The Cup of Fury Part 45

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.

CHAPTER VI

The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to conform. Then she paused.

On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers, it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.

Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile, compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; b.u.mps, blows, collisions, oscillations, running aground--stresses that crumpled steel or scissored the rivets in two.

It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ash.o.r.e in fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds; some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory, degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps.

People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as little on their pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen emergency.

Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages.

He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at all.

Hitherto he had insisted on preliminary proofs. He wanted no steel in a ship's hull or in any part of her that had not behaved well in the shop tests, in the various machines that put the metal under bending stress, cross-breaking, hammering, drifting, shearing, elongation, contraction, compression, deflection, tension, and torsion stresses.

The best of the steels had their elastic limits; there was none that did not finally snap.

Once this point was found, the individual metal was placed according to its quality, the responsibility imposed on it being only a tenth of its proved capacity. That ought to have been enough of a margin of safety. Yet it did not prevent disasters.

People could not always be put to such shop tests beforehand. A reference or two, a snap judgment based on first impressions, ushered a man or a woman into a place where weakness or malice could do incalculable harm. In every inst.i.tution, as in every structure, these danger-spots exist. Davidge, for all his care and knowledge of people, could only take the best he could get.

Jake Nuddle had got past the sentry-line with ludicrous ease and had contrived already the ruin of one ship. His program, which included all the others, had had a little setback, but he could easily regain his lost ground, for the mob had vented its rage against him and was appeased.

Mamise was inside the sentry-lines, too, both of Davidge's shop and his heart. Her purposes were loyal, but she was drifting toward a supreme stress that should try her inmost fiber. And at the moment she felt an almost unbearable strain in the petty decision of whether to go with the clerks or stop with the boss.

Mamise was not so much afraid of what the clerks would say of her. It was Davidge that she was protecting. She did not want to have them talking about him--as if anything could have stopped them from that!

While she debated between being unselfish enough to leave him unconsoled and being selfish enough to stay, she spent so much time that the outer office was empty, anyway.

Seeing herself alone, she made a quick motion toward the door. Miss Gabus came out, stared violently, and said:

"Was you goin' in?"

"No--oh no!" said Mamise. "I left something in my desk."

She opened her desk, took out a pencil-nub and hurried away, ostentatiously pa.s.sing the other clerks as they struggled across the yard to the gate.

She walked to her shanty and found it all pins and needles. She was so desperate that she went to see her sister.

Marie Louise found Abbie in her kitchen, sewing b.u.t.tons on the extremely personal property of certain bachelors whom she washed for in spite of Jake's high earnings--from which she benefited no more than before. If Jake had come into a million, or shattered the world to bits and then rebuilt it nearer to his heart's desire, he would not have had enough to make much difference to Abbie. Mamise had made many handsome presents to Abbie, but somehow they vanished, or at least got Abbie no farther along the road to contentment or grace.

Mamise was full of the story of the disaster to the _Clara_. She drew Abbie into the living-room away from the children, who were playing in the kitchen because it was full of the savor of the forthcoming supper.

"Abbie dear, have you heard the news?"

Abbie gasped, "Oh G.o.d, is anything happened to Jake--killed or arrested or anything?"

"No, no--but _Clara_--the _Clara_--"

"Clara who?"

"The ship, the first ship we built, she's destroyed."