Common Cause

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  Judge Dana’s words echoed back to him: “In the same cause—with the last drop of blood—to the finish!” What terms could he find wherein to speak to these, his enemies of old, looking up at him with such befriending eyes?

  Montrose Clark had delivered himself of a hurried and unheeded introduction, and now Jeremy stood, with shaking knees, gazing down at them. Opportunely and suddenly the parable of Nick Milliken came into his mind.

  “My friends,” he said unsteadily, “I can’t make you a speech. There aren’t thanks made for this sort of thing. But I can tell you the parable of Milliken. You know Milliken, the Socialist—one of us. He was talking to a bunch that were ripe for a strike, arguing against it because it would hinder one little corner of our war. This is what he told them: ‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I’ve been fighting Wall Street and the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. I’m against everything they represent. I expect to go on fighting them the rest of my life. But if I were walking down the street with Mr. Morgan and we met a mad wolf in the road I’d say to him: “Pierpont, let’s get together and kill that wolf. Our little scrap can wait.”

  “That’s what Milliken told them, my friends. That’s all I can say to you now. We’ve had our differences, you and I. We’ll have them again. They seemed big and bitter at the time. How little they seem now! For now we’re facing the mad wolf of Germany right here in Centralia. He’s in the heart of our State. “Let’s get him out! Our little scrap can wait!”

  They rose to him again.

  “But, God bless your dear hearts,” cried young Jeremy Robson with shining eyes and outstretched hands, “how can we ever fight each other after this!”

  Up in a far corner of the gallery a pair of strong, little, sun-tanned, eager, tremulous hands went forth involuntarily as if to meet Jeremy’s, unseen.

  While that very unliterary and decidedly militant organization, the Fenchester War Reading Club, was pouring forward to overwhelm the editor of The Guardian, there gathered in the little side room a hasty and earnest conference of three. Andrew Galpin and Montrose Clark having left it, the lone survivor, Judge Selden Dana, remained to catch Jeremy as he came out.

  “Jem,” he said, “you’ve won.”

  “Thanks to you people!”

  “Thanks to a good fight. Galpin tells me The Fair Dealer backers are through. We’ve scared the local advertisers out of their contracts and the paper can’t hold ’em because of the change of publication date. Verrall made a fatal break when he put a date in that contract. They’re through. But The Fair Dealer is going on.”

  “No! Who’s going to back it?”

  “Montrose Clark. He’s going to take it over.”

  “For his corporation campaign. I see. Then this means another fight of another kind on my hands.”

  “He’s going to use it to beat out Martin Embree with his own candidate.”

  Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “You know The Guardian can’t and won’t stand for you fellows’ kind of candidate.”

  “You’ll stand for this one.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Jeremy Robson.”

  “Jer—Andy was right, sure!” gasped the other. “The town has gone crazy and I’ve gone with it.”

  “On a platform of Centralia for the War,” continued the other. “Now put your lower jaw back on its hinges and I’ll explain how this isn’t as crazy from our point of view as you’d think. You’ll be elected—for we’ll lick ‘Smiling Mart’—only for the unfinished term. The war will last that long, and while the war lasts internal policies don’t matter. After the war—why, we’ll have a newspaper of our own to lick you with when you come up for reelection.”

  “I’ll give you a good run both ways,” promised Jeremy. And the two men soberly shook hands upon it.

  “What a scheme; the woman’s boycott!” said Jeremy presently. “I might have known that was your fine Italian hand.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “No? Who did work it out?”

  “A much cleverer politician than I ever thought of being.”

  “There ain’t no sich animule,” denied Jeremy. “Show it to me.”

  “I have been sitting at the feet of Wisdom, Wile, and Woman. Her other name,” said Judge Dana, “is Marcia Ames. And my professional advice to you is to be on your way.”

  42

  “In dreams she grows not older

  The lands of Dream among—”

  The deep, soft thrill of the contralto voice floated through the war air on invisible wings. The listener, coming softly up the pathway of the old garden, paused to hearken, to drink it in, with the fragrance of the late roses, the wine of the sun-drenched air, the peace of the shaded ways, all the other lovelinesses of a world suddenly blessed to his soul.

  “Though all the world wax colder

  Though all the songs be sung

  In dreams doth he—”

  The voice faltered and sank, at the sound of his foot upon the steps. The singer’s hands strayed like suddenly affrighted things among the keys of the piano. She stood to face him as he entered, and of all the tremulous, tender beauty of her, only her eyes meeting and merging with his, were unwavering.

  “Jem!” she said, very low.

  “Marcia!”

  She lifted her arms as he crossed swiftly to her, and clung to him, and gave him her lips in glad and complete surrender, while he held her close and murmured to her the words that he had been so hungry to speak, she so hungry to hear.

  “Jem,” she whispered presently, “you cannot give me up now, Jem.”

  “I never did, dear love,” he said.

  “Ah, but you did. You tried. How could you even try!”

  “I never did. Not really. Not for a moment. Not even when I thought you had married someone else.”

  She moved in his arms to hide her eyes against his face.

  “You must have known that I never could,” she murmured.

  “Don’t you see,” he pursued eagerly, “that if I had really given you up, I should have given up the paper, the fight, everything? Don’t you see that, love?”

  “Yes; that is true,” she assented sweetly. “That must be true. Though perhaps you did not know it . . . Ah, Jem, but I have wearied for you!”

  “When’s the very earliest you can marry me, dearest?” he asked.

  She looked up at him with her level and fearless eyes. “Any time, Jem.”

  “I’m asking a lot of you,” he said, his eager face clouding for the moment. “It isn’t all plain sailing yet; and there won’t be so much to live on even here. If we go to Washington you’ll find it doubly hard, I’m afraid.”

  “But I have my own money, Jem. And what is this about Washington?”

  “Oh!” said he casually; “they want to nominate me for the Senate, against Mart Embree.”

  “Jem! You will take it?”

  “If my liege lady approves.”

  “Of course she approves. It is wonderful. How could you keep it to yourself! Why did you not tell me the instant you came?”

  “Well, you see, I was intent on other matters,” said Jem, looking down into the flushed and adorable face, which flushed the more adorably at his words. He bent to her. “Dearest of my heart,” he said passionately, “what does it all matter in comparison with you!”

  Stepping gloriously from rose-tipped cloud to rose-tipped cloud as youth may do when winged with happiness and love, Jeremy, on his way office-ward, presently found himself at the Inter-Urban terminal being accosted by a man who said:

  “If you are deaf, I can make signs.”

  “I beg your pardon,” apologized Jeremy hastily. “Were you speaking to me?”

  “Only three times,” said the stranger. “So far,” he added.

  Thus recalled from his castle-building the editor contemplated his interceptor. The man was a stranger in town. He carried a small, nondescript bag. He looked like a country minister on a week-day, or a prosperous plumber off the job, or a middle-aged clerk o
n an errand, or any one of a hundred other everyday individuals. In fact he was in face, figure, dress, and manner, the most commonplace, humdrum, unremarkable, completely average individual that Jeremy had ever encountered. He might have posed as the composite photograph of a convention of ten thousand Average Citizens.

  “I was asking you: do you know this city,” he was saying patiently.

  Now Jeremy possessed a singularly retentive visual memory. This memory had suddenly started working with a jar. “I do,” he said. “Do I know you?”

  “You do not,” said the man.

  “I’m not so sure,” retorted Jeremy. “I seem to remember a talk at the Owl’s Nest in Philadelphia, six years ago or so, by a distinguished globe-trotter and war correspondent.1 Now if you hadn’t told me that I did not know you, I would have said—”

  “You would have thought,” corrected the stranger, without the flicker of an eyelid.

  “I would have thought you were that lecturer.”

  “Likenesses are deceptive,” observed the other.

  “And, in spite of your new mustache, remembering a meeting at the Lion d’Or just off the Place Clichy a year later, I would have said—”

  “You would have thought,” interpolated the other, imperturbably.

  “I would have thought that you were still the same, and I would have said—that is, I would have thought that your name was Jerome Tillinghast.”

  “But you wouldn’t say it.”

  “Not on any account, if there is good reason against it in the opinion of Jerome Tillinghast—who, by the way, didn’t have that furrow over his temple when I knew him.”

  “Shrapnel,” explained the other. “Russian campaign. Got me in the leg, too. So they packed me home, and Uncle Sam set me to work. My official name is James Tilley. And yours?”

  Jeremy explained himself.

  “The Guardian, eh? You’re the last man in town I’d have looked up. But now that I’ve met you, I’ll just mention that Washington thinks pretty well of The Guardian. Keep it up, my boy. And now, where would I be likely to find a bold and dashing patriot, by name, Emil Bausch?”

  Jeremy gave the directions. James Tilley thanked him. “Nobody ever recognizes me,” he observed, “or notices me, or remembers me. I’m such a common article. That’s all that makes me valuable. So kindly forget all this. And good-bye.”

  Five minutes later he was sitting in Emil Bausch’s private office explaining to that perturbed gentleman certain supposedly very private matters in connection with a chemical project in one phase of which Bausch had acted for a certain otherwise unidentified “Mr. Stern.” Bausch was loftily contemptuous, though nervous.

  “The other details,” said the caller pleasantly, “are entered in Ledger M, under the cipher of X-32, formerly kept at 60 Wall Street.”

  Bausch gulped twice and said he had never heard of it.

  “Fortunate for you,” returned the other. “Take my advice and don’t hear of it. Don’t have any part in it. Don’t do business with people who have. Trouble lies that way.”

  Thereafter Mr. Bausch repaired to the Deutscher Club where he had several more beers than was his wont, and subsequently delivered himself of touching appreciations of free speech and the privileges of American citizenship. He wound up, after dinner, by declaring to a puzzled assemblage that he knew his rights and wasn’t afraid of anybody, even if he did come from Washington and wear a tin shield.

  Meantime a supremely ordinary appearing person contrived to get himself admitted to the President’s room of the Fenchester Trust Company, and introduced himself to Robert Wanser, who found his bearing, mild though it was, distinctly antipathetic. In a voice so quiet as to give the effect of being meek, the intruder ventured to advise Mr. Wanser to shun the Deutscher Club.

  “Go to the devil!” retorted Mr. Wanser, whose nerves had been recently frazzled by local as well as national events.

  “I’m giving you the opposite advice,” returned the other equably. “Keep away from the Deutscher Club.”

  “Save your advice for those who want it. Who are you, anyway?”

  “James Tilley, at your service. Sent here from Washington to help you avoid trouble.”

  The word “Washington” fell chill upon the banker’s ear. Nevertheless, he blustered “The Deutscher Club is my club. The Government cannot tell a private citizen to keep away from a private club.”

  “But a well-wisher—such as myself—may suggest that he find his amusements elsewhere.”

  “Well-wisher! A(c)h! Spy. Is this a free country? In Germany one would not be so oppressed.”

  “This is not Germany. Bear that in mind. The Deutscher Club is—or something like it.”

  “But—”

  “And, by the way, tell your wife—Bertha Wanser is your wife, isn’t she? Exactly! She talks too much. Propaganda. Tell her to—”

  “Vimmen, too!” snarled the other. “You can’t even keep your hands off vimmen. Tell her yourself.”

  James Tilley sighed. “I will,” he said, and departed, leaving an irritant, disconcerting and healthily prudent impress upon the mind of the grandson of ’48.

  As for Mrs. Wanser, she was profoundly displeased with the face, apparel, carriage, and particularly the manner of her unknown caller, which was abrupt and brusque.

  “You go to the motion pictures, madam,” he stated.

  “Yes,” she said, wondering.

  “On the 11th you were at the Gayety. A Four-Minute-Man2 spoke. You protested to the management.”

  “I did. I told the manager he’d lose my custom if they let such nonsense go on.”

  “The speaker was Professor Brender, of the University—”

  “A German,” she broke in. “And he gets up in public and makes shame of Germany.”

  “As a Four-Minute-Man he speaks with the authority of the Government. On the 14th you protested to the Orpheum.”

  “You been spying on me,” said the lady, wrathfully.

  “Certainly. You’re a suspicious person. Take my advice. Stop talking, or if you must talk, talk like an American. Propaganda is a dangerous game. Go to those two movie managers and withdraw—”

  “I won’t,” she declared, pale with fury.

  “I think you will. Ask your husband. And do as he tells you. He’ll tell you just what I have—if he’s wise.”

  For all his modest disavowals of being able to make an impression upon people, there were now at least three individuals in Fenchester who would hold in tenacious and painful memory to the last day of their lives the smallest detail of James Tilley’s unremarkable personality. He now proceeded to enlarge the list. Whether by chance or by design, he encountered Pastor Klink, who was doing some quiet research work in connection with back files of the newspapers, in the City Library, and Pastor Klink took the next train for home and a reflective silence. He met with the Reverend Theo Gunst and that fervid theologian retired to draft an editorial for the leading German religious weekly, reeking with protestations of loyalty, which almost tore his agonized heart out by its Teutonic roots. He ran across Gordon Fliess and earnestly counseled him against the strain of frequent railway journeys between Bellair and Fenchester. On the other hand, and as indicating a certain amiable flexibility of view on his part, he dropped in upon A. M. Wymett to extol the broadening influence of travel. A. M. Wymett traveled.

  He called upon Vogt and Niebuhr, and Henry Dolge, the educational expert, leaving behind him devastated areas of alarm, caution, and at least temporary silence.

  Within two days after his arrival, though he had said no word nor even given any hint upon either point, the Deutscher Club burst into a riot of American flags,3 and Martin Embree made a speech so full of patriotic pathos that it brought tears to the eyes of his hearers, particularly the Germans.

  Bausch, and Niebuhr, and Dolge, and a few others of the old school, however, took to meeting in a respectable saloon kept by one Muller down in “the Ward.” To them came Gordon Fliess, and influential
men from the Northern Tier, for conference. What passed there was asserted to be perfectly loyal, and supposed to be quite private . . .

  But within a fortnight, James Tilley, more unobtrusive than ever, stepped off another Inter-Urban trolley, and stayed over one train. Thence he went to Bellair, and so passes into his chosen obscurity. He gave no advice this time. Not, at least, to Bausch, or Dolge, Niebuhr, or the respectable saloon-keeper, Muller; neither to Gordon Fliess. But the respectable saloon unostentatiously ceased to exist. And its more than respectable patrons named above quietly vanished, and the places that had known them knew them no more. Observing which, the more cautious Robert Wanser trembled, and congratulated himself.

  Deutschtum, hitherto hardly bent, was now broken4 in the State of Centralia.

  43

  Patriotism had waxed and politics waned with the ebbing of the year 1917, in Centralia. Through the murk and fume of alien treachery, enemy propaganda, and the reckless self-seeking of petty partisanship had burst a clear, high, consuming flame of Americanism. Lesser matters were forgotten in the maintenance of that beacon-fire. Men of all types of political belief, of all classes, of all economic and social creeds, had abandoned their private feuds and bitternesses in the fervor against the common enemy. To them had rallied the finer and more courageous element of the German-Americans, some impulsively from emotion and sentiment like Stockmuller and Blasius, others, in the pain and travail of old ties broken and from the profound conviction of loyalty and right, like Professor Brender. Centralia, thirty years before marked by Deutschtum to be the Little Germany of the New World, was slowly, doggedly establishing its birthright of Americanism.

  Poison still lurked in its system. There were whisperings in dark corners. The German-language press still gave heart-service to the Kaiser’s cause in hint and suggestion and innuendo, while giving lip-service to the cause of the United States in artificial and machine-made editorials. The German pulpit, preaching an ineradicable Germanism by the very use of the German tongue, was lack-loyal where it dared not be disloyal. Over many a Verein and Bund and Gesellschaft the Stars and Stripes waved above seething revolt of spirit. Workers in all patriotic causes felt the dead-weight of a sullen, unworded, untraceable opposition clogging their efforts. But all this was negative. Deutschtum, a few short months before so arrogant and confident of its power over Centralia, was on its defense. More; it was in hiding. No other one force had done so much to drive it thither as that once yellow mongrel of journalism, The Fenchester Guardian.