"He is a strange man, your--the smith," whispered Vincenza at last. "I was always half afraid of him."
Cain suddenly seemed to awaken from deep thought. He turned, took the girl's hand, and started to walk back toward the hospice with her. As they walked, he gazed into the distance with wide open eyes. He was still carrying his hat in his hand. Suddenly he stood still. "It seems to me," said he, with a dreamy look, "that we have all misunderstood him--my father."
Vincenza dared not reply, his manner was so unusual. He walked silently along beside her, and that evening, and many times afterward, his thoughts were more with Stephen, who was gone and never came back, than with Vincenza, on whom his heart was set, and from whom he soon learned that Simmen would not refuse her to him.
JAKOB SCHAFFNER
* * * * * *
[THE IRON IDOL]
TRANSLATED BY AMELIA VON ENDE
In one of our great industrial centres lived a childless couple, a workingman and his wife, by the name of Höflinger. They had been married ten years and had become resigned and accustomed to their solitude. The husband turned the sentiment, which no offspring of his could claim, toward the hopes and the aims of his class. He was known as a well-read, serious and reliable man, whose political activity was founded upon practical reality rather than theory and who was hostile to the exploitation of principles popular with the ordinary run of Socialist party leaders, but not always truly beneficial to the proletariat. Hence he was held in higher esteem by the trades union than by the party. He usually had a young man in his home who not only enjoyed room and board at moderate price, but, if he had a good head, was trained by Höflinger in class-consciousness and a practical knowledge of the tactics of life. Thus Höflinger had no difficulty in filling the vacancy whenever his boarder drifted away.
As he showed a fatherly solicitude toward these youths, so his wife spent upon them her unused motherly gift and feeling. She had never buried any of the ardent desires of her womanhood; she had never known sickness. In spite of the shadow of her childlessness she went on living her full, significant woman's life, and constantly defied the gnawing thoughts of what might have been by a cheerful acceptance of what life offered her. She was the daughter of a tailor, a dark blond of trustworthy aspect, quietly inclined toward play and fancy, but contented to express it before the men of her household only as a half humorous, half melancholy mood. Her father had called her Marie, but one of his customers, a lieutenant-general, had named her Spiele. She on her part called her husband, whose real name was Ferdinand, "the long one," not so much for his bodily length, as for the extent of his activities, calculations, schemes and unionist controversies, which sometimes made her lose her breath and her judgment.
At this time Höflinger was occupied with the organization of a laborers' consumers' league. This work frequently called him away and kept them apart, and though he always returned to her, still she resented his having been separated from her for a time. In the factory, too, Höflinger occupied a special and independent position: he served the iron saw, a giant of double a man's height. This had impaired his hearing; figuratively speaking, you had to use Gothic type in order to make him understand. On the other hand, this deficiency favored his tendency to accept the phenomena of life summarily and to survey things from the organizer's standpoint.