The Man on Horseback/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
BERTHA WEDEKIND
"Well, Tom, I am glad to see you!" Mrs. Wedekind, small, delicate, white-haired, with something about her reminiscent of old lace and lavender, beamed upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles. "And rich, aren't you?"
Tom Graves felt slightly embarrassed. References to the lucky strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory and his suddenly acquired wealth often made him curiously ill at ease as if it were a reflection, quite undeserved, on his character and his manliness.
So he smiled vaguely and apologetically and shook her hand without knowing what to reply, while Martin Wedekind, guessing what was going on in the young Westerner's mind, came to the rescue.
"Yes, Fanny," he said to his wife. "Who would have believed last year that the Killicott ranch harbored a prospective capitalist?" He turned to Tom and led him to the sideboard with its hospitable array of bottles and glasses and syphons. "Shall I mix you one in honor of the occasion?"
But Tom Graves was not listening, for Bertha Wedekind had come into the dining-room, an exquisite little figure with her wheat-colored hair that rippled over the broad, smooth, low forehead in a curly, untamable mass, her violet-blue eyes, her pure oval of a face, pink and white and flower-soft. Her youthful incompleteness seemed a lovely sketch for some thing larger, finer, more splendid; just a sketch of happy, seductive hints with the high-lights of woman hood yet missing.
Tom took her narrow, white hand, looking upon her admiringly and approvingly. She was dressed in foamy silver lace over shimmering rose-pink satin, with contrasting moire ribbons in deep purple and a cluster of purple satin orchids at her high waist line.
Tom laughed. He remembered how he had seen her the year before, on the Killicott ranch where she had been spending the summer together with her parents, in riding breeches, a khaki coat, a blue silk tie loosely knotted around her slim throat, and her hair pinned up carelessly beneath a flopping, mannish stetson, riding the range alongside of him and glorying in the speed and tang and zest of it.
"By Ginger, Bertha," he said, "you've sure changed some. Now that gown of yours," he was studying it naïvely, "I lay you my rock bottom dollar it's from Paris."
Bertha smiled rather languidly.
"I am afraid you would lose your bet, Tom," she replied. "This gown is not from Paris. I bought it in Berlin. Had it made there …" And, as if returning to a subject that was uppermost in her mind: "You don't have to go to Paris any more for gowns or, oh, 'most anything. You can get everything you want in Berlin. Not only frocks and frills, but beauty, and culture, and big things, worthwhile things! Why, compared to Germany, America is …"
"Daughter," cut in her mother dryly, "aren't you forgetting that you are an American?"
"Dad is a German. Aren't you, Dad?"
Martin Wedekind flushed an angry red. "I was born in Berlin. But I am an American—every inch of me—all the time!"
"Uncle Heinrich told me in Berlin that …"
"Leave your Uncle Heinrich out of the question. He and I have gone different ways. I tell you that I am an American, while he is a Prussian officer. And—" turning to Tom and smiling bitterly, as if remembering something that had happened very long ago and that he had never been able to eradicate completely from his mind, "you know what Prussian officers are, don't you?"
Tom shook his head. His range of actual experience was limited by Spokane to the west, by Butte to the east, and the British Columbia border to the north. Of course he had known foreigners, but they were mostly Britons, Canadians, and Scandinavians, men very much like himself, men blending easily into the great, rolling West.
"I'll tell you what they are," continued Wedekind heatedly, "for I know them. They are brass-buttoned, brass-gallooned, brass-helmeted, brass-souled, saber-rattling vulgarians. They are …"
"Father! Please!" came Bertha's hurt, indignant cry, and at the same time, simultaneous with the Chinese servant's felt-slippered appearance, Mrs. Wedekind interrupted with a conciliatory:
"The soup's on the table!"
Martin Wedekind laughed.
"Never mind, little fellow," he said to his daughter, calling her by his favorite nickname, "you and I aren't going to quarrel over …"
"Over anything or anybody, Dad dear." Bertha finished the sentence for him, and gave his arm an affectionate little squeeze.
But even so there was a sort of embarrassed hush during dinner now and again when the conversation turned to Berlin; and, somehow, it seemed impossible to keep away from the subject. Bertha was young and impressionable. She had just returned from Germany after her first visit abroad; and all she had seen there, and felt and heard, was very vivid in her memory, and very important.
Tom Graves looked at her rather ruefully. He was deeply in love with her, and he said to himself that she was different from the girl he used to know, different from the clear-eyed Western girl who had ridden by his side across the rolling range of the Killicott. Harder she seemed, more sure of herself, less considerate of other people's feelings, more stubborn and unreasonable in the swing of her own prejudices, more critical and skeptical; and after dinner, when Mrs. Wedekind had left the house to call on a neighbor while her husband was stealing a surreptitious forty winks behind the shelter of the evening paper, the change struck him more forcibly than ever.
Bertha was at the piano, her fingers softly sweeping the keys while she hummed a German song:
"Klingling, tschingtsching und Paukenkrach,
Noch aus der Feme tönt es schwach,
Ganz leise bumbumbumbum tsching,
Zog da ein bunter Schmetterling,
Tschingtsching, bum, um die Ecke?" …
Tom looked at her: at the tiny points of light that danced in her fair hair, the soft curve of her neck, the slim, straight young shoulders, and he took a deep breath, like a man about to jump. He was what his life had made him, the range, the free roaming, the open, vaulted sky. Simple he was and just a little stubborn; at times easily embarrassed, but of a lean veracity, with himself and other people, that forced him to speak out sudden and unafraid where other, more sophisticated men, would have hesitated.
Thus it was now.
He had always loved her, and he had never considered the fact that he was a simple horse wrangler, while she was the daughter of a well-to-do, well-educated man. What had kept him from speaking to her of love had been the fact that he had been poor. Now he was on the road to fortune, and so he spoke straight out, without preamble:
"Bertha, I must tell you something. I …"
She turned very quickly and cut through his sentence with a gesture of her slim, white fingers.
"Don't, Tom," she said.
"But you don't know what I …"
"I do. You are going to tell me that you love me, aren't you?" And, when he did not reply, just inclined his head, she went on: "I shall never marry an American!"
"You … What?" Tom was utterly taken aback.
"I shall never marry an American," she repeated calmly.
"But—why?"
She did not reply for several seconds. She had always liked Tom, had always felt safe in his presence. There had even been moments, last year on the Killicott ranch, when her liking had edged close to the danger line of something greater. But she had changed since then. In Berlin a new world, new people, a new view-point, new prejudices, had spread before her; and, honest in so far that she saw things without spectacles, dishonest in so far that these things were only those she wanted to see, she told Tom just what she thought.
"Love to me is a romantic thing, and you—I mean, American men—are so terribly, terribly prosy, so commonplace!"
Tom Graves was hurt. Not personally hurt, but hurt in his Americanism, his patriotism. It was a narrow patriotism, geographically limited, but it was clean and good and very decent.
"Bertha," he said, "pardon me but you don't know what you're talking about!"
"Oh, don't I?"
"You don t. Romance? Is that what you are after?"
"Yes," she said stubbornly.
"All right. And aren't we Americans romantic enough for anybody who cares for that sort of thing? Why, girl, is there anything more romantic in the wide world than a typical American whose great-grandfather, rifle in arm and knife in boot, came out of Virginia into Kentucky in the days when Kentucky was the farthest frontier? Not for gain, but just to see what was going on behind the ranges? Whose grandfather drifted into Kansas when it was 'Bloody' Kansas and thence via Panama to California in the first great gold rush? Whose father mined and ranched and played poker and drank his red liquor from Alaska to the Sierras?"
"Meaning yourself?"
"You bet your life! I guess I've read some, back on the old homestead, in the long winter evenings in my father's tattered old books! I read a lot about your Brian Boru, and Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Tamerlane, and Frederick Barbarossa, and Roland, and all the other guys with their long, foreign, stem-winding names! But, say, for real, live, kicking romance, you give me a plain American, out of the Northwest, via Kentucky, Kansas, and California! Give me …"
"Teleglam, Missie!" came a soft, sing-song voice from the door, and Yat, the old Chinese servant, waddled in, giving a yellow envelope to Bertha.
She tore it open rapidly, read, and rushed over to her father.
"Dad! Dad!"
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Hello, little fellow! What's all the excitement?"
"Oh, Dad! Baron von Gotz-Wrede is coming to America! He's going to come West, to Spokane!"
Martin Wedekind did not reply. Rather pityingly he looked at Tom Graves, who was moodily studying the pattern in the claret-colored Saruk rug.
But the German baron's cable was not the only one which was flashed over the Western wires that night. For when Tom returned to his room at the Hotel Spokane he found there a telegram, dated Berlin, offering him half a million dollars spot cash for control of the Yankee Doodle Glory.
It was signed: "Johannes Hirschfeld & Co., G.M.B.H."