On the charred remnant she read:

The Beautiful Miss.... One of London's reigning beaut.... daughter of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....

Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin's statue of "The Thinker."

One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and raining about her face. Her old waist was half b.u.t.toned, and no one would have regretted if it had been all b.u.t.toned. She was as plebeian as an ash-can and as full of old embers.

She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike.

He had been to a meeting of other thinkers--ground and lofty thinkers who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and its remedy.

The evil was the possession of money by those who had acc.u.mulated it.

The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich, which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.

It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried to get rich by getting riches.

This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear almost unmanned him--what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children would be left motherless--and fatherless, for he would, of course, be too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too, the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their wife's name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:

"Whatta h.e.l.lsa matter wit choo?"

She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him as best she could:

"I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought for a minute it was my sister."

"Your sister? How'd she get her pitcher in the paper? Who did she shoot?"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the sheet from her and saw the young woman in the young-manly garb.

Jake gloated over the picture: "Some looker! What is she, a queen in burlecue?"

Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.

He roared. "London's ranging beaut? And you're what thinks she's your sister! The one that ran away? Was she a beaut like this?"

Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:

"Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn't I see her first?

Whyn't you tell me more about her? You never talk about her none. Why not?" No answer. "All I know is she went wrong and flew the coop."

Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. "Who said she went wrong?"

"You did!" Jake retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake praying for her--hollerin' at G.o.d to forgive her? Didn't you, or did you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin'

over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains to the head."

He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She tried to take back what she had said:

"Don't you set there tellin' me I ever told you nothin' mean about my pore little sister. She was as good a girl as ever lived, Mamise was."

"You're changin' your tune now, ain'tcha? Because you think she looks like a grand dam in pants! And where dya get that Mamise stuff? What was her honestogawd name? Maryer? You're tryin' to swell her up a little, huh?"

"No, I ain't. She was named Marie Louise after her gran'-maw, on'y as a baby she couldn't say it right. She said 'Mamise.' That's what she called her poor little self--Mamise. Seems like I can see her now, settin' on the floor like Sister. And where is she now? O Gawd! whatever become of her, runnin' off thataway--a little sixteen-year-ol' chile, runnin' off with a cheap thattical troupe, because her aunt smacked her.

"She never had no maw and no bringin' up, and she was so pirty. She had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said."

"And that ain't no lie," said Jake, with characteristic gallantry.

"There's nothin' but monopoly everywheres in the world. She got all the looks and I got you. I wonder who got her!"

Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for an article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date and growled:

"Aw, this paper's nearly a year old--May, 1916, it says."

This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner, flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping from stove to table, ministering to him.

Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was like an old tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite and provided with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever disturbs it.

Explosives are useful in place. But Jake was of the sort that blow up regardless of the occasion.

His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who was richer or better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than he was. Yet he had nothing in him of that constructive envy which is called emulation and leads to progress, to days of toil, nights of thought. His idea of equality was not to climb to the peak, but to drag the climbers down.

Prating always of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe them or remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of wages was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution to the war against oppressive capital was to denounce all successful men as brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors with the malefactors.

Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French Revolution, and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs who burned chateaux and shops, and butchered women as well as men, growling their ominous refrain:

"Noo sum zum c.u.m eel zaw" ("_Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont_").

The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret armies of enemies now inside the nation and threatened her success in the war.

The thing that prevented their triumph was that their blunders were greater than their malice, their folly more certain than their villainy. As soon as America entered the lists against Germany, the Jake Nuddles would begin doing their stupid best to prevent enlistment, to persuade desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck factories and trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of freedom they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than the snaky spies of Germany, and more venomous.

As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie Louise.

The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him was a beastly desire. He praised her grace because it tortured his wife. But even fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage of hatred at the look of cleanliness and comeliness, the environment of luxury only emphasized by her peasant disguise.

When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up the paper again and glared at it with hostile envy.

"Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir and a Lady, eh?

Just wait till we get through with them Sirs and Ladies. We'll mow 'em down. You'll see. Robbin' us poor toilers that does all the work!

We'll put an end to their peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany leaves of these birds we'll finish up. And then we'll take this rotten United States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just wait!"

His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the face, knocked the pretty lady's portrait to the floor and walked on it as he strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod on little Sister's hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little brother howled in duet.

Then father turned on them.

"Aw, shut up or I'll--"

He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished anything--except his meals. He left his children crying and his wife in a new distress; but then, revolutions cannot pause for women and children.

When he had gone, and Sister's tears had dried on her s.m.u.tty face, Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture of England's reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss W. was to be in England, blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other's estate.

CHAPTER VIII

When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from her even the props of hostility. She had nothing to lean on now, n.o.body to fight with for life and reputation. She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated thoughts followed one another in waves across her soul--grief for her foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses, remorse for seeming to have deserted them in their last hours, remorse for having been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse for that remorse, grief at losing the lovable, troublesome children, creature distress at giving up the creature comforts of the luxurious home, the revulsion of her unfettered mind and her restless young body at the prospect of exchanging liberty and occupation for the half-death of an idle cell--a kind of coffin residence--fear of being executed as a spy, and fear of being released to drag herself through life with the ball and chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.