The Cup of Fury Part 44

"No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know you could be so angry."

"I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em, too?"

"Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big s.h.i.+p and all the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they belong."

This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into uncouth laughter.

But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions, and to run among them like a frantic child.

Davidge's next mood was a pa.s.sionate regret for the crew, the dead engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the las.h.i.+ng spray.

Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the s.h.i.+p's cargo would have relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian--what word or words could name that woe so mult.i.tudinous that, like the number of the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?

He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky wilderness--old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies withering like blistered flowers from the flattened b.r.e.a.s.t.s of their mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles.

The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned aloud:

"If they'd only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody--to anybody!

But to pour it into the sea!"

He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:

"I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the fool s.h.i.+p."

He began to laugh again, an imbecile ironic cachinnation.

"The blithering idiot I've been! To go and work and work and work, and drive my men and all the machinery for months and months to make a s.h.i.+p and put in the engines and send it down and load it, and all for some"--a gesture expressed his unspeakable thought--"of a German to blow it to h.e.l.l and gone, with a little clock-bomb in one second!"

In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we all revolve around ourselves as well as our suns.

"What's the use," he maundered--"what's the use of trying to do anything while they're alive and at work right here in our country?

They're everywhere! They swarm like c.o.c.kroaches out of every hole as soon as the light gets low! We've got to blister 'em all to death with rough-on-rats before we can build anything that will last. There's no stopping them without wiping 'em off the earth."

She did not argue with him. At such times people do not want arguments or good counsel or correction. They want somebody to stand by in mute fellows.h.i.+p to watch and listen and suffer, too. So Mamise helped Davidge through that ordeal. He turned from rage at the Germans to contempt for himself.

"It's time I quit out of this and went to work with the army. It makes me sick to be here making s.h.i.+ps for Germans to sink. The thing to do is to kill the Germans first and build the s.h.i.+ps when the sea is safe for humanity. I'm ashamed of myself sitting in an office shooting with a telephone and giving out plans and contracts and paying wages to a gang of mechanics. It's me for a rifle and a bayonet."

Mamise had to oppose this:

"Who's going to get you soldiers across the sea or feed you when you get there if all the s.h.i.+p-builders turn soldier?"

"Let somebody else do it."

"But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans said that America could never put an army across or feed it if she got it there. If you go on strike you'll prove the truth of that."

Then she began to chant his own song to him. A man likes to hear his n.o.bler words recalled. Here is one of the best resources a woman has.

Mamise was speaking for him as well as for herself when she said:

"Oh, I remember how you thrilled me with your talk of all the s.h.i.+ps you would build. You said it was the greatest poem ever written, the idea of making s.h.i.+ps faster than the Germans could sink them. It was that that made me want to be a s.h.i.+p-builder. It was the first big ambition I ever had. And now you tell me it's useless and foolis.h.!.+"

He saw the point without further pressure.

"You're right," he said. "My job's here. It would be selfish and showy to knock off this work and grab a gun. I'll stick. It's hard, though, to settle down here when everybody else is bound for France."

Mamise was one of those unusual wise persons who do not continue to argue a case that has already been won. She added only the warm personal note to help out the cold generality.

"There's my s.h.i.+p to finish, you know. You couldn't leave poor _Mamise_ out there on the stocks unfinished."

The personal note was so warm that he reached out for her. He needed her in his arms. He caught her roughly to him and knew for the first time the feel of her body against his, the sweet compliance of her form to his embrace.

But there was an anachronism to her in the contact. She was in one of those moods of exaltation, of impersonal nationalism, that women were rising to more and more as a new religion. She was feeling terribly American, and, though she had no anger for him and saw no insult in his violence, she seemed to be above and beyond mere hugging and kissing. She was in a Joan of Arc humor, so she put his hands away, yet squeezed them with fervor, for she knew that she had saved him from himself and to himself. She had brought him back to his east again, and the morning is always wonderful.

She had renewed his courage, however, so greatly that he did not despair of her. He merely postponed her, as people were postponing everything beautiful and lovable "for the duration of the war."

He reached for the buzzer. Already Mamise heard its rattlesnake clatter. But his hand paused and went to hers as he stammered:

"We've gone through this together, and you've helped me--I can't tell you how much, honey. Only, I hope we can go through a lot more trouble together. There's plenty of it ahead."

She felt proud and meek and dismally happy. She squeezed his big hand again in both of hers and sighed, with a smile:

"I hope so."

Then he pressed the buzzer, and Miss Gabus was inside the door with suspicious prompt.i.tude. Davidge said:

"Mr. Avery, please--and the others--all the others right away. Ask them to come here; and you might come back, Miss Gabus."

Mr. Avery, the chief clerk, and other clerks and stenographers, gathered, wondering what was about to happen. Some of them came grinning, for when they had asked Miss Gabus what was up she had guessed: "I reckon he's goin' to announce his engagement."

The office force came in like an ill-drilled comic-opera chorus.

Davidge waited till the last-comer was waiting. Then he said:

"Folks, I've just had bad news. The _Clara_--they got her! The Germans got her. She was blown up by a bomb. She was two days out and going like a greyhound when she sank with all on board except six of the crew who got away in a life-boat and were picked up by a tramp."

There was a shock of silence, then a hubbub of gasps, oaths, of incredulous protests.

Miss Gabus was the first to address Davidge:

"My Gawd! Mr. Davidge, what you goin' to do about it?"

They thought him a man of iron when he said, quietly:

"We'll build some more s.h.i.+ps. And if they sink those we'll--build some more."

He was a man of iron, but iron can bend and break and melt, and so can steel. Yet there is a renewal of strength, and, thanks to Mamise, Davidge was recalled to himself, though he was too shrewd or too tactful to give her the credit for redeeming him.

His resolute words gave the office people back to their own characters or their own reactions and their first phrases. Each had something to say. One, "She was such a pretty boat!" another, "Was she insured, d'you suppose?" a third, a fourth, and the rest: "The poor engineer--and the sailors!" "All that work for nothin'!" "The money she cost!" "The Belgians could 'a' used that wheat!" "Those Germans! Is there anything they won't do?"

The chief clerk shepherded them back to their tasks. Davidge took up the telephone to ask for more steel. Mamise renewed the cheerful _rap-rap-rap_ of her typewriter.

The shock that struck the office had yet to rush through the yard.