_ BOOK IV. AT THE SHIPYARD
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. _