Dangerous Days: (16 page)

Rodney had had a prosperous year, and for some time his conscience had been bothering him. For a good many years he had blithely accepted the invitations of his friends - dinners, balls, week-end and yachting parties, paying his way with an occasional box of flowers. He decided, that last winter of peace, to turn host and, true to instinct, to do the unusual.

It was Natalie who gave him the suggestion.

“Why don’t you turn your carriage-house into a studio, and give a studio warming, Roddie? It would be fun fixing it up. And you might make it fancy dress.”

Before long, of course, he had accepted the idea as of his own originating, and was hard at work.

Rodney’s house had been his father’s. He still lived there, although the business district had encroached closely. And for some time he had used the large stable and carriage-house at the rear as a place in which to store the odd bits of furniture, old mirrors and odds and ends that he had picked up here and there. Now and then, as to Natalie, he sold some of them, but he was a collector, not a merchant. In his way, he was an artist.

In the upper floor he had built a skylight, and there, in odd hours, he worked out, in water-color, sketches of interiors, sometimes for houses he was building, sometimes purely for the pleasure of the thing.

The war had brought him enormous increase in his collection. Owners of French chateaus, driven to poverty, were sending to America treasures of all sorts of furniture, tapestries, carpets, old fountains, porcelains, even carved woodwork and ancient mantels, and Rodney, from the mixed motives of business and pride, decided to exhibit them.

The old brick floor of the stable he replaced with handmade tiles. The box-stalls were small display-rooms, hung with tapestries and lighted with candles in old French sconces. The great carriage-room became a refectory, with Jacobean and old monastery chairs, and the vast loft overhead, reached by a narrow staircase that clung to the wall, was railed on its exposed side, waxed as to floor, hung with lanterns, and became a ballroom.

Natalie worked with him, spending much time and a prodigious amount of energy. There was springing up between them one of those curious and dangerous intimacies, of idleness on the woman’s part, of admiration on the man’s, which sometimes develop into a wholly spurious passion. Probably Rodney realized it; certainly Natalie did not. She liked his admiration; she dressed, each day, for Rodney’s unfailing comment on her clothes.

“Clay never notices what I wear,” she said, once, plaintively.

So it was Rodney who brought Audrey Valentine out of her seclusion, and he did it by making her angry. He dropped in to see her between Christmas and New-years, and made a plea.

“A stable-warming!” she said. “How interesting! And fancy dress! Are you going to have them come as grooms, or jockeys? If I were going I’d go as a circus-rider. I used to be able to stand up on a running horse. Of course you’re having horses. What’s a stable without a horse?”

He saw she was laughing at him and was rather resentful.

“I told you I have made it into a studio.”

But when he implored her to go, she was obdurate.

“Do go away and let me alone, Rodney,” she said at last. “I loathe fancy-dress parties.”

“It won’t be a party without you.”

“Then don’t have it. I’ve told you, over and over, I’m not going out. It isn’t decent this year, in my opinion. And, anyhow, I haven’t any money, any clothes, any anything. A bad evening at bridge, and I shouldn’t be able to pay my rent.”

“That’s nonsense. Why do you let people say you are moping about Chris? You’re not.”

“Of course not.”

She sat up.

“What else are they saying?”

“Well, there’s some talk, naturally. You can’t be as popular as you have been, and then just drop out, without some gossip. It’s not bad.”

“What sort of talk?”

He was very uncomfortable.

“Well, of course, you have been pretty strong on the war stuff?”

“Oh, they think I sent him!”

“If only you wouldn’t hide, Audrey. That’s what has made the talk. It’s not Chris’s going.”

“I’m not hiding. That’s idiotic. I was bored to death, if you want the truth. Look here, Rodney. You’re not being honest. What do they say about Chris and myself?”

He was cornered.

“Is it - about another woman?”

“Well, of course now and then - there are always such stories. And of course Chris - “

“Yes, they knew Chris.” Her voice was scornful. “So they think I’m moping and hiding because - How interesting!”

She sat back, with her old insolent smile.

“Poor Chris!” she said. “The only man in the lot except Clay Spencer who is doing his bit for the war, and they - when is your party, Roddie?”

“New-year’s Eve.”

“I’ll come,” she said. And smiling again, dangerously, “I’ll come, with bells on.”

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 carfare, 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 shamefaced 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.