_ BOOK IV. AT THE SHIPYARD
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. _