CHAPTER IV
Dick was coming in from a five days’ walking trip. He had fled from town on Monday, seeking what the road and the sweet early May air and greenery would do for his jumping nerves and tormented mind. “Forget the war,” counseled Ralph, when he telephoned he was off. He had done it fairly well. Spring is a lovely thing in the highlands around Sabinsport. It covers the earth with delicate blossoms, turns the brown tracery of the trees to soft yellows and reds and greens, peoples the air with songsters. It was early this year, and had opened the doors of the farmhouses—started gardens, set men to plowing fields, women to sewing on the porches, children to wandering in the woods. Dick walked without other compass than his own experienced sense of direction and distance, shunning highways, following lanes and little-used roads, stopping only when the day grew dusky and sleeping by preference in friendly farmhouses.
It was Saturday morning, warm, brilliant, fragrant. He would be in Sabinsport by noon, he calculated. How changed he was! How rested! How bright things seemed again! It would be good to get back. He believed he could preach to-morrow. It should be of the healing of the air and the sun.
It was ten o’clock when he struck Jo’s Mills, as it was called—a tiny settlement slightly up a hill from the point where a gray old mill stood on the edge of a stream which took a long tumble here. There were a half dozen, comfortable, old-time, white houses on the street, with apple-trees and lilacs and gardens. There was a big general store—relic of early days when things were busy—only half occupied now—a church—a school—a post-office in the wing of Miss Sally Black’s house—a neat, prim post-office where nobody warmed his back long—though Miss Sally was not above keeping everybody long enough to feel out the news. There was a public telephone in the post-office, and over this it was the custom of the Sabinsport operators to communicate to Miss Sally anything particularly important. It was evident to Dick as he approached that Miss Sally must have received something that the neighbors were interested in, for there was a little group standing around, looking rather glum. He stopped and quite instinctively inquired, “What’s the news?”
“Well,” said one of the men—“it don’t sound good to me—mebbe ’tain’t so—they say the Germans have sunk a ship—a big one with a lot of Americans and women and children—didn’t give no notice—nothing—just sunk ’em.”
“Well—what I say is,” said another, “that ain’t likely. How could a submarine do that—sink a ship like that?—she’d have to blow up inside to sink so quickly. Likely her engine exploded.”
Dick didn’t stop to debate the power of the submarine, but quickly stepped in and called Ralph at theArgusoffice in Sabinsport.
“Hello, Ralph,” he said. “I’ve just walked into Jo’s Mills. There’s an ugly report here of the sinking of a vessel with big loss of Americans—anything in it?”
“Everything in it, theLusitaniawas torpedoed yesterday—she sank in a few minutes. There is a loss of twelve hundred lives reported, one hundred of them Americans.”
“My God!” exclaimed Dick.
“Yes,” replied Ralph, savagely, “my God!” and both men hung up.
It was but five miles into Sabinsport, but Dick always thought of it as the longest and blackest five miles he ever walked. As one drew nearer the town, the valley and the river unfolded, giving glimpses of rare loveliness, but they were lost on him now, though he had been looking forward to them all the morning as a delightful finish to his tramp. The tormented world was again on his back—his mind was grappling with the awful possibilities in the news. This was no ordinary casualty of war—not a battle lost or won. This was not war, as war was understood. It was a new factor in the awful problem. It was something quite outside the code—a deliberate effort to scare the neutral world into giving up the sea code it had been working out with such pain through the ages—scaring them into admitting that atrocities it thought it had done away with were legitimate if you invented an engine of destruction which couldn’t be used unless you abandoned the laws. It was a defiance not only of all codes, but a most impudent defiance of the stern warning of the United States. Dick’s blood ran hot and furious as he thought of it. “It can’t be passed. It means action. They’ll have to retreat—or we’ll have to fight—and they’ll never retreat. It would be giving up half of what they think their strength,” he said, with the conviction of one who knew his Germany—its confidence in itself, its contempt for non-military peoples, its sneering at all laws or practices that stood in the way of its will.
“But who, who in Sabinsport sees this as it is? How are they to be made to see it? Half the town will treat theLusitaniaas a tragedy like theTitanic. Captain Billy will rave and say, ‘If we had protested—if we hadn’t a Democratic administration.’ But that isn’t seeing the issue—his kind of fury against the Germans misses the point—the inner meaning which the country must see if it ever goes whole-heartedly in. Wanton piracy—as savage and unmerciful as the Wotan they worship. God! if I could get into it. But here I stay. I will go home—bathe—dress—read my mail—prepare for services to-morrow—go through them. I’ll sleep and eat and write and smile and talk as if this fearful thing was not on the earth—as if I didn’t know that every day brought it closer to Sabinsport—and she doesn’t know it. Ralph’s right—it’s closing in on us. And what will Ralph say, I wonder.”
What Ralph said was in that evening’sArgus. It was brief.
“When men go to war the appeal is to violence, destruction, death. He who can destroy most, kill most, is the superior. You take what comes in your path. To talk of laws of war is nonsense. To talk of mercy in war is to talk hypocrisy. You’re out to kill. You kill what’s in your way. To debate your right to do what will injure an enemy is not the way of war. It is the way of peace. The destruction of theLusitaniawas an act of war—that hideous, senseless thing to which Europe has appealed. It is a tragedy that Americans should have been destroyed. It is a greater tragedy that they should have put themselves deliberately in the path of death. If they had as deliberately walked between the firing lines in battle, would we have condemned the combatants if they lost their lives?”
Dick bowed his head at the merciless logic of the paragraph, its contempt for humanity as it is, its lofty and reckless egotism. He was encouraged, however, when he learned afterwards that when Otto had congratulated Ralph on the editorial, Ralph had said: “But you missmypoint, Otto. I’m not defending your infernal country. It was cowardly business, but it was logical. You Germans are in a fair way to demonstrate the silliness of trying to insist on honor in war. Laws of war are about as reasonable as laws against tornadoes. The only hope I have is that you’ll reduce the beastly business to its absurdity.”
The effect of theLusitaniaon Sabinsport was much deeper and more general than Dick had dared dream. For the first time since the war began he sensed a feeling of personal responsibility abroad—in the banks, at the grocery, on the street, around the dinner tables. There was a growing consciousness that this was something which did concern her, something that she must see through. There were a few, but only a few in the town, who insisted that we should plunge in immediately and avenge the outrage. Sabinsport was not ready to do that. The world was full of wrongs calling for vengeance, was theLusitaniathe one out of all these many where Sabinsport must act? The town reeked with discussion. Dick found indignation, however, qualified strongly by the suspicion that theLusitaniawas armed. The doubt was a hang-over from her inherited mistrust of English ways and English dealings. “Probably was carrying munitions,” men would say. “Probably did have guns.”
Then, too, Sabinsport found it hard to believe that it was necessary, and therefore right, for Americans to go to Europe during the war, unless they went to enlist or on errands of mercy. You see, Sabinsport’s idea of business was limited, provincial. She had never quite grasped the fact that men ran back and forth to London and Paris and Berlin now-a-days on legitimate business quite as freely as a few of her own citizens ran back and forth to New York. Going to Europe was still an adventure. There had been a time when Sabinsport numbered so few people that had been to Europe that she had formed a society, “The Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe.” It had not lasted long, for she had a sense of humor which saved her from keeping alive that which savored of snobbery, and the Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe died a quiet and early death. Going abroad was now common enough, but it had not yet assumed the proportions of legitimate business.
In spite of all this, however, there was not from the first a doubt in Sabinsport’s mind, if you got down to the bottom of it, that whatever laws there were must be observed; whatever rights we had must be defended. Here she followed Captain Billy, who said, “By the Jumping Jehosophat, we’ll go where we have a right to.” One would have thought, to hear Captain Billy, that he made at least two trips across the ocean a year, though, as a matter of fact, he had never laid his eyes on that water.
“Do you suppose, if my business calls me to London,” said he, “and that the laws allow me, an American citizen, to travel on an English vessel that I’m going to keep off that ship? It has a legal right to carry me. Of course they can come aboard and see if that ship has contraband and guns, and if they find them they can take me off; but they can’t blow her up until they have me safe. That’s all they can do under the law, and that they have got to do. I’m going to travel wherever the law says I may.”
Thus Captain Billy put it at the War Board, in his grocery, and even at home, where Mrs. Captain Billy, who always took him literally, said, with a flutter, “William, you must keep off those ships, even if you have the right to go on them. You will only make trouble if you insist on going to London now.”
And in this insistence there were others in Sabinsport who agreed with Mrs. Captain Billy. There was the Rev. Mr. Pepper, as I have already explained. There was the dwindling Peace Party. There was a small number of Socialists in the mills. But they made only a ripple on the surface of that staid, settled conviction in Sabinsport’s mind—“where we have a right to go, we’re going to go, and Germany shall not stop us.”
It was this conviction, so strong in Sabinsport, that made her pick out of the President’s diplomatic correspondence two words, and all through the discussion cling to them. He had said “strict accountability” at the start, Sabinsport agreed, and she was willing to wait and stand on that. “Fine”—“Just right”—“Don’t give ’em a loophole,” was the average opinion. Of course there were those in Sabinsport, though they were very few, that were, like Mr. Kinney, the pillar in Dick’s church, who had found Belgium’s resistance “impractical,” and who now argued that the trouble with the President’s correspondence was that it did not give us “a leg to run on.” “We don’t want war,” said Vestryman Kinney. “Diplomacy consists in so framing your notes that you have a way out. Suppose Germany won’t agree, we must back down. It looks bad to me. He ought to have been more skillful.”
In all this discussion, however, Dick saw that ingrained deeply in Sabinsport was the idea that keeping peace was a preëminent national duty. He found in the heart of the town a solemn conviction that a country ought to have a machinery that would keep its people out of war, that when things went wrong with other nations there ought to be a way to settle them without fighting. Although he felt that anger over theLusitania—and perhaps something more serious for Germany than anger, that was contempt for the act—stayed and increased in the town, he knew that she clung to the conviction that there ought to be a better way than force to settle it. Sabinsport felt and argued very much as she felt and argued about the attempts in a neighboring State where lynchings sometimes occurred—that the punishment should be left to the law and not to a mob. To rush in now, as Captain Billy demanded, seemed to Sabinsport a little bit like mob action. She wanted a government that had a machinery to take care of such a task as this without forcing her to leave her honest business of earning a living to take up the abominable business of destroying men. She had an idea that we had a machinery for just this purpose. The question was, Would it work?
And so the town waited on events. She went about her business of feeding and clothing herself, but her ears were open, and if her mouth was shut her mind was at work, turning over the mighty and unaccustomed problems. Sabinsport was learning new words, struggling with strange ideas, trying to grasp their relation to herself. Did these things concern her and her business? If so, all right; but if not, well, she’d been trained not to interfere; and, above all, not to interfere in wars across the seas.
Of all the 20,000 people in Sabinsport, only one was aroused to immediate action by theLusitania. A week from the morning that he had heard the dire news at Jo’s Mills, Dick came down to his breakfast to find his husky, cheerful, Irish Katie with swollen eyes and tragic mien.
“Why, Katie!” he exclaimed. “What’s the matter? What’s Mikey been doing now?” He took it for granted it was Mikey. He had never known anything else to reduce Katie to tears.
“Oh, my God!” wailed the woman, “he’s gone—gone to the war—says he’s gone foryou. You never sent him away from me, Mr. Dick, and never said a word to me. You haven’t a heart that hard. You couldn’t do a thing like that.”
“I certainly wouldn’t do such a thing, Katie. I haven’t sent Mikey away. I don’t understand it. Tell me what’s happened—that’s a good soul.” But all that Katie could find words to say was: “Read that—and that to me, his own mother.”
Dick took the crumpled, tear-stained letter and read:
“Dear Mother:
“I’m going to war. They’ll take me in Canada. You tell Mr. Dick to stop worrying because he can’t fight. I’ll do his fightin’ and don’t you go off your head. I can’t stick around Sabinsport any longer with such things doin’ in the world. The Dutchmen are off their bases—they’ve got to get back where they belong.
“I’d said good-by but I knew you’d make a row.
“Your loving son,“Mikey Flaherty.”
“Your loving son,“Mikey Flaherty.”
“Your loving son,“Mikey Flaherty.”
“Your loving son,
“Mikey Flaherty.”
“I didn’t know this, Katie. Mikey never had dropped a word to me that would make me suspect he was thinking of this. I don’t understand what he means by going for me.”
“I knew it, the spalpeen. I knew you’d never treat poor old Katie like this. I understand it well enough, now. It’s him spilin’ for the fight. It’s my own fault. Didn’t I tell him you was eatin’ your heart out because you can’t go, and he has been talkin’ a lot of late about what you had been sayin’ at the Club. Every night when he came home, it was Mr. Dick said this, and Mr. Dick said that. Silly old fool, I am. And him that would rather fight than eat and that sets the world by you, Mr. Dick.”
“But, Katie, what put that nonsense into your head?”
“Oh,” said the woman, sagely, “I know. I know it like I wuz your mother. You don’t have to tell me things. I know you like I do the weather. You ain’t been the same since the dirty Germans did up poor little Belgium. I know the only reason you don’t go is that you wouldn’t live a day.”
“Nonsense, Katie. Where’d you get that?”
“Mikey told me. He was that cut up because you couldn’t go, but he needn’t have run away from his poor old mother like this. I’d let him go for you. I’m no coward. It ain’t his goin’; it’s his thinkin’ I wouldn’t let him. He’s always beatin’ up somebody—might as well be Germans. God pity ’em when Mikey gets there. He’ll wipe up the road with ’em. And don’t you be worryin’, Mr. Dick. I’ll stand it. He can write me, can’t he?”
“Katie, I won’t allow this. Mikey must come back. I’ll go to Canada and have a search made for him. I have friends who’ll find him.”
“Indade and you won’t do anything of the kind. Would you break the by’s heart—and me that proud of him? Where’s the other by in Sabinsport that had the right to get up and go? Let him fight. I’ll live to see him with the stripe on his sleeve—as grand as the grandest. You’ll not raise a finger. Drink your coffee now, and don’t mind me, old fool that I am to be makin’ you worry for a little thing like that.”
And so Dick, with one eye on Katie’s furtive wiping of her eyes, drank his coffee, wondering as he did it at the amazing intuition that affection gives. Katie and Mikey had discerned—so he told himself—what nobody in Sabinsport but Ralph knew, and he had said enough to Ralph to explain his understanding. What was it that ran from soul to soul and opened to the unlettered what was closed to the most highly trained, he asked himself. But they are Irish, and the Irish have a sixth sense—one that looks into hearts.
But it was not divination, it was simply the keen and affectionate eye of Katie on him through all those terrible August and September days at the beginning. She saw what Dick did not realize, the beaten stoop to his shoulder, the despairing look in his eye when he came back from his effort to enlist. Many was the night during the days of that first approach to Paris that Katie had gone home to tell Mikey, “He’s dyin’ of grief, he is. He looks at his paper in the morning and drops his head in his hands and groans. He don’t eat and he don’t talk. The big battle is killin’ him. I peeps in now and then to his study and he is sittin’ lifeless like, thinkin’ and thinkin’. Mikey, he’s dyin’ for love of France, could you beat it?”
And Mikey, much perplexed, watched his hero and took excruciating pains to keep the brakes on himself, not to do anything to worry Mr. Dick. When the battle was over and the Germans turned back, Dick’s joy was so great that Katie herself began to rejoice. For Katie Flaherty, the war dated from that first week of September, 1914. Also from then dated what was to become the dominating passion of her life—her hatred of Germany.
Mikey’s sudden departure was quickly known in Sabinsport, and Katie did not hesitate to make the most of the fact that he had gone for love of Mr. Dick. It had its romantic value, that runaway. It made Katie a town heroine. Certain well-to-do gentlemen in the banks, Cowder and Mulligan among them, sent her a purse. There was much talking to her in the streets as she did Dick’s marketing, and nightly on the porch of the little house on the south bank of the river where she lived a group of friendly neighbors came in to cry or to exult according to Katie’s humor.
Dick was not long in sensing that Mikey’s action was making opinion in Sabinsport, much as Patsy’s adventures in Belgium had done. The very children caught it, and Richard Cowder stopped more than once in his favorite South Side Alley to discuss with the “gang” what the runaway was probably doing at the moment. In reporting his conversations, he sometimes would shake his head, saying, “You know these youngsters are getting a new idea about running away—that it may be a glorious deed.”
The point at which the effect was most significant, in Dick’s judgment, was the wire mill. Practically all of the boys in the South Side Club belonged there. They were friends and companions of Mikey. His going away had sobered them and made them far and away more interested in the war. The most significant effect was the way in which they cooled toward a movement which had begun to make strong headway in the factories and mills, a movement in which Ralph was taking keen interest as he saw in it a possibility of reviving the opposition to munition making which had been destroyed by Cowder’s and Mulligan’s appeal to the mill. This movement was already beginning to crystallize into a new party, made up of workmen and farmers. It was called Labor’s National Peace Council. Nobody could tell just who started it in the mill, but Ralph had seized the idea and was working seriously for it.
“Where in hell did it come from?” Cowder asked Dick. “Not out of this town, I tell you, Ingraham. I know this town like a book. There’s no Labor Peace Council in it when there’s plenty of work. This scheme’s been sneaked in from outside, and it’s being fed on the sly. What I can’t make out is, Who’s doing it? It’s the same crowd that kept up the battle against munitions. I don’t believe it’s Otto. I’m watching him. It’s somebody in the plants.”
Dick had his notions. They were connected with an investigation he had been making on the quiet. His curiosity about where the boys in his club got the arguments they presented against munition making and selling had led him to look into the journals they read, particularly the foreign journals—Slovak, Bohemian, Italian, Polish. He discovered that they were all carrying a surprisingly similar series of articles, protesting on the highest moral grounds against the dragging of the workmen into such a business—making munition, forcing them to earn their bread by preparing destruction for their fellows, or going without it. He didn’t like it and spoke to Ralph, translating to him the selections that he had put his hands on.
“It’s the same hand that does this, Ralph; what do you think?”
“Why,” said Ralph, “I’ve had that stuff offered me. I know all about it. There’s a bunch of peacemakers in the East who are syndicating it, in the domestic as well as the foreign press, paying all the expenses. They say it’s their contribution to the cause. The agent offered it to me here. They would not give me the names of the philanthropists. I told the agent that I didn’t advertise justice, I advocated it. But, Dick, it’s all right. They’re just silly, mistaken in their way of getting at it. You cannot carry on advertising of this kind in this country but people get onto the source of it very soon, just as you have; and that puts an end to it. I told the man that offered me that stuff that would be the way of it.”
“Did Otto ever mention this to you, Ralph?”
Ralph studied. “I believe he did once—asked me if I had ever heard of the scheme—if it had ever been offered to me. He said a newspaper friend of his in New York spoke to him about it. I told him what I’ve told you: that people who believed in these notions and wanted to get them over should come into the open with them. I don’t take any stock in pacifists that don’t work in the open.”
Dick told Cowder all he knew.
“Proves nothing,” he said, “but I don’t like it.”
“Nor I,” said Dick.
When Labor’s National Peace Council began to flourish, Dick couldn’t get it out of his head that there was a connection between the two, that the humanitarian advertisers were the backers of the movement. He went to Ralph with the suggestion. That young man had thrown himself boldly into the campaign and he resented Dick’s idea that there was something suspicious behind it.
“I don’t believe it,” he declared hotly. “It’s the natural thing for people who work, and only want to do useful, honest work, to revolt against this kind of thing. This is a spontaneous labor movement, I tell you, Dick. Our working people and our farmers don’t believe in playing with fire—when the fire means war. They know this selling to the Allies what the Allies wouldn’t otherwise have is going to exasperate Germany and may drag us in. I tell you it’s perfectly natural they should rise and protest and prepare to fight it out at the elections.”
“But, Ralph, who started this thing here? Where did it come from? The shops?”
“Hanged if I know—started itself, I tell you. I don’t care—it’s the ideas. They’re sound. I’m for them.”
“But if these ideas were being scattered and watered by the paid agents of Germany, how would you feel about it? You must know by this time that Germany has no sympathy for peace; that she believes in war. You must realize that she has no objection to selling munitions herself. Why, half the world gets its big guns from her. It’s because she hopes to trap us into being unneutral—refusing for an illogical sentiment to sell her enemies munitions that she’s working this thing up. It’s part of her war program. Can’t you see it, Ralph?”
“I tell you there’s nothing in your suspicion. Look at the men who’ve been here to speak for the party—as good labor men as the Federation has. You can’t suspect them of pro-Germanism; they’re for peace, I tell you, and putting an end to this infernal shell and powder making.”
Nor was it until Ralph had been in Washington to the famous August, 1915, meeting of the council and had himself heard the cynical reply of the precious rascal that was managing affairs, to the demand of honest working men for an explanation of the source of the funds that were being so lavishly used, “What if it is German money?”—that he yielded. “I’ve been a fool,” he said to Dick quite frankly when he came back, and quite as frankly he told the story of his own connection with the party in theArgus.
“The editor of this paper has never concealed his opinion of war. He considers it a senseless and brutal method of trying to settle human differences. He considers the present war in Europe an unnecessary crime in which all the nations concerned are partners. This war has nothing to do with the United States, and the efforts to involve us, whether they come from within or without, are works of the devil. Nobody who reads theArguscan doubt that this has been our opinion from the start. Thinking this, we could only look on munition making in this country as deliberate trading with the devil. Big Business never stops to consider humanity when there’s money to be made. TheArgushas consistently fought the making and the selling of munitions. When a party arose which had this end, theArguswelcomed it, supported it. TheArguswas a fool in doing this. Closer contact with the leaders of the party proved to the editor that a bunch of grafting Americans had persuaded a thick-headed German agent that if he’d give them money enough they’d swing this country away from England, via peace and brotherly love. This came out last week in Washington. We shook the dust of the town from our feet, as did every self-respecting farmer and laborer there, when we discovered it. TheArgusis for peace, but it is not interested in pulling German chestnuts out of the fire. For whatever assistance it has given heretofore in that operation it apologizes to its readers and it assures them it was ignorance and not pro-Germanism which was behind its activities.”
There was much discussion of the editorial over Sabinsport supper tables that evening.
Dick was still in his study when the telephone rang: “Is it you, Dick?” an excited voice called. “Have you seen Ralph’s editorial? Isn’t it splendid? Isn’t it just like him, the honestest thing in the world. Just can’t be dishonest—oh, Dick, do you think I might call him up and tell him so? He despises me so. But to know he isn’t pro-German makes me so happy.”
“Call him up, by all means, Patsy,”—for it was Patsy, though she hadn’t announced herself. “He’ll be mighty pleased, I know.”
And Patsy called, but Ralph was not to be found, and an hour later her courage waned. “Maybe Dick will tell him,” and Dick did two or three days later, but Ralph only grumbled, “She evidently didn’t think enough of it to tell me so herself.”
The editorial brought out an unusually full meeting of the War Board. Ralph came in and told them all about it, and Brutus, who had “known it all the time,” hinted at revelations he’d soon be able to make. According to Brutus, this was a very insignificant activity of the German agents. He knew it to be a fact that they had vast stores of arms in New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Omaha, and that if the United States wasn’t mighty careful what she did there would be an army of thousands of Germans shutting us in our houses while German fleets bombarded the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and Zeppelins rained fire on our roofs. To which Captain Billy swore agreement.
While the discussion went on at the War Board, another went on in a speeding car, driven by Otto Littman. Otto had gone out for a spin in his little roadster—a thing he often did on hot summer nights. Across the river on the hill at a dark corner he had slowed up a bit, just enough for a man to step on the running board and into the car. Katie Flaherty, going home from Dick’s, said to herself: “The reckless creature! How did he know he was wanted? It’s a queer thing he didn’t stop. It’s Otto Littman, I’m thinkin’.”
It was indeed, and the lithe figure that had entered the running car was Max Dalberg, the “wonder of the laboratory,” whom Reuben Cowder had mentioned to Dick in his first confidence of weeks before.
“Well, Littman,” the newcomer said, with something like a sneer, “your young man on theArgusis mighty high in his tone to-night. What’s up? Didn’t they divvy in Washington?”
“None of that, Max. Ralph Gardner’s not that kind. I don’t know where you people get the idea that all Americans can be bought. They can’t be, and yet this whole business has been based on money. You know I never believed in this. I have been willing to put your case whenever I had the chance. I believe it’s right. I’ll work for Germany in any way I think honest, but I won’t lie and I won’t bribe.”
“You can’t put Germany’s case fully in this country, young man, and you know it. The Americans are a set of sentimental fools. They’re hypocrites, too. Talk about neutrality! The whole bunch is like Cowder. Pitch you out if you suggest selling munitions to even another neutral country. There isn’t a score of manufacturers in this country that wouldn’t rather close their plants than sell to us. Do you call that neutrality?”
“I tell you, Max, it’s the people. You don’t see things as they are at all—it’s not the Government. The Government is not preventing the munition makers from selling to Germany. The trouble is these munition makers here won’t sell to Germany.”
“But what kind of a government is it that cannot control its people? Do you suppose our Kaiser would tolerate that kind of weakness? For the sake of the United States, Otto, you ought to help teach this people what a strong nation really is. If this country expects to live she must learn to obey—learn that masters are necessary. What’s she doing now?—taking the bit in her teeth—thinking and doing what she pleases. She’s elected a President to do her thinking and she won’t follow him—forces him to do what his judgment is against.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, those notes. Wilson would never have written them if he hadn’t been afraid of the people. He’s too wise.”
“You’re wrong, Max. Wilson thinks just as Sabinsport does and he’s doing a thing the country will back up.”
“They won’t have a chance long. Germany’s patience is failing. We’ll attend to that. If they insist, they’ll get—Otto, you know as well as I do that there won’t be a plant left in this country soon to make munitions if they insist, and there won’t be a vessel on the seas to carry them. We’ll take care of that. You know we can do it. Why, there’s not a factory in the States that our people are not in, and there’s not a vessel out that we can’t split. We’re giving them a chance—appealing to their own fool sentiments. ‘Love peace?’ Well, take peace—don’t love peace and talk hatred of Germany. ‘Hate money made from munitions?’ Well, that’s easy; don’t make ’em. We’re only giving them their own dope, Otto, and they refuse to stand by their own faith. Hypocrites! English! If they won’t take a Labor’s Peace Council, you can be sure they’ll get a first-class explosion party—and that right soon.”
“See here, Max, I can’t follow anything like that. I’m willing to educate my country, but I won’t revenge her because she refuses my teaching. Cut it out.”
The ruddy blond face of Otto Littman’s companion wore usually the gentlest of smiles—the few who had ever met him in Sabinsport thought him a harmless man, devoted to his laboratory—talking little, playing his piano often late after a busy day’s hard work, friendly to little children, troubling nobody. “Never had a better man,” said Cowder, who almost daily visited the laboratory and listened to his explanations of difficulties both physical and chemical and how they could be overcome—watched his ingenious experiments, discussed long with him future developments.
“German parentage—born here,” he had told Cowder. He never talked of the war more than to say sadly, “It’s bad business.”
Cowder and the children who ran to him on the street at night would not have recognized him now as he leaned over Otto Littman—his blue eyes glittering like steel points, his lips drawn back until two full rows of white teeth showed—they would not have known the voice with its hateful sneer.
“Too late, Otto. You’re in. You can’t get out. Do you suppose we are going to let as good and prosperous an agent as you are, with a father above all suspicion, go when we’ve got him? We’ve got you, Otto Littman, and you’ll do what the High Command orders. Come, come, boy, don’t be an ass. And remember where your interests are. This country is doomed if she doesn’t soon see where her advantage lies. You’re made, whatever happens, for His Majesty never forgets. Your name is on his books.”
Otto Littman made no reply, but, swinging his car around sharply, drove rapidly back, only slowing up as he approached the dusky turn where his passenger had stepped in. He stepped out now as skillfully, and the car went on. One hearing it pass would have been quite willing to swear that it had not stopped.
“Poor fool,” Max said to himself. “Thought he could mix in great affairs and pull out at will. That’s your American education for you—willing to blurt into anything that’s new and promises excitement, pulling out the instant it gets dangerous or pinches their cheap little notions of morality.Gott in Himmel!what does he expect?—that Germany will tolerate such nonsense from any country on the globe? Our time has come and they must learn to understand what valor and power mean in the world.”
He took out his pipe and lit it and strolled, softly humming, into the rooms he occupied; they made up the second story at Katie Flaherty’s. It was a convenient arrangement for a single man who liked to come and go according “to things at the plant.” The little frame house was built like many on the South Side, into the hill; its first story opened on one level, its second on another a street above. Max had this second floor to himself now that Mikey had flown. He had said to Mrs. Flaherty that he’d be glad to take both rooms, his books and papers having outgrown the one. He had made it very pleasant and convenient—wonderfully convenient for a gentleman who occasionally had late callers and preferred they should not be seen coming or going.
Poor Otto reached home in a very different state of mind. The exciting game he had been playing for months now with a proud conviction that he was indeed on the inside, an actor in world affairs, a man trusted by great diplomats and certain one day to be recognized as one of those that had helped hold the United States when she was on the verge of losing herself to England—the game had taken a new turn. It was out of his hands. He was no longer the player—he was the puppet. What could he do? Was it true they “had” him?
Otto Littman was one of not a few prosperous young German-Americans who were caught in 1914, 1915, and 1916 in the coarse and rather clumsy web that German intrigue spun over spots in this land. Otto’s trapping had begun at least half a dozen years before, when he had made his first visit to Germany. He was then twenty-four, a handsome, rather arrogant, excellently educated young man. Rupert Littman had done his best for his only son. He himself was the best of men. He had come here in the early fifties—a lad of ten or twelve, with his father, a refugee of the revolution of 1848. They had found their way to Cincinnati and finally to a farm near Sabinsport. The land had thrived under the elder Littman’s intelligent and friendly touch. He was a prosperous man when the opening of the coal vein under his farm made him rich. He came into Sabinsport and with others, made rich like himself, started a farmers’ bank. This bank Rupert had inherited, and it was to carry it on that he had educated Otto, sending him to Germany to the family he had not seen since childhood but with which he had always had a formal relation, with the understanding that he was to spend at least two years in studying German banking and commercial methods.
The two years had lengthened to six, for Otto had been well received by his relatives. An opening had been found for him in Berlin where he had been given the opportunities his father sought for him. He had been cultivated by serious and older people, and always his relatives had lost no opportunity of impressing upon him the honors that were done him, of telling him that he was being taken in even as they were not. Otto had been flattered, though not so deeply as his relatives felt that he should have been. He had not taken the attentions and opportunities with an especial seriousness. There was a considerable percentage of inner conviction that they were his due, that there must be qualities in him that the attentive had detected which were not in others. Being an American meant something in Germany, he saw; also he soon discovered that there were two classes of his compatriots that Berlin cultivated—the millionaires and the professors. It is doubtful if Otto realized how very cunning this was on the part of Berlin. She had chosen the two classes of the United States most susceptible to flattery, and best placed to serve her purpose. And, how our millionaires and our professors had played her game!
It was not so much what was done for him and for other Americans in Berlin that impressed Otto. It was the country itself—the brightness and neatness of things captivated him. He liked its little gardens with every inch under immaculate cultivation—its tidy forests where the very twigs were saved—its people fitted into their particular niches like so many well-arranged books on a shelf. He liked the sense of men and women being looked after, kept in health, kept in employment, the utmost made out of them—no more letting a bit of human material go to waste than a bit of iron.
Their ways of doing things in business pleased him. There was always somebody that knew everything to be known about a particular thing. There were experts for every feature of the banking business. It was not an inherited rule-of-thumb way of carrying on things, such as he was familiar with at home; it was a thoroughly considered, scientific practice. To be sure, it seemed ponderous to him, but he felt as if it were sure. It had been thought out. Science—science in everything—nothing left to chance—no reliance on luck. He began to take the banking business very seriously indeed, to feel that he could carry home something important and serve not only Sabinsport but the country at large, which at that moment was wallowing in a terrible banking muddle over which his German friends held up their hands in shocked amazement.
As time went on, Otto began to take other things more seriously, and gradually there crept over him a sense of something stupendous going on in men’s thoughts and souls. People were not living for the present in Germany as at home; they were not accepting their place in the world as something fixed; they seemed always to have before them the future, and that future on which their eyes were fixed was something of magnificent if dim proportions. It was something that he finally discovered stirred them to the depths of their being.
“What ails them?” he asked himself, at first. “It is as if they saw things. It isn’t natural.” Slowly he began to understand what they saw, what they felt. It wasn’t a dream; it was a faith that absorbed them—a faith in their own greatness and a conviction that they were soon to be called to prove it to the world, to take their proper place at the head of nations. “They’re crazy,” he told himself at first, “or I am.” But later he began to see with them. Was it not the truth? What nation on earth equaled them—in effective action, in restraint, in fidelity, in valor, in bigness of vision? What other nation was worthy to rule the earth? Certainly not England—she was soft, vain, selfish—her lands in the hands of a few, her people neglected, her government rent by dissensions, her colonies self-governing or ready for revolt. England certainly had lost her sense and her genius for empire.
Not France. France had no dream of empire, no genius for empire; she was content to stay at home. She preferred making things with her hands to making them with machines. She let her people think what they would, say what they would. France had every fault of that futile, impossible thing men called democracy. Certainly not France.
He saw it clearly, finally, as a thing writ on the walls of heaven. The destiny of Germany was to rule the earth. It was right and inevitable that she should do it because she was superior. It was part of her greatness that she saw her destiny, did not shrink from it, dared openly to prepare for it, to educate her people for it.
Her daring thrilled Otto to the very soul. He read Treitschke finally. Her text book. He saw in it a notice to the earth that her master was here, to prepare to receive him. It was an open notice to England, to France, to make way. The conqueror was coming. He did not come in the night. He taught in the open of his approach—marshaled his armies in the open—built his ships in the open.
Otto began to feel an overwhelming contempt for the rest of Europe—that it should not understand what was writ so large before its eyes, that it should touch shoulders with a nation that for years had carried in its heart so wondrous and magnificent an ambition, that had so consistently and frankly prepared to make it real. Time they were put in their place—particularly the two, France and England, that called themselves the best the world has done so far. They were at the end of their string.
His conversion was no half-hearted affair. Like alien converts the world over, he outdid the Germans in the ardor of his faith, in his contempt of opposition, and he felt all this without an instant of waning in loyalty to his own country. As a matter of fact the relations of the United States never entered his mind. The United States had nothing to do with this. Germany had no thought of her. Germany admitted our claim to the Western Hemisphere so far as Otto’s experience went. Germany in South America, Germany in Mexico—of that he saw and knew nothing. His whole mind was aflame with the discovery he had made. It seemed to him like a return to the age of heroes, when men walked grandly and rose to place by great deeds of valor alone.
He had come back to the United States in 1912, but two years were not long enough even to dim the great conception he had caught. Indeed, everything in the country threw into higher relief the superiority of German methods and justified her faith in her destiny.
Sabinsport, after any one of the German towns of corresponding size, seemed ugly, unfinished, disorderly. To their trim, solid, spotless exterior was opposed a straggling, temporary, half-cleaned condition in at least the greater part of the town. Instead of a careful business management of town affairs, by men trained as they would have been for bank or factory, was an absurd political system of choosing men for offices. It was not the good of the town that was at issue, although both sides loudly claimed that it alone considered Sabinsport; it was always the party, with the result that clever men, like Mulligan and Cowder, practically controlled affairs.
Otto might, six years before, have laughed at this ridiculous method of running a town, but not now. Germany had taught him to be serious—oh, very serious, particularly in public matters. It shamed him that his home, the place where he must live and do business, should conduct itself in this crude and wasteful fashion.
He found it difficult in the bank. His “reforms” were disliked—his father, the directors, the men at the books and the windows, clung to their ways, and their ways were not, in his judgment, “scientific.” His father laughed at his impatience. “You must go slow, Otto. What people won’t willingly do because they see it is the better, cannot succeed. Perhaps we’re not so bad as you think. Admit our results are good.”
But Otto was convinced it was chance, the luck of the American, not any sound practice that had brought the bank where it stood. Then constantly there was an irritation in business, a resentment that they would not see and admit the superiority of the practices he would introduce.
The social life bored him, or rather the lack of it. There was no provision for daily natural mixing with one’s friends—no coffee hour, no beer garden, no music. He resented the indifference to the friendly side of life. He criticized resentfully the habit of regarding pleasure as something to be bought with money—the inability to get it without spending. Indeed, Otto felt a thorough and rather bitter disgust at the place money held in Sabinsport. She regarded it, he felt, as an end. Getting it was the chief thing with which men’s minds were occupied. They seemed never to think of public affairs except in terms of business, and of very personal business, too.
But, in spite of this preoccupation with money-getting, they did not, after all, respect money. They flung it about, toyed with it, used it for uncertain schemes, wild ventures, took it for their costly and reckless pleasures. Rarely would you find a German treating money with such carelessness, such contempt. It would seem as if the thing everybody sought was not worth keeping when won. Otto hated this. A German knew the value of money—his countrymen did not. And the few who did and hoarded it, refused to risk it—they seemed to receive no such respect from the people as the open-handed. It was incomprehensible—the American and his money.
But that which combined to make life in Sabinsport most barren and flat to Otto was his feeling that there was no greatness, no sense of a magnificent and mysterious future coming to the country. The people were not working toward a definite national thing. Men and women seemed to think of nothing more magnificent than to gather and spend wealth. The idea of subordinating a personal aim for a national aim, the thing which so dignified German earning, saving and spending, was unheard of here. Here you lived for yourself, not for your nation.
“America is not a nation,” he told his father; “it’s a place where great numbers of people, largely because of a happy chance which probably can never happen again in the world’s history, exercise just enough control of themselves to enable them to live completely selfish lives and they save themselves any slight remorse they might feel for this selfishness by somehow convincing themselves that they are demonstrating the superiority of individual liberty. And what you are getting in America is an undisciplined, self-satisfied people, more and more incapable of thinking itself wrong, more and more incapable of wanting anything but to be let alone in smug comfort. It is not a nation, I tell you, Father,” Otto would say. “A nation must have a single, glorious aim.”
And the old man would wring his hands and say, “You don’t understand, Otto.” And sometimes, walking up and down, would repeat the story of the incident which had led Otto’s grandfather to join the Revolution of 1848 and had brought the family finally to America.
It was not an unusual incident. He was a soldier in training, and one morning in drilling his gun slipped and came down as they stood at “Attention.” The officer in charge sprang at him with a savage oath and cut him with his sword across the face so that the blood ran in streams over his uniform. Rupert Littman finished the drill and that evening joined the party of young revolutionists, suffered with them defeat, was imprisoned, escaped, and, as has been told, in 1850 came to this country.
“You don’t understand, Otto. You look only at the outside. It’s empire they think of over there; it’s liberty here. An empire with an autocrat at the head, even a half-way one, may be orderly. Liberty is apt to look pretty untidy and mixed up in comparison, I know, Otto. But don’t make any mistake; a country that has set out like this one of ours to show that all men that come to its shores are free, that never for a moment has dreamed of ruling other peoples, asks nothing of newcomers but that they don’t interfere with other people’s freedom. Oh, that country may not look as trim on the outside as Germany, its people may not spend their money as sensibly—probably they don’t; and I know we think a good deal more about our own affairs than about public affairs; but don’t you get it into your head that we’re not a nation and have no central enthusiasm. If it came to the test I imagine you would find that the right of every man to mind his own business and of every nation to do the same, would make a pretty strong tie in the United States. You would see, if it came to a test, that we have a core over here.”
“Words, Father, words; you’ve talked this democratic patter so long you think it means something. A nation must have a visible expression of power to be great and feel great. She must have an army, a navy—that is what makes a nation feel great.”
But Rupert Littman shook his head. “You don’t understand, Otto, you don’t understand.” And Otto didn’t understand, and Sabinsport continued to irritate and humiliate him.
The war coming when he was still in this mood aroused his enthusiasm. Now the world would have a demonstration of what greatness in a nation meant. They would see again on earth a real empire rise. So filled was Otto with this sense of the magnificence of German destiny, he felt no criticism for anything that Germany could do, no doubt of anything she said. If she invaded Belgium it was because France was already about to do so, and she beat her to it. If she burned Louvain, it was for the unanswerable reasons that the Emperor himself condescended to give to the American people.
His exultation, naturally enough, made him resent the almost universal sympathy for heroic little Belgium. He resented the something like contempt for forcing the war—for all Sabinsport seemed to take it for granted that Germany had started it. What right, he asked himself hotly, have a lot of yokels like these—people who know nothing—nothing of the aspirations of a great nation, a nation with a genius for empire—people who can hardly name the countries of Europe and couldn’t, for the life of them, tell where the Balkans are—what right have they to an opinion? He was outraged at the fact that everybody had an opinion and had no hesitation in giving it. The very barber and bootblack cursed at the Kaiser. Nothing better showed the way Otto had gone than the impulse he felt to have them both arrested. His only consolation in the town was Ralph, who did appreciate the social efficiency of Germany though he flatly denied any comprehension of what Otto meant when he talked of German destiny.
It was natural enough that Otto should have eagerly welcomed the opportunity to help turn public opinion in America against England and toward Germany, which came to him early in the fall of 1914. Germany was unquestionably troubled by the judgment against her. She saw that the United States held her responsible for starting the war and was horrified by her first stroke. This would never do. Agents were at once sent out to take advantage of every conceivable opportunity to make the American think as he ought about these things—that is, to think as Germany thought.
The country filled up with them. One who traveled much in the fall and winter of 1914 and 1915 met them on the trains, in hotels—big, blond, mustached persons with the air of the superman. One of their objects was to enlist quietly the aid of German-American citizens of position and education who had seen enough of Germany to understand and sympathize with her aspirations. There were many of the second or third generations who had had experiences similar to Otto’s, who felt as he did and who believed that in interpreting Germany to the United States they were serving their country.
Otto was one of the first of these young men approached. His vanity was deeply flattered. To be invited into great affairs, to be asked to help with a campaign important to the Empire, to serve his own land at the same time by helping to set her right—what an opening! He promised his full and loyal service. He asked only to be used.
The first service asked of him was to secure full information about the munition making in the district of which Sabinsport was an important point, and to place in every plant as many of the men which would be sent to him as he could without attracting attention. He easily and naturally enough carried out the commission, and he did it without compunction. It seemed plausible and proper enough to him that Germany should inform herself about the chances of the Allies supplying themselves with munitions, and he admired the care she took to get accurate information. So far as Otto was concerned, this was all there was in the matter.
The campaign against selling munitions, which was started in the winter and spring of 1915, tickled him enormously. Clever—what could be more clever than using this absurd obsession of a few pacifists to prevent her enemy from getting shells and shrapnel!Germanystirring up sentiment against war-weapons to weaken her opponent! That was humor—great humor. And Otto went into the campaign with gusto, working quietly through the men he had placed in the plant at Sabinsport, particularly Max Dalberg; working through unseeing Ralph, working in a dozen towns where he had business and social relations. His attitude was strictly correct. We were neutral. Why should we preach neutrality and make for one antagonist what circumstances made it impossible to make for another? We must treat all alike. The campaign took hold. The workingmen favored it. Otto was greatly pleased. That much money was being used in sending around speakers, in circulating documents, in advertising, in establishing newspaper and periodical organs, he vaguely knew. It was all right. You must get the ear of the public. Why not?
The only serious rebuff Otto had in the early months of his propaganda was when he attempted to contract with Cowder and with other manufacturers for their output. He was amazed and incensed at their attitude. They treated the suggestion that they sell to “Sweden” as an insult. It was this attitude, so hostile to Germany, that had made him completely lose his control with Cowder. It had been unbearable; this contempt, this resentment at the suggestion. He had felt that he was defending Germany when he raised his hand. His controlled and adroit companion had criticized him severely, “You’ll give the game away, Littman, if you lose your temper like that.”
But Otto had replied hotly, “Give it away! It’s a fair game. I believe in what I’m doing. It’s war and fair enough. What I can’t tolerate is the hypocrisy of the American attitude. To pretend to be neutral and act as if you were insulted when it is suggested to you that you sell something so it will get to Germany as well as to England. To pretend to be neutral and to be concerned only with their rights, and yet tolerate with indifference England’s violations and rage against Germany’s.”
“Well, they mustn’t complain if we use stronger arguments. If they can’t make good the neutrality they preach, we’ll have to see what a little force will do.”
“What do you mean?” asked Otto, sharply. “You can’t force the United States.”
“The hell we can’t,” was all his chief answered.
The reply had made no deep impression on Otto then. He remembered it now. He remembered how this hint had recurred as he talked with the German agents in the different places where he had met them. After the Washington fiasco, bursting completely the party for which he had labored so faithfully, this threat came back to him more often. It made him anxious. It was in the back of his mind when he flared at Max and brought upon his head the taunt that humiliated and alarmed him. What if they carried it out—these explosions that they threatened—how could he escape complicity? He could refuse to help, but what good would that do if he was accused. It was a very unhappy young diplomat that laid his head on the pillow that night—one thoroughly disillusioned with great affairs.
The succeeding months made him more unhappy. Sabinsport mistrusted him, and he was made to feel it. In the business life of the town where he had been treated with deference there was a withdrawal, hard to define but very real to Otto. Again and again when he entered an office or room men stopped talking. There was a restraint at the War Board—the one group in the town which had always listened with eagerness, whether to outlandish theories and gossip or to sensible argument and unquestioned fact. Why should the War Board harbor suspicions of him? Did the War Boardcare?
Ralph, who had been his willing listener, was changed, it seemed to him. After the downfall of Labor’s National Peace Council, he put the question bluntly to Otto: “Did you know that it was German money that was backing up the munition and pacifist campaign?” Otto hesitated. “Never mind,” said Ralph, convinced, “but you must see that is a kind of thing not done, Otto. Embroiling us with England when we’re trying to keep out of the scrap is the work of a sneak. You know why I threw theArgusto the party. It was because I believed it an honest American effort to combat militarism in the United States, to stop the making and selling of munitions. Do you suppose I would have taken any stock in a German effort to stop munition making here? It’s a scream—Germany spending money in such a cause while she’s using Belgium’s guns and running her factories night and day making munitions! I’m with you in any frank effort to make people understand Germany better. I begin to think, Otto, that this business makes me understand Germany better than anything that has happened. You may be sure I’ll look twice hereafter at things made-in-Germany, particularly ideas. I don’t like this business, Otto, and I have to say so.”
And Otto could find few words to defend the campaign—though he had been able to do it so volubly and confidently to himself.
But it was with his father that the great strain came—his father who was watching him with eyes in which love, agony and anger disputed place, and neither of them could speak. He might try, as he did, to cut off gradually all relations with the plotters, for now he called them so to himself. He might, as he did, see more and more clearly that Germany was trying to embroil the United States with Mexico. He might feel that he could put his finger on the human cause of half the explosions in the country, but he dared not speak, for to speak would, he felt, throw him into the hands of the secret service with documentary evidence enough at least to cause his imprisonment—these letters of his, so full of admiration for the country which he realized every day now was steadily marching into war with his own country.
The war had brought to no one in Sabinsport so far as great humiliation and wretchedness as to this dabbler in world politics. No small part of his misery was due to his fear that the suspicion abroad in Sabinsport would find its way overseas to the one girl in the world for whom he had ever really cared. Would the intangible thing which followed him in the street find Nancy Cowder in Serbia and poison her loyal and honest mind against him? He had many reasons for knowing how candidly she weighed things. Would she be misled by gossip and the letters he’d been sending her, so full of his own importance in the great work of making America understand Germany? Would Nancy say, like Ralph, “All this does make me understand Germany better, Otto”? He had an awful fear of it. The only consolation was his certainty that she had no other Sabinsport correspondent but her father, and it was unthinkable that her father would write of their quarrel over the munitions contract.