Dangerous Days

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.