"Yes; he owns it, too."
The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he asked
more deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"
"A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel the
competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But 'Every Other Week' is about
the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding
its own."
"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a
return to the sourness of his earlier mood. "I don't know as I care much
for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him." He
clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started
up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical;
as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy,
"You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."
Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the
West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and
class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town
where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could
remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese
and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a
price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and
tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in
mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to
fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and
mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till
they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the
exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,
rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;
and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon
him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his native
speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father
and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to
parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de Dytchman's
house." He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of
school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back
to it. He regarded his father's business as part of his national
disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and
informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.
When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen,
he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar
till he was one of the richest men in the place.
Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl
whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an
American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had
been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,
fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
visible taint of their German origin.
In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;
and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so
hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she kept
silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest
granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of
the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.
Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his
financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the
Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of
municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes
that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the
reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was
talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some
day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin
sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a
strike."
When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in
Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had
grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years he
lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go
wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from
Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at
last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood
friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.
In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to
understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the
best. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the
direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near
Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives
still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and
about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was
ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his
younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,
for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to
learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and
shame, and music, for which they had some taste.
The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father
with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether
blame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his
money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling
humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des
Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of
wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who
had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in
his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in
Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.