The New-year, destined to be so crucial, came in cheerfully enough. There was, to be sure, a trifle less ostentation in the public celebrations, but the usual amount of champagne brought in the most vital year in the history of the nation. The customary number of men, warmed by that champagne, made reckless love to the women who happened to be near them and forgot it by morning. And the women themselves presented pictures of splendor of a peculiar gorgeousness.
The fact that almost coincident with the war there had come into prominence an entirely new school of color formed one of the curious contrasts of the period. Into a drab world there flamed strange and bizarre theatrical effects, in scenery and costume. Some of it was beautiful, most of it merely fantastic. But it was immediately reflected in the clothing of fashionable women. Europe, which had originated it, could use it but little; but great opulent America adopted it and made it her own.
So, while the rest of the world was gray, America flamed, and Natalie Spencer, spending her days between dressmakers and decorators, flamed with the rest.
On New-year's Eve Clayton Spencer always preceded the annual ball of the City Club, of which he was president, by a dinner to the board of governors and their wives. It was his dinner. He, and not Natalie, arranged the seating, ordered the flowers, and planned the menu. He took considerable pride in it; he liked to think that it was both beautiful and dignified. His father had been president before him, and he liked to think that he was carrying on his father's custom with the punctilious dignity that had so characterized him.
He was dressed early. Natalie had been closeted with Madeleine, her maid, and a hair-dresser, for hours. As he went down-stairs he could hear her voice raised in querulous protest about something.
When he went into the library Buckham was there stooping over the fire, his austere old face serious and intent.
“Well, another year almost gone, Buckham!” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Spencer.”
“It would be interesting to know what the New-year holds.”
“I hope it will bring you peace and happiness, sir.”
“Thank you.”
And after Buckham had gone he thought that rather a curious New-year's wish. Peace and happiness! Well, God knows he wanted both. A vague comprehension of the understanding the upper servants of a household acquire as to the inner life of the family stirred in him; how much they knew and concealed under their impassive service.
When Natalie came down the staircase a few minutes later she was swathed in her chinchilla evening wrap, and she watched his face, after her custom when she expected to annoy him, with the furtive look that he had grown to associate with some unpleasantness.
“I hate dressing for a ball at this hour,” she said, rather breathlessly. “I don't feel half-dressed by midnight.”
Madeleine, in street costume, was behind her with a great box.
“She has something for my hair,” she explained. Her tone was nervous, but he was entirely unsuspicious.
“You don't mind if I don't go on to Page's, do you? I'm rather tired, and I ought to stay at the club as late as I can.”
“Of course not. I shall probably pick up some people, anyhow. Everybody is going on.”
In the car she chattered feverishly and he listened, lapsing into one of the silences which her talkative spells always enforced.
“What flowers are you having?” she asked, finally.
“White lilacs and pussy-willow. Did your orchids come?”
“Thanks, yes. But I'm not wearing them. My gown is flame color. They simply shrieked.”
“Flame color?”
“A sort of orange,” she explained. And, in a slightly defiant tone: “Rodney's is a costume dance, you know.”
“Do you mean you are in fancy dress?”
“I am, indeed.”
He was rather startled. The annual dinner of the board of governors of the City Club and their wives was a most dignified function always. He was the youngest by far of the men; the women were all frankly dowagers. They represented the conservative element of the city's social life, that element which frowned on smartness and did not even recognize the bizarre. It was old-fashioned, secure in its position, influential, and slightly tedious.
“There will be plenty in fancy dress.”
“Not at the dinner.”
“Stodgy old frumps!” was Natalie's comment. “I believe you would rather break one of the ten commandments than one of the conventions,” she added.
It was when he saw her coming down the staircase in the still empty clubhouse that he realized the reason for her defiant attitude when she acknowledged to fancy dress. For she wore a peacock costume of the most daring sort. Over an orange foundation, eccentric in itself and very short, was a vivid tunic covered with peacock feathers on gold tissue, with a sweeping tail behind, and on her head was the towering chest of a peacock on a gold bandeau. She waved a great peacock fan, also, and half-way down the stairs she paused and looked down at him, with half-frightened eyes.
“Do you like it?”
“It is very wonderful,” he said, gravely.
He could not hurt her. Her pleasure in it was too naive. It dawned on him then that Natalie was really a child, a spoiled and wilful child. And always afterward he tried to remember that, and to judge her accordingly.
She came down, the upturned wired points of the tunic trembling as she stepped. When she came closer he saw that she was made up for the costume ball also, her face frankly rouged, fine lines under her eyes, her lashes blackened. She looked very lovely and quite unfamiliar. But he had determined not to spoil her evening, and he continued gravely smiling.
“You'd better like it, Clay,” she said, and took a calculating advantage of what she considered a softened mood. “It cost a thousand dollars.”
She went on past him, toward the room where the florist was still putting the finishing touches to the flowers on the table. When the first guests arrived, she came back and took her place near him, and he was uncomfortably aware of the little start of surprise with which she burst upon each new arrival, In the old and rather staid surroundings of the club she looked out of place—oriental, extravagant, absurd.
And Clayton Spencer suffered. To draw him as he stood in the club that last year of our peace, 1916, is to draw him not only with his virtues but with his faults; his over emphasis on small things; his jealousy for his dignity; his hatred of the conspicuous and the unusual.
When, after the informal manner of clubs, the party went in to dinner, he was having one of the bad hours of his life to that time. And when, as was inevitable, the talk of the rather serious table turned to the war, it seemed to him that Natalie, gorgeous and painted, represented the very worst of the country he loved, indifference, extravagance, and ostentatious display.
But Natalie was not America. Thank God, Natalie was not America.
Already with the men she was having a triumph. The women, soberly clad, glanced at each other with raised eye-brows and cynical smiles. Above the band, already playing in the ballroom, Clayton could hear old Terry Mackenzie paying Natalie extravagant, flagrant compliments.
“You should be sitting in the sun, or on a balcony,” he was saying, his eyes twinkling. “And pretty gentlemen with long curls and their hats tucked under their arms should be feeding you nightingale tongues, or whatever it is you eat.”
“Bugs,” said Natalie.
“But—tell me,” Terry bent toward her, and Mrs. Terry kept fascinated eyes on him. “Tell me, lovely creature—aren't peacocks unlucky?”
“Are they? What bad luck can happen to me because I dress like this?”
“Frightfully bad luck,” said Terry, jovially. “Some one will undoubtedly carry you away, in the course of the evening, and go madly through the world hunting a marble balustrade to set you on. I'll do it myself if you'll give me any encouragement.”
Perhaps, had Clayton Spencer been entirely honest with himself that night, he would have acknowledged that he had had a vague hope of seeing Audrey at the club. Cars came up, discharged their muffled occupants under the awning and drove away again. Delight and Mrs. Haverford arrived and he danced with Delight, to her great anxiety lest she might not dance well. Graham came very late, in the wake of Marion Hayden.
But Audrey did not appear.
He waited until the New-year came in. The cotillion was on then, and the favors for the midnight figure were gilt cornucopias filled with loose flowers. The lights went out for a moment on the hour, the twelve strokes were rung on a triangle in the orchestra, and there was a moment's quiet. Then the light blazed again, flowers and confetti were thrown, and club servants in livery carried round trays of champagne.
Clayton, standing glass in hand, surveyed the scene with a mixture of satisfaction and impatience. He found Terry Mackenzie at his elbow.
“Great party, Clay,” he said. “Well, here's to 1917, and may it bring luck.”
“May it bring peace,” said Clayton, and raised his glass.
Some time later going home in the car with Mrs. Mackenzie, quiet and slightly grim beside him, Terry spoke out of a thoughtful silence.
“There's something wrong with Clay,” he said. “If ever a fellow had a right to be happy—he has a queer look. Have you noticed it?”
“Anybody married to Natalie Spencer would develop what you call a queer look,” she replied, tartly.
“Don't you think he is in love with her?”
“If you ask me, I think he has reached the point where he can't bear the sight of her. But he doesn't know it.”
“She's pretty.”
“So is a lamp-shade,” replied Mrs. Terry, acidly. “Or a kitten, or a fancy ice-cream. But you wouldn't care to be married to them, would you?”
It was almost dawn when Natalie came in. Clayton had not been asleep. He had got to thinking rather feverishly of the New-year. Without in any way making a resolution, he had determined to make it a better year than the last; to be more gentle with Natalie, more understanding with Graham; to use his new prosperity wisely; to forget his own lack of happiness in making others happy. He was very vague about that. The search of the ages the rector had called happiness, and one found it by giving it.
To his surprise, Natalie came into his bedroom, looking like some queer oriental bird, vivid and strangely unlike herself.
“I saw your light. Heavens, what a party!”
“I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope you didn't mind my not going on.”
“I wish you had. Clay, you'll never guess what happened.”
“Probably not. What?”
“Well, Audrey just made it, that's all. Funny! I wish you'd seen some of their faces. Of course she was disgraceful, but she took it off right away. But it was like her—no one else would have dared.”
His mouth felt dry. Audrey—disgraceful!
“It was in the stable, you know, I told you. And just at midnight the doors opened and a big white horse leaped in with Audrey on his back. No saddle—nothing. She was dressed like a bare-back rider in the circus, short tulle skirts and tights. They nearly mobbed her with joy.” She yawned. “Well, I'm off to bed.”
He roused himself.
“A happy New-year, my dear.”
“Thanks,” she said, and wandered out, her absurd feathered tail trailing behind her.
He lay back and closed his eyes. So Audrey had done that, Audrey, who had been in his mind all those sleepless hours; for he knew now that back of all his resolutions to do better had been the thought of her.
He felt disappointed and bitter. The sad disillusion of the middle years, still heroically clinging to faiths that one after another destroyed themselves, was his.
Audrey was frightened. She did not care a penny's worth what her little world thought. Indeed, she knew that she had given it a new thrill and so had won its enthusiastic approval. She was afraid of what Clayton would think.
She was absurdly quiet and virtuous all the next day, gathered out her stockings and mended them; began a personal expenditure account for the New-year, heading it carefully with “darning silk, 50 cents”; wrote a long letter to Chris, and—listened for the telephone. If only he would call her, so she could explain. Still, what could she explain? She had done it. It was water over the dam—and it is no fault of Audrey's that she would probably have spelled it “damn.”
By noon she was fairly abject. She did not analyze her own anxiety, or why the recollection of her escapade, which would a short time before have filled her with a sort of unholy joy, now turned her sick and trembling.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Clay called her up. She gasped a little when she heard his voice.
“I wanted to tell you, Audrey,” he said, “that we can probably use the girl you spoke about, rather soon.”
“Very well. Thank you. Is—wasn't there something else, too?”
“Something else?”
“You are angry, aren't you?”
He hesitated.
“Surprised. Not angry. I haven't any possible right to be angry.”
“Will you come up and let me tell you about it, Clay?”
“I don't see how that will help any.”
“It will help me.”
He laughed at that; her new humility was so unlike her.
“Why, of course I'll come, Audrey,” he said, and as he rang off he was happier than he had been all day.
He was coming. Audrey moved around the little room, adjusting chairs, rearranging the flowers that had poured in on New-year's day, brushing the hearth. And as she worked she whistled. He would be getting into the car now. He would be so far on his way. He would be almost there. She ran into her bedroom and powdered her nose, with her lips puckered, still whistling, and her heart singing.
But he scolded her thoroughly at first.
“Why on earth did you do it,” he finished. “I still can't understand. I see you one day, gravity itself, a serious young woman—as you are to-day. And then I hear—it isn't like you, Audrey.”
“Oh yes, it is. It's exactly like me. Like one me. There are others, of course.”
She told him then, making pitiful confession of her own pride and her anxiety to spare Chris's name.
“I couldn't bear to have them suspect he had gone to the war because of a girl. Whatever he ran away from, Clay, he's doing all right now.”
He listened gravely, with, toward the end, a jealousy he would not have acknowledged even to himself. Was it possible that she still loved Chris? Might she not, after the fashion of women, be building a new and idealized Chris, now that he had gone to war, out of his very common clay?
“He has done splendidly,” he agreed.
Again the warmth and coziness of the little room enveloped him. Audrey's low huskily sweet voice, her quick smile, her new and unaccustomed humility, and the odd sense of her understanding, comforted him. She made her indefinite appeal to the best that was in him.
Nothing so ennobles a man as to have some woman believe in his nobility.
“Clay,” she said suddenly, “you are worrying about something.”
“Nothing that won't straighten out, in time.”
“Would it help to talk about it?”
He realized that he had really come to her to talk about it. It had been in the back of his head all the time.
“I'm rather anxious about Graham.”
“Toots Hayden?”
“Partly.”
“I'm afraid she's got him, Clay. There isn't a trick in the game she doesn't know. He had about as much chance as I have of being twenty again. She wants to make a wealthy marriage, and she's picked on Graham. That's all.”
“It isn't only Marion. I'm afraid there's another girl, a girl at the mill—his stenographer. I have no proof of anything. In fact, I don't think there is anything yet. She's in love with him, probably, or she thinks she is. I happened on them together, and she looked—Of course, if what you say about Marion is true, he can not care for her, even, well, in any way.”
“Oh, nonsense, Clay. A man—especially a boy—can love a half-dozen girls. He can be crazy about any girl he is with. It may not be love, but it plays the same tricks with him that the real thing does.”
“I can't believe that.”
“No. You wouldn't.”
She leaned back and watched him. How much of a boy he was himself, anyhow! And yet how little he understood the complicated problems of a boy like Graham, irresponsible but responsive, rich without labor, with time for the sort of dalliance Clay himself at the same age had had neither leisure nor inclination to indulge.
He was wandering about the room, his hands in his pockets, his head bent. When he stopped:
“What am I to do with the girl, Audrey?”
“Get rid of her. That's easy.”
“Not so easy as it sounds.”
He told her of Dunbar and the photographs, of Rudolph Klein, and the problem as he saw it.
“So there I am,” he finished. “If I let her go, I lose one of the links in Dunbar's chain. If I keep her?”
“Can't Natalie talk to him? Sometimes a woman can get to the bottom of these things when a man can't. He might tell her all about it.”
“Possibly. But I think it unlikely Natalie would tell me.”
She leaned over and patted his hand impulsively.
“What devils we women are!” she said. “Now and then one of us gets what she deserves. That's me. And now and then one of us get's something she doesn't deserve. And that's Natalie. She's over-indulgent to Graham.”
“He is all she has.”
“She has you.”
Something in her voice made him turn and look at her.
“That ought to be something, you know,” she added. And laughed a little.
“Does Natalie pay his debts?”
“I rather think so.”
But that was a subject he could not go on with.
“The fault is mine. I know my business better than I know how to handle my life, or my family. I don't know why I trouble you with it all, anyhow. You have enough.” He hesitated. “That's not exactly true, either. I do know. I'm relying on your woman's wit to help me. I'm wrong somehow.”
“About Graham?”
“I have a curious feeling that I am losing him. I can't ask for his confidence. I can't, apparently, even deserve it. I see him, day after day, with all the good stuff there is in him, working as little as he can, drinking more than he should, out half the night, running into debt—good heavens, Audrey, what can I do?”
She hesitated.
“Of course, you know one thing that would save him, Clay?”
“What?”
“Our getting into the war.”
“I ought not to have to lose my boy in order to find him. But—we are going to be in it.”
He had risen and was standing, an elbow on the mantel-piece, looking down at her.
“I suppose every man wonders, once in a while, how he'd conduct himself in a crisis. When the Lusitania went down I dare say a good many fellows wondered if they'd have been able to keep their coward bodies out of the boats. I know I did. And I wonder about myself now. What can I do if we go into the war? I couldn't do a forced march of more than five miles. I can't drill, or whatever they call it. I can shoot clay pigeons, but I don't believe I could hit a German coming at me with a bayonet at twenty feet. I'd be pretty much of a total loss. Yet I'll want to do something.”
And when she sat, very silent, looking into the fire: “You see, you think it absurd yourself.”
“Hardly absurd,” she roused herself to look up at him. “If it is, it's the sort of splendid absurdity I am proud of. I was wondering what Natalie would say.”
“I don't believe it lies between a man and his wife. It's between him and his God.”
He was rather ashamed of that, however, and soon after he went away.
Natalie Spencer was finding life full of interest that winter. Now and then she read the headings in the newspapers, not because she was really interested, but that she might say, at the dinner-party which was to her the proper end of a perfect day:
“What do you think of Turkey declaring her independence?”
Or:
“I see we have taken the Etoile Wood.”
Clayton had overheard her more than once, and had marveled at the dexterity with which, these leaders thrown out, she was able to avoid committing herself further.
The new house engrossed her. She was seeing a great deal of Rodney, too, and now and then she had fancied that there was a different tone in Rodney's voice when he addressed her. She never analyzed that tone, or what it suggested, but it gave her a new interest in life. She was always marceled, massaged, freshly manicured. And she had found a new facial treatment. Clayton, in his room at night, could hear the sharp slapping of flesh on flesh, as Madeleine gently pounded certain expensive creams into the skin of her face and neck.
She refused all forms of war activity, although now and then she put some appeal before Clayton and asked him if he cared to send a check. He never suggested that she answer any of these demands personally, after an experience early in the winter.
“Why don't you send it yourself?” he had asked. “Wouldn't you like it to go in your name?”
“It doesn't matter. I don't know any of the committee.”
He had tried to explain what he meant.
“You might like to feel that you are doing something.”
“I thought my allowance was only to dress on. If I'm to attend to charities, too, you'll have to increase it.”
“But,” he argued patiently, “if you only sent them twenty-five dollars, did without some little thing to do it, you'd feel rather more as though you were giving, wouldn't you?”
“Twenty-five dollars! And be laughed at!”
He had given in then.
“If I put an extra thousand dollars to your account to-morrow, will you check it out to this fund?”
“It's too much.”
“Will you?'
“Yes, of course,” she had agreed, indifferently. And he had notified her that the money was in the bank. But two months later the list of contributors was published, and neither his name nor Natalie's was among them.
Toward personal service she had no inclination whatever. She would promise anything, but the hour of fulfilling always found her with something else to do. Yet she had kindly impulses, at times, when something occurred to take her mind from herself. She gave liberally to street mendicants. She sent her car to be used by those of her friends who had none. She was lavish with flowers to the sick—although Clayton paid her florist bills.
She was lavish with money—but never with herself.
In the weeks after the opening of the new year Clayton found himself watching her. He wondered sometimes just what went on in her mind during the hours when she sat, her hands folded, gazing into space. He could not tell. He surmised her planning, always planning; the new house, a gown, a hat, a party.
But late in January he began to think that she was planning something else. Old Terry Mackenzie had been there one night, and he had asserted not only that war was coming, but that we would be driven to conscription to raise an army.
“They've all had to come to it,” he insisted. “And we will, as sure as God made little fishes. You can't raise a million volunteers for a war that's three thousand miles away.”
“You mean, conscription among the laboring class?” Natalie had asked naively, and there had been a roar of laughter.
“Not at all,” Terry had said. And chuckled. “This war, if it comes, is every man's burden, rich and poor. Only the rich will give most, because they have most to give.”
“I think that's ridiculous,” Natalie had said.
It was after that that Clayton began to wonder what she was planning.
He came home late one afternoon to find that they were spending the evening in, and to find a very serious Natalie waiting, when he came down-stairs dressed for dinner. She made an effort to be conversational, but it was a failure. He was uneasily aware that she was watching him, inspecting, calculating, choosing her moment. But it was not until they were having coffee that she spoke.
“I'm uneasy about Graham, Clay.”
He looked up quickly.
“Yes?”
“I think he ought to go away somewhere.”
“He ought to stay here, and make a man of himself,” he came out, almost in spite of himself. He knew well enough that such a note always roused Natalie's antagonism, and he waited for the storm. But none came.
“He's not doing very well, is he?”
“He's not failing entirely. But he gives the best of himself outside the mill. That's all.”
She puzzled him. Had she heard of Marion?
“Don't you think, if he was away from this silly crowd he plays with, as he calls it, that he would be better off?”
“Where, for instance?”
“You keep an agent in England. He could go there. Or to Russia, if the Russian contract goes through.”
He was still puzzled.
“But why England or Russia?”
“Anywhere out of this country.”
“He doesn't have to leave this country to get away from a designing woman.”
From her astonished expression, he knew that he had been wrong. She was not trying to get him away from Marion. From what?
She bent forward, her face set hard.
“What woman?”
Well, it was out. She might as well know it. “Don't you think it possible, Natalie, that he may intend to marry Marion Hayden?”
There was a very unpleasant half-hour after that. Marion was a parasite of the rich. She had abused Natalie's hospitality. She was designing. She played bridge for her dress money. She had ensnared the boy.
And then:
“That settles it, I should think. He ought to leave America. If you have a single thought for his welfare you'll send him to England.”
“Then you hadn't known about Marion when you proposed that before?”
“No. I knew he was not doing well. And I'm anxious. After all, he's my boy. He is—”
“I know,” he supplemented gravely. “He is all you have. But I still don't understand why he must leave America.”
It was not until she had gone up-stairs to her room, leaving him uneasily pacing the library floor, that he found the solution. Old Terry Mackenzie and his statement about conscription. Natalie wanted Graham sent out of the country, so he would be safe. She would purchase for hint a shameful immunity, if war came. She would stultify the boy to keep him safe. In that hour of clear vision he saw how she had always stultified the boy, to keep him safe. He saw her life a series of small subterfuges, of petty indulgences, of little plots against himself, all directed toward securing Graham immunity—from trouble at school, from debt, from his own authority.
A wave of unreasoning anger surged over him, but with it there was pity, too; pity for the narrowness of her life and her mind, pity for her very selfishness. And for the first time in his life he felt a shamefaced pity for himself. He shook himself violently. When a man got sorry for himself—
Rudolph Klein had not for a moment believed Anna's story about the watch, and on the day after he discovered it on her wrist he verified his suspicions. During his noon hour he went up-town and, with the confident swagger of a certain type of man who feels himself out of place, entered the jeweler's shop in question.
He had to wait for some little time, and he spent it in surveying contemptuously the contents of the show-cases. That even his wildest estimate fell far short of their value he did not suspect, but his lips curled. This was where the money earned by honest workmen was spent, that women might gleam with such gewgaws. Wall Street bought them, Wall Street which was forcing this country into the war to protect its loans to the Allies. America was to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire that women, and yet more women, might wear those strings of pearls, those glittering diamond baubles.
Into his crooked mind there flashed a line from a speech at the Third Street hall the night before: “War is hell. Let those who want to, go to hell.”
So—Wall Street bought pearls for its women, and the dissolute sons of the rich bought gold wrist-watches for girls they wanted to seduce. The expression on his face was so terrible that the clerk behind the counter, waiting to find what he wanted, was startled.
“I want to look at gold wrist-watches,” he said. And eyed the clerk for a trace of patronage.
“Ladies?”
“Yes.”
He finally found one that was a duplicate of Anna's, and examined it carefully. Yes, it was the same, the maker's name on the dial, the space for the monogram on the back, everything.
“How much is this one?”
“One hundred dollars.”
He almost dropped it. A hundred dollars! Then he remembered Anna's story.
“Have you any gold-filled ones that look like this?”
“We do not handle gold-filled cases.”
He put it down, and turned to go. Then he stopped.
“Don't sell on the installment plan, either, I suppose?” The sneer in his voice was clearer than his anxiety. In his mind, he already knew the answer.
“Sorry. No.”
He went out. So he had been right. That young skunk had paid a hundred dollars for a watch for Anna. To Rudolph it meant but one thing.
That had been early in January. For some days he kept his own counsel, thinking, planning, watching. He was jealous of Graham, but with a calculating jealousy that set him wondering how to turn his knowledge to his own advantage. And Anna's lack of liberty comforted him somewhat. He couldn't meet her outside the mill, at least not without his knowing it.
He established a system of espionage over her that drove her almost to madness.
“What're you hanging round for?” she would demand when he stepped forward at the mill gate. “D'you suppose I never want to be by myself?”
Or:
“You just go away, Rudolph Klein. I'm going up with some of the girls.”
But she never lost him. He was beside her or at her heels, his small crafty eyes on her. When he walked behind her there was a sensuous gleam in them.
After a few weeks she became terrified. There was a coldness of deviltry in him, she knew. And he had the whip-hand. She was certain he knew about the watch, and her impertinence masked an agony of fear. Suppose he went to her father? Why, if he knew, didn't he go to her father?
She suspected him, but she did not know of what. She knew he was an enemy of all government, save that of the mob, that he was an incendiary, a firebrand who set on fire the brutish passions of a certain type of malcontents. She knew, for all he pretended to be the voice of labor, he no more represented the honest labor of the country than he represented law and order.
She watched him sometimes, at the table, when on Sundays he ate the mid-day meal with them; his thin hatchet face, his prominent epiglottis. He wore a fresh cotton shirt then, with a flaming necktie, but he did not clean his fingernails. And his talk was always of tearing down, never of building up.
“Just give us time, and we'll show them,” he often said. And “them” was always the men higher up.
He hated policemen. He and Herman had had many arguments about policemen. Herman was not like Rudolph. He believed in law and order. He even believed in those higher up. But he believed very strongly in the fraternity of labor. Until the first weeks of that New-year, Herman Klein, outside the tyranny of his home life, represented very fairly a certain type of workman, believing in the dignity and integrity of his order. But, with his failure to relocate himself, something went wrong in Herman. He developed, in his obstinate, stubborn, German head a suspicion of the land of his adoption. He had never troubled to understand it. He had taken it for granted, as he took for granted that Anna should work and turn over her money to him.
Now it began to ask things of him. Not much. A delegation of women came around one night and asked him for money for Belgian Relief. The delegation came, because no one woman would venture alone.
“I have no money for Belgians,” he said. He would not let them come in. “Why should I help the Belgians? Liars and hypocrites!”
The story went about the neighborhood, and he knew it. He cared nothing for popularity, but he resented losing his standing in the community. And all along he was convinced that he was right; that the Belgians had lied. There had been, in the Germany he had left, no such will to wanton killing. These people were ignorant. Out of the depths of their ignorance they talked.
He read only German newspapers. In the little room back of Gustav Shroeder's he met only Germans. And always, at his elbow, there was Rudolph.
Until the middle of January Rudolph had not been able to get him to one of his incendiary meetings. Then one cold night while Anna sewed by the lamp inside the little house, Rudolph and Herman walked in the frozen garden, Herman with his pipe, Rudolph with the cheap cigarets he used incessantly. Anna opened the door a crack and listened at first. She was watchful of Rudolph, always, those days. But the subject was not Anna.
“You think we get in, then?” Herman asked.
“Sure.”
“But for what?”
“So 'Spencers' can make more money out of it,” said Rudolph bitterly. “And others like them. But they and their kind don't do the dying. It's the workers that go and die. Look at Germany!”
“Yes. It is so in Germany.”
“All this talk about democracy—that's bunk. Just plain bunk. Why should the workers in this country kill the workers in another? Why? To make money for capital—more money.”
“Ja,” Herman assented. “That is what war is. Always the same. I came here to get away from war.”
“Well, you didn't get far enough. You left a king behind, but we've got a Czar here.”
Herman was slowly, methodically, following an earlier train of thought.
“I am a workman,” he said. “I would not fight against other workmen. Just as I, a German, will not fight against other Germans.”
“But you would sit here, on the hill, and do nothing.”
“What can I do? One man, and with no job.”
“Come to the meeting to-night.”
“You and your meetings!” the old German said impatiently. “You talk. That's all.”
Rudolph lowered his voice.
“You think we only talk, eh? Well, you come and hear some things. Talk! You come,” he coaxed, changing his tone. “And we'll have some beer and schnitzel at Gus's after. My treat. How about it?”
Old Herman assented. He was tired of the house, tired of the frozen garden, tired of scolding the slovenly girl who pottered around all day in a boudoir cap and slovenly wrapper. Tired of Anna's rebellious face and pert answers.
He went inside the house and put a sweater under his coat, and got his cap.
“I go out,” he said, to the impassive figure under the lamp. “You will stay in.”
“Oh, I don't know. I may take a walk.”
“You will stay in,” he repeated, and followed Rudolph outside. There he reached in, secured the key, and locked the door on the outside. Anna, listening and white with anger, heard his ponderous steps going around to the back door, and the click as he locked that one also.
“Beast!” she muttered. “German schwein.”
It was after midnight when she heard him coming back. She prepared to leap out of her bed when he came up-stairs, to confront him angrily and tell him she was through. She was leaving home. But long after she had miserably cried herself to sleep, Herman sat below, his long-stemmed pipe in his teeth, his stockinged feet spread to the dying fire.
In that small guarded hail that night he had learned many surprising things, there and at Gus's afterward. The Fatherland's war was already being fought in America, and not only by Germans. The workers of the world had banded themselves together, according to the night's speakers. And because they were workers they would not fight the German workers. It was all perfectly simple. With the cooperation of the workers of the world, which recognized no country but a vast brotherhood of labor, it was possible to end war, all war.
In the meantime, while all the workers all over the world were being organized, one prevented as much as possible any assistance going to capitalistic England. One did some simple thing—started a strike, or sawed lumber too short, or burned a wheat-field, or put nails in harvesting machinery, or missent perishable goods, or changed signal-lights on railroads, or drove copper nails into fruit-trees, so they died. This was a pity, the fruit-trees. But at least they did not furnish fruit for Germany's enemies.
So each one did but one thing, and that small, so small that it was difficult to discover. But there were two hundred thousand men to do them, according to Rudolph, and that meant a great deal.
Only one thing about the meeting Herman had not liked. There were packages of wicked photographs going about. Filthy things. When they came to him he had dropped them on the floor. What had they to do with Germany's enemies, or preventing America from going into the war?
Rudolph laughed when he dropped them.
“They won't bite you!” he had said, and had stooped to pick them up. But Herman had kept his foot on them.
So—America would go into the war against the Fatherland, unless many hundreds of thousands did each their little bit. And if they did not, America would go in, and fight for England to control the seas, and the Spencer plant would make millions of shells that honest German workers, sweat-brothers of the world, might die.
He remembered word for word the peroration of the evening's speech.
“We would extend the hand of brotherhood to the so-called enemy, and strangle the cry for war in the fat white throats of the blood-bloated money-lenders of Wall Street, before it became articulate.”
He was very tired. He stooped and picked up his shoes, and with them in his hand, drawn to his old-time military erectness, he stood for some time before the gilt-framed picture on the wall. Then he went slowly and ponderously up-stairs to bed.