The Strong City

by Caldwell, Taylor;

Burnley said nothing for several long moments. He looked from Dietrich, faintly smiling, to Franz, and then to Brent. He chewed his lower lip. He tapped his fingers on the desk. Then he stood up.

  “Two thousand dollars, then, you swine,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Dietrich, his smile broader, shook his head. “I am sorry, Mr. Burnley. No checks. You understand, of course. But I have the money, in cash.” He unlocked a drawer, and withdrew a packet of bills, which he gently laid before the chief of detectives. Then he leaned back in his chair, and smiled again, as though amused.

  Burnley lifted the packet. He slapped the desk with it, slowly, significantly. Then he clapped his hard derby on his bald head. He took up his cane. He dangled it in his hand. Then he laughed shortly.

  “Remember, Mr. Dietrich, the Burnley Detective Agency is always at your service.” He turned to Brent and Collins. “Boys, we’re licked. But our necks ain’t goin’ to stretch. That’s something to think of.”

  He left, followed by his burly men. The door banged behind him .

  Then it was that Franz collapsed into the chair Burnley had vacated. He stared before him, blindly. Dietrich surveyed him with a magnanimous expression.

  “Stoessel, you have saved us a great deal. You have also saved us considerable money. Mr. Schmidt—”

  Franz aroused himself. He jerked himself upwards in his chair, and leaned forward as if to spring. His face and his eyes were frightful. His bitten lips showed tiny beads of blood. Dietrich, aghast, pushed his chair from his desk. His eyelids, with their pale lashes, flickered in deathly alarm. But when Franz spoke, it was in his usual quiet tones.

  “I have saved you nothing, Dietrich. In fact, this little affair is going to cost the Schmidt Steel Company a great deal of money. There is Tom Harrow’s widow, and his three small children. It will cost the Schmidt Steel Company just five thousand dollars as a sympathy offering to Mrs. Harrow, in her great loss.”

  “You are mad!” gasped Dietrich.

  Franz shook his head. He smiled, as though to himself. “Five thousand dollars. The Schmidt Steel Company regrets the loss of a valued foreman, and commiserates with his widow. A noble gesture.”

  “You are mad,” repeated Dietrich, staring at him with hating contempt. “We shall not give a penny.”

  “Yes, you will,” said Franz, nodding his head, and smiling again, that vague and dreadful smile. “You will also listen to what I have to say.

  “In the first place, there is a man here who knows. How he knows, I do not know, myself. But it is certain he does. Whether he overheard some of our arrangements or not, I do not know. I think not. I think he only surmises. He is a foreman, also, one of Harrow’s most devoted followers. I have only to speak to him. A strike will follow, a very disastrous strike. That is only one of the contingencies. One of the smallest.”

  He paused. He drew a deep slow breath, as though something were torturing him unbearably. Dietrich regarded him palely, his mouth gripped in a thin line. The crack of Schmidt’s door widened. Neither saw it.

  Franz lifted his hand, spread out the fingers. He bent one. “That is the first contingency. The second is more formidable. If the money is not paid to Mrs. Harrow, I may be compelled to go to the police and tell what I know—”

  Dietrich laughed evilly. “And involve yourself? Remember, it was you who gave the instructions to the detectives.”

  “I gave instructions only to incite a brawl with Harrow. Then to drag him away to the nearest police station, where he would be held for a day or two until all danger of the strike was past. In the first place, the whole thing was illegal. If Harrow died accidentally, it was during the commission of an illegal act. And the illegal act was perpetrated by your hirelings. It was you who called them, not I. I need not enlarge just now on the consequences following an investigation.”

  Dietrich’s thin white nostrils dilated. He looked at Franz malignantly.

  “You will hang,” he said, and he repeated the words, with venomous relish: “You will hang.”

  Franz inclined his head. “But, as Burnley said, I shall not hang alone.”

  Dietrich’s thin white face was a slab of pallid evil.

  “This is blackmail, you schweinehund,” he said.

  Franz shook his head with dim and smiling wonder, and again his eyes were fixed on something not in the room.

  “No, it is only the price of a man’s life,” he said, very softly.

  “And you think a stinking Englishman is worth five thousand dollars!” Dietrich flung himself back in his chair and snickered.

  Franz stood up, leaned again half-way across the desk.

  “He was my friend,” he said. And then again, as if to himself: “He was my friend!”

  “And you killed your friend,” remarked Dietrich, enjoying himself. His almost colorless eyes blinked pleasantly behind their lenses.

  “No,” said Franz, in a dull sick voice. “I did not kill him. It was something else that killed him.” He stood upright, swaying a little. He looked through the windows, and fixed his gaze on the chimneys of the great mills.

  He saw the mills. Something stirred in him, the far echoing memory of Tom Harrow’s voice. When they had stared so intently at each other during those last frightful moments before Tom had died, Franz had heard that voice in himself. He had heard: “There is a devil in you, Franz. God help you.”

  Yes, there was a devil in him, he thought. A devil that would not let go. A devil that would drive him on, even now. It was his nature. Tom had recognized that, recognized the awful truth that no man can resist himself, that he must follow his nature, even if it led him to hell. Tom, the uncouth and uneducated, Tom who had suffered, Tom who knew everything had known this also. The appalling impotence of man against himself had been known to him. At the last, he had had only compassion.

  A bell sounded in Hans’s office. Dietrich sprang to his feet and glided away. Franz did not notice his going. No, he thought, it is not quite true. I can go back. Even now, I can go back.

  And then he knew that he could not go back. The devil in himself had him. He lacked even the desire to resist. Later, he believed that was his strength.

  Dietrich returned. Franz looked at him blindly, not seeing him. Dietrich was smiling again, almost affectionately.

  “Stoessel, I am pleased to tell you that I have discussed your—suggestion—with Mr. Schmidt, and, as always, he is willing to be generous. Mrs. Harrow will receive five thousand dollars from the Schmidt Steel Company. Mr. Schmidt sympathizes with Mrs. Harrow in her great sorrow—”

  Franz’s eyes focussed swiftly on the superintendent’s feral features. He passed his hand over his lips and chin.

  “The gesture,” he said, “will be an excellent deterrent to a strike.”

  Suddenly he burst into a wild fit of laughter. He rocked on his heels. He caught the back of a chair to keep himself from falling. He threw back his head, and his shouts of laughter filled the room with a mad and mirthless sound. He shook his head; tears spurted from his eyes, as though he were overcome.

  Dietrich, appalled, retreated to the windows, and plucked at the cord of the window-shade with nervous fingers.

  “Verrückt!” he muttered.

  CHAPTER 31

  On the morning of the funeral of Tom Harrow, Egon Stoessel awoke, and lay silently, gazing about him with a dumb and terrified expression.

  Each night when he went to bed, he prayed humbly, and with trembling, that tomorrow there would be a change. Tomorrow, he. would think, despairingly, yet with a faint hope, it would be different. He would open his eyes. He would see the ashen light of morning more clearly, as it came through the windows. There would not be, first, a complete darkness, followed thereafter by a dim glimmer, then by sudden wheels of fire whirling before his vision, and then, very slowly, as the wheels faded, the emerging of the rectangular shape of the window palely gray in the dusky wall. Tomorrow, he would say to himself, he would awake, and there would be the window, reassur
ingly complete and sharp, without the terrifying preliminaries which had afflicted his eyes and his senses for the past few weeks.

  But this morning, the wheels of fire were more vivid, more scalding to his aching eyes, and after their passing, the window did not emerge at all. Terror set his heart to rolling and plunging. He sat upright, his flannel nightshirt dampening with sudden icy sweat. There was only darkness. Perhaps, he screamed to himself through his terror, it was still night. He fumbled in the bed for Emmi. She was not there. Then he heard the sounds of her in the kitchen, and he knew, from the sounds, that the bottom door was wide open. There should, therefore, be a long streaming upwards from the kitchen lamp, lit in the early dawn. But there was no streaming. Everything was as black as the bottom of a pit at midnight.

  Impelled now, by pure primitive terror, he swung his thin legs over the side of the bed. He thrust his arms out before him, and whimpering, he felt his way to the door. It was wide open. He reached downwards with a shaking and tentative foot, found the stairway. Then, giving way entirely to his terror and horror, he plunged down the stairway, hitting against the sides of the close cold walls, his feet hardly finding the stairs. He burst into the kitchen with a great cry of anguish.

  “Emmi! I cannot see! I am blind!”

  He stood there, in the warm and lighted kitchen, staring blindly before him, an old thin haggard man, with a wild white face and outstretched reaching arms. His nightshirt fell about his quaking knees. His gray hair stood upright on his tremulous head. His eyes, wide and staring, bulged, and his mouth was open, and now silent, but with an expression as though he were inwardly screaming, over and over. Threads of glaucous saliva stretched from one distended lip to the other.

  Emmi, paralyzed, stared at him from the stove, a large wooden spoon in her hand. For several moments, she was incapable of moving. Her face became ghastly gray in hue. Her whole vision was absorbed in the sight of that figure in the doorway, reaching for her, silently shrieking, the fingers extended and clutching air, like a drowning man clutching water.

  Then the spoon dropped from her hand with a clatter onto the iron stove. Egon felt her strong reassuring arms about him, and she felt his quivering rigidity and frantic clutching hands, which first seized her shoulders, then her wrists, her hands, her shoulders again.

  “Nonsense,” she said, loudly, keeping her thickening voice firm and calm over her own terror and agony. “It will pass in a moment. Egon, you must control yourself.”

  She seized his hands strongly in her own, pressing warmth into their bony coldness, trying to subdue their awful trembling. She led him to a chair near the stove. There, she chafed his hands, talked soothingly. He gasped, stared about him, his eyes bulging madly. A film was over them. Trickles of sweat rolled down his face, hung in drops from his chin. He could not speak. He could only stare, and allow her to rub his hands, and, finally, his numb and jerking feet.

  “You are cold,” she scolded. “You have taken a chill. That will hurt the eyes. You must control yourself.”

  His voice came, bubbling, incoherent. “Emmi—!”

  “Be calm. In a moment, you will see again. It is nothing. It has often happened to me,” she lied, steadfastly.

  At this word of hope, he broke into loud dry sobbing. He drew her hands to his chest, held them there in a spasmodic grip. He tried to see her face, but there was only complete darkness. She saw him trying to see her, and the sight of those filmed distended eyes, blind and veined with scarlet threads, was almost more than she could bear. Her heart was pounding with a torturing pain. She felt the grip of his hands, holding hers in death’s own strength.

  “It has happened before,” he said, and he spoke as though his voice wrenched itself painfully through a paralyzed throat. “I have been afraid. I thought it would pass.”

  “It will pass,” she said, quietly. She let him hold her hands. She sat back on her heels. Her face was still and white, her pale lips parted in her effort to breathe. The stove fumed near them, sending out rays of warmth and comfort. The lamp flickered on the table, throwing a pool of light on the plates and the cutlery. A smell of coffee and new fresh bread filled the kitchen. On its shelf over the black iron sink, a clock ticked loudly.

  “Be calm,” said Emmi, rubbing her husband’s pallid hands over and over, after she had gently released them. “In a moment, you will see.”

  His trembling lessened. But his blind eyes were still fixed on her face in their wild and distended and unblinking desperation.

  “Emmi, Emmi!” he whimpered, over and over.

  “Yes,” she said, in her quiet and unshaking voice. She reached over to a chair and took her shawl which she had laid there after the fire had warmed the cold room. She put the shawl over Egon’s thin bent shoulders. Over its thick gray folds, his gaunt corded throat and quaking head emerged. His look was piteous, distraught, blue with terror. He felt nothing but her reassuring presence, her strength, upon which he had leaned for so many years. He was conscious of nothing else but the courage and firmness of her hands, and her soothing words. He clung to her with a sudden convulsive movement, leaning towards her, burying his distracted face on her shoulder. She held him to her as she might have held a child, rocking a little on her heels, murmuring in his ear. After a little, he wept. She felt his tears through the thin blue cotton of her dress, and they were like drops of blood to her.

  She and Egon were alone in the dark cold flat. Franz had spent the night at Tom Harrow’s cottage, sitting with a few men from the mills, while Dolly, exhausted and prostrate, slept. There was no one to send for help. There was nowhere to look for strength but in herself. And she knew that always she had had to look for strength only in her own fortitude and courage.

  Moment by moment she held Egon, seeing and feeling his tears, and her own face grew perceptibly older and more shrunken. Her pale blue eyes became suffused with something more poignant than tears. The bones of cheek and jaw and eye-socket sharpened under her thoughts and her almost overwhelming fear. The temples, from which her graying yellow hair was strained upwards to their knot on the top of her head, took on a bruised appearance. There was a blue and deathly shadow about her lips and wide nostrils. But never for a moment did she allow the sobbing old man in her arms to feel or guess the anguish that pervaded her, and the nausea that sent thrills of retching through her spare body. She stared over his head unblinkingly, her eyes fixed on a terrible and mournful vision, which could sicken and temporarily strike her down, but which could never overcome her.

  “It will pass,” she said, over and over. “Be calm. It will pass.”

  Finally, he became quiet in her arms. The scalding tears grew less and less. He said, brokenly: “Emmi, what shall we do, if I am blind?”

  “You are not blind,” she said, vigorously. “Believe it. You are not blind. But it has been very wrong, not to tell me before. Then, this could have been spared you. I have asked you to see a physician, when your glasses did not help you any longer. But you delayed. Your eyes are strained. If you will be calm, your sight will be restored.”

  “Yes, yes,” he whispered, his shaking lips against her neck. He believed her. Emmi had never lied to him.

  Again, there was silence in the kitchen. Egon’s thin old body relaxed, warmed by her arms, the stove, and the shawl. She held him closer. A great and melancholy tenderness flooded her heart, her soul. It seemed to her that her flesh could not contain such a flood, that it must burst from her, and that she must cry out, and weep aloud. She had always loved Egon with a cold and jealous and protecting passion, almost savage in its possessiveness. He had been her child. Franz had never been her child. He had, first, been her equal, and then her superior. Finally, he had hated her. Suddenly, with a sad horror, she saw that she had come to hate him in turn. But the hatred, strangely, had not dissolved her understanding of what he was, nor had it destroyed her bitter love for him. Never had she felt for him this protecting passion she felt for Egon, not even when he had lain in her arms as a
child. In some way she must always have known that Egon was one of the innocents of the world, covered with wounds, eternally suffering, silent and gentle and bewildered. She knew, now, that he had always suffered. She must have known, subconsciously, that he had suffered, but never had the thought risen to her conscious mind. Now, she was appalled, aghast, filled with self-reproach and corroding remorse. All these years she had failed him, though she had loved him.

  Love is not enough, she cried to herself, some coldness in her vanishing forever. Love was never enough. Love was sometimes a door separating those who loved, blinding them, feeling the loved one behind the door, but always out of reach. There must be a sensitive understanding, also. She had never understood Egon, however much she had loved and protected him. He had made her impatient, because of her lack of comprehension. He had known that impatience, and had become silent, not reproachful, only mournful, and hopeless. As in a mirror, she saw his yearning for his home; she saw the scenes he saw, which had never touched her own sensibilities. She saw his nostalgia; felt its creeping sorrow in her own bones. She had sacrificed him! She had brought him to a hateful land, which he had not hated, and which had only frightened and confused him. She had brought him to a land of coldness, which had no place in it for gentleness and placidity and humble hearts and peace. She had filled his ears with its raw clangor, the sound of its machines, the clamor of its lifeless vitality, the uproar of its growth, which was only a mechanical growth, as though some monstrous mechanism had acquired the ability to extend its arms of steel and grow new rivets and new pistons, until all the world was full of its screeching and grinding, its wheels and its rods, its belts and its whistles, a Juggernaut of steel. She was certain there was no soul in this mechanism, in its scraping bedlam of noise and brutality. Egon had been caught in its glittering and bellowing turmoil, its shifting nightmare of faces, its flashes of flame, its concatenation of din, its horrible and gigantic rhythm and bloodless pulsing. He was like a moth in a jungle of pistons and belts, fluttering feebly. He was appalled by the facelessness of American life, for all his life he had seen only man and not men. The poverty of this life, its cold fever, its greedy iron heart, had broken him, and his own horror had destroyed him.