Sabinsport, after any one of the German towns of corresponding size, seemed ugly, unfinished, disorderly. To their trim, solid, spotless exterior was opposed a straggling, temporary, half-cleaned condition in at least the greater part of the town. Instead of a careful business management of town affairs, by men trained as they would have been for bank or factory, was an absurd political system of choosing men for offices. It was not the good of the town that was at issue, although both sides loudly claimed that it alone considered Sabinsport; it was always the party, with the result that clever men, like Mulligan and Cowder, practically controlled affairs.
Otto might, six years before, have laughed at this ridiculous method of running a town, but not now. Germany had taught him to be serious—oh, very serious, particularly in public matters. It shamed him that his home, the place where he must live and do business, should conduct itself in this crude and wasteful fashion.
He found it difficult in the bank. His “reforms” were disliked—his father, the directors, the men at the books and the windows, clung to their ways, and their ways were not, in his judgment, “scientific.” His father laughed at his impatience. “You must go slow, Otto. What people won’t willingly do because they see it is the better, cannot succeed. Perhaps we’re not so bad as you think. Admit our results are good.”
But Otto was convinced it was chance, the luck of the American, not any sound practice that had brought the bank where it stood. Then constantly there was an irritation in business, a resentment that they would not see and admit the superiority of the practices he would introduce.
The social life bored him, or rather the lack of it. There was no provision for daily natural mixing with one’s friends—no coffee hour, no beer garden, no music. He resented the indifference to the friendly side of life. He criticized resentfully the habit of regarding pleasure as something to be bought with money—the inability to get it without spending. Indeed, Otto felt a thorough and rather bitter disgust at the place money held in Sabinsport. She regarded it, he felt, as an end. Getting it was the chief thing with which men’s minds were occupied. They seemed never to think of public affairs except in terms of business, and of very personal business, too.
But, in spite of this preoccupation with money-getting, they did not, after all, respect money. They flung it about, toyed with it, used it for uncertain schemes, wild ventures, took it for their costly and reckless pleasures. Rarely would you find a German treating money with such carelessness, such contempt. It would seem as if the thing everybody sought was not worth keeping when won. Otto hated this. A German knew the value of money—his countrymen did not. And the few who did and hoarded it, refused to risk it—they seemed to receive no such respect from the people as the open-handed. It was incomprehensible—the American and his money.
But that which combined to make life in Sabinsport most barren and flat to Otto was his feeling that there was no greatness, no sense of a magnificent and mysterious future coming to the country. The people were not working toward a definite national thing. Men and women seemed to think of nothing more magnificent than to gather and spend wealth. The idea of subordinating a personal aim for a national aim, the thing which so dignified German earning, saving and spending, was unheard of here. Here you lived for yourself, not for your nation.
“America is not a nation,” he told his father; “it’s a place where great numbers of people, largely because of a happy chance which probably can never happen again in the world’s history, exercise just enough control of themselves to enable them to live completely selfish lives and they save themselves any slight remorse they might feel for this selfishness by somehow convincing themselves that they are demonstrating the superiority of individual liberty. And what you are getting in America is an undisciplined, self-satisfied people, more and more incapable of thinking itself wrong, more and more incapable of wanting anything but to be let alone in smug comfort. It is not a nation, I tell you, Father,” Otto would say. “A nation must have a single, glorious aim.”
And the old man would wring his hands and say, “You don’t understand, Otto.” And sometimes, walking up and down, would repeat the story of the incident which had led Otto’s grandfather to join the Revolution of 1848 and had brought the family finally to America.
It was not an unusual incident. He was a soldier in training, and one morning in drilling his gun slipped and came down as they stood at “Attention.” The officer in charge sprang at him with a savage oath and cut him with his sword across the face so that the blood ran in streams over his uniform. Rupert Littman finished the drill and that evening joined the party of young revolutionists, suffered with them defeat, was imprisoned, escaped, and, as has been told, in 1850 came to this country.