The Cup of Fury Part 24

He kissed Polly, waved to Marie Louise, stepped into his car, and shot away.

Polly watched him with devout eyes and said:

"Poor boy! he's dying to get across into the trenches, but they won't take him because he's a little near-sighted, thank G.o.d! And he works like a dog, day and night." Then she returned to the rites of hospitality. "Had your breakfast?"

"At the station." The truth for once coincided very pleasantly with convenience.

"Then I know what you want," said Polly, "a bath and a nap. After that all-night train-trip you ought to be a wreck."

"I am."

Polly led her to a welcoming room that would have been quite pretty enough if it had had only a bed and a chair. Marie Louise felt as if she had come out of the wilderness into a city of refuge. Polly had an engagement, a committee meeting of women war-workers, and would not be back until luncheon-time. Marie Louise steeped herself in a hot tub, then in a long sweet sleep in a real bed. She was wakened by the voices of children, and looked out from her window to see the Widdicombe tots drilling in a company of three with a drum, a flag, and a wooden gun. The American army was not much bigger compared with the European nations in arms, but it would grow.

Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman idea that was claiming half of the war, the true squaw-spirit that takes up the drudgery at home while the braves go out to swap missiles with the enemy. When Marie Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to get into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of opportunities.

At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer was coming over from Washington. He had asked for sittings, and she had acceded to his request.

"I never can get photographs enough of my homely self," said Polly.

"I'm always hoping that by some accident the next one will make me look as I want to look--make ithers see me as I see mysel'!"

When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie Louise must pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented at last, to quiet her. They spent a harrowing afternoon striking att.i.tudes all over the place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths, profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the struggle to a.s.sume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul.

The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation were far-reaching for Marie Louise.

According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The Sunday after that Marie Louise's likeness appeared with "Dolly Madison's" and Jean Elliott's syndicated letters on "The Week in Washington" in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now and then her likeness popped out at her from _Town and Country_, _Vogue_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _The Spur_, what not?

One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial drawing-room.

He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it "Mamise"

with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.

"She's in this country now, the paper says," said Jake. "She's in Washington, and if I was you I'd write her a little letter astin' her is she our sister."

Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that "our." The more Jake considered the matter the less he liked the thought of waiting for a letter to go and an answer to come.

"Meet 'em face to face; that's me!" he declared at last. "I think I'll just take a trip to the little old capital m'self. I can tell the rest the c'mittee I'm goin' to put a few things up to some them Senators and Congersmen. That'll get my expenses paid for me."

There simply was n.o.body that Jake Nuddle would not cheat, if he could.

His always depressing wife suggested: "Supposin' the lady says she ain't Mamise, how you goin' to prove she is? You never seen her."

Jake snarled at her for a fool, but he knew that she was right. He resisted the dismal necessity as long as he could, and then extended one of his most cordial invitations:

"Aw, h.e.l.l! I reckon I'll have to drag you along."

He grumbled and cursed his fate and resolved to make Mamise pay double for ruining his excursion.

CHAPTER V

For a time Marie Louise had the solace of being busy and of nibbling at the edge of great occasions. The nation was reconst.i.tuting its whole life, and Washington was the capital of all the Allied peoples, their brazen serpent and their promise of salvation. Almost everybody was doing with his or her might what his or her hand found to do.

Repet.i.tion and contradiction of effort abounded; there was every confusion of counsel and of action. But the Republic was gathering itself for a mighty leap into the arena. For the first time women were being not merely permitted, but pleaded with, to lend their aid.

Marie Louise rolled bandages at a Red Cross room presided over by a pleasant widow, Mrs. Perry Merithew, with a son in the aviation, who was forever needing bandages. Mamise tired of these, bought a car and joined the Women's Motor Corps. She had a collision with a reckless wretch named "Pet" Bettany, and resigned. She helped with big festivals, toiled day and night at sweaters, and finally bought herself a knitting-machine and spun out half a dozen pairs of socks a day, by keeping a sweatshop pace for sweatshop hours. She was trying to find a more useful job. The trouble was that everybody wanted to be at something, to get into a uniform of some sort, to join the universal mobilization.

She went out little of evenings, preferring to keep herself in the seclusion of the Rosslyn home. Gradually her fears subsided and she felt that her welcome was wearing through. She began to look for a place to live. Washington was in a panic of rentals.

Apartments cost more than houses. A modest creature who had paid seventy-five dollars a month for a little flat let it for five hundred a month for the duration of the war. A gorgeous Sultana who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment rented it for a thousand dollars a month "for the duration." Marie Louise had money enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would buy.

She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices. She took up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books on system and efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.

Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an intermittent fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was trying to do his bit, but he was lost in the maelstrom swirling through the channels of official life. He would come to town for a few days, wait about, fuming, and return in disgust to his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism that pulled him back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he lost several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because their hours clashed with Marie Louise's.

On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel an invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero's. Little as he knew of the eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the famous name of Prothero. He had spoken with reverence always of her late husband, one of the rebuilders of the American navy, a voice crying in the wilderness for a revival of the ancient glories of the merchant marine. Davidge had never met him or his widow. He felt that he could not refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects to the relict of his idol.

But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom everybody had heard of, had heard of him. When he entered her door on the designated evening his riddle was answered.

The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on the console a little envelope which he proffered on his tray. The envelope was about the size of those that new-born parents use to inclose the proclamation of the advent of a new-born infant. The card inside Davidge's envelope carried the legend, "Miss Webling."

The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced him. There indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a majestic granddam in a coronet of white hair.

Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it. She clasped his and pa.s.sed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a character:

"This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright."

Mrs. Prothero pressed his hand and kept it while she said: "It is like Marie Louise to bring youth to cheer up an old crone like me."

Davidge m.u.f.fed the opening horribly. Instead of saying something brilliant about how young Mrs. Prothero looked, he said:

"Youth? I'm a hundred years old."

"You are!" Mrs. Prothero cried. "Then how old does that make me, in the Lord's name--a million?"

Davidge could not even recover the foot he had put in it. By looking foolish and keeping silent he barely saved himself from adding the other foot. Mrs. Prothero smiled at his discomfiture.

"Don't worry. I'm too ancient to be caught by pretty speeches--or to like the men who have 'em always ready."

She pressed his hand again and turned to welcome the financial Cyclops, James Dyckman, and his huge wife, and Captain Fargeton, a foreign military attache with service chevrons and wound-chevrons and a _croix de guerre_, and a wife, who had been Mildred Tait.

"All that and an American spouse!" said Davidge to Marie Louise.

"Have you never had an American spouse?" she asked, brazenly.

"Not one!" he confessed.

Major and Polly Widdicombe had come in with Marie Louise, and Davidge drifted into their circle. The great room filled gradually with men of past or future fame, and the poor women who were concerned in enduring its acquisition.