The Cup of Fury Part 52

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 longsh.o.r.eman, 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.

BOOK V

IN WASHINGTON

[Ill.u.s.tration: How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other's examination.]

CHAPTER I

The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People thought of the gales that would hara.s.s the poor souls in the clammy trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not enough for themselves.

To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an office not half warm enough.

The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives along. The dour autumn seemed to wrench hopes from the heart like shriveled leaves, and to fill the air with swirling discouragements.

The men at work about the ships were numb and often stopped to blow upon their aching fingers. The red-hot rivets went in showers that threatened to blister, but gave no warmth.

The ambitions of Mamise congealed along with the other stirring things. She was sorely tempted to give up the unwomanly battle and accept Davidge's offer of a wedding-ring. She had, of course, her Webling inheritance to fall back upon, but she had come to hate it so as tainted money that she would not touch it or its interest. She put it all into Liberty Bonds and gave a good many of those to various charities. Not the least of her delights in her new career had been her emanc.i.p.ation from slavery to the money Mr. Verrinder had spoken of as her wages for aiding Sir Joseph Webling.

A marriage with Davidge was an altogether different slavery, a thoroughly patriotic livelihood. It would permit her to have servants to wait on her and build her fires. She would go out only when she wished, and sleep late of mornings. She would have mult.i.tudinous furs and a closed and heated limousine to carry her through the white world. She could salve her conscience by taking up some of the more comfortable forms of war work. She could manage a Red Cross bandage-factory or a knitting-room or serve hot dishes in a cozy canteen.

At times from sheer creature discomfort she inclined toward matrimony, as many another woman has done. These craven moods alternated with periods of self-rebuke. She told herself that such a marriage would dishonor her and cheat Davidge.

Besides, marriage was not all wedding-bells and luxury; it had its gall as well as its honey. Even in divorceful America marriage still possesses for women a certain finality. Only one marriage in nine ended in divorce that year.

Mamise knew men and women, married, single, and betwixt. She was far, indeed, from that more or less imaginary character so frequent in fiction and so rare in reality, the young woman who knows nothing of life and mankind. Like every other woman that ever lived, she knew a good deal more than she would confess, and had had more experience than she would admit under oath. In fact, she did not deny that she knew more than she wished she knew, and Davidge had found her very tantalizing about just how much her experience totaled up.

She had observed the enormous difference between a man and a woman who meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably.

Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially refreshing as bread and b.u.t.ter. The maddening thing about marriage is what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do exist, and some people get them.

Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared in plenty and in privation.

Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any other man.

She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a husband, of what she would be like as a wife.

Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an office by the fascinating advertis.e.m.e.nts of freedom, a career, achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home, commerce its treadmills and its oak.u.m-picking no less than the jail.

The cozy little cottage and the pleasant ch.o.r.es of solitude began to nag her soul.

The destruction of the good ship _Clara_ had dealt her a heavier blow than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many an aeschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business h.e.l.l with all the infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and compet.i.tion.

The blowing up of the _Clara_ had revealed the pitiful truth that men may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger.

The _Clara_ served as a warning that the ship _Mamise_ now on the stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or destroyed as soon as done. A pall of discontent was gathering about her. It was the turn of that season in her calendar. The weather was conspiring with the inner November.

The infamous winter of 1917-18 was preparing to descend upon the blackest year in human annals. Everybody was unhappy; there was a frightful shortage of food among all nations, a terrifying shortage of coal, and the lowest temperature ever known would be recorded.

America, less unfortunate than the other peoples, was bitterly disappointed in herself.