"Ask Billy," Hertha said, looking up. "I'm sure it's time for him to come and look after the flowers."
CHAPTER XVI
William Applebaum, or Billy, as Kathleen called him, was a short man, stockily built, whose little length of limb and small hands were overtopped by a large head that commanded attention. It was well shaped, with an abundance of blond hair, a straight forehead, clear blue eyes and a fair, healthy skin. His mouth and chin were too small for the rest of his face, but he wisely concealed them with a beard which, as time went on, he kept closely clipped.
His grandfather, of whom he was justly proud, had been a revolutionist in Germany, in 1848, one of the band that strove bravely, but unsuccessfully, to bring political democracy to the Fatherland. Young Wilhelm was imprisoned for his activities, but he made his escape, and in a series of perilous adventures, in which his daring was only equaled by his good luck, at length found himself in America. There he settled in a small town in the Middle West, married, and brought up a family; and in his old age found himself with a son William and a grandson of the same name, living in the town of his adoption.
Those who love to dwell upon the past are grateful for any audience, and the grandfather, harking back at the end of his life to its one dramatic happening, was happy in the garden, working among his bright shrubs and clambering vines, or of a winter night seated by the ugly but heat-giving stove, to tell his always attentive small grandson of his great adventures. It would be, "Billy, I never hear a knock like that at the door that I don't remember the time I was drinking a glass of beer at the back of the house and the police knocked at the front and spoke my name." Or, "That's a strong grape-vine, Billy, growing against the arbor, and I like to see you climb up and get the fruit for us; but would you have been able to climb down the vine that saved my life the night I left prison?"
The story that Billy liked the best was the one where his grandfather—he must think of him not as gray-haired and rheumatic, but as a swift-running, strong youth—hid in a cart filled with hay. He lay close to the bottom, scarcely able to breathe for the seed about his face, jolting to the town on the seacoast. Suddenly there appeared the always pursuing soldiers. They came up, and the captain, staring suspiciously at the cart, called upon the driver to stop, and ordered the men to probe the hay with their bayonets. The soldiers reached over and jabbed again and again, going down deep until they touched the floor of the cart. But they found nothing and at length, turning about, put spurs to their steeds and galloped away. "When we reached the coast, and my good friend and comrade unloaded his hay, I lay there safe and sound," the old man would end impressively. "For it was not always the floor of the cart that they touched, but sometimes the board that I had put above my body as I lay huddled against the planks."
But while the first William had showed an adventurous spirit, the third of the name was content with a quiet and orderly existence. His grandfather became an intensely patriotic American, who fought through the Civil War, and to his death never voted any but the Republican ticket. To do otherwise would have seemed to him to doubt his adopted but intensely beloved land. He was impatient of any criticism of America. "It is only those who have fled from a despotism," he would say, "who can appreciate the United States." And so his grandson had taken things much as they came, and had done nothing more startling in his life than at twenty to come to New York where he found better opportunity for advancement than in the town of his birth. He obtained a position as bookkeeper, and for fifteen years, with absolute regularity, appeared at eight o'clock in the little stationer's shop, tucked among the great office buildings on the downtown street, to remain until half-past five when, with equal regularity, he returned to his well-kept boarding house, his only home in New York.
His annual vacation of two weeks for some years was spent in his western town, but marriage and death broke up the home there, the house was sold, and those remaining to him moved to the Pacific coast. After this, he rarely left the city, staying to care for the flowers that in the summer his landlady allowed him to plant in her back yard—though they were a trouble Monday with the wash—and to play long hours on the piano that stood against the wall by the further window in his south room. Sometimes he went for a day to a beach, but night found him in his bed at home. Vacation over, he was quite ready to take up work. His German singing society was the greatest excitement in his methodical life, and if the chorus master assigned him a solo part, never an ambitious one, he practised at home night after night, his pleasant bass sounding through the old house.
He was just the sort of man who should have married; but whether he was held by a romance of the days before he left his western town, or whether his elderly landlady, knowing that she could not have him herself was yet successful in guarding him against all comers, it was certain that he had made love to no woman since he had come to the great city, until, at thirty-five years of age, he met Kathleen. Then the pleasant clerk of precise ways, whose sentiment had been satisfied in singing "lieder" and watering tender plants, was consumed by a great, unselfish passion. His life no longer moved about his books in the comfortable cage in the stationer's shop, nor about the boarding-house room in the quiet street, but day and night it found its happiness, its sorrow, too, and unrest, in the life of a woman.