_ BOOK VII. AT THE SHIPYARD
CHAPTER III
Sutton was a mighty man in his way, and earning a wage that would have been accounted princely a year before. All the workers were receiving immense increase of pay, but the champion riveters were lavishly rewarded.
The whole shipyard industry was on a racing basis. Plans were being laid to celebrate the next Fourth of July with an unheard-of number of launchings. Every boat-building company was trying to put overboard an absolute maximum of hulls on that day.
"Hurry-up" Hurley, who had driven the first rivets into a steel ship pneumatically, and Charles M. Schwab, of Bethlehem, were the inspiring leaders in the rush, and their ambition was to multiply the national output by ten. The spirit of emulation thrilled all the thrillable workmen, but the riveters were the spectacular favorites. Their names appeared in the papers as they topped each other's scores, and Sutton kept outdoing himself. For special occasions he groomed himself like a race-horse, resting the day before the great event and then giving himself up to a frenzy of speed.
On one noble day of nine hours' fury he broke the world's record temporarily. He drove four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five three-quarter-inch rivets into place. Then he was carried away to a twenty-four-hour rest, like an exhausted prizefighter.
That was one of the great days in Mamise's history, for she was permitted to assist in the achievement, and she was not entirely grateful to Davidge for suppressing the publication of her name alongside Sutton's. Her photograph appeared with his in many of the supplements, but nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow. The publication of her photograph as an English belle had made history for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but this picture had no follow-up except in her own pride.
This rapture, however, long postdated her first adventure into the shipyard. That grim period of eight hours was an alternation of shame, awkwardness, stupidity, failure, fatigue, and despair.
She did not even wash up for lunch, but picked her fodder from her pail with her companions. She smoked a convivial cigarette with the gang and was proud as a boy among grown-ups. She even wanted to be tough and was tempted to use ugly words in a swaggering pride.
But after her lunch it was almost impossible for her to get up and go back to her task, and she would have fainted from sheer weariness except that she had forsworn such luxuries as swoons.
The final whistle found her one entire neuralgia. The unending use of the same muscles, the repetition of the same rhythmic series, the cranium-shattering clatter of all the riveting-guns, the anxiety to be sure of each successive rivet, quite burned her out. And she learned that the reward for this ordeal was, according to the minimum wage-scale adopted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, thirty cents an hour for eight hours, with a ten-per-cent. increase for a six-day week. This would amount to all of two dollars and sixty-four cents for the day, and fifteen dollars for the week!
It was munificent for a passer-boy, but it was ruinous for a young woman of independent fortune and an ambition to look her best. She gasped with horror when she realized the petty reward for such prolonged torment. She was too weary to contrast the wage with the prices of food, fuel, and clothing. While wages climbed expenses soared.
She understood as never before, and never after, why labor is discontent and why it is so easily stirred to rebellion, why it feels itself the exploited slave of imaginary tyrants. She went to bed at eight and slept in the deeps of sweat-earned repose.
The next morning, getting up was like scourging a crowd of fagged-out children to school. All her limbs and sundry muscles whose existence she had never realized before were like separate children, each aching and wailing: "I can't! I won't!"
But the lameness vanished when she was at work again, and her sinews began to learn their various trades and to manage them automatically. She grew strong and lusty, and her task grew easy. She began to understand that while the employee has troubles enough and to spare, he has none of the torments of leadership; he is not responsible for the securing of contracts and materials, for borrowings of capital from the banks, or for the weekly nightmare of meeting the pay-roll. There are two hells in the cosmos of manufacture: the dark pit where the laborer fights the tiny worms of expense and the dizzy crags where the employer battles with the dragons of aggregates.
Mamise saw that most of the employees were employees because they lacked the self-starter of ambition. They were lazy-minded, and even their toiling bodies were lazy. For all their appearance of effort they did not ordinarily attain an efficiency of thirty per cent. of their capabilities. The turnover in employment was three times what it should have been. Three hundred men were hired for every hundred steadily at work, and the men at work did only a third of the work they could have done. The total wastefulness of man rivaled the ghastly wastefulness of nature with spawn and energy.
The poor toilers were more reckless, more shiftless, relatively more dissipated, than the idle rich, for the rich ordinarily squandered only the interest on their holdings, while the laborer wasted his capital in neglecting to make full use of his muscle. The risks they took with life and limb were amazing.
On Saturdays great numbers quit work and waited for their pay. On Mondays the force was greatly reduced by absentees nursing the hang-over from the Sunday drunk, and of those that came to work so many were unfit that the Monday accident increase was proverbial.
The excuse of slavery or serfdom was no longer legitimate, though it was loudly proclaimed by the agitators, the trade-union editors, and the parlor reformers. For, say what they would, labor could resign or strike at will; the laborer had his vote and his equality of opportunity. He was free even from the ordinary obligations, for nobody expected the workman to make or keep a contract for his services after it became inconvenient to him.
There were bad sports among them, as among the rich and the classes between. There were unions and individuals that were tyrants in power and cry-babies in trouble. There was much cruelty, trickery, and despotism inside the unions--ferocious jealousy of union against union, and mutual destructiveness.
This was, of course, inevitable, and it only proved that lying, cheating, and bullying were as natural to the so-called "laborer" as to the so-called "capitalist." The folly is in making the familiar distinction between them. Mamise saw that the majority of manual laborers did not do a third of the work they might have done and she knew that many of the capitalists did three times as much as they had to.
It is the individual that tells the story, and Mamise, who had known hard-working, firm-muscled men, and devoted mothers and pure daughters among the rich, found them also among the poor, but intermingled here, as above, with sots, degenerates, child-beaters, and wantons.
Mamise learned to admire and to be fond of many of the men and their families. But she had adventures with blackguards, rakes, and brutes. She was lovingly entreated by many a dear woman, but she was snubbed and slandered by others who were as extravagant, indolent, and immoral as the wives and daughters of the rich.
But all in all, the ship-builders loafed horribly in spite of the poetic inspiration of their calling and the prestige of public laudation; in spite of the appeals for hulls to carry food to the starving and troops to the anxious battle-front of Europe. In spite also of the highest wages ever paid to a craft, they kept their efficiency at a lower point than lower paid workmen averaged in the listless pre-war days. Yet there was no lack of outcry that the workman was throttled and enslaved by the greed of capital. There was no lack of outcry that profiteers were bleeding the nation to death and making martyrs of the poor.
Most of the capitalists had been workmen themselves and had risen from the lethargic mass by the simple expedient of using their brains for schemes and making their muscles produce more than the average output. The laborers who failed failed because when they got their eight-hour day they did not turn their leisure to production. And some of them dared to claim that the manual toilers alone produced the wealth and should alone be permitted to enjoy it, as if it were possible or desirable to choke off initiative and adventure or to devise a society in which the man whose ambition is to avoid work will set the pace for the man who loves it for itself and whose discontent goads him on to self-improvement! As if it were possible or desirable for the man who works half-heartedly eight hours a day to keep down the man who works whole-souledly eighteen hours a day! For time is power.
Even the benefits the modern laborer enjoys are largely the result of intervention in his behalf by successful men of enterprise who thrust upon the toiler the comforts, the safeguards, and the very privileges he will not or cannot seek for himself.
During the war the employers of labor, the generals of these tremendous armies, were everlastingly alert to find some means to stimulate them to do themselves justice. The best artists of the country devised eloquent posters, and these were stuck up everywhere, reminding the laborer that he was the partner of the soldier. Orators visited the yards and harangued the men. After each appeal there was a brief spurt of enthusiasm that showed what miracles could be accomplished if they had not lapsed almost at once into the usual sullen drudgery.
There were appeals to thrift also. The government needed billions of dollars, needed them so badly that the pennies of the poorest man must be sought for. Few of the workmen had the faintest idea of saving. The wives of some of them were humbly provident, but many of them were debt-runners in the shops and wasters in the kitchens.
A gigantic effort was put forth to teach the American people thrift. The idea of making small investments in government securities was something new. Bonds were supposed to be for bankers and plutocrats. Vast campaigns of education were undertaken, and the rich implored the poor to lay aside something for a rainy day. The rich invented schemes to wheedle the poor to their own salvation. So huge had been the wastefulness before that the new fashion produced billions upon billions of investments in Liberty Bonds, and hundreds of millions in War Savings Stamps.
Bands of missionaries went everywhere, to the theaters, the moving-picture houses, the schools, the shops, the factories, preaching the new gospel of good business and putting it across in the name of patriotism.
One of these troupes of crusaders marched upon Davidge's shipyard. And with it came Nicky Easton at last.
Easton had deferred his advent so long that Mamise and Davidge had come almost to yearn for him with heartsick eagerness. The first inkling of the prodigal's approach was a visit that Jake Nuddle paid to Mamise late one evening. She had never broached to him the matter of her talk with Easton, waiting always for him to speak of it to her. She was amazed to see him now, and he brought amazement with him.
"I just got a call on long distance," he said, "and a certain party tells me you was one of us all this time. Why didn't you put a feller wise?"
Mamise was inspired to answer his reproach with a better: "Because I don't trust you, Jake. You talk too much."
This robbed Jake of his bluster and convinced him that the elusive Mamise was some tremendous super-spy. He became servile at once, and took pride in being the lackey of her unexplained and unexplaining majesty. Mamise liked him even less in this role than the other.
She took his information with a languid indifference, as if the terrifying news were simply a tiresome confirmation of what she had long expected. Jake was tremulous with excitement and approval.
"Well, well, who'd 'a' thought our little Mamise was one of them slouch-hounds you read about? I see now why you've been stringin' that Davidge boob along. You got him eatin' out your hand. And I see now why you put them jumpers on and went out into the yards. You just got to know everything, ain't you?"
Mamise nodded and smiled felinely, as she imagined a queen of mystery would do. But as soon as she could get rid of Jake she was like a child alone in a graveyard.
Jake had told her that Nicky would be down in a few days, and not to be surprised when he appeared. She wanted to get the news to Davidge, but she dared not go to his rooms so late. And in the morning she was due at her job of passing rivets. She crept into bed to rest her dog-tired bones against the morrow's problems. Her dreams were all of death and destruction, and of steel ships crumpled like balls of paper thrown into a waste-basket.
If she had but known it, Davidge was making the rounds of his sentry-line. The guard at one gate was sound asleep. He found two others playing cards, and a fourth man dead drunk.
Inside the yards the great hulls rose up to the moon like the buttresses of a cliff. Only, they were delicately vulnerable, and Europe waited for them. _