The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  He was angry enough, jealous enough. But he was quick, too, to see that that particular lump of potters' clay which was Herman Klein was ready for the wheel. Even while he was cursing the girl his cunning mind was already plotting, revenge for the Spencers, self-aggrandizement among his fellows for himself. His inordinate conceit, wounded by Anna's defection, found comfort in the early prospect of putting over a big thing. He carried the coal in, to find Herman gloomily clearing his untidy table. For a moment they worked in silence, Rudolph at the stove, Herman at the sink.

  Then Rudolph washed his hands under the faucet and faced the older man. "How do you know she bought herself that watch," he demanded.

  Herman eyed him.

  "Perhaps you gave it to her!" Something like suspicion of Rudolph crept into his eyes.

  "Me? A hundred-dollar watch!"

  "How do you know it cost a hundred dollars?"

  "I saw it. She tried that story on me, too. But I was too smart for her. I went to the store and asked. A hundred bucks!"

  Herman's lips drew back over his teeth.

  "You knew it, eh? And you did not tell me?"

  "It wasn't my funeral," said Rudolph coolly. "If you wanted to believe she bought it herself?"

  "If she bought it herself!" Rudolph's shoulder was caught in an iron grip. "You will tell me what you mean."

  "Well, I ask you, do you think she'd spend that much on a watch? 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 shirt 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 assured 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 class-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 pawn 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 class than the rest, with a military bearing and a heavy German accent, for all his careful English.

  "Will a dog snatch 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 hell 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 attitude 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-assured him, cunning eyes averted.

  "Well, a strike," he suggested. "The men'll listen to you. God 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 XXXIII

  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 analyze 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 Del
ight, with her friendship 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.

  For the first time he was beginning to think of Clayton as a man, rather than a father.

  Not that all of this was coherently thought out. It was a series of impressions, outgrowth of his own beginning development and of his own uneasiness.

  He wondered, too, about Rodney Page. He seemed to be always around, underfoot, suave, fastidious, bowing Natalie out of the room and in again. He had deplored the war until he found his attitude unfashionable, and then he began, with great enthusiasm, to arrange pageants for Red Cross funds, and even to make little speeches, graceful and artificial, patterned on his best after-dinner manner.

  Graham was certain that he supported his mother in trying to keep him at home, and he began to hate him with a healthy young hate. However, late in April, he posed in one of the pageants, rather ungraciously, in a khaki uniform. It was not until the last minute that he knew that Delight Haverford was to be the nurse bending over his prostrate figure. He turned rather savage.

  "Rotten nonsense," he said to her, "when they stood waiting to be posed.

  "Oh, I don't know. They're rather pretty;"

  "Pretty! Do you suppose I want it be pretty?"

  "Well, I do," said Delight, calmly.

  "It's fake. That's what I hate. If you were really a nurse, and was really in uniform -! But this parading in somebody else's clothes, or stuff hired for the occasion - it's sickening."

  Delight regarded him with clear, appraising eyes.

  "Why don't you get a uniform of your own, then?" she inquired. She smiled a little.

  He never knew what the effort cost her. He was pale and angry, and his face in the tableau was so set that it brought a round of applause. With the ringing down of the curtain he confronted her, almost menacingly.

  "What did you mean by that?" he demanded. "We've hardly got into this thing yet."

  "We are in it, Graham."

  "Just because I don't leap into the first recruiting office and beg them to take me - what right have you got to call me a slacker?"

  "But I heard - "

  "Go on!"

  "It doesn't matter what I heard, if you are going."

  "Of course I'm going," he said, truculently.

  He meant it, too. He would get Anna settled somewhere - she had begun to mend - and then he would have it out with Marion and his mother. But there was no hurry. The war would last a long time. And so it was that Graham Spencer joined the long line of those others who had bought a piece of ground, or five yoke of oxen, or had married a wife.

  It was the morning after the pageant that Clayton, going down-town with him in the car, voiced his expectation that the government would take over their foreign contracts, and his feeling that, in that case, it would be a mistake to profit by the nation's necessities.

  "What do you mean, sir?"

  "I mean we should take only a small profit. A banker's profit."

  Graham had been fairly stunned, and had sat quiet while Clayton explained his attitude. There were times when big profits were allowable. There was always the risk to invested capital to consider. But he did not want to grow fat on the nation's misfortunes. Italy was one thing. This was different.

  "But - we are just getting on our feet!"

  "Think it over!" said Clayton. "This is going to be a long war, and an expensive one. We don't particularly want to profit by it, do we?"

  Graham flushed. He felt rather small and cheap, but with that there was a growing admiration of his father. Suddenly he saw that this man beside him was a big man, one to be proud of. For already he knew the cost of the decision. He sat still, turning this new angle of war over in his mind.

  "I'd like to see some of your directors when you put that up to them!"

  Clayton nodded rather grimly. He did not anticipate a pleasant hour.

  "How about mother?"

  "I think we may take it for granted that she feels as we do."

  Graham pondered that, too.

  "What about the new place?"

  "It's too soon to discuss that. We are obligated to do a certain amount. Of course it would be wise to cut where we can."

  Graham smiled.

  "She'll raise the deuce of a row," was his comment.

  It had never occurred to him before to take sides between his father and his mother, but there was rising in him a new and ardent partisanship of his father, a feeling that they were, in a way, men together. He had, more than once, been tempted to go to him with the Anna Klein situation. He would have, probably, but a fellow felt an awful fool going to somebody and telling him that a girl was in love with him, and what the dickens was he to do about it?

  He wondered, too, if anybody would believe that his relationship with Anna was straight, under the circumstances. For weeks now he had been sending her money, out of a sheer sense of responsibility for her beating and her illness. He took no credit for altruism. He knew quite well the possibilities of the situation. He made no promises to himself. But such attraction as Anna had had for him had been of her prettiness, and their propinquity. Again she was girl, and that was all. And the attraction was very faint now. He was only sorry for her.

  When she could get about she took to calling him up daily from a drug-store at a near-by corner, and once he met her after dark and they walked a few blocks together. She was still weak, but she was spiritualized, too. He liked her a great deal that night.

  "Do you know you've loaned me over a hundred dollars, Graham?" she asked.

  "That's not a loan. I owed you that."

  "I'll pay it back. I'm going to start to-morrow to look for work, and it won't cost me much to live."

  "If you send it back, I'll buy you another watch!"

  And, tragic as the subject was, they both laughed.

  "I'd have died if I hadn't had you to think about when I was sick, Graham. I wanted to die - except for you."

  He had kissed her then, rather because he knew she expected him to. When they got back to the house she said:

  "You wouldn't care to come up?"

  "I don't think I had better, Anna."

  "The landlady doesn't object. There isn't any parlor. All the girls have their callers in their rooms."

  "I have to go out to-night," he said evasively. "I'll come some other time."

  As he started away he glanced back at her. She was standing in the doorway, eying him wistfully, a lonely and depressed little figure. He was tempted to throw discretion to the wind and go back. But he did not.

  On the day when Clayton
had broached the subject of offering their output to the government at only a banker's profit, Anna called him up at his new office in the munition plant.

  He was rather annoyed. His new secretary was sitting across the desk, and it was difficult to make his responses noncommittal.

  "Graham!"

  "Yes."

  "Is anybody there? Can you talk?"

  "Not very well."

  "Then listen; I'll talk. I want to see you."

  "I'm busy all day. Sorry."

  "Listen, Graham, I must see you. I've something to tell you."

  "All right, go ahead."

  "It's about Rudolph. I was out looking for a position yesterday and I met him."

  "Yes?"

  He looked up. Miss Peterson was absently scribbling on the cover of her book, and listening intently.

  "He was terrible, Graham. He accused me of all sorts of things, about you."

  He almost groaned aloud over the predicament he was in. It began to look serious.

  "Suppose I pick you up and we have dinner somewhere?"

  "At the same corner?"

  "Yes."

  He was very irritable all morning. He felt as though a net was closing in around him, and his actual innocence made him the more miserable. Miss Peterson found him very difficult that day, and shed tears in her little room before she went to lunch.

  Anna herself was difficult that evening. Her landlady's son had given up a good job and enlisted. Everybody was going. She supposed Graham would go next, and she'd be left alone.

  "I don't know. I'd like to."

  "Oh, you'll go, all right. And you'll forget I ever existed." She made an effort. "You're right, of course. I'm only looking ahead. If anything happens to you, I'll kill myself."

  The idea interested her. She began to dramatize herself, a forlorn figure, driven from home, and deserted by her lover. She saw herself lying in the cottage, stately and mysterious, while the hill girls went in and out, and whispered.