_ BOOK IV. AT THE SHIPYARD
CHAPTER IX
The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.
But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience and returned to her theme.
"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."
"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.
She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys from the clutch of a child, and went on:
"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a typewriter."
"It keeps you nearer to me."
"But I don't want to be near you. I want to build ships. Please let me go out in the yard. Please give me a real job."
He could not keep from laughing at her, at such delicacy pleading for such toil. His amusement humiliated her and baffled her so that at length she said:
"Please go on home. It's getting late, and I don't like you at all."
"I know you don't like me, but couldn't you love me?"
"That's more impossible than liking you, since you won't let me have my only wish."
"It's too brutal, I tell you. And it's getting too cold. It would simply ruin your perfect skin. I don't want to marry a longshoreman, thank you."
"Then I'll thank you to go on home. I'm tired out. I've got to get up in the morning at the screech of dawn and take up your ghastly drudgery again."
"If you'll marry me you won't have to work at all."
"But work is the one thing I want. So if you'll kindly take yourself off I'll be much obliged. You've no business here, anyway, and it's getting so late that you'll have all the neighbors talking."
"A lot I care!"
"Well, I care a lot," she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie. "I've got to live among them."
It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl's house by a sleepy parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into his overcoat, and growled:
"Good night!"
She sighed "Good night!" and wished that she were not so cantankerous. The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be quite squared.
She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.
Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone, imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when he was away or when he was at home.
When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely cottage she stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to begin moiling again.
Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and organized they would not have had their wages at all.
But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease. Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books straight.
Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of their families or the barrooms of idleness.
Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all that the German horror might spare.
Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of love. _