Lifted Masks Part 20

Herman Beckman did not go to the commencement exercises that night.

There was no train home until morning, so he had the night to spend in town. He was alone, for his friends a.s.sumed that he would be out at the university. But he preferred being alone.

He sat in his room at the hotel, reading. And he could read. Years of discipline stood him in good stead now. His life had taught him to read anywhere, at any time. He had never permitted himself the luxury of not being "in the mood." It was only the men who had gone to college who could do that. He _had_ to read. He always carried some little book with him, for how did a man know that he might not have to wait an hour for a train somewhere? The man had a simple-minded veneration for knowledge. He wanted to know about things. And he had never learned to pretend that he didn't want to know. He quite lacked the modern art of flippancy. He believed in great books.

And so on the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel--cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones--reading Marcus Aurelius. But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man. At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his son's oration. They wanted a statement from him.

He told them that he had never believed the sins of a parent should be visited on a child, and that it was even so with the thought. He had always contended that a man should do his own thinking. The contention applied to his son.

"Gamey old brute!" was what one of the reporters said in the elevator.

He could not read Marcus Aurelius after that. He went to bed, but he did not sleep. Many things pa.s.sed before him. His antic.i.p.ations, his dreams for Fritz, had brought the warmest pleasure of his stern, unrelaxing life. There was a great emptiness tonight. What was a man to turn to, think about, when he seemed stripped, not only of the future, but of the past? He seemed called upon to readjust the whole of his life, giving up that which he had held dearest. What was left? Daylight found him turning it over and over.

In the morning he went home. He got away without seeing any of his friends.

He did not try to read this morning; somehow it seemed there was no use in trying to read any more. He watched the country through which they were pa.s.sing, thinking of the hundreds of times he had ridden over it in campaigning. He wondered, vaguely, just how much money he had spent on railroad fare--he had never accepted mileage. Fred's "What's the use?" kept ringing in his ears. There was something about that phrase which made one feel very tired and old. It even seemed there was no use looking out to see how the crops were getting on. _What's the use? What's the use?_ Was that a phrase one learned in college?

There had been two things to tell "mother" that night. The first was that he had stopped in town and told Claus Hansen he could have that south hundred and sixty he had been wanting for two years.

It was not easy to tell the woman who had worked shoulder to shoulder with him for thirty years, the woman who during those years had risen with him in the early morning and worked with him until darkness rescued the weary bodies, that in their old age they must surrender the fruit of their toil. They would have left just what they had started with. They had just held their own.

Coming down on the train he had made up his mind that if Hansen were in town he would tell him that he could have the land. He felt so very tired and old, so bowed down with Fred's "What's the use?" that he saw that he himself would never get the mortgage paid off. And Fred had said something about making the railroads pay it. He did not know just how the boy figured that out--indeed, he was getting a little dazed about the whole thing--but if Fritz had any idea of having the railroads pay off the mortgage on _his_ farm--he couldn't forget how the boy looked when he said it, face white, eyes burning--he would see to it right now that there was no chance of that.

He tried not to look at the land as he drove past it on the way home. He wondered just how much campaign literature it had paid for.

He wondered if he would ever get used to seeing Claus Hansen putting up his hay over there in that field.

He had felt so badly about telling mother that he told it very bluntly. And because he felt so sorry for her he said not one kind word, but just sat quiet, looking the other way.

She was clearing off the table. He heard her sc.r.a.ping out the potato dish with great care. Then she was coming over to him. She came awkwardly, hesitatingly--her life had not schooled her in meeting emotional moments beautifully--but she laid her hand upon him, patted him on the shoulder as one would a child. "Never mind, papa--never you mind. It will make it easier for us. There's enough left--and it will make it easier. We're getting on--we're--" There she broke off abruptly into a vigorous scolding of the dog, who was lifting covetous nostrils to a piece of meat.

That was all. And there was no woman in the country had worked harder. And Martha was ambitious; she liked land, and she did not like Claus Hansen's wife.

Yes, he had had a good wife.

Then there was that other thing to tell her--about Fritz. That was harder.

Mother had not gone up to the city to hear Fritz "speak" because her feet were bothering her, and she could not wear her shoes. He had had a vague idea of how disappointed she was, though she had said very little about it. Martha never had been one to say much about things. When he came back, of course she had wanted to know all about it, and he had put her off. Now he had to tell her.

It was much harder; and in the telling of it he broke down.

This time she did not come over and pat his shoulder. Perhaps Martha knew--likely she had never heard the word intuition, but, anyway, she knew--that it was beyond that.

It seemed difficult for her to comprehend. She was bewildered to find that Fritz could change parties all in a minute. She seemed to grasp, first of all, that it was disrespectful to his father. Some boys at school had been putting notions into his head.

But gradually she began to see it. Fritz wanted to make money. Fritz wanted to have it easier. And the other people did "have it easier."

It divided her feeling: sorry and indignant for the father, secretly glad and relieved for the boy. "He will have it easier than we had it, papa," she said at the last. "But it was not right of Fritz,"

she concluded, vaguely but severely.

As she washed the dishes Martha was thinking that likely Fritz's wife would have a hired girl.

Then Martha went up to bed. He said that he would come in a few minutes, but many minutes went by while he sat out on the side porch trying to think it out.

The moon was s.h.i.+ning brightly down on that hundred and sixty which Claus Hansen was to have. And the moon, too, seemed to be saying: "What's the use?"

Well, what _was_ the use? Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. What had it all amounted to? What was there left? What had he done?

Two Americas, Fred had said, and his but the America of the dreamers. He had always thought that he was fighting for the real.

And now Fred said that he had never become an American at all.

From the time he was twelve years old he had wanted to be an American. A queer old man back in the German village--an old man, he recalled strangely now, who had never been in America--told him about it. He told how all men were brothers in America, how the poor and the rich loved each other--indeed, how there were no poor and rich at all, but the same chance for every man who would work. He told about the marvellous resources of that distant America--gold in the earth, which men were free to go and get, hundreds upon hundreds of miles of untouched forests and great rivers--all for men to use, great cities no older than the men who were in them, which men at that present moment were _making_--every man his equal chance.

He told of rich land which a man could have for nothing, which would be _his_, if he would but go and work upon it. In the heart of the little German boy there was kindled then a fire which the years had never put out. His cheeks grew red, his eyes bright and very deep as he listened to the story. He went home that night and dreamed of going to America. And through the years of his boyhood, penny by penny, he saved his money for America. It was his dream. It was the pa.s.sion of his life. More plainly than the events of yesterday, he remembered his first glimpse of those wonderful sh.o.r.es--the lump in his throat, the pa.s.sionate excitement, the uplift. Leaning over the railing of his boat, staring, searching, penetrating, wors.h.i.+pping, he lifted up his heart and sent out his pledge of allegiance to the new land. How he would love America, work for it, be true to it!

He had three dollars and sixty cents in his pocket when he stepped upon American soil. He wondered if any man had ever felt richer. For had he not reached the land where there was an equal chance for every man who would work, where men loved each other as brothers, and where the earth itself was so rich and so gracious in its offerings?

The old man crossed one leg over the other--slowly, stiffly. It made him tired and stiff now just to think of the work he had done between that day and this.

But there was something which he had always had--that something was _his_ America. That had never wavered, though he soon learned that between it and realities were many things which were wrong and unfortunate. With the whole force and pa.s.sion of his nature, with all his single mindedness--would some call it simple mindedness?--he threw himself into the fight against those things which were blurring men's vision of his America. No work, no sacrifice was too great, for America had enemies who called themselves friends, men who were striking heavy blows at that equal chance for every man.

When he failed, it was because he did not know enough; he must work, he must study, he must think, in order to make more real to other men the America which was in his heart. He must fight for it because it was his.

And now it seemed that the end had come; he was old, he was tired, he was not sure. Claus Hansen would have his land and his son would join hands with the things which he had spent his life in fighting.

And far deeper and sadder and more bitter than that, he had not transmitted the America of his heart even to his own son. He was not leaving someone to fight for it in his stead, to win where he had failed. Fred saw in it but a place for gain. "I lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success." That was what he had given to his boy. Yes, that was what he had bequeathed to America. Could the failure, the futility of his life be more clearly revealed?

Twice Martha had called to him, but still he sat, smoking, thinking.

There was much to think about to-night.

Finally, it was not thought, but visions. Too tired for conscious thinking, he gave himself up to what came--Fred's America, his America, the America of the dreamers--and the things which stood between. The America of the future---what would that America be?

At the last, taking form from many things which came and went, shaping itself slowly, form giving place to new form, he seemed to see it grow. Out beyond that land Claus Hansen was to have, a long way off, there rose the vision of the America of the future--an America of realities, and yet an America of dreams; for the dreamers had become the realists---or was it that the realists had become dreamers? In the manifold forms taken on and cast aside destroying dualism had made way for the strength and the dignity and harmony of unity. He watched it as breathlessly, as yearningly, as the nineteen-year-old boy had watched the other America taking shape in the distance some forty years before. "How did you come?" he whispered. "What are you?"

And the voice of that real America seemed to answer: "I came because for a long-enough time there were enough men who held me in their hearts. I came because there were men who never gave me up. I was won by men who believed that they had failed."

Again there was a lump in his throat--once more an exultation flooded all his being. For to the old man--tired, stiff, smitten though he had been, there came again that same uplift which long before had come to the boy. Was there not here an answer to "What's the use?" For he would leave America as he came to it--loving it, believing in it. What were the work and the failure of a lifetime when there was something in his heart which was his? Should he say that he had fought in vain when he had kept it for himself? It was as real, as wonderful--yes as inevitable, as it had been forty years before. Realities had taken his land, his career, his hopes for the boy. But realities had not stripped him of his dream. The futility of the years could not harm the things which were in his heart. Even in America he had not lost His America.

"Perhaps it is then that it is like that," he murmured, his vision carrying him back to the days of his broken English. "Perhaps it is that every man's America is in the inside of his own heart. Perhaps it is that it will come when it has grown big--big and very strong--in the hearts."

XII

THE ANARCHIST: HIS DOG

Stubby had a route, and that was how he happened to get a dog. For the benefit of those who have never carried papers it should be thrown in that having a route means getting up just when there is really some fun in sleeping, lining up at the _Leader_ office--maybe having a sc.r.a.p with the fellow who says you took his place in the line--getting your papers all damp from the press and starting for the outskirts of the city. Then you double up the paper in the way that will cause all possible difficulty in undoubling and hurl it with what force you have against the front door. It is good to have a route, for you at least earn your salt, so your father can't say _that_ any more. If he does, you know it isn't so.

When you have a route, you whistle. All the fellows whistle. They may not feel like it, but it is the custom--as could be sworn to by many sleepy citizens. And as time goes on you succeed in acquiring the easy manner of a brigand.

Stubby was little and everything about him seemed sawed off just a second too soon,--his nose, his fingers, and most of all, his hair.