There had been once, in Herman Klein the making of a good American.
He had come to America, not at the call of freedom, but of peace and
plenty. Nevertheless, he had possibilities.
Taken in time he might have become a good American. But nothing was done
to stimulate in him a sentiment for his adopted land. He would, indeed,
have been, for all his citizenship papers, a man without a country but
for one thing.
The Fatherland had never let go. When he went to the Turnverein, it was
to hear the old tongue, to sing the old songs. Visiting Germans from
overseas were constantly lecturing, holding before him the vision of
great Germany. He saw moving-pictures of Germany; he went to meetings
which commenced with “Die Wacht am Rhine.” One Christmas he received a
handsome copy of a photograph of the Kaiser through the mail. He never
knew who sent it, but he had it framed in a gilt frame, and it hung over
the fireplace in the sitting-room.
He had been adopted by America, but he had not adopted America, save
his own tiny bit of it. He took what the new country gave him with no
faintest sense that he owed anything in return beyond his small yearly
taxes. He was neither friendly nor inimical.
His creed through the years had been simple: to owe no man money, even
for a day; to spend less than he earned; to own his own home; to rise
early, work hard, and to live at peace with his neighbors. He had
learned English and had sent Anna to the public school. He spoke English
with her, always. And on Sunday he put on his best clothes, and sat
in the German Lutheran church, dozing occasionally, but always rigidly
erect.
With his first savings he had bought a home, a tiny two-roomed frame
cottage on a bill above the Spencer mill, with a bit of waste land that
he turned into a thrifty garden. Anna was born there, and her mother
had died there ten years later. But long enough before that he had added
four rooms, and bought an adjoining lot. At that time the hill had been
green; the way to the little white house had been along and up a winding
path, where in the spring the early wild flowers came out on sunny
banks, and the first buds of the neighborhood were on Klein's own
lilac-bushes.
He had had a magnificent sense of independence those days, and of
freedom.
He voted religiously, and now and then in the evenings he had been the
moderate member of a mild socialist group. Theoretically, he believed
that no man should amass a fortune by the labor of others. Actually he
felt himself well paid, a respected member of society, and a property
owner.
In the early morning, winter and summer, he emerged into the small side
porch of his cottage and there threw over himself a pail of cold water
from the well outside. Then he rubbed down, dressed in the open air
behind the old awning hung there, took a dozen deep breaths and a cup of
coffee, and was off for work. The addition of a bathroom, with running
hot water, had made no change in his daily habits.
He was very strict with Anna, and with the women who, one after another,
kept house for him.
“I'll have no men lounging around,” was his first instruction on
engaging them. And to Anna his solicitude took the form almost of
espionage. The only young man he tolerated about the place was a distant
relative. Rudolph Klein.
On Sunday evenings Rudolph came in to supper. But even Rudolph found it
hard to get a word with the girl alone.
“What's eating him, anyhow,” he demanded of Anna one Sunday evening,
when by the accident of a neighbor calling old Herman to the gate, he
had the chance of a word.
“He knows a lot about you fellows,” Anna had said. “And the more he
knows the less he trusts you. I don't wonder.”
“He hasn't anything on me.”
But Anna had come to the limit of her patience with her father at last.
“What's the matter with you?” she demanded angrily one night, when
Herman had sat with his pipe in his mouth, and had refused her
permission to go to the moving-pictures with another girl. “Do you think
I'm going on forever like this, without a chance to play? I'm sick of
it. That's all.”
“You vill not run around with the girls on this hill.” He had conquered
all but the English “w.” He still pronounced it like a “v.”
“What's the matter with the girls on this hill?” And when he smoked on
in imperturbable silence, she had flamed into a fury.
“This is free America,” she reminded him. “It's not Germany. And I've
stood about all I can. I work all day, and I need a little fun. I'm
going.”
And she had gone, rather shaky as to the knees, but with her head held
high, leaving him on the little veranda with his dead pipe in his
mouth and his German-American newspaper held before his face. She had
returned, still terrified, to find the house dark and the doors locked,
and rather than confess to any one, she had spent the night in a chair
out of doors.
At dawn she had heard him at the side of the house, drawing water for
his bath. He had gone through his morning program as usual, by the
sounds, and had started off for work without an inquiry about her. Only
when she heard the gate click had she hammered at the front door and
been admitted by the untidy servant.
“Fine way to treat me!” she had stormed, and for a part of that day she
was convinced that she would never go back home again. But fear of her
father was the strongest emotion she knew, and she went back that night,
as usual. It not being Herman's way to bother with greetings, she had
passed him on the porch without a word, and that night, winding a clock
before closing the house, he spoke to her for the first time.
“There is a performance at the Turnverein Hall to-morrow night. Rudolph
vill take you.”
“I don't like Rudolph.”
“Rudolph viii take you,” he had repeated, stolidly. And she had gone.
He had no conception of any failure in himself as a parent. He had the
German idea of women. They had a distinct place in the world, but that
place was not a high one. Their function was to bring children into the
world. They were breeding animals, and as such to be carefully watched
and not particularly trusted. They had no place in the affairs of men,
outside the home.
Not that he put it that way. In his way he probably loved the girl. But
never once did he think of her as an intelligent and reasoning creature.
He took her salary, gave her a small allowance for car-fare, and banked
the rest of it in his own name. It would all be hers some day, so what
difference did it make?
But the direst want would not have made him touch a penny of it.
He disliked animals. But in a curious shame-faced fashion he liked
flowers. Such portions of his garden as were useless for vegetables he
had planted out in flowers. But he never cut them and brought them into
the house, and he watched jealously that no one else should do so. He
kept poisoned meat around for such dogs in the neighborhood as wandered
in, and Anna had found him once callously watching the death agonies of
one of them.
Such, at the time the Spencer mill began work on its new shell contract,
was Herman Klein, sturdily honest, just according to his ideas of
justice, callous rather than cruel, but the citizen of a world bounded
by his memories of Germany, his life at the mill, and his home.
But, for all that, he was not a man the German organization in America
put much faith in. Rudolph, feeling his way, had had one or two
conversations with him early in the war that had made him report
adversely.
“Let them stop all this fighting,” Herman had said. “What matter now who
commenced it? Let them all stop. It is the only way.”
“Sure, let them stop!” said Rudolph, easily. “Let them stop trying to
destroy Germany.”
“That is nonsense,” Herman affirmed, sturdily. “Do you think I know
nothing? I, who was in the Prussian Guard for five years. Think you I
know nothing of the plan?”
The report of the German atrocities, however, found him frankly
incredulous, and one noon hour, in the mill, having read the Belgian
King's statement that the German army in Belgium had protected its
advance with women and children, Rudolph found him tearing the papers to
shreds furiously.
“Such lies!” he cried. “It is not possible that they should be
believed.”
The sinking of the Lusitania, however, left him thoughtful and
depressed. In vain Rudolph argued with him.
“They were warned,” he said. “If they chose to take the chance, is it
Germany's fault? If you tell me not to put my hand on a certain piece in
a machine and I do it anyhow, is it your fault if I lose a hand?”
Old Herman eyed him shrewdly.
“And if Anna had been on the ship, you think the same, eh?”
Rudolph had colored.
For some time now Rudolph had been in love with Anna. He had not had
much encouragement. She went out with him, since he was her only means
of escape, but she treated him rather cavalierly, criticized his clothes
and speech, laughed openly at his occasional lapses into sentiment, and
was, once in a long time, so kind that she set his heart leaping.
Until the return of Graham Spencer, all had gone fairly well. But with
his installment in the mill, Rudolph's relations with Anna had changed.
She had grown prettier--Rudolph was not observant enough to mark what
made the change, but he knew that he was madder about her than ever. And
she had assumed toward him an attitude of almost scornful indifference.
The effect on his undisciplined young mind was bad. He had no suspicion
of Graham. He only knew his own desperate unhappiness. In the meetings
held twice weekly in a hall on Third Street he was reckless, advocating
violence constantly. The conservative element watched him uneasily; the
others kept an eye on him, for future use.
The closing week of the old year found the situation strained in the
Klein house. Herman had had plenty of opportunities for situations,
but all of them had to do directly or indirectly with the making of
munitions for the Allies. Old firms in other lines were not taking on
new men. It was the munition works that were increasing their personnel.
And by that time the determination not to assist Germany's enemies had
become a fixed one.
The day after Christmas, in pursuit of this idea, he commanded Anna
to leave the mill. But she had defied him, for the second time in her,
life, her face pale to the lips.
“Not on your life,” she had said. “You may want to starve. I don't.”
“There is plenty of other work.”
“Don't you kid yourself. And, anyhow, I'm not looking for it. I don't
mind working so you can sit here and nurse a grouch, but I certainly
don't intend to start hunting another job.”
She had eyed him morosely. “If you ask me,” she continued, “you're out
of your mind. What's Germany to you? You forgot it as fast as you
could, until this war came along. You and Rudolph! You're long distance
patriots, you are.”
“I will not help my country's enemies,” he had said doggedly.
“Your country s enemies. My word! Isn't this your country? What's the
old Kaiser to you?”
He had ordered her out of the house, then, but she had laughed at him.
She could always better him in an argument.
“Suppose I do go?” she had inquired. “What are you going to live on? I'm
not crazy in the head, if you are.”
She rather thought he would strike her. He had done it before, with the
idea of enforcing discipline. If he did, she would leave him. Let him
shift for himself. He had taken her money for years, and he could live
on that. But he had only glared at her.
“We would have done better to remain in Germany,” he said. “America has
no respect for parents. It has no discipline. It is a country without
law.”
She felt a weakening in him, and followed up her advantage.
“And another thing, while we're at it,” she flung at him. “Don't you go
on trying to shove Rudolph down my throat. I'm off Rudolph for keeps.”
She flung out her arm, and old Herman saw the gleam of something gold on
her wrist. He caught her hand in his iron grip and shoved up her sleeve.
There was a tiny gold wrist-watch there, on a flexible chain. His
amazement and rage gave her a moment to think, although she was
terrified.
“Where did you get that?”
“The mill gave them to the stenographers for Christmas.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
“We're not talking much these days, are we?”
He let her go then, and that night, in the little room behind Gustav
Shroeder's saloon, he put the question to Rudolph. Because he was
excited and frightened he made slow work of his inquiry, and Rudolph had
a moment to think.
“Sure,” he replied. “All the girls in the executive offices got them.”
But when the meeting was over, Rudolph did not go back to his
boarding-house. He walked the streets and thought.
He had saved Anna from her father. But he was of no mind to save her
from himself. She would have to account to him for that watch.
Anna herself lay awake until late. She saw already the difficulties
before her. Herman was suspicious. He might inquire. There were other
girls from the mill offices on the hill. And he might speak to Rudolph.
The next evening she found Rudolph waiting for her outside the mill
gate. Together they started up what had been, when Herman bought the
cottage, a green hill with a winding path. But the smoke and ore from
the mill had long ago turned it to bareness, had killed the trees and
shrubbery, and filled the little hollows where once the first arbutus
had hidden with cinders and ore dust. The path had become a crooked
street, lined with wooden houses, and paved with worn and broken bricks.
Where once Herman Klein had carried his pail and whistled bits of
Shubert as he climbed along, a long line of blackened men made their
evening way. Untidy children sat on the curb, dogs lay in the center
of the road, and women in all stages of dishabille hung over the high
railings of their porches and watched for their men.
Under protest of giving her a lift up the hill, Rudolph slipped his hand
through Anna's left arm.
Immediately she knew that the movement was a pretext. She could not free
herself.
“Be good, now,” he cautioned her. “I've got you. I want to see that
watch.”
“You let me alone.”
“I'm going to see that watch.”
With his free hand he felt under her sleeve and drew down the bracelet.
“So the mill gave it to you, eh? That's a lie, and you know it.”
“I'll tell you, Rudolph,” she temporized. “Only don't tell father. All
the girls have watches, and I wanted one. So I bought it.”
“That's a lie, too.”
“On the installment plan,” she insisted. “A dollar a week, that's
straight. I've paid five on it already.”
He was almost convinced, not quite. He unfastened it awkwardly and took
it off her wrist. It was a plain little octagonal watch, and on the back
was a monogram. The monogram made him suspicious again.
“It's only gold filled, Rudolph.”
“Pretty classy monogram for a cheap watch.” He held it close; on the
dial was the jeweler's name, a famous one. He said nothing more, put
it back on Anna's arm and released her. At the next corner he left her,
with a civil enough good-bye, but with rage in his heart.