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.