“I won’t,” she declared, pale with fury.
“I think you will. Ask your husband. And do as he tells you. He’ll tell you just what I have—if he’s wise.”
For all his modest disavowals of being able to make an impression upon people, there were now at least three individuals in Fenchester who would hold in tenacious and painful memory to the last day of their lives the smallest detail of James Tilley’s unremarkable personality. He now proceeded to enlarge the list. Whether by chance or by design, he encountered Pastor Klink, who was doing some quiet research work in connection with back files of the newspapers, in the City Library, and Pastor Klink took the next train for home and a reflective silence. He met with the Reverend Theo Gunst and that fervid theologian retired to draft an editorial for the leading German religious weekly, reeking with protestations of loyalty, which almost tore his agonized heart out by its Teutonic roots. He ran across Gordon Fliess and earnestly counseled him against the strain of frequent railway journeys between Bellair and Fenchester. On the other hand, and as indicating a certain amiable flexibility of view on his part, he dropped in upon A. M. Wymett to extol the broadening influence of travel. A. M. Wymett traveled.
He called upon Vogt and Niebuhr, and Henry Dolge, the educational expert, leaving behind him devastated areas of alarm, caution, and at least temporary silence.
Within two days after his arrival, though he had said no word nor even given any hint upon either point, the Deutscher Club burst into a riot of American flags, and Martin Embree made a speech so full of patriotic pathos that it brought tears to the eyes of his hearers, particularly the Germans.
Bausch, and Niebuhr, and Dolge, and a few others of the old school, however, took to meeting in a respectable saloon kept by one Muller down in “the Ward.” To them came Gordon Fliess, and influential men from the Northern Tier, for conference. What passed there was asserted to be perfectly loyal, and supposed to be quite private....
But within a fortnight, James Tilley, more unobtrusive than ever, stepped off another Inter-Urban trolley, and stayed over one train. Thence he went to Bellair, and so passes into his chosen obscurity. He gave no advice this time. Not, at least, to Bausch, or Dolge, Niebuhr, or the respectable saloon-keeper, Muller; neither to Gordon Fliess. But the respectable saloon unostentatiously ceased to exist. And its more than respectable patrons named above quietly vanished, and the places that had known them knew them no more. Observing which, the more cautious Robert Wanser trembled, and congratulated himself.
Deutschtum, hitherto hardly bent, was now broken in the State of Centralia.