The Cup of Fury Part 58

At this delicious moment an insolent cub in boots and spurs cut in and would not be denied. Davidge was tempted to use his fists, but Mamise, though she longed to tarry with Davidge, knew the value of tantalism, and consented to the abduction. For revenge Davidge took up with Polly and danced after Mamise, to be near her. He followed so close that the disastrous cub, in a sudden pirouette, contrived to swipe Polly across the shin and ankle-bones with his spur.

She almost swooned of agony, and clung to Davidge for support, mixing astonishing profanity with her smothered groans. The cub showered apologies on her, and reviled "Regulations" which compelled him to wear spurs with his boots, though he had only a desk job.

Polly smiled at him murderously, and said it was nothing. But Mamise saw her distress, rid herself of the hapless criminal and gave Polly her arm, as she limped through the barrage of hurtling couples. Polly asked Davidge to retrieve her husband from the sloe-eyed amba.s.sadress who was hypnotizing him. She wailed to Mamise:

"I know I'm marked for life. I ought to have a wound-chevron for this.

I've got to go home and put my ankle in splints. I'll probably have to wear it in a sling for a month. I'd like to kill the rotten hound that put me out of business. And I had the next dance with that beautiful Rumanian devil! You stay and dance with your ship-builder!"

Mamise could not even think of it, and insisted on bidding good night to the crestfallen Davidge. He offered to ride out home with her, but Polly refused. She wanted to have a good cry in the car.

Davidge bade Mamise good night, reminded her that she was plighted to luncheon at twelve-thirty, and went to the house of the friend he was stopping with, the hotels being booked solid for weeks ahead. He was nursing a stern determination to endure bachelordom no longer.

Mamise was thinking of Davidge tenderly with one of her brains, while another segment condoled with Polly. But most of her wits were engaged in hunting a good excuse for her Baltimore escapade the next afternoon, and in discarding such implausible excuses as occurred to her.

Bitter chill it was, and these owls, for all their feathers, were a-cold. Major Widdicombe was chattering.

"I danced myself into a sweat, and now my undershirt is all icicles. I know I'll die of pneumonia."

He shifted his foot, and one of his spurs grazed the ankle of Polly, who was snuggling to him for warmth.

She yowled: "My Gawd! My yankle! You'll not last long enough for pneumonia if you touch me again."

He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to embrace her, she would none of him.

When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac.

It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an attack on a walled town.

The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under the flight.

The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise's room was like a storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice between the all-too-snowy sheets.

She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front.

She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the sh.e.l.l-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get new shoes across.

Yet, in these frozen h.e.l.ls there were not men enough. The German offensive must not find the lines so spa.r.s.ely defended. Men must be combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter.

America was denying herself warmth in order to build sh.e.l.ls and to shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women, too--thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the clothes, to warm men's hearts _via_ their stomachs, and to take their minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage.

Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now.

Later they would be going across to play in France--one-night stands, two a day in Picardy.

Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of burlesque of the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad in draughty halls.

She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the soldiers.

The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the impulse. It would be her atonement.

She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over--if he had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do that most of all.

She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or another--and then set about her destiny.

She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell asleep in the blissful a.s.surance of a martyrdom.

CHAPTER IV

The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray in mittened hands.

Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if you'll turn on the hot water, please."

"Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again.

No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew."

Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at eleven-thirty.

"Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!"

"Yessum, that's the raht tahm."

"Great heavens!"

"Yes, ma'am."

Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.

She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire.

This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're going to commit suicide, anyway?")

But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as unG.o.dliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of helpless holy living.

Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable fetor.

And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and shared their glorious loathsomeness.

The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise's one skip-bath day must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure enough when she was dressed.

Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise's inspection, and Mamise pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.

Mamise remembered her plan to go abroad and entertain the soldiers.

Polly tried to dissuade her from an even crazier scheme than ship-building, but ended by promising to telephone her husband to look into the matter of a pa.s.sport for her.

Despite her best efforts, it was already twelve-thirty and Mamise had not left the house. She was afraid that Davidge would be miffed. Polly suggested telephoning the hotel.

Those were bad days for telephoners. The wires were as crowded as everything else.

"It will take an hour to get the hotel," said Mamise, "another hour to page the man. I'll make a dash for it. He'll give me a little grace, I know."