The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I have arrived at the conclusion, Stoessel,” said Dietrich, “that it would be best for every one concerned, and especially for the Schmidt Steel Company, if you left these premises as quietly and quickly as possible, and did not return.”

  Franz said nothing, but his eyes were slivers of blue ice. Having finished wiping his face, he put away his stained handkerchief. Then he stood like a soldier, at attention.

  Dietrich felt encouraged by this lack of anger and absence of protest.

  “We have had a hard time in the past months, to control the men. I do not think they can now long be controlled. Even you can see that. They must have heard the—story. Now they are aroused against you. When you appear as assistant to Dethloff and myself, they will discover everything. Who knows what disorders will then arise? Who knows but what one of them will again attempt your life?”

  He smiled again, with delight, remembering the death that had come so closely to Franz. But Franz’s livid lips merely tightened, and again he waited.

  Dietrich shook his head, with sudden solemnity. “We cannot countenance a situation which might result in your permanent injury, or death. That would be inhuman.”

  Then, for the first time, Franz smiled himself, cunningly. He still waited.

  Dietrich’s eyes sharpened swiftly, and he took on a hostile expression, openly hating now.

  “Moreover, we cannot forget that you cost the Schmidt Steel Company five thousand dollars for your murder of your friend.”

  He stood up, with a gesture of dismissal. “I can see that you are taking this matter sensibly. I have always thought you extremely intelligent. We are willing to give you one hundred dollars as an expression of our gratitude, and our regret that we can no longer employ you.”

  He exchanged a quick complacent glance with Dethloff, who nodded and grinned.

  But Franz did not move. He folded his arms on his chest and studied Dietrich thoughtfully.

  “There are a few matters which you have not considered,” he said, in a quiet voice. “I will enumerate them to you, and you will then agree with me that my presence here is very necessary. In fact, you will urge me to remain.”

  Dietrich frowned. He lifted his hand with an authoritative gesture.

  “I think we need say nothing more, Stoessel. I will give you your money at once. I do not advise you to leave through the mills. The temper of the men is bad. Exceedingly bad. You will leave through my own door.”

  Franz smiled. He sat on the edge of Dietrich’s desk, impertinently. He rubbed his chin with a contemplative gesture. With his other hand he played with Dietrich’s long quill pen, turning it over and over in his strong fingers. But his eyes were fixed ruthlessly on Dietrich’s thin fox-like face.

  “I must still speak. You cannot throw me out like this. If you attempt more forcible measures, I shall go to Mr. Schmidt, himself. A moment, please. You will let me speak. Then you must decide what to do.”

  “Prussian dog!” exclaimed Dietrich, turning crimson. He glanced at Dethloff. “You will please remove this—man, at once.”

  Franz glanced idly over his shoulder at the hesitant and middle-aged Dethloff. Apparently that look was enough, for Dethloff stopped, flushing. Franz returned to the Superintendent, as though the interruption had not taken place.

  “You must remember,” he said softly, “that I was attacked because I had protected the interests of this company, at great personal danger to myself. I sacrificed Tom Harrow, who had done me no harm, and who was my friend. I am sorry that he died; I had not intended it so. But that is past. It is foolish to regret anything. Nevertheless, I saved this company from a disastrous strike, and immense losses. You have said so, yourself. That alone is a consideration.

  “You say the men are in a state of disorder. But what does the disorder matter, if the leader is absent? There is no leader. The two who might have led them are dead. Disorder among men is the signal to the strong to strike, and subdue. The moment is ready. I can quell this disorder in less than a day, with benefit to the Schmidt Steel Company. While the men are in this condition, we can seize our advantage. Never were we in such a strong position, as now, when they are more terrified than enraged. If you give me authority, I can not only quiet the men, but force them to accept conditions beneficial to this company. I ask you to give me this opportunity.”

  He paused a moment. “They will accept everything. Their own anger and disorder have weakened them.”

  Dietrich regarded him with leaden hatred, and fear. He knew the truth of Franz’s words, and he was the more frantic to get rid of him, to destroy him in the eyes of Hans Schmidt, so mysteriously concerned with him.

  “You must leave,” he said, trying to make his voice inexorable. “I am busy. I have nothing more to say to you.”

  He furtively glanced at his watch. In less than an hour, Schmidt himself would arrive. A light dew of sweat broke out on his high receding forehead.

  “Go,” he said.

  Franz shook his head with gentle humor, understanding everything.

  “I have not finished,” he said, calmly.

  “I do not fear these men,” he went on. “The act of one of them has terrified them. Moreover, I hold the whip again. I have only to hint that Kozak’s brother will be arrested, perhaps hung, if another attempt is made to injure me. Moreover, others can be implicated. The fact that one of them failed to kill me will give me a mysterious and terrifying aspect to them. They will think, in their simplicity, that their failure has demonstrated my greater strength. Such are the workings of the mind of the simple and stupid. I shall seize this advantage. I shall announce longer hours and smaller wages. They will accept in their fright and confusion.”

  He stood up, confronting the Superintendent easily.

  “You are at liberty to refuse all my offers, all my arguments. If you do so, I warn you that real disorders shall occur in these mills, with subsequent disaster to the company. I shall call a meeting of these men. You see, I am quite calm, and ruthless. I shall tell them that Harrow’s death was deliberately plotted by the detectives you hired, and that I attempted, without success, to save his life. I shall call a strike. The consequences, then, will be that I will become a hero to these men. As for the consequences to these mills, your imagination must supply the details.”

  Dietrich’s face elongated itself until it was only a sliver of leaden-colored flesh, in which his colorless eyes gleamed like the eyes of a reptile.

  “You are attempting blackmail,” he said, in a low and baleful voice.

  Franz laughed frankly. “Blackmail. It is a detestable word. I did not use it. You have an evil mind. I am merely telling you candidly what will happen.

  “Let me go on. I have a large advantage with which to start. The fact that I was able to secure five thousand dollars for Harrow’s widow can be made either an advantage to you, dispelling all nasty rumors, or it can be an advantage to me. I can tell the men that I forced you, upon learning that your hirelings killed Harrow, to pay this money to Mrs. Harrow. You can see what an advantage that will give me. However, the decision is still yours to make.”

  Dietrich sat down slowly, his eyes still fixed viciously upon Franz. His thin fingers beat a tattoo upon his desk. He was silent.

  Franz was palely exultant.

  “On second thought, I may not decide to accept your urging that I remain. I believe I shall not accept it.”

  Dietrich looked up swiftly, his color returning. A slight smile began to form at the corners of his thread-like lips. But Franz raised his hand gently.

  “A moment please. Once I told you that I had a secret formula for preventing the breakage of moulds. It is now perfected. No one knows of this but me. I have been a loyal fool, considering giving this secret to so small a mill as this, where the advantages to me cannot be very great. Though, of course, it will be of enormous benefit to this company. But you have demonstrated to me that loyalty is not in you, that you return efforts in your behalf with enmity and ruthlessn
ess. Why, then, should I give the mills this secret, which will bring it great prosperity, and expansion?”

  Dietrich was terribly shaken. He wet his lips. His reptilian eyes shifted.

  “I do not believe you have such a secret,” he began, in a stifled voice.

  Franz sighed lightly. “That is for you to believe. Today, I shall go to the Sessions Steel Company, in Windsor. I shall tell them of my secret. I believe they will reward me accordingly. They are well on the way to becoming the dominant steel mills of this state. My secret will not only benefit them beyond imagination, but will end in the ruin of the Schmidt Steel Company, who must discard more than twenty-five percent of the moulds.”

  He took his cap from his pocket and pulled it over his aching head.

  “You are not discharging me. I am leaving,” he said. “The consequences are yours, not mine.”

  Dietrich was silent. He sweated with hatred, and fear. His mind seethed and roiled. Dethloff picked his nose feverishly in the background.

  None of them knew that Han Schmidt had been in his office since eight o’clock that morning, an unusual thing. None knew that he had heard everything. So, when he appeared at his door, short, fat, pink and bristling, and grunting savagely, they turned startled and discomfitted faces upon him.

  But he looked only at Franz Stoessel, and his tiny porcine eyes were blazing. They could not tell whether he was only smiling, or grimacing virulently.

  He held up a finger to Franz. “You will please to come in here, lumpenhund,” he said, harshly. “At once.”

  For a moment Franz stood rigidly at attention, his heels together. Then he smiled swiftly and malignantly at Dietrich. With a slight, ironical bow, then, he walked past the stricken and paralyzed Superintendent, and respectfully entered Hans’s office, closing the door significantly behind him.

  Dietrich sat immobile as wax, after Franz’s departure. He did not stir even when Dethloff whinnied a little with horselike and spiteful amusement.

  CHAPTER 37

  Hans Schmidt sat under the portrait of his wife’s father, and the contrast between his squat porcine pinkness and the dark spectral and austere face and torso above him was both startling and ludicrous. “Red cabbage growing under a Lombardy poplar,” thought Franz, pleased at this unusual burgeoning of imagination in himself.

  He was very calm and his manner towards his employer was both easy and respectful. He had quickly guessed that Hans appreciated audacity, but not familiarity, and that only the most obvious and brutal humor would please him. Subtlety would arouse his animosity, hatred and anger, for he would believe that it was tinged with superiority and ridicule. He was a peasant, this Franz knew, and he also knew that the direct, simple and coarse approach was the only one the peasant understood. But this peasant demanded exaggerated respect, also, to tickle his ego.

  Hans sat, grunting in his chest, and surveyed Franz, who stood at attention, and waited. He kept Franz standing for several long moments, while his tiny and choleric blue eyes squinted under the thick and hairy brows. His deliberate glance wandered up and down Franz, as though scrutinizing him for some weakness on which he could pounce. But his manner, though truculent, was not inimical. It was cautious, and brutish, however. He continued to make vulgar sounds in his chest, and once or twice, still without taking his eyes away from Franz, he coughed frankly, and expectorated. Finally, he opened a drawer, deliberately lit his cigar, and puffed, his short fat fingers crossed on his paunch.

  Franz endured the scrutiny without wincing, or showing any evidence of uneasiness. Unobtrusively, he was also subjecting Hans to scrutiny. The diamond ring on the puffy red finger fascinated him, as did the diamond horseshoe in the crimson brocaded cravat. Hans was as clean as a fat slaughtered hog, scrupulously scrubbed and scoured for market. Franz found something vulgar even in that excessive cleanliness, as though Hans had rubbed himself to the quick to rid himself of the odor of barnyard manure.

  To himself, Hans thought: A swine, but a swine out of my own pen. Deitrich is right: he is a Prussian. But I need a Prussian. He would stop at nothing. But I need men now who will stop at nothing. He is more than I thought. A gentleman, and I have always hated gentlemen. But I need a gentleman. Moreover, there is my daughter. And this is a handsome dog.

  He spoke aloud, in his guttural German speech, deliberately accenting the low peasant intonations as though to offend Franz:

  “So! You will threaten us?”

  Franz smiled. “It is I who have been threatened, Mein Herr. I only retaliate. I am wounded. Does a man take assaults without retaliation?”

  Hans was silent. He scowled. His shining pink skull was wrapped in wreaths of smoke.

  “You are an impudent schweinkopf,” he said, at last. “You do not know your palce. You are without loyalty. There is no discipline in you. You defy your superiors. In short, you have become an American.”

  Again Franz smiled, then said quickly: “That is a libel I cannot tolerate. I am none of the things you have said, Mein Herr Schmidt. But am I a worm? Must I tolerate the ingratitude of your Superintendent, and his bullying, and hatred, in the name of discipline? Would I be a German if I submitted to injustice without protest?”

  Hans studied the tip of his cigar. He turned it about in his fingers. His thick pink under lip thrust itself out from under his bristling mustache.

  “You think Dietrich hates you?”

  “He is afraid of me,” replied Franz.

  “Afraid of you—a laborer in the mills?” Hans lifted his brows in an attempt to look incredulous, and succeeded only in giving a wry and surly smile.

  “If I were only a laborer in the mills, you would not condescend to speak to me here, as you are now speaking,” said Franz, with a stiff bow.

  At this, Hans burst into loud and raucous laughter. “You are a fox!” he exclaimed. “A yellow fox. A Prussian fox, for all your claim to be a Bavarian!” He laughed again. “So! Dietrich is afraid of you! Do you know why?”

  “Men of small wit are afraid of men with intelligence,” answered Franz, boldly. He was feeling his way with cautiousness, advancing only when Hans showed that he would tolerate an advance.

  “And you say you are not disloyal, impudent, and without discipline!” Hans was scowling again, but Franz saw that he was not as displeased as he pretended. “You can speak so of your superior! You deserve to be whipped with the knout, as they do in the Army.”

  Franz now decided on even a bolder move. “Herr Dietrich is a Saxon rabbit,” he said. “Is it impudent of me to despise him? In America, inferior men often dictate to the superior.”

  Hans drew his brows thickly together, so that his eyes were malicious blue points of light under their shadow.

  “And you are superior, so?”

  “I am a Bavarian,” replied Franz, smiling cynically to himself as he drew up his shoulders and his head in a proud and simple gesture.

  Hans’ brows relaxed. He grinned sneeringly. “And I repeat—you are a fox,” he said, and his harsh voice was sardonic. “Do not think you deceive me. I know all your tricks. I have exercised them, myself. You will have to learn fresh ones, if you wish to dazzle me. Use them on fools.”

  Franz hesitated. He wondered, for a moment, if he ought to appear insulted and hurt, or whether boldness would again serve him. He decided on the boldness. He laughed a little, affected to be embarrassed. “In my position, one must try anything,” he confessed. “But, as a Bavarian also, I ought to have known better.”

  In himself, he was amazed. Why did Hans Schmidt waste words with him, talking to him slyly, and watching him so acutely? He was, after all, only an obscure foreman, who had just been discharged. Was it the secret of the moulds? Franz frankly doubted this. Hans was so choleric, so full of the vehemence and impulsiveness of the peasant, that in moments of stress he would forget personal advantage. Gentlemen, the superior, never forgot, and so used hypocrisy. But Hans, the peasant, was no hypocrite. What, then, was his motive for all this?

&nbs
p; Hans, as though following his thoughts, said brutally: “You are a hypocrite. You are also a liar.”

  Franz, wishing to test his own amazement and awakening conjecture, bowed, said gravely: “You will then permit me to leave, Mein Herr?”

  Hans leaned forward, his chair creaking, and pointed his finger at the younger man: “You admit you are a hypocrite and a liar?”

  Franz was now certain that there was an ulterior motive in all this, beyond the mere fact of the “secret,” and a sudden cold excitement seized him.

  “Who am I to contradict you, Mein Herr?” he replied, with a slight smile.

  “Bah! A clever trick! A Prussian trick, answering a question with a question! You are impudent. I am sure of that. Do you think there is room for an impudent dog in my mills?”

  “That is for you to answer, Mein Herr.” Franz was watching him closely, and the cold excitement increased in his mind.

  Hans flung himself noisily back in his chair. His fat rosy features wrinkled sullenly. His eyes were splinters of blue malevolence.

  “What is your idea for the moulds?” he asked, abruptly.

  Franz was not taken off his guard, as Hans expected. He made a regretful motion with his hand. “I have patented the idea, Mein Herr. Once, I thought of not patenting it at all, and only of turning it over to your Superintendent. Subsequent events, with their cynical disregard of my services to the Company, have convinced me that I must protect myself.—You will now permit me to leave?”

  Hans shouted, with sudden fury, turning crimson: “I have no idea of dismissing you! Moreover, you fox, you have no idea of leaving! Let us stop this childish fencing. Let us be open. What do you want?”

  But Franz had heard only the first words completely. “I have no idea of dismissing you!” Then, in truth, there was an ulterior motive! Exultation caused him to flush, to double his fists. But he kept his voice quiet, if bold, and his eyes looked into Hans’s levelly.

  “I want to be Superintendent of the mills.”