Her upper works were well along, her funnel was in, and her mast and bridge. She looked from a distance like a ship that had run ashore.
There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the ships that grew alongside the Mamise, and each gang strove to put its boat overboard in record time. The “Mamisers,” as they called themselves, fought against time and trouble to redeem her from the “jinx” that had set her back again and again. During the last few days the heat was furious and the hot plates made an inferno of the work. Then an icy rain set in. The workers would not stop for mean weather, hot or cold.
Mamise, the rivet-passer, stood to her task in a continual shower-bath. The furnace was sheltered, but the hot rivets must be passed across the rain curtain. Sutton urged her to lay off and give way to Snotty or somebody whose health didn’t matter a damn. Davidge ordered her home, but her pride in her sex and her zest for her ship kept her at work.
And then suddenly she sneezed!
She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken with a great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely 333 the little explosion of tickled surfaces or a forewarning of a slight cold. It was the alarum of the new Great Death, the ravening lion under the sheep’s wool of influenza.
The world that had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza swept the world with recurrent violences.
Men who had feared to go to the trenches were snatched from their offices and from their homes. Men who had tried in vain to get into the fight died in their beds. Women and children perished innumerably. Hearse-horses were overworked. The mysterious, invisible all-enemy did not spare the soldiers; it sought them in the dugouts, among the reserves, at the ports of embarkation and debarkation, at the training-camps. In the hospitals it slew the convalescent wounded and killed the nurses.
From America the influenza took more lives than the war itself.
It baffled science and carried off the doctors. Masks appeared and people in offices were dressed in gauze muzzles. In some of the cities the entire populace went with bandaged mouths, and a man who would steal a furtive puff of a cigarette stole up a quiet street and kept his eyes alert for the police.
Whole families were stricken down and brave women who dared the pestilence found homes where father, mother, and children lay writhing and starving in pain and delirium.