The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  When he glanced idly at his watch, Franz saw that it was well past midnight. But he was not sleepy. He often sat alone, thinking, the pipe in his mouth and a glass of beer at his elbow. He would rock slowly back and forth on his straight chair, thinking a thousand thoughts. He preferred his own company, and one of his characteristics was an intense love of solitude. He remembered what Heine had said, that every German has the mind of a philosopher and the soul of a soldier. He knew he was no philosopher, and decidedly no soldier. Nevertheless, he was a solitary. He was contemplative, rather than philosophical. He amused himself with no abstracts. He dealt with facts, and all the ramifications of facts. Sometimes, when he was alone, he read intensely. He liked Nietzsche, though he laughed at his tormented and impotent will-to-power. It was the impotence which amused him, rather than the philosophy. He had long ago come to the conclusion that the passionate devotees of power were all eunuchs. He wanted power for himself. As an abstract he did not adore it, as Nietzsche adored it. It was a personal thing, for him. But for Nietzsche, it was the adoration of the hero, the superman. Franz knew there were no supermen. There were only men who wanted personal power, and were able to obtain it, and men who lusted for power, and could never obtain it. The impulse toward power smoldered in every man. There were only a few who knew how to get it. The rest merely adored.

  He got up and took his mother’s precious volume of Schiller’s poems from the table. He lit another gas jet, and idled through the pages. He was much obsessed by poetry. It was like looking into a fantastic world where real truths were born for projection into the world of reality. The womb of the unreal created the real—but Schiller could not fascinate him tonight. A curious restlessness crept along his nerves. He lifted his head and listened. His eyes glanced at Irmgard’s door. He put aside the book.

  The restlessness increased. He thought of his mother. He was fond of her, though she annoyed and amused him. He knew what she wanted of him. He was incapable of fulfilling her wants, and from childhood he had resented her urging hands upon him. He had an instinctive knowledge of the world of men, and his mother seemed to him to be foolish. So he had taken to tormenting her. He did not acknowledge to himself that his pleasure in tormenting her had its roots in cruelty. Had he acknowledged this, he would have been more pleased than embarrassed. For, above all things, he despised humanity.

  Nevertheless, he wished that he had not participated in that shameful scene with her. Some latent German respect for parents still endured in him. But, he thought, she is such a fool. She has always been a fool. Those who dream of distorting men out of their natural shape are always fools. Jesus had tried it, and had received proper justice. Hundreds of other teachers and philosophers had tried it. The kindest thing that men had done to them was to forget them.

  He forgot Emmi. He looked at Irmgard’s door again, and 75 frowned. She puzzled him, and vaguely excited him. Such immobility was not natural in one so young. He never allowed anything to puzzle or disturb him. The fact that Irmgard had done so increased his first hostility towards her.

  He scratched his head. He yawned. The yawn was deliberate, in order to dismiss his thoughts of Irmgard. But he could not forget her pale hair and pale face, and the green eyes like jewels. He thought of his mother’s not too subtle desire for a marriage between her son and her niece. He grinned involuntarily. It was now easily to be seen that she had imagined that Irmgard would bring with her some of the Social Democratic theories which had afflicted her father. Emmi, in other words, had brought up reinforcements. The German in her would not admit final defeat. Hell, what did she want with him! Yet, he could feel some compassion for her, for he understood her shrewdly. What must life be like, when one was tormented by fantasy and fanaticism? And helplessness?

  He stood up, and stretched. The restlessness tingled all through his big body. He knew he would not be able to sleep. Angry irritation prickled his flesh. This was the first time that any woman had been able to do this to him. He had no time for women, except for a casual woman occasionally. Irmgard’s face rose up before him, and the angry prickling increased.

  He looked at her door, closed and final. There was only silence behind it. Suddenly, she took on the aspect of an enigma. He laughed at himself, shortly. This country girl, with the peasant’s hands and the peasant’s passivity! He was not much moved by beauty, and Irmgard did not appeal to him particularly. It was that infernal passivity of hers, he thought. He could not believe that anything very profound lived behind it. But at least the wench, not having anything to say, knew how to keep quiet. That was a rare thing in a woman.

  It was nearly one o’clock, and he was wasting time thinking about her. He emptied his pipe in the stove, and pushed back his chair. He would go to bed. He turned out the light.

  Then, to his own stupefaction, he found himself knocking gently on her door.

  When he became aware of what he had done, he stepped back, hastily. His first impulse was to run, an ignominious act. But he forced himself to wait, grimly. Of course, the girl was placidly asleep. He waited for a few moments, and then turned away with relief, contemptuous of himself.

  Just then the door opened silently, and Irmgard stood there, in the light of the gas jets. She wore a coarse crimson woolen robe, closely wrapped about her. Her hair hung over her shoulders in thick shining braids. She looked at Franz silently, but now he saw that her pallor was accentuated by faint streaks of red under her eyes. So, she has been crying, he thought. He felt a twinge of sympathy, but was also obscurely annoyed and affronted. Then, there was something after all, beneath that passivity. The realization irritated him.

  He smiled casually. “Were you asleep? I hope I did not awaken you. I thought, if you were not asleep, we could talk for a few minutes.”

  She closed the door behind her. She walked to the stove as though she did not see him, and stood there, her back to him. “Will you sit down?” he asked, indicating the chair he had vacated. She sat down. She folded her hands on her knee. But still, she did not see him. She was like an automaton. He stood behind her, and saw the heroic modelling of her head, and the glistening of her pale hair. He pulled up another chair and sat near her. He spoke again, in a low voice:

  “This is all so strange to you, Irmgard, is it not? But the strangeness will pass, and everything will be all right.”

  She did not answer. But she turned her face to him. Her green eyes were very still, and her lips moved as though she tried to speak. They looked at each other, and could not look away. He felt as though two strong hands held his head and forced him to look at his cousin.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked, at last. He was a little shaken. For a moment he had experienced an almost irresistible desire to take her hand.

  “Yes,” she said. “My father taught me. It is enough. It is correct, but slow. That ought to be sufficient.”

  He paused. Her shoulders were full and strong under the frayed robe. He saw the high pointed mounds of her breast, and the slope of her large arms. That curious tingling along his nerves quickened into a gathering fever. And she looked back at him quietly. What she thought he did not know. But he saw that her nostril widened, and the quiet lines of her large mouth became rigid.

  “You are thinking that my conduct to my mother was inexcusable,” he said. He waited. She still regarded him with her strange eyes, but said nothing. He leaned back in his chair, and assumed a rueful expression.

  “My mother does not understand America. She never will. She imagined that, being a new land, it would be full of new hopes and new dreams. A sort of bright vision emerging from the darkness of Europe. She believed that we should find here everything that was beautiful, significant and immortal in Europe, combined with the splendor of complete realization, growth and culmination, with something of German overtones. She expected to find the leisure and tranquillity and Gemütlichkeit of old Germany, too, a federation of mankind overlaid with peace and friendliness. And much talk and philosophy. A nation where everythi
ng was in the glorious process of becoming, and where everyone dined out under awnings and discussed Heine.”

  He paused. Irmgard still did not speak. But her eye-sockets awnings and discussed Heine.”

  He tried to laugh. “Perhaps that is not a complete picture. She knew how America was expanding and growing. She expected to find a tumult of work here, a kind of heaven where everyone was working for the common welfare and common good. Work. She has always worshiped work, even for its own sake. She thought she would find her work here, and that I would advance it. You can see how foolish she was. And—this is where she ended.” He made a sweeping gesture about the room, which seemed also to include the flat, the street, and all of America.

  Irmgard’s lips had fallen apart. They were very pale. But she still listened in silence.

  “My mother had read a lot about America,” he went on. “She knew its philosophers, its statesmen, its heroes. The only sad thing is that she believed them. She did not want to come here for money. She hated what Germany had become. I think, yes, I truly think, that had we settled in a hut somewhere, she would not have minded even if we had eaten only once a day, provided that she could have had the company of large-minded poets, philosophers and political geniuses about her. Provided she could have had a part in the growth of America towards those immense ideals which she believed existed here.” And he laughed again, his short, unamused laugh.

  “She is the worst kind of egotist,” he said.

  Then Irmgard spoke, and her voice quivered tensely: “And you do not see how piteous that is?”

  He was taken aback. He had been talking to her, believing that she did not understand anything of what he had been saying. It had been enough for him to see her. He stared at her blankly.

  “Piteous? Yes, I suppose it is.” But he was hardly conscious of what he had been saying.

  She looked at him for a long time. And now he saw that he had been wrong. This was no stupid peasant girl, with the passivity of a summer landscape within her. How could he have thought that the daughter of Emil Hoeller could have been stupid? It is I who am stupid, he thought. But the thought brought no consolation to him, but only a great irritability and an obscure anger against her.

  He looked away from her face, to her hands. He was surprised to see that they were clenched, as though she were experiencing some passionate emotion.

  “It is not her dreams which are so bad,” she said, still in a low voice. “It is your attitude towards them.”

  “And what is your attitude?” he asked. His eyes wandered from her chin down the length of her large white throat.

  “I understand what she has wanted, though I knew America was not so,” she replied. “I know that the world is all alike, wherever you go. I do not know how I know this. Everything is the same. One must understand it, and accept it.”

  Again, there was a silence between them. The room was very cold and dark, in spite of the hissing gas jets. The wind had come up again, rattling the windows with fury. It seemed to Franz that he could hear his heart beating loudly in the stillness, and that the only reality was this girl with the green eyes and Roman body. Every inch of his flesh was alive with this reality. Suddenly he wanted to touch her, to hold her, and the desire was like a fire in him.

  “You do not like me, do you, Irmgard?” he asked, very softly, leaning towards her.

  She regarded him straightly. Her expression was unmoved. Then she stood up. “No,” she answered. “I do not like you. Good night.”

  She stood up, and left the room. Her door closed silently behind her.

  She was gone. The chill of the room came through Franz’s garments. But he sat still and stared at her door. It seemed to him that he stared for hours.

  When he finally went to bed, stiff with cold, he could not sleep. He knew only one thing: he hated this girl.

  CHAPTER 11

  Years later, it was frequently written that Franz Stoessel had often said that steel had been his very life, that from the first moment he had entered the great cavern of the Schmidt Steel Company in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, he had known that this was to be part of himself. This was probably a sentimental lie, or one of Franz’s innumerable cynical hypocrisies. Other men might utter expected hypocrisies without wincing, feeling themselves amiable and good-natured in doing so. Worse, they very often came to believe in their hypocrisies. Franz was frequently a hypocrite, for he was both expedient and. realistic, and if hypocrisy was necessary to his advancement, then he surpassed rivals in the art of lying. But he never ceased to be amused at it. He had long ago come to the conclusion that men hated truth, hated directness and sincerity, and that they preferred lies. They gave honors and riches to men who lied, and power. Therefore, from the first, he gave them what they wanted. This filled him with disgust, but also with that neverending amusement and wry contempt. And so clever was he that they never suspected the sincerity of his insincerities. He was all things to all men, and so he was trusted. Better still, he prospered.

  No one, not even Hans Schmidt, ever suspected that Franz neither liked nor hated the mills, that had chance thrown him into another industry his attitude towards it would have been exactly the attitude he had for this. It was only a means to an end. He never revolted against chance or circumstance. He merely used them. But devotion to the mills was expected of him, and he gave them outward service if nothing else.

  Nor was he ever fascinated, even from the first, by the immense murky gloom of the mills, lit by the red fires, and smothered in smoke and heat. He looked without much interest at the half-naked men guiding the mighty kettles of liquid metal which blazed like the sun. He felt the promise in the mills, the promise for himself. That was all. He did not feel that here were men who were doing something, creating rails and locomotives. If he saw, in this inferno of Vulcan, deafening and gigantic, hoarse with voices and the hiss of molten metal as it ran into the moulds, the drama of a young and growing industry, he saw it only in relation to himself. The clanging and the cries, the groan of cranes, the acrid smell of acids, the thin gray coiling smoke, the enormous hammering, filled him with excitement. But it was the excitement of his own promise. It is true he began to live only for the hours he spent there, grimy, naked to the waist, sweating and straining; it is true that the uproar and the thunder were a tremendous symphony in his ears. But still, it was only because he felt that his own promise was being forged in these mills. The clamor seemed to him only to be a terrible and godlike prelude to something greater for himself.

  At home, he was morose, preoccupied, determined. He brought strange books home, which he had borrowed from the local library. He read the history of steel. Had he been thrown into a mining community, he would have studied mining with equal absorption. He read everything he could find on chemistry, the vast juggling of opening resources, the terrific tide of mechanics which was rising in the new world. His mind became a file in which he laid away small items that he subconsciously knew were vital. He read and filed with grim purpose for himself, and not for love. At times, when he was tired, he even hated the mills.

  He had worked here for five years, starting as a puddler. He became a moulder. Then, because he was able to wring the last drop of sweat from his unfortunate co-workers, he was made a foreman. He was held in approving esteem by his immediate superiors, because his “gang” could be made to produce more than any other. He was relentless, ruthless, implacable. His men hated him, but so far they were still too helpless, too wretched, too cowed, to lift their hands against him. But he knew, as he walked through the mills and saw the black-faced and sweating men with their sullen and desperate faces, that a danger lived here, stronger than steel and more terrible than armies. The mills were not only forging steel, he thought. They were forging terror. This did not disturb him. He felt in himself a power stronger than the power of these men. They hated him, but he hated them more, with a purity of hatred undisturbed by consideration of family or fear of hunger. They hated him for his oppression of them.
He hated them for what they were. All this life, this hatred of his kind was the whip which gave him power over them, a psychological power against which they were almost always impotent. He had long ago stumbled on the frightful truth that to subjugate men, and rule them, it was necessary only to hate them.

  So far, there had been no strikes in this mill. But he knew they were coming. They had occurred elsewhere, with bloodshed and death and disorganization. He read the newspapers thoroughly. He found, or thought he had found, the solution to this problem, which was growing more acute every year.

  The laborers worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. He also worked these hours and these days. But he had his own promise to sustain him. They had no promise. He never felt compassion for them. He could look without emotion on an injured or dying workman, even though aware that starvation faced his family. He was not concerned with sentimentality. His smiling hatred was too strong for that. Never, at any time, did he regard his men as being of the same flesh and stuff as himself. If they had been, he reasoned, they would have had his own promise in themselves. Not having this promise, they were unworthy of life. They lived only for service. When they could not perform this service, their reason for living had been removed. They had no right to live.

  However, he made friends with his fellow foremen, and in particular, with a young Englishman by the name of Tom Harrow. He was hardly less friendly with another foreman, a “hunky,” who was a giant of a man, like a gorilla. At one time Franz had worked under Jan Kozak, and it was from him that he had learned moulding. Franz had the instinct of being able to seek out those who could be of benefit to him. Tom Harrow was no benefit, but he was Franz’s recreation, for the Englishman had a wise obscene humor and a neverending good-nature. He was both ignorant and clever, philosophical and vulgar, shrewd and dirty. Franz enjoyed his company, for he liked to laugh, provided it did not interfere with more important things.