Dangerous Days

He established a system of espionage over her that drove her almost to

madness.

"What're you hanging round for?" she would demand when he stepped

forward at the mill gate. "D'you suppose I never want to be by myself?"

Or: "You just go away, Rudolph Klein. I'm going up with some of the girls."

But she never lost him. He was beside her or at her heels, his small

crafty eyes on her. When he walked behind her there was a sensuous gleam

in them.

After a few weeks she became terrified. There was a coldness of deviltry

in him, she knew. And he had the whip-hand. She was certain he knew

about the watch, and her impertinence masked an agony of fear. Suppose

he went to her father? Why, if he knew, didn't he go to her father?

She suspected him, but she did not know of what. She knew he was

an enemy of all government, save that of the mob, that he was an

incendiary, a firebrand who set on fire the brutish passions of a

certain type of malcontents. She knew, for all he pretended to be the

voice of labor, he no more represented the honest labor of the country

than he represented law and order.

She watched him sometimes, at the table, when on Sundays he ate the

mid-day meal with them; his thin hatchet face, his prominent epiglottis.

He wore a fresh cotton shirt then, with a flaming necktie, but he did

not clean his fingernails. And his talk was always of tearing down,

never of building up.

"Just give us time, and we'll show them," he often said. And "them" was

always the men higher up.

He hated policemen. He and Herman had had many arguments about

policemen. Herman was not like Rudolph. He believed in law and order. He

even believed in those higher up. But he believed very strongly in the

fraternity of labor. Until the first weeks of that New-year, Herman

Klein, outside the tyranny of his home life, represented very fairly a

certain type of workman, believing in the dignity and integrity of his

order. But, with his failure to relocate himself, something went wrong

in Herman. He developed, in his obstinate, stubborn, German head

a suspicion of the land of his adoption. He had never troubled to

understand it. He had taken it for granted, as he took for granted that

Anna should work and turn over her money to him.

Now it began to ask things of him. Not much. A delegation of women

came around one night and asked him for money for Belgian Relief. The

delegation came, because no one woman would venture alone.