Balance Wheel

by Taylor Caldwell

  The sky was gray and somber, and snow was falling thickly. The house would be warm. Geraldine was home for Christmas; Isabel had met her train that afternoon. Gerry, thought Jochen. He’d take her to their doctor if she still looked ill and thin and tired. She was his darling, his pet. My sweet thing, thought Jochen. She never asks for anything, and I’d give her the world, if I could. But she never tells me anything any more.

  He decided that his vague distress was due to his worry about his oldest daughter. He said to the chauffeur: “Can’t you go faster?” He sat on the edge of the velvet seat, and then without warning he heard again: “Porky Dutchman!” That was Charlie. It had nothing to do with him, Jochen. His misery became so acute that it was a physical pain. He put his hand on his chest. In spite of what that damned doctor said there must be something wrong with his heart! He knew it.

  Charles had his steel, now, thought Jochen. For a time, at least, the Connington Steel Company would not get those patents it wanted so urgently. It would get nothing. The Wittmann Machine Tool Company was safe. Charlie, the dirty dog, was safe. The company would go on, as it had always gone on. My father’s company, thought Jochen. He sat back in his seat, drew a deep breath. The pain had vanished, and the tightness.

  The house, now so despised by Isabel, was as warm as Jochen had anticipated. It was also silent. The lamps had been lighted, and the curtains drawn against the wind and the snow. A maid told Jochen that Mrs. Wittmann had had to attend a club meeting, and that she would not be home for another hour. Miss May and Miss Ethel were at a pre-Christmas party. Yes, Miss Geraldine had arrived. She was upstairs in her room.

  Jochen threw his coat and hat into the hands of the maid, and forgetting his “heart,” ran very fast up the wide and carpeted stairs. He called: “Gerry! Gerry!” He forgot that this was a detested nickname, and that Isabel resented it. He called again: “Gerry!” And he burst into his daughter’s room, with a delighted smile, and his arms out.

  Geraldine had been lying on her bed in her pretty ruffled room, and one wall light was dimly lit. She pushed herself up on one elbow as her father entered, and pressed her hand against her cheek. All her movements were sluggish and full of fatigue. Her black hair had loosened, and rolled on her thin shoulders. Her eyes were very big and heavy and dull, and her face was white and almost gaunt.

  “Papa,” she said. Then slowly, weakly, she stood up. Jochen stood there and watched her, and the shock of his pain and fear kept him standing mutely, his arms extended. Then she was leaning against his bulky chest, and her head was dropping against his shoulder. He put his arms about her; his heart began to thump loudly in his ears and temples and throat. “Why, Gerry,” he said, and held her closer. “Why, Gerry.”

  He lifted his hands and thrust them almost fiercely through her hair, pulling her head against his shoulder as if to hide her, as if she were a stricken or threatened child. He took up strands of her hair and kissed them; he pushed her hair from her forehead, and kissed it. “Why, Gerry, my sweet,” he said, in dismay. He was very frightened. “What’s wrong with my girl, home for Christmas? Is my girl sick? What’ve they been doing to my girl? I knew I shouldn’t have let you go away!”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Papa,” she said, feebly. “I’m just tired, I guess. The courses are hard.” She began to cry, suddenly, despairingly, and clung to him. “I did miss you so, Papa! I wanted you so, Papa!”

  “Why, Gerry,” he said again. It hurt him to breathe. “Why—why I’ll kill anybody who ever hurts you! You mustn’t cry like that, Gerry. Hush, hush, Gerry. See, it’s Papa. There’s no one here but us, my darling. Let’s sit down together and talk, eh? Whatever my girl wants she can have.” But Geraldine, he remembered, never asked for anything, never had temper tantrums, never demanded. He sat her down on the edge of her bed, and he sat with her, holding her in his arms, wiping her eyes. “You never tell me,” he said.

  He took her face in his hands; it was blotched, and between the blotches the flesh was a sickly white, and her lips were bluish. “You’re sick!” he cried. “You never told me! You’ll never go away from me again.”

  But Geraldine remembered that her school was not far from Harvard, and that she would not see Jim for months if she remained at home. She stammered: “I—I like the school, Papa. It isn’t that.”

  She fixed her large eyes on her father, and she, too, was frightened. His color was very bad; he had become fatter, yet he was so flabby and worn. He looked as if he had gained years, even since Thanksgiving, and his shoulders, always so broad and thick, sagged. She knew so much about her father. She cried wretchedly, the tears running down her cheeks. “It isn’t that,” she repeated.

  Her father was at Mr. Brinkwell’s mercy. She thought of the new home which was to be built in the summer; she thought of her father’s huge expenses. She knew he was afraid. She could not tell him that she didn’t want to become engaged to Kenneth Brinkwell. Kenneth’s father could be so revengeful. She thought of Roger Brinkwell again, and shrank.

  “You always told me everything,” Jochen was pleading. “Tell me, Gerry, tell me, now.”

  She could never tell him. Then she heard herself saying, with sick horror: “Papa, I don’t want to be engaged to Kenneth. I just can’t, Papa.”

  His hands dropped onto his knees. His jowly face twitched.

  “Oh, Papa,” said the girl. “I didn’t mean that! I didn’t mean to say that!” She put her hands on his shoulders, vehemently. “Please forget I said that. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

  He took one of her hands and held it tightly. He stared before him, with bleakness. He said: “I thought you liked Kenneth, Gerry.”

  “I do like him, Papa. Or, at least, I don’t dislike him. He’s awfully nice to me. He writes me almost every day. He isn’t like his father—” And stopped, horrified again.

  “No,” said Jochen. “He isn’t like his father. He isn’t even very much like his mother. Lucky for him. I always thought he was kind of a nice young fellow, in a way.”

  The engagement was supposed to be announced on New Year’s Eve. The Brinkwells were giving a dance for the young couple. It was to be the “affair of the season.” The marriage was to take place next June. Jochen said, apathetically: “You never told me, Gerry. There’s the ring, and everything. You ought to have told me before.”

  “I was going to, Papa,” said the young girl, with fresh tears. “And then—”

  He turned to his daughter, and his eyes were miserable. All at once, they sharpened, and his whole moonlike face flushed heavily. “And then, I went to the Connington,” he said.

  It was his heart; he knew it now, more than ever. Only a diseased heart could cause a man such pain. He tried to keep his breathing shallow. He sat, bent and sagging, on the bed, and he said to himself: I’m the cause of this. I’m killing my little girl. She’s never said anything, just because of me. She’s doing all this, for me. So I could have what I wanted.

  “I wouldn’t have gone,” he said, with a hatred for everything and everyone but his daughter. “But your uncle made me get out. He stole my share of my father’s company from me. He robbed me. I had to get out—out of my father’s company, where I was somebody, where I was vice-president in charge of production, where I wasn’t a hired man. That’s what he did to me—your uncle.”

  “Oh, Papa,” said Geraldine, mournfully. “You know Uncle Charlie didn’t ‘steal’ anything from you. He always liked you; he always came here, even when he didn’t see Uncle Willie very often, and never saw Uncle Fred. Uncle Charlie wouldn’t do any harm to anybody.”

  He moved away from her. “He robbed me, Gerry. He ruined me. He drove me out.” But he did not look at her. He rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes. “No, it wasn’t just like that, Gerry.” He could not stop himself. “It was Brinkwell, all the time. I must have been out of my mind! Brinkwell wanted our patents; he wanted me to push Charlie. Charlie’s an obstinate—” He stopped. (“Porky Dutchman!”) Jochen stood up, and
then began to pace the room with a ponderous, old man’s tread. “He said we’d all make money if Charlie leased the patents—We would have, too. But Charlie wouldn’t lease him the patents. I know why, now, and Charlie was right. I’ve just found out, these last few months. But how could Charlie have known? He never told anybody anything. He just sat there in his office, and I thought he was looking sick and tired because of his liver, and all the time it was—”

  “Was what, Papa?” Geraldine asked, eagerly. She got up.

  “It was something else,” said Jochen. He put his arm about his daughter, and they walked up and down together. “I know now. Brinkwell used me. But he couldn’t use Charlie. He tried to stop Charlie from getting steel, but he didn’t know Charlie! Charlie got the steel. It was all something too big for me; Brinkwell played me for a fool. But he couldn’t play with Charlie!”

  “Nobody can play with Uncle Charlie,” said Geraldine. Some color had come into her face. “Why don’t you go and tell Uncle Charlie all this, Papa?”

  “Why, Gerry, I’d die first,” said Jochen, simply. “Besides, I hate him. He was my father’s favorite. It was always Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. But I suppose my father was right, in a way, but Charlie didn’t have to be so bustling and busy and cocksure, in the early days, and being so damned right and smug about everything all the time. It made Willie sick, and that idiot, Fred, too.” His resentment made his voice rise.

  How much money had he, now? This house—it was mortgage-free. He didn’t have to build that damned house for Isabel, which was to cost sixty thousand dollars! There were his stocks and bonds, seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth, and the market rising. There were thirty thousand dollars in the bank. No mortgage on the house, and all his insurance paid up. But there was, of course, Isabel, and the other two girls. His money wasn’t a fortune. It would be enough for a while. He’d go to Pittsburgh, or Cleveland. He knew the machine tool business better than anybody, even old Charlie. He hated the Connington; he hated Brinkwell, and this stinking town. He was still a young man, and a valuable one. The other steel companies would jump at him. He put his arms about his daughter and hugged her tightly.

  “You don’t have to marry young Kenneth, my sweetheart,” he said, and there was a new strength in his voice. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We’ll get out of here; there’re better places in this country.” He rubbed her under her chin, and he chuckled. “But don’t tell anybody anything. It’s just between the two of us, eh?”

  She burrowed her head in his chest, and her thin young arms clung to him. She had been such a fool. She ought to have told her father before. Then she looked up, and said fearfully: “But the dance, Papa. And the announcement. On New Year’s Eve, too.”

  He had forgotten this. He hesitated. He might use guile and chicanery, himself, but he had never wanted his daughters to be hard or expedient or cunning. Especially not Geraldine. He frowned.

  “I know, Papa,” said Geraldine, understanding. “We’ll go through the engagement party. That’ll help. That’ll give you time. Six months. And it won’t really be hurting Kenneth. He wouldn’t want someone to marry him who didn’t want to. Why, there’re hundreds of girls who’d marry him in a minute. He was almost engaged to a girl in Philadelphia, before he came here, and his mother was angry with him when he began to like me. Mrs. Brinkwell would be only too glad not to have Kenneth marry me.”

  For no reason at all they began to laugh. Jochen forgot all about his “heart.” He felt free, exultant, and young. He tickled Geraldine, as he chased her, and then they went downstairs together, hand in hand, to meet Isabel who was just coming in.

  “Well,” said Isabel, as the maid helped her remove her rich fur coat. “You two look very happy, I must say. What’ve you been up to? Jochen, I’ve just bought the most beautiful Chippendale mirror for our new entrance hall; in really wonderful condition. You must see it. It’s at Blake’s. And Geraldine, there’s a dress you must see, for New Year’s Eve. I don’t like these ready-made clothes, so cheap, really. But this is from Paris. We’ll look at it tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER LIV

  Abruptly, only two days before Christmas, the Connington Steel Company, seriously alarmed at the stubbornness of their workers both in Andersburg and Pittsburgh, and stunned by a large public resentment against it, agreed to negotiate with the leaders of the strike. “There’s something going on in this damned country that I can’t understand,” said Roger Brinkwell to Jochen Wittmann. “This is something unique. But if there wasn’t a war going on in Europe we’d sit here, snug, and let them starve themselves to death. We haven’t time, just now.”

  “Rotten business,” agreed Jochen.

  Charles, when he heard of the end of the strike, called in his brother Friederich and Tom Murphy. He said: “Now, our own men mustn’t have a company union any longer. They’ve got to join the tool-makers at Connington, in one union. That strengthens everybody. And Tom—we’re raising our own tool-makers, and everybody else, ten cents on the dollar. We’ve got the big orders from the Amalgamated Steel Company, now, and more coming in.” He told no one that he had already assigned his own personal patents, such as the aeroplane steering control assembly, to the Amalgamated Steel Company, who were re-releasing it to aeroplane companies.

  He tried not to think too much. Tomorrow, Jim would be home. There was Friederich’s wedding on January fifteenth to plan for, and his hopes for his life with Phyllis. There were times when a man dared not think too much, for there was nothing he could do. He could only temporize. Charles remembered what his father had always quoted to him so admiringly, a saying of Lincoln’s: “All government—indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act—is founded on compromise.” But I’ve always thought that, reflected Charles, with some bitterness.

  Jim seemed even bigger when he came home, and when his father mentioned that he was still only eighteen, Jim was prompt in reminding him that within a few weeks he would be nineteen. He appeared wary, at first, but Charles, following his minister’s advice, talked only of his son. He could not help but be hurt, however, when Jim asked about the shops only once or twice, and was more interested in the result of the strike.

  He said, idly, the day after Christmas: “I understand they’re going to announce Gerry’s engagement to Kenneth Brinkwell on New Year’s.” He began to laugh, then stopped, soberly.

  “Don’t be such an imbecile,” said Charles. “Gerry showed me the ring you gave her, before you went away. She’s a girl of sense. I suppose she has to go through this thing, but, of course, she’ll never marry young Brinkwell.”

  “You’ve known about Gerry and me all along,” Jim accused his father.

  Charles thought that it was hard to be a father. Jim was looking at him reproachfully. So he said: “Gerry made me see it was all right.”

  They had had Christmas dinner alone, but Phyllis was having dinner with them tonight. For some reason, Jim was not too enthusiastic. Apparently the appalling idea that his father might be capable of begetting other children had been too much for him. When Phyllis came, he was less affectionate with her than he had ever been before. Phyllis was amused, though Charles was annoyed. “I understand all about it, dear,” Phyllis said to Charles, as he drove her home. She patted his hand maternally. He did not care particularly about that, either.

  However, by exercising tremendous self-control, Charles found it not too hard to keep from being irritable with his son. He was jealous of Jim’s school-life, away from his own, but Jim’s deep and passionate devotion to his studies was something so unique that Charles could not help but be proud, though he sometimes smiled when Jim, in this, his freshman year, and still far from beginning his real medical studies, spoke with dignity of his “profession.”

  “Are you supposed to be studying these books?” Charles asked once, noticing certain books which looked somewhat advanced to him, dealing, as they did, with pathology. Jim admitted that these were not th
e books he was actually studying at the moment; they were simply books he had bought, far in anticipation, because they fascinated him. When Charles, a day or two before Jim left for school, confessed to “another” headache, Jim wanted to know what Dr. Metzger had told him of his blood pressure, and if there were symptoms of hypertension. This seemed so like the old days that Charles was much cheered, especially when he overheard Jim talking learnedly to Dr. Metzger on the telephone and discussing systolic and diastolic, with regard to Charles. When Jim lectured him anxiously on “emotional states” Charles knew for certain that his son had not actually left him.

  “But he never will,” Phyllis said, when Charles told her of these incidents.

  Jim returned to attend Friederich’s wedding, and had grown at least another five inches, in Charles’ estimation. Jim said: “What you’ve done with old Uncle Fred, Dad! It’s amazing.”

  “I haven’t ‘done’ anything with him,” said Charles, annoyed. “No one can do anything for anybody. A man can only do things with or for himself. You make me sound like a schemer.”

  “Well, you are, in a nice way,” said Jim, with elderly and affectionate patronage. “Uncle Fred’s a human being, for the first time in his life. And look how clean he is, and how he talks so moderately, and marrying that nice Helen, too. He hardly ever gets excited, except for his eyes. I heard him and George Hadden talking about the war, and Uncle Fred didn’t once scream, or talk about Socialism, and ‘capitalistic evils.’ He didn’t once yell about ‘Germany’s wrongs,’ as he did a couple of years ago. Now he just says—and I heard him saying it to George—that everybody’s guilty of this war, and that the Kaiser ought to be in an insane asylum.”