She had missed the carnival and she woke on the morning after. Nearly everybody was surprised to find that ending this one war had brought a dozen new wars, a hundred, a myriad.
The danger that had united the nations into a holy crusade had ended, and the crusaders were men again. They were back in the same old world with the same old sins and sorrows and selfishnesses, and unnumbered new ones. And they had the habit of battle––the gentlest were accustomed to slaughter.
It was not the Central Powers alone that had disintegrated. The Entente Cordiale was turned into a caldron of toil and trouble. No two people in any one nation agreed on the best way to keep the peace. Nobody could accept any other body’s theories.
Russia, whose collapse had cost the Allies a glimpse of destruction and a million lives, was a new plague spot, the center of the world’s dread. While the people in Russia starved or slew one another their terrible missionaries went about the world preaching chaos as the new gospel and fanning the always smoldering discontent of labor into a prairie fire.
Ships were needed still. Europe must be fed. Hunger was the Bolshevists’ blood-brother. Unemployment was the third in the grim fraternity.
Davidge increased his force daily, adding a hundred men or more to his army, choosing mainly from the returning hordes of soldiers.
When Mamise at last had left the hospital she found a new 343 ship growing where the Mamise had dwelt. The Mamise was at the equipping-dock, all but ready for the sea, about to steam out and take on a cargo of food to Poland, the new-old country gathering her three selves together under the spell of Paderewski’s patriotic fire.
Mamise wanted to go to work again. Her strength was back and she was not content to return to crochet-hooks and tennis-racquets. She had tasted the joy of machinery, had seen it add to her light muscles a giant’s strength. She wanted to build a ship all by herself, especially the riveting.
Davidge opposed her with all his might. He pointed out that the dream of women laboring with men, each at her job, had been postponed, like so many other dreams, lost like so many other benefits that mitigated war.
The horrors of peace were upon the world. Men were driving the women back to the kitchen. There were not jobs enough for all.