CHAPTER V.
“WHEN SORROWS COME.”
Do you know, dear reader, how slowly and heavily fall the first drops of a thunder shower? After a little, when the storm is fully upon us, when the wind crashes in the branches of the trees, and sheets of rain beat against the windows, there is but small account made of a single drop; but at first, after a day of sunshine, ah! how large and ominous they seem; and even so is the first coming of trouble.
It was but a few weeks after the end of the Sängerfest that a change in Leppel Rolf which had long been silently operative, began to manifest itself in his outward man. He grew morose in speech and manner, shabby in his clothing, negligent of his daily task, more and more absorbed in his invention, which now neared completion, and as he fondly hoped, success. Meanwhile, the hope brought something far from happiness, whatever might be the case with realization. Anna’s color grew hard, her features sharp, her eyes anxious, under the pressure of dread for the future, and the knowledge that Leppel’s savings and her own had been exhausted to the last penny, and that all which now stood between them and dire want were her husband’s daily wages. And Leppel had been of late more than once sharply reproved by the foreman of the great building firm for which he worked.
Indeed, Anna could not justly blame the foreman. She would have scolded, too, if an employé of hers had been found dreaming over his work, and drawing plans on the smooth pine boards, instead of making them into doors.
“If he had looked at the plans, he would have admired, instead of cursing,” growled Leppel.
“Not if they delayed work he had contracted to finish by a certain time,” returned Anna shrewdly. “Everything in its own time and place, Leppel; should I get through the work I do, if I did not remember that?”
Anna’s practical, clear-seeing spirit did not know the power of an idea stronger than itself; it was no wonder she lacked patience. Meanwhile troubles dropped faster and faster both upon herself and her neighbors.
The old Frau did not wait to receive the little grandson who came when the June roses bloomed over the land, as beautiful and sweet as they. Life and death lay together under the shoemaker’s roof; the old life passively drifting out of the world, as the young life struggled into being. It was terrible for Dora, said all the gossips; but, fortunately, Dora was one of those happy persons who take everything quietly, so it seemed to do her no harm. Anna Rolf was at the house day and night, and managed everything, in spite of the fact that her own domestic anxieties were daily on the increase. It was owing to her, she always said afterwards, that little Louis had such splendid health. She “started him right,” and the start is just everything to a baby!
There never was such a baby! Of course not. Others might be as pretty, perhaps as bright and knowing, but what baby ever was so good and loving since the world began, or cooed in such varied tones, as sweet as the notes of an angel’s harp? There was no doubt about it, he was certainly a remarkable child; and as the young mother lay upon her bed in the hot, close room, or by and by went about her work again in the kitchen beneath, many an old tale returned to her mind that she had heard in her German home, of beings from the upper air, higher intelligences who had come down to teach and bless our sinful earth. Her wonderful dream also returned to her many times, and, bending over the little form, she strove to trace in the unconscious baby features some resemblance to that strange and beautiful face that had looked so lovingly into hers. And at times she quite believed she could; when little Louis’ eyes were suddenly opened, and he looked into her face with that strange, grave look, the resemblance was wonderful, thought Dora.
These thoughts she kept to herself; they were sweet and beautiful, but Karl would only have laughed at her for them, willing as he was to agree that such a baby as their boy had seldom, if ever, been seen before.
The grandmother’s testered bed was very convenient for Louis to lie upon while Dora was busy. They remembered the old Frau tenderly. “She was a good woman and a hard worker,” Karl had said gravely. But she was now reaping the reward of her goodness. Was it possible to wish her back into such a world as this, especially as her funeral expenses and Dora’s illness had brought their savings very low indeed?
And trade began to fall off.
Karl Metzerott had a certain reputation in his own quarter of Micklegard for the excellence of his work. His shoes were not fancy shoes, he was wont to say, but he used only the best leather, and they were every stitch hand-made. One pair of them would outlast two pairs of machine-made shoes, he said, and then be half-soled to look as good as new. But there was no denying that the machine-made shoes were cheaper to begin with, whatever they might be in the end; and when business is bad all over the country, money as tight as wax, and the air filled with rumors of a general financial crisis, and complaints of over-production,—whatever that may be,—why, people will wear the cheapest things they can find. Perhaps they reason that the sooner the things wear out the sooner will the demand catch up with the supply, and the evil of over-production be remedied; or perhaps it is simply that if a man have five dollars to buy shoes for his entire family, he must make it go as far as it will, rather than spend it all on one member (or pair of members), letting the rest go barefoot. As to what he shall do when the cheap shoes are gone, why, he must just resort to the expedient of which the rest of us avail ourselves when everything else has proved unsuccessful,—he must trust in Providence.
Whatever the cause, Metzerott saw his best customers pass his door in machine-made shoes; but he did derive a sort of cynical pleasure from noticing how soon the shoes were brought to him to be mended and patched.
“I must work over hours, and lower my prices,” he said to Dora; and, though the latter could not quite understand why he must overwork, when rows of unsold shoes stood upon his shelves, she made no objection, as the idea seemed to comfort him.
Lowering the prices, however, had an excellent effect; and though the shoes were sold at little more than cost, it was certainly less depressing than to see them hanging there so helplessly, or staring from the shelves with their toes turned out in the first position, in such an exasperating manner.
Anna Rolf also felt the hard times, even more than the Metzerotts, since “every woman her own dressmaker” is an easier problem to solve than how to make one’s own shoes. Leppel had been discharged at last,—got the sack, as he expressed it; not before he had richly earned, as one might candidly admit, all that the sack might contain. But oh! for the innocent who suffer with the guilty, in this world of ours! There is never a jewelled cup of gold in the mouth of any sack for them.
Leppel’s family bade fair to have very little in their own mouths for a while, with the father out of work, and Anna expecting to be again laid aside from hers for a season. “But you have no rent to pay, that is one thing,” said Dora comfortingly, “and we will take care of the children, Karl and Louis and I. Do you suppose I can forget how good you were to me?”
Leppel himself could have lived on air, in his present tension of mind and body. His model was at last completed; more, it actually worked. It was indeed a beauteous little machine, and the admiration of the whole quarter; so that, in spite of the hard times, he had been able to borrow five dollars here and ten there, until he had raised enough to pay the necessary fees at the patent-office.
“But if you take my advice,” said one of the lenders (the loans were all to be secured by shares in the patent), “you’ll get a man I know in Washington to look into it for you. I believe he has that patent-office at his finger-ends, and it’s a regular picnic to hear him tell why this model was a failure, and that, not half so good, perhaps, took like hot cakes. Just send your machine to him. It looks to me like a pretty good thing, but”—
“I’ll take it to him,” answered Leppel sharply.
He did take it to him.
The man of knowledge inspected it closely, and carefully studied every motion. Then he thoughtfully stroked his beard, which was long and luxuriant (perhaps from excess of knowledge) to the point of aggressiveness.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, yes. Seems pretty clever: ingenious, too; works all right; labor-saving, no doubt of that. Might be a very good thing; but I’m afraid, Mr. Rolf, I’m afraid there’s no money in it. In fact,” for you see the man of knowledge had had other interviews with inventors, and he knew that things must be broken to them gently, “in fact, there’s a what-you-call-‘em already in the office, enough like yours to be its own brother.”
“Impossible! I never heard of it!” stammered the inventor.
“Oh! I don’t suppose you did; case of great minds thinking alike, you know. Bless your soul, it happens every day! Not the same machine, you know,” with an emphasis as if it might possibly have been the same something else; “but like it; just enough like it for yours to be an infringement on the patent, if the patent was worth anything, which it ain’t.”
“Then my invention is surely not the same,” said poor Leppel, in his labored English; for, though he had twice helped to elect a President, he had lived in America only ten years. “Have you not already said it was good and labor-saving?”
“Oh, it’s all that,” said the man of knowledge easily; “but the fact is, it didn’t pay. It was tried, you know. The man who owned it,—not the inventor, who sold it for a song and was happy ever after, as the story-books say,—but the man who bought it—well, he was pretty warm about the pockets, so he did some extensive advertising, and started up his works in fine style; but the machines cost like fun to make, especially at first; if they had taken, you know, he could have run things on a bigger scale, and so made ‘em cheaper; but they didn’t take. They save muscle, of course; but you see most of us have muscle, and very few of us money. That’s about the English of it, I guess. If they’d saved time, now, or money, ’twould have been different.”
“What became of him?” asked Leppel gloomily.
“The inventor? don’t know; clever fellow, though, ought to succeed at something; maybe not the first thing he tried, but something. Oh! you mean the holder of the patent? Failed, and blew his brains out afterwards; can’t say but it served him right, either.”
“It served him quite right,” cried the inventor fiercely; “he took advantage of the other man’s necessities”—
“But we all do that, you know, Mr. Rolf,” said the man of knowledge. “I never came across a patent yet that was run on Gospel principles. What I blame this fellow for is for letting himself go before he examined into things. Pen and ink are cheap, and arithmetic taught for nothing; and he ought to have known human nature well enough to see that he hadn’t struck a paying job. Well, don’t be discouraged; go home and invent something that is cheap to make, and knocks Father Time into the middle of next week—some improvement in the telegraph, for instance, so a man can hear yesterday how stocks stood day after to-morrow—and you’ll make a fortune yet. Good-night. Oh, don’t mention it! I’ve really enjoyed our little talk; took me back twenty years.”
Twenty years! So his fixed idea, his Moloch, to whom he had sacrificed work, wife, and children, his machine that was to have enabled them to live like princes, had been tried and failed, while he was still a happy schoolboy in Germany! He took the night train for home, and sat gazing into the blank darkness outside the window, his beloved model still carefully cherished upon his knees,—why, he scarcely knew. The conductor shook him twice before he heard the demand for his ticket, and then he only turned his head and stared stupidly, so that the other took the bit of pasteboard himself from the hat-band, where Leppel had mechanically placed it.
“He ain’t drunk,” the conductor said to the brakeman, afterwards, as they stood together on the front platform; “so he must be either crazy or a blank fool.”
The brakeman inspected Leppel through the glass of the door, and concerted measures with the conductor, to be taken if the supposed maniac should become violent. But there was no danger of violence from poor Leppel. He had not yet begun to realize what had happened to him; only he felt queer, and very numb and stupid.
The numbness and stupidity had not worn off when he stepped upon the platform, at Micklegard, of the station nearest his home. The model was heavy, and he was just alive enough to resolve to leave it at the ticket-office. The clerk was known to him, and recognized immediately the package of which he was asked to take charge.
“What?” he said with cheerful consternation, “fetched it back, after all? No go, eh?”
“No,” said Leppel, slowly and stupidly, “it was no go.” He walked away bent and draggingly. The clerk looked after him, then stowed the model carefully away on a high shelf. “Well, I’m blest!” he said. “I certainly am!”
It was barely daylight of a January morning, and in the upper windows of his home, when he reached it, shone a faint light. A feeble baby wail came down the staircase as he opened the door. Leppel was not too stupid to understand that. Another mouth to be fed; that was what the cry meant to the house-father who had thrown away his children’s daily bread in pursuit of a shadow. He climbed the steep stairs that led up directly from the little parlor to his bedroom door, where Dora met him, smiling kindly.
“She is doing well,” she said, “and it is another fine boy. But, oh!” as she noticed the look upon his face, “don’t tell her any bad news if you can help it.”
“If I can help it,” he said assentingly. His brain seemed only equal to repeating what was said to him. He went into the room, and sat upon a chair by Anna’s bedside. They had been bad friends for some time, but he was scarcely awake enough to dread her tongue now.
“Well,” she said angrily, “have you nothing to say? You might tell me you are glad I am safe through with it.”
“I am glad,” he said obediently, “that you are safe through with it.”
“And you had better be,” she cried. “I don’t know what your children would have done without me,—such a father as they have! Here! don’t you care to see your baby?”
She pulled the cover from its face, and he inspected it with the same dull obedience, but beginning now to be unpleasantly conscious of Anna’s angry eyes. Yet all the while the old love was tugging at her heartstrings, as she read in his face and bearing the story of his failure. But she would not spare him; Anna had not learned to spare either herself or others.
“And your invention? Of course that was a failure, as I always told you!”
“Yes,” he said in English, recalling the words of the ticket-clerk, “yes, it was no go.”
“And the money all wasted, and your place thrown away, and my children starving!” she cried, her voice growing louder and shriller with each particular; “and now the great stupid fool tells me it was no go. No go!” She broke into wild, hysterical laughter, and beat upon her head with her work-worn hands.
They must have turned him out of the room, Leppel supposed, for he found himself in the open air without very well knowing how he came there. There was a heavy fog; and, well though he knew the streets, he was again surprised to find himself suddenly standing upon the bridge across the Mickle River, which at this season of the year, especially after such mild weather as had lately prevailed, was apt to be very high, and, with the melting of the snow in the mountains, to overflow its banks, and work mischief to all in its way.
Leppel stood for some moments stupidly and fixedly regarding the swift, turbid current. Did he lose his balance? Was he seized with sudden giddiness? Or was it a deliberate plunge? No one ever knew.
The policeman who saw him fall had help upon the spot as quickly as it was possible to do so; but it was only the earthly frame of Leopold Rolf that was rescued from the angry waters. The soul of the man whose invention would not pay had gone to carry its cause before the Great Inventor, the Maker of heaven and earth.