eir
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 ship."

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
ship 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 hell 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 cockroaches 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
fellowship 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 ships for Germans to sink. The thing to do
is to kill the Germans first and build the ships 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 ship-builders turn soldier?"

"Let somebody else do it."

"But who can do it as well as you can? The Germans s