The Cup of Fury Part 70

It thrilled him to be back at work again. The silence of the hospital had irked his soul. Here the air was full of the pneumatic riveter.

They called it the gun that would win the war. The shipyard atmosphere was shattered all day long as if with machine-gun fire and the riveters were indeed firing at Germany. Every red-hot rivet was a bullet's worth.

The cry grew louder for ships. The submarine was cutting down the world's whole fleet by a third. In February the Germans sank the _Tuscania_, loaded with American soldiers, and 159 of them were lost.

Uncle Sam tightened his lips and added the _Tuscania's_ dead soldiers to the _Lusitania's_ men and women and children on the invoice against Germany. He tightened his belt, too, and cut down his food for Europe's sake. He loosened his purse-strings and poured out gold and bonds and war-savings stamps, borrowing, lending, and spending with the desperation of a gambler determined to break the bank.

While Davidge was still in the hospital the German offensive broke. It succeeded beyond the scope of the blackest prophecy. It threw the fear of h.e.l.l into the stoutest hearts. All over the country people were putting pins in maps, always putting them farther back. Everybody talked strategy, and geography became the most dreadful of topics.

On March 29th Pershing threw what American troops were abroad into the general stock, gave them to Haig and Foch to use as they would.

On the same day the mysterious giant cannon of the Germans sent a sh.e.l.l into Paris, striking a church and killing seventy-five worshipers. And it was on a Good Friday that the men of _Gott_ sent this harbinger of good-will.

The Germans began to talk of the end of Great Britain, the erasure of France, and the reduction of America to her proper place.

Spring came to the dismal world again with a sardonic smile. In Washington the flower-duel was renewed between the Emba.s.sy terrace and the Louise Home. The irises made a drive and the forsythia sent up its barrage. The wistaria and the magnolia counterattacked. The Senator took off his wig again to give official sanction to summer and to rub his bewildered head the better.

The roving breezes fluttered tragic newspapers everywhere--in the parks, on the streets, on the scaffolds of the buildings, along the tented lanes, and in the barrack-rooms.

This wind was a love-zephyr as of old. But the world was frosted with a tremendous fear. What if old England fell? Empires did fall.

Nineveh, Babylon, and before them Ur and Nippur, and, after, Persia and Alexander's Greece and Rome. Germany was making the great try to renew Rome's sway; her Emperor called himself the Caesar. What if he should succeed?

Distraught by so many successes, the Germans grew frantic. They were diverted from one prize to another.

The British set their backs to the wall. The French repeated their Verdun watchword, "No thoroughfare," and the Americans began to come up. The Allies were driven finally to what they had always realized to be necessary, but had never consented to--a unified command. They put all their destinies into the hands of Foch.

Instantly and melodramatically the omens changed. Foch could live up to his own motto now, "Attack, attack, attack." He had been like a man gambling his last francs. Now he had word that unlimited funds were on the way from his Uncle Sam. He did not have to count his money over and over. He could squander it regardless.

In every direction he attacked, attacked, attacked. The stupefied world saw the German hordes checked, driven rearward, here, there, the other place.

Towns were redeemed, rivers regained, prisoners scooped up by the ten thousand. The pins began a great forward march along the maps. People fought for the privilege of placing them. Geography became the most fascinating sport ever known.

Davidge had come from the hospital minus one arm just as the bulletins changed from grave to gay. He was afraid now that the war would be over before his ships could share the glorious part that ships played in all this victory. The British had turned all their hulls to the American sh.o.r.es and the American troops were pouring into them in unbelievable floods.

Secrecy lost its military value. The best strategy that could be devised was to publish just how many Americans were landing in France.

General March would carry the news to Secretary Baker and he would scatter it broadcast through George Creel's Committee on Public Information, using telegraph, wireless, telephone, cable, post-office, placard, courier.

Davidge had always said that the war would be over as soon as the Germans got the first real jolt. With them war was a business and they would withdraw from it the moment they foresaw a certain bankruptcy ahead.

But there was the war after the war to be considered--the war for commerce, the postponed war with disgruntled labor and the impatient varieties of socialists and with the rabid Bolshevists frankly proclaiming their intention to destroy civilization as it stood.

Like a prudent skipper, Davidge began to trim his ship for the new storm that must follow the old. He took thought of the rivalries that would spring up inevitably between the late Allies, like brothers now, but doomed to turn upon one another with all the greater bitterness after war. For peace hath her wickedness no less renowned than war.

What would labor do when the spell of consecration to the war was gone and the pride of war wages must go before a fall? The time would come abruptly when the spectacle of employers begging men to work at any price would be changed to the spectacle of employers having no work for men--at any price.

The laborers would not surrender without a battle. They had tasted power and big money and they would not be lulled by economic explanations.

Mamise came upon Davidge one day in earnest converse with a faithful old toiler who had foreseen the same situation and wanted to know what his boss thought about it.

Iddings had worked as a mechanic all his life. He had worked hard, had lived sober, had turned his wages over to his wife, and spent them on his home and his children.

He was as good a man as could be found. Latterly he had been tormented by two things, the bitterness of increasing infirmities and dwindling power and the visions held out to him by Jake Nuddle and the disciples Jake had formed before he was taken away.

As Mamise came up in her overalls Iddings was saying:

"It ain't right, boss, and you know it. When a man like me works as hard as I done and cuts out all the fun and the booze and then sees old age comin' on and nothin' saved to speak of and no chance to save more'n a few hundred dollars, whilst other men has millions--why, I'm readin' the other day of a woman spendin' eighty thousand dollars on a fur coat, and my old woman slavin' like a horse all her life and goin'

round in a plush rag--I tell you it ain't right and you can't prove it is."

"I'm not going to try to," said Davidge. "I didn't build the world and I can't change it much. I see nothing but injustice everywhere I look. It's not only among men, but among animals and insects and plants. The weeds choke out the flowers; the wolves eat up the sheep unless the dogs fight the wolves; the gentle and the kind go under unless they're mighty clever. They call it the survival of the fittest, but it's really the survival of the fightingest."

"That's what I'm comin' to believe," said Iddings. "The workman will never get his rights unless he fights for 'em."

"Never."

"And if he wants to get rich he's got to fight the rich."

"No. He wants to make sure he's fighting his real enemies and fighting with weapons that won't be boomerangs."

"I don't get that last."

"Look here, Iddings, there are a lot of d.a.m.ned fools filling workmen's heads with insanity, telling them that their one hope of happiness is to drag down the rich, to blow up the factories or take control of 'em, to bankrupt the bankers and turn the government upside down. If they can't get a majority at the polls they won't pay any attention to the polls or the laws. They'll butcher the police and a.s.sa.s.sinate the big men. But that game can't win. It's been tried again and again by discontented idiots who go out and kill instead of going out to work.

"You can't get rich by robbing the rich and dividing up their money.

If you took all that Rockefeller is said to have and divided it up among the citizens of the country you'd get four or five dollars apiece at most, and you'd soon lose that.

"Rockefeller started as a laboring-man at wages you wouldn't look at to-day. The laboring-men alongside could have made just as much as he did if they'd a mind to. Somebody said he could have written Shakespeare's plays if he had a mind to, and Lamb said, 'Yes, if you'd a mind to.' The thing seems to be to be born with a mind to and to cultivate a mind to.

"You take Rockefeller's money away and he'll make more while you're fumbling with what you've got. Take Shakespeare's plays away and he'll write others while you're scratching your head.

"Don't let 'em fool you, Iddings, into believing that rich men get rich by stealing. We all cheat more or less, but no man ever built up a big fortune by plain theft. Men make money by making it.

"Karl Marx, who wrote your 'Workmen's Bible,' called capital a vampire. Well, there aren't any vampires except in the movies.

"Speaking of vamping wealth, did you ever hear how I got where I am?--not that it's so very far and not that I like to talk about myself--but just to show you how true your man Marx is.

"I was a working-man and worked hard. I put by a little out of what I made. Of nights I studied. I learned all ends of the ship-building business in a way. But I needed money to get free. It never occurred to me to claim somebody else's money as mine. I thought the rich would help me to get rich if I helped them to get richer. My idea of getting capital was to go get it. I was a long time finding where there was any.

"By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast--a steamer had run aground and the hull was abandoned after they took out what machinery they could salvage. The hull stood up in the storms and the sand began to bury it. It would have been 'dead capital' then for sure.

"The timbers were sound, though, and I found I could buy it cheap. I put in all I had saved in all my life, eight thousand dollars, for the hull. I got a man to risk something with me.

"We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in six masts, and made a big schooner of her.

"She cost us sixty thousand dollars all told. Before she was ready to sail we sold her for a hundred and twenty thousand. The buyers made big money out of her. The schooner is carrying food now and giving employment to sailors.

"Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did 'dead labor suck the life out of living labor,' as Karl Marx says? You could do the same.

You could if you would. There's plenty of old hulls lying around on the sands of the world."

Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.