Dangerous Days Part 54

Anyhow, the installment story doesn't go. That place doesn't sell on installments."

"Who is there would buy her such a watch?" Herman's voice was thick.

"How about Graham Spencer? She's been pretty thick with him."

"How you mean--thick?"

Rudolph shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't mean anything. But he's taken her out in his car. And the Spencers think there's nothing can't be bought with money."

Herman put down the dish-cloth and commenced to draw down his s.h.i.+rt sleeves.

"Where you going?" Rudolph demanded uneasily.

"I go to the Spencers!"

"Listen!" Rudolph said, excitedly. "Don't you do it; not yet. You got to get him first. We don't know anything; we don't even know he gave her that watch. We've got to find her, don't you see? And then, we've got to learn if he's going there--wherever she is."

"I shall bring her back," Herman said, stubbornly. "I shall bring her back, and I shall kill her."

"And get strung up yourself! Now listen?" he argued. "You leave this to me. I'll find her. I've got a friend, a city detective, and he'll help me, see? We'll get her back, all right. Only you've got to keep your hands off her. It's the Spencers that have got to pay."

Herman went back to the sink, slowly.

"That is right. It is the Spencers," he muttered.

Rudolph went out. Late in the evening he came back, with the news that the search was on. And, knowing Herman's pride, he a.s.sured him that the hill need never learn of Anna's flight, and if any inquiries came he advised him to say the girl was sick.

In Rudolph's twisted mind it was not so much Anna's delinquency that enraged him. The hill had its own ideas of morality. But he was fiercely jealous, with that cla.s.s-jealousy which was the fundamental actuating motive of his life. He never for a moment doubted that she had gone to Graham.

And, sitting by the fire in the little house, old Herman's untidy head shrunk on his shoulders, Rudolph almost forgot Anna in plotting to use this new p.a.w.n across the hearth from him in his game of destruction.

By the end of the week, however, there was no news of Anna. She had not returned to the mill. Rudolph's friend on the detective force had found no clew, and old Herman had advanced from brooding by the fire to long and furious wanderings about the city streets.

He felt no remorse, only a growing and alarming fury. He returned at night, to his cold and unkempt house, to cook himself a frugal and wretched meal. His money had run very low, and with true German stubbornness he refused to draw any from the savings bank.

Rudolph was very busy. There were meetings always, and to the little inner circle that met behind Gus's barroom one night later in March, he divulged the plan for the destruction of the new Spencer munition plant.

"But--will they take him back?" one of the men asked. He was of better cla.s.s than the rest, with a military bearing and a heavy German accent, for all his careful English.

"Will a dog s.n.a.t.c.h at a bone?" countered Rudolph. "Take him back!

They'll be crazy about it."

"He has been there a long time. He may, at the last, weaken."

But Rudolph only laughed, and drank more whisky of the German agent's providing.

"He won't weaken," he said. "Give me a few days more to find the girl, and all h.e.l.l won't hold him."

On the Sunday morning after the President had been before Congress, he found Herman dressed for church, but sitting by the fire. All around him lay the Sunday paper, and he barely raised his head when Rudolph entered.

"Well, it's here!" said Rudolph.

"It has come. Yes."

"Wall Street will be opening champagne to-day."

Herman said nothing. But later on he opened up the fountain of rage in his heart. It was wrong, all wrong. We had no quarrel with Germany.

It was the capitalists and politicians who had done it. And above all, England.

He went far. He blamed America and Americans for his loss of work, for Anna's disappearance. He searched his mind for grievances and found them in the ore dust on the hill, which killed his garden; in the inefficiency of the police, who could not find Anna; in the very att.i.tude of Clayton Spencer toward his resignation.

And on this smoldering fire Rudolph piled fuel Not that he said a great deal. He worked around the cottage, washed dishes, threw pails of water on the dirty porches, swept the floor, carried in coal and wood. And gradually he began to play on the older man's vanity. He had had great influence with the millworkers. No one man had ever had so much.

Old Herman sat up, and listened sourly. But after a time he got up and pouring some water out of the kettle, proceeded to shave himself.

And Rudolph talked on. If now he were to go back, and it were to the advantage of the Fatherland and of the workers of the world to hamper the industry, who so able to do it as Herman.

"Hamper? How?" Herman asked, suspiciously, holding his razor aloft. He had a great fear of the law.

Rudolph re-a.s.sured him, cunning eyes averted.

"Well, a strike," he suggested. "The men'll listen to you. G.o.d knows they've got a right to strike."

"I shall not go back," said Herman stolidly, and finished his shaving.

But Rudolph was satisfied. He left Herman sitting again by the fire, but his eyes were no longer brooding. He was thinking, watching the smoke curl up from the china-bowled German pipe which he had brought from the Fatherland, and which he used only on special occasions.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

The declaration of war found Graham desperately unhappy. Natalie held him rigidly to his promise, but it is doubtful if Natalie alone could have kept, him out of the army. Marion was using her influence, too! She held him by alternating between almost agreeing to runaway marriage and threats of breaking the engagement if he went to war. She had tacitly agreed to play Natalie's game, and she was doing it.

Graham did not a.n.a.lyze his own misery. What he said to himself was that he was making a mess of things. Life, which had seemed to be a simple thing, compounded of work and play, had become involved, difficult and wretched.

Some times he watched Clayton almost with envy. He seemed so sure of himself; he was so poised, so calm, so strong. And he wondered if there had been a tumultuous youth behind the quiet of his maturity.

He compared the even course of Clayton's days, his work, his club, the immaculate orderliness of his life, with his own disordered existence.

He was hedged about with women. Wherever he turned, they obtruded themselves. He made plans and women brushed them aside. He tried to live his life, and women stepped in and lived it for him. His mother, Marion, Anna Klein. Even Delight, with her friends.h.i.+p always overclouded with disapproval. Wherever he turned, a woman stood in the way. Yet he could not do without them. He needed them even while he resented them.

Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction that all was not well between his father and his mother. He had always taken them for granted much as he did the house and the servants. In his brief vacations during his college days they had agreed or disagreed, amicably enough. He had considered, in those days, that life was a very simple thing. People married and lived together. Marriage, he considered, was rather the end of things.

But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and not an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only changed their habits.

His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and the wreckage of years of dissension.

It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.