‘You mark my words, you let him go with Mr. Max and something will happen you’ll be sorry for!’ Come, now, Freddy” she said coaxingly and with a bantering jocosity that infuriated him, “Drink your nice chocolate that I made for you while it’s good and hot. It’s just the thing you need.” Then, seeing the angry protest in his face, she relented a little, saying: “Well, I’ll ask your mother if you can have a cup of coffee for your Second Breakfast. If she says it’s all right, I’ll make it for you.”

Zweite Frühstück! He had forgotten that abomination! At nine o’clock in the morning beer, sausages, sauerkraut, cold cut meats, and liverwurst, pumpernickel, butter, jam—and beer again! Bah! He started to tell her savagely that, so far as he was concerned, there would be no second breakfast; he’d have coffee, toast, two eggs and orange juice right now, or not at all. Yes, by God! And he’d put an end to this Mister Freddy business once for all. Did this old fool think he was a schoolboy that he should have to whine and wheedle like a ninny for a cup of coffee? Ask his mother!

The sense of injury and indignity rose up choking in his throat. Why, damn them all, he’d show them if he was to be treated like a child in arms. He’d show them that they had a grown man to deal with, who had gone out and faced the world alone, and made his own way in a foreign country while the rest of them stayed home and went to seed in a one horse town. Where would they all be now if it hadn’t been for him? Who had moved heaven and earth during the war to get food through to them? Who had smuggled, bribed, pulled wires, wrote letters, sweated blood, made use of every stratagem and exerted every influence, and spared no labor and expense to keep them all from starving? Whose money had kept them going in the years that followed the Armistice? Who was it? Oh, they knew, they knew well enough! Mister Freddy was the boy! And was the man who had done all this to ask permission of his mother to drink a cup of coffee? By God, he did not think so!

Yet, when he looked up with a tongue of fierce reproof, he saw Anna’s broad red face, which had in it all the love, the loyalty, the concern, and simple trust of those innocent and child-like people who spend their lives in serving others, and whose lives are lived only in the lives of those they serve and love. When Jack saw this, he could not speak the hot and angry words. Instead, his heart was twisted in him with wild nameless pity. It seemed to him that his life had been steeped in all the hard and iniquitous dyes of the great earth, that he could never recapture his lost innocence again, nor make these people understand the man be had become. To them he was still the child who had left them; to him they seemed themselves like children. The strange dark light of time fell over him, and he had no tongue to utter what he wished to say.

Then his mother came and sat beside him, her dark convulsive face marked deep with pride and tenderness. And one by one the others came and stood fondly around his bed; wild fury choked him, shame covered him, pain and pity stabbed his heart, but they stood round him while he dressed.

They were always with him. They were with him in the house and in the garden. They were with him when he went out in the street. They watched him eat, they came to watch him when he bathed. Each night they ushered him to bed, and every morning they were standing round him when he woke. He was never for a moment free of them, he had not a moment’s peace or privacy; horror, boredom, a feeling of loss and agony drowned his spirit. He turned on them to curse them with all the fury of his maddened and exasperated flesh, but when he looked into their faces alive with love and tenderness his heart was torn with wild pity, and he could not speak.

In the house it was always night or morning. In the street it was always morning, and under the lime trees in the garden behind the house where bright geraniums grew, it was always afternoon. And they were always with him. They prodded him with gleeful fingers, they winked at him with knowing and secretive winks, they rubbed their hands in exultant anticipation, as they hinted, darkly, at some new delight they had prepared for him. Sometimes it was Anna with something held behind her back: a plate covered with a napkin—“Guess what’s here?” He could not. It would be a heavy peach-cake, glutinous with its syrups, and covered with a luscious inch-thick coat of “schlagsahne.” And with beer! Great God! With beer! His stomach turned against this richness, his Yankee notions cautioned a trim girth for business men, and careful diets, and his man-like dignity cursed with rage because a mature and worldly man must grin and gloat like a boy over a cookie which a fool of an old woman had given him. Nevertheless, he took it smiling, trying to show the right degree of stupefied surprise and ecstasy the old woman expected him to feel.

Then the others rubbed their hands exultantly as they hinted at surprises, or told him of delights in store for him. On Monday they were invited out to Uncle Abe’s for dinner—his heart sank down with leaden weariness; on Wednesday Cousin Jake was coming with his wife for tea—his flesh turned grey with apathy; on Sunday—oh! he’d grin all over when he heard what they had planned for Sunday!—they were taking the Rhine-boat for a picnic in the woods across the river ten miles up, after which they would cross by ferry, and walk home again.

Desolation.

Jack thought that he endured it all—dinner at Uncle Abe’s together with young Abie’s stamp collections, and songs and selections at the piano by young Lena afterwards; tea with the family and Cousin Jake and his wife Sadie, and all that pompous fool’s smart-Aleck questions about America—which he had never visited but which he could talk about, of course, with all his customary conceit, assurance, and unfathomed ignorance.

Jack endured it all—food, weddings, the interminable family gatherings, and reunions, funerals, gossip, visits and receptions. He endured all the questions endlessly repeated and patiently answered to circles of dark oily faces, smiling with benignant and approving pride above fat paunches comfortably crossed by hands. He endured the picnics up the river and the long walks back, blistered feet and prehistoric plumbing, beer evenings of a sodden jollity in enormous and cavernous drinking halls, thick with a murk of smoke, glutinous with the warmth and odor of a thousand heavy bodies and roaring with the thick mixed tumults of guttural voices and Wagnerian music.

Jack endured it all, and fear ate like a vulture at his heart, desolation rested in his bowels, and his heart was torn with nameless horror and pity as he saw how like a ghost he had become to all that was a part of him, to everything with which his life was most familiar.