The Cup of Fury Part 71

"That's all very fine," he growled, "but where would I get my start? I got no eight thousand or anybody to lend me ten dollars."

"The banks will lend to men who will make money make money. It's not the guarantee they want so much as inspiration. Pierpont Morgan said he lent on character, not on collateral."

"Morgan, humph!"

"The trouble isn't with Morgan, but with you. What do you do with your nights? Study? study? beat your brains for ideas? No, you go home, tired, play with the children, talk with the wife, smoke, go to bed.

It's a beautiful life, but it's not a money-making life. You can't make money by working eight hours a day for another man's money.

You've got to get out and find it or dig it up.

"That business with the old hull put me on my feet, put dreams in my head. I looked about for other chances, took some of them and wished I hadn't. But I kept on trying. The war in Europe came. The world was crazy for ships. They couldn't build 'em fast enough to keep ahead of the submarines. On the Great Lakes there was a big steamer not doing much work. I heard of her. I went up and saw her. The job was to get her to the ocean. I managed it on borrowed money, bought her, and brought her up the Saint Lawrence to the sea--and down to New York. I made a fortune on that deal. Then did I retire and smoke my pipe of peace? No. I looked for another chance.

"When our country went into the war she needed ships of her own. She had to have shipyards first to build 'em in. My lifelong ambition was to make ships from the keel-plate up. I looked for the best place to put a shipyard, picked on this spot because other people hadn't found it. My partners and I got the land cheap because it was swamp. We worked out our plans, sitting up all night over blue-prints and studying how to save every possible penny and every possible waste motion.

"And now look at the swamp. It's one of the prettiest yards in the world. The Germans sank my _Clara_. Did I stop or go to making speeches about German vampires? No. I went on building.

"The Germans tried to get my next boat. I fought for her as I'll fight the Germans, the I. W. W., the Bolshevists, or any other sneaking coyotes that try to destroy my property.

"I lost this right arm trying to save that ship. And now that I'm crippled, am I asking for a pension or an admission to an old folks'

home? Am I pa.s.sing the hat to you other workers? No. I'm as good as ever I was. I made my left arm learn my right arm's business. If I lose my left arm next I'll teach my feet to write. And if I lose those, by G.o.d! I'll write with my teeth, or wigwag my ears.

"The trouble with you, Iddings, and the like of you is you brood over your troubles, instead of brooding over ways to improve yourself. You spend time and money on quack doctors. But I tell you, don't fight your work or your boss. Fight nature, fight sleep, fight fatigue, fight the sky, fight despair, and if you want money hunt up a place where it's to be found."

If Iddings had had brains enough to understand all this he would not have been Iddings working by the day. His stubborn response was:

"Well, I'll say the laboring-man is being bled by the capitalists and he'll never get his rights till he grabs 'em."

"And I'll say be sure that you're grabbing your rights and not grabbing your own throat.

"I'm for all the liberty in the world, for the dignity of labor, the voice of labor, the labor-union, the profit-sharing basis, the republic of labor. I think the workers ought to have a voice in running the work--all the share they can handle, all the control that won't hurt the business. But the business has got to come first, for it's business that makes comfort. I'll let any man run this shop who can run it as well as I can or better.

"What I'm against is letting somebody run my business who can't run his own. Talk won't build ships, old man. And complaints and protests won't build ships, or make any important money.

"Poor men are just as good as rich men and ought to have just the same rights, votes, privileges. But the first right a poor man ought to preserve is the right to become a rich man. Riches are beautiful things, Iddings, and they're worth working for. And they've got to be worked for.

"A laboring-man is a man that labors, whether he labors for two dollars a day or a thousand; and a loafer is a loafer, whether he has millions or dimes. Well, I've talked longer than I ever did before or ever will again. Do you believe anything I say?"

"No."

Davidge had to laugh. "Well, Iddings, I've got to hand it to you for obstinacy; you've got an old mule skinned to death. But old mules can't compete with race-horses. Balking and kicking won't get you very far."

He walked away, and Mamise went along. Davidge was in a somber mood.

"Poor old fellow, he's got no self-starter, no genius, no ideas, and he's doomed to be a drudge. It's the rotten cruelty of the world that most people are born without enough get-up-and-get to bring them and their work together without a whistle and a time-clock and an overseer. What scheme could ever be invented to keep poor old Iddings up to the level of a Sutton or a Sutton down to his?"

Mamise had heard a vast amount of discontented talk among the men.

"There's an awful lot of trouble brewing."

"Trouble is no luxury to me," said Davidge. "Blessed is he that expects trouble, for he shall get it. Wait till this war is over and then you'll see a real war."

"Shall we all get killed or starved?"

"Probably. But in the mean while we had better sail on and on and on.

The storm will find us wherever we are, and there's more danger close ash.o.r.e than out at sea. Let's make a tour of the _Mamise_ and see how soon she'll be ready to go overboard."

CHAPTER VIII

Nicky Easton's attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate the ship had failed, but the wounds he dealt her had r.e.t.a.r.ded her so that she missed by many weeks the chance of being launched on the Fourth of July with the other ships that made the Big Splash on that holy day. The first boat took her dive at one minute after midnight and eighty-one ships followed her into the astonished sea.

While the damaged parts of the _Mamise_ were remade, Davidge pushed the work on other portions of the ship's anatomy, so that when at length she was ready for the dip she was farther advanced than steel ships usually are before they are first let into the sea.

Her upper works were well along, her funnel was in, and her mast and bridge. She looked from a distance like a ship that had run ash.o.r.e.

There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the ships that grew alongside the _Mamise_, and each gang strove to put its boat overboard in record time. The "Mamisers," as they called themselves, fought against time and trouble to redeem her from the "jinx" that had set her back again and again. During the last few days the heat was furious and the hot plates made an inferno of the work. Then an icy rain set in. The workers would not stop for mean weather, hot or cold.

Mamise, the rivet-pa.s.ser, stood to her task in a continual shower-bath.

The furnace was sheltered, but the hot rivets must be pa.s.sed across the rain curtain. Sutton urged her to lay off and give way to Snotty or somebody whose health didn't matter a d.a.m.n. Davidge ordered her home, but her pride in her s.e.x and her zest for her ship kept her at work.

And then suddenly she sneezed!

She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken with a great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely the little explosion of tickled surfaces or a forewarning of a slight cold. It was the alarum of the new Great Death, the ravening lion under the sheep's wool of influenza.

The world that had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza swept the world with recurrent violences.

Men who had feared to go to the trenches were s.n.a.t.c.hed from their offices and from their homes. Men who had tried in vain to get into the fight died in their beds. Women and children perished innumerably.

Hea.r.s.e-horses were overworked. The mysterious, invisible all-enemy did not spare the soldiers; it sought them in the dugouts, among the reserves, at the ports of embarkation and debarkation, at the training-camps. In the hospitals it slew the convalescent wounded and killed the nurses.

From America the influenza took more lives than the war itself.

It baffled science and carried off the doctors. Masks appeared and people in offices were dressed in gauze muzzles. In some of the cities the entire populace went with bandaged mouths, and a man who would steal a furtive puff of a cigarette stole up a quiet street and kept his eyes alert for the police.

Whole families were stricken down and brave women who dared the pestilence found homes where father, mother, and children lay writhing and starving in pain and delirium.

At the shipyard every precaution was taken, and Davidge fought the unseen hosts for his men and for their families. Mamise had worn herself down gadding the workmen's row with medicines and victuals in her basket. And yet the death-roll mounted and strength was no protection.

In Washington and other cities the most desperate experiments in sanitation were attempted. Offices were closed or dismissed early.

Stenographers took dictation in masks. It was forbidden to crowd the street-cars. All places of public a.s.sembly were closed, churches no less than theaters and moving-picture shows. It was as illegal to hold prayer-meetings as dances.

This was the supreme blow at religion. The preachers who had confessed that the Church had failed to meet the war problems were dazed.

Mankind had not recovered from the fact that the world had been made a h.e.l.l by the German Emperor, who was the most pious of rulers and claimed to take his crown from G.o.d direct. The German Protestants and priests had used their pulpits for the propaganda of hate. The Catholic Emperor of Austria had aligned his priests. Catholic and Protestants fought for the Allies in the trenches, unfrocked or in their pulpits. The Bishop of London was booed as a slacker. The Pope wrung his hands and could not decide which way to turn. One British general frivolously put it, "I am afraid that the dear old Church has missed the bus this trip."

All religions were split apart and, as Lincoln said of the Civil War, both sides sent up their prayers to the same G.o.d, demanding that He crush the enemy.

For all the good the Y. M. C. A. accomplished, it ended the war with the contempt of most of the soldiers. Individual clergymen won love and crosses of war, but as men, not as saints.