipyard. I can't stand this typewriter-tapping

any longer. I'm going mad. I want to swing a hammer or something. You

told me that women could build a whole ship if they wanted to, and I

want to build my part of one."

"But--"

"If you speak of my hands, I'll prove to you how strong they are.

Besides, if I were out in the yard at work, I could keep a better

watch for Nicky, and I could keep you better informed as to the

troubles always brewing among the workmen."

"But--"

"I'm strong enough for it, too. I've been taking a lot of exercise

recently to get in trim. If you don't believe me, feel that muscle."

She flexed her biceps, and he took hold of it timidly in its silken

sleeve. It amazed him, for it was like marble. Still, he hated to lose

her from the neighborliness of the office; he hated to send her out

among the workmen with their rough language and their undoubted

readiness to haze her and teach her her place. But she was stubborn

and he saw that her threat was in earnest when she said:

"If you don't give me a job, I'll go to some other company."

Then he yielded and wrote her a note to the superintendent of the

yard, and said:

"You can begin to-morrow."

She smiled in her triumph and made the very womanly comment: "But I

haven't a thing to wear. Do you know a good ladies' tailor who can fit

me out with overalls, some one who has been 'Breeches-maker to the

Queen' and can drape a baby-blue denim pant modishly?"

The upshot of it was that she decided to make her own trousseau, and

she went shopping for materials and patterns. She ended by visiting an

emporium for "gents' furnishings." The storekeeper asked her what

size her husband wore, and she said:

"Just about my own."

He gave her the smallest suit in stock, and she held it up against

her. It was much too brief, and she was heartened to know that there

were workmen littler than she.

She bought the garment that came nearest to her own dimensions, and

hurried home with it joyously. It proved to be a perfect misfit, and

she worked over it as if it were a coming-out gown; and indeed it was

her costume for her début into the world of manual labor.

Abbie dropped in and surprised her in her attitudes and was handsomely

scandalized:

"When's the masquerade?" she asked.

Mamise told her of her new career.

Abbie was appalled. "It's against the Bible for a woman to wear a

man's things!" she protested. Abbie could quote the Scripture for

every discouraging purpose.

"I'd rather wear them than wash them," said Mamise; "and if you'll

take my advice you'll get a suit of overalls yourself and earn an

honest living and five times as much money as Jake would give you--if

he ever gave you any."

But Abbie wailed that Mamise had gone indecent as well as crazy, and

trembled at the thought of what the gossips along the row would do

with the family reputation. The worst of it was that Mamise had money

in the bank and did not have to work.

That was the incomprehensible thing to Jake Nuddle. He accepted the

familiar theory that all capital is stolen goods, and he reproached

Mamise with the double theft of poor folks' money and now of poor

folks' work. Mamise's contention that there were not enough workmen

for the country's needs fell on deaf ears, for Jake believed that work

was a crime against the sacred cause of the laboring-man. His ideal of

a laboring-man was one who seized the capital from the capitalists and

then ceased to labor.

But Jake's too familiar eyes showed that he regarded Mamise as a very

interesting spectacle. The rest of the workmen seemed to have the same

opinion when she went to the yard in her overalls next morning. She

was the first woman to take up man's work in the neighborhood, and she

had to endure the most searching stares, grins, frowns, and comments

that were meant to be overheard.

She struck all the men as immodest; some were offended and some were

delighted. As usual, modesty was but another name for conformity.

Mamise had to face the glares of the conventional wives and daughters

in their bodices that followed every contour, their light skirts that

blew above the knees, and their provocative hats and ribbons. They

made it plain to her that they were outraged by this shapeless

passer-by in the bifurcated potato-sack, with her hair tucked up under

a vizored cap and her hands in coarse mittens.

Mamise had studied the styles affected by the workmen as if they were

fashion-plates from Paris, and she had equipped herself with a slouchy

cap, heavy brogans, a thick sweater, a woolen shirt, and thick

flannels underneath.

She was as well concealed as she could manage, and yet her femininity

seemed to be emphasized by her very disguise. The roundness of bosom

and hip and the fineness of shoulder differed too much from the

masculine outline to be hidden. And somehow there was more coquetry in

her careful carelessness than in all the exaggerated womanishness of

the shanty belles. She had been a source of constant wonder to the

community from the first. But now she was regarded as a downright

menace to the peace and the morals of society.

Mamise reported to the superintendent and gave him Davidge's card. The

old man respected Davidge's written orders and remembered the private

instructions Davidge had given him to protect Mamise from annoyance at

all costs. The superintendent treated her as if she were a child

playing at salesmanship in a store. And this was the attitude of all

the men except a few incorrigible gallants, who tried to start

flirtations and make movie dates with her.

Sutton, the master riveter, alone received her with just the right

hospitality. He had no fear that she would steal his job or his glory

or that any man would. He had talked with her often and let her

practise at his riveting-gun. He had explained that her ambition to be

a riveter was hopeless, since it would take at least three month's

apprenticeship before she could hope to begin on such a career. But

her sincere longings to be a builder and not a loafer won his

respect.

When she expressed a shy wish to belong to his riveting-gang he said:

"Right you are, miss--or should I say mister?"

"I'd be proud if you'd call me bo," said Mamise.

"Right you are, bo. We'll start you in as a passer-boy. I'll be glad

to get rid of that sleep-walker. Hay, Snotty!" he called to a grimy

lad with an old bucket. The youth rubbed the back of his greasy glove

across the snub of nose that had won him his name, and, shifting his

precocious quid, growled:

"Ah, what!"

"Ah, go git your time--or change to another gang. Tell the supe. I'm

not fast enough for you. Go on--beat it!"

Mamise saw that she already had an enemy. She protested against

displacing another toiler, but Sutton told her that there were jobs

enough for the cub.

He explained the nature of Mamise's duties, talking out of one side of

his mouth and using the other for ejaculations of an apparently

inexhaustible supply of tobacco-juice. Seeing that Mamise's startled

eyes kept following these missiles, he laughed:

"Do you use chewin'?"

"I don't think so," said Mamise, not quite sure of his meaning.

"Well, you'll have to keep a wad of gum goin', then, for you cert'n'y

need a lot of spit in this business."

Mamise found this true enough, and the next time Davidge saw her she

kept her grinders milling and used the back of her glove with a

professional air. For the present, however, she had no brain-cells to

spare for mastication. Sutton introduced her to his crew.

"This gink here with the whiskers is Zupnik; he's the holder-on; he

handles the dolly and hangs on to the rivets while I swat 'em. The

pill over by the furnace is the heater; his name is Pafflow, and his

job is warming up the rivets. Just before they begin to sizzle he

yanks 'em out with the tongs and throws 'em to you. You ketch 'em in

the bucket--I hope, and take 'em out with your tongs and put 'em in

the rivet-hole, and then Zupnik and me we do the rest. And what do we

call you? Miss Webling is no name for a workin'-man."

"My name is Marie Louise."

"Moll is enough."

And Moll she was thenceforth.

The understanding of Mamise's task was easier than its performance.

Pafflow sent the rivets to her fast and fleet, and they were red-hot.

The first one passed her and struck Sutton. His language blistered.

The second sizzled against her hip. The third landed in the pail with

a pleasant clink, but she was so slow in getting her tongs about it,

and fitting it into its place, that it was too cold for use. This

threw her into a state of hopelessness. She was ready to resign.

"I think I'd better go back to crocheting," she sighed.

Sutton gave her a playful shove that almost sent her off the

platform:

"Nah, you don't, Moll. You made me chase Snotty off the job, and

you're goin' t'rough wit' it. You ain't doin' no worse 'n I done

meself when I started rivetin'. Cheese! but I spoiled so much work I

got me tail kicked offen me a dozen times!"

This was politer language than some that he used. His conversation was

interspersed with words that no one prints. They scorched Mamise's

ears like red-hot rivets at first, but she learned to accept them as

mere emphasis. And, after all, blunt Anglo-Saxon never did any harm

that Latin paraphrase could prevent.

The main thing was Sutton's rough kindliness, his splendid efficiency,

and his infinite capacity for taking pains with each rivet-head,

hammering it home, then taking up his pneumatic chipping-tool to trim

it neat. That is the genius and the glory of the artisan, to perfect

each detail _ad unguem_, like a poet truing up a sonnet.

Sutton was putting in thousands on thousands of rivets a month, and

every one of them was as important to him as every other. He feared

the thin knife-blade of the rivet-tester as the scrupulous writer

dreads the learned critic's scalpel.

Mamise was dazed to learn that the ship named after her would need

nearly half a million rivets, each one of them necessary to the

craft's success. The thought of the toil, the noise, the sweat,

the money involved made the work a sort of temple-building, and

the thought of Nicky Easton's ability to annul all that devout

accomplishment in an instant nauseated her like a blasphemy. She

felt herself a priestess in a holy office and renewed her flagging

spirits with prayers for strength and consecration.

But few of the laborers had Sutton's pride or Mamise's piety in the

work. Just as she began to get the knack of catching and placing the

rivets Pafflow began to register his protest against her sex. He took

a low joy in pitching rivets wild, and grinned at her dancing lunges

after them.

Mamise would not tattle, but she began again to lose heart. Sutton's

restless appetite for rivets noted the new delay, and he grasped the

cause of it at once. His first comment was to walk over to the furnace

and smash Pafflow in the nose.

"You try any of that I. W. W. sabotodge here, you----, and I'll stuff

you in a rivet-hole and turn the gun loose on you."

Pafflow yielded first to force and later to the irresistible power of

Mamise's humility. Indeed, her ardor for service warmed his

indifferent soul at last, and he joined with her to make a brilliant

team, hurtling the rivets in red arcs from the coke to the pail with

the precision of a professional baseball battery.

Mamise eventually acquired a womanly deftness in plucking up the rivet

and setting it in place, and Davidge might have seen grounds for

uneasiness in her eager submissiveness to Sutton as she knelt before

him, watched his eye timidly, and glowed like coke under the least

breath of his approval.

CHAPTER III

Sutton was a mighty man in his way, and earning a wage that would have

been accounted princely a year before. All the workers were receiving

immense increase of pay, but the champion riveters were lavishly

rewarded.

The whole shipyard industry was on a racing basis. Plans were being

laid to celebrate the next Fourth of July with an unheard-of number of

launchings. Every boat-building company was trying to put overboard an

absolute maximum of hulls on that day.

"Hurry-up" Hurley, who had driven the first rivets into a steel ship

pneumatically, and Charles M. Schwab, of Bethlehem, were the inspiring

leaders in the rush, and their ambition was to multiply the national

output by ten. The spirit of emulation thrilled all the thrillable

workmen, but the riveters were the spectacular favorites. Their names

appeared in the papers as they topped each other's scores, and Sutton

kept outdoing himself. For special occasions he groomed himself like a

race-horse, resting the day before the great event and then giving

himself up to a frenzy of speed.

On one noble day of nine hours' fury he broke the world's record

temporarily. He drove four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five

three-quarter-inch rivets into place. Then he was carried away to a

twenty-four-hour rest, like an exhausted prizefighter.

That was one of the great days in Mamise's history, for she was

permitted to assist in the achievement, and she was not entirely

grateful to Davidge for suppressing the publication of her name

alongside Sutton's. Her photograph appeared with his in many of the

supplements, but nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss

Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow.

The publication of her photograph as an English belle had made

history for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but

this picture had no follow-up except in her own pride.

This rapture, however, long postdated her first adventure into the

shipyard. That grim period of eight hours was an alternation of shame,

awkwardness, stupidity, failure, fatigue, and despair.

She did not even wash up for lunch, but picked her fodder from her

pail with her companions. She smoked a convivial cigarette with the

gang and was proud as a boy among grown-ups. She even wanted to be

tough and was tempted to use ugly words in a swaggering pride.

But after her lunch it was almost impossible for her to get up and go

back to her task, and she would have fainted from sheer weariness

except that she had forsworn such luxuries as swoons.

The final whistle found her one entire neuralgia. The unending use of

the same muscles, the repetition of the same rhythmic series, the

cranium-shattering clatter of all the riveting-guns, the anxiety to be

sure of each successive rivet, quite burned her out. And she learned

that the reward for this ordeal was, according to the minimum

wage-scale adopted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, thirty cents an

hour for eight hours, with a ten-per-cent. increase for a six-day

week. This would amount to all of two dollars and sixty-four cents for

the day, and fifteen dollars for the week!

It was munificent for a passer-boy, but it was ruinous for a young

woman of independent fortune and an ambition to look her best. She

gasped with horror when she realized the petty reward for such

prolonged torment. She was too weary to contrast the wage with the

prices of food, fuel, and clothing. While wages climbed expenses

soared.

She understood as never before, and never after, why labor is

discontent and why it is so easily stirred to rebellion, why it feels

itself the exploited slave of imaginary tyrants. She went to bed at

eight and slept in the deeps of sweat-earned repose.

The next morning, getting up was like scourging a crowd of fagged-out

children to school. All her limbs and sundry muscles whose existence

she had never realized before were like separate children, each aching

and wailing: "I can't! I won't!"

But the lameness vanished when she was at work again, and her sinews

began to learn their various trades and to manage them automatically.

She grew strong and lusty, and her task grew easy. She began to

understand that while the employee has troubles enough and to spare,

he has none of the torments of leadership; he is not responsible for

the securing of contracts and materials, for borrowings of capital

from the banks, or for the weekly nightmare of meeting the pay-roll.

There are two hells in the cosmos of manufacture: the dark pit where

the laborer fights the tiny worms of expense and the dizzy crags where

the employer battles with the dragons of aggregates.

Mamise saw that most of the employees were employees because they

lacked the self-starter of ambition. They were lazy-minded, and even

their toiling bodies were lazy. For all their appearance of effort

they did not ordinarily attain an efficiency of thirty per cent. of

their capabilities. The turnover in employment was three times what it

should have been. Three hundred men were hired for every hundred

steadily at work, and the men at work did only a third of the work

they could have done. The total wastefulness of man rivaled the

ghastly wastefulness of nature with spawn and energy.

The poor toilers were more reckless, more shiftless, relatively more

dissipated, than the idle rich, for the rich ordinarily squandered

only the interest on their holdings, while the laborer wasted his

capital in neglecting to make full use of his muscle. The risks they

took with life and limb were amazing.

On Saturdays great numbers quit work and waited for their pay. On

Mondays the force was greatly reduced by absentees nursing the

hang-over from the Sunday drunk, and of those that came to work so

many were unfit that the Monday accident increase was proverbial.

The excuse of slavery or serfdom was no longer legitimate, though it

was loudly proclaimed by the agitators, the trade-union editors, and

the parlor reformers. For, say what they would, labor could resign or

strike at will; the laborer had his vote and his equality of

opportunity. He was free even from the ordinary obligations, for

nobody expected the workman to make or keep a contract for his

services after it became inconvenient to him.

There were bad sports among them, as among the rich and the classes

between. There were unions and individuals that were tyrants in power

and cry-babies in trouble. There was much cruelty, trickery, and

despotism inside the unions--ferocious jealousy of union against

union, and mutual destructiveness.

This was, of course, inevitable, and it only proved that lying,

cheating, and bullying were as natural to the so-called "laborer" as

to the so-called "capitalist." The folly is in making the familiar

distinction between them. Mamise saw that the majority of manual

laborers did not do a third of the work they might have done and she

knew that many of the capitalists did three times as much as they had

to.

It is the individual that tells the story, and Mamise, who had known

hard-working, firm-muscled men, and devoted mothers and pure daughters

among the rich, found them also among the poor, but intermingled here,

as above, with sots, degenerates, child-beaters, and wantons.

Mamise learned to admire and to be fond of many of the men and their

families. But she had adventures with blackguards, rakes, and brutes.

She was lovingly entreated by many a dear woman, but she was snubbed

and slandered by others who were as extravagant, indolent, and immoral

as the wives and daughters of the rich.

But all in all, the ship-builders loafed horribly in spite of the

poetic inspiration of their calling and the prestige of public

laudation; in spite of the appeals for hulls to carry food to the

starving and troops to the anxious battle-front of Europe. In spite

also of the highest wages ever paid to a craft, they kept their

efficiency at a lower point than lower paid workmen averaged in the

listless pre-war days. Yet there was no lack of outcry that the

workman was throttled and enslaved by the greed of capital. There was

no lack of outcry that profiteers were bleeding the nation to death

and making martyrs of the poor.

Most of the capitalists had been workmen themselves and had risen from

the lethargic mass by the simple expedient of using their brains for

schemes and making their muscles produce more than the average output.

The laborers who failed failed because when they got their eight-hour

day they did not turn their leisure to production. And some of them

dared to claim that the manual toilers alone produced the wealth and

should alone be permitted to enjoy it, as if it were possible or

desirable to choke off initiative and adventure or to devise a society

in which the man whose ambition is to avoid work will set the pace for

the man who loves it for itself and whose discontent goads him on to

self-improvement! As if it were possible or desirable for the man who

works half-heartedly eight hours a day to keep down the man who works

whole-souledly eighteen hours a day! For time is power.

Even the benefits the modern laborer enjoys are largely the result of

intervention in his behalf by successful men of enterprise who thrust

upon the toiler the comforts, the safeguards, and the very privileges

he will not or cannot seek for himself.

During the war the employers of labor, the generals of these

tremendous armies, were everlastingly alert to find some means to

stimulate them to do themselves justice. The best artists of the

country devised eloquent posters, and these were stuck up everywhere,

reminding the laborer that he was the partner of the soldier. Orators

visited the yards and harangued the men. After each appeal there was a

brief spurt of enthusiasm that showed what miracles could be

accomplished if they had not lapsed almost at once into the usual

sullen drudgery.

There were appeals to thrift also. The government needed billions of

dollars, needed them so badly that the pennies of the poorest man must

be sought for. Few of the workmen had the faintest idea of saving. The

wives of some of them were humbly provident, but many of them were

debt-runners in the shops and wasters in the kitchens.

A gigantic effort was put forth to teach the American people thrift.

The idea of making small investments in government securities was

something new. Bonds were supposed to be for bankers and plutocrats.

Vast campaigns of education were undertaken, and the rich implored the

poor to lay aside something for a rainy day. The rich invented schemes

to wheedle the poor to their own salvation. So huge had been the

wastefulness before that the new fashion produced billions upon

billions of investments in Liberty Bonds, and hundreds of millions in

War Savings Stamps.

Bands of missionaries went everywhere, to the theaters, the

moving-picture houses, the schools, the shops, the factories,

preaching the new gospel of good business and putting it across in the

name of patriotism.

One of these troupes of crusaders marched upon Davidge's shipyard. And

with it came Nicky Easton at last.

Easton had deferred his advent so long that Mamise and Davidge had

come almost to yearn for him with heartsick eagerness. The first

inkling of the prodigal's approach was a visit that Jake Nuddle paid

to Mamise late one evening. She had never broached to him the matter

of her talk with Easton, waiting always for him to speak of it to her.

She was amazed to see him now, and he brought amazement with him.

"I just got a call on long distance," he said, "and a certain party

tells me you was one of us all this time. Why didn't you put a feller

wise?"

Mamise was inspired to answer his reproach with a better: "Because I

don't trust you, Jake. You talk too much."

This robbed Jake of his bluster and convinced him that the elusive

Mamise was some tremendous super-spy. He became servile at once, and

took pride in being the lackey of her unexplained and unexplaining

majesty. Mamise liked him even less in this rôle than the other.

She took his information with a languid indifference, as if the

terrifying news were simply a tiresome confirmation of what she had

long expected. Jake was tremulous with excitement and approval.

"Well, well, who'd 'a' thought our little Mamise was one of them

slouch-hounds you read about? I see now why you've been stringin' that

Davidge boob along. You got him eatin' out your hand. And I see now

why you put them jumpers on and went out into the yards. You just got

to know everything, ain't you?"

Mamise nodded and smiled felinely, as she imagined a queen of mystery

would do. But as soon as she could get rid of Jake she was like a

child alone in a graveyard.

Jake had told her that Nicky would be down in a few days, and not to

be surprised when he appeared. She wanted to get the news to Davidge,

but she dared not go to his rooms so late. And in the morning she was

due at her job of passing rivets. She crept into bed to rest her

dog-tired bones against the morrow's problems. Her dreams were all of

death and destruction, and of steel ships crumpled like balls of

paper thrown into a waste-basket.

If she had but known it, Davidge was making the rounds of his

sentry-line. The guard at one gate was sound asleep. He found two

others playing cards, and a fourth man dead drunk.

Inside the yards the great hulls rose up to the moon like the

buttresses of a cliff. Only, they were delicately vulnerable, and

Europe waited for them.

CHAPTER IV

True sleep came to Mamise so late that her alarm-clock could hardly

awaken her. It took all her speed to get her to her post. She dared

not keep Sutton waiting, and fear of the time-clock had become a habit

with her. As she caught the gleaming rivets and thrust them into their

sconces, she wondered if all this toil were merely a waste of effort

to give the sarcastic gods another laugh at human folly.

She wanted to find Davidge and took at last the desperate expedient of

pretended sickness. The passer-boy Snotty was found to replace her,

and she hurried to Davidge's office.

Miss Gabus stared at her and laughed. "Tired of your rivetin' a'ready?

Come to get your old job back?"

Mamise shook her head and asked for Davidge. He was out--no, not out

of town, but out in the yard or the shop or up in the mold-loft or

somewheres, she reckoned.

Mamise set out to find him, and on the theory that among places to

look for anything or anybody the last should be first she climbed the

long, long stairs to the mold-loft.

He was not among the acolytes kneeling at the templates; nor was he in

the cathedral of the shop. She sought him among the ships, and came

upon him at last talking to Jake Nuddle, of all people!

Nuddle saw Mamise first and winked, implying that he also was making a

fool of Davidge. Davidge looked sheepish, as he always did when he was

caught in a benevolent act.

"I was just talking to your brother-in-law, Miss Webling," he said,

"trying to drive a few rivets into that loose skull. I don't want to

fire him, on your account, but I don't see why I should pay an I. W.

W. or a Bolshevist to poison my men."

Davidge had been alarmed by the indifference of his sentinels. He

thought it imbecile to employ men like Nuddle to corrupt the men

within, while the guards admitted any wanderer from without. He was

making a last attempt to convert Nuddle to industry for Mamise's sake,

trying to pluck this dingy brand from the burning.

"I was just showing Nuddle a little bookkeeping in patriotism," he

said. "The Liberty Loan people are coming here, and I want the yard to

do itself proud. Some of the men and women are going without

necessities to help the government, while Nuddle and some others are

working for the Kaiser. This is the record of Nuddle and his crew:

"'Wages, six to ten dollars a day guaranteed by the government.

Investment in Liberty Bonds, nothing; purchases of War Savings Stamps,

nothing; contributions to Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., K. of C., J. W. B.,

Salvation Army, nothing; contributions to relief funds of the Allies,

nothing. Time spent at drill, none; time spent in helping recruiting,

none. A clean sheet, and a sheet full of time spent in interfering

with other men's work, sneering at patriotism, saying the Kaiser is no

worse than the Allies, pretending that this is a war to please the

capitalists, and that a soldier is a fool.'

"In other words, Nuddle, you are doing the Germans' business, and I

don't intend to pay you American money any longer unless you do more

work with your hands and less with your jaw."

Nuddle was stupid enough to swagger.

"Just as you say, Davidge. You'll change your tune before long,

because us workin'-men, bein' the perdoocers, are goin' to take over

all these plants and run 'em to soot ourselves."

"Fine!" said Davidge. "And will you take over my loans at the banks to

meet the pay-rolls?"

"We'll take over the banks!" said Jake, majestically. "We'll take over

everything and let the workin'-men git their doos at last."

"What becomes of us wicked plutocrats?"

"We'll have you workin' for us."

"Then we'll be the workin'-men, and it will be our turn to take over

things and set you plutocrats to workin' for us, I suppose. And we'll

be just where we are now."

This was growing too seesawy for Nuddle, and he turned surly.

"Some of you won't be in no shape to take over nothin'."

Davidge laughed. "It's as bad as that, eh? Well, while I can, I'll

just take over your button."

"You mean I'm fired?"

"Exactly," said Davidge, holding out his hand for the badge that

served as a pass to the yards and the pay-roll. "Come with me, and

you'll get what money's coming to you."

This struck through Nuddle's thick wits. He cast a glance of dismay at

Mamise. If he were discharged, he could not help Easton with the grand

blow-up. He whined:

"Ain't you no regard for a family man? I got a wife and kids dependent

on me."

"Well, do what Karl Marx did--let them starve or live on their own

money while you prove that capital is as he said, 'a vampire of dead

labor sucking the life out of living labor.' Or feed them on the wind

you try to sell me."

"Aw, have a heart! I talk too much, but I'm all right," Jake pleaded.

Davidge relented a little. "If you'll promise to give your mouth a

holiday and your hands a little work I'll keep you to the end of the

month. And then, on your way!"

"All right, boss; much obliged," said Jake, so relieved at his respite

that he bustled away as if victorious, winking shrewdly at Mamise--who

winked back, with some difficulty.

She waited till he was a short distance off, then she murmured,

quickly:

"Don't jump--but Nicky Easton is coming here in the next few days; I

don't know just when. He told Jake; Jake told me. What shall we do?"

Davidge took the blow with a smile:

"Our little guest is coming at last, eh? He promised to see you first.

I'll have Larrey keep close to you, and the first move he makes we'll

jump him. In the mean while I'll put some new guards on the job

and--well, that's about all we can do but wait."

"I mustn't be seen speaking to you too friendly. Jake thinks I'm

fooling you."

"God help me, if you are, for I love you. And I want you to be

careful. Don't run any risks. I'd rather have the whole shipyard

smashed than your little finger."

"Thanks, but if I could swap my life for one ship it would be the best

bargain I ever bought. Good-by."

As she ran back to her post Davidge smiled at the womanishness of her

gait, and thought of Joan of Arc, never so lovably feminine as in her

armor.

CHAPTER V

Days of harrowing restiveness followed, Mamise starting at every word

spoken to her, leaping to her feet at every step that passed her

cottage, springing from her sleep with a cry, "Who's there!" at every

breeze that fumbled a shutter.

But nothing happened; nobody came for her.

The afternoon of the Liberty Loan drive was declared a half-holiday.

The guards were doubled at the gates, and watchmen moved among the

crowds; but strangers were admitted if they looked plausible, and

several motor-loads of them rolled in. Some of them carried bundles of

circulars and posters and application blanks. Some of them were of

foreign aspect, since a large number of the workmen had to be

addressed in other languages than English.

Mamise drifted from one audience to another. She encountered her

team-mate Pafflow and tried to find a speaker who was using his

language.

At length a voice of an intonation familiar to him threw him into an

ecstasy. What was jargon to Mamise was native music to him, and she

lingered at his elbow, pretending to share his thrill in order to

increase it.

She felt a twitch at her sleeve, and turned idly.

Nicky Easton was at her side. Her mind, all her minds, began to

convene in alarm like the crew of a ship attacked.

"Nicky!" she gasped.

"No names, pleass! But to follow me quick."

"I'm right with you." She turned to follow him. "One minute." She

stepped back and spoke fiercely to Pafflow. "Pafflow, find Mr.

Davidge. Tell him Nicky is here. Remember, _Nicky is here_. It's life

and death. Find him."

Pafflow mumbled, "Nicky is here!" and Mamise ran after Nicky, who was

lugging a large suit-case. He was quivering with excitement.

"I didn't knew you in pentaloons, but Chake Nuttle pointet you owit,"

he laughed.

"Wh-where is Jake?"

"He goes ahead vit a boondle of bombs. Nobody is on the _Schiff_. Ve

could not have so good a chence again."

Mamise might have, ought to have, seized him and cried for help; but

she could not somehow throw off the character she had assumed with

Nicky. She obeyed him in a kind of automatism. Her eyes searched the

crowd for Larrey, who had kept all too close to her of recent days and

nights. But he had fallen under the hypnotism of some too eloquent

spellbinder.

Mamise felt the need of doing a great heroic feat, but she could not

imagine what it might be. Pending the arrival from heaven of some

superfeminine inspiration, she simply went along to be in at the

death.

Pafflow was a bit stupid and two bits stubborn. He puzzled over

Mamise's peculiar orders. He wanted to hear the rest of that fiery

speech. He turned and stared after Mamise and noted the way she went,

with the foppish stranger carrying the heavy baggage. But he was used

to obeying orders after a little balking, and in time his slow brain

started him on the hunt for Davidge. He quickened his pace and asked

questions, being put off or directed hither and yon.

At last he saw the boss sitting on a platform behind whose fluttering

bunting a white-haired man was hurling noises at the upturned faces of

the throng. Pafflow supposed that his jargon was English.

Getting to Davidge was not easy. But Pafflow was stubborn. He pushed

as close to the front as he could, and there a wall of bodies held

him.

The orator was checked in full career with almost fatal results by the

sudden bellowing of a voice from the crowd below. He supposed that he

was being heckled. He paused among the ruins of his favorite period,

and said:

"Well, my friend, what is it?"

Pafflow ignored him and shouted: "Meesta Davutch! O-o-h, Meesta

Davutch. Neecky is here."

Davidge, hearing his name bruited, rose and called into the mob,

"What's that?"

"Neecky is here."

When Davidge understood he was staggered. For a moment he stood in a

stupor. Then he apologized to the speaker. "An emergency call. Please

forgive me and go right on!"

He bowed to the other distinguished guests and left the platform.

Pafflow found him and explained.

"Moll, the passer-boy, my gang, she say find you, life and death, and

say Neecky is here! I doan' know what she means, but now I find you."

"Which way--where--did you--have you an idea where she went?"

"She go over by new ship _Mamise_--weeth gentleman all dressy up."

Davidge ran toward the scaffolding surrounding the almost finished

hull. He recognized one or two of his plain-clothes guards and stopped

just long enough to tell them to get together and search every ship at

once, and to make no excitement about it.

The scaffolding was like a jungle, and he prowled through it with

caution and desperate speed, up and down the swaying, cleated planks

and in and out of the hull.

He searched the hold first, expecting that Nicky would naturally plant

his explosives there. That indeed was his scheme, but Mamise had found

among her tumbled wits one little idea only, and that was to delay

Nicky as long as possible.

She suggested to him that before he began to lay his train of wires he

ought to get a general view of the string of ships. The best point was

the top deck, where they were just about to hoist the enormous rudder

to the stern-post.

Nicky accepted the suggestion, and Mamise guided him through the

labyrinth. They had met Jake at the base of the falsework, and he came

along, leaving his bundle. Nicky carried his suit-case with him. He

did not intend to be separated from it. Jake was always glad to be

separated from work.

They made the climb, and Nicky's artistic soul lingered to praise the

beautiful day for the beautiful deed. In a frenzy of talk, Mamise

explained to him what she could. She pointed to the great hatchway for

the locomotives and told him:

"The ship would have been in the water now if it weren't for that big

hatch. It set us--the company back ninety days."

"And now the ship goes to be in the sky in about nine minutes. Come

along once."

"Look down here, how deep it is!" said Mamise, and led him to the

edge. She was ready to thrust him into the pit, but he kept a firm

grip on a rope, and she sighed with regret.

But Davidge, looking up from the depth of the well, saw Nicky and

Mamise peering over the edge. His face vanished.

"Who iss?" said Nicky. "Somebody is below dere. Who iss?"

Mamise said she did not know, and Jake had not seen.

Nicky was in a flurry. The fire in Davidge's eyes told him that

Davidge was looking for him. There was a dull sound in the hitherto

silent ship of some one running.

Nicky grew hysterical with wrath. To be caught at the very outset of

his elaborate campaign was maddening. He opened his suit-case, took

out from the protecting wadding a small iron death-machine and held it

in readiness. A noble plan had entered his brain for rescuing his

dream.

Nuddle, glancing over the side, recognized Davidge and told Nicky who

it was that came. When Davidge reached the top deck, he found Nicky

smiling with the affability of a floorwalker.

"Meester Davitch--please, one momend. I holt in my hant a little

machine to blow us all high-sky if you are so unkind to be impolite.

You move--I srow. We all go up togedder in much pieces. Better it is

you come with me and make no trouble, and then I let you safe your

life. You agree, yes? Or must I srow?"

Davidge looked at the bomb, at Nicky, at Nuddle, then at Mamise. Life

was sweet here on this high steel crag, with the cheers of the crowds

about the stands coming faintly up on the delicious breeze. He knew

explosives. He had seen them work. He could see what that handful of

lightning in Nicky's grasp would do to this mountain he had built.

Life was sweet where the limpid river spread its indolent floods far

and wide. And Mamise was beautiful. The one thing not sweet and not

beautiful was the triumph of this sardonic Hun.

Davidge pondered but did not speak.

With all the superiority of the Kultured German for the untutored

Yankee, Nicky said, "Vell?"

Perhaps it was the V that did it. For Davidge, without a word, went

for him.

CHAPTER VI

The most tremendous explosives refuse to explode unless some detonator

like fulminate of mercury is set off first. Each of us has his own

fulminate, and the snap of a little cap of it brings on our

cataclysm.

It was a pity, seeing how many Germans were alienated from their

country by the series of its rulers' crimes, and seeing how many

German names were in the daily lists of our dead, that the word and

the accent grew so hateful to the American people. It was a pity, but

the Americans were not to blame if the very intonation of a Teutonism

made their ears tingle.

Davidge prized life and had no suicidal inclinations or temptations.

No imaginable crisis in his affairs could have convinced him to

self-slaughter. He was brave, but cautious.

Even now, if Nicky Easton, poising the bombshell with its appalling

threat, had murmured a sardonic "Well?" Davidge would probably have

smiled, shrugged, and said:

"You've got the bead on me, partner. I'm yours." He would have gone

along as Nicky's prisoner, waiting some better chance to recover his

freedom.

But the mal-pronunciation of the shibboleth strikes deep centers of

racial feeling and makes action spring faster than thought. The

Sicilians at vespers asked the Frenchmen to pronounce "cheecheree,"

and slew them when they said "sheesheree." So Easton snapped a

fulminate in Davidge when his Prussian tongue betrayed him into that

impertinent, intolerable alien "Vell?"

Davidge was helpless in his own frenzy. He leaped.

Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant's

consideration. As a football-player hesitates a sixteenth of a second

too long before he passes the ball or punts it, and so forfeits his

opportunity, so Nicky Easton stood and stared for the length of time

it takes the eyes to widen.

That was just too long for him and just long enough for Davidge, who

went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a

vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky's grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell

from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it

out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge's hundred-and-eighty-pound

weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him

collapsing backward, staggering, wavering, till he, too, went

overboard.

Davidge hit the deck like a ball-player sliding for a base, and he

went slithering to the edge. He would have followed Nicky over the

hundred-foot steel precipice if Mamise had not flung herself on him

and caught his heel. He was stopped with his right arm dangling out in

space and his head at the very margin of the deck.

In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been panic-stricken

at the sight of the bomb in Nicky's hand, had been backing away

slowly. He would have backed into the abyss if he had not struck a

stanchion and clutched it desperately.

And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted on the huge

blade of the ship's anchor lying on a wharf waiting to be hoisted into

place. The shell burst with an all-rending roar and sprayed rags of

steel in every direction. The upward stream caught Nicky in midair and

shattered him to shreds.

Nuddle's whole back was obliterated and half a corpse fell forward,

headless, on the deck. Davidge's right arm was ripped from the

shoulder and his hat vanished, all but the brim.

Mamise was untouched by the bombardment, but the downward rain of

fragments tore her flesh as she lay sidelong.

The bomb, exploding in the open air, lost much of its efficiency, but

the part of the ship nearest was crumpled like an old tomato-can that

a boy has placed on a car track to be run over.

The crash with its reverberations threw the throngs about the

speakers' stands into various panics, some running away from the

volcano, some toward it. Many people were knocked down and trampled.

Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They found

Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging as the torn

arteries in Davidge's shoulder spouted his life away. A quick

application of first aid saved him until the surgeon attached to the

shipyard could reach him.

Mamise's injuries were painful and cruel, but not dangerous. Of

Jake Nuddle there was not enough left to assure Larrey of his

identification. Of Nicky Easton there was so little trace that the

first searchers did not know that he had perished.

Davidge and Mamise were taken to the hospital, and when Davidge was

restored to consciousness his first words were a groan of awful

satisfaction:

"I got a German!"

When he learned that he had no longer a right arm he smiled again and

muttered:

"It's great to be wounded for your country."

Which was a rather inelegant paraphrase of the classic "_Dulce et

decorum_," but caught its spirit admirably.

Of Jake Nuddle he knew nothing and forgot everything till some days

later, when he was permitted to speak to Mamise, in whose welfare he

was more interested than his own, and the story of whose unimportant

wounds harrowed him more than his own.

Her voice came to him over the bedside telephone. After an exchange of

the inevitable sympathies and regrets and tendernesses, Mamise

sighed:

"Well, we're luckier than poor Jake."

"We are? What happened to him?"

"He was killed, horribly. His pitiful wife! Abbie has been here and

she is inconsolable. He was her idol--not a very pretty one, but idols

are not often pretty. It's too terribly bad, isn't it?"

Davidge's bewildered silence was his epitaph for Jake. Even though he

were dead, one could hardly praise him, though, now that he was dead,

Davidge felt suddenly that he must have been indeed the first and the

eternal victim of his own qualities.

Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from his cradle

on--indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly kicked her to death

before he was born.

Mamise had hated and loathed him, but she felt now that Abbie had been

righter than she in loving the wretch who had been dowered with no

beauty of soul or body.

She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long silence, she

asked:

"Are you there?"

"Yes."

"You don't say anything about poor Jake."

"I--I don't know what to say."

He felt it hateful to withhold praise from the dead, and yet a kind of

honesty forced him to oppose the habit of lauding all who have just

died, since it cheapened the praise of the dead who deserve praise--or

what we call "deserve."

Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: "It was noble of poor Jake

to give his life trying to save the ship, wasn't it?"

"What's that?" said Davidge, and she spoke with labored precision.

"I say that you and I, who were the only witnesses, feel sorry that

poor Jake had to be killed in the struggle with Easton."

"Oh, I see! Yes--yes," said Davidge, understanding.

Mamise went on: "Mr. Larrey was here and he didn't know who Jake was

till I told him how he helped you try to disarm Nicky. It will be a

fine thing for poor Abbie and her children to remember that, won't

it?"

Davidge's heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the sweet purpose

of Mamise's falsehood.

"Yes, yes," he said. "I'll give Abbie a pension on his account."

"That's beautiful of you!"

And so it was done. It pleased a sardonic fate to let Jake Nuddle pose

in his tomb as the benefactor he had always pretended to be.

The operative, Larrey, had made many adverse reports against him, but

in the blizzard of reports against hundreds of thousands of suspects

that turned the Department of Justice files into a huge snowdrift

these earlier accounts of Nuddle's treasonable utterances and deeds

were forgotten.

The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief space in the

newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was all but

forgotten.

When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call upon Davidge in

her wheeled chair, she found him strangely lacking in cordiality. She

was bitterly hurt at first, until she gleaned from his manner that he

was trying to remove himself gracefully from her heart because of his

disability.

She amazed him by her sudden laughter. He was always slow to

understand why his most solemn or angry humor gave her so much

amusement.

While her nurse and his were talking at a little distance it pleased

her to lean close to Davidge and tease him excruciatingly with a

flirtatious manner.

"Before very long I'm going to take up that bet we made."

"What bet?"

"That the next proposal would come from me. I'm going to propose the

first of next week."

"If you do, I'll refuse you."

Though she understood him perfectly, it pleased her to assume a motive

he had never dreamed of.

"Oh, you mustn't think that I'm going to be an invalid for life. The

doctor says I'll be as well as ever in a little while."

Davidge could not see how he was to tell her that he didn't mean that

without telling her just what he did mean. In his tormented petulance

he turned his back on her and groaned.

"Oh, go away and let me alone."

She was laughing beyond the limits called ladylike as she began to

wheel her chair toward the door. The nurse ran after her, asking:

"What on earth?"

Mamise assured, "Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven," and would not

explain the riddle.

CHAPTER VII

Davidge was the modern ideal of an executive. He appeared never to do

any work. He kept an empty desk and when he was away no one missed

him. He would not use a roll-top desk, but sat at a flat table with

nothing on it but a memorandum-pad, a calendar, an "in" and an "out"

basket, both empty most of the time.

He had his work so organized that it went on in his absence as if he

were there. He insisted that the executives of the departments should

follow the same rule. If they were struck down in battle their places

were automatically supplied as in the regular army.

So when Davidge went to the hospital the office machine went on as if

he had gone to lunch.

Mamise called on him oftener than he had called on her. She left the

hospital in a few days after the explosion, but she did not step into

his office and run the corporation for him as a well-regulated heroine

of recent fiction would have done. She did not feel that she knew

enough. And she did not know enough. She kept to her job with the

riveting-gang and expected to be discharged any day for lack of pull

with the new boss.

But while she lasted she was one of the gang, and proud of it. She was

neither masculine nor feminine, but human. As Vance Thompson has said,

the lioness is a lion all but a little of the time, and so Mamise put

off sexlessness with her overalls and put it on with her petticoats.

She put off the coarseness at the same time as she scrubbed away the

grime.

The shipyard was still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending

experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to

her. She had not known what "pneumatic" or "hydraulic" really meant.

The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to

give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing

in the Grimms' stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air and

water and their dumfounding transformations.

She learned that machinery can be as beautiful as any other human

structure. Fools and art-snobs had said that machinery is ugly, and

some of it is indeed nearly as ugly as some canvases, verses, and

cathedrals. Other small-pates chattered of how the divine works of

nature shamed the crudities of man. They spoke of the messages of the

mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the

flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to

give them praise without slandering man's creations, for a God that

could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a

better God than one who could merely make a work of art himself.

But machinery has its messages, too. It enables the little cave-dweller

to pulverize the mountain; to ship it to Mohammed in Medina; to pick it

up and shoot it at his enemies.

Mamise, at any rate, was so enraptured by the fine art of machinery

that when she saw a traveling-crane pick up a mass of steel and go

down the track with it to its place, she thought that no poplar-tree

was ever so graceful. And the rusty hulls of the new ships showing the

sky through the steel lace of their rivetless sides were fairer than

the sky.

Surgeons in steel operated on the battered epidermis of the _Mamise_

and sewed her up again. It was slow work and it had all the

discouraging influence of work done twice for one result. But the toil

went on, and when at last Davidge left the hospital he was startled by

the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at

home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost

finished ship where he had left a patchwork of iron plates.

It thrilled him to be back at work again. The silence of the hospital

had irked his soul. Here the air was full of the pneumatic riveter.

They called it the gun that would win the war. The shipyard atmosphere

was shattered all day long as if with machine-gun fire and the

riveters were indeed firing at Germany. Every red-hot rivet was a

bullet's worth.

The cry grew louder for ships. The submarine was cutting down the

world's whole fleet by a third. In February the Germans sank the

_Tuscania_, loaded with American soldiers, and 159 of them were lost.

Uncle Sam tightened his lips and added the _Tuscania's_ dead soldiers

to the _Lusitania's_ men and women and children on the invoice against

Germany. He tightened his belt, too, and cut down his food for

Europe's sake. He loosened his purse-strings and poured out gold and

bonds and war-savings stamps, borrowing, lending, and spending with

the desperation of a gambler determined to break the bank.

While Davidge was still in the hospital the German offensive broke. It

succeeded beyond the scope of the blackest prophecy. It threw the fear

of hell into the stoutest hearts. All over the country people were

putting pins in maps, always putting them farther back. Everybody

talked strategy, and geography became the most dreadful of topics.

On March 29th Pershing threw what American troops were abroad into the

general stock, gave them to Haig and Foch to use as they would.

On the same day the mysterious giant cannon of the Germans sent a

shell into Paris, striking a church and killing seventy-five

worshipers. And it was on a Good Friday that the men of _Gott_ sent

this harbinger of good-will.

The Germans began to talk of the end of Great Britain, the erasure of

France, and the reduction of America to her proper place.

Spring came to the dismal world again with a sardonic smile. In

Washington the flower-duel was renewed between the Embassy terrace and

the Louise Home. The irises made a drive and the forsythia sent up its

barrage. The wistaria and the magnolia counterattacked. The Senator

took off his wig again to give official sanction to summer and to rub

his bewildered head the better.

The roving breezes fluttered tragic newspapers everywhere--in the

parks, on the streets, on the scaffolds of the buildings, along the

tented lanes, and in the barrack-rooms.

This wind was a love-zephyr as of old. But the world was frosted with

a tremendous fear. What if old England fell? Empires did fall.

Nineveh, Babylon, and before them Ur and Nippur, and, after, Persia

and Alexander's Greece and Rome. Germany was making the great try to

renew Rome's sway; her Emperor called himself the Cæsar. What if he

should succeed?

Distraught by so many successes, the Germans grew frantic. They were

diverted from one prize to another.

The British set their backs to the wall. The French repeated their

Verdun watchword, "No thoroughfare," and the Americans began to come

up. The Allies were driven finally to what they had always realized to

be necessary, but had never consented to--a unified command. They put

all their destinies into the hands of Foch.

Instantly and melodramatically the omens changed. Foch could live up

to his own motto now, "Attack, attack, attack." He had been like a man

gambling his last francs. Now he had word that unlimited funds were on

the way from his Uncle Sam. He did not have to count his money over

and over. He could squander it regardless.

In every direction he attacked, attacked, attacked. The stupefied

world saw the German hordes checked, driven rearward, here, there, the

other place.

Towns were redeemed, rivers regained, prisoners scooped up by the ten

thousand. The pins began a great forward march along the maps. People

fought for the privilege of placing them. Geography became the most

fascinating sport ever known.

Davidge had come from the hospital minus one arm just as the bulletins

changed from grave to gay. He was afraid now that the war would be

over before his ships could share the glorious part that ships played

in all this victory. The British had turned all their hulls to the

American shores and the American troops were pouring into them in

unbelievable floods.

Secrecy lost its military value. The best strategy that could be

devised was to publish just how many Americans were landing in

France.

General March would carry the news to Secretary Baker and he would

scatter it broadcast through George Creel's Committee on Public

Information, using telegraph, wireless, telephone, cable, post-office,

placard, courier.

Davidge had always said that the war would be over as soon as the

Germans got the first real jolt. With them war was a business and they

would withdraw from it the moment they foresaw a certain bankruptcy

ahead.

But there was the war after the war to be considered--the war for

commerce, the postponed war with disgruntled labor and the impatient

varieties of socialists and with the rabid Bolshevists frankly

proclaiming their intention to destroy civilization as it stood.

Like a prudent skipper, Davidge began to trim his ship for the new

storm that must follow the old. He took thought of the rivalries that

would spring up inevitably between the late Allies, like brothers now,

but doomed to turn upon one another with all the greater bitterness

after war. For peace hath her wickedness no less renowned than war.

What would labor do when the spell of consecration to the war was gone

and the pride of war wages must go before a fall? The time would come

abruptly when the spectacle of employers begging men to work at any

price would be changed to the spectacle of employers having no work

for men--at any price.

The laborers would not surrender without a battle. They had tasted

power and big money and they would not be lulled by economic

explanations.

Mamise came upon Davidge one day in earnest converse with a faithful

old toiler who had foreseen the same situation and wanted to know what

his boss thought about it.

Iddings had worked as a mechanic all his life. He had worked hard, had

lived sober, had turned his wages over to his wife, and spent them on

his home and his children.

He was as good a man as could be found. Latterly he had been tormented

by two things, the bitterness of increasing infirmities and dwindling

power and the visions held out to him by Jake Nuddle and the disciples

Jake had formed before he was taken away.

As Mamise came up in her overalls Iddings was saying:

"It ain't right, boss, and you know it. When a man like me works as

hard as I done and cuts out all the fun and the booze and then sees

old age comin' on and nothin' saved to speak of and no chance to save

more'n a few hundred dollars, whilst other men has millions--why, I'm

readin' the other day of a woman spendin' eighty thousand dollars on a

fur coat, and my old woman slavin' like a horse all her life and goin'

round in a plush rag--I tell you it ain't right and you can't prove it

is."

"I'm not going to try to," said Davidge. "I didn't build the world

and I can't change it much. I see nothing but injustice everywhere I

look. It's not only among men, but among animals and insects and

plants. The weeds choke out the flowers; the wolves eat up the sheep

unless the dogs fight the wolves; the gentle and the kind go under

unless they're mighty clever. They call it the survival of the

fittest, but it's really the survival of the fightingest."

"That's what I'm comin' to believe," said Iddings. "The workman will

never get his rights unless he fights for 'em."

"Never."

"And if he wants to get rich he's got to fight the rich."

"No. He wants to make sure he's fighting his real enemies and fighting

with weapons that won't be boomerangs."

"I don't get that last."

"Look here, Iddings, there are a lot of damned fools filling workmen's

heads with insanity, telling them that their one hope of happiness is

to drag down the rich, to blow up the factories or take control of

'em, to bankrupt the bankers and turn the government upside down. If

they can't get a majority at the polls they won't pay any attention to

the polls or the laws. They'll butcher the police and assassinate the

big men. But that game can't win. It's been tried again and again by

discontented idiots who go out and kill instead of going out to work.

"You can't get rich by robbing the rich and dividing up their money.

If you took all that Rockefeller is said to have and divided it up

among the citizens of the country you'd get four or five dollars

apiece at most, and you'd soon lose that.

"Rockefeller started as a laboring-man at wages you wouldn't look at

to-day. The laboring-men alongside could have made just as much as he

did if they'd a mind to. Somebody said he could have written

Shakespeare's plays if he had a mind to, and Lamb said, 'Yes, if you'd

a mind to.' The thing seems to be to be born with a mind to and to

cultivate a mind to.

"You take Rockefeller's money away and he'll make more while you're

fumbling with what you've got. Take Shakespeare's plays away and he'll

write others while you're scratching your head.

"Don't let 'em fool you, Iddings, into believing that rich men get

rich by stealing. We all cheat more or less, but no man ever built up

a big fortune by plain theft. Men make money by making it.

"Karl Marx, who wrote your 'Workmen's Bible,' called capital a

vampire. Well, there aren't any vampires except in the movies.

"Speaking of vamping wealth, did you ever hear how I got where I

am?--not that it's so very far and not that I like to talk about

myself--but just to show you how true your man Marx is.

"I was a working-man and worked hard. I put by a little out of what I

made. Of nights I studied. I learned all ends of the ship-building

business in a way. But I needed money to get free. It never occurred

to me to claim somebody else's money as mine. I thought the rich would

help me to get rich if I helped them to get richer. My idea of getting

capital was to go get it. I was a long time finding where there was

any.

"By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast--a steamer had run

aground and the hull was abandoned after they took out what machinery

they could salvage. The hull stood up in the storms and the sand began

to bury it. It would have been 'dead capital' then for sure.

"The timbers were sound, though, and I found I could buy it cheap. I

put in all I had saved in all my life, eight thousand dollars, for the

hull. I got a man to risk something with me.

"We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in six masts,

and made a big schooner of her.

"She cost us sixty thousand dollars all told. Before she was ready to

sail we sold her for a hundred and twenty thousand. The buyers made

big money out of her. The schooner is carrying food now and giving

employment to sailors.

"Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did 'dead labor suck the

life out of living labor,' as Karl Marx says? You could do the same.

You could if you would. There's plenty of old hulls lying around on

the sands of the world."

Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.

"That's all very fine," he growled, "but where would I get my start? I

got no eight thousand or anybody to lend me ten dollars."

"The banks will lend to men who will make money make money. It's not

the guarantee they want so much as inspiration. Pierpont Morgan said

he lent on character, not on collateral."

"Morgan, humph!"

"The trouble isn't with Morgan, but with you. What do you do with your

nights? Study? study? beat your brains for ideas? No, you go home,

tired, play with the children, talk with the wife, smoke, go to bed.

It's a beautiful life, but it's not a money-making life. You can't

make money by working eight hours a day for another man's money.

You've got to get out and find it or dig it up.

"That business with the old hull put me on my feet, put dreams in my

head. I looked about for other chances, took some of them and wished I

hadn't. But I kept on trying. The war in Europe came. The world was

crazy for ships. They couldn't build 'em fast enough to keep ahead of

the submarines. On the Great Lakes there was a big steamer not doing

much work. I heard of her. I went up and saw her. The job was to get

her to the ocean. I managed it on borrowed money, bought her, and

brought her up the Saint Lawrence to the sea--and down to New York. I

made a fortune on that deal. Then did I retire and smoke my pipe of

peace? No. I looked for another chance.

"When our country went into the war she needed ships of her own. She

had to have shipyards first to build 'em in. My lifelong ambition was

to make ships from the keel-plate up. I looked for the best place to

put a shipyard, picked on this spot because other people hadn't found

it. My partners and I got the land cheap because it was swamp. We

worked out our plans, sitting up all night over blue-prints and

studying how to save every possible penny and every possible waste

motion.

"And now look at the swamp. It's one of the prettiest yards in the

world. The Germans sank my _Clara_. Did I stop or go to making

speeches about German vampires? No. I went on building.

"The Germans tried to get my next boat. I fought for her as I'll fight

the Germans, the I. W. W., the Bolshevists, or any other sneaking

coyotes that try to destroy my property.

"I lost this right arm trying to save that ship. And now that I'm

crippled, am I asking for a pension or an admission to an old folks'

home? Am I passing the hat to you other workers? No. I'm as good as

ever I was. I made my left arm learn my right arm's business. If I

lose my left arm next I'll teach my feet to write. And if I lose

those, by God! I'll write with my teeth, or wigwag my ears.

"The trouble with you, Iddings, and the like of you is you brood over

your troubles, instead of brooding over ways to improve yourself. You

spend time and money on quack doctors. But I tell you, don't fight

your work or your boss. Fight nature, fight sleep, fight fatigue,

fight the sky, fight despair, and if you want money hunt up a place

where it's to be found."

If Iddings had had brains enough to understand all this he would not

have been Iddings working by the day. His stubborn response was:

"Well, I'll say the laboring-man is being bled by the capitalists and

he'll never get his rights till he grabs 'em."

"And I'll say be sure that you're grabbing your rights and not

grabbing your own throat.

"I'm for all the liberty in the world, for the dignity of labor, the

voice of labor, the labor-union, the profit-sharing basis, the

republic of labor. I think the workers ought to have a voice in

running the work--all the share they can handle, all the control that

won't hurt the business. But the business has got to come first, for

it's business that makes comfort. I'll let any man run this shop who

can run it as well as I can or better.

"What I'm against is letting somebody run my business who can't run

his own. Talk won't build ships, old man. And complaints and protests

won't build ships, or make any important money.

"Poor men are just as good as rich men and ought to have just the same

rights, votes, privileges. But the first right a poor man ought to

preserve is the right to become a rich man. Riches are beautiful

things, Iddings, and they're worth working for. And they've got to be

worked for.

"A laboring-man is a man that labors, whether he labors for two

dollars a day or a thousand; and a loafer is a loafer, whether he has

millions or dimes. Well, I've talked longer than I ever did before or

ever will again. Do you believe anything I say?"

"No."

Davidge had to laugh. "Well, Iddings, I've got to hand it to you for

obstinacy; you've got an old mule skinned to death. But old mules

can't compete with race-horses. Balking and kicking won't get you very

far."

He walked away, and Mamise went along. Davidge was in a somber mood.

"Poor old fellow, he's got no self-starter, no genius, no ideas, and

he's doomed to be a drudge. It's the rotten cruelty of the world that

most people are born without enough get-up-and-get to bring them and

their work together without a whistle and a time-clock and an

overseer. What scheme could ever be invented to keep poor old Iddings

up to the level of a Sutton or a Sutton down to his?"

Mamise had heard a vast amount of discontented talk among the men.

"There's an awful lot of trouble brewing."

"Trouble is no luxury to me," said Davidge. "Blessed is he that

expects trouble, for he shall get it. Wait till this war is over and

then you'll see a real war."

"Shall we all get killed or starved?"

"Probably. But in the mean while we had better sail on and on and on.

The storm will find us wherever we are, and there's more danger close

ashore than out at sea. Let's make a tour of the _Mamise_ and see how

soon she'll be ready to go overboard."

CHAPTER VIII

Nicky Easton's attempt to assassinate the ship had failed, but the

wounds he dealt her had retarded her so that she missed by many weeks

the chance of being launched on the Fourth of July with the other

ships that made the Big Splash on that holy day. The first boat took

her dive at one minute after midnight and eighty-one ships followed

her into the astonished sea.

While the damaged parts of the _Mamise_ were remade, Davidge pushed

the work on other portions of the ship's anatomy, so that when at

length she was ready for the dip she was farther advanced than steel

ships usually are before they are first let into the sea.

Her upper works were well along, her funnel was in, and her mast and

bridge. She looked from a distance like a ship that had run ashore.

There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the ships that grew

alongside the _Mamise_, and each gang strove to put its boat overboard

in record time. The "Mamisers," as they called themselves, fought

against time and trouble to redeem her from the "jinx" that had set

her back again and again. During the last few days the heat was

furious and the hot plates made an inferno of the work. Then an icy

rain set in. The workers would not stop for mean weather, hot or

cold.

Mamise, the rivet-passer, stood to her task in a continual shower-bath.

The furnace was sheltered, but the hot rivets must be passed across

the rain curtain. Sutton urged her to lay off and give way to Snotty

or somebody whose health didn't matter a damn. Davidge ordered her

home, but her pride in her sex and her zest for her ship kept her at

work.

And then suddenly she sneezed!

She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken with a

great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely the little

explosion of tickled surfaces or a forewarning of a slight cold. It

was the alarum of the new Great Death, the ravening lion under the

sheep's wool of influenza.

The world that had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking

back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza

swept the world with recurrent violences.

Men who had feared to go to the trenches were snatched from their

offices and from their homes. Men who had tried in vain to get into

the fight died in their beds. Women and children perished innumerably.

Hearse-horses were overworked. The mysterious, invisible all-enemy did

not spare the soldiers; it sought them in the dugouts, among the

reserves, at the ports of embarkation and debarkation, at the

training-camps. In the hospitals it slew the convalescent wounded and

killed the nurses.

From America the influenza took more lives than the war itself.

It baffled science and carried off the doctors. Masks appeared and

people in offices were dressed in gauze muzzles. In some of the cities

the entire populace went with bandaged mouths, and a man who would

steal a furtive puff of a cigarette stole up a quiet street and kept

his eyes alert for the police.

Whole families were stricken down and brave women who dared the

pestilence found homes where father, mother, and children lay writhing

and starving in pain and delirium.

At the shipyard every precaution was taken, and Davidge fought the

unseen hosts for his men and for their families. Mamise had worn

herself down gadding the workmen's row with medicines and victuals in

her basket. And yet the death-roll mounted and strength was no

protection.

In Washington and other cities the most desperate experiments in

sanitation were attempted. Offices were closed or dismissed early.

Stenographers took dictation in masks. It was forbidden to crowd the

street-cars. All places of public assembly were closed, churches no

less than theaters and moving-picture shows. It was as illegal to hold

prayer-meetings as dances.

This was the supreme blow at religion. The preachers who had confessed

that the Church had failed to meet the war problems were dazed.

Mankind had not recovered from the fact that the world had been made a

hell by the German Emperor, who was the most pious of rulers and

claimed to take his crown from God direct. The German Protestants and

priests had used their pulpits for the propaganda of hate. The

Catholic Emperor of Austria had aligned his priests. Catholic and

Protestants fought for the Allies in the trenches, unfrocked or in

their pulpits. The Bishop of London was booed as a slacker. The Pope

wrung his hands and could not decide which way to turn. One British

general frivolously put it, "I am afraid that the dear old Church has

missed the bus this trip."

All religions were split apart and, as Lincoln said of the Civil War,

both sides sent up their prayers to the same God, demanding that He

crush the enemy.

For all the good the Y. M. C. A. accomplished, it ended the war with

the contempt of most of the soldiers. Individual clergymen won love

and crosses of war, but as men, not as saints.

The abandoned world abandoned all its gods, and men fought men in the

name of mankind.

Even against the plague the churchfolk were refused permission to pray

together. Christian Scientists published full pages of advertising

protesting against the horrid situation, but nobody heeded.

The ship of state lurched along through the mingled storms, mastless,

rudderless, pilotless, priestless, and everybody wondered which would

live the longer, the ship or the storm.

And then Mamise sneezed. And the tiny at-choo! frightened her to the

soul of her soul. It frightened the riveting-crew as well. The plague

had come among them.

"Drop them tongs and go home!" said Sutton.

"I've got to help finish my ship," Mamise pleaded.

"Go home, I tell you."

"But she's to be launched day after to-morrow and I've got to christen

her."

"Go home or I'll carry you," said Sutton, and he advanced on her. She

dropped her tongs and ran through the gusty rain, across the yard, out

of the gate, and down the muddy paths as if a wolf pursued.

She flung into her cottage, lighted the fires, heated water, drank a

quart of it, took quinine, and crept into her bed. Her tremors shook

the covers off. Sweat rained out of her pores and turned to ice-water

with the following ague.

The doctor came. Sutton had gone for him and threatened to beat him up

if he delayed. The doctor had nothing to give her but orders to stay

in bed and wait. Davidge came, and Abbie, and they tried to pretend

that they were not in a worse panic than Mamise.

There were no nurses to be spared and Abbie was installed. In spite of

her malministrations or because of them, Mamise grew better. She

stayed in bed all that day and the next, and when the morning of the

launching dawned, she felt so well that Abbie could not prevent her

from getting up and putting on her clothes.

She was to be woman again to-day and to wear the most fashionable gown

in her wardrobe and the least masculine hat.

She felt a trifle giddy as she dressed, but she told Abbie that she

never felt better. Her only alarm was the difficulty in hooking her

frock at the waist. Abbie fought them together with all her might and

main.

"If being a workman is going to take away my waistline, here's where I

quit work," said Mamise. "As Mr. Dooley says, I'm a pathrite, but I'm

no bigot."

Davidge had told her to keep to her room. He had telephoned to Polly

Widdicombe to come down and christen the ship. Polly was delayed and

Davidge was frantic. In fact, the Widdicombe motor ran off the road

into a slough of despond, and Polly did not arrive until after the

ship was launched from the ways and the foolhardy Mamise was in the

hospital.

When Davidge saw Mamise climbing the steps to the launching-platform

he did not recognize her under her big hat till she paused for breath

and looked up, counting the remaining steep steps and wondering if her

tottering legs would negotiate the height.

He ran down and haled her up, scolding her with fury. He had been on

the go all night, and he was raw with uneasiness.

"I'm all right," Mamise pleaded. "I got caught in the jam at the gate

and was nearly crushed. That's all. It's glorious up here and I'd

rather die than miss it."

It was a sight to see. The shipyard was massed with workmen and their

families, and every roof was crowded. On a higher platform in the rear

the reporters of the moving-picture newspapers were waiting with their

cameras. On the roof of a low shed a military band was tootling

merrily.

And the sky had relented of its rain. The day was a masterpiece of

good weather. A brilliant throng mounted to the platform, an admiral,

sea-captains and lieutenants, officers of the army, a Senator,

Congressmen, judges, capitalists, the jubilant officers of the

ship-building corporation. And Mamise was the queen of the day. She

was the "sponsor" for the ship and her name stood out on both sides of

the prow, high overhead where the launching-crew grinned down on her

and called her by her _nom de guerre_, "Moll."

The moving-picture men yelled at her and asked her to pose. She went

to the rail and tried to smile, feeling as silly as a Sunday-school

girl repeating a golden text, and looking it.

Once more she would appear in the Sunday supplements, and her childish

confusion would make throngs in moving-picture theaters laugh with

pleasant amusement. Mamise was news to-day.

The air was full of the hubbub of preparation. Underneath the upreared

belly of the ship gnomes crouched, pounding the wedges in to lift the

hull so that other gnomes could knock the shoring out.

There was a strange fascination in the racket of the shores falling

over, the dull clatter of a vast bowling-alley after a ten-strike.

Painters were at work brushing over the spots where the shores had

rested.

Down in the tanks inside the hull were a few luckless anonymities with

search-lights, put there to watch for leaks from loose rivet-heads.

They would be in the dark and see nothing of the festival. Always

there has to be some one in the dark at such a time.

The men who would saw the holding-blocks stood ready, as solemn as

clergymen. The cross-saws were at hand for their sacred office. The

sawyers and the other workmen were overdoing their unconcern. Mamise

caught sight of Sutton, lounging in violent indifference, but giving

himself away by the frenzy of his jaws worrying his quid and spurting

tobacco juice in all directions.

There was reason, too, for uneasiness. Sometimes a ship would not

start when the blocks were sawed through. There would be a long delay

while hydraulic jacks were sought and put to work to force her

forward. Such a delay had a superstitious meaning. Nobody liked a ship

that was afraid of her element. They wanted an eagerness in her

get-away. Or suppose she shot out too impetuously and listed on the

ways, ripping the scaffolding to pieces like a whale thrashing a raft

apart. Suppose she careened and stuck or rolled over in the mud. Such

things had happened and might happen again. The _Mamise_ had suffered

so many mishaps that the other ship crews called her a hoodoo.

At last the hour drew close. Davidge was a fanatic on schedules. He

did not want his ship to be late to her engagement.

"She's named after me, poor thing," said Mamise. "She's bound to be

late."

"She'll be on time for once," Davidge growled.

In the older days with the old-fashioned ships the boats had gone to

the sea like brides with trousseaux complete. The launching-guests had

made the journey with her; a dinner had been served aboard, and when

the festivities were ended the waiting tugs had taken the new ship to

the old sea for the honeymoon.

But nowadays only hulls were launched, as a rule. The mere husk was

then brought to the equipping-dock to receive her engines and all her

equipment.

The _Mamise_ was farther advanced, but she would have to tie up for

sixty days at least. The carpenters had her furniture all ready and

waiting, but she could not put forth under her own steam for two

months more.

The more reason for impatience at any further delay. Davidge went

along the launching-platform rails, like a captain on the bridge,

eager to move out of the slip.

"Make ready!" he commanded. "Stand by! Where's the bottle? Good Lord!

Where's the bottle?"

That precious quart of champagne was missing now. The bottle had been

prepared by an eminent jeweler with silver decoration and a silken

net. The neck would be a cherished souvenir thereafter, made into a

vase to hold flowers.

The bottle was found, a cable was lowered from aloft and the bottle

fastened to it.

Davidge explained to Mamise for the tenth time just what she was to

do. He gave the signal to the sawyers. The snarl of the teeth in the

holding-blocks was lost in the noise of the band. The great whistle on

the fabricating-plant split the air. The moving-picture camera-men

cranked their machines. The last inches of the timbers that held the

ship ashore were gnawed through. The sawyers said they could feel the

ship straining. She wanted to get to her sea. They loved her for it.

Suddenly she was "sawed off." She was moving. The rigid mountain was

an avalanche of steel departing down a wooden hill.

Mamise stared, gasped, paralyzed with launch-fright. Davidge nudged

her. She hurled the bottle at the vanishing keel. It broke with a loud

report. The wine splashed everywhichway. Some of it spattered Mamise's

new gown.

Her muscles went to work in womanly fashion to brush off the stain.

When she looked up, ashamed of her homely misbehavior, she cried:

"O Lord! I forgot to say, 'I christen thee _Mamise_.'"

"Say it now," said Davidge.

She shouted the words down the channel opening like an abyss as the

vast hulk diminished toward the river. Far below she could see the

water leap back from the shock of the new-comer. Great, circling

ripples retreated outward. Waves fought and threw up bouquets of

spume.

The chute smoked with the heat of the ship's passage and a white cloud

of steam flew up and followed her into the river.

She was launched, beautifully, perfectly. She sailed level. She was

water-borne.

People were cheering, the band was pounding all out of time, every eye

following the ship, the leader forgetting to lead.

Mamise wept and Davidge's eyes were wet. Something surged in him like

the throe of the river where the ship went in. It was good to have

built a good ship.

Mamise wrung his hand. She would have kissed him, but she remembered

in time. The camera caught the impulse. People laughed at that in the

movie theaters. People cheered in distant cities as they assisted

weeks after in the début of _Mamise_.

The movies took the people everywhere on magic carpets. Yet there were

curious people who bewailed them as inartistic!

Mamise's little body and her little soul were almost blasted by the

enormity of her emotions. The ship was like a child too big for its

mother, and the ending of the long travail left her wrecked.

She tried to enter into the hilarity of the guests, but she was filled

with awe and prostrate as if a god had passed by.

The crowd began to trickle down the long steps to the feast in the

mess hall. She dreaded the descent, the long walk, the sitting at

table. She wanted to go home and cry very hard and be good and sick

for a long while.

But she could not desert Davidge at such a time or mar his triumph by

her hypochondria. She wavered as she climbed down. She rode with

Davidge to the mess-hall in his car and forced herself to voice

congratulations too solemn and too fervid for words.

The guests of honor sat at a table disguised with scenery as a ship's

deck. A thousand people sat at the other tables and took part in the

banquet.

Mamise could not eat the food of human caterers. She had fed on

honey-dew and drunk the milk of paradise.

She lived through the long procession of dishes and heard some of the

oratory, the glowing praises of Davidge and Uncle Sam, Mr. Schwab, Mr.

Hurley, President Wilson, the Allies, and everybody else. She heard it

proclaimed that America was going back to the sea, so long neglected.

The prodigal was returning home.

Mamise could think of nothing but a wish to be in bed. The room began

to blur. People's faces went out of focus. Her teeth began to chatter.

Her jaw worked ridiculously like a riveting-gun. She was furious at

it.

She heard Davidge whispering: "What's the matter, honey? You're ill

again."

"I--I fancy--I--I guess I--I--am," she faltered.

"O God!" he groaned, "why did you come out?"

He rose, lifted her elbow, murmured something to the guests. He would

have supported her to the door, but she pleaded:

"Don't! They'll think it's too much ch-ch-champagne. I'm all right!"

She made the door in excellent control, but it cost her her last cent

of strength. Outside, she would have fallen, but he huddled her in his

arms, lifted her, carried her to his car. He piled robes on her, but

those riveters inside her threatened to pound her to death. Burning

pains gnawed her chest like cross-cut saws.

When the car stopped she was not in front of her cottage, but before

the hospital.

When the doctor finished his inspection she heard him mumble to

Davidge:

"Pneumonia! Double pneumonia!"

CHAPTER IX

Once more Mamise had come between Davidge and his work. He did not

care what happened to his ships or his shipyard. He watched Mamise

fighting for life, if indeed she fought, for he could not get to her

through the fog.

She was often delirious and imagined herself back in her cruel times.

He learned a few things about that mystic period she would never

disclose. And he was glad that she had never told him more. He fled

from her, for eavesdropping on a delirium has something of the

contemptible quality of peeping at a nakedness.

He supposed that Mamise would die. All the poor women with pasts that

he had read about, in what few novels he had read, had died or it had

been found out that they had magically retained their innocence

through years of evil environment.

He supposed also that Mamise would die, because that was the one thing

needful to make his life a perfect failure. He had not gone to war,

yet he had lost his arm. He had never really desperately loved before,

and now he would lose his heart. It was just as well, because if

Mamise lived he would lose her, anyway. He would not tie her to the

crippled thing he was.

While the battalions of disease ravaged the poor Belgium of Mamise's

body the world outside went on making history. The German Empire kept

caving in on all sides. Her armies held nowhere. Her only pride was in

saving a defeat from being a disaster. Her confederates were

disintegrating. The newspapers mentioned now, not cities that

surrendered to the Allies, but nations.

And at last Germany added one more to her unforgivable assaults upon

the patience of mankind. Just as the Allies poised for the last

tremendous all-satisfying _coup de grâce_ the Empire put up her hands

and whined the word that had become the world-wide synonym for

poltroonery, "_Kamerad!_"

Foch wept, American soldiers cursed because they could not prove their

mettle and drive the boche into the Rhine. Never was so bitter a

disappointment mingled with a triumph so magnificent. The world went

wild with the news of peace. The nations all made carnival over the

premature rumor and would not be denied their rhapsodies because the

story was denied. They made another and a wilder carnival when the

news was confirmed.

Davidge took the peace without enthusiasm. Mamise had been better, but

was worse again. She got still better than before and not quite so

worse again. And so in a climbing zigzag she mounted to health at

last.

She had missed the carnival and she woke on the morning after. Nearly

everybody was surprised to find that ending this one war had brought a

dozen new wars, a hundred, a myriad.

The danger that had united the nations into a holy crusade had ended,

and the crusaders were men again. They were back in the same old world

with the same old sins and sorrows and selfishnesses, and unnumbered

new ones. And they had the habit of battle--the gentlest were

accustomed to slaughter.

It was not the Central Powers alone that had disintegrated. The

Entente Cordiale was turned into a caldron of toil and trouble. No two

people in any one nation agreed on the best way to keep the peace.

Nobody could accept any other body's theories.

Russia, whose collapse had cost the Allies a glimpse of destruction

and a million lives, was a new plague spot, the center of the world's

dread. While the people in Russia starved or slew one another their

terrible missionaries went about the world preaching chaos as the new

gospel and fanning the always smoldering discontent of labor into a

prairie fire.

Ships were needed still. Europe must be fed. Hunger was the

Bolshevists' blood-brother. Unemployment was the third in the grim

fraternity.

Davidge increased his force daily, adding a hundred men or more to his

army, choosing mainly from the returning hordes of soldiers.

When Mamise at last had left the hospital she found a new ship

growing where the _Mamise_ had dwelt. The _Mamise_ was at the

equipping-dock, all but ready for the sea, about to steam out and take

on a cargo of food to Poland, the new-old country gathering her three

selves together under the spell of Paderewski's patriotic fire.

Mamise wanted to go to work again. Her strength was back and she was

not content to return to crochet-hooks and tennis-racquets. She had

tasted the joy of machinery, had seen it add to her light muscles a

giant's strength. She wanted to build a ship all by herself,

especially the riveting.

Davidge opposed her with all his might. He pointed out that the dream

of women laboring with men, each at her job, had been postponed, like

so many other dreams, lost like so many other benefits that mitigated

war.

The horrors of peace were upon the world. Men were driving the women

back to the kitchen. There were not jobs enough for all.

But Mamise pleaded to be allowed to work at least till her own ship

was finished. So Davidge yielded to quiet her. She put back into her

overalls and wielded a monkey-wrench in the engine-room. She took

flying trips on the lofty cranes.

One afternoon when the whistle blew she remained aloft alone to revel

in the wonder view of the world, the wide and gleaming river, the

peaceful hills, the so-called handiwork of God, and everywhere the

pitiful beauty of man's efforts to work out his destiny and enslave

the forces.

Human power was not the least of these forces. Ingenious men had

learned how to use not only wind currents, waterfalls, and lightning

and the heat stored up in coal, but to use also the power stored up in

the muscles of their more slow-brained fellows. And these forces broke

loose at times with the ruinous effect of tornadoes, floods, and

thunderbolts.

The laborers needed merciful and intelligent handling, and the better

they were the better their work. It was hard to say what was heresy

and what was wisdom, what was oppression and what was helpful

discipline. Whichever way one turned, there was misunderstanding,

protest, revolt.

Mamise thought that everybody ought to be happy and love everybody

else. She thought that it ought to be joy enough to go on working in

that splendid shop and about the flock of ships on the ways.

And yet people would insist on being miserable. She, the priestess of

unalloyed rapture, also sighed.

Hearing a step on the crane, she was startled. After all, she was only

a woman, alone up here, and help could never reach her if any one

threatened her. She looked over the edge.

There came the man who most of all threatened her--Davidge. He

endangered her future most of all, whether he married her or deserted

her. He evidently had no intention of marrying her, for she had given

him chances enough and hints enough.

He had a telegram in his hand and apologized for following her.

"I didn't know but it might be bad news."

"There's nobody to send me bad news except you and Abbie." She opened

the telegram. It was an invitation from Polly to come back to sanity

and a big dance at the Hotel Washington. She smiled. "I wonder if I'll

ever dance again."

Davidge was tired from the climb. He dropped to the seat occupied by

the chauffeur of the crane. He rose at once with an apology and

offered his place to Mamise.

She shook her head, then gave a start:

"Great Heavens! that reminds me! That seat of yours I took on the

train from New York. I've never paid for it."

"Oh, for the Lord's sake--"

"I'm going to pay it. That's where all the trouble started. How much

was it?"

"I don't remember."

"About two dollars now."

"Exactly one then."

She drove her hand down into the pocket of her breeches and dragged up

a fistful of small money.

"To-day was pay-day. Here's your dollar."

"Want a receipt?"

"Sure, Mike. I couldn't trust you."

An odd look crossed his face. He did not play easily, but he tried:

"I can't give you a receipt now, because everybody is looking."

"Do you mean that you had an idea of kissing me?" she gasped.

"Yep."

"You reckless devil! Do you think that a plutocrat can kiss every poor

goil in the shop?"

"You're the only one here."

"Well, then, do you think you'll take advantage of my womanly

helplessness?"

"Yes."

"Never! Overalls is royal raiment when wore for voitue's sake. You'll

never kiss me till you put a wedding-ring on me finger."

He looked away, sobered and troubled.

She stared at him. "Good Heavens! Can't you take a hint?"

"Not that one."

"Then I insist on your marrying me. You have compromised me

hopelessly. Everybody says I am working here just to be near you, and

that's a fact."

He was a caricature of mental and physical awkwardness.

She gasped: "And still he doesn't answer me! Must I get on my knees to

you?"

She dropped on her knees, a blue denim angel on a cloud, praying

higher.

He stormed: "For Heaven's sake, get up! Somebody will see you."

She did not budge. "I'll not rise from my knees till you promise to

marry me."

He started to escape, moved toward the steps. She seized his knees and

moaned:

"Oh, pity me! pity me!"

He was excruciated with her burlesque, tried to drag her to her feet,

but he had only one hand and he could not manage her.

"Please get up. I can't make you. I've only one arm."

"Let's see if it fits." She rose and, holding his helpless hand,

whirled round into his arm. "Perfect!" Then she stood there and called

from her eyrie to the sea-gulls that haunted the river, "In the

presence of witnesses this man has taken me for his affianced

fiancée."

* * * * *

They had a wedding in the village church. Abbie was matron of honor

and gave her sister away. Her children were very dressed up and

highly uncomfortable. Abbie drew Mamise aside after the signing of the

book.

"Oh, thank Gawd you're marrit at last, Mamise! You've been such a

worrit to me. I hope you'll be as happy as poor Jake and me was. If he

only hadn't 'a' had to gave his life for you, you wouldn't 'a' been.

But he's watchin' you from up there and-- Oh dear! Oh dear!"

Jake was already a tradition of increasing beauty. So may we all of us

be!

Mamise insisted on dragging Davidge away from the shipyard for a brief

honeymoon.

"You're such a great executive, they'll never miss you. But I shall. I

decline to take my honeymoon or live my married life alone."

They went up to Washington for a while of shopping. The city was

already reverting to type. The heart had gone out of the stay-at-home

war-workers and the tide was on the ebb save for a new population of

returned soldiers, innumerably marked with the proofs of sacrifice,

not only by their service chevrons, their wound stripes, but also by

the parts of their brave bodies that they had left in France.

They were shy and afraid of themselves and of the world, and

especially of their women. But, as Adelaide wrote of the new task of

rehabilitation, "a merciful Providence sees to it that we become, in

time, used to anything. If we had all been born with one arm or one

leg our lives and loves would have gone on just the same."

To many another woman, as to Mamise, was given the privilege of adding

herself to her wounded lover to complete him.

Polly Widdicombe, seeing Mamise and Davidge dancing together, smiled

through her tears, almost envying her her husband. Davidge danced as

well with one arm as with two, but Mamise, as she clasped that blunt

shoulder and that pocketed sleeve, was given the final touch of

rapture made perfect with regret: she had the aching pride of a

soldier's sweetheart, for she could say:

"I am his right arm."

THE END