_ BOOK III. IN WASHINGTON
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. _