CLICK-CLICK! Click-click! Clickety-click! One hundred pairs of knitting needles furnished a subdued castanet accompaniment to the voice of a long, lean lady-droner who stood upon the platform of the Fenchester Club Auditorium, and read from a typed list. At times she referred to various issues of The Guardian ranged on a flag-bedecked table. And at times the clickers paused to make notes in small books wherewith they had provided themselves for that very purpose. The gathering was the every morning meeting of the Fenchester Ladies War Reading Club.
Socially it was a comprehensively representative gathering, and something more. Pretty much every family whose comings and goings were wont to be entered (by Buddy Higman or some other arbiter of the elegancies) in The Guardian’s Society Notes had at least one member present. Sprinkled among the women who made up the active list of membership were a few associate members, mere males, and in the presiding officer’s chair sat Mr. Montrose Clark; for, after the regular proceedings of the day, special business was in order.
Miss Rappelje, the secretary, read from her list: “Nicholas Engel, grocer. Last year, two columns a week, average. Since The Fair Dealer announcement, half a column.”
The castanet chorus diminished while the knitters and crocheters entered a note against Herr Engel’s grocery.
“The Fliess Brewing Company,” continued the reader. “Last year five columns; now, none.”
“Hurray for Prohibition! Beer’s a German drink anyway,” cried a voice, and there was a wave of laughter as the clicking resumed.
“The Great Northwestern Stores. Last year three full pages, regularly, and on special sales as high as five—”
“Pardon me.” A member rose in the center of the house. “Mr. Ahrens sent a representative to tell me that, in spite of unsettled conditions, they have contracted to use more space in The Guardian than ever before, and to ask me to report it here.”
“Let ’em!” commented a determined and ominous voice. “I shall wait and see.”
From the murmur of assent which greeted this, it was evident that many would wait and see. So the reading went on, through dairies, laundries, undertakers, soft drinks, ice dealers, stationers, milliners, garages, all the lines of industry which bid in print for trade, while the knitters alternately toiled and made their notes.
Outside, in a small anteroom off the stage, Mr. Jeremy Robson put his obstinate head down and balked. Ten days’ enforced rest, except for his one escape, had gone far to restore him to fitness. Now he fended off Judge Selden Dana and demanded enlightenment.
“Not a step farther till I know what I’m up against,” he declared.
“All you have to do,” returned the lawyer soothingly, “is to trust to me and do as I tell you.”
“Is that all!” retorted Jeremy, with intent. “Who are these people outside and what are they doing?”
“They’re your well-earned enemies, and they’re saving the paper for you.”
“Somebody’s certainly done a job in that direction.-But how? These sound like mostly women.”
“So they are. As to how they’re pulling your paper through, that’s the simplest thing in the world. We got up a War Reading Club.”
“Reading Club,” repeated Jeremy. “Perfectly simple! Of course! Andy Galpinsaidthe whole town had gone crazy since I was laid up. Andy was right.”
“A great authority once proposed a classic question: ‘Who’s loony now?’ Wait until you hear the rest of this. The club meets here every morning to do knitting and other war-work while certain extracts from the local papers are read to them.”
“Good idea,” remarked Jeremy, weary but polite. “Shall I have something put in the paper about it?”
“My Lord, no!” almost shouted Dana.
Jeremy leaped in his chair. “I wish you would n’t do that sort of thing,” he protested.
“Still a bit jumpy? Well, I’ll explain in words of one syllable. But first apply your eye to this peep-hole and tell me what you think of our membership.”
Doing as he was directed, the editor looked out over what, in earlier days, he would have identified as a mass-meeting of The Guardian’s enemies.
“How much purchasing power per year in the local stores would you suppose they represent?” asked Dana. “A big lot. Quarter of a million, maybe.”
“Nearer twice that. Now, we’ve got a little committee called the Committee on Selective Reading. I happen to be chairman of it. Our committee chooses what advertisements—you get that, Jem?—what advertisements shall be read each day. That’s our White List. Our members deal only with merchants whose loyalty is above suspicion. What would you think of the loyalty of an advertiser who quit The Guardian to go into The Fair Dealer?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m prejudiced.”
“So is the War Reading Club. It’s my committee’s business to keep ’em prejudiced—against any merchant who advertises in the wrong place. Now, our theory is that our members read no advertisements, themselves, and don’t intend to; certainly not after The Fair Dealer appears. Therefore they know of the local advertising only as the Committee on Selective Reading chooses it for them. That’s thetheory.”
“What’s the fact?”
“The fact is that ninety-nine per cent of those women will see any merchant in town doubly damned before they spend a cent in his shop unless he sticks by The Guardian as long as The Guardian sticks by the country. Do you get it now?”
“Boycott!”
“And blackmail. You should have seen the weak-kneed among the store-people when we let our programme leak out! You heard part of it from Galpin.”
“Dana,” said the editor, “if you’d told me this before, you’d have saved me some mighty tough days.”
“Couldn’t risk it. Can’t you see that we’ve been skirting the ragged edge of the law? If you’d been in on it, The Fair Dealer could have charged conspiracy.”
“Then why tell me now?”
“We-ell, we can’t work under cover much longer. Besides, I doubt if there’s much of any fight left in Embree and his crowd.” He peered out through the peep-hole. “They’ve turned it into an experience meeting now,” he remarked. “Then you come on. They’re expecting you. Will you come peaceably or be escorted?”
“Let me keep out of sight until it’s my turn, anyway,” pleaded Jeremy.
So the lawyer, leading him in, established him behind a wing where he was half-hidden, and placed himself as a screen. As he settled himself down, a plump and luxuriously dressed woman at the rear of the hall rose and said austerely:
“I disapprove The Guardian’s local policy. I consider it unfair and prejudiced against—er—ah—against our kind of people. But while we are at war I agree to support it loyally and to deal only with those who support it.”
“Are my eyes playing tricks?” whispered Jeremy in Dana’s ear. “Or is that Mrs. Ambrose Galsworth, who tried to have me blackballed at the Canoe Club?”
“She’s a new member. Wait! There’s worse to come,” chuckled the lawyer.
A little, lean, brisk, twinkling old maid projected herself out of her seat with a jumping-jack effect.
“I never expected to live to see the day I’d speak for The Guardian after they printed that awful political attack on my dear uncle,” she declared. “But the country first! Put down Celia Jenney on your list. And”—her black bright eyes snapped out sparks—“if there’s a store in town that don’t want my trade while this war is on, all it has to do is to take its advertising out of The Guardian and put it into The Fair Dealer—if that’s its silly name.”
“She spends only about fifteen thousand a year in this town,” observed Dana aside to Jeremy.
“No wonder the advertisers have been falling over themselves to get back into the paper!” murmured the editor.
After further informal pledges the chairman called for reports from the “Missionary Workers.” Up rose Aider-man Crobin—Crooked Crobin, as The Guardian had dubbed him for years.
“T’ree of my constitchoonts assured me this mahmin’—voluntarily, ye ondherstand; quite voluntarily—that they are cancelin’ their contract wid th’ noo paper.”
A tall, pale young woman rose in the center of the house, and as she moistened her nervous lips a murmur and a rustle swept over the audience; for this was Mrs. Dennis Robbins, Governor Embree’s sister.
“I bring five pledges of advertisers to stand by The Guardian—and America,” she said in a low voice; and a quick ripple of sympathetic applause answered her.
Before it had died away, old Madam Taylor rustled silkily to her feet.
“I’m the tax-dodger,” she cackled. “See The Guardian if you don’t believe it. But I never dodged a good fight. Two stores that I trade with cut down their advertising in The Guardian. So I cut down my trade with them. I cut it down to nothing. Now I understand they feel differently about the paper,” she concluded malevolently.
Up popped pursy little Mrs. Stockmuller. “Me, I quit Ahrens anyway,” she announced, and sat down flushed with the resultant applause of the multitude and suddenly conscious of latent and hitherto unsuspected capabilities as a public speaker.
Then little Anne Serviss pledged the support of three hundred University girls, and following her, the Reverend Mr. Merserole reared himself impressively into sight and hearing.
“Inter arma, rixæ minores silent,” he proclaimed oracularly, “if my friend Judge Dana, whom I observe upon the stage, will permit me to alter a legal proverb to fit the occasion. ‘In time of war, lesser quarrels are stilled.’ Many of us have had our—er—trials with The Guardian. But all that is forgotten in the larger cause. I beg to report, Mr. Chairman, that eighteen members of my church—leading members, I may add—have signed an agreement to advertise in no local morning paper during the war.”
“But that’s boycott and against the law, isn’t it?” queried some cautious member.
Dana jumped to his feet.
“Let ’em take it up!” he cried, his face lighted by a joyous snarl. “Just let us get ’em into court on it!”
A shout answered him. There was no mistaking the temper of that crowd. Friends or enemies of The Guardian’s lesser policies, they were shoulder to shoulder now in the common cause. A conservative old judge was just resuming his seat, after reporting, when the door was jerked open and there burst into the aisle Andrew Galpin, livid with the excitement of great tidings.
“They’ve quit!” he shouted. Then, recalling himself to the proprieties, he added: “I beg pardon, Mr. Chairman. But they’ve quit!”
Mr. Montrose Clark rose. “Mr. Andrew Galpin, of The Guardian,” he announced. “Mr. Galpin has, perhaps, matter of interest to present before this meeting.”
“They’ve quit. That’s all,” said the excited Galpin. His wild and roving glance fell upon Jeremy Robson who had incautiously moved forward at sight of his associate, and the last vestige of parliamentary decorum departed from him. “Do you get that, Boss?” he bellowed. “The Botches have quit. We win.”
“Who’s quit?”
“What’s a Botch?”
“Platform!”
“Tell us about it.”
“What’s a Botch?” repeated the general manager. “Bausch is a Botch. Wanser’s a Botch. The Deutscher Club’s a batch of Botches. ‘Smiling Mart’ Embree’s a Botch, The Fair Dealer would have been a Botch, but there is n’t going to be any Fair Dealer. They could n’t stand the gaff you folks put to ’em. Publication day’s indefinitely postponed.”
Hardly had he finished when Jeremy Robson found himself being hustled by Judge Dana and the chairman, who had possessed themselves of an arm apiece, to the front of the platform. The house rose to him in a burst of acclaim. He looked out, with nerves aquiver, across that waiting audience of one-time enemies, opponents bitter and implacable, bitterly and implacably fought in many an unforgotten campaign; now his allies, rallying to a service greater than all past hatreds, higher than all past loyalties.
Judge Dana’s words echoed back to him: “In the same cause—with the last drop of blood—to the finish!” What terms could he find wherein to speak to these, his enemies of old, looking up at him with such befriending eyes?
Montrose Clark had delivered himself of a hurried and unheeded introduction, and now Jeremy stood, with shaking knees, gazing down at them. Opportunely and suddenly the parable of Nick Milliken came into his mind.
“My friends,” he said unsteadily, “I can’t make you a speech. There are n’t thanks made for this sort of thing. But I can tell you the parable of Milliken. You know Milliken, the Socialist—one of us. He was talking to a bunch that were ripe for a strike, arguing against it because it would hinder one little corner of our war. This is what he told them: ‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I’ve been fighting Wall Street and the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. I’m against everything they represent. I expect to go on fighting them the rest of my life. But if I were walking down the street with Mr. Morgan and we met a mad wolf in the road I’d say to him: “Pierpont, let’s get together and kill that wolf. Our little scrap can wait.” That’s what Milliken told them, my friends. That’s all I can say to you now. We’ve had our differences, you and I. We’ll have them again. They seemed big and bitter at the time. How little they seem now! For now we’re facing the mad wolf of Germany right here in Centralia. He’s in the heart of our State. “Let’s get him out! Our little scrap can wait!”’”
They rose to him again.
“But, God bless your dear hearts,” cried young Jeremy Robson with shining eyes and outstretched hands, “how can we ever fight each other after this!”
Up in a far corner of the gallery a pair of strong, little, sun-tanned, eager, tremulous hands went forth involuntarily as if to meet Jeremy’s, unseen.
While that very unliterary and decidedly militant organization, the Fenchester War Reading Club, was pouring forward to overwhelm the editor of The Guardian, there gathered in the little side room a hasty and earnest conference of three. Andrew Galpin and Montrose Clark having left it, the lone survivor, Judge Selden Dana, remained to catch Jeremy as he came out.
“Jem,” he said, “you’ve won.”
“Thanks to you people!”
“Thanks to a good fight. Galpin tells me The Fair Dealer backers are through. We’ve scared the local advertisers out of their contracts and the paper can’t hold ’em because of the change of publication date. Verrall made a fatal break when he put a date in that contract. They’re through. But The Fair Dealer is going on.”
“No! Who’s going to back it?”
“Montrose Clark. He’s going to take it over.”
“For his corporation campaign. I see. Then this means another fight of another kind on my hands.”
“He’s going to use it to beat out Martin Embree with his own candidate.”
Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “You know The Guardian can’t and won’t stand for you fellows’ kind of candidate.”
“You’ll stand for this one.”
“Who is it?”
“Jeremy Robson.”
“Jer—Andy was right,sure!” gasped the other. “The town has gone crazy and I’ve gone with it.”
“On a platform of Centralia for the War,” continued the other. “Now put your lower jaw back on its hinges and I’ll explain how this is n’t as crazy from our point of view as you’d think. You’ll be elected—for we’ll lick ‘Smiling Mart’—only for the unfinished term. The war will last that long, and while the war lasts internal polides don’t matter. After the war—why, we’ll have a newspaper of our own to lick you with when you come up for reelection.”
“I’ll give you a good run both ways,” promised Jeremy. And the two men soberly shook hands upon it.
“What a scheme; the woman’s boycott!” said Jeremy presently. “I might have known that was your fine Italian hand.”
“It was n’t.”
“No? Who did work it out?”
“A much cleverer politician than I ever thought of being.”
“There ain’t no sich animule,” denied Jeremy. “Show it to me.”
“I have been sitting at the feet of Wisdom, Wile, and Woman. Her other name,” said Judge Dana, “is Marcia Ames. And my professional advice to you is to be on your way.”
“In dreams she grows not older
The lands of Dream among—”
THE deep, soft thrill of the contralto voice floated through the warm air on invisible wings. The listener, coming softly up the pathway of the old garden, paused to hearken, to drink it in, with the fragrance of the late roses, the wine of the sun-drenched air, the peace of the shaded ways, all the other lovelinesses of a world suddenly blessed to his soul.
The voice faltered and sank, at the sound of his foot upon the steps. The singer’s hands strayed like suddenly affrighted things among the keys of the piano. She stood to face him as he entered, and of all the tremulous, tender beauty of her, only her eyes meeting and merging with his, were unwavering.
“Jem!” she said, very low.
“Marcia!”
She lifted her arms as he crossed swiftly to her, and clung to him, and gave him her lips in glad and complete surrender, while he held her close and murmured to her the words that he had been so hungry to speak, she so hungry to hear.
“Jem,” she whispered presently, “you cannot give me up now, Jem.”
“I never did, dear love,” he said.
“Though all the world wax colder,
Though all the songs be sung.
In dreams doth he—”
“Ah, but you did. You tried. How could you even try!”
“I never did. Not really. Not for a moment. Not even when I thought you had married some one else.”
She moved in his arms to hide her eyes against his face.
“You must have known that I never could,” she murmured.
“Don’t you see,” he pursued eagerly, “that if I had really given you up, I should have given up the paper, the fight, everything? Don’t you see that, love?”
“Yes; that is true,” she assented sweetly. “That must be true. Though perhaps you did not know it.... Ah, Jem, but I have wearied for you!”
“When’s the very earliest you can marry me, dearest?” he asked.
She looked up at him with her level and fearless eyes. “Any time, Jem.”
“I’m asking a lot of you,” he said, his eager face clouding for the moment. “It is n’t all plain sailing yet; and there won’t be so much to live on even here. If we go to Washington you’ll find it doubly hard, I’m afraid.”
“But I have my own money, Jem. And what is this about Washington?”
“Oh!” said he casually; “they want to nominate me for the Senate, against Mart Embree.”
“Jem! You will take it?”
“If my liege lady approves.”
“Of course she approves. It is wonderful. How could you keep it to yourself! Why did you not tell me the instant you came?”
“Well, you see, I was intent on other matters,” said Jem, looking down into the flushed and adorable face, which flushed the more adorably at his words. He bent to her. “Dearest of my heart,” he said passionately, “what does it all matter in comparison with you!”
Stepping gloriously from rose-tipped cloud to rose-tipped cloud as youth may do when winged with happiness and love, Jeremy, on his way office-ward, presently found himself at the Inter-Urban terminal being accosted by a man who said: “If you are deaf, I can make signs.”
“I beg your pardon,” apologized Jeremy hastily. “Were you speaking to me?”
“Only three times,” said the stranger. “So far,” he added.
Thus recalled from his castle-building the editor contemplated his interceptor. The man was a stranger in town. He carried a small, nondescript bag. He looked like a country minister on a week-day, or a prosperous plumber off the job, or a middle-aged clerk on an errand, or any one of a hundred other everyday individuals. In fact he was in face, figure, dress, and manner, the most commonplace, humdrum, unremarkable, completely average individual that Jeremy had ever encountered. He might have posed as the composite photograph of a convention of ten thousand Average Citizens.
“I was asking you: do you know this city,” he was saying patiently.
Now Jeremy possessed a singularly retentive visual memory. This memory had suddenly started working with a jar. “I do,” he said. “Do I know you?”
“You do not,” said the man.
“I’m not so sure,” retorted Jeremy. “I seem to remember a talk at the Owl’s Nest in Philadelphia, six years ago or so, by a distinguished globe-trotter and war correspondent. Now if you had n’t told me that I did not know you, I would have said—”
“You would have thought,” corrected the stranger, without the flicker of an eyelid.
“I would have thought you were that lecturer.”
“Likenesses are deceptive,” observed the other.
“And, in spite of your new mustache, remembering a meeting at the Lion d’Or just off the Place Clichy a year later, I would have said—”
“You would have thought,” interpolated the other, imperturbably.
“I would have thought that you were still the same, and I would have said—that is, I would have thought that your name was Jerome Tillinghast.”
“But you would n’t say it.”
“Not on any account, if there is good reason against it in the opinion of Jerome Tillinghast—who, by the way, did n’t have that furrow over his temple when I knew him.”
“Shrapnel,” explained the other. “Russian campaign. Got me in the leg, too. So they packed me home, and Uncle Sam set me to work. My official name is James Tilley. And yours?”
Jeremy explained himself.
“The Guardian, eh? You’re the last man in town I’d have looked up. But now that I’ve met you, I’ll just mention that Washington thinks pretty well of The Guardian. Keep it up, my boy. And now, where would I be likely to find a bold and dashing patriot, by name, Emil Bausch?”
Jeremy gave the directions. James Tilley thanked him. “Nobody ever recognizes me,” he observed, “or notices me, or remembers me. I’m such a common article. That’s all that makes me valuable. So kindly forget all this. And good-bye.”
Five minutes later he was sitting in Emil Bausch’s private office explaining to that perturbed gentleman certain supposedly very private matters in connection with a chemical project in one phase of which Bausch had acted for a certain otherwise unidentified “Mr. Stern.” Bausch was loftily contemptuous, though nervous.
“The other details,” said the caller pleasantly, “are entered in Ledger M, under the cipher of X-32, formerly kept at 60 Wall Street.”
Bausch gulped twice and said he had never heard of it.
“Fortunate for you,” returned the other. “Take my advice and don’t hear of it. Don’t have any part in it. Don’t do business with people who have. Trouble lies that way.”
Thereafter Mr. Bausch repaired to the Deutscher Club where he had several more beers than was his wont, and subsequently delivered himself of touching appreciations of free speech and the privileges of American citizenship. He wound up, after dinner, by declaring to a puzzled assemblage that he knew his rights and was n’t afraid of anybody, even if he did come from Washington and wear a tin shield.
Meantime a supremely ordinary appearing person contrived to get himself admitted to the President’s room of the Fenchester Trust Company, and introduced himself to Robert Wanser, who found his bearing, mild though it was, distinctly antipathetic. In a voice so quiet as to give the effect of being meek, the intruder ventured to advise Mr. Wanser to shun the Deutscher Club.
“Go to the devil!” retorted Mr. Wanser, whose nerves had been recently frazzled by local as well as national events.
“I’m giving you the opposite advice,” returned the other equably. “Keep away from the Deutscher Club.”
“Save your advice for those who want it. Who are you, anyway?”
“James Tilley, at your service. Sent here from Washington to help you avoid trouble.”
The word “Washington” fell chill upon the banker’s ear. Nevertheless, he blustered “The Deutscher Club is my club. The Government cannot tell a private citizen to keep away from a private club.”
“But a well-wisher—such as myself—may suggest that he find his amusements elsewhere.”
“Well-wisher! A(c)h! Spy. Is this a free country? In Germany one would not be so oppressed.”
“This is not Germany. Bear that in mind. The Deutscher Clubis—or something like it.”
“But—”
“And, by the way, tell your wife—Bertha Wanser is your wife, isn’t she? Exactly! She talks too much. Propaganda. Tell her to—”
“Vimmen, too!” snarled the other. “You can’t even keep your hands off vimmen. Tell her yourself.”
James Tilley sighed. “I will,” he said, and departed, leaving an irritant, disconcerting and healthily prudent impress upon the mind of the grandson of ’48.
As for Mrs. Wanser, she was profoundly displeased with the face, apparel, carriage, and particularly the manner of her unknown caller, which was abrupt and brusque.
“You go to the motion pictures, madam,” he stated.
“Yes,” she said, wondering.
“On the 11th you were at the Gayety. A Four-Minute-Man spoke. You protested to the management.”
“I did. I told the manager he’d lose my custom if they let such nonsense go on.”
“The speaker was Professor Brender, of the University—”
“A German,” she broke in. “And he gets up in public and makes shame of Germany.”
“As a Four-Minute-Man he speaks with the authority of the Government. On the 14th you protested to the Orpheum.”
“You been spying on me,” said the lady, wrathfully.
“Certainly. You’re a suspicious person. Take my advice. Stop talking, or if you must talk, talk like an American. Propaganda is a dangerous game. Go to those two movie managers and withdraw—”
“I won’t,” she declared, pale with fury.
“I think you will. Ask your husband. And do as he tells you. He’ll tell you just what I have—if he’s wise.”
For all his modest disavowals of being able to make an impression upon people, there were now at least three individuals in Fenchester who would hold in tenacious and painful memory to the last day of their lives the smallest detail of James Tilley’s unremarkable personality. He now proceeded to enlarge the list. Whether by chance or by design, he encountered Pastor Klink, who was doing some quiet research work in connection with back files of the newspapers, in the City Library, and Pastor Klink took the next train for home and a reflective silence. He met with the Reverend Theo Gunst and that fervid theologian retired to draft an editorial for the leading German religious weekly, reeking with protestations of loyalty, which almost tore his agonized heart out by its Teutonic roots. He ran across Gordon Fliess and earnestly counseled him against the strain of frequent railway journeys between Bellair and Fenchester. On the other hand, and as indicating a certain amiable flexibility of view on his part, he dropped in upon A. M. Wymett to extol the broadening influence of travel. A. M. Wymett traveled.
He called upon Vogt and Niebuhr, and Henry Dolge, the educational expert, leaving behind him devastated areas of alarm, caution, and at least temporary silence.
Within two days after his arrival, though he had said no word nor even given any hint upon either point, the Deutscher Club burst into a riot of American flags, and Martin Embree made a speech so full of patriotic pathos that it brought tears to the eyes of his hearers, particularly the Germans.
Bausch, and Niebuhr, and Dolge, and a few others of the old school, however, took to meeting in a respectable saloon kept by one Muller down in “the Ward.” To them came Gordon Fliess, and influential men from the Northern Tier, for conference. What passed there was asserted to be perfectly loyal, and supposed to be quite private....
But within a fortnight, James Tilley, more unobtrusive than ever, stepped off another Inter-Urban trolley, and stayed over one train. Thence he went to Bellair, and so passes into his chosen obscurity. He gave no advice this time. Not, at least, to Bausch, or Dolge, Niebuhr, or the respectable saloon-keeper, Muller; neither to Gordon Fliess. But the respectable saloon unostentatiously ceased to exist. And its more than respectable patrons named above quietly vanished, and the places that had known them knew them no more. Observing which, the more cautious Robert Wanser trembled, and congratulated himself.
Deutschtum, hitherto hardly bent, was now broken in the State of Centralia.
PATRIOTISM had waxed and politics waned with the ebbing of the year 1917, in Centralia. Through the murk and fume of alien treachery, enemy propaganda, and the reckless self-seeking of petty partisanship had burst a clear, high, consuming flame of Americanism. Lesser matters were forgotten in the maintenance of that beacon-fire. Men of all types of political belief, of all classes, of all economic and social creeds, had abandoned their private feuds and bitternesses in the fervor against the common enemy. To them had rallied the finer and more courageous element of the German-Americans, some impulsively from emotion and sentiment like Stock-muller and Blasius, others, in the pain and travail of old ties broken and from the profound conviction of loyalty and right, like Professor Brender. Centralia, thirty years before marked by Deutschtum to be the Little Germany of the New World, was slowly, doggedly establishing its birthright of Americanism.
Poison still lurked in its system. There were whisperings in dark corners. The German-language press still gave heart-service to the Kaiser’s cause in hint and suggestion and innuendo, while giving lip-service to the cause of the United States in artificial and machine-made editorials. The German pulpit, preaching an ineradicable Germanism by the very use of the German tongue, was lack-loyal where it dared not be disloyal. Over many a Verein and Bund and Gesellschaft the Stars and Stripes waved above seething revolt of spirit. Workers in all patriotic causes felt the dead-weight of a sullen, unworded, untraceable opposition clogging their efforts. But all this was negative. Deutschtum, a few short months before so arrogant and confident of its power over Centralia, was on its defense. More; it was in hiding. No other one force had done so much to drive it thither as that once yellow mongrel of journalism, The Fenchester Guardian.
The Guardian’s den was brightly lighted on this December evening of 1917. It was brightly lighted on most evenings. Yet Doc Summerfield, aforetime of a pessimistic view regarding the effect of night-labor upon Jeremy Robson, was obliged to admit that he showed a steady improvement in spite of apparent overwork. Perhaps this was because he had provided himself with a highly valued assistant. The assistant was seated opposite the chief, reading proof on an editorial, when the door opened, and in stalked Andrew Galpin, traveling-bag in hand.
“Hello, Bosses!” he said.
“Hello, Andy,” said his chief; and “Welcome back, Andy,” said the assistant getting up to perch upon the arm of the chief editorial chair, thus leaving a seat for the general manager, who took it with a nod.
“I saw Cassius Kimball,” he stated. “He’s just back from Washington.”
“Any new’s?” asked Jeremy.
“We’ve located Emil Bausch. But not for publication.”
“Where is he?”
“Behind two row’s of barbed wire, one of ’em charged with electricity, in a pleasant Southern camp. He’s a member of the Millionaires’ Club, there. They caught him on that chemical deal. Supposed to be wholesale drugs; really high explosives.”
“Any other of our extinguished local lights heard from?”
“Muller, the saloon-keeper, is down there, too. But not in the Millionaires’ Club. He’s gardening. One dollar per diem. Martin Dolge is in Mexico.”
“What about Gunst and Klink and the church outfit?”
“They’ve promised to be good. Three of their religious weeklies are scheduled to quit. Gordon Fliess has dropped his financial support of the German-American dailies. We’re going to go stale for lack of opposition’ if this keeps on,” prophesied Andy sadly.
“Cassius did n’t run across Mart Embree down there, did he?” queried Jeremy.
“Ay-ah. He did. Says ‘Smiling Mart’ was running around like a little, worried dog, wagging his tail anxiously and trying to make his peace.”
“Peace is still Governor Embree’s specialty, then?” put in the assistant, from her perch.
“Why, I guess it always will be, so long as there’s a German vote in Centralia,” returned the general manager. “But what does ‘Smiling Mart’ amount to, now? We’ve got the whole bunch licked to a frazzle, and licked for keeps.”
“Do you think so. So easily?”
Andy Galpin looked intently at Mrs. Jeremy Robson. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said meekly. “You think it is n’t over?”
The little, tawny head was shaken emphatically.
“I think that we shall have it all to fight again,” she said, in her unchanged, precise, and subtly caressing manner of speech.
“When?” The chief and the general manager challenged her with one voice.
“When Germany’s peace offer is made. Then you will see Governor Embree and all that is left of Germany here making their fight for a peace which will be worse than war. That is why I will not listen to Jem’s giving up the paper.”
“What do you think of that, Andy?” asked Jem.
The general manager smiled his slow, homely, friendly smile at Marcia Robson. “I think what I’ve thought since the first minute I set eyes on her,” he said: “that she’s a wise guy. Boss, we haven’t won this war over here until we’ve won this war over there, and don’t you forget it! By the way, there’s quite a little talk in Washington, Kimball tells me, about the new Senator-elect from Centralia.”
“I blush, modestly and prettily,” retorted Jem. “Or—Marcia, you do it for me. I’d rather stay here and run the old Guardian.”
“I’d rather have you,” returned Andy, with rueful emphasis.
“We shall be back for the fight that is coming,” promised Marcia.
Galpin’s eyes wandered slowly about the room and returned upon Marcia. “It gives me the shivers,” he said, “to think how near we were to losing out on the whole fight when Buddy Higman went and got you. I’d like to have heard Buddy’s argument.”
“It was effective,” laughed Marcia. “Buddy was honestly convinced that without The Guardian to guide it, the Nation would go to immediate destruction.”
“Buddy’s little plan turned out well for him,” observed Jem. “Marcia is sending him to Old Central in the fall. Sort of a fairy godmother, aren’t you?” he added, looking up at his wife. “Pull the paper through with one hand, save us all, and make a man of Buddy with the other.”
“Do not give me too much credit,” said Marcia, more gravely. “It was Andy who really held you here when you wished to go into the army.”
“Oh, well, I had my stake in the paper, too,” disclaimed the general manager, picking up his valise and hat. “Good-night, Bosses,” he added. “Don’t overwork and spoil your beauty, you two.”
“Marcia,” said Jem, after their aide had gone. “That night when you came back—don’t go away while I’m talking seriously, please!—would you really have married me, right away, then and there?”
“Certainly, I would. I meant to. You were very cruel. You spoiled my plans.”
He regarded her with suspicion. Was there a note of raillery in the sweet, even voice?
“What plans?”
“Why, to marry you then.”
“And then what?”
“To put my money into the paper and keep you from selling it, of course.’
“But if I would n’t have taken it? And I would n’t, you know.”
“That would not have made the slightest difference,” she said calmly. “You could not have sold the paper, in any case, if you had married me when—when I proposed to you.”
“Could n’t I! I’d have had to, if matters had gone on as they were going.”
“No. For you could not have sold the paper without the plant, and the plant being real estate, could not be transferred without the wife’s consent.”
“So it couldn’t! You wretched little plotter! Who put you up to that?”
“I consulted a lawyer,” she replied demurely. “On a hypothetical case.”
“I’m jealous,” declared Jem. “You were trying to marry me for my property and not for my winning self. Was that the only reason?”
Her face changed adorably as she bent over him. “What do you think?” she said.
“But I wanted to have—what is it Andy called it?—a stake in the paper, too,” she continued, after a moment. “You have never let me. Do you think that is fair?”
“It’s the only fair way. We’re not out of the woods yet, with The Guardian. Newspaper property is going to be mighty uncertain before this war is over, and I don’t want you involved in it. The Guardian has taken you in, little wife, but it won’t take your money.”
“Not even if you should need it? To save the paper?”
“Not even then.”
“Jem, I—I want a—a stake in the paper.”
“Why, Marcia! What is it, dearest? You’re not crying, are you?”
“No, Ithinknot. If I am, it is for happiness, Jem. I—I have a—a special stake now in the paper. I want to keep The Guardian to hand it down to—to—”
“Marcia!” He turned in the circle of her arms, but for once the frank eyes were hidden from him.
“—to our son,” said the soft voice with a little catch in it. “I am sure it will be a son, Jem. If we name him Jeremy Andrew Robson”—the voice was muffled now against Jem’s cheek—“he will be almost The Guardian’s child—next to being ours, Jem.”
Jem drew a long, deep breath of happiness. “There’ll always be a good fight for a hundred per cent American paper like The Guardian to get into. That’s the real best of the business, I guess.” He bent over the little, proud, bowed head. “I hope he’ll be as good an American as his mother,” he said.