Jake took a sudden interest in the matter. "Did the boss tell you where the _Clara_ was goin' to?"

"Yes--Norfolk."

Jake considered his unmentionable cigar a few minutes, then rose and mumbled:

"Goin' out to get some more cigars."

Abbie called after him, "Hay, you got a whole half-box left." But Jake did not seem to hear the recall.

He came back later cigarless and asked for the box.

"I thought you went out to git some," said Abbie, who felt it necessary to let no occasion slip for reminding him of some blunder he had made. Jake laughed very amiably.

"Well, so I did, and I went into a cigar-store, at that. But I hadda telephone a certain party, long-distance--and I forgot."

Abbie broke in, "Who you got to long-distance to?"

Jake did not answer.

Two days later Davidge was so proud that he came out into the main office and told all the clerks of the new distinction.

"They loaded the _Clara_ in record time with wheat for England. She sails to-day."

At his first chance to speak to Marie Louise he said:

"You compared her to Little Red Riding Hood--remember? Well, she's starting out through the big woods with a lot of victuals for old Granny England. If only the wolves don't get her!"

He felt, and Mamise felt, as lonely and as anxious for her as if she were indeed a little red-bonneted forest-farer on an errand of mercy.

Ships have always been dear to humankind because of the dangers they run and because of the pluck they show in storms and fires, and the unending fights they make against wind and wave. But of late they had had unheard-of enemies to meet, the submarine and the infernal machine placed inside the cargo.

Marie Louise spoke of this at the supper-table that night:

"To think, with so little food in the world and so many starving to death, people could sink ships full of wheat!"

On the second day after the _Clara_ set forth on the ocean Marie Louise took dictation for an hour and wrote out her letters as fast as she could. In the afternoon she took the typewritten transcripts into Davidge's office to drop them into his "in" basket.

The telephone rang. His hand went out to it, and she heard him say:

"Mr. Davidge speaking.... h.e.l.lo, Ed.... What? You're too close to the 'phone.... That's better.... You're too far away--start all over.... I don't get that.... Yes--a life-boat picked up with what--oh, six survivors. Yes--from what ship? I say, six survivors from what ship?... The _Clara_? She's gone? _Clara_?"

He reeled and wavered in his chair. "What happened--many lost? And the boat--cargo--everything--everybody but those six! They got her, then!

The Germans got her--on her first voyage! G.o.d d.a.m.n their guts!

Good-by, Ed."

He seemed to be calm, but the hand that held up the receiver groped for the hook with a pitiful blind man's gesture.

Mamise could not resist that blundering helplessness. She ran forward and took his hand and set the receiver in place.

He was too numb to thank her, but he was grateful. His mother was dead. The ship he had named for her was dead. He needed mothering.

Mamise put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them as if to hold them together under their burden. She said:

"I heard. I can't tell you how-- Oh, what can we do in such a world!"

He laughed foolishly and said, with a stumbling voice:

"I'll get a German for this--somehow!"

CHAPTER V

Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge's agony.

She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children.

She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob his own heart out.

She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard him groan, "I'll get a German for this!" somehow it horrified her, coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole nation.

America had stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them.

America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters; the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing--that torture never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.

America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood was the frank and undeniable pa.s.sion of the American Republic. To kill enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further notice.

The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their desks, women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams, business men across their counters, "Kill Germans!"

It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken over civilization.

They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing that grew with the butchery.

Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the Americans, but n.o.body thought of them as Germans now, and least of all did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations, German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.

It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy.

The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride.

Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled, mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work.

Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves, the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.

Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was a.s.sa.s.sinated; the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea.

Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a blood-feud of his own with Germany.

He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her with a sudden demand:

"Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?"