_ BOOK VII. AT THE SHIPYARD
CHAPTER I
Mamise was astounded by the altered aspect of her own soul, for people can on occasion accomplish what the familiar Irish drillmaster invited his raw recruits to do--"Step out and take a look at yourselves."
Also, like the old lady of the nursery rhymes whose skirts were cut off while she slept, Mamise regarded herself with incredulity and exclaimed:
"Can this be I?"
If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.
What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings, of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them. Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister's husband of disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would involve her sister's ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced that her sister's husband was in a plot against her lover and her country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have something at last to give up for her nation.
The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was threatened by her sister's husband, and her vague patriotism had been stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the blood of its votaries. Men were offering themselves, casting from them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they were missing from the beadroll of contributors.
Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer's share in the process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and offer what gift she had--the poor little gift of entertaining the soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would be the liberty and what little good name her sister's husband had; it would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had dealt with harshly enough already.
But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy. She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country. Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.
She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never known.
She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her lips, voicing the words:
"You owe me something, old capital. You'll never put up any statues to me or carve my name on any tablets, but I'm doing something for you that will mean more than anybody will ever realize."
She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily and wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so.
Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise's room to demand an accounting.
"I was just on the point of telephoning the police to see if you had been found in the river."
Mamise did not bother either to explain her past lies or tell any new ones. She majestically answered:
"Polly darling, I have been engaged in affairs of state, which I am not at liberty to divulge to the common public."
"Rot!" said Polly. "I believe the 'affairs,' but not the 'state.'"
Mamise was above insult. "Some day you will know. You've heard of Helen of Troy, the lady with the face that launched a thousand ships? Well, this face of mine will launch at least half a dozen freight-boats."
Polly yawned. "I'll call my doctor in the morning and have you taken away quietly. Your mind's wandering, as well as the rest of you."
Mamise chuckled like a child with a great secret, and Polly waddled back to her bed.
Next morning Mamise woke into a world warm with her own importance, though the thermometer was farther down than Washington's oldest records. She called Davidge on the long-distance telephone, and there was a zero in his voice that she had never heard before.
"This is Mamise," she sang.
"Yes?" Simply that and nothing more.
She laughed aloud, glad that he cared enough for her to be so angry at her. She forgot the decencies of telephone etiquette enough to sing out:
"Do you really love me so madly?"
He loathed sentimentalities over the telephone, and she knew it, and was always indulging in them. But the fat was on the wire now, and he came back at her with a still icier tone:
"There's only one good excuse for what you've done. Are you telephoning from a hospital?"
"No, from Polly's."
"Then I can't imagine any excuse."
"But you're a business man, not an imaginator," she railed. "You evidently don't know me. I'm 'Belle Boyd, the Rebel Spy,' and also 'Joan of Arkansas,' and a few other patriots. I've got news for you that will melt the icicles off your eyebrows."
"News?" he answered, with no curiosity modifying his anger.
"War news. May I come down and tell you about it?"
"This is a free country."
"Fine! You're simply adorable when you try to sulk. What time would be most convenient?"
"I make no more appointments with you, young woman."
"All right. Then I'll wait at my shanty till you come."
"I was going to rent it."
"You just dare! I am coming back to work. The strike is over."
"You'd better come to the office as soon as you get here."
"All right. Give my love to Miss Gabus."
She left the telephone and set about packing her things in a fury. Polly reminded her that she had appointments for fittings at dressmakers'.
"I never keep appointments," said Mamise. "You can cancel them for me till this cruel war is over. Have the bills sent to me at the shipyard, will you, dear? Sorry to bother you, but I've barely time to catch my train."
Polly called her a once unmentionable name that was coming into fashionable use after a long exile. Women had draped themselves in a certain animal's pelt with such freedom and grace for so many years that its name had lost enough of its impropriety to be spoken, and not too much to express disapproval.
"You skunk!" said Polly. And Mamise laughed. Everything made her laugh now; she was so happy that she began to cry.
"Why the crocodiles?" said Polly. "Because you're leaving me?"
"No, I'm crying because I didn't realize how unhappy I had always been before I am as happy as I am now. I'm going to be useful at last, Polly. I'm going to do something for my country."
She was sharing in that vast national ecstasy which is called patriotism and which turns the flames of martyrdom into roses.
When Mamise reached the end of her journey she found Davidge waiting for her at the railroad station with a limousine.
His manner was studiously insulting, but he was helplessly glad to see her, and the humiliation he had suffered from her failure to keep her engagements with him in Washington was canceled by the tribute of her return to him. The knot of his frown was solved by the mischief of her smile. He had to say:
"Why didn't you meet me at luncheon?"
"How could I prevent the Potomac from putting the old bridge out of commission?" she demanded. "I got there in time, but they wouldn't let me across, and by the time I reached the hotel you had gone, and I didn't know where to find you. Heaven knows I tried."
The simplicity of this explanation deprived him of every excuse for further wrath, and he was not inspired to ask any further questions. He was capable of nothing better than a large and stupid:
"Oh!"
"Wait till you hear what I've got to tell you."
But first he disclosed a little plot of his own with a comfortable guiltiness:
"How would you like," he stammered, "since you say you have news--how would you like--instead of going to your shanty--I've had a fire built in it--but--how would you like to take a ride in the car--out into the country, you know? Then you could tell me, and nobody would hear or interrupt."
She was startled by the similarity of his arrangement to that of Nicky Easton, but she approached it with different dread.
She regretted the broad daylight and the disconcerting landscape. In the ride with Nicky she had been enveloped in the dark. Now the sky was lined with unbleached wool. The air was thick with snow withheld, and the snow on the ground took the color of the sky. But the light was searching, cynical, and the wayside scenes were revealed with the despondent starkness of a Russian novel. In this romanceless, colorless dreariness it was not easy for Mamise to gloss over the details of her meeting with Nicky Easton.
There was no escaping this part of the explanation, however, and she could see how little comfort Davidge took from the news that she had gone so far to be alone with a former devotee. A man does not want his sweetheart to take risks for him beyond a certain point, and he would rather not be saved at all than be saved by her at too high a price. The modern man has a hard time living down the heritage from the ten-thousand-year habitude of treating his women like children who cannot be trusted to take care of themselves.
Mamise had such poor success with the part of her chronicle she wished to publish that she boggled miserably the part she wanted to handle with most discretion. As is usual in such cases, the most conspicuous thing about her message was her inability to conceal the fact that she was concealing something. Davidge's imagination was consequently so busy that he paid hardly any attention to the tremendous facts she so awkwardly delivered.
She might as well have told him flat that Nicky would not divulge his plot except with his arms about her and his lips at her cheeks. That would not have been easy telling, but it was all too easy imagining for Davidge. He was thrown into an utter wretchedness by the vision he had of her surrender to the opportunity and to the undoubted importunity of her companion. He had a morbid desire to make her confess, and confessors have a notorious appetite for details.
"You weren't riding with Easton alone in the dark all that time--without--"
She waited for the question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse thesaurus of his vocabulary he found nothing subtle. He groaned:
"Without his--his making love to you?"
"I wish you wouldn't ask me," said Mamise.
"I don't need to. You've answered," Davidge snarled. "And so will he."
Mamise's heart was suddenly a live coal, throbbing with fire and keenly painful--yet very warm. She had a man who loved her well enough to hate for her and to avenge her. That was something gained.
Davidge brooded. It was inconceivably hideous that he should have given his heart to this pretty thing at his side only to have her ensconce herself in the arms of another man and give him the liberty of her cheeks--Heaven knew, hell knew, what other liberties. He vowed that he would never put his lips where another man's had been.
Mamise seemed to feel soiled and fit only for the waste-basket of life. She had delivered her "message to Garcia," and Garcia rewarded her with disgust. She waited shame-fast for a moment before she could even falter:
"Did you happen to hear the news I brought you? Or doesn't it interest you?"
Davidge answered with repugnance:
"Agh!"
In her meekness she needed some insult to revive her, and this sufficed. She flared instantly:
"I'm sorry I told you. I hope that Nicky blows up your whole damned shipyard and you with it; and I'd like to help him!"
Nothing less insane could have served the brilliant effect of that outburst. It cleared the sultry air like a crackling thunderbolt. A gentle rain followed down her cheeks, while the overcharged heart of Davidge roared with Jovian laughter.
There is no cure for these desperate situations like such an explosion. It burns up at once the litter of circumstance and leaves hardly an ash. It fuses elements that otherwise resist welding, and it annihilates all minor fears in one great terror that ends in a joyous relief.
Mamise was having a noble cry now, and Davidge was sobbing with laughter--the two forms of recreation most congenial to their respective sexes.
Davidge caught her hands and cooed with such noise that the driver outside must have heard the reverberations through the glass:
"You blessed child! I'm a low-lived brute, and you're an angel."
A man loves to call himself a brute, and a woman loves to be called an angel, especially when it is untrue in both cases.
The sky of their being thus cleansed with rain and thunder, and all blue peace again, they were calm enough by and by to consider the main business of the session--what was to be done to save the shipyard from destruction?
Mamise had to repeat most of what she had told, point by point:
Nicky was not going to wait till the ships were launched or even finished. He was impatient to strike a resounding blow at the American program. Nicky was going to let Mamise know just when the blow was to be struck, so that she might share in the glory of it when triumphant Germany rewarded her faithful servants in America. Jake Nuddle was to take part in the ship-slaughter for the double privilege of protesting against this capitalistic war and of crippling those cruel capitalists to whom he owed all his poverty--to hear him tell it.
When Mamise had finished this inventory of the situation Davidge pondered aloud:
"Of course, we ought to turn the case over to the Department of Justice and the Military and Naval Intelligence to handle, but--"
"But I'd like to shelter my poor sister if I could," said Mamise. "Of course, I wouldn't let any tenderness for Jake Nuddle stand in the way of my patriotic duty, for Heaven knows he's as much of a traitor to my poor sister as he is to everything else that's decent, but I'd like to keep him out of it somehow. Something might happen to make it possible, don't you suppose?"
"I might cripple him and send him to a hospital to save his life," said Davidge.
"Anything to keep him out of it," said Mamise. "If I should tell the authorities, though, they'd put him in jail right away, wouldn't they?"
"Probably. And they'd run your friend Nicky down and intern him. Then I'd lose my chance to lay hands on him as--"
"As he did on you," was what he started to say, but he stopped in time.
This being Davidge's fierce desire, he found plenty of justification for it in other arguments. In the first place, there was no telling where Nicky might be. He had given Mamise no hint of his headquarters. She had neglected to ask where she could reach him, and had been instructed simply to wait till he gave her the signal. No doubt he could be picked up somewhere in the enormous, ubiquitous net with which America had been gradually covered by the secret services and by the far-flung line of the American Protective League made up of private citizens. But there would be a certain unsatisfactoriness about nipping his plot so far from even the bud. Prevention is wisdom, but it lacks fascination.
And supposing that they found Nicky, what evidence had they against him, except Mamise's uncorroborated statement that he had discussed certain plots with her? Enemy aliens could be interned without trial, but that meant a halcyon existence for Nicky and every comfort except liberty. This was not to be considered. Davidge had a personal grudge, too, to satisfy. He owed Nicky punishment for sinking the ship named after Davidge's mother and for planning to sink the ship he was naming after the woman he hoped to make his wife.
Davidge was eager to seize Nicky in the very act of planting his torpedo and hoist him with his own petard. So he counseled a plan of waiting further developments. Mamise was the more willing, since it deferred the hateful moment when Jake Nuddle would be exposed. She had a hope that things might so happen as to leave him out of the denouement entirely.
And now Davidge and Mamise were in perfect agreement, conspirators against a conspiracy. And there was the final note of the terrible in their compact: their failure meant the demolition of all those growing ships, the nullification of Davidge's entire contribution to the war; their success would mean perhaps the death of Easton and the blackening of the name of Mamise's sister and her sister's children.
The solemnity of the outlook made impossible any talk of love. Davidge left Mamise at her cottage and rode back to his office, feeling like the commander of a stockade in the time of an Indian uprising. Mamise found that his foresight had had the house warmed for her; and there were flowers in a jar. She smiled at his tenderness even in his wrath. But the sight of the smoke rolling from the chimney had caught the eye of her sister, and she found Abbie waiting to welcome her.
The two rushed to each other with the affection of blood-kin, but Mamise felt like a Judas when she kissed the sister she was planning to betray. Abbie began at once to recite a catalogue of troubles. They were sordid and petty, but Mamise shivered to think how real a tragedy impended. She wondered how right she was to devastate her sister's life for the sake of a cause which, after all, was only the imagined welfare of millions of total strangers. She could not see the nation for the people, but her sister was her sister, and pitifully human. That was the worst wrench of war, the incessant compulsions to tear the heart away from its natural moorings. _