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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cup of Fury
+       A Novel of Cities and Shipyards
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2009 [EBook #30351]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CUP OF FURY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES
+
+ The Cup of Fury
+ The Unpardonable Sin
+ We Can't Have Everything
+ In a Little Town
+ The Thirteenth Commandment
+ Clipped Wings
+ What Will People Say?
+ The Last Rose of Summer
+ Empty Pockets
+ Long Ever Ago
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
+
+Established 1817
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise reflected,
+"if one could stay single at the same time."]
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+A Novel of Cities and Shipyards
+
+BY RUPERT HUGHES
+
+Author of "We Can't Have Everything" "The Unpardonable Sin" etc.
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY HENRY RALEIGH
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+ Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers
+ Printed in the United States of America
+ Published May, 1919
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  "It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise
+      reflected, "if one could stay single at the same
+      time."                                              Frontispiece
+                                                             Facing p.
+  He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought
+      herself free and came to the ground and was almost
+      trampled.                                                      3
+  "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a
+      war-worker about as long as I can."                           75
+  "'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"
+      Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie
+      Louise hung back. "Aren't you afraid to push on
+      when you can't see where you're going?" she
+      demanded.                                                     91
+  There was something hallowed and awesome about it all.
+      It had a cathedral majesty.                                  166
+  How quaint a custom it is for people who know each
+      other well and see each other in plain clothes
+      every day to get themselves up with meticulous
+      skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for
+      each other's examination.                                    235
+  "So I have already done something more for Germany.
+      That's splendid. Now tell me what else I can do."
+      Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see
+      through her thin disguise.                                   270
+  Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling
+      in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at
+      Sutton's elbow.                                              282
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought
+herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled.]
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie Louise had felt
+that she would scream if she were kept a moment outside. The luxury of
+simply wishing the gate ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by
+the pleasant deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on
+the door like a Japanese mask.
+
+Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall. The obsolete
+gorgeousness of the London home had never been in good taste, but had
+grown as lovable with years as do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old
+relative. All the good, comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing
+now as never before. The stairway had something of the grand manner,
+too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her own room;
+and there, she knew, was a solitude where she could cry as hard as she
+wanted to, and therefore usually did not want to. Besides, her mood
+now was past crying for.
+
+She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt the
+cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there till her heart
+should be replenished with courage automatically, as ponds are fed
+from above.
+
+Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and people shut
+out. She was in one of the moods when the soul longs to gather its
+faculties together in a family, making one self of all its selves.
+Marie Louise had known privation and homelessness and the perils they
+bring a young woman, and now she had riches and a father and mother
+who were great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into
+their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she asked
+nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave.
+
+She would have said that no human voice or presence could be anything
+but a torture to her. And yet, when she hurried up the steps, she was
+suddenly miraculously restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion
+of a child's laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about
+to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely surprised
+once more, and altogether terrified with her perfect regularity.
+
+Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer
+world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing
+keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the
+counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and
+puerility to solemnity.
+
+The children called her "Auntie," but they were not hers except
+through the adoption of a love that had to claim some kinship. They
+looked like her children, though--so much so, indeed, that strangers
+thought that she was their young mother. But it was because she looked
+like their mother, who had died, that the American girl was a member
+of this British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much of
+its perilous destiny.
+
+She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons not of faery,
+but of fact, that had leaped out at her from nowhere. It solaced her
+somehow to burlesque the terror that had whelmed her, and, now that
+she was assailed by ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the
+shrieks she had not dared to release in the street she gave forth with
+vigor, as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with
+milk-curdling cries of:
+
+"Boo-ooh!"
+
+Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their thumbs at
+her and said:
+
+"Bang! Bang!"
+
+And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and staggered back,
+stammering:
+
+"Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular, take my l-l-life
+but spare my m-m-money."
+
+She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred the sacred
+text now, and the First Murderer, who had all the conservative
+instincts of childhood, had to correct her misquotation of the sacred
+formula:
+
+"No, no, Auntie. Say, 'Take my money but spare my life!' Now we dot to
+do it all over."
+
+"I beg your pardon humbly," she said, and went back to be ambushed
+again. This time the boy had an inspiration. To murder and robbery he
+would add scalping.
+
+But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of fright, real or
+feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides, she had been to the
+hairdresser's, and she explained that she really could not afford to
+be scalped. The boy was bitterly disappointed, and he grew furious
+when the untimely maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and
+demanded that they come to bed at once or be reported.
+
+As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity, Marie Louise,
+watching them, was suddenly shocked by the thought of how early in
+life humanity begins to revel in slaughter. The most innocent babes
+must be taught not to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a
+caul, or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always
+almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them when they
+are born. Their first pastimes are killing games, playing dead,
+stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The American Indian is the
+international nursery pet because of his traditional fiendishness.
+
+It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural that the boy
+interrupted in his massacre of his beloved aunt should hang back to
+squall that he would say his prayers only to her. Marie Louise glanced
+at her watch. She had barely time to dress for dinner, but the
+children had to be obeyed. She made one weak protest.
+
+"Fräulein hears your prayers."
+
+"But she's wented out."
+
+"Well, I'll hear them, then."
+
+"Dot to tell us fairy-'tory, too," said the girl.
+
+"All right, one fairy-'tory--"
+
+She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap
+demanding "somefin bluggy."
+
+Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among
+the Grimms' fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet
+and guileless enough for these two lambs.
+
+All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots;
+of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being
+turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals
+or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank
+blood and crunched children's bones as if they were reed birds; of
+hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked
+them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German
+fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against
+each of the legends. But her mind could not find substitutes.
+
+After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for
+romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She
+confessed her poverty of ideas.
+
+The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:
+
+"Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed."
+
+In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own
+and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way
+hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as
+she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can
+be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and
+praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so
+recently come.
+
+But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as
+mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned
+in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of
+lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of
+children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her
+knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting
+them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was
+very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged
+with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered
+as they drowned.
+
+She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty "Amen" she
+protested.
+
+"You didn't thank God for anything. Haven't you anything to thank God
+for?"
+
+If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of
+special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, "Oh yes!" They
+looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and
+chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their
+finger-tips, and the boy said:
+
+"We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_." And the
+girl said, "A-men!"
+
+Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss
+of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it
+announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled
+home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven
+for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from
+their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering
+fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and
+down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself
+that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more
+repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the
+blasphemy.
+
+She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her
+ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: "You wicked,
+wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a
+prayer! God must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it.
+Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?"
+
+"Wicked your own self!" the boy snapped back. "Fräulein read it in the
+paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like
+what you do, and she said, '_Ach, unser_ Dott--how dood you are to us,
+to make sink dat _Lusitania_!'"
+
+He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in:
+"It's Fräulein's work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend,
+the harpy!"
+
+The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved
+Fräulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise
+fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming:
+"You shall not call our own precious Fräulein names. Harpy, your own
+self!"
+
+And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and
+echoed, "Harpy, your own self!"
+
+It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible
+cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: "But, my
+darlings, you don't know what you are saying. The _Lusitania_ was a
+beautiful ship--"
+
+The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: "She wasn't as beautiful
+as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond."
+
+Marie Louise condescended to argue: "Oh yes, she was! She was a great
+ship, noble like Saint Paul's Cathedral, and she was loaded with
+passengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was
+ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into
+the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore
+them from their mothers' arms and ran off with them, choking and
+strangling them and dragging them down and down--forever down."
+
+She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain. Then the
+onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw the supercilious lad
+regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment was:
+
+"It served 'em jolly well right for bein' on 'at old boat."
+
+Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul. She shrank from
+the boy and groaned, "Oh, you toad, you little toad!"
+
+He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took refuge in a
+higher authority. "Fräulein told us. And she knows."
+
+The bit lassiky stormed to his support: "She does so!" and drove it
+home with the last nail of feminine argument: "So there now!"
+
+Marie Louise retorted, weakly: "We'll see! We'll soon see!" And she
+rushed out of the room, like another little girl, straight to the door
+of Sir Joseph, where she knocked impatiently. His man appeared and
+murmured through a crevice: "Sorry, miss, but Seh Joseph is
+dressing."
+
+Marie Louise went to Lady Webling's door, and a maid came to whisper:
+"She is in her teb. We're having dinner at tome to-night, miss."
+
+Marie Louise nodded. Dinner must be served, and on time. It was the
+one remaining solemnity that must not be forgotten or delayed.
+
+She went to her own room. Her maid was in a stew about the hour, and
+the gown that was to be put on. Marie Louise felt that black was the
+only wear on such a Bartholomew's night. But Sir Joseph hated black so
+well that he had put a clause in his will against its appearance even
+at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his
+prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she
+felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his
+good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as
+all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for
+every excess of virtue or vice--if, indeed, vice is anything but an
+immoderate, untimely virtue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Marie Louise let her maid select the gown. She was an exquisite
+picture as she stood before the long mirror and watched the buckling
+on of her armor, her armor of taffeta and velvet with the colors of
+sunlit leaves and noon-warmed flowers in carefully elected wrinkles
+assured with many a hook and eye. Her image was radiant and pliant and
+altogether love-worthy, but her thoughts were sad and stern.
+
+She was resolved that Fräulein should not remain in the house another
+night. She wondered that Sir Joseph had not ousted her from the family
+at the first crash of war. The old crone! She could have posed for one
+of the Grimms' most vulturine witches. But she had kept a civil tongue
+in her head till now; the children adored her, and Sir Joseph had
+influence enough to save her from being interned or deported.
+
+Hitherto, Marie Louise had felt sorry for her in her dilemma of being
+forced to live at peace in the country her own country was locked in
+war with. Now she saw that the woman's oily diplomacy was only for
+public use, and that all the while she was imbruing the minds of the
+little children with the dye of her own thoughts. The innocents
+naturally accepted everything she told them as the essence of truth.
+
+Marie Louise hoped to settle the affair before dinner, but by the time
+she was gowned and primped, the first premature guest had arrived like
+the rashest primrose, shy, surprised, and surprising. Sir Joseph had
+gone below already. Lady Webling was hull down on the stairway.
+
+Marie Louise saw that her protest must wait till after the dinner, and
+she followed to do her duty to the laws of hospitality.
+
+Sir Joseph liked to give these great affairs. He loved to eat and to
+see others eat. "The more the merrier," was his motto--one of the
+most truthless of the old saws. Little dinners at Sir Joseph's--what
+he called "on fameals"--would have been big dinners elsewhere. A big
+dinner was like a Lord Mayor's banquet. He needed only a crier at his
+back and a Petronius to immortalize his _gourmandise_.
+
+To-night he had great folk and small fry. Nobody pretended to know the
+names of everybody. Sir Joseph himself leaned heavily on the man who
+sang out the labels of the guests, and even then his wife whispered
+them to him as they came forward, and for a precaution, kept slipping
+them into the conversation as reminders.
+
+There were several Americans present: a Doctor and Mrs. Clinton
+Worthing who had come over with a special shipload of nurses. The ship
+had been fitted out by Mrs. Worthing, who had been Muriel Schuyler,
+daughter of the giant plutocrat, Jacob Schuyler, who was lending
+England millions of money weekly. A little American millionaire,
+Willie Enslee, living in England now on account of some scandal in his
+past, was there. He did not look romantic.
+
+Marie Louise had no genius for names, or faces, either. To-night she
+was frightened, and she made some horrible blunders, greeting the
+grisly Mr. Verrinder by the name of Mr. Hilary. The association was
+clear, for Mr. Hilary had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in
+Parliament; but it was like calling "Mr. Capulet" "Mr. Montague."
+Marie Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra
+effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs. Norcross had
+only recently shaken off the name of Mrs. Patchett after a resounding
+divorce. So Marie Louise called her new husband by the name of her
+old, which made it very pleasant.
+
+Her wits were so badly dispersed that she gave up the attempt to take
+in the name of an American whom Lady Webling passed along to her as
+"Mr. Davidge, of the States." And he must have been somebody of
+importance, for even Sir Joseph got his name right. Marie Louise,
+however, disliked him cordially at once--for two reasons: first, she
+hated herself so much that she could not like anybody just then; next,
+this American was entirely too American. He was awkward and
+indifferent, but not at all with the easy amble and patrician
+unconcern of an English aristocrat.
+
+Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly born, at that, but
+she liked extreme Americanism never the more. Perhaps she was a bit of
+a snob, though fate was getting ready to beat the snobbery out of her.
+And hers was an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some
+people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger dialect.
+But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her
+environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke
+Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German
+intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the
+same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her
+livelihood.
+
+In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an
+affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an
+Englishwoman said, "Cahn't you?" it seemed tactless to answer, "No, I
+cann't." To respond to "Good mawning" with "Good morrning" had the
+effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the
+shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a
+pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was
+good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see
+people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said
+it.
+
+This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored
+her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other
+group. Then he startled her--by being startled as he caught sight of
+her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a
+tender, "My daughter," Davidge stopped short and mumbled:
+
+"I've had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven't I?"
+
+Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. "I think not."
+
+He took the slap with a smile. "Did I hear Lady Webling call you her
+daughter?"
+
+Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, "Yes," with the
+aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost "Yis."
+
+"Then you're right and I'm wrong. I beg your pardon."
+
+"Daon't mention it," said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady
+Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach
+herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at
+once through the sieve of her memory.
+
+Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long
+column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait
+till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up
+into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that
+changes an it to a him or a her.
+
+The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and
+outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for
+giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.
+
+In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something
+mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached
+prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what
+really happened--which was, that she retained no impression of him at
+all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he
+had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never
+forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her.
+
+He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a
+resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a
+moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams--a
+girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western
+state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of
+instruments--xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions,
+cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This
+girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of
+the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she
+had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and
+the strange cry she put into her music.
+
+When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels
+on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom
+from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman
+tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too,
+in four voices--in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and
+finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They
+called her "Mamise, the Quartet in One."
+
+Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the
+theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and
+Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage,
+where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go
+on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a
+bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully
+plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather
+contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to
+blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment,
+"I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these
+days--or nights, Miss Mamise."
+
+She had grumbled, "Much ubbliged!" and returned to the ape, while
+Davidge slunk away, ashamed.
+
+He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never
+seen "Mamise" in the electric lights. He had never found the name in
+any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner--Spanish,
+Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her
+nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what
+had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or
+been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible
+conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten
+admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd
+of peeresses and plutocrats in London.
+
+He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had
+had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and
+then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided
+that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and
+confused.
+
+But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this
+tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his
+lost Mamise.
+
+If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so
+often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after
+all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie
+Louise together again so much as the man's hatred of leaving anything
+unfinished--even a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking
+Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a
+snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.
+
+A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him
+respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him
+staring at her over Sir Joseph's shoulder and puzzling about her. And
+this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she
+fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of
+those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate
+of being called daughter by Lady Webling.
+
+She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the
+incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the
+best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the
+husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry
+voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously
+smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity,
+though her talk was rarely witty on its own account.
+
+Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in
+a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool.
+She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was
+aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless,
+reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and
+amiable feelings; these made manners enough.
+
+She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back
+into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther than many a duke dared
+trace his line. She had traveled the world; she had danced with kings,
+and had made two popes laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn't
+afraid of anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being
+friendly with them, or angry with them.
+
+Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no difference to
+Polly's affection if she found out all there was to find out about
+Marie Louise. And yet Polly's friendship did not have the dull
+certainty of indestructibility. Marie Louise knew that one word wrong
+or one act out of key might end it forever, and then Polly would be
+her loud and ardent enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly
+could hate as briskly as she could love.
+
+She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the _Lusitania_.
+
+"I shouldn't have come to-night," she said, "except that I want to
+talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know
+how much I loathe 'em all. 'The Hymn of Hate' is a lullaby to what I
+feel."
+
+Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady
+C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went
+straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got
+what-for, and everybody was delighted. The two were devoted enemies
+from then on, and it was beautiful to see them come together.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night and
+invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a fight with anybody but
+Germans. She turned her full-orbed back on Lady C.-W. and, so to
+speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades at her. Lady C.-W. passed by
+without a word, and Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for
+Marie Louise was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W.
+
+She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before. Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must be a very great
+man.
+
+She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, "How is the new ship
+coming on?" and the American said, "She's doing as well as could be
+expected."
+
+So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a
+heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered
+in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him or
+his name.
+
+Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband. "How do you
+know? He might be your own mother, for all you can tell. Put on your
+distance-glasses, you poor fish." She turned to Marie Louise. "You
+know how near-sighted Tom is."
+
+"An excellent fault in a man," said Marie Louise.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Polly. "You can't trust even the blind ones.
+And you'll notice that when Tom comes to one of these décolleté
+dinners, he wears his reading-glasses."
+
+All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-glasses,
+taking off his reading-glasses and pouching them and putting them
+away, and putting on his distance-glasses, and from force of habit
+putting their pouch away. Then he stared at Davidge, took off his
+distance-glasses, found the case with difficulty, put them up,
+pocketed them, and stood blearing into space while he searched for
+his reading-glasses, found them, put the case back in his pocket and
+saddled his nose with the lenses.
+
+Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said:
+
+"Well, after all that, what?"
+
+"I don't know him," said Widdicombe.
+
+It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work.
+
+Polly said: "That proves nothing. Tom's got a near-memory, too. The
+man's a pest. If he didn't make so much money, I'd abandon him on a
+door-step."
+
+That was Polly's form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how she doted
+on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet dog. Widdicombe had
+the helpless manner of one, and was always at heel with Polly. But
+he was a Titan financially, and he was signing his name now to
+munitions-contracts as big as national debts.
+
+Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the Widdicombes by one
+of Lady Webling's most mysterious glances, to meet a new-comer whom
+Lady Webling evidently regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling
+was as wide as a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in
+front of her by turning her back on the company. She made such a nook
+now and, taking Marie Louise's hand in hers, put it in the hand of the
+tall and staring man whose very look Marie Louise found invasive. His
+handclasp was somehow like an illicit caress.
+
+How strange it is that with so much modesty going about, people should
+be allowed to wear their hands naked! The fashion of the last few
+years compelling the leaving off of gloves was not really very nice.
+Marie Louise realized it for the first time. Her fastidious right hand
+tried to escape from the embrace of the stranger's fingers, but they
+clung devil-fishily, and Lady Webling's soft cushion palm was there
+conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling tone:
+
+"This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much--Mr. Easton, you
+know."
+
+"Oh yes," said Marie Louise.
+
+"Be very nice to him," said Lady Webling. "He is taking you out to
+dinner."
+
+At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited priest,
+and there was such a slow crystallization as follows a cry of "Fall
+in!" to weary soldiers. The guests were soon in double file and on the
+march to the battlefield with the cooks.
+
+Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise's hand; he had carried it up into
+the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand over it for guard. A
+lady can hardly wrench loose from such an attention, but Marie Louise
+abhorred it.
+
+Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented his
+courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One hates to have even
+a bunch of violets jabbed into one's nose with the command, "Smell!"
+
+She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something in it as
+faint as the odor of high game. It was a time when the least hint of
+Teutonism carried the stench of death to British nostrils.
+
+Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German birth, and
+their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph had become a
+naturalized citizen ages ago and had won respect and affection a
+decade back. His lavish use of his money for charities and for great
+industries had won him his knighthood, and while there was a certain
+sniff of suspicion in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his
+name, those who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien
+birth that they forgave it him now.
+
+As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid of his
+speech. She was as used to it as to his other little mannerisms. She
+did not think of the old couple as fat and awkward. She did not
+analyze their attributes or think of their features in detail. She
+thought of them simply as them. But Easton was new; he brought in a
+subtle whiff of the hated Germany that had done the _Lusitania_ to
+death.
+
+The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn wake. The
+triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats. The feast was
+brilliant and large and long, and it seemed criminal to see such waste
+of provender when so much of the world was hungry. The talk was almost
+all of the _Lusitania_ and the deep damnation of her taking off. Many
+of the guests had crossed the sea in her graceful shell, and they
+felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst of
+the German sea crimes.
+
+Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down the flowery
+lane of the table. She could not see him at all, for the candles and
+the roses. Just once she heard his voice in a lull. Its twang carried
+it all the way up the alley:
+
+"A man that would kill a passenger-ship would shoot a baby in its
+cradle. When you think how long it takes to build a ship, how much
+work she represents, how sweet she is when she rides out and all
+that--by Gosh! there's no word mean enough for the skoundrels. There's
+nothing they won't do now--absolutely nothing."
+
+She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again that night.
+She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince of distress he gave her
+by his provincialism was forgotten in the anguish her foster-parents
+caused her.
+
+For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that Sir Joseph
+and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their expressions of horror
+and grief over the finished epic, the _Lusitania_. It was not for lack
+of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there
+was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors
+call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great
+actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was
+when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an
+emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at
+least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness,
+gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They
+"get across the footlights" between each player on the human stage and
+his audience.
+
+Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well
+and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of
+such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such
+rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr.
+Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman's evening
+dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in
+the government, nobody knew just what.
+
+Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder's silence the
+distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the
+Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going
+up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his
+bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the
+inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he
+groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and
+breadth of the table: "I remember readin' about old Greek witch name
+Circe--changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned
+those German swine into the shape of human beings."
+
+Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked--by the vulgarity, no
+doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language--only in the
+platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the
+eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his
+comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily
+correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or
+the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too
+much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal
+"without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as
+"whidthout witch." He made it on the third trial.
+
+Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two
+other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked
+anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder's gaze was merely studious. Marie
+Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of
+heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a
+search-light that studies and registers, then moves away.
+
+Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept
+recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made
+several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the _Lusitania_;
+but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the
+ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where
+she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at
+all.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain
+of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming the government. She
+always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she
+said:
+
+"It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in
+by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of?
+If the Cabinet doesn't fall for this, we might as well give up."
+
+The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh
+of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and
+a foggy tongue in answer:
+
+"Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin' to convoy the
+_Lusitania_; but she didn't come to rendezvous because why? Because
+some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a
+trap."
+
+This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility
+startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in all directions
+like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then
+at somebody else. Marie Louise's racing gaze noted that Mr.
+Verrinder's eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except
+Strathdene.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt's eyes as they ran simply expressed a disgust that
+she put into words with her usual frankness:
+
+"Don't be more idiotic than necess'ry, my dear boy; there are secret
+codes, you know."
+
+"S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know--that's what you
+mean, sweetheart. I don't know one little secret, but Huns-- Do you
+know how many thousand Germans there are loose in England--do you?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. "I haven't the faintest
+notion. Far more than I wish, I'm sure."
+
+"I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And God knows how many
+more. And I'm not alluthing to Germans in disguise, naturalized
+Germans--quinine pills with a little coating. I'm not referring to
+you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates' respect for you. Ever'body has.
+You have done all you could to overcome the fatal error of your
+parents. You're a splen'id gen'l'man. Your 'xception proves rule. Even
+Germans can't all be perf'ly rotten."
+
+"Thank you, Marquess, thank you," said Sir Joseph, with a natural
+embarrassment.
+
+Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the English "Thank
+you" and Sir Joseph's "Thang gyou."
+
+Then Lady Webling's eyes went around the table, catching up the
+women's eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop from the
+embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment with her to the
+drawing-room, where the women sat about smoking miserably and waiting
+for the men to come forth and take them home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+There must have been embarrassment enough left to go round the
+dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief while the men flocked
+into the drawing-room. And they began to plead engagements in offices
+or homes or Parliament.
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock when the last of the guests had gone,
+except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into his own study.
+Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight, as if he had set himself
+an imaginary chalk-line to follow. He jostled against the door, and as
+he closed it, swung with it uncertainly.
+
+Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the head in the
+direction of the study door:
+
+"Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He's nice, but--"
+
+"We're very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I--and we do hope you will
+be."
+
+Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband for her.
+It was a dreadful situation, because there was no compulsion except
+the compulsion of obligation. They never gave her a chance to do
+anything for them; they were always doing things for her. What an
+ingrate she would be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to
+marry a man she felt such antipathy for--surely there could be some
+less hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway
+on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness in the
+immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of untenanted divans and
+of empty chairs drawn into groups as the departed guests had left
+them.
+
+Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed for an answer.
+
+"You don't really dislike Nicky, do you?"
+
+"N-o-o. I've not known him long enough to dislike him very well."
+
+She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady Webling sighed
+profoundly and smothered her disappointment in a fond "Good night."
+She smothered the great child, too, in a hugely buxom embrace. When
+Marie emerged she was suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to
+Lady Webling of Fräulein Ernst's attack on the children's souls. She
+spoke now.
+
+"There's one thing, mamma, I've been wanting to tell you all evening.
+Please don't let it distress you, but really I'm afraid you'll have to
+get rid of Fräulein."
+
+Lady Webling's voluminous yawn was stricken midway into a gasp. Marie
+Louise told her the story of the diabolical prayer. Lady Webling took
+the blow without reeling. She expressed shock, but again expressed it
+too perfectly.
+
+She promised to "reprimand the foolish old soul."
+
+"To reprimand her!" Marie Louise cried. "You won't send her away?"
+
+"Send her away where, my child? Where should we send the poor thing?
+But I'll speak to her very sharply. It was outrageous of her. What if
+the children should say such things before other people? It would be
+frightful! Thank you for telling me, my dear. And now I'm for bed! And
+you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?"
+
+Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door, implying and
+rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise was lingering for a
+last word with Easton.
+
+Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs with Lady
+Webling's arm about her. For the first time in her life she distrusted
+the perfection of the old soul's motives. She felt like a Judas when
+Lady Webling offered her cheek for another good-night kiss. Then she
+pretended to read a book while she listened for Lady Webling's last
+puff as she made the top step.
+
+At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened and Easton
+came out. He was bending down to murmur into Sir Joseph's downcast
+countenance. Easton was saying, with a tremulous emotion, "This is the
+beginning of the end of England's control of the sea."
+
+Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness rather
+than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the awe of a horrible
+hope.
+
+Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed to start as he
+saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her dotingly and said:
+
+"You are not gone to bed yet?"
+
+She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden rush of
+gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton's smile with any
+favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration.
+
+Sir Joseph said: "Good night, Nicky. It is long before I see you some
+more."
+
+Nicholas nodded. "But I shall see Miss Marie Louise quite soon now."
+
+This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky bent and kissed
+her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous "Ah!" and went his way.
+
+It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the riddle. Then
+Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly. He had an envelope with
+him, sealed with great red buttons of wax. He asked Marie Louise into
+his office and said, with an almost stealthy importance:
+
+"My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes, you see,
+when I am having a big dealing on the Stock Exchange I do not like
+that everybody knows my business. Too many people wish to know all I
+do, so they can be doing the same. What everybody knows helps nobody.
+It is my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody finding
+out something. Understand?"
+
+"Yes, papa!" Marie Louise answered with the utmost confidence that
+what he did was good and wise and straight. She experienced a qualm
+when Sir Joseph explained that Nicky was the man. She wondered why he
+did not come to the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to
+question Sir Joseph's motives. He had never been anything but good to
+her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good that for her to give
+thought-room to a suspicion of him was heinous.
+
+He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous financial moment.
+She had known him to work up great drives on the market and to use all
+sorts of people to prepare his attacks. She did not understand big
+business methods. She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment.
+When, then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in
+Regent's Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to Nicky's
+without any one's witnessing the transfer, she felt the elation of a
+child intrusted with an important errand. So she walked all the way to
+Regent's Park with the long strides of a young woman out for a
+constitutional. She found a bench where she was told to, and sat down
+to bask in the spring air, and wait.
+
+By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie Louise, and
+made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave him her hand. She had
+taken the precaution to wear gloves--also she had the envelope in her
+hand. She left it in Nicky's. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and
+murmuring, "So sorry I can't stop," lifted his hat and hurried off.
+
+Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her constitutional.
+
+Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night.
+
+Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky outside a Bond
+Street shop. She was to have a small parcel and drop it. Nicky would
+stoop and pick it up and hand her in its stead another of similar
+wrapper. She was to thank him and come home.
+
+Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter and a
+request to take the children with her for a long walk, ending at the
+Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The children carried their private
+navies with them and squatted at the brim of the huge basin, poking
+their reluctant yachts to sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful
+scheme for using a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under
+water and from a distance knocked his sister's sailboat about till its
+canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he wore the
+most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina soon realized
+who had caused this catastrophe and how, and she went for Victor of
+the U-stick with finger-nails and feet and nearly rounded him into the
+toy ocean. It evidently made a difference whose ship was gored.
+
+Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as well as a
+trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing.
+
+It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments. He
+thought he recognized Marie Louise, but he was not sure. Women in the
+morning look so unlike their evening selves. He dared not speak.
+
+Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to speak, but
+Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud even to see him when she
+looked at him. She would not have known him, anyway.
+
+Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the appearance
+of the man he had seen at her side at the dinner. But the confirmation
+was Davidge's exile, for the fellow lifted his hat with a look of
+great surprise and said to Marie Louise, "Fancy finding you heah!"
+
+"Blah!" said Davidge to himself, and went on about his business.
+
+Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but went on
+scolding Victor and Bettina.
+
+"If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine they'll
+submarine you!"
+
+And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, "You were so glad
+the _Lusitania_ was sunk, you see now how it feels!"
+
+She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to
+send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those
+who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and
+infinitesimally sensitive to their own.
+
+When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious look of
+disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was also already one of
+those ladies who find a man's lap an excellent consolation. He got rid
+of her adroitly and when she and Victor were once more engaged in
+navigation Nicky took up the business he had come for.
+
+"May I stop a moment?" he said, and sat down.
+
+"I have a letter for you," said Marie Louise.
+
+His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a
+letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the
+letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.
+
+This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When
+the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would
+murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take
+her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly
+achieved.
+
+This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph
+apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He seemed to be
+sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery
+bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as
+well.
+
+He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an
+important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise,
+for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as
+sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort
+to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would
+have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes
+the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a
+bathroom.
+
+Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country
+seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it
+from nobility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were
+forests and surreptitious pheasants, deer that would almost but never
+quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and
+transept like cherubim all wings and voice.
+
+The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to
+intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like
+life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had,
+tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff
+or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or
+company.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great
+friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so
+grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious
+a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.
+
+Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to
+visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already
+pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea.
+Polly came down, too, and had "the time of her young life" in doing a
+bit of the women's war work that became the beautiful fashion of the
+time. The justification of it was that it released men for the
+trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.
+
+She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like
+hostlers around the stables and in the paddocks, breaking colts and
+mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and
+worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the
+plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows
+they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according
+to their natures.
+
+The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and
+portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with
+agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along
+with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached
+America.
+
+There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this "As You Like It" life and
+that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was
+the strangest of clandestine affairs.
+
+Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind
+the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town,
+fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another
+little note to Nicky.
+
+She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of
+bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and
+offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across
+country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the
+twist of a ravine.
+
+He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of
+courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so
+close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he
+tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go,
+and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie
+Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel
+of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was
+almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so
+frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him
+back, and bothered her no more that day.
+
+"If you ever annoy me again," she said, "it'll be the last you'll see
+of me."
+
+She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him
+cowed.
+
+It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged to love
+Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.
+
+There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is
+something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful
+child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the
+forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.
+
+Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment.
+Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and
+herself kept refusing to obey.
+
+From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was
+desperately in love with soldiers _en masse_ and individually. There
+was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were
+going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws
+of death variously the worse for the experience.
+
+The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of
+comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out
+their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were
+hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.
+
+She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.
+
+She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly
+wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls
+dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth
+they must go through life piecemeal.
+
+But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her
+appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was
+referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.
+
+Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official
+intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time.
+One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed
+ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause
+in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she
+ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the
+Weblings.
+
+She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage through her mind.
+But it came back as often as she drove it out and then the thought
+began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane
+as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its
+intuitions, like a woman's, are the resultants of such complex
+instincts that they are above analysis.
+
+But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the
+suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was
+always somewhere in her sky.
+
+Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was
+incessantly confirmed by the minutiæ of every-day existence. The
+interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any
+other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked
+ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the
+trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.
+
+She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots that all
+the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid to the last degree of
+fear. She saw herself on the scaffold. She resolved to carry no more
+messages.
+
+But the next request of Sir Joseph's found her complying automatically.
+It had come to be her habit to do what he asked her to do, and to take
+pride in the service as a small installment on her infinite debt. And
+every time her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph or
+Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness or do some great
+public service that won commendation from on high.
+
+One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling discharged
+Fräulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged an English nurse.
+Another day Lady Webling asked her to go on a visit to a hospital.
+There she lavished tenderness on the British wounded and ignored the
+German. How could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British?
+Another time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel she saw Sir
+Joseph's name heading a war subscription, and that night he made, at a
+public meeting, a speech denouncing Germany in terms of vitriol.
+
+After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was still
+neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a promise of better
+behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise was kept, with many a
+violation quickly apologized for.
+
+Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room
+in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and
+those still more pitiable ones, the missing.
+
+Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost.
+She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick,
+the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.
+
+The strain on Marie Louise's heart was the more exhausting because she
+had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used
+somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She
+tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was
+afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again
+and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her
+tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were
+innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too
+much to ask him. He would lie in any case.
+
+She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in
+her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a
+tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police
+station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize
+the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were
+false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If
+they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling
+perhaps to the gallows.
+
+To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.
+
+Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and
+inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be
+the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie
+Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and
+the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she
+had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and
+indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the
+sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all
+the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.
+
+In the autumn the town house was opened again. There was much thinly
+veiled indignation in the papers and in the circulation of gossip
+because of Sir Joseph's prominence in English life. The Germans were
+so relentless and so various in their outrages upon even the cruel
+usages of combat that the sound of a German name grew almost
+unbearable. People were calling for Sir Joseph's arrest. Others
+scoffed at the cruelty and cowardice of such hysteria.
+
+A once-loved prince of German blood had been frozen out of the navy,
+and the internment camps were growing like boom towns. Yet other
+Germans somehow were granted an almost untrammeled freedom, and
+thousands who had avoided evil activity were tolerated throughout the
+war.
+
+Sir Joseph kept retorting to suspicion with subscription. He took
+enormous quantities of the government loans. His contributions to the
+Red Cross and the multitudinous charities were more like endowments
+than gifts. How could Marie Louise be vile enough to suspect him?
+
+Yet in spite of herself she resolved at last to refuse further
+messenger service. Then she learned that Nicky had left England and
+gone to America on most important financial business of a most
+confidential nature.
+
+Marie Louise was too glad of her release to ask questions. She
+rejoiced that she had not insulted her foster-parents with mutiny, and
+she drudged at whatever war work the committees found for her. They
+found nothing very picturesque, but the more toilsome her labor was
+the more it served for absolution of any evil she might have done.
+
+And now that the dilemma of loyalty was taken from her soul, her body
+surrendered weakly. She had time to fall ill. It was enough that she
+got her feet wet. Her convalescence was slow even in the high hills of
+Matlock.
+
+The winter had passed, and the summer of 1916 had come before Marie
+Louise was herself. The Weblings had moved out to the country again;
+the flowers were back in the gardens; the deer and the birds were in
+their summer garb and mood. But now the house guests were all wounded
+soldiers and nurses. Sir Joseph had turned over his estate for a war
+hospital.
+
+Lady Webling went among her visitors like a queen making her rounds.
+Sir Joseph squandered money on his distinguished company. Marie Louise
+joined them and took what comfort she could in such diminution of pain
+and such contributions of war power as were permitted her. Those were
+the only legitimate happinesses in the world.
+
+The tennis-courts were peopled now with players glad of one arm or one
+eye or even a demodeled face. On the golf-links crutched men hobbled.
+The horses in the stables bore only partial riders. The card-parties
+were squared by players using hands made by hand. The music-room
+resounded with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had
+little but their voices left. They howled, "Keep your head down,
+Fritzie boy," or, "We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we
+are and here we are again," or moaned love-songs with a sardonic
+irony.
+
+And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come to tea!
+
+Young Hawdon was there. "Well, Marie Louise," he had said, "I'm back
+from France, but not _in toto_. Fact is, I'm neither here nor there.
+Quite a sketchy party you have. But we'll charge it all to Germany,
+and some day we'll collect. Some day! Some day!" And he burst into
+song.
+
+The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times there was
+hilarity, but it was always close to tears.
+
+The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie Louise with
+them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers, but Sir Joseph said
+that there was just as much for her to do in town. There was no lack
+of poor soldiers anywhere. Besides, he needed her, he said. This set
+her heart to plunging with the old fear. But he was querulous and
+irascible nowadays, and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for
+she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles living
+under the sword.
+
+The news from America was more encouraging to England and to the
+Americans in England. German spies were being arrested with amazing
+frequence. Ambassadors were floundering in hot water and setting up a
+large traffic in return-tickets. Even the trunks of certain
+"Americans" were searched--men and women who were amazed to learn that
+curious German documents had got mixed up in their own effects. Some
+most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.
+
+It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids had
+been published in the London papers that Sir Joseph had his first
+stroke of paralysis.
+
+Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie Louise was
+heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted, but schooled
+rather by its prolonged exercise, and she gave the forlorn old wretch
+a love and a tenderness that had been wrought to a fine art without
+losing any of its spontaneous reality.
+
+At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled like a
+snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered soldier, but
+slowly he won back his faculties and his members. The doors that were
+shut between his brain and his powers opened one by one, and he became
+a man again.
+
+The first thing he wrote with his rediscovered right hand was his
+signature to a document his lawyer brought him after a consultation.
+It was a transfer of twenty thousand pounds in British war bonds, "for
+services rendered and other valuable considerations," to his dear
+daughter Marie Louise Webling.
+
+When the warrant was handed to her with the bundle of securities,
+Marie Louise was puzzled, then shocked as the old man explained with
+his still uncertain lips. When she understood, she rejected the gift
+with horror. Sir Joseph pleaded with her in a thick speech that had
+relapsed to an earlier habit.
+
+"I am theenkink how close I been by dyink. Du bist--zhoo are in my
+vwill, of coorse, but a man says, 'I vwill,' and some heirs says, 'You
+vwon't yet!' Better I should make sure of somethink."
+
+"But I don't want money, papa--not like this. And I won't have you
+speak of wills and such odious things."
+
+"You have been like our own daughter only more obeyink as poor Hedwig.
+You should not make me sick by to refuse."
+
+She could only quiet him by accepting the wealth and bringing him the
+receipt for its deposit in a safe of her own.
+
+When he was once more able to hoist his massive body to its feet and
+to walk to his own door, he said:
+
+"_Mein_--my _Gott_! Look at the calendar once. It is nineteen
+seventeen already."
+
+He ceased to be that simple, primitive thing, a sick man; he became
+again the financier. She heard of him anew on war-industry boards. She
+saw his name on lists of big subscriptions. He began to talk anew of
+Nicky, and he spoke with unusual anxiety of U-boats. He hoped that
+they would have a bad week. There was no questioning his sincerity in
+this.
+
+And one evening he came home in a womanish flurry. He pinched the ear
+of Marie Louise and whispered to her:
+
+"Nicky is here in England--safe after the sea voyage. Be a nize girl,
+and you shall see him soon now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with
+fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter
+through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton
+packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to
+the sill.
+
+Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel
+where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating
+humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air.
+He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into
+his study, where he confided to her great news:
+
+"Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big
+business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even
+servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take
+your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate.
+Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the
+engine. A man is there--Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and
+drive slowly--so slowly. Give him this letter--put in bosom of dress
+not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope.
+Then he gets out, and you come home--but carefully. Don't let one of
+those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most
+important."
+
+Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But
+Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded
+hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest
+pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the
+chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains
+on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine.
+There was something of the effect of moving along the floor of the
+sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but
+everything was a blur.
+
+Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was
+so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and
+so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in
+the fog that he said nothing more cordial than:
+
+"At last! So you come!"
+
+He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a
+little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from
+Sir Joseph and took from him another.
+
+Nicky did not care to tarry.
+
+"I should get back to my house with this devil's cold I've caught," he
+said. "Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?"
+
+The "you" struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed
+Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent
+in German banking-houses.
+
+"How did you find the United States?" Marie Louise asked, with a
+sudden qualm of homesickness.
+
+"Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!"
+
+"I think you can get along better afoot," said Marie Louise, as she
+made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.
+
+"_Au revoir!_" said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the door back of
+him.
+
+That night there was one of Sir Joseph's dinners. But almost nobody
+came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and
+Lady Webling seemed more frightened than insulted by the last-moment
+regrets of the guests. Was it an omen?
+
+It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise to carry
+another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone, shuddering in the wet
+and edged air. She found the bench agreed on, and sat waiting, craven
+and mutinous. Nicky did not come, but another man passed her, looked
+searchingly, turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:
+
+"Miss Webling?"
+
+She gave him her stingiest "Yis."
+
+"Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and explain."
+
+"He is not coming?"
+
+"He can't. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter for you. Have
+you one for him?"
+
+Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have liked Nicky
+himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The stranger said:
+
+"I am Mr. von Gröner, a frient of--of Nicky's."
+
+Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But von Gröner's
+credentials were good; it was surely Nicky's hand that had penned the
+lines on the envelope. She took it reluctantly and gave him the letter
+she carried.
+
+She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he accepted the
+testimony of Nicky's autograph.
+
+The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand. This time her
+envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added line, "_Kindness of Mr.
+von Gröner._"
+
+Von Gröner tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits were in an
+absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of him, afraid that
+he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not, afraid that he was a
+real German, afraid that he was a pretended spy, or an English
+secret-service man. She was afraid of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid
+to obey them or disobey them, to love them or hate them, betray them
+or be betrayed. She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus,
+of desire.
+
+She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state of panic,
+too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them
+whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that
+would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would
+have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate
+cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of a
+lightning-storm.
+
+Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope she had just
+brought with other letters of Nicky's. Sir Joseph slipped them into a
+book, then took one of them out cautiously and showed it to Marie
+Louise.
+
+"Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?"
+
+"Yes," she said, then, "No," then, "Of course," then, "I don't know."
+
+Lady Webling said, "Sit down once, my child, and tell me just how this
+man von Gröner does, acts, speaks."
+
+She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that they would take
+her into their confidence, but they exchanged querying looks and
+signaled caution.
+
+Sir Joseph said: "Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and his
+memory--little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead yet. Who
+knows?"
+
+"Dead?" Marie Louise cried. "Dead, and sends you letters?"
+
+"Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I write him
+once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe. Anyway, I think I
+don't feel so very good now--mamma and I take maybe a little journey.
+You come along with, yes?"
+
+A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in her world led
+her to say:
+
+"Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do--or wherever to go."
+
+Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held her hand in
+one of his and patted it with the flabby other, mumbling:
+
+"Yes, but what is it we want you to do?"
+
+From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic among the folds
+of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled, nodding and still patting
+her hand as he said:
+
+"Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Gröner. I esk him to come
+himself after dark to-night now."
+
+Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight die out of the
+west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner in the Tower, a
+princess waiting for the morrow's little visit to the scaffold. Or did
+the English shoot women, as Edith Cavell had been shot?
+
+There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey. It was the
+butler to murmur, "Dinner, please." She went down and joined mamma and
+papa at the table. There were no guests except Terror and Suspense,
+and both of them wore smiling masks and made no visible sign of their
+presence.
+
+After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the door. There
+was nothing surprising about that. Women had given up the ancient
+pretense that their respectability was something that must be policed
+by a male relative or squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice
+nor malaria was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night
+air; nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be
+risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been easy
+enough to lose under the old régime.
+
+So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of the family
+might have done. She drove to a little square too dingily middle class
+to require a policeman. She sounded her horn three squawks and swung
+open the door, and a man waiting under an appointed tree stepped from
+its shadow and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She
+dropped into high speed and whisked out of the square.
+
+"You have for me a message," said Mr. von Gröner.
+
+"Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes--at the house. We'll go there at once if you please."
+
+"Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky--I ought to telephone him I shall be
+gone."
+
+"Nicky is well enough to telephone?"
+
+"Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If you will
+please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only."
+
+Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could hardly
+kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von Gröner left her, her
+heart shaking her with a faint tremor like that of the engine of her
+car.
+
+Von Gröner returned promptly, but he said: "I think we should not go
+too straight to your father's house. Might be we are followed. We can
+tell soon. Go in the park, please, and suddenly stop, turn round, and
+I look at what cars follow."
+
+She let him command her. She was letting everybody command her; she
+had no destination, no North Star in her life. Von Gröner kept her
+dodging about Regent's Park till she grew angry.
+
+"This seems rather silly, doesn't it? I am going home. Sir Joseph has
+worries enough without--"
+
+"Ah, he has worries?"
+
+She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not please her. He
+kept up a rain of questions, too, but she answered them all by
+referring him to Sir Joseph.
+
+At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men closed in on
+the car and peered into their faces. Von Gröner snapped at them, and
+they fell back.
+
+Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened the door herself
+and led von Gröner to Sir Joseph's room.
+
+As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling weeping
+frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie Louise fell back
+and motioned von Gröner away, but he pushed the door open and, taking
+her by the elbow, thrust her forward.
+
+Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph, who had been
+trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused with his palm
+uplifted.
+
+Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old couple was not
+alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder. By the door, almost touching
+Marie Louise, was a tall, grim person she had not seen. He closed the
+door behind von Gröner and Marie Louise.
+
+Mr. Verrinder said, "Be good enough to sit down." To von Gröner he
+said, "How are you, Bickford?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sir Joseph was staring at the new-comer, and his German nativity told
+him what Marie Louise had not been sure of, that von Gröner was no
+German. When Verrinder gave him an English name it shook Marie Louise
+with a new dismay. Sir Joseph turned from the man to Marie Louise and
+demanded:
+
+"Marie Louise, you ditt not theenk this man is a Cherman?"
+
+This one more shame crushed Marie Louise. She dropped into a chair,
+appealing feebly to the man she had retrieved:
+
+"Your name is not von Gröner?"
+
+Bickford grinned. "Well, in a manner of speakin'. You might say it's
+my pen-name. Not that I've ever been in the pen--except with Nicky."
+
+"Nicky is in the-- He's not ill?"
+
+"Well, he's a bit sick. He was a bit seasick to start with, and when
+we gave him the collar--well, he doesn't like his room."
+
+"But his letters--" Marie Louise pleaded, her fears racing ahead of
+her questions.
+
+"I was always a hand at forgery, but I thought best to turn it to the
+aid of me country. I'm proud if you liked me work. The last ones were
+not up to the mark. _I_ was hurried, and Nicky was ugly. He refused to
+answer any more questions. I had to do it all on me own. Ahfterwards I
+found I had made a few mistakes."
+
+When Marie Louise realized that this man had been calmly taking the
+letters addressed to Nicky and answering them in his feigned script to
+elicit further information from Sir Joseph and enmesh him further, she
+dropped her hands at her sides, feeling not only convicted of crime,
+but of imbecility as well.
+
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling spread their hands and drew up their
+shoulders in surrender and gave up hope of bluff.
+
+Verrinder wanted to be merciful and avoid any more climaxes.
+
+"You see it's all up, Sir Joseph, don't you?" he said.
+
+Sir Joseph drew himself again as high as he could, though the burden
+of his flesh kept pulling him down. He did not answer.
+
+"Come now, Sir Joseph, be a sport."
+
+"The Englishman's releechion," sneered Sir Joseph, "to be ein
+_Sportmann_."
+
+"Oh, I know you can't understand it," said Verrinder. "It seems to be
+untranslatable into German--just as we can't seem to understand
+_Germanity_ except that it is the antonym of _humanity_. You fellows
+have no boyhood literature, I am told, no Henty or Hughes or Scott to
+fill you with ideas of fair play. You have no games to teach you. One
+really can't blame you for being such rotters, any more than one can
+blame a Kaffir for not understanding cricket.
+
+"But sport aside, use your intelligence, old man. _I_'ve laid my cards
+on the table--enough of them, at least. We've trumped every trick, and
+we've all the trumps outstanding. You have a few high cards up your
+sleeve. Why not toss them on the table and throw yourselves on the
+mercy of his Majesty?"
+
+The presence of Marie Louise drove the old couple to a last battle for
+her faith. Lady Webling stormed, "All what you accuse us is lies,
+lies!"
+
+Verrinder grew stern:
+
+"Lies, you say? We have you, and your daughter--also Nicky. We
+have--well, I'll not annoy you with their names. Over in the States
+they have a lot more of you fellows.
+
+"You and Sir Joseph have lived in this country for years and years.
+You have grown fat--I mean to say rich--upon our bounty. We have loved
+and trusted you. His Majesty has given you both marks of his most
+gracious favor."
+
+"We paid well for that," sneered Lady Webling.
+
+"Yes, I fancy you did--but with English pounds and pence that you
+gained with the help of British wits and British freedom. You have
+contributed to charities, yes, and handsomely, too, but not entirely
+without the sweet usages of advertisement. You have not hidden that
+part of your bookkeeping from the public.
+
+"But the rest of your books--you don't show those. We know a ghastly
+lot about them, and it is not pretty, my dear lady. I had hoped you
+would not force us to publish those transactions. You have plotted the
+destruction of the British Empire; you have conspired to destroy ships
+in dock and at sea; you have sent God knows how many lads to their
+death--and women and children, too. You have helped to blow up
+munitions-plants, and on your white heads is the blood of many and
+many a poor wretch torn to pieces at his lathe. You have made widows
+of women and orphans of children who never heard of you, nor you of
+them. Nor have you cared--or dared--to inquire.
+
+"Sir Joseph has been perfecting a great scheme to buy up what
+munitions-plants he could in this country in order to commit sabotage
+and slow up the production of the ammunition our troops are crying
+for. He has plotted with others to send defective shells that will rip
+up the guns they do not fit, and powders that will explode too soon or
+not at all. God! to think that the lives of our brave men and the life
+of our Empire should be threatened by such people as you!
+
+"And in the American field Sir Joseph has connived with a syndicate to
+purchase factories, to stop production at the source, since your
+U-boats and your red-handed diplomatic spies cannot stop it otherwise.
+Your agents have corrupted a few of the Yankees, and killed others,
+and would have killed more if the name of your people had not become
+such a horror even in that land where millions of Germans live that
+every proffer is suspect.
+
+"You see, we know you, Lady Webling and Sir Joseph. We have watched
+you all the while from the very first, and we know that you are not
+innocent even of complicity in the supreme infamy of luring the
+_Lusitania_ to her death."
+
+He was quivering with the rush of his emotions over the broken dam of
+habitual reticence.
+
+Lady Webling and Sir Joseph had quivered, too, less under the impact
+of his denunciation than in the confusion of their own exposure to
+themselves and to Marie Louise.
+
+They had watched her eyes as she heard Mr. Verrinder's philippic. They
+had seen her pass from incredulity to belief. They had seen her glance
+at them and glance away in fear of them.
+
+This broke them utterly, for she was utterly dear to them. She was
+dearer than their own flesh and blood. She had replaced their dead.
+She had been born to them without pain, without infancy, born full
+grown in the prime of youth and beauty. They had watched her love grow
+to a passion, and their own had grown with it.
+
+What would she do now? She was the judge they feared above England.
+They awaited her sentence.
+
+Her eyes wandered to them and searched them through. At first, under
+the spell of Verrinder's denunciation, she saw them as two bloated
+fiends, their hands dripping blood, their lips framed to lies, their
+brains to cunning and that synonym for Germanism, _ruthlessness_--the
+word the Germans chose, as their Kaiser chose Huns for an ideal.
+
+But she looked again. She saw the pleading in their eyes. Their very
+uncomeliness besought her mercy. After all, she had seen none of the
+things Verrinder described. The only real things to her, the only
+things she knew of her own knowledge, were the goodnesses of these
+two. They were her parents. And now for the first time they needed
+her. The mortgage their generosity had imposed on her had fallen due.
+
+How could she at the first unsupported obloquy of a stranger turn
+against them? Her first loyalty was due to them, and no other loyalty
+was under test. Something swept her to her feet. She ran to them and,
+as far as she could, gathered them into her arms. They wept like two
+children whom reproaches have hardened into defiance, but whom
+kindness has melted.
+
+Verrinder watched the spectacle with some surprise and not altogether
+with scorn. Whatever else Miss Webling was, she was a good sport. She
+stuck to her team in defeat.
+
+He said, not quite harshly, "So, Miss Webling, you cast your lot with
+them."
+
+"I do."
+
+"Do you believe that what I said was true?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Really, you should be careful. Those messages you carried incriminate
+you."
+
+"I suppose they do, though I never knew what was in them. No, I'll
+take that back. I'm not trying to crawl out of it."
+
+"Then since you confess so much, I shall have to ask you to come with
+them."
+
+"To the--the Tower of London?"
+
+"The car is ready."
+
+Marie Louise was stabbed with fright. She seized the doomed twain in a
+faster embrace.
+
+"What are you going to do with these poor souls?"
+
+"Their souls my dear Miss Webling, are outside our jurisdiction."
+
+"With their poor bodies, then?"
+
+"I am not a judge or a jury, Miss Webling. Everything will be done
+with propriety. They will not be torpedoed in midocean without
+warning. They will have the full advantage of the British law to the
+last."
+
+That awful word jarred them all. But Sir Joseph was determined to make
+a good end. He drew himself up with another effort.
+
+"Excuse, pleass, Mr. Verrinder--might it be we should take with us a
+few little things?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Thang gyou." He bowed and turned to go, taking his wife and Marie
+Louise by the arm, for mutual support.
+
+"If you don't mind, I'll come along," said Mr. Verrinder.
+
+Sir Joseph nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as
+if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which
+adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused on the sill somewhat
+shyly:
+
+"This is a most unpleasant task, but--"
+
+Marie Louise hesitated, smiling gruesomely.
+
+"My room is across the hall. You can hardly be in both places at once,
+can you?"
+
+"I fancy I can trust you--especially as the house is surrounded. If
+you don't mind joining us later."
+
+Marie Louise went to her room. Her maid was there in a palsy of fear.
+The servants had not dared apply themselves to the keyholes, but they
+knew that the master was visited by the police and that a cordon was
+drawn about the house.
+
+The ashen girl offered her help to Marie Louise, wondering if she
+would compromise herself with the law, but incapable of deserting so
+good a mistress even at such a crisis. Marie Louise thanked her and
+told her to go to bed, compelled her to leave. Then she set about the
+dreary task of selecting a few necessaries--a nightgown, an extra day
+gown, some linen, some silver, and a few brushes. She felt as if she
+were laying out her own grave-clothes, and that she would need little
+and not need that little long.
+
+She threw a good-by look, a long, sweeping, caressing glance, about
+her castle, and went across the hall, lugging her hand-bag. Before she
+entered Sir Joseph's room she knocked.
+
+It was Mr. Verrinder that answered, "Come in."
+
+He was seated in a chair, dejected and making himself as inoffensive
+as possible. Lady Webling had packed her own bag and was helping the
+helpless Sir Joseph find the things he was looking for in vain, though
+they were right before him. Marie Louise saw evidences that a larger
+packing had already been done. Verrinder had surprised them, about to
+flee.
+
+Sir Joseph was ready at last. He was closing his bag when he took a
+last glance, and said:
+
+"My toot'-brush and powder."
+
+He went to his bathroom cabinet, and there he saw in the little
+apothecary-shop a bottle of tablets prescribed for him during his
+illness. It was conspicuously labeled "_Poison_."
+
+He stood staring at the bottle so long in such fascination that Lady
+Webling came to the door to say:
+
+"Vat is it you could not find now, papa?"
+
+She leaned against the edge of the casement, and he pointed to the
+bottle. Their eyes met, and in one long look they passed through a
+brief Gethsemane. No words were exchanged. She nodded. He took the
+bottle from the shelf stealthily, unscrewed the top, poured out a heap
+of tablets and gave them to her, then poured another heap into his fat
+palm.
+
+"_Prosit_!" he said, and they flung the venom into their throats. It
+was brackish merely from the coating, but they could not swallow all
+the pellets. He filled a glass of water at the faucet and handed it to
+his wife. She quaffed enough to get the pellets down her resisting
+throat, and handed the glass to him.
+
+They remained staring at each other, trying to crowd into their eyes
+an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were
+all awry with nausea and the premonition of lethal pains.
+
+Verrinder began to wonder at their delay. He was about to rise. Marie
+Louise went to the door anxiously. Sir Joseph mumbled:
+
+"Look once, my darlink. I find some bong-bongs. Vould you like, yes?"
+
+With a childish canniness he held the bottle so that she could see the
+skull and cross-bones and the word beneath.
+
+Marie Louise, not realizing that they had already set out on the
+adventure, gave a stifled cry and snatched at the bottle. It fell to
+the floor with a crash, and the tablets leaped here and there like
+tiny white beetles. Some of them ran out into the room and caught
+Verrinder's eye.
+
+Before he could reach the door Sir Joseph had said, triumphantly, to
+Marie Louise:
+
+"Mamma and I did eat already. Too bad you do not come vit. _Adé,
+Töchterchen. Lebewohl!_"
+
+He was reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when Verrinder burst
+into the homely scene of their tragedy. He caught up the broken bottle
+and saw the word "_Poison_." Beneath were the directions, but no word
+of description, no mention of the antidote.
+
+"What is this stuff?" Verrinder demanded, in a frenzy of dread and
+wrath and self-reproach.
+
+"I don't know," Marie Louise stammered.
+
+Verrinder repeated his demand of Sir Joseph.
+
+"_Weiss nit_," he mumbled, beginning to stagger as the serpent struck
+its fangs into his vitals.
+
+Verrinder ran out into the hall and shouted down the stairs:
+
+"Bickford, telephone for a doctor, in God's name--the nearest one.
+Send out to the nearest chemist and fetch him on the run--with every
+antidote he has. Send somebody down to the kitchen for warm water,
+mustard, coffee."
+
+There was a panic below, but Marie Louise knew nothing except the
+swirling tempest of her own horror. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, blind
+with torment, wrung and wrenched with spasms of destruction, groped
+for each other's hands and felt their way through clouds of fire to a
+resting-place.
+
+Marie Louise could give them no help, but a little guidance toward the
+bed. They fell upon it--and after a hideous while they died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The physician arrived too late--physicians were hard to get for
+civilians. While he was being hunted down and brought in, Verrinder
+fought an unknown poison with what antidotes he could improvise, and
+saw that they merely added annoyance to agony.
+
+His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this eminent couple
+for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion by proof and
+strengthen assurance with evidence, and always delaying the blow in
+the hope of gathering in still more of Germany's agents. At last he
+had thrown the slowly woven net about the Weblings and revealed them
+to themselves as prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped
+out through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his
+care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman who was
+involved in their guilt.
+
+Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of it. So he
+and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that
+the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe
+was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners;
+there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.
+
+Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate the story and
+keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself to the remaining
+prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling.
+
+He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive after the
+whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some
+of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted
+into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise
+escape to warn the other conspirators and to continue her nefarious
+activities.
+
+His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling into
+submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She had loved the old
+couple with a filial passion, and the sight of their last throes had
+driven her into a frenzy of grief. She needed the doctor's care before
+Verrinder could talk to her at all. The answers he elicited from her
+hysteria were full of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of
+inaccuracy, of folly. But so he had found all human testimony; for
+these three things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to
+remember it, and to tell it.
+
+When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her woes, it was
+she who began the questioning. She went up and down the room
+disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands and beating her breast
+till it hurt Verrinder to watch her brutality to that tender flesh.
+
+"What--what does it mean?" she sobbed. "What have you done to my poor
+papa and mamma? Why did you come here?"
+
+"Surely you must know."
+
+"What do I know? Only that they were good sweet people."
+
+"Good sweet spies!"
+
+"Spies! Those poor old darlings?"
+
+"Oh, I say--really, now, you surely can't have the face, the
+insolence, to--"
+
+"I haven't any insolence. I haven't anything but a broken heart."
+
+"How many hearts were broken--how many hearts were stopped, do you
+suppose, because of your work?"
+
+"My what?"
+
+"I refer to the lives that you destroyed."
+
+"I--I destroyed lives? Which one of us is going mad?"
+
+"Oh, come, now, you knew what you were doing. You were glad and proud
+for every poor fellow you killed."
+
+"It's you, then, that are mad." She stared at him in utter fear. She
+made a dash for the door. He prevented her. She fell back and looked
+to the window. He took her by the arm and twisted her into a chair. He
+had seen hysteria quelled by severity. He stood over her and spoke
+with all the sternness of his stern soul.
+
+"You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me. You carried
+messages for those people. The last messages you took you delivered to
+one of our agents."
+
+Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only stammer the
+fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth:
+
+"I didn't know what was in the letters. I never knew."
+
+Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense:
+
+"What did you think was in them, then?"
+
+"I had no idea. Papa--Sir Joseph didn't take me into his confidence."
+
+"But you knew that they were secret."
+
+"He told me that they were--that they were business messages--secret
+financial transactions."
+
+"Transactions in British lives--oh, they were that! And you knew it."
+
+"I did not know it! I did not know it! I did not know it!"
+
+She realized too late that the strength of the retort suffered by its
+repetition. It became nonsense on the third iterance. She grew afraid
+even to defend herself.
+
+Seeing how frightened she was at bay, Mr. Verrinder forebore to drive
+her to distraction.
+
+"Very well, you did not know what the messages contained. But why did
+you consent to such sneaking methods? Why did you let them use you for
+such evident deceit?"
+
+"I was glad to be of use to them. They had been so good to me for so
+long. I was used to doing as I was told. I suppose it was gratitude."
+
+It was then that Mr. Verrinder delivered himself of his bitter opinion
+of gratitude, which has usually been so well spoken of and so rarely
+berated for excess.
+
+"Gratitude is one of the evils of the world. I fancy that few other
+emotions have done more harm. In moderation it has its uses, but in
+excess it becomes vicious. It is a form of voluntary servitude; it
+absolutely destroys all respect for public law; it is the foundation
+of tyrannies; it is the secret of political corruption; it is the
+thing that holds dynasties together, family despotism; it is
+soul-mortgage, bribery. It is a monster of what the Americans call
+graft. It is chloroform to the conscience, to patriotism, to every
+sense of public duty. 'Scratch my back, and I am your slave'--that's
+gratitude."
+
+Mr. Verrinder rarely spoke at such length or with such apothegm.
+
+Marie Louise was a little more dazed than ever to hear gratitude
+denounced. She was losing all her bearings. Next he demanded:
+
+"But admitting that you were duped by your gratitude, how did it
+happen that your curiosity never led you to inquire into the nature of
+those messages?"
+
+"I respected Sir Joseph beyond all people. I supposed that what he did
+was right. I never knew it not to be. And then--well, if, I did wonder
+a little once in a while, I thought I'd better mind my own business."
+
+Verrinder had his opinion of this, too. "Minding your own business!
+That's another of those poisonous virtues. Minding your own business
+leads to pacifism, malevolent neutrality, selfishness of every sort.
+It's death to charity and public spirit. Suppose the Good Samaritan
+had minded his own business! But-- Well, this is getting us no
+forwarder with you. You carried those messages, and never felt even a
+woman's curiosity about them! You met Nicky Easton often, and never
+noted his German accent, never suspected that he was not the
+Englishman he pretended to be. Is that true?"
+
+He saw by the wild look in her eyes and their escape from his own that
+he had scored a hit. He did not insist upon her acknowledging it.
+
+"And your only motive was gratitude?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"You never asked any pay for it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You never received anything for it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"We find the record of a transfer to you of securities for some twenty
+thousand pounds. Why was that given you?"
+
+"It--it was just out of generosity. Sir Joseph said he was afraid I
+might be--that his will might be broken, and--"
+
+"Ah! you discussed his will with him, then?"
+
+She was horrified at his implication. She cried, "Oh, I begged him not
+to, but he insisted."
+
+"He said there were other heirs and they might contest his will. Did
+he mention the heirs?"
+
+"No, sir. I don't think so. I don't remember that he did."
+
+"He did not by any chance refer to the other grandparents of the two
+children? Mr. and Mrs. Oakby, the father and mother of the father of
+Victor and Bettina?"
+
+"He didn't refer to them, I'm sure. Yes, I am quite sure."
+
+"Did he say that his money would be left in trust for his grandchildren?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And he gave you twenty thousand pounds just out of generosity?"
+
+"Yes. Yes, Mr. Verrinder."
+
+"It was a fairish amount of money for messenger fees, wasn't it? And
+it came to you while you were carrying those letters to Nicky?"
+
+"No! Sir Joseph had been ill. He had had a stroke of paralysis."
+
+"And you were afraid he might have another?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"You were not afraid of that?"
+
+"Yes, of course I was, but-- What are you trying to make me say--that
+I went to him and demanded the money?"
+
+"That idea occurs to you, does it?"
+
+She writhed with disgust at the suggestion. Yet it had a clammy
+plausibility. Mr. Verrinder went on:
+
+"These messages, you say, concerned a financial transaction?"
+
+"So papa told me."
+
+"And you believed him?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"You never doubted him?"
+
+All the tortures of doubt that had assailed her recurred to her now
+and paralyzed her power to utter the ringing denial that was needed.
+He went on:
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd that Sir Joseph should be willing to pay
+you twenty thousand pounds just to carry messages concerning some
+mythical business?"
+
+She did not answer. She was afraid to commit herself to anything.
+Every answer was a trap. Verrinder went on: "Twenty thousand pounds is
+a ten-per-centum commission on two hundred thousand pounds. That was
+rather a largish transaction to be carried on through secret letters,
+eh? Nicky Easton was not a millionaire, was he? Now I ask you, should
+you think of him as a Rothschild? Or was he, do you think, acting as
+agent for some one else, perhaps, and if so, for whom?"
+
+She answered none of these. They were based on the assumption that she
+had put forward herself. She could find nothing to excuse her.
+Verrinder was simply playing tag with her. As soon as he touched her
+he ran away and came at her from another direction.
+
+"Of course, we know that you were only the adopted daughter of Sir
+Joseph. But where did you first meet him?"
+
+"In Berlin."
+
+The sound of that word startled her. That German name stood for all
+the evils of the time. It was the inaccessible throne of hell.
+
+Verrinder was startled by it, too.
+
+"In Berlin!" he exclaimed, and nodded his head. "Now we are getting
+somewhere. Would you mind telling me the circumstances?"
+
+She blushed a furious scarlet.
+
+"I--I'd rather not."
+
+"I must insist."
+
+"Please send me to the Tower and have me imprisoned for life. I'd
+rather be there than here. Or better yet--have me shot. It would make
+me happier than anything you could do."
+
+"I'm afraid that your happiness is not the main object of the moment.
+Will you be so good as to tell me how you met Sir Joseph in--in
+Berlin."
+
+Marie Louise drew a deep breath. The past that she had tried to
+smother under a new life must be confessed at such a time of all
+times!
+
+"Well, you know that Sir Joseph had a daughter; the two children
+up-stairs are hers, and--and what's to become of them, in Heaven's
+name?"
+
+"One problem at a time, if you don't mind. Sir Joseph had a daughter.
+That would be Mrs. Oakby."
+
+"Yes. Her husband died before her second baby was born, and she died
+soon after. And Sir Joseph and Lady Webling mourned for her bitterly,
+and--well, a year or so later they were traveling on the Continent--in
+Germany, they were, and one night they went to the Winter Garten in
+Berlin--the big music-hall, you know. Well, they were sitting far
+back, and an American team of musicians came on--the Musical Mokes, we
+were called."
+
+"We?"
+
+She bent her head in shame. "I was one of them. I played a xylophone
+and a saxophone and an accordion--all sorts of things. Well, Lady
+Webling gave a little gasp when she saw me, and she looked at Sir
+Joseph--so she told me afterward--and then they got up and stole 'way
+up front just as I left the stage--to make a quick change, you know. I
+came back--in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and
+making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard
+her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the
+black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and did a funny fall, and--"
+
+"But, pardon me--why did Lady Webling scream?"
+
+"Because I looked like her dead daughter. It was so horrible to see
+her child come out of the grave in--in tights, blatting a trombone at
+a clown in that big variety theater."
+
+"I can quite understand. And then--"
+
+"Well, Sir Joseph came round to the stage door and sent in his card.
+The man who brought it grinned and told everybody an old man was
+smitten on me; and Ben, the black-face man, said, 'I'll break his
+face,' but I said I wouldn't see him.
+
+"Well, when I was dressed and leaving the theater with the black-face
+man, you know, Sir Joseph was outside. He stopped me and said: 'My
+child! My child!' and the tears ran down his face. I stopped, of
+course, and said, 'What's the matter now?' And he said, 'Would you
+come with me?' and I said, 'Not in a thousand years, old Creepo
+Christmas!' And he said: 'My poor wife is in the carriage at the curb.
+She wants to speak to you.' And then of course I had to go, and she
+reached out and dragged me in and wept all over me. I thought they
+were both crazy, but finally they explained, and they asked me to go
+to their hotel with them. So I told Ben to be on his way, and I went.
+
+"Well, they asked me a lot of questions, and I told them a little--not
+everything, but enough, Heaven knows. And they begged me to be their
+daughter. I thought it would be pretty stupid, but they said they
+couldn't stand the thought of their child's image going about as I
+was, and I wasn't so stuck on the job myself--odd, how the old
+language comes back, isn't it? I haven't heard any of it for so long
+I'd almost forgotten it." She passed her handkerchief across her lips
+as if to rub away a bad taste. It left the taste of tears. She sighed:
+"Well, they adopted me, and I learned to love them. And--and that's
+all."
+
+"And you learned to love their native country, too, I fancy."
+
+"At first I did like Germany pretty well. They were crazy about us in
+Berlin. I got my first big money and notices and attention there. You
+can imagine it went to my head. But then I came to England and tried
+to be as English as I could, so as not to be conspicuous. I never
+wanted to be conspicuous off the stage--or on it, for that matter. I
+even took lessons from the man who had the sign up, you remember,
+'Americans taught to speak English!' I always had a gift for foreign
+languages, and I got to thinking in English, too."
+
+"One moment, please. Did you say 'Americans taught?' Americans?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You're not American?"
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"Damned stupid of me!"
+
+Verrinder frowned. This complicated matters. He had cornered her, only
+to have her abscond into neutral territory. He had known that Marie
+Louise was an adopted child, but had not suspected her Americanism.
+This required a bit of thinking. While he studied it in the back room
+of his brain his forehead self was saying:
+
+"So Sir Joseph befriended you, and that was what won your amazing,
+unquestioning gratitude?"
+
+"That and a thousand thousand little kindnesses. I loved them like
+mother and father."
+
+"But your own--er--mother and father--you must have had parents of
+your own--what was their nationality?"
+
+"Oh, they were, as we say, 'Americans from 'way back.' But my father
+left my mother soon after I was born. We weren't much good, I guess.
+It was when I was a baby. He was very restless, they say. I suppose I
+got my runaway nature from him. But I've outgrown that. Anyway, he
+left my mother with three children. My little brother died. My mother
+was a seamstress in a little town out West--an awful hole it was. I
+was a tiny little girl when they took me to my mother's funeral. I
+remember that, but I can't remember her. That was my first death. And
+now this! I've lost a mother and father twice. That hasn't happened to
+many people. So you must forgive me for being so crazy. So many of my
+loved are dead. It's frightful. We lose so many as we grow up. Life is
+like walking through a graveyard, with the sextons always busy opening
+new places. There was so much crying and loneliness before, and now
+this war goes on and on--as if we needed a war!"
+
+"God knows, we don't."
+
+Marie Louise went to the window and raised the curtain. A haggard gray
+light had been piping the edges of the shade. Now the full casement
+let in a flood of warm morning radiance.
+
+The dull street was alive again. Sparrows were hopping. Wagons were on
+the move. Small and early tradesfolk were about their business.
+Servants were opening houses as shops were being opened in town.
+
+The big wheel had rolled London round into the eternal day. Doors and
+windows were being flung ajar. Newspapers and milk were taken in,
+ashes put out, cats and dogs released, front stoops washed, walks
+swept, gardens watered. Brooms were pendulating. In the masters' rooms
+it was still night and slumber-time, but humble people were alert.
+
+The morning after a death is a fearful thing. Those papers on the
+steps across the way were doubtless loaded with more tragedies from
+the front, and among the cruel facts was the lie that concealed the
+truth about the Weblings, who were to read no more morning papers, eat
+no more breakfasts, set out on no more journeys.
+
+Grief came to Marie Louise now with a less brackish taste. Her sorrow
+had the pity of the sunlight on it. She wept not now for the terror
+and hatefulness of the Weblings' fate, but for the beautiful things
+that would bless them no more, for the roses that would glow unseen,
+the flowers that would climb old walls and lean out unheeded, asking
+to be admired and proffering fragrance in payment of praise. The
+Weblings were henceforth immune to the pleasant rumble of wagons in
+streets, to the cheery good mornings of passers-by, the savor of
+coffee in the air, the luscious colors of fruits piled upon silver
+dishes.
+
+Then she heard a scamper of bare feet, the squeals of mischief-making
+children escaping from a pursuing nurse.
+
+It had been a favorite pastime of Victor and Bettina to break in upon
+Marie Louise of mornings when she forgot to lock her door. They loved
+to steal in barefoot and pounce on her with yelps of savage delight
+and massacre her, pull her hair and dance upon her bed and on her as
+she pleaded for mercy.
+
+She heard them coming now, and she could not reach the door before it
+opened and disclosed the grinning, tousle-curled cherubs in their
+sleeping-suits.
+
+They darted in, only to fall back in amazement. Marie Louise was not
+in bed. The bed had not been slept in. Marie Louise was all dressed,
+and she had been crying. And in a chair sat a strange, formidable old
+gentleman who looked tired and forlorn.
+
+"Auntie!" they gasped.
+
+She dropped to her knees, and they ran to her for refuge from the
+strange man.
+
+She hugged them so hard that they cried, "Don't!"
+
+Without in the least understanding what it was all about, they heard
+her saying to the man:
+
+"And now what's to become of these poor lambs?"
+
+The old stranger passed a slow gray hand across his dismal face and
+pondered.
+
+The children pointed, then remembered that it is impolite to point,
+and drew back their little index hands and whispered:
+
+"Auntie, what you up so early for?" and, "Who is that?"
+
+And she whispered, "S-h-h!"
+
+Being denied the answer to this charade, they took up a new interest.
+
+"I wonder is grandpapa up, too, and all dressed," said Victor.
+
+"And maybe grandmamma," Bettina shrilled.
+
+"I'll beat you to their room," said Victor.
+
+Marie Louise seized them by their hinder garments as they fled.
+
+"You must not bother them."
+
+"Why not?" said Victor.
+
+"Will so!" said Bettina, pawing to be free.
+
+Marie Louise implored: "Please, please! They've gone."
+
+"Where?"
+
+She cast her eyes up at that terrible query, and answered it vaguely.
+
+"Away."
+
+"They might have told a fellow good-by," Victor brooded.
+
+"They--they forgot, perhaps."
+
+"I don't think that was very nice of them," Bettina pouted.
+
+Victor was more cheerful. "Perhaps they did; perhaps they kissed us
+while we was asleep--_were_ asleep."
+
+Bettina accepted with delight.
+
+"Seems to me I 'member somebody kissin' me. Yes, I 'member now."
+
+Victor was skeptical. "Maybe you only had a dream about it."
+
+"What else is there?" said Mr. Verrinder, rising and patting Victor on
+the shoulder. "You'd better run along to your tubs now."
+
+They recognized the authority in his voice and obeyed.
+
+The children took their beauty with them, but left their destiny to be
+arranged by higher powers, the gods of Eld.
+
+"What is to become of them," Louise groaned again, "when I go to
+prison?"
+
+Verrinder was calm. "Sir Joseph's will doubtless left the bulk of his
+fortune to them. That will provide for their finances. And they have
+two grandparents left. The Oakbys will surely be glad to take the
+children in, especially as they will come with such fortunes."
+
+"You mean that I am to have no more to do with them?"
+
+"I think it would be best to remove them to a more strictly English
+influence."
+
+This hurt her horribly. She grew impatient for the finishing blow.
+
+"And now that they are disposed of, have you decided what's to become
+of me?"
+
+"It is not for me to decide. By the by, have you any one to represent
+you or intercede for you here, or act as your counsel in England?"
+
+She shook her head. "A good many people have been very nice to me, of
+course. I've noticed, though, that even they grew cold and distant of
+late. I'd rather die than ask any of them."
+
+"But have you no relatives living--no one of importance in the States
+who could vouch for you?"
+
+She shook her head with a doleful humility.
+
+"None of our family were ever important that I ever heard of, though
+of course one never knows what relatives are lurking about. Mine will
+never claim me; that's certain. I did have a sister--poor thing!--if
+she's alive. We didn't get along very well. I was too wild and
+restless as a girl. She was very good, hard-working, simple, homely as
+sin--or homely as virtue. I was all for adventure. I've had my fill of
+it. But once you begin it, you can't stop when you've had enough. If
+she's not dead, she's probably married and living under another
+name--Heaven knows what name or where. But I could find her, perhaps.
+I'd love to go to her. She was a very good girl. She's probably
+married a good man and has brought up her children piously, and never
+mentioned me. I'd only bring disgrace on her. She'd disown me if I
+came home with this cloud of scandal about me."
+
+"No one shall know of this scandal unless you tell."
+
+She laughed harshly, with a patronizing superiority.
+
+"Really, Mr. Verrinder, did you ever know a secret to be kept?"
+
+"This one will be."
+
+She laughed again at him, then at herself.
+
+He rose wearily. "I think I shall have to be getting along. I haven't
+had a bath or a shave to-day. I shall ask you to keep to your room and
+deny yourself to all visitors. I won't ask you to promise not to
+escape. If the guard around the house is not capable of detaining you,
+you're welcome to your freedom, though I warn you that England is as
+hard to get out of as to get into nowadays. Whatever you do, for your
+own sake, at least, keep this whole matter secret and stick to the
+story we agreed on. Good morning!"
+
+He bowed himself out. No rattling of chains marked his closing of the
+door, but if he had been a turnkey in Newgate he could not have left
+Marie Louise feeling more a prisoner. Her room was her body's jail,
+but her soul was in a dungeon, too.
+
+As Verrinder went down the hall he scattered a covey of whispering
+servants.
+
+The nurse who had waited to seize the children when they came forth
+had left them to dress themselves while she hastened to publish in the
+servants' dining-room the appalling fact that she had caught sight of
+a man in Miss Marie Louise's room. The other servants had many other
+even more astounding things to tell--to wit: that after mysterious
+excitements about the house, with strange men going and coming, and
+the kitchen torn to pieces for mustard and warm milk and warm water
+and strong coffee, and other things, Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were
+no more, and the whole household staff was out of a job. Strange
+police-like persons were in the house, going through all the papers in
+Sir Joseph's room. The servants could hardly wait to get out with the
+gossip.
+
+And Mr. Verrinder had said that this secret would be kept!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Somewhere along about this time, though there is no record of the
+exact date--and it was in a shabby home in a humble town where dates
+made little difference--a homely woman sniffed.
+
+Her name was Mrs. Nuddle.
+
+What Mrs. Nuddle was sniffing at was a page of fashion cartoons,
+curious human hieroglyphs that women can read and run to buy.
+Highly improbable garments were sketched on utterly impossible
+figures--female eels who could crawl through their own garters, eels
+of strange mottlings, with heads like cranberries, feet like thorns,
+and no spines at all.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle was as opposite in every way as could be. She could not
+have crawled through her own washtub if she had knocked the bottom out
+of it. She was a caricature made by nature and long, hard work, and
+she laughed at the caricatures devised by art in a hurry.
+
+She was about to cast the paper aside as a final rebuke when she
+caught sight of portraits of real people of fashion. They did not look
+nearly so fashionable as the cartoons, but they were at least
+possible. Some of them were said to be prominent in charity; most of
+them were prominent out of their corsages.
+
+Now Mrs. Nuddle sniffed at character, not at caricature. Leaning
+against her washtub and wringer, both as graceful as their engineer,
+she indulged herself in the pitiful but unfailing solace of the poor
+and the ugly, which is to attribute to the rich dishonesty and to the
+beautiful wickedness.
+
+The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea of her tub
+had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the rawhide of her big
+forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the newspaper-gallery of portraits.
+One sudsy hand supported and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These
+women, belles and swells, were all as glossy as if they had been
+ironed.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle sneered: "If the hussies would do an honest day's work it
+would be better for their figgers." She was mercifully oblivious of
+the fact that her tub-calisthenics had made her no more exquisite than
+a cow in a kimono.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties. Their
+sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her problem, which was
+the riddle of a husband who was faithful only to the bottle, who was
+indifferent to the children he got so easily, and was poetical only in
+that he never worked save when the mood was on him.
+
+Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had come into her
+home wrapped round a bundle of laundry. But now she was startled, and
+she would have startled anybody who might have been watching her, for
+she stared hard at a photographed beauty and gasped:
+
+"Sister!"
+
+She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and uncommonly
+common, greeted with the word "Sister!" the photograph of a very
+young, very beautiful, very gracile creature, in a mannish costume
+that emphasized her femininity, in a foreign garden, in a braw hat
+with curls cascading from under it, with a throat lilying out of a
+flaring collar, with hands pocketed in a smart jacket, and below that
+a pair of most fashionable legs in riding-breeches and puttees! She
+carried not a parasol nor a riding-crop, but a great reaping-hook
+swung across her shoulder, and she smiled as impudently, as
+immortally, as if she were Youth and had slain old Time and carried
+off his scythe.
+
+The picture did not reply to Mrs. Nuddle's cry, but Mrs. Nuddle's
+eldest daughter, a precocious little adventuress of eleven or so, who
+was generally called "Sister," turned from the young brother whose
+smutty face she was just smacking and snapped:
+
+"Aw, whatcha want?"
+
+Little Sister supposed that her irritating mother was going to tell
+her to stop doing something, or to start doing something--either of
+which behests she always hated and only obeyed because her mother was
+bigger than she was. She turned and saw her mother swaying and
+clutching at the air. Sister had a gorgeous hope that mother would
+fall into the tub and be interesting for once. But mother was a born
+disappointer. She shook off the promising swoon, righted herself, and
+began fiercely to scan the paper to find out whose name the picture
+bore. The caption was torn off.
+
+Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out who it really
+was.
+
+In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband had stripped
+off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove, lighted his pipe
+with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it out with practised
+accuracy, and trodden it as he went away. Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it
+up.
+
+On the charred remnant she read:
+
+  The Beautiful Miss.... One of London's reigning beaut.... daughter
+  of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....
+
+Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and
+squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin's statue of "The Thinker."
+One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and
+raining about her face. Her old waist was half buttoned, and no one
+would have regretted if it had been all buttoned. She was as plebeian
+as an ash-can and as full of old embers.
+
+She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His
+wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was
+loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was
+doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike.
+He had been to a meeting of other thinkers--ground and lofty thinkers
+who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and
+its remedy.
+
+The evil was the possession of money by those who had accumulated it.
+The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich,
+which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.
+
+It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was
+to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to
+burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and
+beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried
+to get rich by getting riches.
+
+This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile
+Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear
+almost unmanned him--what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in
+the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children
+would be left motherless--and fatherless, for he would, of course, be
+too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too,
+the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their
+wife's name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:
+
+"Whatta hellsa matter wit choo?"
+
+She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him as best
+she could:
+
+"I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought for a
+minute it was my sister."
+
+"Your sister? How'd she get her pitcher in the paper? Who did she
+shoot?"
+
+He snatched the sheet from her and saw the young woman in the
+young-manly garb.
+
+Jake gloated over the picture: "Some looker! What is she, a queen in
+burlecue?"
+
+Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.
+
+He roared. "London's ranging beaut? And you're what thinks she's your
+sister! The one that ran away? Was she a beaut like this?"
+
+Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:
+
+"Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn't I see her first?
+Whyn't you tell me more about her? You never talk about her none. Why
+not?" No answer. "All I know is she went wrong and flew the coop."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. "Who said she went wrong?"
+
+"You did!" Jake retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake
+praying for her--hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did
+you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of
+the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin'
+over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains to the head."
+
+He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She tried to take
+back what she had said:
+
+"Don't you set there tellin' me I ever told you nothin' mean about my
+pore little sister. She was as good a girl as ever lived, Mamise
+was."
+
+"You're changin' your tune now, ain'tcha? Because you think she looks
+like a grand dam in pants! And where dya get that Mamise stuff? What
+was her honestogawd name? Maryer? You're tryin' to swell her up a
+little, huh?"
+
+"No, I ain't. She was named Marie Louise after her gran'-maw, on'y
+as a baby she couldn't say it right. She said 'Mamise.' That's what
+she called her poor little self--Mamise. Seems like I can see her
+now, settin' on the floor like Sister. And where is she now? O
+Gawd! whatever become of her, runnin' off thataway--a little
+sixteen-year-ol' chile, runnin' off with a cheap thattical troupe,
+because her aunt smacked her.
+
+"She never had no maw and no bringin' up, and she was so pirty. She
+had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said."
+
+"And that ain't no lie," said Jake, with characteristic gallantry.
+"There's nothin' but monopoly everywheres in the world. She got all
+the looks and I got you. I wonder who got her!"
+
+Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for an
+article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date and growled:
+
+"Aw, this paper's nearly a year old--May, 1916, it says."
+
+This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner,
+flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping
+from stove to table, ministering to him.
+
+Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was like an old
+tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite and provided
+with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever disturbs it.
+Explosives are useful in place. But Jake was of the sort that blow up
+regardless of the occasion.
+
+His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who was richer or
+better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than he was. Yet he had
+nothing in him of that constructive envy which is called emulation and
+leads to progress, to days of toil, nights of thought. His idea of
+equality was not to climb to the peak, but to drag the climbers down.
+Prating always of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe
+them or remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of wages
+was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution to the war
+against oppressive capital was to denounce all successful men as
+brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors with the malefactors.
+
+Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French Revolution,
+and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs who burned châteaux
+and shops, and butchered women as well as men, growling their ominous
+refrain:
+
+"Noo sum zum cum eel zaw" ("_Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont_").
+
+The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret armies of
+enemies now inside the nation and threatened her success in the war.
+The thing that prevented their triumph was that their blunders were
+greater than their malice, their folly more certain than their
+villainy. As soon as America entered the lists against Germany, the
+Jake Nuddles would begin doing their stupid best to prevent
+enlistment, to persuade desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck
+factories and trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of
+freedom they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the
+battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than the snaky
+spies of Germany, and more venomous.
+
+As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie Louise.
+The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him was a beastly
+desire. He praised her grace because it tortured his wife. But even
+fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage of hatred at the look of
+cleanliness and comeliness, the environment of luxury only emphasized
+by her peasant disguise.
+
+When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up the paper
+again and glared at it with hostile envy.
+
+"Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir and a Lady, eh?
+Just wait till we get through with them Sirs and Ladies. We'll mow 'em
+down. You'll see. Robbin' us poor toilers that does all the work!
+We'll put an end to their peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany
+leaves of these birds we'll finish up. And then we'll take this rotten
+United States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just
+wait!"
+
+His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the face,
+knocked the pretty lady's portrait to the floor and walked on it as he
+strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod on little Sister's
+hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little brother howled in duet.
+Then father turned on them.
+
+"Aw, shut up or I'll--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished anything--except
+his meals. He left his children crying and his wife in a new distress;
+but then, revolutions cannot pause for women and children.
+
+When he had gone, and Sister's tears had dried on her smutty face,
+Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture of England's
+reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss W. was to be in England,
+blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other's estate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from her even the props
+of hostility. She had nothing to lean on now, nobody to fight with for
+life and reputation. She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated
+thoughts followed one another in waves across her soul--grief for her
+foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses, remorse for
+seeming to have deserted them in their last hours, remorse for having
+been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse for that remorse, grief at
+losing the lovable, troublesome children, creature distress at giving
+up the creature comforts of the luxurious home, the revulsion of her
+unfettered mind and her restless young body at the prospect of
+exchanging liberty and occupation for the half-death of an idle
+cell--a kind of coffin residence--fear of being executed as a spy, and
+fear of being released to drag herself through life with the ball and
+chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.
+
+Verrinder's mind was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked
+to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had
+bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The
+fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no
+taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his
+pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir
+Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism, he
+had been touched by Marie Louise's sincerities. She proved them by the
+very contradictions of her testimony, with its history of keen
+intelligence alternating with curious blindness. He knew how people
+get themselves all tangled up in conflicting duties, how they let
+evils slide along, putting off till to-morrow the severing of the
+cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew
+that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to
+gratitude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for
+complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.
+
+As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten
+and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in
+caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons enough then to believe
+that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in
+which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her
+bewilderment feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this moment
+when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted Germany had just about
+persuaded the majority of their countrymen that the world would be
+intolerable if Germany triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating
+her tyranny lay in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.
+
+The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a martyr out of
+Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England. She would be
+advertised, as a counterweight to the hideous mistake the Germans made
+in immortalizing with their bullets the poor little nurse, "_die_
+Cavell."
+
+Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved, and
+clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man its tea and
+toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea deferred helped him to
+the conclusion that the one wise thing was to restore Marie Louise
+quietly to her own country. He went with freshened step and determined
+mind to a conference with the eminent men concerned. He made his own
+confession of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted.
+Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council agree
+with him.
+
+Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found the house a
+flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and thwarted reporters. The
+relatives and the reporters he satisfied with a few well-chosen lies.
+Then he sent his name up to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the
+card-tray through the door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some
+wild animal.
+
+"I'll be down," said Marie Louise, and she primped herself like
+another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the executioner. She
+was calmed by the hope that she would learn her fate, at least, and
+she cared little what it was, so long as it was not unknown.
+
+Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.
+
+"Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should offer you
+freedom and silence, would you go back to America and tell no one of
+what has happened here?"
+
+The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting the sunlight
+into a dungeon. The very word "America" was itself a rush of fresh
+air. The long-forgotten love of country came back into her heart on a
+cry of hope.
+
+"Oh, you don't mean that you might?"
+
+"We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise--"
+
+She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: "I'll
+promise anything--anything! Oh I don't want to be free just for the
+sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to--to
+expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the
+bad I've brought about. I won't try to shift any blame. I want to
+confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what
+a wicked fool I've been."
+
+Verrinder checked her: "But that is just what you must not do. Unless
+you can assure us that you will carry this burden about with you and
+keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed
+with the case--legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady
+Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We'd
+really rather not, but if you insist--"
+
+"Oh, I'll promise. I'll keep the secret. Let them rest."
+
+She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror
+of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of
+hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when
+bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed
+cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then
+flung back to the dark.
+
+Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and
+that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he
+said
+
+"Would you swear to keep this inviolate?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Have you a Bible?"
+
+She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the
+bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It
+fell open easily, as if it had been a familiar companion of Sir
+Joseph's. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful
+Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanctity as she
+recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the
+twisted German type. But she said:
+
+"Will this do?"
+
+Verrinder shook his head. "I don't know that an oath on a German Bible
+would really count. It might be considered a mere heap of paper."
+
+Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her fingers. She
+found an English Bible after a further search. Its pages had seen the
+light but seldom. It slipped from her hand and fell open. She knelt to
+pick it up with a tremor of fear.
+
+She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page before her.
+These words caught her eye:
+
+  For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me. Take the winecup of
+  this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send
+  thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad
+  because of the sword that I will send among them.
+
+She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly, took the book from
+her hand, closed it, and held it before her. She put the slim tips of
+her young fingers near the talon of his old thumb and echoed in a
+timid, silvern voice the broken phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:
+
+"I solemnly swear--that so long as I live--I will tell no one--what I
+know--of the crimes and death--of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling--unless
+called upon--in a court of law. This oath is made--with no mental
+reservations--and is binding--under all circumstances whatsoever--so
+help me God!"
+
+When she had whispered the last invocation he put the book away and
+gripped her hand in his.
+
+"I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal--and perhaps
+immoral. Our action might be overruled and the whole case opened. But
+I think you are safe, especially if you get to America--the sooner the
+better."
+
+"Thank you!" she said.
+
+He laughed, somewhat pathetically.
+
+"Good luck!"
+
+He did not tell her that England would still be watching over her,
+that her name and her history were already cabled to America, that
+she would be shadowed to the steamer, observed aboard the boat,
+and picked up at the dock by the first of a long series of detectives
+constituting a sort of serial guardian angel.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+IN NEW YORK
+
+[Illustration: "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a
+war-worker about as long as I can."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days. Passenger-steamers
+were few, irregular, and secret. The passport regulations were
+exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder's influence could not
+speed the matter greatly.
+
+There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder's
+suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands of counsel, and
+he arranged her surrender of all claims on the Webling estate. But he
+insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been
+given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his
+inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.
+
+Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's
+safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such
+a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions peopled it with.
+
+She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the
+Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that
+startled her. They used the expression, "Under the circumstances,"
+with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had
+already trickled through to them.
+
+On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock no friends
+greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a
+certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with
+some pride how pretty she was. "It'll be a pleasure to keep an eye on
+her," he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist
+professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise's mystic squire had not
+counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting
+forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town
+of her birth, Wakefield.
+
+Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller and
+shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her
+time.
+
+At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the
+cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She
+had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too
+humble to sew for them.
+
+Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town
+intolerably ugly. It held no associations for her. She had been
+unhappy there, and she said: "Poor me! No wonder I ran away." She
+justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She
+longed for some one to mother her present self.
+
+But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived
+was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning
+out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She
+did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not
+remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely
+placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.
+
+One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise's mother had done sewing,
+had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the
+other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after.
+But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.
+
+Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his
+predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the
+elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala.
+Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a
+street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate
+ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, "I don't remember
+him."
+
+It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made
+almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from
+its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an
+anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him
+than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a
+gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.
+
+Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York, was overjoyed
+when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from
+life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.
+
+She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled
+down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among
+them for furniture and clothes and books.
+
+Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President
+visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against
+Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who
+held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the
+nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after
+so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that
+there was any cause for war.
+
+But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition
+was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena--in spirit
+at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would
+spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle.
+The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new
+enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should
+raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to
+get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak
+through.
+
+America's vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown. The first
+embarrassment was the panic of volunteers.
+
+Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang madly in
+all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to volunteer, too, but
+for what? What could she do? Where could she get it to do? In the
+chaos of her impatience she did nothing.
+
+Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen, hailed, and
+seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise's detective knew who Polly
+was. He groaned to note that she was the first friend his client had
+found.
+
+Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her before everybody
+in the big Tudor Room. And Polly's husband greeted her with warmth of
+hand and voice.
+
+Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy. The prodigal
+was home, had been welcomed with a kiss. Evidently her secret had not
+crossed the ocean. She could take up life again. Some day the past
+would confront and denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was
+enfranchised anew of human society.
+
+Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph's death and his wife's, and
+what a shock it must have been to poor Marie Louise, but how well she
+bore up under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a
+shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to
+Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there?
+And Polly's husband was to be a major--think of it! He was going to be
+all dolled up in olive drab and things and-- "Damn the clock, anyway;
+if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's
+your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it
+off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, for you must come to
+us and nowhere else and-- Good-by, darling child, and-- All right,
+Tom, I'm coming!"
+
+And she was gone.
+
+Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier and yet much
+lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace.
+She had lost a friend who still rejoiced to see her.
+
+But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged. When he turned
+in his report he threatened to turn in his resignation unless he were
+relieved of the futile task of recording Marie Louise's blameless and
+eventless life.
+
+And then the agent's night was turned to day--at least his high noon
+was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie Louise was abruptly
+addressed by Nicky Easton.
+
+She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue,
+rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other
+white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need
+for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American
+soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale
+need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered
+flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this
+linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious
+crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite
+of lunch.
+
+Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at
+sight of him.
+
+"I thought you were dead."
+
+He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelgänger_." And he began to
+hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man
+who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the
+home of his dead sweetheart:
+
+              "_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt.
+              Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!
+              Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,
+              Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle
+              So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._"
+
+Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always
+roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that
+crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.
+
+"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded.
+
+He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.
+
+"I have another engagement, and I am late," she said.
+
+"Where are you living?"
+
+She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking
+with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.
+
+"You don't ask me where I have been?"
+
+"I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or
+somewhere. However did you get out?"
+
+"The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein,
+but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?"
+
+She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had
+betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him
+extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about
+herself. He went on:
+
+"Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I
+try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they
+use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when
+_Deutschland ist über alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some
+work togedder. I come soon by your house. _Auf_--Goot-py."
+
+He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the
+labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and
+she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of
+New York.
+
+She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought
+counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country.
+It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing
+her trunk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to
+Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same
+effort. It was a wire Babel.
+
+Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long
+been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently
+trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote,
+telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all
+the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the
+funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and
+administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all
+the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.
+
+Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept
+pleading with Long Distance:
+
+"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end
+important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to
+Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."
+
+The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call
+her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie
+Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central
+again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had
+never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This
+central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then
+vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.
+
+Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold
+her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own
+name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into
+her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion
+till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from
+Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone
+number and the message.
+
+  So glad you're on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and
+  see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but
+  there's always room--especially for you, dear. You'll never get in
+  at a hotel.
+
+Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried again.
+
+The seventh central dazed her with, "We can take nothing but gov'ment
+business till two P.M."
+
+Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her watch,
+gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag, snapped it, and
+rose to go.
+
+She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the note for the
+address and telephoned a telegram, saying that she would arrive at
+five o'clock. The telegraph-operator told her that the company could
+not guarantee delivery, as traffic over the wires was very heavy.
+Marie Louise sighed and rose, worn out with telephone-fag.
+
+She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi, and hastily
+made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the station an hour ago,
+and they had been checked through from the house.
+
+Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick up the note she
+had propped on the telephone-table. She left it there and closed the
+door on another chapter of her life.
+
+She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a weary
+while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car to-day,
+to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths at night were still more
+unobtainable.
+
+She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach. Scores of people
+had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches were filled. She
+sidled through the crowded aisles and found no seat. She invaded the
+chair-cars in desperation.
+
+In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage. She appealed
+to him. "You must have one chair left."
+
+He was hardly polite in his answer. "No, ma'am, I ain't. I ain't a
+single chair."
+
+"But I've got to sit somewhere," she said.
+
+The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He moved back to
+the front to repel boarders. Several men stared from the depths of
+their dentist's chairs, but made no proffer of their seats. They
+believed that woman's newfangled equality included the privilege of
+standing up.
+
+One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or pretended.
+Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with her eyes. His smile of
+recognition changed to a smile of courtesy. He proffered her his seat
+with an old-fashioned gesture. She declined with a shake of the head
+and a coldly correct smile.
+
+He insisted academically, as much as to say: "I can see that you are a
+gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman and permit me to do my
+duty." There was a brief, silent tug-of-war between his unselfishness
+and hers. He won. Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into
+his place.
+
+"But where will you sit?" she said.
+
+"Oh, I'll get along."
+
+He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the air of one
+who would get along. He had shown himself masterful in two combats,
+and compelled her to take the chair he had doubtless engaged with
+futile providence days before.
+
+"Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own," she thought.
+
+The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the tunnel
+of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River. People felt their
+ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed hard. The train came back
+to the surface and the sunlight, and ran across New Jersey.
+
+Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make sure of it.
+Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same thing. At this time
+all the people in America seemed to be thinking _en masse_. When she
+reached the dining-car every seat was taken and there was a long
+bread-line in the narrow corridor.
+
+The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye, caught it, and
+motioned to her to take his place. She shook her head. But it seemed
+to do no good to shake heads at him; he came down the corridor and
+lifted his hat. His voice and words were pleading, but his tone was
+imperative.
+
+"Please take my place."
+
+She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing. She was
+angry at being bossed even for her own benefit. Worse yet, by the time
+she got to the head of the line the second man had moved up to first.
+He stared at her as if he wondered what she was doing there. She fell
+back, doubly vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a
+look like a policeman's shove. The fellow backed up on the next man's
+toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to her place and went back
+to the foot of the class without waiting for her furious thanks.
+
+She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to be cowed or
+compelled to take chairs or money. People who had tried to move her
+soul or lend her their experience or their advantages had always
+aroused resentment.
+
+Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just thumbing his
+last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he left That Man would take
+the chair and order her luncheon for her. But it was not so to be. She
+passed him still well down the line. He had probably given his place
+to other women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a
+trifle unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the
+rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not claim
+even a glance of gratitude.
+
+It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed
+to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it
+was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed.
+Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared at the
+reeling landscape.
+
+Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos, looking for
+Polly Widdicombe's letter. She could not find it. She found the checks
+for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, and various other
+things, but not the letter. This gave her a new fright.
+
+She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table. She
+could see it plainly as her remembered glance took its last survey of
+the room. The brain has a way of developing occasional photographs
+very slowly. Something strikes our eyes, and we do not really see it
+till long after. We hear words and say, "How's that?" or, "I beg your
+pardon!" and hear them again before they can be repeated.
+
+This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to hope that she
+could remember a little farther back to the contents of the letter and
+the telephone number written there. But her memory would not respond.
+The effort to cudgel it seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting
+more and more completely.
+
+All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had said about there
+being no chance to get into a hotel--"an hôtel," Marie Louise still
+thought it.
+
+It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours late.
+People began to worry audibly about the hotels that would probably
+refuse them admission. At length they began to stroll toward the
+dining-car for an early dinner.
+
+Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of other
+employment, went along. There was no queue in the corridor now. She
+did not have to take That Man's place. She found one at a little empty
+table. But by and by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant
+seats, he sat down opposite her.
+
+She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In fact, seeing
+that she owed him for her seat-- It suddenly smote her that he must
+have paid for it. She owed him money! This was unendurable!
+
+He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she found courage to
+speak to him.
+
+"I beg your pardon--"
+
+He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass, but she went
+on:
+
+"May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave me?"
+
+He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:
+
+"Why, I don't remember, I'm sure."
+
+"Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to
+me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too."
+
+"That's mighty kind of you," he said.
+
+He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for
+having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on
+forgetting it.
+
+"I'll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel
+easier about it, I'll ask you for it."
+
+"I could hardly rob a perfect stranger," she began.
+
+He broke in: "They say nobody is perfect, and I'm not a perfect
+stranger. I've met you before, Miss Webling."
+
+"Not rilly! Wherever was it? I'm so stupid not to remember--even your
+name."
+
+He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand
+her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in
+the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified
+her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long
+gone--the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip
+of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the
+palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in
+London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he
+recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his
+distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke
+the ice a little. He said at last:
+
+"My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father's house in
+London."
+
+This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and gasped:
+
+"You don't mean it. I-- Oh yes, of course I remember--"
+
+"Please don't lie about it," he pleaded, bluntly, "for of course you
+don't."
+
+She laughed, but very nervously.
+
+"Well, we did give very large dinners."
+
+"It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a mile down the
+street from you, and I said nothing immortal. I was only a business
+acquaintance of Sir Joseph's, anyway. It was about ships, of course."
+
+He saw that her mind was far away and under strange excitation. But
+she murmured, distantly:
+
+"Oh, so you are--interested in ships?"
+
+"I make 'em for a living."
+
+"Rilly! How interesting!"
+
+This constraint was irksome. He ventured:
+
+"How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He's well, I hope."
+
+Her eyes widened. "Didn't you know? Didn't you read in the papers--about
+their death together?"
+
+"Theirs? His wife and he died together?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In a submarine attack?"
+
+"No, at home. It was in all the papers--about their dying on the same
+night, from--from ptomaine poisoning."
+
+"No!"
+
+He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled word. He
+explained: "I must have been out in the forest or in the mines at the
+time. Forgive me for opening the old wound. How long ago was it? I see
+you're out of mourning."
+
+"Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear mourning in
+England during the war."
+
+"That's so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen--mothers and
+daughters! My God! what you've gone through! And such pluck!"
+
+Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across and touched
+hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of fierce sympathy. She did
+not resent the message. Then he muttered:
+
+"I know what it means. I lost my father and mother--not at once, of
+course--years apart. But to lose them both in one night!"
+
+She made a sharp attempt at self-control:
+
+"Please! I beg you--please don't speak of it."
+
+He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise was doubly
+fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and afraid of something
+or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible, and Ross Davidge always
+felt a challenge from the impossible and the inaccessible.
+
+She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter and rose.
+She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her. She left the
+dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself for a brute and a
+blunderer.
+
+He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could call him,
+but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize his
+chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had forgotten
+to pay him for the chair.
+
+It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington at last.
+The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay. The appearance
+of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph's, and the necessity for telling
+him the lie about that death, had brought on a crisis of nerves. She
+was afraid of the dark, but more afraid of the man who might ask
+still more questions. She avoided him purposely when she left the
+train.
+
+A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand. Polly
+Widdicombe's car was not waiting. Marie Louise went to the front of
+the building to see if she might be there. She was appalled at the
+thought of Polly's not meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as
+never before.
+
+It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard people say that
+it was much too majestic for a railroad station. As if America did not
+owe more to the iron god of the rails than to any of her other
+deities!
+
+Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome floating
+cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically sustained. The
+superb beauty of it clutched her throat. She wanted to do something
+for it and all the holy ideals it symbolized.
+
+Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably never
+reached her. The porter asked her, "Was you thinkin' of a taxi?" and
+she said, "Yes," only to realize that she had no address to give the
+driver.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+IN WASHINGTON
+
+[Illustration: "'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"
+Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. "Aren't
+you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're going?" she
+demanded.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+She went through her hand-bag again, while the porter computed how
+many tips he was missing and the cab-starter looked insufferable
+things about womankind.
+
+She asked if any of them knew where Grinden Hall might be, but they
+shook their heads. She had a sudden happy idea. She would ask the
+telephone Information for the number. She hurried to a booth, followed
+by the despondent porter. She asked for Information and got her, but
+that was all.
+
+"Please give me the numba of Mrs. Widdicombe's, in Rosslyn."
+
+A Washington dialect eventually told her that the number was a private
+wire and could not be given.
+
+Marie Louise implored a special dispensation, but it was against the
+rules.
+
+She asked for the supervisor--who was equally sorry and adamant. Marie
+Louise left the booth in utter defeat. There was nothing to do but go
+to a hotel till the morrow.
+
+She recalled the stories of the hopelessness of getting a room. Yet
+she had no choice but to make the try. She had got a seat on the train
+where there were none. Perhaps she could trust her luck to provide her
+with a lodging, too.
+
+"We'll go back to the taxi-stand," she told the porter.
+
+He did not conceal his joy at being rid of her.
+
+She tried the Shoreham first, and when the taxicab deposited her under
+the umbrellas of the big trees and she climbed the homelike steps to a
+lobby with the air of a living-room she felt welcome and secure.
+Brilliant clusters were drifting to dinner, and the men were more
+picturesque than the women, for many of them were in uniform. Officers
+of the army and navy of the United States and of Great Britain and of
+France gave the throng the look of a costume-party.
+
+There was a less interesting crowd at the desk, and now nobody offered
+her his place at the head of the line. It would have done no good, for
+the room-clerk was shaking his head to all the suppliants. Marie
+Louise saw women turned away, married couples, men alone. But
+new-comers pressed forward and kept trying to convince the deskman
+that he had rooms somewhere, rooms that he had forgotten, or was
+saving for people who would never arrive.
+
+He stood there shaking his head like a toy in a window. People tried
+to get past him in all the ways people try to get through life, in the
+ways that Saint Peter must grow very tired of at the gate of
+heaven--bluff, whine, bribery, intimidation, flirtation.
+
+Some demanded their rights with full confidence and would not take no
+for answer. Some pleaded with hopelessness in advance; they were used
+to rebuffs. They appealed to his pity. Some tried corruption; they
+whispered that they would "make it all right," or they managed a sly
+display of money--one a one-dollar bill with the "1" folded in,
+another a fifty-dollar bill with the "50" well to the fore. Some grew
+ugly and implied favoritism; they were the born strikers and
+anarchists. Even though they looked rich, they had that habit of
+finding oppression and conspiracy everywhere. A few women appealed to
+his philanthropy, and a few others tried to play the siren. But his
+head oscillated from side to side, and nobody could swing it up and
+down.
+
+Marie Louise watched the procession anxiously. There seemed to be no
+end to it. The people who had come here first had been turned away
+into outer darkness long ago and had gone to other hotels. The present
+wretches were those who had gone to the other hotels first and made
+this their second, third, or sixth choice.
+
+Marie Louise did not go to the desk. She could take a hint at second
+hand. She would have been glad of a place to sit down, but all the
+divans were filled with gossipers very much at home and somewhat
+contemptuous of the vulgar herd trying to break into their select and
+long-established circle. She heard a man saying, with amiable anger:
+"Ah'm mahty sah'y Ah can't put you up at ouah haouse, but we've got
+'em hangin' on the hat-rack in the hall. You infunnal patriots have
+simply ruined this little old taown."
+
+She heard a pleasant laugh. "Don't worry. I'll get along somehow."
+
+She glanced aside and saw That Man again. She had forgotten his name
+again; yet she felt curiously less lonely, not nearly so hopeless. The
+other man said:
+
+"Say, Davidge, are you daown heah looking for one of these dollah-a-yeah
+jobs? Can you earn it?"
+
+"I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking for a bed."
+
+"Not a chance. The government's taken ovah half the hotels for
+office-buildings."
+
+"I'll go to a Turkish bath, then."
+
+"Good Lawd! man, I hud a man propose that, and the hotel clerk said he
+had telephoned the Tukkish bath, and a man theah said: 'For God's sake
+don't send anybody else heah! We've got five hundred cots full
+naow.'"
+
+"There's Baltimore."
+
+"Baltimer's full up. So's Alexandra. Go on back home and write a
+letta."
+
+"I'll try a few more hotels first."
+
+"No use--not an openin'."
+
+"Well, I've usually found that the best place to look for things is
+where people say they don't grow."
+
+Marie Louise thought that this was most excellent advice. She decided
+to follow it and keep on trying.
+
+As she was about to move toward the door the elevator, like a great
+cornucopia, spilled a bevy of men and women into the lobby. Leading
+them all came a woman of charm, of distinction, of self-possession.
+She was smiling over one handsome shoulder at a British officer.
+
+The forlorn Marie Louise saw her, and her eyes rejoiced; her face was
+kindled with haven-beacons. She pressed forward with her hand out, and
+though she only murmured the words, a cry of relief thrilled them.
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt! What luck to find you!"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt turned with a smile of welcome in advance. Her hand
+went forward. Her smile ended suddenly. Blank amazement passed into
+contemptuous wrath. Her hand went back. With the disgust of a sick
+eagle in a zoo, she drew a film over her eyes.
+
+The smile on Marie Louise's face also hung unsupported for a moment.
+It faded, then rallied. She spoke with patience, underlining the words
+with an affectionate reproof:
+
+"My dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, I am Miss Webling--Marie Louise. Don't
+you know me?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt answered: "I did. But I don't!"
+
+Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.
+
+The head waiter bowed with deference and command and beckoned Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek hauteur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+As she came out of the first hotel of her selection and rejection
+Marie Louise asked the car-starter the name of another. He mentioned
+the New Willard.
+
+It was not far, and she was there before she had time to recover from
+the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's bludgeon-like snub. As
+timidly as the waif and estray that she was, she ventured into the
+crowded, gorgeous lobby with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big
+columns. At one side a long corridor ran brokenly up a steep hill. It
+was populous with loungers who had just finished their dinners or were
+waiting for a chance to get into the dining-rooms. Orchestra music was
+lilting down the aisle.
+
+When Marie Louise had threaded the crowd and reached the desk a very
+polite and eager clerk asked her if she had a reservation. He seemed
+to be as regretful as she when she said no. He sighed, "We've turned
+away a hundred people in the last two hours."
+
+She accepted her dismissal dumbly, then paused to ask, "I say, do you
+by any chance know where Grinden Hall is?"
+
+He shook his head and turned to another clerk to ask, "Do you know of
+a hotel here named Grinden Hall?"
+
+The other shook his head, too. There was a vast amount of head-shaking
+going on everywhere in Washington. He added, "I'm new here." Nearly
+everybody seemed to be new here. It seemed as if the entire populace
+had moved into a ready-made town.
+
+Marie Louise had barely the strength to explain, "Grinden Hall is not
+an hotel; it is a home, in Rosslyn, wherever that is."
+
+"Oh, Rosslyn--that's across the river in Virginia."
+
+"Do you know, by any chance, Major Thomas Widdicombe?"
+
+He shook his head. Major Widdicombe was a big man, but the town was
+fairly swarming with men bigger than he. There were shoals of
+magnates, but giants in their own communities were petty nuisances
+here pleading with room-clerks for cots and with head waiters for
+bread. The lobby was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees.
+Several of them had the Congressional look. Later history would record
+them as the historic statesmen of titanic debates, men by whose
+eloquence and leadership and committee-room toil the Republic would be
+revolutionized in nearly every detail, and billions made to flow like
+water.
+
+As Marie Louise collected her porter and her hand-luggage for her next
+exit she saw Ross Davidge just coming in. She stepped behind a large
+politician or something. She forgot that she owed Davidge money, and
+she felt a rather pleasurable agitation in this game of hide-and-seek,
+but something made her shy of Davidge. For one thing, it was ludicrous
+to be caught being turned out of a second hotel.
+
+The politician walked away, and Davidge would have seen Marie Louise
+if he had not stopped short and turned a cold shoulder on her, just as
+the distant orchestra, which had been crooning one of Jerome Kern's
+most insidiously ingratiating melodies, began to blare with all its
+might the sonorities of "The Star-spangled Banner."
+
+Miss Webling saw the people in the alley getting to their feet slowly,
+awkwardly. A number of army and navy officers faced the music and
+stood rigid at attention. The civilians in the lobby who were already
+standing began to pull their hats off sheepishly like embarrassed
+peasants. People were still as self-conscious as if the song had just
+been written. They would soon learn to feel the tremendous importance
+of that eternal query, the only national anthem, perhaps, that ever
+began with a question and ended with a prayer. Americans would soon
+learn to salute it with eagerness and to deal ferociously with
+men--and women, too--who were slow to rise.
+
+Marie Louise watched Davidge curiously. He was manifestly on fire with
+patriotism, but he was ashamed to show it, ashamed to stand erect and
+click his heels. He fumbled his hat and slouched, and looked as if he
+had been caught in some guilt. He was indeed guilty of a childish
+fervor. He wanted to shout, he wanted to weep, he wanted to fight
+somebody; but he did not know how to express himself without striking
+an attitude, and he was incapable of being a _poseur_--except as an
+American posily affects poselessness.
+
+When the anthem ended, people sank into their chairs with sighs of
+relief; the officers sharply relaxed; the civilians straightened up
+and felt at home again. Ross Davidge marched to the desk, not noticing
+Marie Louise, who motioned to her porter to come along with her
+luggage and went to hunt shelter at the Raleigh Hotel. She kept her
+taxi now and left her hand-baggage in it while she received the
+inevitable rebuff. From there she traveled to hotel after hotel,
+marching in with the dismal assurance that she would march right out
+again.
+
+The taxi-driver was willing to take her to hotels as long as they and
+her money lasted. Her strength and her patience gave out first. At the
+Lafayette she advanced wearily, disconsolately to the desk. She saw
+Ross Davidge stretched out in a big chair. He did not see her. His hat
+was pulled over his eyes, and he had the air of angry failure. If he
+despaired, what chance had she?
+
+She received the usual regrets from the clerk. As she left the desk
+the floor began to wabble. She hurried to an inviting divan and
+dropped down, beaten and distraught. She heard some one approach, and
+her downcast eyes saw a pair of feet move up and halt before her.
+
+Since Lady Clifton-Wyatt's searing glance and words Marie Louise had
+felt branded visibly, and unworthy of human kindness and shelter. She
+was piteously grateful to this man for his condescension in saying:
+
+"You'll have to excuse me for bothering you again. But I'm afraid
+you're in worse trouble than I am. Nobody seems to be willing to take
+you in."
+
+He meant this as a light jocularity, but it gave her a moment's
+serious fear that he had overheard Lady Clifton-Wyatt's slashing
+remark. But he went on:
+
+"Won't you allow me to try to find you a place? Don't you know anybody
+here?"
+
+"I know numbers of people, but I don't know where any of them are."
+
+She told him of her efforts to get to Rosslyn by telephone, by
+telegraph, by train or taxicab. Little tears added a sparkle to
+laughter, but threatened rain. She ended with, "And now that I've
+unloaded my riddles on you, aren't you sorry you spoke?"
+
+"Not yet," he said, with a subtle compliment pleasantly implying that
+she was perilous. Everybody likes to be thought perilous. He went on:
+"I don't know Rosslyn, but it can't be much of a place for size. If
+you have a friend there, we'll find her if we have to go to every
+house in Rosslyn."
+
+"But it's getting rather late, isn't it, to be knocking at all the
+doors all by myself?"
+
+She had not meant to hint, and it was a mere coincidence that he
+thought to say:
+
+"Couldn't I go along?"
+
+"Thank you, but it's out in the country rather far, I'm afraid."
+
+"Then I must go along."
+
+"I couldn't think of troubling you."
+
+The end of it was that he had his way, or she hers, or both theirs. He
+made no nonsense of adventure or escapade about it, and she was too
+well used to traveling alone to feel ashamed or alarmed. He led her to
+the taxi, told the driver that Grinden Hall was their objective and
+must be found. Then he climbed in with her, and they rode in a dark
+broken with the fitful lightnings of street-lamps and motors.
+
+The taxi glided out M Street. The little shops of Georgetown went
+sidelong by. The cab turned abruptly to the left and clattered across
+the old aqueduct bridge. On a broad reach of the Potomac the new-risen
+moon spread a vast sheet of tin-foil of a crinkled sheen. This was all
+that was beautiful about the sordid neighborhood, but it was very
+beautiful, and tender to a strange degree.
+
+Once across, the driver stopped and leaned round to call in at the
+door:
+
+"This is Rosslyn. Where do yew-all want to go next?"
+
+"Grinden Hall. Ask somebody."
+
+"Ask who? They ain't a soul tew be saw."
+
+They waited in the dark awhile; then Davidge got out and, seeing a
+street-car coming down through the hills like a dragon in fiery
+scales, he stopped it to ask the motorman of Grinden Hall. He knew
+nothing, but a sleepy passenger said that he reckoned that that
+was the fancy name of Mr. Sawtell's place, and he shouted the
+directions:
+
+"Yew go raht along this road ovah the caw tracks, and unda a bridge
+and keep a-goin' up a ridge and ova till yew come to a shawp tu'n to
+the raht. Big whaht mansion, ain't it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Davidge. "I never saw it."
+
+"Well, I reckon that's the place. Only 'Hall' I knaow about up heah."
+
+The motorman kicked his bell and started off.
+
+"Nothing like trying," said Davidge, and clambered in. The taxicab
+went veering and yawing over an unusually Virginian bad road. After a
+little they entered a forest. The driver threw on his search-light,
+and it tore from the darkness pictures of forest eerily green in the
+glare--old trees slanting out, deep channels blackening into
+mysterious glades. The car swung sharply to the right and growled up a
+hill, curving and swirling and threatening to capsize at every moment.
+The sense of being lost was irresistible.
+
+Marie Louise fell to pondering; suddenly she grew afraid to find
+Grinden Hall. She knew that Polly knew Lady Clifton-Wyatt. They might
+have met since Polly wrote that letter. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had
+perhaps--had doubtless--told Polly all about Marie Louise. Polly would
+probably refuse her shelter. She knew Polly: there was no middle
+ground between her likes and dislikes; she doted or she hated. She was
+capable of smothering her friends with affection and of making them
+ancient enemies in an instant. For her enemies she had no use or
+tolerance. She let them know her wrath.
+
+The car stopped. The driver got down and went forward to a narrow lane
+opening from the narrow road. There was a sign-board there. He read it
+by the light of the moon and a few matches. He came back and said:
+
+"Here she is. Grinden Hall is what she says on that theah sign-bode."
+
+Marie Louise was in a flutter. "What time is it?" she asked.
+
+Davidge held his watch up and lighted a match.
+
+"A little after one."
+
+"It's awfully late," she said.
+
+The car was turning at right angles now, and following a narrow track
+curling through a lawn studded with shrubbery. There was a moment's
+view of all Washington beyond the valley of the moon-illumined river.
+Its lights gleamed in a patient vigilance. It had the look of the holy
+city that it is. The Capitol was like a mosque in Mecca, the Mecca of
+the faithful who believe in freedom and equality. The Washington
+Monument, picked out from the dark by a search-light, was a lofty
+steeple in a dream-world.
+
+Davidge caught a quick breath of piety and reverence. Marie Louise was
+too frightened by her own destiny to think of the world's anxieties.
+
+The car raced round the circular road. Her eyes were snatched from the
+drowsy town, small with distance, to the imminent majesty of a great
+Colonial portico with columns tall and stately and white, a temple of
+Parthenonian dignity in the radiance of the priestly moon. There was
+not a light in any window, no sign of life.
+
+The car stopped. But-- Marie Louise simply dared not face Polly and
+risk a scene in the presence of Davidge. She tapped on the glass and
+motioned the driver to go on. He could not believe her gestures. She
+leaned out and whispered:
+
+"Go on--go on! I'll not stop!"
+
+Davidge was puzzled, but he said nothing; and Marie Louise made no
+explanation till they were outside again, and then she said:
+
+"Do you think I'm insane?"
+
+"This is not my party," he said.
+
+She tried to explain: "There wasn't a light to be seen. They couldn't
+have got my telegram. They weren't expecting me. They may not have
+been at home. I hadn't the courage to stop and wake the house."
+
+That was not her real reason, but Davidge asked for no other. If he
+noted that she was strangely excited over a trifle like getting a few
+servants and a hostess out of bed, he made no comment.
+
+When she pleaded, "Do you mind if I go back to Washington with you?"
+he chuckled: "It's certainly better than going alone. But what will
+you do when you get there?"
+
+"I'll go to the railroad station and sit up," Marie Louise announced.
+"I'm no end sorry to have been such a nuisance."
+
+"Nuisance!" he protested, and left his intonation to convey all the
+compliments he dared not utter.
+
+The cab dived into another woods and ran clattering down a roving
+hill road. Up the opposite steep it went with a weary gait. It crawled
+to the top with turtle-like labor. Davidge knew the symptoms, and he
+frowned in the shadow, yet smiled a little.
+
+The car went banging down, held by a squealing brake. The light grew
+faint, and in the glimmer there was a close shave at the edge of a
+hazardous bridge over a deep, deep ravine. The cab rolled forward on
+the rough planks under its impetus, but it picked up no speed.
+Half-way across, it stopped.
+
+"Whatever is the matter?" Marie Louise exclaimed.
+
+Davidge leaned out and called to the driver, "What's the matter now?"
+though he knew full well.
+
+"Gas is gone, I reckon," the fellow snarled, as he got down. After a
+moment's examination he confirmed his diagnosis. "Yep, gas is all
+gone. I been on the go too long on this one call."
+
+"In Heaven's name, where can you get some more gasolene?" said Marie
+Louise.
+
+"Nearest garodge is at Rosslyn, I reckon, lady."
+
+"How far is that?"
+
+"I'd hate to say, lady. Three, fo' mahls, most lahkly, and prob'ly
+closed naow."
+
+"Go wake it up at once."
+
+"No thanky, lady. I got mahty po' feet for them hills."
+
+"What do you propose to do?"
+
+"Ain't nothin' tew dew but wait fo' somebody to come along."
+
+"When will that be?"
+
+"Along todes mawnin' they ought to be somebody along, milkman or
+somethin'."
+
+"Cheerful!" said Marie Louise.
+
+"Batt'ries kind o' sick, tew, looks lahk. I was engaged by the houah,
+remember," the driver reminded them as he clambered back to his place,
+put his feet up on the dashboard and let his head roll into a position
+of ease.
+
+The dimming lights waned and did not wax. By and by they went where
+lights go when they go out. There was no light now except the moonset,
+shimmering mistily across the tree-tops of the rotunda of the forest,
+just enough to emphasize the black of the well they were in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+How would she take it?
+
+That was what interested Davidge most. What was she really like? And
+what would she do with this intractable situation? What would the
+situation do with her? For situations make people as well as people
+situations.
+
+Now was the time for an acquaintance of souls. An almost absolute dark
+erased them from each other's sight. Their eyes were as useless as the
+useless eyes of fish in subterrene caverns. Miss Webling could have
+told Davidge the color of his eyes, of course, being a woman. But
+being a man, he could not remember the color of hers, because he had
+noted nothing about her eyes except that they were very eye-ish.
+
+He would have blundered ridiculously in describing her appearance. His
+information of her character was all to gain. He had seen her
+wandering about Washington homeless among the crowds and turned from
+every door. She had borne the ordeal as well as could be asked. She
+had accepted his proffer of protection with neither terror nor
+assurance.
+
+He supposed that in a similar plight the old-fashioned woman--or at
+least the ubiquitous woman of the special eternal type that
+fictionists call "old-fashioned"--would have been either a bleating,
+tremulous gazelle or a brazen siren. But Miss Webling behaved like
+neither of these. She took his gallantry with a matter-of-fact
+reasonableness, much as a man would accept the offer of another man's
+companionship on a tiresome journey. She gave none of those
+multitudinous little signals by which a woman indicates that she is
+either afraid that a man will try to hug her or afraid that he will
+not. She was apparently planning neither to flirt nor to faint.
+
+Davidge asked in a matter-of-fact tone: "Do you think you could walk
+to town? The driver says it's only three-fo' miles."
+
+She sighed: "My feet would never make it. And I have on high-heeled
+boots."
+
+His "Too bad!" conveyed more sympathy than she expected. He had
+another suggestion.
+
+"You could probably get back to the home of Mrs. Widdicombe. That
+isn't so far away."
+
+She answered, bluntly, "I shouldn't think of it!"
+
+He made another proposal without much enthusiasm.
+
+"Then I'd better walk in to Washington and get a cab and come back for
+you."
+
+She was even blunter about this: "I shouldn't dream of that. You're a
+wreck, too."
+
+He lied pluckily, "Oh, I shouldn't mind."
+
+"Well, I should! And I don't fancy the thought of staying here alone
+with that driver."
+
+He smiled in the dark at the double-edged compliment of implying that
+she was safer with him than with the driver. But she did not hear his
+smile.
+
+She apologized, meekly: "I've got you into an awful mess, haven't I? I
+usually do make a mess of everything I undertake. You'd better beware
+of me after this."
+
+His "I'll risk it" was a whole cyclopedia of condensed gallantry.
+
+They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing, hearing
+only the bated breath of the night wind groping stealthily through the
+tree-tops, and from far beneath, the still, small voice of a brook
+feeling its way down its unlighted stairs.
+
+At last her voice murmured, "Are you quite too horribly uncomfortable
+for words?"
+
+His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: "I couldn't be
+more comfortable except for one thing. I'm all out of cigars."
+
+"Oh!" He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before she spoke
+again, timidly:
+
+"I fancy you don't smoke cigarettes?"
+
+"When I can't get cigars; any tobacco is better than none."
+
+Another blank of troubled silence, then, "I wonder if you'd say that
+of mine."
+
+Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed. "I'll guarantee
+to."
+
+A few years before he would have accepted a woman's confession that
+she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all
+the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have
+said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he
+had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke
+them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the
+United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women
+and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes.
+After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and
+at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a
+"drug-addict." It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to
+be immoral to somebody.
+
+But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds come in. He
+knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one hand while they rolled a
+cigarette with the other. He knew Red Cross saints who could puff a
+forbidden cigarette like a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had
+ever made such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in
+a tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests of
+virtue--tests that have nothing whatever to do with the case, whether
+savage or civilized folk invent them.
+
+He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard the click of
+her rings against metal. He heard the little noise of the portals of a
+cigarette-case opening. His hands and hers stumbled together, and his
+fingers selected a little cylinder from the row.
+
+He produced a match and held the flame before her. He filled his eyes
+with her vivid features as the glow detached her from the dark. Of her
+eyes he saw only the big lids, but he noted her lips, pursed a trifle
+with the kissing muscles, and he sighed as she blew a smoke about her
+like a goddess creating a cloud of vanishment. He lighted his own
+cigarette and threw the match away. They returned to a perfect gloom
+mitigated by the slight increase and decrease in the vividness of
+their tobacco-tips as they puffed.
+
+She was the first to speak:
+
+"I have a whole box of fags in my hand-bag. I usually have a good
+supply. When you want another-- Does it horrify you to see a woman
+smoke?"
+
+He was very superior to his old bigotry. "Quite the contrary!"
+
+This was hardly honest enough, so he said:
+
+"It did once, though. I remember how startled I was years ago when I
+was in England and I saw ladies smoking in hotel corridors; and on the
+steamer coming back, there was a countess or something who sat in the
+balcony and puffed away. Of course, at the big dinners in London they
+smoked, too. They did at Sir Joseph's, I remember."
+
+He did not see her wince at this name.
+
+"There were some odd fish surrounding old Sir Joseph. Some of them I
+couldn't quite make out. He was just a little hard to get at, himself.
+I got very huffy at the old boy once or twice, I'm sorry to say. It
+was about ships. I'm a crank on ships. Everybody has at least one
+mania. That's mine--ships. Sir Joseph and I quarreled about them. He
+wanted to buy all I could make, but he was in no hurry to have 'em
+finished. I told him he talked more like a German trying to stop
+production than like a Britisher trying to speed it up. That made him
+huffy. I'm sorry I did him such an injustice. When you insult a man,
+and he dies--What a terrible repartee dying is! He had offered me a
+big price, too, but it's not money I want to make; it's ships. And I
+want to see 'em at work. Did you ever see a ship launched?"
+
+"No, I never did."
+
+"There's nothing prettier. Come over to my shipyard and I'll show you.
+We're going to put one over before long. I'll let you christen her."
+
+"That would be wonderful."
+
+"It's better than that. The civilized world is starting out on the
+most poetic job it ever undertook."
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"Yep. The German sharks are gradually dragging all our shipping under
+water. The inventors don't seem able to devise any cure for the
+submarines except to find 'em and fight 'em. They're hard to find, and
+they won't fight. But they keep popping up and stabbing our pretty
+ships to death. And now the great game is on, the greatest game that
+civilized men ever fought with hell."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"We're going to try to build ships faster than the Hun can sink 'em.
+Isn't that a glorious job for you? Was there ever a--well, a nobler
+idea? We can't kill the beast; so we're going to choke him to death
+with food." He laughed to hide his embarrassing exaltation.
+
+She was not afraid of it: "It is rather a stupendous inspiration,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Who was it said he'd rather have written Gray's 'Elegy' than taken
+Quebec? I'd rather have thought up this thought than written the
+Iliad. Nobody knows who invented the idea. He's gone to oblivion
+already, but he has done more for the salvation of freedom than all
+the poets of time."
+
+This shocked her, yet thrilled her with its loftiness. She thrilled to
+him suddenly, too. She saw that she was within the aura of a fiery
+spirit--a business man aflame. And she saw in a white light that the
+builders of things, even of perishable things, are as great as the
+weavers of immortal words--not so well remembered, of course, for
+posterity has only the words. Poets and highbrows scorn them, but
+living women who can see the living men are not so foolish. They are
+apt to prefer the maker to the writer. They reward the poet with a
+smile and a compliment, but give their lives to the manufacturers, the
+machinists, the merchants. Then the neglected poets and their toadies
+the critics grow sarcastic about this and think that they have
+condemned women for materialism when they are themselves blind to its
+grandeur. They ignore the divinity that attends the mining and
+smelting and welding and selling of iron things, the hewing and sawing
+and planing of woods, the sowing and reaping and distribution of
+foods. They make a priestcraft and a ritual of artful language, and
+are ignorant of their own heresy. But since they deal in words, they
+have a fearful advantage and use it for their own glorification, as
+priests are wont to do.
+
+Marie Louise had a vague insight into the truth, but was not aware of
+her own wisdom. She knew only that this Davidge who had made himself
+her gallant, her messenger and servant, was really a genius, a giant.
+She felt that the rôles should be reversed and she should be waiting
+upon him.
+
+In Sir Joseph's house there had been a bit of statuary representing
+Hercules and Omphale. The mighty one was wearing the woman's kirtle
+and carrying her distaff, and the girl was staggering under the
+lion-skin and leaning on the bludgeon. Marie Louise always hated the
+group. It seemed to her to represent just the way so many women tried
+to master the men they infatuated. But Marie Louise despised
+masterable men, and she had no wish to make a toy of one. Yet she had
+wondered if a man and a woman could not love each other more perfectly
+if neither were master or mistress, but both on a parity--a team,
+indeed.
+
+Davidge enjoyed talking to her, at least. That comforted her. When she
+came back from her meditations he was saying:
+
+"My company is reaching out. We've bought a big tract of swamp, and
+we're filling it in and clearing it, and we're going to lay out a
+shipyard there and turn out ships--standardized ships--as fast as we
+can. We're steadying the ground first, sinking concrete piles in steel
+casing--if you put 'em end to end, they'd reach twenty-five miles.
+They're just to hold the ground together. That's what the whole
+country has got to do before it can really begin to begin--put some
+solid ground under its feet. When the ship is launched she mustn't
+stick on the ways or in the mud.
+
+"Of course, I'd rather go as a soldier, but I've got no right to. I
+can ride or walk all day, and shoot straight and stand all kinds of
+weather, and killing Germans would just about tickle me to death. But
+this is a time when every man has got to do what he can do better than
+he can do anything else. And I've spent my life in shipyards.
+
+"I was a common laborer first--swinging a sledge; I had an arm then!
+That was before we had compressed-air riveters. I was a union man and
+went on strike and fought scabs and made the bosses eat crow. Now I'm
+one of the bosses. I'm what they call a capitalist and an oppressor of
+labor. Now I put down strikes and fight the unions--not that I don't
+believe in 'em, not that I don't know where labor was before they had
+unions and where it would be without 'em to-day and to-morrow, but
+because all these things have to be adjusted gradually, and because
+the main thing, after all, is building ships--just now, of course,
+especially.
+
+"When I was a workman I took pride in my job, and I thought I was an
+artist at it. I wouldn't take anybody's lip. Now that I'm a boss I
+have to take everybody's lip, because I can't strike. I can't go to my
+boss and demand higher wages and easier hours, because my boss is the
+market. But I don't suppose there's anything on earth that interests
+you less than labor problems."
+
+"They might if I knew the first thing about them."
+
+"Well, the first thing is that they are the next war, the big war
+after this one's over. The job is to keep it down till peace comes.
+Then hell will pop--if you'll pardon my French. I'm all for labor
+getting its rights, but some of the men don't want the right to
+work--they want the right to loaf. I say let the sky be the limit of
+any man's opportunity--the sky and his own limitations and ambitions.
+But a lot of the workmen don't want opportunity; they've got no
+ambition; they hate to build things. They talk about the terrible
+conditions their families live in, and how gorgeously the rich men
+live. But the rich men were poor once, and the poor can be rich--if
+they can and will.
+
+"The war is going to be the fight between the makers and the breakers,
+the uplifters and the down-draggers, you might say. And it's going to
+be some war!
+
+"The men on the wrong side--what I call the wrong side, at least--are
+just as much our enemies as the Germans. We've got to watch 'em just
+as close. They'd just as soon burn an unfinished ship as the Germans
+would sink her when she's on her way.
+
+"That little ship I'm building now! Would you believe it? It has to be
+guarded every minute. Most of our men are all right. They'd work
+themselves to death for the ship, and they pour out their sweat like
+prayers. But sneaks get in among 'em, and it only takes a fellow with
+a bomb one minute to undo the six months' work of a hundred."
+
+"Tell me about your ship," she said.
+
+A ship she could understand. It was personal and real; labor theories
+were as foreign to her as problems in metaphysics.
+
+"Well, it's my first-born, this ship," he said. "Of course I've built
+a lot of other ships, but they were for other people--just jobs, for
+wages or commissions. This one is all my own--a freighter, ugly as sin
+and commodious as hell--I beg your pardon! But the world needs
+freighters--the hungry mobs of Europe, they'll be glad to see my
+little ship come in, if ever she does. If she doesn't I'll-- But
+she'll last a few trips before they submarine her--I guess."
+
+He fell silent among his visions and left her to her own.
+
+He saw himself wandering about a shipyard, a poor thing, but his own.
+His mind was like a mold-loft full of designs and detail-drawings to
+scale, blue-prints and models. On the way a ship was growing for him.
+As yet she was a ghastly thing all ribs, like the skeleton of some
+ancient sea-monster left ashore at high tide and perished eons back,
+leaving only the bones.
+
+His fancy saw her transverses taking on their iron flesh. He saw the
+day of her nativity. He heard them knock out the blocks that lowered
+the sliding-ways to the groundways and sent her swirling into the
+sea.
+
+He saw her ready for her cargo, saw a Niagara of wheat cascading into
+her hold. He saw her go forth into the sea.
+
+Then he saw the ship stagger, a wound opened in her side, from the
+bullet of a submarine.
+
+It was all so vivid that he spoke aloud in a frenzy of ire:
+
+"If the Germans kill my ship I'll kill a German! By God, I will!"
+
+He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and he begged her
+pardon humbly.
+
+She had been away in reverie, too. The word "submarine" had sent her
+back into her haunting remembrances of the _Lusitania_ and of her own
+helpless entanglement in the fate of other ships--their names as
+unknown to her as the names and faces of the men that died with them,
+or perished of starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The
+thought of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered with
+such violence that Davidge was startled from his own wrath.
+
+"You're having a chill," he said. "I wish you would take my coat. You
+don't want to get sick."
+
+She shook her head and chattered, "No, no."
+
+"Then you'd better get out and walk up and down this bridge awhile.
+There's not even a lap-robe here."
+
+"I should like to walk, I think."
+
+She stepped out, aided by his hand, a strong hand, and warm about her
+icy fingers. Her knees were weak, and he set her elbow in the hollow
+of his arm and guided her. They walked like the blind leading the
+blind through a sea of pitch. The only glimmer was the little
+scratches of light pinked in the dead sky by a few stars.
+
+"'It's beautiful overhead, if you're going that way,'" Davidge
+quoted.
+
+He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back timidly.
+
+"Not so fast! I can't see a thing."
+
+"That's the best time to keep moving."
+
+"But aren't you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're
+going?" she demanded.
+
+"Who can ever tell where he's going? The sunlight is no guaranty.
+We're all bats in the daytime and not cats at night. The main thing is
+to sail on and on and on."
+
+She caught a little of his recklessness--suffered him to hurry her to
+and fro through the inky air till she was panting for breath and
+tired. Then they groped to the rail and peered vainly down at the
+brook, which, like an unbroken child, was heard and not seen. They
+leaned their elbows on the rail and stared into the muffling gloom.
+
+"I think I'll have another of your cigarettes," he said.
+
+"So will I," said she.
+
+There was a cozy fireside moment as they took their lights from the
+same match. When he threw the match overboard he said:
+
+"Like a human life, eh? A little spark between dark and dark."
+
+He was surprised at stumbling into rhyme, and apologized. But she
+said:
+
+"Do you know, I rather like that. It reminds me of a poem about a
+rain-storm--Russell Lowell's, I fancy; it told of a flock of sheep
+scampering down a dusty road and clattering across a bridge and back
+to the dust again. He said it was like human life, 'a little noise
+between two silences.'"
+
+"H'm!" was the best Davidge could do. But the agony of the brevity of
+existence seized them both by the hearts, and their hearts throbbed
+and bled like birds crushed in the claws of hawks. Their hearts had
+such capabilities of joy, such songs in them, such love and longing,
+such delight in beauty--and beauty was so beautiful, so frequent, so
+thrilling! Yet they could spend but a glance, a sigh, a regret, a
+gratitude, and then their eyes were out, their ears still, their lips
+cold, their hearts dust. The ache of it was beyond bearing.
+
+"Let's walk. I'm cold again," she whispered.
+
+He felt that she needed the sense of hurry, and he went so fast that
+she had to run to keep up with him. There seemed to be some comfort in
+the privilege of motion for its own sake; motion was life; motion was
+godhood; motion was escape from the run-down clock of death.
+
+Back and forth they kept their promenade, till her body refused to
+answer the whips of restlessness. Her brain began to shut up shop. It
+would do no more thinking this night.
+
+She stumbled toward the taxicab. Davidge lifted her in, and she sank
+down, completely done. She fell asleep.
+
+Davidge took his place in the cab and wondered lazily at the quaint
+adventure. He was only slightly concerned with wondering at the cause
+of her uneasiness. He was used to minding his own business.
+
+She slept so well that when the groping search-light of a coming
+automobile began to slash the night and the rubber wheels boomed
+across the bridge she did not waken. If the taxi-driver heard its
+sound, he preferred to pretend not to. The passengers in the passing
+car must have been surprised, but they took their wonderment with
+them. We so often imagine mischief when there is innocence and _vice
+versa_; for opportunity is just as likely to create distaste as
+interest and the lack of it to instigate enterprise.
+
+Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly in the dark and did not know
+that he was not awake until at some later time he was half aroused by
+the meteoric glow and whiz of another automobile. It had gone before
+he was quite awake, and he sank back into sleep.
+
+Before he knew it, many black hours had slid by and daylight was come;
+the rosy fingers of light were moving about, recreating the world to
+vision, sketching a landscape hazily on a black canvas, then stippling
+in the colors, and finishing, swiftly but gradually, the details to an
+inconceivable minuteness of definition, giving each leaf its own sharp
+contour and every rock its every facet. From the brook below a
+mistlike cigarette smoke exhaled. The sky was crimson, then pink, then
+amber, then blue.
+
+Birds began to twitter, to fashion little crystal stanzas, and to
+hurl themselves about the valley as if catapults propelled them. One
+songster perched on the iron rail of the bridge and practised a vocal
+lesson, cocking his head from side to side and seeming to approve his
+own skill.
+
+A furred caterpillar resumed his march across the Appian Way, making
+of each crack between boards a great abyss to be bridged cautiously
+with his own body. The day's work was begun, while Davidge drowsed and
+smiled contentedly at the side of the strange, sleeping woman as if
+they had been married for years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The sky was filled with morning when a noise startled Davidge out of
+nullity. He was amazed to find a strange woman asleep at his elbow. He
+remembered her suddenly.
+
+With a clatter of wheels and cans and hoofs a milkman's wagon and team
+came out of the hills. Davidge stepped down from the car and stopped
+the loud-voiced, wide-mouthed driver with a gesture. He spoke in a low
+voice which the milkman did not copy. The taxi-driver woke to the
+extent of one eye and a horrible yawn, while Davidge explained his
+plight.
+
+"Gasolene gave out, hey?" said the milkman.
+
+"It certainly did," said Davidge, "and I'd be very much obliged if
+you'd get me some more."
+
+"Wa-all, I'm purty busy."
+
+"I'll pay you anything you ask."
+
+The milkman was modest in his ambitions.
+
+"How'd two dollars strike ye?"
+
+"Five would be better if you hurried."
+
+This looked suspicious, but the milkman consented.
+
+"Wa-all, all right, but what would I fetch the gasolene in?"
+
+"One of your milk-cans."
+
+"They're all fuller melk."
+
+"I'll buy one, milk and all."
+
+"Wa-all, I reckon I'll hev to oblige you."
+
+"Here's five dollars on account. There'll be five more when you get
+back."
+
+"Wa-all, all ri-ight. Get along there, Jawn Henry."
+
+John Henry got along. Even his _cloppety-clop_ did not waken Miss
+Webling.
+
+The return of the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with
+the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion,
+finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three
+strange men at work outside.
+
+When the tank was filled, Davidge entered her compartment with a
+cheery "Good morning," and slammed the door after him. The gasolene,
+like the breath of a god, gave life to the dead. The car snarled and
+jumped, and went roaring across the bridge, up the hill and down
+another, and down that and up another.
+
+Here they caught, through a frame of leaves, a glimpse of Washington
+in the sunrise, a great congregation of marble temples and trees and
+sky-colored waters, the shaft of the Monument lighted with the milky
+radiance of a mountain peak on its upper half, the lower part still
+dusk with valley shadow, and across the plateau of roofs the solemn
+Capitol in as mythical a splendor as the stately dome that Kubla Khan
+decreed in Xanadu.
+
+This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury to the
+taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he reached Rosslyn
+once more, crossed the Potomac's many-tinted stream, and rattled
+through Georgetown and the shabby, sleeping little shops of M Street
+into the tree-tunnels of Washington.
+
+He paused to say, "Where do we go from here?"
+
+Davidge and Marie Louise looked their chagrin. They still had no place
+to go.
+
+"To the Pennsylvania Station," said Davidge. "We can at least get
+breakfast there."
+
+The streets of Washington are never so beautiful as at this still hour
+when nothing stirs but the wind in the trees and the grass on the
+lawns, and hardly anybody is abroad except the generals on their
+bronze horses fronting their old battles with heroic eyes. The station
+outside was something Olympic but unfrequented. Inside, it was a vast
+cathedral of untenanted pews.
+
+Davidge paid the driver a duke's ransom. There was no porter about,
+and he carried Marie Louise's suit-cases to the parcel-room. Her
+baggage had had a long journey. She retreated to the women's room for
+what toilet she could make, and came forth with a very much washed
+face. Somnambulistic negroes took their orders at the lunch-counter.
+
+Marie Louise had weakly decided to return to New York again, but the
+hot coffee was full of defiance, and she said that she would make
+another try at Mrs. Widdicombe as soon as a human hour arrived.
+
+And she showed a tactfulness that won much respect from Davidge when
+she said:
+
+"Do get your morning paper and read it. I'm sure I have nothing to say
+that I haven't said, and if I had, it could wait till you find out how
+the battle goes in Europe."
+
+He bought her a paper, too, and they sat on a long bench, exchanging
+comments on the news that made almost every front page a chapter in
+world history.
+
+She heard him groan with rage. When she looked up he pointed to the
+submarine record of that week.
+
+"Last week the losses took a horrible jump--forty ships of over
+sixteen hundred tons. This week it's almost as bad--thirty-eight
+ships of over sixteen hundred, thirteen ships under, and eight
+fishing-vessels. Think of it--all of 'em merchant-ships!
+
+"Pretty soon I've got to send my ship out to run the gantlet. She's
+like Little Red Riding Hood going through the forest to take old
+Granny Britain some food. And the wolves are waiting for her. What a
+race of people, what a pack of beasts!"
+
+Marie Louise had an idea. "I'll tell you a pretty name for your
+ship--_Little Red Riding Hood_. Why don't you give her that?"
+
+He laughed. "The name would be heavier than the cargo. I wonder what
+the crew would make of it. No, this ship, my first one, is to be named
+after"--he lowered his voice as one does on entering a church--"after
+my mother."
+
+"Oh, that's beautiful!" Marie Louise said. "And will she be there to
+christen-- Oh, I remember, you said--"
+
+He nodded three or four times in wretchedness. But the grief was his
+own, and he must not exploit it. He assumed an abrupt cheer.
+
+"I'll name the next ship after you, if you don't mind."
+
+This was too glorious to be believed. What bouquet or jewel could
+equal it? She clapped her hands like a child hearing a Christmas
+promise.
+
+"What is your first name, Miss Webling?"
+
+She suddenly realized that they were not, after all, such old friends
+as the night had seemed to make them.
+
+"My first two names," she said, "are Marie Louise."
+
+"Oh! Well, then we'll call the ship _Marie Louise_."
+
+She saw that he was a little disappointed in the name, so she said:
+
+"When I was a girl they called me Mamise."
+
+She was puzzled to see how this startled him.
+
+He jumped audibly and fastened a searching gaze on her. Mamise! He had
+thought of Mamise when he saw her, and now she gave the name. Could
+she possibly be the Mamise he remembered? He started to ask her, but
+checked himself and blushed. A fine thing it would be to ask this
+splendid young princess, "Pardon me, Princess, but were you playing in
+cheap vaudeville a few years ago?" It was an improbable coincidence
+that he should meet her thus, but an almost impossible coincidence
+that she should wear both the name and the mien of Mamise and not be
+Mamise. But he dared not ask her.
+
+She noted his blush and stammer, but she was afraid to ask their
+cause.
+
+"_Mamise_ it shall be," he said.
+
+And she answered, "I was never so honored in my life."
+
+"Of course," he warned her, "the boat isn't built yet. In fact, the
+new yard isn't built yet. There's many a slip 'twixt the keel and the
+ship. She might never live to be launched. Some of these sneaking
+loafers on our side may blow her up before the submarines get a chance
+at her."
+
+There he was, speaking of submarines once more! She shivered, and she
+looked at the clock and got up and said:
+
+"I think I'll try Mrs. Widdicombe now."
+
+"Let me go along," said Davidge.
+
+But she shook her head. "I've taken enough of your life--for the
+present."
+
+Trying to concoct a felicitous reply, he achieved only an eloquent
+silence. He put her and her luggage aboard a taxicab, and then she
+gave him her most cordial hand.
+
+"I could never hope to thank you enough," she said, "and I won't begin
+to try. Send me your address when you have one, and I'll mail you Mrs.
+Widdicombe's confidential telephone number. I do want to see you soon
+again, unless you've had enough of me for a lifetime."
+
+He did very handsomely by the lead she gave him:
+
+"I couldn't have enough--not in a lifetime."
+
+The taxi-driver snipped the strands of their gaze as he whisked her
+away.
+
+Marie Louise felt a forenoon elation in the cool air and the bright
+streets, thick with men and women in herds hurrying to their patriotic
+tasks, and a multitude of officers and enlisted men seeking their
+desks. She was here to join them, and she hoped that it would not be
+too hard to find some job with a little thrill of service in it.
+
+As she went through Georgetown now M Street was different--full of
+marketers and of briskness. The old bridge was crowded. As her car
+swooped up the hills and skirted the curves to Polly Widdicombe's she
+began to be afraid again. But she was committed to the adventure and
+she was eager for the worst of it. She found the house without trouble
+and saw in the white grove of columns Polly herself, bidding good-by
+to her husband, whose car was waiting at the foot of the steps.
+
+Polly hailed Marie Louise with cries of such delight that before the
+cab had made the circle and drawn up at the steps the hunted look was
+gone and youth come back to Marie Louise's anxious smile. Polly kissed
+her and presented her husband, pointing to the gold leaves on his
+shoulders with militaristic pride.
+
+Widdicombe blushed and said: "Fearless desk-fighter has to hurry off
+to battle with ruthless stenographers. Such are the horrors of war!"
+
+He insisted on paying Marie Louise's driver, though she said, "Women
+will never be free so long as men insist on paying all their bills."
+
+Polly said: "Hush, or the brute will set me free!"
+
+He kissed Polly, waved to Marie Louise, stepped into his car, and shot
+away.
+
+Polly watched him with devout eyes and said:
+
+"Poor boy! he's dying to get across into the trenches, but they won't
+take him because he's a little near-sighted, thank God! And he works
+like a dog, day and night." Then she returned to the rites of
+hospitality. "Had your breakfast?"
+
+"At the station." The truth for once coincided very pleasantly with
+convenience.
+
+"Then I know what you want," said Polly, "a bath and a nap. After that
+all-night train-trip you ought to be a wreck."
+
+"I am."
+
+Polly led her to a welcoming room that would have been quite pretty
+enough if it had had only a bed and a chair. Marie Louise felt as if
+she had come out of the wilderness into a city of refuge. Polly had an
+engagement, a committee meeting of women war-workers, and would not be
+back until luncheon-time. Marie Louise steeped herself in a hot tub,
+then in a long sweet sleep in a real bed. She was wakened by the
+voices of children, and looked out from her window to see the
+Widdicombe tots drilling in a company of three with a drum, a flag,
+and a wooden gun. The American army was not much bigger compared with
+the European nations in arms, but it would grow.
+
+Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman idea that
+was claiming half of the war, the true squaw-spirit that takes up the
+drudgery at home while the braves go out to swap missiles with the
+enemy. When Marie Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to
+get into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of
+opportunities.
+
+At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer was
+coming over from Washington. He had asked for sittings, and she had
+acceded to his request.
+
+"I never can get photographs enough of my homely self," said Polly.
+"I'm always hoping that by some accident the next one will make me
+look as I want to look--make ithers see me as I see mysel'!"
+
+When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie Louise must
+pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented at last, to quiet
+her. They spent a harrowing afternoon striking attitudes all over the
+place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths,
+profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the
+struggle to assume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul.
+
+The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation were
+far-reaching for Marie Louise.
+
+According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs
+appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The
+Sunday after that Marie Louise's likeness appeared with "Dolly
+Madison's" and Jean Elliott's syndicated letters on "The Week in
+Washington" in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now
+and then her likeness popped out at her from _Town and Country_,
+_Vogue_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _The Spur_, what not?
+
+One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who
+had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some
+time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in
+an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial
+drawing-room.
+
+He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it "Mamise"
+with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.
+
+"She's in this country now, the paper says," said Jake. "She's in
+Washington, and if I was you I'd write her a little letter astin' her
+is she our sister."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that "our." The more Jake
+considered the matter the less he liked the thought of waiting for a
+letter to go and an answer to come.
+
+"Meet 'em face to face; that's me!" he declared at last. "I think I'll
+just take a trip to the little old capital m'self. I can tell the rest
+the c'mittee I'm goin' to put a few things up to some them Senators
+and Congersmen. That'll get my expenses paid for me."
+
+There simply was nobody that Jake Nuddle would not cheat, if he
+could.
+
+His always depressing wife suggested: "Supposin' the lady says she
+ain't Mamise, how you goin' to prove she is? You never seen her."
+
+Jake snarled at her for a fool, but he knew that she was right. He
+resisted the dismal necessity as long as he could, and then extended
+one of his most cordial invitations:
+
+"Aw, hell! I reckon I'll have to drag you along."
+
+He grumbled and cursed his fate and resolved to make Mamise pay double
+for ruining his excursion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+For a time Marie Louise had the solace of being busy and of nibbling
+at the edge of great occasions. The nation was reconstituting its
+whole life, and Washington was the capital of all the Allied peoples,
+their brazen serpent and their promise of salvation. Almost everybody
+was doing with his or her might what his or her hand found to do.
+Repetition and contradiction of effort abounded; there was every
+confusion of counsel and of action. But the Republic was gathering
+itself for a mighty leap into the arena. For the first time women were
+being not merely permitted, but pleaded with, to lend their aid.
+
+Marie Louise rolled bandages at a Red Cross room presided over by a
+pleasant widow, Mrs. Perry Merithew, with a son in the aviation, who
+was forever needing bandages. Mamise tired of these, bought a car and
+joined the Women's Motor Corps. She had a collision with a reckless
+wretch named "Pet" Bettany, and resigned. She helped with big
+festivals, toiled day and night at sweaters, and finally bought
+herself a knitting-machine and spun out half a dozen pairs of socks a
+day, by keeping a sweatshop pace for sweatshop hours. She was trying
+to find a more useful job. The trouble was that everybody wanted to be
+at something, to get into a uniform of some sort, to join the
+universal mobilization.
+
+She went out little of evenings, preferring to keep herself in
+the seclusion of the Rosslyn home. Gradually her fears subsided
+and she felt that her welcome was wearing through. She began to
+look for a place to live. Washington was in a panic of rentals.
+Apartments cost more than houses. A modest creature who had paid
+seventy-five dollars a month for a little flat let it for five
+hundred a month for the duration of the war. A gorgeous Sultana
+who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment rented it
+for a thousand dollars a month "for the duration." Marie Louise had
+money enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would
+buy.
+
+She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices. She took
+up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books on system and
+efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.
+
+Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an intermittent
+fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was trying to do his bit, but
+he was lost in the maelstrom swirling through the channels of official
+life. He would come to town for a few days, wait about, fuming, and
+return in disgust to his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism
+that pulled him back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he
+lost several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because
+their hours clashed with Marie Louise's.
+
+On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel an
+invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero's. Little as he knew of the
+eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the famous name of
+Prothero. He had spoken with reverence always of her late husband, one
+of the rebuilders of the American navy, a voice crying in the
+wilderness for a revival of the ancient glories of the merchant
+marine. Davidge had never met him or his widow. He felt that he could
+not refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects to
+the relict of his idol.
+
+But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom everybody had heard
+of, had heard of him. When he entered her door on the designated
+evening his riddle was answered.
+
+The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on the console
+a little envelope which he proffered on his tray. The envelope was
+about the size of those that new-born parents use to inclose the
+proclamation of the advent of a new-born infant. The card inside
+Davidge's envelope carried the legend, "Miss Webling."
+
+The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced him. There
+indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a majestic granddam in a
+coronet of white hair.
+
+Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it. She clasped his
+and passed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a character:
+
+"This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright."
+
+Mrs. Prothero pressed his hand and kept it while she said: "It is
+like Marie Louise to bring youth to cheer up an old crone like me."
+
+Davidge muffed the opening horribly. Instead of saying something
+brilliant about how young Mrs. Prothero looked, he said:
+
+"Youth? I'm a hundred years old."
+
+"You are!" Mrs. Prothero cried. "Then how old does that make me, in
+the Lord's name--a million?"
+
+Davidge could not even recover the foot he had put in it. By looking
+foolish and keeping silent he barely saved himself from adding the
+other foot. Mrs. Prothero smiled at his discomfiture.
+
+"Don't worry. I'm too ancient to be caught by pretty speeches--or to
+like the men who have 'em always ready."
+
+She pressed his hand again and turned to welcome the financial
+Cyclops, James Dyckman, and his huge wife, and Captain Fargeton, a
+foreign military attaché with service chevrons and wound-chevrons and
+a _croix de guerre_, and a wife, who had been Mildred Tait.
+
+"All that and an American spouse!" said Davidge to Marie Louise.
+
+"Have you never had an American spouse?" she asked, brazenly.
+
+"Not one!" he confessed.
+
+Major and Polly Widdicombe had come in with Marie Louise, and Davidge
+drifted into their circle. The great room filled gradually with men of
+past or future fame, and the poor women who were concerned in enduring
+its acquisition.
+
+Marie Louise was radiant in mood and queenly in attire. Davidge was
+startled by the magnificence of her jewelry. Some of it was of old
+workmanship, royal heirloomry. Her accent was decidedly English, yet
+her race was undoubtedly American. The many things about her that had
+puzzled him subconsciously began to clamor at least for the attention
+of curiosity. He watched her making the best of herself, as a skilful
+woman does when she is all dressed up in handsome scenery among
+toplofty people.
+
+Polly was describing the guests as they came in:
+
+"That's Colonel Harvey Forbes. His name has been sent to Congress for
+approval as a brigadier-general. I knew him in the midst of the
+wildest scandal--remind me to tell you. He was only a captain then.
+He'll probably end as a king or something. This war is certainly good
+to some people."
+
+Davidge watched Marie Louise studying the somber officer. He was a bit
+jealous, shamed by his own civilian clothes. Suddenly Marie Louise's
+smile at Polly's chatter stopped short, shriveled, then returned to
+her face with a look of effort. Her muscles seemed to be determined
+that her lips should not droop.
+
+Davidge heard the butler announce:
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt and General Sir Hector Havendish."
+
+Davidge wondered which of the two names could have so terrified
+Marie Louise. Naturally he supposed that it was the man's. He turned
+to study the officer in his British uniform. He saw a tall,
+loose-jointed, jovial man of horsy look and carriage, and no hint of
+mystery--one would say an intolerance of mystery.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was equally amiable. She laughed and wrung the
+hands of Mrs. Prothero. They were like two school-girls met in another
+century.
+
+Davidge noted that Marie Louise turned her back and listened with
+extraordinary interest to Major Widdicombe's old story about an
+Irishman who did or said something or other. Davidge heard Mrs.
+Prothero say to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, with all the joy in the world:
+
+"Who do you suppose is here but our Marie Louise?"
+
+"Our Marie Louise?" Lady Clifton-Wyatt echoed, with a slight chill.
+
+"Yes, Marie Louise Webling. It was at her house that I met you. Where
+has the child got to? There she is."
+
+Without raising her voice she focused it between Marie Louise's
+shoulder-blades.
+
+"Marie Louise, my dear!"
+
+Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled
+forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's limber
+attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she
+would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she
+evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs.
+Prothero's home; so she bowed and murmured:
+
+"Ah, yis! How are you?"
+
+To Davidge's amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting the rebuff
+in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to
+Davidge's confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of
+cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas.
+She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen
+his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new
+fleet.
+
+Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had
+passed through so many women's wars that she had learned to
+ignore them even when--especially when--her drawing-room was the
+battleground.
+
+Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the
+butler.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the
+dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the
+current at the elbow of the pretty young girl, said to Davidge:
+
+"Are you taking me out or--"
+
+It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he mumbled:
+
+"I--I am sorry, but--er--Miss Webling--"
+
+"Oh! Ah!" said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. It was a very short "Oh!" and a
+very long "Ah!" a sort of gliding, crushing "Ah!" It went over him
+like a tank, leaving him flat.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt reached Sir Hector's arm in a few strides and
+unhooked him from the girl--also the girl from him. The girl was
+grateful. Sir Hector was used to disappointments.
+
+Davidge went to Marie Louise, who stood lonely and distraught. He felt
+ashamed of his word "sorry" and hoped she hadn't heard it. Silently
+and crudely he angled his arm, and she took it and went along with him
+in a somnambulism.
+
+Davidge, manlike, tried to cheer up his elbow-mate by a compliment. A
+man's first aid to a woman in distress is a compliment or a few pats
+of the hand. He said:
+
+"This is the second big dinner you and I have attended. There were
+bushels of flowers between us before, but I'd rather see your face
+than a ton of roses."
+
+The compliment fell out like a ton of coal. He did not like it at all.
+She seemed not to have heard him, for she murmured:
+
+"Yis, isn't it?"
+
+Then, as the occultists say, he went into the silence. There is
+nothing busier than a silence at a dinner. The effort to think with no
+outlet in speech kept up such a roaring in his head that he could
+hardly grasp what the rest were saying.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt sat at Davidge's right and kept invading his quiet
+communion with Marie Louise by making remarks of the utmost
+graciousness somehow fermented--like wine turned vinegar.
+
+"I wonder if you remember when we met in London, Mr. Davidge? It was
+just after the poor _Lusitania_ was sunk."
+
+"So it was," said Davidge.
+
+"It was at Sir Joseph Webling's. You knew he was dead, didn't you? Or
+did you?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Webling told me."
+
+"Oh, did she! I was curious to know."
+
+She cast a look past him at Marie Louise and saw that the girl was
+about ready to make a scene. She smiled and deferred further torture.
+
+Mrs. Prothero supervened. She had the beautiful theory that the way to
+make her guests happy was to get them to talking about themselves. She
+tried to draw Davidge out of his shell. But he talked about her
+husband instead, and of the great work he had done for the navy. He
+turned the tables of graciousness on her. Her nod recognized the
+chivalry; her lips smiled with pride in her husband's praise; her eyes
+glistened with an old regret made new. "He would have been useful
+now," she sighed.
+
+"He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new navy," said
+Davidge. "The thing we haven't got and have got to get is a merchant
+marine."
+
+He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself. He was
+still going strong when the dinner was finished.
+
+Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women away with
+her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone.
+
+Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind
+of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that
+seemed to cry "Help!" He wondered what the feud could be that threw
+Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the
+thought that she had a yellow streak in her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was kept in order by the
+presence of men. She knew that the least charming of attributes in
+masculine eyes are the female feline, the gift and art of claws.
+
+Men can be catty, too--tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline when they
+are not on their good behavior. There are times when the warning,
+"Gentlemen, there are ladies present," restores them to order as
+quickly as the entrance of a teacher turns a school-room of young
+savages into an assembly of young saints.
+
+The women in Mrs. Prothero's drawing-room could not hear any of the
+words the men mixed with their smoke, but they could hear now and then
+a muffled explosion of laughter of a quality that indicated what had
+provoked it.
+
+The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by their
+isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was like getting their
+minds out of tight corsets. They were not impatient for the men--as
+some of the men may have imagined. These women were of an age where
+they had something else to think of besides men. They had careers to
+make or keep among women as well as the men among men.
+
+The servants kept them on guard till the coffee, tobacco, and liqueurs
+were distributed. Then recess was declared. Marie Louise found herself
+on a huge tapestried divan provided with deep, soft cushions that held
+her like a quicksands. On one side of her was the mountainous Mrs.
+Dyckman resembling a stack of cushions cased in silk; on the other was
+Mildred Tait Fargeton, whose father had been ambassador to France.
+
+Marie Louise listened to their chatter with a frantic impatience.
+Polly was heliographing ironic messages with her eyes. Polly was
+hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler, who was furious at the
+Administration because it did not put all its transportation problems
+in her husband's hands. She would not have intrusted him with the
+buying of a spool of thread; but that was different.
+
+Mrs. Prothero was monopolized by Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Marie Louise
+could see that she herself was the theme of the talk, for Mrs.
+Prothero kept casting startled glances Marie-Louise-ward, and Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt glances of baleful stealth.
+
+Marie Louise had proved often enough that she was no coward, but
+even the brave turn poltroon when they fight without a sense of
+justification. Her pride told her that she ought to cross over to Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt and demand that she speak up. But her sense of guilt
+robbed her of her courage. And that oath she had given to Mr.
+Verrinder without the least reluctance now loomed before her as the
+greatest mistake of her life. Her sword and shield were both in pawn.
+
+She gave herself up for lost and had only one hope, that the men would
+not come in--especially that Ross Davidge would not come in in time to
+learn what Lady Clifton-Wyatt was so eager to publish. She gave Mrs.
+Prothero up for lost, too, and Polly. But she wanted to keep Ross
+Davidge fond of her.
+
+Then in a lull Mrs. Prothero spoke up sharply:
+
+"I simply can't believe it, my dear. I don't know that I ever saw a
+German spy, but that child is not one. I'd stake my life on it."
+
+"And now the avalanche!" thought Marie Louise.
+
+The word "spy" was beginning to have more than an academic or
+fictional interest to Americans, and it caught the ear of every person
+present.
+
+Mrs. Dyckman and Mme. Fargeton sat up as straight as their curves
+permitted and gasped:
+
+"A German spy! Who? Where?"
+
+Polly Widdicombe sprang to her feet and darted to Mrs. Prothero's
+side.
+
+"Oh, how lovely! Tell me who she is! I'm dying to shoot a spy."
+
+Marie Louise sickened at the bloodthirstiness of Polly the insouciante.
+
+Mrs. Prothero tried to put down the riot of interest by saying:
+
+"Oh, it's nothing. Lady Clifton-Wyatt is just joking."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was at bay. She shot a glance at Marie Louise and
+insisted:
+
+"Indeed I'm not! I tell you she is a spy."
+
+"Who's a spy?" Polly demanded.
+
+"Miss Webling," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+
+Polly began to giggle; then she frowned with disappointment.
+
+"Oh, I thought you meant it."
+
+"I do mean it, and if you'll take my advice you'll be warned in
+time."
+
+Polly turned, expecting to find Marie Louise showing her contemptuous
+amusement, but the look she saw on Marie Louise's face was disconcerting.
+Polly's loyalty remained staunch. She hated Lady Clifton-Wyatt anyway,
+and the thought that she might be telling the truth made her a little
+more hatable. Polly stormed:
+
+"I won't permit you to slander my best friend."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt replied, "I don't slahnda hah, and if she is yaw
+best friend--well--"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt hated Polly and was glad of the weapon against her.
+Polly felt a sudden terrific need of retorting with a blow. Men had
+never given up the fist on the mouth as the simple, direct answer to
+an insult too complicated for any other retort. She wanted to slap
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt's face. But she did not know how to fight. Perhaps
+women will acquire the male prerogative of the smash in the jaw along
+with the other once exclusive masculine privileges. It will do them no
+end of good and help to clarify all life for them. But for the present
+Polly could only groan, "Agh!" and turn to throw an arm about Marie
+Louise and drag her forward.
+
+"I'd believe one word of Marie Louise against a thousand of yours,"
+she declared.
+
+"Very well--ahsk hah, then."
+
+Polly was crying mad, and madder than ever because she hated herself
+for crying when she got mad. She almost sobbed now to Marie Louise,
+"Tell her it's a dirty, rotten lie."
+
+Marie Louise had been dragged to her feet. She temporized, "What has
+she sai-said?"
+
+Polly snickered nervously, "Oh, nothing--except that you were a German
+spy."
+
+And now somewhere, somehow, Marie Louise found the courage of
+desperation. She laughed:
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt is notori--famous for her quaint sense of humor."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt sneered, "Could one expect a spy to admit it?"
+
+Marie Louise smiled patiently. "Probably not. But surely even you
+would hardly insist that denying it proves it?"
+
+This sophistry was too tangled for Polly. She spoke up:
+
+"Let's have the details, Lady Clifton-Wyatt--if you don't mind."
+
+"Yes, yes," the chorus murmured.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt braced herself. "Well, in the first place Miss
+Webling is not Miss Webling."
+
+"Oh, but I am," said Marie Louise.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt gasped, "You don't mean to pretend that--"
+
+"Did you read the will?" said Marie Louise.
+
+"No, of course not, but--"
+
+"It says there that I was their daughter."
+
+"Well, we'll not quibble. Legally you may have been, but actually you
+were their adopted child."
+
+"Yis?" said Marie Louise. "And where did they find me? Had you
+heard?"
+
+"Since you force me to it, I must say that it is generally believed
+that you were the natural daughter of Sir Joseph."
+
+Marie Louise was tremendously relieved by having something that she
+could deny. She laughed with a genuineness that swung the credulity
+all her way. She asked:
+
+"And who was my mother--my natural mother, could you tell me? I really
+ought to know."
+
+"She is believed to have been a--a native of Australia."
+
+"Good Heavens! You don't mean a kangaroo?"
+
+"An actress playing in Vienna."
+
+"Oh, I am relieved! And Sir Joseph was my father--yes. Do go on."
+
+"Whether Sir Joseph was your father or not, he was born in Germany and
+so was his wife, and they took a false oath of allegiance to his
+Majesty. All the while they were loyal only to the Kaiser. They worked
+for him, spied for him. It is said that the Kaiser had promised to
+make Sir Joseph one of the rulers over England when he captured the
+island. Sir Joseph was to have any castle he wanted and untold
+wealth."
+
+"What was I to have?" Marie Louise was able to mock her. "Wasn't I to
+have at least Westminster Abbey to live in? And one of the crown
+princes for a husband?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt lost her temper and her bearings.
+
+"Heaven knows what you were promised, but you did your best to earn
+it, whatever it was."
+
+Mrs. Prothero lost patience. "Really, my dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, this
+is all getting beyond me."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt grew scarlet, too. She spoke with the wrath of a
+Tisiphone whipping herself to a frenzy. "I will bring you proofs. This
+creature was a paid secret agent, a go-between for Sir Joseph and the
+Wilhelmstrasse. She carried messages. She went into the slums of
+Whitechapel disguised as a beggar to meet the conspirators. She
+carried them lists of ships with their cargoes, dates of sailing,
+destinations. She carried great sums of money. She was the paymaster
+of the spies. Her hands are red with the blood of British sailors and
+women and children. She grew so bold that at last she attracted the
+attention of even Scotland Yard. She was followed, traced to Sir
+Joseph's home. It was found that she lived at his house.
+
+"One of the spies, named Easling or Oesten, was her lover. He was
+caught and met his deserts before a firing-squad in the Tower. His
+confession implicated Sir Joseph. The police raided his place. A
+terrific fight ensued. He resisted arrest. He tried to shoot one of
+our police. The bullet went wild and killed his wife. Before he could
+fire again he was shot down by one of our men."
+
+The astonishing transformations the story had undergone in its transit
+from gossip to gossip stunned Marie Louise. The memory of the reality
+saddened her beyond laughter. Her distress was real, but she had
+self-control enough to focus it on Lady Clifton-Wyatt and murmur:
+
+"Poor thing, she is quite mad!"
+
+There is nothing that so nearly drives one insane as to be accused of
+insanity.
+
+The prosecutrix almost strangled on her indignation at Marie Louise's
+calm.
+
+"The effrontery of this woman is unendurable, Mrs. Prothero. If you
+believe her, you must permit me to leave. I know what I am saying. I
+have had what I tell you from the best authority. Of course, it may
+sound insane, but wait until you learn what the German secret agents
+have been doing in America for years and what they are doing now."
+
+There had been publication enough of the sickening duplicity of
+ambassadors and attachés to lead the Americans to believe that
+Teutonism meant anything revolting. Mrs. Prothero was befuddled at
+this explosion in her quiet home. She asked:
+
+"But surely all this has never been published, has it? I think we
+should have heard of it here."
+
+"Of course not," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. "We don't publish the
+accounts of the submarines we sink, do we? No more do we tell the
+Germans what spies of theirs we have captured. And, since Sir Joseph
+and his wife were dead, there would have been no profit in publishing
+broadcast the story of the battle. So they agreed to let it be known
+that they died peacefully or rather painfully in their beds, of
+ptomaine poisoning."
+
+"That's true," said Mrs. Prothero. "That's what I read. That's what
+I've always understood."
+
+Now, curiously, as often happens in court, the discovery that a
+witness has stumbled on one truth in a pack of lies renders all he has
+said authentic and shifts the guilt to the other side. Marie Louise
+could feel the frost of suspicion against her forming in the air.
+
+Polly made one more onset: "But, tell me, Lady Clifton-Wyatt, where
+was Marie Louise during all this Wild West End pistol-play?"
+
+"In her room with her lover," snarled Lady Clifton-Wyatt. "The
+servants saw her there."
+
+This threw a more odious light on Marie Louise. She was not merely a
+nice clean spy, but a wanton.
+
+Polly groaned: "Tell that to Scotland Yard! I'd never believe it."
+
+"Scotland Yard knows it without my telling," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+
+"But how did Marie Louise come to escape and get to America?"
+
+"Because England did not want to shoot a woman, especially not a
+young woman of a certain prettiness. So they let her go, when she
+swore that she would never return to England. But they did not trust
+her. She is under observation now! Your home is watched, my dear Mrs.
+Widdicombe, and I dare say there is a man on guard outside now, my
+dear Mrs. Prothero."
+
+This sent a chill along every spine. Marie Louise was frightened out
+of her own brief bravado.
+
+There was a lull in the trial while everybody reveled in horror. Then
+Mrs. Prothero spoke in a judicial tone.
+
+"And now, Miss Webling, please tell us your side of all this. What
+have you to say in your own behalf?"
+
+Marie Louise's mouth suddenly turned dry as bark; her tongue was like
+a dead leaf. She was inarticulate with remembrance of her oath to
+Verrinder. She just managed to whisper:
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+It sounded like an autumn leaf rasping across a stone. Polly cried out
+in agony:
+
+"Marie Louise!"
+
+Marie Louise shook her head and could neither think nor speak. There
+was a hush of waiting. It was broken by the voices of the men
+strolling in together. They were utterly unwelcome. They stopped and
+stared at the women all staring at Marie Louise.
+
+Seeing Davidge about to ask what the tableau stood for, she found
+voice to say:
+
+"Mr. Davidge, would you be so good as to take me home--to Mrs.
+Widdicombe's, that is. I--I am a little faint."
+
+"Delighted! I mean--I'm sorry--I'd be glad," he stammered, eager to be
+at her service, yet embarrassed by the sudden appeal.
+
+"You'll pardon me, Mrs. Prothero, for running away!"
+
+"Of course," said Mrs. Prothero, still dazed.
+
+He bowed to her, and all round. Marie Louise nodded and whispered,
+"Good night!" and moved toward the door waveringly. Davidge's heart
+leaped with pity for her.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt checked him as he hurried past her.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davidge, I'm stopping at the Shoreham. Won't you drop in and
+have a cup of tea with me to-morrow at hahf pahst fah?"
+
+"Thank you! Yes!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The intended victim of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's little lynching-bee walked
+away, holding her head high. But she felt the noose still about her
+neck and wondered when the rope would draw her back and up.
+
+Marie Louise marched through Mrs. Prothero's hall in excellent form,
+with just the right amount of dizziness to justify her escape on the
+plea of sudden illness. The butler, like a benign destiny, opened the
+door silently and let her out into the open as once before in London a
+butler had opened a door and let her into the welcome refuge of
+walls.
+
+She gulped the cool night air thirstily, and it gave her courage.
+But it gave her no wisdom. She had indeed got away from Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt's direct accusation of being a spy and she had brought
+with her unscathed the only man whose good opinion was important to
+her. But she did not know what she wanted to do with him, except that
+she did not want him to fall into Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hands--in
+which she had left her reputation.
+
+Polly Widdicombe would have gone after Marie Louise forthwith, but
+Polly did not intend to leave her pet foewoman in possession of the
+field--not that she loved Marie Louise more, but that she loved Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt less. Polly was dazed and bewildered by Marie Louise's
+defection, but she would not accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt's version of
+this story or of any other.
+
+Besides, Polly gleaned that Marie Louise wanted to be alone, and she
+knew that the best gift friendship can bestow at times is solitude.
+The next best gift is defense in absence. Polly announced that she
+would not permit her friend to be traduced; and Lady Clifton-Wyatt,
+seeing that the men had flocked in from the dining-room and knowing
+that men always discount one woman's attack on another as mere
+cattiness, assumed her most angelic mien and changed the subject.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+As usual in retreats, the first problem was transportation. Marie
+Louise found herself and Davidge outside Mrs. Prothero's door, with no
+means of getting to Rosslyn. She had come in the Widdicombe car;
+Davidge had come in a hotel cab and sent it away. Luckily at last a
+taxi returning to the railroad terminal whizzed by. Davidge yelled in
+vain. Then he put his two fingers to his mouth and let out a short
+blast that brought the taxi-driver round. In accordance with the
+traffic rules, he had to make the circuit of the big statue-crowned
+circle in front of Mrs. Prothero's home, one of those numerous hubs
+that give Washington the effect of what some one called "revolving
+streets."
+
+When he drew up at the curb Davidge's first question was:
+
+"How's your gasolene supply?"
+
+"Full up, boss."
+
+Marie Louise laughed. "You don't want to spend another night in a taxi
+with me, I see."
+
+Davidge writhed at this deduction. He started to say, "I'd be glad to
+spend the rest of my life in a taxi with you." That sounded a little
+too flamboyant, especially with a driver listening in. So he said
+nothing but "Huh!"
+
+He explained to the driver the route to Grinden Hall, and they set
+forth.
+
+Marie Louise had a dilemma of her own. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had had the
+last word, and it had been an invitation to Davidge to call on her.
+Worse yet, he had accepted it. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's purpose was, of
+course, to rob Marie Louise of this last friend. Perhaps the wretch
+had a sentimental interest in Davidge, too. She was a widow and a
+man-grabber; she still had a tyrannic beauty and a greed of conquest.
+Marie Louise was determined that Davidge should not fall into her
+clutches, but she could hardly exact a promise from him to stay away.
+
+The taxi was crossing the aqueduct bridge before she could brave
+the point. She was brazen enough to say, "You'll accept Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt's invitation to tea, of course?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," said Davidge. "No American woman can resist a
+lord; so how could an American man resist a Lady?"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+This helpless syllable expressed another defeat for Marie Louise. When
+they reached the house she bade him good night without making any
+arrangement for a good morrow, though Davidge held her hand decidedly
+longer than ever before.
+
+She stood on the portico and watched his cab drive off. She gazed
+toward Washington and did not see the dreamy constellation it made
+with the shaft of the Monument ghostly luminous as if with a
+phosphorescence of its own. She felt an outcast indeed. She imagined
+Polly hurrying back to ask questions that could not be dodged any
+longer. She had no right to defend herself offensively from the
+rightful demands of a friend and hostess. Besides, the laws of
+hospitality would not protect her from Polly's temper. Polly would
+have a perfect right to order her from the house. And she would, too,
+when she knew everything. It would be best to decamp before being
+asked to.
+
+Marie Louise whirled and sped into the house, rang for the maid, and
+said:
+
+"My trunks! Please have them brought down--or up, from wherever they
+are, will you?"
+
+"Your trunks, miss!"
+
+"And a taxicab. I shall have to leave at once."
+
+"But--oh, I am sorry. Shall I help you pack?"
+
+"Thank you, no--yes--no!"
+
+The maid went out with eyes popping, wondering what earthquake had
+sent the guest home alone for such a headlong exit.
+
+Things flew in the drowsy house, and Marie Louise's chamber looked
+like the show-room of a commercial traveler for a linen-house when
+Polly appeared at the door and gasped:
+
+"What in the name of--I didn't know you were sick enough to be
+delirious!"
+
+She came forward through an archipelago of clothes to where Marie
+Louise was bending over a trunk. Polly took an armload of things away
+from her and put them back in the highboy. As she set her arms akimbo
+and stood staring at Marie Louise with a lovable and loving insolence,
+she heard the sound of a car rattling round the driveway, and her
+first words were:
+
+"Who's coming here at this hour?"
+
+"That's the taxi for me," Marie Louise explained.
+
+Polly turned to the maid, "Go down and send it away--no, tell the
+driver to go to the asylum for a strait-jacket."
+
+The maid smiled and left. Marie Louise was afraid to believe her own
+hopes.
+
+"You don't mean you want me to stay, do you--not after what that woman
+said?"
+
+"Do you imagine for a moment," returned Polly, "that I'd ever believe
+a word that cat could utter? Good Lord! if Lady Clifton-Wyatt told me
+it was raining and I could see it was, I'd know it wasn't and put down
+my umbrella."
+
+Marie Louise rejoiced at the trust implied, but she could not make a
+fool of so loyal a friend. She spoke with difficulty:
+
+"What if what she said was the truth, or, anyway, a kind of burlesque
+of it?"
+
+"Marie Louise!" Polly gasped, and plounced into a chair. "Tell me the
+truth this minute, the true truth."
+
+Marie Louise was perishing for a confidante. She had gone about as far
+without one as a normal woman can. She sat wondering how to begin,
+twirling her rings on her fingers. "Well, you see--you see--it is true
+that I'm not Sir Joseph's daughter. I was born in a little village--in
+America--Wakefield--out there in the Middle West. I ran away from
+home, and--"
+
+She hesitated, blanched, blushed, skipped over the years she tried not
+to think of and managed never to speak of. She came down to:
+
+"Well, anyway, at last I was in Berlin--on the stage--"
+
+"You were an actress?" Polly gasped.
+
+Marie Louise confessed, "Well, I'd hardly say that."
+
+She told Polly what she had told Mr. Verrinder of the appearance of
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, of their thrill at her resemblance to
+their dead daughter, of their plea that she leave the stage and enter
+their family, of her new life, and the outbreak of the war.
+
+Major Widdicombe pounded on the door and said: "Are you girls going to
+talk all night? I've got to get up at seven and save the country."
+
+Polly cried to him, "Go away," and to Marie Louise, "Go on."
+
+Marie Louise began again, but just as she reached the first suspicions
+of Sir Joseph's loyalty she remembered the oath she had plighted to
+Verrinder and stopped short.
+
+"I forgot! I can't!"
+
+Polly groaned: "Oh, my God! You're not going to stop there! I loathe
+serials."
+
+Marie Louise shook her head. "If only I could tell you; but I just
+can't! That's all; I can't!"
+
+Polly turned her eyes up in despair. "Well, I might as well go to bed,
+I suppose. But I sha'n't sleep a wink. Tell me one thing, though. You
+weren't really a German spy, were you?"
+
+"No, no! Of course not! I loathe everything German."
+
+"Well, let the rest rest, then. So long as Lady Clifton-Wyatt is a
+liar I can stand the strain. If you had been a spy, I suppose I'd have
+to shoot you or something; but so long as you're not, you don't budge
+out of this house. Is that understood?"
+
+Marie Louise nodded with a pathetic gratitude, and Polly stamped a
+kiss on her brow like a notarial seal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The next morning's paper announced that spring had officially arrived
+and been recognized at the Capitol--a certain Senator had taken off
+his wig. Washington accepted this as the sure sign that the weather
+was warm. It would not be officially autumn till that wig fell back
+into place.
+
+There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual
+flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts Avenue. The
+famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it, and flaunted little
+fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the Louise Home replied by
+setting their magnolia-trees on fire with flowers like lamps, flowers
+that hurried out ahead of their own leaves and then broke and covered
+the ground with great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy
+Terrace put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more
+gorgeous--irises in a row of blue, blue footlights.
+
+The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses of
+an earlier régime, kept their state, had the last word, the word that
+could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria, wistful lavender
+clusters weeping from the trellises in languorous grace.
+
+Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn, felt in the
+wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were brisk with hope. The
+river went its way in a more sparkling flow. The air blew from the
+very fountains of youth with a teasing blarney. She thought of Ross
+Davidge and smiled tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But
+she frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She
+wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate that woman.
+
+Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that she had
+forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered her in the
+chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He was out. She pursued
+him by wire travel till she found him in an office of the Shipping
+Board. He talked on the corner of a busy man's desk. She heard the
+busy man say with a taunting voice, "A lady for you, Davidge."
+
+She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was in for it now,
+and she felt silly when she explained why she bothered him. But she
+was stubborn, too. When he understood, he laughed with the constraint
+of a man bandying enforced gallantries on another man's telephone.
+
+"I'd hate to be as honest as all that."
+
+"It's not honesty," she persisted. "It's selfishness. I can't rest
+while the debt is on my mind."
+
+He was perplexed. "I've got to see several men on the Shipping Board.
+There's a big fight on between the wooden-ship fellows and the
+steel-ship men, and I'm betwixt and between 'em. I won't have time to
+run out to see you."
+
+"I shouldn't dream of asking you. I was coming in to town, anyway."
+
+"Oh! Well, then--well--er--when can I meet you?"
+
+"Whenever you say! The Willard at--When shall you be free?"
+
+"Not before four and then only for half an hour."
+
+"Four it is."
+
+"Fine! Thank you ever so much. I'll buy me a lot of steel with all
+that money you owe me."
+
+Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the
+telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize
+Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose
+office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she
+had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce
+with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
+
+Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be
+only to-day's battle. There would still be to-morrows and the
+day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to
+Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from
+Washington would be the only safety.
+
+But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved
+Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important
+work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live
+on at Polly Widdicombe's forever.
+
+Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of
+her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was
+there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked
+at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were
+costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone,
+anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more
+easily be kept aloof.
+
+She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as
+affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places
+she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places
+that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented
+yesterday.
+
+Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr.
+Hailstorks:
+
+"Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it
+if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for
+a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is
+getting to be quite a bore.'"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.
+
+He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely
+furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs,
+rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have
+achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does,
+what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things
+to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.
+
+Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear
+of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard,
+Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The
+house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream
+ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession
+of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill
+superbly built up above the silver Thames.
+
+"Whatever is all that?" she cried.
+
+"Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere
+real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of
+adjoining property and made renting easier.
+
+"And what's the price of all this grandeur?"
+
+"Only three hundred a month," said Mr. Hailstorks.
+
+"Only!" gasped Marie Louise.
+
+"It will be four hundred in a week or two--yes ma'am," said Mr.
+Hailstorks.
+
+So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.
+
+She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private
+game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The
+park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost
+in--with Ross Davidge.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was
+waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the
+car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.
+
+He said what she hoped he would say:
+
+"I didn't know you drove so well."
+
+She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.'
+Hop in, and I'll show you."
+
+He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of
+her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had
+an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that
+he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked
+round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth
+Street, fast and far.
+
+She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her
+out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking
+that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with
+some other body's child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and
+she had apparently forgotten it again.
+
+They were well to the north when she said:
+
+"Do you know Rock Creek Park?"
+
+"No, I've never been in it."
+
+"Would you like a glimpse? I think it's the prettiest park in the
+world."
+
+She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming
+almost universal and gasped:
+
+"Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it's just about as short to go
+through the park. I mustn't make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt's
+tea."
+
+He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except, "It's mighty
+pretty along here." She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the
+long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the
+south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight
+through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing
+charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling
+and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges
+and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling
+among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood,
+and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the
+water's edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were
+being celebrated on the grass.
+
+"I always lose my way in this park," she said. "I expect I'm lost
+now."
+
+She began to regret Davidge's approaching absence, with a strange
+loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed,
+hardly meaning to speak aloud, "Too bad you're going away so soon."
+
+He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He
+spoke with an affectionate reassurance.
+
+She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and
+gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The élan of
+rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.
+
+"I'll tell you what we'll do. The next time I come to Washington you
+drive me over to my shipyard and I'll show you the new boat and the
+new yard for the rest of the flock."
+
+"That would be glorious. I should like to know something about
+ships."
+
+"I can teach you all I know in a little while."
+
+"You know all there is to know, don't you?"
+
+"Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old
+methods, but they're all done away with. The fabricated ship is an
+absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What
+few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know.
+Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along
+to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
+
+"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot
+of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such
+a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara
+Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard.
+Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who
+tried to sweep the tide back with a broom."
+
+He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly
+saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire
+from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to
+bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent
+he had been, and subsided with a slump.
+
+"What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!"
+
+She rose at that. "The day has passed when a man can apologize for
+talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know,
+and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting
+better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never
+go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and
+have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval
+officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm
+going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up."
+
+"Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel.
+He apologized again for his roughness.
+
+"I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said.
+
+As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as
+with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.
+
+"Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once."
+
+"Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another
+engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I
+hadn't."
+
+They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering
+the sweet sorrow of parting.
+
+The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and
+gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new
+and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.
+
+Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of
+ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was
+herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young
+womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of
+desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight
+by the Diana that is also there.
+
+Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as
+he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her
+dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and
+love began to blaze within him.
+
+He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to
+his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity
+perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no
+colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish
+something worth while.
+
+As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:
+
+"Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I'm late to
+dinner."
+
+She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
+
+Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever
+into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of
+the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name.
+This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away
+before he could overtake her.
+
+Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss
+Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall
+pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a
+forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women,
+too.
+
+The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly
+with the Teutonic _r_. Davidge studied him and began to remember him.
+He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind,
+ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of
+Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's
+home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for
+anybody he hates.
+
+He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting
+after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious.
+But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and
+turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
+
+Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as
+an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of
+some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic
+accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew
+of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German
+accent. An icy fear chilled him.
+
+His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness
+that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had
+exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a
+governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude,
+and endless trouble.
+
+Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
+
+"Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a
+woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so
+afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe's? Why was
+she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in
+such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero's dinner, and to keep
+me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much
+German association?"
+
+He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of
+them so wild as the truth--that Marie Louise was cowering under the
+accusation of being a German agent.
+
+He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the
+employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his
+hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his
+riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then
+thinking of ships and not of him.
+
+That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of
+Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the
+family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered
+the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of
+novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They
+were the very latest romance to her now.
+
+The authors of _An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the
+Compass in Iron Ships_, _The Marine Steam-engine_, and _An Outline
+of Ship-building_, _Theoretical and Practical_, could hardly have
+dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace
+of a young woman's arms. The books would have struck a naval architect
+as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of
+news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand
+with ease was Captain Samuels's _From the Forecastle to the
+Cabin_, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his
+youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
+_Dreadnaught_, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of
+American marine glory.
+
+She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and
+dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another
+book, Bowditch's _American Navigation_. It was the "Revised Edition of
+1883," but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the
+reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her
+shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their
+cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off
+the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the
+alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists
+to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none
+stranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock
+off work early.
+
+Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife's prerogatives.
+On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the
+black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven
+of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the
+curtains, "S'em o'clock, please!" did not please Jake at all.
+
+He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then
+began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small
+wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were
+dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got
+in each other's way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found
+his wife's stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings
+seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her
+corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out
+of it sputtering:
+
+"That's your damned shimmy. Where's my damned shirt?"
+
+Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left
+the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had
+breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the
+Capitol. It inspired in Jake's heart no national reverence. He said to
+his awestruck wife:
+
+"There's where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet and agree
+on their hold-ups. They're all the hirelings of the capitalists.
+
+"They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They
+didn't dare consult 'em. They knew the people wasn't in favor of no
+such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and
+them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that
+wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States
+joined the Allies and collected for 'em off Germany."
+
+It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of
+horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept
+rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was
+thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium,
+the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British
+dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed
+on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage,
+took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche
+across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and
+ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable,
+immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there
+was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate,
+croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot
+of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real working-men.
+
+Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to him who has
+the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its
+ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what
+he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not
+feel, he grew maudlin:
+
+"So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves and send 'em
+off to the slaughter-house in France--all for money! Anything to grind
+down the honest workman into the dust, no matter how many mothers'
+hearts they break!"
+
+Jake was one of those who never express sympathy for anybody except in
+the course of a tirade against somebody else. He had small use for
+wives, mothers, or children except as clubs to pound rich men with.
+His wife, who knew him all too well, was not impressed by his
+eloquence. Her typical answer to his typical tirade was, "I wonder how
+on earth we're goin' to find Mamise."
+
+Jake groaned at the anticlimax to his lofty flight, but he realized
+that the main business before the house was what his wife propounded.
+
+He remembered seeing an Information Bureau sign in the station. He had
+learned from the newspaper in which he had seen Mamise's picture that
+she was visiting Major Widdicombe. He had written the name down on the
+tablets of his memory, and his first plan was to find Major
+Widdicombe. Jake had a sort of wolfish cunning in tracing people he
+wanted to meet. He could always find anybody who might lend him money.
+He had mysterious difficulties in tracing some one who could give him
+work.
+
+He left his wife to simmer in the station while he set forth on a
+scouting expedition. After much travel he found at last the office of
+the Ordnance Department, in which Major Widdicombe toiled, and he
+appeared at length at Major Widdicombe's desk.
+
+Jake was cautious. He would not state his purpose. He hardly dared to
+claim relationship with Miss Webling until he was positive that she
+was his sister-in-law. Noting Jake's evasiveness, the Major discreetly
+evaded the request for his guest's address. He would say no more
+than:
+
+"Miss Webling is coming down to lunch with me at the--that is with my
+wife. I'll tell her you're looking for her; if she wants to meet you,
+I'll tell you, if you come back here."
+
+"All right, mucher bliged," said Jake. Baffled and without further
+recourse, he left the Major's presence, since there seemed to be
+nothing else to do. But once outside, he felt that there had been
+something highly unsatisfactory about the parley. He decided to
+imitate Mary's little lamb and to hang about the building till the
+Major should appear. In an hour or two he was rewarded by seeing
+Widdicombe leave the door and step into an automobile. Jake heard him
+tell the driver, "The Shoreham."
+
+Jake walked to the hotel and saw Marie Louise seated at a table by a
+window. He recognized her by her picture and was duly triumphant. He
+was ready to advance and demand recognition. Then he realized that he
+could make no claim on her without his awful wife's corroboration. He
+took a street-car back to the station and found his nominal helpmeet
+sitting just where he had left her.
+
+Abbie had bought no newspaper, book, or magazine to while away the
+time with. She was not impatient of idleness. It was luxury enough
+just not to be warshin' clo'es, cookin' vittles, or wrastlin' dishes.
+She took a dreamy content in studying the majesty of the architecture,
+but her interest in it was about that of a lizard basking on a fallen
+column in a Greek peristyle. It was warm and spacious and nobody
+disturbed her drowsy beatitude.
+
+When Jake came and summoned her she rose like a rheumatic old
+househound and obeyed her master's voice.
+
+Jake gave her such a vote of confidence as was implied in letting her
+lug the luggage. It was cheaper for her to carry it than for him to
+store it in the parcel-room. It caused the fellow-passengers in the
+street-car acute inconvenience, but Jake was superior to public
+opinion of his wife. In such a homely guise did the fates approach
+Miss Webling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The best place for a view is in one's back yard; then it is one's own.
+If it is in the front yard, then the house is only part of the
+public's view.
+
+In London Marie Louise had lived at Sir Joseph Webling's home, its
+gray, fog-stained, smoked-begrimed front flush with the pavement. But
+back of the house was a high-walled garden with a fountain that never
+played. There was a great rug of English-green grass, very green all
+winter and still greener all summer. At an appropriate spot was a
+tree; a tea-table sat under it; in blossom-time it sprinkled pink
+petals on the garden hats of the women; and on the grass they fell, to
+twist Tennyson, softlier than tired eyelids on tired eyes.
+
+So Marie Louise adored her new home with its unpromising entrance and
+its superb surprise from the rear windows. When she broke the news to
+Polly Widdicombe, that she was leaving her, they had a good fight over
+it. Yet Polly could hardly insist that Marie Louise stay with her
+forever, especially when Marie Louise had a perfectly good home of her
+own.
+
+Polly went along for a morning of reconstruction work. There were
+pictures, chairs, cushions, and knickknacks that simply had to be
+hidden away. The original tenants evidently had the theory that a bare
+space on a wall or a table was as indecent as on a person's person.
+
+They had taken crude little chromos and boxed them in gaudy frames,
+many of whose atrocities were aggravated by panels of plush of a color
+that could hardly be described by any other name than fermented prune.
+Over the corner of these they had thrown "throws" or drapes of
+malicious magenta horribly figured in ruthless incompatibilities.
+
+Chairs of unexplainable framework were upholstered with fabrics of
+studied delirium. Every mantel was an exhibit of models of what not to
+do. When Henry James said that Americans had no end of taste, but most
+of it was bad, he must have based his conclusions on such a
+conglomerate as this.
+
+Polly and Marie Louise found some of the furniture bad enough to be
+amusing. But they toted a vanload of it into closets and storerooms.
+Where the pictures came away they left staring spaces of unfaded
+wall-paper. Still, they were preferable to the pictures.
+
+By noon the women were exhausted. They washed their dust-smutted hands
+and faces and exclaimed upon the black water they left. But the
+exercise had given them appetite, and when Marie Louise locked the
+front door she felt all the comfort of a householder. She had a home
+of her very own to lock up, and though she had roamed through
+pleasures and palaces, she agreed that, be it ever so horrible,
+there's no place like home.
+
+She and Polly were early to their luncheon engagement with Major
+Widdicombe. Their appetites disputed the clock. Polly decided to
+telephone her husband for Heaven's sake to come at once to her
+rescue.
+
+While Polly was telephoning Marie Louise sat waiting on a divan. Her
+muscles were so tired that she grew nearly as placidly animal as her
+sister in the Pennsylvania Station. She was as different in every
+other way as possible. Her life, her environment, her ambitions, had
+been completely alien to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been
+educated and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and
+successes.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat her again, or
+kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself sent to prison or
+to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that the children would be
+run over in the street, would pull a boilerful of boiling water over
+onto them, or steal, or go wrong in any of the myriad ways that
+children have of going wrong. Mrs. Nuddle's ecstasies were a job well
+done, a word of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an
+interval without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when
+her husband was working and treating her as well as one treats an old
+horse.
+
+Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.
+
+Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less harrowing, but
+infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no longer related to each
+other by any ties except blood kinship. Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman
+gone wrong, Marie Louise a goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a
+poor advertisement of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early
+bedding, churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most
+attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage, a
+cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant acquaintance.
+
+At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters were to
+be brought together. But there was to be an intervention. Even while
+Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue that she would have called
+contentment trouble was stealing toward her.
+
+The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton.
+He frightened her, but he would not let her run away.
+
+As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he pressed her
+back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory prayer:
+
+"Wait once, pleass."
+
+The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months before given her up
+as hopelessly correct. But guardian angels were still provided for
+Nicky Easton; and one of them, seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise
+back into the select coterie of the suspects.
+
+There's no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror. It lifts
+the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry, and gives the blind
+eyes enough for running. Marie Louise's fatigue fell from her like a
+burden whose straps are slit.
+
+When Nicky said: "I could not find you in New York. Now we are here we
+can have a little talkink," she stammered: "Not here! Not now!"
+
+"Why not, pleass?"
+
+"I have an engagement--a friend--she has just gone to telephone a
+moment."
+
+"You are ashamed of me, then?"
+
+She let him have it. "Yes!"
+
+He winced at the slap in the face.
+
+She went on: "Besides, she knows you. Her husband is an officer in the
+army. I can't talk to you here."
+
+"Where, then, and when?"
+
+"Any time--any place--but here."
+
+"Any time is no time. You tell me, or I stay now."
+
+"Come to--to my house."
+
+"You have a howiss, then?"
+
+"Yes. I just took it to-day. I shall be there this afternoon--at
+three, if you will go."
+
+"Very goot. The address is--"
+
+She gave it; he repeated it, mumbled, "At sree o'clock I am there,"
+and glided away just as Polly returned.
+
+They were eating a consommé madrilène when the Major arrived. He
+dutifully ate what his wife had selected for him, and listened amiably
+to what she had to tell him about her morning, though he was bursting
+to tell her about his. Polly made a vivid picture of Marie Louise's
+new home, ending with:
+
+"Everything on God's earth in it except a piano and a book."
+
+This reminded Marie Louise of the books she had read on ship-building,
+and she asked if she might borrow them. Polly made a woeful face at
+this.
+
+"My dear! When a woman starts to reading up on a subject a man is
+interested in, she's lost--and so is he. Beware of it, my dear."
+
+Tom demurred: "Go right on, Marie Louise, so that you can take an
+intelligent interest in what your husband is working on."
+
+"My husband!" said Marie Louise. "Aren't you both a trifle premature?"
+
+Polly went glibly on: "Don't listen to Tom, my dear. What does he know
+about what a man wants his wife to take an intelligent interest in?
+Once a woman knows about her husband's business, he's finished with
+her and ready for the next. Tom's been trying to tell me for ten years
+what he's working at, and I haven't the faintest idea yet. It always
+gives him something to hope for. When he comes home of evenings he can
+always say, 'Perhaps to-night's the night when she'll listen.' But
+once you listen intelligently and really understand, he's through with
+you, and he'll quit you for some pink-cheeked ignoramus who hasn't
+heard about it yet."
+
+Marie Louise, being a woman, knew how to get her message to another
+woman; the way seems to be to talk right through her talk. The acute
+creatures have ears to hear with and mouths to talk with, and they
+apparently find no difficulty in using both at the same time.
+Somewhere along about the middle of Polly's discourse Marie Louise
+began to answer it before it was finished. Why should she wait when
+she knew what was coming? So she said contemporaneously and
+covocally:
+
+"But I'm not going to marry a ship-builder, my dear. Don't be absurd!
+I'm not planning to take an intelligent interest in Mr. Davidge's
+business. I'm planning to take an intelligent interest in my own. I'm
+going to be a ship-builder myself, and I want to learn the A B C's."
+
+They finished that argument at the same time and went on together down
+the next stretch in a perfect team:
+
+"Oh, well of course, if            "Mr. Davidge tells me,"
+that's the case," asserted         Marie Louise explained, "that
+Polly, "then you're quite          women are needed in ship-
+crazy--unless you're simply        building, and that anybody
+hunting for a new sensation.       can learn. In fact, every-
+And on that score I'll admit       body has to, anyway; so
+that it sounds rather interest-    I've got as good a chance as
+ing. I may take a whack at         a man. I'm as strong as a
+it myself. I'm quite fed up        horse. Fine! Come along,
+on bandages and that sort of       and we'll build a U-boat
+thing. Get me a job in the         chaser together. Mr. Davidge
+same factory or whatever           would be delighted to
+they call it. Will you?"           have you, I'm sure."
+
+This was arrant hubbub to the mere man who was not capable of carrying
+on a conversation except by the slow, primitive methods of Greek
+drama, strophe and antistrophe, one talking while the other listened,
+then _vice versa_.
+
+So he had time to remember that he had something to remember, and to
+dig it up. He broke in on the dialogue:
+
+"By the way, that reminds me, Marie Louise. There's a man in town
+looking for you."
+
+"Looking for me!" Marie Louise gasped, alert as an antelope at once.
+"What was his name?"
+
+"I can't seem to recall it. I'll have it in a minute. He didn't
+impress me very favorably, so I didn't tell him you were living with
+us."
+
+Polly turned on Tom: "Come along, you poor nut! I hate riddles, and so
+does Marie Louise."
+
+"That's it!" Tom cried. "_Riddle--Nuddle_. His name is Nuddle. Do you
+know a man named Nuddle?"
+
+The name conveyed nothing to Marie Louise except a suspicion that Mr.
+Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.
+
+"What was his nationality?" she asked. "English?"
+
+"I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of pungkin pie."
+
+Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When Widdicombe
+asked what message he should take back her curiosity led her to brave
+her fate and know the worst:
+
+"Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon--no, not
+before five. I have some shopping to do, and the servants to engage."
+
+She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint conveyed
+in Marie Louise's remark as they left the dining-room, "I've a little
+telephoning to do."
+
+Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of telephoning.
+
+Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps,
+for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He
+wondered what had become of Marie Louise.
+
+Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie
+Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly
+got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at
+Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that
+they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her
+eyes.
+
+She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled
+toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before.
+That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and
+children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and
+drawn the face in new lines.
+
+Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the
+poignant call:
+
+"Mamise!"
+
+That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and
+it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician's
+"Abracadabra!"
+
+Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her
+sister's charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking
+matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her
+arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it
+needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: "Abbie darling! My
+darling Abbie!" while Abbie wept: "Mamise! Oh, my poor little
+Mamise!"
+
+A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake
+Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he
+looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim,
+round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife's arms for a
+sister-in-law.
+
+Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and
+tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the
+matrimonial lottery.
+
+"Mamise!" she said. "I want you should meet my husbin'."
+
+"I'm delighted!" said Mamise, before she saw her sister's fate. She
+was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock
+without reeling.
+
+Jake's hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his
+cordiality was sincere as he growled:
+
+"Pleaster meecher, Mamise."
+
+He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call
+him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not
+instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle,
+and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and
+piece it together.
+
+Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked:
+
+"Where are you living--here in Washington?"
+
+"Laws, no!" said Abbie; and that reminded her of the bundles she had
+dropped at the sight of Mamise. They had played havoc with the
+sidewalk traffic, but she hurried to regain them.
+
+Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody looking who
+counted. So he checked his wife with amazement at the preposterousness
+of her carrying bundles while Sir Walter Raleigh was at hand. He
+picked them up and brought them to Marie Louise's feet, disgusted at
+the stupid amazement of his wife, who did not have sense enough to
+conceal it. Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance
+of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for noticing such
+things, but the eye is not to blame for what it can't help seeing, nor
+the ear for what is forced upon it. She had a feeling that the first
+thing to do was to get her sister in out of the rain of glances from
+the passers-by.
+
+"You must come to me at once," she said. "I've just taken a house.
+I've got no servants in yet, and you'll have to put up with it as it
+is."
+
+Abbie gasped at the "servants." She noted the authority with which
+Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed to the bundles, which he
+hastened to seize.
+
+Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile and showed
+it on her face. She saw many palaces on the way and expected Marie
+Louise to stop at any of them. When the car drew up at Marie Louise's
+home Abbie was bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she
+found her dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie's
+loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for
+picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This distress
+caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.
+
+Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent enough to take
+off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch himself out on a divan
+whose ulterior maroon did not disturb his repose in the least.
+
+"This is what I call something like," he said; and then, "And now,
+Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself."
+
+This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she evaded with a
+plea:
+
+"I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling. How are you,
+and how long have you been married, and where do you live?"
+
+"Goin' on eight years come next October, and we got three childern. I
+been right poorly lately. Don't seem to take as much interest in
+worshin' as I useter."
+
+"Washing!" Marie Louise exclaimed. "You don't wash, do you? That is, I
+mean to say--professionally?"
+
+"Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too."
+
+Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred thousand dollars, and
+her sister was a--washerwoman! It was intolerable. She glanced at
+Jake.
+
+"But Mr.--your husband--"
+
+"Oh, Jake, he works--off and on. But he ain't got what you might call
+a hankerin' for it. He can take work or let it alone. I can't say as
+much for him when it comes to licker. Fact is, some the women say,
+'Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do you ever--'"
+
+"Your name isn't--it isn't Nuddle, is it?" Marie Louise broke in.
+
+"Sure it is. What did you think it was?"
+
+So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer. That
+solved one of her day's puzzles and solved it very tamely. So many of
+life's mysteries, like so many of fiction's, peter out at the end.
+They don't sustain.
+
+Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation that
+believed it a husband's duty to support his wife by his own labor. The
+thought of her sister supporting a worthless husband by her own toil
+was odious. The first task was to get Jake to work. It was only
+natural that she should think of her own new mania.
+
+She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said: "I have it! Why
+doesn't your husband go in for ship-building?"
+
+Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge had said of the
+need of men. She was sure that she could get him a splendid job, and
+that Mr. Davidge would do anything for her.
+
+Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved, but a thought
+struck him, and he chewed it over. Among the gang of idealists he
+consorted with, or at least salooned with, the dearest ambition of all
+was to turn America's dream of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare
+of failure. In order to secure "just recognition" for the workman they
+would cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor--that
+was their ideal of labor.
+
+As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the
+shipyard Jake's interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing,
+and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off
+strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, to wreck
+launching-ways so that hulls that escaped all other attacks would
+crack through and stick--it was a Golconda of opportunities for this
+modern conquistador. He could hardly keep his face straight till he
+heard Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor; and
+when he asked, "Do you think your gentleman friend, this man Davidge,
+would really give me a job?" she cried, with more enthusiasm than
+tact:
+
+"I know he would. He'd give anybody a job. Besides, I'm going to take
+one myself. And, Abbie honey, what would you say to your becoming a
+ship-builder, too? It would be immensely easier and pleasanter than
+washing clothes."
+
+Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture of
+herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie peeked and
+whispered:
+
+"It's a man."
+
+"Do you suppose it's that feller Davidge?" said Jake.
+
+"No, it's--it's--somebody else," said Marie Louise, who knew who it
+was without looking.
+
+She was at her wit's end now. Nicky Easton was at the door, and a
+sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she had not suspected were
+in the parlor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+If anything is anybody's very own, it is surely his past, or
+hers--particularly hers. But Nicky Easton was bringing one of the most
+wretched chapters of Marie Louise's past to her very door. She did not
+want to reopen it, especially not before her new-found family. One
+likes to have a few illusions left for these reunions. So she said:
+
+"Abbie darling, would you forgive me if I saw this--person alone?
+Besides, you'll be wanting to get settled in your room, if Mr.--Ja--your
+husband doesn't mind taking your things up."
+
+Abbie had not been used to taking dismissals graciously. She had never
+been to court and been permitted to retire. Besides, people who know
+how to take an eviction gracefully usually know enough to get out
+before they are put out. But Abbie had to be pushed, and she went,
+heartbroken, disgraced, resentful. Jake sulked after her. They moved
+like a couple of old flea-bitten mongrels spoken to sharply.
+
+And of course they stole back to the head of the stairs and listened.
+
+Nicky had his face made up for a butler, or at least a maid. When he
+saw Marie Louise he had to undo his features, change his opening
+oration, and begin all over again.
+
+"It is zhoo yourself, then," he said.
+
+"Yes. Come in, do. I have no servants yet."
+
+"Ah!" he cooed, encouraged at once.
+
+She squelched his hopes. "My sister and her husband are here,
+however."
+
+This astounded him so that he spoke in two languages at once: "Your
+schwister! Since how long do you have a sester? And where did you
+get?"
+
+"I have always had her, but we haven't seen each other for years."
+
+He gasped, "_Was Sie nicht sagen_!"
+
+"And if you wouldn't mind not talking German--"
+
+"_Recht so_. Excuse. Do I come in--no?"
+
+She stepped back, and he went into the drawing-room. He smiled at what
+he saw, and was polite, if cynical.
+
+"You rent foornished?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He waved her to a chair so that he might sit down.
+
+"_Was giebt's neues_--er--what is the noose?"
+
+"I have none. What is yours?"
+
+"You mean you do not wish to tell. If I should commence once, I should
+never stop. But we are both alife yet. That is always somethink. I was
+never so nearly not."
+
+Marie Louise could not withhold the protest:
+
+"You saved yourself by betraying your friends."
+
+"Well, I telled--I told only what the English knew already. If they
+let me go for it, it was no use to kill everybody, should I?"
+
+He was rather miserable about it, for he could see that she despised
+him more for being an informer than for having something to inform. He
+pleaded in extenuation:
+
+"But I shall show how usefool I can be to my country. Those English
+shall be sorry to let me go, and my people glad. And so shall you."
+
+She studied him, and dreaded him, loathing his claim on her, longing
+to order him never to speak again to her, yet strangely interested in
+his future power for evil. The thought occurred to her that if she
+could learn his new schemes she might thwart them. That would be some
+atonement for what she had not prevented before. This inspiration
+brightened her so suddenly and gave such an eagerness to her manner
+that he saw the light and grew suspicious--a spy has to be, for he
+carries a weapon that has only one cartridge in it.
+
+Marie Louise waited for him to explain his purpose till the suspense
+began to show; then she said, bluntly:
+
+"What mischief are you up to now?"
+
+"Mitschief--me?" he asked, all innocently.
+
+"You said you wanted to see me."
+
+"I always want to see you. You interest--my eyes--my heart--"
+
+"Please don't." She said it with the effect of slamming a door.
+
+She looked him full in the eyes angrily, then remembered her
+curiosity. He saw her gaze waver with a double motive.
+
+It is strange how people can fence with their glances, as if they were
+emanations from the eyes instead of mere reflections of light back and
+forth. But however it is managed, this man and this woman played their
+stares like two foils feeling for an opening. At length he surrendered
+and resolved to appeal:
+
+"How do you feel about--about us?"
+
+"Who are us?"
+
+"We Germans."
+
+"We are not Germans. I'm American."
+
+"Then England is your greater enemy than Germany."
+
+She wanted to smile at that, but she said:
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+He pleaded for his cause. "America ought not to have joined the war
+against the _Vaterland_. It is only a few Americans--bankers who
+lended money to England--who wish to fight us."
+
+Up-stairs Jake's heart bounded. Here was a fellow-spirit. He listened
+for Marie Louise's response; he caught the doubt in her tone. She
+could not stomach such an absurdity:
+
+"Bosh!" she said.
+
+It sounded like "Boche!" And Nicky flushed.
+
+"You have been in this Washington town too long. I think I shall go
+now."
+
+Marie Louise made no objection. She had not found out what he was up
+to, but she was sick of duplicity, sick of the sight of him and all he
+stood for. She did not even ask him to come again. She went to the
+door with him and stood there a moment, long enough for the man who
+was shadowing Nicky to identify her. She watched Nicky go and hoped
+that she had seen the last of him. But up-stairs the great heart of
+Jake Nuddle was seething with excitement. He ran to the front window,
+caught a glimpse of Nicky, and hurried back down the stairs.
+
+Abbie called out, "Where you goin'?"
+
+Jake did not answer such a meddlesome question, but he said to Marie
+Louise, as he brushed past her on the stairs:
+
+"I'm going to the drug-store to git me some cigars."
+
+Nicky paused on the curb, looking for a cab. He had dismissed his own,
+hoping to spend a long while with Marie Louise. He saw that he was
+not likely to pick up a cab in such a side-street, and so he walked on
+briskly.
+
+He was furious with Marie Louise. He had had hopes of her, and she had
+fooled him. These Americans were no longer dependable.
+
+And then he heard footsteps on the walk, quick footsteps that spelled
+hurry. Nicky drew aside to let the speeder pass; but instead he heard
+a constabular "Hay!" and his shoulder-blades winced.
+
+It was only Jake Nuddle. Jake had no newspaper to sell, but he had an
+idea for a collaboration which would bring him some of that easy money
+the Germans were squandering like drunken sailors.
+
+"You was just talkin' to my sister-in-law," said Jake.
+
+"Ah, you are then the brother of Marie Louise?"
+
+"Yep, and I couldn't help hearin' a little of what passed between
+you."
+
+Jake's slyness had a detective-like air in Nicky's anxious eyes. He
+warned himself to be on guard. Jake said:
+
+"I'm for Germany unanimous. I think it's a rotten shame for America to
+go into this war. And some of us Americans are sayin' we won't stand
+for it. We don't own no Congersmen; we're only the protelarriat, as
+the feller says; but we're goin' to put this country on the bum, and
+that's what old Kaiser Bill wants we should do, or I miss my guess,
+hay?"
+
+Nicky was cautious:
+
+"How do you propose to help the All Highest?"
+
+"Sabotodge."
+
+"You interest me," said Nicky.
+
+They had come to one of the circles that moon the plan of Washington.
+Nicky motioned Jake to a bench, where they could command the approach
+and be, like good children, seen and not heard. Jake outlined his
+plan.
+
+When Nicky Easton had rung Marie Louise's bell he had not imagined how
+much help Marie Louise would render him in giving him the precious
+privilege of meeting her unprepossessing brother-in-law; nor had she
+dreamed what peril she was preparing for Davidge in planning to secure
+for him and his shipyard the services of this same Jake, as lazy and
+as amiable as any side-winder rattlesnake that ever basked in the
+sunlit sand.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+AT THE SHIPYARD
+
+[Illustration: There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It
+had a cathedral majesty.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Davidge despised a man who broke his contracts. He broke one with
+himself and despised himself. He broke his contract to ignore the
+existence of Marie Louise. The next time he came to Washington he
+sought her out. He called up the Widdicombe home and learned that she
+had moved. She had no telephone yet, for it took a vast amount of time
+to get any but a governmental telephone installed. So he noted her
+address, and after some hesitation decided to call. If she did not
+want to see him, her butler could tell him that she was out.
+
+He called. Marie Louise had tried in vain to get in servants who would
+stay. Abbie talked to them familiarly--and so did Jake. The virtuous
+ones left because of Jake, and the others left because of Abbie.
+
+So Abbie went to the door when Davidge called. He supposed that the
+butler was having a day off and the cook was answering the bell. He
+offered his card to Abbie.
+
+She wiped her hand on her apron and took it, then handed it back to
+him, saying:
+
+"You'll have to read it. I ain't my specs."
+
+Davidge said, "Please ask Miss Webling if she can see Mr. Davidge."
+
+"You're not Mr. Davidge!" Abbie gasped, remembering the importance
+Marie Louise gave him.
+
+"Yes," said Davidge, with proper modesty.
+
+"Well, I want to know!"
+
+Abbie wiped her hand again and thrust it forward, seizing his
+questioning fingers in a practised clench, and saying, "Come right on
+in and seddown." She haled the befuddled Davidge to a chair and
+regarded him with beaming eyes. He regarded her with the eyes of
+astonishment--and the ears, too, for the amazing servant, forever
+wiping her hands, went to the stairs and shrieked:
+
+"Mamee-eese! Oh, Ma-mee-uz! Mist' Davidge is shere."
+
+Poor Mamise! She had to come down upon such a scene, and without
+having had any chance to break the news that she had a sister she had
+to introduce the sister. She had no chance to explain her till a
+fortunate whiff of burning pastry led Abbie to groan, "My Lord, them
+pies!" and flee.
+
+If ever Marie Louise had been guilty of snobbery, she was doing
+penance for it now. She was too loyal to what her family ought to have
+been and was not to apologize for Abbie, but she suffered in a social
+purgatory.
+
+Worse yet, she had to ask Davidge to give her brother-in-law a job.
+And Davidge said he would. He said it before he saw Jake. And when he
+saw him, though he did not like him, he did not guess what treachery
+the fellow planned. He invited him to come to the shipyard--by train.
+
+He invited Mamise to ride thither in her own car the next day to see
+his laboratory for ships, never dreaming that the German menace was
+already planning its destruction.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in perplexities
+that one question and one answer would put an end to. In real life we
+incessantly dread to ask the answers to conundrums that we cannot
+solve, and persist in misery for lack of a little frankness.
+
+For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a torment. So
+stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter! Yet he was unable to
+bring himself to the point of solving his curiosity. The car had
+covered forty miles, perhaps, while his thoughts ran back and forth,
+lacing the road like a dog accompanying a carriage. A mental
+speedometer would have run up a hundred miles before he made the
+plunge and popped the subject.
+
+"Mamise is an unusual name," he remarked.
+
+Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that his long
+silence had been devoted to her.
+
+"Like it?" she asked.
+
+"You bet." The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and made her
+laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred yards of road that went
+up and down and up and down in huge billows. Then he broke out again:
+
+"It's an unusual name."
+
+She laughed patiently. "So I've heard."
+
+The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.
+
+"I only knew one other--er--Mamise."
+
+This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique. The chill woods
+seemed to be rather glum about it, too. The road abandoned them and
+flung into a sun-bathed plain.
+
+"Really? You really knew another--er--Mamise?"
+
+"Yes. Years ago."
+
+"Was she nice?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"Oh!" She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped across a
+loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some jealousy she asked,
+"What was she like?"
+
+"You."
+
+"That's odd." A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard glided by,
+reverting to oblivion. "Tell me about her."
+
+A big motor charged past so fast that the passengers were only blurs,
+a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping
+veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the
+road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant
+travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful
+prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence.
+
+"It was funny," said Davidge. "I was younger than I am. I went to a
+show one night. A musical team played that everlasting 'Poet and
+Peasant' on the xylophones. They played nearly everything on nearly
+everything--same old stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jokes
+by the same fool clown and the solemn dubs. But they had a girl with
+'em--a young thing. She didn't play very well. She had a way with her,
+though--seemed kind of disgusted with life and the rest of the troupe
+and the audience. And she had a right to be disgusted, for she was as
+pretty as--I don't know what. She was just beautiful--slim and limber
+and long--what you might imagine a nymph would look like if she got
+loose in a music-hall.
+
+"I was crazy about her. If I could ever have written a poem about
+anybody, it would have been about her. She struck me as something sort
+of--well, divine. She wore the usual, and not much of it--low neck,
+bare arms, and--tights. But I kind of revered her; she was so dog-on
+pretty.
+
+"When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan for true.
+I couldn't rest till I saw the manager and asked him to take me back
+and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty grin and said he didn't
+run that kind of a theater, and I said I'd knock his face off if he
+thought I thought he did. Well, he gave in finally and took me back. I
+fell down the side-aisle steps and sprawled along the back of the
+boxes and stumbled up the steps to the stage.
+
+"And then I met Mamise--that was her name on the program--Mamise. She
+was pretty and young as ever, but she wasn't a nymph any longer. She
+was just a young, painted thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was
+feeding a big monkey--a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a
+bicycle and smoking a cigar--getting ready to go on the stage.
+
+"It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful,
+that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said,
+'Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.' She
+looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me,
+and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in
+the big electric lights.
+
+"She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I
+agreed with her then--and since. She said, 'Much obliged' in a
+contemptuous contralto and--and turned to the other monkey.
+
+"The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down
+a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her
+at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I
+never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric
+lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric
+lights in my--my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She
+may be dead now.
+
+"It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance
+of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more
+comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came
+along she--well, as she didn't, she must have been a good girl, don't
+you suppose?"
+
+The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an
+endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and stacks of corn, with
+pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal
+sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.
+
+"What do you call a good girl?" she asked.
+
+"That's a hard question to answer nowadays."
+
+"Why nowadays?"
+
+"Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas
+of girls are so much more--complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said,
+that's my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can
+you forgive her for wearing your name?"
+
+"I could forgive that Mamise anything," she sighed. "But this Mamise I
+can't forgive at all."
+
+This puzzled him. "I don't quite get that."
+
+She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what
+helpless writers call "a shady dell"; its tenderness won from him a
+timid confession.
+
+"You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as
+can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other."
+
+"Somehow we are each other."
+
+He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance
+from the road. She was blushing.
+
+He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, "It's a small world,
+after all." He nearly swung to the other extreme. "Well, I'll be--" He
+settled like a dying pendulum on, "Well--well!" They both laughed, and
+he put out his hand. "Pleased to meet you again."
+
+She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.
+
+The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep
+cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine
+stopped. The car sailed softly.
+
+He was eager for news of the years between then and now. It was so
+wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have
+evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the
+working of such social machinery. He urged:
+
+"Tell me all about yourself."
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"But what happened to you after I saw you? You don't remember me, of
+course."
+
+"I remember the monkey."
+
+They both laughed at the unconscious brutality of this. He turned
+solemn and asked:
+
+"You mean that so many men came back to call on you?"
+
+"No, not so many--too many, but not many. But--well, the monkey was
+more unusual, I suppose. He traveled with us several weeks. He was
+very jealous. He had a fight with a big trained dog that I petted
+once. They nearly killed each other before they could be separated.
+And such noises as they made! I can hear them yet. The manager of the
+monkey wanted to marry me. I was unhappy with my team, but I hated
+that man--he was such a cruel beast with the monkey that supported
+him. He'd have beaten me, too, I suppose, and made me support him."
+
+Davidge sighed with relief as if her escape had been just a moment
+before instead of years ago.
+
+"Lord! I'm glad you didn't marry him! But tell me what did happen
+after I saw you."
+
+The road led them into a sizable town, street-car tracks, bad
+pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like
+chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks
+well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil
+War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, and the
+country again.
+
+Davidge noted that she had not answered his question. He repeated it:
+
+"What happened after you and the monkey-trainer parted?"
+
+"Oh, years later I was in Berlin with a team called the Musical Mokes,
+and Sir Joseph and Lady Webling saw me and thought I looked like their
+daughter, and they adopted me--that's all."
+
+She had grown a bit weary of her autobiography. Abbie had made her
+tell it over and over, but had tried in vain to find out what went on
+between her stage-beginnings and her last appearance in Berlin.
+
+Davidge was fascinated by her careless summary of such great events;
+for to one in love, all biography of the beloved becomes important
+history. But having seen her as a member of Sir Joseph's household, he
+was more interested in the interregnum.
+
+"But between your reaching Berlin and the time I saw you what
+happened?"
+
+"That's my business."
+
+She saw him wince at the abrupt discourtesy of this. She apologized:
+
+"I don't mean to be rude, but--well, it wouldn't interest you."
+
+"Oh yes, it would. Don't tell me if you don't want to, but--"
+
+"But--"
+
+"Oh, nothing!"
+
+"You mean you'll think that if I don't tell you it's because I'm
+ashamed to."
+
+"Oh no, not at all."
+
+"Oh yes, at all. Well, what if I were?"
+
+"I can't imagine your having done anything to be ashamed of."
+
+"O Lord! Am I as stupid as that comes to?"
+
+"No! But I mean, you couldn't have done anything to be really ashamed
+of."
+
+"That's what I mean. I've done numberless things I'd give my right arm
+not to have done."
+
+"I mean really wicked things."
+
+"Such as--"
+
+"Oh--well, I mean being bad."
+
+"Woman-bad or man-bad?"
+
+"Bad for a woman."
+
+"So what's bad for one is not bad for another."
+
+"Well, not exactly, but there is a difference."
+
+"If I told you that I had been very, very wicked in those mysterious
+years, would it seem important to you?"
+
+"Of course! Horribly! It couldn't help it, if a man cared much for a
+woman."
+
+"And if a woman cared a lot for a man, ought it to make a difference
+what he had done before he met her?"
+
+"Well, of course--but that's different."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, because it is."
+
+"Men say 'Because!' too, I see."
+
+"It's just shorthand with us. It means you know it so well there's no
+need of explaining."
+
+"Oh! Well, if you--I say, _if_ you were very much in love with me--"
+
+"Which I--"
+
+"Don't be odiously polite. I'm arguing, not fishing. If you were
+deeply in love with me, would it make a good deal of difference to you
+if several years ago I had been--oh, loose?"
+
+"It would break my heart."
+
+Marie Louise liked him the better for this, but she held to her
+argument.
+
+"All right. Now, still supposing that we loved each other, ought I
+to inquire of you if the man of my possible choice had been
+perfectly--well, spotless, all that time? Ought I expect that he was
+saving himself up for me, feeling himself engaged to me, you might
+say, long before he met me, and keeping perfectly true to his
+future fiancée--ought I to expect that?"
+
+He flushed a little as he mumbled:
+
+"Hardly!"
+
+She laughed a trifle bitterly:
+
+"So we're there already?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"At the double standard. What's crime for the goose is pastime for the
+gander."
+
+He did not intend to give up man's ancient prerogative.
+
+"Well, it's better to have almost any standard than none, isn't it?"
+
+"I wonder."
+
+"The single standard is better than the sixteen to one--silver for men
+and gold for women."
+
+"Perhaps! But you men seem to believe in a sixteen to none. Mind you,
+I'm not saying I've been bad."
+
+"I knew you couldn't have been."
+
+"Oh yes, I could have been--I'm not saying I wasn't. I'm not saying
+anything at all. I'm saying that it's nobody's business but my own."
+
+"Even your future husband has no right to know?"
+
+"None whatever. He has the least right of all, and he'd better not try
+to find out."
+
+"You women are changing things!"
+
+"We have to, if we're going to live among men. When you're in
+Rome--"
+
+"You're going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?"
+
+"We've always done that more or less, and nobody ever could stop us,
+from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of
+women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with
+liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women
+went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about
+all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained
+that with all our modern science we hadn't invented one new deadly
+sin. We go on using the same old seven--well, indecencies. It will be
+the same with women. It's bound to be. You can't keep women unfree.
+You've simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and
+it's dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better
+than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they
+will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I
+fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old
+Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed
+circus to-day.
+
+"When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or
+committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social
+success, as the case might be. She'll go on doing much the same--just
+as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others
+go right along about their business, whether it's in a bank, a church,
+a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.
+
+"But in the new marriage--for marriage is really changing, though the
+marrying people are the same old folks--in the new marriage a man must
+do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better
+or worse and no questions asked."
+
+He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with.
+"In other words, we'll take our women as is."
+
+"That's the expression--_as is_. A man will take his sweetheart 'as
+is' or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she'll
+get along somehow."
+
+"The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?"
+
+"That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one,
+and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old
+times and the Middle Ages and nowadays, and there'll be all kinds
+forever. But we're wrangling like a pair of lovers instead of getting
+along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances."
+
+"Aren't we going to be more than that?"
+
+"I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I'm not asking for a job
+as your wife."
+
+"You can have it."
+
+"Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the
+world and can support you in the style you're accustomed to, I may
+come and ask for your hand."
+
+Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew
+more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has
+some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did
+not often argue abstrusely, and she was already fagged out mentally.
+She broke off the debate.
+
+"Now let's think of something else, if you don't mind."
+
+They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in
+alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite
+of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him
+in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between
+his first sight of her and his second.
+
+In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of
+mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still
+pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached
+the town where his shipyard lay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess
+of land and riverscape--a large steel shed, a bewilderment of
+scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that
+were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of
+machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty
+water.
+
+A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the
+neighborhood were numbers of workmen's huts--some finished, and long
+rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of
+raw biscuits.
+
+She saw it all as it was, with a stranger's eyes. Davidge saw it with
+the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly
+accepting future possibilities as realities.
+
+Davidge said, with repressed pride:
+
+"Well, thar she blows!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"My shipyard!" This with depressed pride.
+
+"Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!" This with forced enthusiasm.
+
+"You don't like it," he groaned.
+
+"I'm crazy about it."
+
+"If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and weeds and
+mud-holes and sluices you'd appreciate what we've reclaimed and the
+work that has been done."
+
+The motor pitched down a badly bruised road.
+
+"Where's the ship that's nearly done--your mother's ship?"
+
+"Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding."
+
+"Don't tell me there's a ship in there!"
+
+"Yep, and she's just bursting to come out."
+
+They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if a bottle of
+beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough to blow off the froth
+would blow him over.
+
+Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the ship that
+Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did not believe Marie
+Louise ready to understand it.
+
+"Let's begin at the beginning," he said. "See those railroad tracks
+over there? Well, that's where the timber comes from the forests and
+the steel from the mills. Now we'll see what happens to 'em in the
+shop."
+
+He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that
+could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it
+across the long room like a captured beetle.
+
+"Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It's our dressmaking-shop. We lay down
+the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact
+size, and then make templates of wood to match--those are the
+patterns. It's something like making a gown, I suppose."
+
+"I see," said Marie Louise. "Then you fit the dress together out in
+the yard."
+
+"Exactly," said Davidge. "You've mastered the whole thing already.
+It's a long climb up there. Will you try it?"
+
+"Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-'ems
+first."
+
+She watched the men at work, each group about its own machine, like
+priests at their various altars. Davidge explained to her the cruncher
+that manicured thick plates of steel sheets as if they were
+finger-nails, or beveled their edges; the puncher that needled
+rivet-holes through them as if they were silk, the ingenious Lysholm
+tables with rollers for tops.
+
+Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop, understanding
+nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden to touch anything. In her
+ignorance of technical matters, the simplest device was miraculous.
+The whole place was a vast laboratory of mysteries and magic.
+
+There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a
+cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for
+the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries
+were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They
+chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she
+them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness,
+another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and
+so did she, but embarrassment caused a common silence.
+
+On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established
+they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to
+make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and
+coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of
+people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction.
+
+Marie Louise's response to the mood of the place was conversion, a
+passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments
+of toil and wield the--she did not even know the names of the tools.
+She only knew that they were sacred implements.
+
+She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this
+world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old
+space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to
+be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation.
+
+As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting
+which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh
+intolerable staccato.
+
+Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull
+they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution
+across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the
+ship.
+
+In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening
+in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against
+reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman
+velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own
+inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.
+
+"That's the great Sutton," Davidge remarked, presently. "He's our
+prima donna. He's the champion riveter of this part of the country.
+Like to meet him?"
+
+Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to
+the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the
+muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.
+
+Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn.
+Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the
+impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere
+manager.
+
+Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:
+
+"Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling."
+
+Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion
+confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his
+muscles a little tauter.
+
+Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a
+rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared
+not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked,
+stupidly:
+
+"So that's a riveter?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," Sutton confessed, "this is a riveter."
+
+"Oh!" said Marie Louise.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was
+as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value,
+since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a
+rivetress.
+
+She said, "Thank you," and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up
+his work again, as a man does after a woman has passed by, pretending
+to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.
+
+At a distance Davidge paused to say: "He's a great card, Sutton. He
+gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he's my
+ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the
+traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in
+being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal
+laborers have only one ideal--to do the least possible work and earn
+enough to loaf most of the time."
+
+Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle's principles and wondered
+if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge's
+pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he
+would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded
+short hours for his conspiracies.
+
+At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave
+her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He
+led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps
+of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very
+important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She
+saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat
+sheet of perforated steel--the homeliest contraption imaginable.
+
+"Whatever is all this," she asked,--"the beginning of a bridge?"
+
+"Yes and no. It's the beginning of part of the bridge we're building
+across the Atlantic."
+
+"I don't believe that I quite follow you."
+
+"This is the keel of a ship."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yep!"
+
+"And was the _Clara_ like this once?"
+
+"No. _Clara's_ an old-fashioned creature like mother. This is a
+newfangled thing like--like you."
+
+"Like me! This isn't--"
+
+"This is to be the _Mamise_."
+
+She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.
+
+"I must confess she's not very beautiful to start with."
+
+"Neither were you at first, I suppose. I--I beg your pardon. I
+mean--"
+
+He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated ships, the
+standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture at distances by
+various steel plants, the absence of curved lines, the advantage of
+all the sacrifice of the old art for the new speed.
+
+In spite of what she had read she could not make his information her
+own. And yet it was thrilling to look at. She broke out:
+
+"I've just got to learn how to build ships. It's the one thing on
+earth that will make me happy."
+
+"Then I'll have to get it for you."
+
+"You mean it?"
+
+"If anything I could do could make you happy--cutting off my right
+arm, or--"
+
+"That's no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I'm wretchedly
+unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy, are most of us just where
+boys are when they have outgrown boyhood and haven't reached
+manhood--when they are crazy to be at something, and can't even decide
+where to begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to
+work. Here's my job, and I want it!"
+
+He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him, and he
+smiled. She protested:
+
+"I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the roughest sort
+of farmwork. I'm stronger than I look. I think I'd rather play one of
+those rat-tat-tat instruments than--than a harp in New Jerusalem."
+
+Davidge shook his head. "I'm afraid you're not quite strong enough. It
+takes a lot of power to hold the gun against the hull. The compressed
+air kicks and shoves so hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton
+himself has all he can do to keep alive."
+
+"Give me a hammer, then, and let me--smite something."
+
+"Don't you think you'd rather begin in the office? You could learn the
+business there first. Besides, I don't like the thought of your
+roughing up those beautiful hands of yours."
+
+"If men would only quit trying to keep women's hands soft and clean,
+the world would be the better for it."
+
+"Well, come down and learn the business first--you'd be nearer me."
+
+She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical
+left hook:
+
+"But you'd teach me ship-building?"
+
+"I'd rather teach you home-building."
+
+"If you mean a home on the bounding main, I'll get right to work."
+
+He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and he took her to
+the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled by her own ignorance of
+what had come to be the most important of all knowledge.
+
+She sighed. "I've always been such a smatterer. I never have really
+known anything about anything. Most women are so astonishingly
+ignorant and indifferent about the essentials of men's life."
+
+She secretly resolved that she would study some of the basic
+principles of male existence--bookkeeping, drafting, letter-writing,
+filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new mischief to take a
+course of business instruction on the sly and report for duty not as
+an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress in office practice. It was at
+least a refreshing novelty in duplicity.
+
+She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy. The old
+song, "Trust Her Not--She Is Fooling Thee," occurred to her in a
+fantastic parody: "Trust her not--she is fooling thee; she is
+clandestine at the business college; she is leading a double-entry
+life. She writes you in longhand, but she is studying shorthand. She
+is getting to be very fast--on the typewriter."
+
+Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not divulge her
+plot. She was impatient to spring it. She wondered if in a week she
+could learn all she had to learn--if she worked hard. It would be
+rather pleasant to sit at his desk-leaf and take dictation from
+him--confidential letters that he would intrust to no one else,
+letters written in a whisper and full of dark references. She hoped
+she could learn stenographic velocity in a few days.
+
+As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the workmen's
+shanties.
+
+"If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new bungalettes?"
+
+"Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town."
+
+"I'm sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next war millions
+of women will live in tents the way the men do. Those shanties would
+be considered palaces in Belgium and northern France. In fact, any
+number of women are over there now building huts for the poor souls."
+
+Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not understand such a
+twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not want jewels and luxuries and
+a life of wealthy ease. Her only interest in him seemed to be that he
+would let her live in a shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day
+for union wages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+An eloquent contrast with Marie Louise was furnished by Jake Nuddle.
+He was of the ebb type. He was degenerating into a shirker, a
+destroyer, a money-maniac, a complainer of other men's successes. His
+labor was hardly more than a foundation for blackmailing. He loved no
+country, had not even a sense of following the crowd. He called the
+Star-spangled Banner a dirty rag, and he wanted to wipe his feet on
+it. He was useless, baneful, doomed.
+
+Marie Louise was coming into a new Canaan. What she wanted was work
+for the work's sake, to be building something and thereby building
+herself, to be helping her country forward, to be helping mankind,
+poor and rich. The sight of the flag made her heart ache with a
+rapture of patriotism. She had the urge to march with an army.
+
+Marie Louise was on the up grade, Jake on the down. They met at the
+gate of the shipyard.
+
+Jake and Abbie had come over by train. Jake was surly in his tone to
+Davidge. His first question was, "Where do we live?"
+
+Marie Louise answered, "In one of those quaint little cottages."
+
+Jake frowned before he looked. He was one of those who hate before
+they see, feel nausea before they taste, condemn the unknown, the
+unheard, the unoffending.
+
+By the time Jake's eyes had found the row of shanties his frown was a
+splendid thing.
+
+"Quaint little hog-pens!" he growled. "Is this company the same as all
+the rest--treatin' its slaves like swine?"
+
+Davidge knew the type. For the sake of Marie Louise he restrained his
+first impulses and spoke with amiable acidity:
+
+"There are better houses in town, some of them very handsome."
+
+"Yah--but what rent?"
+
+"Rather expensive. Rather distant, too, but you can make it easily in
+an automobile."
+
+"Where would I git a nautomobile?"
+
+"I can introduce you to the man who sold me mine."
+
+"How would I get the price?"
+
+"Just where I did."
+
+"Whurr's that?"
+
+"Oh, all over the place. I used to be a common unskilled laborer like
+you. And now I own a good part of this business. Thousands of men who
+began poorer than I did are richer than I am. The road's just as open
+to you as to me."
+
+Jake had plenty of answers for this. He had memorized numbers of them
+from the tracts; but also he had plans that would not be furthered by
+quarreling with Davidge the first day. He could do Davidge most harm
+by obeying him and outwardly catering to him. He solaced his pride
+with a thought of what Davidge's business would look like when he got
+through with it.
+
+He laughed: "All right, boss. I was just beefin', for the fun of
+beefin'. Them shanties suit me elegant."
+
+Then his fool wife had to go and bust in, "Oh, Jake, if you would do
+like Mr. Davidge done, and git rich and live easy!"
+
+Jake gave her a pantomimic rebuke that reduced her to a pulpy
+silence.
+
+Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie's spirits a little by saying
+that she herself was coming down to work and to live in one of those
+very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as hopeless. Why any one should
+want to leave a house like what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and
+no call to lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get
+somebody to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a
+squatter and actually work--well, it did beat all how foolish some
+folks could be in the world nowadays.
+
+Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves. She had to
+get back to Washington. Davidge had planned to go with her, but a
+long-distance telephone-call, and a visit from a group of prospective
+strikers, and a warning that a consignment of long-expected machinery
+had not yet arrived, took him out of the car. He was tempted to go
+with Marie Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his
+business for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old
+Wakefield phrase, "If I don't see you again, hello!"
+
+She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her thoughts smoked
+through her brain like a dust-cloud of shining particles, each radiant
+atom a great idea. The road home was through the sky; the villages and
+groves were vague pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of
+sunlight, the ridges rainbows.
+
+It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries of
+stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some of the people
+that practised the art. She would study ship-building, and drafting,
+too. Her water-color landscapes had been highly praised by certain
+young men and old ladies in England. She would learn how to keep her
+own bank-account and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light
+bookkeeping; and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium so
+that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one. She would offer
+her home in Washington for rent. With the mobs pouring in, it would
+not be untenanted long.
+
+Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after she reached
+home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her
+mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying
+rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered.
+With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.
+
+Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who
+wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would
+not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard,
+and that was always to-morrow--the movable to-morrow which like the
+horizon is always just beyond.
+
+She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In
+arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten,
+and it was not easy to recapture it.
+
+On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a
+new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system
+with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her
+deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will
+at all.
+
+Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in
+shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature as: "Dear
+customer,--Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would
+say--"
+
+At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the
+pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them
+increased to a respect verging on awe.
+
+They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back hair with the
+free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the keyboard like rain,
+and their letters were exquisitely neat. They had studied for a long
+time, and had acquired proficiency. And it is no easy thing to acquire
+proficiency in any task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or
+moving armies.
+
+Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not know how
+to spell some of the simplest words. When she wrote with running pen
+she never stopped to spell. She just sketched the words and let them
+go. She wrote, "I beleive I recieved," so that nobody could tell _e_
+from _i_; and she put the dot where it might apply to either. Her
+punctuation was all dashes.
+
+The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word stood out in
+its stark reality, howling "Illiterate!" at her. Her punctuation
+simply would not do.
+
+Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an
+ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an invitation to a street-car
+conductors' dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection, while Marie
+Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under the criticisms of her
+teacher. She was back in school again, the dunce of the class, and
+abject discouragements alternated with spurts of zeal.
+
+In the mean while the United States was also learning the rudiments of
+war and the enormous office-practice it required. Before the war was
+over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000 officers in February, 1917,
+would be an army of over 3,000,000, and of these over 2,000,000 would
+have been carried to Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of
+these would be killed to Russia's 1,700,000 dead, Germany's 1,600,000,
+France's 1,385,000, England's 706,200, Italy's 406,000, and Belgium's
+102,000. The wounded Americans would be three times the total present
+army. Everybody was ignorant, blunderful. Externally and internally
+the United States was as busy as a trampled ant-hill.
+
+Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies made drives;
+the financiers made drives; the charities made drives. The world-heart
+was never so driven. And this was all on top of the ordinary human
+suffering, which did not abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth
+ached just as fiercely; jealousy was just as sickly green; empires
+crackled; people starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army
+after army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated atom
+in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.
+
+Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She was lonely,
+love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally ashamed of her
+general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington's infamous hot weeks
+supervened. In the daytime the heat stung like a cat-o'-nine-tails.
+The nights were suffocation. She "slept," gasping as a fish flounders
+on dry land. After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for
+rest, the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had
+come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of drudgery at the
+loathly necessities of her stupid work.
+
+Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees the
+mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, "That is my goal!" But
+the feet must cross every ditch, wade every swamp, scramble across
+every ledge. The peak is the harder to see the nearer it comes; the
+last cliffs hide it altogether, and when it is reached it is only a
+rough crag surrounded by higher crags. The glory that lights it is
+glory in distant eyes alone.
+
+So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid home to the
+gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that the stage also is
+squalid and slavish, and that the will-o'-the-wisp of gorgeous freedom
+had jumped back to home life. She left the cheap theaters for the
+expensive luxury of Sir Joseph's mansion. But that had its squalors
+and slaveries, too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous
+America, only to find in America a thousand distresses.
+
+Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true freedom. She
+would be a builder of ships--cast off the restraint of womanhood and
+be a magnificent builder of ships! And now she was finding that this
+dream was also a nightmare.
+
+Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The hot wave
+found her an easy victim. A frightened servant who did not know the
+difference between sunstroke and heat prostration nearly killed her
+before a doctor came.
+
+The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed. It was her
+trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge regretting that she
+could not come to the launching of the _Clara_. Abbie was not present,
+either. She came up to be with Marie Louise. This was not the least of
+Marie Louise's woes.
+
+She was quite childish about missing the great event. She wept because
+another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle against the bow as it
+lurched down the toboggan-slide.
+
+Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business man's
+letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that there had
+been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster--an unexploded
+infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to wreck the launching-ways
+had been detected on the final inspection.
+
+Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even though she knew
+the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still in jeopardy. Her
+shaken faith in humanity was still capable of feeling bewilderment at
+the extremes of German savagery. She cried out to her sister:
+
+"How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy
+that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got
+into the yard?"
+
+"It didn't have to have been a German," said Abbie, bitterly.
+
+"Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly trick? No
+American would!"
+
+"Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican," said Abbie. "There's
+some them Independent workmen so independent they ain't got any
+country any more 'n what Cain had."
+
+"You can't suppose that Mr. Davidge has enemies among his own
+people?"
+
+"O' course he has! Slews of 'em. Some them workmen can't forgive the
+man that gives 'em a job."
+
+"But he pays big wages. Think of what Jake gets."
+
+"Oh, him! If he got all they was, he'd holler he was bein' cheated.
+Hollerin' and hatin' always come easy to Jake. If they wasn't easy, he
+wouldn't do 'em."
+
+Marie Louise gasped: "Abbie! In Heaven's name, you don't imply--"
+
+"No, I don't!" snapped Abbie. "I never implied in my life, and don't
+you go sayin' I did."
+
+Abbie was at bay now. She had to defend her man from outside
+suspicion. Suspicion of her husband is a wife's prerogative
+
+Marie Louise was too much absorbed in the general vision of man's
+potential villainy to follow up the individual clue. She was
+frightened away from considering Jake as a candidate for such infamy.
+Her wildest imaginings never put him in association with Nicky
+Easton.
+
+There were so many excursions and alarms in the world of 1917 that the
+riddle of who tried to sink the ship on dry land joined a myriad
+others in the riddle limbo.
+
+When Marie Louise was well enough to go back to her business school
+she found riddles enough in trying to decide where this letter or that
+had got to on the crazy keyboard, or what squirmy shorthand symbol it
+was that represented this syllable or that.
+
+She had lost the little speed she had had, and it was double drudgery
+regaining the forgotten lore. But she stood the gaff and found herself
+on the dizzy height of graduation from a lowly business school. She
+had traveled a long way from the snobbery of her recent years.
+
+Davidge recognized her face and her voice when she presented herself
+before him. But her soul was an utter stranger. She did not invite him
+to call on her or warn him that she was coming to call on him.
+
+She appeared in his anteroom and bribed one of the clerks to go to him
+with a message:
+
+"A young lady's outside--wants a position--as a stenogerpher."
+
+Davidge growled without looking up:
+
+"Why bother me? Send her to the chief clerk."
+
+"She wants to see you specially."
+
+"I'm out."
+
+"Said Miss Webling sent her."
+
+"O Lord!--show her in."
+
+Marie Louise entered. Davidge looked up, leaped up.
+
+She did not come in with the drawing-room, train-dragging manner of
+Miss Webling. She did not wear the insolent beauty of Mamise of the
+Musical Mokes. She was a white-waisted, plain-skirted office-woman, a
+businessette. She had a neat little hat and gave him a secretarial
+bow.
+
+He rushed to her hand, and they had a good laugh like two children
+playing pretend. Then he said:
+
+"Why the camouflage?"
+
+The word was not very new even then, or he would not have used it.
+
+She explained, with royal simplicity:
+
+"I want a job."
+
+She brought out her diploma and a certificate giving her a civil-service
+status. She was quite conceited about it.
+
+She insisted on displaying her accomplishments.
+
+"Give me some dictation," she dictated.
+
+He nodded, pummeled his head for an idea while she took from her
+hand-bag, not a vanity-case, but a stenographer's notebook and a sheaf
+of pencils.
+
+He noted that she sat down stenographically--very concisely. She
+perched her notebook on the desk of one crossed knee and perked her
+eyes up as alertly as a sparrow.
+
+All this professionalism sat so quaintly on the two Marie Louises he
+had known that he roared with laughter as at a child dressed up.
+
+She smiled patiently at his uproar till it subsided. Then he sobered
+and began to dictate:
+
+"Ready? 'Miss Mamise'--cross that out--'Miss Marie Louise Webling'--you
+know the address; I don't. 'Dear--My dear'--no, just 'Dear Miss
+Webling. Reference is had to your order of recent date that this
+house engage you as amanuensis.' Dictionary in the bookcase
+outside--comma--no, period. 'In reply I would--I wish to--I beg to--we
+beg to say that we should--I should just as soon engage Mona Lisa for
+a stenographer as you.' Period and paragraph.
+
+"'We have,'--comma,--'however,'--comma,--'another position to offer
+you,'--comma,--'that is, as wife to the senior member of this firm.'
+Period. 'The best wages we can--we can offer you are--is the use of
+one large,'--comma,--'slightly damaged heart and a million thanks a
+minute.' Period. 'Trusting that we may be favored with a prompt and
+favorable reply, we am--I are--am--yours very sincerely, truly
+yours,'--no, just say 'yours,' and I'll sign it. By the way, do you
+know what the answer will be?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"I mean that I know the answer."
+
+"Let me have it."
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"'Yes'?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+A long glum pause till she said, "Am I fired?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+More pause. She intervened in his silence.
+
+"What do I do next, please?"
+
+He said, of habit, "Why, sail on, and on, and on."
+
+He reached for his basket of unanswered mail. He said:
+
+"I've given you a sample of my style, now you give me a sample of
+yours, and then I'll see if I can afford to keep you as a stenographer
+instead of a wife."
+
+She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office, and seated
+herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart pit-a-patted as fast as
+her fingers, but she drew up the letter in a handsome style while he
+sat and stared at her and mused upon the strange radiance she brought
+into the office in a kind of aureole.
+
+He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer,
+entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma,
+suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very
+rasping "I beg your pardon," and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose
+from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily
+accurate version of his letter.
+
+And now he had two women on his hands and one on his heart. He dared
+not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss Webling. He dared not show
+his devotion to Marie Louise, though as a matter of fact it made him
+glow like a lighthouse.
+
+He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk's office. It was noted that
+he made many more trips to that office than ever before. Instead of
+pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer, he usually came out
+himself on all sorts of errands. His buzzer did not buzz, but the
+gossip did.
+
+Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till she grew
+furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not being deft enough to
+conceal his affection that she began to resent it as an offense and
+not a compliment.
+
+The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence in one of
+the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging her to live at a
+hotel or at some of the more comfortable homes she snubbed him
+bluntly. When he desperately urged her to take lunch or dinner with
+him she drew herself up and mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie
+stenographer and said:
+
+"Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist shall loor
+me to lunch with him. You'd probably drug the wine."
+
+"Then will you--"
+
+"No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!"
+
+"May I call, then?"
+
+More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:
+
+"Yessir--the fourteenth house on the left side of the road is me."
+
+The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched up the
+street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an
+imbecility. The whole village was eying the boss on his way to spark a
+stenog. His little love-affair was as clandestine as Lady Godiva's
+famous bareback ride.
+
+He cut his call short after an age-long half-hour of enduring the
+ridicule twinkling in Mamise's eyes. He stayed just late enough for it
+to get dark enough to conceal his return through that street. He was
+furious at the situation and at Mamise for teasing him so. But she
+became all the dearer for her elusiveness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+After the novelty of the joke wore off Mamise grew as uncomfortable as
+he. She was beginning to love him more and her job less. But she was
+determined not to throw away her independence. Pride was her duenna,
+and a ruthless one. She tried to feed her pride on her ambition and on
+an occasional visit to the ship that was to wear her name.
+
+She met Sutton, the prima donna riveter. He was always clattering away
+like a hungry woodpecker, but he always had time to stop and discuss
+his art with her.
+
+Once or twice he let her try the riveter--the "gun," he called it; but
+her thumb was not strong enough to hold the trigger against that
+hundred-and-fifty-pound pressure per square inch.
+
+One day Marie Louise came on Jake Nuddle and Sutton in a wrangle. She
+caught enough of the parley to know that Jake was sneering at Sutton's
+waste of energy and enthusiasm, his long hours and low pay. Sutton
+earned a very substantial income, but all pay was low pay to Jake, who
+was spreading the gospel of sabotage through the shipyard.
+
+Meanwhile the good ship _Clara_, weaned from the dock, floated in the
+basin and received her equipment. And at last the day came when she
+was ready for her trial trip.
+
+That morning the smoke rolled from her funnels in a twisted skein.
+What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had
+become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the
+flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a soul, a name, a fate.
+
+It was impossible to think now that the _Clara_ was merely an iron box
+with an engine to push it about. _Clara_ was somebody, a personality,
+a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature. She was "she" to everybody.
+And at last one morning she kicked up her heels and took a long white
+bone in her teeth and went her ways.
+
+The next day _Clara_ came back. There was something about her manner
+of sweeping into the bay, about the proud look of her as she came to a
+halt, that convinced all the watchers in the shipyard of her success.
+
+When they learned that she had exceeded all her contract stipulations
+there was a tumult of rejoicing; for her success was the success of
+every man and lad in the company's employ--at least so thought all who
+had any instinct of team-play and collective pride. A few soreheads
+were glum, or sneered at the enthusiasm of the others. It was strange
+that Jake Nuddle was associated with all of these groups.
+
+_Clara_ was not permitted to linger and rest on her laurels. She had
+work to do. Every ship in the world was working overtime except the
+German Kiel Canal boats. _Clara_ was gone from the view the next
+morning. Mamise missed her as she looked from the office window. She
+mentioned this to Davidge, for fear he might not know. Somebody might
+have stolen her. He explained:
+
+"She's going down to Norfolk to take on a cargo of food for
+England--wheat for the Allies. I'm glad she's going to take
+breadstuffs to people. My mother used to be always going about to
+hungry folks with a basket of food on her arm."
+
+Mamise had Jake and Abbie in to dinner that night. She was all agog
+about the success of _Clara_, and hoped that _Mamise_ would one day do
+as well.
+
+Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. "Did the boss tell you
+where the _Clara_ was goin' to?"
+
+"Yes--Norfolk."
+
+Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes, then rose and
+mumbled:
+
+"Goin' out to get some more cigars."
+
+Abbie called after him, "Hay, you got a whole half-box left." But Jake
+did not seem to hear the recall.
+
+He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.
+
+"I thought you went out to git some," said Abbie, who felt it
+necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some blunder he
+had made. Jake laughed very amiably.
+
+"Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that. But I hadda
+telephone a certain party, long-distance--and I forgot."
+
+Abbie broke in, "Who you got to long-distance to?"
+
+Jake did not answer.
+
+Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out into the main
+office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.
+
+"They loaded the _Clara_ in record time with wheat for England. She
+sails to-day."
+
+At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:
+
+"You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood--remember? Well, she's
+starting out through the big woods with a lot of victuals for old
+Granny England. If only the wolves don't get her!"
+
+He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her as if she
+were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an errand of mercy.
+
+Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the dangers they
+run and because of the pluck they show in storms and fires, and the
+unending fights they make against wind and wave. But of late they had
+had unheard-of enemies to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine
+placed inside the cargo.
+
+Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:
+
+"To think, with so little food in the world and so many starving to
+death, people could sink ships full of wheat!"
+
+On the second day after the _Clara_ set forth on the ocean Marie
+Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her letters as fast as
+she could. In the afternoon she took the typewritten transcripts into
+Davidge's office to drop them into his "in" basket.
+
+The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she heard him say:
+
+"Mr. Davidge speaking.... Hello, Ed.... What? You're too close to the
+'phone.... That's better.... You're too far away--start all over.... I
+don't get that.... Yes--a life-boat picked up with what--oh, six
+survivors. Yes--from what ship? I say, six survivors from what
+ship?... The _Clara_? She's gone? _Clara_?"
+
+He reeled and wavered in his chair. "What happened--many lost? And the
+boat--cargo--everything--everybody but those six! They got her, then!
+The Germans got her--on her first voyage! God damn their guts!
+Good-by, Ed."
+
+He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the receiver groped
+for the hook with a pitiful blind man's gesture.
+
+Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She ran forward
+and took his hand and set the receiver in place.
+
+He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His mother was
+dead. The ship he had named for her was dead. He needed mothering.
+
+Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them as if to hold
+them together under their burden. She said:
+
+"I heard. I can't tell you how-- Oh, what can we do in such a world!"
+
+He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:
+
+"I'll get a German for this--somehow!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge's
+agony.
+
+She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as
+the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children.
+She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her
+slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some
+woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob
+his own heart out.
+
+She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard
+him groan, "I'll get a German for this!" somehow it horrified her,
+coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole
+nation.
+
+America had stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and
+selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them.
+America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the
+Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel
+ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters;
+the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing--that torture
+never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most
+expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and
+megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.
+
+America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind
+charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood
+was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill
+enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their
+glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further
+notice.
+
+The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were
+thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their desks,
+women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams,
+business men across their counters, "Kill Germans!"
+
+It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the
+Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was
+fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from
+that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken
+over civilization.
+
+They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that
+pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not
+Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular
+battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing
+that grew with the butchery.
+
+Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the
+Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all
+did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations,
+German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.
+
+It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a
+duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy.
+The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride.
+Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled,
+mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work.
+
+Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the
+world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved
+and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and
+omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves,
+the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.
+
+Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated;
+the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea.
+Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a
+blood-feud of his own with Germany.
+
+He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her
+with a sudden demand:
+
+"Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?"
+
+"No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I
+never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know
+you could be so angry."
+
+"I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em,
+too?"
+
+"Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on
+board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they
+belong."
+
+This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for
+the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into
+uncouth laughter.
+
+But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the
+distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions,
+and to run among them like a frantic child.
+
+Davidge's next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead
+engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the
+sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without
+water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.
+
+Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship's cargo would have
+relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian--what word
+or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of
+the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?
+
+He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky
+wilderness--old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies
+withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of their
+mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He
+thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles.
+The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned
+aloud:
+
+"If they'd only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody--to anybody!
+But to pour it into the sea!"
+
+He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul
+broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:
+
+"I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the
+fool ship."
+
+He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.
+
+"The blithering idiot I've been! To go and work and work and work, and
+drive my men and all the machinery for months and months to make a
+ship and put in the engines and send it down and load it, and all for
+some"--a gesture expressed his unspeakable thought--"of a German to
+blow it to hell and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!"
+
+In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He
+burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we
+all revolve around ourselves as well as our suns.
+
+"What's the use," he maundered--"what's the use of trying to do
+anything while they're alive and at work right here in our country?
+They're everywhere! They swarm like cockroaches out of every hole as
+soon as the light gets low! We've got to blister 'em all to death with
+rough-on-rats before we can build anything that will last. There's no
+stopping them without wiping 'em off the earth."
+
+She did not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments
+or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute
+fellowship to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped
+Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to
+contempt for himself.
+
+"It's time I quit out of this and went to work with the army. It makes
+me sick to be here making ships for Germans to sink. The thing to do
+is to kill the Germans first and build the ships when the sea is safe
+for humanity. I'm ashamed of myself sitting in an office shooting with
+a telephone and giving out plans and contracts and paying wages to a
+gang of mechanics. It's me for a rifle and a bayonet."
+
+Mamise had to oppose this:
+
+"Who's going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you when you
+get there if all the ship-builders turn soldier?"
+
+"Let somebody else do it."
+
+"But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said that America
+could never put an army across or feed it if she got it there. If you
+go on strike you'll prove the truth of that."
+
+Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes to hear his
+nobler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources a woman has.
+Mamise was speaking for him as well as for herself when she said:
+
+"Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all the ships
+you would build. You said it was the greatest poem ever written, the
+idea of making ships faster than the Germans could sink them. It was
+that that made me want to be a ship-builder. It was the first big
+ambition I ever had. And now you tell me it's useless and foolish!"
+
+He saw the point without further pressure.
+
+"You're right," he said. "My job's here. It would be selfish and showy
+to knock off this work and grab a gun. I'll stick. It's hard, though,
+to settle down here when everybody else is bound for France."
+
+Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not continue to
+argue a case that has already been won. She added only the warm
+personal note to help out the cold generality.
+
+"There's my ship to finish, you know. You couldn't leave poor _Mamise_
+out there on the stocks unfinished."
+
+The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her. He needed
+her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and knew for the first
+time the feel of her body against his, the sweet compliance of her
+form to his embrace.
+
+But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She was in one of
+those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism, that women were
+rising to more and more as a new religion. She was feeling terribly
+American, and, though she had no anger for him and saw no insult in
+his violence, she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and
+kissing. She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away,
+yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had saved him
+from himself and to himself. She had brought him back to his east
+again, and the morning is always wonderful.
+
+She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he did not
+despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people were postponing
+everything beautiful and lovable "for the duration of the war."
+
+He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its rattlesnake
+clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers as he stammered:
+
+"We've gone through this together, and you've helped me--I can't tell
+you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go through a lot more trouble
+together. There's plenty of it ahead."
+
+She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed his big hand
+again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:
+
+"I hope so."
+
+Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the door with
+suspicious promptitude. Davidge said:
+
+"Mr. Avery, please--and the others--all the others right away. Ask
+them to come here; and you might come back, Miss Gabus."
+
+Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers,
+gathered, wondering what was about to happen. Some of them came
+grinning, for when they had asked Miss Gabus what was up she had
+guessed: "I reckon he's goin' to announce his engagement."
+
+The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera chorus.
+Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting. Then he said:
+
+"Folks, I've just had bad news. The _Clara_--they got her! The Germans
+got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She was two days out and going
+like a greyhound when she sank with all on board except six of the
+crew who got away in a life-boat and were picked up by a tramp."
+
+There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths, of
+incredulous protests.
+
+Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:
+
+"My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin' to do about it?"
+
+They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:
+
+"We'll build some more ships. And if they sink those we'll--build some
+more."
+
+He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt, and so can
+steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and, thanks to Mamise,
+Davidge was recalled to himself, though he was too shrewd or too
+tactful to give her the credit for redeeming him.
+
+His resolute words gave the office people back to their own
+characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each
+had something to say. One, "She was such a pretty boat!" another, "Was
+she insured, d'you suppose?" a third, a fourth, and the rest: "The
+poor engineer--and the sailors!" "All that work for nothin'!" "The
+money she cost!" "The Belgians could 'a' used that wheat!" "Those
+Germans! Is there anything they won't do?"
+
+The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks. Davidge took up
+the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise renewed the cheerful
+_rap-rap-rap_ of her typewriter.
+
+The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the yard.
+There was no lack of messengers to go among the men with the bad word
+that the first of the Davidge ships had been destroyed. It was a
+personal loss to nearly everybody, as it had been to Davidge, for
+nearly everybody had put some of his soul and some of his sweat into
+that slow and painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of
+the wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers was
+both loud and ferocious.
+
+Jake Nuddle was one of the few who did not revile the German plague.
+He was not in the least excited over the dead sailors. They did not
+belong to his union. Besides, Jake did not love work or the things it
+made. He claimed to love the workers and the money they made.
+
+He was tactless enough to say to a furious orator:
+
+"Ah, what's it to you? The more ships the Germans sink the more you
+got to build and the more they'll have to pay you. If Davidge goes
+broke, so much the better. The sooner we bust these capitalists the
+sooner the workin'-man gets his rights."
+
+The orator retorted: "This is war-times. We got to make ships to win
+the war."
+
+Jake laughed. "Whose war is it? The capitalists'. You're fightin' for
+Morgan and Rockefeller to save their investments and to help 'em to
+grind you into the dirt. England and France and America are all
+land-grabbers. They're no better 'n Germany."
+
+The workers wanted a scapegoat, and Jake unwittingly volunteered. They
+welcomed him with a bloodthirsty roar. They called him vigorous
+shipyard names and struck at him. He backed off. They followed. He
+made a crucial mistake; he whirled and ran. They ran after him. Some
+of them threw hammers and bolts. Some of these struck him as he fled.
+Workmen ahead of him were roused by the noise and headed him off.
+
+He darted through an opening in the side of the _Mamise_. The crowd
+followed him, chased him out on an upper deck.
+
+"Throw him overboard! Kill him!" they shouted.
+
+He took refuge behind Sutton the riveter, whose gun had made such
+noise that he had heard none of the clamor. Seeing Jake's white face
+and the mark of a thrown monkey-wrench on his brow, Sutton shut off
+the compressed air and confronted the pursuers. He was naked to the
+waist, and he had no weapon, but he held them at bay while he
+demanded:
+
+"What's the big idea? What you playin'? Puss in a corner? How many of
+yous guys does it take to lick this one gink?"
+
+A burly patriot, who forgot that his name and his accent were
+Teutonic, roared:
+
+"Der sneagin' Sohn off a peach ain't sorry _die Clara_ is by dose tam
+Chermans _gesunken_!"
+
+"What!" Sutton howled. "The _Clara_ sunk? Whatya mean--sunk?"
+
+Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven thousands of rivets
+into the frame of the ship, and a little explosive had opened all the
+seams and ended her days! When at last he understood the _Clara's_
+fate and Nuddle's comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:
+
+"And you thought it was good business, did you? And these fellers
+was thinkin' about lynchin' you, was they? Well, they're all
+wrong--they're all wrong: we'd ought to save lynchin' for real
+guys. What you need is somethin' like--this!"
+
+His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye. Jake in
+a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward; his head
+struck the steel deck, and his soul went out. When it came back he lay
+still for a while, pretending to be unconscious until the gang had
+dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton was making ready to begin riveting
+again. Then he picked himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:
+
+"I'll fix you for this, you--"
+
+Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big
+foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop
+that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold.
+He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words--hunched
+back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe
+hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow and
+disperse his enemies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted
+that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to
+conform. Then she paused.
+
+On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too
+weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of
+Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the
+brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his
+friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers,
+it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from
+foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.
+
+Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a
+ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She
+had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters
+at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and
+without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile,
+compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions,
+oscillations, running aground--stresses that crumpled steel or
+scissored the rivets in two.
+
+It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or
+death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home
+with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some
+limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in
+fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died
+dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds;
+some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led
+long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory,
+degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps.
+
+People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and
+destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as little on their
+pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the
+ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen
+emergency.
+
+Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before
+he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past
+performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the
+recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the
+national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one
+and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages.
+
+He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little
+except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he
+had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he
+had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at
+all.
+
+Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted no steel in
+a ship's hull or in any part of her that had not behaved well in the
+shop tests, in the various machines that put the metal under bending
+stress, cross-breaking, hammering, drifting, shearing, elongation,
+contraction, compression, deflection, tension, and torsion stresses.
+The best of the steels had their elastic limits; there was none that
+did not finally snap.
+
+Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed according
+to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being only a tenth of
+its proved capacity. That ought to have been enough of a margin of
+safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.
+
+People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand. A
+reference or two, a snap judgment based on first impressions, ushered
+a man or a woman into a place where weakness or malice could do
+incalculable harm. In every institution, as in every structure, these
+danger-spots exist. Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people,
+could only take the best he could get.
+
+Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous ease and had
+contrived already the ruin of one ship. His program, which included
+all the others, had had a little setback, but he could easily regain
+his lost ground, for the mob had vented its rage against him and was
+appeased.
+
+Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge's shop and
+his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was drifting toward a
+supreme stress that should try her inmost fiber. And at the moment she
+felt an almost unbearable strain in the petty decision of whether to
+go with the clerks or stop with the boss.
+
+Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would say of her. It
+was Davidge that she was protecting. She did not want to have them
+talking about him--as if anything could have stopped them from that!
+
+While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave him
+unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent so much time
+that the outer office was empty, anyway.
+
+Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the door. Miss
+Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:
+
+"Was you goin' in?"
+
+"No--oh no!" said Mamise. "I left something in my desk."
+
+She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried away,
+ostentatiously passing the other clerks as they struggled across the
+yard to the gate.
+
+She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles. She was so
+desperate that she went to see her sister.
+
+Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing buttons on the
+extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom she washed for
+in spite of Jake's high earnings--from which she benefited no more
+than before. If Jake had come into a million, or shattered the world
+to bits and then rebuilt it nearer to his heart's desire, he would not
+have had enough to make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many
+handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or at least got
+Abbie no farther along the road to contentment or grace.
+
+Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to the _Clara_. She drew
+Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who were playing in
+the kitchen because it was full of the savor of the forthcoming
+supper.
+
+"Abbie dear, have you heard the news?"
+
+Abbie gasped, "Oh God, is anything happened to Jake--killed or
+arrested or anything?"
+
+"No, no--but _Clara_--the _Clara_--"
+
+"Clara who?"
+
+"The ship, the first ship we built, she's destroyed."
+
+"For the land's sake! I want to know! Well, what you know about
+that!"
+
+Abbie could not rise to very lofty heights of emotion or language over
+anything impersonal. She made hardly so much noise over this tragedy
+as a hen does over the delivery of an egg.
+
+Mamise was distressed by her stolidity. She understood with regret why
+Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational companion. She hated to
+think well of Jake or ill of her sister, but one cannot help receiving
+impressions.
+
+She did her best to stimulate Abbie to a decent warmth, but Abbie was
+as immune to such appeals as those people were who were still
+wondering why America went to war with Germany.
+
+Abbie was entirely perfunctory in her responses to Mamise's pictures
+of the atrocity. She grew really indignant when she looked at the
+clock and saw that Jake was late to dinner. She broke in on Mamise's
+excitement with a distressful:
+
+"And we got steak 'n' cab'ge for supper."
+
+"I must hurry back to my own shack," said Mamise, rising.
+
+"You stay right where you are. You're goin' to eat with us."
+
+"Not to-night, thanks, dear."
+
+She kept no servant of her own. She enjoyed the circumstance of
+getting her meals. She was camping out in her shanty. To-night she
+wanted to be busy about something especially about a kitchen--the
+machine-shop of the woman who wants to be puttering at something.
+
+She was dismally lonely, but she was not equal to a supper at Jake's.
+She would have liked a few children of her own, but she was glad that
+she did not own the Nuddle children, especially the elder two.
+
+The Nuddles had given three hostages to Fortune. Jake cared little
+whether Fortune kept the hostages or not, or whether or not she
+treated them as the Germans treated Belgian hostages.
+
+Little Sister was the oldest of the trio completed by Little Brother
+and a middle-sized bear named Sam. Sis and Sam were juvenile
+anarchists born with those gifts of mischief, envy, indolence, and
+denunciation that Jake and the literary press-agents of the same
+spirit flattered as philosophy or even as philanthropy. Little
+Brother was a quiet, patient gnome with quaint instincts of industry
+and accumulation. He was always at work at something. His mud-pie
+bakery was famous for two blocks. He gathered bright pebbles and
+shells. In the marble season he was a plutocrat in taws and agates.
+Being always busy, he always had time to do more things. He even
+volunteered to help his mother. When he got an occasional penny he
+hoarded it in hiding. He had need to, for Sam borrowed what he could
+and stole what he could not wheedle.
+
+Little Brother was not stingy, but he saved; he bought his mother
+petty gifts once in a while when he had enough to pay for something.
+
+Little Sister and Sam were capable in emotional crises of sympathy or
+hatred to express themselves volubly. Little Brother had no gifts of
+speech. He made gifts of pebbles or of money awkwardly, shyly, with
+few words. Mamise, as she tried to extricate herself from Abbie's
+lassoing hospitality, paused in the door and studied the children,
+contrasting them with the Webling grandchildren who had been born with
+gold spoons in their mouths and somebody to take them out, fill them,
+and put them in again. But luxury seemed to make small difference in
+character.
+
+She mused upon the three strange beings that had come into the world
+as a result of the chance union of Jake and Abbie. Without that they
+would never have existed and the world would have never known the
+difference, nor would they.
+
+Sis and Sam were quarreling vigorously. Little Brother was silent upon
+the hearth. He had collected from the gutter many small stones and
+sticks. They were treasures to him and he was as important about them
+as a miser about his shekels. Again and again he counted them, taking
+a pleasure in their arithmetic. Already he was advanced in mathematics
+beyond the others and he loved to arrange his wealth for the sheer
+delight of arrangement; orderliness was an instinct with him already.
+
+For a time Mamise noted how solemnly he kept at work, building a little
+stone house and painfully making it stand. He was a home-builder
+already.
+
+Sam had paid no heed to the work. But, wondering what Mamise was
+looking at, he turned and saw his brother. A grin stretched his
+mouth. Little Brother grew anxious. He knew that when something he had
+builded interested Sam its doom was close.
+
+"Whass 'at?" said Sam.
+
+"None yer business," said Little Brother, as spunky as Belgium before
+the Kaiser.
+
+"'S'ouse, ain't it?"
+
+"You lea' me 'lone, now!"
+
+"Where d'you git it at?"
+
+"I built it."
+
+"Gimme't!"
+
+"You build you one for your own self now."
+
+"'At one's good enough for me."
+
+"Maw! You make Sam lea' my youse alone."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle moaned: "Sammie, don't bother Little Brother now. You go
+on about your own business."
+
+Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with the side of
+his foot.
+
+Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had darted at him and
+smacked him with violence. Instantly she was ashamed of herself. Sam
+began to rub his face and yowl:
+
+"Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me, so she did."
+
+Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it
+was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She
+had accepted too much of Mamise's money to be very indignant, but she
+did rise to a wail:
+
+"Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern."
+
+"I'm sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just
+couldn't help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his
+brother's house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he'll be just
+as much of a nuisance as Jake and he'll call it syndicalism or
+internationalism or something, just as Jake does."
+
+Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white
+story.
+
+When Abbie gasped, "What on earth's the matter?" he growled: "I bumped
+into a girder. Whatya s'pose?"
+
+Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction, but she
+knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the
+home champion.
+
+She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the
+steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was
+earning--or at least receiving--the family was eating high.
+
+Little Sister told her brother Sam, "It's a shame to waste good meat
+on his old black lamp." And Sam's regret was, "I wisht I'd 'a' gave it
+to um."
+
+Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but
+it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public
+welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to
+expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have
+time to be kind to them in particular.
+
+Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every
+time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made
+her mad.
+
+To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of anxiety for
+him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:
+
+"But, oh, did you hear of the destruction of the _Clara_?"
+
+"Yes, I heard of the destruction of the _Clara_," he echoed, with a
+sneer. "If I had my way the whole rotten fleet would follow her to the
+bottom of the ocean!"
+
+"Why, Jake!" was Abbie's best.
+
+Jake went on: "And it will, too, or I'm a liar. The Germans will get
+them boats as fast as they build 'em." He laughed. "I tell you them
+Kaiser-boys just eats ships."
+
+"But how were they able to destroy the _Clara_?" Mamise demanded.
+
+"Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk they just put a
+bomb into her."
+
+"But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?"
+
+"Oh, we--they have ways."
+
+The little slip from "we" to "they" caught Mamise's ear. Her first
+intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her amazement the first
+words that leaped were:
+
+"Poor Abbie!"
+
+Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from
+cloud to ground. Mamise's whole thought was from zig to zag in some
+such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.
+
+"We--they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German
+organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake
+must have been involved in the wreck of the _Clara_. That means that
+he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means
+that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister
+is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!"
+
+This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake
+grumbling:
+
+"What ya mean--'poor Abbie!'?"
+
+Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the
+lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was
+thinking--or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his
+own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through
+Mamise, though Mamise did not know this--that is, he hoped she did
+not. And yet perhaps she did.
+
+And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie
+was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and
+her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid
+thoughtlessness.
+
+Jake, suspecting Mamise's suspicion of him, was moved to justify
+himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who
+had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy
+country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had
+become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant
+nothing to her bovine soul. She was thinking of something else,
+usually, throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole
+nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess she was
+hunting through her work-basket for a good thread to patch Sam's pants
+with.
+
+Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was her first encounter
+with the abysmal hatred of which some of these loud lovers of mankind
+are capable. Jake's theories had been merely absurd or annoying
+before, but now they grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed
+by an actual crime.
+
+Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of Jake or attack
+him. She despised him too well to argue with him, and she rose to go.
+
+Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She would not be
+persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow and cooked herself a little
+meal of her own. She felt stained once more with vicarious guilt, and
+wondered what she had done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes
+of others.
+
+She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself of Sir
+Joseph Webling's guilt by keeping his secret. If she had gone to the
+British authorities with her first suspicion of Sir Joseph and Nicky
+Easton she would have escaped from sharing their guilt. She would
+have been branded as an informer, but only by the conspirators; and
+Sir Joseph himself and Lady Webling might have been saved from
+self-destruction.
+
+Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again she had only
+suspicion for her guide. But in England she had been a foreigner and
+Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here she was in her own country, and
+she owed nothing to Jake Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to
+his wife as to his flag.
+
+It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one clear duty was
+to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake. It was not a pretty duty,
+but it was a definite. She resolved that the first thing she did in
+the morning would be to go to Davidge with what facts she had. The
+resolution brought her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper
+with a sense of pleasant righteousness.
+
+Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted a cigarette,
+and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned evening of spinsterial
+respectability. Then the door opened and Abbie walked in. Abbie did
+not think it sisterly to knock. She paused to register her formal
+protest against Mamise's wicked addiction to tobacco.
+
+"I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you'd break yourself of that horbul
+habbut."
+
+Mamise laughed tolerantly. "You were cooking cabbage when I was at
+your house. Why can't I cook this vegetable?"
+
+"But I wa'n't cooking the cabbage in my face."
+
+"You were cooking it in mine. But let's not argue about botany or
+ethics."
+
+Abbie was not aware of mentioning either of those things, but she had
+other matters to discuss. She dropped into a chair, sighing:
+
+"Jake's went out to telephone, and I thought I'd just run over for a
+few words. You see, I--"
+
+"Where was Jake telephoning?"
+
+"I d'know. He's always long-distancin' somebody. But what I come
+for--"
+
+"Doesn't it ever occur to you to wonder?"
+
+"Long as it ain't some woman--or if it is, as long as it's long
+distance--why should I worry my head about it? The thing I wanted to
+speak of is--"
+
+"Didn't it rather make your blood run cold to hear Jake speak as he
+did of the lost ship?"
+
+"Oh, I'm so used to his rantin' it goes in one ear and out the
+other."
+
+"You'd better keep a little of it in your brain. I'm worried about
+your husband, even if you're not, Abbie dear."
+
+"What call you got to worry?"
+
+"I have a ghastly feeling that my brother-in-law is mixed up in the
+sinking of the _Clara_."
+
+"Don't be foolish!"
+
+"I'm trying not to be. But do you remember the night I told you both
+that the _Clara_ was going to Norfolk to take on her cargo? Well, he
+went out to get cigars, though he had a lot, and he let it slip that
+he had been talking on the long-distance telephone. When the _Clara_
+is sunk, he is not surprised. He says, 'We--they have ways.' He
+prophesies the sinking of all the ships Mr. Davidge--"
+
+Abbie seized this name as a weapon of self-defense and mate-defense.
+
+"Oh, you're speakin' for Mr. Davidge now."
+
+"Perhaps. He's my employer, and Jake's, too. I feel under some
+obligations to him, even though Jake doesn't. I feel some obligations
+to the United States, and Jake doesn't. I distrust and abhor Germany,
+and Jake likes her as well as he does us. The background is perfect.
+When such crimes are being done as Germany keeps doing, condoning them
+is as bad as committing them."
+
+"Big words!" sniffed Abbie. "Can't you talk United States?"
+
+"All right, my dear. I say that since Jake is glad the _Clara_ was
+sunk and hopes that more ships will be sunk, he is as bad as the men
+that sank her. And what's more, I have made up my mind that Jake
+helped to sink her, and that he works in this yard simply for a chance
+to sink more ships. Do you get those words of one syllable?"
+
+"No," said Abbie. Ideas of one syllable are as hard to grasp as words
+of many. "I don't know what you're drivin' at a tall."
+
+"Poor Abbie!" sighed Mamise. "Dream on, if you want to. But I'm going
+to tell Mr. Davidge to keep a watch on Jake. I'm going to warn him
+that Jake is probably mixed up in the sinking of that beautiful ship
+he named after his mother."
+
+Even Abbie could not miss the frightful meaning of this. She was one
+of those who never trust experience, one of those who think that, in
+spite of all the horrible facts of the past, horrible things are
+impossible in the future. Higher types of the same mind had gone about
+saying that war was impossible, later insisting that it was impossible
+that the United States should be dragged into this war because it was
+so horrible, and next averring that since this war was so horrible
+there could never be another.
+
+Even Abbie could imagine what would happen if Mamise denounced Jake as
+an accomplice in the sinking of the Clara. It would be so terrible
+that it must be impossible. The proof that Jake was innocent was the
+thought of what would happen to him and to her and their children if
+he were found guilty. She summed it all up in a phrase:
+
+"Mamise, you're plumb crazy!"
+
+"I hope so, but I'm also crazy enough to put Mr. Davidge on his
+guard."
+
+"And have him fire Jake, or get him arrested?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Ain't you got any sense of decency or dooty a tall?"
+
+"I'm trying to find out."
+
+"Well, I always knew a woman who'd smoke cigarettes would do
+anything."
+
+"I'll do this."
+
+"O' course you won't; but if you did, I'd--why, I'd--why, I just don't
+know what I'd do."
+
+"Would you give up Jake?"
+
+"Give up Jake? Divorce him or something?"
+
+Mamise nodded.
+
+Abbie gasped: "Why, you're positively immor'l! Posi-_tive_-ly! He's
+the father of my childern! I'll stick to Jake through thick and
+thin."
+
+"Through treason and murder, too? You were an American, you know,
+before you ever met him. And I was an American before he became my
+brother-in-law. And I don't intend to let him make me a partner in his
+guilt just because he made you give him a few children."
+
+"I won't listen to another word," cried Abbie. "You're too indecent to
+talk to." And she slammed the door after her.
+
+"Poor Abbie!" said Mamise, and closed her book, rubbed the light out
+of her cigarette, and went to bed.
+
+But not to sleep. Abbie had not argued well, but sometimes that is
+best for the arguments, for then the judge becomes their attorney.
+Mamise tossed on a grid of perplexities. Neither her mind nor her body
+could find comfort.
+
+She rose early to escape her thoughts. It was a cold, raw morning, and
+Abbie came dashing through the drizzle with her shawl over her head
+and her cheeks besprent with tears and rain. She flung herself on
+Mamise and sobbed:
+
+"I ain't slep' a wink all night. I been thinkin' of Jake and the
+childern. I was mad at you last night, but I'm sorry for what I said.
+You're my own sister--all I got in the world besides the three
+childern. And I'm all you got, and I know it ain't in you to go and
+send the father o' my childern to jail and ruin my life. I've had a
+hard life, and so've you, Mamise honey, but we got to be friends and
+love one another, for we're all that's left of our fambly, and it
+couldn't be that one sister would drive the other to distraction and
+drag the family name in the mud. It couldn't be, could it, Mamise?
+Tell me you was only teasin' me! I didn't mean what I said last night
+about you bein' indecent, and you didn't mean what you said about
+Jake, did you, Mamise? Say you didn't, or I'll just die right here."
+
+She had left the door open, and a gust of windy rain came lashing in.
+The world outside was cold and wet, and Abbie was warm and afraid and
+irresistibly pitiful.
+
+Mamise could only hug and kiss her and say:
+
+"I'll see! I'll see!"
+
+When people do not know what their chief mysteries, themselves, will
+do they say, "I'll see."
+
+Mamise thought of Davidge, and she could not promise to leave him in
+ignorance of the menace imminent above him. But when at last she tore
+herself from Abbie's clutching hands and hurried away to the office
+she looked back and saw Abbie out in the rain, staring after her in
+terror and shaking her head helplessly. She could not promise herself
+that she would tell Davidge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+She reached the office late in spite of her early start. Davidge had
+gone. He had gone to Pittsburgh to try to plead for more steel for
+more ships.
+
+The head clerk told her this. He was in an ugly mood, sarcastic about
+Mamise's tardiness, and bitter with the knowledge that all the work of
+building another _Clara_ had to be carried through with its endless
+detail and the chance of the same futility. He was as sick about it as
+a Carlyle who must rewrite a burned-up history, an Audubon who must
+repaint all his pictures.
+
+Davidge had left no good-by for Mamise. This hurt her. She wished that
+she had stopped to tell him good night the afternoon before.
+
+In his prolonged absence Mamise wondered if he were really in
+Pittsburgh or in Washington with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She experienced
+the first luxury of jealousy; it was aggravated by alarm. She was left
+alone, a prey to the appeals of Abbie, who could not persuade her to
+promise silence.
+
+But the next night Jake was gone. Abbie explained that he had been
+called out of town to a meeting of a committee of his benevolent
+insurance order. Mamise wondered and surmised.
+
+Jake went to meet Nicky Easton and claim his pay for his share in the
+elimination of the _Clara_. Nicky paid him so handsomely that Jake
+lost his head and imagined himself already a millionaire. Strangely,
+he did not at once set about dividing his wealth among his beloved
+"protelariat." He made a royal progress from saloon to saloon, growing
+more and more haughty, and pounding on successive bars with a vigor
+that increased as his articulation effervesced. His secret would
+probably have bubbled out of him if he had not been so offensive that
+he was bounced out of every barroom before he had time to get to the
+explanation of his wealth. In one "poor man's club" he fell asleep
+and rolled off his chair to a comfortable berth among the spittoons.
+
+Next morning Jake woke up with his head swollen and his purse
+vanished. He sought out Nicky and demanded another fee. Nicky laughed
+at his claim; but Jake grew threatening, and Nicky was frightened into
+offering him a chance to win another fortune by sinking another ship.
+He staked Jake to the fare for his return and promised to motor down
+some dark night and confer with him. Jake rolled home in state.
+
+On the same train went a much interested sleuth who detached himself
+from the entourage of Nicky and picked up Jake.
+
+Jake had attracted some attention when he first met Nicky in
+Washington, but the sadly overworked Department of Justice could not
+provide a squad of escorts for every German or pro-German suspect.
+Before the war was over the secret army under Mr. Bielaski reached a
+total of two hundred and fifty thousand, but the number of suspects
+reached into the millions. From Nicky Easton alone a dozen activities
+radiated; and studying him and his communicants was a slow and complex
+task.
+
+Mr. Larrey decided that the best way to get a line on Jake would be to
+take a job alongside him and "watch his work." It was the easiest
+thing in the world to get a job at Davidge's shipyard; and it was
+another of the easiest things in the world to meet Jake, for Jake was
+eager to meet workmen, particularly workmen like Larrey, who would
+listen to reason, and take an interest in the gentle art of slowing up
+production. Larrey was all for sabotage.
+
+One evening Jake invited him to his house for further development. On
+that evening Mamise dropped in. She did not recognize Larrey, but he
+remembered her perfectly.
+
+He could hardly believe his camera eyes at first when he saw the great
+Miss Webling enter a workman's shanty and accept Jake Nuddle's
+introduction:
+
+"Larrey, old scout, this is me sister-in-law. Mamise, shake hands with
+me pal Larrey."
+
+Larrey had been the first of her shadows in New York, but had been
+called off when she proved unprofitable and before she met Easton. And
+now he found her at work in a shipyard where strange things were
+happening! He was all afire with the covey of spies he had flushed.
+His first impulse was to shoot off a wire in code to announce his
+discovery. Then he decided to work this gold-mine himself. It would be
+pleasanter to cultivate this pretty woman than Jake Nuddle, and she
+would probably fall for him like a thousand of brick. But when he
+invited himself to call on her her snub fell on him like a thousand of
+brick. She would not let him see her home, and he was furious till
+Jake explained, "She's sweet on the boss."
+
+Larrey decided that he had better call on Davidge and tip him off to
+the past of his stenographer and get him to place her under
+observation.
+
+The next day Davidge came back from his protracted journey. He had
+fought a winning battle for an allotment of steel. He was boyish with
+the renewal of battle ardor, and boyish in his greeting of Mamise. He
+made no bones of greeting her before all the clerks with a horribly
+embarrassing enthusiasm:
+
+"Lord! but I've been homesick to see you!"
+
+Miss Gabus was disgusted. Mamise was silly with confusion.
+
+Those people who are always afraid of new customs have dreaded public
+life for women lest it should destroy modesty and rob them of the
+protection of guardians, duennas, and chaperons. But the world seems
+to have to have a certain amount of decency to get along on, at all,
+and provides for it among humans about as well as it provides for the
+protection of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish
+and some prosper.
+
+The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in
+spasms of anxiety over other people's souls would have given up Mamise
+and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached
+bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them,
+their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of
+temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances
+and crowds.
+
+Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of
+longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these
+anguishes were as futile as prayers for the moon. Outside of office
+hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.
+
+These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more
+than a mother's vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls or
+_yashmaks_ will infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good
+deal of time--and very dolefully.
+
+Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry
+for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly
+he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first
+ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy,
+the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She
+remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had
+wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that
+communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal
+of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing
+human was alien to her.
+
+Davidge had spoken of marriage--had told her that he was a candidate
+for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been
+full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning
+after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own
+loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses
+combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.
+
+When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of
+her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he
+had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that
+womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man's to crush. But fate
+provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood
+by, and the day's work was waiting to be done.
+
+Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter. She
+hammered out a devil's tattoo on it, and he devoured estimates and
+commercial correspondence, while an aromatic haze enveloped them both
+as truly as if they had been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.
+
+Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon hour made a
+noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity to cast an evil
+spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women have a wonderful pity for men that
+other women cultivate! Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling
+was:
+
+"Goin' to lunch now, Mi' Swebling?"
+
+And all that Miss Webling said was:
+
+"Not just yet--thank you."
+
+Both were almost swooning with the tremendous significance of the
+moment.
+
+Miss Webling felt that she was defying all the powers of espionage and
+convention when she made so brave as to linger while Miss Gabus left
+the room in short twitches, with the painful reluctance of one who
+pulls off an adhesive plaster by degrees. When at last she was really
+off, Miss Webling went to Davidge's door, feeling as wicked as the
+maid in Ophelia's song, though she said no more than:
+
+"Well, did you have a successful journey?"
+
+Davidge whirled in his chair.
+
+"Bully! Sit down, won't you?"
+
+He thought that no goddess had ever done so divine a thing so
+ambrosially as she when she smiled and shook her incredibly exquisite
+head. He rose to his feet in awe of her. His restless hands, afraid to
+lay hold of their quarry, automatically extracted his watch from his
+pocket and held it beneath his eyes. He stared at it without
+recognizing the hour, and stammered:
+
+"Will you lunch with me?"
+
+"No, thank you!"
+
+This jolted an "Oh!" out of him. Then he came back with:
+
+"When am I going to get a chance to talk to you?"
+
+"You know my address."
+
+"Yes, but--" He thought of that horrible evening when he had marched
+through the double row of staring cottages. But he was determined.
+"Going to be home this evening?"
+
+"By some strange accident--yes."
+
+"By some strange accident, I might drop round."
+
+"Do."
+
+They laughed idiotically, and she turned and glided out.
+
+She went to the mess-hall and moved about, selecting her dishes.
+Pretending not to see that Miss Gabus was pretending not to see her,
+she took her collation to another table and ate with the relish of a
+sense of secret guilt--the guilt of a young woman secretly betrothed.
+
+Davidge kept away from the office most of the afternoon because Mamise
+was so intolerably sweet and so tantalizingly unapproachable. He made
+a pretext of inspecting the works. She had a sugary suspicion of his
+motive, and munched it with strange comfort.
+
+What might have happened if Davidge had called on her in her then mood
+and his could easily be guessed. But there are usually interventions.
+The chaperon this time was Mr. Larrey, the operative of the Department
+of Justice. He also had his secret.
+
+He arrived at Davidge's home just as Davidge finished the composition
+of his third lawn tie and came down-stairs to go. When he saw Larrey
+he was a trifle curt with his visitor. Thinking him a workman and
+probably an ambassador from one of the unions on the usual mission of
+such ambassadors--more pay, less hours, or the discharge of some
+unorganized laborer--Davidge said:
+
+"Better come round to the office in the morning."
+
+"I can't come to your office," said Larrey.
+
+"Why not? It's open to everybody."
+
+"Yeh, but I can't afford to be seen goin' there."
+
+"Good Lord! Isn't it respectable enough for you?"
+
+"Yeh, but--well, I think it's my duty to tip you off to a little slick
+work that's goin' on in your establishment."
+
+"Won't it keep till to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yeh--I guess so. It's only one of your stenographers."
+
+This checked Davidge. By a quaint coincidence he was about to call on
+one of his stenographers. Larrey amended his first statement:
+"Leastways, I'll say she calls herself a stenographer. But that's only
+her little camouflage. She's not on the level."
+
+Davidge realized that the stenographer he was wooing was not on the
+level. She was in the clouds. But his curiosity was piqued. He
+motioned Larrey to a chair and took another.
+
+"Shoot," he said.
+
+"Well, it's this Miss Webling. Know anything about her?"
+
+"Something," said Davidge. He was too much amused to be angry. He
+thought that Larrey was another of those amateur detectives who
+flattered Germany by crediting her with an omnipresence in evil. He
+was a faithful reader of Ellis Parker Butler's famous sleuth, and he
+grinned at Larrey. "Well, Mr. Philo Gubb, go on. Your story interests
+me."
+
+Larrey reddened. He spoke earnestly, explained who he was, showed his
+credentials, and told what he knew of Miss Webling. He added what he
+imagined Davidge knew.
+
+Davidge found the whole thing too preposterous to be insolent. His
+chivalry in Mamise's behalf was not aroused, because he thought that
+the incident would make a good story to tell her. He drew Larrey out
+by affecting amazed incredulity.
+
+Larrey explained: "She's an old friend of ours. We got the word from
+the British to pick the lady up when she first landed in this country.
+She was too slick for us, I guess, because we never got the goods on
+her. We gave her up after a couple of weeks. Then her trail crossed
+Nicky Easton's once more."
+
+"And who is Nicky Easton?"
+
+"He's a German agent she knew in London--great friend of her adopted
+father's. The British nabbed him once, but he split on the gang, and
+they let him off. Whilst I was trailin' him I ran into a feller named
+Nuddle--he come up to see Easton. I followed him here, and lo and
+behold! Miss Webling turns up, too! And passin' herself off for
+Nuddle's sister-in-law! Nuddle's a bad actor, but she's worse. And she
+pretends to be a poor workin'-girl. Cheese! You should have seen her
+in New York all dolled up!"
+
+Davidge ignored the opportunity to say that he had had the privilege
+of seeing Miss Webling all dolled up. He knew why Mamise was living as
+she did. It was a combination of lark and crusade. He nursed Larrey's
+story along, and asked with patient amusement:
+
+"What's your theory as to her reason for playing such a game?"
+
+He smiled as he said this, but sobered abruptly when Larrey
+explained:
+
+"You lost a ship not long ago, didn't you? You got other ships on the
+ways, ain't you? Well, I don't need to tell you it's good business for
+the Huns to slow up or blow up all the ships they can. Every boat they
+stop cuts down the supplies of the Allies just so much. This Miss
+Webling's adopted father was in on the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and
+this girl was, too, probably. She carried messages between old Webling
+and Easton, and walked right into a little trap the British laid for
+her. She put up a strong fight, and, being an American, was let go.
+But her record got to this country before she did. You ask me what
+she's up to. Well, what should she be up to but the Kaiser's work?
+She's no stenographer, and she wouldn't be here playin' tunes on a
+typewriter unless she had some good business reason. Well, her
+business is--she's a ship-wrecker."
+
+The charge was ridiculous, yet there were confirmations or seeming
+confirmations of it. The mere name of Nicky Easton was a thorn in
+Davidge's soul. He remembered Easton in London at Mamise's elbow, and
+in Washington pursuing her car and calling her "Mees Vapelink."
+
+Davidge promised Larrey that he would look into the matter, and bade
+him good night with mingled respect and fear.
+
+When he set out at length to call on Mamise he was grievously troubled
+lest he had lost his heart to a clever adventuress. He despised his
+suspicions, and yet--somebody had destroyed his ship. He remembered
+how shocked she had been by the news. Yet what else could the worst
+spy do but pretend to be deeply worried? Davidge had never liked Jake
+Nuddle; Mamise's alleged relationship by marriage did not gain
+plausibility on reconsideration. The whim to live in a workman's
+cottage was even less convincing.
+
+Mr. Larrey had spoiled Davidge's blissful mood and his lover's program
+for the evening. Davidge moved slowly toward Mamise's cottage, not as
+a suitor, but as a student.
+
+Larrey shadowed him from force of habit, and saw him going with
+reluctant feet, pausing now and then, irresolute. Davidge was thinking
+hard, calling himself a fool, now for trusting Mamise and now for
+listening to Larrey. To suspect Mamise was to be a traitor to his
+love: not to suspect her was to be a traitor to his common sense and
+to his beloved career.
+
+And the Mamise that awaited the belated Davidge was also in a state of
+tangled wits. She, too, had dressed with a finikin care, as Davidge
+had, neither of them stopping to think how quaint a custom it is for
+people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes
+every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening
+like Christmas parcels for each other's examination. Nature dresses
+the birds in the mating season. Mankind with the aid of the
+dressmaker and the haberdasher plumes up at will.
+
+But as Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and Davidge his
+Larrey, so Mamise had her sister Abbie.
+
+Abbie came in unexpectedly and regarded Mamise's costume with no
+illusions except her own cynical ones:
+
+"What you all diked up about?"
+
+Mamise shrugged her eyebrows, her lips, and her shoulders.
+
+Abbie guessed. "That man comin'?"
+
+Mamise repeated her previous business.
+
+"Kind of low neck, don't you think? And your arms nekked."
+
+Mamise drew over her arms a scarf that gave them color rather than
+concealment. Abbie scorned the subterfuge.
+
+"Do you think it's proper to dress like that for a man to come
+callin'?"
+
+"I did think so till you spoke," snapped Mamise in all the bitterness
+of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed and unlovely shame.
+
+Abbie felt unwelcome. "Well, I just dropped over because Jake's went
+out to some kind of meetin'."
+
+"With whom? Where?"
+
+"Oh, some of the workmen--a lot of soreheads lookin' for more wages."
+
+Mamise was indignant: "The soldiers get thirty dollars a month on a
+twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets more than that a week for
+loafing round the shop about seven hours a day. How on earth did you
+ever tie yourself up to such a rotten bounder?"
+
+Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:
+
+"Well, I ain't seen you marryin' anything better. I guess I'll go
+home. I don't seem to be wanted here."
+
+This was one of those exact truths that decent people must immediately
+deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and said:
+
+"Forgive me, dear--I'm a beast. But Jake is such a--" She felt Abbie
+wriggling ominously and changed to: "He's so unworthy of you. These
+are such terrible times, and the world is in such horrible need of
+everybody's help and especially of ships. It breaks my heart to see
+anybody wasting his time and strength interfering with the builders
+instead of joining them. It's like interfering with the soldiers.
+It's a kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and the
+children."
+
+This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears of
+self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of suffering
+for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a world. She was
+like so many of the air-ships the United States was building then: she
+could not be induced to leave the ground or, if she got up, to glide
+back safely.
+
+She tried now to love her country, but she hardly rose before she
+fell.
+
+"Oh, I know it's tur'ble what folks are sufferin', but--well, the
+Lord's will be done, I say."
+
+"And I say it's mainly the devil's will that's being done!" said
+Mamise.
+
+This terrified Abbie. "I wisht you'd be a little careful of your
+language, Mamise. Swearin' and cigarettes both is pretty much of a
+load for a lady to git by with."
+
+"O Lord!" sighed Mamise, in despair. She was capable of long, high
+flights, but she could not carry such a passenger.
+
+Abbie continued: "And do you think it's right, seein' men here all by
+yourself?"
+
+"I'm not seeing men--but a man."
+
+"But all by yourself."
+
+"I'm not all by myself when he's here."
+
+"You'll get the neighbors talkin'--you'll see!"
+
+"A lot I care for their talk!"
+
+"Why don't you marry him and settle down respectable and have childern
+and--"
+
+"Why don't you go home and take care of your own?"
+
+"I guess I better." And she departed forthwith.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The two sisters had managed to fray each other's nerves raw. The mere
+fact that Abbie advocated marriage and maternity threw Mamise into a
+cantankerous distaste for her own dreams.
+
+Larrey had delayed Davidge long enough for Mamise to be rid of Abbie,
+but the influence of both Larrey and Abbie was manifest in the
+strained greetings of the caller and the callee. Instead of the
+eagerness to rush into each other's arms that both had felt in the
+morning, Davidge entered Mamise's presence with one thought dominant:
+"Is she really a spy? I must be on my guard." And Mamise was thinking,
+"If he should be thinking what Abbie thought, how odious!"
+
+Thus once more their moods chaperoned them. Love could not attune
+them. She sat; he sat. When their glances met they parted at once.
+
+She mistook his uncertainty for despondency. She assumed that he was
+brooding over his lost ship. Out of a long silence she spoke:
+
+"I wonder if the world will ever forget and forgive?"
+
+"Forget and forgive who--whom, for what?"
+
+"Germany for all she's done to this poor world--Belgium, the
+_Lusitania_, the _Clara_?"
+
+He smiled sadly. "The _Clara_ was a little slow tub compared to the
+_Lusitania_, but she meant a lot to me."
+
+"And to me. So did the _Lusitania_. She nearly cost me my life."
+
+He was startled. "You didn't plan to sail on her?"
+
+"No, but--" She paused. She had not meant to open this subject.
+
+But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had told.
+
+"How do you mean--she nearly cost you your life?"
+
+"Oh, that's one of the dark chapters of my past."
+
+"You never told me about it."
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Please!" He said it with a surprising earnestness. He had a sudden
+hope that her confession might be an absolving explanation.
+
+She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire to release
+that old secret. She began, recklessly:
+
+"Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on the stage, and
+Sir Joseph Webling--"
+
+"You told me that much, but not what happened before you met him."
+
+"No, I didn't tell you that, and I'm not going to now, but--well, Sir
+Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of my own--to know and
+remember. Sir Joseph was German born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was
+contagious, for he--well, I can't tell you."
+
+"Please!"
+
+"I swore not to."
+
+"You gave your oath to a German?"
+
+"No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I'm always
+forgetting and starting to tell."
+
+"Why did you take your oath?"
+
+"I traded secrecy for freedom."
+
+"You mean you turned state's evidence?"
+
+"Oh no, I didn't tell on them. I didn't know what they were up to when
+they used me for-- But I'm skidding now. I want to tell you--terribly.
+But I simply must not. I made an awful mistake that night at Mrs.
+Prothero's in pretending to be ill."
+
+"You only pretended?"
+
+"Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got after me,
+accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that resulted in the
+sinking of ships and the killing of men. She said that the police came
+to our house, and Sir Joseph tried to kill one of them and killed his
+own wife and then was shot by an officer and that they gave out the
+story that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She
+said Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story she told,
+and I was afraid she'd tell you, so I spirited you away on the pretext
+of illness."
+
+Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey's story. He
+said:
+
+"But it wasn't true what Lady C.-W. told?"
+
+"Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact, and I
+couldn't explain it without breaking my oath. And now I've pretty
+nearly broken it, after all. I've sprained it badly."
+
+"Don't you want to go on and--finish it off?"
+
+"I want to--oh, how I want to! but I've got to save a few shreds of
+respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were going to tea with
+Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish now I'd let you go. Then you'd
+have known the worst of me--or worse than the worst."
+
+She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her bewilderment,
+that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized her hands and felt a need
+to gather her home to his arms.
+
+She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him. Studying his
+radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had known part of her story
+before and was glad to hear her confess it, but her intuition missed
+fire when she guessed at the source of his information.
+
+"You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!"
+
+"Not since I saw her with you."
+
+"Then who told you?"
+
+He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her read his heart
+so true.
+
+"The main thing is that you told me. And now once more I ask you: will
+you marry me?"
+
+This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her brusquerie:
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"And why not?"
+
+"I'll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love
+a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a
+womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.
+
+But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It
+offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of
+her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She
+wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her
+sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous
+impatience and returned to her theme.
+
+"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some
+atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many
+ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I
+met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened
+a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards
+and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."
+
+"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.
+
+She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys
+from the clutch of a child, and went on:
+
+"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office
+work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a
+typewriter."
+
+"It keeps you nearer to me."
+
+"But I don't want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me
+go out in the yard. Please give me a real job."
+
+He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for
+such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at
+length she said:
+
+"Please go on home. It's getting late, and I don't like you at all."
+
+"I know you don't like me, but couldn't you love me?"
+
+"That's more impossible than liking you, since you won't let me have
+my only wish."
+
+"It's too brutal, I tell you. And it's getting too cold. It would
+simply ruin your perfect skin. I don't want to marry a longshoreman,
+thank you."
+
+"Then I'll thank you to go on home. I'm tired out. I've got to get up
+in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly
+drudgery again."
+
+"If you'll marry me you won't have to work at all."
+
+"But work is the one thing I want. So if you'll kindly take yourself
+off I'll be much obliged. You've no business here, anyway, and it's
+getting so late that you'll have all the neighbors talking."
+
+"A lot I care!"
+
+"Well, I care a lot," she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie.
+"I've got to live among them."
+
+It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as
+sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl's house by a sleepy
+parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into
+his overcoat, and growled:
+
+"Good night!"
+
+She sighed "Good night!" and wished that she were not so cantankerous.
+The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step
+forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with
+the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical
+problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be
+quite squared.
+
+She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and
+womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be
+nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it
+was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.
+
+Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone,
+imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would
+marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed
+single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could
+only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when
+he was away or when he was at home.
+
+When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely cottage she
+stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into
+a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little
+cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all
+these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that
+lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to
+begin moiling again.
+
+Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the
+pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into
+the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and
+organized they would not have had their wages at all.
+
+But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but
+everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the
+idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not
+imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease.
+Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the
+mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the
+steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers
+and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce
+the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in
+bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in
+vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would
+revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books
+straight.
+
+Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to
+go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at
+his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He
+had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took
+their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of
+their families or the barrooms of idleness.
+
+Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could
+not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only
+by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war
+was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what
+could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all
+that the German horror might spare.
+
+Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of
+love.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+IN WASHINGTON
+
+[Illustration: How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other
+well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up
+with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each
+other's examination.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People
+thought of the gales that would harass the poor souls in the clammy
+trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in
+camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and
+on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless
+persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not
+enough for themselves.
+
+To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in
+the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold
+bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house
+grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an
+office not half warm enough.
+
+The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded
+them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives
+along. The dour autumn seemed to wrench hopes from the heart like
+shriveled leaves, and to fill the air with swirling discouragements.
+The men at work about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow
+upon their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that
+threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.
+
+The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other stirring
+things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly battle and
+accept Davidge's offer of a wedding-ring. She had, of course, her
+Webling inheritance to fall back upon, but she had come to hate it so
+as tainted money that she would not touch it or its interest. She put
+it all into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various
+charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had been
+her emancipation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder had spoken of
+as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph Webling.
+
+A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery, a
+thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have servants
+to wait on her and build her fires. She would go out only when she
+wished, and sleep late of mornings. She would have multitudinous furs
+and a closed and heated limousine to carry her through the white
+world. She could salve her conscience by taking up some of the more
+comfortable forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross
+bandage-factory or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy
+canteen.
+
+At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward matrimony,
+as many another woman has done. These craven moods alternated with
+periods of self-rebuke. She told herself that such a marriage would
+dishonor her and cheat Davidge.
+
+Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it had its
+gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America marriage still
+possesses for women a certain finality. Only one marriage in nine
+ended in divorce that year.
+
+Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt. She was far,
+indeed, from that more or less imaginary character so frequent in
+fiction and so rare in reality, the young woman who knows nothing of
+life and mankind. Like every other woman that ever lived, she knew a
+good deal more than she would confess, and had had more experience
+than she would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she
+knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had found her very
+tantalizing about just how much her experience totaled up.
+
+She had observed the enormous difference between a man and a woman who
+meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably.
+Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously
+intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever
+good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially
+refreshing as bread and butter. The maddening thing about marriage is
+what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do
+exist, and some people get them.
+
+Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she
+coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared
+in plenty and in privation.
+
+Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any other man.
+She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind
+of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a
+husband, of what she would be like as a wife.
+
+Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and
+everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an
+office by the fascinating advertisements of freedom, a career,
+achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that
+business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home,
+commerce its treadmills and its oakum-picking no less than the jail.
+The cozy little cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to
+nag her soul.
+
+The destruction of the good ship _Clara_ had dealt her a heavier blow
+than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal
+injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what
+bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch,
+the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many
+an Æschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus
+chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his
+profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly
+awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the
+infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and competition.
+
+The blowing up of the _Clara_ had revealed the pitiful truth that men
+may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only
+to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger.
+The _Clara_ served as a warning that the ship _Mamise_ now on the
+stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or
+destroyed as soon as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about
+her. It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather was
+conspiring with the inner November.
+
+The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend upon the
+blackest year in human annals. Everybody was unhappy; there was a
+frightful shortage of food among all nations, a terrifying shortage of
+coal, and the lowest temperature ever known would be recorded.
+America, less unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly
+disappointed in herself.
+
+There was food in plenty for America, but not for her confederates.
+The prices were appalling. Wages went up and up, but never quite
+caught the expenses. It was necessary to send enormous quantities of
+everything to our allies lest they perish before we could arrive with
+troops. And Germany went on fiendishly destroying ships, foodstuffs,
+and capital, displaying in every victory a more insatiable cruelty, a
+more revolting cynicism toward justice, mercy, or truth.
+
+The Kaiserly contempt for America's importance seemed to be justified.
+People were beginning to remember Rome, and to wonder if, after all,
+Germany might not crush France and England with the troops that had
+demolished Russia. And then America would have to fight alone.
+
+At this time Mamise stumbled upon an old magazine of the ancient date
+of 1914. It was full of prophecies that the Kaiser would be dethroned,
+exiled, hanged, perhaps. The irony of it was ghastly. Nothing was more
+impossible than the downfall of the Kaiser--who seemed verifying his
+boasts that he took his crown from God. He was praising the strong
+sword of the unconquerable Germany. He was marshaling the millions
+from his eastern front to throw the British troops into the sea and
+smother the France he had bled white. The best that the most hopeful
+could do was to mutter: "Hurry! hurry! We've got to hurry!"
+
+Mamise grew fretful about the delay to the ship that was to take her
+name across the sea. She went to Davidge to protest: "Can't you hurry
+up my ship? If she isn't launched soon I'm going to go mad."
+
+Davidge threw back his head and emitted a noise between laughter and
+profanity. He picked up a letter and flung it down.
+
+"I've just got orders changing the specifications again. This is the
+third time, and the third time's the charm; for now we've got to take
+out all we've put in, make a new set of drawings and a new set of
+castings and pretty blamed near tear down the whole ship and rebuild
+it."
+
+"In the name of Heaven, why?"
+
+"In the name of hades, because we've got to get a herd of railroad
+locomotives to France, and sending them over in pieces won't do. They
+want 'em ready to run. So the powers that be have ordered me to
+provide two hatchways big enough to lower whole locomotives through,
+and pigeonholes in the hold big enough to carry them. As far as the
+_Mamise_ is concerned, that means we've just about got to rub it out
+and do it over again. It's a case of back to the mold-loft for
+_Mamise_."
+
+"And about how much more delay will this mean?"
+
+"Oh, about ninety days or thereabouts. If we're lucky we'll launch her
+by spring."
+
+This was almost worse than the death of the _Clara_. That tragedy had
+been noble; it dealt a noble blow and woke the heart to a noble grief
+and courage. But deferment made the heart sick, and the brain and
+almost the stomach.
+
+Davidge liked the disappointment no better than Mamise did, but he was
+used to it.
+
+"And now aren't you glad you're not a ship-builder? How would you feel
+if you had got your wish to work in the yard and had turned your
+little velvet hands into a pair of nutmeg-graters by driving about ten
+thousand rivets into those plates, only to have to cut 'em all out
+again and drive 'em into an entirely new set of plates, knowing that
+maybe they'd have to come out another time and go back? How'd you like
+that?"
+
+Mamise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.
+
+Davidge went on:
+
+"That's a business man's life, my dear--eternally making things that
+won't sell, putting his soul and his capital and his preparation into
+a pile of stock that nobody will take off his hands. But he has to go
+right on, borrowing money and pledging the past for the future and
+never knowing whether his dreams will turn out to be dollars
+or--junk!"
+
+Mamise realized for the first time the pathos, the higher drama of the
+manufacturer's world, that world which poets and some other literary
+artists do not describe because they are too ignorant, too petty, too
+bookish. They sneer at the noble word _commercial_ as if it were a
+reproach!
+
+Mamise, however, looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of
+despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to
+rise beyond a poetical height to the clouds of the practical.
+
+"What will you do with all the workmen who are on that job?"
+
+Davidge grinned. "They're announcing their monthly strike for higher
+wages--threatening to lay off the force. It'd serve 'em right to take
+'em at their word for a while. But you simply can't fight a labor
+union according to Queensbery rules, so I'll give 'em the raise and
+put 'em on another ship."
+
+"And the _Mamise_ will be idle and neglected for three months."
+
+"Just about."
+
+"The Germans couldn't have done much worse by her, could they?"
+
+"Not much."
+
+"I think I'll call it a day and go home," said Mamise.
+
+"Better call it a quarter and go to New York or Palm Beach or
+somewhere where there's a little gaiety."
+
+"Are you sick of seeing me round?"
+
+"Since you won't marry me--yes."
+
+Mamise sniffed at this and set her little desk in order, aligned the
+pencils in the tray, put the carbons back in the box and the rubber
+cover on the typewriter. Then she sank it into its well and put on her
+hat.
+
+Davidge held her heavy coat for her and could not resist the
+opportunity to fold her into his arms. Just as his arms closed about
+her and he opened his lips to beg her not to desert him he saw over
+her shoulder the door opening.
+
+He had barely time to release her and pretend to be still holding her
+coat when Miss Gabus entered. His elaborate guiltlessness confirmed
+her bitterest suspicions, and she crossed the room to deposit a sheaf
+of letters in Davidge's "in" basket and gather up the letters in his
+"out" basket. She passed across the stage with an effect of absolute
+refrigeration, like one of Richard III's ghosts.
+
+Davidge was furious at Miss Gabus and himself. Mamise was furious at
+them both--partly for the awkwardness of the incident, partly for the
+failure of Davidge's enterprise against her lips.
+
+When Miss Gabus was gone the ecstatic momentum was lost. Davidge
+grumbled:
+
+"Shall I see you to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mamise.
+
+She gave him her hand. He pressed it in his two palms and shook his
+head. She shook her head. They were both rebuking the bad behavior of
+the fates.
+
+Mamise trudged homeward--or at least houseward. She was in another of
+her irresolute states, and irresolution is the most disappointing of
+all the moods to the irresolute ones and all the neighbors. It was
+irresolution that made "Hamlet" a five-act play, and only a
+Shakespeare could have kept him endurable.
+
+Mamise was becoming unendurable to herself. When she got to her
+cottage she found it as dismal as an empty ice-box. When she had
+started the fire going she had nothing else to do. In sheer
+desperation she decided to answer a few letters. There was an old one
+from Polly Widdicombe. She read it again. It contained the usual
+invitation to come back to reason and Washington.
+
+Just for something positive to do she resolved to go. There was a
+tonic in the mere act of decision. She wrote a letter. She felt that
+she could not wait so long as its answer would require. She resolved
+to send a telegram.
+
+This meant hustling out into the cold again, but it was something to
+do, somewhere to go, some excuse for a hope.
+
+Polly telegraphed:
+
+  Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal
+  if you can.
+
+Mamise showed Davidge the telegram. He was very plucky about letting
+her go. For her sake he was so glad that he concealed his own
+loneliness. That made her underestimate it. He confirmed her belief
+that he was glad to be rid of her by making a lark of her departure.
+He filled an old suit-case with coal and insisted on her taking it.
+The porter who lugged it along the platform at Washington gave Mamise
+a curious look. He supposed that this was one of those suit-cases full
+of bottled goods that were coming into Washington in such multitudes
+since the town had been decreed absolutely dry. He shook it and was
+surprised when he failed to hear the glug-glug of liquor.
+
+But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of that other
+form of carbon which women wear in rings and necklaces. The whole
+country was underheated. To the wheatless, meatless, sweetless days
+there were added the heatless months. Major Widdicombe took his
+breakfasts standing up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in
+bed, and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.
+
+There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices of the
+Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the shops and
+theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country clubs were closed. Every
+device to save a lump of coal was put into legal effect so that the
+necessary war factories might run and the ships go over the sea. Soon
+there would be gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people
+would obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated by
+law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than one meat to one
+person. Grocers would be fined for selling too much sugar to a family.
+Placards, great billboards, and all the newspapers were filled with
+counsels to save, save, save, and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds.
+People grew depressed at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so
+little show of accomplishment.
+
+American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and
+apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics,
+for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The
+Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every
+advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any
+one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without
+warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the
+reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what
+could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no
+reserves worth the name. France and England were literally "all in."
+
+Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They
+credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron
+Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future.
+Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful
+Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out
+now to confess--or rather to boast--that they had planned this triumph
+all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up
+reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a
+German planet.
+
+The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching
+day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up
+to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of
+incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities
+sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war
+openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the
+bills.
+
+In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never
+so many fowls counted before they were hatched--and in the final
+outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.
+
+But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The
+strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in
+Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was
+counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh
+against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian résistance in the
+Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own
+mountainsides.
+
+Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German
+collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break.
+
+So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who
+had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before
+America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a
+great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.
+
+The premonition of the dawning of _Der Tag_ stirred the heart of Nicky
+Easton, of course. He had led for months the life of a fox in a
+hunt-club county. Every time he put his head out he heard the bay of
+the hounds. He had stolen very few chickens, and he expected every
+moment to be pounced on. But now that he felt assured of a German
+triumph in a little while, he began to think of the future. His heart
+turned again to Mamise.
+
+His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place had
+compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had been used to.
+His German accent did not help him, and he had found that even those
+heavy persons known as light women, though they had no other virtue,
+had patriotism enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility.
+His dialect insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being
+insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with German-stained
+money.
+
+In his alliance with Jake Nuddle for the blowing up of the _Clara_,
+and their later communications looking toward the destruction of other
+ships, he kept informed of Mamise. He always asked Jake about her. He
+was bitterly depressed by the news that she was "sweet on" Davidge. He
+was exultant when he learned from Jake that she had given up her work
+in the office and had gone to Washington. Jake learned her address
+from Abbie, and passed it on to Nicky.
+
+Nicky was tempted to steal into Washington and surprise her. But enemy
+aliens were forbidden to visit the capital, and he was afraid to go by
+train. He had wild visions of motoring thither and luring her to a
+ride with him. He wanted to kidnap her. He might force her to marry
+him by threatening to kill her and himself. At least he might make her
+his after the classic manner of his fellow-countrymen in Belgium. But
+he had not force enough to carry out anything so masterful. He was a
+sentimental German, not a warrior.
+
+In his more emotional moods he began to feel a prophetic sorrow for
+Marie Louise after the Germans had conquered the world. She would be
+regarded as a traitress. She had been adopted by Sir Joseph Webling
+and had helped him, only to abandon the cause and go over to the
+enemy.
+
+If Nicky could convert her again to loyalty, persuade her to do some
+brave deed for the Fatherland in redemption of her blacksliding, then
+when _Der Tag_ came he could reveal what she had done. When in that
+resurrection day the graves opened and all the good German spies and
+propagandists came forth to be crowned by _Gott_ and the Kaiser, Nicky
+could lead Marie Louise to the dual throne, and, describing her
+reconciliation to the cause, claim her as his bride. And the Kaiser
+would say, "_Ende gut, alles gut!_"
+
+Never a missionary felt more sanctity in offering salvation to a lost
+soul by way of repentance than Nicky felt when he went to the house of
+an American friend and had Mamise called on the long-distance
+telephone.
+
+Mamise answered, "Yes, this is Miss Webling," to the faint-voiced
+long-distance operator, and was told to hold the wire. She heard:
+"All ready with Washington. Go ahead." Then she heard a timid query:
+
+"Hallow, hallow! Iss this Miss Vapelink?"
+
+She was shocked at the familiar dialect. She answered:
+
+"This is Miss Webling, yes. Who is it?"
+
+"You don'd know my woice?"
+
+"Yes--yes. I know you--"
+
+"Pleass to say no names."
+
+"Where are you?"
+
+"In Philadelphia."
+
+"All right. What do you want?"
+
+"To see you."
+
+"You evidently know my address."
+
+"You know I cannot come by Vashington."
+
+"Then how can I see you?"
+
+"You could meet me some place, yes?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"It is important, most important."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To you--only to you. It is for your sake."
+
+She laughed at this; yet it set her curiosity on fire, as he hoped it
+would. He could almost hear her pondering. But what she asked was:
+
+"How did you find my address?"
+
+"From Chake--Chake Nuttle."
+
+He could not see the wild look that threw her eyes and lips wide. She
+had never dreamed of such an acquaintance. The mere possibility of it
+set her brain whirling. It seemed to explain many things, explain them
+with a horrible clarity. She dared not reveal her suspicions to Nicky.
+She said nothing till she heard him speak again:
+
+"Vell, you come, yes?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"You could come here best?"
+
+"No, it's too far."
+
+"By Baltimore we could meet once?"
+
+"All right. Where? When?"
+
+"To-morrow. I do not know Baltimore good. Ve could take ride by
+automobile and talk so. Yes?"
+
+"All right." This a little anxiously.
+
+"To-morrow evening. I remember it is a train gets there from
+Vashington about eight. I meet you. Make sure nobody sees you take
+that train, yes?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know people follow people sometimes."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I trust you alvays, Marie Louise."
+
+"All right. Good-by."
+
+"Goot-py, Marie Louise."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered several sharp
+and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes had wakened in the
+receiver.
+
+The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that Nicky had some
+postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again. Her ear was as
+bewildered as your tongue when it expects to taste one thing and
+tastes another, for it was Davidge's voice that spoke, asking for her.
+She called him by name, and he growled:
+
+"Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger who kept me
+waiting so long?"
+
+"Don't you wish you knew?" she laughed. "Where are you now? At the
+shipyard?"
+
+"No, I'm in Washington--ran up on business. Can I see you to-night?"
+
+"I hope so--unless we're going out--as I believe we are. Hold the
+wire, won't you, while I ask." She came back in due season to say,
+"Polly says you are to come to dinner and go to a dance with us
+afterward."
+
+"A dance? I'm not invited."
+
+"It's a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right to take
+you--no end of big bugs will be there."
+
+"I'm rusty on dancing, but with you--"
+
+"Thanks. We'll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight. Wrap up well.
+It's cold, isn't it?"
+
+He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of
+her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he
+dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the
+new musical insanity known as "jazz"--so pestilential a music that
+even the fiddlers capered and writhed.
+
+The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old Rosslyn bridge
+squealed with cold under the motor. It was good to see the lights of
+the Hall at last, and to thaw himself out at the huge fireplace.
+
+"Lucky to get a little wood," said Major Widdicombe. "Don't know what
+we'll do when it's gone. Coal is next to impossible."
+
+Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two or three other
+house guests, and some wives of important people. They laid off their
+wraps and then decided to keep them on.
+
+Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly clad,
+discouraged office-hack that when she descended the stairs and paused
+on the landing a few steps from the floor, to lift her eyebrows and
+her lip-corners at him, he was glad of the pause.
+
+"Break it to me gently," he called across the balustrade.
+
+She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed in her
+complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was dazed by her
+unimagined splendor.
+
+As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the tribute in
+his, she said:
+
+"Break what to you gently?"
+
+"You!" he groaned. "Good Lord! Talk about 'the glory that was Greece
+and the grandeur that was Rome'!"
+
+With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on his evening
+finery.
+
+"The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning in
+décolleté. For a pair of common laborers, we are certainly gaudy."
+
+Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, "So you're the fascinating
+brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary of that awful
+ship-factory."
+
+Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: "Never again. She's
+fired! We can't afford her."
+
+"Bully for you," said Polly. "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned,
+grandmotherly sort of person, but I'll be damned if I can see why a
+woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie Louise here should be
+pounding typewriter keys in an office. Of course, if she had to-- But
+even then, I should say that it would be her solemn religious duty to
+sell her soul for a lot of glad-rags.
+
+"A lot of people are predicting that women will never go back to the
+foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but--well, I'm no
+prophetess, but all I can say is that if this war puts an end to the
+dressmaker's art, it will certainly put civilization on the blink.
+Now, honestly, what could a woman accomplish in the world if she
+worked in overalls twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four years--what
+could she make that would be more worth while than getting herself all
+dressed up and looking her best?"
+
+Davidge said: "You're talking like a French aristocrat before the
+Revolution; but I wish you could convince her of it."
+
+Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she was thrilled,
+thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in her best clothes--in and
+out of her best clothes, and liberally illuminated with jewelry. She
+was now something like a great singer singing the highest note of her
+master-aria in her best rôle--herself at once the perfect instrument
+and the perfect artist.
+
+Marie Louise went in on Davidge's arm. The dining-room was in gala
+attire, the best silver and all of it out--flowers and candles. But
+the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women,
+who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no
+apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to
+the chill.
+
+Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise
+was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.
+
+"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She
+is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up
+stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!"
+
+The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of
+amazement.
+
+"What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary."
+
+This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise
+admitted that it took management.
+
+Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own
+breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes?
+And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and
+eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?"
+
+Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have
+to. Nobody's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without
+giving me the same excuse."
+
+Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly
+affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her
+daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her
+element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of
+luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent
+people.
+
+"I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go
+back to honest work again."
+
+She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred
+to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife
+and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.
+
+When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while,
+talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was
+heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of
+the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front,
+the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that
+they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would
+take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in
+getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The
+astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry
+and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order
+to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great
+battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner's
+inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said:
+
+"I get enough of this in the shop, and I'm frozen through. Let's go in
+and jaw the women."
+
+Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the
+majestic languor of lions well fed.
+
+Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that
+concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman,
+of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman's stories were always long, and
+people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute
+all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a
+chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of
+mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was seated
+sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm
+rested. Davidge's eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline
+described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a
+shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the
+head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder
+carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a
+sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one
+quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a
+stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.
+
+Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her
+where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the
+gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all
+those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with
+their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light
+that satin shimmers with.
+
+In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and
+brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled
+bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his
+prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown
+so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with
+much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had
+removed the ban on extravagance.
+
+The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise
+wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the
+safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad
+to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking,
+laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through
+the deeps of color.
+
+The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge
+sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the
+curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and
+polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals
+of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied
+steel.
+
+He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it
+into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a
+lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed it in platinum. He
+contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the
+goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other.
+The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as
+large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like
+sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet
+somehow worth more than anything useful.
+
+He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their
+patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture,
+transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.
+
+He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were
+to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their
+plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.
+
+It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend
+his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task.
+It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the
+toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces
+about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their
+fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.
+
+Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few
+should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be
+allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.
+
+And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich
+and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor?
+When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the
+reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the
+same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to
+learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would
+contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing
+of comfort to one's children rendered impossible, the establishment
+of one's destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would
+there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted "universal happiness."
+It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the
+next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.
+
+He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from these
+nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve
+in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work
+out their hearts' desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even
+more hateful middle class at their mercy.
+
+It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel,
+and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous
+sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many
+men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every
+privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might
+ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but
+little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed
+the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city
+shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men
+who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did
+not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not
+create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all
+for their voyage.
+
+A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry,
+was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought
+that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor
+problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools
+they worked with most.
+
+The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head
+of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected
+the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set
+steps.
+
+Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much
+of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan
+and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a practised skill. There was a
+startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and
+swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping,
+now limping, now running.
+
+He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his
+whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus
+intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in
+a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_.
+
+She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them,
+and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of
+jealousy in what she murmured:
+
+"You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships,
+young man!"
+
+"No?"
+
+"What cabarets have you graduated from?"
+
+He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?"
+
+"No."
+
+"One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a
+feather as you."
+
+"Are you referring to my head or my feet?"
+
+"Your blessed feet!"
+
+His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a
+delirium of motion.
+
+"That's unfair!" she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire
+of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him
+dizzily while he applauded with the other dancers till the band
+renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily
+equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the
+crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.
+
+The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from
+his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. "I wish we could sail on and
+on and on forever."
+
+"Forever is a long time," she smiled.
+
+"May I have the next dance?"
+
+"Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But
+don't--"
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he
+suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young
+officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered
+if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she
+responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be
+so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy
+smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous,
+an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for
+the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a
+temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism plus athleticism.
+
+Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise comported
+herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that desperate condition in
+which men are made ready to commit monogamy. He felt that he could not
+endure to have Mamise free any longer.
+
+He presented himself to her for the next dance.
+
+She laughed. "I'm booked."
+
+He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the dance
+out--stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men on the
+side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed him at seeing
+still a fourth stranger with his arms about Mamise, her breast to his
+and her procedure obedient to his. Worse yet, when a fifth insolent
+stranger cut in on the twin stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth
+temporary husband for another with a levity that amounted to
+outrageous polyandry.
+
+Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so intensely
+that he wanted to put an end to the abomination, reform it altogether.
+He did not want to dance between those white arms so easily forsworn.
+He wanted to rescue Mamise from this place of horror and hale her away
+to a cave with no outlook on mankind.
+
+It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she understood
+him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the proof of her sway
+over him and still sane enough to take a joy in her triumph.
+
+She introduced her partner--Davidge would almost have called the
+brute a paramour. He did not get the man's name and was glad of
+it--especially as the hunter deserted her and went after his next
+Sabine.
+
+"You've lost your faithful stenographer," was the first phrase of
+Mamise's that Davidge understood.
+
+"Why so?" he grumbled.
+
+"Because this is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a war-worker
+about as long as I can. I'm for the fleshpots and the cold-cream jars
+and the light fantastic. Aren't you going to dance with me any more?"
+
+"Just as you please," Davidge said, with a singularly boyish
+sulkiness, and wondered why Mamise laughed so mercilessly:
+
+"Of course I please."
+
+The music struck up an abandoned jig, but he danced with great dignity
+till his feet ran away with him. Then he made off with her again in
+one of his frenzies, and a laughter filled his whole being.
+
+She heard him growl something.
+
+"What did you say?" she said.
+
+"I said, 'Damn you!'"
+
+She laughed so heartily at this that she had to stop dancing for a
+moment. She astonished him by a brazen question:
+
+"Do you really love me as much as that?"
+
+"More," he groaned, and they bobbed and ducked and skipped as he
+muttered a wild anachronism:
+
+"If you don't marry me I'll murder you."
+
+"You're murdering me now. May I breathe, please?"
+
+He was furious at her evasion of so solemn a proposal. Yet she was so
+beautifully alive and aglow that he could not exactly hate her. But he
+said:
+
+"I won't ask you again. Next time you can ask me."
+
+"All right; that's a bet. I'll give you fair warning."
+
+And then that dance was over, and Mamise triumphant in all things. She
+was tumultuously hale and happy, and her lover loved her.
+
+To her that hath--for now, whom should Mamise see but Lady Clifton-Wyatt?
+Her heart ached with a reminiscent fear for a moment; then a malicious
+hope set it going again. Major Widdicombe claimed Mamise for the next
+dance, and extracted her from Davidge's possession. As they danced
+out, leaving Davidge stranded, Mamise noted that Lady C.-W. was
+regarding Davidge with a startled interest.
+
+The whirl of the dance carried her close to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and
+she knew that Lady C.-W. had seen her. Broken glimpses revealed to her
+that Lady C.-W. was escorting her escort across the ballroom floor
+toward Davidge.
+
+She saw the brazen creature tap Davidge's elbow and smile, putting out
+her hand with coquetry. She saw her debarrass herself of her
+companion, a French officer whose exquisite horizon-blue uniform was
+amazingly crossed with the wound and service chevrons of three years'
+warfaring. Nevertheless, Lady Clifton-Wyatt dropped him for the
+civilian Davidge. Mamise, flitting here and there, saw that Davidge
+was being led to the punch-altar, thence to a lonely strip of chairs,
+where Lady C.-W. sat herself down and motioned him to drop anchor
+alongside.
+
+Mamise longed to be near enough to hear what she could guess: her
+enemy's artless prelude followed by gradual modulations to her main
+theme--Mamise's wicked record.
+
+Mamise wished that she had studied lip-reading to get the details. But
+this was a slight vexation in the exultance of her mood. She was
+serene in the consciousness that Davidge already knew the facts about
+her, and that Lady Clifton-Wyatt's gossip would fall with the dreary
+thud of a story heard before. So Mamise's feet flew, and her heart
+made a music of its own to the tune of:
+
+"Thank God, I told him!"
+
+She realized, as never before, the tremendous comfort and convenience
+of the truth. She had been by instinct as veracious as a politely bred
+person may be, but now she understood that the truth is mighty good
+business. She resolved to deal in no other wares.
+
+This resolution lasted just long enough for her to make a hasty
+exception: she would begin her exclusive use of the truth as soon as
+she had told Polly a neat lie in explanation of her inexplicable
+journey to Baltimore.
+
+Lady C.-W. was doing Mamise the best turn in her power. Davidge was
+still angry at Mamise's flippancy in the face of his ardor. But Lady
+C.-W.'s attack gave the flirt the dignity of martyrdom. When Lady
+C.-W. finished her subtly casual account of all that Mamise had done
+or been accused of doing, Davidge crushed her with the quiet remark:
+
+"So she told me."
+
+"She told you that!"
+
+"Yes, and explained it all!"
+
+"She would!" was the best that Lady Clifton-Wyatt could do, but she
+saw that the case was lost. She saw that Davidge's gaze was following
+Mamise here and there amid the dancers, and she was sportswoman enough
+to concede:
+
+"She is a beauty, anyway--there's no questioning that, at least."
+
+It was the canniest thing she could have done to re-establish herself
+in Davidge's eyes. He felt so well reconciled with the world that he
+said:
+
+"You wouldn't care to finish this dance, I suppose?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was democratic--in the provinces and the
+States--and this was as good a way of changing the subject as any. She
+rose promptly and entered the bosom of Davidge. The good American who
+did not believe in aristocracies had just time to be overawed at
+finding himself hugging a real Lady with a capital L when the music
+stopped.
+
+It is an old saw that what is too foolish to be said can be sung.
+Music hallows or denatures whatever it touches. It was quite proper,
+because quite customary, for Davidge and Lady Clifton-Wyatt to stand
+enfolded in each other's embrace so long as a dance tune was in the
+air. The moment the musicians quit work the attitude became indecent.
+
+Amazing and eternal mystery, that custom can make the same thing mean
+everything, or nothing, or all the between-things. The ancient
+Babylonians carried the idea of the permissible embrace to the
+ultimate intimacy in their annual festivals, and the good women
+doubtless thought no more of it than a woman of to-day thinks of
+waltzing with a presentable stranger. They went home to their husbands
+and their housework as if they had been to church. Certain Bolsheviki,
+even in the year 1918, put up placards renewing the ancient
+Mesopotamian custom, under the guise of a community privilege and a
+civic duty.
+
+And yet some people pretend to differentiate between fashions and
+morals!
+
+But nobody at this dance was foolish enough to philosophize. Everybody
+was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from the British embassy came
+up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hand and body for the next dance.
+Davidge had been mystically attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her
+in a mood for reconciliation. She liked him so well that when the
+Italian aviator to whom she had pledged the "Tickle Toe" came to
+demand it, she perjured herself calmly and eloped with Davidge. And
+Davidge, instead of being alarmed by her easy morals, was completely
+reassured.
+
+But he found her unready with another perjury when he abruptly asked
+her:
+
+"What are you doing to-morrow?"
+
+"Let me see," she temporized in a flutter, thinking of Baltimore and
+Nicky.
+
+"If you've nothing special on, how about a tea-dance? I'm getting
+addicted to this."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm booked up for to-morrow," she faltered. "Polly keeps
+the calendar. Yes, I know we have some stupid date--I can't think just
+what. How about the day after?"
+
+The deferment made his amorous heart sick, and to-morrow's to-morrow
+seemed as remote as Judgment Day. Besides, as he explained:
+
+"I've got to go back to the shipyard to-morrow evening. Couldn't you
+give me a lunch--an early one at twelve-thirty?"
+
+"Yes, I could do that. In fact, I'd love it!"
+
+"And me too?"
+
+"That would be telling."
+
+At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs cut in and
+would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to use his fists, but Mamise,
+though she longed to tarry with Davidge, knew the value of tantalism,
+and consented to the abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly
+and danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close that
+the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to swipe Polly
+across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.
+
+She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for support, mixing
+astonishing profanity with her smothered groans. The cub showered
+apologies on her, and reviled "Regulations" which compelled him to
+wear spurs with his boots, though he had only a desk job.
+
+Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing. But Mamise
+saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal and gave Polly
+her arm, as she limped through the barrage of hurtling couples. Polly
+asked Davidge to retrieve her husband from the sloe-eyed ambassadress
+who was hypnotizing him. She wailed to Mamise:
+
+"I know I'm marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron for this.
+I've got to go home and put my ankle in splints. I'll probably have to
+wear it in a sling for a month. I'd like to kill the rotten hound that
+put me out of business. And I had the next dance with that beautiful
+Rumanian devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!"
+
+Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding good night
+to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride out home with her, but
+Polly refused. She wanted to have a good cry in the car.
+
+Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she was plighted to
+luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the house of the friend he was
+stopping with, the hotels being booked solid for weeks ahead. He was
+nursing a stern determination to endure bachelordom no longer.
+
+Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her brains, while
+another segment condoled with Polly. But most of her wits were engaged
+in hunting a good excuse for her Baltimore escapade the next
+afternoon, and in discarding such implausible excuses as occurred to
+her.
+
+Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were
+a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.
+
+"I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is all icicles. I
+know I'll die of pneumonia."
+
+He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle of Polly,
+who was snuggling to him for warmth.
+
+She yowled: "My Gawd! My yankle! You'll not last long enough for
+pneumonia if you touch me again."
+
+He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to
+embrace her, she would none of him.
+
+When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac.
+It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and
+battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets
+clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an
+attack on a walled town.
+
+The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under
+the flight.
+
+The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise's room was like a
+storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as
+she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a
+heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice
+between the all-too-snowy sheets.
+
+She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and
+she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied
+bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front.
+She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent
+bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the
+shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at
+Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow
+barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get
+new shoes across.
+
+Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German
+offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be
+combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter.
+America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to
+shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women,
+too--thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the
+clothes, to warm men's hearts _via_ their stomachs, and to take their
+minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would
+furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage.
+Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now.
+Later they would be going across to play in France--one-night stands,
+two a day in Picardy.
+
+Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of burlesque of
+the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as
+by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a
+wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a
+dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad
+in draughty halls.
+
+She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of
+it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful
+as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those
+poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along
+the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a
+blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial
+misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the
+soldiers.
+
+The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the
+impulse. It would be her atonement.
+
+She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise
+it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the
+altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister
+of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over--if he
+had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return
+to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final
+atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be
+nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do
+that most of all.
+
+She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him
+farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or
+another--and then set about her destiny.
+
+She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears
+refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell
+asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a
+colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray
+in mittened hands.
+
+Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if
+you'll turn on the hot water, please."
+
+"Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this
+mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again.
+No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's
+half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee
+nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew."
+
+Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at
+eleven-thirty.
+
+"Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!"
+
+"Yessum, that's the raht tahm."
+
+"Great heavens!"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted
+with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.
+
+She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern
+history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the
+heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless
+day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two
+baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in
+the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire.
+This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for
+they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're
+going to commit suicide, anyway?")
+
+But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the
+very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an
+extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as
+ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an
+Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of
+helpless holy living.
+
+Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew
+rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their
+stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance,
+they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable
+fetor.
+
+And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had
+once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these
+slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and
+shared their glorious loathsomeness.
+
+The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise's one skip-bath day
+must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left
+unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure
+enough when she was dressed.
+
+Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as
+an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise's inspection, and Mamise
+pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.
+
+Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain the soldiers.
+Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier scheme than
+ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone her husband to look
+into the matter of a passport for her.
+
+Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and Mamise had
+not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge would be miffed. Polly
+suggested telephoning the hotel.
+
+Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as crowded as
+everything else.
+
+"It will take an hour to get the hotel," said Mamise, "another hour to
+page the man. I'll make a dash for it. He'll give me a little grace, I
+know."
+
+The car was not ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky
+and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads
+were sleety and skiddy, and required careful driving.
+
+Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found it closed
+to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer
+Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and
+piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old
+aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected to live.
+
+It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the
+distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get to Washington
+was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a détour of
+miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort
+Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the
+soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to
+the marble pages of the Arlington epic.
+
+The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in
+Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand
+dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of
+eternal anonymity--dead from all our wars, and many of them with their
+wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.
+
+But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this
+occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the
+Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past
+the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached
+the hotel, she was just one hour late.
+
+Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to
+reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them
+all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous.
+And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He
+had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result
+of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a
+haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.
+
+In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly
+Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her
+amazement.
+
+"Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with
+you and go to the theater."
+
+"Oh!" said the befuddled Davidge. "Oh, of course! Silly of me!
+Good-by!"
+
+Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement
+to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase
+after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking
+the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in
+vain.
+
+When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless
+confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had
+befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or
+hated her the more.
+
+But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry
+into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too short for her to
+risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back for a suit-case, in view
+of the Alexandria détour. She must, therefore, travel without baggage.
+Therefore she must return the same night. She found, to her immense
+relief, that this could be done. The seven-o'clock train to Baltimore
+reached there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.
+
+She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but now an
+inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that she was dining out
+with Polly somewhere; consequently it would be safe to tell Polly that
+she was dining out with Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to
+compare notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One
+cannot be seen to blush.
+
+She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by what Widdicombe
+called "the ebony maid with the ivory head." Mamise told her not to
+summon her lame mistress to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss
+Webling was dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him.
+She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then rang
+off.
+
+This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted to
+Davidge for his bewilderment.
+
+To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could leave,
+Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows that keep going
+without interruption. Public benefactors maintain them for the
+salvation of women who have no homes or do not want to go to them
+yet.
+
+The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly, as usual
+leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects shown were selected from
+all the fascinating events of the time. Then followed a doleful
+imitation of Mr. Charles Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the
+artistry of the original.
+
+The _cinema de résistance_ was a long and idiotic vampire picture in
+which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to impossible ruin by
+wiles and attitudes that would have driven any actual male to flight,
+laughter, or a call for the police. But the audience seemed to enjoy
+it, as a substitute, no doubt, for the old-fashioned gruesome
+fairy-stories that one accepts because they are so unlike the tiresome
+realities. Mamise wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She
+was tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment, if
+ever opportunity offered.
+
+In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled away the
+dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her dinner on the train,
+remembering vividly how her heart history with Davidge had begun on a
+train. She missed him now, and his self-effacing gallantry.
+
+The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive was ill
+concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn't quite exist.
+Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she had never paid Davidge
+for that chair he gave up to her. She vowed again that she would not
+forget. She felt a deep remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks.
+She regretted especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was
+her privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no right
+to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she belonged to
+him.
+
+She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too, as well as
+her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible and subjecting
+herself to a self-immolation among hardships. After the war--assuming
+that the war would soon end and that she would come out of it
+alive--afterward she could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.
+
+Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was startled to
+find Baltimore already gathering round the train. And she had not even
+begun to organize her stratagems against Nicky Easton. She made a
+hasty exit from the car and sought the cab-ranks outside.
+
+From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself, lifted his hat,
+and motioned her to an open door. She bent her head down and her
+knees up and entered a little room on wheels.
+
+Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for as soon as
+Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself the limousine moved
+off--into what adventures? Mamise was wondering.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+IN BALTIMORE
+
+[Illustration: "So I have already done something more for Germany. That's
+splendid. Now tell me what else I can do." Nicky was too intoxicated with
+his success to see through her thin disguise.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young
+vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her
+own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some
+lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had
+forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.
+
+Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had
+been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in
+the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees
+whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule
+would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out
+as anonymously as she had sneaked in.
+
+Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her
+hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on.
+They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was
+fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a
+kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was
+complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.
+
+But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled
+against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted
+his arms away and muttered:
+
+"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the
+driver to let me out?"
+
+"_Nein doch_!"
+
+"Then let me alone or I will."
+
+Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her,
+and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble
+stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its
+statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.
+
+They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she
+was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:
+
+"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."
+
+Nicky fidgeted and sulked:
+
+"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is
+no use."
+
+"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have
+stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."
+
+"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."
+
+Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could
+not imagine how to coax him out of silence.
+
+His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:
+
+"_Ach Gott_, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These
+Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my _Vaterland_.
+But the time comes soon, and I must make patience. _Eile mit Weile!_"
+
+"You'd better tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he
+shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom
+rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized
+that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him by asserting her own
+dignity.
+
+She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly
+schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She
+hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they
+kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might
+accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had
+"vamped" for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her
+fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark
+was all the better for her purpose.
+
+At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a
+struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought
+Nicky's, as she cooed:
+
+"Come along, Nicky, don't be so cantankerous."
+
+His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its clutch:
+
+"But you are so colt!"
+
+She insinuated, "You couldn't expect me to make love to you the very
+first thing, could you?"
+
+"You mean you do like me?"
+
+Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And he,
+encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her, flung his arm
+about her again and drew her, resisting only in her soul, close to
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+But when his lips hunted hers she hid them in her fur collar; and he,
+imputing it to coquetry, humored her, finding her delicate timidity
+enhancing and inspiring. He chuckled:
+
+"You shall kiss me yet."
+
+"Not till you have told me what you sent for me for."
+
+"No, feerst you must give me one to proof your good fate--your good
+face--" He was trying to say "good faith."
+
+She was stubborn, but he was more obstinate still, and he had the
+advantage of the secret.
+
+And so at last she sighed "All right," and put up her cheek to pay the
+price. His arms tightened about her, and his lips were not content
+with her cheek. He fought to win her lips, but she began to tear off
+her gloves to scratch his eyes out if need be for release.
+
+She was revolted, and she would have marred his beauty if he had not
+let her go. Once freed, she regained her self-control, for the sake of
+her mission, and said, with a mock seriousness:
+
+"Now, be careful, or I won't listen to you at all."
+
+Sighing with disappointment, but more determined than ever to make her
+his, he said:
+
+"Feerst I must esk you, how is your feelink about Chermany?"
+
+"Just as before."
+
+"Chust as vich 'before'? Do you loaf Chermany or hate?"
+
+She was permitted to say only one thing. It came hard:
+
+"I love her, of course."
+
+"_Ach, behüt' dich, Gott!_" he cried, and would have clasped her
+again, but she insisted on discipline. He began his explanation.
+
+"I did told you how, to safe my life in England, I confessed
+somethings. Many of our people here will not forgive. My only vay to
+get back vere I have been is to make--as Americans say--to make myself
+skvare by to do some big vork. I have done a little, not much, but
+more can be if you help."
+
+"What could I do?"
+
+"Much things, but the greatest--listen once: our Chermany has no fear
+of America so long America is on this side of the Atlentic Ozean.
+Americans build ships; Chermany must destroy fester as they build.
+Already I have made one ship less for America. I cannot pooblish
+advertisink, but my people shall one day know, and that day comes
+soon; _Der Tag_ is almost here--you shall see! Our army grows alvays,
+in France; and England and France can get no more men. Ven all is
+ready, Chermany moves like a--a avalenche down a mountain and covers
+France to the sea.
+
+"On that day our fleet--our glorious ships--comes out from Kiel Canal,
+vere man holds them beck like big dogs in leash. Oh those beautiful
+day, Chermany conquers on lent and on sea. France dies, and England's
+navy goes down into the deep and comes never back.
+
+"_Ach Gott_, such a day it shall be--when old England's empire goes
+into history, into ancient history vit Roossia and Rome and Greece and
+Bebylonia.
+
+"England gone, France gone, Italy gone--who shall safe America and her
+armies and her unborn ships, and her cannon and shell and air-ships
+not yet so much as begun?
+
+"_Der Tag_ shall be like the lest day ven _Gott_ makes the graves open
+and the dead come beck to life. The Americans shall fall on knees
+before our Kaiser, and he shall render chudgment. Such a payink!
+
+"Now the Yenkees despise us Chermans. Ve cannot go to this city, to
+that dock. Everywhere is dead-lines and permissions and internment
+camps and persecutions, and all who are not in prison are afraid. They
+change their names from Cherman to English now, but soon they shall
+lift their heads and it shall be the Americans who shall know the
+dead-lines, the licenses, the internment camps.
+
+"So, Marie Louise, my sveetheart, if you can show and I can show that
+in the dark night ve did not forget the _Vaterland_, ve shall be proud
+and safe.
+
+"It is to make you safe ven comes _Der Tag_ I speak to you now. I vish
+you should share my vork now, so you can share my life efterwards.
+Now do I loaf you, Marie Louise? Now do I give you proof?"
+
+Mamise was all ashudder with the intensity of his conviction. She
+imagined an all-conquering Germany in America. She needed but to
+multiply the story of Belgium, of Serbia, of prostrate Russia. The
+Kaiser had put in the shop-window of the world samples enough of the
+future as it would be made by Germany.
+
+And in the mood of that day, with defeatism rife in Europe, and
+pessimism miasmatic in America, there was reason enough for Nicky to
+believe in his prophecy and to inspire belief in its possibility. The
+only impossible thing about it was that the world should ever endure
+the dominance of Germany. Death would seem better to almost everybody
+than life in such a civilization as she promised.
+
+Mamise feared the Teutonic might, but she could not for a moment
+consent to accept it. There was only one thing for her to do, and that
+was to learn what plans she could, and thwart them. Here within her
+grasp was the long-sought opportunity to pay off the debt she had
+incurred. She could be a soldier now, at last. There was no price that
+Nicky might have demanded too great, too costly, too shameful for her
+to pay. To denounce him or defy him would be a criminal waste of
+opportunity.
+
+She said: "I understand. You are right, of course. Let me help in any
+way I can. I only wish there were something big for me to do."
+
+Nicky was overjoyed. He had triumphed both as patriot and as lover.
+
+"There is a big think for you to do," he said. "You can all you
+vill."
+
+"Tell me," she pleaded.
+
+"You are in shipyard. This man Davidge goes on building ships. I gave
+him fair warning. I sinked one ship for him, but he makes more."
+
+"You sank his ship?" Mamise gasped.
+
+"Sure! The _Clara_, he called her. I find where she goes to take
+cargo. I go myself. I row up behind the ship in little boat, and I
+fasten by the rudder-post under the water, where no one sees, a bomb.
+It is all innocent till ship moves. Then every time the rudder turns a
+little screw turns in the machine.
+
+"It turns for two, three days; then--_boom_! It makes explosion, tears
+ship to pieces, and down she goes. And so goes all the next ships if
+you help again."
+
+"Again? What do you mean by again?"
+
+"It is you, Marie Louise, who sinks the _Clara_."
+
+Her laugh of incredulity was hardly more than a shiver of dread.
+
+"_Ja wohl!_ You did told Chake Nuttle vat Davidge tells you. Chake
+Nuttle tells me. I go and make sink the ship!"
+
+"Jake Nuddle! It was Jake that told you!" Mamise faltered, seeing her
+first vague suspicions damnably confirmed.
+
+"Sure! Chake Nuttle is my _Leutnant_. He has had much money. He gets
+more. He shall be rich man after comes _Der Tag_. It might be we make
+him von Nuttle! and you shall be Gräfin von Oesten."
+
+Mamise was in an abject terror. The thick trees of the park were
+spooky as the dim light of the car elicited from the black wall of
+dark faint details of tree-trunks and naked boughs stark with winter.
+She was in a hurry to learn the rest and be gone. She spoke with a
+poor imitation of pride:
+
+"So I have already done something more for Germany. That's splendid.
+Now tell me what else I can do, for I want to--to get busy right
+away."
+
+Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin
+disguise.
+
+"You are close by Davidge. Chake Nuttle tells me he is sveet on you.
+You have his confidence. You can learn what secrets he has. Next time
+we do not vait for ship to be launched and to go for cargo. It might
+go some place ve could not find.
+
+"So now ve going blow up those ships before they touch vater--ve blow
+up his whole yard. You shall go beck and take up again your vork, and
+ven all is right I come down and get a job. I dress like vorkman and
+get into the yard. And I bring in enough bombs to blow up all the
+ships and the cranes and the machines.
+
+"Chake Nuttle tells me Davidge just gets a plate-bending machine.
+Forty-five t'ousand dollars it costs him, and long time to get. In one
+minute--poof! Ve bend that plate-bender!"
+
+He laughed a great Teutonic laugh and supposed that she was laughing,
+too. When he had subsided a little, he said:
+
+"So now you know vat you are to make! You like to do so much for
+Chermany, yes?"
+
+"Oh yes! Yes!" said Mamise.
+
+"You promise to do vat I send you vord?"
+
+"Yes." She would have promised to blow up the Capitol.
+
+"_Ach_, how beautiful you are even in the dark! Kiss me!"
+
+Remembering Judith, she paid that odious price, wishing that she might
+have the beast's infamous head with a sword. It was a kiss of
+betrayal, but she felt that it was no Judas-kiss, since Nicky was no
+Christ.
+
+He told her more of his plans in detail, and was so childishly proud
+of his superb achievements, past and future, that she could hardly
+persuade him to take her back to the station. He assured her that
+there was abundant time, but she would not trust his watch. She
+explained how necessary it was for her to return to Washington and to
+Polly Widdicombe's house before midnight. And at last he yielded to
+her entreaties, opened the door, and leaned out to tell the driver to
+turn back.
+
+Mamise was uneasy till they were out of the park and into the lighted
+streets again. But there was no safety here, for as they glided down
+Charles Street a taxicab going with the reckless velocity of taxicabs
+tried to cut across their path.
+
+There was a swift fencing for the right of way, and then the two cars
+came together with a clash and much crumpling of fenders.
+
+The drivers descended to wrangle over the blame, and Mamise had
+visions of a trip to the police station, with a consequent exposure.
+But Nicky was alive to the danger of notoriety. He got out and assumed
+the blame, taking the other driver's part and offering to pay the
+damages.
+
+The taxicab-driver assessed them liberally at fifty dollars, and Nicky
+filled his palm with bills, ordering his own driver to proceed. The
+car limped along with a twisted steering-gear, and Nicky growled
+thanksgivings over the narrow escape the German Empire had had from
+losing two of its most valuable agents.
+
+Mamise was sick with terror of what might have been. She saw the
+collision with a fatal result, herself and Nicky killed and flung to
+the street, dead together. It was not the fear of dying that froze
+her soul; it was the posthumous blow she would have given to Davidge's
+trust in her and all women, the pain she would have inflicted on his
+love. For to his dying day he would have believed her false to him, a
+cheap and nasty trickster, sneaking off to another town to a
+rendezvous with another man. And that man a German!
+
+The picture of his bitter disillusionment and of her own unmerited and
+eternal disgrace was intolerably real in spite of the fact that she
+knew it to be untrue, for our imaginations are far more ancient and
+more irresistible than our late and faltering reliance on the truth;
+the heavens and hells we fancy have more weight with our credulities
+than any facts we encounter. We can dodge the facts or close our eyes
+to them, but we cannot escape our dreams, whether our eyes are wide or
+sealed.
+
+Mamise could not free herself of this nightmare till she had bidden
+Nicky good-by the last time and left him in the cab outside the
+station.
+
+Further nightmares awaited her, for in the waiting-room she could not
+fight off the conviction that the train would never arrive. When it
+came clanging in on grinding wheels and she clambered aboard, she knew
+that it would be wrecked, and the finding of her body in the débris,
+or its disappearance in the flames, would break poor Davidge's heart
+and leave her to the same ignominy in his memory.
+
+While the train swung on toward Washington, she added another torment
+to her collection: how could she save Davidge from Nicky without
+betraying her sister's husband into the hands of justice? What right
+had she to tell Davidge anything when her sacred duty to her family
+and her poor sister must first be heartlessly violated?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+AT THE SHIPYARD
+
+[Illustration: Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in
+the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own soul, for people
+can on occasion accomplish what the familiar Irish drillmaster invited
+his raw recruits to do--"Step out and take a look at yourselves."
+
+Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts were cut
+off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with incredulity and
+exclaimed:
+
+"Can this be I?"
+
+If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in
+unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.
+
+What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding
+either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In
+London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings,
+of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred
+the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them.
+Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister's husband of
+disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would
+involve her sister's ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced
+that her sister's husband was in a plot against her lover and her
+country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the
+sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn
+duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have
+something at last to give up for her nation.
+
+The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in
+her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was
+threatened by her sister's husband, and her vague patriotism had been
+stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was
+undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining
+white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the
+blood of its votaries. Men were offering themselves, casting from
+them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love
+and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile
+hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the
+slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the
+trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they
+were missing from the beadroll of contributors.
+
+Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build
+ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer's share in the
+process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and
+offer what gift she had--the poor little gift of entertaining the
+soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she
+waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found
+at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save
+ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would
+be the liberty and what little good name her sister's husband had; it
+would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had
+dealt with harshly enough already.
+
+But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy.
+She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner
+being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to
+adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country.
+Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both
+by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she
+could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at
+the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade
+in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes.</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cup of Fury
+       A Novel of Cities and Shipyards
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2009 [EBook #30351]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CUP OF FURY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>THE CUP OF FURY</h1>
+<div style='margin:0 auto 20px auto; text-align:center;'>
+<img alt='emblem' src='images/illus-emb.jpg' />
+</div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<table summary=''>
+
+<tr><td>
+<p class='tp' style='font-variant:small-caps;'>Books by<br />RUPERT HUGHES</p>
+</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>
+<p style='font-size:smaller;'>THE CUP OF FURY<br />
+THE UNPARDONABLE SIN<br />
+WE CAN&rsquo;T HAVE EVERYTHING<br />
+IN A LITTLE TOWN<br />
+THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT<br />
+CLIPPED WINGS<br />
+WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?<br />
+THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER<br />
+EMPTY POCKETS<br />
+LONG EVER AGO</p>
+</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>
+<hr class='books' />
+</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:smaller;'>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, NEW YORK<br /><span >Established 1817</span></p>
+</td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_1' id='linki_1'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='556' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>&ldquo;It would be nice to be married,&rdquo; Marie Louise reflected, &ldquo;if one could stay single at the same time.&rdquo;</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-style:italic;margin-bottom:15px;font-size:1.4em;margin-top:20px;'>The</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:2.0em;margin-bottom:25px;'>CUP OF FURY</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-style:italic;font-size:1.2em;'>A Novel of Cities and Shipyards</p>
+<p class='tp' >BY</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;margin-bottom:10px;'>RUPERT HUGHES</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-style:italic;font-size:smaller;'>Author of</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:smaller;margin-bottom:30px;'>&ldquo;WE CAN&rsquo;T HAVE EVERYTHING&rdquo;<br />&ldquo;THE UNPARDONABLE SIN&rdquo; ETC.</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.0em;'>ILLUSTRATED BY</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>HENRY RALEIGH</p>
+
+<div style='margin:25px auto; text-align:center;'>
+<img alt='emblem' src='images/illus-tpg.jpg' />
+</div>
+
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</p>
+<p class='tp' style='margin-bottom:20px;'>NEW YORK AND LONDON</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<table summary=''><tr><td>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:smaller;font-variant:small-caps;margin-top:20px;'>THE CUP OF FURY</p>
+<hr class='spcl' />
+<p style='font-size:smaller;'>Copyright, 1919, by Harper &amp; Brothers<br />
+Printed in the United States of America<br />
+Published May, 1919</p>
+<p class='tp' style='margin-bottom:20px;font-size:smaller;'>D-T</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+<table border='0' cellpadding='2' cellspacing='0' summary='Illustrations' style='margin:1em auto;'>
+<col style='width:75%;' />
+<col style='width:25%;' />
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>&ldquo;It would be nice to be married,&rdquo; Marie Louise reflected, &ldquo;if one could stay single at the same time.&rdquo;</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_1'><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td />
+  <td valign='top' align='right'><span style='font-size:0.8em;'>Facing p.</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_2'>3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>&ldquo;This is the life for me. I&rsquo;ve been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can.&rdquo;</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_3'>75</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s beautiful overhead if you&rsquo;re going that way,&rsquo;&rdquo; Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you afraid to push on when you can&rsquo;t see where you&rsquo;re going?&rdquo; she demanded.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_4'>91</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral majesty.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_5'>166</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other&rsquo;s examination.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_6'>235</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>&ldquo;So I have already done something more for Germany. That&rsquo;s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do.&rdquo; Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_7'>270</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td valign='top' align='left'><i>Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton&rsquo;s elbow.</i></td>
+  <td valign='bottom' align='right'><a href='#linki_8'>282</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK I</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>IN LONDON</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_2' id='linki_2'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<img src='images/illus-002.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='446' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_3' name='page_3'></a>3</span></div>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p style='text-align:center; margin-top:2em;font-size:1.6em;'>THE CUP OF FURY</p>
+<div class='chsp' style='padding-top:0'>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I' id='CHAPTER_I'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie
+Louise had felt that she would scream if she were kept
+a moment outside. The luxury of simply wishing the gate
+ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by the pleasant
+deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on
+the door like a Japanese mask.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall.
+The obsolete gorgeousness of the London home had never
+been in good taste, but had grown as lovable with years as
+do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old relative. All the good,
+comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing now as never
+before. The stairway had something of the grand manner,
+too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her
+own room; and there, she knew, was a solitude where she
+could cry as hard as she wanted to, and therefore usually did
+not want to. Besides, her mood now was past crying for.</p>
+<p>She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt
+the cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there
+till her heart should be replenished with courage automatically,
+as ponds are fed from above.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and
+people shut out. She was in one of the moods when the
+soul longs to gather its faculties together in a family, making
+one self of all its selves. Marie Louise had known privation
+and homelessness and the perils they bring a young woman,
+and now she had riches and a father and mother who were
+great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into
+their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she
+asked nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_4' name='page_4'></a>4</span></div>
+<p>She would have said that no human voice or presence
+could be anything but a torture to her. And yet, when
+she hurried up the steps, she was suddenly miraculously
+restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion of a child&rsquo;s
+laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about
+to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely
+surprised once more, and altogether terrified with her
+perfect regularity.</p>
+<p>Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the
+outer world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome,
+since nothing keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of
+sanity like the counterweight that comedy furnishes to
+tragedy, farce to frenzy, and puerility to solemnity.</p>
+<p>The children called her &ldquo;Auntie,&rdquo; but they were not hers
+except through the adoption of a love that had to claim some
+kinship. They looked like her children, though&ndash;&ndash;so much so,
+indeed, that strangers thought that she was their young
+mother. But it was because she looked like their mother,
+who had died, that the American girl was a member of this
+British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much
+of its perilous destiny.</p>
+<p>She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons
+not of faery, but of fact, that had leaped out at her from
+nowhere. It solaced her somehow to burlesque the terror
+that had whelmed her, and, now that she was assailed by
+ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the shrieks she had
+not dared to release in the street she gave forth with vigor,
+as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with milk-curdling
+cries of:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Boo-ooh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their
+thumbs at her and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bang! Bang!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and
+staggered back, stammering:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular,
+take my l-l-life but spare my m-m-money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred
+the sacred text now, and the First Murderer, who had all
+the conservative instincts of childhood, had to correct her
+misquotation of the sacred formula:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_5' name='page_5'></a>5</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no, Auntie. Say, &lsquo;Take my money but spare my life!&rsquo;
+Now we dot to do it all over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon humbly,&rdquo; she said, and went back to
+be ambushed again. This time the boy had an inspiration.
+To murder and robbery he would add scalping.</p>
+<p>But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of
+fright, real or feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides,
+she had been to the hairdresser&rsquo;s, and she explained that
+she really could not afford to be scalped. The boy was bitterly
+disappointed, and he grew furious when the untimely
+maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and demanded
+that they come to bed at once or be reported.</p>
+<p>As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity,
+Marie Louise, watching them, was suddenly shocked by
+the thought of how early in life humanity begins to revel
+in slaughter. The most innocent babes must be taught not
+to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a caul,
+or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always
+almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them
+when they are born. Their first pastimes are killing games,
+playing dead, stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The
+American Indian is the international nursery pet because of
+his traditional fiendishness.</p>
+<p>It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural
+that the boy interrupted in his massacre of his beloved aunt
+should hang back to squall that he would say his prayers
+only to her. Marie Louise glanced at her watch. She had
+barely time to dress for dinner, but the children had to be
+obeyed. She made one weak protest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fr&auml;ulein hears your prayers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But she&rsquo;s wented out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll hear them, then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dot to tell us fairy-&rsquo;tory, too,&rdquo; said the girl.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, one fairy-&rsquo;tory&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to
+her lap demanding &ldquo;somefin bluggy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her
+memory among the Grimms&rsquo; fairy-tales. She could recall
+nothing that seemed sweet and guileless enough for these
+two lambs.</p>
+<p>All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_6' name='page_6'></a>6</span>
+plots; of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers;
+of their being turned over to peasants to slay; of their being
+changed into animals or birds; of their being seized by wolves,
+or by giants that drank blood and crunched children&rsquo;s bones
+as if they were reed birds; of hags that cut them up into bits
+or thrust them into ovens and cooked them for gingerbread.
+It occurred to her that all the German fairy-stories were
+murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against each of the
+legends. But her mind could not find substitutes.</p>
+<p>After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize
+for romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous
+and balked. She confessed her poverty of ideas.</p>
+<p>The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and
+go to bed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees
+to their own and put their clasped hands across her lap.
+They became in a way hallowed by their attitude, and the
+world seemed good to her again as she looked down at the
+two children, beautiful as only children can be, innocent
+of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and praying
+to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had
+so recently come.</p>
+<p>But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength
+from them as mothers do, she thought of other children in
+other countries orphaned in swarms, starving in multitudes,
+waiting for food like flocks of lambs in the blizzard
+of the war. She thought still more vividly of children flung
+into the ocean. She had seen these children at her knees
+fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and
+blurting them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed,
+at eyes. So it was very vivid to her how children thrown
+into the sea must have gagged with terror at the bitter medicine
+of death, strangled and smothered as they drowned.</p>
+<p>She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty
+&ldquo;Amen&rdquo; she protested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t thank God for anything. Haven&rsquo;t you anything
+to thank God for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them
+of dozens of special mercies, but almost instantly they answered,
+&ldquo;Oh yes!&rdquo; They looked at each other, understood,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_7' name='page_7'></a>7</span>
+nodded, clapped their hands, and chuckled with pride. Then
+they bent their heads, gabled their finger-tips, and the boy said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We t&rsquo;ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old <i>Lusitania</i>.&rdquo;
+And the girl said, &ldquo;A-men!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed.
+It was the loss of the <i>Lusitania</i> that had first terrified her.
+She had just seen it announced on the placards of newsboys
+in London streets, and had fled home to escape from
+the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it!
+She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from
+their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in
+wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and
+went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to
+self-control, telling herself that the children were not to
+blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very
+innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the blasphemy.</p>
+<p>She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them
+with all her ferocity. She towered over them and cried
+out upon them: &ldquo;You wicked, wicked little beasts, how dare
+you put such loathsome words into a prayer! God must have
+gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it. Wherever
+did you get so hateful an idea?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wicked your own self!&rdquo; the boy snapped back. &ldquo;Fr&auml;ulein
+read it in the paper about the old boat, and she walked
+up and down the room like what you do, and she said, &lsquo;<i>Ach,
+unser</i> Dott&ndash;&ndash;how dood you are to us, to make sink dat
+<i>Lusitania</i>!&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise
+broke in: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Fr&auml;ulein&rsquo;s work, is it? I might have known
+that! Oh, the fiend, the harpy!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew
+that his beloved Fr&auml;ulein was being called something, and
+he struck at Marie Louise fiercely, kicked at her shins and
+tried to bite her hands, screaming: &ldquo;You shall not call our
+own precious Fr&auml;ulein names. Harpy, your own self!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled
+face and echoed, &ldquo;Harpy, your own self!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by
+these irascible cherubs that her anger vanished in regret.
+She pleaded: &ldquo;But, my darlings, you don&rsquo;t know what you
+are saying. The <i>Lusitania</i> was a beautiful ship&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_8' name='page_8'></a>8</span></div>
+<p>The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: &ldquo;She wasn&rsquo;t
+as beautiful as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise condescended to argue: &ldquo;Oh yes, she was!
+She was a great ship, noble like Saint Paul&rsquo;s Cathedral, and
+she was loaded with passengers, men and women and children:
+and then suddenly she was ripped open and sunk, and little
+children like you were thrown into the water, into the deep,
+deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore them from their
+mothers&rsquo; arms and ran off with them, choking and strangling
+them and dragging them down and down&ndash;&ndash;forever down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain.
+Then the onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw
+the supercilious lad regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment
+was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It served &rsquo;em jolly well right for bein&rsquo; on &rsquo;at old boat.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul.
+She shrank from the boy and groaned, &ldquo;Oh, you toad, you
+little toad!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took
+refuge in a higher authority. &ldquo;Fr&auml;ulein told us. And she
+knows.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The bit lassiky stormed to his support: &ldquo;She does so!&rdquo; and
+drove it home with the last nail of feminine argument: &ldquo;So
+there now!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise retorted, weakly: &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see! We&rsquo;ll soon
+see!&rdquo; And she rushed out of the room, like another little
+girl, straight to the door of Sir Joseph, where she knocked impatiently.
+His man appeared and murmured through a
+crevice: &ldquo;Sorry, miss, but Seh Joseph is dressing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went to Lady Webling&rsquo;s door, and a maid
+came to whisper: &ldquo;She is in her teb. We&rsquo;re having dinner
+at tome to-night, miss.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise nodded. Dinner must be served, and on
+time. It was the one remaining solemnity that must not
+be forgotten or delayed.</p>
+<p>She went to her own room. Her maid was in a stew
+about the hour, and the gown that was to be put on. Marie
+Louise felt that black was the only wear on such a Bartholomew&rsquo;s
+night. But Sir Joseph hated black so well that he
+had put a clause in his will against its appearance even at
+his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_9' name='page_9'></a>9</span>
+feared his prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending
+him, because she felt that she owed everything she had, and
+was, to the whim of his good grace. Gratitude was a passion
+with her, and it doomed her, as all passions do, good or bad,
+to the penalties human beings pay for every excess of virtue
+or vice&ndash;&ndash;if, indeed, vice is anything but an immoderate,
+untimely virtue.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_10' name='page_10'></a>10</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II' id='CHAPTER_II'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Marie Louise let her maid select the gown. She
+was an exquisite picture as she stood before the long
+mirror and watched the buckling on of her armor, her armor
+of taffeta and velvet with the colors of sunlit leaves and noon-warmed
+flowers in carefully elected wrinkles assured with
+many a hook and eye. Her image was radiant and pliant
+and altogether love-worthy, but her thoughts were sad and
+stern.</p>
+<p>She was resolved that Fr&auml;ulein should not remain in the
+house another night. She wondered that Sir Joseph had
+not ousted her from the family at the first crash of war.
+The old crone! She could have posed for one of the Grimms&rsquo;
+most vulturine witches. But she had kept a civil tongue in
+her head till now; the children adored her, and Sir Joseph
+had influence enough to save her from being interned or
+deported.</p>
+<p>Hitherto, Marie Louise had felt sorry for her in her dilemma
+of being forced to live at peace in the country her own country
+was locked in war with. Now she saw that the woman&rsquo;s
+oily diplomacy was only for public use, and that all the while
+she was imbruing the minds of the little children with the dye
+of her own thoughts. The innocents naturally accepted
+everything she told them as the essence of truth.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise hoped to settle the affair before dinner, but
+by the time she was gowned and primped, the first premature
+guest had arrived like the rashest primrose, shy,
+surprised, and surprising. Sir Joseph had gone below already.
+Lady Webling was hull down on the stairway.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise saw that her protest must wait till after the
+dinner, and she followed to do her duty to the laws of
+hospitality.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph liked to give these great affairs. He loved to
+eat and to see others eat. &ldquo;The more the merrier,&rdquo; was his
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_11' name='page_11'></a>11</span>
+motto&ndash;&ndash;one of the most truthless of the old saws. Little
+dinners at Sir Joseph&rsquo;s&ndash;&ndash;what he called &ldquo;on fameals&rdquo;&ndash;&ndash;would
+have been big dinners elsewhere. A big dinner was
+like a Lord Mayor&rsquo;s banquet. He needed only a crier at his
+back and a Petronius to immortalize his <i>gourmandise</i>.</p>
+<p>To-night he had great folk and small fry. Nobody pretended
+to know the names of everybody. Sir Joseph himself
+leaned heavily on the man who sang out the labels of the
+guests, and even then his wife whispered them to him as they
+came forward, and for a precaution, kept slipping them into
+the conversation as reminders.</p>
+<p>There were several Americans present: a Doctor and Mrs.
+Clinton Worthing who had come over with a special shipload
+of nurses. The ship had been fitted out by Mrs. Worthing,
+who had been Muriel Schuyler, daughter of the giant plutocrat,
+Jacob Schuyler, who was lending England millions of money
+weekly. A little American millionaire, Willie Enslee, living
+in England now on account of some scandal in his past, was
+there. He did not look romantic.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had no genius for names, or faces, either.
+To-night she was frightened, and she made some horrible
+blunders, greeting the grisly Mr. Verrinder by the name
+of Mr. Hilary. The association was clear, for Mr. Hilary
+had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in Parliament;
+but it was like calling &ldquo;Mr. Capulet&rdquo; &ldquo;Mr. Montague.&rdquo; Marie
+Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra
+effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs.
+Norcross had only recently shaken off the name of Mrs.
+Patchett after a resounding divorce. So Marie Louise called
+her new husband by the name of her old, which made it very
+pleasant.</p>
+<p>Her wits were so badly dispersed that she gave up the
+attempt to take in the name of an American whom Lady
+Webling passed along to her as &ldquo;Mr. Davidge, of the States.&rdquo;
+And he must have been somebody of importance, for even
+Sir Joseph got his name right. Marie Louise, however, disliked
+him cordially at once&ndash;&ndash;for two reasons: first, she hated
+herself so much that she could not like anybody just then;
+next, this American was entirely too American. He was awkward
+and indifferent, but not at all with the easy amble
+and patrician unconcern of an English aristocrat.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_12' name='page_12'></a>12</span></div>
+<p>Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly
+born, at that, but she liked extreme Americanism never the
+more. Perhaps she was a bit of a snob, though fate was getting
+ready to beat the snobbery out of her. And hers was
+an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some
+people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger
+dialect. But she had a habit of taking on the accent and
+color of her environments. She had not been in England a
+month before she spoke Piccadilly almost impeccably. She
+had caught French and German intonations with equal speed
+and had picked up music by ear with the same amazing
+facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her
+livelihood.</p>
+<p>In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation
+or an affectation than a certain form of politeness and
+modesty. When an Englishwoman said, &ldquo;Cahn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; it
+seemed tactless to answer, &ldquo;No, I cann&rsquo;t.&rdquo; To respond to
+&ldquo;Good mawning&rdquo; with &ldquo;Good morrning&rdquo; had the effect of
+a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the shibboleth
+spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a
+pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was
+talking to was good enough for her. She conformed also
+because she hated to see people listening less to what she said
+than to the Yankee way she said it.</p>
+<p>This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success,
+but he bored her before he reached her. She made ready
+for flight to some other group. Then he startled her&ndash;&ndash;by
+being startled as he caught sight of her. When Lady Webling
+transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a tender,
+&ldquo;My daughter,&rdquo; Davidge stopped short and mumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere,
+haven&rsquo;t I?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He took the slap with a smile. &ldquo;Did I hear Lady Webling
+call you her daughter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+with the aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost
+&ldquo;Yis.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re right and I&rsquo;m wrong. I beg your pardon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Daon&rsquo;t mention it,&rdquo; said Marie Louise, and drew closer
+to Lady Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_13' name='page_13'></a>13</span>
+decency to reproach herself for being beastly to the stranger,
+but his name slipped at once through the sieve of her
+memory.</p>
+<p>Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total
+of a long column of accidents when we stop to tot up the
+figures. So we wait till that strange sum of accidents which
+we call a baby is added up into a living child of determined
+sex before we fasten a name that changes an it to a him or a
+her.</p>
+<p>The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back
+on and outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate.
+We are great for giving names to selected fragments of the
+chaos of life.</p>
+<p>In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would
+see something mystic and intended in the meeting that was
+to be the detached prologue of their after conflicts. They
+would quite misremember what really happened&ndash;&ndash;which was,
+that she retained no impression of him at all, and that he
+called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he had met years
+and years before for just a moment, and had never forgotten
+because he had not known her well enough to forget her.</p>
+<p>He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at
+a resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining
+for a moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl
+of old dreams&ndash;&ndash;a girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville
+theater in a Western state. She was one of a musical team
+that played all sorts of instruments&ndash;&ndash;xylophones, saxophones,
+trombones, accordions, cornets, comical instruments concealed
+in hats and umbrellas. This girl had played each of
+them in turn, in solo or with the rest of the group. The
+other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she had
+captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism,
+and the strange cry she put into her music.</p>
+<p>When she played the trombone she looked to him like
+one of the angels on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic
+summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When
+she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that
+shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too,
+in four voices&ndash;&ndash;in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto,
+and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the
+other. They called her &ldquo;Mamise, the Quartet in One.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_14' name='page_14'></a>14</span></div>
+<p>Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the
+manager of the theater to introduce him. The manager
+thought him a young fool, and Davidge had felt himself
+one when he went back to the dingy stage, where he found
+Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go on.
+She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a
+bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary,
+painfully plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward
+and rather contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge
+had never ceased to blush, and blushed again now, when he
+recalled his labored compliment, &ldquo;I expect to see your name
+in the electric lights some of these days&ndash;&ndash;or nights, Miss
+Mamise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had grumbled, &ldquo;Much ubbliged!&rdquo; and returned to the
+ape, while Davidge slunk away, ashamed.</p>
+<p>He had not forgotten that name, though the public had.
+He had never seen &ldquo;Mamise&rdquo; in the electric lights. He
+had never found the name in any dictionary. He had supposed
+her to be a foreigner&ndash;&ndash;Spanish, Polish, Czech, French,
+or something. He had not been able to judge her nationality
+from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered
+what had happened to her. She might have been killed in a
+train wreck or been married to the ape-trainer or gone to
+some other horrible conclusion. He had pretty well buried
+her among his forgotten admirations and torments, when
+lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd of peeresses and
+plutocrats in London.</p>
+<p>He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition
+before he had had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed
+by a cold glance and then by an English intonation
+and a fashionable phrase. He decided that his memory
+had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and confused.</p>
+<p>But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling
+him that this tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so
+haughtily, was really his lost Mamise.</p>
+<p>If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would
+not go wrong so often, perhaps, since their best reasoning
+is only guesswork, after all. It was not going to be destiny
+that brought Davidge and Marie Louise together again so
+much as the man&rsquo;s hatred of leaving anything unfinished&ndash;&ndash;even
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_15' name='page_15'></a>15</span>
+a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking
+Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off
+a snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.</p>
+<p>A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated
+him respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody.
+She found him staring at her over Sir Joseph&rsquo;s shoulder
+and puzzling about her. And this made her wretchedly uncomfortable,
+for perhaps, after all, she fretted, he had indeed
+met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of those odious
+strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate of
+being called daughter by Lady Webling.</p>
+<p>She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity
+by the incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband.
+Polly was one of the best-dressed women in the world. Her
+husband had the look of the husband of the best-dressed
+woman in the world. Polly had a wiry voice, and made no
+effort to soften it, but she was tremendously smart. She
+giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity, though
+her talk was rarely witty on its own account.</p>
+<p>Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her
+griefs in a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself
+as a giddy fool. She carried a delightful jocundity wherever
+she went. She was aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree
+of being careless, reckless, superior even to good manners.
+She had a good heart and amiable feelings; these made
+manners enough.</p>
+<p>She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran
+straight back into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther
+than many a duke dared trace his line. She had traveled the
+world; she had danced with kings, and had made two popes
+laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn&rsquo;t afraid of
+anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being
+friendly with them, or angry with them.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no
+difference to Polly&rsquo;s affection if she found out all there was to
+find out about Marie Louise. And yet Polly&rsquo;s friendship
+did not have the dull certainty of indestructibility. Marie
+Louise knew that one word wrong or one act out of key might
+end it forever, and then Polly would be her loud and ardent
+enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly could
+hate as briskly as she could love.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_16' name='page_16'></a>16</span></div>
+<p>She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the
+<i>Lusitania</i>.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t have come to-night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;except that
+I want to talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to
+tell everybody I know how much I loathe &rsquo;em all. &lsquo;The
+Hymn of Hate&rsquo; is a lullaby to what I feel.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+Lady C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so
+successfully that she went straight up against Polly Widdicombe
+without a tremor. She got what-for, and everybody
+was delighted. The two were devoted enemies from then on,
+and it was beautiful to see them come together.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night
+and invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a
+fight with anybody but Germans. She turned her full-orbed
+back on Lady C.-W. and, so to speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades
+at her. Lady C.-W. passed by without a word, and
+Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for Marie Louise
+was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W.</p>
+<p>She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before.
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must
+be a very great man.</p>
+<p>She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, &ldquo;How
+is the new ship coming on?&rdquo; and the American said, &ldquo;She&rsquo;s
+doing as well as could be expected.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his
+must be a heartbreaking business in these days when ships
+were being slaughtered in such numbers. She asked Polly
+and her husband if they knew him or his name.</p>
+<p>Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband.
+&ldquo;How do you know? He might be your own mother, for all
+you can tell. Put on your distance-glasses, you poor fish.&rdquo;
+She turned to Marie Louise. &ldquo;You know how near-sighted
+Tom is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An excellent fault in a man,&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Polly. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t trust even
+the blind ones. And you&rsquo;ll notice that when Tom comes to
+one of these d&eacute;collet&eacute; dinners, he wears his reading-glasses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-glasses,
+taking off his reading-glasses and pouching them and
+putting them away, and putting on his distance-glasses, and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_17' name='page_17'></a>17</span>
+from force of habit putting their pouch away. Then he stared
+at Davidge, took off his distance-glasses, found the case with
+difficulty, put them up, pocketed them, and stood blearing
+into space while he searched for his reading-glasses, found
+them, put the case back in his pocket and saddled his nose
+with the lenses.</p>
+<p>Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, after all that, what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know him,&rdquo; said Widdicombe.</p>
+<p>It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work.</p>
+<p>Polly said: &ldquo;That proves nothing. Tom&rsquo;s got a near-memory,
+too. The man&rsquo;s a pest. If he didn&rsquo;t make so much
+money, I&rsquo;d abandon him on a door-step.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was Polly&rsquo;s form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how
+she doted on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet
+dog. Widdicombe had the helpless manner of one, and was
+always at heel with Polly. But he was a Titan financially,
+and he was signing his name now to munitions-contracts as
+big as national debts.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the
+Widdicombes by one of Lady Webling&rsquo;s most mysterious
+glances, to meet a new-comer whom Lady Webling evidently
+regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling was as wide as
+a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in front
+of her by turning her back on the company. She made such
+a nook now and, taking Marie Louise&rsquo;s hand in hers, put it
+in the hand of the tall and staring man whose very look
+Marie Louise found invasive. His handclasp was somehow
+like an illicit caress.</p>
+<p>How strange it is that with so much modesty going about,
+people should be allowed to wear their hands naked! The
+fashion of the last few years compelling the leaving off of
+gloves was not really very nice. Marie Louise realized it for
+the first time. Her fastidious right hand tried to escape
+from the embrace of the stranger&rsquo;s fingers, but they clung
+devil-fishily, and Lady Webling&rsquo;s soft cushion palm was there
+conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling
+tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much&ndash;&ndash;Mr.
+Easton, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_18' name='page_18'></a>18</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Be very nice to him,&rdquo; said Lady Webling. &ldquo;He is taking
+you out to dinner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited
+priest, and there was such a slow crystallization as
+follows a cry of &ldquo;Fall in!&rdquo; to weary soldiers. The guests
+were soon in double file and on the march to the battlefield
+with the cooks.</p>
+<p>Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise&rsquo;s hand; he had carried
+it up into the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand
+over it for guard. A lady can hardly wrench loose from such
+an attention, but Marie Louise abhorred it.</p>
+<p>Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented
+his courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One
+hates to have even a bunch of violets jabbed into one&rsquo;s nose
+with the command, &ldquo;Smell!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something
+in it as faint as the odor of high game. It was a time
+when the least hint of Teutonism carried the stench of death
+to British nostrils.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German
+birth, and their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph
+had become a naturalized citizen ages ago and had won
+respect and affection a decade back. His lavish use of his
+money for charities and for great industries had won him his
+knighthood, and while there was a certain sniff of suspicion
+in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his name, those
+who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien birth
+that they forgave it him now.</p>
+<p>As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid
+of his speech. She was as used to it as to his other little
+mannerisms. She did not think of the old couple as fat and
+awkward. She did not analyze their attributes or think of
+their features in detail. She thought of them simply as them.
+But Easton was new; he brought in a subtle whiff of the hated
+Germany that had done the <i>Lusitania</i> to death.</p>
+<p>The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn
+wake. The triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats.
+The feast was brilliant and large and long, and it seemed
+criminal to see such waste of provender when so much of the
+world was hungry. The talk was almost all of the <i>Lusitania</i>
+and the deep damnation of her taking off. Many of the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_19' name='page_19'></a>19</span>
+guests had crossed the sea in her graceful shell, and they
+felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst
+of the German sea crimes.</p>
+<p>Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down
+the flowery lane of the table. She could not see him at all,
+for the candles and the roses. Just once she heard his voice
+in a lull. Its twang carried it all the way up the alley:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A man that would kill a passenger-ship would shoot a
+baby in its cradle. When you think how long it takes to
+build a ship, how much work she represents, how sweet she
+is when she rides out and all that&ndash;&ndash;by Gosh! there&rsquo;s no
+word mean enough for the skoundrels. There&rsquo;s nothing
+they won&rsquo;t do now&ndash;&ndash;absolutely nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again
+that night. She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince
+of distress he gave her by his provincialism was forgotten in
+the anguish her foster-parents caused her.</p>
+<p>For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their
+expressions of horror and grief over the finished epic, the
+<i>Lusitania</i>. It was not for lack of language; they used the
+strongest words they could find. But there was missing the
+subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors call
+sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a
+great actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction.
+No, it was when he expressed them best that he was least
+convincing, since an emotion that can be adequately presented
+is not a very big emotion; at least it does not overwhelm the
+soul. Inadequacy, helplessness, gaucherie, prove that the
+feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They &ldquo;get across the
+footlights&rdquo; between each player on the human stage and his
+audience.</p>
+<p>Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting
+too well and too much. Marie Louise hated herself
+for even the disloyalty of such a criticism of them, but she
+was repelled somehow by such rhetoric, and she liked far
+better the dour silence of old Mr. Verrinder. He looked
+a bishop who had got into a layman&rsquo;s evening dress by mistake.
+He was something very impressive and influential in
+the government, nobody knew just what.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder&rsquo;s silence
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_20' name='page_20'></a>20</span>
+the distracted muttering and stammering of a young English
+aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating
+from wounds and was going up in the air rapidly on the
+Webling champagne. He was maltreating his bread and
+throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the
+inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be
+understood, he groaned to himself, but loudly enough to
+be heard the whole length and breadth of the table: &ldquo;I
+remember readin&rsquo; about old Greek witch name Circe&ndash;&ndash;changed
+human beings into shape of swine. I wonder
+who turned those German swine into the shape of human
+beings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked&ndash;&ndash;by
+the vulgarity, no doubt. &ldquo;Swine&rdquo; do not belong in dining-room
+language&ndash;&ndash;only in the platters or the chairs. Marie
+Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton,
+though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme
+of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct,
+his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax
+or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was
+drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble
+with a very formal &ldquo;without which.&rdquo; It resulted first as
+&ldquo;veetowit veech,&rdquo; then as &ldquo;whidthout witch.&rdquo; He made it
+on the third trial.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered
+two other glances moving in the same direction. Lady
+Webling looked anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder&rsquo;s gaze was
+merely studious. Marie Louise felt an odd impression that
+Lady Webling was sending a kind of heliographic warning,
+while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a search-light that
+studies and registers, then moves away.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady
+Webling kept recommending him with her solicitous manner
+toward him. She made several efforts, too, to shift the
+conversation from the <i>Lusitania</i>; but it swung always back.
+Much bewilderment was expressed because the ship was
+not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was
+where she was when she was struck, and how she came to take
+that course at all.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and
+was uncertain of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_21' name='page_21'></a>21</span>
+the government. She always blamed it for everything, when
+it was Liberal. And now she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship
+to steal in by herself without protection. Whatever was the
+Admiralty thinking of? If the Cabinet doesn&rsquo;t fall for this,
+we might as well give up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices
+with a sigh of resignation. But the Marquess of
+Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and a foggy tongue in
+answer:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin&rsquo;
+to convoy the <i>Lusitania</i>; but she didn&rsquo;t come to rendezvous
+because why? Because some filthy Zherman gave her a
+false wireless and led her into a trap.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility
+startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in
+all directions like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared
+at Strathdene, then at somebody else. Marie Louise&rsquo;s racing
+gaze noted that Mr. Verrinder&rsquo;s eyes went slowly about again,
+studying everybody except Strathdene.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s eyes as they ran simply expressed a
+disgust that she put into words with her usual frankness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be more idiotic than necess&rsquo;ry, my dear boy; there
+are secret codes, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know&ndash;&ndash;that&rsquo;s
+what you mean, sweetheart. I don&rsquo;t know one little
+secret, but Huns&ndash;&ndash; Do you know how many thousand
+Germans there are loose in England&ndash;&ndash;do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. &ldquo;I
+haven&rsquo;t the faintest notion. Far more than I wish, I&rsquo;m
+sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And God
+knows how many more. And I&rsquo;m not alluthing to Germans in
+disguise, naturalized Germans&ndash;&ndash;quinine pills with a little coating.
+I&rsquo;m not referring to you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates&rsquo;
+respect for you. Ever&rsquo;body has. You have done all you
+could to overcome the fatal error of your parents. You&rsquo;re a
+splen&rsquo;id gen&rsquo;l&rsquo;man. Your &rsquo;xception proves rule. Even Germans
+can&rsquo;t all be perf&rsquo;ly rotten.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, Marquess, thank you,&rdquo; said Sir Joseph, with
+a natural embarrassment.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_22' name='page_22'></a>22</span></div>
+<p>Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the
+English &ldquo;Thank you&rdquo; and Sir Joseph&rsquo;s &ldquo;Thang gyou.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then Lady Webling&rsquo;s eyes went around the table, catching
+up the women&rsquo;s eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop
+from the embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment
+with her to the drawing-room, where the women sat
+about smoking miserably and waiting for the men to come
+forth and take them home.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_23' name='page_23'></a>23</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_III' id='CHAPTER_III'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+<p>There must have been embarrassment enough left to
+go round the dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief
+while the men flocked into the drawing-room. And they
+began to plead engagements in offices or homes or Parliament.</p>
+<p>It was not yet ten o&rsquo;clock when the last of the guests had
+gone, except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into
+his own study. Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight,
+as if he had set himself an imaginary chalk-line to follow.
+He jostled against the door, and as he closed it, swung with
+it uncertainly.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the
+head in the direction of the study door:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. He&rsquo;s nice, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I&ndash;&ndash;and we do hope
+you will be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband
+for her. It was a dreadful situation, because there was
+no compulsion except the compulsion of obligation. They
+never gave her a chance to do anything for them; they were
+always doing things for her. What an ingrate she would
+be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to marry a man
+she felt such antipathy for&ndash;&ndash;surely there could be some less
+hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway
+on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness
+in the immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of
+untenanted divans and of empty chairs drawn into groups
+as the departed guests had left them.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed
+for an answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t really dislike Nicky, do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;N-o-o. I&rsquo;ve not known him long enough to dislike him
+very well.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_24' name='page_24'></a>24</span></div>
+<p>She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady
+Webling sighed profoundly and smothered her disappointment
+in a fond &ldquo;Good night.&rdquo; She smothered the great child, too,
+in a hugely buxom embrace. When Marie emerged she was
+suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to Lady
+Webling of Fr&auml;ulein Ernst&rsquo;s attack on the children&rsquo;s souls.
+She spoke now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one thing, mamma, I&rsquo;ve been wanting to tell you
+all evening. Please don&rsquo;t let it distress you, but really I&rsquo;m
+afraid you&rsquo;ll have to get rid of Fr&auml;ulein.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Webling&rsquo;s voluminous yawn was stricken midway
+into a gasp. Marie Louise told her the story of the diabolical
+prayer. Lady Webling took the blow without reeling. She
+expressed shock, but again expressed it too perfectly.</p>
+<p>She promised to &ldquo;reprimand the foolish old soul.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To reprimand her!&rdquo; Marie Louise cried. &ldquo;You won&rsquo;t
+send her away?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Send her away where, my child? Where should we send
+the poor thing? But I&rsquo;ll speak to her very sharply. It was
+outrageous of her. What if the children should say such
+things before other people? It would be frightful! Thank
+you for telling me, my dear. And now I&rsquo;m for bed! And
+you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door,
+implying and rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise
+was lingering for a last word with Easton.</p>
+<p>Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs
+with Lady Webling&rsquo;s arm about her. For the first time in her
+life she distrusted the perfection of the old soul&rsquo;s motives.
+She felt like a Judas when Lady Webling offered her cheek
+for another good-night kiss. Then she pretended to read
+a book while she listened for Lady Webling&rsquo;s last puff as
+she made the top step.</p>
+<p>At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened
+and Easton came out. He was bending down to murmur
+into Sir Joseph&rsquo;s downcast countenance. Easton was saying,
+with a tremulous emotion, &ldquo;This is the beginning of the end
+of England&rsquo;s control of the sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness
+rather than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the
+awe of a horrible hope.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_25' name='page_25'></a>25</span></div>
+<p>Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed
+to start as he saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her
+dotingly and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not gone to bed yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden
+rush of gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton&rsquo;s
+smile with any favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph said: &ldquo;Good night, Nicky. It is long before
+I see you some more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicholas nodded. &ldquo;But I shall see Miss Marie Louise
+quite soon now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky
+bent and kissed her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; and went his way.</p>
+<p>It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the
+riddle. Then Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly.
+He had an envelope with him, sealed with great red buttons
+of wax. He asked Marie Louise into his office and said, with
+an almost stealthy importance:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes,
+you see, when I am having a big dealing on the Stock
+Exchange I do not like that everybody knows my business.
+Too many people wish to know all I do, so they can be doing
+the same. What everybody knows helps nobody. It is
+my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody
+finding out something. Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, papa!&rdquo; Marie Louise answered with the utmost
+confidence that what he did was good and wise and straight.
+She experienced a qualm when Sir Joseph explained that
+Nicky was the man. She wondered why he did not come to
+the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to
+question Sir Joseph&rsquo;s motives. He had never been anything
+but good to her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good
+that for her to give thought-room to a suspicion of him
+was heinous.</p>
+<p>He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous
+financial moment. She had known him to work up great
+drives on the market and to use all sorts of people to prepare
+his attacks. She did not understand big business methods.
+She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment. When,
+then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_26' name='page_26'></a>26</span>
+Regent&rsquo;s Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to
+Nicky&rsquo;s without any one&rsquo;s witnessing the transfer, she felt
+the elation of a child intrusted with an important errand.
+So she walked all the way to Regent&rsquo;s Park with the long
+strides of a young woman out for a constitutional. She
+found a bench where she was told to, and sat down to bask
+in the spring air, and wait.</p>
+<p>By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie
+Louise, and made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave
+him her hand. She had taken the precaution to wear gloves&ndash;&ndash;also
+she had the envelope in her hand. She left it in
+Nicky&rsquo;s. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and murmuring,
+&ldquo;So sorry I can&rsquo;t stop,&rdquo; lifted his hat and hurried off.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her
+constitutional.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night.</p>
+<p>Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky
+outside a Bond Street shop. She was to have a small parcel
+and drop it. Nicky would stoop and pick it up and hand her
+in its stead another of similar wrapper. She was to thank
+him and come home.</p>
+<p>Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter
+and a request to take the children with her for a long walk,
+ending at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The
+children carried their private navies with them and squatted
+at the brim of the huge basin, poking their reluctant yachts to
+sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful scheme for using
+a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under water
+and from a distance knocked his sister&rsquo;s sailboat about till
+its canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he
+wore the most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina
+soon realized who had caused this catastrophe and how, and
+she went for Victor of the U-stick with finger-nails and feet
+and nearly rounded him into the toy ocean. It evidently
+made a difference whose ship was gored.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as
+well as a trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing.</p>
+<p>It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments.
+He thought he recognized Marie Louise, but
+he was not sure. Women in the morning look so unlike their
+evening selves. He dared not speak.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_27' name='page_27'></a>27</span></div>
+<p>Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to
+speak, but Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud
+even to see him when she looked at him. She would not have
+known him, anyway.</p>
+<p>Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the
+appearance of the man he had seen at her side at the dinner.
+But the confirmation was Davidge&rsquo;s exile, for the fellow lifted
+his hat with a look of great surprise and said to Marie Louise,
+&ldquo;Fancy finding you heah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blah!&rdquo; said Davidge to himself, and went on about his
+business.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but
+went on scolding Victor and Bettina.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine
+they&rsquo;ll submarine you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, &ldquo;You
+were so glad the <i>Lusitania</i> was sunk, you see now how it
+feels!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed
+to send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already
+one of those who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of
+others and infinitesimally sensitive to their own.</p>
+<p>When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious
+look of disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was
+also already one of those ladies who find a man&rsquo;s lap an excellent
+consolation. He got rid of her adroitly and when
+she and Victor were once more engaged in navigation Nicky
+took up the business he had come for.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May I stop a moment?&rdquo; he said, and sat down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a letter for you,&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and
+he slipped a letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and
+from it he took the letter she cautiously disclosed. He
+chatted awhile and moved away.</p>
+<p>This sort of meeting took place several times in several
+places. When the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered
+about, Nicky would murmur to Marie Louise that she had
+better start home. He would take her arm familiarly and
+the transfer of the parcel would be deftly achieved.</p>
+<p>This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir
+Joseph apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_28' name='page_28'></a>28</span>
+seemed to be sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes
+in their fat, watery bags peered at her with a tender regret
+and an ulterior regret as well.</p>
+<p>He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was
+such an important business and he had no one else to trust.
+And Marie Louise, for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his
+confidence, regarded it as sacred, and would not violate it so
+much as to make the least effort to learn what messages she
+was carrying. Nothing, of course, would have been easier
+than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes the
+lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked
+into a bathroom.</p>
+<p>Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great
+country seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American
+who had bought it from nobility gone back to humility.
+Here life was life. There were forests and surreptitious
+pheasants, deer that would almost but never quite come to
+call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and
+transept like cherubim all wings and voice.</p>
+<p>The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful
+not to intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them.
+The life was like life at a big hotel. There was always a
+little gambling to be had, tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet
+chat, gardens to stroll and sniff or grub in, horses to ride,
+motors at beck and call, solitude or company.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck
+up a great friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from
+Washington, D. C., so grand a lady that even Lady C.-W.
+was a bit in awe of her, so gracious a personage that even
+Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and
+urged her to visit her when she came to America. But Polly
+Widdicombe had already pledged Marie Louise to make
+her home her own on that side of the sea. Polly came down,
+too, and had &ldquo;the time of her young life&rdquo; in doing a bit of
+the women&rsquo;s war work that became the beautiful fashion
+of the time. The justification of it was that it released men
+for the trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully
+good sport.</p>
+<p>She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts
+and worked like hostlers around the stables and in the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_29' name='page_29'></a>29</span>
+paddocks, breaking colts and mucking out stalls. They donned
+the blouses and boots of peasants, and worked in the fields
+with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the plow,
+but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows
+they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve,
+according to their natures.</p>
+<p>The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these
+revelations, and portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and
+puttees, and armed with agricultural weapons, appeared in
+the pages of all the weeklies along with other aristocrats and
+commoners. Some of these even reached America.</p>
+<p>There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this &ldquo;As You
+Like It&rdquo; life and that was the persistence of the secret association
+with Nicky. It was the strangest of clandestine
+affairs.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle
+or behind the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he
+came up from town, fell into the habit of asking her once
+in a while to take another little note to Nicky.</p>
+<p>She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step
+from a clump of bushes by the road and hail her car, or she
+would overtake him and offer him a lift to his inn, or she
+would take horse and gallop across country and find him
+awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the twist of a ravine.</p>
+<p>He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no
+proffer of courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly
+triumphant he rode so close to her that their knees girded
+and their spurs clashed, and he tried to clip her in his arms.
+She gathered her horse and let him go, and he plunged ahead
+so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie Louise
+from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the
+pommel of his own, but she fought herself free and came to
+the ground and was almost trampled. She was so rumpled
+and so furious, and he so frightened, that he left her and
+spurred after her horse, brought him back, and bothered her
+no more that day.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you ever annoy me again,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it&rsquo;ll be the
+last you&rsquo;ll see of me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she
+had him cowed.</p>
+<p>It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_30' name='page_30'></a>30</span>
+to love Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in
+his behalf.</p>
+<p>There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation.
+There is something froward about the passion. It hangs back
+like a fretful child, loathing what is held out for its temptation,
+longing for the forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.</p>
+<p>Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest
+impediment. Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought
+to marry Nicky, and herself kept refusing to obey.</p>
+<p>From very perversity her heart turned to other interests.
+She was desperately in love with soldiers <i>en masse</i> and individually.
+There was safety in numbers and a canceling
+rivalry between those who were going out perhaps to death
+and those who had come back from the jaws of death variously
+the worse for the experience.</p>
+<p>The blind would have been irresistible in their groping
+need of comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body
+or mind putting out their incessant pleas for a gramercy of
+love. Those whose wounds were hideous took on an uncanny
+beauty from their sacrifice.</p>
+<p>She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of
+pity.</p>
+<p>She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help
+the freshly wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend
+courage to the souls dismayed by the first horror of the
+understanding that thenceforth they must go through life
+piecemeal.</p>
+<p>But whenever she made application she met some vague
+rebuff. Her appeals were passed on and on and the blame
+for their failure was referred always to some remote personage
+impossible to reach.</p>
+<p>Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an
+official intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied
+her for a time. One day it came over her that she was
+herself suspect. This seemed ridiculous beyond words
+in view of her abhorrence of the German cause in large and in
+detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she ran upon
+the idea that it was because of her association with the
+Weblings.</p>
+<p>She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage
+through her mind. But it came back as often as she drove
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_31' name='page_31'></a>31</span>
+it out and then the thought began to hover about her that
+perhaps the suspicion was not so insane as she believed.
+The public is generally unreasonable, but its intuitions, like
+a woman&rsquo;s, are the resultants of such complex instincts that
+they are above analysis.</p>
+<p>But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape
+from the suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful
+buzzard it was always somewhere in her sky.</p>
+<p>Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was
+incessantly confirmed by the minuti&aelig; of every-day existence.
+The interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable
+on any other ground. The theory of secret financial
+dealings looked ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial,
+they must be some of the trading with the enemy that was
+so much discussed in the papers.</p>
+<p>She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots
+that all the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid
+to the last degree of fear. She saw herself on the scaffold.
+She resolved to carry no more messages.</p>
+<p>But the next request of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s found her complying
+automatically. It had come to be her habit to do what
+he asked her to do, and to take pride in the service as
+a small installment on her infinite debt. And every time
+her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph
+or Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness
+or do some great public service that won commendation
+from on high.</p>
+<p>One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling
+discharged Fr&auml;ulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged
+an English nurse. Another day Lady Webling asked
+her to go on a visit to a hospital. There she lavished tenderness
+on the British wounded and ignored the German. How
+could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British? Another
+time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel
+she saw Sir Joseph&rsquo;s name heading a war subscription, and
+that night he made, at a public meeting, a speech denouncing
+Germany in terms of vitriol.</p>
+<p>After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was
+still neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a
+promise of better behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise
+was kept, with many a violation quickly apologized for.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_32' name='page_32'></a>32</span></div>
+<p>Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be
+hardly room in the papers for the mere names of the dead
+and the wounded, and those still more pitiable ones, the
+missing.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost
+and lost. She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting
+the sick, the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.</p>
+<p>The strain on Marie Louise&rsquo;s heart was the more exhausting
+because she had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she
+was being used somehow as a tool for the destruction of English
+plans and men. She tried to get the courage to open
+one of those messages, but she was afraid that she might find
+confirmation. She made up her mind again and again to
+put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her tongue
+faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were
+innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated
+Nicky too much to ask him. He would lie in any case.</p>
+<p>She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that
+buzzed in her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes
+on her way to a tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her
+toward a police station, but another spirit carried her past,
+for she would visualize the sure consequences of such an
+exposure. If her suspicions were false, she would be exposed
+as a combination of dastard and dolt. If they were true,
+she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling perhaps
+to the gallows.</p>
+<p>To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply
+unthinkable.</p>
+<p>Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of
+postponement and inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for
+counselor, and a mother to be the first victim of his rashness.
+No wonder he hesitated. And Marie Louise had only hysterical
+suspicion to account for her thoughts; and the victims
+of her first step would be the only father and mother she
+had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet
+of debate and indecision, weighing evidences, pondering
+theories, deferring the sword, hoping that Germany would
+throw away the baser half. And all the while time slid away,
+lives slid away, nations fell.</p>
+<p>In the autumn the town house was opened again. There
+was much thinly veiled indignation in the papers and in the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_33' name='page_33'></a>33</span>
+circulation of gossip because of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s prominence in
+English life. The Germans were so relentless and so various
+in their outrages upon even the cruel usages of combat that
+the sound of a German name grew almost unbearable. People
+were calling for Sir Joseph&rsquo;s arrest. Others scoffed at the
+cruelty and cowardice of such hysteria.</p>
+<p>A once-loved prince of German blood had been frozen
+out of the navy, and the internment camps were growing
+like boom towns. Yet other Germans somehow were granted
+an almost untrammeled freedom, and thousands who had
+avoided evil activity were tolerated throughout the war.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph kept retorting to suspicion with subscription.
+He took enormous quantities of the government loans. His
+contributions to the Red Cross and the multitudinous charities
+were more like endowments than gifts. How could Marie
+Louise be vile enough to suspect him?</p>
+<p>Yet in spite of herself she resolved at last to refuse further
+messenger service. Then she learned that Nicky had left
+England and gone to America on most important financial
+business of a most confidential nature.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was too glad of her release to ask questions.
+She rejoiced that she had not insulted her foster-parents
+with mutiny, and she drudged at whatever war work the
+committees found for her. They found nothing very picturesque,
+but the more toilsome her labor was the more it
+served for absolution of any evil she might have done.</p>
+<p>And now that the dilemma of loyalty was taken from
+her soul, her body surrendered weakly. She had time to fall
+ill. It was enough that she got her feet wet. Her convalescence
+was slow even in the high hills of Matlock.</p>
+<p>The winter had passed, and the summer of 1916 had come
+before Marie Louise was herself. The Weblings had moved
+out to the country again; the flowers were back in the gardens;
+the deer and the birds were in their summer garb and mood.
+But now the house guests were all wounded soldiers and
+nurses. Sir Joseph had turned over his estate for a war
+hospital.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling went among her visitors like a queen making
+her rounds. Sir Joseph squandered money on his distinguished
+company. Marie Louise joined them and took what comfort
+she could in such diminution of pain and such contributions
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_34' name='page_34'></a>34</span>
+of war power as were permitted her. Those were the only
+legitimate happinesses in the world.</p>
+<p>The tennis-courts were peopled now with players glad of
+one arm or one eye or even a demodeled face. On the golf-links
+crutched men hobbled. The horses in the stables bore
+only partial riders. The card-parties were squared by players
+using hands made by hand. The music-room resounded
+with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had
+little but their voices left. They howled, &ldquo;Keep your head
+down, Fritzie boy,&rdquo; or, &ldquo;We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle,
+and here we are and here we are again,&rdquo; or moaned love-songs
+with a sardonic irony.</p>
+<p>And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come
+to tea!</p>
+<p>Young Hawdon was there. &ldquo;Well, Marie Louise,&rdquo; he had
+said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m back from France, but not <i>in toto</i>. Fact is, I&rsquo;m
+neither here nor there. Quite a sketchy party you have.
+But we&rsquo;ll charge it all to Germany, and some day we&rsquo;ll collect.
+Some day! Some day!&rdquo; And he burst into song.</p>
+<p>The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times
+there was hilarity, but it was always close to tears.</p>
+<p>The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie
+Louise with them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers,
+but Sir Joseph said that there was just as much for her to
+do in town. There was no lack of poor soldiers anywhere.
+Besides, he needed her, he said. This set her heart to plunging
+with the old fear. But he was querulous and irascible nowadays,
+and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for
+she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles
+living under the sword.</p>
+<p>The news from America was more encouraging to England
+and to the Americans in England. German spies were being
+arrested with amazing frequence. Ambassadors were floundering
+in hot water and setting up a large traffic in return-tickets.
+Even the trunks of certain &ldquo;Americans&rdquo; were
+searched&ndash;&ndash;men and women who were amazed to learn that
+curious German documents had got mixed up in their own
+effects. Some most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.</p>
+<p>It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids
+had been published in the London papers that Sir
+Joseph had his first stroke of paralysis.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_35' name='page_35'></a>35</span></div>
+<p>Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie
+Louise was heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted,
+but schooled rather by its prolonged exercise, and
+she gave the forlorn old wretch a love and a tenderness that
+had been wrought to a fine art without losing any of its
+spontaneous reality.</p>
+<p>At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled
+like a snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered
+soldier, but slowly he won back his faculties and his
+members. The doors that were shut between his brain and
+his powers opened one by one, and he became a man again.</p>
+<p>The first thing he wrote with his rediscovered right hand
+was his signature to a document his lawyer brought him after
+a consultation. It was a transfer of twenty thousand pounds
+in British war bonds, &ldquo;for services rendered and other valuable
+considerations,&rdquo; to his dear daughter Marie Louise Webling.</p>
+<p>When the warrant was handed to her with the bundle of
+securities, Marie Louise was puzzled, then shocked as the old
+man explained with his still uncertain lips. When she understood,
+she rejected the gift with horror. Sir Joseph pleaded
+with her in a thick speech that had relapsed to an earlier
+habit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am theenkink how close I been by dyink. Du bist&ndash;&ndash;zhoo
+are in my vwill, of coorse, but a man says, &lsquo;I vwill,&rsquo; and
+some heirs says, &lsquo;You vwon&rsquo;t yet!&rsquo; Better I should make
+sure of somethink.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t want money, papa&ndash;&ndash;not like this. And I
+won&rsquo;t have you speak of wills and such odious things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been like our own daughter only more obeyink
+as poor Hedwig. You should not make me sick by to
+refuse.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She could only quiet him by accepting the wealth and
+bringing him the receipt for its deposit in a safe of her own.</p>
+<p>When he was once more able to hoist his massive body to
+its feet and to walk to his own door, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Mein</i>&ndash;&ndash;my <i>Gott</i>! Look at the calendar once. It is nineteen
+seventeen already.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He ceased to be that simple, primitive thing, a sick man;
+he became again the financier. She heard of him anew on
+war-industry boards. She saw his name on lists of big
+subscriptions.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_36' name='page_36'></a>36</span>
+He began to talk anew of Nicky, and he spoke with unusual
+anxiety of U-boats. He hoped that they would have a bad
+week. There was no questioning his sincerity in this.</p>
+<p>And one evening he came home in a womanish flurry. He
+pinched the ear of Marie Louise and whispered to her:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nicky is here in England&ndash;&ndash;safe after the sea voyage.
+Be a nize girl, and you shall see him soon now.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_37' name='page_37'></a>37</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IV' id='CHAPTER_IV'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows
+opaque with fog. The gardens she usually looked
+over, glistening green all winter through, were gone, and in
+their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton packed so tight
+against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to the sill.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky
+tunnel where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky
+and suffocating humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content
+for the hour and the air. He ate with the zest of a boy on a
+holi-morn, and beckoned her into his study, where he confided
+to her great news:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of
+America. Big business he has done. He cannot come yet by
+our house, for even servants must not see him here. So you
+shall go and meet him. You take your own little car, and go
+most careful till you find Hyde Park gate. Inside you stop
+and get out to see if something is matter with the engine.
+A man is there&ndash;&ndash;Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in
+and drive slowly&ndash;&ndash;so slowly. Give him this letter&ndash;&ndash;put in
+bosom of dress not to lose. He tells you maybe something,
+and he gives you envelope. Then he gets out, and you come
+home&ndash;&ndash;but carefully. Don&rsquo;t let one of those buses run
+you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most
+important.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the
+place. But Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and
+pain that she yielded hastily, took the envelope, folded it
+small, thrust it into her chest pocket and went out to the
+garage, where she could hardly bully the chauffeur into letting
+her take her own car. He put all the curtains on, and she
+pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine.
+There was something of the effect of moving along the floor
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_38' name='page_38'></a>38</span>
+of the sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths,
+but everything was a blur.</p>
+<p>Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over.
+But she was so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so
+damp, so chilled, and so uneasy with the apparitions and the
+voices that had haunted him in the fog that he said nothing
+more cordial than:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At last! So you come!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran
+the car a little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave
+him the letter from Sir Joseph and took from him another.</p>
+<p>Nicky did not care to tarry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should get back to my house with this devil&rsquo;s cold I&rsquo;ve
+caught,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do you still have no sun in this bedamned
+England?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;you&rdquo; struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed
+Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent
+on years spent in German banking-houses.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How did you find the United States?&rdquo; Marie Louise asked,
+with a sudden qualm of homesickness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think you can get along better afoot,&rdquo; said Marie Louise,
+as she made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Au revoir!</i>&rdquo; said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the
+door back of him.</p>
+<p>That night there was one of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s dinners. But
+almost nobody came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old
+Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling seemed more
+frightened than insulted by the last-moment regrets of the
+guests. Was it an omen?</p>
+<p>It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise
+to carry another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone,
+shuddering in the wet and edged air. She found the bench
+agreed on, and sat waiting, craven and mutinous. Nicky
+did not come, but another man passed her, looked searchingly,
+turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Webling?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gave him her stingiest &ldquo;Yis.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and
+explain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is not coming?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_39' name='page_39'></a>39</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;He can&rsquo;t. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter
+for you. Have you one for him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have
+liked Nicky himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The
+stranger said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am Mr. von Gr&ouml;ner, a frient of&ndash;&ndash;of Nicky&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But
+von Gr&ouml;ner&rsquo;s credentials were good; it was surely Nicky&rsquo;s
+hand that had penned the lines on the envelope. She took it
+reluctantly and gave him the letter she carried.</p>
+<p>She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he
+accepted the testimony of Nicky&rsquo;s autograph.</p>
+<p>The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand.
+This time her envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added
+line, &ldquo;<i>Kindness of Mr. von Gr&ouml;ner.</i>&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Von Gr&ouml;ner tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits
+were in an absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of
+him, afraid that he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not,
+afraid that he was a real German, afraid that he was a pretended
+spy, or an English secret-service man. She was afraid
+of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid to obey them or disobey
+them, to love them or hate them, betray them or be betrayed.
+She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus, of desire.</p>
+<p>She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state
+of panic, too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear.
+She caught them whispering often. She saw them cling together
+with a devotion that would have been a burlesque in a
+picture seen by strangers. It would have been almost as
+grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate cowering
+hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace
+of a lightning-storm.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope
+she had just brought with other letters of Nicky&rsquo;s. Sir
+Joseph slipped them into a book, then took one of them out
+cautiously and showed it to Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, then, &ldquo;No,&rdquo; then, &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; then,
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Webling said, &ldquo;Sit down once, my child, and tell me
+just how this man von Gr&ouml;ner does, acts, speaks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_40' name='page_40'></a>40</span>
+they would take her into their confidence, but they exchanged
+querying looks and signaled caution.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph said: &ldquo;Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and
+his memory&ndash;&ndash;little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead
+yet. Who knows?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo; Marie Louise cried. &ldquo;Dead, and sends you
+letters?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I
+write him once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe.
+Anyway, I think I don&rsquo;t feel so very good now&ndash;&ndash;mamma and
+I take maybe a little journey. You come along with, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in
+her world led her to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do&ndash;&ndash;or
+wherever to go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held
+her hand in one of his and patted it with the flabby other,
+mumbling:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but what is it we want you to do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic
+among the folds of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled,
+nodding and still patting her hand as he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Gr&ouml;ner. I esk
+him to come himself after dark to-night now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight
+die out of the west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner
+in the Tower, a princess waiting for the morrow&rsquo;s little visit
+to the scaffold. Or did the English shoot women, as Edith
+Cavell had been shot?</p>
+<p>There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey.
+It was the butler to murmur, &ldquo;Dinner, please.&rdquo; She went
+down and joined mamma and papa at the table. There were
+no guests except Terror and Suspense, and both of them wore
+smiling masks and made no visible sign of their presence.</p>
+<p>After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the
+door. There was nothing surprising about that. Women
+had given up the ancient pretense that their respectability
+was something that must be policed by a male relative or
+squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice nor malaria
+was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night air;
+nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_41' name='page_41'></a>41</span>
+risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been
+easy enough to lose under the old r&eacute;gime.</p>
+<p>So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of
+the family might have done. She drove to a little square too
+dingily middle class to require a policeman. She sounded her
+horn three squawks and swung open the door, and a man
+waiting under an appointed tree stepped from its shadow
+and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She dropped
+into high speed and whisked out of the square.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have for me a message,&rdquo; said Mr. von Gr&ouml;ner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&ndash;&ndash;at the house. We&rsquo;ll go there at once if you please.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky&ndash;&ndash;I ought to telephone
+him I shall be gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nicky is well enough to telephone?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If
+you will please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could
+hardly kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von
+Gr&ouml;ner left her, her heart shaking her with a faint tremor
+like that of the engine of her car.</p>
+<p>Von Gr&ouml;ner returned promptly, but he said: &ldquo;I think we
+should not go too straight to your father&rsquo;s house. Might
+be we are followed. We can tell soon. Go in the park, please,
+and suddenly stop, turn round, and I look at what cars follow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She let him command her. She was letting everybody
+command her; she had no destination, no North Star in her
+life. Von Gr&ouml;ner kept her dodging about Regent&rsquo;s Park till
+she grew angry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This seems rather silly, doesn&rsquo;t it? I am going home.
+Sir Joseph has worries enough without&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, he has worries?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not
+please her. He kept up a rain of questions, too, but she
+answered them all by referring him to Sir Joseph.</p>
+<p>At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men
+closed in on the car and peered into their faces. Von Gr&ouml;ner
+snapped at them, and they fell back.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened
+the door herself and led von Gr&ouml;ner to Sir Joseph&rsquo;s room.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_42' name='page_42'></a>42</span></div>
+<p>As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling
+weeping frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie
+Louise fell back and motioned von Gr&ouml;ner away, but he pushed
+the door open and, taking her by the elbow, thrust her
+forward.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph,
+who had been trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused
+with his palm uplifted.</p>
+<p>Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old
+couple was not alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder.
+By the door, almost touching Marie Louise, was a tall, grim
+person she had not seen. He closed the door behind von
+Gr&ouml;ner and Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>Mr. Verrinder said, &ldquo;Be good enough to sit down.&rdquo; To
+von Gr&ouml;ner he said, &ldquo;How are you, Bickford?&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_43' name='page_43'></a>43</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_V' id='CHAPTER_V'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Sir Joseph was staring at the new-comer, and his
+German nativity told him what Marie Louise had not
+been sure of, that von Gr&ouml;ner was no German. When
+Verrinder gave him an English name it shook Marie Louise
+with a new dismay. Sir Joseph turned from the man to
+Marie Louise and demanded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Marie Louise, you ditt not theenk this man is a Cherman?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This one more shame crushed Marie Louise. She dropped
+into a chair, appealing feebly to the man she had retrieved:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your name is not von Gr&ouml;ner?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bickford grinned. &ldquo;Well, in a manner of speakin&rsquo;. You
+might say it&rsquo;s my pen-name. Not that I&rsquo;ve ever been in the
+pen&ndash;&ndash;except with Nicky.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nicky is in the&ndash;&ndash; He&rsquo;s not ill?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, he&rsquo;s a bit sick. He was a bit seasick to start with,
+and when we gave him the collar&ndash;&ndash;well, he doesn&rsquo;t like his
+room.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But his letters&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo; Marie Louise pleaded, her fears racing
+ahead of her questions.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was always a hand at forgery, but I thought best to
+turn it to the aid of me country. I&rsquo;m proud if you liked me
+work. The last ones were not up to the mark. <i>I</i> was hurried,
+and Nicky was ugly. He refused to answer any more
+questions. I had to do it all on me own. Ahfterwards I
+found I had made a few mistakes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When Marie Louise realized that this man had been calmly
+taking the letters addressed to Nicky and answering them in
+his feigned script to elicit further information from Sir Joseph
+and enmesh him further, she dropped her hands at her sides,
+feeling not only convicted of crime, but of imbecility as well.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph and Lady Webling spread their hands and drew
+up their shoulders in surrender and gave up hope of bluff.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_44' name='page_44'></a>44</span></div>
+<p>Verrinder wanted to be merciful and avoid any more
+climaxes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see it&rsquo;s all up, Sir Joseph, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph drew himself again as high as he could, though
+the burden of his flesh kept pulling him down. He did not
+answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come now, Sir Joseph, be a sport.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Englishman&rsquo;s releechion,&rdquo; sneered Sir Joseph, &ldquo;to be
+ein <i>Sportmann</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know you can&rsquo;t understand it,&rdquo; said Verrinder.
+&ldquo;It seems to be untranslatable into German&ndash;&ndash;just as we can&rsquo;t
+seem to understand <i>Germanity</i> except that it is the antonym
+of <i>humanity</i>. You fellows have no boyhood literature, I am
+told, no Henty or Hughes or Scott to fill you with ideas of
+fair play. You have no games to teach you. One really can&rsquo;t
+blame you for being such rotters, any more than one can
+blame a Kaffir for not understanding cricket.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But sport aside, use your intelligence, old man. <i>I</i>&rsquo;ve
+laid my cards on the table&ndash;&ndash;enough of them, at least. We&rsquo;ve
+trumped every trick, and we&rsquo;ve all the trumps outstanding.
+You have a few high cards up your sleeve. Why not toss them
+on the table and throw yourselves on the mercy of his
+Majesty?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The presence of Marie Louise drove the old couple to a last
+battle for her faith. Lady Webling stormed, &ldquo;All what you
+accuse us is lies, lies!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder grew stern:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lies, you say? We have you, and your daughter&ndash;&ndash;also
+Nicky. We have&ndash;&ndash;well, I&rsquo;ll not annoy you with their names.
+Over in the States they have a lot more of you fellows.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You and Sir Joseph have lived in this country for years
+and years. You have grown fat&ndash;&ndash;I mean to say rich&ndash;&ndash;upon
+our bounty. We have loved and trusted you. His
+Majesty has given you both marks of his most gracious favor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We paid well for that,&rdquo; sneered Lady Webling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I fancy you did&ndash;&ndash;but with English pounds and
+pence that you gained with the help of British wits and British
+freedom. You have contributed to charities, yes, and handsomely,
+too, but not entirely without the sweet usages of
+advertisement. You have not hidden that part of your bookkeeping
+from the public.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_45' name='page_45'></a>45</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;But the rest of your books&ndash;&ndash;you don&rsquo;t show those. We
+know a ghastly lot about them, and it is not pretty, my dear
+lady. I had hoped you would not force us to publish those
+transactions. You have plotted the destruction of the British
+Empire; you have conspired to destroy ships in dock and at
+sea; you have sent God knows how many lads to their death&ndash;&ndash;and
+women and children, too. You have helped to blow up
+munitions-plants, and on your white heads is the blood of
+many and many a poor wretch torn to pieces at his lathe.
+You have made widows of women and orphans of children
+who never heard of you, nor you of them. Nor have you
+cared&ndash;&ndash;or dared&ndash;&ndash;to inquire.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir Joseph has been perfecting a great scheme to buy
+up what munitions-plants he could in this country in order
+to commit sabotage and slow up the production of the ammunition
+our troops are crying for. He has plotted with
+others to send defective shells that will rip up the guns they
+do not fit, and powders that will explode too soon or not at
+all. God! to think that the lives of our brave men and the
+life of our Empire should be threatened by such people as you!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And in the American field Sir Joseph has connived with a
+syndicate to purchase factories, to stop production at the
+source, since your U-boats and your red-handed diplomatic
+spies cannot stop it otherwise. Your agents have corrupted
+a few of the Yankees, and killed others, and would have
+killed more if the name of your people had not become such a
+horror even in that land where millions of Germans live that
+every proffer is suspect.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see, we know you, Lady Webling and Sir Joseph.
+We have watched you all the while from the very first, and
+we know that you are not innocent even of complicity in the
+supreme infamy of luring the <i>Lusitania</i> to her death.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was quivering with the rush of his emotions over the
+broken dam of habitual reticence.</p>
+<p>Lady Webling and Sir Joseph had quivered, too, less under
+the impact of his denunciation than in the confusion of their
+own exposure to themselves and to Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>They had watched her eyes as she heard Mr. Verrinder&rsquo;s
+philippic. They had seen her pass from incredulity to belief.
+They had seen her glance at them and glance away in fear
+of them.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_46' name='page_46'></a>46</span></div>
+<p>This broke them utterly, for she was utterly dear to them.
+She was dearer than their own flesh and blood. She had replaced
+their dead. She had been born to them without pain,
+without infancy, born full grown in the prime of youth and
+beauty. They had watched her love grow to a passion, and
+their own had grown with it.</p>
+<p>What would she do now? She was the judge they feared
+above England. They awaited her sentence.</p>
+<p>Her eyes wandered to them and searched them through.
+At first, under the spell of Verrinder&rsquo;s denunciation, she saw
+them as two bloated fiends, their hands dripping blood, their
+lips framed to lies, their brains to cunning and that synonym
+for Germanism, <i>ruthlessness</i>&ndash;&ndash;the word the Germans chose,
+as their Kaiser chose Huns for an ideal.</p>
+<p>But she looked again. She saw the pleading in their eyes.
+Their very uncomeliness besought her mercy. After all,
+she had seen none of the things Verrinder described. The
+only real things to her, the only things she knew of her
+own knowledge, were the goodnesses of these two. They
+were her parents. And now for the first time they needed
+her. The mortgage their generosity had imposed on her
+had fallen due.</p>
+<p>How could she at the first unsupported obloquy of a stranger
+turn against them? Her first loyalty was due to them, and
+no other loyalty was under test. Something swept her to her
+feet. She ran to them and, as far as she could, gathered them
+into her arms. They wept like two children whom reproaches
+have hardened into defiance, but whom kindness has melted.</p>
+<p>Verrinder watched the spectacle with some surprise and
+not altogether with scorn. Whatever else Miss Webling was,
+she was a good sport. She stuck to her team in defeat.</p>
+<p>He said, not quite harshly, &ldquo;So, Miss Webling, you cast
+your lot with them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you believe that what I said was true?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really, you should be careful. Those messages you carried
+incriminate you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose they do, though I never knew what was in
+them. No, I&rsquo;ll take that back. I&rsquo;m not trying to crawl out
+of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_47' name='page_47'></a>47</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Then since you confess so much, I shall have to ask you
+to come with them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To the&ndash;&ndash;the Tower of London?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The car is ready.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was stabbed with fright. She seized the
+doomed twain in a faster embrace.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you going to do with these poor souls?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Their souls my dear Miss Webling, are outside our
+jurisdiction.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With their poor bodies, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not a judge or a jury, Miss Webling. Everything
+will be done with propriety. They will not be torpedoed in
+midocean without warning. They will have the full advantage
+of the British law to the last.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That awful word jarred them all. But Sir Joseph was determined
+to make a good end. He drew himself up with
+another effort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excuse, pleass, Mr. Verrinder&ndash;&ndash;might it be we should
+take with us a few little things?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thang gyou.&rdquo; He bowed and turned to go, taking his wife
+and Marie Louise by the arm, for mutual support.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind, I&rsquo;ll come along,&rdquo; said Mr. Verrinder.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose
+stairway as if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into
+Sir Joseph&rsquo;s room, which adjoined that of his wife. Mr.
+Verrinder paused on the sill somewhat shyly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is a most unpleasant task, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise hesitated, smiling gruesomely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My room is across the hall. You can hardly be in both
+places at once, can you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I fancy I can trust you&ndash;&ndash;especially as the house is surrounded.
+If you don&rsquo;t mind joining us later.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went to her room. Her maid was there in a
+palsy of fear. The servants had not dared apply themselves
+to the keyholes, but they knew that the master was visited
+by the police and that a cordon was drawn about the house.</p>
+<p>The ashen girl offered her help to Marie Louise, wondering
+if she would compromise herself with the law, but incapable
+of deserting so good a mistress even at such a crisis. Marie
+Louise thanked her and told her to go to bed, compelled her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_48' name='page_48'></a>48</span>
+to leave. Then she set about the dreary task of selecting a
+few necessaries&ndash;&ndash;a nightgown, an extra day gown, some linen,
+some silver, and a few brushes. She felt as if she were laying
+out her own grave-clothes, and that she would need little and
+not need that little long.</p>
+<p>She threw a good-by look, a long, sweeping, caressing glance,
+about her castle, and went across the hall, lugging her hand-bag.
+Before she entered Sir Joseph&rsquo;s room she knocked.</p>
+<p>It was Mr. Verrinder that answered, &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was seated in a chair, dejected and making himself as
+inoffensive as possible. Lady Webling had packed her own
+bag and was helping the helpless Sir Joseph find the things
+he was looking for in vain, though they were right before him.
+Marie Louise saw evidences that a larger packing had already
+been done. Verrinder had surprised them, about to flee.</p>
+<p>Sir Joseph was ready at last. He was closing his bag when
+he took a last glance, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My toot&rsquo;-brush and powder.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He went to his bathroom cabinet, and there he saw in the
+little apothecary-shop a bottle of tablets prescribed for him
+during his illness. It was conspicuously labeled &ldquo;<i>Poison</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stood staring at the bottle so long in such fascination
+that Lady Webling came to the door to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Vat is it you could not find now, papa?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She leaned against the edge of the casement, and he pointed
+to the bottle. Their eyes met, and in one long look they
+passed through a brief Gethsemane. No words were exchanged.
+She nodded. He took the bottle from the shelf
+stealthily, unscrewed the top, poured out a heap of tablets
+and gave them to her, then poured another heap into his fat
+palm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Prosit</i>!&rdquo; he said, and they flung the venom into their
+throats. It was brackish merely from the coating, but they
+could not swallow all the pellets. He filled a glass of water
+at the faucet and handed it to his wife. She quaffed enough
+to get the pellets down her resisting throat, and handed the
+glass to him.</p>
+<p>They remained staring at each other, trying to crowd into
+their eyes an infinity of strange passionate messages, though
+their features were all awry with nausea and the premonition
+of lethal pains.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_49' name='page_49'></a>49</span></div>
+<p>Verrinder began to wonder at their delay. He was about
+to rise. Marie Louise went to the door anxiously. Sir
+Joseph mumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look once, my darlink. I find some bong-bongs. Vould
+you like, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With a childish canniness he held the bottle so that she
+could see the skull and cross-bones and the word beneath.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, not realizing that they had already set out
+on the adventure, gave a stifled cry and snatched at the bottle.
+It fell to the floor with a crash, and the tablets leaped here
+and there like tiny white beetles. Some of them ran out into
+the room and caught Verrinder&rsquo;s eye.</p>
+<p>Before he could reach the door Sir Joseph had said, triumphantly,
+to Marie Louise:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamma and I did eat already. Too bad you do not come
+vit. <i>Ad&eacute;, T&ouml;chterchen. Lebewohl!</i>&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when
+Verrinder burst into the homely scene of their tragedy. He
+caught up the broken bottle and saw the word &ldquo;<i>Poison</i>.&rdquo;
+Beneath were the directions, but no word of description, no
+mention of the antidote.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is this stuff?&rdquo; Verrinder demanded, in a frenzy of
+dread and wrath and self-reproach.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Marie Louise stammered.</p>
+<p>Verrinder repeated his demand of Sir Joseph.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Weiss nit</i>,&rdquo; he mumbled, beginning to stagger as the
+serpent struck its fangs into his vitals.</p>
+<p>Verrinder ran out into the hall and shouted down the stairs:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bickford, telephone for a doctor, in God&rsquo;s name&ndash;&ndash;the
+nearest one. Send out to the nearest chemist and fetch him
+on the run&ndash;&ndash;with every antidote he has. Send somebody
+down to the kitchen for warm water, mustard, coffee.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a panic below, but Marie Louise knew nothing
+except the swirling tempest of her own horror. Sir Joseph
+and Lady Webling, blind with torment, wrung and wrenched
+with spasms of destruction, groped for each other&rsquo;s hands
+and felt their way through clouds of fire to a resting-place.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise could give them no help, but a little guidance
+toward the bed. They fell upon it&ndash;&ndash;and after a hideous while
+they died.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_50' name='page_50'></a>50</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VI' id='CHAPTER_VI'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The physician arrived too late&ndash;&ndash;physicians were hard to
+get for civilians. While he was being hunted down and
+brought in, Verrinder fought an unknown poison with what
+antidotes he could improvise, and saw that they merely added
+annoyance to agony.</p>
+<p>His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this
+eminent couple for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion
+by proof and strengthen assurance with evidence, and always
+delaying the blow in the hope of gathering in still more of
+Germany&rsquo;s agents. At last he had thrown the slowly woven
+net about the Weblings and revealed them to themselves as
+prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped out
+through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his
+care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman
+who was involved in their guilt.</p>
+<p>Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of
+it. So he and the physician devised a statement for the
+press to the effect that the Weblings died of something
+they had eaten. The stomach of Europe was all deranged,
+and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners; there was a
+kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.</p>
+<p>Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate
+the story and keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself
+to the remaining prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling.</p>
+<p>He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive
+after the whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful
+in solving some of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered
+when they bolted into eternity. Besides, he had
+no intention of letting Marie Louise escape to warn the other
+conspirators and to continue her nefarious activities.</p>
+<p>His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling
+into submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She
+had loved the old couple with a filial passion, and the sight
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_51' name='page_51'></a>51</span>
+of their last throes had driven her into a frenzy of grief.
+She needed the doctor&rsquo;s care before Verrinder could talk to
+her at all. The answers he elicited from her hysteria were full
+of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of inaccuracy, of folly.
+But so he had found all human testimony; for these three
+things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to remember
+it, and to tell it.</p>
+<p>When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her
+woes, it was she who began the questioning. She went up and
+down the room disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands
+and beating her breast till it hurt Verrinder to watch her
+brutality to that tender flesh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&ndash;&ndash;what does it mean?&rdquo; she sobbed. &ldquo;What have
+you done to my poor papa and mamma? Why did you come
+here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surely you must know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do I know? Only that they were good sweet people.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good sweet spies!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Spies! Those poor old darlings?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I say&ndash;&ndash;really, now, you surely can&rsquo;t have the face,
+the insolence, to&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t any insolence. I haven&rsquo;t anything but a broken
+heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How many hearts were broken&ndash;&ndash;how many hearts were
+stopped, do you suppose, because of your work?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I refer to the lives that you destroyed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&ndash;&ndash;I destroyed lives? Which one of us is going mad?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, come, now, you knew what you were doing. You
+were glad and proud for every poor fellow you killed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s you, then, that are mad.&rdquo; She stared at him in
+utter fear. She made a dash for the door. He prevented
+her. She fell back and looked to the window. He took
+her by the arm and twisted her into a chair. He had seen
+hysteria quelled by severity. He stood over her and spoke
+with all the sternness of his stern soul.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me.
+You carried messages for those people. The last messages
+you took you delivered to one of our agents.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only
+stammer the fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_52' name='page_52'></a>52</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know what was in the letters. I never knew.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you think was in them, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had no idea. Papa&ndash;&ndash;Sir Joseph didn&rsquo;t take me into
+his confidence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you knew that they were secret.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He told me that they were&ndash;&ndash;that they were business
+messages&ndash;&ndash;secret financial transactions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Transactions in British lives&ndash;&ndash;oh, they were that! And
+you knew it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I did not know it! I did not know it! I did not know it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She realized too late that the strength of the retort suffered
+by its repetition. It became nonsense on the third
+iterance. She grew afraid even to defend herself.</p>
+<p>Seeing how frightened she was at bay, Mr. Verrinder forebore
+to drive her to distraction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very well, you did not know what the messages contained.
+But why did you consent to such sneaking methods? Why
+did you let them use you for such evident deceit?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was glad to be of use to them. They had been so
+good to me for so long. I was used to doing as I was told.
+I suppose it was gratitude.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was then that Mr. Verrinder delivered himself of his
+bitter opinion of gratitude, which has usually been so well
+spoken of and so rarely berated for excess.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gratitude is one of the evils of the world. I fancy that
+few other emotions have done more harm. In moderation it
+has its uses, but in excess it becomes vicious. It is a form
+of voluntary servitude; it absolutely destroys all respect for
+public law; it is the foundation of tyrannies; it is the secret
+of political corruption; it is the thing that holds dynasties
+together, family despotism; it is soul-mortgage, bribery. It
+is a monster of what the Americans call graft. It is chloroform
+to the conscience, to patriotism, to every sense of public
+duty. &lsquo;Scratch my back, and I am your slave&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;that&rsquo;s
+gratitude.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Verrinder rarely spoke at such length or with such
+apothegm.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was a little more dazed than ever to hear
+gratitude denounced. She was losing all her bearings. Next
+he demanded:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_53' name='page_53'></a>53</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;But admitting that you were duped by your gratitude,
+how did it happen that your curiosity never led you to inquire
+into the nature of those messages?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I respected Sir Joseph beyond all people. I supposed
+that what he did was right. I never knew it not to be.
+And then&ndash;&ndash;well, if, I did wonder a little once in a while, I
+thought I&rsquo;d better mind my own business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder had his opinion of this, too. &ldquo;Minding your
+own business! That&rsquo;s another of those poisonous virtues.
+Minding your own business leads to pacifism, malevolent
+neutrality, selfishness of every sort. It&rsquo;s death to charity
+and public spirit. Suppose the Good Samaritan had minded
+his own business! But&ndash;&ndash; Well, this is getting us no forwarder
+with you. You carried those messages, and never felt even
+a woman&rsquo;s curiosity about them! You met Nicky Easton
+often, and never noted his German accent, never suspected
+that he was not the Englishman he pretended to be. Is that
+true?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He saw by the wild look in her eyes and their escape from
+his own that he had scored a hit. He did not insist upon
+her acknowledging it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And your only motive was gratitude?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never asked any pay for it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never received anything for it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We find the record of a transfer to you of securities for
+some twenty thousand pounds. Why was that given you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&ndash;&ndash;it was just out of generosity. Sir Joseph said he was
+afraid I might be&ndash;&ndash;that his will might be broken, and&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah! you discussed his will with him, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was horrified at his implication. She cried, &ldquo;Oh, I
+begged him not to, but he insisted.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He said there were other heirs and they might contest his
+will. Did he mention the heirs?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir. I don&rsquo;t think so. I don&rsquo;t remember that he
+did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He did not by any chance refer to the other grandparents
+of the two children? Mr. and Mrs. Oakby, the father and
+mother of the father of Victor and Bettina?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_54' name='page_54'></a>54</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t refer to them, I&rsquo;m sure. Yes, I am quite sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did he say that his money would be left in trust for his
+grandchildren?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And he gave you twenty thousand pounds just out of
+generosity?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. Yes, Mr. Verrinder.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a fairish amount of money for messenger fees,
+wasn&rsquo;t it? And it came to you while you were carrying those
+letters to Nicky?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No! Sir Joseph had been ill. He had had a stroke of
+paralysis.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you were afraid he might have another?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were not afraid of that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, of course I was, but&ndash;&ndash; What are you trying to
+make me say&ndash;&ndash;that I went to him and demanded the money?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That idea occurs to you, does it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She writhed with disgust at the suggestion. Yet it had a
+clammy plausibility. Mr. Verrinder went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These messages, you say, concerned a financial transaction?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So papa told me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you believed him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naturally.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never doubted him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All the tortures of doubt that had assailed her recurred
+to her now and paralyzed her power to utter the ringing
+denial that was needed. He went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t it strike you as odd that Sir Joseph should be
+willing to pay you twenty thousand pounds just to carry
+messages concerning some mythical business?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not answer. She was afraid to commit herself to
+anything. Every answer was a trap. Verrinder went on:
+&ldquo;Twenty thousand pounds is a ten-per-centum commission
+on two hundred thousand pounds. That was rather a
+largish transaction to be carried on through secret letters,
+eh? Nicky Easton was not a millionaire, was he? Now
+I ask you, should you think of him as a Rothschild? Or
+was he, do you think, acting as agent for some one else, perhaps,
+and if so, for whom?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_55' name='page_55'></a>55</span></div>
+<p>She answered none of these. They were based on the
+assumption that she had put forward herself. She could
+find nothing to excuse her. Verrinder was simply playing
+tag with her. As soon as he touched her he ran away and
+came at her from another direction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, we know that you were only the adopted
+daughter of Sir Joseph. But where did you first meet him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Berlin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The sound of that word startled her. That German name
+stood for all the evils of the time. It was the inaccessible
+throne of hell.</p>
+<p>Verrinder was startled by it, too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Berlin!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and nodded his head. &ldquo;Now
+we are getting somewhere. Would you mind telling me the
+circumstances?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She blushed a furious scarlet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;d rather not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must insist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please send me to the Tower and have me imprisoned for
+life. I&rsquo;d rather be there than here. Or better yet&ndash;&ndash;have
+me shot. It would make me happier than anything you could
+do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid that your happiness is not the main object
+of the moment. Will you be so good as to tell me how you
+met Sir Joseph in&ndash;&ndash;in Berlin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise drew a deep breath. The past that she had
+tried to smother under a new life must be confessed at such
+a time of all times!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you know that Sir Joseph had a daughter; the
+two children up-stairs are hers, and&ndash;&ndash;and what&rsquo;s to become
+of them, in Heaven&rsquo;s name?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One problem at a time, if you don&rsquo;t mind. Sir Joseph
+had a daughter. That would be Mrs. Oakby.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. Her husband died before her second baby was
+born, and she died soon after. And Sir Joseph and Lady
+Webling mourned for her bitterly, and&ndash;&ndash;well, a year or
+so later they were traveling on the Continent&ndash;&ndash;in Germany,
+they were, and one night they went to the Winter Garten
+in Berlin&ndash;&ndash;the big music-hall, you know. Well, they were
+sitting far back, and an American team of musicians came on&ndash;&ndash;the
+Musical Mokes, we were called.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_56' name='page_56'></a>56</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;We?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She bent her head in shame. &ldquo;I was one of them. I
+played a xylophone and a saxophone and an accordion&ndash;&ndash;all
+sorts of things. Well, Lady Webling gave a little gasp
+when she saw me, and she looked at Sir Joseph&ndash;&ndash;so she told
+me afterward&ndash;&ndash;and then they got up and stole &rsquo;way up front
+just as I left the stage&ndash;&ndash;to make a quick change, you know.
+I came back&ndash;&ndash;in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing
+round and making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a
+little scream; nobody heard her because I made a loud blat
+on the trombone in the ear of the black-face clown, and he
+gave a shriek and did a funny fall, and&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, pardon me&ndash;&ndash;why did Lady Webling scream?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because I looked like her dead daughter. It was so
+horrible to see her child come out of the grave in&ndash;&ndash;in tights,
+blatting a trombone at a clown in that big variety theater.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can quite understand. And then&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Sir Joseph came round to the stage door and sent
+in his card. The man who brought it grinned and told
+everybody an old man was smitten on me; and Ben, the black-face
+man, said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll break his face,&rsquo; but I said I wouldn&rsquo;t
+see him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, when I was dressed and leaving the theater with
+the black-face man, you know, Sir Joseph was outside. He
+stopped me and said: &lsquo;My child! My child!&rsquo; and the tears
+ran down his face. I stopped, of course, and said, &lsquo;What&rsquo;s
+the matter now?&rsquo; And he said, &lsquo;Would you come with
+me?&rsquo; and I said, &lsquo;Not in a thousand years, old Creepo Christmas!&rsquo;
+And he said: &lsquo;My poor wife is in the carriage at the
+curb. She wants to speak to you.&rsquo; And then of course
+I had to go, and she reached out and dragged me in and wept
+all over me. I thought they were both crazy, but finally
+they explained, and they asked me to go to their hotel with
+them. So I told Ben to be on his way, and I went.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, they asked me a lot of questions, and I told them
+a little&ndash;&ndash;not everything, but enough, Heaven knows. And
+they begged me to be their daughter. I thought it would
+be pretty stupid, but they said they couldn&rsquo;t stand the
+thought of their child&rsquo;s image going about as I was, and
+I wasn&rsquo;t so stuck on the job myself&ndash;&ndash;odd, how the old language
+comes back, isn&rsquo;t it? I haven&rsquo;t heard any of it for
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_57' name='page_57'></a>57</span>
+so long I&rsquo;d almost forgotten it.&rdquo; She passed her handkerchief
+across her lips as if to rub away a bad taste. It
+left the taste of tears. She sighed: &ldquo;Well, they adopted
+me, and I learned to love them. And&ndash;&ndash;and that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you learned to love their native country, too, I
+fancy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At first I did like Germany pretty well. They were crazy
+about us in Berlin. I got my first big money and notices
+and attention there. You can imagine it went to my head.
+But then I came to England and tried to be as English as I
+could, so as not to be conspicuous. I never wanted to be
+conspicuous off the stage&ndash;&ndash;or on it, for that matter. I even
+took lessons from the man who had the sign up, you remember,
+&lsquo;Americans taught to speak English!&rsquo; I always had a gift
+for foreign languages, and I got to thinking in English, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One moment, please. Did you say &lsquo;Americans taught?&rsquo;
+Americans?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not American?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, of course!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Damned stupid of me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder frowned. This complicated matters. He had
+cornered her, only to have her abscond into neutral territory.
+He had known that Marie Louise was an adopted child, but
+had not suspected her Americanism. This required a bit of
+thinking. While he studied it in the back room of his brain
+his forehead self was saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So Sir Joseph befriended you, and that was what won your
+amazing, unquestioning gratitude?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That and a thousand thousand little kindnesses. I loved
+them like mother and father.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But your own&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;mother and father&ndash;&ndash;you must have
+had parents of your own&ndash;&ndash;what was their nationality?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, they were, as we say, &lsquo;Americans from &rsquo;way back.&rsquo;
+But my father left my mother soon after I was born. We
+weren&rsquo;t much good, I guess. It was when I was a baby. He
+was very restless, they say. I suppose I got my runaway
+nature from him. But I&rsquo;ve outgrown that. Anyway, he left
+my mother with three children. My little brother died. My
+mother was a seamstress in a little town out West&ndash;&ndash;an awful
+hole it was. I was a tiny little girl when they took me to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_58' name='page_58'></a>58</span>
+my mother&rsquo;s funeral. I remember that, but I can&rsquo;t remember
+her. That was my first death. And now this! I&rsquo;ve lost a
+mother and father twice. That hasn&rsquo;t happened to many
+people. So you must forgive me for being so crazy. So
+many of my loved are dead. It&rsquo;s frightful. We lose so
+many as we grow up. Life is like walking through a graveyard,
+with the sextons always busy opening new places. There
+was so much crying and loneliness before, and now this war
+goes on and on&ndash;&ndash;as if we needed a war!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God knows, we don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went to the window and raised the curtain.
+A haggard gray light had been piping the edges of the
+shade. Now the full casement let in a flood of warm
+morning radiance.</p>
+<p>The dull street was alive again. Sparrows were hopping.
+Wagons were on the move. Small and early tradesfolk were
+about their business. Servants were opening houses as shops
+were being opened in town.</p>
+<p>The big wheel had rolled London round into the eternal
+day. Doors and windows were being flung ajar. Newspapers
+and milk were taken in, ashes put out, cats and dogs
+released, front stoops washed, walks swept, gardens watered.
+Brooms were pendulating. In the masters&rsquo; rooms it was still
+night and slumber-time, but humble people were alert.</p>
+<p>The morning after a death is a fearful thing. Those
+papers on the steps across the way were doubtless loaded with
+more tragedies from the front, and among the cruel facts
+was the lie that concealed the truth about the Weblings,
+who were to read no more morning papers, eat no more
+breakfasts, set out on no more journeys.</p>
+<p>Grief came to Marie Louise now with a less brackish taste.
+Her sorrow had the pity of the sunlight on it. She wept not
+now for the terror and hatefulness of the Weblings&rsquo; fate,
+but for the beautiful things that would bless them no more,
+for the roses that would glow unseen, the flowers that would
+climb old walls and lean out unheeded, asking to be admired
+and proffering fragrance in payment of praise. The Weblings
+were henceforth immune to the pleasant rumble of wagons
+in streets, to the cheery good mornings of passers-by, the
+savor of coffee in the air, the luscious colors of fruits piled
+upon silver dishes.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_59' name='page_59'></a>59</span></div>
+<p>Then she heard a scamper of bare feet, the squeals of mischief-making
+children escaping from a pursuing nurse.</p>
+<p>It had been a favorite pastime of Victor and Bettina to
+break in upon Marie Louise of mornings when she forgot to
+lock her door. They loved to steal in barefoot and pounce
+on her with yelps of savage delight and massacre her, pull
+her hair and dance upon her bed and on her as she pleaded
+for mercy.</p>
+<p>She heard them coming now, and she could not reach the
+door before it opened and disclosed the grinning, tousle-curled
+cherubs in their sleeping-suits.</p>
+<p>They darted in, only to fall back in amazement. Marie
+Louise was not in bed. The bed had not been slept in.
+Marie Louise was all dressed, and she had been crying.
+And in a chair sat a strange, formidable old gentleman who
+looked tired and forlorn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Auntie!&rdquo; they gasped.</p>
+<p>She dropped to her knees, and they ran to her for refuge from
+the strange man.</p>
+<p>She hugged them so hard that they cried, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without in the least understanding what it was all about,
+they heard her saying to the man:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now what&rsquo;s to become of these poor lambs?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The old stranger passed a slow gray hand across his dismal
+face and pondered.</p>
+<p>The children pointed, then remembered that it is impolite
+to point, and drew back their little index hands and whispered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Auntie, what you up so early for?&rdquo; and, &ldquo;Who is that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she whispered, &ldquo;S-h-h!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Being denied the answer to this charade, they took up a
+new interest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder is grandpapa up, too, and all dressed,&rdquo; said
+Victor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And maybe grandmamma,&rdquo; Bettina shrilled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll beat you to their room,&rdquo; said Victor.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise seized them by their hinder garments as they
+fled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must not bother them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; said Victor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will so!&rdquo; said Bettina, pawing to be free.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise implored: &ldquo;Please, please! They&rsquo;ve gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_60' name='page_60'></a>60</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She cast her eyes up at that terrible query, and answered
+it vaguely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They might have told a fellow good-by,&rdquo; Victor brooded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&ndash;&ndash;they forgot, perhaps.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think that was very nice of them,&rdquo; Bettina pouted.</p>
+<p>Victor was more cheerful. &ldquo;Perhaps they did; perhaps
+they kissed us while we was asleep&ndash;&ndash;<i>were</i> asleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bettina accepted with delight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seems to me I &rsquo;member somebody kissin&rsquo; me. Yes, I
+&rsquo;member now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Victor was skeptical. &ldquo;Maybe you only had a dream about
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What else is there?&rdquo; said Mr. Verrinder, rising and patting
+Victor on the shoulder. &ldquo;You&rsquo;d better run along to your
+tubs now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They recognized the authority in his voice and obeyed.</p>
+<p>The children took their beauty with them, but left their
+destiny to be arranged by higher powers, the gods of Eld.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is to become of them,&rdquo; Louise groaned again, &ldquo;when
+I go to prison?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder was calm. &ldquo;Sir Joseph&rsquo;s will doubtless left the
+bulk of his fortune to them. That will provide for their
+finances. And they have two grandparents left. The Oakbys
+will surely be glad to take the children in, especially as they
+will come with such fortunes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean that I am to have no more to do with them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think it would be best to remove them to a more strictly
+English influence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This hurt her horribly. She grew impatient for the finishing
+blow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now that they are disposed of, have you decided
+what&rsquo;s to become of me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not for me to decide. By the by, have you any one
+to represent you or intercede for you here, or act as your
+counsel in England?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head. &ldquo;A good many people have been
+very nice to me, of course. I&rsquo;ve noticed, though, that even
+they grew cold and distant of late. I&rsquo;d rather die than ask
+any of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_61' name='page_61'></a>61</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;But have you no relatives living&ndash;&ndash;no one of importance
+in the States who could vouch for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head with a doleful humility.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;None of our family were ever important that I ever heard
+of, though of course one never knows what relatives are
+lurking about. Mine will never claim me; that&rsquo;s certain.
+I did have a sister&ndash;&ndash;poor thing!&ndash;&ndash;if she&rsquo;s alive. We didn&rsquo;t
+get along very well. I was too wild and restless as a girl.
+She was very good, hard-working, simple, homely as sin&ndash;&ndash;or
+homely as virtue. I was all for adventure. I&rsquo;ve had my fill of
+it. But once you begin it, you can&rsquo;t stop when you&rsquo;ve had
+enough. If she&rsquo;s not dead, she&rsquo;s probably married and living
+under another name&ndash;&ndash;Heaven knows what name or where.
+But I could find her, perhaps. I&rsquo;d love to go to her. She
+was a very good girl. She&rsquo;s probably married a good man
+and has brought up her children piously, and never mentioned
+me. I&rsquo;d only bring disgrace on her. She&rsquo;d disown me if I
+came home with this cloud of scandal about me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one shall know of this scandal unless you tell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed harshly, with a patronizing superiority.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really, Mr. Verrinder, did you ever know a secret to be
+kept?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This one will be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed again at him, then at herself.</p>
+<p>He rose wearily. &ldquo;I think I shall have to be getting along.
+I haven&rsquo;t had a bath or a shave to-day. I shall ask you to keep
+to your room and deny yourself to all visitors. I won&rsquo;t ask
+you to promise not to escape. If the guard around the house
+is not capable of detaining you, you&rsquo;re welcome to your
+freedom, though I warn you that England is as hard to get
+out of as to get into nowadays. Whatever you do, for your
+own sake, at least, keep this whole matter secret and stick to
+the story we agreed on. Good morning!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He bowed himself out. No rattling of chains marked his
+closing of the door, but if he had been a turnkey in Newgate
+he could not have left Marie Louise feeling more a prisoner.
+Her room was her body&rsquo;s jail, but her soul was in a dungeon,
+too.</p>
+<p>As Verrinder went down the hall he scattered a covey of
+whispering servants.</p>
+<p>The nurse who had waited to seize the children when they
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_62' name='page_62'></a>62</span>
+came forth had left them to dress themselves while she hastened
+to publish in the servants&rsquo; dining-room the appalling fact
+that she had caught sight of a man in Miss Marie Louise&rsquo;s
+room. The other servants had many other even more
+astounding things to tell&ndash;&ndash;to wit: that after mysterious
+excitements about the house, with strange men going and
+coming, and the kitchen torn to pieces for mustard and warm
+milk and warm water and strong coffee, and other things,
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were no more, and the whole
+household staff was out of a job. Strange police-like persons
+were in the house, going through all the papers in Sir Joseph&rsquo;s
+room. The servants could hardly wait to get out with the
+gossip.</p>
+<p>And Mr. Verrinder had said that this secret would be kept!</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_63' name='page_63'></a>63</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VII' id='CHAPTER_VII'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Somewhere along about this time, though there is no
+record of the exact date&ndash;&ndash;and it was in a shabby home
+in a humble town where dates made little difference&ndash;&ndash;a homely
+woman sniffed.</p>
+<p>Her name was Mrs. Nuddle.</p>
+<p>What Mrs. Nuddle was sniffing at was a page of fashion
+cartoons, curious human hieroglyphs that women can read and
+run to buy. Highly improbable garments were sketched on
+utterly impossible figures&ndash;&ndash;female eels who could crawl
+through their own garters, eels of strange mottlings, with
+heads like cranberries, feet like thorns, and no spines at all.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle was as opposite in every way as could be.
+She could not have crawled through her own washtub if she
+had knocked the bottom out of it. She was a caricature made
+by nature and long, hard work, and she laughed at the caricatures
+devised by art in a hurry.</p>
+<p>She was about to cast the paper aside as a final rebuke
+when she caught sight of portraits of real people of fashion.
+They did not look nearly so fashionable as the cartoons, but
+they were at least possible. Some of them were said to be
+prominent in charity; most of them were prominent out of
+their corsages.</p>
+<p>Now Mrs. Nuddle sniffed at character, not at caricature.
+Leaning against her washtub and wringer, both as graceful
+as their engineer, she indulged herself in the pitiful but unfailing
+solace of the poor and the ugly, which is to attribute
+to the rich dishonesty and to the beautiful wickedness.</p>
+<p>The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea
+of her tub had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the
+rawhide of her big forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the
+newspaper-gallery of portraits. One sudsy hand supported
+and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These women, belles
+and swells, were all as glossy as if they had been ironed.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_64' name='page_64'></a>64</span></div>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle sneered: &ldquo;If the hussies would do an honest
+day&rsquo;s work it would be better for their figgers.&rdquo; She was
+mercifully oblivious of the fact that her tub-calisthenics had
+made her no more exquisite than a cow in a kimono.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties.
+Their sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her
+problem, which was the riddle of a husband who was faithful
+only to the bottle, who was indifferent to the children he got
+so easily, and was poetical only in that he never worked save
+when the mood was on him.</p>
+<p>Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had
+come into her home wrapped round a bundle of laundry.
+But now she was startled, and she would have startled anybody
+who might have been watching her, for she stared hard at a
+photographed beauty and gasped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sister!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and
+uncommonly common, greeted with the word &ldquo;Sister!&rdquo; the
+photograph of a very young, very beautiful, very gracile
+creature, in a mannish costume that emphasized her femininity,
+in a foreign garden, in a braw hat with curls cascading from
+under it, with a throat lilying out of a flaring collar, with
+hands pocketed in a smart jacket, and below that a pair of
+most fashionable legs in riding-breeches and puttees! She
+carried not a parasol nor a riding-crop, but a great reaping-hook
+swung across her shoulder, and she smiled as impudently,
+as immortally, as if she were Youth and had slain old Time
+and carried off his scythe.</p>
+<p>The picture did not reply to Mrs. Nuddle&rsquo;s cry, but Mrs.
+Nuddle&rsquo;s eldest daughter, a precocious little adventuress of
+eleven or so, who was generally called &ldquo;Sister,&rdquo; turned from
+the young brother whose smutty face she was just smacking
+and snapped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, whatcha want?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Little Sister supposed that her irritating mother was going
+to tell her to stop doing something, or to start doing something&ndash;&ndash;either
+of which behests she always hated and only
+obeyed because her mother was bigger than she was. She
+turned and saw her mother swaying and clutching at the air.
+Sister had a gorgeous hope that mother would fall into the
+tub and be interesting for once. But mother was a born
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_65' name='page_65'></a>65</span>
+disappointer. She shook off the promising swoon, righted
+herself, and began fiercely to scan the paper to find out whose
+name the picture bore. The caption was torn off.</p>
+<p>Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out
+who it really was.</p>
+<p>In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband
+had stripped off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove,
+lighted his pipe with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it
+out with practised accuracy, and trodden it as he went away.
+Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it up.</p>
+<p>On the charred remnant she read:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>The Beautiful Miss....
+One of London&rsquo;s reigning beaut....
+daughter of Sir Joseph W....
+doing farm work on the estate in....</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless
+chair and squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin&rsquo;s statue of
+&ldquo;The Thinker.&rdquo; One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair
+was damp with steam and raining about her face. Her old waist
+was half buttoned, and no one would have regretted if it had
+been all buttoned. She was as plebeian as an ash-can and as
+full of old embers.</p>
+<p>She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now
+he gasped. His wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle
+of the day! Thinking was loafing with her. He was supposed
+to do the family thinking. It was doubly necessary that she
+should work now, because he was on a strike. He had been to
+a meeting of other thinkers&ndash;&ndash;ground and lofty thinkers who
+believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world
+and its remedy.</p>
+<p>The evil was the possession of money by those who had
+accumulated it. The remedy was to take it away from them.
+Then the poor would be rich, which was right, and the rich
+would be poor, which was righter still.</p>
+<p>It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of
+work was to quit working. And the way to insure universal
+prosperity was to burn down the factories and warehouses,
+destroy all machinery and beggar the beasts who invented,
+invested, built, and hired and tried to get rich by getting riches.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_66' name='page_66'></a>66</span></div>
+<p>This program would take some little time to perfect, and
+meanwhile Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed,
+a sharp fear almost unmanned him&ndash;&ndash;what if she should fall
+sick and have to loaf in the horsepital? What if she should die?
+O Gord! Her little children would be left motherless&ndash;&ndash;and
+fatherless, for he would, of course, be too busy saving the world
+to save his children. He would lose, too, the prestige enjoyed
+only by those who have their money in their wife&rsquo;s name. So
+he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatta hellsa matter wit choo?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him
+as best she could:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought
+for a minute it was my sister.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your sister? How&rsquo;d she get her pitcher in the paper?
+Who did she shoot?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He snatched the sheet from her and saw the young woman
+in the young-manly garb.</p>
+<p>Jake gloated over the picture: &ldquo;Some looker! What is she,
+a queen in burlecue?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.</p>
+<p>He roared. &ldquo;London&rsquo;s ranging beaut? And you&rsquo;re what
+thinks she&rsquo;s your sister! The one that ran away? Was she
+a beaut like this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn&rsquo;t I see
+her first? Whyn&rsquo;t you tell me more about her? You never
+talk about her none. Why not?&rdquo; No answer. &ldquo;All I know
+is she went wrong and flew the coop.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. &ldquo;Who said she went wrong?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You did!&rdquo; Jake retorted with vigor. &ldquo;Usedn&rsquo;t you to keep
+me awake praying for her&ndash;&ndash;hollerin&rsquo; at God to forgive her?
+Didn&rsquo;t you, or did you?&rdquo; No answer. &ldquo;And you think this
+is her!&rdquo; The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. &ldquo;Say,
+you must &rsquo;a&rsquo; went plumb nutty! Bendin&rsquo; over that tub must
+&rsquo;a&rsquo; gave you a rush of brains to the head.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She
+tried to take back what she had said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you set there tellin&rsquo; me I ever told you nothin&rsquo;
+mean about my pore little sister. She was as good a girl as
+ever lived, Mamise was.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_67' name='page_67'></a>67</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re changin&rsquo; your tune now, ain&rsquo;tcha? Because you
+think she looks like a grand dam in pants! And where dya
+get that Mamise stuff? What was her honestogawd name?
+Maryer? You&rsquo;re tryin&rsquo; to swell her up a little, huh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I ain&rsquo;t. She was named Marie Louise after her gran&rsquo;-maw,
+on&rsquo;y as a baby she couldn&rsquo;t say it right. She said &lsquo;Mamise.&rsquo;
+That&rsquo;s what she called her poor little self&ndash;&ndash;Mamise.
+Seems like I can see her now, settin&rsquo; on the floor like Sister.
+And where is she now? O Gawd! whatever become of her,
+runnin&rsquo; off thataway&ndash;&ndash;a little sixteen-year-ol&rsquo; chile, runnin&rsquo; off
+with a cheap thattical troupe, because her aunt smacked her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She never had no maw and no bringin&rsquo; up, and she was so
+pirty. She had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And that ain&rsquo;t no lie,&rdquo; said Jake, with characteristic gallantry.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothin&rsquo; but monopoly everywheres in the
+world. She got all the looks and I got you. I wonder who got
+her!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for
+an article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date
+and growled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, this paper&rsquo;s nearly a year old&ndash;&ndash;May, 1916, it says.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner,
+flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping
+from stove to table, ministering to him.</p>
+<p>Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was
+like an old tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite
+and provided with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever
+disturbs it. Explosives are useful in place. But Jake
+was of the sort that blow up regardless of the occasion.</p>
+<p>His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who
+was richer or better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than
+he was. Yet he had nothing in him of that constructive envy
+which is called emulation and leads to progress, to days of
+toil, nights of thought. His idea of equality was not to climb
+to the peak, but to drag the climbers down. Prating always
+of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe them or
+remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of
+wages was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution
+to the war against oppressive capital was to denounce all
+successful men as brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors
+with the malefactors.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_68' name='page_68'></a>68</span></div>
+<p>Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French
+Revolution, and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs
+who burned ch&acirc;teaux and shops, and butchered women as
+well as men, growling their ominous refrain:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Noo sum zum cum eel zaw&rdquo; (&ldquo;<i>Nous sommes hommes comme
+ils sont</i>&rdquo;).</p>
+<p>The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret
+armies of enemies now inside the nation and threatened her
+success in the war. The thing that prevented their triumph
+was that their blunders were greater than their malice, their
+folly more certain than their villainy. As soon as America
+entered the lists against Germany, the Jake Nuddles would begin
+doing their stupid best to prevent enlistment, to persuade
+desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck factories and
+trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of freedom
+they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the
+battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than
+the snaky spies of Germany, and more venomous.</p>
+<p>As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie
+Louise. The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him
+was a beastly desire. He praised her grace because it tortured
+his wife. But even fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage
+of hatred at the look of cleanliness and comeliness, the environment
+of luxury only emphasized by her peasant disguise.</p>
+<p>When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up
+the paper again and glared at it with hostile envy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir
+and a Lady, eh? Just wait till we get through with them Sirs
+and Ladies. We&rsquo;ll mow &rsquo;em down. You&rsquo;ll see. Robbin&rsquo; us
+poor toilers that does all the work! We&rsquo;ll put an end to their
+peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany leaves of these
+birds we&rsquo;ll finish up. And then we&rsquo;ll take this rotten United
+States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just
+wait!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the
+face, knocked the pretty lady&rsquo;s portrait to the floor and walked
+on it as he strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod
+on little Sister&rsquo;s hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little
+brother howled in duet. Then father turned on them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, shut up or I&rsquo;ll&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_69' name='page_69'></a>69</span>
+anything&ndash;&ndash;except his meals. He left his children crying and his wife
+in a new distress; but then, revolutions cannot pause for
+women and children.</p>
+<p>When he had gone, and Sister&rsquo;s tears had dried on her smutty
+face, Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture
+of England&rsquo;s reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss
+W. was to be in England, blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other&rsquo;s
+estate.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_70' name='page_70'></a>70</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VIII' id='CHAPTER_VIII'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from
+her even the props of hostility. She had nothing to
+lean on now, nobody to fight with for life and reputation.
+She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated thoughts followed
+one another in waves across her soul&ndash;&ndash;grief for her
+foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses,
+remorse for seeming to have deserted them in their last hours,
+remorse for having been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse
+for that remorse, grief at losing the lovable, troublesome children,
+creature distress at giving up the creature comforts of
+the luxurious home, the revulsion of her unfettered mind and
+her restless young body at the prospect of exchanging liberty
+and occupation for the half-death of an idle cell&ndash;&ndash;a kind of
+coffin residence&ndash;&ndash;fear of being executed as a spy, and fear of
+being released to drag herself through life with the ball and
+chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.</p>
+<p>Verrinder&rsquo;s mind was hardly more at rest when he left her
+and walked to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector
+of England who had bungled his task and let the wards of his
+suspicion break loose. The fault was not his, but he would
+never escape the reproach. He had no taste for taking revenge
+on the young woman. It would not salve his pride to
+visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir
+Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism,
+he had been touched by Marie Louise&rsquo;s sincerities. She
+proved them by the very contradictions of her testimony, with
+its history of keen intelligence alternating with curious blindness.
+He knew how people get themselves all tangled up in
+conflicting duties, how they let evils slide along, putting off
+till to-morrow the severing of the cords and the stepping forth
+with freedom from obligation. He knew that the very best
+people, being those who are most sensitive to gratitude and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_71' name='page_71'></a>71</span>
+to other people&rsquo;s pains, are incessantly let in for complications
+that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.</p>
+<p>As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there
+are unwritten and implied that make obedience to the law an
+experiment in caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons
+enough then to believe that Marie Louise had meant
+no harm and had not understood the evil in which she was so
+useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her bewilderment
+feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this
+moment when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted
+Germany had just about persuaded the majority of their
+countrymen that the world would be intolerable if Germany
+triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating her tyranny lay
+in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.</p>
+<p>The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a
+martyr out of Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England.
+She would be advertised, as a counterweight to the
+hideous mistake the Germans made in immortalizing with
+their bullets the poor little nurse, &ldquo;<i>die</i> Cavell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved,
+and clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man
+its tea and toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea
+deferred helped him to the conclusion that the one wise thing
+was to restore Marie Louise quietly to her own country. He
+went with freshened step and determined mind to a conference
+with the eminent men concerned. He made his own confession
+of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted.
+Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council
+agree with him.</p>
+<p>Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found
+the house a flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and
+thwarted reporters. The relatives and the reporters he satisfied
+with a few well-chosen lies. Then he sent his name up
+to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the card-tray through the
+door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some wild animal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be down,&rdquo; said Marie Louise, and she primped herself
+like another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the
+executioner. She was calmed by the hope that she would
+learn her fate, at least, and she cared little what it was, so
+long as it was not unknown.</p>
+<p>Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_72' name='page_72'></a>72</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should
+offer you freedom and silence, would you go back to America
+and tell no one of what has happened here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting
+the sunlight into a dungeon. The very word &ldquo;America&rdquo;
+was itself a rush of fresh air. The long-forgotten love of
+country came back into her heart on a cry of hope.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you don&rsquo;t mean that you might?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke
+in: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll promise anything&ndash;&ndash;anything! Oh I don&rsquo;t want
+to be free just for the sake of escaping punishment! No, no.
+I just want a chance to&ndash;&ndash;to expiate the evil I have done. I
+want to do some good to undo all the bad I&rsquo;ve brought about.
+I won&rsquo;t try to shift any blame. I want to confess. It will
+take this awful load off my heart to tell people what a wicked
+fool I&rsquo;ve been.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder checked her: &ldquo;But that is just what you must
+not do. Unless you can assure us that you will carry this
+burden about with you and keep it secret at no matter what
+cost, then we shall have to proceed with the case&ndash;&ndash;legally.
+We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, as
+it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We&rsquo;d
+really rather not, but if you insist&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ll promise. I&rsquo;ll keep the secret. Let them rest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty
+than the terror of exposing the dead. The mere thought
+brought back pictures of hideous days when the grave was
+not refuge enough from vengeance, when bodies were dug up,
+gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed cobblestones,
+quartered with a sword in the market-place and then flung
+back to the dark.</p>
+<p>Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under
+duress, and that when she was out of reach of the law she
+would forget, so he said</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you swear to keep this inviolate?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you a Bible?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She thought there must be one, and she searched for it
+among the bookshelves. But first she came across one in
+the German tongue. It fell open easily, as if it had been a
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_73' name='page_73'></a>73</span>
+familiar companion of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s. She abhorred the sight
+of the words that youthful Sunday-school lessons had given
+an unearthly sanctity as she recognized them twisted into the
+German paraphrase and printed in the twisted German type.
+But she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will this do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Verrinder shook his head. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know that an oath
+on a German Bible would really count. It might be considered
+a mere heap of paper.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her
+fingers. She found an English Bible after a further search.
+Its pages had seen the light but seldom. It slipped from
+her hand and fell open. She knelt to pick it up with a tremor
+of fear.</p>
+<p>She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page
+before her. These words caught her eye:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me. Take the winecup
+of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send
+thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad
+because of the sword that I will send among them.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly,
+took the book from her hand, closed it, and held it before her.
+She put the slim tips of her young fingers near the talon of his
+old thumb and echoed in a timid, silvern voice the broken
+phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I solemnly swear&ndash;&ndash;that so long as I live&ndash;&ndash;I will tell no
+one&ndash;&ndash;what I know&ndash;&ndash;of the crimes and death&ndash;&ndash;of Sir Joseph
+and Lady Webling&ndash;&ndash;unless called upon&ndash;&ndash;in a court of law.
+This oath is made&ndash;&ndash;with no mental reservations&ndash;&ndash;and is
+binding&ndash;&ndash;under all circumstances whatsoever&ndash;&ndash;so help me
+God!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When she had whispered the last invocation he put the
+book away and gripped her hand in his.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal&ndash;&ndash;and
+perhaps immoral. Our action might be overruled and the
+whole case opened. But I think you are safe, especially if
+you get to America&ndash;&ndash;the sooner the better.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you!&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>He laughed, somewhat pathetically.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_74' name='page_74'></a>74</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Good luck!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not tell her that England would still be watching
+over her, that her name and her history were already cabled
+to America, that she would be shadowed to the steamer,
+observed aboard the boat, and picked up at the dock by the
+first of a long series of detectives constituting a sort of serial
+guardian angel.</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_75' name='page_75'></a>75</span></div>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK II</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>IN NEW YORK</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_3' id='linki_3'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<img src='images/illus-076.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='484' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>&ldquo;This is the life for me. I&rsquo;ve been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can.&rdquo;</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_76' name='page_76'></a>76</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days.
+Passenger-steamers were few, irregular, and secret. The
+passport regulations were exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr.
+Verrinder&rsquo;s influence could not speed the matter greatly.</p>
+<p>There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder&rsquo;s
+suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands
+of counsel, and he arranged her surrender of all claims on the
+Webling estate. But he insisted that she should keep the
+twenty thousand pounds that had been given to her absolutely.
+He may have been influenced in this by his inability to see
+from what other funds he could collect his fee.</p>
+<p>Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the
+purser&rsquo;s safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean,
+through such a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions
+peopled it with.</p>
+<p>She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered
+them to the Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received
+her with a coldness that startled her. They used the expression,
+&ldquo;Under the circumstances,&rdquo; with a freezing implication
+that made her wonder if the secret had already trickled
+through to them.</p>
+<p>On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock
+no friends greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival
+was noted by a certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to
+watch her and saw with some pride how pretty she was.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;ll be a pleasure to keep an eye on her,&rdquo; he told a luckless
+colleague who had a long-haired pacifist professor allotted to
+him. But Marie Louise&rsquo;s mystic squire had not counted on
+her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting
+forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the
+little town of her birth, Wakefield.</p>
+<p>Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_77' name='page_77'></a>77</span>
+and shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some,
+too, since her time.</p>
+<p>At least, most of the people she had known had moved away
+to the cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their
+place. She had not known many of the better people. Her
+mother had been too humble to sew for them.</p>
+<p>Coming from London and the country life of England, she
+found the town intolerably ugly. It held no associations for
+her. She had been unhappy there, and she said: &ldquo;Poor me!
+No wonder I ran away.&rdquo; She justified her earlier self with
+a kind of mothering sympathy. She longed for some one to
+mother her present self.</p>
+<p>But her sister was not to be found. The old house where
+they had lived was replaced by a factory that had made
+suspenders and now was turning out cartridge-belts. She
+found no one who knew her sister at all. She did not
+give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not
+remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town
+marshal vaguely placed her father as a frequent boarder at the
+jail.</p>
+<p>One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise&rsquo;s mother had
+done sewing, had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had
+run away and that the other sister had left town with somebody
+for somewhere sometime after. But that was all that the
+cupboard of her recollection disclosed.</p>
+<p>Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age
+meeting his predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During
+their senile gossip the elder asks if Pilate had known a certain
+beauty named Mary of Magdala. Pilate shakes his head.
+The other has heard that she took up with a street-preacher
+called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate ponders,
+shakes his head again, and confesses, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t remember
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise&rsquo;s people, who
+had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should
+have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging.
+Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van
+Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite,
+fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot
+who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.</p>
+<p>Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_78' name='page_78'></a>78</span>
+was overjoyed when she went back, but she was disconsolate
+and utterly detached from life. The prodigal had come home,
+but the family had moved away.</p>
+<p>She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel
+and settled down to meditate. The shops interested her,
+and she browsed away among them for furniture and clothes
+and books.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when
+the President visited Congress and asked it to declare a state
+of war against Germany. She was exultant over the great
+step, but the wilful few who held Congress back from answering
+the summons revealed to her why the nation had been
+so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after so much
+insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that
+there was any cause for war.</p>
+<p>But the patience of the majority had been worn thin.
+The opposition was swept away, and America declared herself
+in the arena&ndash;&ndash;in spirit at least. Impatient souls who had
+prophesied how the millions would spring to arms overnight
+wondered at the failure to commit a miracle. The
+Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the
+new enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that
+America should raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to
+train it, or be able to get it past the submarine barrier, or
+feed the few that might sneak through.</p>
+<p>America&rsquo;s vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown.
+The first embarrassment was the panic of volunteers.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang
+madly in all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to
+volunteer, too, but for what? What could she do? Where
+could she get it to do? In the chaos of her impatience she
+did nothing.</p>
+<p>Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen,
+hailed, and seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise&rsquo;s detective
+knew who Polly was. He groaned to note that she
+was the first friend his client had found.</p>
+<p>Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her
+before everybody in the big Tudor Room. And Polly&rsquo;s husband
+greeted her with warmth of hand and voice.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy.
+The prodigal was home, had been welcomed with a kiss.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_79' name='page_79'></a>79</span>
+Evidently her secret had not crossed the ocean. She could
+take up life again. Some day the past would confront and
+denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was enfranchised
+anew of human society.</p>
+<p>Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s death and his
+wife&rsquo;s, and what a shock it must have been to poor Marie
+Louise, but how well she bore up under it, and how perfectly
+darn beautiful she was, and what a shame that it was almost
+midnight! She and her hub were going to Washington.
+Everybody was, of course. Why wasn&rsquo;t Marie Louise there?
+And Polly&rsquo;s husband was to be a major&ndash;&ndash;think of it! He was
+going to be all dolled up in olive drab and things and&ndash;&ndash; &ldquo;Damn
+the clock, anyway; if we miss that train we can&rsquo;t
+get on another for days. And what&rsquo;s your address? Write
+it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it off, and I&rsquo;ll write
+you the minute I get settled, for you must come to us and nowhere
+else and&ndash;&ndash; Good-by, darling child, and&ndash;&ndash; All right,
+Tom, I&rsquo;m coming!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she was gone.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier
+and yet much lonelier. She had found a friend who had not
+heard of her disgrace. She had lost a friend who still rejoiced
+to see her.</p>
+<p>But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged.
+When he turned in his report he threatened to turn in his
+resignation unless he were relieved of the futile task of recording
+Marie Louise&rsquo;s blameless and eventless life.</p>
+<p>And then the agent&rsquo;s night was turned to day&ndash;&ndash;at least his
+high noon was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie
+Louise was abruptly addressed by Nicky Easton.</p>
+<p>She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth
+Avenue, rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd
+of other white-fingered women. A cable had come that there
+was a sudden need for at least ten thousand bandages. These
+were not yet for American soldiers in France, though their
+turn would come, and their wholesale need. But as Marie
+Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered flesh, the
+crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this
+linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in
+vicarious crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little
+air and a bite of lunch.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_80' name='page_80'></a>80</span></div>
+<p>Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She
+gasped at sight of him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed: &ldquo;If I am it, thees is my <i>Doppelg&auml;nger</i>.&rdquo; And
+he began to hum with a grisly smile Schubert&rsquo;s setting to
+Heine&rsquo;s poem of the man who met his own ghost and double,
+aping his love-sorrow outside the home of his dead sweetheart:</p>
+<table summary=''><tr><td>
+<p class='cg'>&ldquo;<i>Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig&rsquo;ne Gestalt.<br />
+Du Doppelg&auml;nger, du bleicher Geselle!<br />
+Was &auml;ffst du nach mein Liebesleid,<br />
+Das mich gequ&auml;lt auf dieser Stelle<br />
+So manche Nacht in alter Zeit.</i>&rdquo;</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+<p>Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the
+song always roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation
+of walking that crowded Avenue with a man humming German
+at her side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hush! Hush, in Heaven&rsquo;s name!&rdquo; she pleaded.</p>
+<p>He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have another engagement, and I am late,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted
+on walking with her to the Waldorf, where she said her
+engagement was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t ask me where I have been?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the
+London Tower or somewhere. However did you get out?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin
+me therein, but you also told all you knew and some more
+yet, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She saw then that he had turned state&rsquo;s evidence. Perhaps
+he had betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible
+to loathe him extra. She lacked the strength to deny his
+odious insinuation about herself. He went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany
+now. But here I try to gain back my place in <i>Deutschland</i>.
+These English think they use me for a stool-pitcheon. But
+they will find out, and when <i>Deutschland ist &uuml;ber alles&ndash;&ndash;ach,
+Gott</i>! You shall help me. We do some work togedder. I
+come soon by your house. <i>Auf</i>&ndash;&ndash;Goot-py.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_81' name='page_81'></a>81</span></div>
+<p>He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went
+into the labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had
+ceased fluttering and she grew calm from very fatigue of
+alarm she resolved to steal out of New York.</p>
+<p>She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision.
+Night brought counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a
+haven, and in the country. It would be an ideal hiding-place.
+She set to work at midnight packing her trunk.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_82' name='page_82'></a>82</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone
+from New York to Washington, but it seemed that
+everybody on earth was making the same effort. It was a wire
+Babel.</p>
+<p>Washington was suddenly America in the same way that
+London had long been England; and Paris France. The
+entire population was apparently trying to get into Washington
+in order to get out again. People wrote, telegraphed,
+radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all the
+rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of
+the funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of
+debate and administration was suddenly dumfounded to find
+itself treated to all the horrors of a boom-town&ndash;&ndash;it was like
+San Francisco in &rsquo;49.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American
+dialect, kept pleading with Long Distance:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I say, cahn&rsquo;t you put me through to Washington?
+It&rsquo;s no end important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two.
+I want to speak to Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling.
+Thank you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The obliging central asked her telephone number and
+promised to call her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment&ndash;&ndash;to
+some centrals. Marie Louise, being finite and ephemeral,
+never heard from that central again. Later she took up the
+receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale
+of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also
+asked her name and number and promised to report, then
+vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.</p>
+<p>Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told
+and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began
+to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number
+hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed
+about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_83' name='page_83'></a>83</span>
+the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington
+with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone
+number and the message.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>So glad you&rsquo;re on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and
+see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but there&rsquo;s
+always room&ndash;&ndash;especially for you, dear. You&rsquo;ll never get in at a hotel.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried
+again.</p>
+<p>The seventh central dazed her with, &ldquo;We can take nothing
+but gov&rsquo;ment business till two <span class='smcaplc'>P.M.</span>&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her
+watch, gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag,
+snapped it, and rose to go.</p>
+<p>She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the
+note for the address and telephoned a telegram, saying that
+she would arrive at five o&rsquo;clock. The telegraph-operator told
+her that the company could not guarantee delivery, as traffic
+over the wires was very heavy. Marie Louise sighed and
+rose, worn out with telephone-fag.</p>
+<p>She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi,
+and hastily made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the
+station an hour ago, and they had been checked through from
+the house.</p>
+<p>Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick
+up the note she had propped on the telephone-table. She
+left it there and closed the door on another chapter of her life.</p>
+<p>She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a
+weary while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car
+to-day, to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths
+at night were still more unobtainable.</p>
+<p>She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach.
+Scores of people had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches
+were filled. She sidled through the crowded aisles
+and found no seat. She invaded the chair-cars in desperation.</p>
+<p>In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage.
+She appealed to him. &ldquo;You must have one chair left.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was hardly polite in his answer. &ldquo;No, ma&rsquo;am, I ain&rsquo;t.
+I ain&rsquo;t a single chair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I&rsquo;ve got to sit somewhere,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_84' name='page_84'></a>84</span></div>
+<p>The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He
+moved back to the front to repel boarders. Several men stared
+from the depths of their dentist&rsquo;s chairs, but made no proffer
+of their seats. They believed that woman&rsquo;s newfangled
+equality included the privilege of standing up.</p>
+<p>One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or
+pretended. Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with
+her eyes. His smile of recognition changed to a smile of
+courtesy. He proffered her his seat with an old-fashioned
+gesture. She declined with a shake of the head and a coldly
+correct smile.</p>
+<p>He insisted academically, as much as to say: &ldquo;I can see
+that you are a gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman
+and permit me to do my duty.&rdquo; There was a brief, silent
+tug-of-war between his unselfishness and hers. He won.
+Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into his place.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But where will you sit?&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ll get along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the
+air of one who would get along. He had shown himself masterful
+in two combats, and compelled her to take the chair he
+had doubtless engaged with futile providence days before.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own,&rdquo; she
+thought.</p>
+<p>The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the
+tunnel of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River.
+People felt their ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed
+hard. The train came back to the surface and the sunlight,
+and ran across New Jersey.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make
+sure of it. Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same
+thing. At this time all the people in America seemed to be
+thinking <i>en masse</i>. When she reached the dining-car every
+seat was taken and there was a long bread-line in the narrow
+corridor.</p>
+<p>The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye,
+caught it, and motioned to her to take his place. She shook her
+head. But it seemed to do no good to shake heads at him;
+he came down the corridor and lifted his hat. His voice and
+words were pleading, but his tone was imperative.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please take my place.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_85' name='page_85'></a>85</span></div>
+<p>She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing.
+She was angry at being bossed even for her own benefit.
+Worse yet, by the time she got to the head of the line the
+second man had moved up to first. He stared at her as if he
+wondered what she was doing there. She fell back, doubly
+vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a
+look like a policeman&rsquo;s shove. The fellow backed up on the
+next man&rsquo;s toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to
+her place and went back to the foot of the class without waiting
+for her furious thanks.</p>
+<p>She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to
+be cowed or compelled to take chairs or money. People who
+had tried to move her soul or lend her their experience or their
+advantages had always aroused resentment.</p>
+<p>Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just
+thumbing his last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he
+left That Man would take the chair and order her luncheon
+for her. But it was not so to be. She passed him still well
+down the line. He had probably given his place to other
+women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a trifle
+unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the
+rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not
+claim even a glance of gratitude.</p>
+<p>It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he
+had seemed to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have
+insulted him. Yet it was not altogether satisfactory to be
+denied the privilege. She fumed. Everything was wrong. She
+sat in her cuckoo&rsquo;s nest and glared at the reeling landscape.</p>
+<p>Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos,
+looking for Polly Widdicombe&rsquo;s letter. She could not find it.
+She found the checks for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of
+gloves, and various other things, but not the letter. This gave
+her a new fright.</p>
+<p>She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table.
+She could see it plainly as her remembered glance took
+its last survey of the room. The brain has a way of developing
+occasional photographs very slowly. Something strikes our
+eyes, and we do not really see it till long after. We hear words
+and say, &ldquo;How&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; or, &ldquo;I beg your pardon!&rdquo; and hear
+them again before they can be repeated.</p>
+<p>This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_86' name='page_86'></a>86</span>
+hope that she could remember a little farther back to the contents
+of the letter and the telephone number written there.
+But her memory would not respond. The effort to cudgel it
+seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting more and more
+completely.</p>
+<p>All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had
+said about there being no chance to get into a hotel&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;an
+h&ocirc;tel,&rdquo; Marie Louise still thought it.</p>
+<p>It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours
+late. People began to worry audibly about the hotels that
+would probably refuse them admission. At length they began
+to stroll toward the dining-car for an early dinner.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of
+other employment, went along. There was no queue in
+the corridor now. She did not have to take That Man&rsquo;s
+place. She found one at a little empty table. But by and
+by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant seats,
+he sat down opposite her.</p>
+<p>She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In
+fact, seeing that she owed him for her seat&ndash;&ndash; It suddenly smote
+her that he must have paid for it. She owed him money!
+This was unendurable!</p>
+<p>He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she
+found courage to speak to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass,
+but she went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave
+me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, I don&rsquo;t remember, I&rsquo;m sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It
+just occurred to me that I had cheated you out of your chair,
+and your money, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s mighty kind of you,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful
+to him for having the tact not to be flamboyant about it
+and not insisting on forgetting it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if
+you will feel easier about it, I&rsquo;ll ask you for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could hardly rob a perfect stranger,&rdquo; she began.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_87' name='page_87'></a>87</span></div>
+<p>He broke in: &ldquo;They say nobody is perfect, and I&rsquo;m not a
+perfect stranger. I&rsquo;ve met you before, Miss Webling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not rilly! Wherever was it? I&rsquo;m so stupid not to remember&ndash;&ndash;even
+your name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could
+understand her haziness the better from the fact that when
+he first saw her in the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was
+because he had identified her once more with the long-lost, long-sought
+beauty of years long gone&ndash;&ndash;the girl he had seen in the
+cheap vaudeville theater. This slip of memory had uncovered
+another memory. He had corrected the palimpsest
+and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in
+London. She had given him the same start then as now, and,
+as he recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously.
+So he had kept his distance. But the proffer of the money
+for the chair-car chair broke the ice a little. He said at last:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father&rsquo;s
+house in London.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and
+gasped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean it. I&ndash;&ndash; Oh yes, of course I remember&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t lie about it,&rdquo; he pleaded, bluntly, &ldquo;for of
+course you don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed, but very nervously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we did give very large dinners.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a
+mile down the street from you, and I said nothing immortal.
+I was only a business acquaintance of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s, anyway.
+It was about ships, of course.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He saw that her mind was far away and under strange
+excitation. But she murmured, distantly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, so you are&ndash;&ndash;interested in ships?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I make &rsquo;em for a living.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rilly! How interesting!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This constraint was irksome. He ventured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He&rsquo;s well, I
+hope.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her eyes widened. &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you know? Didn&rsquo;t you read
+in the papers&ndash;&ndash;about their death together?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Theirs? His wife and he died together?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_88' name='page_88'></a>88</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;In a submarine attack?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, at home. It was in all the papers&ndash;&ndash;about their dying
+on the same night, from&ndash;&ndash;from ptomaine poisoning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled
+word. He explained: &ldquo;I must have been out in the forest
+or in the mines at the time. Forgive me for opening the
+old wound. How long ago was it? I see you&rsquo;re out of
+mourning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear
+mourning in England during the war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen&ndash;&ndash;mothers
+and daughters! My God! what you&rsquo;ve gone
+through! And such pluck!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across
+and touched hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of
+fierce sympathy. She did not resent the message. Then he
+muttered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know what it means. I lost my father and mother&ndash;&ndash;not
+at once, of course&ndash;&ndash;years apart. But to lose them both in
+one night!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a sharp attempt at self-control:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please! I beg you&ndash;&ndash;please don&rsquo;t speak of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise
+was doubly fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and
+afraid of something or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible,
+and Ross Davidge always felt a challenge from the
+impossible and the inaccessible.</p>
+<p>She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter
+and rose. She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her.
+She left the dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself
+for a brute and a blunderer.</p>
+<p>He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could
+call him, but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize
+his chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had
+forgotten to pay him for the chair.</p>
+<p>It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington
+at last. The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay.
+The appearance of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph&rsquo;s,
+and the necessity for telling him the lie about that death,
+had brought on a crisis of nerves. She was afraid of the dark,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_89' name='page_89'></a>89</span>
+but more afraid of the man who might ask still more questions.
+She avoided him purposely when she left the train.</p>
+<p>A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand.
+Polly Widdicombe&rsquo;s car was not waiting. Marie
+Louise went to the front of the building to see if she might
+be there. She was appalled at the thought of Polly&rsquo;s not
+meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as never before.</p>
+<p>It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard
+people say that it was much too majestic for a railroad
+station. As if America did not owe more to the iron god
+of the rails than to any of her other deities!</p>
+<p>Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome
+floating cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically
+sustained. The superb beauty of it clutched her throat.
+She wanted to do something for it and all the holy ideals it
+symbolized.</p>
+<p>Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably
+never reached her. The porter asked her, &ldquo;Was you
+thinkin&rsquo; of a taxi?&rdquo; and she said, &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; only to realize
+that she had no address to give the driver.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_90' name='page_90'></a>90</span></p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK III</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>IN WASHINGTON</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_4' id='linki_4'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_91' name='page_91'></a>91</span>
+<img src='images/illus-092.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='373' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s beautiful overhead if you&rsquo;re going that way,&rsquo;&rdquo; Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you afraid to push on when you can&rsquo;t see where you&rsquo;re going?&rdquo; she demanded.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_92' name='page_92'></a>92</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>She went through her hand-bag again, while the porter
+computed how many tips he was missing and the cab-starter
+looked insufferable things about womankind.</p>
+<p>She asked if any of them knew where Grinden Hall might
+be, but they shook their heads. She had a sudden happy
+idea. She would ask the telephone Information for the
+number. She hurried to a booth, followed by the despondent
+porter. She asked for Information and got her, but that
+was all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please give me the numba of Mrs. Widdicombe&rsquo;s, in
+Rosslyn.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A Washington dialect eventually told her that the number
+was a private wire and could not be given.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise implored a special dispensation, but it was
+against the rules.</p>
+<p>She asked for the supervisor&ndash;&ndash;who was equally sorry and
+adamant. Marie Louise left the booth in utter defeat.
+There was nothing to do but go to a hotel till the morrow.</p>
+<p>She recalled the stories of the hopelessness of getting a room.
+Yet she had no choice but to make the try. She had got a
+seat on the train where there were none. Perhaps she could
+trust her luck to provide her with a lodging, too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll go back to the taxi-stand,&rdquo; she told the porter.</p>
+<p>He did not conceal his joy at being rid of her.</p>
+<p>She tried the Shoreham first, and when the taxicab deposited
+her under the umbrellas of the big trees and she climbed the
+homelike steps to a lobby with the air of a living-room she
+felt welcome and secure. Brilliant clusters were drifting to
+dinner, and the men were more picturesque than the women,
+for many of them were in uniform. Officers of the army and
+navy of the United States and of Great Britain and of France
+gave the throng the look of a costume-party.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_93' name='page_93'></a>93</span></div>
+<p>There was a less interesting crowd at the desk, and now
+nobody offered her his place at the head of the line. It
+would have done no good, for the room-clerk was shaking
+his head to all the suppliants. Marie Louise saw women
+turned away, married couples, men alone. But new-comers
+pressed forward and kept trying to convince the deskman
+that he had rooms somewhere, rooms that he had forgotten,
+or was saving for people who would never arrive.</p>
+<p>He stood there shaking his head like a toy in a window.
+People tried to get past him in all the ways people try to
+get through life, in the ways that Saint Peter must grow
+very tired of at the gate of heaven&ndash;&ndash;bluff, whine, bribery,
+intimidation, flirtation.</p>
+<p>Some demanded their rights with full confidence and would
+not take no for answer. Some pleaded with hopelessness in
+advance; they were used to rebuffs. They appealed to his
+pity. Some tried corruption; they whispered that they
+would &ldquo;make it all right,&rdquo; or they managed a sly display
+of money&ndash;&ndash;one a one-dollar bill with the &ldquo;1&rdquo; folded in,
+another a fifty-dollar bill with the &ldquo;50&rdquo; well to the fore.
+Some grew ugly and implied favoritism; they were the
+born strikers and anarchists. Even though they looked
+rich, they had that habit of finding oppression and conspiracy
+everywhere. A few women appealed to his philanthropy,
+and a few others tried to play the siren. But
+his head oscillated from side to side, and nobody could
+swing it up and down.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise watched the procession anxiously. There
+seemed to be no end to it. The people who had come here
+first had been turned away into outer darkness long ago
+and had gone to other hotels. The present wretches were
+those who had gone to the other hotels first and made this
+their second, third, or sixth choice.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise did not go to the desk. She could take
+a hint at second hand. She would have been glad of a
+place to sit down, but all the divans were filled with
+gossipers very much at home and somewhat contemptuous
+of the vulgar herd trying to break into their select and
+long-established circle. She heard a man saying, with amiable
+anger: &ldquo;Ah&rsquo;m mahty sah&rsquo;y Ah can&rsquo;t put you up at
+ouah haouse, but we&rsquo;ve got &rsquo;em hangin&rsquo; on the hat-rack
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_94' name='page_94'></a>94</span>
+in the hall. You infunnal patriots have simply ruined this
+little old taown.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She heard a pleasant laugh. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t worry. I&rsquo;ll get along
+somehow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She glanced aside and saw That Man again. She had forgotten
+his name again; yet she felt curiously less lonely, not
+nearly so hopeless. The other man said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, Davidge, are you daown heah looking for one of these
+dollah-a-yeah jobs? Can you earn it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not looking for a job. I&rsquo;m looking for a bed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not a chance. The government&rsquo;s taken ovah half the
+hotels for office-buildings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go to a Turkish bath, then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good Lawd! man, I hud a man propose that, and the
+hotel clerk said he had telephoned the Tukkish bath, and a
+man theah said: &lsquo;For God&rsquo;s sake don&rsquo;t send anybody else
+heah! We&rsquo;ve got five hundred cots full naow.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s Baltimore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Baltimer&rsquo;s full up. So&rsquo;s Alexandra. Go on back home
+and write a letta.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll try a few more hotels first.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No use&ndash;&ndash;not an openin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ve usually found that the best place to look
+for things is where people say they don&rsquo;t grow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise thought that this was most excellent advice.
+She decided to follow it and keep on trying.</p>
+<p>As she was about to move toward the door the elevator,
+like a great cornucopia, spilled a bevy of men and women
+into the lobby. Leading them all came a woman of charm,
+of distinction, of self-possession. She was smiling over one
+handsome shoulder at a British officer.</p>
+<p>The forlorn Marie Louise saw her, and her eyes rejoiced;
+her face was kindled with haven-beacons. She pressed forward
+with her hand out, and though she only murmured the
+words, a cry of relief thrilled them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Clifton-Wyatt! What luck to find you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt turned with a smile of welcome in
+advance. Her hand went forward. Her smile ended suddenly.
+Blank amazement passed into contemptuous wrath. Her
+hand went back. With the disgust of a sick eagle in a zoo,
+she drew a film over her eyes.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_95' name='page_95'></a>95</span></div>
+<p>The smile on Marie Louise&rsquo;s face also hung unsupported for
+a moment. It faded, then rallied. She spoke with patience,
+underlining the words with an affectionate reproof:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, I am Miss Webling&ndash;&ndash;Marie
+Louise. Don&rsquo;t you know me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt answered: &ldquo;I did. But I don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.</p>
+<p>The head waiter bowed with deference and command and
+beckoned Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek
+hauteur.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_96' name='page_96'></a>96</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>As she came out of the first hotel of her selection and
+rejection Marie Louise asked the car-starter the name
+of another. He mentioned the New Willard.</p>
+<p>It was not far, and she was there before she had time to
+recover from the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s
+bludgeon-like snub. As timidly as the waif and estray that
+she was, she ventured into the crowded, gorgeous lobby
+with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big columns. At
+one side a long corridor ran brokenly up a steep hill. It
+was populous with loungers who had just finished their dinners
+or were waiting for a chance to get into the dining-rooms.
+Orchestra music was lilting down the aisle.</p>
+<p>When Marie Louise had threaded the crowd and reached
+the desk a very polite and eager clerk asked her if she had
+a reservation. He seemed to be as regretful as she when she
+said no. He sighed, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve turned away a hundred people
+in the last two hours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She accepted her dismissal dumbly, then paused to ask,
+&ldquo;I say, do you by any chance know where Grinden Hall is?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head and turned to another clerk to ask,
+&ldquo;Do you know of a hotel here named Grinden Hall?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other shook his head, too. There was a vast amount
+of head-shaking going on everywhere in Washington. He
+added, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m new here.&rdquo; Nearly everybody seemed to be
+new here. It seemed as if the entire populace had moved
+into a ready-made town.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had barely the strength to explain, &ldquo;Grinden
+Hall is not an hotel; it is a home, in Rosslyn, wherever that is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Rosslyn&ndash;&ndash;that&rsquo;s across the river in Virginia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know, by any chance, Major Thomas Widdicombe?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head. Major Widdicombe was a big man,
+but the town was fairly swarming with men bigger than he.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_97' name='page_97'></a>97</span>
+There were shoals of magnates, but giants in their own communities
+were petty nuisances here pleading with room-clerks
+for cots and with head waiters for bread. The lobby
+was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees. Several
+of them had the Congressional look. Later history
+would record them as the historic statesmen of titanic debates,
+men by whose eloquence and leadership and committee-room
+toil the Republic would be revolutionized in nearly every
+detail, and billions made to flow like water.</p>
+<p>As Marie Louise collected her porter and her hand-luggage
+for her next exit she saw Ross Davidge just coming in.
+She stepped behind a large politician or something. She
+forgot that she owed Davidge money, and she felt a rather
+pleasurable agitation in this game of hide-and-seek, but
+something made her shy of Davidge. For one thing, it was
+ludicrous to be caught being turned out of a second hotel.</p>
+<p>The politician walked away, and Davidge would have seen
+Marie Louise if he had not stopped short and turned a cold
+shoulder on her, just as the distant orchestra, which had been
+crooning one of Jerome Kern&rsquo;s most insidiously ingratiating
+melodies, began to blare with all its might the sonorities of
+&ldquo;The Star-spangled Banner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Miss Webling saw the people in the alley getting to their
+feet slowly, awkwardly. A number of army and navy officers
+faced the music and stood rigid at attention. The
+civilians in the lobby who were already standing began to
+pull their hats off sheepishly like embarrassed peasants.
+People were still as self-conscious as if the song had just
+been written. They would soon learn to feel the tremendous
+importance of that eternal query, the only national anthem,
+perhaps, that ever began with a question and ended with a
+prayer. Americans would soon learn to salute it with eagerness
+and to deal ferociously with men&ndash;&ndash;and women, too&ndash;&ndash;who
+were slow to rise.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise watched Davidge curiously. He was manifestly
+on fire with patriotism, but he was ashamed to show
+it, ashamed to stand erect and click his heels. He fumbled
+his hat and slouched, and looked as if he had been caught
+in some guilt. He was indeed guilty of a childish fervor.
+He wanted to shout, he wanted to weep, he wanted to fight
+somebody; but he did not know how to express himself without
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_98' name='page_98'></a>98</span>
+striking an attitude, and he was incapable of being a
+<i>poseur</i>&ndash;&ndash;except as an American posily affects poselessness.</p>
+<p>When the anthem ended, people sank into their chairs
+with sighs of relief; the officers sharply relaxed; the civilians
+straightened up and felt at home again. Ross Davidge
+marched to the desk, not noticing Marie Louise, who motioned
+to her porter to come along with her luggage and went
+to hunt shelter at the Raleigh Hotel. She kept her taxi
+now and left her hand-baggage in it while she received the
+inevitable rebuff. From there she traveled to hotel after
+hotel, marching in with the dismal assurance that she would
+march right out again.</p>
+<p>The taxi-driver was willing to take her to hotels as long
+as they and her money lasted. Her strength and her patience
+gave out first. At the Lafayette she advanced wearily,
+disconsolately to the desk. She saw Ross Davidge stretched
+out in a big chair. He did not see her. His hat was pulled
+over his eyes, and he had the air of angry failure. If he
+despaired, what chance had she?</p>
+<p>She received the usual regrets from the clerk. As she left
+the desk the floor began to wabble. She hurried to an inviting
+divan and dropped down, beaten and distraught. She heard
+some one approach, and her downcast eyes saw a pair of feet
+move up and halt before her.</p>
+<p>Since Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s searing glance and words Marie
+Louise had felt branded visibly, and unworthy of human
+kindness and shelter. She was piteously grateful to this man
+for his condescension in saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to excuse me for bothering you again. But
+I&rsquo;m afraid you&rsquo;re in worse trouble than I am. Nobody
+seems to be willing to take you in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He meant this as a light jocularity, but it gave her a moment&rsquo;s
+serious fear that he had overheard Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s
+slashing remark. But he went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you allow me to try to find you a place? Don&rsquo;t
+you know anybody here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know numbers of people, but I don&rsquo;t know where any
+of them are.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She told him of her efforts to get to Rosslyn by telephone,
+by telegraph, by train or taxicab. Little tears added a sparkle
+to laughter, but threatened rain. She ended with, &ldquo;And
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_99' name='page_99'></a>99</span>
+now that I&rsquo;ve unloaded my riddles on you, aren&rsquo;t you sorry
+you spoke?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not yet,&rdquo; he said, with a subtle compliment pleasantly
+implying that she was perilous. Everybody likes to be thought
+perilous. He went on: &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know Rosslyn, but it can&rsquo;t
+be much of a place for size. If you have a friend there, we&rsquo;ll
+find her if we have to go to every house in Rosslyn.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it&rsquo;s getting rather late, isn&rsquo;t it, to be knocking at all
+the doors all by myself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had not meant to hint, and it was a mere coincidence
+that he thought to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t I go along?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, but it&rsquo;s out in the country rather far, I&rsquo;m
+afraid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I must go along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t think of troubling you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The end of it was that he had his way, or she hers, or
+both theirs. He made no nonsense of adventure or escapade
+about it, and she was too well used to traveling alone
+to feel ashamed or alarmed. He led her to the taxi, told
+the driver that Grinden Hall was their objective and must be
+found. Then he climbed in with her, and they rode in a dark
+broken with the fitful lightnings of street-lamps and motors.</p>
+<p>The taxi glided out M Street. The little shops of Georgetown
+went sidelong by. The cab turned abruptly to the left
+and clattered across the old aqueduct bridge. On a broad
+reach of the Potomac the new-risen moon spread a vast sheet
+of tin-foil of a crinkled sheen. This was all that was beautiful
+about the sordid neighborhood, but it was very beautiful,
+and tender to a strange degree.</p>
+<p>Once across, the driver stopped and leaned round to call
+in at the door:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is Rosslyn. Where do yew-all want to go next?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Grinden Hall. Ask somebody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ask who? They ain&rsquo;t a soul tew be saw.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They waited in the dark awhile; then Davidge got out
+and, seeing a street-car coming down through the hills like
+a dragon in fiery scales, he stopped it to ask the motorman
+of Grinden Hall. He knew nothing, but a sleepy passenger
+said that he reckoned that that was the fancy name of Mr.
+Sawtell&rsquo;s place, and he shouted the directions:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_100' name='page_100'></a>100</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Yew go raht along this road ovah the caw tracks, and
+unda a bridge and keep a-goin&rsquo; up a ridge and ova till yew
+come to a shawp tu&rsquo;n to the raht. Big whaht mansion,
+ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;I never saw it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I reckon that&rsquo;s the place. Only &lsquo;Hall&rsquo; I knaow
+about up heah.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The motorman kicked his bell and started off.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing like trying,&rdquo; said Davidge, and clambered in.
+The taxicab went veering and yawing over an unusually
+Virginian bad road. After a little they entered a forest. The
+driver threw on his search-light, and it tore from the darkness
+pictures of forest eerily green in the glare&ndash;&ndash;old trees slanting
+out, deep channels blackening into mysterious glades. The
+car swung sharply to the right and growled up a hill, curving
+and swirling and threatening to capsize at every moment.
+The sense of being lost was irresistible.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise fell to pondering; suddenly she grew afraid
+to find Grinden Hall. She knew that Polly knew Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+They might have met since Polly wrote that letter.
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt had perhaps&ndash;&ndash;had doubtless&ndash;&ndash;told Polly
+all about Marie Louise. Polly would probably refuse her
+shelter. She knew Polly: there was no middle ground between
+her likes and dislikes; she doted or she hated. She
+was capable of smothering her friends with affection and of
+making them ancient enemies in an instant. For her enemies
+she had no use or tolerance. She let them know her wrath.</p>
+<p>The car stopped. The driver got down and went forward
+to a narrow lane opening from the narrow road. There was
+a sign-board there. He read it by the light of the moon and
+a few matches. He came back and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here she is. Grinden Hall is what she says on that theah
+sign-bode.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was in a flutter. &ldquo;What time is it?&rdquo; she
+asked.</p>
+<p>Davidge held his watch up and lighted a match.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A little after one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s awfully late,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>The car was turning at right angles now, and following a
+narrow track curling through a lawn studded with shrubbery.
+There was a moment&rsquo;s view of all Washington beyond the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_101' name='page_101'></a>101</span>
+valley of the moon-illumined river. Its lights gleamed in a
+patient vigilance. It had the look of the holy city that it is.
+The Capitol was like a mosque in Mecca, the Mecca of the
+faithful who believe in freedom and equality. The Washington
+Monument, picked out from the dark by a search-light,
+was a lofty steeple in a dream-world.</p>
+<p>Davidge caught a quick breath of piety and reverence.
+Marie Louise was too frightened by her own destiny to think
+of the world&rsquo;s anxieties.</p>
+<p>The car raced round the circular road. Her eyes were
+snatched from the drowsy town, small with distance, to the
+imminent majesty of a great Colonial portico with columns
+tall and stately and white, a temple of Parthenonian dignity
+in the radiance of the priestly moon. There was not a light
+in any window, no sign of life.</p>
+<p>The car stopped. But&ndash;&ndash; Marie Louise simply dared not
+face Polly and risk a scene in the presence of Davidge. She
+tapped on the glass and motioned the driver to go on. He
+could not believe her gestures. She leaned out and whispered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go on&ndash;&ndash;go on! I&rsquo;ll not stop!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge was puzzled, but he said nothing; and Marie
+Louise made no explanation till they were outside again,
+and then she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you think I&rsquo;m insane?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is not my party,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>She tried to explain: &ldquo;There wasn&rsquo;t a light to be seen.
+They couldn&rsquo;t have got my telegram. They weren&rsquo;t expecting
+me. They may not have been at home. I hadn&rsquo;t the courage
+to stop and wake the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was not her real reason, but Davidge asked for no
+other. If he noted that she was strangely excited over a
+trifle like getting a few servants and a hostess out of bed, he
+made no comment.</p>
+<p>When she pleaded, &ldquo;Do you mind if I go back to Washington
+with you?&rdquo; he chuckled: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s certainly better than going
+alone. But what will you do when you get there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go to the railroad station and sit up,&rdquo; Marie Louise
+announced. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m no end sorry to have been such a nuisance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nuisance!&rdquo; he protested, and left his intonation to convey
+all the compliments he dared not utter.</p>
+<p>The cab dived into another woods and ran clattering down
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_102' name='page_102'></a>102</span>
+a roving hill road. Up the opposite steep it went with a
+weary gait. It crawled to the top with turtle-like labor.
+Davidge knew the symptoms, and he frowned in the shadow,
+yet smiled a little.</p>
+<p>The car went banging down, held by a squealing brake.
+The light grew faint, and in the glimmer there was a close
+shave at the edge of a hazardous bridge over a deep, deep
+ravine. The cab rolled forward on the rough planks under its
+impetus, but it picked up no speed. Half-way across, it
+stopped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever is the matter?&rdquo; Marie Louise exclaimed.</p>
+<p>Davidge leaned out and called to the driver, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the
+matter now?&rdquo; though he knew full well.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gas is gone, I reckon,&rdquo; the fellow snarled, as he got down.
+After a moment&rsquo;s examination he confirmed his diagnosis.
+&ldquo;Yep, gas is all gone. I been on the go too long on this one
+call.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Heaven&rsquo;s name, where can you get some more gasolene?&rdquo;
+said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nearest garodge is at Rosslyn, I reckon, lady.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How far is that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d hate to say, lady. Three, fo&rsquo; mahls, most lahkly, and
+prob&rsquo;ly closed naow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go wake it up at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No thanky, lady. I got mahty po&rsquo; feet for them hills.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you propose to do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t nothin&rsquo; tew dew but wait fo&rsquo; somebody to come
+along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When will that be?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Along todes mawnin&rsquo; they ought to be somebody along,
+milkman or somethin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cheerful!&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Batt&rsquo;ries kind o&rsquo; sick, tew, looks lahk. I was engaged
+by the houah, remember,&rdquo; the driver reminded them as he
+clambered back to his place, put his feet up on the dashboard
+and let his head roll into a position of ease.</p>
+<p>The dimming lights waned and did not wax. By and by
+they went where lights go when they go out. There was no
+light now except the moonset, shimmering mistily across the
+tree-tops of the rotunda of the forest, just enough to emphasize
+the black of the well they were in.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_103' name='page_103'></a>103</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_III_1' id='CHAPTER_III_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+<p>How would she take it?</p>
+<p>That was what interested Davidge most. What
+was she really like? And what would she do with this intractable
+situation? What would the situation do with her?
+For situations make people as well as people situations.</p>
+<p>Now was the time for an acquaintance of souls. An
+almost absolute dark erased them from each other&rsquo;s sight.
+Their eyes were as useless as the useless eyes of fish in subterrene
+caverns. Miss Webling could have told Davidge
+the color of his eyes, of course, being a woman. But being a
+man, he could not remember the color of hers, because he had
+noted nothing about her eyes except that they were very
+eye-ish.</p>
+<p>He would have blundered ridiculously in describing her
+appearance. His information of her character was all to gain.
+He had seen her wandering about Washington homeless
+among the crowds and turned from every door. She had
+borne the ordeal as well as could be asked. She had accepted
+his proffer of protection with neither terror nor assurance.</p>
+<p>He supposed that in a similar plight the old-fashioned
+woman&ndash;&ndash;or at least the ubiquitous woman of the special
+eternal type that fictionists call &ldquo;old-fashioned&rdquo;&ndash;&ndash;would have
+been either a bleating, tremulous gazelle or a brazen siren.
+But Miss Webling behaved like neither of these. She took
+his gallantry with a matter-of-fact reasonableness, much as a
+man would accept the offer of another man&rsquo;s companionship
+on a tiresome journey. She gave none of those multitudinous
+little signals by which a woman indicates that she is either
+afraid that a man will try to hug her or afraid that he will
+not. She was apparently planning neither to flirt nor to faint.</p>
+<p>Davidge asked in a matter-of-fact tone: &ldquo;Do you think
+you could walk to town? The driver says it&rsquo;s only three-fo&rsquo;
+miles.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_104' name='page_104'></a>104</span></div>
+<p>She sighed: &ldquo;My feet would never make it. And I have on
+high-heeled boots.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His &ldquo;Too bad!&rdquo; conveyed more sympathy than she expected.
+He had another suggestion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could probably get back to the home of Mrs. Widdicombe.
+That isn&rsquo;t so far away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She answered, bluntly, &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t think of it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made another proposal without much enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;d better walk in to Washington and get a cab
+and come back for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was even blunter about this: &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t dream of
+that. You&rsquo;re a wreck, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He lied pluckily, &ldquo;Oh, I shouldn&rsquo;t mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I should! And I don&rsquo;t fancy the thought of staying
+here alone with that driver.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled in the dark at the double-edged compliment of
+implying that she was safer with him than with the driver.
+But she did not hear his smile.</p>
+<p>She apologized, meekly: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got you into an awful mess,
+haven&rsquo;t I? I usually do make a mess of everything I undertake.
+You&rsquo;d better beware of me after this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll risk it&rdquo; was a whole cyclopedia of condensed
+gallantry.</p>
+<p>They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing,
+hearing only the bated breath of the night wind groping
+stealthily through the tree-tops, and from far beneath, the
+still, small voice of a brook feeling its way down its unlighted
+stairs.</p>
+<p>At last her voice murmured, &ldquo;Are you quite too horribly
+uncomfortable for words?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: &ldquo;I
+couldn&rsquo;t be more comfortable except for one thing. I&rsquo;m all
+out of cigars.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before
+she spoke again, timidly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I fancy you don&rsquo;t smoke cigarettes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I can&rsquo;t get cigars; any tobacco is better than none.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Another blank of troubled silence, then, &ldquo;I wonder if you&rsquo;d
+say that of mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll guarantee to.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_105' name='page_105'></a>105</span></div>
+<p>A few years before he would have accepted a woman&rsquo;s
+confession that she smoked cigarettes as a confession of
+complete abandonment to all the other vices. A few years
+farther back, indeed, and he would have said that any man
+who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he had seen
+so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies
+smoke them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice.
+In some of the United States it was then against the law for
+men (not to say women and children) to sell or give away or
+even to possess cigarettes. After the war crusades would
+start against all forms of tobacco, and at least one clergyman
+would call every man who smoked cigarettes a &ldquo;drug-addict.&rdquo;
+It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to be
+immoral to somebody.</p>
+<p>But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds
+come in. He knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one
+hand while they rolled a cigarette with the other. He knew
+Red Cross saints who could puff a forbidden cigarette like
+a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had ever made
+such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in a
+tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests
+of virtue&ndash;&ndash;tests that have nothing whatever to do with the
+case, whether savage or civilized folk invent them.</p>
+<p>He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard
+the click of her rings against metal. He heard the little
+noise of the portals of a cigarette-case opening. His hands
+and hers stumbled together, and his fingers selected a little
+cylinder from the row.</p>
+<p>He produced a match and held the flame before her. He
+filled his eyes with her vivid features as the glow detached
+her from the dark. Of her eyes he saw only the big lids,
+but he noted her lips, pursed a trifle with the kissing muscles,
+and he sighed as she blew a smoke about her like a goddess
+creating a cloud of vanishment. He lighted his own cigarette
+and threw the match away. They returned to a perfect
+gloom mitigated by the slight increase and decrease in the
+vividness of their tobacco-tips as they puffed.</p>
+<p>She was the first to speak:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a whole box of fags in my hand-bag. I usually
+have a good supply. When you want another&ndash;&ndash; Does it horrify
+you to see a woman smoke?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_106' name='page_106'></a>106</span></div>
+<p>He was very superior to his old bigotry. &ldquo;Quite the
+contrary!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was hardly honest enough, so he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It did once, though. I remember how startled I was
+years ago when I was in England and I saw ladies smoking
+in hotel corridors; and on the steamer coming back, there
+was a countess or something who sat in the balcony and
+puffed away. Of course, at the big dinners in London they
+smoked, too. They did at Sir Joseph&rsquo;s, I remember.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not see her wince at this name.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There were some odd fish surrounding old Sir Joseph.
+Some of them I couldn&rsquo;t quite make out. He was just a
+little hard to get at, himself. I got very huffy at the old
+boy once or twice, I&rsquo;m sorry to say. It was about ships.
+I&rsquo;m a crank on ships. Everybody has at least one mania.
+That&rsquo;s mine&ndash;&ndash;ships. Sir Joseph and I quarreled about them.
+He wanted to buy all I could make, but he was in no hurry
+to have &rsquo;em finished. I told him he talked more like a
+German trying to stop production than like a Britisher trying
+to speed it up. That made him huffy. I&rsquo;m sorry I did him
+such an injustice. When you insult a man, and he dies&ndash;&ndash;What
+a terrible repartee dying is! He had offered me a big
+price, too, but it&rsquo;s not money I want to make; it&rsquo;s ships.
+And I want to see &rsquo;em at work. Did you ever see a ship
+launched?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I never did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing prettier. Come over to my shipyard and
+I&rsquo;ll show you. We&rsquo;re going to put one over before long.
+I&rsquo;ll let you christen her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be wonderful.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s better than that. The civilized world is starting out
+on the most poetic job it ever undertook.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yep. The German sharks are gradually dragging all our
+shipping under water. The inventors don&rsquo;t seem able to
+devise any cure for the submarines except to find &rsquo;em and
+fight &rsquo;em. They&rsquo;re hard to find, and they won&rsquo;t fight. But
+they keep popping up and stabbing our pretty ships to death.
+And now the great game is on, the greatest game that civilized
+men ever fought with hell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_107' name='page_107'></a>107</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re going to try to build ships faster than the Hun
+can sink &rsquo;em. Isn&rsquo;t that a glorious job for you? Was there
+ever a&ndash;&ndash;well, a nobler idea? We can&rsquo;t kill the beast; so
+we&rsquo;re going to choke him to death with food.&rdquo; He laughed
+to hide his embarrassing exaltation.</p>
+<p>She was not afraid of it: &ldquo;It is rather a stupendous inspiration,
+isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who was it said he&rsquo;d rather have written Gray&rsquo;s &lsquo;Elegy&rsquo;
+than taken Quebec? I&rsquo;d rather have thought up this thought
+than written the Iliad. Nobody knows who invented the
+idea. He&rsquo;s gone to oblivion already, but he has done more
+for the salvation of freedom than all the poets of time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This shocked her, yet thrilled her with its loftiness. She
+thrilled to him suddenly, too. She saw that she was within
+the aura of a fiery spirit&ndash;&ndash;a business man aflame. And
+she saw in a white light that the builders of things, even
+of perishable things, are as great as the weavers of immortal
+words&ndash;&ndash;not so well remembered, of course, for posterity has
+only the words. Poets and highbrows scorn them, but
+living women who can see the living men are not so foolish.
+They are apt to prefer the maker to the writer. They reward
+the poet with a smile and a compliment, but give their
+lives to the manufacturers, the machinists, the merchants.
+Then the neglected poets and their toadies the critics grow
+sarcastic about this and think that they have condemned
+women for materialism when they are themselves blind to
+its grandeur. They ignore the divinity that attends the
+mining and smelting and welding and selling of iron things,
+the hewing and sawing and planing of woods, the sowing
+and reaping and distribution of foods. They make a priestcraft
+and a ritual of artful language, and are ignorant of their
+own heresy. But since they deal in words, they have a fearful
+advantage and use it for their own glorification, as priests
+are wont to do.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had a vague insight into the truth, but was
+not aware of her own wisdom. She knew only that this
+Davidge who had made himself her gallant, her messenger
+and servant, was really a genius, a giant. She felt that the
+r&ocirc;les should be reversed and she should be waiting upon
+him.</p>
+<p>In Sir Joseph&rsquo;s house there had been a bit of statuary
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_108' name='page_108'></a>108</span>
+representing Hercules and Omphale. The mighty one was
+wearing the woman&rsquo;s kirtle and carrying her distaff, and
+the girl was staggering under the lion-skin and leaning on
+the bludgeon. Marie Louise always hated the group. It
+seemed to her to represent just the way so many women
+tried to master the men they infatuated. But Marie Louise
+despised masterable men, and she had no wish to make a toy
+of one. Yet she had wondered if a man and a woman could
+not love each other more perfectly if neither were master or
+mistress, but both on a parity&ndash;&ndash;a team, indeed.</p>
+<p>Davidge enjoyed talking to her, at least. That comforted
+her. When she came back from her meditations he was saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My company is reaching out. We&rsquo;ve bought a big tract
+of swamp, and we&rsquo;re filling it in and clearing it, and we&rsquo;re
+going to lay out a shipyard there and turn out ships&ndash;&ndash;standardized
+ships&ndash;&ndash;as fast as we can. We&rsquo;re steadying the
+ground first, sinking concrete piles in steel casing&ndash;&ndash;if you put
+&rsquo;em end to end, they&rsquo;d reach twenty-five miles. They&rsquo;re
+just to hold the ground together. That&rsquo;s what the whole
+country has got to do before it can really begin to begin&ndash;&ndash;put
+some solid ground under its feet. When the ship is
+launched she mustn&rsquo;t stick on the ways or in the mud.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, I&rsquo;d rather go as a soldier, but I&rsquo;ve got no right
+to. I can ride or walk all day, and shoot straight and stand
+all kinds of weather, and killing Germans would just about
+tickle me to death. But this is a time when every man
+has got to do what he can do better than he can do anything
+else. And I&rsquo;ve spent my life in shipyards.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was a common laborer first&ndash;&ndash;swinging a sledge; I had
+an arm then! That was before we had compressed-air
+riveters. I was a union man and went on strike and fought
+scabs and made the bosses eat crow. Now I&rsquo;m one of the
+bosses. I&rsquo;m what they call a capitalist and an oppressor
+of labor. Now I put down strikes and fight the unions&ndash;&ndash;not
+that I don&rsquo;t believe in &rsquo;em, not that I don&rsquo;t know where
+labor was before they had unions and where it would be
+without &rsquo;em to-day and to-morrow, but because all these
+things have to be adjusted gradually, and because the main
+thing, after all, is building ships&ndash;&ndash;just now, of course, especially.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I was a workman I took pride in my job, and I
+thought I was an artist at it. I wouldn&rsquo;t take anybody&rsquo;s
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_109' name='page_109'></a>109</span>
+lip. Now that I&rsquo;m a boss I have to take everybody&rsquo;s lip,
+because I can&rsquo;t strike. I can&rsquo;t go to my boss and demand
+higher wages and easier hours, because my boss is the market.
+But I don&rsquo;t suppose there&rsquo;s anything on earth that interests
+you less than labor problems.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They might if I knew the first thing about them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, the first thing is that they are the next war, the big
+war after this one&rsquo;s over. The job is to keep it down till peace
+comes. Then hell will pop&ndash;&ndash;if you&rsquo;ll pardon my French.
+I&rsquo;m all for labor getting its rights, but some of the men
+don&rsquo;t want the right to work&ndash;&ndash;they want the right to loaf.
+I say let the sky be the limit of any man&rsquo;s opportunity&ndash;&ndash;the
+sky and his own limitations and ambitions. But a lot of the
+workmen don&rsquo;t want opportunity; they&rsquo;ve got no ambition;
+they hate to build things. They talk about the terrible
+conditions their families live in, and how gorgeously the
+rich men live. But the rich men were poor once, and the
+poor can be rich&ndash;&ndash;if they can and will.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The war is going to be the fight between the makers and
+the breakers, the uplifters and the down-draggers, you might
+say. And it&rsquo;s going to be some war!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The men on the wrong side&ndash;&ndash;what I call the wrong side,
+at least&ndash;&ndash;are just as much our enemies as the Germans.
+We&rsquo;ve got to watch &rsquo;em just as close. They&rsquo;d just as soon
+burn an unfinished ship as the Germans would sink her when
+she&rsquo;s on her way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That little ship I&rsquo;m building now! Would you believe it?
+It has to be guarded every minute. Most of our men are all
+right. They&rsquo;d work themselves to death for the ship, and
+they pour out their sweat like prayers. But sneaks get in
+among &rsquo;em, and it only takes a fellow with a bomb one minute
+to undo the six months&rsquo; work of a hundred.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me about your ship,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>A ship she could understand. It was personal and real;
+labor theories were as foreign to her as problems in metaphysics.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s my first-born, this ship,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Of course
+I&rsquo;ve built a lot of other ships, but they were for other people&ndash;&ndash;just
+jobs, for wages or commissions. This one is all my
+own&ndash;&ndash;a freighter, ugly as sin and commodious as hell&ndash;&ndash;I
+beg your pardon! But the world needs freighters&ndash;&ndash;the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_110' name='page_110'></a>110</span>
+hungry mobs of Europe, they&rsquo;ll be glad to see my little ship
+come in, if ever she does. If she doesn&rsquo;t I&rsquo;ll&ndash;&ndash; But she&rsquo;ll
+last a few trips before they submarine her&ndash;&ndash;I guess.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He fell silent among his visions and left her to her own.</p>
+<p>He saw himself wandering about a shipyard, a poor thing,
+but his own. His mind was like a mold-loft full of designs
+and detail-drawings to scale, blue-prints and models. On the
+way a ship was growing for him. As yet she was a ghastly
+thing all ribs, like the skeleton of some ancient sea-monster
+left ashore at high tide and perished eons back, leaving only
+the bones.</p>
+<p>His fancy saw her transverses taking on their iron flesh.
+He saw the day of her nativity. He heard them knock out
+the blocks that lowered the sliding-ways to the groundways
+and sent her swirling into the sea.</p>
+<p>He saw her ready for her cargo, saw a Niagara of wheat
+cascading into her hold. He saw her go forth into the sea.</p>
+<p>Then he saw the ship stagger, a wound opened in her side,
+from the bullet of a submarine.</p>
+<p>It was all so vivid that he spoke aloud in a frenzy of ire:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the Germans kill my ship I&rsquo;ll kill a German! By
+God, I will!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and he
+begged her pardon humbly.</p>
+<p>She had been away in reverie, too. The word &ldquo;submarine&rdquo;
+had sent her back into her haunting remembrances of the
+<i>Lusitania</i> and of her own helpless entanglement in the fate
+of other ships&ndash;&ndash;their names as unknown to her as the names
+and faces of the men that died with them, or perished of
+starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The thought
+of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered
+with such violence that Davidge was startled from his own
+wrath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re having a chill,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I wish you would take
+my coat. You don&rsquo;t want to get sick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head and chattered, &ldquo;No, no.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;d better get out and walk up and down this
+bridge awhile. There&rsquo;s not even a lap-robe here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should like to walk, I think.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She stepped out, aided by his hand, a strong hand, and
+warm about her icy fingers. Her knees were weak, and he
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_111' name='page_111'></a>111</span>
+set her elbow in the hollow of his arm and guided her. They
+walked like the blind leading the blind through a sea of
+pitch. The only glimmer was the little scratches of light
+pinked in the dead sky by a few stars.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s beautiful overhead, if you&rsquo;re going that way,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+Davidge quoted.</p>
+<p>He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back timidly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so fast! I can&rsquo;t see a thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the best time to keep moving.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But aren&rsquo;t you afraid to push on when you can&rsquo;t see
+where you&rsquo;re going?&rdquo; she demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who can ever tell where he&rsquo;s going? The sunlight is no
+guaranty. We&rsquo;re all bats in the daytime and not cats at
+night. The main thing is to sail on and on and on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She caught a little of his recklessness&ndash;&ndash;suffered him to
+hurry her to and fro through the inky air till she was panting
+for breath and tired. Then they groped to the rail and peered
+vainly down at the brook, which, like an unbroken child,
+was heard and not seen. They leaned their elbows on the rail
+and stared into the muffling gloom.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll have another of your cigarettes,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So will I,&rdquo; said she.</p>
+<p>There was a cozy fireside moment as they took their lights
+from the same match. When he threw the match overboard
+he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like a human life, eh? A little spark between dark and
+dark.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was surprised at stumbling into rhyme, and apologized.
+But she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know, I rather like that. It reminds me of a
+poem about a rain-storm&ndash;&ndash;Russell Lowell&rsquo;s, I fancy; it told
+of a flock of sheep scampering down a dusty road and clattering
+across a bridge and back to the dust again. He said it
+was like human life, &lsquo;a little noise between two silences.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m!&rdquo; was the best Davidge could do. But the agony
+of the brevity of existence seized them both by the hearts,
+and their hearts throbbed and bled like birds crushed in the
+claws of hawks. Their hearts had such capabilities of joy,
+such songs in them, such love and longing, such delight in
+beauty&ndash;&ndash;and beauty was so beautiful, so frequent, so thrilling!
+Yet they could spend but a glance, a sigh, a regret, a gratitude,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_112' name='page_112'></a>112</span>
+and then their eyes were out, their ears still, their lips cold,
+their hearts dust. The ache of it was beyond bearing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s walk. I&rsquo;m cold again,&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
+<p>He felt that she needed the sense of hurry, and he went so
+fast that she had to run to keep up with him. There seemed
+to be some comfort in the privilege of motion for its own sake;
+motion was life; motion was godhood; motion was escape
+from the run-down clock of death.</p>
+<p>Back and forth they kept their promenade, till her body
+refused to answer the whips of restlessness. Her brain began
+to shut up shop. It would do no more thinking this night.</p>
+<p>She stumbled toward the taxicab. Davidge lifted her in,
+and she sank down, completely done. She fell asleep.</p>
+<p>Davidge took his place in the cab and wondered lazily
+at the quaint adventure. He was only slightly concerned
+with wondering at the cause of her uneasiness. He was
+used to minding his own business.</p>
+<p>She slept so well that when the groping search-light of a
+coming automobile began to slash the night and the rubber
+wheels boomed across the bridge she did not waken. If the
+taxi-driver heard its sound, he preferred to pretend not to.
+The passengers in the passing car must have been surprised,
+but they took their wonderment with them. We so often
+imagine mischief when there is innocence and <i>vice versa</i>;
+for opportunity is just as likely to create distaste as interest
+and the lack of it to instigate enterprise.</p>
+<p>Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly in the dark and
+did not know that he was not awake until at some later time
+he was half aroused by the meteoric glow and whiz of another
+automobile. It had gone before he was quite awake, and he
+sank back into sleep.</p>
+<p>Before he knew it, many black hours had slid by and daylight
+was come; the rosy fingers of light were moving about,
+recreating the world to vision, sketching a landscape hazily
+on a black canvas, then stippling in the colors, and finishing,
+swiftly but gradually, the details to an inconceivable minuteness
+of definition, giving each leaf its own sharp contour and
+every rock its every facet. From the brook below a mistlike
+cigarette smoke exhaled. The sky was crimson, then pink,
+then amber, then blue.</p>
+<p>Birds began to twitter, to fashion little crystal stanzas,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_113' name='page_113'></a>113</span>
+and to hurl themselves about the valley as if catapults propelled
+them. One songster perched on the iron rail of the
+bridge and practised a vocal lesson, cocking his head from
+side to side and seeming to approve his own skill.</p>
+<p>A furred caterpillar resumed his march across the Appian
+Way, making of each crack between boards a great abyss to
+be bridged cautiously with his own body. The day&rsquo;s work
+was begun, while Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly
+at the side of the strange, sleeping woman as if they had been
+married for years.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_114' name='page_114'></a>114</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IV_1' id='CHAPTER_IV_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The sky was filled with morning when a noise startled
+Davidge out of nullity. He was amazed to find a
+strange woman asleep at his elbow. He remembered her
+suddenly.</p>
+<p>With a clatter of wheels and cans and hoofs a milkman&rsquo;s
+wagon and team came out of the hills. Davidge stepped down
+from the car and stopped the loud-voiced, wide-mouthed
+driver with a gesture. He spoke in a low voice which the
+milkman did not copy. The taxi-driver woke to the extent
+of one eye and a horrible yawn, while Davidge explained his
+plight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gasolene gave out, hey?&rdquo; said the milkman.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It certainly did,&rdquo; said Davidge, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;d be very much
+obliged if you&rsquo;d get me some more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wa-all, I&rsquo;m purty busy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pay you anything you ask.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The milkman was modest in his ambitions.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How&rsquo;d two dollars strike ye?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Five would be better if you hurried.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This looked suspicious, but the milkman consented.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wa-all, all right, but what would I fetch the gasolene in?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One of your milk-cans.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re all fuller melk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll buy one, milk and all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wa-all, I reckon I&rsquo;ll hev to oblige you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s five dollars on account. There&rsquo;ll be five more when
+you get back.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wa-all, all ri-ight. Get along there, Jawn Henry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>John Henry got along. Even his <i>cloppety-clop</i> did not
+waken Miss Webling.</p>
+<p>The return of the rattletrap and the racket of filling the
+tank with the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_115' name='page_115'></a>115</span>
+in confusion, finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little
+room, with three strange men at work outside.</p>
+<p>When the tank was filled, Davidge entered her compartment
+with a cheery &ldquo;Good morning,&rdquo; and slammed the door after
+him. The gasolene, like the breath of a god, gave life to the
+dead. The car snarled and jumped, and went roaring across
+the bridge, up the hill and down another, and down that
+and up another.</p>
+<p>Here they caught, through a frame of leaves, a glimpse of
+Washington in the sunrise, a great congregation of marble
+temples and trees and sky-colored waters, the shaft of the
+Monument lighted with the milky radiance of a mountain
+peak on its upper half, the lower part still dusk with valley
+shadow, and across the plateau of roofs the solemn Capitol
+in as mythical a splendor as the stately dome that Kubla
+Khan decreed in Xanadu.</p>
+<p>This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury
+to the taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he
+reached Rosslyn once more, crossed the Potomac&rsquo;s many-tinted
+stream, and rattled through Georgetown and the shabby,
+sleeping little shops of M Street into the tree-tunnels of
+Washington.</p>
+<p>He paused to say, &ldquo;Where do we go from here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge and Marie Louise looked their chagrin. They still
+had no place to go.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To the Pennsylvania Station,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;We can
+at least get breakfast there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The streets of Washington are never so beautiful as at this
+still hour when nothing stirs but the wind in the trees and the
+grass on the lawns, and hardly anybody is abroad except the
+generals on their bronze horses fronting their old battles
+with heroic eyes. The station outside was something Olympic
+but unfrequented. Inside, it was a vast cathedral of untenanted
+pews.</p>
+<p>Davidge paid the driver a duke&rsquo;s ransom. There was no
+porter about, and he carried Marie Louise&rsquo;s suit-cases to the
+parcel-room. Her baggage had had a long journey. She
+retreated to the women&rsquo;s room for what toilet she could
+make, and came forth with a very much washed face. Somnambulistic
+negroes took their orders at the lunch-counter.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had weakly decided to return to New York
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_116' name='page_116'></a>116</span>
+again, but the hot coffee was full of defiance, and she said that
+she would make another try at Mrs. Widdicombe as soon as a
+human hour arrived.</p>
+<p>And she showed a tactfulness that won much respect from
+Davidge when she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do get your morning paper and read it. I&rsquo;m sure I have
+nothing to say that I haven&rsquo;t said, and if I had, it could
+wait till you find out how the battle goes in Europe.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He bought her a paper, too, and they sat on a long bench,
+exchanging comments on the news that made almost every
+front page a chapter in world history.</p>
+<p>She heard him groan with rage. When she looked up he
+pointed to the submarine record of that week.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Last week the losses took a horrible jump&ndash;&ndash;forty ships
+of over sixteen hundred tons. This week it&rsquo;s almost as bad&ndash;&ndash;thirty-eight
+ships of over sixteen hundred, thirteen ships
+under, and eight fishing-vessels. Think of it&ndash;&ndash;all of &rsquo;em
+merchant-ships!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pretty soon I&rsquo;ve got to send my ship out to run the
+gantlet. She&rsquo;s like Little Red Riding Hood going through the
+forest to take old Granny Britain some food. And the wolves
+are waiting for her. What a race of people, what a pack of
+beasts!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had an idea. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you a pretty name for
+your ship&ndash;&ndash;<i>Little Red Riding Hood</i>. Why don&rsquo;t you give her
+that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed. &ldquo;The name would be heavier than the
+cargo. I wonder what the crew would make of it. No,
+this ship, my first one, is to be named after&rdquo;&ndash;&ndash;he lowered
+his voice as one does on entering a church&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;after my
+mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s beautiful!&rdquo; Marie Louise said. &ldquo;And will she
+be there to christen&ndash;&ndash; Oh, I remember, you said&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded three or four times in wretchedness. But the
+grief was his own, and he must not exploit it. He assumed
+an abrupt cheer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll name the next ship after you, if you don&rsquo;t mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was too glorious to be believed. What bouquet or
+jewel could equal it? She clapped her hands like a child
+hearing a Christmas promise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is your first name, Miss Webling?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_117' name='page_117'></a>117</span></div>
+<p>She suddenly realized that they were not, after all, such
+old friends as the night had seemed to make them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My first two names,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;are Marie Louise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! Well, then we&rsquo;ll call the ship <i>Marie Louise</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She saw that he was a little disappointed in the name, so
+she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I was a girl they called me Mamise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was puzzled to see how this startled him.</p>
+<p>He jumped audibly and fastened a searching gaze on her.
+Mamise! He had thought of Mamise when he saw her, and
+now she gave the name. Could she possibly be the Mamise he
+remembered? He started to ask her, but checked himself and
+blushed. A fine thing it would be to ask this splendid young
+princess, &ldquo;Pardon me, Princess, but were you playing in
+cheap vaudeville a few years ago?&rdquo; It was an improbable
+coincidence that he should meet her thus, but an almost
+impossible coincidence that she should wear both the name
+and the mien of Mamise and not be Mamise. But he dared
+not ask her.</p>
+<p>She noted his blush and stammer, but she was afraid to
+ask their cause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Mamise</i> it shall be,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>And she answered, &ldquo;I was never so honored in my life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he warned her, &ldquo;the boat isn&rsquo;t built yet.
+In fact, the new yard isn&rsquo;t built yet. There&rsquo;s many a slip
+&rsquo;twixt the keel and the ship. She might never live to
+be launched. Some of these sneaking loafers on our side
+may blow her up before the submarines get a chance at
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There he was, speaking of submarines once more! She
+shivered, and she looked at the clock and got up and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll try Mrs. Widdicombe now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me go along,&rdquo; said Davidge.</p>
+<p>But she shook her head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken enough of your life&ndash;&ndash;for
+the present.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Trying to concoct a felicitous reply, he achieved only an
+eloquent silence. He put her and her luggage aboard a taxicab,
+and then she gave him her most cordial hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could never hope to thank you enough,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and
+I won&rsquo;t begin to try. Send me your address when you have
+one, and I&rsquo;ll mail you Mrs. Widdicombe&rsquo;s confidential
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_118' name='page_118'></a>118</span>
+telephone number. I do want to see you soon again, unless
+you&rsquo;ve had enough of me for a lifetime.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did very handsomely by the lead she gave him:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t have enough&ndash;&ndash;not in a lifetime.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The taxi-driver snipped the strands of their gaze as he
+whisked her away.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise felt a forenoon elation in the cool air and the
+bright streets, thick with men and women in herds hurrying
+to their patriotic tasks, and a multitude of officers and enlisted
+men seeking their desks. She was here to join them, and she
+hoped that it would not be too hard to find some job with a
+little thrill of service in it.</p>
+<p>As she went through Georgetown now M Street was different&ndash;&ndash;full
+of marketers and of briskness. The old bridge
+was crowded. As her car swooped up the hills and skirted the
+curves to Polly Widdicombe&rsquo;s she began to be afraid again.
+But she was committed to the adventure and she was eager
+for the worst of it. She found the house without trouble
+and saw in the white grove of columns Polly herself, bidding
+good-by to her husband, whose car was waiting at the foot
+of the steps.</p>
+<p>Polly hailed Marie Louise with cries of such delight that
+before the cab had made the circle and drawn up at the steps
+the hunted look was gone and youth come back to Marie
+Louise&rsquo;s anxious smile. Polly kissed her and presented her
+husband, pointing to the gold leaves on his shoulders with
+militaristic pride.</p>
+<p>Widdicombe blushed and said: &ldquo;Fearless desk-fighter has
+to hurry off to battle with ruthless stenographers. Such are
+the horrors of war!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He insisted on paying Marie Louise&rsquo;s driver, though she
+said, &ldquo;Women will never be free so long as men insist on
+paying all their bills.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly said: &ldquo;Hush, or the brute will set me free!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He kissed Polly, waved to Marie Louise, stepped into his
+car, and shot away.</p>
+<p>Polly watched him with devout eyes and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor boy! he&rsquo;s dying to get across into the trenches, but
+they won&rsquo;t take him because he&rsquo;s a little near-sighted, thank
+God! And he works like a dog, day and night.&rdquo; Then she
+returned to the rites of hospitality. &ldquo;Had your breakfast?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_119' name='page_119'></a>119</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;At the station.&rdquo; The truth for once coincided very
+pleasantly with convenience.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I know what you want,&rdquo; said Polly, &ldquo;a bath and
+a nap. After that all-night train-trip you ought to be a
+wreck.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly led her to a welcoming room that would have been
+quite pretty enough if it had had only a bed and a chair.
+Marie Louise felt as if she had come out of the wilderness into
+a city of refuge. Polly had an engagement, a committee
+meeting of women war-workers, and would not be back until
+luncheon-time. Marie Louise steeped herself in a hot tub,
+then in a long sweet sleep in a real bed. She was wakened
+by the voices of children, and looked out from her window to
+see the Widdicombe tots drilling in a company of three
+with a drum, a flag, and a wooden gun. The American army
+was not much bigger compared with the European nations in
+arms, but it would grow.</p>
+<p>Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman
+idea that was claiming half of the war, the true
+squaw-spirit that takes up the drudgery at home while the
+braves go out to swap missiles with the enemy. When Marie
+Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to get
+into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of
+opportunities.</p>
+<p>At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer
+was coming over from Washington. He had asked
+for sittings, and she had acceded to his request.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never can get photographs enough of my homely self,&rdquo;
+said Polly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m always hoping that by some accident the
+next one will make me look as I want to look&ndash;&ndash;make ithers
+see me as I see mysel&rsquo;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie
+Louise must pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented
+at last, to quiet her. They spent a harrowing afternoon
+striking attitudes all over the place, indoors and out, standing,
+sitting, heads and half-lengths, profile and three-quarters
+and full face. Their muscles ached with the struggle to
+assume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul.</p>
+<p>The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation
+were far-reaching for Marie Louise.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_120' name='page_120'></a>120</span></div>
+<p>According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new
+photographs appeared the following Sunday in each of the four
+newspapers. The Sunday after that Marie Louise&rsquo;s likeness
+appeared with &ldquo;Dolly Madison&rsquo;s&rdquo; and Jean Elliott&rsquo;s syndicated
+letters on &ldquo;The Week in Washington&rdquo; in Sunday
+supplements throughout the country. Every now and then
+her likeness popped out at her from <i>Town and Country</i>, <i>Vogue</i>,
+<i>Harper&rsquo;s Bazaar</i>, <i>The Spur</i>, what not?</p>
+<p>One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake
+Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the
+Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of
+Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape,
+but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial drawing-room.</p>
+<p>He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it
+&ldquo;Mamise&rdquo; with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s in this country now, the paper says,&rdquo; said Jake.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s in Washington, and if I was you I&rsquo;d write her a little
+letter astin&rsquo; her is she our sister.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that &ldquo;our.&rdquo;
+The more Jake considered the matter the less he liked the
+thought of waiting for a letter to go and an answer to come.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Meet &rsquo;em face to face; that&rsquo;s me!&rdquo; he declared at last.
+&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll just take a trip to the little old capital m&rsquo;self.
+I can tell the rest the c&rsquo;mittee I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to put a few things up
+to some them Senators and Congersmen. That&rsquo;ll get my
+expenses paid for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There simply was nobody that Jake Nuddle would not
+cheat, if he could.</p>
+<p>His always depressing wife suggested: &ldquo;Supposin&rsquo; the lady
+says she ain&rsquo;t Mamise, how you goin&rsquo; to prove she is? You
+never seen her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake snarled at her for a fool, but he knew that she was right.
+He resisted the dismal necessity as long as he could, and then
+extended one of his most cordial invitations:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, hell! I reckon I&rsquo;ll have to drag you along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He grumbled and cursed his fate and resolved to make
+Mamise pay double for ruining his excursion.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_121' name='page_121'></a>121</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_V_1' id='CHAPTER_V_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+<p>For a time Marie Louise had the solace of being busy
+and of nibbling at the edge of great occasions. The
+nation was reconstituting its whole life, and Washington was
+the capital of all the Allied peoples, their brazen serpent and
+their promise of salvation. Almost everybody was doing
+with his or her might what his or her hand found to do.
+Repetition and contradiction of effort abounded; there was
+every confusion of counsel and of action. But the Republic
+was gathering itself for a mighty leap into the arena. For
+the first time women were being not merely permitted, but
+pleaded with, to lend their aid.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise rolled bandages at a Red Cross room presided
+over by a pleasant widow, Mrs. Perry Merithew, with a son
+in the aviation, who was forever needing bandages. Mamise
+tired of these, bought a car and joined the Women&rsquo;s Motor
+Corps. She had a collision with a reckless wretch named
+&ldquo;Pet&rdquo; Bettany, and resigned. She helped with big festivals,
+toiled day and night at sweaters, and finally bought herself
+a knitting-machine and spun out half a dozen pairs of socks
+a day, by keeping a sweatshop pace for sweatshop hours.
+She was trying to find a more useful job. The trouble was
+that everybody wanted to be at something, to get into a
+uniform of some sort, to join the universal mobilization.</p>
+<p>She went out little of evenings, preferring to keep herself
+in the seclusion of the Rosslyn home. Gradually her fears
+subsided and she felt that her welcome was wearing through.
+She began to look for a place to live. Washington was in a
+panic of rentals. Apartments cost more than houses. A
+modest creature who had paid seventy-five dollars a month
+for a little flat let it for five hundred a month for the duration
+of the war. A gorgeous Sultana who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month
+apartment rented it for a thousand
+dollars a month &ldquo;for the duration.&rdquo; Marie Louise had money
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_122' name='page_122'></a>122</span>
+enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would
+buy.</p>
+<p>She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices.
+She took up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books
+on system and efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.</p>
+<p>Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an
+intermittent fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was
+trying to do his bit, but he was lost in the maelstrom swirling
+through the channels of official life. He would come to town
+for a few days, wait about, fuming, and return in disgust to
+his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism that pulled him
+back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he lost
+several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because
+their hours clashed with Marie Louise&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel
+an invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s. Little as he knew
+of the eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the
+famous name of Prothero. He had spoken with reverence
+always of her late husband, one of the rebuilders of the
+American navy, a voice crying in the wilderness for a revival
+of the ancient glories of the merchant marine. Davidge had
+never met him or his widow. He felt that he could not
+refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects
+to the relict of his idol.</p>
+<p>But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom
+everybody had heard of, had heard of him. When he entered
+her door on the designated evening his riddle was answered.</p>
+<p>The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on
+the console a little envelope which he proffered on his tray.
+The envelope was about the size of those that new-born
+parents use to inclose the proclamation of the advent of a new-born
+infant. The card inside Davidge&rsquo;s envelope carried the
+legend, &ldquo;Miss Webling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced
+him. There indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a
+majestic granddam in a coronet of white hair.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it.
+She clasped his and passed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a
+character:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero pressed his hand and kept it while she said:
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_123' name='page_123'></a>123</span>
+&ldquo;It is like Marie Louise to bring youth to cheer up an old
+crone like me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge muffed the opening horribly. Instead of saying
+something brilliant about how young Mrs. Prothero looked,
+he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Youth? I&rsquo;m a hundred years old.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are!&rdquo; Mrs. Prothero cried. &ldquo;Then how old does
+that make me, in the Lord&rsquo;s name&ndash;&ndash;a million?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge could not even recover the foot he had put in it.
+By looking foolish and keeping silent he barely saved himself
+from adding the other foot. Mrs. Prothero smiled at his
+discomfiture.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t worry. I&rsquo;m too ancient to be caught by pretty
+speeches&ndash;&ndash;or to like the men who have &rsquo;em always ready.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She pressed his hand again and turned to welcome the
+financial Cyclops, James Dyckman, and his huge wife, and
+Captain Fargeton, a foreign military attach&eacute; with service
+chevrons and wound-chevrons and a <i>croix de guerre</i>, and a wife,
+who had been Mildred Tait.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All that and an American spouse!&rdquo; said Davidge to
+Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you never had an American spouse?&rdquo; she asked,
+brazenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not one!&rdquo; he confessed.</p>
+<p>Major and Polly Widdicombe had come in with Marie
+Louise, and Davidge drifted into their circle. The great room
+filled gradually with men of past or future fame, and the poor
+women who were concerned in enduring its acquisition.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was radiant in mood and queenly in attire.
+Davidge was startled by the magnificence of her jewelry.
+Some of it was of old workmanship, royal heirloomry. Her
+accent was decidedly English, yet her race was undoubtedly
+American. The many things about her that had puzzled him
+subconsciously began to clamor at least for the attention of
+curiosity. He watched her making the best of herself, as a
+skilful woman does when she is all dressed up in handsome
+scenery among toplofty people.</p>
+<p>Polly was describing the guests as they came in:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s Colonel Harvey Forbes. His name has been sent
+to Congress for approval as a brigadier-general. I knew him
+in the midst of the wildest scandal&ndash;&ndash;remind me to tell you.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_124' name='page_124'></a>124</span>
+He was only a captain then. He&rsquo;ll probably end as a king
+or something. This war is certainly good to some people.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge watched Marie Louise studying the somber officer.
+He was a bit jealous, shamed by his own civilian clothes.
+Suddenly Marie Louise&rsquo;s smile at Polly&rsquo;s chatter stopped short,
+shriveled, then returned to her face with a look of effort.
+Her muscles seemed to be determined that her lips should
+not droop.</p>
+<p>Davidge heard the butler announce:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Clifton-Wyatt and General Sir Hector Havendish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge wondered which of the two names could have so
+terrified Marie Louise. Naturally he supposed that it was the
+man&rsquo;s. He turned to study the officer in his British uniform.
+He saw a tall, loose-jointed, jovial man of horsy look and
+carriage, and no hint of mystery&ndash;&ndash;one would say an intolerance
+of mystery.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt was equally amiable. She laughed and
+wrung the hands of Mrs. Prothero. They were like two school-girls
+met in another century.</p>
+<p>Davidge noted that Marie Louise turned her back and
+listened with extraordinary interest to Major Widdicombe&rsquo;s
+old story about an Irishman who did or said something or
+other. Davidge heard Mrs. Prothero say to Lady Clifton-Wyatt,
+with all the joy in the world:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who do you suppose is here but our Marie Louise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our Marie Louise?&rdquo; Lady Clifton-Wyatt echoed, with a
+slight chill.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Marie Louise Webling. It was at her house that I
+met you. Where has the child got to? There she is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without raising her voice she focused it between Marie
+Louise&rsquo;s shoulder-blades.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Marie Louise, my dear!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on
+casters pulled forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s limber attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously
+hostile. She looked as if she would turn Marie Louise to
+stone with a Medusa glare, but she evidently felt that she had
+no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s home;
+so she bowed and murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, yis! How are you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To Davidge&rsquo;s amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_125' name='page_125'></a>125</span>
+the rebuff in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully.
+Then, to Davidge&rsquo;s confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+marched on him with a gush of cordiality as if she had been
+looking for him around the Seven Seas. She remembered him,
+called him by name and told him that she had seen his pickchah
+in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new fleet.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but
+she had passed through so many women&rsquo;s wars that she had
+learned to ignore them even when&ndash;&ndash;especially when&ndash;&ndash;her
+drawing-room was the battleground.</p>
+<p>Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization
+of the butler.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward
+the dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was
+floating along the current at the elbow of the pretty young
+girl, said to Davidge:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you taking me out or&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he
+mumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&ndash;&ndash;I am sorry, but&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;Miss Webling&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! Ah!&rdquo; said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. It was a very
+short &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; and a very long &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; a sort of gliding, crushing
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; It went over him like a tank, leaving him flat.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt reached Sir Hector&rsquo;s arm in a few strides
+and unhooked him from the girl&ndash;&ndash;also the girl from him. The
+girl was grateful. Sir Hector was used to disappointments.</p>
+<p>Davidge went to Marie Louise, who stood lonely and distraught.
+He felt ashamed of his word &ldquo;sorry&rdquo; and hoped
+she hadn&rsquo;t heard it. Silently and crudely he angled his
+arm, and she took it and went along with him in a somnambulism.</p>
+<p>Davidge, manlike, tried to cheer up his elbow-mate by a
+compliment. A man&rsquo;s first aid to a woman in distress is a
+compliment or a few pats of the hand. He said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is the second big dinner you and I have attended.
+There were bushels of flowers between us before, but I&rsquo;d
+rather see your face than a ton of roses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The compliment fell out like a ton of coal. He did not like
+it at all. She seemed not to have heard him, for she murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yis, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_126' name='page_126'></a>126</span></div>
+<p>Then, as the occultists say, he went into the silence. There
+is nothing busier than a silence at a dinner. The effort
+to think with no outlet in speech kept up such a roaring in
+his head that he could hardly grasp what the rest were saying.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt sat at Davidge&rsquo;s right and kept invading
+his quiet communion with Marie Louise by making
+remarks of the utmost graciousness somehow fermented&ndash;&ndash;like
+wine turned vinegar.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder if you remember when we met in London,
+Mr. Davidge? It was just after the poor <i>Lusitania</i> was sunk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So it was,&rdquo; said Davidge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was at Sir Joseph Webling&rsquo;s. You knew he was dead,
+didn&rsquo;t you? Or did you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Miss Webling told me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, did she! I was curious to know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She cast a look past him at Marie Louise and saw that the
+girl was about ready to make a scene. She smiled and
+deferred further torture.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero supervened. She had the beautiful theory
+that the way to make her guests happy was to get them to
+talking about themselves. She tried to draw Davidge out
+of his shell. But he talked about her husband instead, and of
+the great work he had done for the navy. He turned the
+tables of graciousness on her. Her nod recognized the
+chivalry; her lips smiled with pride in her husband&rsquo;s praise;
+her eyes glistened with an old regret made new. &ldquo;He would
+have been useful now,&rdquo; she sighed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new
+navy,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;The thing we haven&rsquo;t got and have
+got to get is a merchant marine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself.
+He was still going strong when the dinner was finished.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women
+away with her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone.</p>
+<p>Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room
+with a kind of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly.
+She cast him a look that seemed to cry &ldquo;Help!&rdquo; He wondered
+what the feud could be that threw Miss Webling into
+such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the thought that
+she had a yellow streak in her.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_127' name='page_127'></a>127</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VI_1' id='CHAPTER_VI_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was
+kept in order by the presence of men. She knew that the
+least charming of attributes in masculine eyes are the female
+feline, the gift and art of claws.</p>
+<p>Men can be catty, too&ndash;&ndash;tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline
+when they are not on their good behavior. There are times
+when the warning, &ldquo;Gentlemen, there are ladies present,&rdquo;
+restores them to order as quickly as the entrance of a
+teacher turns a school-room of young savages into an assembly
+of young saints.</p>
+<p>The women in Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s drawing-room could not
+hear any of the words the men mixed with their smoke, but
+they could hear now and then a muffled explosion of laughter
+of a quality that indicated what had provoked it.</p>
+<p>The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by
+their isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was
+like getting their minds out of tight corsets. They were not
+impatient for the men&ndash;&ndash;as some of the men may have imagined.
+These women were of an age where they had something else
+to think of besides men. They had careers to make or keep
+among women as well as the men among men.</p>
+<p>The servants kept them on guard till the coffee, tobacco,
+and liqueurs were distributed. Then recess was declared.
+Marie Louise found herself on a huge tapestried divan provided
+with deep, soft cushions that held her like a quicksands.
+On one side of her was the mountainous Mrs. Dyckman
+resembling a stack of cushions cased in silk; on the other was
+Mildred Tait Fargeton, whose father had been ambassador
+to France.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise listened to their chatter with a frantic impatience.
+Polly was heliographing ironic messages with her
+eyes. Polly was hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler,
+who was furious at the Administration because it did not put
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_128' name='page_128'></a>128</span>
+all its transportation problems in her husband&rsquo;s hands. She
+would not have intrusted him with the buying of a spool of
+thread; but that was different.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero was monopolized by Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+Marie Louise could see that she herself was the theme of the
+talk, for Mrs. Prothero kept casting startled glances Marie-Louise-ward,
+and Lady Clifton-Wyatt glances of baleful
+stealth.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had proved often enough that she was no
+coward, but even the brave turn poltroon when they fight
+without a sense of justification. Her pride told her that she
+ought to cross over to Lady Clifton-Wyatt and demand that
+she speak up. But her sense of guilt robbed her of her courage.
+And that oath she had given to Mr. Verrinder without the
+least reluctance now loomed before her as the greatest mistake
+of her life. Her sword and shield were both in pawn.</p>
+<p>She gave herself up for lost and had only one hope, that
+the men would not come in&ndash;&ndash;especially that Ross Davidge
+would not come in in time to learn what Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+was so eager to publish. She gave Mrs. Prothero up for lost,
+too, and Polly. But she wanted to keep Ross Davidge fond
+of her.</p>
+<p>Then in a lull Mrs. Prothero spoke up sharply:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I simply can&rsquo;t believe it, my dear. I don&rsquo;t know that
+I ever saw a German spy, but that child is not one. I&rsquo;d stake
+my life on it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now the avalanche!&rdquo; thought Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>The word &ldquo;spy&rdquo; was beginning to have more than an
+academic or fictional interest to Americans, and it caught
+the ear of every person present.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Dyckman and Mme. Fargeton sat up as straight as
+their curves permitted and gasped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A German spy! Who? Where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly Widdicombe sprang to her feet and darted to Mrs.
+Prothero&rsquo;s side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, how lovely! Tell me who she is! I&rsquo;m dying to shoot
+a spy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise sickened at the bloodthirstiness of Polly the
+insouciante.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero tried to put down the riot of interest by
+saying:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_129' name='page_129'></a>129</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s nothing. Lady Clifton-Wyatt is just joking.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt was at bay. She shot a glance at
+Marie Louise and insisted:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed I&rsquo;m not! I tell you she is a spy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s a spy?&rdquo; Polly demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Webling,&rdquo; said Lady Clifton-Wyatt.</p>
+<p>Polly began to giggle; then she frowned with disappointment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I thought you meant it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do mean it, and if you&rsquo;ll take my advice you&rsquo;ll be
+warned in time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly turned, expecting to find Marie Louise showing her
+contemptuous amusement, but the look she saw on Marie
+Louise&rsquo;s face was disconcerting. Polly&rsquo;s loyalty remained
+staunch. She hated Lady Clifton-Wyatt anyway, and the
+thought that she might be telling the truth made her a little
+more hatable. Polly stormed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t permit you to slander my best friend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt replied, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t slahnda hah, and
+if she is yaw best friend&ndash;&ndash;well&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt hated Polly and was glad of the weapon
+against her. Polly felt a sudden terrific need of retorting
+with a blow. Men had never given up the fist on the mouth
+as the simple, direct answer to an insult too complicated for
+any other retort. She wanted to slap Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s
+face. But she did not know how to fight. Perhaps women
+will acquire the male prerogative of the smash in the jaw
+along with the other once exclusive masculine privileges. It
+will do them no end of good and help to clarify all life for them.
+But for the present Polly could only groan, &ldquo;Agh!&rdquo; and turn
+to throw an arm about Marie Louise and drag her forward.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d believe one word of Marie Louise against a thousand
+of yours,&rdquo; she declared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very well&ndash;&ndash;ahsk hah, then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly was crying mad, and madder than ever because she
+hated herself for crying when she got mad. She almost
+sobbed now to Marie Louise, &ldquo;Tell her it&rsquo;s a dirty, rotten lie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had been dragged to her feet. She temporized,
+&ldquo;What has she sai-said?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly snickered nervously, &ldquo;Oh, nothing&ndash;&ndash;except that you
+were a German spy.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_130' name='page_130'></a>130</span></div>
+<p>And now somewhere, somehow, Marie Louise found the
+courage of desperation. She laughed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Clifton-Wyatt is notori&ndash;&ndash;famous for her quaint
+sense of humor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt sneered, &ldquo;Could one expect a spy to
+admit it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise smiled patiently. &ldquo;Probably not. But
+surely even you would hardly insist that denying it proves it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This sophistry was too tangled for Polly. She spoke up:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s have the details, Lady Clifton-Wyatt&ndash;&ndash;if you don&rsquo;t
+mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; the chorus murmured.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt braced herself. &ldquo;Well, in the first place
+Miss Webling is not Miss Webling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but I am,&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt gasped, &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to pretend
+that&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you read the will?&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, of course not, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It says there that I was their daughter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;ll not quibble. Legally you may have been, but
+actually you were their adopted child.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yis?&rdquo; said Marie Louise. &ldquo;And where did they find me?
+Had you heard?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Since you force me to it, I must say that it is generally
+believed that you were the natural daughter of Sir Joseph.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was tremendously relieved by having something
+that she could deny. She laughed with a genuineness
+that swung the credulity all her way. She asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who was my mother&ndash;&ndash;my natural mother, could you
+tell me? I really ought to know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She is believed to have been a&ndash;&ndash;a native of Australia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good Heavens! You don&rsquo;t mean a kangaroo?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An actress playing in Vienna.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I am relieved! And Sir Joseph was my father&ndash;&ndash;yes.
+Do go on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whether Sir Joseph was your father or not, he was born
+in Germany and so was his wife, and they took a false oath
+of allegiance to his Majesty. All the while they were loyal
+only to the Kaiser. They worked for him, spied for him. It is
+said that the Kaiser had promised to make Sir Joseph one
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_131' name='page_131'></a>131</span>
+of the rulers over England when he captured the island. Sir
+Joseph was to have any castle he wanted and untold wealth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was I to have?&rdquo; Marie Louise was able to mock
+her. &ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t I to have at least Westminster Abbey to live
+in? And one of the crown princes for a husband?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt lost her temper and her bearings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heaven knows what you were promised, but you did your
+best to earn it, whatever it was.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Prothero lost patience. &ldquo;Really, my dear Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt, this is all getting beyond me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt grew scarlet, too. She spoke with the
+wrath of a Tisiphone whipping herself to a frenzy. &ldquo;I will
+bring you proofs. This creature was a paid secret agent, a
+go-between for Sir Joseph and the Wilhelmstrasse. She carried
+messages. She went into the slums of Whitechapel disguised
+as a beggar to meet the conspirators. She carried them
+lists of ships with their cargoes, dates of sailing, destinations.
+She carried great sums of money. She was the paymaster
+of the spies. Her hands are red with the blood of British
+sailors and women and children. She grew so bold that at last
+she attracted the attention of even Scotland Yard. She was
+followed, traced to Sir Joseph&rsquo;s home. It was found that she
+lived at his house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One of the spies, named Easling or Oesten, was her lover.
+He was caught and met his deserts before a firing-squad in the
+Tower. His confession implicated Sir Joseph. The police
+raided his place. A terrific fight ensued. He resisted arrest.
+He tried to shoot one of our police. The bullet went wild and
+killed his wife. Before he could fire again he was shot down
+by one of our men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The astonishing transformations the story had undergone
+in its transit from gossip to gossip stunned Marie Louise. The
+memory of the reality saddened her beyond laughter. Her
+distress was real, but she had self-control enough to focus
+it on Lady Clifton-Wyatt and murmur:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor thing, she is quite mad!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is nothing that so nearly drives one insane as to be
+accused of insanity.</p>
+<p>The prosecutrix almost strangled on her indignation at
+Marie Louise&rsquo;s calm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The effrontery of this woman is unendurable, Mrs.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_132' name='page_132'></a>132</span>
+Prothero. If you believe her, you must permit me to leave.
+I know what I am saying. I have had what I tell you from
+the best authority. Of course, it may sound insane, but wait
+until you learn what the German secret agents have been doing
+in America for years and what they are doing now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There had been publication enough of the sickening duplicity
+of ambassadors and attach&eacute;s to lead the Americans to
+believe that Teutonism meant anything revolting. Mrs.
+Prothero was befuddled at this explosion in her quiet home.
+She asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But surely all this has never been published, has it?
+I think we should have heard of it here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t
+publish the accounts of the submarines we sink, do we? No
+more do we tell the Germans what spies of theirs we have
+captured. And, since Sir Joseph and his wife were dead, there
+would have been no profit in publishing broadcast the story
+of the battle. So they agreed to let it be known that they
+died peacefully or rather painfully in their beds, of ptomaine
+poisoning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; said Mrs. Prothero. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I read.
+That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve always understood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now, curiously, as often happens in court, the discovery
+that a witness has stumbled on one truth in a pack of lies
+renders all he has said authentic and shifts the guilt to the
+other side. Marie Louise could feel the frost of suspicion
+against her forming in the air.</p>
+<p>Polly made one more onset: &ldquo;But, tell me, Lady Clifton-Wyatt,
+where was Marie Louise during all this Wild West
+End pistol-play?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In her room with her lover,&rdquo; snarled Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+&ldquo;The servants saw her there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This threw a more odious light on Marie Louise. She was
+not merely a nice clean spy, but a wanton.</p>
+<p>Polly groaned: &ldquo;Tell that to Scotland Yard! I&rsquo;d never
+believe it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Scotland Yard knows it without my telling,&rdquo; said Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how did Marie Louise come to escape and get to
+America?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because England did not want to shoot a woman, especially
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_133' name='page_133'></a>133</span>
+not a young woman of a certain prettiness. So they let her
+go, when she swore that she would never return to England.
+But they did not trust her. She is under observation now!
+Your home is watched, my dear Mrs. Widdicombe, and I
+dare say there is a man on guard outside now, my dear Mrs.
+Prothero.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This sent a chill along every spine. Marie Louise was
+frightened out of her own brief bravado.</p>
+<p>There was a lull in the trial while everybody reveled in
+horror. Then Mrs. Prothero spoke in a judicial tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now, Miss Webling, please tell us your side of all this.
+What have you to say in your own behalf?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise&rsquo;s mouth suddenly turned dry as bark; her
+tongue was like a dead leaf. She was inarticulate with remembrance
+of her oath to Verrinder. She just managed to whisper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It sounded like an autumn leaf rasping across a stone.
+Polly cried out in agony:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Marie Louise!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise shook her head and could neither think nor
+speak. There was a hush of waiting. It was broken by the
+voices of the men strolling in together. They were utterly
+unwelcome. They stopped and stared at the women all
+staring at Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>Seeing Davidge about to ask what the tableau stood for, she
+found voice to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Davidge, would you be so good as to take me home&ndash;&ndash;to
+Mrs. Widdicombe&rsquo;s, that is. I&ndash;&ndash;I am a little faint.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Delighted! I mean&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;m sorry&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;d be glad,&rdquo; he stammered,
+eager to be at her service, yet embarrassed by the
+sudden appeal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll pardon me, Mrs. Prothero, for running away!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Mrs. Prothero, still dazed.</p>
+<p>He bowed to her, and all round. Marie Louise nodded and
+whispered, &ldquo;Good night!&rdquo; and moved toward the door
+waveringly. Davidge&rsquo;s heart leaped with pity for her.</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt checked him as he hurried past her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Mr. Davidge, I&rsquo;m stopping at the Shoreham. Won&rsquo;t
+you drop in and have a cup of tea with me to-morrow at
+hahf pahst fah?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you! Yes!&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_134' name='page_134'></a>134</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VII_1' id='CHAPTER_VII_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The intended victim of Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s little lynching-bee
+walked away, holding her head high. But she felt the
+noose still about her neck and wondered when the rope would
+draw her back and up.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise marched through Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s hall in excellent
+form, with just the right amount of dizziness to justify
+her escape on the plea of sudden illness. The butler, like a
+benign destiny, opened the door silently and let her out into
+the open as once before in London a butler had opened a
+door and let her into the welcome refuge of walls.</p>
+<p>She gulped the cool night air thirstily, and it gave her courage.
+But it gave her no wisdom. She had indeed got away
+from Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s direct accusation of being a spy
+and she had brought with her unscathed the only man whose
+good opinion was important to her. But she did not know
+what she wanted to do with him, except that she did not want
+him to fall into Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s hands&ndash;&ndash;in which she
+had left her reputation.</p>
+<p>Polly Widdicombe would have gone after Marie Louise
+forthwith, but Polly did not intend to leave her pet foewoman
+in possession of the field&ndash;&ndash;not that she loved Marie Louise
+more, but that she loved Lady Clifton-Wyatt less. Polly
+was dazed and bewildered by Marie Louise&rsquo;s defection, but
+she would not accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s version of this
+story or of any other.</p>
+<p>Besides, Polly gleaned that Marie Louise wanted to be
+alone, and she knew that the best gift friendship can bestow
+at times is solitude. The next best gift is defense
+in absence. Polly announced that she would not permit
+her friend to be traduced; and Lady Clifton-Wyatt, seeing
+that the men had flocked in from the dining-room and
+knowing that men always discount one woman&rsquo;s attack on
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_135' name='page_135'></a>135</span>
+another as mere cattiness, assumed her most angelic mien
+and changed the subject.</p>
+<hr class='tb' />
+<p>As usual in retreats, the first problem was transportation.
+Marie Louise found herself and Davidge outside Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s
+door, with no means of getting to Rosslyn. She had
+come in the Widdicombe car; Davidge had come in a hotel
+cab and sent it away. Luckily at last a taxi returning to the
+railroad terminal whizzed by. Davidge yelled in vain. Then
+he put his two fingers to his mouth and let out a short blast
+that brought the taxi-driver round. In accordance with the
+traffic rules, he had to make the circuit of the big statue-crowned
+circle in front of Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s home, one of those
+numerous hubs that give Washington the effect of what some
+one called &ldquo;revolving streets.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When he drew up at the curb Davidge&rsquo;s first question
+was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How&rsquo;s your gasolene supply?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Full up, boss.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise laughed. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to spend another
+night in a taxi with me, I see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge writhed at this deduction. He started to say,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d be glad to spend the rest of my life in a taxi with you.&rdquo;
+That sounded a little too flamboyant, especially with a driver
+listening in. So he said nothing but &ldquo;Huh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He explained to the driver the route to Grinden Hall, and
+they set forth.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had a dilemma of her own. Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+had had the last word, and it had been an invitation
+to Davidge to call on her. Worse yet, he had accepted it.
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s purpose was, of course, to rob Marie
+Louise of this last friend. Perhaps the wretch had a sentimental
+interest in Davidge, too. She was a widow and a man-grabber;
+she still had a tyrannic beauty and a greed of conquest.
+Marie Louise was determined that Davidge should
+not fall into her clutches, but she could hardly exact a promise
+from him to stay away.</p>
+<p>The taxi was crossing the aqueduct bridge before she could
+brave the point. She was brazen enough to say, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll
+accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s invitation to tea, of course?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I suppose so,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;No American woman
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_136' name='page_136'></a>136</span>
+can resist a lord; so how could an American man resist a
+Lady?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This helpless syllable expressed another defeat for Marie
+Louise. When they reached the house she bade him good
+night without making any arrangement for a good morrow,
+though Davidge held her hand decidedly longer than ever
+before.</p>
+<p>She stood on the portico and watched his cab drive off.
+She gazed toward Washington and did not see the dreamy
+constellation it made with the shaft of the Monument ghostly
+luminous as if with a phosphorescence of its own. She felt
+an outcast indeed. She imagined Polly hurrying back to
+ask questions that could not be dodged any longer. She had
+no right to defend herself offensively from the rightful demands
+of a friend and hostess. Besides, the laws of hospitality
+would not protect her from Polly&rsquo;s temper. Polly would have
+a perfect right to order her from the house. And she would,
+too, when she knew everything. It would be best to decamp
+before being asked to.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise whirled and sped into the house, rang for the
+maid, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My trunks! Please have them brought down&ndash;&ndash;or up,
+from wherever they are, will you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your trunks, miss!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And a taxicab. I shall have to leave at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But&ndash;&ndash;oh, I am sorry. Shall I help you pack?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, no&ndash;&ndash;yes&ndash;&ndash;no!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The maid went out with eyes popping, wondering what
+earthquake had sent the guest home alone for such a headlong
+exit.</p>
+<p>Things flew in the drowsy house, and Marie Louise&rsquo;s chamber
+looked like the show-room of a commercial traveler for a
+linen-house when Polly appeared at the door and gasped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What in the name of&ndash;&ndash;I didn&rsquo;t know you were sick enough
+to be delirious!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She came forward through an archipelago of clothes to
+where Marie Louise was bending over a trunk. Polly took
+an armload of things away from her and put them back in the
+highboy. As she set her arms akimbo and stood staring at
+Marie Louise with a lovable and loving insolence, she heard
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_137' name='page_137'></a>137</span>
+the sound of a car rattling round the driveway, and her first
+words were:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s coming here at this hour?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the taxi for me,&rdquo; Marie Louise explained.</p>
+<p>Polly turned to the maid, &ldquo;Go down and send it away&ndash;&ndash;no,
+tell the driver to go to the asylum for a strait-jacket.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The maid smiled and left. Marie Louise was afraid to
+believe her own hopes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean you want me to stay, do you&ndash;&ndash;not after
+what that woman said?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you imagine for a moment,&rdquo; returned Polly, &ldquo;that I&rsquo;d
+ever believe a word that cat could utter? Good Lord! if Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt told me it was raining and I could see it was,
+I&rsquo;d know it wasn&rsquo;t and put down my umbrella.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise rejoiced at the trust implied, but she could
+not make a fool of so loyal a friend. She spoke with difficulty:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What if what she said was the truth, or, anyway, a kind
+of burlesque of it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Marie Louise!&rdquo; Polly gasped, and plounced into a chair.
+&ldquo;Tell me the truth this minute, the true truth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was perishing for a confidante. She had gone
+about as far without one as a normal woman can. She sat
+wondering how to begin, twirling her rings on her fingers.
+&ldquo;Well, you see&ndash;&ndash;you see&ndash;&ndash;it is true that I&rsquo;m not Sir Joseph&rsquo;s
+daughter. I was born in a little village&ndash;&ndash;in America&ndash;&ndash;Wakefield&ndash;&ndash;out
+there in the Middle West. I ran away from home,
+and&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She hesitated, blanched, blushed, skipped over the years
+she tried not to think of and managed never to speak of.
+She came down to:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, anyway, at last I was in Berlin&ndash;&ndash;on the stage&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were an actress?&rdquo; Polly gasped.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise confessed, &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;d hardly say that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She told Polly what she had told Mr. Verrinder of the appearance
+of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, of their thrill at
+her resemblance to their dead daughter, of their plea that she
+leave the stage and enter their family, of her new life, and
+the outbreak of the war.</p>
+<p>Major Widdicombe pounded on the door and said: &ldquo;Are
+you girls going to talk all night? I&rsquo;ve got to get up at seven
+and save the country.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_138' name='page_138'></a>138</span></div>
+<p>Polly cried to him, &ldquo;Go away,&rdquo; and to Marie Louise, &ldquo;Go
+on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise began again, but just as she reached the first
+suspicions of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s loyalty she remembered the oath
+she had plighted to Verrinder and stopped short.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I forgot! I can&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly groaned: &ldquo;Oh, my God! You&rsquo;re not going to stop
+there! I loathe serials.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise shook her head. &ldquo;If only I could tell you;
+but I just can&rsquo;t! That&rsquo;s all; I can&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly turned her eyes up in despair. &ldquo;Well, I might as
+well go to bed, I suppose. But I sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t sleep a wink. Tell
+me one thing, though. You weren&rsquo;t really a German spy,
+were you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no! Of course not! I loathe everything German.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, let the rest rest, then. So long as Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+is a liar I can stand the strain. If you had been a
+spy, I suppose I&rsquo;d have to shoot you or something; but so
+long as you&rsquo;re not, you don&rsquo;t budge out of this house. Is
+that understood?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise nodded with a pathetic gratitude, and Polly
+stamped a kiss on her brow like a notarial seal.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_139' name='page_139'></a>139</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VIII_1' id='CHAPTER_VIII_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The next morning&rsquo;s paper announced that spring had officially
+arrived and been recognized at the Capitol&ndash;&ndash;a certain
+Senator had taken off his wig. Washington accepted
+this as the sure sign that the weather was warm. It would
+not be officially autumn till that wig fell back into place.</p>
+<p>There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual
+flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts
+Avenue. The famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it,
+and flaunted little fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the
+Louise Home replied by setting their magnolia-trees on fire
+with flowers like lamps, flowers that hurried out ahead of
+their own leaves and then broke and covered the ground with
+great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy Terrace
+put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more gorgeous&ndash;&ndash;irises
+in a row of blue, blue footlights.</p>
+<p>The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses
+of an earlier r&eacute;gime, kept their state, had the last
+word, the word that could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria,
+wistful lavender clusters weeping from the trellises in
+languorous grace.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn,
+felt in the wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were
+brisk with hope. The river went its way in a more sparkling
+flow. The air blew from the very fountains of youth with a
+teasing blarney. She thought of Ross Davidge and smiled
+tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But she
+frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+She wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate
+that woman.</p>
+<p>Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that
+she had forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered
+her in the chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He
+was out. She pursued him by wire travel till she found him
+in an office of the Shipping Board. He talked on the corner of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_140' name='page_140'></a>140</span>
+a busy man&rsquo;s desk. She heard the busy man say with a
+taunting voice, &ldquo;A lady for you, Davidge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was
+in for it now, and she felt silly when she explained why she
+bothered him. But she was stubborn, too. When he understood,
+he laughed with the constraint of a man bandying enforced
+gallantries on another man&rsquo;s telephone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d hate to be as honest as all that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not honesty,&rdquo; she persisted. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s selfishness. I
+can&rsquo;t rest while the debt is on my mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was perplexed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to see several men on the
+Shipping Board. There&rsquo;s a big fight on between the wooden-ship
+fellows and the steel-ship men, and I&rsquo;m betwixt and between
+&rsquo;em. I won&rsquo;t have time to run out to see you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t dream of asking you. I was coming in to
+town, anyway.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! Well, then&ndash;&ndash;well&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;when can I meet you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whenever you say! The Willard at&ndash;&ndash;When shall you be
+free?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not before four and then only for half an hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Four it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fine! Thank you ever so much. I&rsquo;ll buy me a lot of
+steel with all that money you owe me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so
+used to the telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise
+could visualize Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting
+the important man whose office he had desecrated with
+this silly hammockese. She felt that she had made herself
+a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce with her
+highest trump and had not captured the king.</p>
+<p>Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+would be only to-day&rsquo;s battle. There would still be
+to-morrows and the day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had
+declared herself openly hostile to Marie Louise, and would
+get her sooner or later. Flight from Washington would be
+the only safety.</p>
+<p>But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She
+loved Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman
+to do important work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace.
+But she could not live on at Polly Widdicombe&rsquo;s
+forever.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_141' name='page_141'></a>141</span></div>
+<p>Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must
+find a nook of her own. And she would have to live in it all
+by herself. Who was there to live with? She felt horribly
+deserted in life. She had looked at numerous houses and
+apartments from time to time. Apartments were costlier and
+fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone, anyway,
+she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would
+more easily be kept aloof.</p>
+<p>She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort
+known as affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not
+even that. Places she had found not altogether odious before
+were rented now. Places that her heart went out to to-day
+proved to have been rented yesterday.</p>
+<p>Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed
+to Mr. Hailstorks:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, a carpenter made it&ndash;&ndash;so let it pass for a house. I&rsquo;ll
+take it if it has a floor. I&rsquo;m like Gelett Burgess: &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t so
+much care for a door, but this crawling around without
+touching the ground is getting to be quite a bore.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.</p>
+<p>He unlocked the door of somebody&rsquo;s tenantless ex-home
+with its lonely furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one
+does, on the chairs, rugs, pictures, and vases that other people
+have been born with, have achieved, or have had thrust upon
+them. She wondered, as one does, what sort of beings they
+could have been that had selected such things to live among,
+and what excuse they had had for them.</p>
+<p>Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her
+to the rear of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the
+expectable back yard, Marie Louise was startled to see a noble
+landscape leap into view. The house loomed over a precipitous
+descent into a great valley. A stream ran far below, and
+then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession of uplifting
+terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill superbly
+built up above the silver Thames.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever is all that?&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rock Creek Park, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Mr. Hailstorks, who had
+a sincere real-estately affection for parks, since they raised
+the price of adjoining property and made renting easier.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what&rsquo;s the price of all this grandeur?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only three hundred a month,&rdquo; said Mr. Hailstorks.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_142' name='page_142'></a>142</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Only!&rdquo; gasped Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will be four hundred in a week or two&ndash;&ndash;yes ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Hailstorks.</p>
+<p>So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.</p>
+<p>She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her
+private game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her.
+She needed one. The park, it occurred to her, was an excellent
+wilderness to get lost in&ndash;&ndash;with Ross Davidge.</p>
+<hr class='tb' />
+<p>She was late to her meeting with Davidge&ndash;&ndash;not unintentionally.
+He was waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking,
+when she drove up in the car she had bought for her Motor
+Corps work.</p>
+<p>He said what she hoped he would say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know you drove so well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She quoted a popular phrase: &ldquo;&lsquo;You don&rsquo;t know the half
+of it, dearie.&rsquo; Hop in, and I&rsquo;ll show you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew
+he thought of her. But he was not hero or coward enough to
+tell a woman that he had an engagement with another woman.
+She pretended to have forgotten that he had told her, though
+she could think of little else. She whisked round the corner of
+I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth Street, fast
+and far.</p>
+<p>She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could
+not make her out. She had a scared look that puzzled him.
+She was really thinking that she was the most unconscionable
+kidnapper that ever ran off with some other body&rsquo;s child. He
+could hardly dun her for the money, and she had apparently
+forgotten it again.</p>
+<p>They were well to the north when she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know Rock Creek Park?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;ve never been in it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you like a glimpse? I think it&rsquo;s the prettiest park
+in the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now
+becoming almost universal and gasped:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it&rsquo;s just about as short
+to go through the park. I mustn&rsquo;t make you late to Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s tea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_143' name='page_143'></a>143</span>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s mighty pretty along here.&rdquo; She turned into Blagdon
+Road and coasted down the long, many-turning dark glade.
+At the end she failed to steer to the south. The creek
+itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight through
+its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing
+charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank,
+curling and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests,
+over bridges and once more right through the bright flood.
+The creek scrambling among its piled-up boulders was too
+gay to suggest any amorous mood, and Marie Louise did
+not quite dare to drive the car down to the water&rsquo;s edge at
+any of the little green plateaus where picnics were being
+celebrated on the grass.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always lose my way in this park,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I expect
+I&rsquo;m lost now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She began to regret Davidge&rsquo;s approaching absence, with
+a strange loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to
+her. She sighed, hardly meaning to speak aloud, &ldquo;Too bad
+you&rsquo;re going away so soon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was startled to find that his departure meant something
+to her. He spoke with an affectionate reassurance.</p>
+<p>She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies
+and gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping.
+The &eacute;lan of rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise
+now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what we&rsquo;ll do. The next time I come to
+Washington you drive me over to my shipyard and I&rsquo;ll show
+you the new boat and the new yard for the rest of the flock.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be glorious. I should like to know something
+about ships.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can teach you all I know in a little while.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know all there is to know, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the
+old methods, but they&rsquo;re all done away with. The fabricated
+ship is an absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the
+old methods. What few ship-builders we had are trying to
+forget what they know. Everybody is green. We had to
+find out for ourselves and pass it along to the foremen, and
+they hand it out to the laborers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a
+ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_144' name='page_144'></a>144</span>
+out there&rsquo;ll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think
+it&rsquo;s raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade
+of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless
+policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide
+back with a broom.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he
+hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie
+Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive
+that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he
+realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided
+with a slump.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She rose at that. &ldquo;The day has passed when a man can
+apologize for talking business to a woman. I&rsquo;ve been in England
+for years, you know, and the women over there are doing
+all the men&rsquo;s work and getting better wages at it than the men
+ever did. After the war they&rsquo;ll never go back to their tatting
+and prattle. I&rsquo;m going to your shipyard and have a look-in,
+but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over
+a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I&rsquo;m going
+on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great!&rdquo; he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on
+the wheel. He apologized again for his roughness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll forgive anything except an apology,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored
+with a blow as with an accolade she saw by her watch that
+it was after six.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great Heavens! it&rsquo;s six and more!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt will never forgive you&ndash;&ndash;or me. I&rsquo;ll take you
+to her at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;ve
+got another engagement for dinner&ndash;&ndash;with a man, at half past
+six. I wish I hadn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood,
+suffering the sweet sorrow of parting.</p>
+<p>The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of
+sunset and gathering night saddened the business man&rsquo;s soul,
+but wakened a new and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests
+of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened
+to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_145' name='page_145'></a>145</span>
+estate of young womanhood before love has educated it
+to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks
+in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that is
+also there.</p>
+<p>Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie
+Louise suddenly, as he saw how ardent she could be. He had
+known her till now only in her dejected and terrified, distracted
+humors. Now he saw her on fire, and love began to blaze
+within him.</p>
+<p>He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw
+her to his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the
+opportunity perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for
+dalliance. There is no colder chaperon for a woman than a
+new ambition to accomplish something worth while.</p>
+<p>As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by.
+I&rsquo;m late to dinner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.</p>
+<p>Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw
+the lever into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience,
+and the growl of the gear drowned the sound of another man&rsquo;s
+voice calling her name. This man ran toward her, but she
+did not notice him and got away before he could overtake her.</p>
+<p>Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he
+called Miss Webling &ldquo;Mees Vapelink.&rdquo; The Teutonic intonation
+did not fall pleasantly on the American ear at that time.
+Washington was a forbidden city to Germanic men and soon
+would banish the enemy women, too.</p>
+<p>The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were
+snarly with the Teutonic <i>r</i>. Davidge studied him and began
+to remember him. He had seen him with Marie Louise
+somewhere. Suddenly his mind, ransacking the filing-cabinet
+of his memory, turned up a picture of Nicky Easton at the side
+of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph&rsquo;s home. He could
+not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for anybody
+he hates.</p>
+<p>He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who
+ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious
+or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus
+with character and turning a tired business man into a restless
+swain.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_146' name='page_146'></a>146</span></div>
+<p>Davidge resented Easton&rsquo;s claim on Marie Louise, whatever
+it was, as an invasion of some imagined property right of his
+own, or at least of some option he had secured somehow. He
+was alarmed at the Teutonic accent of the interloper. He
+began to take heed of how little he knew of Marie Louise,
+after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling&rsquo;s German accent.
+An icy fear chilled him.</p>
+<p>His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness
+that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master,
+Jacob Cruit, who had exchanged an income of a
+million a year and dictatorial powers for a governmental wage
+of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude, and endless
+trouble.</p>
+<p>Davidge&rsquo;s head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit
+had no part:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can she be one of those horrible women who have
+many lovers? Is she a woman of affairs? What is all this
+mystery about her? What was she so afraid of the night she
+would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe&rsquo;s? Why was she so upset
+by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in
+such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s dinner,
+and to keep me from keeping my engagement with Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much German association?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild,
+but none of them so wild as the truth&ndash;&ndash;that Marie Louise was
+cowering under the accusation of being a German agent.</p>
+<p>He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge
+her from the employment of his thoughts. Yet that night
+as he lay cooking in his hot berth he thought of Marie Louise
+instead of ships. None of his riot of thoughts was so fantastic
+as the fact that she was even then thinking of ships
+and not of him.</p>
+<p>That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the
+owner of Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some
+member of the family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his
+old text-books littered the shelves. Marie Louise selected and
+bore away an armload, not of novels, but of books whose very
+backs had repelled her before. They were the very latest romance
+to her now.</p>
+<p>The authors of <i>An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of
+the Compass in Iron Ships</i>, <i>The Marine Steam-engine</i>, and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_147' name='page_147'></a>147</span>
+<i>An Outline of Ship-building</i>, <i>Theoretical and Practical</i>, could
+hardly have dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs
+in the embrace of a young woman&rsquo;s arms. The books
+would have struck a naval architect as quaintly old-fashioned,
+but to Marie Louise they were as full of news as the latest
+evening extra. The only one she could understand with ease
+was Captain Samuels&rsquo;s <i>From the Forecastle to the Cabin</i>, and
+she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his youth,
+his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
+<i>Dreadnaught</i>, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the
+decay of American marine glory.</p>
+<p>She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed
+and dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took
+up another book, Bowditch&rsquo;s <i>American Navigation</i>. It was
+the &ldquo;Revised Edition of 1883,&rdquo; but it was fresh sensation to
+her. She lay prone like the reading Magdalen in the picture,
+her hair pouring down over her shoulders, her bosom pillowed
+on the volume beneath her eyes.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_148' name='page_148'></a>148</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IX' id='CHAPTER_IX'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning
+may keep their cubbyholes until seven, no later. By
+half past seven they must be off the car. Jake Nuddle was an
+ugly riser. He had always regarded the alarm-clock as the
+most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists to enslave the
+poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none stranger than
+that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock off
+work early.</p>
+<p>Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife&rsquo;s
+prerogatives. On this morning, if he had been awaker he would
+have bitten off the black hand that reached into his berth and
+twitched the sheet at seven of a non-working day. The voice
+that murmured appealingly through the curtains, &ldquo;S&rsquo;em
+o&rsquo;clock, please!&rdquo; did not please Jake at all.</p>
+<p>He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times
+heartily, then began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet.
+In the same small wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons,
+and misses were dressing in quarters just as strait.
+Jake and his wife had always got in each other&rsquo;s way, but
+never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found his wife&rsquo;s
+stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings seemed
+to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along
+her corset. He thrust his head and arms into something
+white and came out of it sputtering:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s your damned shimmy. Where&rsquo;s my damned
+shirt?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed
+somehow and left the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the
+heavier baggage. They had breakfast at the lunch-counter;
+then they went out and looked at the Capitol. It inspired in
+Jake&rsquo;s heart no national reverence. He said to his awestruck
+wife:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_149' name='page_149'></a>149</span>
+and agree on their hold-ups. They&rsquo;re all the hirelings of the
+capitalists.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They voted for this rotten war without consulting the
+people. They didn&rsquo;t dare consult &rsquo;em. They knew the
+people wasn&rsquo;t in favor of no such crime. But the Congersmen
+get their orders from Wall Street, and them brokers wanted
+the war because they owned so much stock that wouldn&rsquo;t be
+worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States
+joined the Allies and collected for &rsquo;em off Germany.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of
+horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world
+and kept rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up
+munitions. It was thus that they contemplated the mangled
+villages of innocent Belgium, the slavery-drives in the French
+towns, the windrows of British dead, the increasing lust of
+conquest, which grew by what it fed on, till at last America,
+driven frantic by the endless carnage, took up belatedly the
+gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche across the mountain
+to the other side before it engulfed and ruined the world.
+While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable, immeasurable,
+and yet mysteriously endurable only because there was
+no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate,
+croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the
+lot of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real
+working-men.</p>
+<p>Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to
+him who has the nobility to understand the dream that raised
+it, he burlesqued its ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven
+of soul, he found there what he knew best because it was his
+own. Aping a sympathy he could not feel, he grew maudlin:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves
+and send &rsquo;em off to the slaughter-house in France&ndash;&ndash;all for
+money! Anything to grind down the honest workman into
+the dust, no matter how many mothers&rsquo; hearts they break!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake was one of those who never express sympathy for anybody
+except in the course of a tirade against somebody else.
+He had small use for wives, mothers, or children except as
+clubs to pound rich men with. His wife, who knew him all
+too well, was not impressed by his eloquence. Her typical answer
+to his typical tirade was, &ldquo;I wonder how on earth we&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; to find Mamise.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_150' name='page_150'></a>150</span></div>
+<p>Jake groaned at the anticlimax to his lofty flight, but he
+realized that the main business before the house was what
+his wife propounded.</p>
+<p>He remembered seeing an Information Bureau sign in the
+station. He had learned from the newspaper in which he had
+seen Mamise&rsquo;s picture that she was visiting Major Widdicombe.
+He had written the name down on the tablets of his
+memory, and his first plan was to find Major Widdicombe.
+Jake had a sort of wolfish cunning in tracing people he wanted
+to meet. He could always find anybody who might lend him
+money. He had mysterious difficulties in tracing some one
+who could give him work.</p>
+<p>He left his wife to simmer in the station while he set forth
+on a scouting expedition. After much travel he found at last
+the office of the Ordnance Department, in which Major Widdicombe
+toiled, and he appeared at length at Major Widdicombe&rsquo;s
+desk.</p>
+<p>Jake was cautious. He would not state his purpose. He
+hardly dared to claim relationship with Miss Webling until
+he was positive that she was his sister-in-law. Noting Jake&rsquo;s
+evasiveness, the Major discreetly evaded the request for his
+guest&rsquo;s address. He would say no more than:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Webling is coming down to lunch with me at the&ndash;&ndash;that
+is with my wife. I&rsquo;ll tell her you&rsquo;re looking for her; if
+she wants to meet you, I&rsquo;ll tell you, if you come back here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, mucher bliged,&rdquo; said Jake. Baffled and without
+further recourse, he left the Major&rsquo;s presence, since there
+seemed to be nothing else to do. But once outside, he felt that
+there had been something highly unsatisfactory about the parley.
+He decided to imitate Mary&rsquo;s little lamb and to hang
+about the building till the Major should appear. In an hour or
+two he was rewarded by seeing Widdicombe leave the door
+and step into an automobile. Jake heard him tell the driver,
+&ldquo;The Shoreham.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake walked to the hotel and saw Marie Louise seated at
+a table by a window. He recognized her by her picture and
+was duly triumphant. He was ready to advance and demand
+recognition. Then he realized that he could make no claim
+on her without his awful wife&rsquo;s corroboration. He took a
+street-car back to the station and found his nominal helpmeet
+sitting just where he had left her.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_151' name='page_151'></a>151</span></div>
+<p>Abbie had bought no newspaper, book, or magazine to
+while away the time with. She was not impatient of idleness.
+It was luxury enough just not to be warshin&rsquo; clo&rsquo;es, cookin&rsquo;
+vittles, or wrastlin&rsquo; dishes. She took a dreamy content in
+studying the majesty of the architecture, but her interest
+in it was about that of a lizard basking on a fallen column in
+a Greek peristyle. It was warm and spacious and nobody
+disturbed her drowsy beatitude.</p>
+<p>When Jake came and summoned her she rose like a rheumatic
+old househound and obeyed her master&rsquo;s voice.</p>
+<p>Jake gave her such a vote of confidence as was implied in
+letting her lug the luggage. It was cheaper for her to carry
+it than for him to store it in the parcel-room. It caused the
+fellow-passengers in the street-car acute inconvenience, but
+Jake was superior to public opinion of his wife. In such a
+homely guise did the fates approach Miss Webling.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_152' name='page_152'></a>152</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_X' id='CHAPTER_X'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The best place for a view is in one&rsquo;s back yard; then it is
+one&rsquo;s own. If it is in the front yard, then the house
+is only part of the public&rsquo;s view.</p>
+<p>In London Marie Louise had lived at Sir Joseph Webling&rsquo;s
+home, its gray, fog-stained, smoked-begrimed front flush with
+the pavement. But back of the house was a high-walled garden
+with a fountain that never played. There was a great rug
+of English-green grass, very green all winter and still greener
+all summer. At an appropriate spot was a tree; a tea-table
+sat under it; in blossom-time it sprinkled pink petals on the
+garden hats of the women; and on the grass they fell, to twist
+Tennyson, softlier than tired eyelids on tired eyes.</p>
+<p>So Marie Louise adored her new home with its unpromising
+entrance and its superb surprise from the rear windows.
+When she broke the news to Polly Widdicombe, that she was
+leaving her, they had a good fight over it. Yet Polly could
+hardly insist that Marie Louise stay with her forever, especially
+when Marie Louise had a perfectly good home of her own.</p>
+<p>Polly went along for a morning of reconstruction work.
+There were pictures, chairs, cushions, and knickknacks that
+simply had to be hidden away. The original tenants evidently
+had the theory that a bare space on a wall or a table
+was as indecent as on a person&rsquo;s person.</p>
+<p>They had taken crude little chromos and boxed them in
+gaudy frames, many of whose atrocities were aggravated by
+panels of plush of a color that could hardly be described by
+any other name than fermented prune. Over the corner of
+these they had thrown &ldquo;throws&rdquo; or drapes of malicious
+magenta horribly figured in ruthless incompatibilities.</p>
+<p>Chairs of unexplainable framework were upholstered with
+fabrics of studied delirium. Every mantel was an exhibit
+of models of what not to do. When Henry James said that
+Americans had no end of taste, but most of it was bad, he
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_153' name='page_153'></a>153</span>
+must have based his conclusions on such a conglomerate as
+this.</p>
+<p>Polly and Marie Louise found some of the furniture bad
+enough to be amusing. But they toted a vanload of it into
+closets and storerooms. Where the pictures came away they
+left staring spaces of unfaded wall-paper. Still, they were
+preferable to the pictures.</p>
+<p>By noon the women were exhausted. They washed their
+dust-smutted hands and faces and exclaimed upon the black
+water they left. But the exercise had given them appetite,
+and when Marie Louise locked the front door she felt all the
+comfort of a householder. She had a home of her very own
+to lock up, and though she had roamed through pleasures and
+palaces, she agreed that, be it ever so horrible, there&rsquo;s no
+place like home.</p>
+<p>She and Polly were early to their luncheon engagement with
+Major Widdicombe. Their appetites disputed the clock.
+Polly decided to telephone her husband for Heaven&rsquo;s sake to
+come at once to her rescue.</p>
+<p>While Polly was telephoning Marie Louise sat waiting on
+a divan. Her muscles were so tired that she grew nearly as
+placidly animal as her sister in the Pennsylvania Station.
+She was as different in every other way as possible. Her life,
+her environment, her ambitions, had been completely alien
+to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been educated
+and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and
+successes.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat
+her again, or kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself
+sent to prison or to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid
+that the children would be run over in the street, would pull
+a boilerful of boiling water over onto them, or steal, or go
+wrong in any of the myriad ways that children have of going
+wrong. Mrs. Nuddle&rsquo;s ecstasies were a job well done, a word
+of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an interval
+without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when
+her husband was working and treating her as well as one
+treats an old horse.</p>
+<p>Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less
+harrowing, but infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_154' name='page_154'></a>154</span>
+longer related to each other by any ties except blood kinship.
+Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman gone wrong, Marie Louise a
+goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a poor advertisement
+of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early bedding,
+churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most
+attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage,
+a cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant
+acquaintance.</p>
+<p>At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters
+were to be brought together. But there was to be an intervention.
+Even while Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue
+that she would have called contentment trouble was stealing
+toward her.</p>
+<p>The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was
+Nicky Easton. He frightened her, but he would not let her
+run away.</p>
+<p>As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he
+pressed her back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory
+prayer:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait once, pleass.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months
+before given her up as hopelessly correct. But guardian
+angels were still provided for Nicky Easton; and one of them,
+seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise back into the select
+coterie of the suspects.</p>
+<p>There&rsquo;s no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror.
+It lifts the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry,
+and gives the blind eyes enough for running. Marie Louise&rsquo;s
+fatigue fell from her like a burden whose straps are slit.</p>
+<p>When Nicky said: &ldquo;I could not find you in New York.
+Now we are here we can have a little talkink,&rdquo; she stammered:
+&ldquo;Not here! Not now!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not, pleass?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have an engagement&ndash;&ndash;a friend&ndash;&ndash;she has just gone to
+telephone a moment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are ashamed of me, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She let him have it. &ldquo;Yes!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He winced at the slap in the face.</p>
+<p>She went on: &ldquo;Besides, she knows you. Her husband is
+an officer in the army. I can&rsquo;t talk to you here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where, then, and when?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_155' name='page_155'></a>155</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Any time&ndash;&ndash;any place&ndash;&ndash;but here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Any time is no time. You tell me, or I stay now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come to&ndash;&ndash;to my house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have a howiss, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. I just took it to-day. I shall be there this afternoon&ndash;&ndash;at
+three, if you will go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very goot. The address is&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gave it; he repeated it, mumbled, &ldquo;At sree o&rsquo;clock I am
+there,&rdquo; and glided away just as Polly returned.</p>
+<p>They were eating a consomm&eacute; madril&egrave;ne when the Major
+arrived. He dutifully ate what his wife had selected for him,
+and listened amiably to what she had to tell him about her
+morning, though he was bursting to tell her about his.
+Polly made a vivid picture of Marie Louise&rsquo;s new home, ending
+with:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Everything on God&rsquo;s earth in it except a piano and a book.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This reminded Marie Louise of the books she had read on
+ship-building, and she asked if she might borrow them. Polly
+made a woeful face at this.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear! When a woman starts to reading up on a subject
+a man is interested in, she&rsquo;s lost&ndash;&ndash;and so is he. Beware
+of it, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Tom demurred: &ldquo;Go right on, Marie Louise, so that you
+can take an intelligent interest in what your husband is
+working on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My husband!&rdquo; said Marie Louise. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you both a
+trifle premature?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly went glibly on: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t listen to Tom, my dear.
+What does he know about what a man wants his wife to take
+an intelligent interest in? Once a woman knows about her
+husband&rsquo;s business, he&rsquo;s finished with her and ready for the
+next. Tom&rsquo;s been trying to tell me for ten years what he&rsquo;s
+working at, and I haven&rsquo;t the faintest idea yet. It always
+gives him something to hope for. When he comes home of
+evenings he can always say, &lsquo;Perhaps to-night&rsquo;s the night
+when she&rsquo;ll listen.&rsquo; But once you listen intelligently and
+really understand, he&rsquo;s through with you, and he&rsquo;ll quit you
+for some pink-cheeked ignoramus who hasn&rsquo;t heard about it
+yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise, being a woman, knew how to get her message
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_156' name='page_156'></a>156</span>
+to another woman; the way seems to be to talk right through
+her talk. The acute creatures have ears to hear with and
+mouths to talk with, and they apparently find no difficulty
+in using both at the same time. Somewhere along about the
+middle of Polly&rsquo;s discourse Marie Louise began to answer it
+before it was finished. Why should she wait when she knew
+what was coming? So she said contemporaneously and covocally:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I&rsquo;m not going to marry a ship-builder, my dear.
+Don&rsquo;t be absurd! I&rsquo;m not planning to take an intelligent
+interest in Mr. Davidge&rsquo;s business. I&rsquo;m planning to take an
+intelligent interest in my own. I&rsquo;m going to be a ship-builder
+myself, and I want to learn the A B C&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They finished that argument at the same time and went on
+together down the next stretch in a perfect team:</p>
+<table summary='' width='100%'>
+<tr>
+<td valign='top'>
+<p>"Oh, well of course, if that&rsquo;s the case," asserted Polly,
+"then you&rsquo;re quite crazy&ndash;&ndash;unless you&rsquo;re simply hunting for a new
+sensation. And on that score I&rsquo;ll admit that it sounds rather
+interesting. I may take a whack at it myself. I&rsquo;m quite fed up on
+bandages and that sort of thing. Get me a job in the same factory
+or whatever they call it. Will you?"</p></td>
+<td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td valign='top'>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Davidge tells me,&rdquo; Marie Louise explained, &ldquo;that
+women are needed in ship-building, and that anybody can learn. In
+fact, everybody has to, anyway; so I&rsquo;ve got as good a chance as a
+man. I&rsquo;m as strong as a horse. Fine! Come along, and we&rsquo;ll build a
+U-boat chaser together. Mr. Davidge would be delighted to have
+you, I&rsquo;m sure.&rdquo;</p></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>This was arrant hubbub to the mere man who was not
+capable of carrying on a conversation except by the slow,
+primitive methods of Greek drama, strophe and antistrophe,
+one talking while the other listened, then <i>vice versa</i>.</p>
+<p>So he had time to remember that he had something to
+remember, and to dig it up. He broke in on the dialogue:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the way, that reminds me, Marie Louise. There&rsquo;s a
+man in town looking for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Looking for me!&rdquo; Marie Louise gasped, alert as an antelope
+at once. &ldquo;What was his name?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t seem to recall it. I&rsquo;ll have it in a minute. He
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_157' name='page_157'></a>157</span>
+didn&rsquo;t impress me very favorably, so I didn&rsquo;t tell him you
+were living with us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly turned on Tom: &ldquo;Come along, you poor nut! I hate
+riddles, and so does Marie Louise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it!&rdquo; Tom cried. &ldquo;<i>Riddle&ndash;&ndash;Nuddle</i>. His name is
+Nuddle. Do you know a man named Nuddle?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The name conveyed nothing to Marie Louise except a suspicion
+that Mr. Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was his nationality?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;English?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of
+pungkin pie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When
+Widdicombe asked what message he should take back her
+curiosity led her to brave her fate and know the worst:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon&ndash;&ndash;no,
+not before five. I have some shopping to do, and the
+servants to engage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint
+conveyed in Marie Louise&rsquo;s remark as they left the dining-room,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a little telephoning to do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of
+telephoning.</p>
+<p>Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went
+down the steps, for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew
+his wife aside. He wondered what had become of Marie
+Louise.</p>
+<p>Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes,
+till Marie Louise came out. She had waited only to make
+sure that Tom and Polly got away. When she came down the
+steps she cast a casual glance at Jake and her sister, who
+came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that they were
+looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her eyes.</p>
+<p>She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister
+who waddled toward her was not the sister she had left in
+Wakefield years before. That sister was young and lean and
+a maid. Marriage and hard work and children had swaddled
+this sister in bundles of strange flesh and drawn the face in
+new lines.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her
+shoulder the poignant call:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamise!&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_158' name='page_158'></a>158</span></div>
+<p>That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar
+cry, and it reverted the years and altered the scene like a
+magician&rsquo;s &ldquo;Abracadabra!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full
+brunt of her sister&rsquo;s charge. The repeated name identified
+the strange-looking matron as the girl grown old, and Marie
+Louise gathered her into her arms with a fierce homesickness.
+Her loneliness had found what it needed. She had kinfolk
+now, and she sobbed: &ldquo;Abbie darling! My darling Abbie!&rdquo;
+while Abbie wept: &ldquo;Mamise! Oh, my poor little Mamise!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about,
+but Jake Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good
+to him as he looked her over, and for the nonce he was content
+to have the slim, round fashionable creature enveloped in his
+wife&rsquo;s arms for a sister-in-law.</p>
+<p>Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery
+and tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn
+in the matrimonial lottery.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamise!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want you should meet my husbin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m delighted!&rdquo; said Mamise, before she saw her sister&rsquo;s
+fate. She was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and
+she took the shock without reeling.</p>
+<p>Jake&rsquo;s hand was not as rough so it ought to have been,
+and his cordiality was sincere as he growled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pleaster meecher, Mamise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was ready already with her first name, but she had
+nothing to call him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her
+sister would not instinctively know a name so familiar to
+Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle, and it was a long while before
+Marie Louise managed to pick it up and piece it together.</p>
+<p>Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She
+asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you living&ndash;&ndash;here in Washington?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Laws, no!&rdquo; said Abbie; and that reminded her of the
+bundles she had dropped at the sight of Mamise. They
+had played havoc with the sidewalk traffic, but she hurried
+to regain them.</p>
+<p>Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody
+looking who counted. So he checked his wife with amazement
+at the preposterousness of her carrying bundles while Sir
+Walter Raleigh was at hand. He picked them up and brought
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_159' name='page_159'></a>159</span>
+them to Marie Louise&rsquo;s feet, disgusted at the stupid amazement
+of his wife, who did not have sense enough to conceal it.
+Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance
+of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for
+noticing such things, but the eye is not to blame for what
+it can&rsquo;t help seeing, nor the ear for what is forced upon it.
+She had a feeling that the first thing to do was to get her
+sister in out of the rain of glances from the passers-by.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must come to me at once,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just
+taken a house. I&rsquo;ve got no servants in yet, and you&rsquo;ll have
+to put up with it as it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie gasped at the &ldquo;servants.&rdquo; She noted the authority
+with which Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed
+to the bundles, which he hastened to seize.</p>
+<p>Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile
+and showed it on her face. She saw many palaces on the
+way and expected Marie Louise to stop at any of them.
+When the car drew up at Marie Louise&rsquo;s home Abbie was
+bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she found her
+dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie&rsquo;s
+loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for
+picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This
+distress caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.</p>
+<p>Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent
+enough to take off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch
+himself out on a divan whose ulterior maroon did not disturb
+his repose in the least.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is what I call something like,&rdquo; he said; and then,
+&ldquo;And now, Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she
+evaded with a plea:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling.
+How are you, and how long have you been married, and
+where do you live?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Goin&rsquo; on eight years come next October, and we got three
+childern. I been right poorly lately. Don&rsquo;t seem to take
+as much interest in worshin&rsquo; as I useter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Washing!&rdquo; Marie Louise exclaimed. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t wash,
+do you? That is, I mean to say&ndash;&ndash;professionally?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_160' name='page_160'></a>160</span>
+thousand dollars, and her sister was a&ndash;&ndash;washerwoman! It
+was intolerable. She glanced at Jake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But Mr.&ndash;&ndash;your husband&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Jake, he works&ndash;&ndash;off and on. But he ain&rsquo;t got what
+you might call a hankerin&rsquo; for it. He can take work or let it
+alone. I can&rsquo;t say as much for him when it comes to licker.
+Fact is, some the women say, &lsquo;Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do
+you ever&ndash;&ndash;&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your name isn&rsquo;t&ndash;&ndash;it isn&rsquo;t Nuddle, is it?&rdquo; Marie Louise
+broke in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure it is. What did you think it was?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer.
+That solved one of her day&rsquo;s puzzles and solved it very tamely.
+So many of life&rsquo;s mysteries, like so many of fiction&rsquo;s, peter
+out at the end. They don&rsquo;t sustain.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation
+that believed it a husband&rsquo;s duty to support his wife by his
+own labor. The thought of her sister supporting a worthless
+husband by her own toil was odious. The first task was to
+get Jake to work. It was only natural that she should think
+of her own new mania.</p>
+<p>She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said:
+&ldquo;I have it! Why doesn&rsquo;t your husband go in for ship-building?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge
+had said of the need of men. She was sure that she could get
+him a splendid job, and that Mr. Davidge would do anything
+for her.</p>
+<p>Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved,
+but a thought struck him, and he chewed it over. Among
+the gang of idealists he consorted with, or at least salooned
+with, the dearest ambition of all was to turn America&rsquo;s dream
+of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare of failure. In order
+to secure &ldquo;just recognition&rdquo; for the workman they would
+cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor&ndash;&ndash;that
+was their ideal of labor.</p>
+<p>As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized
+over the shipyard Jake&rsquo;s interest kindled. To get into a shipyard
+just growing, and spread his doctrines among the men
+as they came in, to bring off strikes and to play tricks with
+machinery everywhere, to wreck launching-ways so that hulls
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_161' name='page_161'></a>161</span>
+that escaped all other attacks would crack through and stick&ndash;&ndash;it
+was a Golconda of opportunities for this modern conquistador.
+He could hardly keep his face straight till he heard
+Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor;
+and when he asked, &ldquo;Do you think your gentleman friend,
+this man Davidge, would really give me a job?&rdquo; she cried,
+with more enthusiasm than tact:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know he would. He&rsquo;d give anybody a job. Besides,
+I&rsquo;m going to take one myself. And, Abbie honey, what
+would you say to your becoming a ship-builder, too? It
+would be immensely easier and pleasanter than washing
+clothes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture
+of herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie
+peeked and whispered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you suppose it&rsquo;s that feller Davidge?&rdquo; said Jake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, it&rsquo;s&ndash;&ndash;it&rsquo;s&ndash;&ndash;somebody else,&rdquo; said Marie Louise, who
+knew who it was without looking.</p>
+<p>She was at her wit&rsquo;s end now. Nicky Easton was at the
+door, and a sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she
+had not suspected were in the parlor.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_162' name='page_162'></a>162</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_XI' id='CHAPTER_XI'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+</div>
+<p>If anything is anybody&rsquo;s very own, it is surely his past, or
+hers&ndash;&ndash;particularly hers. But Nicky Easton was bringing
+one of the most wretched chapters of Marie Louise&rsquo;s past to
+her very door. She did not want to reopen it, especially not
+before her new-found family. One likes to have a few illusions
+left for these reunions. So she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Abbie darling, would you forgive me if I saw this&ndash;&ndash;person
+alone? Besides, you&rsquo;ll be wanting to get settled in your room,
+if Mr.&ndash;&ndash;Ja&ndash;&ndash;your husband doesn&rsquo;t mind taking your things
+up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie had not been used to taking dismissals graciously.
+She had never been to court and been permitted to retire.
+Besides, people who know how to take an eviction gracefully
+usually know enough to get out before they are put out. But
+Abbie had to be pushed, and she went, heartbroken, disgraced,
+resentful. Jake sulked after her. They moved
+like a couple of old flea-bitten mongrels spoken to sharply.</p>
+<p>And of course they stole back to the head of the stairs and
+listened.</p>
+<p>Nicky had his face made up for a butler, or at least a maid.
+When he saw Marie Louise he had to undo his features, change
+his opening oration, and begin all over again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is zhoo yourself, then,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. Come in, do. I have no servants yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he cooed, encouraged at once.</p>
+<p>She squelched his hopes. &ldquo;My sister and her husband are
+here, however.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This astounded him so that he spoke in two languages at
+once: &ldquo;Your schwister! Since how long do you have a sester?
+And where did you get?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have always had her, but we haven&rsquo;t seen each other for
+years.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He gasped, &ldquo;<i>Was Sie nicht sagen</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_163' name='page_163'></a>163</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;And if you wouldn&rsquo;t mind not talking German&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Recht so</i>. Excuse. Do I come in&ndash;&ndash;no?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She stepped back, and he went into the drawing-room. He
+smiled at what he saw, and was polite, if cynical.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You rent foornished?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He waved her to a chair so that he might sit down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Was giebt&rsquo;s neues</i>&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;what is the noose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have none. What is yours?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean you do not wish to tell. If I should commence
+once, I should never stop. But we are both alife yet. That
+is always somethink. I was never so nearly not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise could not withhold the protest:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You saved yourself by betraying your friends.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I telled&ndash;&ndash;I told only what the English knew already.
+If they let me go for it, it was no use to kill everybody,
+should I?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was rather miserable about it, for he could see that she
+despised him more for being an informer than for having
+something to inform. He pleaded in extenuation:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I shall show how usefool I can be to my country.
+Those English shall be sorry to let me go, and my people glad.
+And so shall you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She studied him, and dreaded him, loathing his claim
+on her, longing to order him never to speak again to her, yet
+strangely interested in his future power for evil. The thought
+occurred to her that if she could learn his new schemes she
+might thwart them. That would be some atonement for
+what she had not prevented before. This inspiration brightened
+her so suddenly and gave such an eagerness to her manner
+that he saw the light and grew suspicious&ndash;&ndash;a spy has to be,
+for he carries a weapon that has only one cartridge in it.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise waited for him to explain his purpose till the
+suspense began to show; then she said, bluntly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What mischief are you up to now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mitschief&ndash;&ndash;me?&rdquo; he asked, all innocently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You said you wanted to see me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always want to see you. You interest&ndash;&ndash;my eyes&ndash;&ndash;my
+heart&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t.&rdquo; She said it with the effect of slamming a
+door.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_164' name='page_164'></a>164</span></div>
+<p>She looked him full in the eyes angrily, then remembered
+her curiosity. He saw her gaze waver with a double motive.</p>
+<p>It is strange how people can fence with their glances, as
+if they were emanations from the eyes instead of mere reflections
+of light back and forth. But however it is managed,
+this man and this woman played their stares like two foils
+feeling for an opening. At length he surrendered and resolved
+to appeal:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you feel about&ndash;&ndash;about us?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who are us?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We Germans.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are not Germans. I&rsquo;m American.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then England is your greater enemy than Germany.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She wanted to smile at that, but she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He pleaded for his cause. &ldquo;America ought not to have joined
+the war against the <i>Vaterland</i>. It is only a few Americans&ndash;&ndash;bankers
+who lended money to England&ndash;&ndash;who wish to fight us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Up-stairs Jake&rsquo;s heart bounded. Here was a fellow-spirit.
+He listened for Marie Louise&rsquo;s response; he caught the doubt
+in her tone. She could not stomach such an absurdity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bosh!&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>It sounded like &ldquo;Boche!&rdquo; And Nicky flushed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been in this Washington town too long. I
+think I shall go now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise made no objection. She had not found out
+what he was up to, but she was sick of duplicity, sick of the
+sight of him and all he stood for. She did not even ask him
+to come again. She went to the door with him and stood
+there a moment, long enough for the man who was shadowing
+Nicky to identify her. She watched Nicky go and hoped that
+she had seen the last of him. But up-stairs the great heart
+of Jake Nuddle was seething with excitement. He ran to the
+front window, caught a glimpse of Nicky, and hurried back
+down the stairs.</p>
+<p>Abbie called out, &ldquo;Where you goin&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake did not answer such a meddlesome question, but he
+said to Marie Louise, as he brushed past her on the stairs:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to the drug-store to git me some cigars.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky paused on the curb, looking for a cab. He had dismissed
+his own, hoping to spend a long while with Marie
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_165' name='page_165'></a>165</span>
+Louise. He saw that he was not likely to pick up a cab in
+such a side-street, and so he walked on briskly.</p>
+<p>He was furious with Marie Louise. He had had hopes of
+her, and she had fooled him. These Americans were no
+longer dependable.</p>
+<p>And then he heard footsteps on the walk, quick footsteps
+that spelled hurry. Nicky drew aside to let the speeder pass;
+but instead he heard a constabular &ldquo;Hay!&rdquo; and his shoulder-blades
+winced.</p>
+<p>It was only Jake Nuddle. Jake had no newspaper to sell,
+but he had an idea for a collaboration which would bring him
+some of that easy money the Germans were squandering like
+drunken sailors.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You was just talkin&rsquo; to my sister-in-law,&rdquo; said Jake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, you are then the brother of Marie Louise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yep, and I couldn&rsquo;t help hearin&rsquo; a little of what passed
+between you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake&rsquo;s slyness had a detective-like air in Nicky&rsquo;s anxious
+eyes. He warned himself to be on guard. Jake said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m for Germany unanimous. I think it&rsquo;s a rotten shame
+for America to go into this war. And some of us Americans
+are sayin&rsquo; we won&rsquo;t stand for it. We don&rsquo;t own no Congersmen;
+we&rsquo;re only the protelarriat, as the feller says; but we&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; to put this country on the bum, and that&rsquo;s what old
+Kaiser Bill wants we should do, or I miss my guess, hay?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky was cautious:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you propose to help the All Highest?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sabotodge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You interest me,&rdquo; said Nicky.</p>
+<p>They had come to one of the circles that moon the plan of
+Washington. Nicky motioned Jake to a bench, where they
+could command the approach and be, like good children, seen
+and not heard. Jake outlined his plan.</p>
+<p>When Nicky Easton had rung Marie Louise&rsquo;s bell he had not
+imagined how much help Marie Louise would render him in
+giving him the precious privilege of meeting her unprepossessing
+brother-in-law; nor had she dreamed what peril she was
+preparing for Davidge in planning to secure for him and his
+shipyard the services of this same Jake, as lazy and as
+amiable as any side-winder rattlesnake that ever basked in
+the sunlit sand.</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK IV</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>AT THE SHIPYARD</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_5' id='linki_5'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_166' name='page_166'></a>166</span>
+<img src='images/illus-168.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='520' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral majesty.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_167' name='page_167'></a>167</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Davidge despised a man who broke his contracts. He
+broke one with himself and despised himself. He broke
+his contract to ignore the existence of Marie Louise. The
+next time he came to Washington he sought her out. He
+called up the Widdicombe home and learned that she had
+moved. She had no telephone yet, for it took a vast amount
+of time to get any but a governmental telephone installed.
+So he noted her address, and after some hesitation decided
+to call. If she did not want to see him, her butler could
+tell him that she was out.</p>
+<p>He called. Marie Louise had tried in vain to get in servants
+who would stay. Abbie talked to them familiarly&ndash;&ndash;and so
+did Jake. The virtuous ones left because of Jake, and the
+others left because of Abbie.</p>
+<p>So Abbie went to the door when Davidge called. He supposed
+that the butler was having a day off and the cook
+was answering the bell. He offered his card to Abbie.</p>
+<p>She wiped her hand on her apron and took it, then handed
+it back to him, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to read it. I ain&rsquo;t my specs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge said, &ldquo;Please ask Miss Webling if she can see
+Mr. Davidge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not Mr. Davidge!&rdquo; Abbie gasped, remembering
+the importance Marie Louise gave him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Davidge, with proper modesty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I want to know!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie wiped her hand again and thrust it forward, seizing
+his questioning fingers in a practised clench, and saying,
+&ldquo;Come right on in and seddown.&rdquo; She haled the befuddled
+Davidge to a chair and regarded him with beaming eyes. He
+regarded her with the eyes of astonishment&ndash;&ndash;and the ears, too,
+for the amazing servant, forever wiping her hands, went to
+the stairs and shrieked:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_168' name='page_168'></a>168</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamee-eese! Oh, Ma-mee-uz! Mist&rsquo; Davidge is shere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Poor Mamise! She had to come down upon such a scene,
+and without having had any chance to break the news that
+she had a sister she had to introduce the sister. She had
+no chance to explain her till a fortunate whiff of burning
+pastry led Abbie to groan, &ldquo;My Lord, them pies!&rdquo; and flee.</p>
+<p>If ever Marie Louise had been guilty of snobbery, she was
+doing penance for it now. She was too loyal to what her
+family ought to have been and was not to apologize for
+Abbie, but she suffered in a social purgatory.</p>
+<p>Worse yet, she had to ask Davidge to give her brother-in-law
+a job. And Davidge said he would. He said it before
+he saw Jake. And when he saw him, though he did not like
+him, he did not guess what treachery the fellow planned.
+He invited him to come to the shipyard&ndash;&ndash;by train.</p>
+<p>He invited Mamise to ride thither in her own car the next
+day to see his laboratory for ships, never dreaming that the
+German menace was already planning its destruction.</p>
+<hr class='tb' />
+<p>Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in
+perplexities that one question and one answer would put an
+end to. In real life we incessantly dread to ask the answers
+to conundrums that we cannot solve, and persist in misery
+for lack of a little frankness.</p>
+<p>For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a
+torment. So stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter!
+Yet he was unable to bring himself to the point of solving
+his curiosity. The car had covered forty miles, perhaps,
+while his thoughts ran back and forth, lacing the road like a
+dog accompanying a carriage. A mental speedometer would
+have run up a hundred miles before he made the plunge and
+popped the subject.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamise is an unusual name,&rdquo; he remarked.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that
+his long silence had been devoted to her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like it?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You bet.&rdquo; The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and
+made her laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred
+yards of road that went up and down and up and down in
+huge billows. Then he broke out again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an unusual name.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_169' name='page_169'></a>169</span></div>
+<p>She laughed patiently. &ldquo;So I&rsquo;ve heard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only knew one other&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;Mamise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique.
+The chill woods seemed to be rather glum about it, too.
+The road abandoned them and flung into a sun-bathed plain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really? You really knew another&ndash;&ndash;er&ndash;&ndash;Mamise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes. Years ago.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Was she nice?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped
+across a loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some
+jealousy she asked, &ldquo;What was she like?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s odd.&rdquo; A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard
+glided by, reverting to oblivion. &ldquo;Tell me about her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A big motor charged past so fast that the passengers were
+only blurs, a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind
+trailing snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer
+of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated
+they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and
+wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a
+very allegory of placid opulence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was funny,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;I was younger than I am.
+I went to a show one night. A musical team played that
+everlasting &lsquo;Poet and Peasant&rsquo; on the xylophones. They
+played nearly everything on nearly everything&ndash;&ndash;same old
+stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jokes by the same fool
+clown and the solemn dubs. But they had a girl with &rsquo;em&ndash;&ndash;a
+young thing. She didn&rsquo;t play very well. She had a way
+with her, though&ndash;&ndash;seemed kind of disgusted with life and the
+rest of the troupe and the audience. And she had a right
+to be disgusted, for she was as pretty as&ndash;&ndash;I don&rsquo;t know what.
+She was just beautiful&ndash;&ndash;slim and limber and long&ndash;&ndash;what you
+might imagine a nymph would look like if she got loose in a
+music-hall.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was crazy about her. If I could ever have written a
+poem about anybody, it would have been about her. She
+struck me as something sort of&ndash;&ndash;well, divine. She wore the
+usual, and not much of it&ndash;&ndash;low neck, bare arms, and&ndash;&ndash;tights.
+But I kind of revered her; she was so dog-on pretty.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_170' name='page_170'></a>170</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan
+for true. I couldn&rsquo;t rest till I saw the manager and asked him
+to take me back and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty
+grin and said he didn&rsquo;t run that kind of a theater, and I said
+I&rsquo;d knock his face off if he thought I thought he did. Well,
+he gave in finally and took me back. I fell down the side-aisle
+steps and sprawled along the back of the boxes and stumbled
+up the steps to the stage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then I met Mamise&ndash;&ndash;that was her name on the program&ndash;&ndash;Mamise.
+She was pretty and young as ever, but she
+wasn&rsquo;t a nymph any longer. She was just a young, painted
+thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was feeding a big
+monkey&ndash;&ndash;a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a
+bicycle and smoking a cigar&ndash;&ndash;getting ready to go on the
+stage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was
+so graceful, that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity.
+The manager said, &lsquo;Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants
+to pays his respecks.&rsquo; She looked up in a sullen way, and the
+chimpanzee showed his teeth at me, and I mumbled something
+about expecting to see the name Mamise up in the big
+electric lights.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned
+fool, and I agreed with her then&ndash;&ndash;and since. She said, &lsquo;Much
+obliged&rsquo; in a contemptuous contralto and&ndash;&ndash;and turned to the
+other monkey.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop,
+knocked down a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the
+alley. I was mad at her at first, but afterward I always
+respected her for snubbing me. I never saw her again, never
+saw her name again. As for the big electric lights, I was
+a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric
+lights in my&ndash;&ndash;my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon
+after. She may be dead now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big,
+slow glance of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made
+me feel more comfortable about her. If she had welcomed
+every stranger that came along she&ndash;&ndash;well, as she didn&rsquo;t,
+she must have been a good girl, don&rsquo;t you suppose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of
+plenty, an endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_171' name='page_171'></a>171</span>
+stacks of corn, with pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted
+ingots of squash; but an autumnal sorrow clouded the landscape
+for Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you call a good girl?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a hard question to answer nowadays.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why nowadays?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful
+and our ideas of girls are so much more&ndash;&ndash;complicated. Anyway,
+as the fellow said, that&rsquo;s my story. And now you know
+all about Mamise that I know. Can you forgive her for
+wearing your name?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could forgive that Mamise anything,&rdquo; she sighed. &ldquo;But
+this Mamise I can&rsquo;t forgive at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This puzzled him. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t quite get that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong
+of what helpless writers call &ldquo;a shady dell&rdquo;; its tenderness
+won from him a timid confession.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are
+as different as can be, and yet somehow you remind me of
+each other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Somehow we are each other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him
+a hasty glance from the road. She was blushing.</p>
+<p>He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a small
+world, after all.&rdquo; He nearly swung to the other extreme.
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo; He settled like a dying pendulum on,
+&ldquo;Well&ndash;&ndash;well!&rdquo; They both laughed, and he put out his hand.
+&ldquo;Pleased to meet you again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.</p>
+<p>The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a
+long, steep cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted.
+The whir of the engine stopped. The car sailed softly.</p>
+<p>He was eager for news of the years between then and now.
+It was so wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville
+should have evolved into this orchid of the salons. He
+was interested in the working of such social machinery. He
+urged:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me all about yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, thanks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what happened to you after I saw you? You don&rsquo;t
+remember me, of course.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_172' name='page_172'></a>172</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I remember the monkey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They both laughed at the unconscious brutality of this. He
+turned solemn and asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean that so many men came back to call on
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not so many&ndash;&ndash;too many, but not many. But&ndash;&ndash;well,
+the monkey was more unusual, I suppose. He traveled with
+us several weeks. He was very jealous. He had a fight with
+a big trained dog that I petted once. They nearly killed each
+other before they could be separated. And such noises as they
+made! I can hear them yet. The manager of the monkey
+wanted to marry me. I was unhappy with my team, but I
+hated that man&ndash;&ndash;he was such a cruel beast with the monkey
+that supported him. He&rsquo;d have beaten me, too, I suppose, and
+made me support him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge sighed with relief as if her escape had been just
+a moment before instead of years ago.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lord! I&rsquo;m glad you didn&rsquo;t marry him! But tell me what
+did happen after I saw you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The road led them into a sizable town, street-car tracks,
+bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen&rsquo;s little homes in rows
+like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business
+blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a
+gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements,
+shanties, and the country again.</p>
+<p>Davidge noted that she had not answered his question. He
+repeated it:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What happened after you and the monkey-trainer parted?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, years later I was in Berlin with a team called the
+Musical Mokes, and Sir Joseph and Lady Webling saw me
+and thought I looked like their daughter, and they adopted
+me&ndash;&ndash;that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had grown a bit weary of her autobiography. Abbie
+had made her tell it over and over, but had tried in vain to
+find out what went on between her stage-beginnings and her
+last appearance in Berlin.</p>
+<p>Davidge was fascinated by her careless summary of such
+great events; for to one in love, all biography of the beloved
+becomes important history. But having seen her as a member
+of Sir Joseph&rsquo;s household, he was more interested in the
+interregnum.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_173' name='page_173'></a>173</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;But between your reaching Berlin and the time I saw you
+what happened?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s my business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She saw him wince at the abrupt discourtesy of this. She
+apologized:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean to be rude, but&ndash;&ndash;well, it wouldn&rsquo;t interest
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes, it would. Don&rsquo;t tell me if you don&rsquo;t want to,
+but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, nothing!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean you&rsquo;ll think that if I don&rsquo;t tell you it&rsquo;s because
+I&rsquo;m ashamed to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh no, not at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes, at all. Well, what if I were?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine your having done anything to be ashamed
+of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O Lord! Am I as stupid as that comes to?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No! But I mean, you couldn&rsquo;t have done anything to be
+really ashamed of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I mean. I&rsquo;ve done numberless things I&rsquo;d
+give my right arm not to have done.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean really wicked things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Such as&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh&ndash;&ndash;well, I mean being bad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Woman-bad or man-bad?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bad for a woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So what&rsquo;s bad for one is not bad for another.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, not exactly, but there is a difference.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I told you that I had been very, very wicked in those
+mysterious years, would it seem important to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course! Horribly! It couldn&rsquo;t help it, if a man cared
+much for a woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if a woman cared a lot for a man, ought it to make
+a difference what he had done before he met her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, of course&ndash;&ndash;but that&rsquo;s different.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, because it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Men say &lsquo;Because!&rsquo; too, I see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just shorthand with us. It means you know it so well
+there&rsquo;s no need of explaining.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_174' name='page_174'></a>174</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! Well, if you&ndash;&ndash;I say, <i>if</i> you were very much in love
+with me&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Which I&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be odiously polite. I&rsquo;m arguing, not fishing. If
+you were deeply in love with me, would it make a good deal of
+difference to you if several years ago I had been&ndash;&ndash;oh, loose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would break my heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise liked him the better for this, but she held
+to her argument.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. Now, still supposing that we loved each other,
+ought I to inquire of you if the man of my possible choice
+had been perfectly&ndash;&ndash;well, spotless, all that time? Ought
+I expect that he was saving himself up for me, feeling himself
+engaged to me, you might say, long before he met me, and
+keeping perfectly true to his future fianc&eacute;e&ndash;&ndash;ought I to expect
+that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He flushed a little as he mumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hardly!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed a trifle bitterly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So we&rsquo;re there already?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At the double standard. What&rsquo;s crime for the goose is
+pastime for the gander.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not intend to give up man&rsquo;s ancient prerogative.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s better to have almost any standard than none,
+isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The single standard is better than the sixteen to one&ndash;&ndash;silver
+for men and gold for women.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps! But you men seem to believe in a sixteen to
+none. Mind you, I&rsquo;m not saying I&rsquo;ve been bad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I knew you couldn&rsquo;t have been.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes, I could have been&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;m not saying I wasn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;m
+not saying anything at all. I&rsquo;m saying that it&rsquo;s nobody&rsquo;s
+business but my own.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Even your future husband has no right to know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;None whatever. He has the least right of all, and he&rsquo;d
+better not try to find out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You women are changing things!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have to, if we&rsquo;re going to live among men. When
+you&rsquo;re in Rome&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_175' name='page_175'></a>175</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve always done that more or less, and nobody ever
+could stop us, from the Garden of Eden on. In the future,
+one thing is sure: a lot of women will go wrong, as the saying
+is, under the new conditions, with liberty and their own
+money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women went
+wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about
+all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody
+complained that with all our modern science we hadn&rsquo;t invented
+one new deadly sin. We go on using the same old
+seven&ndash;&ndash;well, indecencies. It will be the same with women.
+It&rsquo;s bound to be. You can&rsquo;t keep women unfree. You&rsquo;ve
+simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and
+it&rsquo;s dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be
+better than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery,
+for fear they will be worse than the imaginary woman they put
+up for an argument. I fancy women were just about as good
+and just about as bad in old Turkey, in the jails they call
+harems, as they are in a three-ringed circus to-day.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or
+cried or committed suicide or took to the streets or went on
+with her social success, as the case might be. She&rsquo;ll go on doing
+much the same&ndash;&ndash;just as men do. Some men repent, some
+cheat, some kill themselves; others go right along about their
+business, whether it&rsquo;s in a bank, a church, a factory, a city or
+a village or anywhere.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But in the new marriage&ndash;&ndash;for marriage is really changing,
+though the marrying people are the same old folks&ndash;&ndash;in the
+new marriage a man must do what a woman has had to do
+all along: take the partner for better or worse and no questions
+asked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to
+reason with. &ldquo;In other words, we&rsquo;ll take our women as is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the expression&ndash;&ndash;<i>as is</i>. A man will take his sweetheart
+&lsquo;as is&rsquo; or leave her. And whichever he does, as you
+always say, oh, she&rsquo;ll get along somehow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned
+home. I had one, and it could well be spared. There were all
+kinds of homes in old times and the Middle Ages and nowadays,
+and there&rsquo;ll be all kinds forever. But we&rsquo;re wrangling
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_176' name='page_176'></a>176</span>
+like a pair of lovers instead of getting along beautifully like a
+pair of casual acquaintances.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t we going to be more than that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I&rsquo;m not
+asking for a job as your wife.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can have it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have
+made my way in the world and can support you in the style
+you&rsquo;re accustomed to, I may come and ask for your hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but
+she grew more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for
+the love-game has some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening
+game of golf. She did not often argue abstrusely,
+and she was already fagged out mentally. She broke off the
+debate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now let&rsquo;s think of something else, if you don&rsquo;t mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly
+engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make
+her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to
+guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten
+him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of
+her and his second.</p>
+<p>In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the
+element of mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property
+value. He was still pondering her and wondering what she
+was pondering when they reached the town where his
+shipyard lay.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_177' name='page_177'></a>177</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama
+an ugly mess of land and riverscape&ndash;&ndash;a large steel shed,
+a bewilderment of scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy
+flats spotted with flies that were probably human beings,
+among a litter of timber, of girders, of machine-shanties, of
+railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty water.</p>
+<p>A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection.
+In the neighborhood were numbers of workmen&rsquo;s
+huts&ndash;&ndash;some finished, and long rows of them in building, as
+much alike and as graceful as a pan of raw biscuits.</p>
+<p>She saw it all as it was, with a stranger&rsquo;s eyes. Davidge
+saw it with the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to
+evident faults, vividly accepting future possibilities as realities.</p>
+<p>Davidge said, with repressed pride:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, thar she blows!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My shipyard!&rdquo; This with depressed pride.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!&rdquo; This with forced
+enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t like it,&rdquo; he groaned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m crazy about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and
+weeds and mud-holes and sluices you&rsquo;d appreciate what we&rsquo;ve
+reclaimed and the work that has been done.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The motor pitched down a badly bruised road.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the ship that&rsquo;s nearly done&ndash;&ndash;your mother&rsquo;s ship?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me there&rsquo;s a ship in there!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yep, and she&rsquo;s just bursting to come out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if
+a bottle of beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough
+to blow off the froth would blow him over.</p>
+<p>Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_178' name='page_178'></a>178</span>
+ship that Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did
+not believe Marie Louise ready to understand it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s begin at the beginning,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;See those railroad
+tracks over there? Well, that&rsquo;s where the timber comes
+from the forests and the steel from the mills. Now we&rsquo;ll see
+what happens to &rsquo;em in the shop.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes
+that could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers
+and carry it across the long room like a captured beetle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It&rsquo;s our dressmaking-shop.
+We lay down the design on the floor, and mark out every
+piece of the ship in exact size, and then make templates of
+wood to match&ndash;&ndash;those are the patterns. It&rsquo;s something like
+making a gown, I suppose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said Marie Louise. &ldquo;Then you fit the dress together
+out in the yard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve mastered the whole
+thing already. It&rsquo;s a long climb up there. Will you try it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-&rsquo;ems
+first.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She watched the men at work, each group about its own
+machine, like priests at their various altars. Davidge explained
+to her the cruncher that manicured thick plates of
+steel sheets as if they were finger-nails, or beveled their edges;
+the puncher that needled rivet-holes through them as if they
+were silk, the ingenious Lysholm tables with rollers for tops.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop,
+understanding nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden
+to touch anything. In her ignorance of technical matters,
+the simplest device was miraculous. The whole place was a
+vast laboratory of mysteries and magic.</p>
+<p>There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all.
+It had a cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple
+builded with hands for the sake of the things builded with
+hands. The robes of the votaries were grimy and greasy, and
+the prayer they poured out was sweat. They chewed tobacco
+and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she them.
+They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness,
+another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want
+to speak, and so did she, but embarrassment caused a common
+silence.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_179' name='page_179'></a>179</span></div>
+<p>On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had
+established they had fashioned vessels that should carry not
+myrrh and nard to make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate
+smoke, but wheat, milk and coal, clothes and shoes and shells,
+for the feeding and warming of people in need, and for the destruction
+of the god of destruction.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise&rsquo;s response to the mood of the place was conversion,
+a passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put
+on the holy vestments of toil and wield the&ndash;&ndash;she did not even
+know the names of the tools. She only knew that they were
+sacred implements.</p>
+<p>She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led
+her from this world with its own sky of glass to the outer
+world with the same old space-colored sky. He conducted
+her among heaps of material waiting to be assembled, the
+raw stuffs of creation.</p>
+<p>As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the
+riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air
+became a well-nigh intolerable staccato.</p>
+<p>Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk
+of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie
+Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark
+caverns into the hold of the ship.</p>
+<p>In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew
+maddening in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their
+machine-guns against reverberant metal and hammering steel
+against steel with a superhuman velocity; for man had made
+himself more than man by his own inventions, had multiplied
+himself by his own machineries.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the great Sutton,&rdquo; Davidge remarked, presently.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s our prima donna. He&rsquo;s the champion riveter of this
+part of the country. Like to meet him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man
+was stripped to the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his
+flesh and shot from the muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.</p>
+<p>Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped
+his brawn. Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned
+to Davidge with the impatience of a great tenor interrupted
+in a cadenza by a mere manager.</p>
+<p>Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_180' name='page_180'></a>180</span></div>
+<p>Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his
+confusion confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded.
+Perhaps he made his muscles a little tauter.</p>
+<p>Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise
+try to drive a rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition
+was, but he dared not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in
+the silence, asked, stupidly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So that&rsquo;s a riveter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; Sutton confessed, &ldquo;this is a riveter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Marie Louise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I guess we&rsquo;ll move on,&rdquo; said Davidge. As conversation,
+it was as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative
+historical value, since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her
+inability to be a rivetress.</p>
+<p>She said, &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; and moved on. Davidge followed.
+Sutton took up his work again, as a man does after a woman
+has passed by, pretending to be indignant, trying by an added
+ferocity to conceal his delight.</p>
+<p>At a distance Davidge paused to say: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a great card,
+Sutton. He gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he
+spends it, and he&rsquo;s my ideal of a workman. His work comes
+first. He hogs all the pay the traffic will bear, but he goes
+on working and he takes a pride in being better than anybody
+else in his line. So many of these infernal laborers have only
+one ideal&ndash;&ndash;to do the least possible work and earn enough to
+loaf most of the time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle&rsquo;s principles
+and wondered if she had done right in recommending him for
+a place on Davidge&rsquo;s pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a
+slacker, never dreaming that he would be industrious in all
+forms of destruction. Jake never demanded short hours for
+his conspiracies.</p>
+<p>At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot
+Jake and gave her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father
+of all this factory. He led her down, out and along the
+bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps of rusty iron,
+to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very important
+about something, but she could not imagine what it was.
+She saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It
+lay along a flat sheet of perforated steel&ndash;&ndash;the homeliest contraption
+imaginable.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_181' name='page_181'></a>181</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever is all this,&rdquo; she asked,&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;the beginning of a
+bridge?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes and no. It&rsquo;s the beginning of part of the bridge we&rsquo;re
+building across the Atlantic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe that I quite follow you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is the keel of a ship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yep!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And was the <i>Clara</i> like this once?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No. <i>Clara&rsquo;s</i> an old-fashioned creature like mother. This
+is a newfangled thing like&ndash;&ndash;like you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like me! This isn&rsquo;t&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is to be the <i>Mamise</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must confess she&rsquo;s not very beautiful to start with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Neither were you at first, I suppose. I&ndash;&ndash;I beg your
+pardon. I mean&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated
+ships, the standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture
+at distances by various steel plants, the absence of curved
+lines, the advantage of all the sacrifice of the old art for the
+new speed.</p>
+<p>In spite of what she had read she could not make his
+information her own. And yet it was thrilling to look at.
+She broke out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just got to learn how to build ships. It&rsquo;s the one
+thing on earth that will make me happy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll have to get it for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If anything I could do could make you happy&ndash;&ndash;cutting off
+my right arm, or&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I&rsquo;m
+wretchedly unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy,
+are most of us just where boys are when they have outgrown
+boyhood and haven&rsquo;t reached manhood&ndash;&ndash;when they are
+crazy to be at something, and can&rsquo;t even decide where to
+begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to
+work. Here&rsquo;s my job, and I want it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him,
+and he smiled. She protested:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_182' name='page_182'></a>182</span>
+roughest sort of farmwork. I&rsquo;m stronger than I look.
+I think I&rsquo;d rather play one of those rat-tat-tat instruments
+than&ndash;&ndash;than a harp in New Jerusalem.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge shook his head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid you&rsquo;re not quite
+strong enough. It takes a lot of power to hold the gun
+against the hull. The compressed air kicks and shoves so
+hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton himself has all he
+can do to keep alive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give me a hammer, then, and let me&ndash;&ndash;smite something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think you&rsquo;d rather begin in the office? You
+could learn the business there first. Besides, I don&rsquo;t like the
+thought of your roughing up those beautiful hands of yours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If men would only quit trying to keep women&rsquo;s hands soft
+and clean, the world would be the better for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, come down and learn the business first&ndash;&ndash;you&rsquo;d be
+nearer me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a
+practical left hook:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you&rsquo;d teach me ship-building?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather teach you home-building.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you mean a home on the bounding main, I&rsquo;ll get right
+to work.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and
+he took her to the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled
+by her own ignorance of what had come to be the most important
+of all knowledge.</p>
+<p>She sighed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been such a smatterer. I never
+have really known anything about anything. Most women
+are so astonishingly ignorant and indifferent about the
+essentials of men&rsquo;s life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She secretly resolved that she would study some of the
+basic principles of male existence&ndash;&ndash;bookkeeping, drafting,
+letter-writing, filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new
+mischief to take a course of business instruction on the sly
+and report for duty not as an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress
+in office practice. It was at least a refreshing novelty in
+duplicity.</p>
+<p>She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy.
+The old song, &ldquo;Trust Her Not&ndash;&ndash;She Is Fooling Thee,&rdquo; occurred
+to her in a fantastic parody: &ldquo;Trust her not&ndash;&ndash;she is
+fooling thee; she is clandestine at the business college; she is
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_183' name='page_183'></a>183</span>
+leading a double-entry life. She writes you in longhand,
+but she is studying shorthand. She is getting to be very fast&ndash;&ndash;on
+the typewriter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not
+divulge her plot. She was impatient to spring it. She
+wondered if in a week she could learn all she had to learn&ndash;&ndash;if
+she worked hard. It would be rather pleasant to sit at his
+desk-leaf and take dictation from him&ndash;&ndash;confidential letters
+that he would intrust to no one else, letters written in a
+whisper and full of dark references. She hoped she could
+learn stenographic velocity in a few days.</p>
+<p>As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the
+workmen&rsquo;s shanties.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new
+bungalettes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next
+war millions of women will live in tents the way the men
+do. Those shanties would be considered palaces in Belgium
+and northern France. In fact, any number of women are
+over there now building huts for the poor souls.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not
+understand such a twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not
+want jewels and luxuries and a life of wealthy ease. Her only
+interest in him seemed to be that he would let her live in a
+shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day for union
+wages.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_184' name='page_184'></a>184</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_III_1_1' id='CHAPTER_III_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+<p>An eloquent contrast with Marie Louise was furnished
+by Jake Nuddle. He was of the ebb type. He was
+degenerating into a shirker, a destroyer, a money-maniac, a
+complainer of other men&rsquo;s successes. His labor was hardly
+more than a foundation for blackmailing. He loved no
+country, had not even a sense of following the crowd. He
+called the Star-spangled Banner a dirty rag, and he wanted
+to wipe his feet on it. He was useless, baneful, doomed.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was coming into a new Canaan. What she
+wanted was work for the work&rsquo;s sake, to be building something
+and thereby building herself, to be helping her country forward,
+to be helping mankind, poor and rich. The sight of the
+flag made her heart ache with a rapture of patriotism. She
+had the urge to march with an army.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was on the up grade, Jake on the down.
+They met at the gate of the shipyard.</p>
+<p>Jake and Abbie had come over by train. Jake was surly
+in his tone to Davidge. His first question was, &ldquo;Where do
+we live?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise answered, &ldquo;In one of those quaint little
+cottages.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake frowned before he looked. He was one of those
+who hate before they see, feel nausea before they taste,
+condemn the unknown, the unheard, the unoffending.</p>
+<p>By the time Jake&rsquo;s eyes had found the row of shanties
+his frown was a splendid thing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Quaint little hog-pens!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Is this company
+the same as all the rest&ndash;&ndash;treatin&rsquo; its slaves like swine?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge knew the type. For the sake of Marie Louise he
+restrained his first impulses and spoke with amiable acidity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are better houses in town, some of them very
+handsome.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yah&ndash;&ndash;but what rent?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_185' name='page_185'></a>185</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Rather expensive. Rather distant, too, but you can
+make it easily in an automobile.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where would I git a nautomobile?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can introduce you to the man who sold me mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How would I get the price?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just where I did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whurr&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, all over the place. I used to be a common unskilled
+laborer like you. And now I own a good part of this business.
+Thousands of men who began poorer than I did are richer
+than I am. The road&rsquo;s just as open to you as to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake had plenty of answers for this. He had memorized
+numbers of them from the tracts; but also he had plans that
+would not be furthered by quarreling with Davidge the first
+day. He could do Davidge most harm by obeying him and
+outwardly catering to him. He solaced his pride with a
+thought of what Davidge&rsquo;s business would look like when
+he got through with it.</p>
+<p>He laughed: &ldquo;All right, boss. I was just beefin&rsquo;, for the
+fun of beefin&rsquo;. Them shanties suit me elegant.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then his fool wife had to go and bust in, &ldquo;Oh, Jake, if
+you would do like Mr. Davidge done, and git rich and live
+easy!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake gave her a pantomimic rebuke that reduced her to a
+pulpy silence.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie&rsquo;s spirits a little by
+saying that she herself was coming down to work and to live
+in one of those very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as
+hopeless. Why any one should want to leave a house like
+what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and no call to
+lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get somebody
+to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a
+squatter and actually work&ndash;&ndash;well, it did beat all how foolish
+some folks could be in the world nowadays.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves.
+She had to get back to Washington. Davidge had planned
+to go with her, but a long-distance telephone-call, and a visit
+from a group of prospective strikers, and a warning that a
+consignment of long-expected machinery had not yet arrived,
+took him out of the car. He was tempted to go with Marie
+Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his business
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_186' name='page_186'></a>186</span>
+for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old
+Wakefield phrase, &ldquo;If I don&rsquo;t see you again, hello!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her
+thoughts smoked through her brain like a dust-cloud of
+shining particles, each radiant atom a great idea. The road
+home was through the sky; the villages and groves were vague
+pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of sunlight,
+the ridges rainbows.</p>
+<p>It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries
+of stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some
+of the people that practised the art. She would study ship-building,
+and drafting, too. Her water-color landscapes had
+been highly praised by certain young men and old ladies in
+England. She would learn how to keep her own bank-account
+and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light bookkeeping;
+and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium
+so that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one.
+She would offer her home in Washington for rent. With the
+mobs pouring in, it would not be untenanted long.</p>
+<p>Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after
+she reached home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she
+would sublet her mansion. Now that she wanted to collect
+rent from it instead of paying rent for it her description of its
+advantages was inevitably altered. With perfect sincerity
+she described its very faults as attractions.</p>
+<p>Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of
+people who wanted to look the place over. She had incessant
+offers, but she would not surrender her nest till she was ready
+to go back to the shipyard, and that was always to-morrow&ndash;&ndash;the
+movable to-morrow which like the horizon is always just
+beyond.</p>
+<p>She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance.
+In arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the
+age of ten, and it was not easy to recapture it.</p>
+<p>On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over
+again in a new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She
+studied the touch-system with the keyboard covered, and her
+blunders were disheartening. Her deft fingers seemed hardly
+to be her own. They would not obey her will at all.</p>
+<p>Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to
+write in shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_187' name='page_187'></a>187</span>
+as: &ldquo;Dear customer,&ndash;&ndash;Letter received and contents noted.
+In reply to same would say&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some
+of the pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion
+of them increased to a respect verging on awe.</p>
+<p>They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back
+hair with the free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the
+keyboard like rain, and their letters were exquisitely neat.
+They had studied for a long time, and had acquired proficiency.
+And it is no easy thing to acquire proficiency in any
+task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or moving
+armies.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not
+know how to spell some of the simplest words. When she
+wrote with running pen she never stopped to spell. She just
+sketched the words and let them go. She wrote, &ldquo;I beleive
+I recieved,&rdquo; so that nobody could tell <i>e</i> from <i>i</i>; and she put
+the dot where it might apply to either. Her punctuation
+was all dashes.</p>
+<p>The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word
+stood out in its stark reality, howling &ldquo;Illiterate!&rdquo; at her.
+Her punctuation simply would not do.</p>
+<p>Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an
+ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an invitation to a street-car
+conductors&rsquo; dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection,
+while Marie Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under
+the criticisms of her teacher. She was back in school again,
+the dunce of the class, and abject discouragements alternated
+with spurts of zeal.</p>
+<p>In the mean while the United States was also learning the
+rudiments of war and the enormous office-practice it required.
+Before the war was over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000
+officers in February, 1917, would be an army of over 3,000,000,
+and of these over 2,000,000 would have been carried to
+Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of these would
+be killed to Russia&rsquo;s 1,700,000 dead, Germany&rsquo;s 1,600,000,
+France&rsquo;s 1,385,000, England&rsquo;s 706,200, Italy&rsquo;s 406,000, and
+Belgium&rsquo;s 102,000. The wounded Americans would be three
+times the total present army. Everybody was ignorant,
+blunderful. Externally and internally the United States was
+as busy as a trampled ant-hill.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_188' name='page_188'></a>188</span></div>
+<p>Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies
+made drives; the financiers made drives; the charities made
+drives. The world-heart was never so driven. And this was
+all on top of the ordinary human suffering, which did not
+abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth ached just as fiercely;
+jealousy was just as sickly green; empires crackled; people
+starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army after
+army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated
+atom in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She
+was lonely, love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally
+ashamed of her general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington&rsquo;s
+infamous hot weeks supervened. In the daytime the
+heat stung like a cat-o&rsquo;-nine-tails. The nights were suffocation.
+She &ldquo;slept,&rdquo; gasping as a fish flounders on dry land.
+After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for rest,
+the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had
+come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of
+drudgery at the loathly necessities of her stupid work.</p>
+<p>Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees
+the mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, &ldquo;That is
+my goal!&rdquo; But the feet must cross every ditch, wade every
+swamp, scramble across every ledge. The peak is the harder
+to see the nearer it comes; the last cliffs hide it altogether,
+and when it is reached it is only a rough crag surrounded by
+higher crags. The glory that lights it is glory in distant eyes
+alone.</p>
+<p>So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid
+home to the gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that
+the stage also is squalid and slavish, and that the will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp
+of gorgeous freedom had jumped back to home life.
+She left the cheap theaters for the expensive luxury of Sir
+Joseph&rsquo;s mansion. But that had its squalors and slaveries,
+too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous America,
+only to find in America a thousand distresses.</p>
+<p>Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true
+freedom. She would be a builder of ships&ndash;&ndash;cast off the restraint
+of womanhood and be a magnificent builder of ships!
+And now she was finding that this dream was also a nightmare.</p>
+<p>Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The
+hot wave found her an easy victim. A frightened servant
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_189' name='page_189'></a>189</span>
+who did not know the difference between sunstroke and heat
+prostration nearly killed her before a doctor came.</p>
+<p>The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed.
+It was her trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge
+regretting that she could not come to the launching of the
+<i>Clara</i>. Abbie was not present, either. She came up to be
+with Marie Louise. This was not the least of Marie Louise&rsquo;s
+woes.</p>
+<p>She was quite childish about missing the great event.
+She wept because another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle
+against the bow as it lurched down the toboggan-slide.</p>
+<p>Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business
+man&rsquo;s letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that
+there had been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster&ndash;&ndash;an
+unexploded infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to
+wreck the launching-ways had been detected on the final
+inspection.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even
+though she knew the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still
+in jeopardy. Her shaken faith in humanity was still capable
+of feeling bewilderment at the extremes of German savagery.
+She cried out to her sister:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have
+tried to destroy that ship even before it was launched? How
+could a German spy have got into the yard?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It didn&rsquo;t have to have been a German,&rdquo; said Abbie,
+bitterly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly
+trick? No American would!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican,&rdquo; said
+Abbie. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s some them Independent workmen so independent
+they ain&rsquo;t got any country any more &rsquo;n what
+Cain had.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t suppose that Mr. Davidge has enemies among
+his own people?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O&rsquo; course he has! Slews of &rsquo;em. Some them workmen
+can&rsquo;t forgive the man that gives &rsquo;em a job.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he pays big wages. Think of what Jake gets.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, him! If he got all they was, he&rsquo;d holler he was bein&rsquo;
+cheated. Hollerin&rsquo; and hatin&rsquo; always come easy to Jake. If
+they wasn&rsquo;t easy, he wouldn&rsquo;t do &rsquo;em.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_190' name='page_190'></a>190</span></div>
+<p>Marie Louise gasped: &ldquo;Abbie! In Heaven&rsquo;s name, you
+don&rsquo;t imply&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; snapped Abbie. &ldquo;I never implied in my
+life, and don&rsquo;t you go sayin&rsquo; I did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie was at bay now. She had to defend her man from
+outside suspicion. Suspicion of her husband is a wife&rsquo;s
+prerogative</p>
+<p>Marie Louise was too much absorbed in the general vision
+of man&rsquo;s potential villainy to follow up the individual clue.
+She was frightened away from considering Jake as a candidate
+for such infamy. Her wildest imaginings never put him in
+association with Nicky Easton.</p>
+<p>There were so many excursions and alarms in the world
+of 1917 that the riddle of who tried to sink the ship on dry
+land joined a myriad others in the riddle limbo.</p>
+<p>When Marie Louise was well enough to go back to her
+business school she found riddles enough in trying to decide
+where this letter or that had got to on the crazy keyboard,
+or what squirmy shorthand symbol it was that represented
+this syllable or that.</p>
+<p>She had lost the little speed she had had, and it was double
+drudgery regaining the forgotten lore. But she stood the gaff
+and found herself on the dizzy height of graduation from a
+lowly business school. She had traveled a long way from the
+snobbery of her recent years.</p>
+<p>Davidge recognized her face and her voice when she presented
+herself before him. But her soul was an utter stranger.
+She did not invite him to call on her or warn him that she
+was coming to call on him.</p>
+<p>She appeared in his anteroom and bribed one of the clerks
+to go to him with a message:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A young lady&rsquo;s outside&ndash;&ndash;wants a position&ndash;&ndash;as a stenogerpher.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge growled without looking up:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why bother me? Send her to the chief clerk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She wants to see you specially.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Said Miss Webling sent her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O Lord!&ndash;&ndash;show her in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Marie Louise entered. Davidge looked up, leaped up.</p>
+<p>She did not come in with the drawing-room, train-dragging
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_191' name='page_191'></a>191</span>
+manner of Miss Webling. She did not wear the insolent
+beauty of Mamise of the Musical Mokes. She was a white-waisted,
+plain-skirted office-woman, a businessette. She had
+a neat little hat and gave him a secretarial bow.</p>
+<p>He rushed to her hand, and they had a good laugh like two
+children playing pretend. Then he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why the camouflage?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The word was not very new even then, or he would not
+have used it.</p>
+<p>She explained, with royal simplicity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want a job.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She brought out her diploma and a certificate giving her a
+civil-service status. She was quite conceited about it.</p>
+<p>She insisted on displaying her accomplishments.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give me some dictation,&rdquo; she dictated.</p>
+<p>He nodded, pummeled his head for an idea while she took
+from her hand-bag, not a vanity-case, but a stenographer&rsquo;s
+notebook and a sheaf of pencils.</p>
+<p>He noted that she sat down stenographically&ndash;&ndash;very concisely.
+She perched her notebook on the desk of one crossed
+knee and perked her eyes up as alertly as a sparrow.</p>
+<p>All this professionalism sat so quaintly on the two Marie
+Louises he had known that he roared with laughter as at a
+child dressed up.</p>
+<p>She smiled patiently at his uproar till it subsided. Then he
+sobered and began to dictate:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ready? &lsquo;Miss Mamise&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;cross that out&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;Miss Marie
+Louise Webling&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;you know the address; I don&rsquo;t. &lsquo;Dear&ndash;&ndash;My
+dear&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;no, just &lsquo;Dear Miss Webling. Reference is had
+to your order of recent date that this house engage you as
+amanuensis.&rsquo; Dictionary in the bookcase outside&ndash;&ndash;comma&ndash;&ndash;no,
+period. &lsquo;In reply I would&ndash;&ndash;I wish to&ndash;&ndash;I beg to&ndash;&ndash;we beg
+to say that we should&ndash;&ndash;I should just as soon engage Mona
+Lisa for a stenographer as you.&rsquo; Period and paragraph.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;We have,&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;comma,&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;however,&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;comma,&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;another position
+to offer you,&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;comma,&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;that is, as wife to the senior
+member of this firm.&rsquo; Period. &lsquo;The best wages we can&ndash;&ndash;we
+can offer you are&ndash;&ndash;is the use of one large,&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;comma,&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;slightly
+damaged heart and a million thanks a minute.&rsquo;
+Period. &lsquo;Trusting that we may be favored with a prompt
+and favorable reply, we am&ndash;&ndash;I are&ndash;&ndash;am&ndash;&ndash;yours very sincerely,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_192' name='page_192'></a>192</span>
+truly yours,&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;no, just say &lsquo;yours,&rsquo; and I&rsquo;ll sign it.
+By the way, do you know what the answer will be?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean that I know the answer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me have it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A long glum pause till she said, &ldquo;Am I fired?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>More pause. She intervened in his silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do I do next, please?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He said, of habit, &ldquo;Why, sail on, and on, and on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He reached for his basket of unanswered mail. He said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve given you a sample of my style, now you give me a
+sample of yours, and then I&rsquo;ll see if I can afford to keep you
+as a stenographer instead of a wife.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office,
+and seated herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart
+pit-a-patted as fast as her fingers, but she drew up the letter
+in a handsome style while he sat and stared at her and mused
+upon the strange radiance she brought into the office in a
+kind of aureole.</p>
+<p>He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular
+stenographer, entered and stared at the interloper with amazement,
+comma, suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She
+murmured a very rasping &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; and stepped
+out, as Marie Louise rose from the writing-machine and
+brought him an extraordinarily accurate version of his letter.</p>
+<p>And now he had two women on his hands and one on his
+heart. He dared not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss
+Webling. He dared not show his devotion to Marie Louise,
+though as a matter of fact it made him glow like a lighthouse.</p>
+<p>He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk&rsquo;s office. It was
+noted that he made many more trips to that office than ever
+before. Instead of pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer,
+he usually came out himself on all sorts of errands.
+His buzzer did not buzz, but the gossip did.</p>
+<p>Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_193' name='page_193'></a>193</span>
+she grew furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not
+being deft enough to conceal his affection that she began
+to resent it as an offense and not a compliment.</p>
+<p>The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence
+in one of the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging
+her to live at a hotel or at some of the more comfortable
+homes she snubbed him bluntly. When he desperately urged
+her to take lunch or dinner with him she drew herself up and
+mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie stenographer and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist
+shall loor me to lunch with him. You&rsquo;d probably drug the
+wine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then will you&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May I call, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yessir&ndash;&ndash;the fourteenth house on the left side of the road
+is me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched
+up the street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt
+inane to an imbecility. The whole village was eying the
+boss on his way to spark a stenog. His little love-affair
+was as clandestine as Lady Godiva&rsquo;s famous bareback ride.</p>
+<p>He cut his call short after an age-long half-hour of enduring
+the ridicule twinkling in Mamise&rsquo;s eyes. He stayed just late
+enough for it to get dark enough to conceal his return through
+that street. He was furious at the situation and at Mamise
+for teasing him so. But she became all the dearer for her
+elusiveness.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_194' name='page_194'></a>194</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IV_1_1' id='CHAPTER_IV_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+<p>After the novelty of the joke wore off Mamise grew as
+uncomfortable as he. She was beginning to love him
+more and her job less. But she was determined not to throw
+away her independence. Pride was her duenna, and a ruthless
+one. She tried to feed her pride on her ambition and on an
+occasional visit to the ship that was to wear her name.</p>
+<p>She met Sutton, the prima donna riveter. He was always
+clattering away like a hungry woodpecker, but he always had
+time to stop and discuss his art with her.</p>
+<p>Once or twice he let her try the riveter&ndash;&ndash;the &ldquo;gun,&rdquo; he called
+it; but her thumb was not strong enough to hold the trigger
+against that hundred-and-fifty-pound pressure per square inch.</p>
+<p>One day Marie Louise came on Jake Nuddle and Sutton in
+a wrangle. She caught enough of the parley to know that
+Jake was sneering at Sutton&rsquo;s waste of energy and enthusiasm,
+his long hours and low pay. Sutton earned a very substantial
+income, but all pay was low pay to Jake, who was spreading
+the gospel of sabotage through the shipyard.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the good ship <i>Clara</i>, weaned from the dock,
+floated in the basin and received her equipment. And at last
+the day came when she was ready for her trial trip.</p>
+<p>That morning the smoke rolled from her funnels in a twisted
+skein. What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees
+in many a forest, had become an individual, as what has been
+vegetables and fruits and the flesh of animals becomes at last
+a child with a soul, a name, a fate.</p>
+<p>It was impossible to think now that the <i>Clara</i> was merely
+an iron box with an engine to push it about. <i>Clara</i> was somebody,
+a personality, a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature.
+She was &ldquo;she&rdquo; to everybody. And at last one morning she
+kicked up her heels and took a long white bone in her teeth
+and went her ways.</p>
+<p>The next day <i>Clara</i> came back. There was something
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_195' name='page_195'></a>195</span>
+about her manner of sweeping into the bay, about the proud
+look of her as she came to a halt, that convinced all the
+watchers in the shipyard of her success.</p>
+<p>When they learned that she had exceeded all her contract
+stipulations there was a tumult of rejoicing; for her success
+was the success of every man and lad in the company&rsquo;s
+employ&ndash;&ndash;at least so thought all who had any instinct of team-play
+and collective pride. A few soreheads were glum, or
+sneered at the enthusiasm of the others. It was strange that
+Jake Nuddle was associated with all of these groups.</p>
+<p><i>Clara</i> was not permitted to linger and rest on her laurels.
+She had work to do. Every ship in the world was working
+overtime except the German Kiel Canal boats. <i>Clara</i> was
+gone from the view the next morning. Mamise missed her as
+she looked from the office window. She mentioned this to
+Davidge, for fear he might not know. Somebody might have
+stolen her. He explained:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s going down to Norfolk to take on a cargo of food
+for England&ndash;&ndash;wheat for the Allies. I&rsquo;m glad she&rsquo;s going to
+take breadstuffs to people. My mother used to be always
+going about to hungry folks with a basket of food on her
+arm.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise had Jake and Abbie in to dinner that night. She
+was all agog about the success of <i>Clara</i>, and hoped that
+<i>Mamise</i> would one day do as well.</p>
+<p>Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. &ldquo;Did the boss
+tell you where the <i>Clara</i> was goin&rsquo; to?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&ndash;&ndash;Norfolk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes,
+then rose and mumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Goin&rsquo; out to get some more cigars.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie called after him, &ldquo;Hay, you got a whole half-box
+left.&rdquo; But Jake did not seem to hear the recall.</p>
+<p>He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you went out to git some,&rdquo; said Abbie, who felt
+it necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some
+blunder he had made. Jake laughed very amiably.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that.
+But I hadda telephone a certain party, long-distance&ndash;&ndash;and I
+forgot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie broke in, &ldquo;Who you got to long-distance to?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_196' name='page_196'></a>196</span></div>
+<p>Jake did not answer.</p>
+<p>Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out
+into the main office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They loaded the <i>Clara</i> in record time with wheat for
+England. She sails to-day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood&ndash;&ndash;remember?
+Well, she&rsquo;s starting out through the big woods with a lot of
+victuals for old Granny England. If only the wolves don&rsquo;t
+get her!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her
+as if she were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an
+errand of mercy.</p>
+<p>Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the
+dangers they run and because of the pluck they show in
+storms and fires, and the unending fights they make against
+wind and wave. But of late they had had unheard-of enemies
+to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine placed
+inside the cargo.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To think, with so little food in the world and so many
+starving to death, people could sink ships full of wheat!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On the second day after the <i>Clara</i> set forth on the ocean
+Marie Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her
+letters as fast as she could. In the afternoon she took the
+typewritten transcripts into Davidge&rsquo;s office to drop them
+into his &ldquo;in&rdquo; basket.</p>
+<p>The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she
+heard him say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Davidge speaking.... Hello, Ed.... What?
+You&rsquo;re too close to the &rsquo;phone.... That&rsquo;s better.... You&rsquo;re
+too far away&ndash;&ndash;start all over.... I don&rsquo;t get that.... Yes&ndash;&ndash;a
+life-boat picked up with what&ndash;&ndash;oh, six survivors. Yes&ndash;&ndash;from
+what ship? I say, six survivors from what ship?... The
+<i>Clara</i>? She&rsquo;s gone? <i>Clara</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He reeled and wavered in his chair. &ldquo;What happened&ndash;&ndash;many
+lost? And the boat&ndash;&ndash;cargo&ndash;&ndash;everything&ndash;&ndash;everybody
+but those six! They got her, then! The Germans got her&ndash;&ndash;on
+her first voyage! God damn their guts! Good-by, Ed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_197' name='page_197'></a>197</span>
+receiver groped for the hook with a pitiful blind man&rsquo;s
+gesture.</p>
+<p>Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She
+ran forward and took his hand and set the receiver in place.</p>
+<p>He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His
+mother was dead. The ship he had named for her was dead.
+He needed mothering.</p>
+<p>Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them
+as if to hold them together under their burden. She said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I heard. I can&rsquo;t tell you how&ndash;&ndash; Oh, what can we do in
+such a world!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get a German for this&ndash;&ndash;somehow!&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_198' name='page_198'></a>198</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_V_1_1' id='CHAPTER_V_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung
+out of Davidge&rsquo;s agony.</p>
+<p>She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him.
+Its death was as the death of many children. It might mean
+the death of many children. She stood over him, weeping
+for him like another Niobe among her slaughtered family.
+The business man in his tragedy had to have some woman at
+hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to
+sob his own heart out.</p>
+<p>She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When
+she heard him groan, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get a German for this!&rdquo; somehow
+it horrified her, coming from him; yet it was becoming the
+watchword of the whole nation.</p>
+<p>America had stood by for three years feeding Europe&rsquo;s
+hungry and selling munitions to the only ones that could come
+and get them. America had been forced into the war by the
+idiotic ingenuities of the Germans, who kept frustrating all
+their own achievements, the cruel ones thwarting the clever
+ones; the liars undermining the fighters; the wise, who
+knew so much, not knowing the first thing&ndash;&ndash;that torture never
+succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most
+expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and
+trickery and megalomania can accomplish nothing but its
+own eventual ruin.</p>
+<p>America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in
+its blind charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth.
+A need for German blood was the frank and undeniable passion
+of the American Republic. To kill enough Germans fast
+enough to crush them and their power and their glory was the
+acknowledged business of the United States until further
+notice.</p>
+<p>The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers
+were thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_199' name='page_199'></a>199</span>
+desks, women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered
+dreams, business men across their counters, &ldquo;Kill
+Germans!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but
+the Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The
+world was fighting for its life and health against a plague, a
+new outrush from that new plague-spot whence so many
+floods of barbarism had broken over civilization.</p>
+<p>They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats
+that pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the
+world was not Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to
+one vast circular battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a
+frenzy of loathing that grew with the butchery.</p>
+<p>Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with
+the Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now,
+and least of all did they so think of themselves. In the mind
+of the Allied nations, German and vermin were linked in
+rhyme and reason.</p>
+<p>It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best
+people feel it a duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts
+of prey without mercy. The Germans themselves had proclaimed
+their own nature with pride. Peaceful Belgium&ndash;&ndash;invaded,
+burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled, mulcted,
+deported, enslaved&ndash;&ndash;was the first sample of German work.</p>
+<p>Davidge had hated Germany&rsquo;s part in the war from the first,
+for the world&rsquo;s sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled
+and starved and the big nations thrown into desperation, and
+for the insolence and omnipresence of the German menace&ndash;&ndash;for
+the land filled with graves, the sea with ships, the air with
+indiscriminate slaughter.</p>
+<p>Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship
+was assassinated; the hill of wheat she carried had been
+spilled into the sterile sea. Nearly all of her crew had
+been murdered or drowned. He had a blood-feud of his
+own with Germany.</p>
+<p>He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He
+looked at her with a sudden demand:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does it shock you to have me hate &rsquo;em?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No! No, indeed!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t thinking of them,
+but of you. I never saw you before like this. You scared me
+a little. I didn&rsquo;t know you could be so angry.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_200' name='page_200'></a>200</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not half as angry as I&rsquo;d like to be. Don&rsquo;t you abominate
+&rsquo;em, too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes&ndash;&ndash;I wish that Germany were one big ship and all
+the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to
+blast them all to&ndash;&ndash;where they belong.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection
+for the Germans, and he added, &ldquo;Amen!&rdquo; with a little
+nervous reaction into uncouth laughter.</p>
+<p>But this was only another form of his anguish. At such
+times the distraught soul seems to have need of all its
+emotions and expressions, and to run among them like a
+frantic child.</p>
+<p>Davidge&rsquo;s next mood was a passionate regret for the crew,
+the dead engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and
+cast into the sea, the sufferings of the little squad that escaped
+into a life-boat without water or provisions or shelter from
+the sun and the lashing spray.</p>
+<p>Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship&rsquo;s cargo
+would have relieved. He had been reading much of late of the
+Armenian&ndash;&ndash;what word or words could name that woe so
+multitudinous that, like the number of the stars, the mind
+refused to attempt its comprehension?</p>
+<p>He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a
+rocky wilderness&ndash;&ndash;old crones knocked aside to shrivel with
+famine, babies withering like blistered flowers from the
+flattened breasts of their mothers dying with hunger, fatigue,
+blows, violation, and despair. He thought of Poland childless
+and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles. The talons of
+hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned aloud:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If they&rsquo;d only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody&ndash;&ndash;to
+anybody! But to pour it into the sea!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His
+struggling soul broke loose from the depths and hunted safety
+in self-ridicule:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might better have left the wheat at home and never have
+built the fool ship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The blithering idiot I&rsquo;ve been! To go and work and work
+and work, and drive my men and all the machinery for months
+and months to make a ship and put in the engines and send
+it down and load it, and all for some&rdquo;&ndash;&ndash;a gesture expressed
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_201' name='page_201'></a>201</span>
+his unspeakable thought&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;of a German to blow it to hell
+and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy.
+He burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest
+constantly do, for we all revolve around ourselves as well as
+our suns.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use,&rdquo; he maundered&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;what&rsquo;s the use of
+trying to do anything while they&rsquo;re alive and at work right
+here in our country? They&rsquo;re everywhere! They swarm
+like cockroaches out of every hole as soon as the light gets
+low! We&rsquo;ve got to blister &rsquo;em all to death with rough-on-rats
+before we can build anything that will last. There&rsquo;s no
+stopping them without wiping &rsquo;em off the earth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not argue with him. At such times people do not
+want arguments or good counsel or correction. They want
+somebody to stand by in mute fellowship to watch and listen
+and suffer, too. So Mamise helped Davidge through that
+ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to contempt
+for himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s time I quit out of this and went to work with the army.
+It makes me sick to be here making ships for Germans to sink.
+The thing to do is to kill the Germans first and build the ships
+when the sea is safe for humanity. I&rsquo;m ashamed of myself
+sitting in an office shooting with a telephone and giving out
+plans and contracts and paying wages to a gang of mechanics.
+It&rsquo;s me for a rifle and a bayonet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise had to oppose this:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you
+when you get there if all the ship-builders turn soldier?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let somebody else do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said
+that America could never put an army across or feed it if she
+got it there. If you go on strike you&rsquo;ll prove the truth of
+that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes
+to hear his nobler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources
+a woman has. Mamise was speaking for him as well
+as for herself when she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all
+the ships you would build. You said it was the greatest poem
+ever written, the idea of making ships faster than the Germans
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_202' name='page_202'></a>202</span>
+could sink them. It was that that made me want to be a
+ship-builder. It was the first big ambition I ever had. And
+now you tell me it&rsquo;s useless and foolish!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He saw the point without further pressure.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My job&rsquo;s here. It would be
+selfish and showy to knock off this work and grab a gun. I&rsquo;ll
+stick. It&rsquo;s hard, though, to settle down here when everybody
+else is bound for France.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not
+continue to argue a case that has already been won. She added
+only the warm personal note to help out the cold generality.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s my ship to finish, you know. You couldn&rsquo;t leave
+poor <i>Mamise</i> out there on the stocks unfinished.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her.
+He needed her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and
+knew for the first time the feel of her body against his, the
+sweet compliance of her form to his embrace.</p>
+<p>But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She
+was in one of those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism,
+that women were rising to more and more as a new
+religion. She was feeling terribly American, and, though
+she had no anger for him and saw no insult in his violence,
+she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and kissing.
+She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away,
+yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had
+saved him from himself and to himself. She had brought him
+back to his east again, and the morning is always wonderful.</p>
+<p>She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he
+did not despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people
+were postponing everything beautiful and lovable &ldquo;for the
+duration of the war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its
+rattlesnake clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers
+as he stammered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve gone through this together, and you&rsquo;ve helped me&ndash;&ndash;I
+can&rsquo;t tell you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go
+through a lot more trouble together. There&rsquo;s plenty of it
+ahead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed
+his big hand again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope so.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_203' name='page_203'></a>203</span></div>
+<p>Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the
+door with suspicious promptitude. Davidge said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Avery, please&ndash;&ndash;and the others&ndash;&ndash;all the others right
+away. Ask them to come here; and you might come back,
+Miss Gabus.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers,
+gathered, wondering what was about to happen.
+Some of them came grinning, for when they had asked Miss
+Gabus what was up she had guessed: &ldquo;I reckon he&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to
+announce his engagement.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera
+chorus. Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting.
+Then he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Folks, I&rsquo;ve just had bad news. The <i>Clara</i>&ndash;&ndash;they got her!
+The Germans got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She
+was two days out and going like a greyhound when she sank
+with all on board except six of the crew who got away in a life-boat
+and were picked up by a tramp.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths,
+of incredulous protests.</p>
+<p>Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin&rsquo; to do about it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll build some more ships. And if they sink those
+we&rsquo;ll&ndash;&ndash;build some more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt,
+and so can steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and,
+thanks to Mamise, Davidge was recalled to himself, though
+he was too shrewd or too tactful to give her the credit for
+redeeming him.</p>
+<p>His resolute words gave the office people back to their own
+characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each
+had something to say. One, &ldquo;She was such a pretty boat!&rdquo;
+another, &ldquo;Was she insured, d&rsquo;you suppose?&rdquo; a third, a fourth,
+and the rest: &ldquo;The poor engineer&ndash;&ndash;and the sailors!&rdquo; &ldquo;All
+that work for nothin&rsquo;!&rdquo; &ldquo;The money she cost!&rdquo; &ldquo;The Belgians
+could &rsquo;a&rsquo; used that wheat!&rdquo; &ldquo;Those Germans! Is there
+anything they won&rsquo;t do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks.
+Davidge took up the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise
+renewed the cheerful <i>rap-rap-rap</i> of her typewriter.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_204' name='page_204'></a>204</span></div>
+<p>The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the
+yard. There was no lack of messengers to go among the
+men with the bad word that the first of the Davidge ships
+had been destroyed. It was a personal loss to nearly everybody,
+as it had been to Davidge, for nearly everybody had
+put some of his soul and some of his sweat into that slow and
+painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of the
+wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers
+was both loud and ferocious.</p>
+<p>Jake Nuddle was one of the few who did not revile the German
+plague. He was not in the least excited over the dead
+sailors. They did not belong to his union. Besides, Jake
+did not love work or the things it made. He claimed to love
+the workers and the money they made.</p>
+<p>He was tactless enough to say to a furious orator:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, what&rsquo;s it to you? The more ships the Germans sink
+the more you got to build and the more they&rsquo;ll have to pay
+you. If Davidge goes broke, so much the better. The sooner
+we bust these capitalists the sooner the workin&rsquo;-man gets his
+rights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The orator retorted: &ldquo;This is war-times. We got to make
+ships to win the war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake laughed. &ldquo;Whose war is it? The capitalists&rsquo;. You&rsquo;re
+fightin&rsquo; for Morgan and Rockefeller to save their investments
+and to help &rsquo;em to grind you into the dirt. England and
+France and America are all land-grabbers. They&rsquo;re no
+better &rsquo;n Germany.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The workers wanted a scapegoat, and Jake unwittingly
+volunteered. They welcomed him with a bloodthirsty roar.
+They called him vigorous shipyard names and struck at him.
+He backed off. They followed. He made a crucial mistake;
+he whirled and ran. They ran after him. Some of them
+threw hammers and bolts. Some of these struck him as he
+fled. Workmen ahead of him were roused by the noise and
+headed him off.</p>
+<p>He darted through an opening in the side of the <i>Mamise</i>.
+The crowd followed him, chased him out on an upper deck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Throw him overboard! Kill him!&rdquo; they shouted.</p>
+<p>He took refuge behind Sutton the riveter, whose gun had
+made such noise that he had heard none of the clamor. Seeing
+Jake&rsquo;s white face and the mark of a thrown monkey-wrench
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_205' name='page_205'></a>205</span>
+on his brow, Sutton shut off the compressed air and confronted
+the pursuers. He was naked to the waist, and he had
+no weapon, but he held them at bay while he demanded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the big idea? What you playin&rsquo;? Puss in a
+corner? How many of yous guys does it take to lick this one
+gink?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A burly patriot, who forgot that his name and his accent
+were Teutonic, roared:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Der sneagin&rsquo; Sohn off a peach ain&rsquo;t sorry <i>die Clara</i> is by
+dose tam Chermans <i>gesunken</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What!&rdquo; Sutton howled. &ldquo;The <i>Clara</i> sunk? Whatya mean&ndash;&ndash;sunk?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven
+thousands of rivets into the frame of the ship, and a little
+explosive had opened all the seams and ended her days!
+When at last he understood the <i>Clara&rsquo;s</i> fate and Nuddle&rsquo;s
+comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you thought it was good business, did you? And
+these fellers was thinkin&rsquo; about lynchin&rsquo; you, was they? Well,
+they&rsquo;re all wrong&ndash;&ndash;they&rsquo;re all wrong: we&rsquo;d ought to save
+lynchin&rsquo; for real guys. What you need is somethin&rsquo; like&ndash;&ndash;this!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye.
+Jake in a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward;
+his head struck the steel deck, and his soul went out.
+When it came back he lay still for a while, pretending to be
+unconscious until the gang had dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton
+was making ready to begin riveting again. Then he picked
+himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll fix you for this, you&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call
+him. His big foot described an upward arc, and Jake a
+parabola, ending in a drop that almost took him through an
+open hatch into the depth of the hold. He saved himself,
+peering over the edge, too weak for words&ndash;&ndash;hunched back,
+crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe
+hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow
+and disperse his enemies.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_206' name='page_206'></a>206</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VI_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VI_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When
+Mamise noted that desks were being cleared for inaction
+she began mechanically to conform. Then she paused.</p>
+<p>On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of
+employees, too weary with office routine to be discontent.
+But now she thought of Davidge left alone in his office to
+brood over his lost ship, the brutal mockery of such loving
+toil. It seemed heartless to her as his friend to desert him
+in the depths. But as one of his stenographers, it would look
+shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from foot
+to foot and from resolve to resolve.</p>
+<p>Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses
+as a ship&rsquo;s frame in the various waves and weathers that confront
+it. She had picked up some knowledge of the amazing
+twists a ship encounters at rest and in motion&ndash;&ndash;stresses in
+still water, with cargo and without, hogging and sagging
+stresses, seesaw strains, tensile, compressive, transverse, racking,
+pounding; bumps, blows, collisions, oscillations, running
+aground&ndash;&ndash;stresses that crumpled steel or scissored the rivets
+in two.</p>
+<p>It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean
+life or death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly
+forth and came home with rich cargo; some steamed out in
+pride and never came back; some limped in from the sea
+racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in fogs; some
+fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died
+dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them
+to shreds; some turned turtle at their docks and went down
+in the mud. Some led long and honorable lives, and others,
+beginning with glory, degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal
+tramps.</p>
+<p>People were but ships and bound for as many destinations
+and destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_207' name='page_207'></a>207</span>
+little on their pilots and engineers, their engines and their
+frames. The test of the ship and of the person was the daily
+drudgery and the unforeseen emergency.</p>
+<p>Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats.
+Before he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his
+past performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation
+in the recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden
+withdrawal into the national army of nearly every male
+between twenty-one and thirty-one and of hundreds of
+thousands of volunteers of other ages.</p>
+<p>He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom
+he knew little except that she would not tell him much.
+And on her dubious voucher he had taken Jake Nuddle into
+his employ. Now he had to accept them as he had to accept
+steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at all.</p>
+<p>Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted
+no steel in a ship&rsquo;s hull or in any part of her that had not
+behaved well in the shop tests, in the various machines that
+put the metal under bending stress, cross-breaking, hammering,
+drifting, shearing, elongation, contraction, compression,
+deflection, tension, and torsion stresses. The best of the
+steels had their elastic limits; there was none that did not
+finally snap.</p>
+<p>Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed
+according to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being
+only a tenth of its proved capacity. That ought to have been
+enough of a margin of safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.</p>
+<p>People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand.
+A reference or two, a snap judgment based on first
+impressions, ushered a man or a woman into a place where
+weakness or malice could do incalculable harm. In every
+institution, as in every structure, these danger-spots exist.
+Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people, could
+only take the best he could get.</p>
+<p>Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous
+ease and had contrived already the ruin of one ship. His
+program, which included all the others, had had a little setback,
+but he could easily regain his lost ground, for the
+mob had vented its rage against him and was appeased.</p>
+<p>Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge&rsquo;s
+shop and his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_208' name='page_208'></a>208</span>
+drifting toward a supreme stress that should try her inmost
+fiber. And at the moment she felt an almost unbearable
+strain in the petty decision of whether to go with the clerks
+or stop with the boss.</p>
+<p>Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would
+say of her. It was Davidge that she was protecting. She
+did not want to have them talking about him&ndash;&ndash;as if anything
+could have stopped them from that!</p>
+<p>While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave
+him unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent
+so much time that the outer office was empty, anyway.</p>
+<p>Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the
+door. Miss Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Was you goin&rsquo; in?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No&ndash;&ndash;oh no!&rdquo; said Mamise. &ldquo;I left something in my
+desk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried
+away, ostentatiously passing the other clerks as they struggled
+across the yard to the gate.</p>
+<p>She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles.
+She was so desperate that she went to see her sister.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing buttons
+on the extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom
+she washed for in spite of Jake&rsquo;s high earnings&ndash;&ndash;from which
+she benefited no more than before. If Jake had come into a
+million, or shattered the world to bits and then rebuilt it
+nearer to his heart&rsquo;s desire, he would not have had enough to
+make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many
+handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or
+at least got Abbie no farther along the road to contentment
+or grace.</p>
+<p>Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to the <i>Clara</i>. She
+drew Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who
+were playing in the kitchen because it was full of the savor of
+the forthcoming supper.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Abbie dear, have you heard the news?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie gasped, &ldquo;Oh God, is anything happened to Jake&ndash;&ndash;killed
+or arrested or anything?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no&ndash;&ndash;but <i>Clara</i>&ndash;&ndash;the <i>Clara</i>&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clara who?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The ship, the first ship we built, she&rsquo;s destroyed.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_209' name='page_209'></a>209</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;For the land&rsquo;s sake! I want to know! Well, what you
+know about that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie could not rise to very lofty heights of emotion or
+language over anything impersonal. She made hardly so
+much noise over this tragedy as a hen does over the delivery
+of an egg.</p>
+<p>Mamise was distressed by her stolidity. She understood
+with regret why Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational
+companion. She hated to think well of Jake or ill of her
+sister, but one cannot help receiving impressions.</p>
+<p>She did her best to stimulate Abbie to a decent warmth,
+but Abbie was as immune to such appeals as those people were
+who were still wondering why America went to war with
+Germany.</p>
+<p>Abbie was entirely perfunctory in her responses to Mamise&rsquo;s
+pictures of the atrocity. She grew really indignant when she
+looked at the clock and saw that Jake was late to dinner.
+She broke in on Mamise&rsquo;s excitement with a distressful:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And we got steak &rsquo;n&rsquo; cab&rsquo;ge for supper.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must hurry back to my own shack,&rdquo; said Mamise, rising.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You stay right where you are. You&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to eat with
+us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not to-night, thanks, dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She kept no servant of her own. She enjoyed the circumstance
+of getting her meals. She was camping out in her
+shanty. To-night she wanted to be busy about something
+especially about a kitchen&ndash;&ndash;the machine-shop of the woman
+who wants to be puttering at something.</p>
+<p>She was dismally lonely, but she was not equal to a supper
+at Jake&rsquo;s. She would have liked a few children of her own,
+but she was glad that she did not own the Nuddle children,
+especially the elder two.</p>
+<p>The Nuddles had given three hostages to Fortune. Jake
+cared little whether Fortune kept the hostages or not, or
+whether or not she treated them as the Germans treated
+Belgian hostages.</p>
+<p>Little Sister was the oldest of the trio completed by Little
+Brother and a middle-sized bear named Sam. Sis and Sam
+were juvenile anarchists born with those gifts of mischief,
+envy, indolence, and denunciation that Jake and the literary
+press-agents of the same spirit flattered as philosophy or even
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_210' name='page_210'></a>210</span>
+as philanthropy. Little Brother was a quiet, patient gnome
+with quaint instincts of industry and accumulation. He was
+always at work at something. His mud-pie bakery was
+famous for two blocks. He gathered bright pebbles and
+shells. In the marble season he was a plutocrat in taws and
+agates. Being always busy, he always had time to do more
+things. He even volunteered to help his mother. When he
+got an occasional penny he hoarded it in hiding. He had
+need to, for Sam borrowed what he could and stole what he
+could not wheedle.</p>
+<p>Little Brother was not stingy, but he saved; he bought his
+mother petty gifts once in a while when he had enough to pay
+for something.</p>
+<p>Little Sister and Sam were capable in emotional crises of
+sympathy or hatred to express themselves volubly. Little
+Brother had no gifts of speech. He made gifts of pebbles or
+of money awkwardly, shyly, with few words. Mamise, as
+she tried to extricate herself from Abbie&rsquo;s lassoing hospitality,
+paused in the door and studied the children, contrasting them
+with the Webling grandchildren who had been born with
+gold spoons in their mouths and somebody to take them out,
+fill them, and put them in again. But luxury seemed to make
+small difference in character.</p>
+<p>She mused upon the three strange beings that had come
+into the world as a result of the chance union of Jake and
+Abbie. Without that they would never have existed and the
+world would have never known the difference, nor would they.</p>
+<p>Sis and Sam were quarreling vigorously. Little Brother
+was silent upon the hearth. He had collected from the gutter
+many small stones and sticks. They were treasures to him
+and he was as important about them as a miser about his
+shekels. Again and again he counted them, taking a pleasure
+in their arithmetic. Already he was advanced in mathematics
+beyond the others and he loved to arrange his wealth
+for the sheer delight of arrangement; orderliness was an
+instinct with him already.</p>
+<p>For a time Mamise noted how solemnly he kept at work,
+building a little stone house and painfully making it stand.
+He was a home-builder already.</p>
+<p>Sam had paid no heed to the work. But, wondering what
+Mamise was looking at, he turned and saw his brother. A
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_211' name='page_211'></a>211</span>
+grin stretched his mouth. Little Brother grew anxious. He
+knew that when something he had builded interested Sam its
+doom was close.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whass &rsquo;at?&rdquo; said Sam.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;None yer business,&rdquo; said Little Brother, as spunky as
+Belgium before the Kaiser.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;S&rsquo;ouse, ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You lea&rsquo; me &rsquo;lone, now!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where d&rsquo;you git it at?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I built it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gimme&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You build you one for your own self now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;At one&rsquo;s good enough for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Maw! You make Sam lea&rsquo; my youse alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Nuddle moaned: &ldquo;Sammie, don&rsquo;t bother Little
+Brother now. You go on about your own business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with
+the side of his foot.</p>
+<p>Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had
+darted at him and smacked him with violence. Instantly
+she was ashamed of herself. Sam began to rub his face and
+yowl:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me,
+so she did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally
+disgusted; it was intolerable that any one should slap her
+children but herself. She had accepted too much of Mamise&rsquo;s
+money to be very indignant, but she did rise to a wail:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my
+childern.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father
+I just couldn&rsquo;t help taking a whack at him. The little bully
+knocked over his brother&rsquo;s house just to hear it fall. When
+he grows up he&rsquo;ll be just as much of a nuisance as Jake and
+he&rsquo;ll call it syndicalism or internationalism or something, just
+as Jake does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black
+eye and a white story.</p>
+<p>When Abbie gasped, &ldquo;What on earth&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; he
+growled: &ldquo;I bumped into a girder. Whatya s&rsquo;pose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_212' name='page_212'></a>212</span>
+but she knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist
+he was the home champion.</p>
+<p>She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of
+the steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages
+Jake was earning&ndash;&ndash;or at least receiving&ndash;&ndash;the family was
+eating high.</p>
+<p>Little Sister told her brother Sam, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a shame to waste
+good meat on his old black lamp.&rdquo; And Sam&rsquo;s regret was,
+&ldquo;I wisht I&rsquo;d &rsquo;a&rsquo; gave it to um.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any
+of this, but it was only another cruel evidence that great
+lovers of the public welfare are apt to be harshly regarded
+at home. It is too much to expect that one who tenderly
+considers mankind in the mass should have time to be kind
+to them in particular.</p>
+<p>Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did
+appreciate. Every time he praised her looks or her swell
+clothes she acted as if he made her mad.</p>
+<p>To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of
+anxiety for him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, oh, did you hear of the destruction of the <i>Clara</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I heard of the destruction of the <i>Clara</i>,&rdquo; he echoed,
+with a sneer. &ldquo;If I had my way the whole rotten fleet
+would follow her to the bottom of the ocean!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, Jake!&rdquo; was Abbie&rsquo;s best.</p>
+<p>Jake went on: &ldquo;And it will, too, or I&rsquo;m a liar. The Germans
+will get them boats as fast as they build &rsquo;em.&rdquo; He
+laughed. &ldquo;I tell you them Kaiser-boys just eats ships.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how were they able to destroy the <i>Clara</i>?&rdquo; Mamise
+demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk
+they just put a bomb into her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, we&ndash;&ndash;they have ways.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The little slip from &ldquo;we&rdquo; to &ldquo;they&rdquo; caught Mamise&rsquo;s ear.
+Her first intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her
+amazement the first words that leaped were:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor Abbie!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick
+slash from cloud to ground. Mamise&rsquo;s whole thought was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_213' name='page_213'></a>213</span>
+from zig to zag in some such procedure as this, but infinitely
+swift.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&ndash;&ndash;they? That means that Jake considers himself a
+part of the German organization for destruction, the will
+to ruin. That means that Jake must have been involved in
+the wreck of the <i>Clara</i>. That means that he deliberately connived
+at a crime against his country. That means that he is
+a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister
+is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment.
+She heard Jake grumbling:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What ya mean&ndash;&ndash;&lsquo;poor Abbie!&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake,
+and the lightning of understanding struck him. He realized
+what she was thinking&ndash;&ndash;or at least he suspected it, because
+he was thinking of his own past. He was realizing that he
+had met Nicky Easton through Mamise, though Mamise
+did not know this&ndash;&ndash;that is, he hoped she did not. And yet
+perhaps she did.</p>
+<p>And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each
+other. Abbie was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous
+of Mamise and her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was
+one of stolid thoughtlessness.</p>
+<p>Jake, suspecting Mamise&rsquo;s suspicion of him, was moved to
+justify himself by one of his tirades against society in general.
+Abbie, who had about as much confidence in the world as an
+old rabbit in a doggy country, had heard Jake thunder so
+often that his denunciations had become as vaguely lulling
+as a continual surf. Generalizations meant nothing to her
+bovine soul. She was thinking of something else, usually,
+throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole
+nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess
+she was hunting through her work-basket for a good thread
+to patch Sam&rsquo;s pants with.</p>
+<p>Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was
+her first encounter with the abysmal hatred of which some of
+these loud lovers of mankind are capable. Jake&rsquo;s theories
+had been merely absurd or annoying before, but now they
+grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed by an actual
+crime.</p>
+<p>Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_214' name='page_214'></a>214</span>
+Jake or attack him. She despised him too well to argue with
+him, and she rose to go.</p>
+<p>Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She
+would not be persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow
+and cooked herself a little meal of her own. She felt stained
+once more with vicarious guilt, and wondered what she had
+done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes of others.</p>
+<p>She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself
+of Sir Joseph Webling&rsquo;s guilt by keeping his secret. If she
+had gone to the British authorities with her first suspicion of
+Sir Joseph and Nicky Easton she would have escaped from
+sharing their guilt. She would have been branded as an
+informer, but only by the conspirators; and Sir Joseph himself
+and Lady Webling might have been saved from self-destruction.</p>
+<p>Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again
+she had only suspicion for her guide. But in England she
+had been a foreigner and Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here
+she was in her own country, and she owed nothing to Jake
+Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to his wife as to his
+flag.</p>
+<p>It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one
+clear duty was to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake.
+It was not a pretty duty, but it was a definite. She resolved
+that the first thing she did in the morning would be to go to
+Davidge with what facts she had. The resolution brought
+her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper with a
+sense of pleasant righteousness.</p>
+<p>Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted
+a cigarette, and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned
+evening of spinsterial respectability. Then the door opened
+and Abbie walked in. Abbie did not think it sisterly to
+knock. She paused to register her formal protest against
+Mamise&rsquo;s wicked addiction to tobacco.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you&rsquo;d break yourself of
+that horbul habbut.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise laughed tolerantly. &ldquo;You were cooking cabbage
+when I was at your house. Why can&rsquo;t I cook this vegetable?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I wa&rsquo;n&rsquo;t cooking the cabbage in my face.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were cooking it in mine. But let&rsquo;s not argue about
+botany or ethics.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_215' name='page_215'></a>215</span></div>
+<p>Abbie was not aware of mentioning either of those things,
+but she had other matters to discuss. She dropped into a
+chair, sighing:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jake&rsquo;s went out to telephone, and I thought I&rsquo;d just
+run over for a few words. You see, I&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where was Jake telephoning?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I d&rsquo;know. He&rsquo;s always long-distancin&rsquo; somebody. But
+what I come for&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it ever occur to you to wonder?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Long as it ain&rsquo;t some woman&ndash;&ndash;or if it is, as long as it&rsquo;s
+long distance&ndash;&ndash;why should I worry my head about it? The
+thing I wanted to speak of is&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t it rather make your blood run cold to hear Jake
+speak as he did of the lost ship?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m so used to his rantin&rsquo; it goes in one ear and out
+the other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better keep a little of it in your brain. I&rsquo;m worried
+about your husband, even if you&rsquo;re not, Abbie dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What call you got to worry?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a ghastly feeling that my brother-in-law is mixed
+up in the sinking of the <i>Clara</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be foolish!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying not to be. But do you remember the night
+I told you both that the <i>Clara</i> was going to Norfolk to take
+on her cargo? Well, he went out to get cigars, though he had
+a lot, and he let it slip that he had been talking on the long-distance
+telephone. When the <i>Clara</i> is sunk, he is not surprised.
+He says, &lsquo;We&ndash;&ndash;they have ways.&rsquo; He prophesies the
+sinking of all the ships Mr. Davidge&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie seized this name as a weapon of self-defense and
+mate-defense.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re speakin&rsquo; for Mr. Davidge now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps. He&rsquo;s my employer, and Jake&rsquo;s, too. I feel
+under some obligations to him, even though Jake doesn&rsquo;t.
+I feel some obligations to the United States, and Jake doesn&rsquo;t.
+I distrust and abhor Germany, and Jake likes her as well as
+he does us. The background is perfect. When such crimes
+are being done as Germany keeps doing, condoning them is as
+bad as committing them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Big words!&rdquo; sniffed Abbie. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you talk United
+States?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_216' name='page_216'></a>216</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, my dear. I say that since Jake is glad the
+<i>Clara</i> was sunk and hopes that more ships will be sunk, he
+is as bad as the men that sank her. And what&rsquo;s more, I
+have made up my mind that Jake helped to sink her, and
+that he works in this yard simply for a chance to sink more
+ships. Do you get those words of one syllable?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Abbie. Ideas of one syllable are as hard to
+grasp as words of many. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;re
+drivin&rsquo; at a tall.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor Abbie!&rdquo; sighed Mamise. &ldquo;Dream on, if you want
+to. But I&rsquo;m going to tell Mr. Davidge to keep a watch on
+Jake. I&rsquo;m going to warn him that Jake is probably mixed
+up in the sinking of that beautiful ship he named after his
+mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Even Abbie could not miss the frightful meaning of this.
+She was one of those who never trust experience, one of those
+who think that, in spite of all the horrible facts of the past,
+horrible things are impossible in the future. Higher types of
+the same mind had gone about saying that war was impossible,
+later insisting that it was impossible that the United States
+should be dragged into this war because it was so horrible,
+and next averring that since this war was so horrible there
+could never be another.</p>
+<p>Even Abbie could imagine what would happen if Mamise
+denounced Jake as an accomplice in the sinking of the Clara.
+It would be so terrible that it must be impossible. The proof
+that Jake was innocent was the thought of what would happen
+to him and to her and their children if he were found guilty.
+She summed it all up in a phrase:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mamise, you&rsquo;re plumb crazy!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope so, but I&rsquo;m also crazy enough to put Mr. Davidge
+on his guard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And have him fire Jake, or get him arrested?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you got any sense of decency or dooty a tall?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to find out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I always knew a woman who&rsquo;d smoke cigarettes
+would do anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O&rsquo; course you won&rsquo;t; but if you did, I&rsquo;d&ndash;&ndash;why, I&rsquo;d&ndash;&ndash;why,
+I just don&rsquo;t know what I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_217' name='page_217'></a>217</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you give up Jake?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give up Jake? Divorce him or something?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise nodded.</p>
+<p>Abbie gasped: &ldquo;Why, you&rsquo;re positively immor&rsquo;l! Posi-<i>tive</i>-ly!
+He&rsquo;s the father of my childern! I&rsquo;ll stick to Jake
+through thick and thin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Through treason and murder, too? You were an American,
+you know, before you ever met him. And I was an
+American before he became my brother-in-law. And I don&rsquo;t
+intend to let him make me a partner in his guilt just because
+he made you give him a few children.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t listen to another word,&rdquo; cried Abbie. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
+too indecent to talk to.&rdquo; And she slammed the door after her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor Abbie!&rdquo; said Mamise, and closed her book, rubbed
+the light out of her cigarette, and went to bed.</p>
+<p>But not to sleep. Abbie had not argued well, but sometimes
+that is best for the arguments, for then the judge becomes
+their attorney. Mamise tossed on a grid of perplexities.
+Neither her mind nor her body could find comfort.</p>
+<p>She rose early to escape her thoughts. It was a cold, raw
+morning, and Abbie came dashing through the drizzle with
+her shawl over her head and her cheeks besprent with tears
+and rain. She flung herself on Mamise and sobbed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t slep&rsquo; a wink all night. I been thinkin&rsquo; of Jake and
+the childern. I was mad at you last night, but I&rsquo;m sorry
+for what I said. You&rsquo;re my own sister&ndash;&ndash;all I got in the world
+besides the three childern. And I&rsquo;m all you got, and I
+know it ain&rsquo;t in you to go and send the father o&rsquo; my childern
+to jail and ruin my life. I&rsquo;ve had a hard life, and so&rsquo;ve
+you, Mamise honey, but we got to be friends and love one
+another, for we&rsquo;re all that&rsquo;s left of our fambly, and it couldn&rsquo;t
+be that one sister would drive the other to distraction and
+drag the family name in the mud. It couldn&rsquo;t be, could it,
+Mamise? Tell me you was only teasin&rsquo; me! I didn&rsquo;t mean
+what I said last night about you bein&rsquo; indecent, and you
+didn&rsquo;t mean what you said about Jake, did you, Mamise?
+Say you didn&rsquo;t, or I&rsquo;ll just die right here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had left the door open, and a gust of windy rain came
+lashing in. The world outside was cold and wet, and Abbie
+was warm and afraid and irresistibly pitiful.</p>
+<p>Mamise could only hug and kiss her and say:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_218' name='page_218'></a>218</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll see! I&rsquo;ll see!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When people do not know what their chief mysteries,
+themselves, will do they say, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise thought of Davidge, and she could not promise
+to leave him in ignorance of the menace imminent above
+him. But when at last she tore herself from Abbie&rsquo;s clutching
+hands and hurried away to the office she looked back and saw
+Abbie out in the rain, staring after her in terror and shaking
+her head helplessly. She could not promise herself that she
+would tell Davidge.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_219' name='page_219'></a>219</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VII_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VII_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>She reached the office late in spite of her early start.
+Davidge had gone. He had gone to Pittsburgh to try
+to plead for more steel for more ships.</p>
+<p>The head clerk told her this. He was in an ugly mood,
+sarcastic about Mamise&rsquo;s tardiness, and bitter with the
+knowledge that all the work of building another <i>Clara</i> had
+to be carried through with its endless detail and the chance
+of the same futility. He was as sick about it as a Carlyle
+who must rewrite a burned-up history, an Audubon who
+must repaint all his pictures.</p>
+<p>Davidge had left no good-by for Mamise. This hurt her.
+She wished that she had stopped to tell him good night the
+afternoon before.</p>
+<p>In his prolonged absence Mamise wondered if he were really
+in Pittsburgh or in Washington with Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+She experienced the first luxury of jealousy; it was aggravated
+by alarm. She was left alone, a prey to the appeals of Abbie,
+who could not persuade her to promise silence.</p>
+<p>But the next night Jake was gone. Abbie explained that
+he had been called out of town to a meeting of a committee
+of his benevolent insurance order. Mamise wondered and
+surmised.</p>
+<p>Jake went to meet Nicky Easton and claim his pay for his
+share in the elimination of the <i>Clara</i>. Nicky paid him so
+handsomely that Jake lost his head and imagined himself
+already a millionaire. Strangely, he did not at once set
+about dividing his wealth among his beloved &ldquo;protelariat.&rdquo;
+He made a royal progress from saloon to saloon, growing more
+and more haughty, and pounding on successive bars with a
+vigor that increased as his articulation effervesced. His secret
+would probably have bubbled out of him if he had not been so
+offensive that he was bounced out of every barroom before he
+had time to get to the explanation of his wealth. In one
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_220' name='page_220'></a>220</span>
+&ldquo;poor man&rsquo;s club&rdquo; he fell asleep and rolled off his chair to a
+comfortable berth among the spittoons.</p>
+<p>Next morning Jake woke up with his head swollen and his
+purse vanished. He sought out Nicky and demanded another
+fee. Nicky laughed at his claim; but Jake grew threatening,
+and Nicky was frightened into offering him a chance to win
+another fortune by sinking another ship. He staked Jake to
+the fare for his return and promised to motor down some dark
+night and confer with him. Jake rolled home in state.</p>
+<p>On the same train went a much interested sleuth who
+detached himself from the entourage of Nicky and picked up
+Jake.</p>
+<p>Jake had attracted some attention when he first met
+Nicky in Washington, but the sadly overworked Department
+of Justice could not provide a squad of escorts for every German
+or pro-German suspect. Before the war was over the
+secret army under Mr. Bielaski reached a total of two hundred
+and fifty thousand, but the number of suspects reached into
+the millions. From Nicky Easton alone a dozen activities
+radiated; and studying him and his communicants was a
+slow and complex task.</p>
+<p>Mr. Larrey decided that the best way to get a line on Jake
+would be to take a job alongside him and &ldquo;watch his work.&rdquo;
+It was the easiest thing in the world to get a job at Davidge&rsquo;s
+shipyard; and it was another of the easiest things in the world
+to meet Jake, for Jake was eager to meet workmen, particularly
+workmen like Larrey, who would listen to reason, and
+take an interest in the gentle art of slowing up production.
+Larrey was all for sabotage.</p>
+<p>One evening Jake invited him to his house for further
+development. On that evening Mamise dropped in. She
+did not recognize Larrey, but he remembered her perfectly.</p>
+<p>He could hardly believe his camera eyes at first when he
+saw the great Miss Webling enter a workman&rsquo;s shanty and
+accept Jake Nuddle&rsquo;s introduction:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Larrey, old scout, this is me sister-in-law. Mamise, shake
+hands with me pal Larrey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Larrey had been the first of her shadows in New York, but
+had been called off when she proved unprofitable and before
+she met Easton. And now he found her at work in a shipyard
+where strange things were happening! He was all afire
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_221' name='page_221'></a>221</span>
+with the covey of spies he had flushed. His first impulse was
+to shoot off a wire in code to announce his discovery. Then
+he decided to work this gold-mine himself. It would be
+pleasanter to cultivate this pretty woman than Jake Nuddle,
+and she would probably fall for him like a thousand of brick.
+But when he invited himself to call on her her snub fell on
+him like a thousand of brick. She would not let him see her
+home, and he was furious till Jake explained, &ldquo;She&rsquo;s sweet
+on the boss.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Larrey decided that he had better call on Davidge and tip
+him off to the past of his stenographer and get him to place
+her under observation.</p>
+<p>The next day Davidge came back from his protracted
+journey. He had fought a winning battle for an allotment
+of steel. He was boyish with the renewal of battle ardor,
+and boyish in his greeting of Mamise. He made no bones
+of greeting her before all the clerks with a horribly embarrassing
+enthusiasm:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lord! but I&rsquo;ve been homesick to see you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Miss Gabus was disgusted. Mamise was silly with confusion.</p>
+<p>Those people who are always afraid of new customs have
+dreaded public life for women lest it should destroy modesty
+and rob them of the protection of guardians, duennas, and
+chaperons. But the world seems to have to have a certain
+amount of decency to get along on, at all, and provides for it
+among humans about as well as it provides for the protection
+of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish
+and some prosper.</p>
+<p>The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own
+souls in spasms of anxiety over other people&rsquo;s souls would
+have given up Mamise and Davidge for lost, since she lived
+alone and he was an unattached bachelor. But curiously
+enough, their characters chaperoned them, their jobs and
+ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of
+temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by
+circumstances and crowds.</p>
+<p>Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate
+emotion, of longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in
+office hours these anguishes were as futile as prayers for the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_222' name='page_222'></a>222</span>
+moon. Outside of office hours there were other obstacles,
+embarrassments, interferences.</p>
+<p>These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever,
+any more than a mother&rsquo;s vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent
+walls or <i>yashmaks</i> will infallibly prevail. But they managed
+to kill a good deal of time&ndash;&ndash;and very dolefully.</p>
+<p>Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to
+feel very sorry for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She
+remembered how cruelly he had been bludgeoned by the news
+of the destruction of his first ship, and she kept remembering
+the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy, the strange ecstasy
+of entering into the grief of another. She remembered how
+she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had wrestled
+together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that
+communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand
+for a renewal of union, for a consummation of it, indeed.
+She was human, and nothing human was alien to her.</p>
+<p>Davidge had spoken of marriage&ndash;&ndash;had told her that he was
+a candidate for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then,
+for her heart had been full of the new wine of ambition.
+Like other wines, it had its morning after when all that had
+been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own loneliness told
+her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses combined
+would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.</p>
+<p>When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes
+at sight of her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would
+have been glad if he had snatched her to his breast and crushed
+her there. She had that womanly longing to be crushed, and
+he the man&rsquo;s to crush. But fate provided a sentinel. Miss
+Gabus was looking on; the office force stood by, and the day&rsquo;s
+work was waiting to be done.</p>
+<p>Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter.
+She hammered out a devil&rsquo;s tattoo on it, and he
+devoured estimates and commercial correspondence, while an
+aromatic haze enveloped them both as truly as if they had
+been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.</p>
+<p>Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon
+hour made a noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity
+to cast an evil spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women
+have a wonderful pity for men that other women cultivate!
+Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling was:</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_223' name='page_223'></a>223</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Goin&rsquo; to lunch now, Mi&rsquo; Swebling?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And all that Miss Webling said was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not just yet&ndash;&ndash;thank you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Both were almost swooning with the tremendous significance
+of the moment.</p>
+<p>Miss Webling felt that she was defying all the powers of
+espionage and convention when she made so brave as to linger
+while Miss Gabus left the room in short twitches, with the
+painful reluctance of one who pulls off an adhesive plaster by
+degrees. When at last she was really off, Miss Webling went
+to Davidge&rsquo;s door, feeling as wicked as the maid in Ophelia&rsquo;s
+song, though she said no more than:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, did you have a successful journey?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge whirled in his chair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bully! Sit down, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He thought that no goddess had ever done so divine a thing
+so ambrosially as she when she smiled and shook her incredibly
+exquisite head. He rose to his feet in awe of her. His restless
+hands, afraid to lay hold of their quarry, automatically
+extracted his watch from his pocket and held it beneath his
+eyes. He stared at it without recognizing the hour, and
+stammered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you lunch with me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, thank you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This jolted an &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; out of him. Then he came back with:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When am I going to get a chance to talk to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know my address.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo; He thought of that horrible evening when
+he had marched through the double row of staring cottages.
+But he was determined. &ldquo;Going to be home this evening?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By some strange accident&ndash;&ndash;yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By some strange accident, I might drop round.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They laughed idiotically, and she turned and glided out.</p>
+<p>She went to the mess-hall and moved about, selecting her
+dishes. Pretending not to see that Miss Gabus was pretending
+not to see her, she took her collation to another table
+and ate with the relish of a sense of secret guilt&ndash;&ndash;the guilt
+of a young woman secretly betrothed.</p>
+<p>Davidge kept away from the office most of the afternoon
+because Mamise was so intolerably sweet and so tantalizingly
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_224' name='page_224'></a>224</span>
+unapproachable. He made a pretext of inspecting the works.
+She had a sugary suspicion of his motive, and munched it with
+strange comfort.</p>
+<p>What might have happened if Davidge had called on her
+in her then mood and his could easily be guessed. But there
+are usually interventions. The chaperon this time was Mr.
+Larrey, the operative of the Department of Justice. He also
+had his secret.</p>
+<p>He arrived at Davidge&rsquo;s home just as Davidge finished the
+composition of his third lawn tie and came down-stairs to go.
+When he saw Larrey he was a trifle curt with his visitor.
+Thinking him a workman and probably an ambassador from
+one of the unions on the usual mission of such ambassadors&ndash;&ndash;more
+pay, less hours, or the discharge of some unorganized
+laborer&ndash;&ndash;Davidge said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better come round to the office in the morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t come to your office,&rdquo; said Larrey.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not? It&rsquo;s open to everybody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yeh, but I can&rsquo;t afford to be seen goin&rsquo; there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good Lord! Isn&rsquo;t it respectable enough for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yeh, but&ndash;&ndash;well, I think it&rsquo;s my duty to tip you off to a
+little slick work that&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; on in your establishment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t it keep till to-morrow evening?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yeh&ndash;&ndash;I guess so. It&rsquo;s only one of your stenographers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This checked Davidge. By a quaint coincidence he was
+about to call on one of his stenographers. Larrey amended
+his first statement: &ldquo;Leastways, I&rsquo;ll say she calls herself a
+stenographer. But that&rsquo;s only her little camouflage. She&rsquo;s
+not on the level.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge realized that the stenographer he was wooing was
+not on the level. She was in the clouds. But his curiosity
+was piqued. He motioned Larrey to a chair and took another.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shoot,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s this Miss Webling. Know anything about her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something,&rdquo; said Davidge. He was too much amused to
+be angry. He thought that Larrey was another of those
+amateur detectives who flattered Germany by crediting her
+with an omnipresence in evil. He was a faithful reader of
+Ellis Parker Butler&rsquo;s famous sleuth, and he grinned at Larrey.
+&ldquo;Well, Mr. Philo Gubb, go on. Your story interests me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Larrey reddened. He spoke earnestly, explained who he
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_225' name='page_225'></a>225</span>
+was, showed his credentials, and told what he knew of Miss
+Webling. He added what he imagined Davidge knew.</p>
+<p>Davidge found the whole thing too preposterous to be
+insolent. His chivalry in Mamise&rsquo;s behalf was not aroused,
+because he thought that the incident would make a good
+story to tell her. He drew Larrey out by affecting amazed
+incredulity.</p>
+<p>Larrey explained: &ldquo;She&rsquo;s an old friend of ours. We got the
+word from the British to pick the lady up when she first
+landed in this country. She was too slick for us, I guess,
+because we never got the goods on her. We gave her up
+after a couple of weeks. Then her trail crossed Nicky
+Easton&rsquo;s once more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who is Nicky Easton?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a German agent she knew in London&ndash;&ndash;great friend
+of her adopted father&rsquo;s. The British nabbed him once, but
+he split on the gang, and they let him off. Whilst I was
+trailin&rsquo; him I ran into a feller named Nuddle&ndash;&ndash;he come up
+to see Easton. I followed him here, and lo and behold!
+Miss Webling turns up, too! And passin&rsquo; herself off for
+Nuddle&rsquo;s sister-in-law! Nuddle&rsquo;s a bad actor, but she&rsquo;s
+worse. And she pretends to be a poor workin&rsquo;-girl. Cheese!
+You should have seen her in New York all dolled up!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge ignored the opportunity to say that he had had the
+privilege of seeing Miss Webling all dolled up. He knew why
+Mamise was living as she did. It was a combination of lark
+and crusade. He nursed Larrey&rsquo;s story along, and asked with
+patient amusement:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your theory as to her reason for playing such a
+game?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled as he said this, but sobered abruptly when
+Larrey explained:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You lost a ship not long ago, didn&rsquo;t you? You got other
+ships on the ways, ain&rsquo;t you? Well, I don&rsquo;t need to tell you
+it&rsquo;s good business for the Huns to slow up or blow up all the
+ships they can. Every boat they stop cuts down the supplies
+of the Allies just so much. This Miss Webling&rsquo;s adopted
+father was in on the sinking of the <i>Lusitania</i>, and this girl
+was, too, probably. She carried messages between old Webling
+and Easton, and walked right into a little trap the
+British laid for her. She put up a strong fight, and, being an
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_226' name='page_226'></a>226</span>
+American, was let go. But her record got to this country
+before she did. You ask me what she&rsquo;s up to. Well, what
+should she be up to but the Kaiser&rsquo;s work? She&rsquo;s no stenographer,
+and she wouldn&rsquo;t be here playin&rsquo; tunes on a typewriter
+unless she had some good business reason. Well, her
+business is&ndash;&ndash;she&rsquo;s a ship-wrecker.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The charge was ridiculous, yet there were confirmations or
+seeming confirmations of it. The mere name of Nicky
+Easton was a thorn in Davidge&rsquo;s soul. He remembered Easton
+in London at Mamise&rsquo;s elbow, and in Washington pursuing
+her car and calling her &ldquo;Mees Vapelink.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge promised Larrey that he would look into the
+matter, and bade him good night with mingled respect and
+fear.</p>
+<p>When he set out at length to call on Mamise he was grievously
+troubled lest he had lost his heart to a clever adventuress.
+He despised his suspicions, and yet&ndash;&ndash;somebody had destroyed
+his ship. He remembered how shocked she had been by the
+news. Yet what else could the worst spy do but pretend to
+be deeply worried? Davidge had never liked Jake Nuddle;
+Mamise&rsquo;s alleged relationship by marriage did not gain
+plausibility on reconsideration. The whim to live in a workman&rsquo;s
+cottage was even less convincing.</p>
+<p>Mr. Larrey had spoiled Davidge&rsquo;s blissful mood and his
+lover&rsquo;s program for the evening. Davidge moved slowly
+toward Mamise&rsquo;s cottage, not as a suitor, but as a student.</p>
+<p>Larrey shadowed him from force of habit, and saw him
+going with reluctant feet, pausing now and then, irresolute.
+Davidge was thinking hard, calling himself a fool, now for
+trusting Mamise and now for listening to Larrey. To suspect
+Mamise was to be a traitor to his love: not to suspect her
+was to be a traitor to his common sense and to his beloved
+career.</p>
+<p>And the Mamise that awaited the belated Davidge was
+also in a state of tangled wits. She, too, had dressed with a
+finikin care, as Davidge had, neither of them stopping to
+think how quaint a custom it is for people who know each
+other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to
+get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like
+Christmas parcels for each other&rsquo;s examination. Nature
+dresses the birds in the mating season. Mankind with the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_227' name='page_227'></a>227</span>
+aid of the dressmaker and the haberdasher plumes up at
+will.</p>
+<p>But as C&aelig;sar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and
+Davidge his Larrey, so Mamise had her sister Abbie.</p>
+<p>Abbie came in unexpectedly and regarded Mamise&rsquo;s costume
+with no illusions except her own cynical ones:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What you all diked up about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise shrugged her eyebrows, her lips, and her shoulders.</p>
+<p>Abbie guessed. &ldquo;That man comin&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise repeated her previous business.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kind of low neck, don&rsquo;t you think? And your arms
+nekked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise drew over her arms a scarf that gave them color
+rather than concealment. Abbie scorned the subterfuge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you think it&rsquo;s proper to dress like that for a man to
+come callin&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I did think so till you spoke,&rdquo; snapped Mamise in all the
+bitterness of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed
+and unlovely shame.</p>
+<p>Abbie felt unwelcome. &ldquo;Well, I just dropped over because
+Jake&rsquo;s went out to some kind of meetin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With whom? Where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, some of the workmen&ndash;&ndash;a lot of soreheads lookin&rsquo; for
+more wages.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was indignant: &ldquo;The soldiers get thirty dollars
+a month on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets
+more than that a week for loafing round the shop about seven
+hours a day. How on earth did you ever tie yourself up to
+such a rotten bounder?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I ain&rsquo;t seen you marryin&rsquo; anything better. I guess
+I&rsquo;ll go home. I don&rsquo;t seem to be wanted here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was one of those exact truths that decent people must
+immediately deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and
+said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgive me, dear&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;m a beast. But Jake is such a&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;
+She felt Abbie wriggling ominously and changed to: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
+so unworthy of you. These are such terrible times, and the
+world is in such horrible need of everybody&rsquo;s help and especially
+of ships. It breaks my heart to see anybody wasting
+his time and strength interfering with the builders instead of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_228' name='page_228'></a>228</span>
+joining them. It&rsquo;s like interfering with the soldiers. It&rsquo;s a
+kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and
+the children.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears
+of self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of
+suffering for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a
+world. She was like so many of the air-ships the United States
+was building then: she could not be induced to leave the
+ground or, if she got up, to glide back safely.</p>
+<p>She tried now to love her country, but she hardly rose before
+she fell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know it&rsquo;s tur&rsquo;ble what folks are sufferin&rsquo;, but&ndash;&ndash;well,
+the Lord&rsquo;s will be done, I say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I say it&rsquo;s mainly the devil&rsquo;s will that&rsquo;s being done!&rdquo;
+said Mamise.</p>
+<p>This terrified Abbie. &ldquo;I wisht you&rsquo;d be a little careful of
+your language, Mamise. Swearin&rsquo; and cigarettes both is
+pretty much of a load for a lady to git by with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O Lord!&rdquo; sighed Mamise, in despair. She was capable of
+long, high flights, but she could not carry such a passenger.</p>
+<p>Abbie continued: &ldquo;And do you think it&rsquo;s right, seein&rsquo;
+men here all by yourself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not seeing men&ndash;&ndash;but a man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But all by yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not all by myself when he&rsquo;s here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll get the neighbors talkin&rsquo;&ndash;&ndash;you&rsquo;ll see!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lot I care for their talk!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you marry him and settle down respectable
+and have childern and&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you go home and take care of your own?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess I better.&rdquo; And she departed forthwith.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_229' name='page_229'></a>229</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VIII_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VIII_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The two sisters had managed to fray each other&rsquo;s nerves
+raw. The mere fact that Abbie advocated marriage and
+maternity threw Mamise into a cantankerous distaste for her
+own dreams.</p>
+<p>Larrey had delayed Davidge long enough for Mamise to be
+rid of Abbie, but the influence of both Larrey and Abbie was
+manifest in the strained greetings of the caller and the callee.
+Instead of the eagerness to rush into each other&rsquo;s arms that
+both had felt in the morning, Davidge entered Mamise&rsquo;s
+presence with one thought dominant: &ldquo;Is she really a spy?
+I must be on my guard.&rdquo; And Mamise was thinking, &ldquo;If he
+should be thinking what Abbie thought, how odious!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus once more their moods chaperoned them. Love could
+not attune them. She sat; he sat. When their glances met
+they parted at once.</p>
+<p>She mistook his uncertainty for despondency. She assumed
+that he was brooding over his lost ship. Out of a
+long silence she spoke:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder if the world will ever forget and forgive?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forget and forgive who&ndash;&ndash;whom, for what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Germany for all she&rsquo;s done to this poor world&ndash;&ndash;Belgium,
+the <i>Lusitania</i>, the <i>Clara</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled sadly. &ldquo;The <i>Clara</i> was a little slow tub compared
+to the <i>Lusitania</i>, but she meant a lot to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And to me. So did the <i>Lusitania</i>. She nearly cost me
+my life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was startled. &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t plan to sail on her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo; She paused. She had not meant to open
+this subject.</p>
+<p>But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had
+told.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you mean&ndash;&ndash;she nearly cost you your life?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_230' name='page_230'></a>230</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s one of the dark chapters of my past.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never told me about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please!&rdquo; He said it with a surprising earnestness. He
+had a sudden hope that her confession might be an absolving
+explanation.</p>
+<p>She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire
+to release that old secret. She began, recklessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on
+the stage, and Sir Joseph Webling&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You told me that much, but not what happened before
+you met him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t tell you that, and I&rsquo;m not going to now, but&ndash;&ndash;well,
+Sir Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of
+my own&ndash;&ndash;to know and remember. Sir Joseph was German
+born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was contagious, for he&ndash;&ndash;well,
+I can&rsquo;t tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I swore not to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You gave your oath to a German?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I&rsquo;m always
+forgetting and starting to tell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why did you take your oath?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I traded secrecy for freedom.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean you turned state&rsquo;s evidence?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh no, I didn&rsquo;t tell on them. I didn&rsquo;t know what they
+were up to when they used me for&ndash;&ndash; But I&rsquo;m skidding now.
+I want to tell you&ndash;&ndash;terribly. But I simply must not. I
+made an awful mistake that night at Mrs. Prothero&rsquo;s in
+pretending to be ill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You only pretended?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got
+after me, accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that
+resulted in the sinking of ships and the killing of men. She
+said that the police came to our house, and Sir Joseph tried
+to kill one of them and killed his own wife and then was shot
+by an officer and that they gave out the story that Sir Joseph
+and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She said
+Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story
+she told, and I was afraid she&rsquo;d tell you, so I spirited you
+away on the pretext of illness.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_231' name='page_231'></a>231</span></div>
+<p>Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey&rsquo;s
+story. He said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it wasn&rsquo;t true what Lady C.-W. told?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact,
+and I couldn&rsquo;t explain it without breaking my oath. And
+now I&rsquo;ve pretty nearly broken it, after all. I&rsquo;ve sprained it
+badly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you want to go on and&ndash;&ndash;finish it off?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want to&ndash;&ndash;oh, how I want to! but I&rsquo;ve got to save a few
+shreds of respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were
+going to tea with Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish
+now I&rsquo;d let you go. Then you&rsquo;d have known the worst of
+me&ndash;&ndash;or worse than the worst.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her
+bewilderment, that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized
+her hands and felt a need to gather her home to his arms.</p>
+<p>She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him.
+Studying his radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had
+known part of her story before and was glad to hear her
+confess it, but her intuition missed fire when she guessed at the
+source of his information.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not since I saw her with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then who told you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her
+read his heart so true.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The main thing is that you told me. And now once more
+I ask you: will you marry me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her
+brusquerie:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And why not?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries
+as you are.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_232' name='page_232'></a>232</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IX_1' id='CHAPTER_IX_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a
+man does not love a woman the less for being feminine,
+and when she thwarts him by a womanliness she delights him
+excruciatingly.</p>
+<p>But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion
+at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the
+funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish
+forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile
+in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full
+penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience
+and returned to her theme.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make
+some atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don&rsquo;t
+know how many ships, and I wanted to take some part in
+building others. So when I met you and you told me that
+women could build ships, too, you wakened a great hope in
+me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards and
+swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With those hands?&rdquo; He laughed and reached for them.</p>
+<p>She put them out of sight back of her as one removes
+dangerous toys from the clutch of a child, and went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you wouldn&rsquo;t let me. So I took up the next best
+thing, office work. I studied that hateful stenography and
+learned to play a typewriter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It keeps you nearer to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t want to be near you. I want to build ships.
+Please let me go out in the yard. Please give me a real job.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy
+pleading for such toil. His amusement humiliated her and
+baffled her so that at length she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please go on home. It&rsquo;s getting late, and I don&rsquo;t like
+you at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know you don&rsquo;t like me, but couldn&rsquo;t you love me?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_233' name='page_233'></a>233</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s more impossible than liking you, since you won&rsquo;t
+let me have my only wish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too brutal, I tell you. And it&rsquo;s getting too cold.
+It would simply ruin your perfect skin. I don&rsquo;t want to
+marry a longshoreman, thank you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll thank you to go on home. I&rsquo;m tired out. I&rsquo;ve
+got to get up in the morning at the screech of dawn and take
+up your ghastly drudgery again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you&rsquo;ll marry me you won&rsquo;t have to work at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But work is the one thing I want. So if you&rsquo;ll kindly take
+yourself off I&rsquo;ll be much obliged. You&rsquo;ve no business here,
+anyway, and it&rsquo;s getting so late that you&rsquo;ll have all the
+neighbors talking.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lot I care!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I care a lot,&rdquo; she said, blandly belying her words
+to Abbie. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to live among them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise.
+He felt as sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl&rsquo;s house
+by a sleepy parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily,
+fought his way into his overcoat, and growled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good night!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She sighed &ldquo;Good night!&rdquo; and wished that she were not
+so cantankerous. The closing of the door shook her whole
+frame, and she made a step forward to call him back, but sank
+into a chair instead, worn out with the general unsatisfactoriness
+of life, the complicated mathematical problem that
+never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be
+quite squared.</p>
+<p>She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering
+mankind and womankind and their mutual dependence and
+incompatibility. It would be nice to be married if one could
+stay single at the same time. But it was hopelessly impossible
+to eat your cake and have it, too.</p>
+<p>Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that
+Davidge had gone, imagined all sorts of things and wished that
+her wild sister would marry and settle down. And yet she
+wished that she herself had stayed single, for the children
+were a torment, and of her husband she could only say that
+she did not know whether he bothered her the more when
+he was away or when he was at home.</p>
+<p>When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_234' name='page_234'></a>234</span>
+cottage she stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed
+to hale her from it into a palace. As he walked home his
+heart warmed to all the little cottages, most of them dark and
+cheerless, and he longed to change all these to palaces, too. He
+felt sorry for the poor, tired people that lived so humbly there
+and slept now but to rise in the morning to begin moiling again.</p>
+<p>Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines
+at the pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so
+much treasure into the hands of the poor. If he had not
+schemed and borrowed and organized they would not have
+had their wages at all.</p>
+<p>But now he wished that there might be no poor and no
+wages, but everybody palaced and living on money from home.
+That seemed to be the idea, too, of his more discontented
+working-men, but he could not imagine how everybody could
+have a palace and everybody live at ease. Who was to build
+the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the mountains
+and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the
+steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the
+dreamers and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists
+to denounce the capitalists and draw pictures of them
+as obese swine wallowing in bags of gold while emaciated children
+put out their lean hands in vain. But cartoons were not
+construction, and the men who would revolutionize the world
+could not, as a rule, keep their own books straight.</p>
+<p>Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the
+mental riches to go out and get them. Davidge had been as
+poor as the poorest man at his works, but he had sold muscle
+for money and brains for money. He had dreamed and
+schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took their
+pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms
+of their families or the barrooms of idleness.</p>
+<p>Still there was no convincing them of the realization that
+they could not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease
+by ease, but only by sweat. And so everybody was saying
+that as soon as this great war was over a greater war was
+coming upon the world. He wondered what could be done
+to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all that
+the German horror might spare.</p>
+<p>Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs
+of love.</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK V</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>IN WASHINGTON</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_6' id='linki_6'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_235' name='page_235'></a>235</span>
+<img src='images/illus-286.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='485' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other&rsquo;s examination.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_236' name='page_236'></a>236</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering
+world. People thought of the gales that would harass
+the poor souls in the clammy trenches, the icy winds that
+would flutter the tents of the men in camps, the sleety storms
+that would lash the workers on the docks and on the decks
+of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless persecution
+of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not enough
+for themselves.</p>
+<p>To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing.
+Mamise woke in the chill little cottage and had to leap from
+her snug bed to a cold bathroom, come out chattering to a cold
+kitchen. Just as her house grew a little warm, she had to
+leave it for a long, windy walk to an office not half warm
+enough.</p>
+<p>The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds
+stampeded them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans
+herding Belgian fugitives along. The dour autumn seemed
+to wrench hopes from the heart like shriveled leaves, and to
+fill the air with swirling discouragements. The men at work
+about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow upon
+their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that
+threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.</p>
+<p>The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other
+stirring things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly
+battle and accept Davidge&rsquo;s offer of a wedding-ring.
+She had, of course, her Webling inheritance to fall
+back upon, but she had come to hate it so as tainted money
+that she would not touch it or its interest. She put it all
+into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various
+charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had
+been her emancipation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder
+had spoken of as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph
+Webling.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_237' name='page_237'></a>237</span></div>
+<p>A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery,
+a thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have
+servants to wait on her and build her fires. She would go
+out only when she wished, and sleep late of mornings. She
+would have multitudinous furs and a closed and heated limousine
+to carry her through the white world. She could salve
+her conscience by taking up some of the more comfortable
+forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross bandage-factory
+or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy canteen.</p>
+<p>At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward
+matrimony, as many another woman has done. These
+craven moods alternated with periods of self-rebuke. She
+told herself that such a marriage would dishonor her and cheat
+Davidge.</p>
+<p>Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it
+had its gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America
+marriage still possesses for women a certain finality. Only one
+marriage in nine ended in divorce that year.</p>
+<p>Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt.
+She was far, indeed, from that more or less imaginary character
+so frequent in fiction and so rare in reality, the young
+woman who knows nothing of life and mankind. Like every
+other woman that ever lived, she knew a good deal more
+than she would confess, and had had more experience than she
+would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she
+knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had
+found her very tantalizing about just how much her experience
+totaled up.</p>
+<p>She had observed the enormous difference between a man
+and a woman who meet occasionally and the same people
+chained together interminably. Quail is a delicacy for invalids
+and gourmets, but notoriously intolerable as a steady
+diet. On the other hand, bread is forever good. One never
+tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially refreshing
+as bread and butter. The maddening thing about
+marriage is what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all,
+capital prizes do exist, and some people get them.</p>
+<p>Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her
+lonelier hours she coveted their dual blessedness, enriched
+with joys and griefs shared in plenty and in privation.</p>
+<p>Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_238' name='page_238'></a>238</span>
+other man. She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she
+longed for him with a kind of ferocity. Then she was afraid
+of him, of what he would be like as a husband, of what she
+would be like as a wife.</p>
+<p>Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything
+and everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had
+been lured into an office by the fascinating advertisements of
+freedom, a career, achievement, doing-your-bit and other
+catchwords. She had found that business has its boredoms
+no less than the prison walls of home, commerce its treadmills
+and its oakum-picking no less than the jail. The cozy little
+cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to nag her
+soul.</p>
+<p>The destruction of the good ship <i>Clara</i> had dealt her a
+heavier blow than she at first realized, for the mind suffers
+from obscure internal injuries as the body does after a great
+shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the
+business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet,
+and the lover, though there has not been many an &AElig;schylos
+or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus
+chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing
+at his profits; the &OElig;dipos in the factory who sees everything
+gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business
+hell with all the infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes,
+panics, and competition.</p>
+<p>The blowing up of the <i>Clara</i> had revealed the pitiful truth
+that men may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and
+costly structure, only to see it all annulled at once by a
+careless or a malicious stranger. The <i>Clara</i> served as a warning
+that the ship <i>Mamise</i> now on the stocks and growing
+ever so slowly might be never finished, or destroyed as soon
+as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about her.
+It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather
+was conspiring with the inner November.</p>
+<p>The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend
+upon the blackest year in human annals. Everybody was
+unhappy; there was a frightful shortage of food among all
+nations, a terrifying shortage of coal, and the lowest temperature
+ever known would be recorded. America, less
+unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly disappointed
+in herself.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_239' name='page_239'></a>239</span></div>
+<p>There was food in plenty for America, but not for her confederates.
+The prices were appalling. Wages went up and up,
+but never quite caught the expenses. It was necessary to
+send enormous quantities of everything to our allies lest
+they perish before we could arrive with troops. And Germany
+went on fiendishly destroying ships, foodstuffs, and capital,
+displaying in every victory a more insatiable cruelty, a more
+revolting cynicism toward justice, mercy, or truth.</p>
+<p>The Kaiserly contempt for America&rsquo;s importance seemed
+to be justified. People were beginning to remember Rome,
+and to wonder if, after all, Germany might not crush France
+and England with the troops that had demolished Russia.
+And then America would have to fight alone.</p>
+<p>At this time Mamise stumbled upon an old magazine of the
+ancient date of 1914. It was full of prophecies that the
+Kaiser would be dethroned, exiled, hanged, perhaps. The
+irony of it was ghastly. Nothing was more impossible than
+the downfall of the Kaiser&ndash;&ndash;who seemed verifying his boasts
+that he took his crown from God. He was praising the strong
+sword of the unconquerable Germany. He was marshaling
+the millions from his eastern front to throw the British troops
+into the sea and smother the France he had bled white. The
+best that the most hopeful could do was to mutter: &ldquo;Hurry!
+hurry! We&rsquo;ve got to hurry!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise grew fretful about the delay to the ship that was
+to take her name across the sea. She went to Davidge to
+protest: &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you hurry up my ship? If she isn&rsquo;t launched
+soon I&rsquo;m going to go mad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge threw back his head and emitted a noise between
+laughter and profanity. He picked up a letter and flung it
+down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just got orders changing the specifications again.
+This is the third time, and the third time&rsquo;s the charm; for now
+we&rsquo;ve got to take out all we&rsquo;ve put in, make a new set of
+drawings and a new set of castings and pretty blamed near
+tear down the whole ship and rebuild it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the name of Heaven, why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the name of hades, because we&rsquo;ve got to get a herd of
+railroad locomotives to France, and sending them over in
+pieces won&rsquo;t do. They want &rsquo;em ready to run. So the
+powers that be have ordered me to provide two hatchways
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_240' name='page_240'></a>240</span>
+big enough to lower whole locomotives through, and pigeonholes
+in the hold big enough to carry them. As far as the
+<i>Mamise</i> is concerned, that means we&rsquo;ve just about got to
+rub it out and do it over again. It&rsquo;s a case of back to the
+mold-loft for <i>Mamise</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And about how much more delay will this mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, about ninety days or thereabouts. If we&rsquo;re lucky
+we&rsquo;ll launch her by spring.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was almost worse than the death of the <i>Clara</i>. That
+tragedy had been noble; it dealt a noble blow and woke the
+heart to a noble grief and courage. But deferment made the
+heart sick, and the brain and almost the stomach.</p>
+<p>Davidge liked the disappointment no better than Mamise
+did, but he was used to it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now aren&rsquo;t you glad you&rsquo;re not a ship-builder?
+How would you feel if you had got your wish to work in the
+yard and had turned your little velvet hands into a pair of
+nutmeg-graters by driving about ten thousand rivets into
+those plates, only to have to cut &rsquo;em all out again and drive
+&rsquo;em into an entirely new set of plates, knowing that maybe
+they&rsquo;d have to come out another time and go back? How&rsquo;d
+you like that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.</p>
+<p>Davidge went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a business man&rsquo;s life, my dear&ndash;&ndash;eternally making
+things that won&rsquo;t sell, putting his soul and his capital and his
+preparation into a pile of stock that nobody will take off his
+hands. But he has to go right on, borrowing money and
+pledging the past for the future and never knowing whether
+his dreams will turn out to be dollars or&ndash;&ndash;junk!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise realized for the first time the pathos, the higher
+drama of the manufacturer&rsquo;s world, that world which poets
+and some other literary artists do not describe because they
+are too ignorant, too petty, too bookish. They sneer at the
+noble word <i>commercial</i> as if it were a reproach!</p>
+<p>Mamise, however, looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair
+as a kind of despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal
+strife. She tried to rise beyond a poetical height to the clouds
+of the practical.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What will you do with all the workmen who are on that
+job?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_241' name='page_241'></a>241</span></div>
+<p>Davidge grinned. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re announcing their monthly
+strike for higher wages&ndash;&ndash;threatening to lay off the force.
+It&rsquo;d serve &rsquo;em right to take &rsquo;em at their word for a while.
+But you simply can&rsquo;t fight a labor union according to Queensbery
+rules, so I&rsquo;ll give &rsquo;em the raise and put &rsquo;em on another
+ship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the <i>Mamise</i> will be idle and neglected for three
+months.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Germans couldn&rsquo;t have done much worse by her, could
+they?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not much.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll call it a day and go home,&rdquo; said Mamise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better call it a quarter and go to New York or Palm
+Beach or somewhere where there&rsquo;s a little gaiety.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you sick of seeing me round?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Since you won&rsquo;t marry me&ndash;&ndash;yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise sniffed at this and set her little desk in order,
+aligned the pencils in the tray, put the carbons back in the
+box and the rubber cover on the typewriter. Then she sank
+it into its well and put on her hat.</p>
+<p>Davidge held her heavy coat for her and could not resist
+the opportunity to fold her into his arms. Just as his arms
+closed about her and he opened his lips to beg her not to
+desert him he saw over her shoulder the door opening.</p>
+<p>He had barely time to release her and pretend to be still
+holding her coat when Miss Gabus entered. His elaborate
+guiltlessness confirmed her bitterest suspicions, and she crossed
+the room to deposit a sheaf of letters in Davidge&rsquo;s &ldquo;in&rdquo; basket
+and gather up the letters in his &ldquo;out&rdquo; basket. She passed
+across the stage with an effect of absolute refrigeration, like
+one of Richard III&rsquo;s ghosts.</p>
+<p>Davidge was furious at Miss Gabus and himself. Mamise
+was furious at them both&ndash;&ndash;partly for the awkwardness of the
+incident, partly for the failure of Davidge&rsquo;s enterprise against
+her lips.</p>
+<p>When Miss Gabus was gone the ecstatic momentum was
+lost. Davidge grumbled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shall I see you to-morrow?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Mamise.</p>
+<p>She gave him her hand. He pressed it in his two palms
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_242' name='page_242'></a>242</span>
+and shook his head. She shook her head. They were both
+rebuking the bad behavior of the fates.</p>
+<p>Mamise trudged homeward&ndash;&ndash;or at least houseward. She
+was in another of her irresolute states, and irresolution is the
+most disappointing of all the moods to the irresolute ones
+and all the neighbors. It was irresolution that made &ldquo;Hamlet&rdquo;
+a five-act play, and only a Shakespeare could have kept
+him endurable.</p>
+<p>Mamise was becoming unendurable to herself. When she
+got to her cottage she found it as dismal as an empty ice-box.
+When she had started the fire going she had nothing
+else to do. In sheer desperation she decided to answer a few
+letters. There was an old one from Polly Widdicombe.
+She read it again. It contained the usual invitation to come
+back to reason and Washington.</p>
+<p>Just for something positive to do she resolved to go. There
+was a tonic in the mere act of decision. She wrote a letter.
+She felt that she could not wait so long as its answer would
+require. She resolved to send a telegram.</p>
+<p>This meant hustling out into the cold again, but it was
+something to do, somewhere to go, some excuse for a hope.</p>
+<p>Polly telegraphed:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal if you can.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mamise showed Davidge the telegram. He was very
+plucky about letting her go. For her sake he was so glad
+that he concealed his own loneliness. That made her underestimate
+it. He confirmed her belief that he was glad to be
+rid of her by making a lark of her departure. He filled an
+old suit-case with coal and insisted on her taking it. The
+porter who lugged it along the platform at Washington gave
+Mamise a curious look. He supposed that this was one of
+those suit-cases full of bottled goods that were coming into
+Washington in such multitudes since the town had been
+decreed absolutely dry. He shook it and was surprised when
+he failed to hear the glug-glug of liquor.</p>
+<p>But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of
+that other form of carbon which women wear in rings and
+necklaces. The whole country was underheated. To the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_243' name='page_243'></a>243</span>
+wheatless, meatless, sweetless days there were added the heatless
+months. Major Widdicombe took his breakfasts standing
+up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in bed,
+and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.</p>
+<p>There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices
+of the Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the
+shops and theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country
+clubs were closed. Every device to save a lump of coal was
+put into legal effect so that the necessary war factories might
+run and the ships go over the sea. Soon there would be
+gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people would
+obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated
+by law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than
+one meat to one person. Grocers would be fined for selling
+too much sugar to a family. Placards, great billboards, and
+all the newspapers were filled with counsels to save, save, save,
+and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds. People grew depressed
+at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so little show
+of accomplishment.</p>
+<p>American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America
+and apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved
+by mathematics, for there were not ships enough to carry
+them and their supplies. The Germans were building up
+reserves in France, and they had every advantage of inner
+lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any one of a
+hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without warning,
+and wherever they struck the line would split before the
+reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once
+through, what could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went
+about that the Allies had no reserves worth the name. France
+and England were literally &ldquo;all in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans
+meek. They credited God with a share in their achievement
+and pinned an Iron Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging
+His resources for the future. Those who had protested that
+the war had been forced on a peaceful Germany and that her
+majestic fight was all in self-defense came out now to confess&ndash;&ndash;or
+rather to boast&ndash;&ndash;that they had planned this triumph all
+along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored
+up reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world
+and make it a German planet.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_244' name='page_244'></a>244</span></div>
+<p>The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this
+approaching day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched
+subjects were whipped up to further endurance by a brandy
+of fiery promises, the prospects of incalculable loot, vast
+colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities sky-high. They
+were told to be glad that America had come into the war
+openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could
+pay the bills.</p>
+<p>In the whole history of chicken-computation there were
+probably never so many fowls counted before they were
+hatched&ndash;&ndash;and in the final outcome never such a crackling and
+such a stench of rotten eggs.</p>
+<p>But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the
+outcome. The strategical experts protested against the wasteful
+&ldquo;side-shows&rdquo; in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki,
+and the taking of Jerusalem was counted merely a pretty bit
+of Christmas shopping that could not weigh against the fall
+of Kerensky, the end of Russian r&eacute;sistance in the Bolshevik
+upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own mountainsides.</p>
+<p>Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy
+German collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the
+first to break.</p>
+<p>So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many
+in America who had been driven to cover because of their
+Teutonic activities before America entered the war began
+to dream that they, too, would reap a great reward for their
+martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.</p>
+<p>The premonition of the dawning of <i>Der Tag</i> stirred the
+heart of Nicky Easton, of course. He had led for months the
+life of a fox in a hunt-club county. Every time he put his
+head out he heard the bay of the hounds. He had stolen very
+few chickens, and he expected every moment to be pounced
+on. But now that he felt assured of a German triumph in a
+little while, he began to think of the future. His heart turned
+again to Mamise.</p>
+<p>His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place
+had compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had
+been used to. His German accent did not help him, and he
+had found that even those heavy persons known as light
+women, though they had no other virtue, had patriotism
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_245' name='page_245'></a>245</span>
+enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility. His dialect
+insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being
+insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with
+German-stained money.</p>
+<p>In his alliance with Jake Nuddle for the blowing up of the
+<i>Clara</i>, and their later communications looking toward the
+destruction of other ships, he kept informed of Mamise. He
+always asked Jake about her. He was bitterly depressed
+by the news that she was &ldquo;sweet on&rdquo; Davidge. He was
+exultant when he learned from Jake that she had given up
+her work in the office and had gone to Washington. Jake
+learned her address from Abbie, and passed it on to Nicky.</p>
+<p>Nicky was tempted to steal into Washington and surprise
+her. But enemy aliens were forbidden to visit the capital,
+and he was afraid to go by train. He had wild visions of
+motoring thither and luring her to a ride with him. He
+wanted to kidnap her. He might force her to marry him by
+threatening to kill her and himself. At least he might make
+her his after the classic manner of his fellow-countrymen in
+Belgium. But he had not force enough to carry out anything
+so masterful. He was a sentimental German, not a warrior.</p>
+<p>In his more emotional moods he began to feel a prophetic
+sorrow for Marie Louise after the Germans had conquered
+the world. She would be regarded as a traitress. She had
+been adopted by Sir Joseph Webling and had helped him,
+only to abandon the cause and go over to the enemy.</p>
+<p>If Nicky could convert her again to loyalty, persuade her
+to do some brave deed for the Fatherland in redemption of
+her blacksliding, then when <i>Der Tag</i> came he could reveal
+what she had done. When in that resurrection day the graves
+opened and all the good German spies and propagandists
+came forth to be crowned by <i>Gott</i> and the Kaiser, Nicky could
+lead Marie Louise to the dual throne, and, describing her
+reconciliation to the cause, claim her as his bride. And the
+Kaiser would say, &ldquo;<i>Ende gut, alles gut!</i>&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Never a missionary felt more sanctity in offering salvation
+to a lost soul by way of repentance than Nicky felt when he
+went to the house of an American friend and had Mamise
+called on the long-distance telephone.</p>
+<p>Mamise answered, &ldquo;Yes, this is Miss Webling,&rdquo; to the
+faint-voiced long-distance operator, and was told to hold the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_246' name='page_246'></a>246</span>
+wire. She heard: &ldquo;All ready with Washington. Go ahead.&rdquo;
+Then she heard a timid query:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hallow, hallow! Iss this Miss Vapelink?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was shocked at the familiar dialect. She answered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is Miss Webling, yes. Who is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;d know my woice?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&ndash;&ndash;yes. I know you&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pleass to say no names.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Philadelphia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. What do you want?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To see you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You evidently know my address.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know I cannot come by Vashington.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then how can I see you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could meet me some place, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is important, most important.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To whom?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To you&ndash;&ndash;only to you. It is for your sake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed at this; yet it set her curiosity on fire, as he
+hoped it would. He could almost hear her pondering. But
+what she asked was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How did you find my address?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;From Chake&ndash;&ndash;Chake Nuttle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could not see the wild look that threw her eyes and lips
+wide. She had never dreamed of such an acquaintance. The
+mere possibility of it set her brain whirling. It seemed to
+explain many things, explain them with a horrible clarity.
+She dared not reveal her suspicions to Nicky. She said
+nothing till she heard him speak again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Vell, you come, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could come here best?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, it&rsquo;s too far.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By Baltimore we could meet once?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. Where? When?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To-morrow. I do not know Baltimore good. Ve could
+take ride by automobile and talk so. Yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right.&rdquo; This a little anxiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To-morrow evening. I remember it is a train gets there
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_247' name='page_247'></a>247</span>
+from Vashington about eight. I meet you. Make sure
+nobody sees you take that train, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know people follow people sometimes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I trust you alvays, Marie Louise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. Good-by.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Goot-py, Marie Louise.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_248' name='page_248'></a>248</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered
+several sharp and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes
+had wakened in the receiver.</p>
+<p>The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that
+Nicky had some postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again.
+Her ear was as bewildered as your tongue when it expects to
+taste one thing and tastes another, for it was Davidge&rsquo;s voice
+that spoke, asking for her. She called him by name, and he
+growled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger
+who kept me waiting so long?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you wish you knew?&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;Where are
+you now? At the shipyard?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m in Washington&ndash;&ndash;ran up on business. Can I see
+you to-night?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope so&ndash;&ndash;unless we&rsquo;re going out&ndash;&ndash;as I believe we are.
+Hold the wire, won&rsquo;t you, while I ask.&rdquo; She came back in
+due season to say, &ldquo;Polly says you are to come to dinner and
+go to a dance with us afterward.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A dance? I&rsquo;m not invited.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right
+to take you&ndash;&ndash;no end of big bugs will be there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m rusty on dancing, but with you&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thanks. We&rsquo;ll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight.
+Wrap up well. It&rsquo;s cold, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The
+thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting.
+He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden
+Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known
+as &ldquo;jazz&rdquo;&ndash;&ndash;so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers
+capered and writhed.</p>
+<p>The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old
+Rosslyn bridge squealed with cold under the motor. It was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_249' name='page_249'></a>249</span>
+good to see the lights of the Hall at last, and to thaw himself
+out at the huge fireplace.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lucky to get a little wood,&rdquo; said Major Widdicombe.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know what we&rsquo;ll do when it&rsquo;s gone. Coal is next to
+impossible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two
+or three other house guests, and some wives of important
+people. They laid off their wraps and then decided to keep
+them on.</p>
+<p>Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly
+clad, discouraged office-hack that when she descended the
+stairs and paused on the landing a few steps from the floor,
+to lift her eyebrows and her lip-corners at him, he was glad
+of the pause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Break it to me gently,&rdquo; he called across the balustrade.</p>
+<p>She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed
+in her complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was
+dazed by her unimagined splendor.</p>
+<p>As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the
+tribute in his, she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Break what to you gently?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You!&rdquo; he groaned. &ldquo;Good Lord! Talk about &lsquo;the glory
+that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome&rsquo;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on
+his evening finery.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning
+in d&eacute;collet&eacute;. For a pair of common laborers, we are
+certainly gaudy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, &ldquo;So you&rsquo;re the
+fascinating brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary
+of that awful ship-factory.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: &ldquo;Never
+again. She&rsquo;s fired! We can&rsquo;t afford her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bully for you,&rdquo; said Polly. &ldquo;I suppose I&rsquo;m an old-fashioned,
+grandmotherly sort of person, but I&rsquo;ll be damned if
+I can see why a woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie
+Louise here should be pounding typewriter keys in an office.
+Of course, if she had to&ndash;&ndash; But even then, I should say that
+it would be her solemn religious duty to sell her soul for a lot
+of glad-rags.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lot of people are predicting that women will never go
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_250' name='page_250'></a>250</span>
+back to the foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but&ndash;&ndash;well,
+I&rsquo;m no prophetess, but all I can say is that if this
+war puts an end to the dressmaker&rsquo;s art, it will certainly put
+civilization on the blink. Now, honestly, what could a woman
+accomplish in the world if she worked in overalls twenty-four
+hours a day for twenty-four years&ndash;&ndash;what could she make that
+would be more worth while than getting herself all dressed up
+and looking her best?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge said: &ldquo;You&rsquo;re talking like a French aristocrat
+before the Revolution; but I wish you could convince her
+of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she
+was thrilled, thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in
+her best clothes&ndash;&ndash;in and out of her best clothes, and liberally
+illuminated with jewelry. She was now something like a great
+singer singing the highest note of her master-aria in her best
+r&ocirc;le&ndash;&ndash;herself at once the perfect instrument and the perfect
+artist.</p>
+<p>Marie Louise went in on Davidge&rsquo;s arm. The dining-room
+was in gala attire, the best silver and all of it out&ndash;&ndash;flowers
+and candles. But the big vault was cold; the men shivered
+and marveled at the women, who left their wraps on the
+backs of their chairs and sat up in no apparent discomfort
+with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to the chill.</p>
+<p>Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just
+who Mamise was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect
+nut? She is, though&ndash;&ndash;the worst ever. Do you know what
+she has done? Taken up stenography and gone into the
+office of a ship-building gang!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries
+of amazement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s more,&rdquo; said Mamise, &ldquo;I live on my salary.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was considered incredible in the Washington of then.
+Mamise admitted that it took management.</p>
+<p>Mamise said: &ldquo;Polly, can you see me living in a shanty
+cooking my own breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself
+and washing my own dishes? And for lunch going to a big
+mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and eating on the swollen
+arm of a big chair?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly shook her head in despair of her. &ldquo;Let those do it
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_251' name='page_251'></a>251</span>
+that have to. Nobody&rsquo;s going to get me to live like a Belgian
+refugee without giving me the same excuse.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more
+than a silly affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings
+the memory of her daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity.
+Here she was in her element, at her superlative. She
+breathed deeply of the atmosphere of luxury, the incense of
+rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent people.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don&rsquo;t think
+I&rsquo;ll ever go back to honest work again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She thought she saw in Davidge&rsquo;s eyes a gleam of approval.
+It occurred to her that he was renewing his invitation to her
+to become his wife and live as a lady. She was not insulted
+by the surmise.</p>
+<p>When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men
+sat for a while, talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts
+the country was heaping into mountains&ndash;&ndash;the blood-sweating
+taxes, the business end of the war, the prospect for the spring
+campaign on the Western Front, the avalanche of Russia, the
+rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that they were in German
+pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would take to replace
+the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in getting
+men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The
+astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down
+all industry and business for four days and for the ten succeeding
+Mondays in order to eke out coal; this was regarded
+as worse than the loss of a great battle. Every aspect of
+the war was so depressing that the coroner&rsquo;s inquest broke
+up at once when Major Widdicombe said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I get enough of this in the shop, and I&rsquo;m frozen through.
+Let&rsquo;s go in and jaw the women.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room
+with the majestic languor of lions well fed.</p>
+<p>Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen
+that concealed his stare. She was listening politely to
+the wife of Holman, of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman&rsquo;s
+stories were always long, and people were always interrupting
+them because they had to or stay mute all night. Davidge
+was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a chance to revel
+in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of mitigated
+silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_252' name='page_252'></a>252</span>
+seated sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it
+her upraised arm rested. Davidge&rsquo;s eyes followed the strange
+and marvelous outline described by the lines of that arm,
+running into the sharp rise of a shoulder, like an apple against
+the throat, the bizarre shape of the head in its whimsical
+coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder carrying the caressing
+glance down that arm to the hand clasping a sheaf of outspread
+plumes against her knee, and on along to where one
+quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged
+from a stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.</p>
+<p>Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the
+body of her where it disappeared below the shoulders into the
+possession of the gown; he imagined with a certain awe what
+she must be like beneath all those long lines, those rounded
+surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with their curious little
+pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light that satin
+shimmers with.</p>
+<p>In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and
+satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed
+sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had
+surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful
+plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began
+to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more
+than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had
+removed the ban on extravagance.</p>
+<p>The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too,
+and Mamise wore all she had. She had taken her gems from
+their prison in the safe-deposit box in the Trust Company
+cellar. They seemed to be glad to be at home in the light
+again. They reveled in it, winking, laughing, playing a kind
+of game in which light chased light through the deeps of
+color.</p>
+<p>The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck
+Davidge sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry
+freight wondered at the curious industry of those who sought
+out pebbles of price, and polished them, shaped them, faceted
+them, and fastened them in metals of studied design, petrified
+jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied steel.</p>
+<p>He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and
+lower it into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers
+with which a lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_253' name='page_253'></a>253</span>
+it in platinum. He contrasted the pneumatic riveter with
+the tiny hammers of the goldsmith. There seemed to be no
+less vanity about one than the other. The work of the jeweler
+would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as large as a rivet-head
+would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like sonnets
+and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing,
+yet somehow worth more than anything useful.</p>
+<p>He wondered what the future would do to these arts and
+their patronesses. The one business of the world now was
+the manufacture, transportation, and efficient delivery of
+explosives.</p>
+<p>He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted
+people were to the humble, who went grimy and weary in
+dirty overalls over their plain clothes to their ugly factories
+and back to their uglier homes.</p>
+<p>It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody
+should spend his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with
+a monotonous task. It seemed hard that the toiling woman
+and the wife and daughter of the toiler might not alleviate
+their bleak persons with pearl necklaces about their throats,
+with rubies pendant from their ears, and their fingers studded
+with sapphire and topaz.</p>
+<p>Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed
+better that a few should have them rather than none at all,
+better that beauty should be allowed to reign somewhere than
+nowhere during its brief perfection.</p>
+<p>And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of
+the rich and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment
+of the poor? When panics came and the rich fasted the poor
+starved. Would the reduction of the opulent and the elevation
+of the paupers all to the same plain average make anybody
+happier? Would the poor be glad to learn that they
+could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would contentment
+set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing
+of comfort to one&rsquo;s children rendered impossible, the establishment
+of one&rsquo;s destiny left to the decision of boards and
+by-laws, would there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had
+voted &ldquo;universal happiness.&rdquo; It would be interesting to see
+how well Russia fared during the next year and how universally
+happiness might be distributed.</p>
+<p>He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_254' name='page_254'></a>254</span>
+these nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist
+Samaritans to solve in the vast laboratory where the manual
+laborers at last could work out their hearts&rsquo; desires, with the
+upper class destroyed and the even more hateful middle class
+at their mercy.</p>
+<p>It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard
+Hotel, and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered
+in a voluminous sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship
+for the poor. Many men had sailed on a bitter voyage
+to arctic regions and endured every privation of cold and
+hunger and peril that this young woman might ride cozy in
+any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but
+little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who
+clubbed the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier
+in the warm city shop, when he sold the finished garment, took
+in far more than the men who went out into the wilderness
+and brought back the pelts. That did not seem right; yet
+he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not create the market
+for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all for their
+voyage.</p>
+<p>A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the
+industry, was beyond Davidge&rsquo;s imagining. He comforted
+himself with the thought that those loud mouths that advertised
+solutions of these labor problems were fools or liars or
+both; and their mouths were the tools they worked with most.</p>
+<p>The important immediate thing to contemplate was the
+fascinating head of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk
+of a sea-lion.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_255' name='page_255'></a>255</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_III_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_III_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not
+entirely neglected the new school of foot improvisation,
+so different from the old set steps.</p>
+<p>Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man
+had so much of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened
+to the pipes of Pan and could &ldquo;shake a sugar-heel&rdquo; with a
+practised skill. There was a startling authority in the
+firmness with which he gathered her in and swept her through
+the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping, now
+limping, now running.</p>
+<p>He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and
+found her to his whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience.
+Holding her thus intimately in the brief wedlock
+of the dance, he began to love her in a way that he could
+think of only one word for&ndash;&ndash;<i>terrible</i>.</p>
+<p>She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging
+them, and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was
+also a flattering spice of jealousy in what she murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t spent all your afternoons and evenings
+building ships, young man!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What cabarets have you graduated from?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He quoted her own words, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you wish you knew?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One thing is certain. I&rsquo;ve never found in any of &rsquo;em as
+light a feather as you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you referring to my head or my feet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your blessed feet!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he
+whirled her in a delirium of motion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s unfair!&rdquo; she protested, affrighted yet delighted by
+the fire of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and
+she clung to him dizzily while he applauded with the other
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_256' name='page_256'></a>256</span>
+dancers till the band renewed the tune. She had regained her
+mental with her bodily equilibrium, and she danced more
+staidly; yet she had seen into the crater of his heart and was
+not sorry that it existed.</p>
+<p>The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender
+her from his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. &ldquo;I
+wish we could sail on and on and on forever.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forever is a long time,&rdquo; she smiled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May I have the next dance?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper.
+But don&rsquo;t&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of
+it, but he suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it
+with a young officer who also knew how to compel her to his
+whim. Davidge wondered if Mamise could be responding to
+this fellow as keenly as she responded to himself. The thought
+was intolerable. She could not be so wanton. It would
+amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy smoldered
+in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous, an
+unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe
+for the next dance, her husband had no cause for
+jealousy. Polly was a temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism
+plus athleticism.</p>
+<p>Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise
+comported herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that
+desperate condition in which men are made ready to commit
+monogamy. He felt that he could not endure to have Mamise
+free any longer.</p>
+<p>He presented himself to her for the next dance.</p>
+<p>She laughed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m booked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the
+dance out&ndash;&ndash;stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men
+on the side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed
+him at seeing still a fourth stranger with his arms about
+Mamise, her breast to his and her procedure obedient to his.
+Worse yet, when a fifth insolent stranger cut in on the twin
+stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth temporary husband for
+another with a levity that amounted to outrageous polyandry.</p>
+<p>Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_257' name='page_257'></a>257</span>
+intensely that he wanted to put an end to the abomination,
+reform it altogether. He did not want to dance between those
+white arms so easily forsworn. He wanted to rescue Mamise
+from this place of horror and hale her away to a cave with no
+outlook on mankind.</p>
+<p>It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she
+understood him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the
+proof of her sway over him and still sane enough to take a joy
+in her triumph.</p>
+<p>She introduced her partner&ndash;&ndash;Davidge would almost have
+called the brute a paramour. He did not get the man&rsquo;s name
+and was glad of it&ndash;&ndash;especially as the hunter deserted her and
+went after his next Sabine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve lost your faithful stenographer,&rdquo; was the first
+phrase of Mamise&rsquo;s that Davidge understood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why so?&rdquo; he grumbled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because this is the life for me. I&rsquo;ve been a heroine and
+a war-worker about as long as I can. I&rsquo;m for the fleshpots and
+the cold-cream jars and the light fantastic. Aren&rsquo;t you going
+to dance with me any more?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just as you please,&rdquo; Davidge said, with a singularly boyish
+sulkiness, and wondered why Mamise laughed so mercilessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I please.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The music struck up an abandoned jig, but he danced with
+great dignity till his feet ran away with him. Then he made
+off with her again in one of his frenzies, and a laughter filled
+his whole being.</p>
+<p>She heard him growl something.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I said, &lsquo;Damn you!&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed so heartily at this that she had to stop dancing
+for a moment. She astonished him by a brazen question:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you really love me as much as that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;More,&rdquo; he groaned, and they bobbed and ducked and
+skipped as he muttered a wild anachronism:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t marry me I&rsquo;ll murder you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re murdering me now. May I breathe, please?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was furious at her evasion of so solemn a proposal.
+Yet she was so beautifully alive and aglow that he could not
+exactly hate her. But he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t ask you again. Next time you can ask me.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_258' name='page_258'></a>258</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;All right; that&rsquo;s a bet. I&rsquo;ll give you fair warning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then that dance was over, and Mamise triumphant in
+all things. She was tumultuously hale and happy, and her
+lover loved her.</p>
+<p>To her that hath&ndash;&ndash;for now, whom should Mamise see but
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Her heart ached with a reminiscent fear
+for a moment; then a malicious hope set it going again.
+Major Widdicombe claimed Mamise for the next dance, and
+extracted her from Davidge&rsquo;s possession. As they danced
+out, leaving Davidge stranded, Mamise noted that Lady
+C.-W. was regarding Davidge with a startled interest.</p>
+<p>The whirl of the dance carried her close to Lady Clifton-Wyatt,
+and she knew that Lady C.-W. had seen her. Broken
+glimpses revealed to her that Lady C.-W. was escorting her
+escort across the ballroom floor toward Davidge.</p>
+<p>She saw the brazen creature tap Davidge&rsquo;s elbow and
+smile, putting out her hand with coquetry. She saw her
+debarrass herself of her companion, a French officer whose
+exquisite horizon-blue uniform was amazingly crossed with the
+wound and service chevrons of three years&rsquo; warfaring. Nevertheless,
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt dropped him for the civilian
+Davidge. Mamise, flitting here and there, saw that Davidge
+was being led to the punch-altar, thence to a lonely strip of
+chairs, where Lady C.-W. sat herself down and motioned
+him to drop anchor alongside.</p>
+<p>Mamise longed to be near enough to hear what she could
+guess: her enemy&rsquo;s artless prelude followed by gradual modulations
+to her main theme&ndash;&ndash;Mamise&rsquo;s wicked record.</p>
+<p>Mamise wished that she had studied lip-reading to get the
+details. But this was a slight vexation in the exultance of her
+mood. She was serene in the consciousness that Davidge
+already knew the facts about her, and that Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s
+gossip would fall with the dreary thud of a story
+heard before. So Mamise&rsquo;s feet flew, and her heart made a
+music of its own to the tune of:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank God, I told him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She realized, as never before, the tremendous comfort and
+convenience of the truth. She had been by instinct as veracious
+as a politely bred person may be, but now she understood
+that the truth is mighty good business. She resolved
+to deal in no other wares.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_259' name='page_259'></a>259</span></div>
+<p>This resolution lasted just long enough for her to make a
+hasty exception: she would begin her exclusive use of the
+truth as soon as she had told Polly a neat lie in explanation
+of her inexplicable journey to Baltimore.</p>
+<p>Lady C.-W. was doing Mamise the best turn in her power.
+Davidge was still angry at Mamise&rsquo;s flippancy in the face of
+his ardor. But Lady C.-W.&rsquo;s attack gave the flirt the dignity
+of martyrdom. When Lady C.-W. finished her subtly casual
+account of all that Mamise had done or been accused of doing,
+Davidge crushed her with the quiet remark:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So she told me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She told you that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, and explained it all!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She would!&rdquo; was the best that Lady Clifton-Wyatt could
+do, but she saw that the case was lost. She saw that Davidge&rsquo;s
+gaze was following Mamise here and there amid the dancers,
+and she was sportswoman enough to concede:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She is a beauty, anyway&ndash;&ndash;there&rsquo;s no questioning that, at
+least.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was the canniest thing she could have done to re-establish
+herself in Davidge&rsquo;s eyes. He felt so well reconciled with the
+world that he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t care to finish this dance, I suppose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Clifton-Wyatt was democratic&ndash;&ndash;in the provinces and
+the States&ndash;&ndash;and this was as good a way of changing the subject
+as any. She rose promptly and entered the bosom of
+Davidge. The good American who did not believe in aristocracies
+had just time to be overawed at finding himself
+hugging a real Lady with a capital L when the music stopped.</p>
+<p>It is an old saw that what is too foolish to be said can be
+sung. Music hallows or denatures whatever it touches. It
+was quite proper, because quite customary, for Davidge and
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt to stand enfolded in each other&rsquo;s embrace
+so long as a dance tune was in the air. The moment
+the musicians quit work the attitude became indecent.</p>
+<p>Amazing and eternal mystery, that custom can make the
+same thing mean everything, or nothing, or all the between-things.
+The ancient Babylonians carried the idea of the permissible
+embrace to the ultimate intimacy in their annual
+festivals, and the good women doubtless thought no more of it
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_260' name='page_260'></a>260</span>
+than a woman of to-day thinks of waltzing with a presentable
+stranger. They went home to their husbands and their housework
+as if they had been to church. Certain Bolsheviki,
+even in the year 1918, put up placards renewing the ancient
+Mesopotamian custom, under the guise of a community
+privilege and a civic duty.</p>
+<p>And yet some people pretend to differentiate between
+fashions and morals!</p>
+<p>But nobody at this dance was foolish enough to philosophize.
+Everybody was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from
+the British embassy came up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt&rsquo;s
+hand and body for the next dance. Davidge had been mystically
+attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her in a mood
+for reconciliation. She liked him so well that when the
+Italian aviator to whom she had pledged the &ldquo;Tickle Toe&rdquo;
+came to demand it, she perjured herself calmly and eloped
+with Davidge. And Davidge, instead of being alarmed by
+her easy morals, was completely reassured.</p>
+<p>But he found her unready with another perjury when he
+abruptly asked her:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you doing to-morrow?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; she temporized in a flutter, thinking of
+Baltimore and Nicky.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you&rsquo;ve nothing special on, how about a tea-dance?
+I&rsquo;m getting addicted to this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;m booked up for to-morrow,&rdquo; she faltered.
+&ldquo;Polly keeps the calendar. Yes, I know we have some stupid
+date&ndash;&ndash;I can&rsquo;t think just what. How about the day after?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The deferment made his amorous heart sick, and to-morrow&rsquo;s
+to-morrow seemed as remote as Judgment Day. Besides,
+as he explained:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to go back to the shipyard to-morrow evening.
+Couldn&rsquo;t you give me a lunch&ndash;&ndash;an early one at twelve-thirty?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I could do that. In fact, I&rsquo;d love it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And me too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be telling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs
+cut in and would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to
+use his fists, but Mamise, though she longed to tarry with
+Davidge, knew the value of tantalism, and consented to the
+abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_261' name='page_261'></a>261</span>
+danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close
+that the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to
+swipe Polly across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.</p>
+<p>She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for
+support, mixing astonishing profanity with her smothered
+groans. The cub showered apologies on her, and reviled
+&ldquo;Regulations&rdquo; which compelled him to wear spurs with his
+boots, though he had only a desk job.</p>
+<p>Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing.
+But Mamise saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal
+and gave Polly her arm, as she limped through the barrage of
+hurtling couples. Polly asked Davidge to retrieve her husband
+from the sloe-eyed ambassadress who was hypnotizing
+him. She wailed to Mamise:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know I&rsquo;m marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron
+for this. I&rsquo;ve got to go home and put my ankle in
+splints. I&rsquo;ll probably have to wear it in a sling for a month.
+I&rsquo;d like to kill the rotten hound that put me out of business.
+And I had the next dance with that beautiful Rumanian
+devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding
+good night to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride
+out home with her, but Polly refused. She wanted to have a
+good cry in the car.</p>
+<p>Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she
+was plighted to luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the
+house of the friend he was stopping with, the hotels being
+booked solid for weeks ahead. He was nursing a stern determination
+to endure bachelordom no longer.</p>
+<p>Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her
+brains, while another segment condoled with Polly. But
+most of her wits were engaged in hunting a good excuse for
+her Baltimore escapade the next afternoon, and in discarding
+such implausible excuses as occurred to her.</p>
+<p>Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were
+a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is
+all icicles. I know I&rsquo;ll die of pneumonia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle
+of Polly, who was snuggling to him for warmth.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_262' name='page_262'></a>262</span></div>
+<p>She yowled: &ldquo;My Gawd! My yankle! You&rsquo;ll not last
+long enough for pneumonia if you touch me again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach
+round to embrace her, she would none of him.</p>
+<p>When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy
+old Potomac. It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring
+and slashing and battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously,
+huge sheets clambering up and falling back split and
+broken, with the uproar of an attack on a walled town.</p>
+<p>The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards
+shrilled under the flight.</p>
+<p>The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise&rsquo;s
+room was like a storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress
+and shivered as she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby
+nightgown. She threw on a heavy bathrobe and kept
+it on when she crept into the icy interstice between the all-too-snowy
+sheets.</p>
+<p>She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore
+venture, and she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible
+to her palsied bones. She grew no warmer from
+besetting visions of the battle-front. She tried to shame
+herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent bed with
+the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the
+shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again,
+as at Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in
+the snow barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack
+of ships to get new shoes across.</p>
+<p>Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The
+German offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended.
+Men must be combed out of every cranny of the nations and
+herded to the slaughter. America was denying herself warmth
+in order to build shells and to shuttle the ships back and forth.
+There was need of more women, too&ndash;&ndash;thousands more to nurse
+the men, to run the canteens, to mend the clothes, to warm
+men&rsquo;s hearts <i>via</i> their stomachs, and to take their minds off
+the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would
+furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their
+courage. Actors and actresses were playing at all the big
+cantonments now. Later they would be going across to play
+in France&ndash;&ndash;one-night stands, two a day in Picardy.</p>
+<p>Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_263' name='page_263'></a>263</span>
+burlesque of the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in
+her bed, startled as by a voice calling her to a mission. She
+had been an actress, a wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters,
+a catcher of late trains, a dweller in rickety hotels. She
+knew cold, and she had played half clad in draughty halls.</p>
+<p>She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the
+memory of it. But now that she was so cold she felt that
+nothing was so pitiful as to be cold. She understood, with a
+congealing vividness, how those poor droves of lads in bitterer
+cold were suffering, scattered along the frontiers of war like
+infinite flocks of sheep caught in a blizzard. She felt ashamed
+to be here shivering in this palatial misery when she might
+be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the soldiers.</p>
+<p>The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she
+felt the impulse. It would be her atonement.</p>
+<p>She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness
+to practise it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her
+pride, on the altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent
+soldiers as a Sister of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman
+would be going over&ndash;&ndash;if he had not stayed in Germany
+too long and been interned there. To return to the team with
+him, being the final degradation, would be the final atonement.
+She felt that she was called, called back. There could
+be nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would
+love to do that most of all.</p>
+<p>She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her
+plan, bid him farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky&rsquo;s secret,
+thwart it one way or another&ndash;&ndash;and then set about her destiny.</p>
+<p>She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The
+warm tears refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks,
+and she fell asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_264' name='page_264'></a>264</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IV_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_IV_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+<p>The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed,
+at the nudge of a colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo,
+who carried a breakfast-tray in mittened hands.</p>
+<p>Mamise said: &ldquo;Oh, good morning, Martha. I&rsquo;ll bathe
+before breakfast if you&rsquo;ll turn on the hot water, please.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an&rsquo;
+bus&rsquo; loose this mo&rsquo;nin&rsquo;, and fill the kitchen range with water
+an&rsquo; bus&rsquo; loose again. No plumber here yit. Made this
+breakfuss on the gas-stove. That&rsquo;s half-froze, tew. I tell
+you, ma&rsquo;am, you&rsquo;re lucky to git your coffee nohow. Better
+take it before it freezes, tew.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful
+hands stood at eleven-thirty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did the clock freeze, too? That can&rsquo;t be the right
+time!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yessum, that&rsquo;s the raht tahm.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great heavens!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, ma&rsquo;am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and
+breakfasted with speed. She dressed with all the agility she
+could muster.</p>
+<p>She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all.
+In modern history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the
+least for the heroine&ndash;&ndash;even such a dubious heroine as Mamise&ndash;&ndash;to
+have a bathless day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles
+they get at least two baths a day: one heroic cold shower in
+the morning and one hot tub in the late afternoon before
+getting into the faultless evening attire. This does not apply
+to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for they never
+bathe. (&ldquo;Why should they,&rdquo; my wife puts in, &ldquo;since they&rsquo;re
+going to commit suicide, anyway?&rdquo;)</p>
+<p>But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_265' name='page_265'></a>265</span>
+that the very politest people came to know the old-fashioned
+luxury of an extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness
+was accounted as ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized
+the bath as an Oriental pollution. During our war
+of wars there was a vast amount of helpless holy living.</p>
+<p>Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a
+time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were
+foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these
+gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood,
+putrefaction, and offal to their abominable fetor.</p>
+<p>And women who had been pretty and soapy and without
+smell, and who had once blanched with shame at the least
+maculation, lived with these slovenly men and vermin and
+dead horses and old dead soldiers and shared their glorious
+loathsomeness.</p>
+<p>The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise&rsquo;s one
+skip-bath day must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred
+again it will be left unmentioned. Heaven knows
+that even this morning she looked pure enough when she was
+dressed.</p>
+<p>Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged
+ankle as an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise&rsquo;s inspection,
+and Mamise pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could
+almost see.</p>
+<p>Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain
+the soldiers. Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier
+scheme than ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone
+her husband to look into the matter of a passport for her.</p>
+<p>Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and
+Mamise had not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge
+would be miffed. Polly suggested telephoning the hotel.</p>
+<p>Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as
+crowded as everything else.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will take an hour to get the hotel,&rdquo; said Mamise,
+&ldquo;another hour to page the man. I&rsquo;ll make a dash for it.
+He&rsquo;ll give me a little grace, I know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The car was not ready when she got to the door. The
+engine was balky and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur
+in a like mood. The roads were sleety and skiddy, and
+required careful driving.</p>
+<p>Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_266' name='page_266'></a>266</span>
+it closed to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war
+spirit. In sheer Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing
+away boat-houses and piers, and carrying all manner of
+wreckage down to pound the old aqueduct bridge with.
+The bridge was not expected to live.</p>
+<p>It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the
+distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get
+to Washington was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria,
+and this meant a d&eacute;tour of miles. It gave Mamise her first
+and only grand rounds through Fort Myer and the Arlington
+National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the soldiers about the
+cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to the
+marble pages of the Arlington epic.</p>
+<p>The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living
+hosts in Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay
+sixteen thousand dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven
+heroes under one monument of eternal anonymity&ndash;&ndash;dead
+from all our wars, and many of them with their wives and
+daughters privileged to lie beside them.</p>
+<p>But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful
+to rise to this occasion; and when her car had crept the
+uneasy miles and reached the Alexandria bridge and crossed
+it, and wound through Potomac Park, past the Washington
+Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached
+the hotel, she was just one hour late.</p>
+<p>Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after
+vain efforts to reach her at various other possible luncheon-places.
+He searched them all on the chance that she might
+have misunderstood the rendezvous. And Mamise spent a
+frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He had
+registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole
+result of this interesting game of two needles hunting each
+other through a haystack was that Davidge went without
+lunch and Mamise ate alone.</p>
+<p>In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally
+got Polly Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise.
+Polly expressed her amazement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to
+dine with you and go to the theater.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said the befuddled Davidge. &ldquo;Oh, of course! Silly
+of me! Good-by!&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_267' name='page_267'></a>267</span></div>
+<p>Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had
+another engagement to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating
+hour in a telephone-chase after his host, told a poor lie to
+explain the necessity for breaking the engagement, and spent
+the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in vain.</p>
+<p>When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a
+hopeless confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some
+mishap had befallen her. It would have been hard to tell
+whether he loved her or hated her the more.</p>
+<p>But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up
+an inquiry into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too
+short for her to risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back
+for a suit-case, in view of the Alexandria d&eacute;tour. She must,
+therefore, travel without baggage. Therefore she must return
+the same night. She found, to her immense relief, that this
+could be done. The seven-o&rsquo;clock train to Baltimore reached
+there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.</p>
+<p>She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but
+now an inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that
+she was dining out with Polly somewhere; consequently it
+would be safe to tell Polly that she was dining out with
+Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to compare
+notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One
+cannot be seen to blush.</p>
+<p>She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by
+what Widdicombe called &ldquo;the ebony maid with the ivory
+head.&rdquo; Mamise told her not to summon her lame mistress
+to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss Webling was
+dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him.
+She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then
+rang off.</p>
+<p>This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted
+to Davidge for his bewilderment.</p>
+<p>To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could
+leave, Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows
+that keep going without interruption. Public benefactors
+maintain them for the salvation of women who have no homes
+or do not want to go to them yet.</p>
+<p>The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly,
+as usual leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects
+shown were selected from all the fascinating events of the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_268' name='page_268'></a>268</span>
+time. Then followed a doleful imitation of Mr. Charles
+Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the artistry of the
+original.</p>
+<p>The <i>cinema de r&eacute;sistance</i> was a long and idiotic vampire
+picture in which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to
+impossible ruin by wiles and attitudes that would have driven
+any actual male to flight, laughter, or a call for the police.
+But the audience seemed to enjoy it, as a substitute, no doubt,
+for the old-fashioned gruesome fairy-stories that one accepts
+because they are so unlike the tiresome realities. Mamise
+wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She was
+tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment,
+if ever opportunity offered.</p>
+<p>In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled
+away the dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her
+dinner on the train, remembering vividly how her heart
+history with Davidge had begun on a train. She missed him
+now, and his self-effacing gallantry.</p>
+<p>The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive
+was ill concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn&rsquo;t
+quite exist. Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she
+had never paid Davidge for that chair he gave up to her.
+She vowed again that she would not forget. She felt a deep
+remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks. She regretted
+especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was her
+privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no
+right to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she
+belonged to him.</p>
+<p>She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too,
+as well as her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible
+and subjecting herself to a self-immolation among hardships.
+After the war&ndash;&ndash;assuming that the war would soon end
+and that she would come out of it alive&ndash;&ndash;afterward she
+could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.</p>
+<p>Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was
+startled to find Baltimore already gathering round the train.
+And she had not even begun to organize her stratagems
+against Nicky Easton. She made a hasty exit from the car
+and sought the cab-ranks outside.</p>
+<p>From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself,
+lifted his hat, and motioned her to an open door. She bent
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_269' name='page_269'></a>269</span>
+her head down and her knees up and entered a little room
+on wheels.</p>
+<p>Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for
+as soon as Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself
+the limousine moved off&ndash;&ndash;into what adventures? Mamise
+was wondering.</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK VI</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>IN BALTIMORE</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_7' id='linki_7'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_270' name='page_270'></a>270</span>
+<img src='images/illus-274.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='513' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>&ldquo;So I have already done something more for Germany. That&rsquo;s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do.&rdquo; Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_271' name='page_271'></a>271</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a
+tawdry young vaudevillette. She had probably walked
+from the station, lugging her own valise, to some ghastly
+theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some lover of hers had
+carried her baggage for her. If so, she had forgotten just
+which one of her experiences he was.</p>
+<p>Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered
+than she had been then, when a little attention was meat
+and drink, and her name in the paper was a sensation. She
+knew that publicity, like love, flees whoso pursueth and pursues
+who flees it, but she prayed that the rule would be proved
+by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out as
+anonymously as she had sneaked in.</p>
+<p>Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was
+groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad
+that she had her gloves on. They were chaperoned, too, as
+it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs
+and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy
+he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was
+complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab
+she was in.</p>
+<p>But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she
+struggled against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar
+bruin&ndash;&ndash;buffeted his arms away and muttered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass
+and tell the driver to let me out?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Nein doch</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then let me alone or I will.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing
+at all to her, and she said the same to him while long strips
+of Baltimorean marble stoops went by. They turned into
+Charles Street and climbed past its statue-haunted gardens
+and on out to the north.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_272' name='page_272'></a>272</span></div>
+<p>They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized
+that she was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She
+spoke angrily:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You said you wanted to see me. I&rsquo;m here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky fidgeted and sulked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink
+from me, it is no use.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with
+me I could have stayed at home. You said you wanted to
+ask me something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity.
+But she could not imagine how to coax him out of silence.</p>
+<p>His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ach Gott</i>, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me.
+These Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf
+my <i>Vaterland</i>. But the time comes soon, and I must make
+patience. <i>Eile mit Weile!</i>&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better tell me what&rsquo;s on your mind,&rdquo; Mamise suggested,
+but he shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom
+of the park, a gloom rather punctuated than diminished by
+the street-lamps. Mamise realized that she could not extort
+Nicky&rsquo;s secret from him by asserting her own dignity.</p>
+<p>She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas
+except such silly schemes as were suggested by her memory
+of the vampire picture. She hated the very passage of such
+thoughts through her mind, but they kept returning, with
+an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might accomplish
+something for her country as Delilah and Judith had &ldquo;vamped&rdquo;
+for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her fascinations
+in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark
+was all the better for her purpose.</p>
+<p>At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and
+after a struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out
+her hand and sought Nicky&rsquo;s, as she cooed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come along, Nicky, don&rsquo;t be so cantankerous.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its
+clutch:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you are so colt!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She insinuated, &ldquo;You couldn&rsquo;t expect me to make love to
+you the very first thing, could you?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_273' name='page_273'></a>273</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean you do like me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And
+he, encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her,
+flung his arm about her again and drew her, resisting only
+in her soul, close to him.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_274' name='page_274'></a>274</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>But when his lips hunted hers she hid them in her fur collar;
+and he, imputing it to coquetry, humored her, finding her
+delicate timidity enhancing and inspiring. He chuckled:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You shall kiss me yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not till you have told me what you sent for me for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, feerst you must give me one to proof your good fate&ndash;&ndash;your
+good face&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo; He was trying to say &ldquo;good faith.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was stubborn, but he was more obstinate still, and he
+had the advantage of the secret.</p>
+<p>And so at last she sighed &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; and put up her cheek
+to pay the price. His arms tightened about her, and his lips
+were not content with her cheek. He fought to win her lips,
+but she began to tear off her gloves to scratch his eyes out
+if need be for release.</p>
+<p>She was revolted, and she would have marred his beauty if
+he had not let her go. Once freed, she regained her self-control,
+for the sake of her mission, and said, with a mock
+seriousness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, be careful, or I won&rsquo;t listen to you at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Sighing with disappointment, but more determined than
+ever to make her his, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Feerst I must esk you, how is your feelink about Chermany?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just as before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Chust as vich &lsquo;before&rsquo;? Do you loaf Chermany or
+hate?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was permitted to say only one thing. It came hard:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I love her, of course.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ach, beh&uuml;t&rsquo; dich, Gott!</i>&rdquo; he cried, and would have clasped
+her again, but she insisted on discipline. He began his
+explanation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I did told you how, to safe my life in England, I confessed
+somethings. Many of our people here will not forgive. My
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_275' name='page_275'></a>275</span>
+only vay to get back vere I have been is to make&ndash;&ndash;as Americans
+say&ndash;&ndash;to make myself skvare by to do some big vork. I have
+done a little, not much, but more can be if you help.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What could I do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Much things, but the greatest&ndash;&ndash;listen once: our Chermany
+has no fear of America so long America is on this side of
+the Atlentic Ozean. Americans build ships; Chermany must
+destroy fester as they build. Already I have made one ship
+less for America. I cannot pooblish advertisink, but my
+people shall one day know, and that day comes soon; <i>Der
+Tag</i> is almost here&ndash;&ndash;you shall see! Our army grows alvays,
+in France; and England and France can get no more men.
+Ven all is ready, Chermany moves like a&ndash;&ndash;a avalenche down
+a mountain and covers France to the sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On that day our fleet&ndash;&ndash;our glorious ships&ndash;&ndash;comes out
+from Kiel Canal, vere man holds them beck like big dogs in
+leash. Oh those beautiful day, Chermany conquers on lent
+and on sea. France dies, and England&rsquo;s navy goes down into
+the deep and comes never back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ach Gott</i>, such a day it shall be&ndash;&ndash;when old England&rsquo;s empire
+goes into history, into ancient history vit Roossia and
+Rome and Greece and Bebylonia.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;England gone, France gone, Italy gone&ndash;&ndash;who shall safe
+America and her armies and her unborn ships, and her cannon
+and shell and air-ships not yet so much as begun?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Der Tag</i> shall be like the lest day ven <i>Gott</i> makes the
+graves open and the dead come beck to life. The Americans
+shall fall on knees before our Kaiser, and he shall render
+chudgment. Such a payink!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now the Yenkees despise us Chermans. Ve cannot go to
+this city, to that dock. Everywhere is dead-lines and permissions
+and internment camps and persecutions, and all
+who are not in prison are afraid. They change their names
+from Cherman to English now, but soon they shall lift their
+heads and it shall be the Americans who shall know the dead-lines,
+the licenses, the internment camps.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So, Marie Louise, my sveetheart, if you can show and I
+can show that in the dark night ve did not forget the <i>Vaterland</i>,
+ve shall be proud and safe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is to make you safe ven comes <i>Der Tag</i> I speak to
+you now. I vish you should share my vork now, so you
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_276' name='page_276'></a>276</span>
+can share my life efterwards. Now do I loaf you, Marie
+Louise? Now do I give you proof?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was all ashudder with the intensity of his conviction.
+She imagined an all-conquering Germany in America.
+She needed but to multiply the story of Belgium, of
+Serbia, of prostrate Russia. The Kaiser had put in the shop-window
+of the world samples enough of the future as it would
+be made by Germany.</p>
+<p>And in the mood of that day, with defeatism rife in Europe,
+and pessimism miasmatic in America, there was reason
+enough for Nicky to believe in his prophecy and to inspire
+belief in its possibility. The only impossible thing about it
+was that the world should ever endure the dominance of
+Germany. Death would seem better to almost everybody
+than life in such a civilization as she promised.</p>
+<p>Mamise feared the Teutonic might, but she could not for a
+moment consent to accept it. There was only one thing for
+her to do, and that was to learn what plans she could, and
+thwart them. Here within her grasp was the long-sought
+opportunity to pay off the debt she had incurred. She could
+be a soldier now, at last. There was no price that Nicky might
+have demanded too great, too costly, too shameful for her to
+pay. To denounce him or defy him would be a criminal waste
+of opportunity.</p>
+<p>She said: &ldquo;I understand. You are right, of course. Let
+me help in any way I can. I only wish there were something
+big for me to do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky was overjoyed. He had triumphed both as patriot
+and as lover.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is a big think for you to do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You can
+all you vill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; she pleaded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are in shipyard. This man Davidge goes on building
+ships. I gave him fair warning. I sinked one ship for him,
+but he makes more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You sank his ship?&rdquo; Mamise gasped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure! The <i>Clara</i>, he called her. I find where she goes to
+take cargo. I go myself. I row up behind the ship in little
+boat, and I fasten by the rudder-post under the water, where no
+one sees, a bomb. It is all innocent till ship moves. Then every
+time the rudder turns a little screw turns in the machine.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_277' name='page_277'></a>277</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;It turns for two, three days; then&ndash;&ndash;<i>boom</i>! It makes explosion,
+tears ship to pieces, and down she goes. And so
+goes all the next ships if you help again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again? What do you mean by again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is you, Marie Louise, who sinks the <i>Clara</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her laugh of incredulity was hardly more than a shiver
+of dread.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ja wohl!</i> You did told Chake Nuttle vat Davidge tells
+you. Chake Nuttle tells me. I go and make sink the ship!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jake Nuddle! It was Jake that told you!&rdquo; Mamise faltered,
+seeing her first vague suspicions damnably confirmed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure! Chake Nuttle is my <i>Leutnant</i>. He has had much
+money. He gets more. He shall be rich man after comes
+<i>Der Tag</i>. It might be we make him von Nuttle! and you shall
+be Gr&auml;fin von Oesten.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was in an abject terror. The thick trees of the
+park were spooky as the dim light of the car elicited from
+the black wall of dark faint details of tree-trunks and naked
+boughs stark with winter. She was in a hurry to learn the
+rest and be gone. She spoke with a poor imitation of pride:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So I have already done something more for Germany.
+That&rsquo;s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do, for I want
+to&ndash;&ndash;to get busy right away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through
+her thin disguise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are close by Davidge. Chake Nuttle tells me he is
+sveet on you. You have his confidence. You can learn
+what secrets he has. Next time we do not vait for ship to
+be launched and to go for cargo. It might go some place
+ve could not find.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So now ve going blow up those ships before they touch
+vater&ndash;&ndash;ve blow up his whole yard. You shall go beck and
+take up again your vork, and ven all is right I come down
+and get a job. I dress like vorkman and get into the yard.
+And I bring in enough bombs to blow up all the ships and
+the cranes and the machines.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Chake Nuttle tells me Davidge just gets a plate-bending
+machine. Forty-five t&rsquo;ousand dollars it costs him, and long
+time to get. In one minute&ndash;&ndash;poof! Ve bend that plate-bender!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed a great Teutonic laugh and supposed that
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_278' name='page_278'></a>278</span>
+she was laughing, too. When he had subsided a little,
+he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So now you know vat you are to make! You like to
+do so much for Chermany, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes! Yes!&rdquo; said Mamise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You promise to do vat I send you vord?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; She would have promised to blow up the Capitol.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ach</i>, how beautiful you are even in the dark! Kiss me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Remembering Judith, she paid that odious price, wishing
+that she might have the beast&rsquo;s infamous head with a sword.
+It was a kiss of betrayal, but she felt that it was no Judas-kiss,
+since Nicky was no Christ.</p>
+<p>He told her more of his plans in detail, and was so childishly
+proud of his superb achievements, past and future, that she
+could hardly persuade him to take her back to the station.
+He assured her that there was abundant time, but she would
+not trust his watch. She explained how necessary it was for
+her to return to Washington and to Polly Widdicombe&rsquo;s house
+before midnight. And at last he yielded to her entreaties,
+opened the door, and leaned out to tell the driver to turn back.</p>
+<p>Mamise was uneasy till they were out of the park and into
+the lighted streets again. But there was no safety here, for
+as they glided down Charles Street a taxicab going with the
+reckless velocity of taxicabs tried to cut across their path.</p>
+<p>There was a swift fencing for the right of way, and then the
+two cars came together with a clash and much crumpling of
+fenders.</p>
+<p>The drivers descended to wrangle over the blame, and
+Mamise had visions of a trip to the police station, with a consequent
+exposure. But Nicky was alive to the danger of
+notoriety. He got out and assumed the blame, taking the
+other driver&rsquo;s part and offering to pay the damages.</p>
+<p>The taxicab-driver assessed them liberally at fifty dollars,
+and Nicky filled his palm with bills, ordering his own driver
+to proceed. The car limped along with a twisted steering-gear,
+and Nicky growled thanksgivings over the narrow escape the
+German Empire had had from losing two of its most valuable
+agents.</p>
+<p>Mamise was sick with terror of what might have been.
+She saw the collision with a fatal result, herself and Nicky
+killed and flung to the street, dead together. It was not the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_279' name='page_279'></a>279</span>
+fear of dying that froze her soul; it was the posthumous blow
+she would have given to Davidge&rsquo;s trust in her and all women,
+the pain she would have inflicted on his love. For to his
+dying day he would have believed her false to him, a cheap
+and nasty trickster, sneaking off to another town to a rendezvous
+with another man. And that man a German!</p>
+<p>The picture of his bitter disillusionment and of her own
+unmerited and eternal disgrace was intolerably real in spite
+of the fact that she knew it to be untrue, for our imaginations
+are far more ancient and more irresistible than our late and
+faltering reliance on the truth; the heavens and hells we fancy
+have more weight with our credulities than any facts we encounter.
+We can dodge the facts or close our eyes to them,
+but we cannot escape our dreams, whether our eyes are wide
+or sealed.</p>
+<p>Mamise could not free herself of this nightmare till she had
+bidden Nicky good-by the last time and left him in the cab
+outside the station.</p>
+<p>Further nightmares awaited her, for in the waiting-room she
+could not fight off the conviction that the train would never
+arrive. When it came clanging in on grinding wheels and she
+clambered aboard, she knew that it would be wrecked, and
+the finding of her body in the d&eacute;bris, or its disappearance in
+the flames, would break poor Davidge&rsquo;s heart and leave her to
+the same ignominy in his memory.</p>
+<p>While the train swung on toward Washington, she added another
+torment to her collection: how could she save Davidge
+from Nicky without betraying her sister&rsquo;s husband into the
+hands of justice? What right had she to tell Davidge anything
+when her sacred duty to her family and her poor sister
+must first be heartlessly violated?</p>
+<hr class='pb' />
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_281' name='page_281'></a>281</span></div>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.4em;'>BOOK VII</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;'>AT THE SHIPYARD</p>
+<div class='figtag'>
+<a name='linki_8' id='linki_8'></a>
+</div>
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_282' name='page_282'></a>282</span>
+<img src='images/illus-286.jpg' alt='' title='' width='346' height='485' /><br />
+<p class='caption'>
+<i>Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton&rsquo;s elbow.</i><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_283' name='page_283'></a>283</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_I_1_1_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own
+soul, for people can on occasion accomplish what the
+familiar Irish drillmaster invited his raw recruits to do&ndash;&ndash;&ldquo;Step
+out and take a look at yourselves.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts
+were cut off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with
+incredulity and exclaimed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can this be I?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked
+at her in unrecognition and convinced her that she was not
+herself.</p>
+<p>What astounded her was the realization that the problem
+of disregarding either her love or her duty was no longer a
+difficult problem. In London, when she had dimly suspected
+her benefactors, the Weblings, of betraying the trust that England
+put in them, she had abhorred the thought of mentioning
+her surmise to any one who might harm them. Later,
+at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister&rsquo;s husband
+of disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because
+it would involve her sister&rsquo;s ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore,
+convinced that her sister&rsquo;s husband was in a plot
+against her lover and her country, she felt hardly so much as
+a brake on her eagerness for the sacrifice of her family or herself.
+The horror had come to be a solemn duty so important
+as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have something
+at last to give up for her nation.</p>
+<p>The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete
+change in her soul. She had gradually come to love the man
+whose prosperity was threatened by her sister&rsquo;s husband, and
+her vague patriotism had been stirred from dreams to delirium.
+Almost the whole world was undergoing such a war change.
+The altar of freedom so shining white had recently become
+an altar of sacrifice splashed with the blood of its votaries.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_284' name='page_284'></a>284</span>
+Men were offering themselves, casting from them all the old
+privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love and business,
+and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile hardships.
+Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the
+slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak
+for the trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves
+because they were missing from the beadroll of contributors.</p>
+<p>Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished
+to build ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer&rsquo;s
+share in the process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line
+herself and offer what gift she had&ndash;&ndash;the poor little gift of
+entertaining the soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had
+lived down. And while she waited for a passport to join the
+army of women in France, she found at hand an opportunity
+to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save ships and all
+the lives that ships alone could save. The price would be the
+liberty and what little good name her sister&rsquo;s husband had;
+it would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom
+life had dealt with harshly enough already.</p>
+<p>But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what
+it would buy. She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded
+chair-car, but her inner being was shaken with joy. She had
+learned to love Davidge and to adore that strange, shapeless
+idea that she called her country. Instead of sacrificing her
+lover to her people, she could serve both by the same deed.
+She was wildly impatient for the moment when she could
+lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured
+at the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost
+her a decade in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they
+were worth it.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind,
+if not her lips, voicing the words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You owe me something, old capital. You&rsquo;ll never put up
+any statues to me or carve my name on any tablets, but I&rsquo;m
+doing something for you that will mean more than anybody
+will ever realize.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_285' name='page_285'></a>285</span>
+and wondering what invisible lover she was waving at.
+Mamise made no explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle
+foolish, but divinely so.</p>
+<p>Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise&rsquo;s
+room to demand an accounting.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was just on the point of telephoning the police to see if
+you had been found in the river.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise did not bother either to explain her past lies or tell
+any new ones. She majestically answered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Polly darling, I have been engaged in affairs of state, which
+I am not at liberty to divulge to the common public.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rot!&rdquo; said Polly. &ldquo;I believe the &lsquo;affairs,&rsquo; but not the
+&lsquo;state.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was above insult. &ldquo;Some day you will know.
+You&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Polly yawned. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll call my doctor in the morning and
+have you taken away quietly. Your mind&rsquo;s wandering, as
+well as the rest of you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise chuckled like a child with a great secret, and Polly
+waddled back to her bed.</p>
+<p>Next morning Mamise woke into a world warm with her
+own importance, though the thermometer was farther down
+than Washington&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is Mamise,&rdquo; she sang.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; Simply that and nothing more.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you really love me so madly?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only one good excuse for what you&rsquo;ve done. Are
+you telephoning from a hospital?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, from Polly&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I can&rsquo;t imagine any excuse.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_286' name='page_286'></a>286</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;But you&rsquo;re a business man, not an imaginator,&rdquo; she railed.
+&ldquo;You evidently don&rsquo;t know me. I&rsquo;m &lsquo;Belle Boyd, the Rebel
+Spy,&rsquo; and also &lsquo;Joan of Arkansas,&rsquo; and a few other patriots.
+I&rsquo;ve got news for you that will melt the icicles off your eyebrows.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;News?&rdquo; he answered, with no curiosity modifying his
+anger.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;War news. May I come down and tell you about it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is a free country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fine! You&rsquo;re simply adorable when you try to sulk.
+What time would be most convenient?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I make no more appointments with you, young woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. Then I&rsquo;ll wait at my shanty till you come.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was going to rent it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You just dare! I am coming back to work. The strike
+is over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better come to the office as soon as you get here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right. Give my love to Miss Gabus.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She left the telephone and set about packing her things in
+a fury. Polly reminded her that she had appointments for
+fittings at dressmakers&rsquo;.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never keep appointments,&rdquo; said Mamise. &ldquo;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&rsquo;ve barely time to catch my train.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You skunk!&rdquo; said Polly. And Mamise laughed. Everything
+made her laugh now; she was so happy that she began
+to cry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why the crocodiles?&rdquo; said Polly. &ldquo;Because you&rsquo;re leaving
+me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m crying because I didn&rsquo;t realize how unhappy I had
+always been before I am as happy as I am now. I&rsquo;m going
+to be useful at last, Polly. I&rsquo;m going to do something for
+my country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was sharing in that vast national ecstasy which is called
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_287' name='page_287'></a>287</span>
+patriotism and which turns the flames of martyrdom into
+roses.</p>
+<p>When Mamise reached the end of her journey she found
+Davidge waiting for her at the railroad station with a
+limousine.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you meet me at luncheon?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How could I prevent the Potomac from putting the old
+bridge out of commission?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;I got there in
+time, but they wouldn&rsquo;t let me across, and by the time I
+reached the hotel you had gone, and I didn&rsquo;t know where to
+find you. Heaven knows I tried.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait till you hear what I&rsquo;ve got to tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But first he disclosed a little plot of his own with a comfortable
+guiltiness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How would you like,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;since you say you
+have news&ndash;&ndash;how would you like&ndash;&ndash;instead of going to your
+shanty&ndash;&ndash;I&rsquo;ve had a fire built in it&ndash;&ndash;but&ndash;&ndash;how would you
+like to take a ride in the car&ndash;&ndash;out into the country, you know?
+Then you could tell me, and nobody would hear or interrupt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was startled by the similarity of his arrangement to
+that of Nicky Easton, but she approached it with different
+dread.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_288' name='page_288'></a>288</span></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s imagination was consequently so busy that
+he paid hardly any attention to the tremendous facts she so
+awkwardly delivered.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You weren&rsquo;t riding with Easton alone in the dark all that
+time&ndash;&ndash;without&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Without his&ndash;&ndash;his making love to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t ask me,&rdquo; said Mamise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t need to. You&rsquo;ve answered,&rdquo; Davidge snarled.
+&ldquo;And so will he.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise&rsquo;s heart was suddenly a live coal, throbbing with
+fire and keenly painful&ndash;&ndash;yet very warm. She had a man who
+loved her well enough to hate for her and to avenge her.
+That was something gained.</p>
+<p>Davidge brooded. It was inconceivably hideous that he
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_289' name='page_289'></a>289</span>
+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&ndash;&ndash;Heaven knew, hell
+knew, what other liberties. He vowed that he would never
+put his lips where another man&rsquo;s had been.</p>
+<p>Mamise seemed to feel soiled and fit only for the waste-basket
+of life. She had delivered her &ldquo;message to Garcia,&rdquo;
+and Garcia rewarded her with disgust. She waited shame-fast
+for a moment before she could even falter:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you happen to hear the news I brought you? Or
+doesn&rsquo;t it interest you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge answered with repugnance:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Agh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In her meekness she needed some insult to revive her, and
+this sufficed. She flared instantly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry I told you. I hope that Nicky blows up your
+whole damned shipyard and you with it; and I&rsquo;d like to help
+him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Mamise was having a noble cry now, and Davidge was sobbing
+with laughter&ndash;&ndash;the two forms of recreation most congenial
+to their respective sexes.</p>
+<p>Davidge caught her hands and cooed with such noise that
+the driver outside must have heard the reverberations through
+the glass:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You blessed child! I&rsquo;m a low-lived brute, and you&rsquo;re an
+angel.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;what was to be done
+to save the shipyard from destruction?</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_290' name='page_290'></a>290</span></div>
+<p>Mamise had to repeat most of what she had told, point by
+point:</p>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;to hear him tell it.</p>
+<p>When Mamise had finished this inventory of the situation
+Davidge pondered aloud:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, we ought to turn the case over to the Department
+of Justice and the Military and Naval Intelligence to
+handle, but&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I&rsquo;d like to shelter my poor sister if I could,&rdquo; said
+Mamise. &ldquo;Of course, I wouldn&rsquo;t let any tenderness for Jake
+Nuddle stand in the way of my patriotic duty, for Heaven
+knows he&rsquo;s as much of a traitor to my poor sister as he is to
+everything else that&rsquo;s decent, but I&rsquo;d like to keep him out
+of it somehow. Something might happen to make it possible,
+don&rsquo;t you suppose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might cripple him and send him to a hospital to save his
+life,&rdquo; said Davidge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anything to keep him out of it,&rdquo; said Mamise. &ldquo;If I
+should tell the authorities, though, they&rsquo;d put him in jail
+right away, wouldn&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Probably. And they&rsquo;d run your friend Nicky down and
+intern him. Then I&rsquo;d lose my chance to lay hands on him
+as&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As he did on you,&rdquo; was what he started to say, but he
+stopped in time.</p>
+<p>This being Davidge&rsquo;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
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_291' name='page_291'></a>291</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>And supposing that they found Nicky, what evidence had
+they against him, except Mamise&rsquo;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&rsquo;s mother and for planning to sink
+the ship he was naming after the woman he hoped to make
+his wife.</p>
+<p>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 d&eacute;nouement entirely.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s entire contribution to the war; their success would
+mean perhaps the death of Easton and the blackening of the
+name of Mamise&rsquo;s sister and her sister&rsquo;s children.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s life for
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_292' name='page_292'></a>292</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_293' name='page_293'></a>293</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_II_1_1_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The period of waiting was as maddening as the suspense of
+the poor insomniac who implored the man next door to &ldquo;drop
+the other shoe.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s criticisms of Jake only spurred Abbie to
+new defenses of him and a more loyal affection.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This information threw Davidge into a complex dismay.
+Here was another of Mamise&rsquo;s long-kept secrets. The success
+of her plan meant the loss of her, or her indefinite postponement.
+It meant more yet. He groaned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good Lord! everybody in the United States is going to
+France except me. Even the women are all emigrating. I
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_294' name='page_294'></a>294</span>
+think I&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Polly had never told him what Mamise had told her, but
+she had to let out a few of the skeletons in Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>He was furious and proposed to &ldquo;go to the mat&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I got my name stained in England because I didn&rsquo;t have
+the pluck to do something positive. I was irresolution personified,
+and I&rsquo;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&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge had a better idea for her protection. &ldquo;Marry me,
+and then they can&rsquo;t say anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then they&rsquo;ll suspect you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Too many good
+Americans have been dragged into hot water by pro-German
+wives, and I&rsquo;m not going to marry you till I can bring you
+some other dower than a spotted reputation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d take you and be glad to get you if you were as polka-dotted
+as a leopardess,&rdquo; said Davidge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just as much obliged; but no, thank you,&rdquo; said Mamise.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This makes about the fifteenth rejection I&rsquo;ve had,&rdquo; said
+Davidge. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;d sworn never to ask you again.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_295' name='page_295'></a>295</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I promised to ask you when the time was ripe,&rdquo; said
+Mamise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forget. Barkis is always willin&rsquo; and waitin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;While we&rsquo;re both waiting,&rdquo; Mamise went on, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s
+one thing you&rsquo;ve got to do for me, or I&rsquo;ll never propose to
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Granted, to the half my shipyard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s only a job in your shipyard. I can&rsquo;t stand this
+typewriter-tapping any longer. I&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you speak of my hands, I&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m strong enough for it, too. I&rsquo;ve been taking a lot of
+exercise recently to get in trim. If you don&rsquo;t believe me,
+feel that muscle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t give me a job, I&rsquo;ll go to some other company.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then he yielded and wrote her a note to the superintendent
+of the yard, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can begin to-morrow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She smiled in her triumph and made the very womanly
+comment: &ldquo;But I haven&rsquo;t a thing to wear. Do you know a
+good ladies&rsquo; tailor who can fit me out with overalls, some one
+who has been &lsquo;Breeches-maker to the Queen&rsquo; and can drape
+a baby-blue denim pant modishly?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;gents&rsquo; furnishings.&rdquo;
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_296' name='page_296'></a>296</span>
+The storekeeper asked her what size her husband wore, and
+she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just about my own.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+d&eacute;but into the world of manual labor.</p>
+<p>Abbie dropped in and surprised her in her attitudes and was
+handsomely scandalized:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When&rsquo;s the masquerade?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>Mamise told her of her new career.</p>
+<p>Abbie was appalled. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s against the Bible for a woman
+to wear a man&rsquo;s things!&rdquo; she protested. Abbie could quote
+the Scripture for every discouraging purpose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather wear them than wash them,&rdquo; said Mamise;
+&ldquo;and if you&rsquo;ll take my advice you&rsquo;ll get a suit of overalls
+yourself and earn an honest living and five times as much
+money as Jake would give you&ndash;&ndash;if he ever gave you any.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; money and now of poor folks&rsquo; work. Mamise&rsquo;s contention
+that there were not enough workmen for the country&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>But Jake&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work in the neighborhood, and she had to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_297' name='page_297'></a>297</span>
+endure the most searching stares, grins, frowns, and comments
+that were meant to be overheard.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Mamise reported to the superintendent and gave him
+Davidge&rsquo;s card. The old man respected Davidge&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_298' name='page_298'></a>298</span></div>
+<p>When she expressed a shy wish to belong to his riveting-gang
+he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Right you are, miss&ndash;&ndash;or should I say mister?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d be proud if you&rsquo;d call me bo,&rdquo; said Mamise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Right you are, bo. We&rsquo;ll start you in as a passer-boy.
+I&rsquo;ll be glad to get rid of that sleep-walker. Hay, Snotty!&rdquo;
+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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, what!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, go git your time&ndash;&ndash;or change to another gang. Tell
+the supe. I&rsquo;m not fast enough for you. Go on&ndash;&ndash;beat it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>He explained the nature of Mamise&rsquo;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&rsquo;s startled eyes kept following these
+missiles, he laughed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you use chewin&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so,&rdquo; said Mamise, not quite sure of his
+meaning.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll have to keep a wad of gum goin&rsquo;, then, for
+you cert&rsquo;n&rsquo;y need a lot of spit in this business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This gink here with the whiskers is Zupnik; he&rsquo;s the
+holder-on; he handles the dolly and hangs on to the rivets
+while I swat &rsquo;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 &rsquo;em out with the tongs
+and throws &rsquo;em to you. You ketch &rsquo;em in the bucket&ndash;&ndash;I
+hope, and take &rsquo;em out with your tongs and put &rsquo;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&rsquo;-man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My name is Marie Louise.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_299' name='page_299'></a>299</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Moll is enough.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And Moll she was thenceforth.</p>
+<p>The understanding of Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;d better go back to crocheting,&rdquo; she sighed.</p>
+<p>Sutton gave her a playful shove that almost sent her off
+the platform:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nah, you don&rsquo;t, Moll. You made me chase Snotty
+off the job, and you&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; t&rsquo;rough wit&rsquo; it. You ain&rsquo;t doin&rsquo;
+no worse &rsquo;n I done meself when I started rivetin&rsquo;. Cheese! but
+I spoiled so much work I got me tail kicked offen me a dozen
+times!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was politer language than some that he used. His
+conversation was interspersed with words that no one prints.
+They scorched Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The main thing was Sutton&rsquo;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 <i>ad unguem</i>, like a poet
+truing up a sonnet.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s
+scalpel.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s ability to annul
+all that devout accomplishment in an instant nauseated her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_300' name='page_300'></a>300</span>
+like a blasphemy. She felt herself a priestess in a holy office
+and renewed her flagging spirits with prayers for strength and
+consecration.</p>
+<p>But few of the laborers had Sutton&rsquo;s pride or Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Mamise would not tattle, but she began again to lose heart.
+Sutton&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You try any of that I. W. W. sabotodge here, you&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;, and
+I&rsquo;ll stuff you in a rivet-hole and turn the gun loose on you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pafflow yielded first to force and later to the irresistible
+power of Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_301' name='page_301'></a>301</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_III_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_III_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurry-up&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>On one noble day of nine hours&rsquo; fury he broke the world&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>That was one of the great days in Mamise&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s elbow. The publication
+of her photograph as an English belle had made history
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_302' name='page_302'></a>302</span>
+for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but this
+picture had no follow-up except in her own pride.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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!</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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: &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t!
+I won&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_303' name='page_303'></a>303</span></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_304' name='page_304'></a>304</span></div>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;ferocious
+jealousy of union against union, and mutual destructiveness.</p>
+<p>This was, of course, inevitable, and it only proved that
+lying, cheating, and bullying were as natural to the so-called
+&ldquo;laborer&rdquo; as to the so-called &ldquo;capitalist.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_305' name='page_305'></a>305</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Bands of missionaries went everywhere, to the theaters,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_306' name='page_306'></a>306</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>One of these troupes of crusaders marched upon Davidge&rsquo;s
+shipyard. And with it came Nicky Easton at last.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I just got a call on long distance,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and a certain
+party tells me you was one of us all this time. Why didn&rsquo;t
+you put a feller wise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise was inspired to answer his reproach with a better:
+&ldquo;Because I don&rsquo;t trust you, Jake. You talk too much.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 r&ocirc;le than the other.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, well, who&rsquo;d &rsquo;a&rsquo; thought our little Mamise was one
+of them slouch-hounds you read about? I see now why
+you&rsquo;ve been stringin&rsquo; that Davidge boob along. You got
+him eatin&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s problems. Her dreams were all of death and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_307' name='page_307'></a>307</span>
+destruction, and of steel ships crumpled like balls of paper
+thrown into a waste-basket.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_308' name='page_308'></a>308</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IV_1_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_IV_1_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s office.</p>
+<p>Miss Gabus stared at her and laughed. &ldquo;Tired of your
+rivetin&rsquo; a&rsquo;ready? Come to get your old job back?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise shook her head and asked for Davidge. He was
+out&ndash;&ndash;no, not out of town, but out in the yard or the shop or
+up in the mold-loft or somewheres, she reckoned.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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!</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was just talking to your brother-in-law, Miss Webling,&rdquo;
+he said, &ldquo;trying to drive a few rivets into that loose skull.
+I don&rsquo;t want to fire him, on your account, but I don&rsquo;t see why
+I should pay an I. W. W. or a Bolshevist to poison my
+men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge had been alarmed by the indifference of his sentinels.
+He thought it imbecile to employ men like Nuddle to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_309' name='page_309'></a>309</span>
+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&rsquo;s sake, trying to
+pluck this dingy brand from the burning.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was just showing Nuddle a little bookkeeping in patriotism,&rdquo;
+he said. &ldquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In other words, Nuddle, you are doing the Germans&rsquo; business,
+and I don&rsquo;t intend to pay you American money any
+longer unless you do more work with your hands and less
+with your jaw.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nuddle was stupid enough to swagger.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just as you say, Davidge. You&rsquo;ll change your tune
+before long, because us workin&rsquo;-men, bein&rsquo; the perdoocers, are
+goin&rsquo; to take over all these plants and run &rsquo;em to soot ourselves.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fine!&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;And will you take over my loans
+at the banks to meet the pay-rolls?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll take over the banks!&rdquo; said Jake, majestically.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll take over everything and let the workin&rsquo;-men git their
+doos at last.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What becomes of us wicked plutocrats?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have you workin&rsquo; for us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll be the workin&rsquo;-men, and it will be our turn
+to take over things and set you plutocrats to workin&rsquo; for us,
+I suppose. And we&rsquo;ll be just where we are now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was growing too seesawy for Nuddle, and he turned
+surly.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_310' name='page_310'></a>310</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Some of you won&rsquo;t be in no shape to take over
+nothin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge laughed. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s as bad as that, eh? Well, while
+I can, I&rsquo;ll just take over your button.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean I&rsquo;m fired?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Davidge, holding out his hand for the
+badge that served as a pass to the yards and the pay-roll.
+&ldquo;Come with me, and you&rsquo;ll get what money&rsquo;s coming to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This struck through Nuddle&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you no regard for a family man? I got a wife and
+kids dependent on me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, do what Karl Marx did&ndash;&ndash;let them starve or live on
+their own money while you prove that capital is as he said, &lsquo;a
+vampire of dead labor sucking the life out of living labor.&rsquo;
+Or feed them on the wind you try to sell me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, have a heart! I talk too much, but I&rsquo;m all right,&rdquo;
+Jake pleaded.</p>
+<p>Davidge relented a little. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;ll promise to give your
+mouth a holiday and your hands a little work I&rsquo;ll keep you
+to the end of the month. And then, on your way!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, boss; much obliged,&rdquo; said Jake, so relieved at
+his respite that he bustled away as if victorious, winking
+shrewdly at Mamise&ndash;&ndash;who winked back, with some difficulty.</p>
+<p>She waited till he was a short distance off, then she murmured,
+quickly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t jump&ndash;&ndash;but Nicky Easton is coming here in the
+next few days; I don&rsquo;t know just when. He told Jake;
+Jake told me. What shall we do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge took the blow with a smile:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our little guest is coming at last, eh? He promised to
+see you first. I&rsquo;ll have Larrey keep close to you, and the
+first move he makes we&rsquo;ll jump him. In the mean while
+I&rsquo;ll put some new guards on the job and&ndash;&ndash;well, that&rsquo;s about
+all we can do but wait.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mustn&rsquo;t be seen speaking to you too friendly. Jake
+thinks I&rsquo;m fooling you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God help me, if you are, for I love you. And I want
+you to be careful. Don&rsquo;t run any risks. I&rsquo;d rather have the
+whole shipyard smashed than your little finger.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_311' name='page_311'></a>311</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Thanks, but if I could swap my life for one ship it would
+be the best bargain I ever bought. Good-by.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_312' name='page_312'></a>312</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_V_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_V_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s there!&rdquo; at every breeze that fumbled a shutter.</p>
+<p>But nothing happened; nobody came for her.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Mamise drifted from one audience to another. She encountered
+her team-mate Pafflow and tried to find a speaker
+who was using his language.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>She felt a twitch at her sleeve, and turned idly.</p>
+<p>Nicky Easton was at her side. Her mind, all her minds,
+began to convene in alarm like the crew of a ship attacked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nicky!&rdquo; she gasped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No names, pleass! But to follow me quick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m right with you.&rdquo; She turned to follow him. &ldquo;One
+minute.&rdquo; She stepped back and spoke fiercely to Pafflow.
+&ldquo;Pafflow, find Mr. Davidge. Tell him Nicky is here. Remember,
+<i>Nicky is here</i>. It&rsquo;s life and death. Find him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pafflow mumbled, &ldquo;Nicky is here!&rdquo; and Mamise ran after
+Nicky, who was lugging a large suit-case. He was quivering
+with excitement.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_313' name='page_313'></a>313</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t knew you in pentaloons, but Chake Nuttle pointet
+you owit,&rdquo; he laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wh-where is Jake?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He goes ahead vit a boondle of bombs. Nobody is on the
+<i>Schiff</i>. Ve could not have so good a chence again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Pafflow was a bit stupid and two bits stubborn. He puzzled
+over Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, my friend, what is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pafflow ignored him and shouted: &ldquo;Meesta Davutch!
+O-o-h, Meesta Davutch. Neecky is here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge, hearing his name bruited, rose and called into the
+mob, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Neecky is here.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_314' name='page_314'></a>314</span></div>
+<p>When Davidge understood he was staggered. For a moment
+he stood in a stupor. Then he apologized to the speaker.
+&ldquo;An emergency call. Please forgive me and go right on!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He bowed to the other distinguished guests and left the
+platform. Pafflow found him and explained.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moll, the passer-boy, my gang, she say find you, life and
+death, and say Neecky is here! I doan&rsquo; know what she means,
+but now I find you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Which way&ndash;&ndash;where&ndash;&ndash;did you&ndash;&ndash;have you an idea where
+she went?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She go over by new ship <i>Mamise</i>&ndash;&ndash;weeth gentleman all
+dressy up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>They made the climb, and Nicky&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The ship would have been in the water now if it weren&rsquo;t
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_315' name='page_315'></a>315</span>
+for that big hatch. It set us&ndash;&ndash;the company back ninety
+days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now the ship goes to be in the sky in about nine
+minutes. Come along once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look down here, how deep it is!&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>But Davidge, looking up from the depth of the well, saw
+Nicky and Mamise peering over the edge. His face vanished.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who iss?&rdquo; said Nicky. &ldquo;Somebody is below dere. Who
+iss?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise said she did not know, and Jake had not seen.</p>
+<p>Nicky was in a flurry. The fire in Davidge&rsquo;s eyes told him
+that Davidge was looking for him. There was a dull sound
+in the hitherto silent ship of some one running.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Meester Davitch&ndash;&ndash;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&ndash;&ndash;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s grasp would do to this mountain he had built.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_316' name='page_316'></a>316</span></div>
+<p>Davidge pondered but did not speak.</p>
+<p>With all the superiority of the Kultured German for the
+untutored Yankee, Nicky said, &ldquo;Vell?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Perhaps it was the V that did it. For Davidge, without a
+word, went for him.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_317' name='page_317'></a>317</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VI_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VI_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>It was a pity, seeing how many Germans were alienated
+from their country by the series of its rulers&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Even now, if Nicky Easton, poising the bombshell with its
+appalling threat, had murmured a sardonic &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; Davidge
+would probably have smiled, shrugged, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got the bead on me, partner. I&rsquo;m yours.&rdquo; He
+would have gone along as Nicky&rsquo;s prisoner, waiting some
+better chance to recover his freedom.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;cheecheree,&rdquo; and slew them when they said
+&ldquo;sheesheree.&rdquo; So Easton snapped a fulminate in Davidge when
+his Prussian tongue betrayed him into that impertinent, intolerable
+alien &ldquo;Vell?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge was helpless in his own frenzy. He leaped.</p>
+<p>Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>That was just too long for him and just long enough for
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_318' name='page_318'></a>318</span>
+Davidge, who went at him football fashion, hurling himself
+through the air like a vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been
+panic-stricken at the sight of the bomb in Nicky&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted
+on the huge blade of the ship&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Nuddle&rsquo;s whole back was obliterated and half a corpse
+fell forward, headless, on the deck. Davidge&rsquo;s right arm was
+ripped from the shoulder and his hat vanished, all but the
+brim.</p>
+<p>Mamise was untouched by the bombardment, but the downward
+rain of fragments tore her flesh as she lay sidelong.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The crash with its reverberations threw the throngs about
+the speakers&rsquo; stands into various panics, some running away
+from the volcano, some toward it. Many people were
+knocked down and trampled.</p>
+<p>Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They
+found Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_319' name='page_319'></a>319</span>
+as the torn arteries in Davidge&rsquo;s shoulder spouted his life
+away. A quick application of first aid saved him until the
+surgeon attached to the shipyard could reach him.</p>
+<p>Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Davidge and Mamise were taken to the hospital, and
+when Davidge was restored to consciousness his first words
+were a groan of awful satisfaction:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I got a German!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When he learned that he had no longer a right arm he
+smiled again and muttered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s great to be wounded for your country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Which was a rather inelegant paraphrase of the classic
+&ldquo;<i>Dulce et decorum</i>,&rdquo; but caught its spirit admirably.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Her voice came to him over the bedside telephone. After
+an exchange of the inevitable sympathies and regrets and
+tendernesses, Mamise sighed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;re luckier than poor Jake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are? What happened to him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was killed, horribly. His pitiful wife! Abbie has
+been here and she is inconsolable. He was her idol&ndash;&ndash;not a
+very pretty one, but idols are not often pretty. It&rsquo;s too
+terribly bad, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from
+his cradle on&ndash;&ndash;indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly
+kicked her to death before he was born.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_320' name='page_320'></a>320</span></div>
+<p>She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long
+silence, she asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say anything about poor Jake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&ndash;&ndash;I don&rsquo;t know what to say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;or what we call &ldquo;deserve.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: &ldquo;It was
+noble of poor Jake to give his life trying to save the ship,
+wasn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; said Davidge, and she spoke with labored
+precision.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I see! Yes&ndash;&ndash;yes,&rdquo; said Davidge, understanding.</p>
+<p>Mamise went on: &ldquo;Mr. Larrey was here and he didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge&rsquo;s heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the
+sweet purpose of Mamise&rsquo;s falsehood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give Abbie a pension on his
+account.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s beautiful of you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s treasonable utterances and deeds were forgotten.</p>
+<p>The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief space in
+the newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was
+all but forgotten.</p>
+<p>When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call
+upon Davidge in her wheeled chair, she found him strangely
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_321' name='page_321'></a>321</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Before very long I&rsquo;m going to take up that bet we made.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What bet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That the next proposal would come from me. I&rsquo;m going
+to propose the first of next week.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you do, I&rsquo;ll refuse you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Though she understood him perfectly, it pleased her to
+assume a motive he had never dreamed of.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you mustn&rsquo;t think that I&rsquo;m going to be an invalid for
+life. The doctor says I&rsquo;ll be as well as ever in a little while.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge could not see how he was to tell her that he didn&rsquo;t
+mean that without telling her just what he did mean. In his
+tormented petulance he turned his back on her and groaned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, go away and let me alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was laughing beyond the limits called ladylike as she
+began to wheel her chair toward the door. The nurse ran
+after her, asking:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What on earth?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise assured, &ldquo;Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven,&rdquo;
+and would not explain the riddle.</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_322' name='page_322'></a>322</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VII_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VII_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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 &ldquo;in&rdquo; and an
+&ldquo;out&rdquo; basket, both empty most of the time.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>So when Davidge went to the hospital the office machine
+went on as if he had gone to lunch.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;pneumatic&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;hydraulic&rdquo; 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
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_323' name='page_323'></a>323</span>
+Grimms&rsquo; stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air
+and water and their dumfounding transformations.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Surgeons in steel operated on the battered epidermis of the
+<i>Mamise</i> 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s worth.</p>
+<p>The cry grew louder for ships. The submarine was cutting
+down the world&rsquo;s whole fleet by a third. In February
+the Germans sank the <i>Tuscania</i>, loaded with American soldiers,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_324' name='page_324'></a>324</span>
+and 159 of them were lost. Uncle Sam tightened his
+lips and added the <i>Tuscania&rsquo;s</i> dead soldiers to the <i>Lusitania&rsquo;s</i>
+men and women and children on the invoice against Germany.
+He tightened his belt, too, and cut down his food for Europe&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Gott</i> sent this harbinger of good-will.</p>
+<p>The Germans began to talk of the end of Great Britain,
+the erasure of France, and the reduction of America to her
+proper place.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The roving breezes fluttered tragic newspapers everywhere&ndash;&ndash;in
+the parks, on the streets, on the scaffolds of the buildings,
+along the tented lanes, and in the barrack-rooms.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s Greece and
+Rome. Germany was making the great try to renew Rome&rsquo;s
+sway; her Emperor called himself the C&aelig;sar. What if he
+should succeed?</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_325' name='page_325'></a>325</span></div>
+<p>Distraught by so many successes, the Germans grew frantic.
+They were diverted from one prize to another.</p>
+<p>The British set their backs to the wall. The French repeated
+their Verdun watchword, &ldquo;No thoroughfare,&rdquo; 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&ndash;&ndash;a unified command. They put all their
+destinies into the hands of Foch.</p>
+<p>Instantly and melodramatically the omens changed. Foch
+could live up to his own motto now, &ldquo;Attack, attack, attack.&rdquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>In every direction he attacked, attacked, attacked. The
+stupefied world saw the German hordes checked, driven rearward,
+here, there, the other place.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Secrecy lost its military value. The best strategy that
+could be devised was to publish just how many Americans
+were landing in France.</p>
+<p>General March would carry the news to Secretary Baker
+and he would scatter it broadcast through George Creel&rsquo;s
+Committee on Public Information, using telegraph, wireless,
+telephone, cable, post-office, placard, courier.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>But there was the war after the war to be considered&ndash;&ndash;the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_326' name='page_326'></a>326</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;at any price.</p>
+<p>The laborers would not surrender without a battle. They
+had tasted power and big money and they would not be lulled
+by economic explanations.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>As Mamise came up in her overalls Iddings was saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It ain&rsquo;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&rsquo; on and nothin&rsquo; saved to
+speak of and no chance to save more&rsquo;n a few hundred dollars,
+whilst other men has millions&ndash;&ndash;why, I&rsquo;m readin&rsquo; the other
+day of a woman spendin&rsquo; eighty thousand dollars on a fur
+coat, and my old woman slavin&rsquo; like a horse all her life and
+goin&rsquo; round in a plush rag&ndash;&ndash;I tell you it ain&rsquo;t right and you
+can&rsquo;t prove it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to try to,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t build
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_327' name='page_327'></a>327</span>
+the world and I can&rsquo;t change it much. I see nothing but
+injustice everywhere I look. It&rsquo;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&rsquo;re
+mighty clever. They call it the survival of the fittest, but
+it&rsquo;s really the survival of the fightingest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m comin&rsquo; to believe,&rdquo; said Iddings. &ldquo;The
+workman will never get his rights unless he fights for &rsquo;em.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if he wants to get rich he&rsquo;s got to fight the rich.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No. He wants to make sure he&rsquo;s fighting his real enemies
+and fighting with weapons that won&rsquo;t be boomerangs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t get that last.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, Iddings, there are a lot of damned fools filling
+workmen&rsquo;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 &rsquo;em, to bankrupt the bankers and
+turn the government upside down. If they can&rsquo;t get a
+majority at the polls they won&rsquo;t pay any attention to the
+polls or the laws. They&rsquo;ll butcher the police and assassinate
+the big men. But that game can&rsquo;t win. It&rsquo;s been tried again
+and again by discontented idiots who go out and kill instead
+of going out to work.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;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&rsquo;d
+get four or five dollars apiece at most, and you&rsquo;d soon lose
+that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rockefeller started as a laboring-man at wages you
+wouldn&rsquo;t look at to-day. The laboring-men alongside could
+have made just as much as he did if they&rsquo;d a mind to. Somebody
+said he could have written Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays if he
+had a mind to, and Lamb said, &lsquo;Yes, if you&rsquo;d a mind to.&rsquo;
+The thing seems to be to be born with a mind to and to
+cultivate a mind to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You take Rockefeller&rsquo;s money away and he&rsquo;ll make more
+while you&rsquo;re fumbling with what you&rsquo;ve got. Take Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays away and he&rsquo;ll write others while you&rsquo;re scratching
+your head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let &rsquo;em fool you, Iddings, into believing that rich
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_328' name='page_328'></a>328</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Karl Marx, who wrote your &lsquo;Workmen&rsquo;s Bible,&rsquo; called
+capital a vampire. Well, there aren&rsquo;t any vampires except
+in the movies.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Speaking of vamping wealth, did you ever hear how I
+got where I am?&ndash;&ndash;not that it&rsquo;s so very far and not that I
+like to talk about myself&ndash;&ndash;but just to show you how true
+your man Marx is.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast&ndash;&ndash;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 &lsquo;dead capital&rsquo; then for sure.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in
+six masts, and made a big schooner of her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did &lsquo;dead
+labor suck the life out of living labor,&rsquo; as Karl Marx says?
+You could do the same. You could if you would. There&rsquo;s
+plenty of old hulls lying around on the sands of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all very fine,&rdquo; he growled, &ldquo;but where would I
+get my start? I got no eight thousand or anybody to lend
+me ten dollars.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_329' name='page_329'></a>329</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;The banks will lend to men who will make money make
+money. It&rsquo;s not the guarantee they want so much as inspiration.
+Pierpont Morgan said he lent on character, not on
+collateral.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Morgan, humph!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The trouble isn&rsquo;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&rsquo;s a beautiful
+life, but it&rsquo;s not a money-making life. You can&rsquo;t make
+money by working eight hours a day for another man&rsquo;s money.
+You&rsquo;ve got to get out and find it or dig it up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t. But I kept on trying.
+The war in Europe came. The world was crazy for ships.
+They couldn&rsquo;t build &rsquo;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&ndash;&ndash;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When our country went into the war she needed ships
+of her own. She had to have shipyards first to build &rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now look at the swamp. It&rsquo;s one of the prettiest
+yards in the world. The Germans sank my <i>Clara</i>. Did I
+stop or go to making speeches about German vampires?
+No. I went on building.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Germans tried to get my next boat. I fought for
+her as I&rsquo;ll fight the Germans, the I. W. W., the Bolshevists,
+or any other sneaking coyotes that try to destroy my
+property.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_330' name='page_330'></a>330</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I lost this right arm trying to save that ship. And
+now that I&rsquo;m crippled, am I asking for a pension or an admission
+to an old folks&rsquo; home? Am I passing the hat to you
+other workers? No. I&rsquo;m as good as ever I was. I made
+my left arm learn my right arm&rsquo;s business. If I lose my left
+arm next I&rsquo;ll teach my feet to write. And if I lose those,
+by God! I&rsquo;ll write with my teeth, or wigwag my ears.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+to be found.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If Iddings had had brains enough to understand all this
+he would not have been Iddings working by the day. His
+stubborn response was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll say the laboring-man is being bled by the
+capitalists and he&rsquo;ll never get his rights till he grabs &rsquo;em.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll say be sure that you&rsquo;re grabbing your rights
+and not grabbing your own throat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;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&ndash;&ndash;all the share they can
+handle, all the control that won&rsquo;t hurt the business. But
+the business has got to come first, for it&rsquo;s business that makes
+comfort. I&rsquo;ll let any man run this shop who can run it as
+well as I can or better.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I&rsquo;m against is letting somebody run my business
+who can&rsquo;t run his own. Talk won&rsquo;t build ships, old man.
+And complaints and protests won&rsquo;t build ships, or make any
+important money.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;re worth
+working for. And they&rsquo;ve got to be worked for.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;ve talked longer
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_331' name='page_331'></a>331</span>
+than I ever did before or ever will again. Do you believe
+anything I say?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidge had to laugh. &ldquo;Well, Iddings, I&rsquo;ve got to hand
+it to you for obstinacy; you&rsquo;ve got an old mule skinned to
+death. But old mules can&rsquo;t compete with race-horses.
+Balking and kicking won&rsquo;t get you very far.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He walked away, and Mamise went along. Davidge was
+in a somber mood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor old fellow, he&rsquo;s got no self-starter, no genius, no
+ideas, and he&rsquo;s doomed to be a drudge. It&rsquo;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mamise had heard a vast amount of discontented talk among
+the men.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an awful lot of trouble brewing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Trouble is no luxury to me,&rdquo; said Davidge. &ldquo;Blessed
+is he that expects trouble, for he shall get it. Wait till this
+war is over and then you&rsquo;ll see a real war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shall we all get killed or starved?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s more danger close ashore than out at sea. Let&rsquo;s
+make a tour of the <i>Mamise</i> and see how soon she&rsquo;ll be ready
+to go overboard.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_332' name='page_332'></a>332</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_VIII_1_1_1' id='CHAPTER_VIII_1_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+<p>Nicky Easton&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>While the damaged parts of the <i>Mamise</i> were remade,
+Davidge pushed the work on other portions of the ship&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the
+ships that grew alongside the <i>Mamise</i>, and each gang strove
+to put its boat overboard in record time. The &ldquo;Mamisers,&rdquo;
+as they called themselves, fought against time and trouble
+to redeem her from the &ldquo;jinx&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t matter a damn. Davidge ordered her home, but her
+pride in her sex and her zest for her ship kept her at work.</p>
+<p>And then suddenly she sneezed!</p>
+<p>She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken
+with a great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_333' name='page_333'></a>333</span>
+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&rsquo;s wool of influenza.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>From America the influenza took more lives than the war
+itself.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s row
+with medicines and victuals in her basket. And yet the
+death-roll mounted and strength was no protection.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>This was the supreme blow at religion. The preachers
+who had confessed that the Church had failed to meet the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_334' name='page_334'></a>334</span>
+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, &ldquo;I am afraid that the dear old Church has missed the
+bus this trip.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The abandoned world abandoned all its gods, and men
+fought men in the name of mankind.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Drop them tongs and go home!&rdquo; said Sutton.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to help finish my ship,&rdquo; Mamise pleaded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go home, I tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But she&rsquo;s to be launched day after to-morrow and I&rsquo;ve
+got to christen her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go home or I&rsquo;ll carry you,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>She flung into her cottage, lighted the fires, heated water,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_335' name='page_335'></a>335</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>She was to be woman again to-day and to wear the most
+fashionable gown in her wardrobe and the least masculine hat.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If being a workman is going to take away my waistline,
+here&rsquo;s where I quit work,&rdquo; said Mamise. &ldquo;As Mr.
+Dooley says, I&rsquo;m a pathrite, but I&rsquo;m no bigot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m all right,&rdquo; Mamise pleaded. &ldquo;I got caught in the
+jam at the gate and was nearly crushed. That&rsquo;s all. It&rsquo;s
+glorious up here and I&rsquo;d rather die than miss it.&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_336' name='page_336'></a>336</span></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;sponsor&rdquo;
+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 <i>nom de guerre</i>, &ldquo;Moll.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Painters were at work brushing over the spots where the
+shores had rested.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_337' name='page_337'></a>337</span>
+lounging in violent indifference, but giving himself away by
+the frenzy of his jaws worrying his quid and spurting tobacco
+juice in all directions.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Mamise</i> had suffered so many mishaps that the
+other ship crews called her a hoodoo.</p>
+<p>At last the hour drew close. Davidge was a fanatic on
+schedules. He did not want his ship to be late to her engagement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s named after me, poor thing,&rdquo; said Mamise. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s
+bound to be late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;ll be on time for once,&rdquo; Davidge growled.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The <i>Mamise</i> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Make ready!&rdquo; he commanded. &ldquo;Stand by! Where&rsquo;s
+the bottle? Good Lord! Where&rsquo;s the bottle?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That precious quart of champagne was missing now. The
+bottle had been prepared by an eminent jeweler with silver
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_338' name='page_338'></a>338</span>
+decoration and a silken net. The neck would be a cherished
+souvenir thereafter, made into a vase to hold flowers.</p>
+<p>The bottle was found, a cable was lowered from aloft and
+the bottle fastened to it.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Suddenly she was &ldquo;sawed off.&rdquo; She was moving. The
+rigid mountain was an avalanche of steel departing down a
+wooden hill.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s new gown.</p>
+<p>Her muscles went to work in womanly fashion to brush
+off the stain.</p>
+<p>When she looked up, ashamed of her homely misbehavior,
+she cried:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O Lord! I forgot to say, &lsquo;I christen thee <i>Mamise</i>.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say it now,&rdquo; said Davidge.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The chute smoked with the heat of the ship&rsquo;s passage
+and a white cloud of steam flew up and followed her into the
+river.</p>
+<p>She was launched, beautifully, perfectly. She sailed level.
+She was water-borne.</p>
+<p>People were cheering, the band was pounding all out of
+time, every eye following the ship, the leader forgetting to lead.</p>
+<p>Mamise wept and Davidge&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_339' name='page_339'></a>339</span></div>
+<p>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
+d&eacute;but of <i>Mamise</i>.</p>
+<p>The movies took the people everywhere on magic carpets.
+Yet there were curious people who bewailed them as inartistic!</p>
+<p>Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The guests of honor sat at a table disguised with scenery
+as a ship&rsquo;s deck. A thousand people sat at the other tables
+and took part in the banquet.</p>
+<p>Mamise could not eat the food of human caterers. She
+had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of paradise.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Mamise could think of nothing but a wish to be in bed.
+The room began to blur. People&rsquo;s faces went out of focus.
+Her teeth began to chatter. Her jaw worked ridiculously
+like a riveting-gun. She was furious at it.</p>
+<p>She heard Davidge whispering: &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter,
+honey? You&rsquo;re ill again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&ndash;&ndash;I fancy&ndash;&ndash;I&ndash;&ndash;I guess I&ndash;&ndash;I&ndash;&ndash;am,&rdquo; she faltered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O God!&rdquo; he groaned, &ldquo;why did you come out?&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_340' name='page_340'></a>340</span></div>
+<p>He rose, lifted her elbow, murmured something to the
+guests. He would have supported her to the door, but she
+pleaded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t! They&rsquo;ll think it&rsquo;s too much ch-ch-champagne.
+I&rsquo;m all right!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>When the car stopped she was not in front of her cottage,
+but before the hospital.</p>
+<p>When the doctor finished his inspection she heard him
+mumble to Davidge:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pneumonia! Double pneumonia!&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='toprule' />
+<div class='chsp'>
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_341' name='page_341'></a>341</span>
+<a name='CHAPTER_IX_1_1' id='CHAPTER_IX_1_1'></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>While the battalions of disease ravaged the poor Belgium
+of Mamise&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>coup de gr&acirc;ce</i>
+the Empire put up her hands and whined the word that had
+become the world-wide synonym for poltroonery, &ldquo;<i>Kamerad!</i>&rdquo;</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_342' name='page_342'></a>342</span></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&ndash;&ndash;the gentlest were accustomed to
+slaughter.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s theories.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Ships were needed still. Europe must be fed. Hunger was
+the Bolshevists&rsquo; blood-brother. Unemployment was the third
+in the grim fraternity.</p>
+<p>Davidge increased his force daily, adding a hundred men or
+more to his army, choosing mainly from the returning hordes
+of soldiers.</p>
+<p>When Mamise at last had left the hospital she found a new
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_343' name='page_343'></a>343</span>
+ship growing where the <i>Mamise</i> had dwelt. The <i>Mamise</i>
+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&rsquo;s patriotic fire.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s strength. She wanted
+to build a ship all by herself, especially the riveting.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The horrors of peace were upon the world. Men were
+driving the women back to the kitchen. There were not
+jobs enough for all.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s efforts to
+work out his destiny and enslave the forces.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_344' name='page_344'></a>344</span></div>
+<p>And yet people would insist on being miserable. She, the
+priestess of unalloyed rapture, also sighed.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>There came the man who most of all threatened her&ndash;&ndash;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.</p>
+<p>He had a telegram in his hand and apologized for following
+her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know but it might be bad news.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nobody to send me bad news except you and
+Abbie.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I wonder if I&rsquo;ll ever dance
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>She shook her head, then gave a start:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great Heavens! that reminds me! That seat of yours I
+took on the train from New York. I&rsquo;ve never paid for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, for the Lord&rsquo;s sake&ndash;&ndash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to pay it. That&rsquo;s where all the trouble started.
+How much was it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t remember.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About two dollars now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly one then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She drove her hand down into the pocket of her breeches
+and dragged up a fistful of small money.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To-day was pay-day. Here&rsquo;s your dollar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Want a receipt?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure, Mike. I couldn&rsquo;t trust you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>An odd look crossed his face. He did not play easily, but
+he tried:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t give you a receipt now, because everybody is
+looking.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean that you had an idea of kissing me?&rdquo; she
+gasped.</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_345' name='page_345'></a>345</span></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Yep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You reckless devil! Do you think that a plutocrat can
+kiss every poor goil in the shop?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re the only one here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then, do you think you&rsquo;ll take advantage of my
+womanly helplessness?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never! Overalls is royal raiment when wore for voitue&rsquo;s
+sake. You&rsquo;ll never kiss me till you put a wedding-ring on
+me finger.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked away, sobered and troubled.</p>
+<p>She stared at him. &ldquo;Good Heavens! Can&rsquo;t you take a
+hint?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not that one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s a fact.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was a caricature of mental and physical awkwardness.</p>
+<p>She gasped: &ldquo;And still he doesn&rsquo;t answer me! Must I
+get on my knees to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She dropped on her knees, a blue denim angel on a cloud,
+praying higher.</p>
+<p>He stormed: &ldquo;For Heaven&rsquo;s sake, get up! Somebody will
+see you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not budge. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll not rise from my knees till you
+promise to marry me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He started to escape, moved toward the steps. She seized
+his knees and moaned:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, pity me! pity me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please get up. I can&rsquo;t make you. I&rsquo;ve only one arm.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s see if it fits.&rdquo; She rose and, holding his helpless
+hand, whirled round into his arm. &ldquo;Perfect!&rdquo; Then she stood
+there and called from her eyrie to the sea-gulls that haunted
+the river, &ldquo;In the presence of witnesses this man has taken
+me for his affianced fianc&eacute;e.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr class='tb' />
+<p>They had a wedding in the village church. Abbie was
+matron of honor and gave her sister away. Her children
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_346' name='page_346'></a>346</span>
+were very dressed up and highly uncomfortable. Abbie drew
+Mamise aside after the signing of the book.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, thank Gawd you&rsquo;re marrit at last, Mamise! You&rsquo;ve
+been such a worrit to me. I hope you&rsquo;ll be as happy as poor
+Jake and me was. If he only hadn&rsquo;t &rsquo;a&rsquo; had to gave his life
+for you, you wouldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;a&rsquo; been. But he&rsquo;s watchin&rsquo; you from
+up there and&ndash;&ndash; Oh dear! Oh dear!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jake was already a tradition of increasing beauty. So
+may we all of us be!</p>
+<p>Mamise insisted on dragging Davidge away from the shipyard
+for a brief honeymoon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re such a great executive, they&rsquo;ll never miss you.
+But I shall. I decline to take my honeymoon or live my
+married life alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To many another woman, as to Mamise, was given the
+privilege of adding herself to her wounded lover to complete
+him.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s sweetheart, for she could say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am his right arm.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style='text-align:center; margin-top:2em;'>THE END</p>
+
+<!-- generated by ppg.rb version: 3.19 -->
+<!-- timestamp: Tue Oct 27 13:25:42 -0600 2009 -->
+
+
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+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Cup of Fury
+       A Novel of Cities and Shipyards
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2009 [EBook #30351]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CUP OF FURY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES
+
+ The Cup of Fury
+ The Unpardonable Sin
+ We Can't Have Everything
+ In a Little Town
+ The Thirteenth Commandment
+ Clipped Wings
+ What Will People Say?
+ The Last Rose of Summer
+ Empty Pockets
+ Long Ever Ago
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
+
+Established 1817
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise reflected,
+"if one could stay single at the same time."]
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+A Novel of Cities and Shipyards
+
+BY RUPERT HUGHES
+
+Author of "We Can't Have Everything" "The Unpardonable Sin" etc.
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY HENRY RALEIGH
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+ Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers
+ Printed in the United States of America
+ Published May, 1919
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  "It would be nice to be married," Marie Louise
+      reflected, "if one could stay single at the same
+      time."                                              Frontispiece
+                                                             Facing p.
+  He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought
+      herself free and came to the ground and was almost
+      trampled.                                                      3
+  "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a
+      war-worker about as long as I can."                           75
+  "'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"
+      Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie
+      Louise hung back. "Aren't you afraid to push on
+      when you can't see where you're going?" she
+      demanded.                                                     91
+  There was something hallowed and awesome about it all.
+      It had a cathedral majesty.                                  166
+  How quaint a custom it is for people who know each
+      other well and see each other in plain clothes
+      every day to get themselves up with meticulous
+      skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for
+      each other's examination.                                    235
+  "So I have already done something more for Germany.
+      That's splendid. Now tell me what else I can do."
+      Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see
+      through her thin disguise.                                   270
+  Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling
+      in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at
+      Sutton's elbow.                                              282
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought
+herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled.]
+
+
+
+
+THE CUP OF FURY
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie Louise had felt
+that she would scream if she were kept a moment outside. The luxury of
+simply wishing the gate ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by
+the pleasant deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on
+the door like a Japanese mask.
+
+Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall. The obsolete
+gorgeousness of the London home had never been in good taste, but had
+grown as lovable with years as do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old
+relative. All the good, comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing
+now as never before. The stairway had something of the grand manner,
+too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her own room;
+and there, she knew, was a solitude where she could cry as hard as she
+wanted to, and therefore usually did not want to. Besides, her mood
+now was past crying for.
+
+She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt the
+cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there till her heart
+should be replenished with courage automatically, as ponds are fed
+from above.
+
+Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and people shut
+out. She was in one of the moods when the soul longs to gather its
+faculties together in a family, making one self of all its selves.
+Marie Louise had known privation and homelessness and the perils they
+bring a young woman, and now she had riches and a father and mother
+who were great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into
+their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she asked
+nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave.
+
+She would have said that no human voice or presence could be anything
+but a torture to her. And yet, when she hurried up the steps, she was
+suddenly miraculously restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion
+of a child's laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about
+to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely surprised
+once more, and altogether terrified with her perfect regularity.
+
+Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer
+world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing
+keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the
+counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and
+puerility to solemnity.
+
+The children called her "Auntie," but they were not hers except
+through the adoption of a love that had to claim some kinship. They
+looked like her children, though--so much so, indeed, that strangers
+thought that she was their young mother. But it was because she looked
+like their mother, who had died, that the American girl was a member
+of this British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much of
+its perilous destiny.
+
+She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons not of faery,
+but of fact, that had leaped out at her from nowhere. It solaced her
+somehow to burlesque the terror that had whelmed her, and, now that
+she was assailed by ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the
+shrieks she had not dared to release in the street she gave forth with
+vigor, as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with
+milk-curdling cries of:
+
+"Boo-ooh!"
+
+Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their thumbs at
+her and said:
+
+"Bang! Bang!"
+
+And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and staggered back,
+stammering:
+
+"Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular, take my l-l-life
+but spare my m-m-money."
+
+She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred the sacred
+text now, and the First Murderer, who had all the conservative
+instincts of childhood, had to correct her misquotation of the sacred
+formula:
+
+"No, no, Auntie. Say, 'Take my money but spare my life!' Now we dot to
+do it all over."
+
+"I beg your pardon humbly," she said, and went back to be ambushed
+again. This time the boy had an inspiration. To murder and robbery he
+would add scalping.
+
+But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of fright, real or
+feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides, she had been to the
+hairdresser's, and she explained that she really could not afford to
+be scalped. The boy was bitterly disappointed, and he grew furious
+when the untimely maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and
+demanded that they come to bed at once or be reported.
+
+As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity, Marie Louise,
+watching them, was suddenly shocked by the thought of how early in
+life humanity begins to revel in slaughter. The most innocent babes
+must be taught not to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a
+caul, or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always
+almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them when they
+are born. Their first pastimes are killing games, playing dead,
+stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The American Indian is the
+international nursery pet because of his traditional fiendishness.
+
+It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural that the boy
+interrupted in his massacre of his beloved aunt should hang back to
+squall that he would say his prayers only to her. Marie Louise glanced
+at her watch. She had barely time to dress for dinner, but the
+children had to be obeyed. She made one weak protest.
+
+"Fraeulein hears your prayers."
+
+"But she's wented out."
+
+"Well, I'll hear them, then."
+
+"Dot to tell us fairy-'tory, too," said the girl.
+
+"All right, one fairy-'tory--"
+
+She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap
+demanding "somefin bluggy."
+
+Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among
+the Grimms' fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet
+and guileless enough for these two lambs.
+
+All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots;
+of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being
+turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals
+or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank
+blood and crunched children's bones as if they were reed birds; of
+hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked
+them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German
+fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against
+each of the legends. But her mind could not find substitutes.
+
+After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for
+romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She
+confessed her poverty of ideas.
+
+The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:
+
+"Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed."
+
+In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own
+and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way
+hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as
+she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can
+be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and
+praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so
+recently come.
+
+But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as
+mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned
+in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of
+lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of
+children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her
+knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting
+them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was
+very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged
+with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered
+as they drowned.
+
+She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty "Amen" she
+protested.
+
+"You didn't thank God for anything. Haven't you anything to thank God
+for?"
+
+If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of
+special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, "Oh yes!" They
+looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and
+chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their
+finger-tips, and the boy said:
+
+"We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_." And the
+girl said, "A-men!"
+
+Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss
+of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it
+announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled
+home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven
+for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from
+their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering
+fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and
+down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself
+that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more
+repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the
+blasphemy.
+
+She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her
+ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: "You wicked,
+wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a
+prayer! God must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it.
+Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?"
+
+"Wicked your own self!" the boy snapped back. "Fraeulein read it in the
+paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like
+what you do, and she said, '_Ach, unser_ Dott--how dood you are to us,
+to make sink dat _Lusitania_!'"
+
+He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in:
+"It's Fraeulein's work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend,
+the harpy!"
+
+The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved
+Fraeulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise
+fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming:
+"You shall not call our own precious Fraeulein names. Harpy, your own
+self!"
+
+And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and
+echoed, "Harpy, your own self!"
+
+It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible
+cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: "But, my
+darlings, you don't know what you are saying. The _Lusitania_ was a
+beautiful ship--"
+
+The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: "She wasn't as beautiful
+as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond."
+
+Marie Louise condescended to argue: "Oh yes, she was! She was a great
+ship, noble like Saint Paul's Cathedral, and she was loaded with
+passengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was
+ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into
+the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore
+them from their mothers' arms and ran off with them, choking and
+strangling them and dragging them down and down--forever down."
+
+She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain. Then the
+onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw the supercilious lad
+regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment was:
+
+"It served 'em jolly well right for bein' on 'at old boat."
+
+Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul. She shrank from
+the boy and groaned, "Oh, you toad, you little toad!"
+
+He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took refuge in a
+higher authority. "Fraeulein told us. And she knows."
+
+The bit lassiky stormed to his support: "She does so!" and drove it
+home with the last nail of feminine argument: "So there now!"
+
+Marie Louise retorted, weakly: "We'll see! We'll soon see!" And she
+rushed out of the room, like another little girl, straight to the door
+of Sir Joseph, where she knocked impatiently. His man appeared and
+murmured through a crevice: "Sorry, miss, but Seh Joseph is
+dressing."
+
+Marie Louise went to Lady Webling's door, and a maid came to whisper:
+"She is in her teb. We're having dinner at tome to-night, miss."
+
+Marie Louise nodded. Dinner must be served, and on time. It was the
+one remaining solemnity that must not be forgotten or delayed.
+
+She went to her own room. Her maid was in a stew about the hour, and
+the gown that was to be put on. Marie Louise felt that black was the
+only wear on such a Bartholomew's night. But Sir Joseph hated black so
+well that he had put a clause in his will against its appearance even
+at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his
+prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she
+felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his
+good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as
+all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for
+every excess of virtue or vice--if, indeed, vice is anything but an
+immoderate, untimely virtue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Marie Louise let her maid select the gown. She was an exquisite
+picture as she stood before the long mirror and watched the buckling
+on of her armor, her armor of taffeta and velvet with the colors of
+sunlit leaves and noon-warmed flowers in carefully elected wrinkles
+assured with many a hook and eye. Her image was radiant and pliant and
+altogether love-worthy, but her thoughts were sad and stern.
+
+She was resolved that Fraeulein should not remain in the house another
+night. She wondered that Sir Joseph had not ousted her from the family
+at the first crash of war. The old crone! She could have posed for one
+of the Grimms' most vulturine witches. But she had kept a civil tongue
+in her head till now; the children adored her, and Sir Joseph had
+influence enough to save her from being interned or deported.
+
+Hitherto, Marie Louise had felt sorry for her in her dilemma of being
+forced to live at peace in the country her own country was locked in
+war with. Now she saw that the woman's oily diplomacy was only for
+public use, and that all the while she was imbruing the minds of the
+little children with the dye of her own thoughts. The innocents
+naturally accepted everything she told them as the essence of truth.
+
+Marie Louise hoped to settle the affair before dinner, but by the time
+she was gowned and primped, the first premature guest had arrived like
+the rashest primrose, shy, surprised, and surprising. Sir Joseph had
+gone below already. Lady Webling was hull down on the stairway.
+
+Marie Louise saw that her protest must wait till after the dinner, and
+she followed to do her duty to the laws of hospitality.
+
+Sir Joseph liked to give these great affairs. He loved to eat and to
+see others eat. "The more the merrier," was his motto--one of the
+most truthless of the old saws. Little dinners at Sir Joseph's--what
+he called "on fameals"--would have been big dinners elsewhere. A big
+dinner was like a Lord Mayor's banquet. He needed only a crier at his
+back and a Petronius to immortalize his _gourmandise_.
+
+To-night he had great folk and small fry. Nobody pretended to know the
+names of everybody. Sir Joseph himself leaned heavily on the man who
+sang out the labels of the guests, and even then his wife whispered
+them to him as they came forward, and for a precaution, kept slipping
+them into the conversation as reminders.
+
+There were several Americans present: a Doctor and Mrs. Clinton
+Worthing who had come over with a special shipload of nurses. The ship
+had been fitted out by Mrs. Worthing, who had been Muriel Schuyler,
+daughter of the giant plutocrat, Jacob Schuyler, who was lending
+England millions of money weekly. A little American millionaire,
+Willie Enslee, living in England now on account of some scandal in his
+past, was there. He did not look romantic.
+
+Marie Louise had no genius for names, or faces, either. To-night she
+was frightened, and she made some horrible blunders, greeting the
+grisly Mr. Verrinder by the name of Mr. Hilary. The association was
+clear, for Mr. Hilary had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in
+Parliament; but it was like calling "Mr. Capulet" "Mr. Montague."
+Marie Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra
+effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs. Norcross had
+only recently shaken off the name of Mrs. Patchett after a resounding
+divorce. So Marie Louise called her new husband by the name of her
+old, which made it very pleasant.
+
+Her wits were so badly dispersed that she gave up the attempt to take
+in the name of an American whom Lady Webling passed along to her as
+"Mr. Davidge, of the States." And he must have been somebody of
+importance, for even Sir Joseph got his name right. Marie Louise,
+however, disliked him cordially at once--for two reasons: first, she
+hated herself so much that she could not like anybody just then; next,
+this American was entirely too American. He was awkward and
+indifferent, but not at all with the easy amble and patrician
+unconcern of an English aristocrat.
+
+Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly born, at that, but
+she liked extreme Americanism never the more. Perhaps she was a bit of
+a snob, though fate was getting ready to beat the snobbery out of her.
+And hers was an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some
+people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger dialect.
+But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her
+environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke
+Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German
+intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the
+same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her
+livelihood.
+
+In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an
+affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an
+Englishwoman said, "Cahn't you?" it seemed tactless to answer, "No, I
+cann't." To respond to "Good mawning" with "Good morrning" had the
+effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the
+shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a
+pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was
+good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see
+people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said
+it.
+
+This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored
+her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other
+group. Then he startled her--by being startled as he caught sight of
+her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a
+tender, "My daughter," Davidge stopped short and mumbled:
+
+"I've had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven't I?"
+
+Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. "I think not."
+
+He took the slap with a smile. "Did I hear Lady Webling call you her
+daughter?"
+
+Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, "Yes," with the
+aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost "Yis."
+
+"Then you're right and I'm wrong. I beg your pardon."
+
+"Daon't mention it," said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady
+Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach
+herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at
+once through the sieve of her memory.
+
+Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long
+column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait
+till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up
+into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that
+changes an it to a him or a her.
+
+The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and
+outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for
+giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.
+
+In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something
+mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached
+prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what
+really happened--which was, that she retained no impression of him at
+all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he
+had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never
+forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her.
+
+He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a
+resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a
+moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams--a
+girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western
+state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of
+instruments--xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions,
+cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This
+girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of
+the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she
+had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and
+the strange cry she put into her music.
+
+When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels
+on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom
+from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman
+tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too,
+in four voices--in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and
+finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They
+called her "Mamise, the Quartet in One."
+
+Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the
+theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and
+Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage,
+where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go
+on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a
+bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully
+plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather
+contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to
+blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment,
+"I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these
+days--or nights, Miss Mamise."
+
+She had grumbled, "Much ubbliged!" and returned to the ape, while
+Davidge slunk away, ashamed.
+
+He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never
+seen "Mamise" in the electric lights. He had never found the name in
+any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner--Spanish,
+Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her
+nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what
+had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or
+been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible
+conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten
+admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd
+of peeresses and plutocrats in London.
+
+He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had
+had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and
+then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided
+that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and
+confused.
+
+But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this
+tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his
+lost Mamise.
+
+If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so
+often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after
+all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie
+Louise together again so much as the man's hatred of leaving anything
+unfinished--even a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking
+Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a
+snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.
+
+A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him
+respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him
+staring at her over Sir Joseph's shoulder and puzzling about her. And
+this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she
+fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of
+those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate
+of being called daughter by Lady Webling.
+
+She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the
+incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the
+best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the
+husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry
+voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously
+smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity,
+though her talk was rarely witty on its own account.
+
+Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in
+a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool.
+She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was
+aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless,
+reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and
+amiable feelings; these made manners enough.
+
+She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back
+into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther than many a duke dared
+trace his line. She had traveled the world; she had danced with kings,
+and had made two popes laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn't
+afraid of anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being
+friendly with them, or angry with them.
+
+Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no difference to
+Polly's affection if she found out all there was to find out about
+Marie Louise. And yet Polly's friendship did not have the dull
+certainty of indestructibility. Marie Louise knew that one word wrong
+or one act out of key might end it forever, and then Polly would be
+her loud and ardent enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly
+could hate as briskly as she could love.
+
+She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the _Lusitania_.
+
+"I shouldn't have come to-night," she said, "except that I want to
+talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know
+how much I loathe 'em all. 'The Hymn of Hate' is a lullaby to what I
+feel."
+
+Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady
+C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went
+straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got
+what-for, and everybody was delighted. The two were devoted enemies
+from then on, and it was beautiful to see them come together.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night and
+invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a fight with anybody but
+Germans. She turned her full-orbed back on Lady C.-W. and, so to
+speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades at her. Lady C.-W. passed by
+without a word, and Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for
+Marie Louise was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W.
+
+She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before. Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must be a very great
+man.
+
+She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, "How is the new ship
+coming on?" and the American said, "She's doing as well as could be
+expected."
+
+So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a
+heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered
+in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him or
+his name.
+
+Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband. "How do you
+know? He might be your own mother, for all you can tell. Put on your
+distance-glasses, you poor fish." She turned to Marie Louise. "You
+know how near-sighted Tom is."
+
+"An excellent fault in a man," said Marie Louise.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Polly. "You can't trust even the blind ones.
+And you'll notice that when Tom comes to one of these decollete
+dinners, he wears his reading-glasses."
+
+All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-glasses,
+taking off his reading-glasses and pouching them and putting them
+away, and putting on his distance-glasses, and from force of habit
+putting their pouch away. Then he stared at Davidge, took off his
+distance-glasses, found the case with difficulty, put them up,
+pocketed them, and stood blearing into space while he searched for
+his reading-glasses, found them, put the case back in his pocket and
+saddled his nose with the lenses.
+
+Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said:
+
+"Well, after all that, what?"
+
+"I don't know him," said Widdicombe.
+
+It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work.
+
+Polly said: "That proves nothing. Tom's got a near-memory, too. The
+man's a pest. If he didn't make so much money, I'd abandon him on a
+door-step."
+
+That was Polly's form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how she doted
+on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet dog. Widdicombe had
+the helpless manner of one, and was always at heel with Polly. But
+he was a Titan financially, and he was signing his name now to
+munitions-contracts as big as national debts.
+
+Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the Widdicombes by one
+of Lady Webling's most mysterious glances, to meet a new-comer whom
+Lady Webling evidently regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling
+was as wide as a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in
+front of her by turning her back on the company. She made such a nook
+now and, taking Marie Louise's hand in hers, put it in the hand of the
+tall and staring man whose very look Marie Louise found invasive. His
+handclasp was somehow like an illicit caress.
+
+How strange it is that with so much modesty going about, people should
+be allowed to wear their hands naked! The fashion of the last few
+years compelling the leaving off of gloves was not really very nice.
+Marie Louise realized it for the first time. Her fastidious right hand
+tried to escape from the embrace of the stranger's fingers, but they
+clung devil-fishily, and Lady Webling's soft cushion palm was there
+conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling tone:
+
+"This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much--Mr. Easton, you
+know."
+
+"Oh yes," said Marie Louise.
+
+"Be very nice to him," said Lady Webling. "He is taking you out to
+dinner."
+
+At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited priest,
+and there was such a slow crystallization as follows a cry of "Fall
+in!" to weary soldiers. The guests were soon in double file and on the
+march to the battlefield with the cooks.
+
+Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise's hand; he had carried it up into
+the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand over it for guard. A
+lady can hardly wrench loose from such an attention, but Marie Louise
+abhorred it.
+
+Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented his
+courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One hates to have even
+a bunch of violets jabbed into one's nose with the command, "Smell!"
+
+She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something in it as
+faint as the odor of high game. It was a time when the least hint of
+Teutonism carried the stench of death to British nostrils.
+
+Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German birth, and
+their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph had become a
+naturalized citizen ages ago and had won respect and affection a
+decade back. His lavish use of his money for charities and for great
+industries had won him his knighthood, and while there was a certain
+sniff of suspicion in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his
+name, those who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien
+birth that they forgave it him now.
+
+As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid of his
+speech. She was as used to it as to his other little mannerisms. She
+did not think of the old couple as fat and awkward. She did not
+analyze their attributes or think of their features in detail. She
+thought of them simply as them. But Easton was new; he brought in a
+subtle whiff of the hated Germany that had done the _Lusitania_ to
+death.
+
+The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn wake. The
+triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats. The feast was
+brilliant and large and long, and it seemed criminal to see such waste
+of provender when so much of the world was hungry. The talk was almost
+all of the _Lusitania_ and the deep damnation of her taking off. Many
+of the guests had crossed the sea in her graceful shell, and they
+felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst of
+the German sea crimes.
+
+Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down the flowery
+lane of the table. She could not see him at all, for the candles and
+the roses. Just once she heard his voice in a lull. Its twang carried
+it all the way up the alley:
+
+"A man that would kill a passenger-ship would shoot a baby in its
+cradle. When you think how long it takes to build a ship, how much
+work she represents, how sweet she is when she rides out and all
+that--by Gosh! there's no word mean enough for the skoundrels. There's
+nothing they won't do now--absolutely nothing."
+
+She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again that night.
+She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince of distress he gave her
+by his provincialism was forgotten in the anguish her foster-parents
+caused her.
+
+For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that Sir Joseph
+and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their expressions of horror
+and grief over the finished epic, the _Lusitania_. It was not for lack
+of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there
+was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors
+call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great
+actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was
+when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an
+emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at
+least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness,
+gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They
+"get across the footlights" between each player on the human stage and
+his audience.
+
+Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well
+and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of
+such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such
+rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr.
+Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman's evening
+dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in
+the government, nobody knew just what.
+
+Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder's silence the
+distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the
+Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going
+up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his
+bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the
+inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he
+groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and
+breadth of the table: "I remember readin' about old Greek witch name
+Circe--changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned
+those German swine into the shape of human beings."
+
+Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked--by the vulgarity, no
+doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language--only in the
+platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the
+eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his
+comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily
+correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or
+the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too
+much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal
+"without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as
+"whidthout witch." He made it on the third trial.
+
+Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two
+other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked
+anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder's gaze was merely studious. Marie
+Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of
+heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a
+search-light that studies and registers, then moves away.
+
+Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept
+recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made
+several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the _Lusitania_;
+but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the
+ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where
+she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at
+all.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain
+of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming the government. She
+always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she
+said:
+
+"It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in
+by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of?
+If the Cabinet doesn't fall for this, we might as well give up."
+
+The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh
+of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and
+a foggy tongue in answer:
+
+"Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin' to convoy the
+_Lusitania_; but she didn't come to rendezvous because why? Because
+some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a
+trap."
+
+This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility
+startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in all directions
+like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then
+at somebody else. Marie Louise's racing gaze noted that Mr.
+Verrinder's eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except
+Strathdene.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt's eyes as they ran simply expressed a disgust that
+she put into words with her usual frankness:
+
+"Don't be more idiotic than necess'ry, my dear boy; there are secret
+codes, you know."
+
+"S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know--that's what you
+mean, sweetheart. I don't know one little secret, but Huns-- Do you
+know how many thousand Germans there are loose in England--do you?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. "I haven't the faintest
+notion. Far more than I wish, I'm sure."
+
+"I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And God knows how many
+more. And I'm not alluthing to Germans in disguise, naturalized
+Germans--quinine pills with a little coating. I'm not referring to
+you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates' respect for you. Ever'body has.
+You have done all you could to overcome the fatal error of your
+parents. You're a splen'id gen'l'man. Your 'xception proves rule. Even
+Germans can't all be perf'ly rotten."
+
+"Thank you, Marquess, thank you," said Sir Joseph, with a natural
+embarrassment.
+
+Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the English "Thank
+you" and Sir Joseph's "Thang gyou."
+
+Then Lady Webling's eyes went around the table, catching up the
+women's eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop from the
+embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment with her to the
+drawing-room, where the women sat about smoking miserably and waiting
+for the men to come forth and take them home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+There must have been embarrassment enough left to go round the
+dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief while the men flocked
+into the drawing-room. And they began to plead engagements in offices
+or homes or Parliament.
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock when the last of the guests had gone,
+except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into his own study.
+Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight, as if he had set himself
+an imaginary chalk-line to follow. He jostled against the door, and as
+he closed it, swung with it uncertainly.
+
+Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the head in the
+direction of the study door:
+
+"Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He's nice, but--"
+
+"We're very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I--and we do hope you will
+be."
+
+Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband for her.
+It was a dreadful situation, because there was no compulsion except
+the compulsion of obligation. They never gave her a chance to do
+anything for them; they were always doing things for her. What an
+ingrate she would be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to
+marry a man she felt such antipathy for--surely there could be some
+less hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway
+on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness in the
+immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of untenanted divans and
+of empty chairs drawn into groups as the departed guests had left
+them.
+
+Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed for an answer.
+
+"You don't really dislike Nicky, do you?"
+
+"N-o-o. I've not known him long enough to dislike him very well."
+
+She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady Webling sighed
+profoundly and smothered her disappointment in a fond "Good night."
+She smothered the great child, too, in a hugely buxom embrace. When
+Marie emerged she was suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to
+Lady Webling of Fraeulein Ernst's attack on the children's souls. She
+spoke now.
+
+"There's one thing, mamma, I've been wanting to tell you all evening.
+Please don't let it distress you, but really I'm afraid you'll have to
+get rid of Fraeulein."
+
+Lady Webling's voluminous yawn was stricken midway into a gasp. Marie
+Louise told her the story of the diabolical prayer. Lady Webling took
+the blow without reeling. She expressed shock, but again expressed it
+too perfectly.
+
+She promised to "reprimand the foolish old soul."
+
+"To reprimand her!" Marie Louise cried. "You won't send her away?"
+
+"Send her away where, my child? Where should we send the poor thing?
+But I'll speak to her very sharply. It was outrageous of her. What if
+the children should say such things before other people? It would be
+frightful! Thank you for telling me, my dear. And now I'm for bed! And
+you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?"
+
+Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door, implying and
+rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise was lingering for a
+last word with Easton.
+
+Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs with Lady
+Webling's arm about her. For the first time in her life she distrusted
+the perfection of the old soul's motives. She felt like a Judas when
+Lady Webling offered her cheek for another good-night kiss. Then she
+pretended to read a book while she listened for Lady Webling's last
+puff as she made the top step.
+
+At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened and Easton
+came out. He was bending down to murmur into Sir Joseph's downcast
+countenance. Easton was saying, with a tremulous emotion, "This is the
+beginning of the end of England's control of the sea."
+
+Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness rather
+than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the awe of a horrible
+hope.
+
+Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed to start as he
+saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her dotingly and said:
+
+"You are not gone to bed yet?"
+
+She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden rush of
+gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton's smile with any
+favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration.
+
+Sir Joseph said: "Good night, Nicky. It is long before I see you some
+more."
+
+Nicholas nodded. "But I shall see Miss Marie Louise quite soon now."
+
+This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky bent and kissed
+her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous "Ah!" and went his way.
+
+It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the riddle. Then
+Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly. He had an envelope with
+him, sealed with great red buttons of wax. He asked Marie Louise into
+his office and said, with an almost stealthy importance:
+
+"My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes, you see,
+when I am having a big dealing on the Stock Exchange I do not like
+that everybody knows my business. Too many people wish to know all I
+do, so they can be doing the same. What everybody knows helps nobody.
+It is my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody finding
+out something. Understand?"
+
+"Yes, papa!" Marie Louise answered with the utmost confidence that
+what he did was good and wise and straight. She experienced a qualm
+when Sir Joseph explained that Nicky was the man. She wondered why he
+did not come to the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to
+question Sir Joseph's motives. He had never been anything but good to
+her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good that for her to give
+thought-room to a suspicion of him was heinous.
+
+He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous financial moment.
+She had known him to work up great drives on the market and to use all
+sorts of people to prepare his attacks. She did not understand big
+business methods. She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment.
+When, then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in
+Regent's Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to Nicky's
+without any one's witnessing the transfer, she felt the elation of a
+child intrusted with an important errand. So she walked all the way to
+Regent's Park with the long strides of a young woman out for a
+constitutional. She found a bench where she was told to, and sat down
+to bask in the spring air, and wait.
+
+By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie Louise, and
+made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave him her hand. She had
+taken the precaution to wear gloves--also she had the envelope in her
+hand. She left it in Nicky's. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and
+murmuring, "So sorry I can't stop," lifted his hat and hurried off.
+
+Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her constitutional.
+
+Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night.
+
+Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky outside a Bond
+Street shop. She was to have a small parcel and drop it. Nicky would
+stoop and pick it up and hand her in its stead another of similar
+wrapper. She was to thank him and come home.
+
+Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter and a
+request to take the children with her for a long walk, ending at the
+Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The children carried their private
+navies with them and squatted at the brim of the huge basin, poking
+their reluctant yachts to sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful
+scheme for using a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under
+water and from a distance knocked his sister's sailboat about till its
+canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he wore the
+most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina soon realized
+who had caused this catastrophe and how, and she went for Victor of
+the U-stick with finger-nails and feet and nearly rounded him into the
+toy ocean. It evidently made a difference whose ship was gored.
+
+Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as well as a
+trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing.
+
+It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments. He
+thought he recognized Marie Louise, but he was not sure. Women in the
+morning look so unlike their evening selves. He dared not speak.
+
+Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to speak, but
+Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud even to see him when she
+looked at him. She would not have known him, anyway.
+
+Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the appearance
+of the man he had seen at her side at the dinner. But the confirmation
+was Davidge's exile, for the fellow lifted his hat with a look of
+great surprise and said to Marie Louise, "Fancy finding you heah!"
+
+"Blah!" said Davidge to himself, and went on about his business.
+
+Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but went on
+scolding Victor and Bettina.
+
+"If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine they'll
+submarine you!"
+
+And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, "You were so glad
+the _Lusitania_ was sunk, you see now how it feels!"
+
+She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to
+send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those
+who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and
+infinitesimally sensitive to their own.
+
+When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious look of
+disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was also already one of
+those ladies who find a man's lap an excellent consolation. He got rid
+of her adroitly and when she and Victor were once more engaged in
+navigation Nicky took up the business he had come for.
+
+"May I stop a moment?" he said, and sat down.
+
+"I have a letter for you," said Marie Louise.
+
+His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a
+letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the
+letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.
+
+This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When
+the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would
+murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take
+her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly
+achieved.
+
+This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph
+apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He seemed to be
+sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery
+bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as
+well.
+
+He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an
+important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise,
+for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as
+sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort
+to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would
+have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes
+the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a
+bathroom.
+
+Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country
+seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it
+from nobility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were
+forests and surreptitious pheasants, deer that would almost but never
+quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and
+transept like cherubim all wings and voice.
+
+The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to
+intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like
+life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had,
+tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff
+or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or
+company.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great
+friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so
+grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious
+a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.
+
+Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to
+visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already
+pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea.
+Polly came down, too, and had "the time of her young life" in doing a
+bit of the women's war work that became the beautiful fashion of the
+time. The justification of it was that it released men for the
+trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.
+
+She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like
+hostlers around the stables and in the paddocks, breaking colts and
+mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and
+worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the
+plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows
+they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according
+to their natures.
+
+The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and
+portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with
+agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along
+with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached
+America.
+
+There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this "As You Like It" life and
+that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was
+the strangest of clandestine affairs.
+
+Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind
+the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town,
+fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another
+little note to Nicky.
+
+She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of
+bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and
+offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across
+country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the
+twist of a ravine.
+
+He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of
+courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so
+close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he
+tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go,
+and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie
+Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel
+of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was
+almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so
+frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him
+back, and bothered her no more that day.
+
+"If you ever annoy me again," she said, "it'll be the last you'll see
+of me."
+
+She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him
+cowed.
+
+It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged to love
+Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.
+
+There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is
+something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful
+child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the
+forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.
+
+Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment.
+Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and
+herself kept refusing to obey.
+
+From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was
+desperately in love with soldiers _en masse_ and individually. There
+was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were
+going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws
+of death variously the worse for the experience.
+
+The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of
+comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out
+their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were
+hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.
+
+She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.
+
+She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly
+wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls
+dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth
+they must go through life piecemeal.
+
+But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her
+appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was
+referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.
+
+Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official
+intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time.
+One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed
+ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause
+in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she
+ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the
+Weblings.
+
+She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage through her mind.
+But it came back as often as she drove it out and then the thought
+began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane
+as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its
+intuitions, like a woman's, are the resultants of such complex
+instincts that they are above analysis.
+
+But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the
+suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was
+always somewhere in her sky.
+
+Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was
+incessantly confirmed by the minutiae of every-day existence. The
+interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any
+other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked
+ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the
+trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.
+
+She felt that she had been conniving in one of the spy-plots that all
+the Empire was talking about. She grew afraid to the last degree of
+fear. She saw herself on the scaffold. She resolved to carry no more
+messages.
+
+But the next request of Sir Joseph's found her complying automatically.
+It had come to be her habit to do what he asked her to do, and to take
+pride in the service as a small installment on her infinite debt. And
+every time her resentment rose to an overboiling point, Sir Joseph or
+Lady Webling would show her some exquisite kindness or do some great
+public service that won commendation from on high.
+
+One day when she was keyed up to protest Lady Webling discharged
+Fraeulein Ernst for her pro-Germanism and engaged an English nurse.
+Another day Lady Webling asked her to go on a visit to a hospital.
+There she lavished tenderness on the British wounded and ignored the
+German. How could Marie Louise suspect her of being anti-British?
+Another time when Marie Louise was almost ready to rebel she saw Sir
+Joseph's name heading a war subscription, and that night he made, at a
+public meeting, a speech denouncing Germany in terms of vitriol.
+
+After all, Marie Louise was not English. And America was still
+neutral. The President had wrung from Germany a promise of better
+behavior, and in a sneaking way the promise was kept, with many a
+violation quickly apologized for.
+
+Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room
+in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and
+those still more pitiable ones, the missing.
+
+Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost.
+She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick,
+the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.
+
+The strain on Marie Louise's heart was the more exhausting because she
+had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used
+somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She
+tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was
+afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again
+and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her
+tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were
+innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too
+much to ask him. He would lie in any case.
+
+She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in
+her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a
+tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police
+station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize
+the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were
+false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If
+they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling
+perhaps to the gallows.
+
+To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.
+
+Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and
+inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be
+the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie
+Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and
+the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she
+had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and
+indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the
+sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all
+the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.
+
+In the autumn the town house was opened again. There was much thinly
+veiled indignation in the papers and in the circulation of gossip
+because of Sir Joseph's prominence in English life. The Germans were
+so relentless and so various in their outrages upon even the cruel
+usages of combat that the sound of a German name grew almost
+unbearable. People were calling for Sir Joseph's arrest. Others
+scoffed at the cruelty and cowardice of such hysteria.
+
+A once-loved prince of German blood had been frozen out of the navy,
+and the internment camps were growing like boom towns. Yet other
+Germans somehow were granted an almost untrammeled freedom, and
+thousands who had avoided evil activity were tolerated throughout the
+war.
+
+Sir Joseph kept retorting to suspicion with subscription. He took
+enormous quantities of the government loans. His contributions to the
+Red Cross and the multitudinous charities were more like endowments
+than gifts. How could Marie Louise be vile enough to suspect him?
+
+Yet in spite of herself she resolved at last to refuse further
+messenger service. Then she learned that Nicky had left England and
+gone to America on most important financial business of a most
+confidential nature.
+
+Marie Louise was too glad of her release to ask questions. She
+rejoiced that she had not insulted her foster-parents with mutiny, and
+she drudged at whatever war work the committees found for her. They
+found nothing very picturesque, but the more toilsome her labor was
+the more it served for absolution of any evil she might have done.
+
+And now that the dilemma of loyalty was taken from her soul, her body
+surrendered weakly. She had time to fall ill. It was enough that she
+got her feet wet. Her convalescence was slow even in the high hills of
+Matlock.
+
+The winter had passed, and the summer of 1916 had come before Marie
+Louise was herself. The Weblings had moved out to the country again;
+the flowers were back in the gardens; the deer and the birds were in
+their summer garb and mood. But now the house guests were all wounded
+soldiers and nurses. Sir Joseph had turned over his estate for a war
+hospital.
+
+Lady Webling went among her visitors like a queen making her rounds.
+Sir Joseph squandered money on his distinguished company. Marie Louise
+joined them and took what comfort she could in such diminution of pain
+and such contributions of war power as were permitted her. Those were
+the only legitimate happinesses in the world.
+
+The tennis-courts were peopled now with players glad of one arm or one
+eye or even a demodeled face. On the golf-links crutched men hobbled.
+The horses in the stables bore only partial riders. The card-parties
+were squared by players using hands made by hand. The music-room
+resounded with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had
+little but their voices left. They howled, "Keep your head down,
+Fritzie boy," or, "We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we
+are and here we are again," or moaned love-songs with a sardonic
+irony.
+
+And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come to tea!
+
+Young Hawdon was there. "Well, Marie Louise," he had said, "I'm back
+from France, but not _in toto_. Fact is, I'm neither here nor there.
+Quite a sketchy party you have. But we'll charge it all to Germany,
+and some day we'll collect. Some day! Some day!" And he burst into
+song.
+
+The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times there was
+hilarity, but it was always close to tears.
+
+The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie Louise with
+them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers, but Sir Joseph said
+that there was just as much for her to do in town. There was no lack
+of poor soldiers anywhere. Besides, he needed her, he said. This set
+her heart to plunging with the old fear. But he was querulous and
+irascible nowadays, and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for
+she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles living
+under the sword.
+
+The news from America was more encouraging to England and to the
+Americans in England. German spies were being arrested with amazing
+frequence. Ambassadors were floundering in hot water and setting up a
+large traffic in return-tickets. Even the trunks of certain
+"Americans" were searched--men and women who were amazed to learn that
+curious German documents had got mixed up in their own effects. Some
+most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.
+
+It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids had
+been published in the London papers that Sir Joseph had his first
+stroke of paralysis.
+
+Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie Louise was
+heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted, but schooled
+rather by its prolonged exercise, and she gave the forlorn old wretch
+a love and a tenderness that had been wrought to a fine art without
+losing any of its spontaneous reality.
+
+At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled like a
+snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered soldier, but
+slowly he won back his faculties and his members. The doors that were
+shut between his brain and his powers opened one by one, and he became
+a man again.
+
+The first thing he wrote with his rediscovered right hand was his
+signature to a document his lawyer brought him after a consultation.
+It was a transfer of twenty thousand pounds in British war bonds, "for
+services rendered and other valuable considerations," to his dear
+daughter Marie Louise Webling.
+
+When the warrant was handed to her with the bundle of securities,
+Marie Louise was puzzled, then shocked as the old man explained with
+his still uncertain lips. When she understood, she rejected the gift
+with horror. Sir Joseph pleaded with her in a thick speech that had
+relapsed to an earlier habit.
+
+"I am theenkink how close I been by dyink. Du bist--zhoo are in my
+vwill, of coorse, but a man says, 'I vwill,' and some heirs says, 'You
+vwon't yet!' Better I should make sure of somethink."
+
+"But I don't want money, papa--not like this. And I won't have you
+speak of wills and such odious things."
+
+"You have been like our own daughter only more obeyink as poor Hedwig.
+You should not make me sick by to refuse."
+
+She could only quiet him by accepting the wealth and bringing him the
+receipt for its deposit in a safe of her own.
+
+When he was once more able to hoist his massive body to its feet and
+to walk to his own door, he said:
+
+"_Mein_--my _Gott_! Look at the calendar once. It is nineteen
+seventeen already."
+
+He ceased to be that simple, primitive thing, a sick man; he became
+again the financier. She heard of him anew on war-industry boards. She
+saw his name on lists of big subscriptions. He began to talk anew of
+Nicky, and he spoke with unusual anxiety of U-boats. He hoped that
+they would have a bad week. There was no questioning his sincerity in
+this.
+
+And one evening he came home in a womanish flurry. He pinched the ear
+of Marie Louise and whispered to her:
+
+"Nicky is here in England--safe after the sea voyage. Be a nize girl,
+and you shall see him soon now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with
+fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter
+through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton
+packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to
+the sill.
+
+Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel
+where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating
+humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air.
+He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into
+his study, where he confided to her great news:
+
+"Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big
+business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even
+servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take
+your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate.
+Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the
+engine. A man is there--Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and
+drive slowly--so slowly. Give him this letter--put in bosom of dress
+not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope.
+Then he gets out, and you come home--but carefully. Don't let one of
+those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most
+important."
+
+Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But
+Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded
+hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest
+pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the
+chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains
+on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine.
+There was something of the effect of moving along the floor of the
+sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but
+everything was a blur.
+
+Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was
+so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and
+so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in
+the fog that he said nothing more cordial than:
+
+"At last! So you come!"
+
+He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a
+little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from
+Sir Joseph and took from him another.
+
+Nicky did not care to tarry.
+
+"I should get back to my house with this devil's cold I've caught," he
+said. "Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?"
+
+The "you" struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed
+Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent
+in German banking-houses.
+
+"How did you find the United States?" Marie Louise asked, with a
+sudden qualm of homesickness.
+
+"Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!"
+
+"I think you can get along better afoot," said Marie Louise, as she
+made a turn and slipped through the pillars of the gate.
+
+"_Au revoir!_" said Nicky, and he dived out, slamming the door back of
+him.
+
+That night there was one of Sir Joseph's dinners. But almost nobody
+came, except Lieutenant Hawdon and old Mr. Verrinder. Sir Joseph and
+Lady Webling seemed more frightened than insulted by the last-moment
+regrets of the guests. Was it an omen?
+
+It was not many days before Sir Joseph asked Marie Louise to carry
+another envelope to Nicky. She went out alone, shuddering in the wet
+and edged air. She found the bench agreed on, and sat waiting, craven
+and mutinous. Nicky did not come, but another man passed her, looked
+searchingly, turned and came back to murmur under his lifted hat:
+
+"Miss Webling?"
+
+She gave him her stingiest "Yis."
+
+"Mr. Easton asked me to meet you in his place, and explain."
+
+"He is not coming?"
+
+"He can't. He is ill. A bad cold only. He has a letter for you. Have
+you one for him?"
+
+Marie Louise liked this man even less than she would have liked Nicky
+himself. She was alarmed, and showed it. The stranger said:
+
+"I am Mr. von Groener, a frient of--of Nicky's."
+
+Marie Louise vibrated between shame and terror. But von Groener's
+credentials were good; it was surely Nicky's hand that had penned the
+lines on the envelope. She took it reluctantly and gave him the letter
+she carried.
+
+She hastened home. Sir Joseph was in a sad flurry, but he accepted the
+testimony of Nicky's autograph.
+
+The next day Marie Louise must go on another errand. This time her
+envelope bore the name of Nicky and the added line, "_Kindness of Mr.
+von Groener._"
+
+Von Groener tried to question Marie Louise, but her wits were in an
+absolute maelstrom of terror. She was afraid of him, afraid that
+he represented Nicky, afraid that he did not, afraid that he was a
+real German, afraid that he was a pretended spy, or an English
+secret-service man. She was afraid of Sir Joseph and his wife, afraid
+to obey them or disobey them, to love them or hate them, betray them
+or be betrayed. She had lost all sense of direction, of impetus,
+of desire.
+
+She saw that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were in a state of panic,
+too. They smiled at her with a wan pity and fear. She caught them
+whispering often. She saw them cling together with a devotion that
+would have been a burlesque in a picture seen by strangers. It would
+have been almost as grotesque as a view of a hippopotamus and his mate
+cowering hugely together and nuzzling each other under the menace of a
+lightning-storm.
+
+Marie Louise came upon them once comparing the envelope she had just
+brought with other letters of Nicky's. Sir Joseph slipped them into a
+book, then took one of them out cautiously and showed it to Marie
+Louise.
+
+"Does that look really like the writing from Nicky?"
+
+"Yes," she said, then, "No," then, "Of course," then, "I don't know."
+
+Lady Webling said, "Sit down once, my child, and tell me just how this
+man von Groener does, acts, speaks."
+
+She told them. They quizzed her. She was afraid that they would take
+her into their confidence, but they exchanged querying looks and
+signaled caution.
+
+Sir Joseph said: "Strange how long Nicky stays sick, and his
+memory--little things he mixes up. I wonder is he dead yet. Who
+knows?"
+
+"Dead?" Marie Louise cried. "Dead, and sends you letters?"
+
+"Yes, but such a funny letter this last one is. I think I write him
+once more and ask him is he dead or crazy, maybe. Anyway, I think I
+don't feel so very good now--mamma and I take maybe a little journey.
+You come along with, yes?"
+
+A rush of desperate gratitude to the only real people in her world led
+her to say:
+
+"Whatever you want me to do is what I want to do--or wherever to go."
+
+Lady Webling drew her to her breast, and Sir Joseph held her hand in
+one of his and patted it with the flabby other, mumbling:
+
+"Yes, but what is it we want you to do?"
+
+From his eyes came a scurry of tears that ran in panic among the folds
+of his cheeks. He shook them off and smiled, nodding and still patting
+her hand as he said:
+
+"Better I write one letter more for Mr. von Groener. I esk him to come
+himself after dark to-night now."
+
+Marie Louise waited in her room, watching the sunlight die out of the
+west. She felt somehow as if she were a prisoner in the Tower, a
+princess waiting for the morrow's little visit to the scaffold. Or did
+the English shoot women, as Edith Cavell had been shot?
+
+There was a knock at the door, but it was not the turnkey. It was the
+butler to murmur, "Dinner, please." She went down and joined mamma and
+papa at the table. There were no guests except Terror and Suspense,
+and both of them wore smiling masks and made no visible sign of their
+presence.
+
+After dinner Marie Louise had her car brought round to the door. There
+was nothing surprising about that. Women had given up the ancient
+pretense that their respectability was something that must be policed
+by a male relative or squire except in broad daylight. Neither vice
+nor malaria was believed any longer to come from exposure to the night
+air; nor was virtue regarded like a sum of money that must not be
+risked by being carried about alone after dark. It had been easy
+enough to lose under the old regime.
+
+So Marie Louise launched out in her car much as a son of the family
+might have done. She drove to a little square too dingily middle class
+to require a policeman. She sounded her horn three squawks and swung
+open the door, and a man waiting under an appointed tree stepped from
+its shadow and into the shadow of the car before it stopped. She
+dropped into high speed and whisked out of the square.
+
+"You have for me a message," said Mr. von Groener.
+
+"Yes. Sir Joseph wants to see you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes--at the house. We'll go there at once if you please."
+
+"Certainly. Delighted. But Nicky--I ought to telephone him I shall be
+gone."
+
+"Nicky is well enough to telephone?"
+
+"Not to come to the telephone, but there is a servant. If you will
+please stop somewhere. I shall be a moment only."
+
+Marie Louise felt that she ought not to stop, but she could hardly
+kidnap the man. So she drew up at a shop and von Groener left her, her
+heart shaking her with a faint tremor like that of the engine of her
+car.
+
+Von Groener returned promptly, but he said: "I think we should not go
+too straight to your father's house. Might be we are followed. We can
+tell soon. Go in the park, please, and suddenly stop, turn round, and
+I look at what cars follow."
+
+She let him command her. She was letting everybody command her; she
+had no destination, no North Star in her life. Von Groener kept her
+dodging about Regent's Park till she grew angry.
+
+"This seems rather silly, doesn't it? I am going home. Sir Joseph has
+worries enough without--"
+
+"Ah, he has worries?"
+
+She did not answer. The eagerness in his voice did not please her. He
+kept up a rain of questions, too, but she answered them all by
+referring him to Sir Joseph.
+
+At last they reached the house. As they got out, two men closed in on
+the car and peered into their faces. Von Groener snapped at them, and
+they fell back.
+
+Marie Louise had taken along her latchkey. She opened the door herself
+and led von Groener to Sir Joseph's room.
+
+As she lifted her hand to knock she heard Lady Webling weeping
+frantically, crying out something incoherent. Marie Louise fell back
+and motioned von Groener away, but he pushed the door open and, taking
+her by the elbow, thrust her forward.
+
+Lady Webling stopped short with a wail. Sir Joseph, who had been
+trying to quiet her by patting her hand, paused with his palm
+uplifted.
+
+Before Marie Louise could speak she saw that the old couple was not
+alone. By the mantel stood Mr. Verrinder. By the door, almost touching
+Marie Louise, was a tall, grim person she had not seen. He closed the
+door behind von Groener and Marie Louise.
+
+Mr. Verrinder said, "Be good enough to sit down." To von Groener he
+said, "How are you, Bickford?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Sir Joseph was staring at the new-comer, and his German nativity told
+him what Marie Louise had not been sure of, that von Groener was no
+German. When Verrinder gave him an English name it shook Marie Louise
+with a new dismay. Sir Joseph turned from the man to Marie Louise and
+demanded:
+
+"Marie Louise, you ditt not theenk this man is a Cherman?"
+
+This one more shame crushed Marie Louise. She dropped into a chair,
+appealing feebly to the man she had retrieved:
+
+"Your name is not von Groener?"
+
+Bickford grinned. "Well, in a manner of speakin'. You might say it's
+my pen-name. Not that I've ever been in the pen--except with Nicky."
+
+"Nicky is in the-- He's not ill?"
+
+"Well, he's a bit sick. He was a bit seasick to start with, and when
+we gave him the collar--well, he doesn't like his room."
+
+"But his letters--" Marie Louise pleaded, her fears racing ahead of
+her questions.
+
+"I was always a hand at forgery, but I thought best to turn it to the
+aid of me country. I'm proud if you liked me work. The last ones were
+not up to the mark. _I_ was hurried, and Nicky was ugly. He refused to
+answer any more questions. I had to do it all on me own. Ahfterwards I
+found I had made a few mistakes."
+
+When Marie Louise realized that this man had been calmly taking the
+letters addressed to Nicky and answering them in his feigned script to
+elicit further information from Sir Joseph and enmesh him further, she
+dropped her hands at her sides, feeling not only convicted of crime,
+but of imbecility as well.
+
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling spread their hands and drew up their
+shoulders in surrender and gave up hope of bluff.
+
+Verrinder wanted to be merciful and avoid any more climaxes.
+
+"You see it's all up, Sir Joseph, don't you?" he said.
+
+Sir Joseph drew himself again as high as he could, though the burden
+of his flesh kept pulling him down. He did not answer.
+
+"Come now, Sir Joseph, be a sport."
+
+"The Englishman's releechion," sneered Sir Joseph, "to be ein
+_Sportmann_."
+
+"Oh, I know you can't understand it," said Verrinder. "It seems to be
+untranslatable into German--just as we can't seem to understand
+_Germanity_ except that it is the antonym of _humanity_. You fellows
+have no boyhood literature, I am told, no Henty or Hughes or Scott to
+fill you with ideas of fair play. You have no games to teach you. One
+really can't blame you for being such rotters, any more than one can
+blame a Kaffir for not understanding cricket.
+
+"But sport aside, use your intelligence, old man. _I_'ve laid my cards
+on the table--enough of them, at least. We've trumped every trick, and
+we've all the trumps outstanding. You have a few high cards up your
+sleeve. Why not toss them on the table and throw yourselves on the
+mercy of his Majesty?"
+
+The presence of Marie Louise drove the old couple to a last battle for
+her faith. Lady Webling stormed, "All what you accuse us is lies,
+lies!"
+
+Verrinder grew stern:
+
+"Lies, you say? We have you, and your daughter--also Nicky. We
+have--well, I'll not annoy you with their names. Over in the States
+they have a lot more of you fellows.
+
+"You and Sir Joseph have lived in this country for years and years.
+You have grown fat--I mean to say rich--upon our bounty. We have loved
+and trusted you. His Majesty has given you both marks of his most
+gracious favor."
+
+"We paid well for that," sneered Lady Webling.
+
+"Yes, I fancy you did--but with English pounds and pence that you
+gained with the help of British wits and British freedom. You have
+contributed to charities, yes, and handsomely, too, but not entirely
+without the sweet usages of advertisement. You have not hidden that
+part of your bookkeeping from the public.
+
+"But the rest of your books--you don't show those. We know a ghastly
+lot about them, and it is not pretty, my dear lady. I had hoped you
+would not force us to publish those transactions. You have plotted the
+destruction of the British Empire; you have conspired to destroy ships
+in dock and at sea; you have sent God knows how many lads to their
+death--and women and children, too. You have helped to blow up
+munitions-plants, and on your white heads is the blood of many and
+many a poor wretch torn to pieces at his lathe. You have made widows
+of women and orphans of children who never heard of you, nor you of
+them. Nor have you cared--or dared--to inquire.
+
+"Sir Joseph has been perfecting a great scheme to buy up what
+munitions-plants he could in this country in order to commit sabotage
+and slow up the production of the ammunition our troops are crying
+for. He has plotted with others to send defective shells that will rip
+up the guns they do not fit, and powders that will explode too soon or
+not at all. God! to think that the lives of our brave men and the life
+of our Empire should be threatened by such people as you!
+
+"And in the American field Sir Joseph has connived with a syndicate to
+purchase factories, to stop production at the source, since your
+U-boats and your red-handed diplomatic spies cannot stop it otherwise.
+Your agents have corrupted a few of the Yankees, and killed others,
+and would have killed more if the name of your people had not become
+such a horror even in that land where millions of Germans live that
+every proffer is suspect.
+
+"You see, we know you, Lady Webling and Sir Joseph. We have watched
+you all the while from the very first, and we know that you are not
+innocent even of complicity in the supreme infamy of luring the
+_Lusitania_ to her death."
+
+He was quivering with the rush of his emotions over the broken dam of
+habitual reticence.
+
+Lady Webling and Sir Joseph had quivered, too, less under the impact
+of his denunciation than in the confusion of their own exposure to
+themselves and to Marie Louise.
+
+They had watched her eyes as she heard Mr. Verrinder's philippic. They
+had seen her pass from incredulity to belief. They had seen her glance
+at them and glance away in fear of them.
+
+This broke them utterly, for she was utterly dear to them. She was
+dearer than their own flesh and blood. She had replaced their dead.
+She had been born to them without pain, without infancy, born full
+grown in the prime of youth and beauty. They had watched her love grow
+to a passion, and their own had grown with it.
+
+What would she do now? She was the judge they feared above England.
+They awaited her sentence.
+
+Her eyes wandered to them and searched them through. At first, under
+the spell of Verrinder's denunciation, she saw them as two bloated
+fiends, their hands dripping blood, their lips framed to lies, their
+brains to cunning and that synonym for Germanism, _ruthlessness_--the
+word the Germans chose, as their Kaiser chose Huns for an ideal.
+
+But she looked again. She saw the pleading in their eyes. Their very
+uncomeliness besought her mercy. After all, she had seen none of the
+things Verrinder described. The only real things to her, the only
+things she knew of her own knowledge, were the goodnesses of these
+two. They were her parents. And now for the first time they needed
+her. The mortgage their generosity had imposed on her had fallen due.
+
+How could she at the first unsupported obloquy of a stranger turn
+against them? Her first loyalty was due to them, and no other loyalty
+was under test. Something swept her to her feet. She ran to them and,
+as far as she could, gathered them into her arms. They wept like two
+children whom reproaches have hardened into defiance, but whom
+kindness has melted.
+
+Verrinder watched the spectacle with some surprise and not altogether
+with scorn. Whatever else Miss Webling was, she was a good sport. She
+stuck to her team in defeat.
+
+He said, not quite harshly, "So, Miss Webling, you cast your lot with
+them."
+
+"I do."
+
+"Do you believe that what I said was true?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Really, you should be careful. Those messages you carried incriminate
+you."
+
+"I suppose they do, though I never knew what was in them. No, I'll
+take that back. I'm not trying to crawl out of it."
+
+"Then since you confess so much, I shall have to ask you to come with
+them."
+
+"To the--the Tower of London?"
+
+"The car is ready."
+
+Marie Louise was stabbed with fright. She seized the doomed twain in a
+faster embrace.
+
+"What are you going to do with these poor souls?"
+
+"Their souls my dear Miss Webling, are outside our jurisdiction."
+
+"With their poor bodies, then?"
+
+"I am not a judge or a jury, Miss Webling. Everything will be done
+with propriety. They will not be torpedoed in midocean without
+warning. They will have the full advantage of the British law to the
+last."
+
+That awful word jarred them all. But Sir Joseph was determined to make
+a good end. He drew himself up with another effort.
+
+"Excuse, pleass, Mr. Verrinder--might it be we should take with us a
+few little things?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Thang gyou." He bowed and turned to go, taking his wife and Marie
+Louise by the arm, for mutual support.
+
+"If you don't mind, I'll come along," said Mr. Verrinder.
+
+Sir Joseph nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as
+if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which
+adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused on the sill somewhat
+shyly:
+
+"This is a most unpleasant task, but--"
+
+Marie Louise hesitated, smiling gruesomely.
+
+"My room is across the hall. You can hardly be in both places at once,
+can you?"
+
+"I fancy I can trust you--especially as the house is surrounded. If
+you don't mind joining us later."
+
+Marie Louise went to her room. Her maid was there in a palsy of fear.
+The servants had not dared apply themselves to the keyholes, but they
+knew that the master was visited by the police and that a cordon was
+drawn about the house.
+
+The ashen girl offered her help to Marie Louise, wondering if she
+would compromise herself with the law, but incapable of deserting so
+good a mistress even at such a crisis. Marie Louise thanked her and
+told her to go to bed, compelled her to leave. Then she set about the
+dreary task of selecting a few necessaries--a nightgown, an extra day
+gown, some linen, some silver, and a few brushes. She felt as if she
+were laying out her own grave-clothes, and that she would need little
+and not need that little long.
+
+She threw a good-by look, a long, sweeping, caressing glance, about
+her castle, and went across the hall, lugging her hand-bag. Before she
+entered Sir Joseph's room she knocked.
+
+It was Mr. Verrinder that answered, "Come in."
+
+He was seated in a chair, dejected and making himself as inoffensive
+as possible. Lady Webling had packed her own bag and was helping the
+helpless Sir Joseph find the things he was looking for in vain, though
+they were right before him. Marie Louise saw evidences that a larger
+packing had already been done. Verrinder had surprised them, about to
+flee.
+
+Sir Joseph was ready at last. He was closing his bag when he took a
+last glance, and said:
+
+"My toot'-brush and powder."
+
+He went to his bathroom cabinet, and there he saw in the little
+apothecary-shop a bottle of tablets prescribed for him during his
+illness. It was conspicuously labeled "_Poison_."
+
+He stood staring at the bottle so long in such fascination that Lady
+Webling came to the door to say:
+
+"Vat is it you could not find now, papa?"
+
+She leaned against the edge of the casement, and he pointed to the
+bottle. Their eyes met, and in one long look they passed through a
+brief Gethsemane. No words were exchanged. She nodded. He took the
+bottle from the shelf stealthily, unscrewed the top, poured out a heap
+of tablets and gave them to her, then poured another heap into his fat
+palm.
+
+"_Prosit_!" he said, and they flung the venom into their throats. It
+was brackish merely from the coating, but they could not swallow all
+the pellets. He filled a glass of water at the faucet and handed it to
+his wife. She quaffed enough to get the pellets down her resisting
+throat, and handed the glass to him.
+
+They remained staring at each other, trying to crowd into their eyes
+an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were
+all awry with nausea and the premonition of lethal pains.
+
+Verrinder began to wonder at their delay. He was about to rise. Marie
+Louise went to the door anxiously. Sir Joseph mumbled:
+
+"Look once, my darlink. I find some bong-bongs. Vould you like, yes?"
+
+With a childish canniness he held the bottle so that she could see the
+skull and cross-bones and the word beneath.
+
+Marie Louise, not realizing that they had already set out on the
+adventure, gave a stifled cry and snatched at the bottle. It fell to
+the floor with a crash, and the tablets leaped here and there like
+tiny white beetles. Some of them ran out into the room and caught
+Verrinder's eye.
+
+Before he could reach the door Sir Joseph had said, triumphantly, to
+Marie Louise:
+
+"Mamma and I did eat already. Too bad you do not come vit. _Ade,
+Toechterchen. Lebewohl!_"
+
+He was reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when Verrinder burst
+into the homely scene of their tragedy. He caught up the broken bottle
+and saw the word "_Poison_." Beneath were the directions, but no word
+of description, no mention of the antidote.
+
+"What is this stuff?" Verrinder demanded, in a frenzy of dread and
+wrath and self-reproach.
+
+"I don't know," Marie Louise stammered.
+
+Verrinder repeated his demand of Sir Joseph.
+
+"_Weiss nit_," he mumbled, beginning to stagger as the serpent struck
+its fangs into his vitals.
+
+Verrinder ran out into the hall and shouted down the stairs:
+
+"Bickford, telephone for a doctor, in God's name--the nearest one.
+Send out to the nearest chemist and fetch him on the run--with every
+antidote he has. Send somebody down to the kitchen for warm water,
+mustard, coffee."
+
+There was a panic below, but Marie Louise knew nothing except the
+swirling tempest of her own horror. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, blind
+with torment, wrung and wrenched with spasms of destruction, groped
+for each other's hands and felt their way through clouds of fire to a
+resting-place.
+
+Marie Louise could give them no help, but a little guidance toward the
+bed. They fell upon it--and after a hideous while they died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The physician arrived too late--physicians were hard to get for
+civilians. While he was being hunted down and brought in, Verrinder
+fought an unknown poison with what antidotes he could improvise, and
+saw that they merely added annoyance to agony.
+
+His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this eminent couple
+for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion by proof and
+strengthen assurance with evidence, and always delaying the blow in
+the hope of gathering in still more of Germany's agents. At last he
+had thrown the slowly woven net about the Weblings and revealed them
+to themselves as prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped
+out through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his
+care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman who was
+involved in their guilt.
+
+Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of it. So he
+and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that
+the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe
+was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners;
+there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.
+
+Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate the story and
+keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself to the remaining
+prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling.
+
+He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive after the
+whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some
+of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted
+into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise
+escape to warn the other conspirators and to continue her nefarious
+activities.
+
+His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling into
+submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She had loved the old
+couple with a filial passion, and the sight of their last throes had
+driven her into a frenzy of grief. She needed the doctor's care before
+Verrinder could talk to her at all. The answers he elicited from her
+hysteria were full of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of
+inaccuracy, of folly. But so he had found all human testimony; for
+these three things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to
+remember it, and to tell it.
+
+When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her woes, it was
+she who began the questioning. She went up and down the room
+disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands and beating her breast
+till it hurt Verrinder to watch her brutality to that tender flesh.
+
+"What--what does it mean?" she sobbed. "What have you done to my poor
+papa and mamma? Why did you come here?"
+
+"Surely you must know."
+
+"What do I know? Only that they were good sweet people."
+
+"Good sweet spies!"
+
+"Spies! Those poor old darlings?"
+
+"Oh, I say--really, now, you surely can't have the face, the
+insolence, to--"
+
+"I haven't any insolence. I haven't anything but a broken heart."
+
+"How many hearts were broken--how many hearts were stopped, do you
+suppose, because of your work?"
+
+"My what?"
+
+"I refer to the lives that you destroyed."
+
+"I--I destroyed lives? Which one of us is going mad?"
+
+"Oh, come, now, you knew what you were doing. You were glad and proud
+for every poor fellow you killed."
+
+"It's you, then, that are mad." She stared at him in utter fear. She
+made a dash for the door. He prevented her. She fell back and looked
+to the window. He took her by the arm and twisted her into a chair. He
+had seen hysteria quelled by severity. He stood over her and spoke
+with all the sternness of his stern soul.
+
+"You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me. You carried
+messages for those people. The last messages you took you delivered to
+one of our agents."
+
+Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only stammer the
+fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth:
+
+"I didn't know what was in the letters. I never knew."
+
+Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense:
+
+"What did you think was in them, then?"
+
+"I had no idea. Papa--Sir Joseph didn't take me into his confidence."
+
+"But you knew that they were secret."
+
+"He told me that they were--that they were business messages--secret
+financial transactions."
+
+"Transactions in British lives--oh, they were that! And you knew it."
+
+"I did not know it! I did not know it! I did not know it!"
+
+She realized too late that the strength of the retort suffered by its
+repetition. It became nonsense on the third iterance. She grew afraid
+even to defend herself.
+
+Seeing how frightened she was at bay, Mr. Verrinder forebore to drive
+her to distraction.
+
+"Very well, you did not know what the messages contained. But why did
+you consent to such sneaking methods? Why did you let them use you for
+such evident deceit?"
+
+"I was glad to be of use to them. They had been so good to me for so
+long. I was used to doing as I was told. I suppose it was gratitude."
+
+It was then that Mr. Verrinder delivered himself of his bitter opinion
+of gratitude, which has usually been so well spoken of and so rarely
+berated for excess.
+
+"Gratitude is one of the evils of the world. I fancy that few other
+emotions have done more harm. In moderation it has its uses, but in
+excess it becomes vicious. It is a form of voluntary servitude; it
+absolutely destroys all respect for public law; it is the foundation
+of tyrannies; it is the secret of political corruption; it is the
+thing that holds dynasties together, family despotism; it is
+soul-mortgage, bribery. It is a monster of what the Americans call
+graft. It is chloroform to the conscience, to patriotism, to every
+sense of public duty. 'Scratch my back, and I am your slave'--that's
+gratitude."
+
+Mr. Verrinder rarely spoke at such length or with such apothegm.
+
+Marie Louise was a little more dazed than ever to hear gratitude
+denounced. She was losing all her bearings. Next he demanded:
+
+"But admitting that you were duped by your gratitude, how did it
+happen that your curiosity never led you to inquire into the nature of
+those messages?"
+
+"I respected Sir Joseph beyond all people. I supposed that what he did
+was right. I never knew it not to be. And then--well, if, I did wonder
+a little once in a while, I thought I'd better mind my own business."
+
+Verrinder had his opinion of this, too. "Minding your own business!
+That's another of those poisonous virtues. Minding your own business
+leads to pacifism, malevolent neutrality, selfishness of every sort.
+It's death to charity and public spirit. Suppose the Good Samaritan
+had minded his own business! But-- Well, this is getting us no
+forwarder with you. You carried those messages, and never felt even a
+woman's curiosity about them! You met Nicky Easton often, and never
+noted his German accent, never suspected that he was not the
+Englishman he pretended to be. Is that true?"
+
+He saw by the wild look in her eyes and their escape from his own that
+he had scored a hit. He did not insist upon her acknowledging it.
+
+"And your only motive was gratitude?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"You never asked any pay for it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You never received anything for it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"We find the record of a transfer to you of securities for some twenty
+thousand pounds. Why was that given you?"
+
+"It--it was just out of generosity. Sir Joseph said he was afraid I
+might be--that his will might be broken, and--"
+
+"Ah! you discussed his will with him, then?"
+
+She was horrified at his implication. She cried, "Oh, I begged him not
+to, but he insisted."
+
+"He said there were other heirs and they might contest his will. Did
+he mention the heirs?"
+
+"No, sir. I don't think so. I don't remember that he did."
+
+"He did not by any chance refer to the other grandparents of the two
+children? Mr. and Mrs. Oakby, the father and mother of the father of
+Victor and Bettina?"
+
+"He didn't refer to them, I'm sure. Yes, I am quite sure."
+
+"Did he say that his money would be left in trust for his grandchildren?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And he gave you twenty thousand pounds just out of generosity?"
+
+"Yes. Yes, Mr. Verrinder."
+
+"It was a fairish amount of money for messenger fees, wasn't it? And
+it came to you while you were carrying those letters to Nicky?"
+
+"No! Sir Joseph had been ill. He had had a stroke of paralysis."
+
+"And you were afraid he might have another?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"You were not afraid of that?"
+
+"Yes, of course I was, but-- What are you trying to make me say--that
+I went to him and demanded the money?"
+
+"That idea occurs to you, does it?"
+
+She writhed with disgust at the suggestion. Yet it had a clammy
+plausibility. Mr. Verrinder went on:
+
+"These messages, you say, concerned a financial transaction?"
+
+"So papa told me."
+
+"And you believed him?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"You never doubted him?"
+
+All the tortures of doubt that had assailed her recurred to her now
+and paralyzed her power to utter the ringing denial that was needed.
+He went on:
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd that Sir Joseph should be willing to pay
+you twenty thousand pounds just to carry messages concerning some
+mythical business?"
+
+She did not answer. She was afraid to commit herself to anything.
+Every answer was a trap. Verrinder went on: "Twenty thousand pounds is
+a ten-per-centum commission on two hundred thousand pounds. That was
+rather a largish transaction to be carried on through secret letters,
+eh? Nicky Easton was not a millionaire, was he? Now I ask you, should
+you think of him as a Rothschild? Or was he, do you think, acting as
+agent for some one else, perhaps, and if so, for whom?"
+
+She answered none of these. They were based on the assumption that she
+had put forward herself. She could find nothing to excuse her.
+Verrinder was simply playing tag with her. As soon as he touched her
+he ran away and came at her from another direction.
+
+"Of course, we know that you were only the adopted daughter of Sir
+Joseph. But where did you first meet him?"
+
+"In Berlin."
+
+The sound of that word startled her. That German name stood for all
+the evils of the time. It was the inaccessible throne of hell.
+
+Verrinder was startled by it, too.
+
+"In Berlin!" he exclaimed, and nodded his head. "Now we are getting
+somewhere. Would you mind telling me the circumstances?"
+
+She blushed a furious scarlet.
+
+"I--I'd rather not."
+
+"I must insist."
+
+"Please send me to the Tower and have me imprisoned for life. I'd
+rather be there than here. Or better yet--have me shot. It would make
+me happier than anything you could do."
+
+"I'm afraid that your happiness is not the main object of the moment.
+Will you be so good as to tell me how you met Sir Joseph in--in
+Berlin."
+
+Marie Louise drew a deep breath. The past that she had tried to
+smother under a new life must be confessed at such a time of all
+times!
+
+"Well, you know that Sir Joseph had a daughter; the two children
+up-stairs are hers, and--and what's to become of them, in Heaven's
+name?"
+
+"One problem at a time, if you don't mind. Sir Joseph had a daughter.
+That would be Mrs. Oakby."
+
+"Yes. Her husband died before her second baby was born, and she died
+soon after. And Sir Joseph and Lady Webling mourned for her bitterly,
+and--well, a year or so later they were traveling on the Continent--in
+Germany, they were, and one night they went to the Winter Garten in
+Berlin--the big music-hall, you know. Well, they were sitting far
+back, and an American team of musicians came on--the Musical Mokes, we
+were called."
+
+"We?"
+
+She bent her head in shame. "I was one of them. I played a xylophone
+and a saxophone and an accordion--all sorts of things. Well, Lady
+Webling gave a little gasp when she saw me, and she looked at Sir
+Joseph--so she told me afterward--and then they got up and stole 'way
+up front just as I left the stage--to make a quick change, you know. I
+came back--in tights, playing a big trombone, prancing round and
+making an awful noise. Lady Webling gave a little scream; nobody heard
+her because I made a loud blat on the trombone in the ear of the
+black-face clown, and he gave a shriek and did a funny fall, and--"
+
+"But, pardon me--why did Lady Webling scream?"
+
+"Because I looked like her dead daughter. It was so horrible to see
+her child come out of the grave in--in tights, blatting a trombone at
+a clown in that big variety theater."
+
+"I can quite understand. And then--"
+
+"Well, Sir Joseph came round to the stage door and sent in his card.
+The man who brought it grinned and told everybody an old man was
+smitten on me; and Ben, the black-face man, said, 'I'll break his
+face,' but I said I wouldn't see him.
+
+"Well, when I was dressed and leaving the theater with the black-face
+man, you know, Sir Joseph was outside. He stopped me and said: 'My
+child! My child!' and the tears ran down his face. I stopped, of
+course, and said, 'What's the matter now?' And he said, 'Would you
+come with me?' and I said, 'Not in a thousand years, old Creepo
+Christmas!' And he said: 'My poor wife is in the carriage at the curb.
+She wants to speak to you.' And then of course I had to go, and she
+reached out and dragged me in and wept all over me. I thought they
+were both crazy, but finally they explained, and they asked me to go
+to their hotel with them. So I told Ben to be on his way, and I went.
+
+"Well, they asked me a lot of questions, and I told them a little--not
+everything, but enough, Heaven knows. And they begged me to be their
+daughter. I thought it would be pretty stupid, but they said they
+couldn't stand the thought of their child's image going about as I
+was, and I wasn't so stuck on the job myself--odd, how the old
+language comes back, isn't it? I haven't heard any of it for so long
+I'd almost forgotten it." She passed her handkerchief across her lips
+as if to rub away a bad taste. It left the taste of tears. She sighed:
+"Well, they adopted me, and I learned to love them. And--and that's
+all."
+
+"And you learned to love their native country, too, I fancy."
+
+"At first I did like Germany pretty well. They were crazy about us in
+Berlin. I got my first big money and notices and attention there. You
+can imagine it went to my head. But then I came to England and tried
+to be as English as I could, so as not to be conspicuous. I never
+wanted to be conspicuous off the stage--or on it, for that matter. I
+even took lessons from the man who had the sign up, you remember,
+'Americans taught to speak English!' I always had a gift for foreign
+languages, and I got to thinking in English, too."
+
+"One moment, please. Did you say 'Americans taught?' Americans?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You're not American?"
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"Damned stupid of me!"
+
+Verrinder frowned. This complicated matters. He had cornered her, only
+to have her abscond into neutral territory. He had known that Marie
+Louise was an adopted child, but had not suspected her Americanism.
+This required a bit of thinking. While he studied it in the back room
+of his brain his forehead self was saying:
+
+"So Sir Joseph befriended you, and that was what won your amazing,
+unquestioning gratitude?"
+
+"That and a thousand thousand little kindnesses. I loved them like
+mother and father."
+
+"But your own--er--mother and father--you must have had parents of
+your own--what was their nationality?"
+
+"Oh, they were, as we say, 'Americans from 'way back.' But my father
+left my mother soon after I was born. We weren't much good, I guess.
+It was when I was a baby. He was very restless, they say. I suppose I
+got my runaway nature from him. But I've outgrown that. Anyway, he
+left my mother with three children. My little brother died. My mother
+was a seamstress in a little town out West--an awful hole it was. I
+was a tiny little girl when they took me to my mother's funeral. I
+remember that, but I can't remember her. That was my first death. And
+now this! I've lost a mother and father twice. That hasn't happened to
+many people. So you must forgive me for being so crazy. So many of my
+loved are dead. It's frightful. We lose so many as we grow up. Life is
+like walking through a graveyard, with the sextons always busy opening
+new places. There was so much crying and loneliness before, and now
+this war goes on and on--as if we needed a war!"
+
+"God knows, we don't."
+
+Marie Louise went to the window and raised the curtain. A haggard gray
+light had been piping the edges of the shade. Now the full casement
+let in a flood of warm morning radiance.
+
+The dull street was alive again. Sparrows were hopping. Wagons were on
+the move. Small and early tradesfolk were about their business.
+Servants were opening houses as shops were being opened in town.
+
+The big wheel had rolled London round into the eternal day. Doors and
+windows were being flung ajar. Newspapers and milk were taken in,
+ashes put out, cats and dogs released, front stoops washed, walks
+swept, gardens watered. Brooms were pendulating. In the masters' rooms
+it was still night and slumber-time, but humble people were alert.
+
+The morning after a death is a fearful thing. Those papers on the
+steps across the way were doubtless loaded with more tragedies from
+the front, and among the cruel facts was the lie that concealed the
+truth about the Weblings, who were to read no more morning papers, eat
+no more breakfasts, set out on no more journeys.
+
+Grief came to Marie Louise now with a less brackish taste. Her sorrow
+had the pity of the sunlight on it. She wept not now for the terror
+and hatefulness of the Weblings' fate, but for the beautiful things
+that would bless them no more, for the roses that would glow unseen,
+the flowers that would climb old walls and lean out unheeded, asking
+to be admired and proffering fragrance in payment of praise. The
+Weblings were henceforth immune to the pleasant rumble of wagons in
+streets, to the cheery good mornings of passers-by, the savor of
+coffee in the air, the luscious colors of fruits piled upon silver
+dishes.
+
+Then she heard a scamper of bare feet, the squeals of mischief-making
+children escaping from a pursuing nurse.
+
+It had been a favorite pastime of Victor and Bettina to break in upon
+Marie Louise of mornings when she forgot to lock her door. They loved
+to steal in barefoot and pounce on her with yelps of savage delight
+and massacre her, pull her hair and dance upon her bed and on her as
+she pleaded for mercy.
+
+She heard them coming now, and she could not reach the door before it
+opened and disclosed the grinning, tousle-curled cherubs in their
+sleeping-suits.
+
+They darted in, only to fall back in amazement. Marie Louise was not
+in bed. The bed had not been slept in. Marie Louise was all dressed,
+and she had been crying. And in a chair sat a strange, formidable old
+gentleman who looked tired and forlorn.
+
+"Auntie!" they gasped.
+
+She dropped to her knees, and they ran to her for refuge from the
+strange man.
+
+She hugged them so hard that they cried, "Don't!"
+
+Without in the least understanding what it was all about, they heard
+her saying to the man:
+
+"And now what's to become of these poor lambs?"
+
+The old stranger passed a slow gray hand across his dismal face and
+pondered.
+
+The children pointed, then remembered that it is impolite to point,
+and drew back their little index hands and whispered:
+
+"Auntie, what you up so early for?" and, "Who is that?"
+
+And she whispered, "S-h-h!"
+
+Being denied the answer to this charade, they took up a new interest.
+
+"I wonder is grandpapa up, too, and all dressed," said Victor.
+
+"And maybe grandmamma," Bettina shrilled.
+
+"I'll beat you to their room," said Victor.
+
+Marie Louise seized them by their hinder garments as they fled.
+
+"You must not bother them."
+
+"Why not?" said Victor.
+
+"Will so!" said Bettina, pawing to be free.
+
+Marie Louise implored: "Please, please! They've gone."
+
+"Where?"
+
+She cast her eyes up at that terrible query, and answered it vaguely.
+
+"Away."
+
+"They might have told a fellow good-by," Victor brooded.
+
+"They--they forgot, perhaps."
+
+"I don't think that was very nice of them," Bettina pouted.
+
+Victor was more cheerful. "Perhaps they did; perhaps they kissed us
+while we was asleep--_were_ asleep."
+
+Bettina accepted with delight.
+
+"Seems to me I 'member somebody kissin' me. Yes, I 'member now."
+
+Victor was skeptical. "Maybe you only had a dream about it."
+
+"What else is there?" said Mr. Verrinder, rising and patting Victor on
+the shoulder. "You'd better run along to your tubs now."
+
+They recognized the authority in his voice and obeyed.
+
+The children took their beauty with them, but left their destiny to be
+arranged by higher powers, the gods of Eld.
+
+"What is to become of them," Louise groaned again, "when I go to
+prison?"
+
+Verrinder was calm. "Sir Joseph's will doubtless left the bulk of his
+fortune to them. That will provide for their finances. And they have
+two grandparents left. The Oakbys will surely be glad to take the
+children in, especially as they will come with such fortunes."
+
+"You mean that I am to have no more to do with them?"
+
+"I think it would be best to remove them to a more strictly English
+influence."
+
+This hurt her horribly. She grew impatient for the finishing blow.
+
+"And now that they are disposed of, have you decided what's to become
+of me?"
+
+"It is not for me to decide. By the by, have you any one to represent
+you or intercede for you here, or act as your counsel in England?"
+
+She shook her head. "A good many people have been very nice to me, of
+course. I've noticed, though, that even they grew cold and distant of
+late. I'd rather die than ask any of them."
+
+"But have you no relatives living--no one of importance in the States
+who could vouch for you?"
+
+She shook her head with a doleful humility.
+
+"None of our family were ever important that I ever heard of, though
+of course one never knows what relatives are lurking about. Mine will
+never claim me; that's certain. I did have a sister--poor thing!--if
+she's alive. We didn't get along very well. I was too wild and
+restless as a girl. She was very good, hard-working, simple, homely as
+sin--or homely as virtue. I was all for adventure. I've had my fill of
+it. But once you begin it, you can't stop when you've had enough. If
+she's not dead, she's probably married and living under another
+name--Heaven knows what name or where. But I could find her, perhaps.
+I'd love to go to her. She was a very good girl. She's probably
+married a good man and has brought up her children piously, and never
+mentioned me. I'd only bring disgrace on her. She'd disown me if I
+came home with this cloud of scandal about me."
+
+"No one shall know of this scandal unless you tell."
+
+She laughed harshly, with a patronizing superiority.
+
+"Really, Mr. Verrinder, did you ever know a secret to be kept?"
+
+"This one will be."
+
+She laughed again at him, then at herself.
+
+He rose wearily. "I think I shall have to be getting along. I haven't
+had a bath or a shave to-day. I shall ask you to keep to your room and
+deny yourself to all visitors. I won't ask you to promise not to
+escape. If the guard around the house is not capable of detaining you,
+you're welcome to your freedom, though I warn you that England is as
+hard to get out of as to get into nowadays. Whatever you do, for your
+own sake, at least, keep this whole matter secret and stick to the
+story we agreed on. Good morning!"
+
+He bowed himself out. No rattling of chains marked his closing of the
+door, but if he had been a turnkey in Newgate he could not have left
+Marie Louise feeling more a prisoner. Her room was her body's jail,
+but her soul was in a dungeon, too.
+
+As Verrinder went down the hall he scattered a covey of whispering
+servants.
+
+The nurse who had waited to seize the children when they came forth
+had left them to dress themselves while she hastened to publish in the
+servants' dining-room the appalling fact that she had caught sight of
+a man in Miss Marie Louise's room. The other servants had many other
+even more astounding things to tell--to wit: that after mysterious
+excitements about the house, with strange men going and coming, and
+the kitchen torn to pieces for mustard and warm milk and warm water
+and strong coffee, and other things, Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were
+no more, and the whole household staff was out of a job. Strange
+police-like persons were in the house, going through all the papers in
+Sir Joseph's room. The servants could hardly wait to get out with the
+gossip.
+
+And Mr. Verrinder had said that this secret would be kept!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Somewhere along about this time, though there is no record of the
+exact date--and it was in a shabby home in a humble town where dates
+made little difference--a homely woman sniffed.
+
+Her name was Mrs. Nuddle.
+
+What Mrs. Nuddle was sniffing at was a page of fashion cartoons,
+curious human hieroglyphs that women can read and run to buy.
+Highly improbable garments were sketched on utterly impossible
+figures--female eels who could crawl through their own garters, eels
+of strange mottlings, with heads like cranberries, feet like thorns,
+and no spines at all.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle was as opposite in every way as could be. She could not
+have crawled through her own washtub if she had knocked the bottom out
+of it. She was a caricature made by nature and long, hard work, and
+she laughed at the caricatures devised by art in a hurry.
+
+She was about to cast the paper aside as a final rebuke when she
+caught sight of portraits of real people of fashion. They did not look
+nearly so fashionable as the cartoons, but they were at least
+possible. Some of them were said to be prominent in charity; most of
+them were prominent out of their corsages.
+
+Now Mrs. Nuddle sniffed at character, not at caricature. Leaning
+against her washtub and wringer, both as graceful as their engineer,
+she indulged herself in the pitiful but unfailing solace of the poor
+and the ugly, which is to attribute to the rich dishonesty and to the
+beautiful wickedness.
+
+The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea of her tub
+had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the rawhide of her big
+forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the newspaper-gallery of portraits.
+One sudsy hand supported and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These
+women, belles and swells, were all as glossy as if they had been
+ironed.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle sneered: "If the hussies would do an honest day's work it
+would be better for their figgers." She was mercifully oblivious of
+the fact that her tub-calisthenics had made her no more exquisite than
+a cow in a kimono.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties. Their
+sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her problem, which was
+the riddle of a husband who was faithful only to the bottle, who was
+indifferent to the children he got so easily, and was poetical only in
+that he never worked save when the mood was on him.
+
+Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had come into her
+home wrapped round a bundle of laundry. But now she was startled, and
+she would have startled anybody who might have been watching her, for
+she stared hard at a photographed beauty and gasped:
+
+"Sister!"
+
+She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and uncommonly
+common, greeted with the word "Sister!" the photograph of a very
+young, very beautiful, very gracile creature, in a mannish costume
+that emphasized her femininity, in a foreign garden, in a braw hat
+with curls cascading from under it, with a throat lilying out of a
+flaring collar, with hands pocketed in a smart jacket, and below that
+a pair of most fashionable legs in riding-breeches and puttees! She
+carried not a parasol nor a riding-crop, but a great reaping-hook
+swung across her shoulder, and she smiled as impudently, as
+immortally, as if she were Youth and had slain old Time and carried
+off his scythe.
+
+The picture did not reply to Mrs. Nuddle's cry, but Mrs. Nuddle's
+eldest daughter, a precocious little adventuress of eleven or so, who
+was generally called "Sister," turned from the young brother whose
+smutty face she was just smacking and snapped:
+
+"Aw, whatcha want?"
+
+Little Sister supposed that her irritating mother was going to tell
+her to stop doing something, or to start doing something--either of
+which behests she always hated and only obeyed because her mother was
+bigger than she was. She turned and saw her mother swaying and
+clutching at the air. Sister had a gorgeous hope that mother would
+fall into the tub and be interesting for once. But mother was a born
+disappointer. She shook off the promising swoon, righted herself, and
+began fiercely to scan the paper to find out whose name the picture
+bore. The caption was torn off.
+
+Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out who it really
+was.
+
+In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband had stripped
+off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove, lighted his pipe
+with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it out with practised
+accuracy, and trodden it as he went away. Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it
+up.
+
+On the charred remnant she read:
+
+  The Beautiful Miss.... One of London's reigning beaut.... daughter
+  of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....
+
+Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and
+squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin's statue of "The Thinker."
+One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and
+raining about her face. Her old waist was half buttoned, and no one
+would have regretted if it had been all buttoned. She was as plebeian
+as an ash-can and as full of old embers.
+
+She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His
+wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was
+loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was
+doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike.
+He had been to a meeting of other thinkers--ground and lofty thinkers
+who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and
+its remedy.
+
+The evil was the possession of money by those who had accumulated it.
+The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich,
+which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.
+
+It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was
+to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to
+burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and
+beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried
+to get rich by getting riches.
+
+This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile
+Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear
+almost unmanned him--what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in
+the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children
+would be left motherless--and fatherless, for he would, of course, be
+too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too,
+the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their
+wife's name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:
+
+"Whatta hellsa matter wit choo?"
+
+She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him as best
+she could:
+
+"I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought for a
+minute it was my sister."
+
+"Your sister? How'd she get her pitcher in the paper? Who did she
+shoot?"
+
+He snatched the sheet from her and saw the young woman in the
+young-manly garb.
+
+Jake gloated over the picture: "Some looker! What is she, a queen in
+burlecue?"
+
+Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.
+
+He roared. "London's ranging beaut? And you're what thinks she's your
+sister! The one that ran away? Was she a beaut like this?"
+
+Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:
+
+"Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn't I see her first?
+Whyn't you tell me more about her? You never talk about her none. Why
+not?" No answer. "All I know is she went wrong and flew the coop."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. "Who said she went wrong?"
+
+"You did!" Jake retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake
+praying for her--hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did
+you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of
+the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin'
+over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains to the head."
+
+He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She tried to take
+back what she had said:
+
+"Don't you set there tellin' me I ever told you nothin' mean about my
+pore little sister. She was as good a girl as ever lived, Mamise
+was."
+
+"You're changin' your tune now, ain'tcha? Because you think she looks
+like a grand dam in pants! And where dya get that Mamise stuff? What
+was her honestogawd name? Maryer? You're tryin' to swell her up a
+little, huh?"
+
+"No, I ain't. She was named Marie Louise after her gran'-maw, on'y
+as a baby she couldn't say it right. She said 'Mamise.' That's what
+she called her poor little self--Mamise. Seems like I can see her
+now, settin' on the floor like Sister. And where is she now? O
+Gawd! whatever become of her, runnin' off thataway--a little
+sixteen-year-ol' chile, runnin' off with a cheap thattical troupe,
+because her aunt smacked her.
+
+"She never had no maw and no bringin' up, and she was so pirty. She
+had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said."
+
+"And that ain't no lie," said Jake, with characteristic gallantry.
+"There's nothin' but monopoly everywheres in the world. She got all
+the looks and I got you. I wonder who got her!"
+
+Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for an
+article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date and growled:
+
+"Aw, this paper's nearly a year old--May, 1916, it says."
+
+This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner,
+flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping
+from stove to table, ministering to him.
+
+Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was like an old
+tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite and provided
+with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever disturbs it.
+Explosives are useful in place. But Jake was of the sort that blow up
+regardless of the occasion.
+
+His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who was richer or
+better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than he was. Yet he had
+nothing in him of that constructive envy which is called emulation and
+leads to progress, to days of toil, nights of thought. His idea of
+equality was not to climb to the peak, but to drag the climbers down.
+Prating always of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe
+them or remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of wages
+was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution to the war
+against oppressive capital was to denounce all successful men as
+brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors with the malefactors.
+
+Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French Revolution,
+and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs who burned chateaux
+and shops, and butchered women as well as men, growling their ominous
+refrain:
+
+"Noo sum zum cum eel zaw" ("_Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont_").
+
+The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret armies of
+enemies now inside the nation and threatened her success in the war.
+The thing that prevented their triumph was that their blunders were
+greater than their malice, their folly more certain than their
+villainy. As soon as America entered the lists against Germany, the
+Jake Nuddles would begin doing their stupid best to prevent
+enlistment, to persuade desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck
+factories and trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of
+freedom they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the
+battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than the snaky
+spies of Germany, and more venomous.
+
+As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie Louise.
+The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him was a beastly
+desire. He praised her grace because it tortured his wife. But even
+fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage of hatred at the look of
+cleanliness and comeliness, the environment of luxury only emphasized
+by her peasant disguise.
+
+When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up the paper
+again and glared at it with hostile envy.
+
+"Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir and a Lady, eh?
+Just wait till we get through with them Sirs and Ladies. We'll mow 'em
+down. You'll see. Robbin' us poor toilers that does all the work!
+We'll put an end to their peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany
+leaves of these birds we'll finish up. And then we'll take this rotten
+United States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just
+wait!"
+
+His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the face,
+knocked the pretty lady's portrait to the floor and walked on it as he
+strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod on little Sister's
+hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little brother howled in duet.
+Then father turned on them.
+
+"Aw, shut up or I'll--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished anything--except
+his meals. He left his children crying and his wife in a new distress;
+but then, revolutions cannot pause for women and children.
+
+When he had gone, and Sister's tears had dried on her smutty face,
+Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture of England's
+reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss W. was to be in England,
+blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other's estate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from her even the props
+of hostility. She had nothing to lean on now, nobody to fight with for
+life and reputation. She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated
+thoughts followed one another in waves across her soul--grief for her
+foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses, remorse for
+seeming to have deserted them in their last hours, remorse for having
+been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse for that remorse, grief at
+losing the lovable, troublesome children, creature distress at giving
+up the creature comforts of the luxurious home, the revulsion of her
+unfettered mind and her restless young body at the prospect of
+exchanging liberty and occupation for the half-death of an idle
+cell--a kind of coffin residence--fear of being executed as a spy, and
+fear of being released to drag herself through life with the ball and
+chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.
+
+Verrinder's mind was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked
+to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had
+bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The
+fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no
+taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his
+pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir
+Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism, he
+had been touched by Marie Louise's sincerities. She proved them by the
+very contradictions of her testimony, with its history of keen
+intelligence alternating with curious blindness. He knew how people
+get themselves all tangled up in conflicting duties, how they let
+evils slide along, putting off till to-morrow the severing of the
+cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew
+that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to
+gratitude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for
+complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.
+
+As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten
+and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in
+caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons enough then to believe
+that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in
+which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her
+bewilderment feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this moment
+when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted Germany had just about
+persuaded the majority of their countrymen that the world would be
+intolerable if Germany triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating
+her tyranny lay in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.
+
+The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a martyr out of
+Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England. She would be
+advertised, as a counterweight to the hideous mistake the Germans made
+in immortalizing with their bullets the poor little nurse, "_die_
+Cavell."
+
+Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved, and
+clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man its tea and
+toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea deferred helped him to
+the conclusion that the one wise thing was to restore Marie Louise
+quietly to her own country. He went with freshened step and determined
+mind to a conference with the eminent men concerned. He made his own
+confession of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted.
+Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council agree
+with him.
+
+Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found the house a
+flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and thwarted reporters. The
+relatives and the reporters he satisfied with a few well-chosen lies.
+Then he sent his name up to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the
+card-tray through the door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some
+wild animal.
+
+"I'll be down," said Marie Louise, and she primped herself like
+another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the executioner. She
+was calmed by the hope that she would learn her fate, at least, and
+she cared little what it was, so long as it was not unknown.
+
+Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.
+
+"Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should offer you
+freedom and silence, would you go back to America and tell no one of
+what has happened here?"
+
+The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting the sunlight
+into a dungeon. The very word "America" was itself a rush of fresh
+air. The long-forgotten love of country came back into her heart on a
+cry of hope.
+
+"Oh, you don't mean that you might?"
+
+"We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise--"
+
+She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: "I'll
+promise anything--anything! Oh I don't want to be free just for the
+sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to--to
+expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the
+bad I've brought about. I won't try to shift any blame. I want to
+confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what
+a wicked fool I've been."
+
+Verrinder checked her: "But that is just what you must not do. Unless
+you can assure us that you will carry this burden about with you and
+keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed
+with the case--legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady
+Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We'd
+really rather not, but if you insist--"
+
+"Oh, I'll promise. I'll keep the secret. Let them rest."
+
+She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror
+of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of
+hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when
+bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed
+cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then
+flung back to the dark.
+
+Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and
+that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he
+said
+
+"Would you swear to keep this inviolate?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Have you a Bible?"
+
+She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the
+bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It
+fell open easily, as if it had been a familiar companion of Sir
+Joseph's. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful
+Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanctity as she
+recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the
+twisted German type. But she said:
+
+"Will this do?"
+
+Verrinder shook his head. "I don't know that an oath on a German Bible
+would really count. It might be considered a mere heap of paper."
+
+Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her fingers. She
+found an English Bible after a further search. Its pages had seen the
+light but seldom. It slipped from her hand and fell open. She knelt to
+pick it up with a tremor of fear.
+
+She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page before her.
+These words caught her eye:
+
+  For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me. Take the winecup of
+  this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send
+  thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad
+  because of the sword that I will send among them.
+
+She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly, took the book from
+her hand, closed it, and held it before her. She put the slim tips of
+her young fingers near the talon of his old thumb and echoed in a
+timid, silvern voice the broken phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:
+
+"I solemnly swear--that so long as I live--I will tell no one--what I
+know--of the crimes and death--of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling--unless
+called upon--in a court of law. This oath is made--with no mental
+reservations--and is binding--under all circumstances whatsoever--so
+help me God!"
+
+When she had whispered the last invocation he put the book away and
+gripped her hand in his.
+
+"I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal--and perhaps
+immoral. Our action might be overruled and the whole case opened. But
+I think you are safe, especially if you get to America--the sooner the
+better."
+
+"Thank you!" she said.
+
+He laughed, somewhat pathetically.
+
+"Good luck!"
+
+He did not tell her that England would still be watching over her,
+that her name and her history were already cabled to America, that
+she would be shadowed to the steamer, observed aboard the boat,
+and picked up at the dock by the first of a long series of detectives
+constituting a sort of serial guardian angel.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+IN NEW YORK
+
+[Illustration: "This is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a
+war-worker about as long as I can."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days. Passenger-steamers
+were few, irregular, and secret. The passport regulations were
+exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder's influence could not
+speed the matter greatly.
+
+There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder's
+suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands of counsel, and
+he arranged her surrender of all claims on the Webling estate. But he
+insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been
+given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his
+inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.
+
+Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's
+safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such
+a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions peopled it with.
+
+She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the
+Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that
+startled her. They used the expression, "Under the circumstances,"
+with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had
+already trickled through to them.
+
+On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock no friends
+greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a
+certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with
+some pride how pretty she was. "It'll be a pleasure to keep an eye on
+her," he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist
+professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise's mystic squire had not
+counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting
+forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town
+of her birth, Wakefield.
+
+Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller and
+shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her
+time.
+
+At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the
+cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She
+had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too
+humble to sew for them.
+
+Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town
+intolerably ugly. It held no associations for her. She had been
+unhappy there, and she said: "Poor me! No wonder I ran away." She
+justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She
+longed for some one to mother her present self.
+
+But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived
+was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning
+out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She
+did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not
+remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely
+placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.
+
+One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise's mother had done sewing,
+had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the
+other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after.
+But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.
+
+Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his
+predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the
+elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala.
+Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a
+street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate
+ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, "I don't remember
+him."
+
+It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made
+almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from
+its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an
+anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him
+than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a
+gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.
+
+Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York, was overjoyed
+when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from
+life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.
+
+She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled
+down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among
+them for furniture and clothes and books.
+
+Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President
+visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against
+Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who
+held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the
+nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after
+so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that
+there was any cause for war.
+
+But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition
+was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena--in spirit
+at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would
+spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle.
+The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new
+enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should
+raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to
+get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak
+through.
+
+America's vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown. The first
+embarrassment was the panic of volunteers.
+
+Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang madly in
+all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to volunteer, too, but
+for what? What could she do? Where could she get it to do? In the
+chaos of her impatience she did nothing.
+
+Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen, hailed, and
+seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise's detective knew who Polly
+was. He groaned to note that she was the first friend his client had
+found.
+
+Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her before everybody
+in the big Tudor Room. And Polly's husband greeted her with warmth of
+hand and voice.
+
+Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy. The prodigal
+was home, had been welcomed with a kiss. Evidently her secret had not
+crossed the ocean. She could take up life again. Some day the past
+would confront and denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was
+enfranchised anew of human society.
+
+Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph's death and his wife's, and
+what a shock it must have been to poor Marie Louise, but how well she
+bore up under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a
+shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to
+Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there?
+And Polly's husband was to be a major--think of it! He was going to be
+all dolled up in olive drab and things and-- "Damn the clock, anyway;
+if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's
+your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it
+off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, for you must come to
+us and nowhere else and-- Good-by, darling child, and-- All right,
+Tom, I'm coming!"
+
+And she was gone.
+
+Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier and yet much
+lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace.
+She had lost a friend who still rejoiced to see her.
+
+But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged. When he turned
+in his report he threatened to turn in his resignation unless he were
+relieved of the futile task of recording Marie Louise's blameless and
+eventless life.
+
+And then the agent's night was turned to day--at least his high noon
+was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie Louise was abruptly
+addressed by Nicky Easton.
+
+She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue,
+rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other
+white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need
+for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American
+soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale
+need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered
+flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this
+linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious
+crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite
+of lunch.
+
+Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at
+sight of him.
+
+"I thought you were dead."
+
+He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelgaenger_." And he began to
+hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man
+who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the
+home of his dead sweetheart:
+
+              "_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt.
+              Du Doppelgaenger, du bleicher Geselle!
+              Was aeffst du nach mein Liebesleid,
+              Das mich gequaelt auf dieser Stelle
+              So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._"
+
+Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always
+roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that
+crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.
+
+"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded.
+
+He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.
+
+"I have another engagement, and I am late," she said.
+
+"Where are you living?"
+
+She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking
+with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.
+
+"You don't ask me where I have been?"
+
+"I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or
+somewhere. However did you get out?"
+
+"The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein,
+but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?"
+
+She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had
+betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him
+extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about
+herself. He went on:
+
+"Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I
+try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they
+use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when
+_Deutschland ist ueber alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some
+work togedder. I come soon by your house. _Auf_--Goot-py."
+
+He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the
+labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and
+she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of
+New York.
+
+She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought
+counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country.
+It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing
+her trunk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to
+Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same
+effort. It was a wire Babel.
+
+Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long
+been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently
+trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote,
+telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all
+the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the
+funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and
+administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all
+the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.
+
+Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept
+pleading with Long Distance:
+
+"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end
+important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to
+Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."
+
+The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call
+her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie
+Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central
+again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had
+never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This
+central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then
+vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.
+
+Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold
+her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own
+name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into
+her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion
+till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from
+Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone
+number and the message.
+
+  So glad you're on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and
+  see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but
+  there's always room--especially for you, dear. You'll never get in
+  at a hotel.
+
+Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried again.
+
+The seventh central dazed her with, "We can take nothing but gov'ment
+business till two P.M."
+
+Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her watch,
+gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag, snapped it, and
+rose to go.
+
+She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the note for the
+address and telephoned a telegram, saying that she would arrive at
+five o'clock. The telegraph-operator told her that the company could
+not guarantee delivery, as traffic over the wires was very heavy.
+Marie Louise sighed and rose, worn out with telephone-fag.
+
+She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi, and hastily
+made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the station an hour ago,
+and they had been checked through from the house.
+
+Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick up the note she
+had propped on the telephone-table. She left it there and closed the
+door on another chapter of her life.
+
+She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a weary
+while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car to-day,
+to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths at night were still more
+unobtainable.
+
+She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach. Scores of people
+had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches were filled. She
+sidled through the crowded aisles and found no seat. She invaded the
+chair-cars in desperation.
+
+In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage. She appealed
+to him. "You must have one chair left."
+
+He was hardly polite in his answer. "No, ma'am, I ain't. I ain't a
+single chair."
+
+"But I've got to sit somewhere," she said.
+
+The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He moved back to
+the front to repel boarders. Several men stared from the depths of
+their dentist's chairs, but made no proffer of their seats. They
+believed that woman's newfangled equality included the privilege of
+standing up.
+
+One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or pretended.
+Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with her eyes. His smile of
+recognition changed to a smile of courtesy. He proffered her his seat
+with an old-fashioned gesture. She declined with a shake of the head
+and a coldly correct smile.
+
+He insisted academically, as much as to say: "I can see that you are a
+gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman and permit me to do my
+duty." There was a brief, silent tug-of-war between his unselfishness
+and hers. He won. Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into
+his place.
+
+"But where will you sit?" she said.
+
+"Oh, I'll get along."
+
+He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the air of one
+who would get along. He had shown himself masterful in two combats,
+and compelled her to take the chair he had doubtless engaged with
+futile providence days before.
+
+"Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own," she thought.
+
+The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the tunnel
+of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River. People felt their
+ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed hard. The train came back
+to the surface and the sunlight, and ran across New Jersey.
+
+Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make sure of it.
+Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same thing. At this time
+all the people in America seemed to be thinking _en masse_. When she
+reached the dining-car every seat was taken and there was a long
+bread-line in the narrow corridor.
+
+The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye, caught it, and
+motioned to her to take his place. She shook her head. But it seemed
+to do no good to shake heads at him; he came down the corridor and
+lifted his hat. His voice and words were pleading, but his tone was
+imperative.
+
+"Please take my place."
+
+She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing. She was
+angry at being bossed even for her own benefit. Worse yet, by the time
+she got to the head of the line the second man had moved up to first.
+He stared at her as if he wondered what she was doing there. She fell
+back, doubly vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a
+look like a policeman's shove. The fellow backed up on the next man's
+toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to her place and went back
+to the foot of the class without waiting for her furious thanks.
+
+She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to be cowed or
+compelled to take chairs or money. People who had tried to move her
+soul or lend her their experience or their advantages had always
+aroused resentment.
+
+Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just thumbing his
+last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he left That Man would take
+the chair and order her luncheon for her. But it was not so to be. She
+passed him still well down the line. He had probably given his place
+to other women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a
+trifle unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the
+rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not claim
+even a glance of gratitude.
+
+It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed
+to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it
+was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed.
+Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared at the
+reeling landscape.
+
+Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos, looking for
+Polly Widdicombe's letter. She could not find it. She found the checks
+for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, and various other
+things, but not the letter. This gave her a new fright.
+
+She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table. She
+could see it plainly as her remembered glance took its last survey of
+the room. The brain has a way of developing occasional photographs
+very slowly. Something strikes our eyes, and we do not really see it
+till long after. We hear words and say, "How's that?" or, "I beg your
+pardon!" and hear them again before they can be repeated.
+
+This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to hope that she
+could remember a little farther back to the contents of the letter and
+the telephone number written there. But her memory would not respond.
+The effort to cudgel it seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting
+more and more completely.
+
+All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had said about there
+being no chance to get into a hotel--"an hotel," Marie Louise still
+thought it.
+
+It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours late.
+People began to worry audibly about the hotels that would probably
+refuse them admission. At length they began to stroll toward the
+dining-car for an early dinner.
+
+Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of other
+employment, went along. There was no queue in the corridor now. She
+did not have to take That Man's place. She found one at a little empty
+table. But by and by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant
+seats, he sat down opposite her.
+
+She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In fact, seeing
+that she owed him for her seat-- It suddenly smote her that he must
+have paid for it. She owed him money! This was unendurable!
+
+He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she found courage to
+speak to him.
+
+"I beg your pardon--"
+
+He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass, but she went
+on:
+
+"May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave me?"
+
+He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:
+
+"Why, I don't remember, I'm sure."
+
+"Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to
+me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too."
+
+"That's mighty kind of you," he said.
+
+He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for
+having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on
+forgetting it.
+
+"I'll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel
+easier about it, I'll ask you for it."
+
+"I could hardly rob a perfect stranger," she began.
+
+He broke in: "They say nobody is perfect, and I'm not a perfect
+stranger. I've met you before, Miss Webling."
+
+"Not rilly! Wherever was it? I'm so stupid not to remember--even your
+name."
+
+He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand
+her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in
+the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified
+her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long
+gone--the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip
+of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the
+palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in
+London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he
+recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his
+distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke
+the ice a little. He said at last:
+
+"My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father's house in
+London."
+
+This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and gasped:
+
+"You don't mean it. I-- Oh yes, of course I remember--"
+
+"Please don't lie about it," he pleaded, bluntly, "for of course you
+don't."
+
+She laughed, but very nervously.
+
+"Well, we did give very large dinners."
+
+"It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a mile down the
+street from you, and I said nothing immortal. I was only a business
+acquaintance of Sir Joseph's, anyway. It was about ships, of course."
+
+He saw that her mind was far away and under strange excitation. But
+she murmured, distantly:
+
+"Oh, so you are--interested in ships?"
+
+"I make 'em for a living."
+
+"Rilly! How interesting!"
+
+This constraint was irksome. He ventured:
+
+"How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He's well, I hope."
+
+Her eyes widened. "Didn't you know? Didn't you read in the papers--about
+their death together?"
+
+"Theirs? His wife and he died together?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In a submarine attack?"
+
+"No, at home. It was in all the papers--about their dying on the same
+night, from--from ptomaine poisoning."
+
+"No!"
+
+He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled word. He
+explained: "I must have been out in the forest or in the mines at the
+time. Forgive me for opening the old wound. How long ago was it? I see
+you're out of mourning."
+
+"Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear mourning in
+England during the war."
+
+"That's so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen--mothers and
+daughters! My God! what you've gone through! And such pluck!"
+
+Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across and touched
+hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of fierce sympathy. She did
+not resent the message. Then he muttered:
+
+"I know what it means. I lost my father and mother--not at once, of
+course--years apart. But to lose them both in one night!"
+
+She made a sharp attempt at self-control:
+
+"Please! I beg you--please don't speak of it."
+
+He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise was doubly
+fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and afraid of something
+or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible, and Ross Davidge always
+felt a challenge from the impossible and the inaccessible.
+
+She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter and rose.
+She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her. She left the
+dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself for a brute and a
+blunderer.
+
+He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could call him,
+but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize his
+chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had forgotten
+to pay him for the chair.
+
+It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington at last.
+The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay. The appearance
+of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph's, and the necessity for telling
+him the lie about that death, had brought on a crisis of nerves. She
+was afraid of the dark, but more afraid of the man who might ask
+still more questions. She avoided him purposely when she left the
+train.
+
+A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand. Polly
+Widdicombe's car was not waiting. Marie Louise went to the front of
+the building to see if she might be there. She was appalled at the
+thought of Polly's not meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as
+never before.
+
+It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard people say that
+it was much too majestic for a railroad station. As if America did not
+owe more to the iron god of the rails than to any of her other
+deities!
+
+Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome floating
+cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically sustained. The
+superb beauty of it clutched her throat. She wanted to do something
+for it and all the holy ideals it symbolized.
+
+Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably never
+reached her. The porter asked her, "Was you thinkin' of a taxi?" and
+she said, "Yes," only to realize that she had no address to give the
+driver.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+IN WASHINGTON
+
+[Illustration: "'It's beautiful overhead if you're going that way,'"
+Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. "Aren't
+you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're going?" she
+demanded.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+She went through her hand-bag again, while the porter computed how
+many tips he was missing and the cab-starter looked insufferable
+things about womankind.
+
+She asked if any of them knew where Grinden Hall might be, but they
+shook their heads. She had a sudden happy idea. She would ask the
+telephone Information for the number. She hurried to a booth, followed
+by the despondent porter. She asked for Information and got her, but
+that was all.
+
+"Please give me the numba of Mrs. Widdicombe's, in Rosslyn."
+
+A Washington dialect eventually told her that the number was a private
+wire and could not be given.
+
+Marie Louise implored a special dispensation, but it was against the
+rules.
+
+She asked for the supervisor--who was equally sorry and adamant. Marie
+Louise left the booth in utter defeat. There was nothing to do but go
+to a hotel till the morrow.
+
+She recalled the stories of the hopelessness of getting a room. Yet
+she had no choice but to make the try. She had got a seat on the train
+where there were none. Perhaps she could trust her luck to provide her
+with a lodging, too.
+
+"We'll go back to the taxi-stand," she told the porter.
+
+He did not conceal his joy at being rid of her.
+
+She tried the Shoreham first, and when the taxicab deposited her under
+the umbrellas of the big trees and she climbed the homelike steps to a
+lobby with the air of a living-room she felt welcome and secure.
+Brilliant clusters were drifting to dinner, and the men were more
+picturesque than the women, for many of them were in uniform. Officers
+of the army and navy of the United States and of Great Britain and of
+France gave the throng the look of a costume-party.
+
+There was a less interesting crowd at the desk, and now nobody offered
+her his place at the head of the line. It would have done no good, for
+the room-clerk was shaking his head to all the suppliants. Marie
+Louise saw women turned away, married couples, men alone. But
+new-comers pressed forward and kept trying to convince the deskman
+that he had rooms somewhere, rooms that he had forgotten, or was
+saving for people who would never arrive.
+
+He stood there shaking his head like a toy in a window. People tried
+to get past him in all the ways people try to get through life, in the
+ways that Saint Peter must grow very tired of at the gate of
+heaven--bluff, whine, bribery, intimidation, flirtation.
+
+Some demanded their rights with full confidence and would not take no
+for answer. Some pleaded with hopelessness in advance; they were used
+to rebuffs. They appealed to his pity. Some tried corruption; they
+whispered that they would "make it all right," or they managed a sly
+display of money--one a one-dollar bill with the "1" folded in,
+another a fifty-dollar bill with the "50" well to the fore. Some grew
+ugly and implied favoritism; they were the born strikers and
+anarchists. Even though they looked rich, they had that habit of
+finding oppression and conspiracy everywhere. A few women appealed to
+his philanthropy, and a few others tried to play the siren. But his
+head oscillated from side to side, and nobody could swing it up and
+down.
+
+Marie Louise watched the procession anxiously. There seemed to be no
+end to it. The people who had come here first had been turned away
+into outer darkness long ago and had gone to other hotels. The present
+wretches were those who had gone to the other hotels first and made
+this their second, third, or sixth choice.
+
+Marie Louise did not go to the desk. She could take a hint at second
+hand. She would have been glad of a place to sit down, but all the
+divans were filled with gossipers very much at home and somewhat
+contemptuous of the vulgar herd trying to break into their select and
+long-established circle. She heard a man saying, with amiable anger:
+"Ah'm mahty sah'y Ah can't put you up at ouah haouse, but we've got
+'em hangin' on the hat-rack in the hall. You infunnal patriots have
+simply ruined this little old taown."
+
+She heard a pleasant laugh. "Don't worry. I'll get along somehow."
+
+She glanced aside and saw That Man again. She had forgotten his name
+again; yet she felt curiously less lonely, not nearly so hopeless. The
+other man said:
+
+"Say, Davidge, are you daown heah looking for one of these dollah-a-yeah
+jobs? Can you earn it?"
+
+"I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking for a bed."
+
+"Not a chance. The government's taken ovah half the hotels for
+office-buildings."
+
+"I'll go to a Turkish bath, then."
+
+"Good Lawd! man, I hud a man propose that, and the hotel clerk said he
+had telephoned the Tukkish bath, and a man theah said: 'For God's sake
+don't send anybody else heah! We've got five hundred cots full
+naow.'"
+
+"There's Baltimore."
+
+"Baltimer's full up. So's Alexandra. Go on back home and write a
+letta."
+
+"I'll try a few more hotels first."
+
+"No use--not an openin'."
+
+"Well, I've usually found that the best place to look for things is
+where people say they don't grow."
+
+Marie Louise thought that this was most excellent advice. She decided
+to follow it and keep on trying.
+
+As she was about to move toward the door the elevator, like a great
+cornucopia, spilled a bevy of men and women into the lobby. Leading
+them all came a woman of charm, of distinction, of self-possession.
+She was smiling over one handsome shoulder at a British officer.
+
+The forlorn Marie Louise saw her, and her eyes rejoiced; her face was
+kindled with haven-beacons. She pressed forward with her hand out, and
+though she only murmured the words, a cry of relief thrilled them.
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt! What luck to find you!"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt turned with a smile of welcome in advance. Her hand
+went forward. Her smile ended suddenly. Blank amazement passed into
+contemptuous wrath. Her hand went back. With the disgust of a sick
+eagle in a zoo, she drew a film over her eyes.
+
+The smile on Marie Louise's face also hung unsupported for a moment.
+It faded, then rallied. She spoke with patience, underlining the words
+with an affectionate reproof:
+
+"My dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, I am Miss Webling--Marie Louise. Don't
+you know me?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt answered: "I did. But I don't!"
+
+Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.
+
+The head waiter bowed with deference and command and beckoned Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek hauteur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+As she came out of the first hotel of her selection and rejection
+Marie Louise asked the car-starter the name of another. He mentioned
+the New Willard.
+
+It was not far, and she was there before she had time to recover from
+the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's bludgeon-like snub. As
+timidly as the waif and estray that she was, she ventured into the
+crowded, gorgeous lobby with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big
+columns. At one side a long corridor ran brokenly up a steep hill. It
+was populous with loungers who had just finished their dinners or were
+waiting for a chance to get into the dining-rooms. Orchestra music was
+lilting down the aisle.
+
+When Marie Louise had threaded the crowd and reached the desk a very
+polite and eager clerk asked her if she had a reservation. He seemed
+to be as regretful as she when she said no. He sighed, "We've turned
+away a hundred people in the last two hours."
+
+She accepted her dismissal dumbly, then paused to ask, "I say, do you
+by any chance know where Grinden Hall is?"
+
+He shook his head and turned to another clerk to ask, "Do you know of
+a hotel here named Grinden Hall?"
+
+The other shook his head, too. There was a vast amount of head-shaking
+going on everywhere in Washington. He added, "I'm new here." Nearly
+everybody seemed to be new here. It seemed as if the entire populace
+had moved into a ready-made town.
+
+Marie Louise had barely the strength to explain, "Grinden Hall is not
+an hotel; it is a home, in Rosslyn, wherever that is."
+
+"Oh, Rosslyn--that's across the river in Virginia."
+
+"Do you know, by any chance, Major Thomas Widdicombe?"
+
+He shook his head. Major Widdicombe was a big man, but the town was
+fairly swarming with men bigger than he. There were shoals of
+magnates, but giants in their own communities were petty nuisances
+here pleading with room-clerks for cots and with head waiters for
+bread. The lobby was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees.
+Several of them had the Congressional look. Later history would record
+them as the historic statesmen of titanic debates, men by whose
+eloquence and leadership and committee-room toil the Republic would be
+revolutionized in nearly every detail, and billions made to flow like
+water.
+
+As Marie Louise collected her porter and her hand-luggage for her next
+exit she saw Ross Davidge just coming in. She stepped behind a large
+politician or something. She forgot that she owed Davidge money, and
+she felt a rather pleasurable agitation in this game of hide-and-seek,
+but something made her shy of Davidge. For one thing, it was ludicrous
+to be caught being turned out of a second hotel.
+
+The politician walked away, and Davidge would have seen Marie Louise
+if he had not stopped short and turned a cold shoulder on her, just as
+the distant orchestra, which had been crooning one of Jerome Kern's
+most insidiously ingratiating melodies, began to blare with all its
+might the sonorities of "The Star-spangled Banner."
+
+Miss Webling saw the people in the alley getting to their feet slowly,
+awkwardly. A number of army and navy officers faced the music and
+stood rigid at attention. The civilians in the lobby who were already
+standing began to pull their hats off sheepishly like embarrassed
+peasants. People were still as self-conscious as if the song had just
+been written. They would soon learn to feel the tremendous importance
+of that eternal query, the only national anthem, perhaps, that ever
+began with a question and ended with a prayer. Americans would soon
+learn to salute it with eagerness and to deal ferociously with
+men--and women, too--who were slow to rise.
+
+Marie Louise watched Davidge curiously. He was manifestly on fire with
+patriotism, but he was ashamed to show it, ashamed to stand erect and
+click his heels. He fumbled his hat and slouched, and looked as if he
+had been caught in some guilt. He was indeed guilty of a childish
+fervor. He wanted to shout, he wanted to weep, he wanted to fight
+somebody; but he did not know how to express himself without striking
+an attitude, and he was incapable of being a _poseur_--except as an
+American posily affects poselessness.
+
+When the anthem ended, people sank into their chairs with sighs of
+relief; the officers sharply relaxed; the civilians straightened up
+and felt at home again. Ross Davidge marched to the desk, not noticing
+Marie Louise, who motioned to her porter to come along with her
+luggage and went to hunt shelter at the Raleigh Hotel. She kept her
+taxi now and left her hand-baggage in it while she received the
+inevitable rebuff. From there she traveled to hotel after hotel,
+marching in with the dismal assurance that she would march right out
+again.
+
+The taxi-driver was willing to take her to hotels as long as they and
+her money lasted. Her strength and her patience gave out first. At the
+Lafayette she advanced wearily, disconsolately to the desk. She saw
+Ross Davidge stretched out in a big chair. He did not see her. His hat
+was pulled over his eyes, and he had the air of angry failure. If he
+despaired, what chance had she?
+
+She received the usual regrets from the clerk. As she left the desk
+the floor began to wabble. She hurried to an inviting divan and
+dropped down, beaten and distraught. She heard some one approach, and
+her downcast eyes saw a pair of feet move up and halt before her.
+
+Since Lady Clifton-Wyatt's searing glance and words Marie Louise had
+felt branded visibly, and unworthy of human kindness and shelter. She
+was piteously grateful to this man for his condescension in saying:
+
+"You'll have to excuse me for bothering you again. But I'm afraid
+you're in worse trouble than I am. Nobody seems to be willing to take
+you in."
+
+He meant this as a light jocularity, but it gave her a moment's
+serious fear that he had overheard Lady Clifton-Wyatt's slashing
+remark. But he went on:
+
+"Won't you allow me to try to find you a place? Don't you know anybody
+here?"
+
+"I know numbers of people, but I don't know where any of them are."
+
+She told him of her efforts to get to Rosslyn by telephone, by
+telegraph, by train or taxicab. Little tears added a sparkle to
+laughter, but threatened rain. She ended with, "And now that I've
+unloaded my riddles on you, aren't you sorry you spoke?"
+
+"Not yet," he said, with a subtle compliment pleasantly implying that
+she was perilous. Everybody likes to be thought perilous. He went on:
+"I don't know Rosslyn, but it can't be much of a place for size. If
+you have a friend there, we'll find her if we have to go to every
+house in Rosslyn."
+
+"But it's getting rather late, isn't it, to be knocking at all the
+doors all by myself?"
+
+She had not meant to hint, and it was a mere coincidence that he
+thought to say:
+
+"Couldn't I go along?"
+
+"Thank you, but it's out in the country rather far, I'm afraid."
+
+"Then I must go along."
+
+"I couldn't think of troubling you."
+
+The end of it was that he had his way, or she hers, or both theirs. He
+made no nonsense of adventure or escapade about it, and she was too
+well used to traveling alone to feel ashamed or alarmed. He led her to
+the taxi, told the driver that Grinden Hall was their objective and
+must be found. Then he climbed in with her, and they rode in a dark
+broken with the fitful lightnings of street-lamps and motors.
+
+The taxi glided out M Street. The little shops of Georgetown went
+sidelong by. The cab turned abruptly to the left and clattered across
+the old aqueduct bridge. On a broad reach of the Potomac the new-risen
+moon spread a vast sheet of tin-foil of a crinkled sheen. This was all
+that was beautiful about the sordid neighborhood, but it was very
+beautiful, and tender to a strange degree.
+
+Once across, the driver stopped and leaned round to call in at the
+door:
+
+"This is Rosslyn. Where do yew-all want to go next?"
+
+"Grinden Hall. Ask somebody."
+
+"Ask who? They ain't a soul tew be saw."
+
+They waited in the dark awhile; then Davidge got out and, seeing a
+street-car coming down through the hills like a dragon in fiery
+scales, he stopped it to ask the motorman of Grinden Hall. He knew
+nothing, but a sleepy passenger said that he reckoned that that
+was the fancy name of Mr. Sawtell's place, and he shouted the
+directions:
+
+"Yew go raht along this road ovah the caw tracks, and unda a bridge
+and keep a-goin' up a ridge and ova till yew come to a shawp tu'n to
+the raht. Big whaht mansion, ain't it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Davidge. "I never saw it."
+
+"Well, I reckon that's the place. Only 'Hall' I knaow about up heah."
+
+The motorman kicked his bell and started off.
+
+"Nothing like trying," said Davidge, and clambered in. The taxicab
+went veering and yawing over an unusually Virginian bad road. After a
+little they entered a forest. The driver threw on his search-light,
+and it tore from the darkness pictures of forest eerily green in the
+glare--old trees slanting out, deep channels blackening into
+mysterious glades. The car swung sharply to the right and growled up a
+hill, curving and swirling and threatening to capsize at every moment.
+The sense of being lost was irresistible.
+
+Marie Louise fell to pondering; suddenly she grew afraid to find
+Grinden Hall. She knew that Polly knew Lady Clifton-Wyatt. They might
+have met since Polly wrote that letter. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had
+perhaps--had doubtless--told Polly all about Marie Louise. Polly would
+probably refuse her shelter. She knew Polly: there was no middle
+ground between her likes and dislikes; she doted or she hated. She was
+capable of smothering her friends with affection and of making them
+ancient enemies in an instant. For her enemies she had no use or
+tolerance. She let them know her wrath.
+
+The car stopped. The driver got down and went forward to a narrow lane
+opening from the narrow road. There was a sign-board there. He read it
+by the light of the moon and a few matches. He came back and said:
+
+"Here she is. Grinden Hall is what she says on that theah sign-bode."
+
+Marie Louise was in a flutter. "What time is it?" she asked.
+
+Davidge held his watch up and lighted a match.
+
+"A little after one."
+
+"It's awfully late," she said.
+
+The car was turning at right angles now, and following a narrow track
+curling through a lawn studded with shrubbery. There was a moment's
+view of all Washington beyond the valley of the moon-illumined river.
+Its lights gleamed in a patient vigilance. It had the look of the holy
+city that it is. The Capitol was like a mosque in Mecca, the Mecca of
+the faithful who believe in freedom and equality. The Washington
+Monument, picked out from the dark by a search-light, was a lofty
+steeple in a dream-world.
+
+Davidge caught a quick breath of piety and reverence. Marie Louise was
+too frightened by her own destiny to think of the world's anxieties.
+
+The car raced round the circular road. Her eyes were snatched from the
+drowsy town, small with distance, to the imminent majesty of a great
+Colonial portico with columns tall and stately and white, a temple of
+Parthenonian dignity in the radiance of the priestly moon. There was
+not a light in any window, no sign of life.
+
+The car stopped. But-- Marie Louise simply dared not face Polly and
+risk a scene in the presence of Davidge. She tapped on the glass and
+motioned the driver to go on. He could not believe her gestures. She
+leaned out and whispered:
+
+"Go on--go on! I'll not stop!"
+
+Davidge was puzzled, but he said nothing; and Marie Louise made no
+explanation till they were outside again, and then she said:
+
+"Do you think I'm insane?"
+
+"This is not my party," he said.
+
+She tried to explain: "There wasn't a light to be seen. They couldn't
+have got my telegram. They weren't expecting me. They may not have
+been at home. I hadn't the courage to stop and wake the house."
+
+That was not her real reason, but Davidge asked for no other. If he
+noted that she was strangely excited over a trifle like getting a few
+servants and a hostess out of bed, he made no comment.
+
+When she pleaded, "Do you mind if I go back to Washington with you?"
+he chuckled: "It's certainly better than going alone. But what will
+you do when you get there?"
+
+"I'll go to the railroad station and sit up," Marie Louise announced.
+"I'm no end sorry to have been such a nuisance."
+
+"Nuisance!" he protested, and left his intonation to convey all the
+compliments he dared not utter.
+
+The cab dived into another woods and ran clattering down a roving
+hill road. Up the opposite steep it went with a weary gait. It crawled
+to the top with turtle-like labor. Davidge knew the symptoms, and he
+frowned in the shadow, yet smiled a little.
+
+The car went banging down, held by a squealing brake. The light grew
+faint, and in the glimmer there was a close shave at the edge of a
+hazardous bridge over a deep, deep ravine. The cab rolled forward on
+the rough planks under its impetus, but it picked up no speed.
+Half-way across, it stopped.
+
+"Whatever is the matter?" Marie Louise exclaimed.
+
+Davidge leaned out and called to the driver, "What's the matter now?"
+though he knew full well.
+
+"Gas is gone, I reckon," the fellow snarled, as he got down. After a
+moment's examination he confirmed his diagnosis. "Yep, gas is all
+gone. I been on the go too long on this one call."
+
+"In Heaven's name, where can you get some more gasolene?" said Marie
+Louise.
+
+"Nearest garodge is at Rosslyn, I reckon, lady."
+
+"How far is that?"
+
+"I'd hate to say, lady. Three, fo' mahls, most lahkly, and prob'ly
+closed naow."
+
+"Go wake it up at once."
+
+"No thanky, lady. I got mahty po' feet for them hills."
+
+"What do you propose to do?"
+
+"Ain't nothin' tew dew but wait fo' somebody to come along."
+
+"When will that be?"
+
+"Along todes mawnin' they ought to be somebody along, milkman or
+somethin'."
+
+"Cheerful!" said Marie Louise.
+
+"Batt'ries kind o' sick, tew, looks lahk. I was engaged by the houah,
+remember," the driver reminded them as he clambered back to his place,
+put his feet up on the dashboard and let his head roll into a position
+of ease.
+
+The dimming lights waned and did not wax. By and by they went where
+lights go when they go out. There was no light now except the moonset,
+shimmering mistily across the tree-tops of the rotunda of the forest,
+just enough to emphasize the black of the well they were in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+How would she take it?
+
+That was what interested Davidge most. What was she really like? And
+what would she do with this intractable situation? What would the
+situation do with her? For situations make people as well as people
+situations.
+
+Now was the time for an acquaintance of souls. An almost absolute dark
+erased them from each other's sight. Their eyes were as useless as the
+useless eyes of fish in subterrene caverns. Miss Webling could have
+told Davidge the color of his eyes, of course, being a woman. But
+being a man, he could not remember the color of hers, because he had
+noted nothing about her eyes except that they were very eye-ish.
+
+He would have blundered ridiculously in describing her appearance. His
+information of her character was all to gain. He had seen her
+wandering about Washington homeless among the crowds and turned from
+every door. She had borne the ordeal as well as could be asked. She
+had accepted his proffer of protection with neither terror nor
+assurance.
+
+He supposed that in a similar plight the old-fashioned woman--or at
+least the ubiquitous woman of the special eternal type that
+fictionists call "old-fashioned"--would have been either a bleating,
+tremulous gazelle or a brazen siren. But Miss Webling behaved like
+neither of these. She took his gallantry with a matter-of-fact
+reasonableness, much as a man would accept the offer of another man's
+companionship on a tiresome journey. She gave none of those
+multitudinous little signals by which a woman indicates that she is
+either afraid that a man will try to hug her or afraid that he will
+not. She was apparently planning neither to flirt nor to faint.
+
+Davidge asked in a matter-of-fact tone: "Do you think you could walk
+to town? The driver says it's only three-fo' miles."
+
+She sighed: "My feet would never make it. And I have on high-heeled
+boots."
+
+His "Too bad!" conveyed more sympathy than she expected. He had
+another suggestion.
+
+"You could probably get back to the home of Mrs. Widdicombe. That
+isn't so far away."
+
+She answered, bluntly, "I shouldn't think of it!"
+
+He made another proposal without much enthusiasm.
+
+"Then I'd better walk in to Washington and get a cab and come back for
+you."
+
+She was even blunter about this: "I shouldn't dream of that. You're a
+wreck, too."
+
+He lied pluckily, "Oh, I shouldn't mind."
+
+"Well, I should! And I don't fancy the thought of staying here alone
+with that driver."
+
+He smiled in the dark at the double-edged compliment of implying that
+she was safer with him than with the driver. But she did not hear his
+smile.
+
+She apologized, meekly: "I've got you into an awful mess, haven't I? I
+usually do make a mess of everything I undertake. You'd better beware
+of me after this."
+
+His "I'll risk it" was a whole cyclopedia of condensed gallantry.
+
+They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing, hearing
+only the bated breath of the night wind groping stealthily through the
+tree-tops, and from far beneath, the still, small voice of a brook
+feeling its way down its unlighted stairs.
+
+At last her voice murmured, "Are you quite too horribly uncomfortable
+for words?"
+
+His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: "I couldn't be
+more comfortable except for one thing. I'm all out of cigars."
+
+"Oh!" He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before she spoke
+again, timidly:
+
+"I fancy you don't smoke cigarettes?"
+
+"When I can't get cigars; any tobacco is better than none."
+
+Another blank of troubled silence, then, "I wonder if you'd say that
+of mine."
+
+Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed. "I'll guarantee
+to."
+
+A few years before he would have accepted a woman's confession that
+she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all
+the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have
+said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he
+had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke
+them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the
+United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women
+and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes.
+After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and
+at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a
+"drug-addict." It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to
+be immoral to somebody.
+
+But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds come in. He
+knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one hand while they rolled a
+cigarette with the other. He knew Red Cross saints who could puff a
+forbidden cigarette like a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had
+ever made such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in
+a tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests of
+virtue--tests that have nothing whatever to do with the case, whether
+savage or civilized folk invent them.
+
+He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard the click of
+her rings against metal. He heard the little noise of the portals of a
+cigarette-case opening. His hands and hers stumbled together, and his
+fingers selected a little cylinder from the row.
+
+He produced a match and held the flame before her. He filled his eyes
+with her vivid features as the glow detached her from the dark. Of her
+eyes he saw only the big lids, but he noted her lips, pursed a trifle
+with the kissing muscles, and he sighed as she blew a smoke about her
+like a goddess creating a cloud of vanishment. He lighted his own
+cigarette and threw the match away. They returned to a perfect gloom
+mitigated by the slight increase and decrease in the vividness of
+their tobacco-tips as they puffed.
+
+She was the first to speak:
+
+"I have a whole box of fags in my hand-bag. I usually have a good
+supply. When you want another-- Does it horrify you to see a woman
+smoke?"
+
+He was very superior to his old bigotry. "Quite the contrary!"
+
+This was hardly honest enough, so he said:
+
+"It did once, though. I remember how startled I was years ago when I
+was in England and I saw ladies smoking in hotel corridors; and on the
+steamer coming back, there was a countess or something who sat in the
+balcony and puffed away. Of course, at the big dinners in London they
+smoked, too. They did at Sir Joseph's, I remember."
+
+He did not see her wince at this name.
+
+"There were some odd fish surrounding old Sir Joseph. Some of them I
+couldn't quite make out. He was just a little hard to get at, himself.
+I got very huffy at the old boy once or twice, I'm sorry to say. It
+was about ships. I'm a crank on ships. Everybody has at least one
+mania. That's mine--ships. Sir Joseph and I quarreled about them. He
+wanted to buy all I could make, but he was in no hurry to have 'em
+finished. I told him he talked more like a German trying to stop
+production than like a Britisher trying to speed it up. That made him
+huffy. I'm sorry I did him such an injustice. When you insult a man,
+and he dies--What a terrible repartee dying is! He had offered me a
+big price, too, but it's not money I want to make; it's ships. And I
+want to see 'em at work. Did you ever see a ship launched?"
+
+"No, I never did."
+
+"There's nothing prettier. Come over to my shipyard and I'll show you.
+We're going to put one over before long. I'll let you christen her."
+
+"That would be wonderful."
+
+"It's better than that. The civilized world is starting out on the
+most poetic job it ever undertook."
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"Yep. The German sharks are gradually dragging all our shipping under
+water. The inventors don't seem able to devise any cure for the
+submarines except to find 'em and fight 'em. They're hard to find, and
+they won't fight. But they keep popping up and stabbing our pretty
+ships to death. And now the great game is on, the greatest game that
+civilized men ever fought with hell."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"We're going to try to build ships faster than the Hun can sink 'em.
+Isn't that a glorious job for you? Was there ever a--well, a nobler
+idea? We can't kill the beast; so we're going to choke him to death
+with food." He laughed to hide his embarrassing exaltation.
+
+She was not afraid of it: "It is rather a stupendous inspiration,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Who was it said he'd rather have written Gray's 'Elegy' than taken
+Quebec? I'd rather have thought up this thought than written the
+Iliad. Nobody knows who invented the idea. He's gone to oblivion
+already, but he has done more for the salvation of freedom than all
+the poets of time."
+
+This shocked her, yet thrilled her with its loftiness. She thrilled to
+him suddenly, too. She saw that she was within the aura of a fiery
+spirit--a business man aflame. And she saw in a white light that the
+builders of things, even of perishable things, are as great as the
+weavers of immortal words--not so well remembered, of course, for
+posterity has only the words. Poets and highbrows scorn them, but
+living women who can see the living men are not so foolish. They are
+apt to prefer the maker to the writer. They reward the poet with a
+smile and a compliment, but give their lives to the manufacturers, the
+machinists, the merchants. Then the neglected poets and their toadies
+the critics grow sarcastic about this and think that they have
+condemned women for materialism when they are themselves blind to its
+grandeur. They ignore the divinity that attends the mining and
+smelting and welding and selling of iron things, the hewing and sawing
+and planing of woods, the sowing and reaping and distribution of
+foods. They make a priestcraft and a ritual of artful language, and
+are ignorant of their own heresy. But since they deal in words, they
+have a fearful advantage and use it for their own glorification, as
+priests are wont to do.
+
+Marie Louise had a vague insight into the truth, but was not aware of
+her own wisdom. She knew only that this Davidge who had made himself
+her gallant, her messenger and servant, was really a genius, a giant.
+She felt that the roles should be reversed and she should be waiting
+upon him.
+
+In Sir Joseph's house there had been a bit of statuary representing
+Hercules and Omphale. The mighty one was wearing the woman's kirtle
+and carrying her distaff, and the girl was staggering under the
+lion-skin and leaning on the bludgeon. Marie Louise always hated the
+group. It seemed to her to represent just the way so many women tried
+to master the men they infatuated. But Marie Louise despised
+masterable men, and she had no wish to make a toy of one. Yet she had
+wondered if a man and a woman could not love each other more perfectly
+if neither were master or mistress, but both on a parity--a team,
+indeed.
+
+Davidge enjoyed talking to her, at least. That comforted her. When she
+came back from her meditations he was saying:
+
+"My company is reaching out. We've bought a big tract of swamp, and
+we're filling it in and clearing it, and we're going to lay out a
+shipyard there and turn out ships--standardized ships--as fast as we
+can. We're steadying the ground first, sinking concrete piles in steel
+casing--if you put 'em end to end, they'd reach twenty-five miles.
+They're just to hold the ground together. That's what the whole
+country has got to do before it can really begin to begin--put some
+solid ground under its feet. When the ship is launched she mustn't
+stick on the ways or in the mud.
+
+"Of course, I'd rather go as a soldier, but I've got no right to. I
+can ride or walk all day, and shoot straight and stand all kinds of
+weather, and killing Germans would just about tickle me to death. But
+this is a time when every man has got to do what he can do better than
+he can do anything else. And I've spent my life in shipyards.
+
+"I was a common laborer first--swinging a sledge; I had an arm then!
+That was before we had compressed-air riveters. I was a union man and
+went on strike and fought scabs and made the bosses eat crow. Now I'm
+one of the bosses. I'm what they call a capitalist and an oppressor of
+labor. Now I put down strikes and fight the unions--not that I don't
+believe in 'em, not that I don't know where labor was before they had
+unions and where it would be without 'em to-day and to-morrow, but
+because all these things have to be adjusted gradually, and because
+the main thing, after all, is building ships--just now, of course,
+especially.
+
+"When I was a workman I took pride in my job, and I thought I was an
+artist at it. I wouldn't take anybody's lip. Now that I'm a boss I
+have to take everybody's lip, because I can't strike. I can't go to my
+boss and demand higher wages and easier hours, because my boss is the
+market. But I don't suppose there's anything on earth that interests
+you less than labor problems."
+
+"They might if I knew the first thing about them."
+
+"Well, the first thing is that they are the next war, the big war
+after this one's over. The job is to keep it down till peace comes.
+Then hell will pop--if you'll pardon my French. I'm all for labor
+getting its rights, but some of the men don't want the right to
+work--they want the right to loaf. I say let the sky be the limit of
+any man's opportunity--the sky and his own limitations and ambitions.
+But a lot of the workmen don't want opportunity; they've got no
+ambition; they hate to build things. They talk about the terrible
+conditions their families live in, and how gorgeously the rich men
+live. But the rich men were poor once, and the poor can be rich--if
+they can and will.
+
+"The war is going to be the fight between the makers and the breakers,
+the uplifters and the down-draggers, you might say. And it's going to
+be some war!
+
+"The men on the wrong side--what I call the wrong side, at least--are
+just as much our enemies as the Germans. We've got to watch 'em just
+as close. They'd just as soon burn an unfinished ship as the Germans
+would sink her when she's on her way.
+
+"That little ship I'm building now! Would you believe it? It has to be
+guarded every minute. Most of our men are all right. They'd work
+themselves to death for the ship, and they pour out their sweat like
+prayers. But sneaks get in among 'em, and it only takes a fellow with
+a bomb one minute to undo the six months' work of a hundred."
+
+"Tell me about your ship," she said.
+
+A ship she could understand. It was personal and real; labor theories
+were as foreign to her as problems in metaphysics.
+
+"Well, it's my first-born, this ship," he said. "Of course I've built
+a lot of other ships, but they were for other people--just jobs, for
+wages or commissions. This one is all my own--a freighter, ugly as sin
+and commodious as hell--I beg your pardon! But the world needs
+freighters--the hungry mobs of Europe, they'll be glad to see my
+little ship come in, if ever she does. If she doesn't I'll-- But
+she'll last a few trips before they submarine her--I guess."
+
+He fell silent among his visions and left her to her own.
+
+He saw himself wandering about a shipyard, a poor thing, but his own.
+His mind was like a mold-loft full of designs and detail-drawings to
+scale, blue-prints and models. On the way a ship was growing for him.
+As yet she was a ghastly thing all ribs, like the skeleton of some
+ancient sea-monster left ashore at high tide and perished eons back,
+leaving only the bones.
+
+His fancy saw her transverses taking on their iron flesh. He saw the
+day of her nativity. He heard them knock out the blocks that lowered
+the sliding-ways to the groundways and sent her swirling into the
+sea.
+
+He saw her ready for her cargo, saw a Niagara of wheat cascading into
+her hold. He saw her go forth into the sea.
+
+Then he saw the ship stagger, a wound opened in her side, from the
+bullet of a submarine.
+
+It was all so vivid that he spoke aloud in a frenzy of ire:
+
+"If the Germans kill my ship I'll kill a German! By God, I will!"
+
+He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and he begged her
+pardon humbly.
+
+She had been away in reverie, too. The word "submarine" had sent her
+back into her haunting remembrances of the _Lusitania_ and of her own
+helpless entanglement in the fate of other ships--their names as
+unknown to her as the names and faces of the men that died with them,
+or perished of starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The
+thought of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered with
+such violence that Davidge was startled from his own wrath.
+
+"You're having a chill," he said. "I wish you would take my coat. You
+don't want to get sick."
+
+She shook her head and chattered, "No, no."
+
+"Then you'd better get out and walk up and down this bridge awhile.
+There's not even a lap-robe here."
+
+"I should like to walk, I think."
+
+She stepped out, aided by his hand, a strong hand, and warm about her
+icy fingers. Her knees were weak, and he set her elbow in the hollow
+of his arm and guided her. They walked like the blind leading the
+blind through a sea of pitch. The only glimmer was the little
+scratches of light pinked in the dead sky by a few stars.
+
+"'It's beautiful overhead, if you're going that way,'" Davidge
+quoted.
+
+He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back timidly.
+
+"Not so fast! I can't see a thing."
+
+"That's the best time to keep moving."
+
+"But aren't you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're
+going?" she demanded.
+
+"Who can ever tell where he's going? The sunlight is no guaranty.
+We're all bats in the daytime and not cats at night. The main thing is
+to sail on and on and on."
+
+She caught a little of his recklessness--suffered him to hurry her to
+and fro through the inky air till she was panting for breath and
+tired. Then they groped to the rail and peered vainly down at the
+brook, which, like an unbroken child, was heard and not seen. They
+leaned their elbows on the rail and stared into the muffling gloom.
+
+"I think I'll have another of your cigarettes," he said.
+
+"So will I," said she.
+
+There was a cozy fireside moment as they took their lights from the
+same match. When he threw the match overboard he said:
+
+"Like a human life, eh? A little spark between dark and dark."
+
+He was surprised at stumbling into rhyme, and apologized. But she
+said:
+
+"Do you know, I rather like that. It reminds me of a poem about a
+rain-storm--Russell Lowell's, I fancy; it told of a flock of sheep
+scampering down a dusty road and clattering across a bridge and back
+to the dust again. He said it was like human life, 'a little noise
+between two silences.'"
+
+"H'm!" was the best Davidge could do. But the agony of the brevity of
+existence seized them both by the hearts, and their hearts throbbed
+and bled like birds crushed in the claws of hawks. Their hearts had
+such capabilities of joy, such songs in them, such love and longing,
+such delight in beauty--and beauty was so beautiful, so frequent, so
+thrilling! Yet they could spend but a glance, a sigh, a regret, a
+gratitude, and then their eyes were out, their ears still, their lips
+cold, their hearts dust. The ache of it was beyond bearing.
+
+"Let's walk. I'm cold again," she whispered.
+
+He felt that she needed the sense of hurry, and he went so fast that
+she had to run to keep up with him. There seemed to be some comfort in
+the privilege of motion for its own sake; motion was life; motion was
+godhood; motion was escape from the run-down clock of death.
+
+Back and forth they kept their promenade, till her body refused to
+answer the whips of restlessness. Her brain began to shut up shop. It
+would do no more thinking this night.
+
+She stumbled toward the taxicab. Davidge lifted her in, and she sank
+down, completely done. She fell asleep.
+
+Davidge took his place in the cab and wondered lazily at the quaint
+adventure. He was only slightly concerned with wondering at the cause
+of her uneasiness. He was used to minding his own business.
+
+She slept so well that when the groping search-light of a coming
+automobile began to slash the night and the rubber wheels boomed
+across the bridge she did not waken. If the taxi-driver heard its
+sound, he preferred to pretend not to. The passengers in the passing
+car must have been surprised, but they took their wonderment with
+them. We so often imagine mischief when there is innocence and _vice
+versa_; for opportunity is just as likely to create distaste as
+interest and the lack of it to instigate enterprise.
+
+Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly in the dark and did not know
+that he was not awake until at some later time he was half aroused by
+the meteoric glow and whiz of another automobile. It had gone before
+he was quite awake, and he sank back into sleep.
+
+Before he knew it, many black hours had slid by and daylight was come;
+the rosy fingers of light were moving about, recreating the world to
+vision, sketching a landscape hazily on a black canvas, then stippling
+in the colors, and finishing, swiftly but gradually, the details to an
+inconceivable minuteness of definition, giving each leaf its own sharp
+contour and every rock its every facet. From the brook below a
+mistlike cigarette smoke exhaled. The sky was crimson, then pink, then
+amber, then blue.
+
+Birds began to twitter, to fashion little crystal stanzas, and to
+hurl themselves about the valley as if catapults propelled them. One
+songster perched on the iron rail of the bridge and practised a vocal
+lesson, cocking his head from side to side and seeming to approve his
+own skill.
+
+A furred caterpillar resumed his march across the Appian Way, making
+of each crack between boards a great abyss to be bridged cautiously
+with his own body. The day's work was begun, while Davidge drowsed and
+smiled contentedly at the side of the strange, sleeping woman as if
+they had been married for years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The sky was filled with morning when a noise startled Davidge out of
+nullity. He was amazed to find a strange woman asleep at his elbow. He
+remembered her suddenly.
+
+With a clatter of wheels and cans and hoofs a milkman's wagon and team
+came out of the hills. Davidge stepped down from the car and stopped
+the loud-voiced, wide-mouthed driver with a gesture. He spoke in a low
+voice which the milkman did not copy. The taxi-driver woke to the
+extent of one eye and a horrible yawn, while Davidge explained his
+plight.
+
+"Gasolene gave out, hey?" said the milkman.
+
+"It certainly did," said Davidge, "and I'd be very much obliged if
+you'd get me some more."
+
+"Wa-all, I'm purty busy."
+
+"I'll pay you anything you ask."
+
+The milkman was modest in his ambitions.
+
+"How'd two dollars strike ye?"
+
+"Five would be better if you hurried."
+
+This looked suspicious, but the milkman consented.
+
+"Wa-all, all right, but what would I fetch the gasolene in?"
+
+"One of your milk-cans."
+
+"They're all fuller melk."
+
+"I'll buy one, milk and all."
+
+"Wa-all, I reckon I'll hev to oblige you."
+
+"Here's five dollars on account. There'll be five more when you get
+back."
+
+"Wa-all, all ri-ight. Get along there, Jawn Henry."
+
+John Henry got along. Even his _cloppety-clop_ did not waken Miss
+Webling.
+
+The return of the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with
+the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion,
+finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three
+strange men at work outside.
+
+When the tank was filled, Davidge entered her compartment with a
+cheery "Good morning," and slammed the door after him. The gasolene,
+like the breath of a god, gave life to the dead. The car snarled and
+jumped, and went roaring across the bridge, up the hill and down
+another, and down that and up another.
+
+Here they caught, through a frame of leaves, a glimpse of Washington
+in the sunrise, a great congregation of marble temples and trees and
+sky-colored waters, the shaft of the Monument lighted with the milky
+radiance of a mountain peak on its upper half, the lower part still
+dusk with valley shadow, and across the plateau of roofs the solemn
+Capitol in as mythical a splendor as the stately dome that Kubla Khan
+decreed in Xanadu.
+
+This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury to the
+taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he reached Rosslyn
+once more, crossed the Potomac's many-tinted stream, and rattled
+through Georgetown and the shabby, sleeping little shops of M Street
+into the tree-tunnels of Washington.
+
+He paused to say, "Where do we go from here?"
+
+Davidge and Marie Louise looked their chagrin. They still had no place
+to go.
+
+"To the Pennsylvania Station," said Davidge. "We can at least get
+breakfast there."
+
+The streets of Washington are never so beautiful as at this still hour
+when nothing stirs but the wind in the trees and the grass on the
+lawns, and hardly anybody is abroad except the generals on their
+bronze horses fronting their old battles with heroic eyes. The station
+outside was something Olympic but unfrequented. Inside, it was a vast
+cathedral of untenanted pews.
+
+Davidge paid the driver a duke's ransom. There was no porter about,
+and he carried Marie Louise's suit-cases to the parcel-room. Her
+baggage had had a long journey. She retreated to the women's room for
+what toilet she could make, and came forth with a very much washed
+face. Somnambulistic negroes took their orders at the lunch-counter.
+
+Marie Louise had weakly decided to return to New York again, but the
+hot coffee was full of defiance, and she said that she would make
+another try at Mrs. Widdicombe as soon as a human hour arrived.
+
+And she showed a tactfulness that won much respect from Davidge when
+she said:
+
+"Do get your morning paper and read it. I'm sure I have nothing to say
+that I haven't said, and if I had, it could wait till you find out how
+the battle goes in Europe."
+
+He bought her a paper, too, and they sat on a long bench, exchanging
+comments on the news that made almost every front page a chapter in
+world history.
+
+She heard him groan with rage. When she looked up he pointed to the
+submarine record of that week.
+
+"Last week the losses took a horrible jump--forty ships of over
+sixteen hundred tons. This week it's almost as bad--thirty-eight
+ships of over sixteen hundred, thirteen ships under, and eight
+fishing-vessels. Think of it--all of 'em merchant-ships!
+
+"Pretty soon I've got to send my ship out to run the gantlet. She's
+like Little Red Riding Hood going through the forest to take old
+Granny Britain some food. And the wolves are waiting for her. What a
+race of people, what a pack of beasts!"
+
+Marie Louise had an idea. "I'll tell you a pretty name for your
+ship--_Little Red Riding Hood_. Why don't you give her that?"
+
+He laughed. "The name would be heavier than the cargo. I wonder what
+the crew would make of it. No, this ship, my first one, is to be named
+after"--he lowered his voice as one does on entering a church--"after
+my mother."
+
+"Oh, that's beautiful!" Marie Louise said. "And will she be there to
+christen-- Oh, I remember, you said--"
+
+He nodded three or four times in wretchedness. But the grief was his
+own, and he must not exploit it. He assumed an abrupt cheer.
+
+"I'll name the next ship after you, if you don't mind."
+
+This was too glorious to be believed. What bouquet or jewel could
+equal it? She clapped her hands like a child hearing a Christmas
+promise.
+
+"What is your first name, Miss Webling?"
+
+She suddenly realized that they were not, after all, such old friends
+as the night had seemed to make them.
+
+"My first two names," she said, "are Marie Louise."
+
+"Oh! Well, then we'll call the ship _Marie Louise_."
+
+She saw that he was a little disappointed in the name, so she said:
+
+"When I was a girl they called me Mamise."
+
+She was puzzled to see how this startled him.
+
+He jumped audibly and fastened a searching gaze on her. Mamise! He had
+thought of Mamise when he saw her, and now she gave the name. Could
+she possibly be the Mamise he remembered? He started to ask her, but
+checked himself and blushed. A fine thing it would be to ask this
+splendid young princess, "Pardon me, Princess, but were you playing in
+cheap vaudeville a few years ago?" It was an improbable coincidence
+that he should meet her thus, but an almost impossible coincidence
+that she should wear both the name and the mien of Mamise and not be
+Mamise. But he dared not ask her.
+
+She noted his blush and stammer, but she was afraid to ask their
+cause.
+
+"_Mamise_ it shall be," he said.
+
+And she answered, "I was never so honored in my life."
+
+"Of course," he warned her, "the boat isn't built yet. In fact, the
+new yard isn't built yet. There's many a slip 'twixt the keel and the
+ship. She might never live to be launched. Some of these sneaking
+loafers on our side may blow her up before the submarines get a chance
+at her."
+
+There he was, speaking of submarines once more! She shivered, and she
+looked at the clock and got up and said:
+
+"I think I'll try Mrs. Widdicombe now."
+
+"Let me go along," said Davidge.
+
+But she shook her head. "I've taken enough of your life--for the
+present."
+
+Trying to concoct a felicitous reply, he achieved only an eloquent
+silence. He put her and her luggage aboard a taxicab, and then she
+gave him her most cordial hand.
+
+"I could never hope to thank you enough," she said, "and I won't begin
+to try. Send me your address when you have one, and I'll mail you Mrs.
+Widdicombe's confidential telephone number. I do want to see you soon
+again, unless you've had enough of me for a lifetime."
+
+He did very handsomely by the lead she gave him:
+
+"I couldn't have enough--not in a lifetime."
+
+The taxi-driver snipped the strands of their gaze as he whisked her
+away.
+
+Marie Louise felt a forenoon elation in the cool air and the bright
+streets, thick with men and women in herds hurrying to their patriotic
+tasks, and a multitude of officers and enlisted men seeking their
+desks. She was here to join them, and she hoped that it would not be
+too hard to find some job with a little thrill of service in it.
+
+As she went through Georgetown now M Street was different--full of
+marketers and of briskness. The old bridge was crowded. As her car
+swooped up the hills and skirted the curves to Polly Widdicombe's she
+began to be afraid again. But she was committed to the adventure and
+she was eager for the worst of it. She found the house without trouble
+and saw in the white grove of columns Polly herself, bidding good-by
+to her husband, whose car was waiting at the foot of the steps.
+
+Polly hailed Marie Louise with cries of such delight that before the
+cab had made the circle and drawn up at the steps the hunted look was
+gone and youth come back to Marie Louise's anxious smile. Polly kissed
+her and presented her husband, pointing to the gold leaves on his
+shoulders with militaristic pride.
+
+Widdicombe blushed and said: "Fearless desk-fighter has to hurry off
+to battle with ruthless stenographers. Such are the horrors of war!"
+
+He insisted on paying Marie Louise's driver, though she said, "Women
+will never be free so long as men insist on paying all their bills."
+
+Polly said: "Hush, or the brute will set me free!"
+
+He kissed Polly, waved to Marie Louise, stepped into his car, and shot
+away.
+
+Polly watched him with devout eyes and said:
+
+"Poor boy! he's dying to get across into the trenches, but they won't
+take him because he's a little near-sighted, thank God! And he works
+like a dog, day and night." Then she returned to the rites of
+hospitality. "Had your breakfast?"
+
+"At the station." The truth for once coincided very pleasantly with
+convenience.
+
+"Then I know what you want," said Polly, "a bath and a nap. After that
+all-night train-trip you ought to be a wreck."
+
+"I am."
+
+Polly led her to a welcoming room that would have been quite pretty
+enough if it had had only a bed and a chair. Marie Louise felt as if
+she had come out of the wilderness into a city of refuge. Polly had an
+engagement, a committee meeting of women war-workers, and would not be
+back until luncheon-time. Marie Louise steeped herself in a hot tub,
+then in a long sweet sleep in a real bed. She was wakened by the
+voices of children, and looked out from her window to see the
+Widdicombe tots drilling in a company of three with a drum, a flag,
+and a wooden gun. The American army was not much bigger compared with
+the European nations in arms, but it would grow.
+
+Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman idea that
+was claiming half of the war, the true squaw-spirit that takes up the
+drudgery at home while the braves go out to swap missiles with the
+enemy. When Marie Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to
+get into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of
+opportunities.
+
+At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer was
+coming over from Washington. He had asked for sittings, and she had
+acceded to his request.
+
+"I never can get photographs enough of my homely self," said Polly.
+"I'm always hoping that by some accident the next one will make me
+look as I want to look--make ithers see me as I see mysel'!"
+
+When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie Louise must
+pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented at last, to quiet
+her. They spent a harrowing afternoon striking attitudes all over the
+place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths,
+profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the
+struggle to assume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul.
+
+The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation were
+far-reaching for Marie Louise.
+
+According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs
+appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The
+Sunday after that Marie Louise's likeness appeared with "Dolly
+Madison's" and Jean Elliott's syndicated letters on "The Week in
+Washington" in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now
+and then her likeness popped out at her from _Town and Country_,
+_Vogue_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _The Spur_, what not?
+
+One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who
+had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some
+time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in
+an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial
+drawing-room.
+
+He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it "Mamise"
+with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.
+
+"She's in this country now, the paper says," said Jake. "She's in
+Washington, and if I was you I'd write her a little letter astin' her
+is she our sister."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that "our." The more Jake
+considered the matter the less he liked the thought of waiting for a
+letter to go and an answer to come.
+
+"Meet 'em face to face; that's me!" he declared at last. "I think I'll
+just take a trip to the little old capital m'self. I can tell the rest
+the c'mittee I'm goin' to put a few things up to some them Senators
+and Congersmen. That'll get my expenses paid for me."
+
+There simply was nobody that Jake Nuddle would not cheat, if he
+could.
+
+His always depressing wife suggested: "Supposin' the lady says she
+ain't Mamise, how you goin' to prove she is? You never seen her."
+
+Jake snarled at her for a fool, but he knew that she was right. He
+resisted the dismal necessity as long as he could, and then extended
+one of his most cordial invitations:
+
+"Aw, hell! I reckon I'll have to drag you along."
+
+He grumbled and cursed his fate and resolved to make Mamise pay double
+for ruining his excursion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+For a time Marie Louise had the solace of being busy and of nibbling
+at the edge of great occasions. The nation was reconstituting its
+whole life, and Washington was the capital of all the Allied peoples,
+their brazen serpent and their promise of salvation. Almost everybody
+was doing with his or her might what his or her hand found to do.
+Repetition and contradiction of effort abounded; there was every
+confusion of counsel and of action. But the Republic was gathering
+itself for a mighty leap into the arena. For the first time women were
+being not merely permitted, but pleaded with, to lend their aid.
+
+Marie Louise rolled bandages at a Red Cross room presided over by a
+pleasant widow, Mrs. Perry Merithew, with a son in the aviation, who
+was forever needing bandages. Mamise tired of these, bought a car and
+joined the Women's Motor Corps. She had a collision with a reckless
+wretch named "Pet" Bettany, and resigned. She helped with big
+festivals, toiled day and night at sweaters, and finally bought
+herself a knitting-machine and spun out half a dozen pairs of socks a
+day, by keeping a sweatshop pace for sweatshop hours. She was trying
+to find a more useful job. The trouble was that everybody wanted to be
+at something, to get into a uniform of some sort, to join the
+universal mobilization.
+
+She went out little of evenings, preferring to keep herself in
+the seclusion of the Rosslyn home. Gradually her fears subsided
+and she felt that her welcome was wearing through. She began to
+look for a place to live. Washington was in a panic of rentals.
+Apartments cost more than houses. A modest creature who had paid
+seventy-five dollars a month for a little flat let it for five
+hundred a month for the duration of the war. A gorgeous Sultana
+who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment rented it
+for a thousand dollars a month "for the duration." Marie Louise had
+money enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would
+buy.
+
+She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices. She took
+up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books on system and
+efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.
+
+Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an intermittent
+fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was trying to do his bit, but
+he was lost in the maelstrom swirling through the channels of official
+life. He would come to town for a few days, wait about, fuming, and
+return in disgust to his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism
+that pulled him back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he
+lost several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because
+their hours clashed with Marie Louise's.
+
+On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel an
+invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero's. Little as he knew of the
+eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the famous name of
+Prothero. He had spoken with reverence always of her late husband, one
+of the rebuilders of the American navy, a voice crying in the
+wilderness for a revival of the ancient glories of the merchant
+marine. Davidge had never met him or his widow. He felt that he could
+not refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects to
+the relict of his idol.
+
+But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom everybody had heard
+of, had heard of him. When he entered her door on the designated
+evening his riddle was answered.
+
+The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on the console
+a little envelope which he proffered on his tray. The envelope was
+about the size of those that new-born parents use to inclose the
+proclamation of the advent of a new-born infant. The card inside
+Davidge's envelope carried the legend, "Miss Webling."
+
+The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced him. There
+indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a majestic granddam in a
+coronet of white hair.
+
+Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it. She clasped his
+and passed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a character:
+
+"This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright."
+
+Mrs. Prothero pressed his hand and kept it while she said: "It is
+like Marie Louise to bring youth to cheer up an old crone like me."
+
+Davidge muffed the opening horribly. Instead of saying something
+brilliant about how young Mrs. Prothero looked, he said:
+
+"Youth? I'm a hundred years old."
+
+"You are!" Mrs. Prothero cried. "Then how old does that make me, in
+the Lord's name--a million?"
+
+Davidge could not even recover the foot he had put in it. By looking
+foolish and keeping silent he barely saved himself from adding the
+other foot. Mrs. Prothero smiled at his discomfiture.
+
+"Don't worry. I'm too ancient to be caught by pretty speeches--or to
+like the men who have 'em always ready."
+
+She pressed his hand again and turned to welcome the financial
+Cyclops, James Dyckman, and his huge wife, and Captain Fargeton, a
+foreign military attache with service chevrons and wound-chevrons and
+a _croix de guerre_, and a wife, who had been Mildred Tait.
+
+"All that and an American spouse!" said Davidge to Marie Louise.
+
+"Have you never had an American spouse?" she asked, brazenly.
+
+"Not one!" he confessed.
+
+Major and Polly Widdicombe had come in with Marie Louise, and Davidge
+drifted into their circle. The great room filled gradually with men of
+past or future fame, and the poor women who were concerned in enduring
+its acquisition.
+
+Marie Louise was radiant in mood and queenly in attire. Davidge was
+startled by the magnificence of her jewelry. Some of it was of old
+workmanship, royal heirloomry. Her accent was decidedly English, yet
+her race was undoubtedly American. The many things about her that had
+puzzled him subconsciously began to clamor at least for the attention
+of curiosity. He watched her making the best of herself, as a skilful
+woman does when she is all dressed up in handsome scenery among
+toplofty people.
+
+Polly was describing the guests as they came in:
+
+"That's Colonel Harvey Forbes. His name has been sent to Congress for
+approval as a brigadier-general. I knew him in the midst of the
+wildest scandal--remind me to tell you. He was only a captain then.
+He'll probably end as a king or something. This war is certainly good
+to some people."
+
+Davidge watched Marie Louise studying the somber officer. He was a bit
+jealous, shamed by his own civilian clothes. Suddenly Marie Louise's
+smile at Polly's chatter stopped short, shriveled, then returned to
+her face with a look of effort. Her muscles seemed to be determined
+that her lips should not droop.
+
+Davidge heard the butler announce:
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt and General Sir Hector Havendish."
+
+Davidge wondered which of the two names could have so terrified
+Marie Louise. Naturally he supposed that it was the man's. He turned
+to study the officer in his British uniform. He saw a tall,
+loose-jointed, jovial man of horsy look and carriage, and no hint of
+mystery--one would say an intolerance of mystery.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was equally amiable. She laughed and wrung the
+hands of Mrs. Prothero. They were like two school-girls met in another
+century.
+
+Davidge noted that Marie Louise turned her back and listened with
+extraordinary interest to Major Widdicombe's old story about an
+Irishman who did or said something or other. Davidge heard Mrs.
+Prothero say to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, with all the joy in the world:
+
+"Who do you suppose is here but our Marie Louise?"
+
+"Our Marie Louise?" Lady Clifton-Wyatt echoed, with a slight chill.
+
+"Yes, Marie Louise Webling. It was at her house that I met you. Where
+has the child got to? There she is."
+
+Without raising her voice she focused it between Marie Louise's
+shoulder-blades.
+
+"Marie Louise, my dear!"
+
+Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled
+forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's limber
+attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she
+would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she
+evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs.
+Prothero's home; so she bowed and murmured:
+
+"Ah, yis! How are you?"
+
+To Davidge's amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting the rebuff
+in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to
+Davidge's confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of
+cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas.
+She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen
+his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new
+fleet.
+
+Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had
+passed through so many women's wars that she had learned to
+ignore them even when--especially when--her drawing-room was the
+battleground.
+
+Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the
+butler.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the
+dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the
+current at the elbow of the pretty young girl, said to Davidge:
+
+"Are you taking me out or--"
+
+It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he mumbled:
+
+"I--I am sorry, but--er--Miss Webling--"
+
+"Oh! Ah!" said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. It was a very short "Oh!" and a
+very long "Ah!" a sort of gliding, crushing "Ah!" It went over him
+like a tank, leaving him flat.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt reached Sir Hector's arm in a few strides and
+unhooked him from the girl--also the girl from him. The girl was
+grateful. Sir Hector was used to disappointments.
+
+Davidge went to Marie Louise, who stood lonely and distraught. He felt
+ashamed of his word "sorry" and hoped she hadn't heard it. Silently
+and crudely he angled his arm, and she took it and went along with him
+in a somnambulism.
+
+Davidge, manlike, tried to cheer up his elbow-mate by a compliment. A
+man's first aid to a woman in distress is a compliment or a few pats
+of the hand. He said:
+
+"This is the second big dinner you and I have attended. There were
+bushels of flowers between us before, but I'd rather see your face
+than a ton of roses."
+
+The compliment fell out like a ton of coal. He did not like it at all.
+She seemed not to have heard him, for she murmured:
+
+"Yis, isn't it?"
+
+Then, as the occultists say, he went into the silence. There is
+nothing busier than a silence at a dinner. The effort to think with no
+outlet in speech kept up such a roaring in his head that he could
+hardly grasp what the rest were saying.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt sat at Davidge's right and kept invading his quiet
+communion with Marie Louise by making remarks of the utmost
+graciousness somehow fermented--like wine turned vinegar.
+
+"I wonder if you remember when we met in London, Mr. Davidge? It was
+just after the poor _Lusitania_ was sunk."
+
+"So it was," said Davidge.
+
+"It was at Sir Joseph Webling's. You knew he was dead, didn't you? Or
+did you?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Webling told me."
+
+"Oh, did she! I was curious to know."
+
+She cast a look past him at Marie Louise and saw that the girl was
+about ready to make a scene. She smiled and deferred further torture.
+
+Mrs. Prothero supervened. She had the beautiful theory that the way to
+make her guests happy was to get them to talking about themselves. She
+tried to draw Davidge out of his shell. But he talked about her
+husband instead, and of the great work he had done for the navy. He
+turned the tables of graciousness on her. Her nod recognized the
+chivalry; her lips smiled with pride in her husband's praise; her eyes
+glistened with an old regret made new. "He would have been useful
+now," she sighed.
+
+"He was the man who laid the keel-blocks of our new navy," said
+Davidge. "The thing we haven't got and have got to get is a merchant
+marine."
+
+He could talk of that, though he could not celebrate himself. He was
+still going strong when the dinner was finished.
+
+Mrs. Prothero clung to the old custom. She took the women away with
+her to the drawing-room, leaving the men alone.
+
+Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind
+of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that
+seemed to cry "Help!" He wondered what the feud could be that threw
+Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the
+thought that she had a yellow streak in her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was kept in order by the
+presence of men. She knew that the least charming of attributes in
+masculine eyes are the female feline, the gift and art of claws.
+
+Men can be catty, too--tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline when they
+are not on their good behavior. There are times when the warning,
+"Gentlemen, there are ladies present," restores them to order as
+quickly as the entrance of a teacher turns a school-room of young
+savages into an assembly of young saints.
+
+The women in Mrs. Prothero's drawing-room could not hear any of the
+words the men mixed with their smoke, but they could hear now and then
+a muffled explosion of laughter of a quality that indicated what had
+provoked it.
+
+The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by their
+isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was like getting their
+minds out of tight corsets. They were not impatient for the men--as
+some of the men may have imagined. These women were of an age where
+they had something else to think of besides men. They had careers to
+make or keep among women as well as the men among men.
+
+The servants kept them on guard till the coffee, tobacco, and liqueurs
+were distributed. Then recess was declared. Marie Louise found herself
+on a huge tapestried divan provided with deep, soft cushions that held
+her like a quicksands. On one side of her was the mountainous Mrs.
+Dyckman resembling a stack of cushions cased in silk; on the other was
+Mildred Tait Fargeton, whose father had been ambassador to France.
+
+Marie Louise listened to their chatter with a frantic impatience.
+Polly was heliographing ironic messages with her eyes. Polly was
+hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler, who was furious at the
+Administration because it did not put all its transportation problems
+in her husband's hands. She would not have intrusted him with the
+buying of a spool of thread; but that was different.
+
+Mrs. Prothero was monopolized by Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Marie Louise
+could see that she herself was the theme of the talk, for Mrs.
+Prothero kept casting startled glances Marie-Louise-ward, and Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt glances of baleful stealth.
+
+Marie Louise had proved often enough that she was no coward, but
+even the brave turn poltroon when they fight without a sense of
+justification. Her pride told her that she ought to cross over to Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt and demand that she speak up. But her sense of guilt
+robbed her of her courage. And that oath she had given to Mr.
+Verrinder without the least reluctance now loomed before her as the
+greatest mistake of her life. Her sword and shield were both in pawn.
+
+She gave herself up for lost and had only one hope, that the men would
+not come in--especially that Ross Davidge would not come in in time to
+learn what Lady Clifton-Wyatt was so eager to publish. She gave Mrs.
+Prothero up for lost, too, and Polly. But she wanted to keep Ross
+Davidge fond of her.
+
+Then in a lull Mrs. Prothero spoke up sharply:
+
+"I simply can't believe it, my dear. I don't know that I ever saw a
+German spy, but that child is not one. I'd stake my life on it."
+
+"And now the avalanche!" thought Marie Louise.
+
+The word "spy" was beginning to have more than an academic or
+fictional interest to Americans, and it caught the ear of every person
+present.
+
+Mrs. Dyckman and Mme. Fargeton sat up as straight as their curves
+permitted and gasped:
+
+"A German spy! Who? Where?"
+
+Polly Widdicombe sprang to her feet and darted to Mrs. Prothero's
+side.
+
+"Oh, how lovely! Tell me who she is! I'm dying to shoot a spy."
+
+Marie Louise sickened at the bloodthirstiness of Polly the insouciante.
+
+Mrs. Prothero tried to put down the riot of interest by saying:
+
+"Oh, it's nothing. Lady Clifton-Wyatt is just joking."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was at bay. She shot a glance at Marie Louise and
+insisted:
+
+"Indeed I'm not! I tell you she is a spy."
+
+"Who's a spy?" Polly demanded.
+
+"Miss Webling," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+
+Polly began to giggle; then she frowned with disappointment.
+
+"Oh, I thought you meant it."
+
+"I do mean it, and if you'll take my advice you'll be warned in
+time."
+
+Polly turned, expecting to find Marie Louise showing her contemptuous
+amusement, but the look she saw on Marie Louise's face was disconcerting.
+Polly's loyalty remained staunch. She hated Lady Clifton-Wyatt anyway,
+and the thought that she might be telling the truth made her a little
+more hatable. Polly stormed:
+
+"I won't permit you to slander my best friend."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt replied, "I don't slahnda hah, and if she is yaw
+best friend--well--"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt hated Polly and was glad of the weapon against her.
+Polly felt a sudden terrific need of retorting with a blow. Men had
+never given up the fist on the mouth as the simple, direct answer to
+an insult too complicated for any other retort. She wanted to slap
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt's face. But she did not know how to fight. Perhaps
+women will acquire the male prerogative of the smash in the jaw along
+with the other once exclusive masculine privileges. It will do them no
+end of good and help to clarify all life for them. But for the present
+Polly could only groan, "Agh!" and turn to throw an arm about Marie
+Louise and drag her forward.
+
+"I'd believe one word of Marie Louise against a thousand of yours,"
+she declared.
+
+"Very well--ahsk hah, then."
+
+Polly was crying mad, and madder than ever because she hated herself
+for crying when she got mad. She almost sobbed now to Marie Louise,
+"Tell her it's a dirty, rotten lie."
+
+Marie Louise had been dragged to her feet. She temporized, "What has
+she sai-said?"
+
+Polly snickered nervously, "Oh, nothing--except that you were a German
+spy."
+
+And now somewhere, somehow, Marie Louise found the courage of
+desperation. She laughed:
+
+"Lady Clifton-Wyatt is notori--famous for her quaint sense of humor."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt sneered, "Could one expect a spy to admit it?"
+
+Marie Louise smiled patiently. "Probably not. But surely even you
+would hardly insist that denying it proves it?"
+
+This sophistry was too tangled for Polly. She spoke up:
+
+"Let's have the details, Lady Clifton-Wyatt--if you don't mind."
+
+"Yes, yes," the chorus murmured.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt braced herself. "Well, in the first place Miss
+Webling is not Miss Webling."
+
+"Oh, but I am," said Marie Louise.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt gasped, "You don't mean to pretend that--"
+
+"Did you read the will?" said Marie Louise.
+
+"No, of course not, but--"
+
+"It says there that I was their daughter."
+
+"Well, we'll not quibble. Legally you may have been, but actually you
+were their adopted child."
+
+"Yis?" said Marie Louise. "And where did they find me? Had you
+heard?"
+
+"Since you force me to it, I must say that it is generally believed
+that you were the natural daughter of Sir Joseph."
+
+Marie Louise was tremendously relieved by having something that she
+could deny. She laughed with a genuineness that swung the credulity
+all her way. She asked:
+
+"And who was my mother--my natural mother, could you tell me? I really
+ought to know."
+
+"She is believed to have been a--a native of Australia."
+
+"Good Heavens! You don't mean a kangaroo?"
+
+"An actress playing in Vienna."
+
+"Oh, I am relieved! And Sir Joseph was my father--yes. Do go on."
+
+"Whether Sir Joseph was your father or not, he was born in Germany and
+so was his wife, and they took a false oath of allegiance to his
+Majesty. All the while they were loyal only to the Kaiser. They worked
+for him, spied for him. It is said that the Kaiser had promised to
+make Sir Joseph one of the rulers over England when he captured the
+island. Sir Joseph was to have any castle he wanted and untold
+wealth."
+
+"What was I to have?" Marie Louise was able to mock her. "Wasn't I to
+have at least Westminster Abbey to live in? And one of the crown
+princes for a husband?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt lost her temper and her bearings.
+
+"Heaven knows what you were promised, but you did your best to earn
+it, whatever it was."
+
+Mrs. Prothero lost patience. "Really, my dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, this
+is all getting beyond me."
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt grew scarlet, too. She spoke with the wrath of a
+Tisiphone whipping herself to a frenzy. "I will bring you proofs. This
+creature was a paid secret agent, a go-between for Sir Joseph and the
+Wilhelmstrasse. She carried messages. She went into the slums of
+Whitechapel disguised as a beggar to meet the conspirators. She
+carried them lists of ships with their cargoes, dates of sailing,
+destinations. She carried great sums of money. She was the paymaster
+of the spies. Her hands are red with the blood of British sailors and
+women and children. She grew so bold that at last she attracted the
+attention of even Scotland Yard. She was followed, traced to Sir
+Joseph's home. It was found that she lived at his house.
+
+"One of the spies, named Easling or Oesten, was her lover. He was
+caught and met his deserts before a firing-squad in the Tower. His
+confession implicated Sir Joseph. The police raided his place. A
+terrific fight ensued. He resisted arrest. He tried to shoot one of
+our police. The bullet went wild and killed his wife. Before he could
+fire again he was shot down by one of our men."
+
+The astonishing transformations the story had undergone in its transit
+from gossip to gossip stunned Marie Louise. The memory of the reality
+saddened her beyond laughter. Her distress was real, but she had
+self-control enough to focus it on Lady Clifton-Wyatt and murmur:
+
+"Poor thing, she is quite mad!"
+
+There is nothing that so nearly drives one insane as to be accused of
+insanity.
+
+The prosecutrix almost strangled on her indignation at Marie Louise's
+calm.
+
+"The effrontery of this woman is unendurable, Mrs. Prothero. If you
+believe her, you must permit me to leave. I know what I am saying. I
+have had what I tell you from the best authority. Of course, it may
+sound insane, but wait until you learn what the German secret agents
+have been doing in America for years and what they are doing now."
+
+There had been publication enough of the sickening duplicity of
+ambassadors and attaches to lead the Americans to believe that
+Teutonism meant anything revolting. Mrs. Prothero was befuddled at
+this explosion in her quiet home. She asked:
+
+"But surely all this has never been published, has it? I think we
+should have heard of it here."
+
+"Of course not," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. "We don't publish the
+accounts of the submarines we sink, do we? No more do we tell the
+Germans what spies of theirs we have captured. And, since Sir Joseph
+and his wife were dead, there would have been no profit in publishing
+broadcast the story of the battle. So they agreed to let it be known
+that they died peacefully or rather painfully in their beds, of
+ptomaine poisoning."
+
+"That's true," said Mrs. Prothero. "That's what I read. That's what
+I've always understood."
+
+Now, curiously, as often happens in court, the discovery that a
+witness has stumbled on one truth in a pack of lies renders all he has
+said authentic and shifts the guilt to the other side. Marie Louise
+could feel the frost of suspicion against her forming in the air.
+
+Polly made one more onset: "But, tell me, Lady Clifton-Wyatt, where
+was Marie Louise during all this Wild West End pistol-play?"
+
+"In her room with her lover," snarled Lady Clifton-Wyatt. "The
+servants saw her there."
+
+This threw a more odious light on Marie Louise. She was not merely a
+nice clean spy, but a wanton.
+
+Polly groaned: "Tell that to Scotland Yard! I'd never believe it."
+
+"Scotland Yard knows it without my telling," said Lady Clifton-Wyatt.
+
+"But how did Marie Louise come to escape and get to America?"
+
+"Because England did not want to shoot a woman, especially not a
+young woman of a certain prettiness. So they let her go, when she
+swore that she would never return to England. But they did not trust
+her. She is under observation now! Your home is watched, my dear Mrs.
+Widdicombe, and I dare say there is a man on guard outside now, my
+dear Mrs. Prothero."
+
+This sent a chill along every spine. Marie Louise was frightened out
+of her own brief bravado.
+
+There was a lull in the trial while everybody reveled in horror. Then
+Mrs. Prothero spoke in a judicial tone.
+
+"And now, Miss Webling, please tell us your side of all this. What
+have you to say in your own behalf?"
+
+Marie Louise's mouth suddenly turned dry as bark; her tongue was like
+a dead leaf. She was inarticulate with remembrance of her oath to
+Verrinder. She just managed to whisper:
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+It sounded like an autumn leaf rasping across a stone. Polly cried out
+in agony:
+
+"Marie Louise!"
+
+Marie Louise shook her head and could neither think nor speak. There
+was a hush of waiting. It was broken by the voices of the men
+strolling in together. They were utterly unwelcome. They stopped and
+stared at the women all staring at Marie Louise.
+
+Seeing Davidge about to ask what the tableau stood for, she found
+voice to say:
+
+"Mr. Davidge, would you be so good as to take me home--to Mrs.
+Widdicombe's, that is. I--I am a little faint."
+
+"Delighted! I mean--I'm sorry--I'd be glad," he stammered, eager to be
+at her service, yet embarrassed by the sudden appeal.
+
+"You'll pardon me, Mrs. Prothero, for running away!"
+
+"Of course," said Mrs. Prothero, still dazed.
+
+He bowed to her, and all round. Marie Louise nodded and whispered,
+"Good night!" and moved toward the door waveringly. Davidge's heart
+leaped with pity for her.
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt checked him as he hurried past her.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davidge, I'm stopping at the Shoreham. Won't you drop in and
+have a cup of tea with me to-morrow at hahf pahst fah?"
+
+"Thank you! Yes!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The intended victim of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's little lynching-bee walked
+away, holding her head high. But she felt the noose still about her
+neck and wondered when the rope would draw her back and up.
+
+Marie Louise marched through Mrs. Prothero's hall in excellent form,
+with just the right amount of dizziness to justify her escape on the
+plea of sudden illness. The butler, like a benign destiny, opened the
+door silently and let her out into the open as once before in London a
+butler had opened a door and let her into the welcome refuge of
+walls.
+
+She gulped the cool night air thirstily, and it gave her courage.
+But it gave her no wisdom. She had indeed got away from Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt's direct accusation of being a spy and she had brought
+with her unscathed the only man whose good opinion was important to
+her. But she did not know what she wanted to do with him, except that
+she did not want him to fall into Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hands--in
+which she had left her reputation.
+
+Polly Widdicombe would have gone after Marie Louise forthwith, but
+Polly did not intend to leave her pet foewoman in possession of the
+field--not that she loved Marie Louise more, but that she loved Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt less. Polly was dazed and bewildered by Marie Louise's
+defection, but she would not accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt's version of
+this story or of any other.
+
+Besides, Polly gleaned that Marie Louise wanted to be alone, and she
+knew that the best gift friendship can bestow at times is solitude.
+The next best gift is defense in absence. Polly announced that she
+would not permit her friend to be traduced; and Lady Clifton-Wyatt,
+seeing that the men had flocked in from the dining-room and knowing
+that men always discount one woman's attack on another as mere
+cattiness, assumed her most angelic mien and changed the subject.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+As usual in retreats, the first problem was transportation. Marie
+Louise found herself and Davidge outside Mrs. Prothero's door, with no
+means of getting to Rosslyn. She had come in the Widdicombe car;
+Davidge had come in a hotel cab and sent it away. Luckily at last a
+taxi returning to the railroad terminal whizzed by. Davidge yelled in
+vain. Then he put his two fingers to his mouth and let out a short
+blast that brought the taxi-driver round. In accordance with the
+traffic rules, he had to make the circuit of the big statue-crowned
+circle in front of Mrs. Prothero's home, one of those numerous hubs
+that give Washington the effect of what some one called "revolving
+streets."
+
+When he drew up at the curb Davidge's first question was:
+
+"How's your gasolene supply?"
+
+"Full up, boss."
+
+Marie Louise laughed. "You don't want to spend another night in a taxi
+with me, I see."
+
+Davidge writhed at this deduction. He started to say, "I'd be glad to
+spend the rest of my life in a taxi with you." That sounded a little
+too flamboyant, especially with a driver listening in. So he said
+nothing but "Huh!"
+
+He explained to the driver the route to Grinden Hall, and they set
+forth.
+
+Marie Louise had a dilemma of her own. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had had the
+last word, and it had been an invitation to Davidge to call on her.
+Worse yet, he had accepted it. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's purpose was, of
+course, to rob Marie Louise of this last friend. Perhaps the wretch
+had a sentimental interest in Davidge, too. She was a widow and a
+man-grabber; she still had a tyrannic beauty and a greed of conquest.
+Marie Louise was determined that Davidge should not fall into her
+clutches, but she could hardly exact a promise from him to stay away.
+
+The taxi was crossing the aqueduct bridge before she could brave
+the point. She was brazen enough to say, "You'll accept Lady
+Clifton-Wyatt's invitation to tea, of course?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," said Davidge. "No American woman can resist a
+lord; so how could an American man resist a Lady?"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+This helpless syllable expressed another defeat for Marie Louise. When
+they reached the house she bade him good night without making any
+arrangement for a good morrow, though Davidge held her hand decidedly
+longer than ever before.
+
+She stood on the portico and watched his cab drive off. She gazed
+toward Washington and did not see the dreamy constellation it made
+with the shaft of the Monument ghostly luminous as if with a
+phosphorescence of its own. She felt an outcast indeed. She imagined
+Polly hurrying back to ask questions that could not be dodged any
+longer. She had no right to defend herself offensively from the
+rightful demands of a friend and hostess. Besides, the laws of
+hospitality would not protect her from Polly's temper. Polly would
+have a perfect right to order her from the house. And she would, too,
+when she knew everything. It would be best to decamp before being
+asked to.
+
+Marie Louise whirled and sped into the house, rang for the maid, and
+said:
+
+"My trunks! Please have them brought down--or up, from wherever they
+are, will you?"
+
+"Your trunks, miss!"
+
+"And a taxicab. I shall have to leave at once."
+
+"But--oh, I am sorry. Shall I help you pack?"
+
+"Thank you, no--yes--no!"
+
+The maid went out with eyes popping, wondering what earthquake had
+sent the guest home alone for such a headlong exit.
+
+Things flew in the drowsy house, and Marie Louise's chamber looked
+like the show-room of a commercial traveler for a linen-house when
+Polly appeared at the door and gasped:
+
+"What in the name of--I didn't know you were sick enough to be
+delirious!"
+
+She came forward through an archipelago of clothes to where Marie
+Louise was bending over a trunk. Polly took an armload of things away
+from her and put them back in the highboy. As she set her arms akimbo
+and stood staring at Marie Louise with a lovable and loving insolence,
+she heard the sound of a car rattling round the driveway, and her
+first words were:
+
+"Who's coming here at this hour?"
+
+"That's the taxi for me," Marie Louise explained.
+
+Polly turned to the maid, "Go down and send it away--no, tell the
+driver to go to the asylum for a strait-jacket."
+
+The maid smiled and left. Marie Louise was afraid to believe her own
+hopes.
+
+"You don't mean you want me to stay, do you--not after what that woman
+said?"
+
+"Do you imagine for a moment," returned Polly, "that I'd ever believe
+a word that cat could utter? Good Lord! if Lady Clifton-Wyatt told me
+it was raining and I could see it was, I'd know it wasn't and put down
+my umbrella."
+
+Marie Louise rejoiced at the trust implied, but she could not make a
+fool of so loyal a friend. She spoke with difficulty:
+
+"What if what she said was the truth, or, anyway, a kind of burlesque
+of it?"
+
+"Marie Louise!" Polly gasped, and plounced into a chair. "Tell me the
+truth this minute, the true truth."
+
+Marie Louise was perishing for a confidante. She had gone about as far
+without one as a normal woman can. She sat wondering how to begin,
+twirling her rings on her fingers. "Well, you see--you see--it is true
+that I'm not Sir Joseph's daughter. I was born in a little village--in
+America--Wakefield--out there in the Middle West. I ran away from
+home, and--"
+
+She hesitated, blanched, blushed, skipped over the years she tried not
+to think of and managed never to speak of. She came down to:
+
+"Well, anyway, at last I was in Berlin--on the stage--"
+
+"You were an actress?" Polly gasped.
+
+Marie Louise confessed, "Well, I'd hardly say that."
+
+She told Polly what she had told Mr. Verrinder of the appearance of
+Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, of their thrill at her resemblance to
+their dead daughter, of their plea that she leave the stage and enter
+their family, of her new life, and the outbreak of the war.
+
+Major Widdicombe pounded on the door and said: "Are you girls going to
+talk all night? I've got to get up at seven and save the country."
+
+Polly cried to him, "Go away," and to Marie Louise, "Go on."
+
+Marie Louise began again, but just as she reached the first suspicions
+of Sir Joseph's loyalty she remembered the oath she had plighted to
+Verrinder and stopped short.
+
+"I forgot! I can't!"
+
+Polly groaned: "Oh, my God! You're not going to stop there! I loathe
+serials."
+
+Marie Louise shook her head. "If only I could tell you; but I just
+can't! That's all; I can't!"
+
+Polly turned her eyes up in despair. "Well, I might as well go to bed,
+I suppose. But I sha'n't sleep a wink. Tell me one thing, though. You
+weren't really a German spy, were you?"
+
+"No, no! Of course not! I loathe everything German."
+
+"Well, let the rest rest, then. So long as Lady Clifton-Wyatt is a
+liar I can stand the strain. If you had been a spy, I suppose I'd have
+to shoot you or something; but so long as you're not, you don't budge
+out of this house. Is that understood?"
+
+Marie Louise nodded with a pathetic gratitude, and Polly stamped a
+kiss on her brow like a notarial seal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The next morning's paper announced that spring had officially arrived
+and been recognized at the Capitol--a certain Senator had taken off
+his wig. Washington accepted this as the sure sign that the weather
+was warm. It would not be officially autumn till that wig fell back
+into place.
+
+There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual
+flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts Avenue. The
+famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it, and flaunted little
+fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the Louise Home replied by
+setting their magnolia-trees on fire with flowers like lamps, flowers
+that hurried out ahead of their own leaves and then broke and covered
+the ground with great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy
+Terrace put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more
+gorgeous--irises in a row of blue, blue footlights.
+
+The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses of
+an earlier regime, kept their state, had the last word, the word that
+could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria, wistful lavender
+clusters weeping from the trellises in languorous grace.
+
+Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn, felt in the
+wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were brisk with hope. The
+river went its way in a more sparkling flow. The air blew from the
+very fountains of youth with a teasing blarney. She thought of Ross
+Davidge and smiled tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But
+she frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She
+wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate that woman.
+
+Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that she had
+forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered her in the
+chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He was out. She pursued
+him by wire travel till she found him in an office of the Shipping
+Board. He talked on the corner of a busy man's desk. She heard the
+busy man say with a taunting voice, "A lady for you, Davidge."
+
+She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was in for it now,
+and she felt silly when she explained why she bothered him. But she
+was stubborn, too. When he understood, he laughed with the constraint
+of a man bandying enforced gallantries on another man's telephone.
+
+"I'd hate to be as honest as all that."
+
+"It's not honesty," she persisted. "It's selfishness. I can't rest
+while the debt is on my mind."
+
+He was perplexed. "I've got to see several men on the Shipping Board.
+There's a big fight on between the wooden-ship fellows and the
+steel-ship men, and I'm betwixt and between 'em. I won't have time to
+run out to see you."
+
+"I shouldn't dream of asking you. I was coming in to town, anyway."
+
+"Oh! Well, then--well--er--when can I meet you?"
+
+"Whenever you say! The Willard at--When shall you be free?"
+
+"Not before four and then only for half an hour."
+
+"Four it is."
+
+"Fine! Thank you ever so much. I'll buy me a lot of steel with all
+that money you owe me."
+
+Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the
+telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize
+Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose
+office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she
+had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce
+with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
+
+Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be
+only to-day's battle. There would still be to-morrows and the
+day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to
+Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from
+Washington would be the only safety.
+
+But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved
+Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important
+work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live
+on at Polly Widdicombe's forever.
+
+Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of
+her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was
+there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked
+at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were
+costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone,
+anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more
+easily be kept aloof.
+
+She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as
+affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places
+she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places
+that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented
+yesterday.
+
+Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr.
+Hailstorks:
+
+"Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it
+if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for
+a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is
+getting to be quite a bore.'"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.
+
+He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely
+furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs,
+rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have
+achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does,
+what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things
+to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.
+
+Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear
+of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard,
+Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The
+house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream
+ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession
+of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill
+superbly built up above the silver Thames.
+
+"Whatever is all that?" she cried.
+
+"Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere
+real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of
+adjoining property and made renting easier.
+
+"And what's the price of all this grandeur?"
+
+"Only three hundred a month," said Mr. Hailstorks.
+
+"Only!" gasped Marie Louise.
+
+"It will be four hundred in a week or two--yes ma'am," said Mr.
+Hailstorks.
+
+So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.
+
+She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private
+game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The
+park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost
+in--with Ross Davidge.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was
+waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the
+car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.
+
+He said what she hoped he would say:
+
+"I didn't know you drove so well."
+
+She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.'
+Hop in, and I'll show you."
+
+He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of
+her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had
+an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that
+he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked
+round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth
+Street, fast and far.
+
+She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her
+out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking
+that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with
+some other body's child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and
+she had apparently forgotten it again.
+
+They were well to the north when she said:
+
+"Do you know Rock Creek Park?"
+
+"No, I've never been in it."
+
+"Would you like a glimpse? I think it's the prettiest park in the
+world."
+
+She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming
+almost universal and gasped:
+
+"Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it's just about as short to go
+through the park. I mustn't make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt's
+tea."
+
+He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except, "It's mighty
+pretty along here." She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the
+long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the
+south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight
+through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing
+charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling
+and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges
+and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling
+among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood,
+and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the
+water's edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were
+being celebrated on the grass.
+
+"I always lose my way in this park," she said. "I expect I'm lost
+now."
+
+She began to regret Davidge's approaching absence, with a strange
+loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed,
+hardly meaning to speak aloud, "Too bad you're going away so soon."
+
+He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He
+spoke with an affectionate reassurance.
+
+She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and
+gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The elan of
+rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.
+
+"I'll tell you what we'll do. The next time I come to Washington you
+drive me over to my shipyard and I'll show you the new boat and the
+new yard for the rest of the flock."
+
+"That would be glorious. I should like to know something about
+ships."
+
+"I can teach you all I know in a little while."
+
+"You know all there is to know, don't you?"
+
+"Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old
+methods, but they're all done away with. The fabricated ship is an
+absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What
+few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know.
+Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along
+to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
+
+"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot
+of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such
+a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara
+Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard.
+Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who
+tried to sweep the tide back with a broom."
+
+He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly
+saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire
+from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to
+bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent
+he had been, and subsided with a slump.
+
+"What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!"
+
+She rose at that. "The day has passed when a man can apologize for
+talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know,
+and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting
+better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never
+go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and
+have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval
+officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm
+going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up."
+
+"Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel.
+He apologized again for his roughness.
+
+"I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said.
+
+As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as
+with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.
+
+"Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt
+will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once."
+
+"Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another
+engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I
+hadn't."
+
+They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering
+the sweet sorrow of parting.
+
+The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and
+gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new
+and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.
+
+Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of
+ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was
+herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young
+womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of
+desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight
+by the Diana that is also there.
+
+Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as
+he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her
+dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and
+love began to blaze within him.
+
+He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to
+his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity
+perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no
+colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish
+something worth while.
+
+As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:
+
+"Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I'm late to
+dinner."
+
+She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
+
+Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever
+into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of
+the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name.
+This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away
+before he could overtake her.
+
+Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss
+Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall
+pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a
+forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women,
+too.
+
+The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly
+with the Teutonic _r_. Davidge studied him and began to remember him.
+He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind,
+ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of
+Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's
+home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for
+anybody he hates.
+
+He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting
+after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious.
+But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and
+turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
+
+Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as
+an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of
+some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic
+accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew
+of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German
+accent. An icy fear chilled him.
+
+His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness
+that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had
+exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a
+governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude,
+and endless trouble.
+
+Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
+
+"Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a
+woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so
+afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe's? Why was
+she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in
+such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero's dinner, and to keep
+me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much
+German association?"
+
+He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of
+them so wild as the truth--that Marie Louise was cowering under the
+accusation of being a German agent.
+
+He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the
+employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his
+hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his
+riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then
+thinking of ships and not of him.
+
+That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of
+Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the
+family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered
+the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of
+novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They
+were the very latest romance to her now.
+
+The authors of _An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the
+Compass in Iron Ships_, _The Marine Steam-engine_, and _An Outline
+of Ship-building_, _Theoretical and Practical_, could hardly have
+dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace
+of a young woman's arms. The books would have struck a naval architect
+as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of
+news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand
+with ease was Captain Samuels's _From the Forecastle to the
+Cabin_, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his
+youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
+_Dreadnaught_, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of
+American marine glory.
+
+She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and
+dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another
+book, Bowditch's _American Navigation_. It was the "Revised Edition of
+1883," but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the
+reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her
+shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their
+cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off
+the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the
+alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists
+to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none
+stranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock
+off work early.
+
+Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife's prerogatives.
+On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the
+black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven
+of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the
+curtains, "S'em o'clock, please!" did not please Jake at all.
+
+He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then
+began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small
+wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were
+dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got
+in each other's way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found
+his wife's stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings
+seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her
+corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out
+of it sputtering:
+
+"That's your damned shimmy. Where's my damned shirt?"
+
+Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left
+the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had
+breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the
+Capitol. It inspired in Jake's heart no national reverence. He said to
+his awestruck wife:
+
+"There's where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet and agree
+on their hold-ups. They're all the hirelings of the capitalists.
+
+"They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They
+didn't dare consult 'em. They knew the people wasn't in favor of no
+such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and
+them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that
+wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States
+joined the Allies and collected for 'em off Germany."
+
+It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of
+horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept
+rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was
+thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium,
+the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British
+dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed
+on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage,
+took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche
+across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and
+ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable,
+immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there
+was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate,
+croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot
+of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real working-men.
+
+Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to him who has
+the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its
+ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what
+he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not
+feel, he grew maudlin:
+
+"So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves and send 'em
+off to the slaughter-house in France--all for money! Anything to grind
+down the honest workman into the dust, no matter how many mothers'
+hearts they break!"
+
+Jake was one of those who never express sympathy for anybody except in
+the course of a tirade against somebody else. He had small use for
+wives, mothers, or children except as clubs to pound rich men with.
+His wife, who knew him all too well, was not impressed by his
+eloquence. Her typical answer to his typical tirade was, "I wonder how
+on earth we're goin' to find Mamise."
+
+Jake groaned at the anticlimax to his lofty flight, but he realized
+that the main business before the house was what his wife propounded.
+
+He remembered seeing an Information Bureau sign in the station. He had
+learned from the newspaper in which he had seen Mamise's picture that
+she was visiting Major Widdicombe. He had written the name down on the
+tablets of his memory, and his first plan was to find Major
+Widdicombe. Jake had a sort of wolfish cunning in tracing people he
+wanted to meet. He could always find anybody who might lend him money.
+He had mysterious difficulties in tracing some one who could give him
+work.
+
+He left his wife to simmer in the station while he set forth on a
+scouting expedition. After much travel he found at last the office of
+the Ordnance Department, in which Major Widdicombe toiled, and he
+appeared at length at Major Widdicombe's desk.
+
+Jake was cautious. He would not state his purpose. He hardly dared to
+claim relationship with Miss Webling until he was positive that she
+was his sister-in-law. Noting Jake's evasiveness, the Major discreetly
+evaded the request for his guest's address. He would say no more
+than:
+
+"Miss Webling is coming down to lunch with me at the--that is with my
+wife. I'll tell her you're looking for her; if she wants to meet you,
+I'll tell you, if you come back here."
+
+"All right, mucher bliged," said Jake. Baffled and without further
+recourse, he left the Major's presence, since there seemed to be
+nothing else to do. But once outside, he felt that there had been
+something highly unsatisfactory about the parley. He decided to
+imitate Mary's little lamb and to hang about the building till the
+Major should appear. In an hour or two he was rewarded by seeing
+Widdicombe leave the door and step into an automobile. Jake heard him
+tell the driver, "The Shoreham."
+
+Jake walked to the hotel and saw Marie Louise seated at a table by a
+window. He recognized her by her picture and was duly triumphant. He
+was ready to advance and demand recognition. Then he realized that he
+could make no claim on her without his awful wife's corroboration. He
+took a street-car back to the station and found his nominal helpmeet
+sitting just where he had left her.
+
+Abbie had bought no newspaper, book, or magazine to while away the
+time with. She was not impatient of idleness. It was luxury enough
+just not to be warshin' clo'es, cookin' vittles, or wrastlin' dishes.
+She took a dreamy content in studying the majesty of the architecture,
+but her interest in it was about that of a lizard basking on a fallen
+column in a Greek peristyle. It was warm and spacious and nobody
+disturbed her drowsy beatitude.
+
+When Jake came and summoned her she rose like a rheumatic old
+househound and obeyed her master's voice.
+
+Jake gave her such a vote of confidence as was implied in letting her
+lug the luggage. It was cheaper for her to carry it than for him to
+store it in the parcel-room. It caused the fellow-passengers in the
+street-car acute inconvenience, but Jake was superior to public
+opinion of his wife. In such a homely guise did the fates approach
+Miss Webling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The best place for a view is in one's back yard; then it is one's own.
+If it is in the front yard, then the house is only part of the
+public's view.
+
+In London Marie Louise had lived at Sir Joseph Webling's home, its
+gray, fog-stained, smoked-begrimed front flush with the pavement. But
+back of the house was a high-walled garden with a fountain that never
+played. There was a great rug of English-green grass, very green all
+winter and still greener all summer. At an appropriate spot was a
+tree; a tea-table sat under it; in blossom-time it sprinkled pink
+petals on the garden hats of the women; and on the grass they fell, to
+twist Tennyson, softlier than tired eyelids on tired eyes.
+
+So Marie Louise adored her new home with its unpromising entrance and
+its superb surprise from the rear windows. When she broke the news to
+Polly Widdicombe, that she was leaving her, they had a good fight over
+it. Yet Polly could hardly insist that Marie Louise stay with her
+forever, especially when Marie Louise had a perfectly good home of her
+own.
+
+Polly went along for a morning of reconstruction work. There were
+pictures, chairs, cushions, and knickknacks that simply had to be
+hidden away. The original tenants evidently had the theory that a bare
+space on a wall or a table was as indecent as on a person's person.
+
+They had taken crude little chromos and boxed them in gaudy frames,
+many of whose atrocities were aggravated by panels of plush of a color
+that could hardly be described by any other name than fermented prune.
+Over the corner of these they had thrown "throws" or drapes of
+malicious magenta horribly figured in ruthless incompatibilities.
+
+Chairs of unexplainable framework were upholstered with fabrics of
+studied delirium. Every mantel was an exhibit of models of what not to
+do. When Henry James said that Americans had no end of taste, but most
+of it was bad, he must have based his conclusions on such a
+conglomerate as this.
+
+Polly and Marie Louise found some of the furniture bad enough to be
+amusing. But they toted a vanload of it into closets and storerooms.
+Where the pictures came away they left staring spaces of unfaded
+wall-paper. Still, they were preferable to the pictures.
+
+By noon the women were exhausted. They washed their dust-smutted hands
+and faces and exclaimed upon the black water they left. But the
+exercise had given them appetite, and when Marie Louise locked the
+front door she felt all the comfort of a householder. She had a home
+of her very own to lock up, and though she had roamed through
+pleasures and palaces, she agreed that, be it ever so horrible,
+there's no place like home.
+
+She and Polly were early to their luncheon engagement with Major
+Widdicombe. Their appetites disputed the clock. Polly decided to
+telephone her husband for Heaven's sake to come at once to her
+rescue.
+
+While Polly was telephoning Marie Louise sat waiting on a divan. Her
+muscles were so tired that she grew nearly as placidly animal as her
+sister in the Pennsylvania Station. She was as different in every
+other way as possible. Her life, her environment, her ambitions, had
+been completely alien to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been
+educated and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and
+successes.
+
+Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat her again, or
+kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself sent to prison or
+to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that the children would be
+run over in the street, would pull a boilerful of boiling water over
+onto them, or steal, or go wrong in any of the myriad ways that
+children have of going wrong. Mrs. Nuddle's ecstasies were a job well
+done, a word of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an
+interval without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when
+her husband was working and treating her as well as one treats an old
+horse.
+
+Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.
+
+Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less harrowing, but
+infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no longer related to each
+other by any ties except blood kinship. Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman
+gone wrong, Marie Louise a goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a
+poor advertisement of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early
+bedding, churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most
+attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage, a
+cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant acquaintance.
+
+At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters were to
+be brought together. But there was to be an intervention. Even while
+Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue that she would have called
+contentment trouble was stealing toward her.
+
+The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton.
+He frightened her, but he would not let her run away.
+
+As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he pressed her
+back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory prayer:
+
+"Wait once, pleass."
+
+The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months before given her up
+as hopelessly correct. But guardian angels were still provided for
+Nicky Easton; and one of them, seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise
+back into the select coterie of the suspects.
+
+There's no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror. It lifts
+the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry, and gives the blind
+eyes enough for running. Marie Louise's fatigue fell from her like a
+burden whose straps are slit.
+
+When Nicky said: "I could not find you in New York. Now we are here we
+can have a little talkink," she stammered: "Not here! Not now!"
+
+"Why not, pleass?"
+
+"I have an engagement--a friend--she has just gone to telephone a
+moment."
+
+"You are ashamed of me, then?"
+
+She let him have it. "Yes!"
+
+He winced at the slap in the face.
+
+She went on: "Besides, she knows you. Her husband is an officer in the
+army. I can't talk to you here."
+
+"Where, then, and when?"
+
+"Any time--any place--but here."
+
+"Any time is no time. You tell me, or I stay now."
+
+"Come to--to my house."
+
+"You have a howiss, then?"
+
+"Yes. I just took it to-day. I shall be there this afternoon--at
+three, if you will go."
+
+"Very goot. The address is--"
+
+She gave it; he repeated it, mumbled, "At sree o'clock I am there,"
+and glided away just as Polly returned.
+
+They were eating a consomme madrilene when the Major arrived. He
+dutifully ate what his wife had selected for him, and listened amiably
+to what she had to tell him about her morning, though he was bursting
+to tell her about his. Polly made a vivid picture of Marie Louise's
+new home, ending with:
+
+"Everything on God's earth in it except a piano and a book."
+
+This reminded Marie Louise of the books she had read on ship-building,
+and she asked if she might borrow them. Polly made a woeful face at
+this.
+
+"My dear! When a woman starts to reading up on a subject a man is
+interested in, she's lost--and so is he. Beware of it, my dear."
+
+Tom demurred: "Go right on, Marie Louise, so that you can take an
+intelligent interest in what your husband is working on."
+
+"My husband!" said Marie Louise. "Aren't you both a trifle premature?"
+
+Polly went glibly on: "Don't listen to Tom, my dear. What does he know
+about what a man wants his wife to take an intelligent interest in?
+Once a woman knows about her husband's business, he's finished with
+her and ready for the next. Tom's been trying to tell me for ten years
+what he's working at, and I haven't the faintest idea yet. It always
+gives him something to hope for. When he comes home of evenings he can
+always say, 'Perhaps to-night's the night when she'll listen.' But
+once you listen intelligently and really understand, he's through with
+you, and he'll quit you for some pink-cheeked ignoramus who hasn't
+heard about it yet."
+
+Marie Louise, being a woman, knew how to get her message to another
+woman; the way seems to be to talk right through her talk. The acute
+creatures have ears to hear with and mouths to talk with, and they
+apparently find no difficulty in using both at the same time.
+Somewhere along about the middle of Polly's discourse Marie Louise
+began to answer it before it was finished. Why should she wait when
+she knew what was coming? So she said contemporaneously and
+covocally:
+
+"But I'm not going to marry a ship-builder, my dear. Don't be absurd!
+I'm not planning to take an intelligent interest in Mr. Davidge's
+business. I'm planning to take an intelligent interest in my own. I'm
+going to be a ship-builder myself, and I want to learn the A B C's."
+
+They finished that argument at the same time and went on together down
+the next stretch in a perfect team:
+
+"Oh, well of course, if            "Mr. Davidge tells me,"
+that's the case," asserted         Marie Louise explained, "that
+Polly, "then you're quite          women are needed in ship-
+crazy--unless you're simply        building, and that anybody
+hunting for a new sensation.       can learn. In fact, every-
+And on that score I'll admit       body has to, anyway; so
+that it sounds rather interest-    I've got as good a chance as
+ing. I may take a whack at         a man. I'm as strong as a
+it myself. I'm quite fed up        horse. Fine! Come along,
+on bandages and that sort of       and we'll build a U-boat
+thing. Get me a job in the         chaser together. Mr. Davidge
+same factory or whatever           would be delighted to
+they call it. Will you?"           have you, I'm sure."
+
+This was arrant hubbub to the mere man who was not capable of carrying
+on a conversation except by the slow, primitive methods of Greek
+drama, strophe and antistrophe, one talking while the other listened,
+then _vice versa_.
+
+So he had time to remember that he had something to remember, and to
+dig it up. He broke in on the dialogue:
+
+"By the way, that reminds me, Marie Louise. There's a man in town
+looking for you."
+
+"Looking for me!" Marie Louise gasped, alert as an antelope at once.
+"What was his name?"
+
+"I can't seem to recall it. I'll have it in a minute. He didn't
+impress me very favorably, so I didn't tell him you were living with
+us."
+
+Polly turned on Tom: "Come along, you poor nut! I hate riddles, and so
+does Marie Louise."
+
+"That's it!" Tom cried. "_Riddle--Nuddle_. His name is Nuddle. Do you
+know a man named Nuddle?"
+
+The name conveyed nothing to Marie Louise except a suspicion that Mr.
+Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.
+
+"What was his nationality?" she asked. "English?"
+
+"I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of pungkin pie."
+
+Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When Widdicombe
+asked what message he should take back her curiosity led her to brave
+her fate and know the worst:
+
+"Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon--no, not
+before five. I have some shopping to do, and the servants to engage."
+
+She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint conveyed
+in Marie Louise's remark as they left the dining-room, "I've a little
+telephoning to do."
+
+Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of telephoning.
+
+Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps,
+for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He
+wondered what had become of Marie Louise.
+
+Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie
+Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly
+got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at
+Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that
+they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her
+eyes.
+
+She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled
+toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before.
+That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and
+children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and
+drawn the face in new lines.
+
+Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the
+poignant call:
+
+"Mamise!"
+
+That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and
+it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician's
+"Abracadabra!"
+
+Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her
+sister's charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking
+matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her
+arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it
+needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: "Abbie darling! My
+darling Abbie!" while Abbie wept: "Mamise! Oh, my poor little
+Mamise!"
+
+A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake
+Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he
+looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim,
+round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife's arms for a
+sister-in-law.
+
+Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and
+tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the
+matrimonial lottery.
+
+"Mamise!" she said. "I want you should meet my husbin'."
+
+"I'm delighted!" said Mamise, before she saw her sister's fate. She
+was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock
+without reeling.
+
+Jake's hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his
+cordiality was sincere as he growled:
+
+"Pleaster meecher, Mamise."
+
+He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call
+him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not
+instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle,
+and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and
+piece it together.
+
+Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked:
+
+"Where are you living--here in Washington?"
+
+"Laws, no!" said Abbie; and that reminded her of the bundles she had
+dropped at the sight of Mamise. They had played havoc with the
+sidewalk traffic, but she hurried to regain them.
+
+Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody looking who
+counted. So he checked his wife with amazement at the preposterousness
+of her carrying bundles while Sir Walter Raleigh was at hand. He
+picked them up and brought them to Marie Louise's feet, disgusted at
+the stupid amazement of his wife, who did not have sense enough to
+conceal it. Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance
+of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for noticing such
+things, but the eye is not to blame for what it can't help seeing, nor
+the ear for what is forced upon it. She had a feeling that the first
+thing to do was to get her sister in out of the rain of glances from
+the passers-by.
+
+"You must come to me at once," she said. "I've just taken a house.
+I've got no servants in yet, and you'll have to put up with it as it
+is."
+
+Abbie gasped at the "servants." She noted the authority with which
+Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed to the bundles, which he
+hastened to seize.
+
+Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile and showed
+it on her face. She saw many palaces on the way and expected Marie
+Louise to stop at any of them. When the car drew up at Marie Louise's
+home Abbie was bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she
+found her dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie's
+loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for
+picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This distress
+caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.
+
+Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent enough to take
+off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch himself out on a divan
+whose ulterior maroon did not disturb his repose in the least.
+
+"This is what I call something like," he said; and then, "And now,
+Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself."
+
+This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she evaded with a
+plea:
+
+"I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling. How are you,
+and how long have you been married, and where do you live?"
+
+"Goin' on eight years come next October, and we got three childern. I
+been right poorly lately. Don't seem to take as much interest in
+worshin' as I useter."
+
+"Washing!" Marie Louise exclaimed. "You don't wash, do you? That is, I
+mean to say--professionally?"
+
+"Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too."
+
+Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred thousand dollars, and
+her sister was a--washerwoman! It was intolerable. She glanced at
+Jake.
+
+"But Mr.--your husband--"
+
+"Oh, Jake, he works--off and on. But he ain't got what you might call
+a hankerin' for it. He can take work or let it alone. I can't say as
+much for him when it comes to licker. Fact is, some the women say,
+'Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do you ever--'"
+
+"Your name isn't--it isn't Nuddle, is it?" Marie Louise broke in.
+
+"Sure it is. What did you think it was?"
+
+So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer. That
+solved one of her day's puzzles and solved it very tamely. So many of
+life's mysteries, like so many of fiction's, peter out at the end.
+They don't sustain.
+
+Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation that
+believed it a husband's duty to support his wife by his own labor. The
+thought of her sister supporting a worthless husband by her own toil
+was odious. The first task was to get Jake to work. It was only
+natural that she should think of her own new mania.
+
+She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said: "I have it! Why
+doesn't your husband go in for ship-building?"
+
+Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge had said of the
+need of men. She was sure that she could get him a splendid job, and
+that Mr. Davidge would do anything for her.
+
+Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved, but a thought
+struck him, and he chewed it over. Among the gang of idealists he
+consorted with, or at least salooned with, the dearest ambition of all
+was to turn America's dream of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare
+of failure. In order to secure "just recognition" for the workman they
+would cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor--that
+was their ideal of labor.
+
+As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the
+shipyard Jake's interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing,
+and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off
+strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, to wreck
+launching-ways so that hulls that escaped all other attacks would
+crack through and stick--it was a Golconda of opportunities for this
+modern conquistador. He could hardly keep his face straight till he
+heard Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor; and
+when he asked, "Do you think your gentleman friend, this man Davidge,
+would really give me a job?" she cried, with more enthusiasm than
+tact:
+
+"I know he would. He'd give anybody a job. Besides, I'm going to take
+one myself. And, Abbie honey, what would you say to your becoming a
+ship-builder, too? It would be immensely easier and pleasanter than
+washing clothes."
+
+Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture of
+herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie peeked and
+whispered:
+
+"It's a man."
+
+"Do you suppose it's that feller Davidge?" said Jake.
+
+"No, it's--it's--somebody else," said Marie Louise, who knew who it
+was without looking.
+
+She was at her wit's end now. Nicky Easton was at the door, and a
+sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she had not suspected were
+in the parlor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+If anything is anybody's very own, it is surely his past, or
+hers--particularly hers. But Nicky Easton was bringing one of the most
+wretched chapters of Marie Louise's past to her very door. She did not
+want to reopen it, especially not before her new-found family. One
+likes to have a few illusions left for these reunions. So she said:
+
+"Abbie darling, would you forgive me if I saw this--person alone?
+Besides, you'll be wanting to get settled in your room, if Mr.--Ja--your
+husband doesn't mind taking your things up."
+
+Abbie had not been used to taking dismissals graciously. She had never
+been to court and been permitted to retire. Besides, people who know
+how to take an eviction gracefully usually know enough to get out
+before they are put out. But Abbie had to be pushed, and she went,
+heartbroken, disgraced, resentful. Jake sulked after her. They moved
+like a couple of old flea-bitten mongrels spoken to sharply.
+
+And of course they stole back to the head of the stairs and listened.
+
+Nicky had his face made up for a butler, or at least a maid. When he
+saw Marie Louise he had to undo his features, change his opening
+oration, and begin all over again.
+
+"It is zhoo yourself, then," he said.
+
+"Yes. Come in, do. I have no servants yet."
+
+"Ah!" he cooed, encouraged at once.
+
+She squelched his hopes. "My sister and her husband are here,
+however."
+
+This astounded him so that he spoke in two languages at once: "Your
+schwister! Since how long do you have a sester? And where did you
+get?"
+
+"I have always had her, but we haven't seen each other for years."
+
+He gasped, "_Was Sie nicht sagen_!"
+
+"And if you wouldn't mind not talking German--"
+
+"_Recht so_. Excuse. Do I come in--no?"
+
+She stepped back, and he went into the drawing-room. He smiled at what
+he saw, and was polite, if cynical.
+
+"You rent foornished?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He waved her to a chair so that he might sit down.
+
+"_Was giebt's neues_--er--what is the noose?"
+
+"I have none. What is yours?"
+
+"You mean you do not wish to tell. If I should commence once, I should
+never stop. But we are both alife yet. That is always somethink. I was
+never so nearly not."
+
+Marie Louise could not withhold the protest:
+
+"You saved yourself by betraying your friends."
+
+"Well, I telled--I told only what the English knew already. If they
+let me go for it, it was no use to kill everybody, should I?"
+
+He was rather miserable about it, for he could see that she despised
+him more for being an informer than for having something to inform. He
+pleaded in extenuation:
+
+"But I shall show how usefool I can be to my country. Those English
+shall be sorry to let me go, and my people glad. And so shall you."
+
+She studied him, and dreaded him, loathing his claim on her, longing
+to order him never to speak again to her, yet strangely interested in
+his future power for evil. The thought occurred to her that if she
+could learn his new schemes she might thwart them. That would be some
+atonement for what she had not prevented before. This inspiration
+brightened her so suddenly and gave such an eagerness to her manner
+that he saw the light and grew suspicious--a spy has to be, for he
+carries a weapon that has only one cartridge in it.
+
+Marie Louise waited for him to explain his purpose till the suspense
+began to show; then she said, bluntly:
+
+"What mischief are you up to now?"
+
+"Mitschief--me?" he asked, all innocently.
+
+"You said you wanted to see me."
+
+"I always want to see you. You interest--my eyes--my heart--"
+
+"Please don't." She said it with the effect of slamming a door.
+
+She looked him full in the eyes angrily, then remembered her
+curiosity. He saw her gaze waver with a double motive.
+
+It is strange how people can fence with their glances, as if they were
+emanations from the eyes instead of mere reflections of light back and
+forth. But however it is managed, this man and this woman played their
+stares like two foils feeling for an opening. At length he surrendered
+and resolved to appeal:
+
+"How do you feel about--about us?"
+
+"Who are us?"
+
+"We Germans."
+
+"We are not Germans. I'm American."
+
+"Then England is your greater enemy than Germany."
+
+She wanted to smile at that, but she said:
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+He pleaded for his cause. "America ought not to have joined the war
+against the _Vaterland_. It is only a few Americans--bankers who
+lended money to England--who wish to fight us."
+
+Up-stairs Jake's heart bounded. Here was a fellow-spirit. He listened
+for Marie Louise's response; he caught the doubt in her tone. She
+could not stomach such an absurdity:
+
+"Bosh!" she said.
+
+It sounded like "Boche!" And Nicky flushed.
+
+"You have been in this Washington town too long. I think I shall go
+now."
+
+Marie Louise made no objection. She had not found out what he was up
+to, but she was sick of duplicity, sick of the sight of him and all he
+stood for. She did not even ask him to come again. She went to the
+door with him and stood there a moment, long enough for the man who
+was shadowing Nicky to identify her. She watched Nicky go and hoped
+that she had seen the last of him. But up-stairs the great heart of
+Jake Nuddle was seething with excitement. He ran to the front window,
+caught a glimpse of Nicky, and hurried back down the stairs.
+
+Abbie called out, "Where you goin'?"
+
+Jake did not answer such a meddlesome question, but he said to Marie
+Louise, as he brushed past her on the stairs:
+
+"I'm going to the drug-store to git me some cigars."
+
+Nicky paused on the curb, looking for a cab. He had dismissed his own,
+hoping to spend a long while with Marie Louise. He saw that he was
+not likely to pick up a cab in such a side-street, and so he walked on
+briskly.
+
+He was furious with Marie Louise. He had had hopes of her, and she had
+fooled him. These Americans were no longer dependable.
+
+And then he heard footsteps on the walk, quick footsteps that spelled
+hurry. Nicky drew aside to let the speeder pass; but instead he heard
+a constabular "Hay!" and his shoulder-blades winced.
+
+It was only Jake Nuddle. Jake had no newspaper to sell, but he had an
+idea for a collaboration which would bring him some of that easy money
+the Germans were squandering like drunken sailors.
+
+"You was just talkin' to my sister-in-law," said Jake.
+
+"Ah, you are then the brother of Marie Louise?"
+
+"Yep, and I couldn't help hearin' a little of what passed between
+you."
+
+Jake's slyness had a detective-like air in Nicky's anxious eyes. He
+warned himself to be on guard. Jake said:
+
+"I'm for Germany unanimous. I think it's a rotten shame for America to
+go into this war. And some of us Americans are sayin' we won't stand
+for it. We don't own no Congersmen; we're only the protelarriat, as
+the feller says; but we're goin' to put this country on the bum, and
+that's what old Kaiser Bill wants we should do, or I miss my guess,
+hay?"
+
+Nicky was cautious:
+
+"How do you propose to help the All Highest?"
+
+"Sabotodge."
+
+"You interest me," said Nicky.
+
+They had come to one of the circles that moon the plan of Washington.
+Nicky motioned Jake to a bench, where they could command the approach
+and be, like good children, seen and not heard. Jake outlined his
+plan.
+
+When Nicky Easton had rung Marie Louise's bell he had not imagined how
+much help Marie Louise would render him in giving him the precious
+privilege of meeting her unprepossessing brother-in-law; nor had she
+dreamed what peril she was preparing for Davidge in planning to secure
+for him and his shipyard the services of this same Jake, as lazy and
+as amiable as any side-winder rattlesnake that ever basked in the
+sunlit sand.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+AT THE SHIPYARD
+
+[Illustration: There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It
+had a cathedral majesty.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Davidge despised a man who broke his contracts. He broke one with
+himself and despised himself. He broke his contract to ignore the
+existence of Marie Louise. The next time he came to Washington he
+sought her out. He called up the Widdicombe home and learned that she
+had moved. She had no telephone yet, for it took a vast amount of time
+to get any but a governmental telephone installed. So he noted her
+address, and after some hesitation decided to call. If she did not
+want to see him, her butler could tell him that she was out.
+
+He called. Marie Louise had tried in vain to get in servants who would
+stay. Abbie talked to them familiarly--and so did Jake. The virtuous
+ones left because of Jake, and the others left because of Abbie.
+
+So Abbie went to the door when Davidge called. He supposed that the
+butler was having a day off and the cook was answering the bell. He
+offered his card to Abbie.
+
+She wiped her hand on her apron and took it, then handed it back to
+him, saying:
+
+"You'll have to read it. I ain't my specs."
+
+Davidge said, "Please ask Miss Webling if she can see Mr. Davidge."
+
+"You're not Mr. Davidge!" Abbie gasped, remembering the importance
+Marie Louise gave him.
+
+"Yes," said Davidge, with proper modesty.
+
+"Well, I want to know!"
+
+Abbie wiped her hand again and thrust it forward, seizing his
+questioning fingers in a practised clench, and saying, "Come right on
+in and seddown." She haled the befuddled Davidge to a chair and
+regarded him with beaming eyes. He regarded her with the eyes of
+astonishment--and the ears, too, for the amazing servant, forever
+wiping her hands, went to the stairs and shrieked:
+
+"Mamee-eese! Oh, Ma-mee-uz! Mist' Davidge is shere."
+
+Poor Mamise! She had to come down upon such a scene, and without
+having had any chance to break the news that she had a sister she had
+to introduce the sister. She had no chance to explain her till a
+fortunate whiff of burning pastry led Abbie to groan, "My Lord, them
+pies!" and flee.
+
+If ever Marie Louise had been guilty of snobbery, she was doing
+penance for it now. She was too loyal to what her family ought to have
+been and was not to apologize for Abbie, but she suffered in a social
+purgatory.
+
+Worse yet, she had to ask Davidge to give her brother-in-law a job.
+And Davidge said he would. He said it before he saw Jake. And when he
+saw him, though he did not like him, he did not guess what treachery
+the fellow planned. He invited him to come to the shipyard--by train.
+
+He invited Mamise to ride thither in her own car the next day to see
+his laboratory for ships, never dreaming that the German menace was
+already planning its destruction.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in perplexities
+that one question and one answer would put an end to. In real life we
+incessantly dread to ask the answers to conundrums that we cannot
+solve, and persist in misery for lack of a little frankness.
+
+For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a torment. So
+stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter! Yet he was unable to
+bring himself to the point of solving his curiosity. The car had
+covered forty miles, perhaps, while his thoughts ran back and forth,
+lacing the road like a dog accompanying a carriage. A mental
+speedometer would have run up a hundred miles before he made the
+plunge and popped the subject.
+
+"Mamise is an unusual name," he remarked.
+
+Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that his long
+silence had been devoted to her.
+
+"Like it?" she asked.
+
+"You bet." The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and made her
+laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred yards of road that went
+up and down and up and down in huge billows. Then he broke out again:
+
+"It's an unusual name."
+
+She laughed patiently. "So I've heard."
+
+The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.
+
+"I only knew one other--er--Mamise."
+
+This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique. The chill woods
+seemed to be rather glum about it, too. The road abandoned them and
+flung into a sun-bathed plain.
+
+"Really? You really knew another--er--Mamise?"
+
+"Yes. Years ago."
+
+"Was she nice?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"Oh!" She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped across a
+loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some jealousy she asked,
+"What was she like?"
+
+"You."
+
+"That's odd." A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard glided by,
+reverting to oblivion. "Tell me about her."
+
+A big motor charged past so fast that the passengers were only blurs,
+a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping
+veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the
+road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant
+travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful
+prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence.
+
+"It was funny," said Davidge. "I was younger than I am. I went to a
+show one night. A musical team played that everlasting 'Poet and
+Peasant' on the xylophones. They played nearly everything on nearly
+everything--same old stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jokes
+by the same fool clown and the solemn dubs. But they had a girl with
+'em--a young thing. She didn't play very well. She had a way with her,
+though--seemed kind of disgusted with life and the rest of the troupe
+and the audience. And she had a right to be disgusted, for she was as
+pretty as--I don't know what. She was just beautiful--slim and limber
+and long--what you might imagine a nymph would look like if she got
+loose in a music-hall.
+
+"I was crazy about her. If I could ever have written a poem about
+anybody, it would have been about her. She struck me as something sort
+of--well, divine. She wore the usual, and not much of it--low neck,
+bare arms, and--tights. But I kind of revered her; she was so dog-on
+pretty.
+
+"When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan for true.
+I couldn't rest till I saw the manager and asked him to take me back
+and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty grin and said he didn't
+run that kind of a theater, and I said I'd knock his face off if he
+thought I thought he did. Well, he gave in finally and took me back. I
+fell down the side-aisle steps and sprawled along the back of the
+boxes and stumbled up the steps to the stage.
+
+"And then I met Mamise--that was her name on the program--Mamise. She
+was pretty and young as ever, but she wasn't a nymph any longer. She
+was just a young, painted thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was
+feeding a big monkey--a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a
+bicycle and smoking a cigar--getting ready to go on the stage.
+
+"It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful,
+that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said,
+'Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.' She
+looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me,
+and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in
+the big electric lights.
+
+"She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I
+agreed with her then--and since. She said, 'Much obliged' in a
+contemptuous contralto and--and turned to the other monkey.
+
+"The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down
+a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her
+at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I
+never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric
+lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric
+lights in my--my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She
+may be dead now.
+
+"It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance
+of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more
+comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came
+along she--well, as she didn't, she must have been a good girl, don't
+you suppose?"
+
+The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an
+endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and stacks of corn, with
+pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal
+sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.
+
+"What do you call a good girl?" she asked.
+
+"That's a hard question to answer nowadays."
+
+"Why nowadays?"
+
+"Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas
+of girls are so much more--complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said,
+that's my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can
+you forgive her for wearing your name?"
+
+"I could forgive that Mamise anything," she sighed. "But this Mamise I
+can't forgive at all."
+
+This puzzled him. "I don't quite get that."
+
+She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what
+helpless writers call "a shady dell"; its tenderness won from him a
+timid confession.
+
+"You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as
+can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other."
+
+"Somehow we are each other."
+
+He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance
+from the road. She was blushing.
+
+He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, "It's a small world,
+after all." He nearly swung to the other extreme. "Well, I'll be--" He
+settled like a dying pendulum on, "Well--well!" They both laughed, and
+he put out his hand. "Pleased to meet you again."
+
+She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.
+
+The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep
+cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine
+stopped. The car sailed softly.
+
+He was eager for news of the years between then and now. It was so
+wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have
+evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the
+working of such social machinery. He urged:
+
+"Tell me all about yourself."
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"But what happened to you after I saw you? You don't remember me, of
+course."
+
+"I remember the monkey."
+
+They both laughed at the unconscious brutality of this. He turned
+solemn and asked:
+
+"You mean that so many men came back to call on you?"
+
+"No, not so many--too many, but not many. But--well, the monkey was
+more unusual, I suppose. He traveled with us several weeks. He was
+very jealous. He had a fight with a big trained dog that I petted
+once. They nearly killed each other before they could be separated.
+And such noises as they made! I can hear them yet. The manager of the
+monkey wanted to marry me. I was unhappy with my team, but I hated
+that man--he was such a cruel beast with the monkey that supported
+him. He'd have beaten me, too, I suppose, and made me support him."
+
+Davidge sighed with relief as if her escape had been just a moment
+before instead of years ago.
+
+"Lord! I'm glad you didn't marry him! But tell me what did happen
+after I saw you."
+
+The road led them into a sizable town, street-car tracks, bad
+pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like
+chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks
+well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil
+War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, and the
+country again.
+
+Davidge noted that she had not answered his question. He repeated it:
+
+"What happened after you and the monkey-trainer parted?"
+
+"Oh, years later I was in Berlin with a team called the Musical Mokes,
+and Sir Joseph and Lady Webling saw me and thought I looked like their
+daughter, and they adopted me--that's all."
+
+She had grown a bit weary of her autobiography. Abbie had made her
+tell it over and over, but had tried in vain to find out what went on
+between her stage-beginnings and her last appearance in Berlin.
+
+Davidge was fascinated by her careless summary of such great events;
+for to one in love, all biography of the beloved becomes important
+history. But having seen her as a member of Sir Joseph's household, he
+was more interested in the interregnum.
+
+"But between your reaching Berlin and the time I saw you what
+happened?"
+
+"That's my business."
+
+She saw him wince at the abrupt discourtesy of this. She apologized:
+
+"I don't mean to be rude, but--well, it wouldn't interest you."
+
+"Oh yes, it would. Don't tell me if you don't want to, but--"
+
+"But--"
+
+"Oh, nothing!"
+
+"You mean you'll think that if I don't tell you it's because I'm
+ashamed to."
+
+"Oh no, not at all."
+
+"Oh yes, at all. Well, what if I were?"
+
+"I can't imagine your having done anything to be ashamed of."
+
+"O Lord! Am I as stupid as that comes to?"
+
+"No! But I mean, you couldn't have done anything to be really ashamed
+of."
+
+"That's what I mean. I've done numberless things I'd give my right arm
+not to have done."
+
+"I mean really wicked things."
+
+"Such as--"
+
+"Oh--well, I mean being bad."
+
+"Woman-bad or man-bad?"
+
+"Bad for a woman."
+
+"So what's bad for one is not bad for another."
+
+"Well, not exactly, but there is a difference."
+
+"If I told you that I had been very, very wicked in those mysterious
+years, would it seem important to you?"
+
+"Of course! Horribly! It couldn't help it, if a man cared much for a
+woman."
+
+"And if a woman cared a lot for a man, ought it to make a difference
+what he had done before he met her?"
+
+"Well, of course--but that's different."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, because it is."
+
+"Men say 'Because!' too, I see."
+
+"It's just shorthand with us. It means you know it so well there's no
+need of explaining."
+
+"Oh! Well, if you--I say, _if_ you were very much in love with me--"
+
+"Which I--"
+
+"Don't be odiously polite. I'm arguing, not fishing. If you were
+deeply in love with me, would it make a good deal of difference to you
+if several years ago I had been--oh, loose?"
+
+"It would break my heart."
+
+Marie Louise liked him the better for this, but she held to her
+argument.
+
+"All right. Now, still supposing that we loved each other, ought I
+to inquire of you if the man of my possible choice had been
+perfectly--well, spotless, all that time? Ought I expect that he was
+saving himself up for me, feeling himself engaged to me, you might
+say, long before he met me, and keeping perfectly true to his
+future fiancee--ought I to expect that?"
+
+He flushed a little as he mumbled:
+
+"Hardly!"
+
+She laughed a trifle bitterly:
+
+"So we're there already?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"At the double standard. What's crime for the goose is pastime for the
+gander."
+
+He did not intend to give up man's ancient prerogative.
+
+"Well, it's better to have almost any standard than none, isn't it?"
+
+"I wonder."
+
+"The single standard is better than the sixteen to one--silver for men
+and gold for women."
+
+"Perhaps! But you men seem to believe in a sixteen to none. Mind you,
+I'm not saying I've been bad."
+
+"I knew you couldn't have been."
+
+"Oh yes, I could have been--I'm not saying I wasn't. I'm not saying
+anything at all. I'm saying that it's nobody's business but my own."
+
+"Even your future husband has no right to know?"
+
+"None whatever. He has the least right of all, and he'd better not try
+to find out."
+
+"You women are changing things!"
+
+"We have to, if we're going to live among men. When you're in
+Rome--"
+
+"You're going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?"
+
+"We've always done that more or less, and nobody ever could stop us,
+from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of
+women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with
+liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women
+went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about
+all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained
+that with all our modern science we hadn't invented one new deadly
+sin. We go on using the same old seven--well, indecencies. It will be
+the same with women. It's bound to be. You can't keep women unfree.
+You've simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and
+it's dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better
+than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they
+will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I
+fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old
+Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed
+circus to-day.
+
+"When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or
+committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social
+success, as the case might be. She'll go on doing much the same--just
+as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others
+go right along about their business, whether it's in a bank, a church,
+a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.
+
+"But in the new marriage--for marriage is really changing, though the
+marrying people are the same old folks--in the new marriage a man must
+do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better
+or worse and no questions asked."
+
+He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with.
+"In other words, we'll take our women as is."
+
+"That's the expression--_as is_. A man will take his sweetheart 'as
+is' or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she'll
+get along somehow."
+
+"The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?"
+
+"That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one,
+and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old
+times and the Middle Ages and nowadays, and there'll be all kinds
+forever. But we're wrangling like a pair of lovers instead of getting
+along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances."
+
+"Aren't we going to be more than that?"
+
+"I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I'm not asking for a job
+as your wife."
+
+"You can have it."
+
+"Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the
+world and can support you in the style you're accustomed to, I may
+come and ask for your hand."
+
+Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew
+more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has
+some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did
+not often argue abstrusely, and she was already fagged out mentally.
+She broke off the debate.
+
+"Now let's think of something else, if you don't mind."
+
+They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in
+alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite
+of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him
+in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between
+his first sight of her and his second.
+
+In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of
+mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still
+pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached
+the town where his shipyard lay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess
+of land and riverscape--a large steel shed, a bewilderment of
+scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that
+were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of
+machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty
+water.
+
+A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the
+neighborhood were numbers of workmen's huts--some finished, and long
+rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of
+raw biscuits.
+
+She saw it all as it was, with a stranger's eyes. Davidge saw it with
+the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly
+accepting future possibilities as realities.
+
+Davidge said, with repressed pride:
+
+"Well, thar she blows!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"My shipyard!" This with depressed pride.
+
+"Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!" This with forced enthusiasm.
+
+"You don't like it," he groaned.
+
+"I'm crazy about it."
+
+"If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and weeds and
+mud-holes and sluices you'd appreciate what we've reclaimed and the
+work that has been done."
+
+The motor pitched down a badly bruised road.
+
+"Where's the ship that's nearly done--your mother's ship?"
+
+"Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding."
+
+"Don't tell me there's a ship in there!"
+
+"Yep, and she's just bursting to come out."
+
+They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if a bottle of
+beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough to blow off the froth
+would blow him over.
+
+Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the ship that
+Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did not believe Marie
+Louise ready to understand it.
+
+"Let's begin at the beginning," he said. "See those railroad tracks
+over there? Well, that's where the timber comes from the forests and
+the steel from the mills. Now we'll see what happens to 'em in the
+shop."
+
+He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that
+could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it
+across the long room like a captured beetle.
+
+"Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It's our dressmaking-shop. We lay down
+the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact
+size, and then make templates of wood to match--those are the
+patterns. It's something like making a gown, I suppose."
+
+"I see," said Marie Louise. "Then you fit the dress together out in
+the yard."
+
+"Exactly," said Davidge. "You've mastered the whole thing already.
+It's a long climb up there. Will you try it?"
+
+"Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-'ems
+first."
+
+She watched the men at work, each group about its own machine, like
+priests at their various altars. Davidge explained to her the cruncher
+that manicured thick plates of steel sheets as if they were
+finger-nails, or beveled their edges; the puncher that needled
+rivet-holes through them as if they were silk, the ingenious Lysholm
+tables with rollers for tops.
+
+Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop, understanding
+nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden to touch anything. In her
+ignorance of technical matters, the simplest device was miraculous.
+The whole place was a vast laboratory of mysteries and magic.
+
+There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a
+cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for
+the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries
+were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They
+chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she
+them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness,
+another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and
+so did she, but embarrassment caused a common silence.
+
+On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established
+they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to
+make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and
+coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of
+people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction.
+
+Marie Louise's response to the mood of the place was conversion, a
+passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments
+of toil and wield the--she did not even know the names of the tools.
+She only knew that they were sacred implements.
+
+She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this
+world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old
+space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to
+be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation.
+
+As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting
+which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh
+intolerable staccato.
+
+Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull
+they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution
+across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the
+ship.
+
+In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening
+in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against
+reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman
+velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own
+inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.
+
+"That's the great Sutton," Davidge remarked, presently. "He's our
+prima donna. He's the champion riveter of this part of the country.
+Like to meet him?"
+
+Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to
+the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the
+muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.
+
+Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn.
+Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the
+impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere
+manager.
+
+Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:
+
+"Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling."
+
+Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion
+confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his
+muscles a little tauter.
+
+Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a
+rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared
+not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked,
+stupidly:
+
+"So that's a riveter?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," Sutton confessed, "this is a riveter."
+
+"Oh!" said Marie Louise.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was
+as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value,
+since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a
+rivetress.
+
+She said, "Thank you," and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up
+his work again, as a man does after a woman has passed by, pretending
+to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.
+
+At a distance Davidge paused to say: "He's a great card, Sutton. He
+gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he's my
+ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the
+traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in
+being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal
+laborers have only one ideal--to do the least possible work and earn
+enough to loaf most of the time."
+
+Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle's principles and wondered
+if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge's
+pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he
+would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded
+short hours for his conspiracies.
+
+At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave
+her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He
+led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps
+of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very
+important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She
+saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat
+sheet of perforated steel--the homeliest contraption imaginable.
+
+"Whatever is all this," she asked,--"the beginning of a bridge?"
+
+"Yes and no. It's the beginning of part of the bridge we're building
+across the Atlantic."
+
+"I don't believe that I quite follow you."
+
+"This is the keel of a ship."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yep!"
+
+"And was the _Clara_ like this once?"
+
+"No. _Clara's_ an old-fashioned creature like mother. This is a
+newfangled thing like--like you."
+
+"Like me! This isn't--"
+
+"This is to be the _Mamise_."
+
+She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.
+
+"I must confess she's not very beautiful to start with."
+
+"Neither were you at first, I suppose. I--I beg your pardon. I
+mean--"
+
+He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated ships, the
+standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture at distances by
+various steel plants, the absence of curved lines, the advantage of
+all the sacrifice of the old art for the new speed.
+
+In spite of what she had read she could not make his information her
+own. And yet it was thrilling to look at. She broke out:
+
+"I've just got to learn how to build ships. It's the one thing on
+earth that will make me happy."
+
+"Then I'll have to get it for you."
+
+"You mean it?"
+
+"If anything I could do could make you happy--cutting off my right
+arm, or--"
+
+"That's no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I'm wretchedly
+unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy, are most of us just where
+boys are when they have outgrown boyhood and haven't reached
+manhood--when they are crazy to be at something, and can't even decide
+where to begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to
+work. Here's my job, and I want it!"
+
+He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him, and he
+smiled. She protested:
+
+"I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the roughest sort
+of farmwork. I'm stronger than I look. I think I'd rather play one of
+those rat-tat-tat instruments than--than a harp in New Jerusalem."
+
+Davidge shook his head. "I'm afraid you're not quite strong enough. It
+takes a lot of power to hold the gun against the hull. The compressed
+air kicks and shoves so hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton
+himself has all he can do to keep alive."
+
+"Give me a hammer, then, and let me--smite something."
+
+"Don't you think you'd rather begin in the office? You could learn the
+business there first. Besides, I don't like the thought of your
+roughing up those beautiful hands of yours."
+
+"If men would only quit trying to keep women's hands soft and clean,
+the world would be the better for it."
+
+"Well, come down and learn the business first--you'd be nearer me."
+
+She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical
+left hook:
+
+"But you'd teach me ship-building?"
+
+"I'd rather teach you home-building."
+
+"If you mean a home on the bounding main, I'll get right to work."
+
+He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and he took her to
+the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled by her own ignorance of
+what had come to be the most important of all knowledge.
+
+She sighed. "I've always been such a smatterer. I never have really
+known anything about anything. Most women are so astonishingly
+ignorant and indifferent about the essentials of men's life."
+
+She secretly resolved that she would study some of the basic
+principles of male existence--bookkeeping, drafting, letter-writing,
+filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new mischief to take a
+course of business instruction on the sly and report for duty not as
+an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress in office practice. It was at
+least a refreshing novelty in duplicity.
+
+She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy. The old
+song, "Trust Her Not--She Is Fooling Thee," occurred to her in a
+fantastic parody: "Trust her not--she is fooling thee; she is
+clandestine at the business college; she is leading a double-entry
+life. She writes you in longhand, but she is studying shorthand. She
+is getting to be very fast--on the typewriter."
+
+Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not divulge her
+plot. She was impatient to spring it. She wondered if in a week she
+could learn all she had to learn--if she worked hard. It would be
+rather pleasant to sit at his desk-leaf and take dictation from
+him--confidential letters that he would intrust to no one else,
+letters written in a whisper and full of dark references. She hoped
+she could learn stenographic velocity in a few days.
+
+As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the workmen's
+shanties.
+
+"If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new bungalettes?"
+
+"Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town."
+
+"I'm sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next war millions
+of women will live in tents the way the men do. Those shanties would
+be considered palaces in Belgium and northern France. In fact, any
+number of women are over there now building huts for the poor souls."
+
+Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not understand such a
+twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not want jewels and luxuries and
+a life of wealthy ease. Her only interest in him seemed to be that he
+would let her live in a shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day
+for union wages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+An eloquent contrast with Marie Louise was furnished by Jake Nuddle.
+He was of the ebb type. He was degenerating into a shirker, a
+destroyer, a money-maniac, a complainer of other men's successes. His
+labor was hardly more than a foundation for blackmailing. He loved no
+country, had not even a sense of following the crowd. He called the
+Star-spangled Banner a dirty rag, and he wanted to wipe his feet on
+it. He was useless, baneful, doomed.
+
+Marie Louise was coming into a new Canaan. What she wanted was work
+for the work's sake, to be building something and thereby building
+herself, to be helping her country forward, to be helping mankind,
+poor and rich. The sight of the flag made her heart ache with a
+rapture of patriotism. She had the urge to march with an army.
+
+Marie Louise was on the up grade, Jake on the down. They met at the
+gate of the shipyard.
+
+Jake and Abbie had come over by train. Jake was surly in his tone to
+Davidge. His first question was, "Where do we live?"
+
+Marie Louise answered, "In one of those quaint little cottages."
+
+Jake frowned before he looked. He was one of those who hate before
+they see, feel nausea before they taste, condemn the unknown, the
+unheard, the unoffending.
+
+By the time Jake's eyes had found the row of shanties his frown was a
+splendid thing.
+
+"Quaint little hog-pens!" he growled. "Is this company the same as all
+the rest--treatin' its slaves like swine?"
+
+Davidge knew the type. For the sake of Marie Louise he restrained his
+first impulses and spoke with amiable acidity:
+
+"There are better houses in town, some of them very handsome."
+
+"Yah--but what rent?"
+
+"Rather expensive. Rather distant, too, but you can make it easily in
+an automobile."
+
+"Where would I git a nautomobile?"
+
+"I can introduce you to the man who sold me mine."
+
+"How would I get the price?"
+
+"Just where I did."
+
+"Whurr's that?"
+
+"Oh, all over the place. I used to be a common unskilled laborer like
+you. And now I own a good part of this business. Thousands of men who
+began poorer than I did are richer than I am. The road's just as open
+to you as to me."
+
+Jake had plenty of answers for this. He had memorized numbers of them
+from the tracts; but also he had plans that would not be furthered by
+quarreling with Davidge the first day. He could do Davidge most harm
+by obeying him and outwardly catering to him. He solaced his pride
+with a thought of what Davidge's business would look like when he got
+through with it.
+
+He laughed: "All right, boss. I was just beefin', for the fun of
+beefin'. Them shanties suit me elegant."
+
+Then his fool wife had to go and bust in, "Oh, Jake, if you would do
+like Mr. Davidge done, and git rich and live easy!"
+
+Jake gave her a pantomimic rebuke that reduced her to a pulpy
+silence.
+
+Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie's spirits a little by saying
+that she herself was coming down to work and to live in one of those
+very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as hopeless. Why any one should
+want to leave a house like what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and
+no call to lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get
+somebody to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a
+squatter and actually work--well, it did beat all how foolish some
+folks could be in the world nowadays.
+
+Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves. She had to
+get back to Washington. Davidge had planned to go with her, but a
+long-distance telephone-call, and a visit from a group of prospective
+strikers, and a warning that a consignment of long-expected machinery
+had not yet arrived, took him out of the car. He was tempted to go
+with Marie Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his
+business for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old
+Wakefield phrase, "If I don't see you again, hello!"
+
+She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her thoughts smoked
+through her brain like a dust-cloud of shining particles, each radiant
+atom a great idea. The road home was through the sky; the villages and
+groves were vague pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of
+sunlight, the ridges rainbows.
+
+It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries of
+stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some of the people
+that practised the art. She would study ship-building, and drafting,
+too. Her water-color landscapes had been highly praised by certain
+young men and old ladies in England. She would learn how to keep her
+own bank-account and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light
+bookkeeping; and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium so
+that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one. She would offer
+her home in Washington for rent. With the mobs pouring in, it would
+not be untenanted long.
+
+Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after she reached
+home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her
+mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying
+rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered.
+With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.
+
+Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who
+wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would
+not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard,
+and that was always to-morrow--the movable to-morrow which like the
+horizon is always just beyond.
+
+She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In
+arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten,
+and it was not easy to recapture it.
+
+On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a
+new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system
+with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her
+deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will
+at all.
+
+Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in
+shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature as: "Dear
+customer,--Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would
+say--"
+
+At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the
+pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them
+increased to a respect verging on awe.
+
+They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back hair with the
+free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the keyboard like rain,
+and their letters were exquisitely neat. They had studied for a long
+time, and had acquired proficiency. And it is no easy thing to acquire
+proficiency in any task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or
+moving armies.
+
+Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not know how
+to spell some of the simplest words. When she wrote with running pen
+she never stopped to spell. She just sketched the words and let them
+go. She wrote, "I beleive I recieved," so that nobody could tell _e_
+from _i_; and she put the dot where it might apply to either. Her
+punctuation was all dashes.
+
+The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word stood out in
+its stark reality, howling "Illiterate!" at her. Her punctuation
+simply would not do.
+
+Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an
+ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an invitation to a street-car
+conductors' dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection, while Marie
+Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under the criticisms of her
+teacher. She was back in school again, the dunce of the class, and
+abject discouragements alternated with spurts of zeal.
+
+In the mean while the United States was also learning the rudiments of
+war and the enormous office-practice it required. Before the war was
+over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000 officers in February, 1917,
+would be an army of over 3,000,000, and of these over 2,000,000 would
+have been carried to Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of
+these would be killed to Russia's 1,700,000 dead, Germany's 1,600,000,
+France's 1,385,000, England's 706,200, Italy's 406,000, and Belgium's
+102,000. The wounded Americans would be three times the total present
+army. Everybody was ignorant, blunderful. Externally and internally
+the United States was as busy as a trampled ant-hill.
+
+Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies made drives;
+the financiers made drives; the charities made drives. The world-heart
+was never so driven. And this was all on top of the ordinary human
+suffering, which did not abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth
+ached just as fiercely; jealousy was just as sickly green; empires
+crackled; people starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army
+after army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated atom
+in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.
+
+Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She was lonely,
+love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally ashamed of her
+general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington's infamous hot weeks
+supervened. In the daytime the heat stung like a cat-o'-nine-tails.
+The nights were suffocation. She "slept," gasping as a fish flounders
+on dry land. After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for
+rest, the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had
+come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of drudgery at the
+loathly necessities of her stupid work.
+
+Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees the
+mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, "That is my goal!" But
+the feet must cross every ditch, wade every swamp, scramble across
+every ledge. The peak is the harder to see the nearer it comes; the
+last cliffs hide it altogether, and when it is reached it is only a
+rough crag surrounded by higher crags. The glory that lights it is
+glory in distant eyes alone.
+
+So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid home to the
+gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that the stage also is
+squalid and slavish, and that the will-o'-the-wisp of gorgeous freedom
+had jumped back to home life. She left the cheap theaters for the
+expensive luxury of Sir Joseph's mansion. But that had its squalors
+and slaveries, too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous
+America, only to find in America a thousand distresses.
+
+Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true freedom. She
+would be a builder of ships--cast off the restraint of womanhood and
+be a magnificent builder of ships! And now she was finding that this
+dream was also a nightmare.
+
+Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The hot wave
+found her an easy victim. A frightened servant who did not know the
+difference between sunstroke and heat prostration nearly killed her
+before a doctor came.
+
+The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed. It was her
+trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge regretting that she
+could not come to the launching of the _Clara_. Abbie was not present,
+either. She came up to be with Marie Louise. This was not the least of
+Marie Louise's woes.
+
+She was quite childish about missing the great event. She wept because
+another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle against the bow as it
+lurched down the toboggan-slide.
+
+Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business man's
+letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that there had
+been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster--an unexploded
+infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to wreck the launching-ways
+had been detected on the final inspection.
+
+Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even though she knew
+the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still in jeopardy. Her
+shaken faith in humanity was still capable of feeling bewilderment at
+the extremes of German savagery. She cried out to her sister:
+
+"How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy
+that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got
+into the yard?"
+
+"It didn't have to have been a German," said Abbie, bitterly.
+
+"Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly trick? No
+American would!"
+
+"Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican," said Abbie. "There's
+some them Independent workmen so independent they ain't got any
+country any more 'n what Cain had."
+
+"You can't suppose that Mr. Davidge has enemies among his own
+people?"
+
+"O' course he has! Slews of 'em. Some them workmen can't forgive the
+man that gives 'em a job."
+
+"But he pays big wages. Think of what Jake gets."
+
+"Oh, him! If he got all they was, he'd holler he was bein' cheated.
+Hollerin' and hatin' always come easy to Jake. If they wasn't easy, he
+wouldn't do 'em."
+
+Marie Louise gasped: "Abbie! In Heaven's name, you don't imply--"
+
+"No, I don't!" snapped Abbie. "I never implied in my life, and don't
+you go sayin' I did."
+
+Abbie was at bay now. She had to defend her man from outside
+suspicion. Suspicion of her husband is a wife's prerogative
+
+Marie Louise was too much absorbed in the general vision of man's
+potential villainy to follow up the individual clue. She was
+frightened away from considering Jake as a candidate for such infamy.
+Her wildest imaginings never put him in association with Nicky
+Easton.
+
+There were so many excursions and alarms in the world of 1917 that the
+riddle of who tried to sink the ship on dry land joined a myriad
+others in the riddle limbo.
+
+When Marie Louise was well enough to go back to her business school
+she found riddles enough in trying to decide where this letter or that
+had got to on the crazy keyboard, or what squirmy shorthand symbol it
+was that represented this syllable or that.
+
+She had lost the little speed she had had, and it was double drudgery
+regaining the forgotten lore. But she stood the gaff and found herself
+on the dizzy height of graduation from a lowly business school. She
+had traveled a long way from the snobbery of her recent years.
+
+Davidge recognized her face and her voice when she presented herself
+before him. But her soul was an utter stranger. She did not invite him
+to call on her or warn him that she was coming to call on him.
+
+She appeared in his anteroom and bribed one of the clerks to go to him
+with a message:
+
+"A young lady's outside--wants a position--as a stenogerpher."
+
+Davidge growled without looking up:
+
+"Why bother me? Send her to the chief clerk."
+
+"She wants to see you specially."
+
+"I'm out."
+
+"Said Miss Webling sent her."
+
+"O Lord!--show her in."
+
+Marie Louise entered. Davidge looked up, leaped up.
+
+She did not come in with the drawing-room, train-dragging manner of
+Miss Webling. She did not wear the insolent beauty of Mamise of the
+Musical Mokes. She was a white-waisted, plain-skirted office-woman, a
+businessette. She had a neat little hat and gave him a secretarial
+bow.
+
+He rushed to her hand, and they had a good laugh like two children
+playing pretend. Then he said:
+
+"Why the camouflage?"
+
+The word was not very new even then, or he would not have used it.
+
+She explained, with royal simplicity:
+
+"I want a job."
+
+She brought out her diploma and a certificate giving her a civil-service
+status. She was quite conceited about it.
+
+She insisted on displaying her accomplishments.
+
+"Give me some dictation," she dictated.
+
+He nodded, pummeled his head for an idea while she took from her
+hand-bag, not a vanity-case, but a stenographer's notebook and a sheaf
+of pencils.
+
+He noted that she sat down stenographically--very concisely. She
+perched her notebook on the desk of one crossed knee and perked her
+eyes up as alertly as a sparrow.
+
+All this professionalism sat so quaintly on the two Marie Louises he
+had known that he roared with laughter as at a child dressed up.
+
+She smiled patiently at his uproar till it subsided. Then he sobered
+and began to dictate:
+
+"Ready? 'Miss Mamise'--cross that out--'Miss Marie Louise Webling'--you
+know the address; I don't. 'Dear--My dear'--no, just 'Dear Miss
+Webling. Reference is had to your order of recent date that this
+house engage you as amanuensis.' Dictionary in the bookcase
+outside--comma--no, period. 'In reply I would--I wish to--I beg to--we
+beg to say that we should--I should just as soon engage Mona Lisa for
+a stenographer as you.' Period and paragraph.
+
+"'We have,'--comma,--'however,'--comma,--'another position to offer
+you,'--comma,--'that is, as wife to the senior member of this firm.'
+Period. 'The best wages we can--we can offer you are--is the use of
+one large,'--comma,--'slightly damaged heart and a million thanks a
+minute.' Period. 'Trusting that we may be favored with a prompt and
+favorable reply, we am--I are--am--yours very sincerely, truly
+yours,'--no, just say 'yours,' and I'll sign it. By the way, do you
+know what the answer will be?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"I mean that I know the answer."
+
+"Let me have it."
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"'Yes'?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+A long glum pause till she said, "Am I fired?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+More pause. She intervened in his silence.
+
+"What do I do next, please?"
+
+He said, of habit, "Why, sail on, and on, and on."
+
+He reached for his basket of unanswered mail. He said:
+
+"I've given you a sample of my style, now you give me a sample of
+yours, and then I'll see if I can afford to keep you as a stenographer
+instead of a wife."
+
+She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office, and seated
+herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart pit-a-patted as fast as
+her fingers, but she drew up the letter in a handsome style while he
+sat and stared at her and mused upon the strange radiance she brought
+into the office in a kind of aureole.
+
+He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer,
+entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma,
+suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very
+rasping "I beg your pardon," and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose
+from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily
+accurate version of his letter.
+
+And now he had two women on his hands and one on his heart. He dared
+not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss Webling. He dared not show
+his devotion to Marie Louise, though as a matter of fact it made him
+glow like a lighthouse.
+
+He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk's office. It was noted that
+he made many more trips to that office than ever before. Instead of
+pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer, he usually came out
+himself on all sorts of errands. His buzzer did not buzz, but the
+gossip did.
+
+Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till she grew
+furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not being deft enough to
+conceal his affection that she began to resent it as an offense and
+not a compliment.
+
+The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence in one of
+the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging her to live at a
+hotel or at some of the more comfortable homes she snubbed him
+bluntly. When he desperately urged her to take lunch or dinner with
+him she drew herself up and mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie
+stenographer and said:
+
+"Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist shall loor
+me to lunch with him. You'd probably drug the wine."
+
+"Then will you--"
+
+"No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!"
+
+"May I call, then?"
+
+More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:
+
+"Yessir--the fourteenth house on the left side of the road is me."
+
+The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched up the
+street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an
+imbecility. The whole village was eying the boss on his way to spark a
+stenog. His little love-affair was as clandestine as Lady Godiva's
+famous bareback ride.
+
+He cut his call short after an age-long half-hour of enduring the
+ridicule twinkling in Mamise's eyes. He stayed just late enough for it
+to get dark enough to conceal his return through that street. He was
+furious at the situation and at Mamise for teasing him so. But she
+became all the dearer for her elusiveness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+After the novelty of the joke wore off Mamise grew as uncomfortable as
+he. She was beginning to love him more and her job less. But she was
+determined not to throw away her independence. Pride was her duenna,
+and a ruthless one. She tried to feed her pride on her ambition and on
+an occasional visit to the ship that was to wear her name.
+
+She met Sutton, the prima donna riveter. He was always clattering away
+like a hungry woodpecker, but he always had time to stop and discuss
+his art with her.
+
+Once or twice he let her try the riveter--the "gun," he called it; but
+her thumb was not strong enough to hold the trigger against that
+hundred-and-fifty-pound pressure per square inch.
+
+One day Marie Louise came on Jake Nuddle and Sutton in a wrangle. She
+caught enough of the parley to know that Jake was sneering at Sutton's
+waste of energy and enthusiasm, his long hours and low pay. Sutton
+earned a very substantial income, but all pay was low pay to Jake, who
+was spreading the gospel of sabotage through the shipyard.
+
+Meanwhile the good ship _Clara_, weaned from the dock, floated in the
+basin and received her equipment. And at last the day came when she
+was ready for her trial trip.
+
+That morning the smoke rolled from her funnels in a twisted skein.
+What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had
+become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the
+flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a soul, a name, a fate.
+
+It was impossible to think now that the _Clara_ was merely an iron box
+with an engine to push it about. _Clara_ was somebody, a personality,
+a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature. She was "she" to everybody.
+And at last one morning she kicked up her heels and took a long white
+bone in her teeth and went her ways.
+
+The next day _Clara_ came back. There was something about her manner
+of sweeping into the bay, about the proud look of her as she came to a
+halt, that convinced all the watchers in the shipyard of her success.
+
+When they learned that she had exceeded all her contract stipulations
+there was a tumult of rejoicing; for her success was the success of
+every man and lad in the company's employ--at least so thought all who
+had any instinct of team-play and collective pride. A few soreheads
+were glum, or sneered at the enthusiasm of the others. It was strange
+that Jake Nuddle was associated with all of these groups.
+
+_Clara_ was not permitted to linger and rest on her laurels. She had
+work to do. Every ship in the world was working overtime except the
+German Kiel Canal boats. _Clara_ was gone from the view the next
+morning. Mamise missed her as she looked from the office window. She
+mentioned this to Davidge, for fear he might not know. Somebody might
+have stolen her. He explained:
+
+"She's going down to Norfolk to take on a cargo of food for
+England--wheat for the Allies. I'm glad she's going to take
+breadstuffs to people. My mother used to be always going about to
+hungry folks with a basket of food on her arm."
+
+Mamise had Jake and Abbie in to dinner that night. She was all agog
+about the success of _Clara_, and hoped that _Mamise_ would one day do
+as well.
+
+Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. "Did the boss tell you
+where the _Clara_ was goin' to?"
+
+"Yes--Norfolk."
+
+Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes, then rose and
+mumbled:
+
+"Goin' out to get some more cigars."
+
+Abbie called after him, "Hay, you got a whole half-box left." But Jake
+did not seem to hear the recall.
+
+He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.
+
+"I thought you went out to git some," said Abbie, who felt it
+necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some blunder he
+had made. Jake laughed very amiably.
+
+"Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that. But I hadda
+telephone a certain party, long-distance--and I forgot."
+
+Abbie broke in, "Who you got to long-distance to?"
+
+Jake did not answer.
+
+Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out into the main
+office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.
+
+"They loaded the _Clara_ in record time with wheat for England. She
+sails to-day."
+
+At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:
+
+"You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood--remember? Well, she's
+starting out through the big woods with a lot of victuals for old
+Granny England. If only the wolves don't get her!"
+
+He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her as if she
+were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an errand of mercy.
+
+Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the dangers they
+run and because of the pluck they show in storms and fires, and the
+unending fights they make against wind and wave. But of late they had
+had unheard-of enemies to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine
+placed inside the cargo.
+
+Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:
+
+"To think, with so little food in the world and so many starving to
+death, people could sink ships full of wheat!"
+
+On the second day after the _Clara_ set forth on the ocean Marie
+Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her letters as fast as
+she could. In the afternoon she took the typewritten transcripts into
+Davidge's office to drop them into his "in" basket.
+
+The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she heard him say:
+
+"Mr. Davidge speaking.... Hello, Ed.... What? You're too close to the
+'phone.... That's better.... You're too far away--start all over.... I
+don't get that.... Yes--a life-boat picked up with what--oh, six
+survivors. Yes--from what ship? I say, six survivors from what
+ship?... The _Clara_? She's gone? _Clara_?"
+
+He reeled and wavered in his chair. "What happened--many lost? And the
+boat--cargo--everything--everybody but those six! They got her, then!
+The Germans got her--on her first voyage! God damn their guts!
+Good-by, Ed."
+
+He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the receiver groped
+for the hook with a pitiful blind man's gesture.
+
+Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She ran forward
+and took his hand and set the receiver in place.
+
+He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His mother was
+dead. The ship he had named for her was dead. He needed mothering.
+
+Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them as if to hold
+them together under their burden. She said:
+
+"I heard. I can't tell you how-- Oh, what can we do in such a world!"
+
+He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:
+
+"I'll get a German for this--somehow!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge's
+agony.
+
+She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as
+the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children.
+She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her
+slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some
+woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob
+his own heart out.
+
+She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard
+him groan, "I'll get a German for this!" somehow it horrified her,
+coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole
+nation.
+
+America had stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and
+selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them.
+America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the
+Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel
+ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters;
+the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing--that torture
+never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most
+expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and
+megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.
+
+America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind
+charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood
+was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill
+enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their
+glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further
+notice.
+
+The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were
+thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their desks,
+women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams,
+business men across their counters, "Kill Germans!"
+
+It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the
+Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was
+fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from
+that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken
+over civilization.
+
+They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that
+pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not
+Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular
+battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing
+that grew with the butchery.
+
+Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the
+Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all
+did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations,
+German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.
+
+It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a
+duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy.
+The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride.
+Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled,
+mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work.
+
+Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the
+world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved
+and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and
+omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves,
+the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.
+
+Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated;
+the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea.
+Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a
+blood-feud of his own with Germany.
+
+He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her
+with a sudden demand:
+
+"Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?"
+
+"No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I
+never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know
+you could be so angry."
+
+"I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em,
+too?"
+
+"Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on
+board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they
+belong."
+
+This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for
+the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into
+uncouth laughter.
+
+But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the
+distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions,
+and to run among them like a frantic child.
+
+Davidge's next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead
+engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the
+sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without
+water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.
+
+Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship's cargo would have
+relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian--what word
+or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of
+the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?
+
+He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky
+wilderness--old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies
+withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of their
+mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He
+thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles.
+The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned
+aloud:
+
+"If they'd only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody--to anybody!
+But to pour it into the sea!"
+
+He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul
+broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:
+
+"I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the
+fool ship."
+
+He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.
+
+"The blithering idiot I've been! To go and work and work and work, and
+drive my men and all the machinery for months and months to make a
+ship and put in the engines and send it down and load it, and all for
+some"--a gesture expressed his unspeakable thought--"of a German to
+blow it to hell and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!"
+
+In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He
+burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we
+all revolve around ourselves as well as our suns.
+
+"What's the use," he maundered--"what's the use of trying to do
+anything while they're alive and at work right here in our country?
+They're everywhere! They swarm like cockroaches out of every hole as
+soon as the light gets low! We've got to blister 'em all to death with
+rough-on-rats before we can build anything that will last. There's no
+stopping them without wiping 'em off the earth."
+
+She did not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments
+or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute
+fellowship to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped
+Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to
+contempt for himself.
+
+"It's time I quit out of this and went to work with the army. It makes
+me sick to be here making ships for Germans to sink. The thing to do
+is to kill the Germans first and build the ships when the sea is safe
+for humanity. I'm ashamed of myself sitting in an office shooting with
+a telephone and giving out plans and contracts and paying wages to a
+gang of mechanics. It's me for a rifle and a bayonet."
+
+Mamise had to oppose this:
+
+"Who's going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you when you
+get there if all the ship-builders turn soldier?"
+
+"Let somebody else do it."
+
+"But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said that America
+could never put an army across or feed it if she got it there. If you
+go on strike you'll prove the truth of that."
+
+Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes to hear his
+nobler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources a woman has.
+Mamise was speaking for him as well as for herself when she said:
+
+"Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all the ships
+you would build. You said it was the greatest poem ever written, the
+idea of making ships faster than the Germans could sink them. It was
+that that made me want to be a ship-builder. It was the first big
+ambition I ever had. And now you tell me it's useless and foolish!"
+
+He saw the point without further pressure.
+
+"You're right," he said. "My job's here. It would be selfish and showy
+to knock off this work and grab a gun. I'll stick. It's hard, though,
+to settle down here when everybody else is bound for France."
+
+Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not continue to
+argue a case that has already been won. She added only the warm
+personal note to help out the cold generality.
+
+"There's my ship to finish, you know. You couldn't leave poor _Mamise_
+out there on the stocks unfinished."
+
+The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her. He needed
+her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and knew for the first
+time the feel of her body against his, the sweet compliance of her
+form to his embrace.
+
+But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She was in one of
+those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism, that women were
+rising to more and more as a new religion. She was feeling terribly
+American, and, though she had no anger for him and saw no insult in
+his violence, she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and
+kissing. She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away,
+yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had saved him
+from himself and to himself. She had brought him back to his east
+again, and the morning is always wonderful.
+
+She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he did not
+despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people were postponing
+everything beautiful and lovable "for the duration of the war."
+
+He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its rattlesnake
+clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers as he stammered:
+
+"We've gone through this together, and you've helped me--I can't tell
+you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go through a lot more trouble
+together. There's plenty of it ahead."
+
+She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed his big hand
+again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:
+
+"I hope so."
+
+Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the door with
+suspicious promptitude. Davidge said:
+
+"Mr. Avery, please--and the others--all the others right away. Ask
+them to come here; and you might come back, Miss Gabus."
+
+Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers,
+gathered, wondering what was about to happen. Some of them came
+grinning, for when they had asked Miss Gabus what was up she had
+guessed: "I reckon he's goin' to announce his engagement."
+
+The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera chorus.
+Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting. Then he said:
+
+"Folks, I've just had bad news. The _Clara_--they got her! The Germans
+got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She was two days out and going
+like a greyhound when she sank with all on board except six of the
+crew who got away in a life-boat and were picked up by a tramp."
+
+There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths, of
+incredulous protests.
+
+Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:
+
+"My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin' to do about it?"
+
+They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:
+
+"We'll build some more ships. And if they sink those we'll--build some
+more."
+
+He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt, and so can
+steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and, thanks to Mamise,
+Davidge was recalled to himself, though he was too shrewd or too
+tactful to give her the credit for redeeming him.
+
+His resolute words gave the office people back to their own
+characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each
+had something to say. One, "She was such a pretty boat!" another, "Was
+she insured, d'you suppose?" a third, a fourth, and the rest: "The
+poor engineer--and the sailors!" "All that work for nothin'!" "The
+money she cost!" "The Belgians could 'a' used that wheat!" "Those
+Germans! Is there anything they won't do?"
+
+The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks. Davidge took up
+the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise renewed the cheerful
+_rap-rap-rap_ of her typewriter.
+
+The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the yard.
+There was no lack of messengers to go among the men with the bad word
+that the first of the Davidge ships had been destroyed. It was a
+personal loss to nearly everybody, as it had been to Davidge, for
+nearly everybody had put some of his soul and some of his sweat into
+that slow and painful structure so instantly annulled. The mockery of
+the wasted toil embittered every one. The wrath of the workers was
+both loud and ferocious.
+
+Jake Nuddle was one of the few who did not revile the German plague.
+He was not in the least excited over the dead sailors. They did not
+belong to his union. Besides, Jake did not love work or the things it
+made. He claimed to love the workers and the money they made.
+
+He was tactless enough to say to a furious orator:
+
+"Ah, what's it to you? The more ships the Germans sink the more you
+got to build and the more they'll have to pay you. If Davidge goes
+broke, so much the better. The sooner we bust these capitalists the
+sooner the workin'-man gets his rights."
+
+The orator retorted: "This is war-times. We got to make ships to win
+the war."
+
+Jake laughed. "Whose war is it? The capitalists'. You're fightin' for
+Morgan and Rockefeller to save their investments and to help 'em to
+grind you into the dirt. England and France and America are all
+land-grabbers. They're no better 'n Germany."
+
+The workers wanted a scapegoat, and Jake unwittingly volunteered. They
+welcomed him with a bloodthirsty roar. They called him vigorous
+shipyard names and struck at him. He backed off. They followed. He
+made a crucial mistake; he whirled and ran. They ran after him. Some
+of them threw hammers and bolts. Some of these struck him as he fled.
+Workmen ahead of him were roused by the noise and headed him off.
+
+He darted through an opening in the side of the _Mamise_. The crowd
+followed him, chased him out on an upper deck.
+
+"Throw him overboard! Kill him!" they shouted.
+
+He took refuge behind Sutton the riveter, whose gun had made such
+noise that he had heard none of the clamor. Seeing Jake's white face
+and the mark of a thrown monkey-wrench on his brow, Sutton shut off
+the compressed air and confronted the pursuers. He was naked to the
+waist, and he had no weapon, but he held them at bay while he
+demanded:
+
+"What's the big idea? What you playin'? Puss in a corner? How many of
+yous guys does it take to lick this one gink?"
+
+A burly patriot, who forgot that his name and his accent were
+Teutonic, roared:
+
+"Der sneagin' Sohn off a peach ain't sorry _die Clara_ is by dose tam
+Chermans _gesunken_!"
+
+"What!" Sutton howled. "The _Clara_ sunk? Whatya mean--sunk?"
+
+Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven thousands of rivets
+into the frame of the ship, and a little explosive had opened all the
+seams and ended her days! When at last he understood the _Clara's_
+fate and Nuddle's comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:
+
+"And you thought it was good business, did you? And these fellers
+was thinkin' about lynchin' you, was they? Well, they're all
+wrong--they're all wrong: we'd ought to save lynchin' for real
+guys. What you need is somethin' like--this!"
+
+His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye. Jake in
+a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward; his head
+struck the steel deck, and his soul went out. When it came back he lay
+still for a while, pretending to be unconscious until the gang had
+dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton was making ready to begin riveting
+again. Then he picked himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:
+
+"I'll fix you for this, you--"
+
+Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big
+foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop
+that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold.
+He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words--hunched
+back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe
+hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow and
+disperse his enemies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted
+that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to
+conform. Then she paused.
+
+On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too
+weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of
+Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the
+brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his
+friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers,
+it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from
+foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.
+
+Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a
+ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She
+had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters
+at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and
+without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile,
+compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions,
+oscillations, running aground--stresses that crumpled steel or
+scissored the rivets in two.
+
+It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or
+death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home
+with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some
+limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in
+fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died
+dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds;
+some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led
+long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory,
+degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps.
+
+People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and
+destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as little on their
+pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the
+ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen
+emergency.
+
+Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before
+he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past
+performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the
+recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the
+national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one
+and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages.
+
+He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little
+except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he
+had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he
+had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at
+all.
+
+Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted no steel in
+a ship's hull or in any part of her that had not behaved well in the
+shop tests, in the various machines that put the metal under bending
+stress, cross-breaking, hammering, drifting, shearing, elongation,
+contraction, compression, deflection, tension, and torsion stresses.
+The best of the steels had their elastic limits; there was none that
+did not finally snap.
+
+Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed according
+to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being only a tenth of
+its proved capacity. That ought to have been enough of a margin of
+safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.
+
+People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand. A
+reference or two, a snap judgment based on first impressions, ushered
+a man or a woman into a place where weakness or malice could do
+incalculable harm. In every institution, as in every structure, these
+danger-spots exist. Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people,
+could only take the best he could get.
+
+Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous ease and had
+contrived already the ruin of one ship. His program, which included
+all the others, had had a little setback, but he could easily regain
+his lost ground, for the mob had vented its rage against him and was
+appeased.
+
+Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge's shop and
+his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was drifting toward a
+supreme stress that should try her inmost fiber. And at the moment she
+felt an almost unbearable strain in the petty decision of whether to
+go with the clerks or stop with the boss.
+
+Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would say of her. It
+was Davidge that she was protecting. She did not want to have them
+talking about him--as if anything could have stopped them from that!
+
+While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave him
+unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent so much time
+that the outer office was empty, anyway.
+
+Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the door. Miss
+Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:
+
+"Was you goin' in?"
+
+"No--oh no!" said Mamise. "I left something in my desk."
+
+She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried away,
+ostentatiously passing the other clerks as they struggled across the
+yard to the gate.
+
+She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles. She was so
+desperate that she went to see her sister.
+
+Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing buttons on the
+extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom she washed for
+in spite of Jake's high earnings--from which she benefited no more
+than before. If Jake had come into a million, or shattered the world
+to bits and then rebuilt it nearer to his heart's desire, he would not
+have had enough to make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many
+handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or at least got
+Abbie no farther along the road to contentment or grace.
+
+Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to the _Clara_. She drew
+Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who were playing in
+the kitchen because it was full of the savor of the forthcoming
+supper.
+
+"Abbie dear, have you heard the news?"
+
+Abbie gasped, "Oh God, is anything happened to Jake--killed or
+arrested or anything?"
+
+"No, no--but _Clara_--the _Clara_--"
+
+"Clara who?"
+
+"The ship, the first ship we built, she's destroyed."
+
+"For the land's sake! I want to know! Well, what you know about
+that!"
+
+Abbie could not rise to very lofty heights of emotion or language over
+anything impersonal. She made hardly so much noise over this tragedy
+as a hen does over the delivery of an egg.
+
+Mamise was distressed by her stolidity. She understood with regret why
+Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational companion. She hated to
+think well of Jake or ill of her sister, but one cannot help receiving
+impressions.
+
+She did her best to stimulate Abbie to a decent warmth, but Abbie was
+as immune to such appeals as those people were who were still
+wondering why America went to war with Germany.
+
+Abbie was entirely perfunctory in her responses to Mamise's pictures
+of the atrocity. She grew really indignant when she looked at the
+clock and saw that Jake was late to dinner. She broke in on Mamise's
+excitement with a distressful:
+
+"And we got steak 'n' cab'ge for supper."
+
+"I must hurry back to my own shack," said Mamise, rising.
+
+"You stay right where you are. You're goin' to eat with us."
+
+"Not to-night, thanks, dear."
+
+She kept no servant of her own. She enjoyed the circumstance of
+getting her meals. She was camping out in her shanty. To-night she
+wanted to be busy about something especially about a kitchen--the
+machine-shop of the woman who wants to be puttering at something.
+
+She was dismally lonely, but she was not equal to a supper at Jake's.
+She would have liked a few children of her own, but she was glad that
+she did not own the Nuddle children, especially the elder two.
+
+The Nuddles had given three hostages to Fortune. Jake cared little
+whether Fortune kept the hostages or not, or whether or not she
+treated them as the Germans treated Belgian hostages.
+
+Little Sister was the oldest of the trio completed by Little Brother
+and a middle-sized bear named Sam. Sis and Sam were juvenile
+anarchists born with those gifts of mischief, envy, indolence, and
+denunciation that Jake and the literary press-agents of the same
+spirit flattered as philosophy or even as philanthropy. Little
+Brother was a quiet, patient gnome with quaint instincts of industry
+and accumulation. He was always at work at something. His mud-pie
+bakery was famous for two blocks. He gathered bright pebbles and
+shells. In the marble season he was a plutocrat in taws and agates.
+Being always busy, he always had time to do more things. He even
+volunteered to help his mother. When he got an occasional penny he
+hoarded it in hiding. He had need to, for Sam borrowed what he could
+and stole what he could not wheedle.
+
+Little Brother was not stingy, but he saved; he bought his mother
+petty gifts once in a while when he had enough to pay for something.
+
+Little Sister and Sam were capable in emotional crises of sympathy or
+hatred to express themselves volubly. Little Brother had no gifts of
+speech. He made gifts of pebbles or of money awkwardly, shyly, with
+few words. Mamise, as she tried to extricate herself from Abbie's
+lassoing hospitality, paused in the door and studied the children,
+contrasting them with the Webling grandchildren who had been born with
+gold spoons in their mouths and somebody to take them out, fill them,
+and put them in again. But luxury seemed to make small difference in
+character.
+
+She mused upon the three strange beings that had come into the world
+as a result of the chance union of Jake and Abbie. Without that they
+would never have existed and the world would have never known the
+difference, nor would they.
+
+Sis and Sam were quarreling vigorously. Little Brother was silent upon
+the hearth. He had collected from the gutter many small stones and
+sticks. They were treasures to him and he was as important about them
+as a miser about his shekels. Again and again he counted them, taking
+a pleasure in their arithmetic. Already he was advanced in mathematics
+beyond the others and he loved to arrange his wealth for the sheer
+delight of arrangement; orderliness was an instinct with him already.
+
+For a time Mamise noted how solemnly he kept at work, building a little
+stone house and painfully making it stand. He was a home-builder
+already.
+
+Sam had paid no heed to the work. But, wondering what Mamise was
+looking at, he turned and saw his brother. A grin stretched his
+mouth. Little Brother grew anxious. He knew that when something he had
+builded interested Sam its doom was close.
+
+"Whass 'at?" said Sam.
+
+"None yer business," said Little Brother, as spunky as Belgium before
+the Kaiser.
+
+"'S'ouse, ain't it?"
+
+"You lea' me 'lone, now!"
+
+"Where d'you git it at?"
+
+"I built it."
+
+"Gimme't!"
+
+"You build you one for your own self now."
+
+"'At one's good enough for me."
+
+"Maw! You make Sam lea' my youse alone."
+
+Mrs. Nuddle moaned: "Sammie, don't bother Little Brother now. You go
+on about your own business."
+
+Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with the side of
+his foot.
+
+Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had darted at him and
+smacked him with violence. Instantly she was ashamed of herself. Sam
+began to rub his face and yowl:
+
+"Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me, so she did."
+
+Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it
+was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She
+had accepted too much of Mamise's money to be very indignant, but she
+did rise to a wail:
+
+"Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern."
+
+"I'm sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just
+couldn't help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his
+brother's house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he'll be just
+as much of a nuisance as Jake and he'll call it syndicalism or
+internationalism or something, just as Jake does."
+
+Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white
+story.
+
+When Abbie gasped, "What on earth's the matter?" he growled: "I bumped
+into a girder. Whatya s'pose?"
+
+Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction, but she
+knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the
+home champion.
+
+She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the
+steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was
+earning--or at least receiving--the family was eating high.
+
+Little Sister told her brother Sam, "It's a shame to waste good meat
+on his old black lamp." And Sam's regret was, "I wisht I'd 'a' gave it
+to um."
+
+Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but
+it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public
+welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to
+expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have
+time to be kind to them in particular.
+
+Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every
+time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made
+her mad.
+
+To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of anxiety for
+him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:
+
+"But, oh, did you hear of the destruction of the _Clara_?"
+
+"Yes, I heard of the destruction of the _Clara_," he echoed, with a
+sneer. "If I had my way the whole rotten fleet would follow her to the
+bottom of the ocean!"
+
+"Why, Jake!" was Abbie's best.
+
+Jake went on: "And it will, too, or I'm a liar. The Germans will get
+them boats as fast as they build 'em." He laughed. "I tell you them
+Kaiser-boys just eats ships."
+
+"But how were they able to destroy the _Clara_?" Mamise demanded.
+
+"Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk they just put a
+bomb into her."
+
+"But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?"
+
+"Oh, we--they have ways."
+
+The little slip from "we" to "they" caught Mamise's ear. Her first
+intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her amazement the first
+words that leaped were:
+
+"Poor Abbie!"
+
+Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from
+cloud to ground. Mamise's whole thought was from zig to zag in some
+such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.
+
+"We--they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German
+organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake
+must have been involved in the wreck of the _Clara_. That means that
+he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means
+that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister
+is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!"
+
+This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake
+grumbling:
+
+"What ya mean--'poor Abbie!'?"
+
+Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the
+lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was
+thinking--or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his
+own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through
+Mamise, though Mamise did not know this--that is, he hoped she did
+not. And yet perhaps she did.
+
+And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie
+was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and
+her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid
+thoughtlessness.
+
+Jake, suspecting Mamise's suspicion of him, was moved to justify
+himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who
+had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy
+country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had
+become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant
+nothing to her bovine soul. She was thinking of something else,
+usually, throughout all the fiery Jakiads. While he indicted whole
+nations and denounced all success as a crime against unsuccess she was
+hunting through her work-basket for a good thread to patch Sam's pants
+with.
+
+Abbie was unmoved, but Mamise was appalled. It was her first encounter
+with the abysmal hatred of which some of these loud lovers of mankind
+are capable. Jake's theories had been merely absurd or annoying
+before, but now they grew monstrous, for they seemed to be confirmed
+by an actual crime.
+
+Mamise felt that she must escape from the presence of Jake or attack
+him. She despised him too well to argue with him, and she rose to go.
+
+Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She would not be
+persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow and cooked herself a little
+meal of her own. She felt stained once more with vicarious guilt, and
+wondered what she had done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes
+of others.
+
+She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself of Sir
+Joseph Webling's guilt by keeping his secret. If she had gone to the
+British authorities with her first suspicion of Sir Joseph and Nicky
+Easton she would have escaped from sharing their guilt. She would
+have been branded as an informer, but only by the conspirators; and
+Sir Joseph himself and Lady Webling might have been saved from
+self-destruction.
+
+Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again she had only
+suspicion for her guide. But in England she had been a foreigner and
+Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here she was in her own country, and
+she owed nothing to Jake Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to
+his wife as to his flag.
+
+It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one clear duty was
+to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake. It was not a pretty duty,
+but it was a definite. She resolved that the first thing she did in
+the morning would be to go to Davidge with what facts she had. The
+resolution brought her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper
+with a sense of pleasant righteousness.
+
+Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted a cigarette,
+and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned evening of spinsterial
+respectability. Then the door opened and Abbie walked in. Abbie did
+not think it sisterly to knock. She paused to register her formal
+protest against Mamise's wicked addiction to tobacco.
+
+"I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you'd break yourself of that horbul
+habbut."
+
+Mamise laughed tolerantly. "You were cooking cabbage when I was at
+your house. Why can't I cook this vegetable?"
+
+"But I wa'n't cooking the cabbage in my face."
+
+"You were cooking it in mine. But let's not argue about botany or
+ethics."
+
+Abbie was not aware of mentioning either of those things, but she had
+other matters to discuss. She dropped into a chair, sighing:
+
+"Jake's went out to telephone, and I thought I'd just run over for a
+few words. You see, I--"
+
+"Where was Jake telephoning?"
+
+"I d'know. He's always long-distancin' somebody. But what I come
+for--"
+
+"Doesn't it ever occur to you to wonder?"
+
+"Long as it ain't some woman--or if it is, as long as it's long
+distance--why should I worry my head about it? The thing I wanted to
+speak of is--"
+
+"Didn't it rather make your blood run cold to hear Jake speak as he
+did of the lost ship?"
+
+"Oh, I'm so used to his rantin' it goes in one ear and out the
+other."
+
+"You'd better keep a little of it in your brain. I'm worried about
+your husband, even if you're not, Abbie dear."
+
+"What call you got to worry?"
+
+"I have a ghastly feeling that my brother-in-law is mixed up in the
+sinking of the _Clara_."
+
+"Don't be foolish!"
+
+"I'm trying not to be. But do you remember the night I told you both
+that the _Clara_ was going to Norfolk to take on her cargo? Well, he
+went out to get cigars, though he had a lot, and he let it slip that
+he had been talking on the long-distance telephone. When the _Clara_
+is sunk, he is not surprised. He says, 'We--they have ways.' He
+prophesies the sinking of all the ships Mr. Davidge--"
+
+Abbie seized this name as a weapon of self-defense and mate-defense.
+
+"Oh, you're speakin' for Mr. Davidge now."
+
+"Perhaps. He's my employer, and Jake's, too. I feel under some
+obligations to him, even though Jake doesn't. I feel some obligations
+to the United States, and Jake doesn't. I distrust and abhor Germany,
+and Jake likes her as well as he does us. The background is perfect.
+When such crimes are being done as Germany keeps doing, condoning them
+is as bad as committing them."
+
+"Big words!" sniffed Abbie. "Can't you talk United States?"
+
+"All right, my dear. I say that since Jake is glad the _Clara_ was
+sunk and hopes that more ships will be sunk, he is as bad as the men
+that sank her. And what's more, I have made up my mind that Jake
+helped to sink her, and that he works in this yard simply for a chance
+to sink more ships. Do you get those words of one syllable?"
+
+"No," said Abbie. Ideas of one syllable are as hard to grasp as words
+of many. "I don't know what you're drivin' at a tall."
+
+"Poor Abbie!" sighed Mamise. "Dream on, if you want to. But I'm going
+to tell Mr. Davidge to keep a watch on Jake. I'm going to warn him
+that Jake is probably mixed up in the sinking of that beautiful ship
+he named after his mother."
+
+Even Abbie could not miss the frightful meaning of this. She was one
+of those who never trust experience, one of those who think that, in
+spite of all the horrible facts of the past, horrible things are
+impossible in the future. Higher types of the same mind had gone about
+saying that war was impossible, later insisting that it was impossible
+that the United States should be dragged into this war because it was
+so horrible, and next averring that since this war was so horrible
+there could never be another.
+
+Even Abbie could imagine what would happen if Mamise denounced Jake as
+an accomplice in the sinking of the Clara. It would be so terrible
+that it must be impossible. The proof that Jake was innocent was the
+thought of what would happen to him and to her and their children if
+he were found guilty. She summed it all up in a phrase:
+
+"Mamise, you're plumb crazy!"
+
+"I hope so, but I'm also crazy enough to put Mr. Davidge on his
+guard."
+
+"And have him fire Jake, or get him arrested?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Ain't you got any sense of decency or dooty a tall?"
+
+"I'm trying to find out."
+
+"Well, I always knew a woman who'd smoke cigarettes would do
+anything."
+
+"I'll do this."
+
+"O' course you won't; but if you did, I'd--why, I'd--why, I just don't
+know what I'd do."
+
+"Would you give up Jake?"
+
+"Give up Jake? Divorce him or something?"
+
+Mamise nodded.
+
+Abbie gasped: "Why, you're positively immor'l! Posi-_tive_-ly! He's
+the father of my childern! I'll stick to Jake through thick and
+thin."
+
+"Through treason and murder, too? You were an American, you know,
+before you ever met him. And I was an American before he became my
+brother-in-law. And I don't intend to let him make me a partner in his
+guilt just because he made you give him a few children."
+
+"I won't listen to another word," cried Abbie. "You're too indecent to
+talk to." And she slammed the door after her.
+
+"Poor Abbie!" said Mamise, and closed her book, rubbed the light out
+of her cigarette, and went to bed.
+
+But not to sleep. Abbie had not argued well, but sometimes that is
+best for the arguments, for then the judge becomes their attorney.
+Mamise tossed on a grid of perplexities. Neither her mind nor her body
+could find comfort.
+
+She rose early to escape her thoughts. It was a cold, raw morning, and
+Abbie came dashing through the drizzle with her shawl over her head
+and her cheeks besprent with tears and rain. She flung herself on
+Mamise and sobbed:
+
+"I ain't slep' a wink all night. I been thinkin' of Jake and the
+childern. I was mad at you last night, but I'm sorry for what I said.
+You're my own sister--all I got in the world besides the three
+childern. And I'm all you got, and I know it ain't in you to go and
+send the father o' my childern to jail and ruin my life. I've had a
+hard life, and so've you, Mamise honey, but we got to be friends and
+love one another, for we're all that's left of our fambly, and it
+couldn't be that one sister would drive the other to distraction and
+drag the family name in the mud. It couldn't be, could it, Mamise?
+Tell me you was only teasin' me! I didn't mean what I said last night
+about you bein' indecent, and you didn't mean what you said about
+Jake, did you, Mamise? Say you didn't, or I'll just die right here."
+
+She had left the door open, and a gust of windy rain came lashing in.
+The world outside was cold and wet, and Abbie was warm and afraid and
+irresistibly pitiful.
+
+Mamise could only hug and kiss her and say:
+
+"I'll see! I'll see!"
+
+When people do not know what their chief mysteries, themselves, will
+do they say, "I'll see."
+
+Mamise thought of Davidge, and she could not promise to leave him in
+ignorance of the menace imminent above him. But when at last she tore
+herself from Abbie's clutching hands and hurried away to the office
+she looked back and saw Abbie out in the rain, staring after her in
+terror and shaking her head helplessly. She could not promise herself
+that she would tell Davidge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+She reached the office late in spite of her early start. Davidge had
+gone. He had gone to Pittsburgh to try to plead for more steel for
+more ships.
+
+The head clerk told her this. He was in an ugly mood, sarcastic about
+Mamise's tardiness, and bitter with the knowledge that all the work of
+building another _Clara_ had to be carried through with its endless
+detail and the chance of the same futility. He was as sick about it as
+a Carlyle who must rewrite a burned-up history, an Audubon who must
+repaint all his pictures.
+
+Davidge had left no good-by for Mamise. This hurt her. She wished that
+she had stopped to tell him good night the afternoon before.
+
+In his prolonged absence Mamise wondered if he were really in
+Pittsburgh or in Washington with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She experienced
+the first luxury of jealousy; it was aggravated by alarm. She was left
+alone, a prey to the appeals of Abbie, who could not persuade her to
+promise silence.
+
+But the next night Jake was gone. Abbie explained that he had been
+called out of town to a meeting of a committee of his benevolent
+insurance order. Mamise wondered and surmised.
+
+Jake went to meet Nicky Easton and claim his pay for his share in the
+elimination of the _Clara_. Nicky paid him so handsomely that Jake
+lost his head and imagined himself already a millionaire. Strangely,
+he did not at once set about dividing his wealth among his beloved
+"protelariat." He made a royal progress from saloon to saloon, growing
+more and more haughty, and pounding on successive bars with a vigor
+that increased as his articulation effervesced. His secret would
+probably have bubbled out of him if he had not been so offensive that
+he was bounced out of every barroom before he had time to get to the
+explanation of his wealth. In one "poor man's club" he fell asleep
+and rolled off his chair to a comfortable berth among the spittoons.
+
+Next morning Jake woke up with his head swollen and his purse
+vanished. He sought out Nicky and demanded another fee. Nicky laughed
+at his claim; but Jake grew threatening, and Nicky was frightened into
+offering him a chance to win another fortune by sinking another ship.
+He staked Jake to the fare for his return and promised to motor down
+some dark night and confer with him. Jake rolled home in state.
+
+On the same train went a much interested sleuth who detached himself
+from the entourage of Nicky and picked up Jake.
+
+Jake had attracted some attention when he first met Nicky in
+Washington, but the sadly overworked Department of Justice could not
+provide a squad of escorts for every German or pro-German suspect.
+Before the war was over the secret army under Mr. Bielaski reached a
+total of two hundred and fifty thousand, but the number of suspects
+reached into the millions. From Nicky Easton alone a dozen activities
+radiated; and studying him and his communicants was a slow and complex
+task.
+
+Mr. Larrey decided that the best way to get a line on Jake would be to
+take a job alongside him and "watch his work." It was the easiest
+thing in the world to get a job at Davidge's shipyard; and it was
+another of the easiest things in the world to meet Jake, for Jake was
+eager to meet workmen, particularly workmen like Larrey, who would
+listen to reason, and take an interest in the gentle art of slowing up
+production. Larrey was all for sabotage.
+
+One evening Jake invited him to his house for further development. On
+that evening Mamise dropped in. She did not recognize Larrey, but he
+remembered her perfectly.
+
+He could hardly believe his camera eyes at first when he saw the great
+Miss Webling enter a workman's shanty and accept Jake Nuddle's
+introduction:
+
+"Larrey, old scout, this is me sister-in-law. Mamise, shake hands with
+me pal Larrey."
+
+Larrey had been the first of her shadows in New York, but had been
+called off when she proved unprofitable and before she met Easton. And
+now he found her at work in a shipyard where strange things were
+happening! He was all afire with the covey of spies he had flushed.
+His first impulse was to shoot off a wire in code to announce his
+discovery. Then he decided to work this gold-mine himself. It would be
+pleasanter to cultivate this pretty woman than Jake Nuddle, and she
+would probably fall for him like a thousand of brick. But when he
+invited himself to call on her her snub fell on him like a thousand of
+brick. She would not let him see her home, and he was furious till
+Jake explained, "She's sweet on the boss."
+
+Larrey decided that he had better call on Davidge and tip him off to
+the past of his stenographer and get him to place her under
+observation.
+
+The next day Davidge came back from his protracted journey. He had
+fought a winning battle for an allotment of steel. He was boyish with
+the renewal of battle ardor, and boyish in his greeting of Mamise. He
+made no bones of greeting her before all the clerks with a horribly
+embarrassing enthusiasm:
+
+"Lord! but I've been homesick to see you!"
+
+Miss Gabus was disgusted. Mamise was silly with confusion.
+
+Those people who are always afraid of new customs have dreaded public
+life for women lest it should destroy modesty and rob them of the
+protection of guardians, duennas, and chaperons. But the world seems
+to have to have a certain amount of decency to get along on, at all,
+and provides for it among humans about as well as it provides for the
+protection of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish
+and some prosper.
+
+The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in
+spasms of anxiety over other people's souls would have given up Mamise
+and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached
+bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them,
+their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of
+temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances
+and crowds.
+
+Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of
+longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these
+anguishes were as futile as prayers for the moon. Outside of office
+hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.
+
+These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more
+than a mother's vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls or
+_yashmaks_ will infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good
+deal of time--and very dolefully.
+
+Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry
+for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly
+he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first
+ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy,
+the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She
+remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had
+wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that
+communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal
+of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing
+human was alien to her.
+
+Davidge had spoken of marriage--had told her that he was a candidate
+for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been
+full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning
+after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own
+loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses
+combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.
+
+When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of
+her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he
+had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that
+womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man's to crush. But fate
+provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood
+by, and the day's work was waiting to be done.
+
+Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter. She
+hammered out a devil's tattoo on it, and he devoured estimates and
+commercial correspondence, while an aromatic haze enveloped them both
+as truly as if they had been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.
+
+Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon hour made a
+noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity to cast an evil
+spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women have a wonderful pity for men that
+other women cultivate! Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling
+was:
+
+"Goin' to lunch now, Mi' Swebling?"
+
+And all that Miss Webling said was:
+
+"Not just yet--thank you."
+
+Both were almost swooning with the tremendous significance of the
+moment.
+
+Miss Webling felt that she was defying all the powers of espionage and
+convention when she made so brave as to linger while Miss Gabus left
+the room in short twitches, with the painful reluctance of one who
+pulls off an adhesive plaster by degrees. When at last she was really
+off, Miss Webling went to Davidge's door, feeling as wicked as the
+maid in Ophelia's song, though she said no more than:
+
+"Well, did you have a successful journey?"
+
+Davidge whirled in his chair.
+
+"Bully! Sit down, won't you?"
+
+He thought that no goddess had ever done so divine a thing so
+ambrosially as she when she smiled and shook her incredibly exquisite
+head. He rose to his feet in awe of her. His restless hands, afraid to
+lay hold of their quarry, automatically extracted his watch from his
+pocket and held it beneath his eyes. He stared at it without
+recognizing the hour, and stammered:
+
+"Will you lunch with me?"
+
+"No, thank you!"
+
+This jolted an "Oh!" out of him. Then he came back with:
+
+"When am I going to get a chance to talk to you?"
+
+"You know my address."
+
+"Yes, but--" He thought of that horrible evening when he had marched
+through the double row of staring cottages. But he was determined.
+"Going to be home this evening?"
+
+"By some strange accident--yes."
+
+"By some strange accident, I might drop round."
+
+"Do."
+
+They laughed idiotically, and she turned and glided out.
+
+She went to the mess-hall and moved about, selecting her dishes.
+Pretending not to see that Miss Gabus was pretending not to see her,
+she took her collation to another table and ate with the relish of a
+sense of secret guilt--the guilt of a young woman secretly betrothed.
+
+Davidge kept away from the office most of the afternoon because Mamise
+was so intolerably sweet and so tantalizingly unapproachable. He made
+a pretext of inspecting the works. She had a sugary suspicion of his
+motive, and munched it with strange comfort.
+
+What might have happened if Davidge had called on her in her then mood
+and his could easily be guessed. But there are usually interventions.
+The chaperon this time was Mr. Larrey, the operative of the Department
+of Justice. He also had his secret.
+
+He arrived at Davidge's home just as Davidge finished the composition
+of his third lawn tie and came down-stairs to go. When he saw Larrey
+he was a trifle curt with his visitor. Thinking him a workman and
+probably an ambassador from one of the unions on the usual mission of
+such ambassadors--more pay, less hours, or the discharge of some
+unorganized laborer--Davidge said:
+
+"Better come round to the office in the morning."
+
+"I can't come to your office," said Larrey.
+
+"Why not? It's open to everybody."
+
+"Yeh, but I can't afford to be seen goin' there."
+
+"Good Lord! Isn't it respectable enough for you?"
+
+"Yeh, but--well, I think it's my duty to tip you off to a little slick
+work that's goin' on in your establishment."
+
+"Won't it keep till to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yeh--I guess so. It's only one of your stenographers."
+
+This checked Davidge. By a quaint coincidence he was about to call on
+one of his stenographers. Larrey amended his first statement:
+"Leastways, I'll say she calls herself a stenographer. But that's only
+her little camouflage. She's not on the level."
+
+Davidge realized that the stenographer he was wooing was not on the
+level. She was in the clouds. But his curiosity was piqued. He
+motioned Larrey to a chair and took another.
+
+"Shoot," he said.
+
+"Well, it's this Miss Webling. Know anything about her?"
+
+"Something," said Davidge. He was too much amused to be angry. He
+thought that Larrey was another of those amateur detectives who
+flattered Germany by crediting her with an omnipresence in evil. He
+was a faithful reader of Ellis Parker Butler's famous sleuth, and he
+grinned at Larrey. "Well, Mr. Philo Gubb, go on. Your story interests
+me."
+
+Larrey reddened. He spoke earnestly, explained who he was, showed his
+credentials, and told what he knew of Miss Webling. He added what he
+imagined Davidge knew.
+
+Davidge found the whole thing too preposterous to be insolent. His
+chivalry in Mamise's behalf was not aroused, because he thought that
+the incident would make a good story to tell her. He drew Larrey out
+by affecting amazed incredulity.
+
+Larrey explained: "She's an old friend of ours. We got the word from
+the British to pick the lady up when she first landed in this country.
+She was too slick for us, I guess, because we never got the goods on
+her. We gave her up after a couple of weeks. Then her trail crossed
+Nicky Easton's once more."
+
+"And who is Nicky Easton?"
+
+"He's a German agent she knew in London--great friend of her adopted
+father's. The British nabbed him once, but he split on the gang, and
+they let him off. Whilst I was trailin' him I ran into a feller named
+Nuddle--he come up to see Easton. I followed him here, and lo and
+behold! Miss Webling turns up, too! And passin' herself off for
+Nuddle's sister-in-law! Nuddle's a bad actor, but she's worse. And she
+pretends to be a poor workin'-girl. Cheese! You should have seen her
+in New York all dolled up!"
+
+Davidge ignored the opportunity to say that he had had the privilege
+of seeing Miss Webling all dolled up. He knew why Mamise was living as
+she did. It was a combination of lark and crusade. He nursed Larrey's
+story along, and asked with patient amusement:
+
+"What's your theory as to her reason for playing such a game?"
+
+He smiled as he said this, but sobered abruptly when Larrey
+explained:
+
+"You lost a ship not long ago, didn't you? You got other ships on the
+ways, ain't you? Well, I don't need to tell you it's good business for
+the Huns to slow up or blow up all the ships they can. Every boat they
+stop cuts down the supplies of the Allies just so much. This Miss
+Webling's adopted father was in on the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and
+this girl was, too, probably. She carried messages between old Webling
+and Easton, and walked right into a little trap the British laid for
+her. She put up a strong fight, and, being an American, was let go.
+But her record got to this country before she did. You ask me what
+she's up to. Well, what should she be up to but the Kaiser's work?
+She's no stenographer, and she wouldn't be here playin' tunes on a
+typewriter unless she had some good business reason. Well, her
+business is--she's a ship-wrecker."
+
+The charge was ridiculous, yet there were confirmations or seeming
+confirmations of it. The mere name of Nicky Easton was a thorn in
+Davidge's soul. He remembered Easton in London at Mamise's elbow, and
+in Washington pursuing her car and calling her "Mees Vapelink."
+
+Davidge promised Larrey that he would look into the matter, and bade
+him good night with mingled respect and fear.
+
+When he set out at length to call on Mamise he was grievously troubled
+lest he had lost his heart to a clever adventuress. He despised his
+suspicions, and yet--somebody had destroyed his ship. He remembered
+how shocked she had been by the news. Yet what else could the worst
+spy do but pretend to be deeply worried? Davidge had never liked Jake
+Nuddle; Mamise's alleged relationship by marriage did not gain
+plausibility on reconsideration. The whim to live in a workman's
+cottage was even less convincing.
+
+Mr. Larrey had spoiled Davidge's blissful mood and his lover's program
+for the evening. Davidge moved slowly toward Mamise's cottage, not as
+a suitor, but as a student.
+
+Larrey shadowed him from force of habit, and saw him going with
+reluctant feet, pausing now and then, irresolute. Davidge was thinking
+hard, calling himself a fool, now for trusting Mamise and now for
+listening to Larrey. To suspect Mamise was to be a traitor to his
+love: not to suspect her was to be a traitor to his common sense and
+to his beloved career.
+
+And the Mamise that awaited the belated Davidge was also in a state of
+tangled wits. She, too, had dressed with a finikin care, as Davidge
+had, neither of them stopping to think how quaint a custom it is for
+people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes
+every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening
+like Christmas parcels for each other's examination. Nature dresses
+the birds in the mating season. Mankind with the aid of the
+dressmaker and the haberdasher plumes up at will.
+
+But as Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and Davidge his
+Larrey, so Mamise had her sister Abbie.
+
+Abbie came in unexpectedly and regarded Mamise's costume with no
+illusions except her own cynical ones:
+
+"What you all diked up about?"
+
+Mamise shrugged her eyebrows, her lips, and her shoulders.
+
+Abbie guessed. "That man comin'?"
+
+Mamise repeated her previous business.
+
+"Kind of low neck, don't you think? And your arms nekked."
+
+Mamise drew over her arms a scarf that gave them color rather than
+concealment. Abbie scorned the subterfuge.
+
+"Do you think it's proper to dress like that for a man to come
+callin'?"
+
+"I did think so till you spoke," snapped Mamise in all the bitterness
+of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed and unlovely shame.
+
+Abbie felt unwelcome. "Well, I just dropped over because Jake's went
+out to some kind of meetin'."
+
+"With whom? Where?"
+
+"Oh, some of the workmen--a lot of soreheads lookin' for more wages."
+
+Mamise was indignant: "The soldiers get thirty dollars a month on a
+twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets more than that a week for
+loafing round the shop about seven hours a day. How on earth did you
+ever tie yourself up to such a rotten bounder?"
+
+Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:
+
+"Well, I ain't seen you marryin' anything better. I guess I'll go
+home. I don't seem to be wanted here."
+
+This was one of those exact truths that decent people must immediately
+deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and said:
+
+"Forgive me, dear--I'm a beast. But Jake is such a--" She felt Abbie
+wriggling ominously and changed to: "He's so unworthy of you. These
+are such terrible times, and the world is in such horrible need of
+everybody's help and especially of ships. It breaks my heart to see
+anybody wasting his time and strength interfering with the builders
+instead of joining them. It's like interfering with the soldiers.
+It's a kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and the
+children."
+
+This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears of
+self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of suffering
+for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a world. She was
+like so many of the air-ships the United States was building then: she
+could not be induced to leave the ground or, if she got up, to glide
+back safely.
+
+She tried now to love her country, but she hardly rose before she
+fell.
+
+"Oh, I know it's tur'ble what folks are sufferin', but--well, the
+Lord's will be done, I say."
+
+"And I say it's mainly the devil's will that's being done!" said
+Mamise.
+
+This terrified Abbie. "I wisht you'd be a little careful of your
+language, Mamise. Swearin' and cigarettes both is pretty much of a
+load for a lady to git by with."
+
+"O Lord!" sighed Mamise, in despair. She was capable of long, high
+flights, but she could not carry such a passenger.
+
+Abbie continued: "And do you think it's right, seein' men here all by
+yourself?"
+
+"I'm not seeing men--but a man."
+
+"But all by yourself."
+
+"I'm not all by myself when he's here."
+
+"You'll get the neighbors talkin'--you'll see!"
+
+"A lot I care for their talk!"
+
+"Why don't you marry him and settle down respectable and have childern
+and--"
+
+"Why don't you go home and take care of your own?"
+
+"I guess I better." And she departed forthwith.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The two sisters had managed to fray each other's nerves raw. The mere
+fact that Abbie advocated marriage and maternity threw Mamise into a
+cantankerous distaste for her own dreams.
+
+Larrey had delayed Davidge long enough for Mamise to be rid of Abbie,
+but the influence of both Larrey and Abbie was manifest in the
+strained greetings of the caller and the callee. Instead of the
+eagerness to rush into each other's arms that both had felt in the
+morning, Davidge entered Mamise's presence with one thought dominant:
+"Is she really a spy? I must be on my guard." And Mamise was thinking,
+"If he should be thinking what Abbie thought, how odious!"
+
+Thus once more their moods chaperoned them. Love could not attune
+them. She sat; he sat. When their glances met they parted at once.
+
+She mistook his uncertainty for despondency. She assumed that he was
+brooding over his lost ship. Out of a long silence she spoke:
+
+"I wonder if the world will ever forget and forgive?"
+
+"Forget and forgive who--whom, for what?"
+
+"Germany for all she's done to this poor world--Belgium, the
+_Lusitania_, the _Clara_?"
+
+He smiled sadly. "The _Clara_ was a little slow tub compared to the
+_Lusitania_, but she meant a lot to me."
+
+"And to me. So did the _Lusitania_. She nearly cost me my life."
+
+He was startled. "You didn't plan to sail on her?"
+
+"No, but--" She paused. She had not meant to open this subject.
+
+But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had told.
+
+"How do you mean--she nearly cost you your life?"
+
+"Oh, that's one of the dark chapters of my past."
+
+"You never told me about it."
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Please!" He said it with a surprising earnestness. He had a sudden
+hope that her confession might be an absolving explanation.
+
+She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire to release
+that old secret. She began, recklessly:
+
+"Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on the stage, and
+Sir Joseph Webling--"
+
+"You told me that much, but not what happened before you met him."
+
+"No, I didn't tell you that, and I'm not going to now, but--well, Sir
+Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of my own--to know and
+remember. Sir Joseph was German born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was
+contagious, for he--well, I can't tell you."
+
+"Please!"
+
+"I swore not to."
+
+"You gave your oath to a German?"
+
+"No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I'm always
+forgetting and starting to tell."
+
+"Why did you take your oath?"
+
+"I traded secrecy for freedom."
+
+"You mean you turned state's evidence?"
+
+"Oh no, I didn't tell on them. I didn't know what they were up to when
+they used me for-- But I'm skidding now. I want to tell you--terribly.
+But I simply must not. I made an awful mistake that night at Mrs.
+Prothero's in pretending to be ill."
+
+"You only pretended?"
+
+"Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got after me,
+accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that resulted in the
+sinking of ships and the killing of men. She said that the police came
+to our house, and Sir Joseph tried to kill one of them and killed his
+own wife and then was shot by an officer and that they gave out the
+story that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She
+said Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story she told,
+and I was afraid she'd tell you, so I spirited you away on the pretext
+of illness."
+
+Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey's story. He
+said:
+
+"But it wasn't true what Lady C.-W. told?"
+
+"Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact, and I
+couldn't explain it without breaking my oath. And now I've pretty
+nearly broken it, after all. I've sprained it badly."
+
+"Don't you want to go on and--finish it off?"
+
+"I want to--oh, how I want to! but I've got to save a few shreds of
+respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were going to tea with
+Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish now I'd let you go. Then you'd
+have known the worst of me--or worse than the worst."
+
+She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her bewilderment,
+that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized her hands and felt a need
+to gather her home to his arms.
+
+She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him. Studying his
+radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had known part of her story
+before and was glad to hear her confess it, but her intuition missed
+fire when she guessed at the source of his information.
+
+"You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!"
+
+"Not since I saw her with you."
+
+"Then who told you?"
+
+He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her read his heart
+so true.
+
+"The main thing is that you told me. And now once more I ask you: will
+you marry me?"
+
+This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her brusquerie:
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"And why not?"
+
+"I'll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love
+a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a
+womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.
+
+But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It
+offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of
+her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She
+wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her
+sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous
+impatience and returned to her theme.
+
+"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some
+atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many
+ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I
+met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened
+a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards
+and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."
+
+"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.
+
+She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys
+from the clutch of a child, and went on:
+
+"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office
+work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a
+typewriter."
+
+"It keeps you nearer to me."
+
+"But I don't want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me
+go out in the yard. Please give me a real job."
+
+He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for
+such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at
+length she said:
+
+"Please go on home. It's getting late, and I don't like you at all."
+
+"I know you don't like me, but couldn't you love me?"
+
+"That's more impossible than liking you, since you won't let me have
+my only wish."
+
+"It's too brutal, I tell you. And it's getting too cold. It would
+simply ruin your perfect skin. I don't want to marry a longshoreman,
+thank you."
+
+"Then I'll thank you to go on home. I'm tired out. I've got to get up
+in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly
+drudgery again."
+
+"If you'll marry me you won't have to work at all."
+
+"But work is the one thing I want. So if you'll kindly take yourself
+off I'll be much obliged. You've no business here, anyway, and it's
+getting so late that you'll have all the neighbors talking."
+
+"A lot I care!"
+
+"Well, I care a lot," she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie.
+"I've got to live among them."
+
+It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as
+sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl's house by a sleepy
+parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into
+his overcoat, and growled:
+
+"Good night!"
+
+She sighed "Good night!" and wished that she were not so cantankerous.
+The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step
+forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with
+the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical
+problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be
+quite squared.
+
+She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and
+womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be
+nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it
+was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.
+
+Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone,
+imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would
+marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed
+single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could
+only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when
+he was away or when he was at home.
+
+When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely cottage she
+stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into
+a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little
+cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all
+these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that
+lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to
+begin moiling again.
+
+Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the
+pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into
+the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and
+organized they would not have had their wages at all.
+
+But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but
+everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the
+idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not
+imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease.
+Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the
+mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the
+steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers
+and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce
+the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in
+bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in
+vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would
+revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books
+straight.
+
+Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to
+go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at
+his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He
+had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took
+their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of
+their families or the barrooms of idleness.
+
+Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could
+not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only
+by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war
+was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what
+could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all
+that the German horror might spare.
+
+Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of
+love.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+IN WASHINGTON
+
+[Illustration: How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other
+well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up
+with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each
+other's examination.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People
+thought of the gales that would harass the poor souls in the clammy
+trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in
+camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and
+on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless
+persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not
+enough for themselves.
+
+To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in
+the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold
+bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house
+grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an
+office not half warm enough.
+
+The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded
+them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives
+along. The dour autumn seemed to wrench hopes from the heart like
+shriveled leaves, and to fill the air with swirling discouragements.
+The men at work about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow
+upon their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that
+threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.
+
+The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other stirring
+things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly battle and
+accept Davidge's offer of a wedding-ring. She had, of course, her
+Webling inheritance to fall back upon, but she had come to hate it so
+as tainted money that she would not touch it or its interest. She put
+it all into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various
+charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had been
+her emancipation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder had spoken of
+as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph Webling.
+
+A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery, a
+thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have servants
+to wait on her and build her fires. She would go out only when she
+wished, and sleep late of mornings. She would have multitudinous furs
+and a closed and heated limousine to carry her through the white
+world. She could salve her conscience by taking up some of the more
+comfortable forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross
+bandage-factory or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy
+canteen.
+
+At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward matrimony,
+as many another woman has done. These craven moods alternated with
+periods of self-rebuke. She told herself that such a marriage would
+dishonor her and cheat Davidge.
+
+Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it had its
+gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America marriage still
+possesses for women a certain finality. Only one marriage in nine
+ended in divorce that year.
+
+Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt. She was far,
+indeed, from that more or less imaginary character so frequent in
+fiction and so rare in reality, the young woman who knows nothing of
+life and mankind. Like every other woman that ever lived, she knew a
+good deal more than she would confess, and had had more experience
+than she would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she
+knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had found her very
+tantalizing about just how much her experience totaled up.
+
+She had observed the enormous difference between a man and a woman who
+meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably.
+Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously
+intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever
+good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially
+refreshing as bread and butter. The maddening thing about marriage is
+what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do
+exist, and some people get them.
+
+Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she
+coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared
+in plenty and in privation.
+
+Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any other man.
+She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind
+of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a
+husband, of what she would be like as a wife.
+
+Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and
+everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an
+office by the fascinating advertisements of freedom, a career,
+achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that
+business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home,
+commerce its treadmills and its oakum-picking no less than the jail.
+The cozy little cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to
+nag her soul.
+
+The destruction of the good ship _Clara_ had dealt her a heavier blow
+than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal
+injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what
+bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch,
+the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many
+an AEschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus
+chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his
+profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly
+awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the
+infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and competition.
+
+The blowing up of the _Clara_ had revealed the pitiful truth that men
+may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only
+to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger.
+The _Clara_ served as a warning that the ship _Mamise_ now on the
+stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or
+destroyed as soon as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about
+her. It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather was
+conspiring with the inner November.
+
+The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend upon the
+blackest year in human annals. Everybody was unhappy; there was a
+frightful shortage of food among all nations, a terrifying shortage of
+coal, and the lowest temperature ever known would be recorded.
+America, less unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly
+disappointed in herself.
+
+There was food in plenty for America, but not for her confederates.
+The prices were appalling. Wages went up and up, but never quite
+caught the expenses. It was necessary to send enormous quantities of
+everything to our allies lest they perish before we could arrive with
+troops. And Germany went on fiendishly destroying ships, foodstuffs,
+and capital, displaying in every victory a more insatiable cruelty, a
+more revolting cynicism toward justice, mercy, or truth.
+
+The Kaiserly contempt for America's importance seemed to be justified.
+People were beginning to remember Rome, and to wonder if, after all,
+Germany might not crush France and England with the troops that had
+demolished Russia. And then America would have to fight alone.
+
+At this time Mamise stumbled upon an old magazine of the ancient date
+of 1914. It was full of prophecies that the Kaiser would be dethroned,
+exiled, hanged, perhaps. The irony of it was ghastly. Nothing was more
+impossible than the downfall of the Kaiser--who seemed verifying his
+boasts that he took his crown from God. He was praising the strong
+sword of the unconquerable Germany. He was marshaling the millions
+from his eastern front to throw the British troops into the sea and
+smother the France he had bled white. The best that the most hopeful
+could do was to mutter: "Hurry! hurry! We've got to hurry!"
+
+Mamise grew fretful about the delay to the ship that was to take her
+name across the sea. She went to Davidge to protest: "Can't you hurry
+up my ship? If she isn't launched soon I'm going to go mad."
+
+Davidge threw back his head and emitted a noise between laughter and
+profanity. He picked up a letter and flung it down.
+
+"I've just got orders changing the specifications again. This is the
+third time, and the third time's the charm; for now we've got to take
+out all we've put in, make a new set of drawings and a new set of
+castings and pretty blamed near tear down the whole ship and rebuild
+it."
+
+"In the name of Heaven, why?"
+
+"In the name of hades, because we've got to get a herd of railroad
+locomotives to France, and sending them over in pieces won't do. They
+want 'em ready to run. So the powers that be have ordered me to
+provide two hatchways big enough to lower whole locomotives through,
+and pigeonholes in the hold big enough to carry them. As far as the
+_Mamise_ is concerned, that means we've just about got to rub it out
+and do it over again. It's a case of back to the mold-loft for
+_Mamise_."
+
+"And about how much more delay will this mean?"
+
+"Oh, about ninety days or thereabouts. If we're lucky we'll launch her
+by spring."
+
+This was almost worse than the death of the _Clara_. That tragedy had
+been noble; it dealt a noble blow and woke the heart to a noble grief
+and courage. But deferment made the heart sick, and the brain and
+almost the stomach.
+
+Davidge liked the disappointment no better than Mamise did, but he was
+used to it.
+
+"And now aren't you glad you're not a ship-builder? How would you feel
+if you had got your wish to work in the yard and had turned your
+little velvet hands into a pair of nutmeg-graters by driving about ten
+thousand rivets into those plates, only to have to cut 'em all out
+again and drive 'em into an entirely new set of plates, knowing that
+maybe they'd have to come out another time and go back? How'd you like
+that?"
+
+Mamise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.
+
+Davidge went on:
+
+"That's a business man's life, my dear--eternally making things that
+won't sell, putting his soul and his capital and his preparation into
+a pile of stock that nobody will take off his hands. But he has to go
+right on, borrowing money and pledging the past for the future and
+never knowing whether his dreams will turn out to be dollars
+or--junk!"
+
+Mamise realized for the first time the pathos, the higher drama of the
+manufacturer's world, that world which poets and some other literary
+artists do not describe because they are too ignorant, too petty, too
+bookish. They sneer at the noble word _commercial_ as if it were a
+reproach!
+
+Mamise, however, looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of
+despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to
+rise beyond a poetical height to the clouds of the practical.
+
+"What will you do with all the workmen who are on that job?"
+
+Davidge grinned. "They're announcing their monthly strike for higher
+wages--threatening to lay off the force. It'd serve 'em right to take
+'em at their word for a while. But you simply can't fight a labor
+union according to Queensbery rules, so I'll give 'em the raise and
+put 'em on another ship."
+
+"And the _Mamise_ will be idle and neglected for three months."
+
+"Just about."
+
+"The Germans couldn't have done much worse by her, could they?"
+
+"Not much."
+
+"I think I'll call it a day and go home," said Mamise.
+
+"Better call it a quarter and go to New York or Palm Beach or
+somewhere where there's a little gaiety."
+
+"Are you sick of seeing me round?"
+
+"Since you won't marry me--yes."
+
+Mamise sniffed at this and set her little desk in order, aligned the
+pencils in the tray, put the carbons back in the box and the rubber
+cover on the typewriter. Then she sank it into its well and put on her
+hat.
+
+Davidge held her heavy coat for her and could not resist the
+opportunity to fold her into his arms. Just as his arms closed about
+her and he opened his lips to beg her not to desert him he saw over
+her shoulder the door opening.
+
+He had barely time to release her and pretend to be still holding her
+coat when Miss Gabus entered. His elaborate guiltlessness confirmed
+her bitterest suspicions, and she crossed the room to deposit a sheaf
+of letters in Davidge's "in" basket and gather up the letters in his
+"out" basket. She passed across the stage with an effect of absolute
+refrigeration, like one of Richard III's ghosts.
+
+Davidge was furious at Miss Gabus and himself. Mamise was furious at
+them both--partly for the awkwardness of the incident, partly for the
+failure of Davidge's enterprise against her lips.
+
+When Miss Gabus was gone the ecstatic momentum was lost. Davidge
+grumbled:
+
+"Shall I see you to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mamise.
+
+She gave him her hand. He pressed it in his two palms and shook his
+head. She shook her head. They were both rebuking the bad behavior of
+the fates.
+
+Mamise trudged homeward--or at least houseward. She was in another of
+her irresolute states, and irresolution is the most disappointing of
+all the moods to the irresolute ones and all the neighbors. It was
+irresolution that made "Hamlet" a five-act play, and only a
+Shakespeare could have kept him endurable.
+
+Mamise was becoming unendurable to herself. When she got to her
+cottage she found it as dismal as an empty ice-box. When she had
+started the fire going she had nothing else to do. In sheer
+desperation she decided to answer a few letters. There was an old one
+from Polly Widdicombe. She read it again. It contained the usual
+invitation to come back to reason and Washington.
+
+Just for something positive to do she resolved to go. There was a
+tonic in the mere act of decision. She wrote a letter. She felt that
+she could not wait so long as its answer would require. She resolved
+to send a telegram.
+
+This meant hustling out into the cold again, but it was something to
+do, somewhere to go, some excuse for a hope.
+
+Polly telegraphed:
+
+  Come without fail dying to see you bring along a scuttle of coal
+  if you can.
+
+Mamise showed Davidge the telegram. He was very plucky about letting
+her go. For her sake he was so glad that he concealed his own
+loneliness. That made her underestimate it. He confirmed her belief
+that he was glad to be rid of her by making a lark of her departure.
+He filled an old suit-case with coal and insisted on her taking it.
+The porter who lugged it along the platform at Washington gave Mamise
+a curious look. He supposed that this was one of those suit-cases full
+of bottled goods that were coming into Washington in such multitudes
+since the town had been decreed absolutely dry. He shook it and was
+surprised when he failed to hear the glug-glug of liquor.
+
+But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of that other
+form of carbon which women wear in rings and necklaces. The whole
+country was underheated. To the wheatless, meatless, sweetless days
+there were added the heatless months. Major Widdicombe took his
+breakfasts standing up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in
+bed, and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.
+
+There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices of the
+Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the shops and
+theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country clubs were closed. Every
+device to save a lump of coal was put into legal effect so that the
+necessary war factories might run and the ships go over the sea. Soon
+there would be gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people
+would obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated by
+law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than one meat to one
+person. Grocers would be fined for selling too much sugar to a family.
+Placards, great billboards, and all the newspapers were filled with
+counsels to save, save, save, and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds.
+People grew depressed at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so
+little show of accomplishment.
+
+American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and
+apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics,
+for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The
+Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every
+advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any
+one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without
+warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the
+reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what
+could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no
+reserves worth the name. France and England were literally "all in."
+
+Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They
+credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron
+Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future.
+Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful
+Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out
+now to confess--or rather to boast--that they had planned this triumph
+all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up
+reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a
+German planet.
+
+The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching
+day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up
+to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of
+incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities
+sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war
+openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the
+bills.
+
+In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never
+so many fowls counted before they were hatched--and in the final
+outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.
+
+But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The
+strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in
+Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was
+counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh
+against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian resistance in the
+Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own
+mountainsides.
+
+Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German
+collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break.
+
+So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who
+had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before
+America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a
+great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.
+
+The premonition of the dawning of _Der Tag_ stirred the heart of Nicky
+Easton, of course. He had led for months the life of a fox in a
+hunt-club county. Every time he put his head out he heard the bay of
+the hounds. He had stolen very few chickens, and he expected every
+moment to be pounced on. But now that he felt assured of a German
+triumph in a little while, he began to think of the future. His heart
+turned again to Mamise.
+
+His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place had
+compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had been used to.
+His German accent did not help him, and he had found that even those
+heavy persons known as light women, though they had no other virtue,
+had patriotism enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility.
+His dialect insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being
+insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with German-stained
+money.
+
+In his alliance with Jake Nuddle for the blowing up of the _Clara_,
+and their later communications looking toward the destruction of other
+ships, he kept informed of Mamise. He always asked Jake about her. He
+was bitterly depressed by the news that she was "sweet on" Davidge. He
+was exultant when he learned from Jake that she had given up her work
+in the office and had gone to Washington. Jake learned her address
+from Abbie, and passed it on to Nicky.
+
+Nicky was tempted to steal into Washington and surprise her. But enemy
+aliens were forbidden to visit the capital, and he was afraid to go by
+train. He had wild visions of motoring thither and luring her to a
+ride with him. He wanted to kidnap her. He might force her to marry
+him by threatening to kill her and himself. At least he might make her
+his after the classic manner of his fellow-countrymen in Belgium. But
+he had not force enough to carry out anything so masterful. He was a
+sentimental German, not a warrior.
+
+In his more emotional moods he began to feel a prophetic sorrow for
+Marie Louise after the Germans had conquered the world. She would be
+regarded as a traitress. She had been adopted by Sir Joseph Webling
+and had helped him, only to abandon the cause and go over to the
+enemy.
+
+If Nicky could convert her again to loyalty, persuade her to do some
+brave deed for the Fatherland in redemption of her blacksliding, then
+when _Der Tag_ came he could reveal what she had done. When in that
+resurrection day the graves opened and all the good German spies and
+propagandists came forth to be crowned by _Gott_ and the Kaiser, Nicky
+could lead Marie Louise to the dual throne, and, describing her
+reconciliation to the cause, claim her as his bride. And the Kaiser
+would say, "_Ende gut, alles gut!_"
+
+Never a missionary felt more sanctity in offering salvation to a lost
+soul by way of repentance than Nicky felt when he went to the house of
+an American friend and had Mamise called on the long-distance
+telephone.
+
+Mamise answered, "Yes, this is Miss Webling," to the faint-voiced
+long-distance operator, and was told to hold the wire. She heard:
+"All ready with Washington. Go ahead." Then she heard a timid query:
+
+"Hallow, hallow! Iss this Miss Vapelink?"
+
+She was shocked at the familiar dialect. She answered:
+
+"This is Miss Webling, yes. Who is it?"
+
+"You don'd know my woice?"
+
+"Yes--yes. I know you--"
+
+"Pleass to say no names."
+
+"Where are you?"
+
+"In Philadelphia."
+
+"All right. What do you want?"
+
+"To see you."
+
+"You evidently know my address."
+
+"You know I cannot come by Vashington."
+
+"Then how can I see you?"
+
+"You could meet me some place, yes?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"It is important, most important."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To you--only to you. It is for your sake."
+
+She laughed at this; yet it set her curiosity on fire, as he hoped it
+would. He could almost hear her pondering. But what she asked was:
+
+"How did you find my address?"
+
+"From Chake--Chake Nuttle."
+
+He could not see the wild look that threw her eyes and lips wide. She
+had never dreamed of such an acquaintance. The mere possibility of it
+set her brain whirling. It seemed to explain many things, explain them
+with a horrible clarity. She dared not reveal her suspicions to Nicky.
+She said nothing till she heard him speak again:
+
+"Vell, you come, yes?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"You could come here best?"
+
+"No, it's too far."
+
+"By Baltimore we could meet once?"
+
+"All right. Where? When?"
+
+"To-morrow. I do not know Baltimore good. Ve could take ride by
+automobile and talk so. Yes?"
+
+"All right." This a little anxiously.
+
+"To-morrow evening. I remember it is a train gets there from
+Vashington about eight. I meet you. Make sure nobody sees you take
+that train, yes?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know people follow people sometimes."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I trust you alvays, Marie Louise."
+
+"All right. Good-by."
+
+"Goot-py, Marie Louise."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered several sharp
+and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes had wakened in the
+receiver.
+
+The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that Nicky had some
+postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again. Her ear was as
+bewildered as your tongue when it expects to taste one thing and
+tastes another, for it was Davidge's voice that spoke, asking for her.
+She called him by name, and he growled:
+
+"Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger who kept me
+waiting so long?"
+
+"Don't you wish you knew?" she laughed. "Where are you now? At the
+shipyard?"
+
+"No, I'm in Washington--ran up on business. Can I see you to-night?"
+
+"I hope so--unless we're going out--as I believe we are. Hold the
+wire, won't you, while I ask." She came back in due season to say,
+"Polly says you are to come to dinner and go to a dance with us
+afterward."
+
+"A dance? I'm not invited."
+
+"It's a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right to take
+you--no end of big bugs will be there."
+
+"I'm rusty on dancing, but with you--"
+
+"Thanks. We'll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight. Wrap up well.
+It's cold, isn't it?"
+
+He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of
+her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he
+dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the
+new musical insanity known as "jazz"--so pestilential a music that
+even the fiddlers capered and writhed.
+
+The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old Rosslyn bridge
+squealed with cold under the motor. It was good to see the lights of
+the Hall at last, and to thaw himself out at the huge fireplace.
+
+"Lucky to get a little wood," said Major Widdicombe. "Don't know what
+we'll do when it's gone. Coal is next to impossible."
+
+Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two or three other
+house guests, and some wives of important people. They laid off their
+wraps and then decided to keep them on.
+
+Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly clad,
+discouraged office-hack that when she descended the stairs and paused
+on the landing a few steps from the floor, to lift her eyebrows and
+her lip-corners at him, he was glad of the pause.
+
+"Break it to me gently," he called across the balustrade.
+
+She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed in her
+complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was dazed by her
+unimagined splendor.
+
+As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the tribute in
+his, she said:
+
+"Break what to you gently?"
+
+"You!" he groaned. "Good Lord! Talk about 'the glory that was Greece
+and the grandeur that was Rome'!"
+
+With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on his evening
+finery.
+
+"The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning in
+decollete. For a pair of common laborers, we are certainly gaudy."
+
+Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, "So you're the fascinating
+brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary of that awful
+ship-factory."
+
+Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: "Never again. She's
+fired! We can't afford her."
+
+"Bully for you," said Polly. "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned,
+grandmotherly sort of person, but I'll be damned if I can see why a
+woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie Louise here should be
+pounding typewriter keys in an office. Of course, if she had to-- But
+even then, I should say that it would be her solemn religious duty to
+sell her soul for a lot of glad-rags.
+
+"A lot of people are predicting that women will never go back to the
+foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but--well, I'm no
+prophetess, but all I can say is that if this war puts an end to the
+dressmaker's art, it will certainly put civilization on the blink.
+Now, honestly, what could a woman accomplish in the world if she
+worked in overalls twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four years--what
+could she make that would be more worth while than getting herself all
+dressed up and looking her best?"
+
+Davidge said: "You're talking like a French aristocrat before the
+Revolution; but I wish you could convince her of it."
+
+Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she was thrilled,
+thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in her best clothes--in and
+out of her best clothes, and liberally illuminated with jewelry. She
+was now something like a great singer singing the highest note of her
+master-aria in her best role--herself at once the perfect instrument
+and the perfect artist.
+
+Marie Louise went in on Davidge's arm. The dining-room was in gala
+attire, the best silver and all of it out--flowers and candles. But
+the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women,
+who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no
+apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to
+the chill.
+
+Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise
+was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.
+
+"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She
+is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up
+stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!"
+
+The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of
+amazement.
+
+"What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary."
+
+This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise
+admitted that it took management.
+
+Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own
+breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes?
+And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and
+eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?"
+
+Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have
+to. Nobody's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without
+giving me the same excuse."
+
+Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly
+affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her
+daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her
+element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of
+luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent
+people.
+
+"I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go
+back to honest work again."
+
+She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred
+to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife
+and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.
+
+When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while,
+talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was
+heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of
+the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front,
+the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that
+they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would
+take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in
+getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The
+astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry
+and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order
+to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great
+battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner's
+inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said:
+
+"I get enough of this in the shop, and I'm frozen through. Let's go in
+and jaw the women."
+
+Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the
+majestic languor of lions well fed.
+
+Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that
+concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman,
+of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman's stories were always long, and
+people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute
+all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a
+chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of
+mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was seated
+sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm
+rested. Davidge's eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline
+described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a
+shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the
+head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder
+carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a
+sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one
+quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a
+stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.
+
+Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her
+where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the
+gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all
+those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with
+their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light
+that satin shimmers with.
+
+In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and
+brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled
+bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his
+prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown
+so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with
+much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had
+removed the ban on extravagance.
+
+The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise
+wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the
+safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad
+to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking,
+laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through
+the deeps of color.
+
+The oddity of the feminine passion for precious stones struck Davidge
+sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the
+curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and
+polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals
+of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied
+steel.
+
+He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it
+into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a
+lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed it in platinum. He
+contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the
+goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other.
+The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as
+large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like
+sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet
+somehow worth more than anything useful.
+
+He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their
+patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture,
+transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.
+
+He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were
+to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their
+plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.
+
+It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that nobody should spend
+his life or hers soiled and tired and fagged with a monotonous task.
+It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the
+toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces
+about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their
+fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.
+
+Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few
+should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be
+allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.
+
+And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich
+and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor?
+When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the
+reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the
+same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to
+learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would
+contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing
+of comfort to one's children rendered impossible, the establishment
+of one's destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would
+there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted "universal happiness."
+It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the
+next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.
+
+He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from these
+nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve
+in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work
+out their hearts' desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even
+more hateful middle class at their mercy.
+
+It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel,
+and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous
+sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many
+men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every
+privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might
+ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but
+little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed
+the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city
+shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men
+who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did
+not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not
+create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all
+for their voyage.
+
+A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry,
+was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought
+that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor
+problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools
+they worked with most.
+
+The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head
+of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected
+the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set
+steps.
+
+Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much
+of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan
+and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a practised skill. There was a
+startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and
+swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping,
+now limping, now running.
+
+He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his
+whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus
+intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in
+a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_.
+
+She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them,
+and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of
+jealousy in what she murmured:
+
+"You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships,
+young man!"
+
+"No?"
+
+"What cabarets have you graduated from?"
+
+He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?"
+
+"No."
+
+"One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a
+feather as you."
+
+"Are you referring to my head or my feet?"
+
+"Your blessed feet!"
+
+His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a
+delirium of motion.
+
+"That's unfair!" she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire
+of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him
+dizzily while he applauded with the other dancers till the band
+renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily
+equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the
+crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.
+
+The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from
+his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. "I wish we could sail on and
+on and on forever."
+
+"Forever is a long time," she smiled.
+
+"May I have the next dance?"
+
+"Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But
+don't--"
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he
+suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young
+officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered
+if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she
+responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be
+so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy
+smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous,
+an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for
+the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a
+temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism plus athleticism.
+
+Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise comported
+herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that desperate condition in
+which men are made ready to commit monogamy. He felt that he could not
+endure to have Mamise free any longer.
+
+He presented himself to her for the next dance.
+
+She laughed. "I'm booked."
+
+He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the dance
+out--stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men on the
+side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed him at seeing
+still a fourth stranger with his arms about Mamise, her breast to his
+and her procedure obedient to his. Worse yet, when a fifth insolent
+stranger cut in on the twin stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth
+temporary husband for another with a levity that amounted to
+outrageous polyandry.
+
+Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so intensely
+that he wanted to put an end to the abomination, reform it altogether.
+He did not want to dance between those white arms so easily forsworn.
+He wanted to rescue Mamise from this place of horror and hale her away
+to a cave with no outlook on mankind.
+
+It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she understood
+him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the proof of her sway
+over him and still sane enough to take a joy in her triumph.
+
+She introduced her partner--Davidge would almost have called the
+brute a paramour. He did not get the man's name and was glad of
+it--especially as the hunter deserted her and went after his next
+Sabine.
+
+"You've lost your faithful stenographer," was the first phrase of
+Mamise's that Davidge understood.
+
+"Why so?" he grumbled.
+
+"Because this is the life for me. I've been a heroine and a war-worker
+about as long as I can. I'm for the fleshpots and the cold-cream jars
+and the light fantastic. Aren't you going to dance with me any more?"
+
+"Just as you please," Davidge said, with a singularly boyish
+sulkiness, and wondered why Mamise laughed so mercilessly:
+
+"Of course I please."
+
+The music struck up an abandoned jig, but he danced with great dignity
+till his feet ran away with him. Then he made off with her again in
+one of his frenzies, and a laughter filled his whole being.
+
+She heard him growl something.
+
+"What did you say?" she said.
+
+"I said, 'Damn you!'"
+
+She laughed so heartily at this that she had to stop dancing for a
+moment. She astonished him by a brazen question:
+
+"Do you really love me as much as that?"
+
+"More," he groaned, and they bobbed and ducked and skipped as he
+muttered a wild anachronism:
+
+"If you don't marry me I'll murder you."
+
+"You're murdering me now. May I breathe, please?"
+
+He was furious at her evasion of so solemn a proposal. Yet she was so
+beautifully alive and aglow that he could not exactly hate her. But he
+said:
+
+"I won't ask you again. Next time you can ask me."
+
+"All right; that's a bet. I'll give you fair warning."
+
+And then that dance was over, and Mamise triumphant in all things. She
+was tumultuously hale and happy, and her lover loved her.
+
+To her that hath--for now, whom should Mamise see but Lady Clifton-Wyatt?
+Her heart ached with a reminiscent fear for a moment; then a malicious
+hope set it going again. Major Widdicombe claimed Mamise for the next
+dance, and extracted her from Davidge's possession. As they danced
+out, leaving Davidge stranded, Mamise noted that Lady C.-W. was
+regarding Davidge with a startled interest.
+
+The whirl of the dance carried her close to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and
+she knew that Lady C.-W. had seen her. Broken glimpses revealed to her
+that Lady C.-W. was escorting her escort across the ballroom floor
+toward Davidge.
+
+She saw the brazen creature tap Davidge's elbow and smile, putting out
+her hand with coquetry. She saw her debarrass herself of her
+companion, a French officer whose exquisite horizon-blue uniform was
+amazingly crossed with the wound and service chevrons of three years'
+warfaring. Nevertheless, Lady Clifton-Wyatt dropped him for the
+civilian Davidge. Mamise, flitting here and there, saw that Davidge
+was being led to the punch-altar, thence to a lonely strip of chairs,
+where Lady C.-W. sat herself down and motioned him to drop anchor
+alongside.
+
+Mamise longed to be near enough to hear what she could guess: her
+enemy's artless prelude followed by gradual modulations to her main
+theme--Mamise's wicked record.
+
+Mamise wished that she had studied lip-reading to get the details. But
+this was a slight vexation in the exultance of her mood. She was
+serene in the consciousness that Davidge already knew the facts about
+her, and that Lady Clifton-Wyatt's gossip would fall with the dreary
+thud of a story heard before. So Mamise's feet flew, and her heart
+made a music of its own to the tune of:
+
+"Thank God, I told him!"
+
+She realized, as never before, the tremendous comfort and convenience
+of the truth. She had been by instinct as veracious as a politely bred
+person may be, but now she understood that the truth is mighty good
+business. She resolved to deal in no other wares.
+
+This resolution lasted just long enough for her to make a hasty
+exception: she would begin her exclusive use of the truth as soon as
+she had told Polly a neat lie in explanation of her inexplicable
+journey to Baltimore.
+
+Lady C.-W. was doing Mamise the best turn in her power. Davidge was
+still angry at Mamise's flippancy in the face of his ardor. But Lady
+C.-W.'s attack gave the flirt the dignity of martyrdom. When Lady
+C.-W. finished her subtly casual account of all that Mamise had done
+or been accused of doing, Davidge crushed her with the quiet remark:
+
+"So she told me."
+
+"She told you that!"
+
+"Yes, and explained it all!"
+
+"She would!" was the best that Lady Clifton-Wyatt could do, but she
+saw that the case was lost. She saw that Davidge's gaze was following
+Mamise here and there amid the dancers, and she was sportswoman enough
+to concede:
+
+"She is a beauty, anyway--there's no questioning that, at least."
+
+It was the canniest thing she could have done to re-establish herself
+in Davidge's eyes. He felt so well reconciled with the world that he
+said:
+
+"You wouldn't care to finish this dance, I suppose?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Lady Clifton-Wyatt was democratic--in the provinces and the
+States--and this was as good a way of changing the subject as any. She
+rose promptly and entered the bosom of Davidge. The good American who
+did not believe in aristocracies had just time to be overawed at
+finding himself hugging a real Lady with a capital L when the music
+stopped.
+
+It is an old saw that what is too foolish to be said can be sung.
+Music hallows or denatures whatever it touches. It was quite proper,
+because quite customary, for Davidge and Lady Clifton-Wyatt to stand
+enfolded in each other's embrace so long as a dance tune was in the
+air. The moment the musicians quit work the attitude became indecent.
+
+Amazing and eternal mystery, that custom can make the same thing mean
+everything, or nothing, or all the between-things. The ancient
+Babylonians carried the idea of the permissible embrace to the
+ultimate intimacy in their annual festivals, and the good women
+doubtless thought no more of it than a woman of to-day thinks of
+waltzing with a presentable stranger. They went home to their husbands
+and their housework as if they had been to church. Certain Bolsheviki,
+even in the year 1918, put up placards renewing the ancient
+Mesopotamian custom, under the guise of a community privilege and a
+civic duty.
+
+And yet some people pretend to differentiate between fashions and
+morals!
+
+But nobody at this dance was foolish enough to philosophize. Everybody
+was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from the British embassy came
+up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hand and body for the next dance.
+Davidge had been mystically attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her
+in a mood for reconciliation. She liked him so well that when the
+Italian aviator to whom she had pledged the "Tickle Toe" came to
+demand it, she perjured herself calmly and eloped with Davidge. And
+Davidge, instead of being alarmed by her easy morals, was completely
+reassured.
+
+But he found her unready with another perjury when he abruptly asked
+her:
+
+"What are you doing to-morrow?"
+
+"Let me see," she temporized in a flutter, thinking of Baltimore and
+Nicky.
+
+"If you've nothing special on, how about a tea-dance? I'm getting
+addicted to this."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm booked up for to-morrow," she faltered. "Polly keeps
+the calendar. Yes, I know we have some stupid date--I can't think just
+what. How about the day after?"
+
+The deferment made his amorous heart sick, and to-morrow's to-morrow
+seemed as remote as Judgment Day. Besides, as he explained:
+
+"I've got to go back to the shipyard to-morrow evening. Couldn't you
+give me a lunch--an early one at twelve-thirty?"
+
+"Yes, I could do that. In fact, I'd love it!"
+
+"And me too?"
+
+"That would be telling."
+
+At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs cut in and
+would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to use his fists, but Mamise,
+though she longed to tarry with Davidge, knew the value of tantalism,
+and consented to the abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly
+and danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close that
+the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to swipe Polly
+across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.
+
+She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for support, mixing
+astonishing profanity with her smothered groans. The cub showered
+apologies on her, and reviled "Regulations" which compelled him to
+wear spurs with his boots, though he had only a desk job.
+
+Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing. But Mamise
+saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal and gave Polly
+her arm, as she limped through the barrage of hurtling couples. Polly
+asked Davidge to retrieve her husband from the sloe-eyed ambassadress
+who was hypnotizing him. She wailed to Mamise:
+
+"I know I'm marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron for this.
+I've got to go home and put my ankle in splints. I'll probably have to
+wear it in a sling for a month. I'd like to kill the rotten hound that
+put me out of business. And I had the next dance with that beautiful
+Rumanian devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!"
+
+Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding good night
+to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride out home with her, but
+Polly refused. She wanted to have a good cry in the car.
+
+Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she was plighted to
+luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the house of the friend he was
+stopping with, the hotels being booked solid for weeks ahead. He was
+nursing a stern determination to endure bachelordom no longer.
+
+Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her brains, while
+another segment condoled with Polly. But most of her wits were engaged
+in hunting a good excuse for her Baltimore escapade the next
+afternoon, and in discarding such implausible excuses as occurred to
+her.
+
+Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were
+a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.
+
+"I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is all icicles. I
+know I'll die of pneumonia."
+
+He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle of Polly,
+who was snuggling to him for warmth.
+
+She yowled: "My Gawd! My yankle! You'll not last long enough for
+pneumonia if you touch me again."
+
+He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to
+embrace her, she would none of him.
+
+When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac.
+It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and
+battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets
+clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an
+attack on a walled town.
+
+The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under
+the flight.
+
+The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise's room was like a
+storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as
+she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a
+heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice
+between the all-too-snowy sheets.
+
+She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and
+she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied
+bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front.
+She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent
+bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the
+shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at
+Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow
+barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get
+new shoes across.
+
+Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German
+offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be
+combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter.
+America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to
+shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women,
+too--thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the
+clothes, to warm men's hearts _via_ their stomachs, and to take their
+minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would
+furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage.
+Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now.
+Later they would be going across to play in France--one-night stands,
+two a day in Picardy.
+
+Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of burlesque of
+the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as
+by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a
+wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a
+dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad
+in draughty halls.
+
+She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of
+it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful
+as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those
+poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along
+the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a
+blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial
+misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the
+soldiers.
+
+The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the
+impulse. It would be her atonement.
+
+She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise
+it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the
+altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister
+of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over--if he
+had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return
+to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final
+atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be
+nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do
+that most of all.
+
+She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him
+farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or
+another--and then set about her destiny.
+
+She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears
+refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell
+asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a
+colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray
+in mittened hands.
+
+Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if
+you'll turn on the hot water, please."
+
+"Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this
+mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again.
+No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's
+half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee
+nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew."
+
+Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at
+eleven-thirty.
+
+"Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!"
+
+"Yessum, that's the raht tahm."
+
+"Great heavens!"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted
+with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.
+
+She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern
+history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the
+heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless
+day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two
+baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in
+the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire.
+This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for
+they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're
+going to commit suicide, anyway?")
+
+But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the
+very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an
+extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as
+ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an
+Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of
+helpless holy living.
+
+Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew
+rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their
+stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance,
+they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable
+fetor.
+
+And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had
+once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these
+slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and
+shared their glorious loathsomeness.
+
+The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise's one skip-bath day
+must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left
+unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure
+enough when she was dressed.
+
+Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as
+an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise's inspection, and Mamise
+pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.
+
+Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain the soldiers.
+Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier scheme than
+ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone her husband to look
+into the matter of a passport for her.
+
+Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and Mamise had
+not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge would be miffed. Polly
+suggested telephoning the hotel.
+
+Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as crowded as
+everything else.
+
+"It will take an hour to get the hotel," said Mamise, "another hour to
+page the man. I'll make a dash for it. He'll give me a little grace, I
+know."
+
+The car was not ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky
+and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads
+were sleety and skiddy, and required careful driving.
+
+Best of all, when she reached the bridge at last, she found it closed
+to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer
+Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and
+piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old
+aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected to live.
+
+It did, but it was not intrusted with traffic till long after the
+distraught Mamise had been told that the only way to get to Washington
+was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a detour of
+miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort
+Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the
+soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to
+the marble pages of the Arlington epic.
+
+The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in
+Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand
+dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of
+eternal anonymity--dead from all our wars, and many of them with their
+wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.
+
+But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this
+occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the
+Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past
+the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached
+the hotel, she was just one hour late.
+
+Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to
+reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them
+all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous.
+And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He
+had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result
+of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a
+haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.
+
+In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly
+Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her
+amazement.
+
+"Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with
+you and go to the theater."
+
+"Oh!" said the befuddled Davidge. "Oh, of course! Silly of me!
+Good-by!"
+
+Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement
+to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase
+after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking
+the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in
+vain.
+
+When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless
+confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had
+befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or
+hated her the more.
+
+But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry
+into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now too short for her to
+risk a journey out to Grinden Hall and back for a suit-case, in view
+of the Alexandria detour. She must, therefore, travel without baggage.
+Therefore she must return the same night. She found, to her immense
+relief, that this could be done. The seven-o'clock train to Baltimore
+reached there at eight, and there was a ten-ten train back.
+
+She had not yet devised a lie to appease Polly with, but now an
+inspiration came to her. She had told Davidge that she was dining out
+with Polly somewhere; consequently it would be safe to tell Polly that
+she was dining out with Davidge somewhere. The two would never meet to
+compare notes. Besides, it is pleasanter to lie by telephone. One
+cannot be seen to blush.
+
+She called up Grinden Hall and was luckily answered by what Widdicombe
+called "the ebony maid with the ivory head." Mamise told her not to
+summon her lame mistress to the telephone, but merely to say that Miss
+Webling was dining with Mr. Davidge and going to the theater with him.
+She made the maid repeat this till she had it by heart, then rang
+off.
+
+This was the message that Polly received and later transmitted to
+Davidge for his bewilderment.
+
+To fill the hours that must elapse before her train could leave,
+Mamise went to one of those moving-picture shows that keep going
+without interruption. Public benefactors maintain them for the
+salvation of women who have no homes or do not want to go to them
+yet.
+
+The moving-picture service included the usual news weekly, as usual
+leading one to marvel why the stupid subjects shown were selected from
+all the fascinating events of the time. Then followed a doleful
+imitation of Mr. Charles Chaplin, which proved by its very fiasco the
+artistry of the original.
+
+The _cinema de resistance_ was a long and idiotic vampire picture in
+which a stodgy creature lured impossible males to impossible ruin by
+wiles and attitudes that would have driven any actual male to flight,
+laughter, or a call for the police. But the audience seemed to enjoy
+it, as a substitute, no doubt, for the old-fashioned gruesome
+fairy-stories that one accepts because they are so unlike the tiresome
+realities. Mamise wondered if vampirism really succeeded in life. She
+was tempted to try a little of it some time, just as an experiment, if
+ever opportunity offered.
+
+In any case, the picture served its main purpose. It whiled away the
+dull afternoon till the dinner hour. She took her dinner on the train,
+remembering vividly how her heart history with Davidge had begun on a
+train. She missed him now, and his self-effacing gallantry.
+
+The man opposite her wanted to be cordial, but his motive was ill
+concealed, and Mamise treated him as if he didn't quite exist.
+Suddenly she remembered with a gasp that she had never paid Davidge
+for that chair he gave up to her. She vowed again that she would not
+forget. She felt a deep remorse, too, for a day of lies and tricks.
+She regretted especially the necessity of deceiving Davidge. It was
+her privilege to hoodwink Polly and other people, but she had no right
+to deceive Davidge. She was beginning to feel that she belonged to
+him.
+
+She resolved to atone for these new transgressions, too, as well as
+her old, by getting over to France as soon as possible and subjecting
+herself to a self-immolation among hardships. After the war--assuming
+that the war would soon end and that she would come out of it
+alive--afterward she could settle down and perhaps marry Davidge.
+
+Reveling in these pleasantly miserable schemes, she was startled to
+find Baltimore already gathering round the train. And she had not even
+begun to organize her stratagems against Nicky Easton. She made a
+hasty exit from the car and sought the cab-ranks outside.
+
+From the shadows a shadowy man semi-detached himself, lifted his hat,
+and motioned her to an open door. She bent her head down and her
+knees up and entered a little room on wheels.
+
+Nicky had evidently given the chauffeur instructions, for as soon as
+Nicky had come in, doubled up, and seated himself the limousine moved
+off--into what adventures? Mamise was wondering.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+IN BALTIMORE
+
+[Illustration: "So I have already done something more for Germany. That's
+splendid. Now tell me what else I can do." Nicky was too intoxicated with
+his success to see through her thin disguise.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young
+vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her
+own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some
+lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had
+forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.
+
+Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had
+been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in
+the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees
+whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule
+would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out
+as anonymously as she had sneaked in.
+
+Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her
+hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on.
+They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was
+fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a
+kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was
+complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.
+
+But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled
+against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted
+his arms away and muttered:
+
+"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the
+driver to let me out?"
+
+"_Nein doch_!"
+
+"Then let me alone or I will."
+
+Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her,
+and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble
+stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its
+statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.
+
+They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she
+was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:
+
+"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."
+
+Nicky fidgeted and sulked:
+
+"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is
+no use."
+
+"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have
+stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."
+
+"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."
+
+Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could
+not imagine how to coax him out of silence.
+
+His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:
+
+"_Ach Gott_, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These
+Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my _Vaterland_.
+But the time comes soon, and I must make patience. _Eile mit Weile!_"
+
+"You'd better tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he
+shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom
+rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized
+that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him by asserting her own
+dignity.
+
+She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly
+schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She
+hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they
+kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might
+accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had
+"vamped" for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her
+fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark
+was all the better for her purpose.
+
+At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a
+struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought
+Nicky's, as she cooed:
+
+"Come along, Nicky, don't be so cantankerous."
+
+His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its clutch:
+
+"But you are so colt!"
+
+She insinuated, "You couldn't expect me to make love to you the very
+first thing, could you?"
+
+"You mean you do like me?"
+
+Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And he,
+encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her, flung his arm
+about her again and drew her, resisting only in her soul, close to
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+But when his lips hunted hers she hid them in her fur collar; and he,
+imputing it to coquetry, humored her, finding her delicate timidity
+enhancing and inspiring. He chuckled:
+
+"You shall kiss me yet."
+
+"Not till you have told me what you sent for me for."
+
+"No, feerst you must give me one to proof your good fate--your good
+face--" He was trying to say "good faith."
+
+She was stubborn, but he was more obstinate still, and he had the
+advantage of the secret.
+
+And so at last she sighed "All right," and put up her cheek to pay the
+price. His arms tightened about her, and his lips were not content
+with her cheek. He fought to win her lips, but she began to tear off
+her gloves to scratch his eyes out if need be for release.
+
+She was revolted, and she would have marred his beauty if he had not
+let her go. Once freed, she regained her self-control, for the sake of
+her mission, and said, with a mock seriousness:
+
+"Now, be careful, or I won't listen to you at all."
+
+Sighing with disappointment, but more determined than ever to make her
+his, he said:
+
+"Feerst I must esk you, how is your feelink about Chermany?"
+
+"Just as before."
+
+"Chust as vich 'before'? Do you loaf Chermany or hate?"
+
+She was permitted to say only one thing. It came hard:
+
+"I love her, of course."
+
+"_Ach, behuet' dich, Gott!_" he cried, and would have clasped her
+again, but she insisted on discipline. He began his explanation.
+
+"I did told you how, to safe my life in England, I confessed
+somethings. Many of our people here will not forgive. My only vay to
+get back vere I have been is to make--as Americans say--to make myself
+skvare by to do some big vork. I have done a little, not much, but
+more can be if you help."
+
+"What could I do?"
+
+"Much things, but the greatest--listen once: our Chermany has no fear
+of America so long America is on this side of the Atlentic Ozean.
+Americans build ships; Chermany must destroy fester as they build.
+Already I have made one ship less for America. I cannot pooblish
+advertisink, but my people shall one day know, and that day comes
+soon; _Der Tag_ is almost here--you shall see! Our army grows alvays,
+in France; and England and France can get no more men. Ven all is
+ready, Chermany moves like a--a avalenche down a mountain and covers
+France to the sea.
+
+"On that day our fleet--our glorious ships--comes out from Kiel Canal,
+vere man holds them beck like big dogs in leash. Oh those beautiful
+day, Chermany conquers on lent and on sea. France dies, and England's
+navy goes down into the deep and comes never back.
+
+"_Ach Gott_, such a day it shall be--when old England's empire goes
+into history, into ancient history vit Roossia and Rome and Greece and
+Bebylonia.
+
+"England gone, France gone, Italy gone--who shall safe America and her
+armies and her unborn ships, and her cannon and shell and air-ships
+not yet so much as begun?
+
+"_Der Tag_ shall be like the lest day ven _Gott_ makes the graves open
+and the dead come beck to life. The Americans shall fall on knees
+before our Kaiser, and he shall render chudgment. Such a payink!
+
+"Now the Yenkees despise us Chermans. Ve cannot go to this city, to
+that dock. Everywhere is dead-lines and permissions and internment
+camps and persecutions, and all who are not in prison are afraid. They
+change their names from Cherman to English now, but soon they shall
+lift their heads and it shall be the Americans who shall know the
+dead-lines, the licenses, the internment camps.
+
+"So, Marie Louise, my sveetheart, if you can show and I can show that
+in the dark night ve did not forget the _Vaterland_, ve shall be proud
+and safe.
+
+"It is to make you safe ven comes _Der Tag_ I speak to you now. I vish
+you should share my vork now, so you can share my life efterwards.
+Now do I loaf you, Marie Louise? Now do I give you proof?"
+
+Mamise was all ashudder with the intensity of his conviction. She
+imagined an all-conquering Germany in America. She needed but to
+multiply the story of Belgium, of Serbia, of prostrate Russia. The
+Kaiser had put in the shop-window of the world samples enough of the
+future as it would be made by Germany.
+
+And in the mood of that day, with defeatism rife in Europe, and
+pessimism miasmatic in America, there was reason enough for Nicky to
+believe in his prophecy and to inspire belief in its possibility. The
+only impossible thing about it was that the world should ever endure
+the dominance of Germany. Death would seem better to almost everybody
+than life in such a civilization as she promised.
+
+Mamise feared the Teutonic might, but she could not for a moment
+consent to accept it. There was only one thing for her to do, and that
+was to learn what plans she could, and thwart them. Here within her
+grasp was the long-sought opportunity to pay off the debt she had
+incurred. She could be a soldier now, at last. There was no price that
+Nicky might have demanded too great, too costly, too shameful for her
+to pay. To denounce him or defy him would be a criminal waste of
+opportunity.
+
+She said: "I understand. You are right, of course. Let me help in any
+way I can. I only wish there were something big for me to do."
+
+Nicky was overjoyed. He had triumphed both as patriot and as lover.
+
+"There is a big think for you to do," he said. "You can all you
+vill."
+
+"Tell me," she pleaded.
+
+"You are in shipyard. This man Davidge goes on building ships. I gave
+him fair warning. I sinked one ship for him, but he makes more."
+
+"You sank his ship?" Mamise gasped.
+
+"Sure! The _Clara_, he called her. I find where she goes to take
+cargo. I go myself. I row up behind the ship in little boat, and I
+fasten by the rudder-post under the water, where no one sees, a bomb.
+It is all innocent till ship moves. Then every time the rudder turns a
+little screw turns in the machine.
+
+"It turns for two, three days; then--_boom_! It makes explosion, tears
+ship to pieces, and down she goes. And so goes all the next ships if
+you help again."
+
+"Again? What do you mean by again?"
+
+"It is you, Marie Louise, who sinks the _Clara_."
+
+Her laugh of incredulity was hardly more than a shiver of dread.
+
+"_Ja wohl!_ You did told Chake Nuttle vat Davidge tells you. Chake
+Nuttle tells me. I go and make sink the ship!"
+
+"Jake Nuddle! It was Jake that told you!" Mamise faltered, seeing her
+first vague suspicions damnably confirmed.
+
+"Sure! Chake Nuttle is my _Leutnant_. He has had much money. He gets
+more. He shall be rich man after comes _Der Tag_. It might be we make
+him von Nuttle! and you shall be Graefin von Oesten."
+
+Mamise was in an abject terror. The thick trees of the park were
+spooky as the dim light of the car elicited from the black wall of
+dark faint details of tree-trunks and naked boughs stark with winter.
+She was in a hurry to learn the rest and be gone. She spoke with a
+poor imitation of pride:
+
+"So I have already done something more for Germany. That's splendid.
+Now tell me what else I can do, for I want to--to get busy right
+away."
+
+Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin
+disguise.
+
+"You are close by Davidge. Chake Nuttle tells me he is sveet on you.
+You have his confidence. You can learn what secrets he has. Next time
+we do not vait for ship to be launched and to go for cargo. It might
+go some place ve could not find.
+
+"So now ve going blow up those ships before they touch vater--ve blow
+up his whole yard. You shall go beck and take up again your vork, and
+ven all is right I come down and get a job. I dress like vorkman and
+get into the yard. And I bring in enough bombs to blow up all the
+ships and the cranes and the machines.
+
+"Chake Nuttle tells me Davidge just gets a plate-bending machine.
+Forty-five t'ousand dollars it costs him, and long time to get. In one
+minute--poof! Ve bend that plate-bender!"
+
+He laughed a great Teutonic laugh and supposed that she was laughing,
+too. When he had subsided a little, he said:
+
+"So now you know vat you are to make! You like to do so much for
+Chermany, yes?"
+
+"Oh yes! Yes!" said Mamise.
+
+"You promise to do vat I send you vord?"
+
+"Yes." She would have promised to blow up the Capitol.
+
+"_Ach_, how beautiful you are even in the dark! Kiss me!"
+
+Remembering Judith, she paid that odious price, wishing that she might
+have the beast's infamous head with a sword. It was a kiss of
+betrayal, but she felt that it was no Judas-kiss, since Nicky was no
+Christ.
+
+He told her more of his plans in detail, and was so childishly proud
+of his superb achievements, past and future, that she could hardly
+persuade him to take her back to the station. He assured her that
+there was abundant time, but she would not trust his watch. She
+explained how necessary it was for her to return to Washington and to
+Polly Widdicombe's house before midnight. And at last he yielded to
+her entreaties, opened the door, and leaned out to tell the driver to
+turn back.
+
+Mamise was uneasy till they were out of the park and into the lighted
+streets again. But there was no safety here, for as they glided down
+Charles Street a taxicab going with the reckless velocity of taxicabs
+tried to cut across their path.
+
+There was a swift fencing for the right of way, and then the two cars
+came together with a clash and much crumpling of fenders.
+
+The drivers descended to wrangle over the blame, and Mamise had
+visions of a trip to the police station, with a consequent exposure.
+But Nicky was alive to the danger of notoriety. He got out and assumed
+the blame, taking the other driver's part and offering to pay the
+damages.
+
+The taxicab-driver assessed them liberally at fifty dollars, and Nicky
+filled his palm with bills, ordering his own driver to proceed. The
+car limped along with a twisted steering-gear, and Nicky growled
+thanksgivings over the narrow escape the German Empire had had from
+losing two of its most valuable agents.
+
+Mamise was sick with terror of what might have been. She saw the
+collision with a fatal result, herself and Nicky killed and flung to
+the street, dead together. It was not the fear of dying that froze
+her soul; it was the posthumous blow she would have given to Davidge's
+trust in her and all women, the pain she would have inflicted on his
+love. For to his dying day he would have believed her false to him, a
+cheap and nasty trickster, sneaking off to another town to a
+rendezvous with another man. And that man a German!
+
+The picture of his bitter disillusionment and of her own unmerited and
+eternal disgrace was intolerably real in spite of the fact that she
+knew it to be untrue, for our imaginations are far more ancient and
+more irresistible than our late and faltering reliance on the truth;
+the heavens and hells we fancy have more weight with our credulities
+than any facts we encounter. We can dodge the facts or close our eyes
+to them, but we cannot escape our dreams, whether our eyes are wide or
+sealed.
+
+Mamise could not free herself of this nightmare till she had bidden
+Nicky good-by the last time and left him in the cab outside the
+station.
+
+Further nightmares awaited her, for in the waiting-room she could not
+fight off the conviction that the train would never arrive. When it
+came clanging in on grinding wheels and she clambered aboard, she knew
+that it would be wrecked, and the finding of her body in the debris,
+or its disappearance in the flames, would break poor Davidge's heart
+and leave her to the same ignominy in his memory.
+
+While the train swung on toward Washington, she added another torment
+to her collection: how could she save Davidge from Nicky without
+betraying her sister's husband into the hands of justice? What right
+had she to tell Davidge anything when her sacred duty to her family
+and her poor sister must first be heartlessly violated?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+AT THE SHIPYARD
+
+[Illustration: Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in
+the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own soul, for people
+can on occasion accomplish what the familiar Irish drillmaster invited
+his raw recruits to do--"Step out and take a look at yourselves."
+
+Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts were cut
+off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with incredulity and
+exclaimed:
+
+"Can this be I?"
+
+If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in
+unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.
+
+What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding
+either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In
+London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings,
+of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred
+the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them.
+Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister's husband of
+disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would
+involve her sister's ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced
+that her sister's husband was in a plot against her lover and her
+country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the
+sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn
+duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have
+something at last to give up for her nation.
+
+The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in
+her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was
+threatened by her sister's husband, and her vague patriotism had been
+stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was
+undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining
+white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the
+blood of its votaries. Men were offering themselves, casting from
+them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love
+and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile
+hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the
+slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the
+trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they
+were missing from the beadroll of contributors.
+
+Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build
+ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer's share in the
+process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and
+offer what gift she had--the poor little gift of entertaining the
+soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she
+waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found
+at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save
+ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would
+be the liberty and what little good name her sister's husband had; it
+would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had
+dealt with harshly enough already.
+
+But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy.
+She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner
+being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to
+adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country.
+Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both
+by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she
+could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at
+the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade
+in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.
+
+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
+denouement 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 debut 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 role 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 Caesar. 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 debut 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 grace_ 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
+fiancee."
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes
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