_ BOOK IV. AT THE SHIPYARD
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. _