The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  “We must make Irmgard as happy as possible in this strange country,” she said, in her loud hectoring voice, as though it were a command.

  “Most certainly,” replied Franz politely. He hung up his coat and cap, and rubbed his hands over the red lids of the fuming stove. He glanced over his shoulder at his father. “You did not get wet, Papa?” he asked, with affection.

  “No, my son, not very much,” answered Egon, smiling with love. “But your own boots are very damp. Do you not think it best to change them?”

  Franz glanced indifferently at his boots. “I think not.” He sat down at the table and looked with pleasure at the food. He broke off a huge piece of bread and buttered it lavishly. His inner joke absorbed him again.

  “I think there is going to be a strike,” he said, chuckling.

  Emmi, who had been waiting upon him, paused, a dish in her hands and alarm in her face. “A strike! Why should there be a strike, Franz?”

  He shrugged. “Business is very bad. We had to shut down three more furnaces today. Several orders have been cancelled, the superintendent told me. There has been a big uproar, because the last shipments were porous. Our way of making moulds is at fault. There is a fortune waiting for a man who can make dependable moulds. So far, we have not found it. Now, we have many shipments back on our hands, fine enough on the surface, but full of air-holes in the center, brittle and worthless. That is something we must always expect, in some quantities. But unfortunately, the entire shipments were in that condition. This is a very bad thing for the Schmidt Steel Company, for our waste has heretofore always been small. Our reputation has already suffered. So—they have had to lay off many more men, and must reduce the wages of those who have been retained.”

  Emmi’s disappointment was swallowed up in her apprehension. “You will be laid off, Franz?”

  He gave her a smiling, cunning look. “Not yet, at least, Mama. You need not fear too much for the bankbooks.”

  She flushed with anger and embarrassment, but before she could reply, Egon said, distressedly: “I knew of this some days ago. But I did not know it was so bad.”

  “It is very bad,” said Franz, tranquilly.

  Emmi exclaimed: “You do not seem too anxious, Franz! Times are very poor. What will you do if you are laid off?”

  He looked at her, narrowing his smiling eyes. “I have said, Mama, that there is no danger, just yet.”

  This important matter settled; Emmi could momentarily forget personal matters. She inhaled a deep breath of relief. Then she frowned. “This morning, I saw the workmen at the gates of the mills. They had been locked out. It was very terrible. Their faces—”

  “Starving is not very pleasant, I agree,” said Franz, devouring his food.

  “You can say that so indifferently!” cried Emmi, passion thick in her voice, the crimson deep in her flat cheeks. Irmgard, washing some dishes at the sink, became alert, and listened with intentness. From her aunt’s tone, and her cousin’s light laugh, she guessed that some deep implication lay beneath them, and that some sore and oozing animosity of long standing was implicit between the woman and her son. Their words were like sparks shooting upward from a hidden and smoldering fire.

  Franz looked at his mother with an air of amiable patience. “Now, Mama, must we quarrel again about the same old thing?”

  Emmi thumped a plate down upon the table. Her worn hands were trembling. Her corded throat throbbed. She gathered her breath for a reply, but Franz gave his cousin a smiling glance over his shoulder.

  “It is an old story, between mama and me,” he said, lightly including her in the conversation.

  Irmgard had been cutting the cheese cake at the sink. She now looked at him, in silence. The gaslight shone in her eyes, and he was suddenly startled at their clear and brilliant greenness, so comprehending, so intense. So taken aback was he at their singular beauty, glowing out at him from between their thick bronze lashes, that he hardly heard his mother’s hurried, passionate words, so filled with rage, breathlessness and incoherence:

  “You do not care, Franz! It is nothing to you if other men starve. It is always yourself, only, always! Those men’s faces—! And their wives and children. It is wrong, terrible. This ought not to exist in a country so rich, so abundant. There should be no starvation, no terror of unemployment. The selfishness of those responsible—”

  “I am not responsible,” said Franz, still smiling slightly. But his eyelids flickered as though he were controlling himself. He looked at Irmgard again, in order to see her eyes. But her white lids obscured them as she wiped dishes, and he saw only her calm profile. “What can I do, Mama?” Emmi’s nostrils distended with her furious breath. She ignored her husband’s alarmed, deprecatory touch on her arm.

  “What can you do? I do not know. It is your attitude, so unconcerned, so indifferent, so selfish, so callous! And your attitude is the attitude of those responsible for all this misery. It is the attitude which needs changing—”

  “You wish me to project thought-waves?” asked Franz, in a maddeningly amused voice. He had been over this so many times with his mother. “I do not believe in thought-waves, Mama. I am only a foreman in the mills. I am just to my men, if they are just with me. I do my daily work. I am nothing at all, remember, but a foreman in the mills. The decisions come from some one else. I get my wages—I do my work. That is my only concern, and must be my only concern.”

  Feeling, even under her fury, the logic of this argument, but her fury increasing because of her impotence against it, Emmi turned violently to her niece:

  “You see, Irmgard! This is America, where men starve among riches, and children go sick and hungry among luxury. If a man is injured, he is thrown out, to die or beg. You have not seen America, Irmgard! But you will see it, and you will hate it as I do.”

  And then Irmgard knew that it was indeed Franz’s attitude which so filled his mother with despair, grief and distraction. It was this attitude which lay at the roots of their mutual antagonism, and deeper than the roots was Emmi’s uncompromising integrity, idealism, and the sacrifices she had made. Her heart lay there, and her son was poisoning it. The girl glanced at her aunt with compassion, but said nothing.

  It was this silence of hers which began to intrigue Franz. He had expected that his cousin would be a garrulous, simple girl, full of Teutonic simplicity and ingenuousness. He had thought of her as a peasant, remembering that she had been attending the small farm practically single-handed, while her formerly vitriolic father had covered his revolutionary fires with the text-books of village children. Her silence might be stupidity, but Franz, who was very astute, began to suspect that it was not stupidity. His interest quickened. He drank his hot coffee, but he watched her closely, becoming more and more pleased with her profile and the slenderness of her waist. Now he saw that she was beautiful, and waited impatiently for the clear lucidity of her eyes to look at him again.

  “Freya,” he said aloud. His mother had begun another tumbling and chaotic series of denunciations, and Egon was sunken over his coffee in silent despondency. The steam of the coffee had blurred his glasses; his thin narrow head was bent as though he had fallen into some mournful trance. He knew that it was useless to interfere between Emmi and his son, and he could only endure the unpleasantness with inner quakings. So neither he nor Emmi heard Franz’s casual word. Franz, watching Irmgard, wondered if she had heard. But Irmgard showed no sign that she had. She would not know what it meant, anyway, thought Franz, and was slightly disappointed. After all, her schooling must have been narrow. Unless her father, once renowned for his scholarly background, might have instructed her.

  “There is no hope for the poor in America!” Emmi was crying, wringing her hands in her apron, her face burning and her pale eyes flashing. “The most miserable peasant in Germany is happier than the workmen here. It is an illusion, a lie, that there is liberty, freedom, happiness and comfort in America. These are only for the rich—”

  Franz regarded her
with calm. “That has always been so, everywhere in the world, Mama, as I have told you so many times. But you are always chasing moonbeams and dreams. What do you expect of America?”

  “I expect that she live up to some of her lies,” said Emmi.

  Franz shrugged. “What nation ever did? We must accept things as they are. The incompetent and the weak must die. I have not done badly. I shall do better. Because I am strong. Do you think America should be an asylum for the unfit and the worthless, the inadequate and the useless? Why? Is this a hospital, a haven, a sanctuary? Even America must deal with the stuff of men, and if the stuff is feeble and rotten, then it must be destroyed. That is the law of nature. Even the dreamers in America must eventually be confronted by that law, and bow to it.

  “I am a foreman in the mills. Some day, I shall be more than that. I shall see to it that I am. I was an immigrant, too, with only a little knowledge of English. Yet, I have risen higher than native Americans, and other immigrants. What I have done, they can do. If they cannot do it, they must be content with the bones and the crusts thrown to them. America is not static. She is in a state of flux. The strong will rise to the surface. The weak will fall to the bottom. I did not make this law. It has existed since the first man breathed.”

  “You have risen because you are ruthless!” cried Emmi.

  Franz shrugged again. “Ruthless! Dreamers always call strong men ruthless. It is their pet word for the will-to-power and the will-to-survive.” He laughed shortly. “If it were not for the ‘ruthless’ the weak would not eat even what they have to eat. We build the walls that shelter them, and make the bread which keeps them alive. Men are not born equal. It is no fault of mine that I was born stronger than many others, and that the majority of men are weak and rotten. I live according to laws laid down before I was born.”

  “Have you ever heard of mercy?” asked Emmi in a choked voice.

  “Mercy,” repeated Franz, in a contemplative voice, as though he had not heard this a thousand weary times before. “What has mercy got to do with law?”

  He pushed back his chair, and smiled kindly at his mother, whose eyes were filled with desperate tears. “We shall have a fire in the parlor tonight. Mama? To welcome Irmgard?”

  He got up. He passed close to Irmgard. He hesitated. It seemed to him that some powerful and irresistible current passed from her body to his, though her back was to him. He saw the fine golden hairs on her white neck, and the living whiteness of her flesh. Then he left the room, humming under his breath.

  Egon again put his hand on his wife’s arm. “Emmi, do not be so distressed. Franz is only teasing you. Why do you quarrel so with him?”

  She made a movement as though to throw off his hand. But when she looked down at his gentle tired face, her own features worked. She sat down in Franz’s chair, and said harshly to her niece: “Irmgard. We must eat our dinner.” Her neck still throbbed; the burning color was still high on her dry cheekbones. Her whole posture was one of futile misery and grief.

  Irmgard sat down near Egon. Her tranquillity was infuriating to Emmi. “What do you think of my son?” she asked bitterly.

  Irmgard lifted her eyes and smiled, not at Emmi, but at Egon, and he smiled back, touched at so much beauty.

  “He can be disagreeable,” said Irmgard, as though with amusement.

  CHAPTER 9

  The “parlor” was chill, dark and dank. Franz built a fire in the stove, and lit the streaming gaslights. His father entered the room, uncertainly. Egon did not like the room with its narrow gloomy slits of windows and cold stark walls. He preferred the kitchen. He still wore his broadcloth coat, and his neatly folded cravat and black-ribboned spectacles, and his bent frail figure gave him a scholarly air. He seated himself timidly as near to the crackling stove as possible and rubbed his hands, shivering.

  “It will soon be warm, Papa,” said Franz, moving restlessly up and down the room, his hands in his pockets. He was incongruous in that room, with his big body and limbs, his yellow hair and large and somewhat brutal face. Egon thought of the young Prussian officers he had seen, marching and helmeted, and he felt the same shrinking from his son that he had felt for them. Franz was a stranger to him, though there was a fondness between them. When Emmi talked of the things of the mind, there was a harsh aggressiveness in her, as though she were using her knowledge as bludgeons. Franz would then pretend a prodigious stupidity, in order to harass and infuriate her. But he never pretended to his father. He always listened with great alertness, and answered astutely. This was the point of contact between them. But still, they were strangers, this elderly scholar and the Prussian son.

  Egon’s escape from a painful world was in revery. His reveries were always gentle, filled with the green mist of remembered trees and tranquil hills. They were always more real to him than the unreality of this dreadful America, with its noise and soot and clamor, its stretching of clanking limbs, its shaking of its enormous steel head. America had never been more than a troubled nightmare to him, though he had lived here for fourteen years. He felt that his body was one shrinking fiber, a thin root, forced to seek its sustenance in a cindered yard. He forced himself to endure, for his wife’s sake, but it was the enduring of pain of a man partially under an anesthetic. His real life was in his reveries, where he saw the faces he had known under quiet skies, and heard the distant cow-bells on the quiet hills. Even the men in his office were shadows in a dark dream.

  Franz heard his father’s sighing. But he was accustomed to that, though the sound always touched him. Stranger though he was to his father, he knew his thoughts, as one knows a familiar voice.

  Emmi had not yet come in. She was still busy in the kitchen, while Irmgard was helping her. Egon glanced sideways at the door, and murmured:

  “Franz, you should not tease your mother. She has a lot to bear. But you are always tormenting her. It is not good, or kind.”

  Franz laughed shortly. “Mama and I understand each other,” he said, with lightness. He, too, looked at the door, and frowned impatiently.

  Egon sighed again. “Did you have a hard day at the mills, my son?”

  Franz lifted his brows. “We are slow, today. Very slow. We have been getting slower for the past two years. Unless something is done, the mills are finished. They have been going down steadily. You know that, Papa.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Franz stopped his pacing and stood before the stove, frowning somberly.

  “I might have to leave. It is no use staying with a sinking ship. Yet, I should not like to leave. My plans are all there.”

  Egon glanced up in gentle surprise. “Your plans? What plans?”

  Franz shrugged. “How do I know? But something keeps me there.”

  “Loyalty, perhaps? Liking for your work?” Egon was softly surprised that these two virtues existed in his son.

  But Franz burst into a loud laugh. He looked at his father as a man might look at a child. “Loyalty! For what? For an old fat man bursting at the seams with richness? No. Loyalty to myself. There is something in that mill for me. There are other mills. Once I even thought of going to Windsor, and getting work in the Sessions Steel Company. But for a man with a future like mine, it is better to be in a dying company. That does not sound sensible, but I feel it is. For, if I rescue it, it is mine.”

  Despite his unworldliness, Egon smiled involuntarily. He 65 felt tender towards his son, who, for all his large manhood, was apparently unsophisticated. “But, Franz, you are only a small foreman in the mills. How can it ever be ‘yours’?”

  But Franz was silent. A shrewd hard look settled on his face. He hummed a little to himself, and, opening the stove door, critically examined the dull red coals within. He poked them vigorously.

  He said finally: “Schmidt knows he is failing. He rarely comes into the mills. But today he came in, with the superintendent fawning like a dog on his heels. Stamping and grunting like a short fat pig, and shouting and swearing.” He laughed again, shortly. “
The two of them came up to the hearth where my men were working, and the superintendent said something to him. He looked at me, and glared. He said: ‘Is your name Franz? Franz what?’ If he thought to intimidate me with his glaring, he was mistaken. I told him my name. His German is very bad; it is evident he was a peasant, in Bavaria. He seemed suspicious of me, and just rocked on his heels, glowering, and asking questions. Where was I born? What were my people? How long had I been in America? I was careful to answer him in my best manner in order to convince him that I was not a peasant, as he was.”

  Egon was alarmed. “I hope you were not disrespectful, Franz? You are always so flippant.”

  Franz smiled. “One must never be subservient to peasants, Papa. They become increasingly arrogant. I was respectful to him as my employer, but I let him know that my class was superior. At times, he had difficulty in understanding me. His vocabulary in English is much better, but in German, he speaks in the peasant’s idioms and coarsenesses.”

  “You angered him, Franz?” cried Egon, thoroughly dismayed.

  “No, on the contrary, he seemed pleased. You should have seen the superintendent, that Saxon swine! He gaped like a fish. He could not understand his master’s condescension. As for my men, they were paralyzed. When Schmidt speaks, the whole mill sinks into comparative silence.”

  “I think he was very amiable, to stop and speak to his workmen,” suggested Egon, despondently. He was certain that Franz had angered the mighty Schmidt. He, himself, had seen his employer only once, and then at a distance. Egon, in spite of what he was, had the German’s innate terror and awe of a superior. He could hardly believe that the great man had really stopped to exchange pleasantries with an obscure foreman in his mills. He was bewildered. He moistened his dry and sunken mouth. “I hope you were not disrespectful,” he whispered hopelessly. But he was increasingly bewildered. Great men do not condescend even to recognize the existence of their servants. He remembered the days of his army service, and shivered again.