_ BOOK IV. AT THE SHIPYARD
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. _