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 201 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 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.”