• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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 car-fare, 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 shame-faced 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