It is now only that the story of Lotte begins,—Lotte, who pined for the great farm and the fields across which the wind swept, and the cows she had named and cared for. Her mother forgot, or did not care. She had never loved her work, and liked better to chatter with the other women in the house, or even to run the machine hour after hour, than to milk, or feed the cattle, or churn. Lotte hated the machine. Her back ached, her eyes burned, and her head throbbed after only an hour or two of it. “Let me take a place,” she begged, but the Grossvater shook his head angrily. This was a free country. There was no need that she should serve. Let her learn to be contented and thankful that she could earn so much. For with their simple habits the wages paid in 1881 seemed wealth. Forty-five cents a pair, three of which she could make in a day, brought the week’s earnings to eight dollars, sometimes to nine dollars, and Peter prophesied that it might even be ten or twelve dollars. Lieschen had as much. Down on the wharves the Grossvater earned sometimes eighteen dollars a week. It was a fortune. At home, in the best of times, with sons and daughters all at work, his books, which he kept always with the accuracy of a merchant, showed something under $1,000 a year as receipts, the expenses hardly varying from the $736.28 which represented the maintenance of the family during Hans’s first year as soldier. Their food ration at home had been nine and a half cents daily. Wheat bread had stood for festivals and high days. Black bread, cabbage soup, beer, cheese, and sausage, with meat on Sundays, had been their only ambition as to food, and here Grossvater Bauer insisted upon the same regimen, and frowned as one by one the fashions of the new country crept in. Peter had been right after all. One must work, it is true, but no harder and no longer, and the return was double. The little iron chest which had held the savings at home held them here, and at rare intervals the Grossvater allowed Lotte to look, and said as he turned over the shining coins, “Thou wilt have most, my Lottchen. It is for thee that I put them away.”
“There is enough for a little farm,” Lotte said one day. “We could go on this Long Island and have land, and not be shut all day in these dark rooms.”
“That is slower,” the Grossvater said. “We will go back with much money when it is earned, and I shall be owner, and thou, Lotte, the mistress, and Franz maybe will go also.”
Lotte shook her head, though her cheeks were pink.
“Franz cares only for America,” she said. “Come with us some day, Grossvater, and let us look at the little house he knows. There is land, two acres, and a barn and a cow, and all for so little. I could be stronger then.”
“That is folly,” the old man said angrily. “It would be but shillings there, where here it is dollars. Wait and you will see.”
Lotte looked after him wonderingly as he turned away. To save was becoming his passion. He grudged her even her shoes and the dress she must have, though no one had so little. Peter revolted openly and came less and less. Lieschen cried, but still looked at the week’s wages as compensation for many evils, and Lotte worked on, the pink spot fixing itself on her cheeks, and her blue eyes growing sadder with every week. Franz, the son of their old neighbor at home, hated this crowded city as she did, and urged her to take her chances and marry him, even if, as yet, he was only laborer in the market gardens out on the Island. There were minutes when Lotte nearly yielded, but the Grossvater seemed to hold her as with chains. She loved him, and she had always submitted. Perhaps in time he would yield and learn again to care for the old life of the country.
At last a change came, but there was in it no release, only closer imprisonment. Peter and Annchen had followed a brother to Chicago and opened a shop double the size of the old one, and they were hardly settled when Lieschen sickened suddenly and after long illness died. For many weeks there was no earning. Even the angry Grossvater saw that it was impossible, and doled out reluctantly the money they had helped him to save. Lieschen had always fretted him. Lotte was the best gift she had ever made the Bauer name, and when the funeral was over, he went home, secretly relieved that the long watch was over; went home to find that the precious chest, hidden always under piles of bedding in the closet where he locked his own possessions, had disappeared. There had been a moving from the story above. Men had gone up and down for an hour, and no one had noticed specially what was carried. There was no clew, even after days of searching; and Grossvater Bauer, who had rushed madly to the police station, haunted it now, with imploring questions, till told they could do nothing and that he must keep away. He sank then into the sort of apathy that had held him when the news came from Sedan. He went to his work, but there was no heart in it, and sat by the fire when night came, with only an impatient shake of the head when Lotte tried to comfort him. Till then no one had realized his age, but now his hair whitened and his broad shoulders bowed. He was an old man; and Lotte said to herself that his earning days were nearly over, and worked an hour or two later that the week’s gain might be a little larger and so comfort him.
She came home one afternoon with her bundle of work. Gretchen, who was nearly thirteen, had helped her carry it, and had shrunk back frightened as the foreman put a finger under her chin, and nodded smilingly at the peach-like face and the great blue eyes. Lotte struck down his hand passionately. She knew better than Gretchen what the smile meant. The child should never know if she could help it, and she did not mind the evil glance that followed her toward the door. There were people standing at their doors as she went slowly up the stairs, her breath coming quickly, as now it always did when she climbed them.
“Poor soul!” one of them said. “She little knows what she’s coming to.”