“In dreams she grows not older
The lands of Dream among--”
THE deep, soft thrill of the contralto voice floated through the warm
air on invisible wings. The listener, coming softly up the pathway of
the old garden, paused to hearken, to drink it in, with the fragrance
of the late roses, the wine of the sun-drenched air, the peace of the
shaded ways, all the other lovelinesses of a world suddenly blessed to
his soul.
The voice faltered and sank, at the sound of his foot upon the steps.
The singer’s hands strayed like suddenly affrighted things among the
keys of the piano. She stood to face him as he entered, and of all the
tremulous, tender beauty of her, only her eyes meeting and merging with
his, were unwavering.
“Jem!” she said, very low.
“Marcia!”
She lifted her arms as he crossed swiftly to her, and clung to him,
and gave him her lips in glad and complete surrender, while he held her
close and murmured to her the words that he had been so hungry to speak,
she so hungry to hear.
“Jem,” she whispered presently, “you cannot give me up now, Jem.”
“I never did, dear love,” he said.
“Though all the world wax colder,
Though all the songs be sung.
In dreams doth he--”
“Ah, but you did. You tried. How could you even try!”
“I never did. Not really. Not for a moment. Not even when I thought you
had married some one else.”
She moved in his arms to hide her eyes against his face.
“You must have known that I never could,” she murmured.
“Don’t you see,” he pursued eagerly, “that if I had really given you up,
I should have given up the paper, the fight, everything? Don’t you see
that, love?”
“Yes; that is true,” she assented sweetly. “That must be true. Though
perhaps you did not know it.... Ah, Jem, but I have wearied for you!”
“When’s the very earliest you can marry me, dearest?” he asked.
She looked up at him with her level and fearless eyes. “Any time, Jem.”
“I’m asking a lot of you,” he said, his eager face clouding for the
moment. “It is n’t all plain sailing yet; and there won’t be so much to
live on even here. If we go to Washington you’ll find it doubly hard,
I’m afraid.”
“But I have my own money, Jem. And what is this about Washington?”
“Oh!” said he casually; “they want to nominate me for the Senate,
against Mart Embree.”
“Jem! You will take it?”
“If my liege lady approves.”
“Of course she approves. It is wonderful. How could you keep it to
yourself! Why did you not tell me the instant you came?”
“Well, you see, I was intent on other matters,” said Jem, looking down
into the flushed and adorable face, which flushed the more adorably at
his words. He bent to her. “Dearest of my heart,” he said passionately,
“what does it all matter in comparison with you!”
*****
Stepping gloriously from rose-tipped cloud to rose-tipped cloud as
youth may do when winged with happiness and love, Jeremy, on his way
office-ward, presently found himself at the Inter-Urban terminal being
accosted by a man who said: “If you are deaf, I can make signs.”
“I beg your pardon,” apologized Jeremy hastily. “Were you speaking to
me?”
“Only three times,” said the stranger. “So far,” he added.
Thus recalled from his castle-building the editor contemplated his
interceptor. The man was a stranger in town. He carried a small,
nondescript bag. He looked like a country minister on a week-day, or a
prosperous plumber off the job, or a middle-aged clerk on an errand, or
any one of a hundred other everyday individuals. In fact he was in face,
figure, dress, and manner, the most commonplace, humdrum, unremarkable,
completely average individual that Jeremy had ever encountered. He might
have posed as the composite photograph of a convention of ten thousand
Average Citizens.
“I was asking you: do you know this city,” he was saying patiently.
Now Jeremy possessed a singularly retentive visual memory. This memory
had suddenly started working with a jar. “I do,” he said. “Do I know
you?”
“You do not,” said the man.
“I’m not so sure,” retorted Jeremy. “I seem to remember a talk at the
Owl’s Nest in Philadelphia, six years ago or so, by a distinguished
globe-trotter and war correspondent. Now if you had n’t told me that I
did not know you, I would have said--”
“You would have thought,” corrected the stranger, without the flicker of
an eyelid.
“I would have thought you were that lecturer.”
“Likenesses are deceptive,” observed the other.
“And, in spite of your new mustache, remembering a meeting at the Lion
d’Or just off the Place Clichy a year later, I would have said--”
“You would have thought,” interpolated the other, imperturbably.
“I would have thought that you were still the same, and I would
have said--that is, I would have thought that your name was Jerome
Tillinghast.”
“But you would n’t say it.”
“Not on any account, if there is good reason against it in the opinion
of Jerome Tillinghast--who, by the way, did n’t have that furrow over
his temple when I knew him.”
“Shrapnel,” explained the other. “Russian campaign. Got me in the leg,
too. So they packed me home, and Uncle Sam set me to work. My official
name is James Tilley. And yours?”
Jeremy explained himself.
“The Guardian, eh? You’re the last man in town I’d have looked up. But
now that I’ve met you, I’ll just mention that Washington thinks pretty
well of The Guardian. Keep it up, my boy. And now, where would I be
likely to find a bold and dashing patriot, by name, Emil Bausch?”
Jeremy gave the directions. James Tilley thanked him. “Nobody ever
recognizes me,” he observed, “or notices me, or remembers me. I’m such a
common article. That’s all that makes me valuable. So kindly forget all
this. And good-bye.”
Five minutes later he was sitting in Emil Bausch’s private office
explaining to that perturbed gentleman certain supposedly very private
matters in connection with a chemical project in one phase of which
Bausch had acted for a certain otherwise unidentified “Mr. Stern.”
Bausch was loftily contemptuous, though nervous.
“The other details,” said the caller pleasantly, “are entered in Ledger
M, under the cipher of X-32, formerly kept at 60 Wall Street.”
Bausch gulped twice and said he had never heard of it.
“Fortunate for you,” returned the other. “Take my advice and don’t hear
of it. Don’t have any part in it. Don’t do business with people who
have. Trouble lies that way.”
Thereafter Mr. Bausch repaired to the Deutscher Club where he had
several more beers than was his wont, and subsequently delivered himself
of touching appreciations of free speech and the privileges of American
citizenship. He wound up, after dinner, by declaring to a puzzled
assemblage that he knew his rights and was n’t afraid of anybody, even
if he did come from Washington and wear a tin shield.
Meantime a supremely ordinary appearing person contrived to get himself
admitted to the President’s room of the Fenchester Trust Company, and
introduced himself to Robert Wanser, who found his bearing, mild though
it was, distinctly antipathetic. In a voice so quiet as to give the
effect of being meek, the intruder ventured to advise Mr. Wanser to shun
the Deutscher Club.
“Go to the devil!” retorted Mr. Wanser, whose nerves had been recently
frazzled by local as well as national events.
“I’m giving you the opposite advice,” returned the other equably. “Keep
away from the Deutscher Club.”
“Save your advice for those who want it. Who are you, anyway?”
“James Tilley, at your service. Sent here from Washington to help you
avoid trouble.”
The word “Washington” fell chill upon the banker’s ear. Nevertheless, he
blustered “The Deutscher Club is my club. The Government cannot tell a
private citizen to keep away from a private club.”
“But a well-wisher--such as myself--may suggest that he find his
amusements elsewhere.”
“Well-wisher! A(c)h! Spy. Is this a free country? In Germany one would
not be so oppressed.”
“This is not Germany. Bear that in mind. The Deutscher Club _is_--or
something like it.”
“But--”
“And, by the way, tell your wife--Bertha Wanser is your wife, isn’t she?
Exactly! She talks too much. Propaganda. Tell her to--”
“Vimmen, too!” snarled the other. “You can’t even keep your hands off
vimmen. Tell her yourself.”
James Tilley sighed. “I will,” he said, and departed, leaving an
irritant, disconcerting and healthily prudent impress upon the mind of
the grandson of ’48.
As for Mrs. Wanser, she was profoundly displeased with the face,
apparel, carriage, and particularly the manner of her unknown caller,
which was abrupt and brusque.
“You go to the motion pictures, madam,” he stated.
“Yes,” she said, wondering.
“On the 11th you were at the Gayety. A Four-Minute-Man spoke. You
protested to the management.”
“I did. I told the manager he’d lose my custom if they let such nonsense
go on.”
“The speaker was Professor Brender, of the University--”
“A German,” she broke in. “And he gets up in public and makes shame of
Germany.”
“As a Four-Minute-Man he speaks with the authority of the Government. On
the 14th you protested to the Orpheum.”
“You been spying on me,” said the lady, wrathfully.
“Certainly. You’re a suspicious person. Take my advice. Stop talking, or
if you must talk, talk like an American. Propaganda is a dangerous game.
Go to those two movie managers and withdraw--”
“I won’t,” she declared, pale with fury.
“I think you will. Ask your husband. And do as he tells you. He’ll tell
you just what I have--if he’s wise.”
For all his modest disavowals of being able to make an impression upon
people, there were now at least three individuals in Fenchester who
would hold in tenacious and painful memory to the last day of their
lives the smallest detail of James Tilley’s unremarkable personality.
He now proceeded to enlarge the list. Whether by chance or by design,
he encountered Pastor Klink, who was doing some quiet research work in
connection with back files of the newspapers, in the City Library, and
Pastor Klink took the next train for home and a reflective silence. He
met with the Reverend Theo Gunst and that fervid theologian retired to
draft an editorial for the leading German religious weekly, reeking with
protestations of loyalty, which almost tore his agonized heart out by
its Teutonic roots. He ran across Gordon Fliess and earnestly counseled
him against the strain of frequent railway journeys between Bellair
and Fenchester. On the other hand, and as indicating a certain amiable
flexibility of view on his part, he dropped in upon A. M. Wymett to
extol the broadening influence of travel. A. M. Wymett traveled.
He called upon Vogt and Niebuhr, and Henry Dolge, the educational
expert, leaving behind him devastated areas of alarm, caution, and at
least temporary silence.
Within two days after his arrival, though he had said no word nor even
given any hint upon either point, the Deutscher Club burst into a riot
of American flags, and Martin Embree made a speech so full of patriotic
pathos that it brought tears to the eyes of his hearers, particularly
the Germans.
Bausch, and Niebuhr, and Dolge, and a few others of the old school,
however, took to meeting in a respectable saloon kept by one Muller down
in “the Ward.” To them came Gordon Fliess, and influential men from
the Northern Tier, for conference. What passed there was asserted to be
perfectly loyal, and supposed to be quite private....
But within a fortnight, James Tilley, more unobtrusive than ever,
stepped off another Inter-Urban trolley, and stayed over one train.
Thence he went to Bellair, and so passes into his chosen obscurity. He
gave no advice this time. Not, at least, to Bausch, or Dolge, Niebuhr,
or the respectable saloon-keeper, Muller; neither to Gordon Fliess. But
the respectable saloon unostentatiously ceased to exist. And its more
than respectable patrons named above quietly vanished, and the places
that had known them knew them no more. Observing which, the more
cautious Robert Wanser trembled, and congratulated himself.
Deutschtum, hitherto hardly bent, was now broken in the State of
Centralia.