Marie Louise's response to the mood of the place was conversion, a pa.s.sion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments of toil and wield the--she did not even know the names of the tools.

She only knew that they were sacred implements.

She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this world with its own sky of gla.s.s to the outer world with the same old s.p.a.ce-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to be a.s.sembled, the raw stuffs of creation.

As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh intolerable staccato.

Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the ship.

In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.

"That's the great Sutton," Davidge remarked, presently. "He's our prima donna. He's the champion riveter of this part of the country.

Like to meet him?"

Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.

Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn.

Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere manager.

Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:

"Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling."

Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his muscles a little tauter.

Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked, stupidly:

"So that's a riveter?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sutton confessed, "this is a riveter."

"Oh!" said Marie Louise.

"Well, I guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value, since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a rivetress.

She said, "Thank you," and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up his work again, as a man does after a woman has pa.s.sed by, pretending to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.

At a distance Davidge paused to say: "He's a great card, Sutton. He gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he's my ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal laborers have only one ideal--to do the least possible work and earn enough to loaf most of the time."

Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle's principles and wondered if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge's pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded short hours for his conspiracies.

At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat sheet of perforated steel--the homeliest contraption imaginable.

"Whatever is all this," she asked,--"the beginning of a bridge?"

"Yes and no. It's the beginning of part of the bridge we're building across the Atlantic."

"I don't believe that I quite follow you."

"This is the keel of a ship."

"No!"

"Yep!"

"And was the _Clara_ like this once?"

"No. _Clara's_ an old-fashioned creature like mother. This is a newfangled thing like--like you."

"Like me! This isn't--"

"This is to be the _Mamise_."

She could not hide her disappointment in her namesake.

"I must confess she's not very beautiful to start with."

"Neither were you at first, I suppose. I--I beg your pardon. I mean--"

He tried to tell her about the new principles of fabricated ships, the standardizing of the parts, and their manufacture at distances by various steel plants, the absence of curved lines, the advantage of all the sacrifice of the old art for the new speed.

In spite of what she had read she could not make his information her own. And yet it was thrilling to look at. She broke out:

"I've just got to learn how to build ships. It's the one thing on earth that will make me happy."

"Then I'll have to get it for you."

"You mean it?"

"If anything I could do could make you happy--cutting off my right arm, or--"

"That's no end nice of you. But I am in earnest. I'm wretchedly unhappy, doing nothing. We women, I fancy, are most of us just where boys are when they have outgrown boyhood and haven't reached manhood--when they are crazy to be at something, and can't even decide where to begin. Women have got to come out in the world and get to work. Here's my job, and I want it!"

He looked at the delicate hands she fluttered before him, and he smiled. She protested:

"I always loved physical exercise. In England I did the roughest sort of farmwork. I'm stronger than I look. I think I'd rather play one of those rat-tat-tat instruments than--than a harp in New Jerusalem."

Davidge shook his head. "I'm afraid you're not quite strong enough. It takes a lot of power to hold the gun against the hull. The compressed air kicks and shoves so hard that even men tire quickly. Sutton himself has all he can do to keep alive."

"Give me a hammer, then, and let me--smite something."

"Don't you think you'd rather begin in the office? You could learn the business there first. Besides, I don't like the thought of your roughing up those beautiful hands of yours."

"If men would only quit trying to keep women's hands soft and clean, the world would be the better for it."

"Well, come down and learn the business first--you'd be nearer me."

She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical left hook:

"But you'd teach me ship-building?"