He was filled with remorse, but when he tried to reach round to embrace her, she would none of him.
When they got to the bridge, they were amazed at the lazy old Potomac. It was a white torment of broken ice, roaring and slashing and battering the piers of the ancient bridge ominously, huge sheets clambering up and falling back split and broken, with the uproar of an attack on a walled town.
The chauffeur went to full speed, and the frosty boards shrilled under the flight.
The house was cold when they reached it, and Mamise’s room was like a storage-vault. She tore off her light dancing-dress and shivered as she stripped and took refuge in a cobwebby nightgown. She threw on a heavy bathrobe and kept it on when she crept into the icy interstice between the all-too-snowy sheets.
She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front. She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get new shoes across.
Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter. America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women, too––thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the clothes, to warm men’s hearts via their stomachs, and to take their minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage. Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now. Later they would be going across to play in France––one-night stands, two a day in Picardy.
Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of 263 burlesque of the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad in draughty halls.
She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the soldiers.
The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the impulse. It would be her atonement.
She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over––if he had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do that most of all.