In the Heart of a Fool
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Title: In the Heart of a Fool
Author: William Allen White
Release date: December 8, 2009 [eBook #30627]
Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE HEART OF A FOOL ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL
BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
THE REAL ISSUE
THE COURT OF BOYVILLE
STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
IN OUR TOWN
A CERTAIN RICH MAN
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
GOD'S PUPPETS
THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL
BY
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Author of "In Our Town," "A Certain Rich Man,"
"The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me," etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I BEING STAGE DIRECTIONS, AND A CAST OF
CHARACTERS. 1
II IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE FOOL AND HIS
LADY FAIR, AND WHAT HE SAID IN HIS
HEART--THE SAME BEING THE THEME AND
THESIS OF THIS STORY 4
III IN WHICH WE CONSIDER THE LADIES--GOD
BLESS 'EM! 21
IV THE ADAMS FAMILY BIBLE LIES LIKE A
GENTLEMAN 38
V IN WHICH MARGARET MÜLLERs DWELLS IN
MARBLE HALLS AND HENRY FENN AND KENYON
ADAMS WIN NOTABLE VICTORIES 47
VI ENTER THE BEAUTY AND CHIVALRY OF
HARVEY; ALSO HEREIN WE BREAK OUR FINEST
HEART 63
VII IN WHICH WE SEE HOW LIFE TRANSLATES
ITSELF INTO THE MATERIALISM AROUND IT 69
VIII CAPTAIN MORTON ACTS AS COURT HERALD AND
MORTY SANDS AND GRANT ADAMS HEAR SAD
NEWS 80
IX WHEREIN HENRY FENN TRIES AN INTERESTING
EXPERIMENT 89
X IN WHICH MARY ADAMS TAKES A MUCH NEEDED
REST 98
XI WHEREIN A FOOL GROPES FOR A SPIRIT AND
CAN FIND ONLY DUST 103
XII IN WHICH WE LEARN THAT LOVE IS THE
LEVER THAT MOVES THE WORLD 114
XIII IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF A
DESERTED HOUSE 126
XIV IN WHICH OUR HERO STROLLS OUT WITH THE
DEVIL TO LOOK AT THE HIGH MOUNTAIN 135
XV WHEREIN WE WELCOME IN A NEW YEAR AND
CONSIDER A SERIOUS QUESTION 152
XVI GRANT ADAMS IS SOLD INTO BONDAGE AND
MARGARET FENN RECEIVES A SHOCK 163
XVII A CHAPTER WHICH INTRODUCES SOME
POSSIBLE GODS 180
XVIII OUR HERO RIDES TO HOUNDS WITH THE
PRIMROSE HUNT 187
XIX HEREIN CAPTAIN MORTON FALLS UNDER
SUSPICION AND HENRY FENN FALLS FROM
GRACE 200
XX IN WHICH HENRY FENN FALLS FROM GRACE
AND RISES AGAIN 209
XXI IN WHICH WE SEE A FAT LITTLE RASCAL ON
THE RACK 219
XXII IN WHICH TOM VAN DORN BECOMES A
WAYFARING MAN ALSO 232
XXIII HERE GRANT ADAMS DISCOVERS HIS INSIDES 241
XXIV IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE
TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN ACCOUNT IN
HIS LEDGER 252
XXV IN WHICH WE SEE TWO TEMPLES AND THE
CONTENTS THEREOF 264
XXVI DR. NESBIT STARTS ON A LONG UPWARD BUT
DEVIOUS JOURNEY 277
XXVII IN WHICH WE SEE SOMETHING COME INTO
THIS STORY OUTSIDE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 288
XXVIII WHEREIN MORTY SANDS MAKES A FEW
SENSIBLE REMARKS IN PUBLIC 298
XXIX BEING NOT A CHAPTER BUT AN INTERLUDE 309
XXX GRANT ADAMS PREACHING A MESSAGE OF LOVE
RAISES THE VERY DEVIL IN HARVEY 320
XXXI IN WHICH JUDGE VAN DORN MAKES HIS BRAGS
AND DR. NESBIT SEES A VISION 337
XXXII WHEREIN VIOLET HOGAN TAKES UP AN OLD
TRADE AND MARGARET VAN DORN SEEKS A
HIGHER PLANE 350
XXXIII IN WHICH THE ANGELS SHAKE A FOOT FOR
HENRY FENN 365
XXXIV A SHORT CHAPTER, YET IN IT WE EXAMINE
ONE CANVAS HEAVEN, ONE REAL HEAVEN, AND
TWO SNUG LITTLE HELLS 379
XXXV THE OLD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS
FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE BROTHERTON
IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT 388
XXXVI A LONG CHAPTER BUT A BUSY ONE, IN WHICH
KENYON ADAMS AND HIS MOTHER HAVE A
STRANGE MEETING, AND LILA VAN DORN
TAKES A NIGHT RIDE 403
XXXVII IN WHICH WE WITNESS A CEREMONY IN THE
TEMPLE OF LOVE 423
XXXVIII GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU 431
XXXIX BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL BUT AN
INTERMEZZO BEFORE THE LAST MOVEMENT 441
XL HERE WE HAVE THE FELLOW AND THE GIRL
BEGINNING TO PREPARE FOR THE LAST
CHAPTER 444
XLI HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS
THIRD AND LAST DEVIL 454
XLII A CHAPTER WHICH IS CONCERNED LARGELY
WITH THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF "THE FULL
STRENGTH OF THE COMPANY" 468
XLIII WHEREIN WE FIND GRANT ADAMS CALLING
UPON KENYON'S MOTHER, AND DARKNESS
FALLS UPON TWO LOVERS 496
XLIV IN WHICH WE SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN,
WITH GEORGE BROTHERTON, AND IN GENERAL
CONSIDER THE HABITANTS OF THE KINGDOM 515
XLV IN WHICH LIDA BOWMAN CONSIDERS HER
UNIVERSE AND TOM VAN DORN WINS ANOTHER
VICTORY 527
XLVI WHEREIN GRANT ADAMS PREACHES PEACE AND
LIDA BOWMAN SPEAKS HER MIND 543
XLVII IN WHICH GRANT ADAMS AND LAURA VAN DORN
TAKE A WALK DOWN MARKET STREET AND MRS.
NESBIT ACQUIRES A LONG LOST
GRANDSON-IN-LAW 561
XLVIII WHEREIN WE ERECT A HOUSE BUILT UPON A
ROCK 575
XLIX HOW MORTY SANDS TURNED AWAY SADLY AND
JUDGE VAN DORN UNCOVERED A SECRET 582
L JUDGE VAN DORN SINGS SOME MERRY SONGS
AND THEY TAKE GRANT ADAMS BEHIND A
WHITE DOOR 597
LI IN WHICH WE END AS WE BEGAN AND ALL
LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER 609
LII NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A
Q. E. D. OR A HIC FABULA DOCET 613
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL
CHAPTER I
BEING STAGE DIRECTIONS, AND A CAST OF CHARACTERS
Sunshine and prairie grass--well in the foreground. For the background,
perhaps a thousand miles away or more than half a decade removed in
time, is the American Civil War. In the blue sky a meadow lark's love
song, and in the grass the boom of the prairie chicken's wings are the
only sounds that break the primeval silence, excepting the lisping of
the wind which dimples the broad acres of tall grass--thousand upon
thousand of acres--that stretch northward for miles. To the left the
prairie grass rises upon a low hill, belted with limestone and finally
merges into the mirage on the knife edge of the far horizon. To the
southward on the canvas the prairie grass is broken by the heavy green
foliage above a sluggish stream that writhes and twists and turns
through the prairie, which rises above the stream and meets another
limestone belt upon which the waving ripples of the unmowed grass wash
southward to the eye's reach.
Enter R. U. E. a four-ox team hauling a cart laden with a printing press
and a printer's outfit; following that are other ox teams hauling carts
laden with tents and bedding, household goods, lumber, and provisions. A
four-horse team hauling merchandise, and a span of mules hitched to a
spring wagon come crashing up through the timber by the stream. Men and
women are walking beside the oxen or the teams and are riding in the
covered wagons. They are eagerly seeking something. It is the equality
of opportunity that is supposed to be found in the virgin prairies of
the new West. The men are nearly all veterans of the late war, for the
most part bearded youngsters in their twenties or early thirties. The
women are their fresh young wives. As the procession halts before the
canvas, the men and women begin to unpack the wagons and to line out on
each side of an imaginary street in the prairie. The characters are
discovered as follows:
Amos Adams, a red-bearded youth of twenty-nine and Mary Sands, his wife.
They are printers and begin unpacking and setting up the printing
material in a tent.
Dr. James Nesbit and Bedelia Satterthwaite, his wife, in the tent beside
the Adamses.
Captain Ezra Morton, and Ruth his wife; he is selling a patent,
self-opening gate.
Ahab Wright, in side whiskers, white necktie, flannel shirt and
carefully considered trousers tucked in shiny boots.
Daniel Sands, Jane, his young wife, and Mortimer, her infant stepson.
Daniel owns the merchandise in the wagon.
Casper Herdicker, cobbler, and Brunhilde Herdicker, his wife.
Herman Müller, bearded, coarse-featured, noisy; a Pennsylvania Dutchman,
his faded, rope-haired, milk-eyed, sickly wife and Margaret, their baby
daughter.
Kyle Perry, owner of the horses and spring wagon.
Dick Bowman, Ira Dooley, Thomas Williams, James McPherson, Dennis Hogan,
a boy, laborers.
As other characters enter during the early pages of the story they shall
be properly introduced.
As the actors unload their wagons the spectators may notice above their
heads bright, beautiful and evanescent forms coming and going in and out
of being. These are the visions of the pioneers, and they are vastly
more real than the men and women themselves. For these visions are the
forces that form the human crystal.
Here abideth these three: sunshine and prairie grass and blue sky, cloud
laden. These for ages have held domain and left the scene unchanged.
When lo--at Upper Middle Entrance,--enter love! And love witched the
dreams and visions of those who toiled in the sunshine and prairie grass
under the blue sky cloud laden. And behold what they visioned in the
witchery of love, took form and spread upon the prairie in wood and
stone and iron, and became a part of the life of the Nation. Blind men
in other lands, in other times looked at the Nation and saw only wood
and stone and iron. Yet the wood and stone and iron should not have
symbolized the era in America. Rather should the dreams and visions of
the pioneers, of those who toiled under the sunshine and in the prairie
grass have symbolized our strength. For half a century later when the
world was agonizing in a death grapple with the mad gods of a crass
materialism, mankind saw rising from the wood and stone and iron that
had seemed to epitomize this Nation, a spirit which had lain hidden yet
dormant in the Nation's life--a beautiful spirit of idealism strong,
brave and humbly wise; the child of the dreams and visions and the love
of humanity that dwelled in the hearts of the pioneers of that earlier
time.
But this is looking forward. So let us go back to scene one, act one, in
those days before the sunshine was shaded, the prairie grass worn off,
and the blue sky itself was so stained and changed that the meadow-lark
was mute!
And now we are ready for the curtain: and--music please.
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE FOOL AND HIS LADY FAIR AND WHAT HE SAID IN HIS
HEART--THE SAME BEING THE THEME AND THESIS OF THIS STORY
A story is a curious thing, that grows with a kind of consciousness of
its own. Time was, in its invertebrate period of gestation when this
story was to be Amos Adams's story. It was to be the story of one who
saw great visions that were realized, who had from the high gods
whispers of their plans. What a book it would have been if Amos and Mary
could have written it--the story of dreams come true. But alas, the high
gods mocked Amos Adams. Mary's clippings from the Tribune--a great
litter of them, furnished certain dates and incidents for the story.
Often when the Tribune was fresh from the press Mary and Amos would sit
together in the printing office and Mary eaten with pride would clip
from the damp paper the grandiloquent effusions of Amos that seemed to
fit into other items that were to remind them of things which they could
not print in their newspaper but which would be material for their book.
What a bundle of these clippings there is! And there was the diary, or
old-fashioned Memory Book of Mary Adams. What a pile of neatly folded
sheets covered with Mary Adams' handwriting are there on the table by
the window! What memories they revive, what old dead joys are brought to
life, what faded visions are repainted. This is to be the Book--the book
that they dreamed of in their youth--even before little Kenyon was born,
before Jasper was born, indeed before Grant was born.
But now the years have written in many things and it will not be even
their story. Indeed as life wrote upon their hearts its mysterious
legend--the legend that erased many of their noble dreams and put iron
into their souls, there is evidence in what they wrote that they thought
it would be Grant's story. Most parents think their sons will be heroes.
But their boy had to do his part in the world's rough work and before
the end the clippings and the notes in the Memory Book show that they
felt that a hero in blue overalls would hardly answer for their Book.
Then there came a time when Amos alone in his later years thought that
it might be Kenyon's story; for Kenyon now is a fiddler of fame, and
fiddlers make grand heroes. But as the clippings and the notes show
forth still another story, the Book that was to be their book and story,
may not be one man's or one woman's story. It may not be even the story
of a town; though Harvey's story is tragic enough. (Indeed sometimes it
has seemed that the story of Harvey, rising in a generation out of the
sunshine and prairie grass, a thousand flued hell, was to be the story
of the Book.) But now Harvey seems to be only a sign of the times, a
symptom of the growth of the human soul. So the Book must tell the tale
of a time and a place where men and women loved and strove and joyed or
suffered and lost or won after the old, old fashion of our race; with
only such new girdles and borders and frills in the record of their work
and play as the changing skirts of passing circumstance require. The
Book must be more than Amos Adams's or his son's or his son's son's
story or his town's, though it must be all of these. It must be the
story of many men and many women, each one working out his salvation in
his own way and all the threads woven into the divine design, carrying
along in its small place on the loom the inscrutable pattern of human
destiny. But most of all it should be the story which shall explain the
America that rose when her great day came--exultant, triumphant to the
glorious call of an ideal, arose from sordid things environing her body
and soul, and consecrated herself without stint or faltering hand to the
challenge of democracy.
In the old days--the old days when Amos Adams was young--he printed the
Harvey _Tribune_ on a hand press. Mary spread the ink upon the
types; he pulled the great lever that impressed each sheet; and as they
worked they sang about the coming of the new day. As a soldier--a
commissioned officer he had fought in the great Civil War for the truth
that should make men free. And he was sure in those elder days that the
new day was just dawning. And Mary was sure too; so the readers of the
Tribune were assured that the dawn was at hand. The editor knew that
there were men who laughed at him for his hopes. But he and Mary, his
wife, only laughed at men who were so blind that they could not see the
dawn. So for many years they kept on rallying to whatever faith or
banner or cause seemed surest in its promise of the sunrise.
Green-backers, Grangers, Knights of Labor, Prohibitionists--these two
crusaders followed all of the banners. And still there came no sunrise.
Farmers' Alliance, Populism, Free Silver--Amos marched with each
cavalcade. And was hopeful in its defeat.
And thus the years dragged on and made decades and the decades marshaled
into a generation that became an era, and a city rose around a mature
man. And still in his little office on a rickety side street, the
_Tribune_, a weekly paper in a daily town, kept pointing to the
sunrise; and Amos Adams, editor and proprietor, an old fool with the
faith of youth, for many years had a book to write and a story to
tell--a story that was never told, for it grew beyond him.
He printed the first edition of the _Tribune_ in his tent under an
elm tree in a vast, unfenced meadow that rose from the fringe of timber
that shaded the Wahoo. Volume one, number one, told a waiting world of
the formation of the town company of Harvey with Daniel Sands as
president. It was one of thousands of towns founded after the Civil
War--towns that were bursting like mushrooms through the prairie soil.
After that war in which millions of men gave their youth and myriads
gave their lives for an ideal, came a reaction. And in the decades that
followed the war, men gave themselves to an orgy of materialism. Harvey
was a part of that orgy. And the Ohio crowd, the group that came from
Elyria--the Sandses, the Adamses, Joseph Calvin, Ahab Wright, Kyle
Perry, the Kollanders[1] and all the rest except the Nesbits--were so
considerable a part of Harvey in the beginning, that probably they were
as guilty as the rest of the country in the crass riot of greed that
followed the war. They brought Amos Adams to Harvey because he was a
printer and in those halcyon days all printers were supposed to be able
to write; and he brought Mary--but did he bring Mary? He was never sure
whether he brought her or she brought him. For Mary Sands--dear, dear
Mary Sands--she had a way with her. She was not Irish for nothing, God
bless her.
Amos always tried to be fair with Daniel Sands because he was Mary's
brother; even though there was a time after he came home a young soldier
from the war and found that Daniel Sands who hired a substitute and
stayed at home, had won Esther Haley, who was pledged to Amos,--a time
when Amos would have killed Daniel Sands. That passed, Mary, Daniel's
sister, came; and for years Amos Adams bore Daniel Sands no grudge. What
has all his money done for Daniel. It has ground the joy out of him--for
one thing. And as for Esther, somewhere about Elyria, Ohio, the grass is
growing over her grave and for forty years only Mortimer, her son, with
her eyes and mouth and hair, was left in the world to remind Amos of the
days when he was stark mad; and Mary, dear, dear, Irish Mary Sands,
caught his heart upon the bounce and made him happy.
So let us say that Mary brought Amos to Harvey with the Ohio crowd, as
Daniel Sands and his followers were known, The other early settlers came
to grow up with the country and to make their independent fortunes; but
Mary and Amos came to see the sunrise. For they were sure that men and
women starting in a new world having found equality of opportunity,
would not make this new world sordid, unfair and cruel as the older
world was around them in those days.
Amos and Mary took up their homestead just south of the town on the
Wahoo, and started the Tribune, and Mary hoped the high hopes of the
Irish while Amos wrote his part of the news, set his share of the type,
ran the errands for the advertising and bragged of the town in their
editorial columns with all the faith of an Irishman by marriage.
What a fairy story the history of Harvey would be if it should be
written only as it was. For one could even begin it once upon a time.
Once upon a time, let us say, there was a land of sunshine and prairie
grass. And then great genii came and set in little white houses and new
unpainted barns, thumbed in faint green hedgerows and board fences, that
checkered in the fields lying green or brown or loam black by the
sluggish streams that gouged broad, zigzag furrows in the land. And upon
a hill that overlooked a rock-bottomed stream the genii, the spirit of
the time, sat a town. It glistened in the sunshine and when the town was
over a year old, it was so newly set in, that its great stone
schoolhouse all towered and tin-corniced, beyond the scattered outlying
residences, rose in the high, untrodden grass. The people of Harvey were
vastly proud of that schoolhouse. The young editor and his wife used to
gaze at it adoringly as they drove to and from the office morning and
evening; and they gilded the town with high hopes. For then they were in
their twenties. The population of Harvey for the most part those first
years was in its twenties also, when gilding is cheap. But thank Heaven
the gilding of our twenties is lasting.
It was into this gilded world that Grant Adams was born. Suckled behind
the press, cradled in the waste basket, toddling under hurrying feet,
Grant's earliest memories were of work--work and working lovers, and
their gay talk as they worked wove strange fancies in his little mind.
It was in those days that Amos Adams and his wife, considering the
mystery of death, tried to peer behind the veil. For Amos tables tipped,
slates wrote, philosophers, statesmen and conquerors flocked in with
grotesque advice, and all those curious phenomena that come from the
activities of the abnormal mind, appeared and astounded the visionaries
as they went about their daily work. The boy Grant used to sit, a
wide-eyed, freckled, sun-browned little creature, running his skinny
little hands through his red hair, and wondering about the unsolvable
problems of life and death.
But soon the problems of a material world came in upon Grant as the
child became a boy: problems of the wood and field, problems of the
constantly growing herd at play in water, in snow, on the ice and in the
prairie; and then came the more serious problems of the wood box, the
stable and farm. Thus he grew strong of limb, quick of hand, firm of
foot and sure of mind. And someway as he grew from childhood into
boyhood, getting hold of his faculties--finding himself physically, so
Harvey seemed to grow with him. All over the town where men needed money
Daniel Sands's mortgages were fastened--not heavily (nothing was heavy
in that day of the town's glorious youth) but surely. Dr. Nesbit's gay
ruthless politics, John Kollander's patriotism, leading always to the
court house and its emoluments, Captain Morton's inventions that never
materialized, the ever coming sunrise of the Adams--all these things
became definitely a part of the changeless universe of Harvey as Grant's
growing faculties became part of his consciousness.
And here is a mystery: the formation of the social crystal. In that
crystal the outer facets and the inner fell into shape--the Nesbits, the
Kollanders, the Adamses, the Calvins, the Mortons, and the Sandses,
falling into one group; and the Williamses, the Hogans, the Bowmans, the
McPhersons, the Dooleys and Casper Herdicker falling into another group.
The hill separated from the valley. The separation was not a matter of
moral sense; for John Kollander and Dan Sands and Joseph Calvin touched
zero in moral intelligence; and it could not have been business sense,
for Captain Morton for all his dreams was a child with a dollar, and Dr.
Nesbit never was out of debt a day in his life; without his salary from
tax-payers John Kollander would have been a charge on the county. In the
matter of industry Daniel Sands was a marvel, but Jamie McPherson
toiling all day used to come home and start up his well drill and its
clatter could be heard far into the night, and often he started it hours
before dawn. Nor could aspirations and visions have furnished the line
of cleavage; for no one could have hopes so high for Harvey as Jamie,
who sank his drill far into the earth, put his whole life, every penny
of his earnings and all his strength into the dream that some day he
would bring coal or oil or gas to Harvey and make it a great city. Yet
when he found the precious vein, thick and rich and easy to mine, Daniel
Sands and Joseph Calvin took his claim from him by chicanery as easily
as they would have robbed a blind man of a penny, and Jamie went to work
in the mines for Daniel Sands grumbling but faithful. Williams and
Dooley and Hogan and Herdicker bent at their daily tasks in those first
years, each feeling that the next day or the next month or at most the
next year his everlasting fortune would be made. And Dick Bowman, cohort
of Dr. Nesbit, many a time and oft would wash up, put on a clean suit,
and go out and round up the voters in the Valley for the Doctor's cause
and scorn his task with a hissing; for Dick read Karl Marx and dreamed
of the day of the revolution. Yet he dwelled with the sons of Essua, who
as they toiled murmured about their stolen birthright. When a decade had
passed in Harvey the social crystal was firm; the hill and the valley
were cast into the solid rock of things as they are. No one could say
why; it was a mystery. It is still a mystery. As society forms and
reforms, its cleavages follow unknown lines.
It was on a day in June--late in the morning, after Grant and Nathan
Perry--son of the stuttering Kyle of that name, had come from a cool
hour in the quiet pool down on the Wahoo and little Grant, waiting like
a hungry pup for his lunch, that was tempting him in the basket under
the typerack, was counting the moments and vaguely speculating as to
what minutes were--when he looked up from the floor and saw what seemed
to him a visitor from another world.[2]
The creature was talking to Amos Adams sitting at the desk; and Amos was
more or less impressed with the visitor's splendor. He wore exceedingly
tight trousers--checked trousers, and a coat cut grandly and
extravagantly in its fullness, a high wing collar, and a soup dish hat.
He was such a figure as the comic papers of the day were featuring as
the exquisite young man of the period.
Youth was in his countenance and lighted his black eyes. His oval,
finely featured face, his blemishless olive skin, his strong jaw and his
high, beautiful forehead, over which a black wing of hair hung
carelessly, gave him a distinction that brought even the child's eyes to
him. He was smiling pleasantly as he said,
"I'm Thomas Van Dorn--Mr. Adams, I believe?" he asked, and added as he
fastened his fresh young eyes upon the editor's, "you scarcely will
remember me--but you doubtless remember the day when father's hunting
party passed through town? Well--I've come to grow up with the country."
The editor rose, roughed his short, sandy beard and greeted the youth
pleasantly. "Mr. Daniel Sands sent me to you, Mr. Adams--to print a
professional card in your paper," said the young man. He pronounced them
"cahd" and "papuh" and smiled brightly as his quick eyes told him that
the editor was conscious of his eastern accent. While they were talking
business, locating the position of the card in the newspaper, the editor
noticed that the young man's eyes kept wandering to Mary Adams,
typesetting across the room. She was a comely woman just in her thirties
and Amos Adams finally introduced her. When he went out the Adamses
talked him over and agreed that he was an addition to the town.
Within a month he had formed a partnership with Joseph Calvin, the
town's eldest lawyer; and young Henry Fenn, who had been trying for a
year to buy a partnership with Calvin, was left to go it alone. So Henry
Fenn contented himself with forming a social partnership with his young
rival. And when the respectable Joseph Calvin was at home or considering
the affairs of the Methodist Sunday School of which he was
superintendent, young Mr. Fenn and young Mr. Van Dorn were rambling at
large over the town and the adjacent prairie, seeking such diversion as
young men in their exceedingly early twenties delight in: Mr. Riley's
saloon, the waters of the Wahoo, by moonlight, the melliferous strains
of "Larboard watch," the shot gun, the quail and the prairie chicken,
the quarterhorse, and the jackpot, the cocktail, the Indian pony, the
election, the footrace, the baseball team, the Sunday School picnic, the
Fourth of July celebration, the dining room girls at the Palace Hotel,
the cross country circus and the trial of the occasional line fence
murder case--all were divertissements that engaged their passing young
attention.
If ever the world was an oyster for a youth the world of Harvey and the
fullness thereof was an oyster to Thomas Van Dorn. He had all that the
crude western community cherished: the prestige of money, family,
education, and that indefinable grace and courtesy of body and soul that
we call charm. And Harvey people seemed to be made for him. He liked
their candor, their strength, their crass materialism, their bray and
bluster, their vain protests of democracy and their unconscious regard
for his caste and culture. So whatever there was of egoism in his nature
grew unchecked by Harvey. He was the young lord of the manor. However
Harvey might hoot at his hat and gibe at his elided R's and mock his
rather elaborate manners behind his back; nevertheless he had his way
with the town and he knew that he was the master. While those about him
worked and worried Tom Van Dorn had but to rub lightly his lamp and the
slave appeared and served him. Naturally a young man of his conspicuous
talents in his exceedingly early twenties who has the vast misfortune to
have a lamp of Aladdin to rub, asks genii first of all for girls and
girls and more girls. Then incidentally he asks for business and perhaps
for politics and may be as an afterthought and for his own comfort he
may pray for the good will of his fellows. Tom Van Dorn became known in
the vernacular as a "ladies man." It did not hurt his reputation as a
lawyer, for he was young and youth is supposed to have its follies so
long as its follies are mere follies. No one in that day hinted that Tom
Van Dorn was anything more dangerous than a butterfly. So he flitted
from girl to girl, from love affair to love affair, from heart to heart
in his gay clothes with his gay manners and his merry face. And men
smiled and women and girls whispered and boys hooted and all the world
gave the young lord his way. But when he included the dining room girls
at the Palace Hotel in his list of conquests, Dr. Nesbit began squinting
seriously at the youth and, late at night coming from his professional
visits, when the doctor passed the young fellow returning from some
humble home down near the river, the Doctor would pipe out in the night,
"Tut, tut, Tom--this is no place for you."
But the Doctor was too busy with his own affairs to assume the
guardianship of Tom Van Dorn. As Mayor of Harvey the Doctor made the
young man city attorney, thereby binding the youth to the Mayor in the
feudal system of politics and attaching all the prestige and charm and
talent of the boy to the Doctor's organization.
For Dr. Nesbit in his blithe and cock-sure youth was born to politics as
the sparks fly upward. Men looked to him for leadership and he blandly
demanded that they follow him. He was every man's friend. He knew the
whole county by its first name. The men, the women, the children, the
dogs, the horses knew him and he knew and loved them all. But in return
for his affection he expected loyalty. He was a jealous leader who
divided no honors. Seven months in the year he wore white linen clothes
and his white clad figure bustling through a crowd on Market Street on
Saturday or elbowing its way through a throng at any formal gathering,
or jogging through the night behind his sorrel mare or moving like a
pink-faced cupid, turned Nemesis in a county convention, made him a
marked man in the community. But what was more important, his
distinction had a certain cheeriness about it. And his cheeriness was
vocalized in a high, piping, falsetto voice, generally gay and nearly
always soft and kindly. It expressed a kind of incarnate good nature
that disarmed enmity and drew men to him instinctively. And underneath
his amicability was iron. Hence men came to him in trouble and he healed
their ills, cured their souls, went on their notes and took their hearts
for his own, which carried their votes for his uses. So he became calif
of Harvey.
Even deaf John Kollander who had political aspirations of a high order
learned early that his road to glory led through obedience to the
Doctor. So John went about the county demanding that the men who had
saved the union should govern it and declaring that the flag of his
country should not be trailed in the dust by vandal hands--meaning of
course by "vandal hands" the opposition candidate for register of deeds
or county clerk or for whatever county office John was asking at that
election; and at the convention John's old army friends voted for the
Doctor's slate and in the election they supported the Doctor's ticket.
But tall, deaf John Kollander in his blue army clothes with their brass
buttons and his campaign hat, always cut loose from Dr. Nesbit's
paternal care after every election. For the Doctor, after he had tucked
John away in a county office, asked only to appoint John's deputies and
that Mrs. Kollander keep out of the Doctor's office and away from his
house.
"I have no objections," the Doctor would chirrup at the ample,
good-natured Rhoda Kollander who would haunt him during John's periods
of political molting, pretending to advise with the Doctor on her
husband's political status, "to your society from May until November
every two years, Rhody, but that's enough. Now go home! Go home, woman,"
he commanded, "and look after your growing family."
And Rhoda Kollander would laugh amiably in telling it and say, "Now I
suppose some women would get mad, but law, I know Doc Jim! He doesn't
mean a thing!" Whereupon she would settle down where she was stopping
until meal time and reluctantly remain to eat. As she settled
comfortably at the table she would laugh easily and exclaim: "Now isn't
it funny! I don't know what John and the boys will have. There isn't a
thing in the house. But, law, I suppose they can get along without me
once in a lifetime." Then she would laugh and eat heartily and sit
around until the crisis at home had passed.
But the neighbors knew that John Kollander was opening a can of
something, gathering the boys around him and as they ate, recounting the
hardships of army life to add spice to an otherwise stale and
unprofitable meal. Afterward probably he would go to some gathering of
his comrades and there fight, bleed and die for his country. For he was
an incorrigible patriot. The old flag, his country's honor, and the
preservation of the union were themes that never tired him. He organized
his fellow veterans in the town and county and helped to organize them
in the state and was forever going to other towns to attend camp fires
and rallies and bean dinners and reunions where he spoke with zeal and
some eloquence about the danger of turning the country over to the
southern brigadiers. He had a set speech which was greatly admired at
the rallies and in this speech it was his wont to reach for one of the
many flags that always adorned the platform on such occasions, tear it
from its hanging and wrapping it proudly about his gaunt figure, recite
a dialogue between himself and the angel Gabriel, the burden of which
was that so long as John Kollander had that flag about him at the
resurrection, no question would be asked at Heaven's gate of one of its
defenders. Now the fact was that John Kollander was sent to the war of
the rebellion a few weeks before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, as
Daniel Sands's paid substitute and his deafness was caused by firing an
anvil at the peace jubilee in Cincinnati, the powder on the anvil being
the only powder John Kollander ever had smelled. But his descriptions of
battle and the hardships and horrors of war were none the less vivid and
harrowing because he had never crossed the Ohio.
Those were the days when the _Tribune_ was at its zenith--the days
when Jared Thurston was employed as its foreman and Lizzie Coulter,
pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired Lizzie Coulter helped Mary Adams to set
the type. It was not a long Day of Triumph, but while it lasted Mary and
Amos made the most of it and spoke in a grand way about "the office
force." They even had vague notions of starting a daily and many a night
Jared and Amos pored over the type samples in the advertising in Rounds
Printer's Cabinet, picked out the type they would need and the other
equipment necessary for the new venture. But it was only a dream. For
gradually Jared found Lizzie's eyes and he found more to interest him
there than in the type-book, and so the dream faded and was gone.
Also as Lizzie's eyes began to glow in his sky, Jared let his interest
lag in the talk at Casper Herdicker's shoe shop, though it was tall
talk, and Jared sitting on a keg in a corner with little Tom Williams,
the stone mason, beside him on a box, and Denny Hogan near him on a
vacant work bench and Ira Dooley on the window ledge would wrangle until
bed time many a night as Dick Bowman, wagging a warlike head, and Casper
pegging away at his shoes, tore society into shreds, smashed idols and
overturned civilization. Up to this point there was complete agreement
between the iconoclasts. They went so far together that they had no
quarrel about the route of the mob down Fifth Avenue in New York--which
Dick knew only as a legend but which Casper had seen; and they were one
in the belief that Dan Sands's bank and Wright & Perry's store should
fall early in the sack of Market Street. But when it came to
reconstructing society there was a clash that mounted to a cataclysm.
For Dick, shaking his head violently, demanded a government that should
regulate everything and Casper waving a vicious, flat-nosed hammer,
battered down all government and stood for the untrammeled and
unhampered liberty of the individual. Night after night they looted
civilization and stained the sky with their fires and the ground with
the oppressor's blood, only to sink their claws and tusks into each
other's vitals in mortal combat over the spoil.
About the time that Jared Thurston found the new stars that had ranged
across his ken, Tom Van Dorn, the handsome, cheerful, exquisite Tom Van
Dorn began to find the debates between Casper and Dick Bowman diverting.
So many a night when the society of the softer sex was either cloying or
inconvenient, the dapper young fellow would come dragging Henry Fenn
with him, to sit on a rickety chair and observe the progress of the
revolution and to enjoy the carnage that always followed the downfall of
the established order. He used to sit beside Jared Thurston who, being a
printer, was supposed to belong to the more intellectual of the crafts
and hence more appreciative than Williams or Dooley or Hogan, of his
young lordship's point of view; and as the debate waxed warm, Tom was
wont to pinch the lean leg of Mr. Thurston in lieu of the winks Tom
dared not venture. But a time came when Jared Thurston sat apart from
Van Dorn and stared coldly at him. And as Tom and Henry Fenn walked out
of the human slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a
particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn
walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while
Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his
face, looked at Tom with great, bright, sympathetic eyes and cut in:
"Tom--why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class
or of your kind. What's your idea in cutting in between Jared and her;
you'll only make trouble."
A smile, a gay, happy, and withal a seductive smile lit up the handsome,
oval face of young Mr. Van Dorn. The smile became a laugh, a quiet,
insinuating, good-natured, light-hearted laugh. As he laughed he
replied:
"Lizzie's all right, Henry--don't worry about Lizzie." Again he laughed
a gentle, deep-voiced chuckle, and held up his hand in the moonlight. A
brown scab was lined across the back of the hand and as Henry saw it Van
Dorn spoke: "Present from Lizzie--little pussy." Again he chuckled and
added, "Nearly made the horse run away, too. Anyway," he laughed
pleasantly, "when I left her she promised to go again."
But Henry Fenn returned to his point: "Tom," he cried, "don't play with
Lizzie--she's not your kind, and it's breaking Jared's heart. Can't you
see what you're doing? You'll go down there a dozen times, make love to
her, hold her hand and kiss her and go away and pick up another girl.
But she's the whole world and Heaven to boot for Jared. She's his one
little ewe lamb, Tom. And she'd be happy with Jared if--"
"If she wants Jared she can have him. I'm not holding her," interrupted
the youth. "And anyway," he exclaimed, "what do I owe to Jared and what
do I owe to her or to any one but myself!"
Fenn did not answer at once. At length he broke the silence. "Well, you
heard what I said and I didn't smile when I said it."
But Tom Van Dorn did smile as he answered, a smile of such sweetness,
and of such winning grace that it sugar-coated his words.
"Henry," he cried in his gay, deep voice with the exuberance of youth
ringing in it, "the world is mine. You know what I think about this
whole business. If Lizzie doesn't want me to bother her she mustn't have
such eyes and such hair and such lips. In this life I shall take what I
find that I can get. I'm not going to be meek nor humble nor patient,
nor forgiving and forbearing and I'm not going to refrain from a mutton
roast because some one has a ewe lamb."
He put a warm, kind, brotherly hand on the shoulder beside him.
"Shocked, aren't you, Henry?" he asked, laughing.
Henry Fenn looked up with a gentle, glowing smile on his rather dull
face and returned, "No, Tom. Maybe you can make it go, but I couldn't."
"Well, I can. Watch me," he cried arrogantly. "Henry, I want the
advantage of my strength in this world and I'm not going to go puling
around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless
a ride. Let 'em walk. Let 'em fall. Let 'em rot for all I care. I'm not
afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place
where man puts on trousers it's a battle of thews and teeth. And nature
never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of
things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly
philosophy of Christ--it doesn't fool me, Henry. I'm a pagan and I want
the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to
live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to
the full--live it hard--live it beautifully, but live it! live it!
Henry, live it like a gentleman and not like an understrapper and
bootlicker! I intend to command, not obey! Rule, not serve! I shall take
and not give--not give save as it pleases me to have my hand licked now
and then! As for Lizzie and Jared," young Mr. Van Dorn waved a gay hand,
"let them look out for themselves. They're not my worries!"
"But, Tom," remonstrated Henry as he looked at the ground, "it's nothing
to me of course, but Lizzie--"
"Ah, Henry," Van Dorn laughed gayly, "I'm not going to hurt Lizzie.
She's good fun: that's all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher--you come
moralizing around me about what I'm doing to some one else, which after
all is not my business but hers; and I'm right here to tell you, what
you're doing to yourself, and that's your business and no one's else.
You're drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky
never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I
beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Müller
and his 'pretty brown-eyed daughter' as you called her, you forgot slick
and clean the flaw in Morse's deed."
"I suppose you're right, Tom. But I was feeling kind of off that day,
mother'd been sick the night before and--"
"And so you filled up with a lot of bad whisky and driveled and wept and
stumbled through the case and I beat you. I tell you, Henry, I keep
myself fit. I have no time to look after others. My job is myself and
you'll find that unless you look after yourself no one else will, at
least whisky won't. If I find girling is beating me in my law cases I
quit girling. But it doesn't. Lord, man, the more I know of human
nature, the more I pick over the souls of these country girls and blow
open the petals of their pretty hearts, the wiser I am."
"But the girls, Tom--the girls--" protested the somber-eyed Mr. Fenn.
"Ah, I don't hurt 'em and they like it. And so long as your whisky
hamestrings you and my girls give me what I need in my business--don't
talk to me."
Tom Van Dorn left Fenn at his mother's door and as Fenn saw his friend
turn toward the south he called, "Aren't you going to your room?"
"Why, it's only eleven o'clock," answered Van Dorn. To the inquiring
silence Van Dorn called, "I'm going down to see Lizzie."
Henry Fenn stood looking at his friend, who explained: "That's all
right. I said I'd be down to-night and she'll wait."
"Well--" said Fenn. But Van Dorn cut him short with "Now, Henry, I can
take care of myself. Lizzie can take care of herself--and you're the
only one of us who, as I see it, needs careful nursing!" And with that
he went striding away.
And three hours later when the moon was waning in the west a girl
sitting by her window gazed at the red orb and dreamed beautiful dreams,
such as a girl may dream but once, of the prince who had come to her so
gloriously. While the prince strolled up the street with his coat over
his arm, his hat in his hand, letting the night wind flutter the raven's
wing of hair on his brow, and as he went he laughed to himself softly
and laughed and laughed. For are we not told of old to put not our trust
in princes!
[Footnote 1: The reader may be interested in seeing one of Mary Adams's
clippings with a note attached. Here is one concerning Mrs. John
Kollander. The clipping from the Harvey _Tribune_ of June, 1871,
reads:
"Mrs. Rhoda Byrd Kollander arrived to-day from Elyria, Ohio. It is her
first visit to Harvey and she was greeted by her husband, Hon. John
Kollander, Register of Deeds of Greeley County, with a handsome new home
in Elm Street."
Then under it is this note:
"Of all the women of the Elyria settlers, Rhoda Kollander would not come
with us and face the hardships of pioneer life; but she made John come
out, get an office and build her a cabin before she would come. Rhoda
will not be happy as an angel unless they have rocking chairs in
Heaven."]
[Footnote 2: Let us read Mary Adams's clipping and note on the arrival
of young Thomas Van Dorn in Harvey. The clipping which is from the local
page of the paper reads:
"Thomas Van Dorn, son of the late General Nicholas Van Dorn of
Schenectady, New York, has located in Harvey for the practice of law and
his advertising card appears elsewhere. Mr. Van Dorn is a Yale man and a
law graduate of that school as well as an alumnus of the college. As a
youth with his father young Thomas stopped in Harvey the day the town
was founded. He was a member of the hunting party organized by Wild Bill
which under General Van Dorn's patronage escorted the Russian Grand Duke
Alexis over this part of the state after buffalo and wild game. Mr.
Thomas Van Dorn remembers the visit well, and old settlers will recall
the fact that Daniel Sands that day sold for $100 in gold to the General
the plot now known as Van Dorn's addition to Harvey. Mr. Thomas Van Dorn
still has the deed to the plot and will soon put the lots on the market.
He was a pleasant caller at the _Tribune_ office this week. Come
again, say we."
And upon a paper whereon the clipping is pasted is this in Mary Adams's
hand:
"The famous Van Dorn baby! How the years have flown since the scandal of
his mother's elopement and his father's duel with Sir Charles shook two
continents. What an old rake the General was. And the boy's mother after
two other marriages and a sad period on the variety stage died alone in
penury! And Amos says that the General was so insolent to his men in the
war, that he dared not go into action with them for fear they would
shoot him in the back. Yet the boy is as lovely and gentle a creature as
one could ask to meet. This is as it should be."]
CHAPTER III
IN WHICH WE CONSIDER THE LADIES--GOD BLESS 'EM!
During those years in the late seventies and the early eighties, the
genii on the Harvey job grunted and grumbled as they worked, for the
hours were long and tedious and the material was difficult to handle.
Kyle Perry's wife died, and it was all the genii could do to find him a
cook who would stay with him and his lank, slab-sided son, and when the
genii did produce a cook--the famous Katrina, they wished her on Kyle
and the boy for life, and she ruled them with an iron rod. And to even
things up, they let Kyle stutter himself into a partnership with Ahab
Wright--though Kyle was trying to tell Ahab that they should have a
partition in their stable. But partition was too much of a mouthful and
poor Kyle fell to stuttering on it and found himself sold into bondage
for life by the genii, dispensing nails and cod-fish and calico as
Ahab's partner, before Kyle could get rid of the word partition.
The genii also had to break poor Casper Herdicker's heart--and he had
one, and a big one, despite his desire for blood and plunder; and they
broke it when his wife Brunhilde deserted the hearthstone back of the
shoe-shop, rented a vacant store room on Market Street and went into the
millinery way of life. And it wasn't enough that the tired genii had to
gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to
dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel,
witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn't enough that
they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging
strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn't enough that the overworked
genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with the
railroad--and he was load enough for any engine; his heart itself
weighed ten stone; it wasn't enough that they had to find various and
innumerable contraptions for Captain Morton to peddle, but there was Tom
Van Dorn's new black silk mustache to grow, and to be oiled and curled
daily; so he had to go to the Palace Hotel barber shop at least once
every day, and passing the cigar counter, he had to pass by Violet
Mauling--pretty, empty-faced, doll-eyed Violet Mauling at the cigar
stand. And all the long night and all the long day, the genii, working
on the Harvey job, cast spells, put on charms, and did their deepest
sorcery to take off the power of the magic runes that young Tom's black
art were putting upon her; and day after day the genii felt their
highest potencies fail. So no wonder they mumbled and grumbled as they
bent over their chores. For a time, the genii had tried to work on Tom
Van Dorn's heart after he dropped Lizzie Coulter and sent her away on a
weary life pilgrimage with Jared Thurston, as the wife of an itinerant
editor; but they found nothing to work on under Tom's cigar holder--that
is, nothing in the way of a heart. There was only a kind of public
policy. So the genii made the public policy as broad and generous as
they could and let it go at that.
Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn rioted in their twenties. John Hollander
saved a bleeding country, pervaded the courthouse and did the housework
at home while Rhoda, his wife, who couldn't cook hard boiled eggs,
organized the French Cooking Club. Captain Ezra Morton spent his mental
energy upon the invention of a self-heating molasses spigot, which he
hoped would revolutionize the grocery business while his physical energy
was devoted to introducing a burglar proof window fastener into the
proud homes that were dotting the tall grass environs of Harvey. Amos
Adams was hearing rappings and holding-high communion with great spirits
in the vasty deep. Daniel Sands, having buried his second wife, was
making eyes at a third and spinning his financial web over the town. Dr.
and Mrs. Nesbit were marvelling at the mystery of a child's soul, a
maiden's soul, reaching out tendril after tendril as the days made
years. The Dick Bowman's were holding biennial receptions to the little
angels who came to the house in the Doctor's valise--and welcomed,
hilariously welcomed babies they were--welcomed with cigars and free
drinks at Riley's saloon by Dick, and in awed silence by Lida, his
wife--welcomed even though the parents never knew exactly how the
celestial guests were to be robed and harped; while the Joe Calvins of
proud Elm Street, opulent in an eight room house, with the town's one
bath tub, scowled at the angels who kept on coming nevertheless--for
such is the careless and often captious way of angels that come to the
world in the doctor's black bag--kept on coming to the frowning house of
Calvin as frequently and as idly as they came to the gay Bowmans.
Looking back on those days a generation later, it would seem as if the
whole town were a wilderness of babies. They came on the hill in Elm
Street, a star-eyed baby named Ann even came to the Daniel Sandses, and
a third baby to the Ezra Mortons and another to the Kollanders (which
gave Rhoda an excuse for forming a lifelong habit of making John serve
her breakfast in bed to the scorn of Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Herdicker who
for thirty years sniffed audibly about Rhoda's amiable laziness) and the
John Dexters had one that came and went in the night. But down by the
river--there they came in flocks. The Dooleys, the McPhersons, the
Williamses and the hordes of unidentified men and women who came to saw
boards, mix mortar, make bricks and dig--to them the kingdom of Heaven
was very near, for they suffered little children and forbade them not.
And also, because the kingdom was so near--so near even to homes without
sewers, homes where dirt and cold and often hunger came--the children
were prone to hurry back to the Kingdom discouraged with their little
earthly pilgrimages. For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and
drawn water in the town's first days seemed by some specific gravity of
the social system to be holding their places at those lower
levels--always reaching vainly and eagerly, but always reaching a little
higher and a little further from them for that equality of opportunity
which seemed to lie about them that first day when the town was born.
In the upper reaches of the town Henry Fenn's bibulous habits became
accepted matters to a wider and wider circle and Tom Van Dorn still had
his way with the girls while the town grinned at the two young men in
gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn,
cryptic messages for the young men--from Tom's mother and Henry's
father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages
with incidental admonitions of his own--kind, gentle and gorgeously
ineffective. Then he would return to his office with a serene sense of a
duty well done, and meet and feast upon the eyes of Mary, his wife,
keen, hungry eyes, filled with more or less sinful pride in his
strength.
No defeat that ever came to Amos Adams, and because he was born out of
his time, defeat was his common portion, and no contumely ever was his
in a time when men scorned the evidence of things not seen, no failure,
no apparent weakness in her husband's nature, ever put a tremor in her
faith in him. For she knew his heart. She could hear his armor clank and
see it shine; she could feel the force and the precision of his lance
when all the world of Harvey saw only a dreamer in rusty clothes,
fumbling with some stupid and ponderous folly that the world did not
understand. The printing office that Mary and Amos thought so grand was
really a little pine shack, set on wooden piers on a side street. Inside
in the single room, with the rough-coated walls above the press and
type-cases covered with inky old sale bills, and specimens of the
_Tribune's_ printing--inside the office which seemed to Mary and
Amos the palace of a race of giants, others saw only a shabby, inky,
little room, with an old fashioned press and a jobber among the type
racks in the gloom to the rear. Through the front window that looked
into a street filled with loads of hay and wood, and with broken wagons,
and scrap iron from a wheelwright's shop, Amos Adams looked for the
everlasting sunrise, and Mary saw it always in his face.
But this is idling; it is not getting on with the Book. A score of men
and women are crowding up to these pages waiting to get into the story.
And the town of Harvey, how it is bursting its bounds, how it is
sprawling out over the white paper, tumbling its new stores and houses
and gas mains and water pipes all over the table; with what a clatter
and clamor and with what vain pride! Now the pride of those years in
Harvey came with the railroad, and here, pulling at the paper, stands
big George Brotherton with his ten stone heart. He has been sputtering
and nagging for a dozen pages to swing off the front platform of the
first passenger car that came to town. He was a fat, overgrown youth in
his late teens, but he wore the uniform of a train newsboy, and any
uniform is a uniform. His laugh was like the crash of worlds--and it is
to-day after thirty years. When the road pushed on westward Brotherton
remained in Harvey and even though the railroad roundhouse employed five
hundred men and even though the town's population doubled and then
trebled, still George Brotherton was better than everything else that
the railroad brought. He found work in a pool and billiard hall; but
that was a pent-up Utica for him and his contracted powers sent him to
Daniel Sands for a loan of twenty-five dollars. The unruffled exterior,
the calm impudence with which the boy waived aside the banker's request
for a second name on George's note, and the boy's obvious eagerness to
be selling something, secured the money and established him in a cigar
store and news stand. Within a year the store became a social center
that rivaled Riley's saloon and being near the midst of things in
business, attracted people of a different sort from those who frequented
Casper Herdicker's debating school in the shoe shop. To the cigar stand
by day came Dr. Nesbit with his festive but guileful politics, Joe
Calvin, Amos Adams, stuttering Kyle Perry, deaf John Kollander,
occasionally Dick Bowman, Ahab Wright in his white necktie and formal
garden whiskers, Rev. John Dexter and Captain Morton; while by night the
little store was a forum for young Mortimer Sands, for Tom Van Dorn, for
Henry Fenn, for the clerks of Market Street and for such gay young
blades as were either unmarried or being married were brave enough to
break the apron string. For thirty years, nearly a generation, they have
been meeting there night after night and on rainy days, taking the world
apart and putting it together again to suit themselves. And though
strangers have come into the council at Brotherton's, Captain Morton
remains dean. And though the Captain does not know it, being corroded
with pride, there still clings about the place a tradition of the day
when Captain Morton rode his high wheeled bicycle, the first the town
ever had seen, in the procession to his wife's funeral. They say it was
the Captain's serene conviction that his agency for the
bicycle--exclusive for five counties--would make him rich, and that it
was no lack of love and respect for his wife but rather an artist's
pride in his work as the distributor of a long-felt want which perched
Ezra Morton on that high wheel in the funeral procession. For Mary Adams
who knew, who was with the stricken family when death came, who was in
the lonely house when the family came home from the cemetery, says that
Ezra's grief was real. Surely thirty years of singlehearted devotion to
the three motherless girls should prove his love.
Those were gala days for Captain Morton; the whole universe was
flowering in his mind in schemes and plans and devices which he hoped to
harness for his power and glory. And the forensic group at Mr.
Brotherton's had much first hand information from the Captain as to the
nature of his proposed activities and his prospective conquests. And
while the Captain in his prime was surveying the world that was about to
come under his domain the house of Adams, little and bleak and poor,
down near the Wahoo on the homestead which the Adamses had taken in the
sixties became in spite of itself, a gay and festive habitation.
Childhood always should make a home bright and there came a time when
the little house by the creek fairly blossomed with young faces. The
children of the Kollanders, the Perrys, the Calvins, the Nesbits, and
the Bowmans--girls and boys were everywhere and they knew all times and
seasons. But the red poll and freckled face of Grant Adams was the
center of this posy bed of youth.
Grant was a shrill-voiced boy, impulsive and passionately generous and
all but obsessed with a desire to protect the weak. Whether it was bug,
worm or dog, or hunted animal or bullied child or drunken man,
fly-swarmed and bedeviled of boys in the alley, or a little girl teased
by her playmates, Grant--fighting mad, came rushing in to do battle for
the victim. Yet he was no anemic child of ragged nerves. His fist went
straight when he fought, and landed with force. His eyes saw accurately
and his voice carried terror in it.
He was a vivid youth, and without him the place down by the river would
have been bleak and dreary. But because Grant was in the world, the
rusty old phaëton in which Amos and Mary rode daily from the farm to
their work, gradually bedecked itself with budding childhood blooming
into youth, and it was no longer drab and dusty, but a veritable chariot
of life. When Grant was a sturdy boy of eight, little Jasper Adams came
into this big bewildering world. And after Grant and his gardenful of
youth were gone, Jasper's garden followed. And there was a short season
when the two gardens were growing together. It was in that season while
Grant was just coming into shoeblacking and paper collars, that in some
indefinite way, Laura Nesbit, daughter of the Doctor and Bedelia
Satterthwaite, his blue blooded Maryland wife, separated herself from
the general beauty of the universe and for Grant, Laura became a
particular person. In Mary Adams's note book she writes with maternal
pride of his fancy for Laura: "It is the only time in Grant's life when
he has looked up instead of down for something to love." And the mother
sets down a communication from Socrates through the planchette to Amos,
declaring that "Love is a sphere center"--a message which doubtless the
fond parents worked into tremendous import for their child. Though a
communication from some anonymous sage called the Peach Blow
Philosopher, who began haunting Amos as a familiar spirit about this
time recorded the oracle, also carefully preserved by Mary in her book
among the prophecies for Grant that, "Carrots, while less fragrant than
roses, are better for the blood." And while the cosmic forces were
wrestling with these problems for Grant and Laura, the children were
tripping down their early teens all innocent of the uproar they were
making among the sages and statesmen and conquerors who flocked about
the planchette board for Amos every night. For Laura, Grant carved tiny
baskets from peach-pits and coffee beans; for her he saved red apples
and candy globes that held in their precious insides gorgeous pictures;
for her he combed his hair and washed his neck; for her he scribbled
verses wherein eyes met skies, and arts met hearts, and beams met dreams
and loves the doves.
The joy of first love that comes in early youth--and always it does come
then, though it is not always confessed--is a gawky and somewhat guilty
joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of
self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his
versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly Yours" and leave
her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted.
And she in his autograph album could only trust herself--though
naturally being female she was bolder--to the placid depths of "As ever
your friend." Though in lean, hungry-eyed Nathan Perry's book she burst
into glowing words of deathless remembrance and Grant wrote in Emma
Morton's album fervid stanzas wherein "you" rimed with "the wandering
Jew" and "me" with "eternity." At school where the subtle wisdom of
childhood reads many things not writ in books, the names of Grant and
Laura were linked together, in the innocent gossip of that world.
They say that modern thought deems these youthful experiences dangerous
and superfluous; and so probably they will end, and the joy of this
earliest mating season will be bottled up and stored for a later
maturity. God is wise and good. Doubtless some new and better thing will
take the place of this first moving of the waters of life in the heart;
but for us of the older generation that is beginning to fade, we are
glad that untaught and innocent, our lips tasted from that spring when
in the heart was no knowledge of the poison that might come with the
draft.
A tall, shy, vivid girl, but above everything else, friendly, was Laura
Nesbit in her middle teens; and though Grant in later years remembered
her as having wonderful gray eyes, the elder town of Harvey for the most
part recollects her only as a gay and kindly spirit looking out into the
world through a happy, inquiring face. But the elder town could not in
the nature of things know Laura Nesbit as the children knew her. For the
democracy of childhood has its own estimates of its own citizens and the
children of Harvey--the Dooleys and the Williamses and the Bowmans as
well as the Calvins, the Mortons, the Sandses and the Kollanders,
remember Laura Nesbit for something more than her rather gawky body. To
the children, she was a bright soul. They remember--and the Bowmans
better than any one else--that Laura Nesbit shared what she had with
every one. She never ate a whole stick of candy in her life. From her
school lunch-basket, the Dooleys had their first oranges and the
Williamses their first bananas. Apples for the Bowmans and maple
sugar--a rare delicacy on the prairies in those days--for every one came
from her wonderful basket. And though her mother kept Laura in white
aprons when the other girls were in ginghams and in little red and black
woolen, though the child's wonderful yellow hair, soft and wavy like her
father's plumey roach, was curled with great care and much pride, it was
her mother's pride--the grim Satterthwaite demand for caste in any
democracy. But even with those caste distinctions there was the face
that smiled, the lips that trembled in sympathy, the heart that felt the
truth.
"Jim," quoth the mother on a day when the yard was full of Dooleys and
Bowmans and Calvins--Calvins, whom Mrs. Nesbit regarded as inferior even
to the Dooleys because of the vast Calvin pretense--"Jim, Laura has
inherited that common Indiana streak of yours. I can't make her a
Satterthwaite--she's Indiana to the bone. Why, when I go to town with
her, every drayman and ditch digger and stableman calls to her, and the
yard is always full of their towheaded children. I'll give her up."
And the Doctor gurgled a chuckle and gave her up also.
She always came with her father to the Adamses on Sunday afternoons, and
while the Doctor and Amos Adams on the porch went into the matter of the
universe as either a phantasm superinduced by the notion of time, or the
notion of time as an hallucination of those who believed in space, down
by the creek Grant and Laura sitting under the oak near the silent,
green pool were feeling their way around the universe, touching shyly
and with great abasement the cords that lead from the body to the soul,
from material to the spiritual, from dust to God.
It is a queer world, a world that is past finding out. Here are two
children, touching souls in the fleetest, lightest way in the world, and
the touch welds them together forever. And along come two others, and
even as the old song has it, "after touch of wedded hands," they are
strangers yet. No one knows what makes happiness in love. Certainly
marriage is no part of it. Certainly it is not first love, for first
lovers often quarrel like cats. Certainly it is not separation, for
absence, alas, does not make the heart grow fonder; nor is it
children--though the good God knows that should help; for they are love
incarnate. Certainly it is not respect, for respect is a stale, cold
comforter, and love is deeper than respect, and often lives without
it--let us whisper the truth in shame. What, then, is this irrational
current of the stuff of life, that carries us all in its sway, that
brings us to earth, that guides our destiny here--makes so vastly for
our happiness or woe, gives us strength or makes us weak, teaches us
wisdom or leads us into folly unspeakable, and all unseen, unmeasured
and infinitely mysterious?
There was young Tom Van Dorn. Love was a pleasurable emotion, and
because it put a joyous fever in his blood, it enhanced his life. But he
never defined love; he merely lived on it. Then there was Ahab Wright
who regarded love as a kind of sin and when he married the pale,
bloodless, shadowy bookkeeper in Wright & Perry's store, he regarded the
charivari prepared by Morty Sands and George Brotherton as a shameful
rite and tried for an hour to lecture the crowd in his front yard on the
evils of unseemly conduct before he gave them an order on the store for
a bucket of mixed candy. If Ahab had defined love he would have put
cupid in side whiskers and a white necktie and set the fat little god to
measuring shingle nails, cod-fish and calico on week days and sitting
around in a tail coat and mouse-colored trousers on Sunday, reading the
_Christian Evangel_ and the _Price Current_. And again there
was Daniel Sands who married five women in a long and more or less
useful life. He would have defined love as the apotheosis of comfort.
Finally there was Henry Fenn to whom love became the compelling force of
his being. Love is many things: indeed only this seems sure. Love is the
current of our lives, and like minnows we run in schools through it,
guided by instinct and by herd suggestions; and some of us are washed
ashore; some of us are caught and devoured, and others fare forth in joy
and reach the deep.
One rainy day when the conclave in Brotherton's cigar store was weary of
discussing the quarrel of Mr. Conklin and Mr. Blaine and the
eccentricities of the old German Kaiser, the subject of love came before
the house for discussion. Dr. Nesbit, who dropped in incidentally to buy
a cigar, but primarily to see George Brotherton about some matters of
state in the Third ward, found young Tom Van Dorn stroking his new silky
mustache, squinting his eyes and considering himself generally in the
attitude of little Jack Horner after the plum episode.
"Speaking broadly," squeaked the Doctor, breaking irritably into the
talk, "touching the ladies, God bless 'em--from young Tom's angle,
there's nothing to 'em. Broad is the petticoat that leadeth to
destruction." The Doctor turned from young Van Dorn, and looked
critically at some obvious subject of Van Dorn's remarks as she picked
her way across the muddy street, showing something more than a wink of
striped stockings, "Tom, there's nothing in it--not a thing in the
world."
"Oh,--I don't know," returned the youth, wagging an impudent, though
good-natured head at the Doctor; "what else is there in the world if not
in that? The world's full of it--flowers, trees, birds, beasts, men and
women--the whole damn universe is afire with it. It's God; there is no
other God--just nature building and propagating and perpetuating
herself."
"I suppose," squeaked the Doctor with a sigh, as he reached for his
morning paper, "that if I had nothing else to do for a living except
practice law with Joe Calvin on the side and just be twenty-five years
old three hundred days in the year, and no other chores except to help
old man Sands rib up his waterworks deal, I would hold some such general
views myself. But when I was twenty-five, young man, Bedelia and I were
running a race with the meal ticket, and our notions as to the moral
government of the universe came hard and were deepset, and we can't
change them now."
George Brotherton, Henry Fenn, Captain Morton and Amos Adams came in
with a kind of Greek chorus of general agreement with the Doctor. Van
Dorn cocked his hat over his eyes and laughed, and then the Doctor went
on in his high falsetto:
"It's all right, Tom; go it while you're young. But that kind of love's
young dream generally ends in a nightmare." He hesitated a minute, and
then said: "Well, so long as we're all here in the family, I'll tell you
about a case I had last night. There's an old fellow--old Dutchman to be
exact, down in Spring township; he came here with us when we founded the
town; husky old boy, that is, he used to be fifteen years ago. And he
had Tom's notion about the ladies, God bless 'em, when he was Tom's age.
When I first knew him his notion was causing him trouble, and had
settled in one leg, and last night he died of the ladies, God bless
'em."
The Doctor's face flinched with pain, and his treble voice winced as he
spoke: "Lord, but he suffered, and to add to his physical torment, he
knew that he had to leave his daughter all alone in the world--and
without a mother and without a dollar; but that isn't the worst, and he
knew it--at the last. This being twenty-five for a living is the hardest
job on earth--when you're sixty, and the old man knew that. The girl has
missed his blood taint; she's not scarred nor disfigured. It would be
better if she were; but he gave her something worse--she's his child!"
For a moment the Doctor was silent, then he sighed deeply and shut his
eyes as he said: "Boys, for a year and more he's been seeing all that he
was, bud like a glorious poison in his daughter."
Van Dorn smiled, and asked casually, "Well, what's her name?" The rest
of the group in the store looked down their noses and the Doctor, with
his paper under his arm, obviously ignored the question and only stopped
in the door to pipe out: "This wasn't the morning to talk to me of the
ladies--God bless 'em."
The men in the store watched him as he started across the street, and
then saw Laura skip gayly toward him, and the two, holding hands,
crossed the muddy street together. She was laughing, and the joy of her
soul--a child's soul, shone like a white flame in the dull street and
George Brotherton, who saw the pair in the street, roared out: "Well,
say--now isn't that something worth looking at? That beats Niagara Falls
and Pike's Peak--for me."
Captain Morton looked at the gay pair attentively for a moment and
spoke: "And I have three to his one; I tell you, gentlemen--three to his
one; and I guess I haven't told you gentlemen about it, but I got the
exclusive agency for seven counties for Golden's Patent Self-Opening
Fruit Can, an absolute necessity for every household, and in another
year my three will be wearing their silks and diamonds!" He smiled
proudly around the group and added: "My! that doesn't make any
difference. Silk or gingham, I know I've got the best girls on
earth--why, if their mother could just see 'em--see how they're
unfolding--why, Emma can make every bit as good hash as her mother," a
hint of tears stood in his blue eyes. "Why--men, I tell you sometimes I
want to die and go right off to Heaven to tell mother all the fine news
about 'em--eh?" Deaf John Kollander, with his hand to his less affected
ear, nodded approval and said, "That's what I always said, James G.
Blaine never was a true friend of the soldier!"
Van Dorn had been looking intently at nothing through the store window.
When no one answered Captain Morton, Van Dorn addressed the house rather
impersonally:
"Man is the blindest of the mammals. You'd think as smart a man as Dr.
Nesbit would see his own vices. Here he is mayor of Harvey, boss of the
town. He buys men with Morty's father's money and sells 'em in politics
like sheep--not for his own gain; not for his family's gain; but just
for the joy of the sport; just as I follow the ladies, God bless 'em;
and yet he stands up and reads me a lecture on the wickedness of a
little more or less innocent flirting." The young man lighted his cigar
at the alcohol flame on the counter. "Morty," he continued, squinting
his eyes and stroking his mustache, and looking at the boy with vast
vanity, "Morty, do you know what your old dad and yon virtuous Nesbit
pasha are doing? Well, I'll tell you something you didn't learn at
military school. They're putting up a deal by which we've voted one
hundred thousand dollars' worth of city bonds as bonus in aid of a
system of city water works and have given them to your dad outright, for
putting in a plant that he will own and control; and that he will build
for seventy-five thousand dollars." Van Dorn smiled a placid, malevolent
smile at the group and went on: "And the sheik of the village there
helped Daniel Sands put it through; helped him buy me as city attorney,
with your father's bank's legal business; helped buy Dick Bowman, poor
devil with a houseful of children for a hundred dollars for his vote in
the council, helped work George here for his vote in the council by
lending money to him for his business; and so on down the line. The Doc
calls that politics, and regards it as one of his smaller vices; but
me?" scoffed the young man, "when I go gamboling down the primrose path
of dalliance with a lady on each arm--or maybe more, I am haled before
the calif and sentenced to his large and virtuous displeasure.
Man,"--here young Mr. Van Dorn drummed his fingers on the showcase and
considered the universe calmly through the store window--"man is the
blindest of mammals." After which smiling deliverance, Thomas Van Dorn
picked up his morning paper, and his gloves, and stalked with some
dignity into the street.
"Well, say,"--Brotherton was the first to speak--"rather cool--"
"Shame, shame!" cried John Kollander, as he buttoned up his blue coat
with its brass buttons. "Where was Blaine when the bullets were
thickest? Answer me that." No one answered, but Captain Morton began:
"Now, George, why, that's all right. Didn't the people vote the bonds
after you fellows submitted 'em? Of course they did. The town wanted
waterworks; Daniel Sands knew how to build 'em--eh? The people couldn't
build 'em themselves, could they?" asked the Captain triumphantly.
Brotherton laughed; Morty Sands grinned,--and, shame be to Amos Adams,
the rugged Puritan, who had opposed the bonds in his paper so boldly, he
only shook a sorrowful head and lifted no voice in protest. Such is the
weakness of our thunderers without their lightning! Brotherton, who
still seemed uneasy, went on: "Say, men, didn't that franchise call for
a system of electric lights and gas in five years and a telephone system
in ten years more--all for that $100,000; I'm right here to tell you we
got a lot for our money."
Again Amos Adams swallowed his Adam's apple and cut in as boldly as a
man may who thinks with his lead pencil: "And don't forget the street
car franchises you gave away at the same time. Water, light, gas,
telephone and street car franchises for fifty years and one hundred
thousand to boot! It seemed to me you were giving away a good deal!"
But John Kollander's approving nod and George Brotherton's great laugh
overcame the editor, and the talk turned to other things.
There came a day in Harvey when men, looking back at events from the
perspective of another day, believed that in those old days of Harvey,
Daniel Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit was servant. And there was much
evidence to indicate that Daniel's was the master spirit of those early
times. But the evidence was merely based on facts, and facts often are
far from the truth. The truth is that Daniel Sands was the beneficiary
of much of the activity of Doctor Nesbit in those days, but the truth is
also that Doctor Nesbit did what he did--won the county seat for Harvey,
secured the railroad, promoted the bond election, which gave Daniel
Sands the franchises for the distribution of water, gas and
electricity--not because the Doctor had any particular regard for Daniel
Sands but because, first of all, the good of the town, as the Doctor saw
it, seemed to require him to act as he acted; and second, because his
triumph at any of these elections meant power, and he was greedy for
power. But he always used his power to make others happy. No man ever
came to the Doctor looking for work that he could not find work for that
man. Men in ditches, men on light poles, men in the court house, men at
Daniel Sands's furnaces, men grading new streets, men working on city or
county contracts knew but one source of authority in Harvey, and that
was Doctor James Nesbit. Daniel Sands was a mere money grubbing incident
of that power. Daniel could have won no one to vote with him; the county
seat would have gone to a rival town, the railroad would not have veered
five miles out of its way to reach Harvey, and a dozen promoters would
have wrangled for a dozen franchises but for Dr. Nesbit.
And if Dr. Nesbit made it his business to see that Dick Bowman had work,
it was somewhat because he knew how badly the little Bowmans needed
food. And if he saw to it that Dick's vote in the council occasionally
yielded him a substantial return from those whom that vote benefited so
munificently, it was partly because the Doctor felt how sorely Lida
Bowman, silently bending over her washtub, needed the little comforts
which the extra fifty-dollar bill would bring that Dick sometimes found
in his monthly pay envelope. And if the Doctor saw to it that Ira Dooley
was made foreman of the water works gang, or that Tom Williams had the
contract for the stone work on the new court house, it was largely in
payment for services rendered by Ira and Tom in bringing in the Second
Ward for John Kollander for county clerk. The rewards of Ira and Tom in
working for the Doctor were virtue's own; and if re-marking a hundred
ballots was part of that blessed service, well and good. And also it
must be recorded that the foremanship and the stone contract were
somewhat the Doctor's way of showing Mrs. Dooley and Mrs. Williams that
he wished them well.
Doctor Nesbit's scheme of politics included no punishments for his
enemies, and he desired every one for his friend. The round, pink face,
the high-roached, yellow hair, the friendly, blue eyes, had no place for
hate in them, and in the high-pitched, soft voice was no note of terror
to evil doers. His countenance did not betray his power; that was in his
tireless little legs, his effective hands, and his shrewd brain motived
by a heart too kind for the finer moral distinctions that men must make
who go far in this world. Yet because he had a heart, a keen mind, even
without much conscience, and a vision larger than those about him, Dr.
Nesbit was their leader. He did not move in a large sphere, but in his
small sphere he was the central force, the dominating spirit. And off in
a dark corner, Daniel Sands, who was hunger incarnate and nothing more,
spun his web, gathered the dust and the flies and the weaker insects and
waxed fat. To say that his mind ruled Dr. Nesbit's, to say that Daniel
Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit servant in those first decades of
Harvey--whatever the facts may seem in those later days--is one of those
ornately ridiculous travesties upon the truth that facts sometimes are
arranged to make. But how little did they know what they were building!
For they and their kind all over America working in the darkness of
their own selfish desires, were laying footing stones--quite substantial
yet necessary--for the structure of a growing civilization which in its
time, stripped of its scaffolding and extraneous débris, was to stand
among the nations of the earth as a tower of righteousness in a stricken
world.
CHAPTER IV
THE ADAMS FAMILY BIBLE LIES LIKE A GENTLEMAN
How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the ass speaks, or
the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either
man or ass, and in the dumb struggle for voice, if fate turns the screws
of destiny upon duty, there is tragedy. Only the consequences of a day
or a deed can decide whether it shall have the warm blessing of our
smiles or the bitter benediction of our tears.
This, one must remember in reading the chapter of this story that shall
follow. It is the close of the story to which Mary Adams, with her
memory book and notes and clippings, has contributed much. For of the
pile of envelopes all numbered in their order; the one marked "Margaret
Müller" was the last envelope that she left. Now the package that
concerns Margaret Müller may not be transcribed separately but must be
woven into the woof of the tale. The package contains a clipping, a
dozen closely written pages, and a photograph--a small photograph of a
girl. The photograph is printed on the picture of a scroll, and the
likeness of the girl does not throb with life as it did thirty years ago
when it was taken. Then the plump, voluptuous arm and shoulders in the
front of the picture seemed to exude life and to bristle with the
temptation that lurked under the brown lashes shading her big, innocent,
brown eyes. And her hair, her wonderful brown hair that fell in a great
rope to her knees, in this photograph is hidden, and only her frizzes,
covering a fine forehead, are emphasized by the picture maker. One may
smile at the picture now, but then when it was taken it told of the red
of her lips and the pink of her flesh, and the dimples that forever went
flickering across her face. In those days, the old-fashioned picture
portrayed with great clearness the joy and charm and impudence of that
beautiful face. But now the picture is only grotesque. It proves rather
than discloses that once, when she was but a young girl, Margaret Müller
had wonderfully molded arms and shoulders, regular features and
enchanting eyes. But that is all the picture shows. In the photograph is
no hint of her mellow voice, of her eager expression and of the
smoldering fires of passion, ambition and purpose that smoked through
those gay, bewitching eyes. The old-fashioned frizzled hair on her
forehead, the obvious pose of her hand with its cheap rings, the curious
cut of her dress, made after that travesty of the prevailing mode which
country papers printed in their fashion columns, the black court-plaster
beauty spot on her cheek and the lace fichu draped over her head and
bare shoulders, all stand out like grinning gargoyles that keep much of
the charm she had in those days imprisoned from our eyes to-day. So the
picture alone is of no great service. Nor will the clipping tell much.
It only records:
"Miss Margaret Müller, daughter of the late Herman Müller of
Spring Township, this county, will teach school in District 18,
the Adams District in Prospect Township, this fall and winter.
She will board with the family of ye editor."
Now the reader must know that Margaret Müller's eyes had been turned to
Harvey as to a magnet for three years. She had chosen the Adams district
school in Prospect Township, because the Adams district school was
nearer than any other school district to Harvey; she had gone to the
Adamses to board because the little bleak house near the Wahoo was the
nearest house in the district to Harvey and to a social circle which she
desired to enter--the best that Harvey offered.
She saw Grant, a rough, ruddy, hardy lad, of her own time of life,
moving in the very center of the society she cherished in her dreams,
and Margaret had no gay inadvertence in her scheme of creation. So when
the lank, strapping, red-headed boy of a man's height, with a man's
shoulders and a child's heart, started to Harvey for high school every
morning, as she started to teach her country school, he carried with
him, beside his lunch, a definite impression that Margaret was a fine
girl. Often, indeed, he thought her an extraordinarily fine girl. Tales
of prowess he brought back from the Harvey High School, and she listened
with admiring face. For they related to youths whose names she knew as
children of the socially elect.
A part of her admiration for Grant was due to the fact that Grant had
leaped the social gulf--deep even then in Harvey--between those who
lived on the hill, and the dwellers in the bottoms near the river.
This instinctively Margaret Müller knew, also--though perhaps
unconsciously--that even if they lived in the bottoms, the Adamses were
of the aristoi; because they were friends of the Nesbits, and Mrs.
Nesbit of Maryland was the fountain head of all the social glory of
Harvey. Thus Margaret Müller of Spring Township came to camp before
Harvey for a lifetime siege, and took her ground where she could aim
straight at the Nesbits and Kollanders and Sandses and Mortons and
Calvins. With all her banners flying, banners gaudy and beautiful,
banners that flapped for men and sometimes snapped at women, she set her
forces down before Harvey, and saw the beleaguered city through the
portals of Grant's fine, wide, blue eyes, within an easy day's walk of
her own place in the world. So she hovered over Grant, played her brown
eyes upon him, flattered him, unconsciously as is the way of the female,
when it would win favor, and because she was wise, wiser than even her
own head knew, she cast upon the youth a strange spell.
Those were the days when Margaret Müller came first to early bloom. They
were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it
flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her
neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair
seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her
bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched,
after she was gone, thrilled him as though they were of her.
Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him
who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the
feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid
may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness
and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from
which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this
story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that
befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of
things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that
Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like
the rest of us in this world--only human; stricken with that
inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love
are most needing our care.
Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in
their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of
holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled,
red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and
generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker
playmates--it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such
grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and
there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased
his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her
bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manuscript
for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece,
"trippingly on the tongue," they harkened back over his ancestry to find
the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a
nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect
and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When
he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership
that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant's odd mania to take up
the cause of the weak--often foolish causes that revealed a kind of
fanatic chivalry in him--Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed
knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.
Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the
child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity
for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a
commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also--the very facts that
were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and
Amos that their son was setting out on his journey from the heart of his
childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands,
broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation
wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child's quick wit and merry
heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so
completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could
not see that his leadership in school came from the fact that a man was
rising in him--the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant
as destiny itself. They could not see the man's body; they saw only the
child's heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor
could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that
matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to
announce that he had been elected President of the senior class in the
Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at
commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed
found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands,
home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half
ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for
glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her
attention--great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant--even Morty arrayed in
his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy
for Grant had passed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as
a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin--and
always with an effect of inadvertence.
Now if a lad is an ass--and he is--how should a poor jack be supposed to
know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth
has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is
no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of
his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos,
Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not
realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a
load he carried--this ass of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden.
In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul
bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland at school,
Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of
Margaret Müller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled
with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with
all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his
heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting
face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed
him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of
soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last
time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the
qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in
Heaven's reservoir, gushing from the almost limitlessly deep springs of
our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our
destinies. And so the ass, laden with this relay of life from the source
of life, that every young, blind ass brings into the world, floundered
in the flood.
Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of
man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a
new heaven and a new earth--strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to
his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and
fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that
unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind
paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new heights, to
feel impulses coming out of the dark that tremble like the blare of
trumpets in the soul,--this is the way of youth.
With all his loyalty for Laura Nesbit--loyalty that enshrined her as a
comrade and friend, such is the contradiction of youth that he was madly
jealous of every big boy at the country school who cast eyes at Margaret
Müller. And because she was ages older than he, she knew it; and it
pleased her. She knew that she could make all his combs and crests and
bands and wattles and spurs glisten, and he knew in some deep instinct
that when she sang the emotion in her voice was a call to him that he
could not put into words. Thus through the autumn, Margaret and Grant
were thrown together daily in the drab little house by the river. Now a
boy and a girl thrown together commonly make the speaking donkeys of
comedy. Yet one never may be sure that they may not be the dumb
struggling creatures of the tragic muse. Heaven knows Margaret Müller
was funny enough in her capers. For she related her antics--her grand
pouts, her elaborate condescensions, her crass coquetry and her hidings
and seekings--into what she called a "case." In the only wisdom she
knew, to open a flirtation was to have a "case." So Margaret ogled and
laughed and touched and ran and giggled and cried and played with her
prey with a practiced lore of the heart that was far beyond the boy's
knowledge. Grant did not know what spell was upon him. He did not know
that his great lithe body, his gripping hands, his firm legs and his
long arms that had in their sinews the power that challenged her to
wrestle when she was with him--he did not know what he meant to the girl
who was forever teasing and bantering him when they were alone. For it
was only when Margaret and Grant were alone or when no one but little
Jasper was with them, that Margaret indulged in the joys of the chase.
Yet often when other boys came to see her--the country boys from the
Prospect school district perhaps, or lorn swains trailing up from Spring
Township--Margaret did not conceal her fluttering delight in them from
Mary Adams. So the elder woman and the girl had long talks in which
Margaret agreed so entirely with Mary Adams that Mary doubted the
evidence of her eyes. And Amos in those days was much interested in
certain transcendental communications coming from his Planchette board
and purporting to be from Emerson who had recently passed over. So Amos
had no eyes for Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl's fine speech.
Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a
ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh--a high, hysterical
laugh--that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret's fair
speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret's wiles
with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of
women!
All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of
Margaret's enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit,
half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he
sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and
self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would
fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside
the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that
was clouding his heart.
But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the
angel--the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the
face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his
soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed
of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.
In May Margaret's school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain
with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy
days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a
newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in
July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that
Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some
excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon
with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw
Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard
Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary's voice lifted in prayer,
with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy,
but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the
two kneeling there with Margaret's shawl over the chair where Mary
knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy's shame to her God.
Death and partings have come across that threshold during these three
decades. Amos Adams has known anguish and has sat with grief many times,
but nothing ever has cut him to the heart like the dead, hopeless woe in
Mary's voice as she prayed there in the bedroom with Grant that August
night. A terrible half-hour came when Mary and Amos talked with
Margaret. For over their shame at what their son had done, above their
love for him, even beyond their high hope for him, rose their sense of
duty to the child who was coming. For the child they spent the passion
of their shame and love and hope as they pleaded with Margaret for a
child's right to a name. But she had hardened her heart. She shook her
head and would not listen to their pleadings. Then they sent Grant to
her. It is not easy to say which was more dreadful, the impudent smile
which she turned to the parents as she shook her head at them, or the
scornful laugh they heard when Grant sat with her. That was a long and
weary night they spent and the sun rose in the morning under a cloud
that never was lifted from their hearts.
In the six or seven sordid, awful weeks that followed before Kenyon was
born, they turned for comfort and for help to Dr. Nesbit. They made his
plan to save the child's good name, their plan. Of course--the Adamses
were selfish. They felt a blight was on their boy's life. They could not
understand that in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in
marriage; that when God sends a soul through the gates of earth it comes
in joy even though we greet it in sorrow. Their gloom should have been
lighted; part of its blackness was their own vain pride in Grant. Yet
they were none the less tender with Margaret, and when she went down
into the valley of the shadow, Mary went with her and stood and
supported the girl in the journey.
When Doctor Nesbit was climbing into the buggy at the gate, Grant,
standing by the hitching-post, said: "Doctor--sometime--when we are
both older--I mean Laura--" He got no further. The Doctor looked at the
boy's ashen face, and knew the cost of the words he was speaking. He
stopped, reached his hand out to Grant and touched his shoulder. "I
think I know, Grant--some day I shall tell her." He got into the buggy,
looked at the lad a moment and said in his high, squeaky voice: "Well,
Grant, boy, you understand after all it's your burden--don't you? Your
mother has saved Margaret's good name. But son--son, don't you let the
folks bear that burden." He paused a moment further and sighed: "Well,
good-by, kid--God help you, and make a man of you," and so turning his
cramping buggy, he drove away in the dusk.
Thus came Kenyon Adams, recorded in the family Bible as the third son of
Mary and Amos Adams, into the wilderness of this world.
CHAPTER V
IN WHICH MARGARET MÜLLER DWELLS IN MARBLE HALLS AND HENRY FENN AND
KENYON ADAMS WIN NOTABLE VICTORIES
The world into which Kenyon Adams came was a busy and noisy and ruthless
world. The prairie grass was leaving Harvey when Grant Adams came, and
the meadow lark left in the year that Jasper came. When Kenyon entered,
even the blue sky that bent over it was threatened. For Dr. Nesbit
returning from the Adamses the evening that Kenyon came to Harvey found
around the well-drill at Jamey McPherson's a great excited crowd. Men
were elbowing each other and craning their necks, and wagging their
heads as they looked at the core of the drill. For it contained
unmistakably a long worm of coal. And that night saw rising over Harvey
such dreams as made the angels sick; for the dreams were all of money,
and its vain display and power. And when men rose after dreaming those
dreams, they swept little Jamey McPherson away in short order. For he
had not the high talents of the money maker. He had only persistence,
industry and a hopeful spirit and a vague vision that he was discovering
coal for the common good. So when Daniel Sands put his mind to bear upon
the worm of coal that came wriggling up from the drilled hole on Jamey's
lot, the worm crawled away from Jamey and Jamey went to work in the
shaft that Daniel sank on his vacant lot near the McPherson home. The
coal smoke from Daniel Sands's mines began to splotch the blue sky above
the town, and Kenyon Adams missed the large leisure and joyous
comraderie that Grant had seen; indeed the only leisurely person whom
Kenyon saw in his life until he was--Heaven knows how old--was Rhoda
Kollander. The hum and bustle of Harvey did not ruffle the calm waters
of her soul. She of all the women in Harvey held to the early custom of
the town of going out to spend the day.
"So that Margaret's gone," she was saying to Mary Adams sometime during
a morning in the spring after Kenyon was born. "Law me--I wouldn't have
a boarder. I tell John, the sanctity of the home is invaded by boarders
these days; and her going out to the dances in town the way she does, I
sh'd think you'd be glad to be alone again, and to have your own little
flock to do for. And so Grant's going to be a carpenter--well, well! He
didn't take to the printing trade, did he? My, my!" she sighed, and
folded her hands above her apron--the apron which she always put on
after a meal, as if to help with the dishes, but which she never soiled
or wrinkled--"I tell John I'm so thankful our little Fred has such a
nice place. He waits table there at the Palace, and gets all his
meals--such nice food, and can go to school too, and you wouldn't
believe it if I'd tell you all the nice men he meets--drummers and
everything, and he's getting such good manners. I tell John there's
nothing like the kind of folks a boy is with in his teens to make him.
And he sees Tom Van Dorn every day nearly and sometimes gets a dime for
serving him, and now, honest, Mary, you wouldn't believe it, but Freddie
says the help around the hotel say that Mauling girl at the cigar stand
thinks Tom's going to marry her, but law me--he's aiming higher than the
Maulings. The old man is going to die--did you know it? They came for
John to sit up with him last night. John's an Odd Fellow, you know. But
speaking of that Margaret, you know she's a friend of Violet's and slips
into the cigar stand sometimes and Violet introduces Margaret to some
nice drummers. And I heard John say that when Margaret gets this term of
school taught here, the Spring Township people have made Doc Jim get her
a job in the court house--register of deeds office. But I tell John--law
me, you men are the worst gossips! Talk about women!"
Little Kenyon in his crib was restless, and Mary Adams was clattering
the dishes, so between the two evils, Mrs. Kollander picked up the
child, and rocked him and patted him and then went on: "I was over and
spent the day with the Sandses the other day. Poor woman, she's real
puny. Ann's such a pretty child and Mrs. Sands says that Morty's not
goin' back to college again. And she says he just moons around Laura
Nesbit. Seems like the boy's got no sense. Why, Laura's just a
child--she's Grant's age, isn't she--not more than eighteen or nineteen,
and Morty must be nearly twenty-three. My--how they have sprung up. I
tell John--why, I'll be thirty-six right soon now, and here I've worked
and slaved my youth away and I'll be an old woman before we know it."
She laughed good naturedly and rocked the fretting child. "Law me, Mary
Adams, I sh'd think you'd want Grant to stay with George Brotherton
there in the cigar stand, instead of carpentering. Such elegant people
he can meet there, and such refined influences since Mr. Brotherton's
put in books and newspapers, and he could work in the printing office
and deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago dailies for Mr.
Brotherton, and do so much better than he can carpentering. I tell John,
if we can just keep our boy among nice people until he's twenty-five,
he'll stay with 'em. Now look at Lide Bowman. Mary Adams, we know she
was a smart woman until she married Dick and now just see her--living
down there with the shanty trash and all those ignorant foreigners, and
she's growing like 'em. She's lost two of her babies, and that seems to
be weighing on her mind, and I can't persuade her to pick up and move
out of there. It's like being in another world. And Mary Adams--let me
tell you--Casper Herdicker has gone into the mine. Yes, sir, he closed
his shop and is going to work in the mine, because he can make three
dollars a day. But law me! you'll not see Hildy Herdicker moving down
there. She'll keep her millinery store and live with the white folks."
The dishes were put away, and in the long afternoon Mary Adams sat
sewing as Rhoda Kollander rambled on. For the third time Rhoda came back
to comment upon the fact that Grant Adams had quit working in the
printing office--a genteel trade, and had stopped delivering papers for
Mr. Brotherton's newspaper stand--a rather high vocation, and was
degrading himself by learning the carpenter's trade, when Mary Adams cut
into the current of the stream of talk.
"Well, my dear, it was this way. There are two reasons why Grant is
learning the carpenter's trade. In the first place, the boy has some
sort of a passion to cast his lot among the poor. He feels they are
neglected and--well, he has a sort of a fierce streak in him to fight
for the under dog, and--"
"Well, law me, Mary--don't I know that? Hasn't Freddie told me time and
again how Grant used to fight for Freddie when he was a little boy and
the big boys plagued him. Grant whipped the whole school for teasing a
little half-witted boy once--did you know that?" Mary Adams shook her
head. "Well, he did, and--well now, isn't that nice. I can see just how
he feels!" And she could. Never lived a more sympathetic soul than
Rhoda. And as she rocked she said: "Of course, if that's the reason--law
me, Mary, you never can tell how these children are going to turn out.
Why, I tell John--"
"And the other reason is, Rhoda, that he is earning two dollars a day as
a carpenter's helper, and since Kenyon came we seem to be miserably hard
pushed for money." Mary Adams stopped and then went on as one carefully
choosing her words: "And since Margaret has gone to board over at the
other side of the school district, and we don't have her board
money--why of course--"
"Why of course," echoed Mrs. Kollander, "of course. I tell John he's
been in a county office now twenty years, drawing all the way from a
thousand to three thousand a year--and what have we got to show for it?
I scrimp and pinch and save, and John does too--but law me--it seems
like the way times are--" Amos Adams, standing at the door, heard her
and cut in:
"I was talking the other night with George Washington about the times,
and they're coming around all right." The man fumbled his sandy beard,
closed his eyes as if to remember something and went on: "Let's see, he
wrote: 'Peas and potatoes preserve the people,' and the next day,
everything in the market dropped but peas and potatoes." He nodded a
wise head. "They think that planchette is nonsense, but how do they
account for coincidences like that! And now tell me some news for the
_Tribune_." The two sat talking well into the twilight and when
Rhoda pulled up her chair to the supper table, the editor's notebook was
full.
Grant appeared, an ox-shouldered, red-haired, bass-voiced boy with
ham-like hands; Jasper came in from school full of the town's adventure
into coal and the industries, and his chatter trickled into the powerful
but slowly spoken insistence of Mrs. Kollander's talk and was lost and
swept finally into silence. After supper Grant retired to a book from
the Sea-side Library, borrowed of Mr. Brotherton from stock--"Sesame and
Lilies" was its title. Jasper plunged into his bookkeeping studies and
by the wood stove in the sitting-room Rhoda Kollander held her levee
until bedtime sent her home.
During the noon hour the next day in Mr. Brotherton's cigar store and
news stand, the walnut bench was filled that he had just installed for
the comfort of his customers. At one end, was Grant Adams who had
hurried up from the mines to buy a paperbound copy of Carlyle's "French
Revolution"; next to him sat deaf John Kollander smoking his noon cigar,
and beside Kollander sat stuttering Kyle Perry, thriftily sponging his
morning Kansas City _Times_ over Dr. Nesbit's shoulder. The absent
brother always was on the griddle at Mr. Brotherton's amen corner, and
the burnt offering of the moment was Henry Fenn. He had just broken over
a protracted drouth--one of a year and a half--and the group was shaking
sad heads over the county attorney's downfall. The doctor was saying,
"It's a disease, just as the 'ladies, God bless 'em' will become a
disease with Tom Van Dorn if he doesn't stop pretty soon--a nervous
disease and sooner or later they will both go down. Poor Henry--Bedelia
and I noticed him at the charity ball last night; he was--"
"A trifle polite--a wee bit too punctilious for these latitudes,"
laughed Brotherton from behind the counter.
"I was going to say decorative--what Mrs. Nesbit calls ornate--kind of
rococco in manner," squeaked the doctor, and sighed. "And yet I can see
he's still fighting his devil--still trying to keep from going clear
under."
"It's a sh-sh-sh-a-ame that ma-a-an should have th-that kind of a
d-d-d-devil in him--is-isis-n't it?" said Kyle Perry, and John
Kollander, who had been smoking in peace, blurted out, "What else can be
expected under a Democratic administration? Of course, they'll return
the rebel flags. They'll pension the rebel soldiers next!" He looked
around for approval, and the smiles of the group would have lured him
further but Tom Van Dorn came swinging through the door with his
princely manner, and the Doctor rose to go. He motioned George
Brotherton to the rear of the room and said gently:
"George--old man Mauling died an hour ago; John Dexter and I were there
at the last. And John sent word for me to have you get your choir
out--so I'll notify Mrs. Nesbit. Dexter said he was a lodge member with
you--what lodge, George?"
"Odd Fellow," returned the big man, then asked, "Pall-bearer?"
"Yes," returned the Doctor. "There's no one else much but the lodge in
his case. You will sing him to sleep with your choir and tuck him in as
pall-bearer as you've been doing for the dead folks ever since you came
to town." The Doctor turned to go, "Meet to-night at the house for choir
practice, I suppose?"
Brotherton nodded, and turned to take a bill from Tom Van Dorn, who had
pocketed a handful of cigars and a number of papers.
"We were just talking about Henry, Tom," remarked Mr. Brotherton, as he
handed back the change.
"He's b-back-sl-slidden," prompted Perry.
"Oh, well--it's all right. Henry has his weaknesses--we all have our
failings. But drunk or sober he danced a dozen times last night with
that pretty school teacher from Prospect Township." Grant looked up from
his book, as Van Dorn continued, "Gorgeous creature--" he shut his eyes
and added: "Don't pity Henry when he can get a woman like that to favor
him!"
As John Kollander thundered back some irrelevant comment on the moment's
politics, Van Dorn led Brotherton to the further end of the counter and
lowering his voice said:
"You know that Mauling girl at the Palace cigar counter?"
As Brotherton nodded, Van Dorn, dropping his voice to a whisper, said:
"Her father's dead--poor child--she's been spending her money--she
hasn't a cent. I know; I have been talking to her more or less for a
year or so. Which one of your lodges does the old man belong to,
George?"
When the big man said: "Odd Fellows," Van Dorn reached into an inner
coat pocket, brought out some bills and slipping them to Brotherton, so
that the group on the bench in the corner could not see, Van Dorn
mumbled:
"Tell her folks this came from the lodge--poor little creature, she's
their sole support."
As Van Dorn lighted his cigar at the alcohol burner Henry Fenn turned
into the store. Fenn stood among them and smiled his electric smile,
that illumined his lean, drawn face and said, "Here," a pause, then, "I
am," another pause, and a more searching smile, "I am again!"
Mr. Brotherton looked up from the magazine counter where he was sorting
out _Centurys_, and _Harpers_ and _Scribners_ from a
pile: "Say--" he roared at the newcomer, "Well--say, Henry--this won't
do. Come--take a brace; pull yourself together. We are all for you."
"Yes," answered Fenn, smiling out of some incandescence in his heart,
"that's just it: You're all for me. The boys over at Riley's saloon are
all for me. Mother--God bless her, down at the house is for me so strong
that she never flinches or falters. I can get every vote in the
delegation, but my own!"
"Oh, Henry, why these tears?" sneered Van Dorn. "We've all got to have
our fun."
"I presume, Tom," snapped Fenn, "that you've got your little affairs of
the heart so that you can take 'em or let 'em alone!" But to the group
in the amen corner, Fenn lifted up his head in shame. He looked like a
whipped dog. One by one the crowd disappeared, all but Grant, who was
bending over his book, and deaf John Kollander.
Fenn and Brotherton went back to Brotherton's desk and Fenn asked, "Did
I--George, was it pretty bad last night? God she--she--that Müller
girl--what a wonderful woman she is. George, do you suppose--" Fenn
caught Grant's eyes wandering toward them. The name of Margaret Müller
had reached his ears. But Fenn went on, lowering his voice: "I honestly
believe she could, if any one could." Fenn put his lean, tapering hand
upon Brotherton's broad fat paw, and smiled a quaint, appreciative
smile, frank and gentle. It was one of those smiles that carried
agreement with what had been said, and with everything that might be
said. Brotherton took up the hallelujah chorus for Margaret with: "Fine
girl--bright, keen--well say, did you know she's buying the books here
of me for the chautauqua course and is trying for a degree--something in
her head besides hairpins--well, say!"
He stopped in the middle of the sentence, and brought down his great
hand on his knee. "Well, say--observe me the prize idiot! Get the blue
ribbon and pin it on your Uncle George. Look here at me overlooking the
main bet. Well, say, Henry--here are the specifications of one large
juicy plan. Funeral to-morrow--old man Mauling; obliging party to die.
Uncle George and the angel choir to officiate with Uncle George doubling
in brass as pall-bearer. The new Mrs. Sands, our bell-voiced contralto,
is sick: also obliging party to be sick. Need new contralto: Müller girl
has voice like morning star, or stars, as the case may be." Fenn flashed
on his electric smile, and rose, looking a question.
"That's the idea, Henry, that finally wormed its way into my master
mind," cried Brotherton, laughing his big laugh. "That's what I said
before I spoke. You are to drive into Prospect Township this
evening--Hey, Grant," called Brotherton to the boy on the bench in the
Amen corner, "Does that pretty school ma'am board with you people?" And
when Grant shook his head, Brotherton went on: "Yes--she's moved across
the district I remember now. Well, anyway, Henry, you're to drive into
Prospect Township this evening and produce one large, luscious brunette
contralto for choir practice at General Nesbit's piano at eight o'clock
sharp." He stood facing Fenn whose eyes were glowing. The lurking devil
seemed to slink away from him. Brotherton, seeing the change, again
burst into his laugh and bringing Fenn to the front of the store roared:
"Well, say--Hennery--are there any flies on your Uncle George's scheme?"
Grant began buttoning his coat. Fenn, free for the moment of his devil,
was happy, and Brotherton looked at the two and cried, "Now get out of
here--the both of you: you're spiling trade. And say," called Brotherton
to Fenn, "bring her up to the Palace Hotel for supper, and we'll fill
her full of rich food, so's she can sing--well, say!"
That evening going home Grant met Margaret and Fenn at a turn of the
road, and before they noticed him, he saw a familiar look in her eyes as
she gazed at the man, saw how closely they were sitting in the buggy,
saw a score of little things that sent the blood to his face and he
strode on past them without speaking. That night he slipped into the
room where the baby lay playing with his toes, and there, standing over
the little fellow, the youth's eyes filled with tears and for the first
time he felt the horror of the baby lifting from him. He did not touch
the child, but tiptoed from the room ashamed to be seen.
To Margaret Müller, the baby's mother, that night opened a new world. To
begin with, it marked her entrance through the portals of the Palace
Hotel as a guest. She had sometimes flitted into the office with its
loose, tiled floors and shabby, onyx splendor to speak to Miss Mauling
of the news stand; then she came as a fugitive and saw things only
furtively. But this night Margaret walked in through the "Ladies
Entrance," sat calmly in the parlor, while Mr. Fenn wrote her name upon
the register, and after some delirious moments of grand conversation
with Mr. Fenn in the gilded hall of pleasure with its chenille draperies
and its apoplectic furniture all puffed to the bursting point, she had
walked with Mr. Fenn through the imposing halls of the wonderful
edifice, like a rescued princess in a fairy tale, to the dining room,
there to meet Mr. Brotherton, and the eldest Miss Morton, who recently
had been playing the cabinet organ at funerals to guide Mr. Brotherton's
choir. Now the eldest Miss Morton was not antique, being only a scant
fifteen in short dresses and pig tails. But at the urgent request of Mr.
Brotherton, and "to fill out the table, and to take the wrinkles out of
her apron by a square meal at the Palace," as Mr. Brotherton explained
to the Captain, she had been primped and curled and scared by her
sisters and her father, and sent along with Mr. Brotherton--possibly in
his great ulster pocket, and she sat breathing irregularly and looking
steadily into her lap in great awe and trepidation.
Margaret Müller, in the dining-room whose fame had spread to the
outposts of Spring township and to the fastnesses of Prospect, behaved
with scarcely less constraint than the eldest Miss Morton. She gazed at
the beamed ceiling, the high wainscoting, the stenciled walls, the
frescoes upon the panels, framed by the beams, the wide sideboard, the
glittering glass and the plated silver service, and if her eyes had not
been so beautiful they would have betrayed her wonder and admiration. As
it was, they showed an ecstasy of delight that made them shine and when
Henry Fenn saw them he looked at Mr. Brotherton, and Mr. Brotherton
looked at Mr. Fenn, and the moon in Mr. Brotherton's face beamed a
lively approval. Moreover the cigar salesman from Leavenworth and a
hardware drummer from St. Louis and a dry-goods salesman from Chicago
and a travelling auditor for the Midland saw Margaret's eyes and they
too looked at one another and gave their unqualified approval. In other
years--in later years--when she was at Bertolini's Grand Palace in
Naples or in some of the other Grand Palaces of other effete and
luxurious capitals of Europe, Margaret used to think of that first meal
at the Palace house in Harvey and wonder what in the world really did
become of the dozen fried oysters that she so innocently ordered. She
could see them looming up, a great pyramid of brown batter, garnished
with cress, and she knew that she had blundered. But she did not see the
wink that Mr. Brotherton gave Mr. Fenn nor the glare that Mr. Fenn gave
Mr. Brotherton; so she faced it out and whether she ate them or left
them, she never could recall.
But it was a glorious occasion in spite of the fried oysters. What
though the tiles of the floor of the Palace were cracked; what though
the curtains sagged, and the furniture was shabby, and the walls were
faded and dingy; what though the great beams in the dining-room were
dirty and the carpets in the halls bedraggled, and the onyx gapping in
great cracks upon the warped walls of the office; what though the paint
had faded and the varnish cracked all over the house! To Margaret Müller
and also to the eldest Miss Morton, who only managed to breathe below
her locket when they were under the stars, it was a dream of marble
halls, and the frowsy Freddie Kollander and the other waiter who brought
in the food on thick, cracked oblong dishes were vassals and serfs by
their sides.
When they started up Sixth Avenue, the eldest Miss Morton was trying to
think of everything that had happened to tell the younger Misses Morton,
Martha and Ruth--what they ate and what Miss Müller wore, and what
Freddie Kollander who waited on them, and also went to high school, did
when he saw her, and how Mr. Fenn acted when Miss Müller got the big
platter of oysters, and what olives tasted like and if anything had been
cooked in the Peerless Cooker that father had just sold Mr. Paxton and
in general why the spirit of mortal should be proud.
But Miss Müller entertained no such thoughts. She was treading upon the
air of some elysium, and she took and held Mr. Fenn's arm with an
unnecessary tightness and began humming the tune that told of the girl
who dreamed she dwelt in marble halls; and then, as they left the thick
of the town and were walking along the board sidewalks that lead to Elm
Crest on Elm Street, they all fell to singing that tune; and as one good
tune deserved another, and as they were going to practice the funeral
music that evening, they sang other tunes of a highly secular nature
that need not be enumerated here. And as Miss Müller had a substantial
dinner folded snugly within her, and the ambition of her life was
looming but a few blocks ahead of her, she walked closer to Mr. Fenn,
county attorney in and for Greeley county, than was really necessary. So
when Mr. Brotherton walked alongside with the eldest Miss Morton
stumbling intermittently over the edge of the sidewalk and walking in
the dry weeds beside it, Miss Müller put some feeling into her singing
voice and they struck what Mr. Brotherton was pleased to call a
barbershop chord, and held it to his delight. And the frosty air rang
with their voices, and the rich tremulous voice of the young woman
thrilled with passion too deep for words. So deep was it that it might
have stirred the hovering soul of the dead whose dirges they were to
sing and brought back to him the time when he too had thrilled with
youth and its inexpressible joy.
Up the hill they go, arm in arm, with fondling voices uttering the
unutterable. And now they turn into a long, broad avenue of elms, of
high, plumey elms trimmed and tended, mulched and cultivated for nearly
twenty years, the apple of one man's eye; great elms set in blue grass,
branching only at the tops, elms that stand in a grove around an
irregular house, elms that shade a broad stone walk leading up to a
wide, hospitable door. The young people ring. There is a stirring in the
house, Margaret Müller's heart is a-flutter--and the eldest Miss Morton
wonders whether Laura or the hired girl will open the door, and in a
moment--enter Margaret Müller into the home of the Nesbits.
As the wide door opens, a glow of light and life falls upon the young
people. Standing in the broad reception room is Doctor Nesbit, with his
finger in a book--a poetry book if you please--and before him with his
arm about her and her head beneath his chin stands his daughter. Coming
down the stairs is Mrs. Bedelia Satterthwaite Nesbit--of the Maryland
Satterthwaites--tall, well-upholstered, with large features and a Roman
nose and with the makings of a double chin, if she ever would deign to
bend her queenly head, and finally with the pomp of a major general in
figure and mien.
She ignores the débris of the carpenters who have been putting in the
hardwood floors, without glancing at it, and walking to her guests,
welcomes them with regal splendor, receiving Miss Müller with rather
obvious dignity. Mrs. Nesbit in those days was a woman of whom the
doctor said, "There is no foolishness about Bedelia." The jovial Mr.
Brotherton attempts some pleasant hyperbole of speech, which the hostess
ignores and the Doctor greets with a smile. Mrs. Nesbit leads the way to
the piano, being a woman of purpose, and whisks the eldest Miss Morton
upon a stool and has the hymn book opened in less time than it takes to
tell how she did it. The Doctor and Laura stand watching the company,
and perhaps they stand awkwardly; which prompts Mr. Brotherton in the
goodness of his heart to say, "Doctor, won't you sit and hear the
music?"
Mrs. Nesbit looks around, sees the two figures standing near the fire
and replies, "No, the Doctor won't."
To which he chirps a mocking echo--"No, the Doctor won't."
Mr. Brotherton glances at Mr. Fenn, and the Doctor sees it. "That's all
right, boys--that's all right; I may be satrap of Harvey and have the
power of life and death over my subjects, but that's down town. Out
here, I'm the minority report."
Mrs. Nesbit opens the hymn book, smooths the fluttering leaves and says
without looking toward the Doctor: "I suppose we may as well begin now."
And she begins beating the time with her index finger and marking the
accents with her foot.
As they sing they can hear the gentle drone of the Doctor's soft voice
in the intervals in the music, reading in some nearby room to his
daughter. They are reading Tennyson's "Maud" and sometimes in the
emotional passages his voice breaks and his eyes fill up and he cannot
go on. At such times, the daughter puts her head upon his shoulder and
often wipes her tears away upon his coat and they are silent until he
can begin again. When his throat cramps, she pats his cheek and they sit
dreaming for a time and the dreams they dream and the dreams they read
differ only in that the poetry is made with words.
It is a proud night for Margaret Müller. She has come into a new
world--the world of her deep desire. Mrs. Nesbit sees the girl's
wandering eyes, taking note of the furniture, as one making an
inventory. No article of the vast array of vases and jars and plaques
and jugs and statuettes and grotesque souvenirs of far journeys across
the world, nor etchings nor steel engravings nor photographs of Roman
antiquities nor storied urns nor animated busts escapes the wandering,
curious brown eyes of the girl. But in her vast wonderment, though her
eyes wander far and wide, they never are too far to flash back betimes
at Henry Fenn's who drinks from the woman's eyes as from a deep and
bewitching well. He does not see that she is staring. But as the minutes
speed, he knows that he is electrified with alternating currents from
her glowing face and that they bring to him a rapture that he has never
known before.
But you may be sure of one thing: Mrs. Nesbit--she that was
Satterthwaite of the Maryland Satterthwaites--she sees what is in the
wind. She is not wearing gold-rimmed nose glasses for her health. Her
health is exceptionally good. And what is more to the point, as they are
singing, Mrs. Nesbit gives George Brotherton a look--one of the genuine
old Satterthwaite looks that speak volumes, and in effect it tells him
that if he has any sense, he will take Henry Fenn home before he makes a
fool of himself. And the eldest Miss Morton, swinging her legs under the
piano stool and drumming away to Mrs. Nesbit's one- and two- and
three- and four-ands, peeps out of the corners of her eyes and sees Miss
Müller gobbling Mr. Fenn right down without chewing him, and whoopee but
Mrs. Nesbit is biting nails, and Mr. Brotherton, he can't hardly keep his
face straight from laughing at all, and if Ruth and Martha ever tell she
will never tell them another thing in the world. And she mustn't forget
to ask Mrs. Nesbit if she's used the Peerless Cooker and if she has,
will she please say something nice about it to Mrs. Ahab Wright, for
Papa is so anxious to sell one to the Wrights!
It is nearly nine o'clock. Mr. Fenn has been eaten up these twenty
times. The wandering eyes have caressed the bric-a-brac over and over.
Mrs. Nesbit's tireless index finger has marked the time while the great
hands of the tall hall clock have crept around and halfway around again.
They are upon the final rehearsal of it.
"Other refuge have I none," says the voice and the eyes say even more
and are mutely answered by another pair of eyes.
"Hangs my helpless soul on thee," says the deep passionate voice, and
the eyes say things even more tender to eyes that falter only because
they are faint with joy. In the short interval the moving finger of Mrs.
Nesbit goes up, and then comes a rattling of the great front door. A
moment later it is opened and the flushed face of Grant Adams is seen.
He is collarless, and untidy; he rushes into the room crying, "O,
doctor--doctor, come--our baby--he is choking." The youth sees Margaret,
and with passion cries: "Kenyon--Kenyon--the baby, he is dying; for
God's sake--Mag, where is the Doctor?"
In an instant the little figure of the Doctor is in the room. He stares
at the red-faced boy, and quick as a flash he sees the open mouth, the
dazed, gaping eyes, the graying face of Margaret as she leans heavily
upon George Brotherton. In another instant the Doctor sees her rally,
grapple with herself, bring back the slow color as if by main strength,
and smile a hard forced smile, as the boy stands in impotent anguish
before them.
"I have the spring wagon here, Doctor--hurry--hurry please,"
expostulates the youth, as the Doctor climbs into his overcoat, and then
looking at Margaret the boy exclaims wildly--"Wouldn't you like to go,
too, Maggie? Wouldn't you?"
She has hold of herself now and replies: "No, Grant, I don't think your
mother will need me," but she almost loses her grip as she asks weakly,
"Do you?"
In another second they are gone, the boy and the Doctor, out into the
night, and the horse's hoofs, clattering fainter and fainter as they
hurry down the road, bring to her the sound of a little heart beating
fainter and fainter, and she holds on to her soul with a hard hand.
Before long Margaret Müller and Henry Fenn are alone in a buggy driving
to Prospect township.
She sees above her on the hill the lights in the great house of her
desire. And she knows that down in the valley where shimmers a single
light is a little body choking for breath, fighting for life.
"Hangs my helpless soul on thee," swirls through her brain, and she is
cold--very cold, and sits aloof and will not talk, cannot talk. Ever the
patter of the horse's feet in the valley is borne upward by the wind,
and she feels in her soul the faltering of a little heart. She dares not
hope that it will start up again; she cannot bear the fear that it will
stop.
So she leaves the man who knew her inmost soul but an hour ago; hardly a
word she speaks at parting; hardly she turns to him as she slips into
the house, cold and shivering with the sound of every hoof-beat on the
road in the night, bringing her back to the helpless soul fluttering in
the little body that once she warmed in hers.
Thus the watchers watched the fighting through the night, the child
fighting so hard to live. For life is dear to a child--even though its
life perpetuates shame and brings only sorrow--life still is dear to
that struggling little body there under that humble roof, where even
those that love it, and hover in agony over it in its bed of torture,
feel that if it goes out into the great mystery from whence it came, it
will take a sad blot from the world with it. And so hope and fear and
love and tenderness and grief are all mingled in the horror that it may
die, in the mute question that asks if death would not be merciful and
kind. And all night the watchers watched, and the watcher who was absent
was afraid to pray, and as the daylight came in, wan and gray, the child
on the rack of misery sank to sleep, and smiled a little smile of peace
at victory.
Then in the pale dawn, a weary man, trudging afoot slowly up the hill
into Harvey, met another going out into the fields. The Doctor looked up
and was astonished to see Henry Fenn, with hard drawn features,
trembling limbs, hollow eyes and set lips. He too had been fighting hard
and he also had won his victory. The Doctor met the man's furtive,
burning eyes and piped out softly:
"Stick to it, Henry--by God, stick hard," and trudged on into the
morning gloaming.
CHAPTER VI
ENTER THE BEAUTY AND CHIVALRY OF HARVEY; ALSO HEREIN WE BREAK OUR FIRST
HEART
Towns are curiously like individuals. They take their character largely
from their experiences, laid layer upon layer in their consciousnesses,
as time moves, and though the experiences are seemingly forgotten, the
results of those experiences are ineffaceably written into the towns.
Four or five towns lie buried under the Harvey that is to-day, each one
possible only as the other upholds it, and all inexorably pointing to
the destiny of the Harvey that is, and to the many other Harveys yet to
rise upon the townsite--the Harveys that shall be. There was, of course,
heredity before the town was; the strong New England strain of blood
that was mixed in the Ohio Valley and about the Great Lakes and changed
by the upheaval of the Civil War. Then came the hegira across the
Mississippi and the infant town in the Missouri Valley--the town of the
pioneers--the town that only obeyed its call and sought instinctively
the school house, the newspaper, orderly government, real estate
gambling and "the distant church that topt the neighboring hill." In the
childhood of the town the cattle trail appeared and with the cattle
trade came wild days and sad disorder. But the railroad moved westward
and the cattle trail moved with the railroad and then in the early
adolescence of the town came coal and gas and oil. And suddenly Harvey
blossomed into youth.
It was a place of adventure; men were made rich overnight by the blow of
a drill in a well. Then was the time for that equality of opportunity to
come which the pioneers sought if ever it was coming. But alas, even in
matters of sheer luck, the fates played favorites. In those fat years it
began raining red-wheeled buggies on Sundays, and smart traps drawn by
horses harnessed gaudily in white or tan appeared on the streets. Morty
Sands often hired a band from Omaha or Kansas City, and held high revel
in the Sands opera house, where all the new dances of that halcyon day
were tripped. The waters of the Wahoo echoed with the sounds of boating
parties--also frequently given by Morty Sands, and his mandolin
twittered gayly on a dozen porches during the summer evenings of that
period. It was Morty who enticed Henry Fenn into the second suit of
evening clothes ever displayed in Harvey, though Tom Van Dorn and George
Brotherton appeared a week later in evening clothes plus white gloves
and took much of the shine from Henry and Morty's splendor. Those were
the days when Nate Perry and young Joe Calvin and Freddie Kollander
organized the little crowd--the Spring Chickens, they called
themselves--and the little crowd was wont to ape its elders and peek
through the fence at the grandeur of the grown-ups. But alas for the
little crowd, month by month it was doomed to see its little girls
kidnaped to bloom in the upper gardens. Thus Emma Morton went; thus Ave
Calvin disappeared, and so Laura Nesbit vanished from the Spring
Chickens and appeared in Morty Sands's bower! Doctor Nesbit in those
days called Morty the "head gardener in the 'rosebud garden of girls!'"
And a lovely garden it was. Of course, it was more or less democratic;
for every one was going to be rich; every one was indeed just on the
verge of riches, and lines of caste were loosely drawn. For wealth was
the only line that marked the social differences. So when Henry Fenn,
the young county attorney, in his new evening clothes brought Margaret
Müller of the Register of Deeds office to Morty Sands's dances, Margaret
had whatever social distinction her wits gave her; which upon the whole
was as much distinction as Rhoda Kollander had whose husband employed
Margaret. The press of the social duties in that day weighed heavily
upon Rhoda, who was not the woman to neglect her larger responsibilities
to so good a husband as John Kollander, by selfishly staying at home and
keeping house for him. She had a place in society to maintain, that the
flag of her country might not be sullied by barring John from a county
office.
The real queen-rose in the garden was Laura Nesbit. How vivid she was!
What lips she had in those days of her first full bloom, and what frank,
searching eyes! And her laugh--that chimed like bells through the
merriment of the youth that always was gathered about her--her laugh
could start a reaction in Morty Sands's heart as far as he could hear
the chime. It was a matter of common knowledge in the "crowd," that
Morty Sands had one supreme aim in life: the courtship of Laura Nesbit.
For her he lavished clothes upon himself until he became known as the
iridescent dream! For her he bought a high-seated cart of great price,
drawn by a black horse in white kid harness! For her he learned a whole
concert of Schubert's songs upon the mandolin and organized a serenading
quartette that wore the grass smooth under her window. For her candy,
flowers, books--usually gift books with padded covers, or with
handpainted decorations, or with sumptuous engravings upon them or in
them, sifted into the Nesbits' front room, and lay in a thick coating
upon the parlor table.
Someway these votive offerings didn't reach the heart of the goddess.
She rode beside him in his stanhope, and she wore his bouquets and read
his books, such as were intended for reading; and alas for her figure,
she ate his candy. But these things did not prosper his suit. She was
just looking around in the market of life. Pippa was forever passing
through her heart singing, "God's in his heaven--all's right with the
world." She did not blink at evil; she knew it, abhorred it, but
challenged it with love. She had a vague idea that evil could be
vanquished by inviting it out to dinner and having it in for tea
frequently and she believed if it still refused to transform itself into
good, that the thing to do with evil was to be a sister to it.
The closest she ever came to overcoming evil with evil was when she
spanked little Joe Calvin for persisting in tying cans to the Morton
cat's tail, whereupon Morty Sands rose and gave the girl nine rahs,
exhibiting an enthusiasm that inspired him for a year. So Laura thought
that if the spanking had not helped much the soul of little Joe, it had
put something worth while into Morty Sands. The thought cheered her. For
Morty was her problem. During the first months after her return from
boarding school, she had broken him--excepting upon minor moonlight
relapses--of trying to kiss her, and she had sufficiently discouraged
his declarations of undying devotion, so that they came only at
weddings, or after other mitigating circumstances which, after pinching
his ear, she was able to overlook.
But she could not get him to work for a living. He wouldn't even keep
office hours. Lecturing settled nothing. Lecturing a youth in a black
and gold blazer, duck trousers and a silk shirt and a red sash, with
socks and hat to match his coat, lecturing a youth who plays the
mandolin while you talk, and looks at you through hazel eyes with all
the intelligence of an affectionate pup, lecturing a youth who you know
would be kissing you at the moment if you weren't twenty pounds heavier
and twice as strong--someway doesn't arouse enthusiasm. So Morty Sands
remained a problem.
Now an affair of the heart when a man is in his twenties and a girl is
just passing out of her teens, is never static; it is dynamic and always
there is something doing.
It was after one of Morty's innumerable summer dances in the Sands Opera
House, that Fate cast her dies for the final throw. Morty had filled
Laura Nesbit's program scandalously full. Two Newports, three military
schottisches, the York, the Racket--ask grandpa and grammer about these
dances, ye who gyrate in to-day's mazes--two waltz quadrilles and a
reel. And when you have danced half the evening with a beautiful girl,
Fate is liable to be thumping vigorously on the door of your heart. So
Morty walking home under a drooping August moon with Laura Nesbit that
night determined to bring matters to a decision. As they came up the
walk to the Nesbit home, the girl was humming the tune that beat upon
his heart, and almost unconsciously they fell to waltzing. At the
veranda steps they paused, and his arm was around her. She tried to move
away from him, and cuffed him as she cried: "Now Morty--you know--you
know very well what I've always--"
"Laura--Laura--" he cried, as he held her hand to his face and tried to
focus her soul with his brown eyes, "Laura," he faltered, then words
deserted him: the fine speech he had planned melted into, "O, my
dear--my dear!" But he kept her hand. The pain and passion in his voice
cut into the girl's heart. She was not frightened. She did not care to
run. She did not even take his persisting arm from about her. She let
him kiss her hand reverently, then she sat with him on the veranda step
and as they sat she drew his arm from her waist until it was hooked in
her arm, and her hand held his.
"Oh, I'm in earnest to-night, Laura," said Morty, gripping her hand.
"I'm staking my whole life to-night, Laura. I'm deadly--oh, quite deadly
serious, Laura, and oh--"
"And I'm serious too, Morty," said the girl--"just as serious as you!"
She slipped her hand away from his and put her hand upon his shoulder
gently, almost tenderly. But the youth felt a certain calmness in her
touch that disheartened him.
In a storm of despair he spoke: "Laura--Laura, can't you see--how can
you let me go on loving you as I do until I am mad! Can't you see that
my soul is yours and always has been! You can call it into heights it
will never know without you! You--you--O, sometimes I feel that I could
pray to you as to God!" He turned to her a face glowing with a white and
holy passion, and dropped her hand from his shoulder and did not touch
her as he spoke. Their eyes met steadfastly in a silence. Then the girl
bowed her head and sobbed. For she knew, even in her teens, she knew
with the intuitions that are old as human love upon the planet that she
was in the naked presence of an adoring soul. When she could speak she
picked up the man's soft white hand, and kissed it. She could not have
voiced her eternal denial more certainly. And Morty Sands lifted an
agonized face to the stars and his jaws trembled. He had lighted his
altar fire and it was quenched. The girl, still holding his hand, said
tenderly:
"I'm so sorry--so sorry, Morty. But I can't! I never--never--never can!"
She hesitated, and repeated, shaking her head sadly, "I never, never can
love you, Morty--never! And it's kind--"
"Yes, yes," he answered as one who realizes a finality. "It's kind
enough--yes, I know you're kind, Laura!" He stopped and gazed at her in
the moonlight--and it was as if a flame on the charred altar of his
heart had sprung up for a second as he spoke: "And I never--never
shall--I never shall love any one else--I never, never shall!"
The girl rose. A moment later the youth followed her. Back into its
sheath under his countenance his soul slipped, and he stood before the
girl smiling a half deprecatory smile. But the girl's face was racked
with sorrow. She had seen tragedy. Her pain wounded him and he winced in
his heart. Wherefore he smiled quite genuinely, and stepped back, and
threw a kiss at the girl as he said: "It's nothing, Laura! Don't mind!
It's nothing at all and we'll forget it! Won't we?"
And turning away, he tripped down the walk, leaving her gazing after him
in the moonlight. At the street he turned back with a gay little
gesture, blew a kiss from his white finger tips and cried, "It's nothing
at all--nothing at all!" And as she went indoors she heard him call,
"It's nothing at all!"
She heard him lift his whistle to the tune of the waltz quadrille, but
she stood with tears in her eyes until the brave tune died in the
distance.
CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH WE SEE HOW LIFE TRANSLATES ITSELF INTO THE MATERIALISM AROUND
IT
Coal and oil and gas and lead and zinc. The black sprite, the brown
sprite, the invisible sprite, the two gray sprites--elemental sprites
they were--destined to be bound servants of man. Yet when they came
rushing out of the earth there at Harvey, man groveled before them, and
sold his immortal soul to these trolls. Naturally enough Daniel Sands
was the high priest at their altar. It was fitting that a devil worship
which prostrated itself before coal and oil and gas and lead and zinc
should make a spider the symbol of its servility. So the spider's web,
all iron and steel in pipes below ground, all steel and iron and copper
in wires and rails above ground, spread out over the town, over the
country near the town, and all the pipes and tubes and rails and wires
led to the dingy little room where Daniel Sands sat spinning his web. He
was the town god. Even the gilded heifer of Baal was a nobler one. And
the curious thing about this orgy of materialism, was that Harvey and
all the thousands of Harveys great and small that filled America in
those decades believed with all their hearts--and they were essentially
kind hearts--that quick, easy and exorbitant profits, really made the
equality of opportunity which every one desired. They thought in terms
of democracy--which is at bottom a spiritual estate,--and they acted
like gross materialists. So they fooled the world, while they deceived
themselves. For the soul of America was not reflected in that debauch of
gross profit making. The soul of America still aspired for justice; but
in the folly of the day, believed quite complacently because a few men
got rich quick (stupid men too,) and many men were well-to-do, that
justice was achieved, and the world ready for the millennium. But there
came a day when Harvey, and all its kind saw the truth in shame.
And life in Harvey shaped itself into a vast greedy dream. A hard,
metallic timbre came into the soft, high voice of Dr. James Nesbit, but
did not warn men of the metallic plate that was galvanizing the Doctor's
soul; nor did it disturb the Doctor. Amos Adams saw the tinplate
covering, heard the sounding brass, and Mary his wife saw and heard too;
but they were only two fools and the Doctor who loved them laughed at
them and turned to the healing of the sick and the subjugation of his
county. So men sent him to the state Senate. Curiously Mrs. Nesbit--she
whom George Brotherton always called the General--she did not shake the
spell of the trolls from her heart. They were building wings and ells
and lean-tos on the house that she called her home, and she came to love
the witchery of the time and place and did not see its folly. Yet there
walked between these two entranced ones, another who should have
awakened. For she was young, fresh from the gods of life. Her eyes,
unflinching, glorious eyes, should have seen through the dream of that
day. But they were only a girl's eyes and were happy, so they could not
see beyond the spell that fell around them. And alas, even when the
prince arrived, his kiss was poisoned too.
When young Thomas Van Dorn came to the Nesbit house on a voyage of
exploration and discovery--came in a handsome suit of gray, with hat and
handkerchief to match, and a flowing crepe tie, black to harmonize with
his flowing mustache and his wing of fine jet black hair above his ivory
tinted face, Laura Nesbit considered him reflectively, and catalogued
him.
"Tom," explained the daughter to her father rather coldly one morning,
after the young man had been reading Swinburne in his deep, mellow
pipe-organ of a voice to the family until bedtime the night before, "Tom
Van Dorn, father, is the kind of a man who needs the influence of some
strong woman!"
Mrs. Nesbit glanced at her husband furtively and caught his grin as he
piped gayly:
"Who also must carry the night key!"
The three laughed but the daughter went on with the cataloguing: "He is
a young man of strong predilections, of definite purpose and more than
ordinary intellectual capacity."
"And so far as I have counted, Laura," her father interrupted again, "I
haven't found an honest hair in his handsome head; though I haven't
completed the count yet!" The father smiled amiably as he made the final
qualification.
The girl caught the mother's look of approval shimmering across the
table and laughed her gay, bell-like chime. "O, you've made a bad guess,
mother."
Again she laughed gayly: "It's not for me to open a school for the
Direction of Miscalculated Purposes. Still," this she said seriously, "a
strong woman is what he needs."
"Not omitting the latch-key," gibed her father, and the talk drifted
into another current.
The next Sunday afternoon young Tom Van Dorn appeared with Rossetti
added to his Swinburne, and crowded Morty Sands clear out of the hammock
so that Morty had to sleep in a porch chair, and woke up frequently and
was unhappy. While the gilded youth slept the Woman woke and listened,
and Morty was left disconsolate.
The shadows were long and deep when Tom Van Dorn rose from the hammock,
closed his book, and stood beside the girl, looking with a gentle
tenderness from the burning depths of his black eyes into her eyes. He
paused before starting away, and held up a hand so that she could see,
wound about it, a flaxen hair, probably drawn from the hammock pillow.
He smiled rather sadly, dropped his eyes to the book closed in his
hands, and quoted softly:
"'And around his heart, one strangling golden hair!'"
He did not speak again, but walked off at a great stride down the stone
path to the street. The next day Rossetti's sonnets came to Laura Nesbit
in a box of roses.
The Sunday following Laura Nesbit made it a point to go with her parents
to spend the day with the Adamses down by the river on their farm. But
not until the Nesbits piled into their phaëton to leave did Grant
appear. He met the visitors at the gate with a great bouquet of woods
flowers, saying, "Here, Mrs. Nesbit--I thought you might like them." But
they found Laura's hands, and he smiled gratefully at her for taking
them. As they drove off, leaving him looking eagerly after them, Dr.
Nesbit said when they were out of hearing, "I tell you, girls--there's
the makings of a man--a real man!"
That night Laura Nesbit in her room looking at the stars, rose and
smelled the woods flowers on her table beside some fading roses.
As her day dreams merged into vague pictures flitting through her drowsy
brain, she heard the plaintive, trembling voice of Morty Sands's
mandolin, coming nearer and nearer, and his lower whistle taking the
tune while the E string crooned an obligato; he passed the house, went
down the street to the Mortons' and came back and went home again, still
trilling his heart out like a bird. As the chirping faded into the night
sounds, the girl smiled compassionately and slept.
As she slept young Thomas Van Dorn walked alone under the elm trees that
plumed over the sidewalks in those environs with hands clasped behind
him, occasionally gazing into the twinkling stars of the summer night,
considering rather seriously many things. He had come out to think over
his speech to the jury the next day in a murder case pending in the
court. But the murderer kept sinking from his consciousness; the speech
would not shape itself to please him, and the young lawyer was forever
meeting rather squarely and abruptly the vision of Laura Nesbit, who
seemed to be asking him disagreeable and conclusive questions, which he
did not like to answer. Was she worth it--the sacrifice that marriage
would require of him? Was he in love with her? What is love anyway?
Wherein did it differ from certain other pleasurable emotions, to which
he was not a stranger? And why was the consciousness of her growing
larger and larger in his life? He tried to whistle reflectively, but he
had no music in his soul and whistling gave him no solace.
It was midnight when he found himself walking past the Nesbit home,
looking toward it and wondering which of the open windows was nearest to
her. He flinched with shame when he recollected himself before other
houses gazing at other windows, and he unpursed his lips that were wont
to whistle a signal, and went down the street shuddering. Then after an
impulse in which some good angel of remorse shook his teeth to rouse his
soul, he lifted his face to the sky and would have cried in his heart
for help, but instead he smiled and went on, trying to think of his
speech and resolving mightily to put Laura Nesbit out of his heart
finally for the night. He held himself to his high resolve for four or
five minutes. It is only fair to say that the white clad figure of the
Doctor coming clicking up the street with his cane keeping time to a
merry air that he hummed as he walked distracted the young man. His
first thought was to turn off and avoid the Doctor who came along
swinging his medicine case gayly. But there rushed over Van Dorn a
feeling that he would like to meet the Doctor. He recognized that he
would like to see any one who was near to Her. It was a pleasing
sensation. He coddled it. He was proud of it; he knew what it meant. So
he stopped the preoccupied figure in white, and cried, "Doctor--we're
late to-night!"
"Well, Tom, I've got a right to be! Two more people in Harvey to-night
than were here at five o'clock this afternoon because I am a trifle
behindhand. Girl at your partner's--Joe Calvin's, and a boy down at Dick
Bowman's!" He paused and smiled and added musingly, "And they're as
tickled down at Dick's as though he was heir to a kingdom!"
"And Joe--I suppose--not quite--"
"Oh, Joe, he's still in the barn, I dropped in to tell him it was a
girl. But he won't venture into the house to see the mother before noon
to-morrow! Then he'll go when she's asleep!"
"Dick really isn't more than two jumps ahead of the wolf, is he,
Doctor?"
"Well," grinned the elder man, "maybe a jump-and-a-half or two jumps."
The young man exclaimed, "Say, Doctor! I think it would be a pious act
to make the fellows put up fifty dollars for Dick to-night. I'll just go
down and raid a few poker games and make them do it."
The Doctor stopped him: "Better let me give it to Dick if you get it,
Tom!" Then he added, "Why don't you keep Christian hours, boy? You can't
try that Yengst case to-morrow and be up all night!"
"That's just what I'm out here for, Doctor--to get my head in shape for
the closing speech."
"Well," sniffed the Doctor, "I wish you no bad luck, but I hope you
lose. Yengst is guilty, and you've no business--"
"Doctor," cut in Van Dorn, "there's not a penny in the Yengst case for
me! He was a poor devil in trouble and he came to my office for help! Do
you consider the morals of your sick folks--whether they have lived
virtuous and upright lives when they come to you stricken and in pain?
They're just sick folks to you in your office, and they're just poor
devils in trouble for me."
The Doctor cocked his head on one side, sparrow-wise, looked for a
moment at the young man and piped, "You're a brassy pup, aren't you!"
A second later the Doctor was trudging up the street, homeward, humming
his bee-like song. Van Dorn watched him until his white clothes faded
into the shades of the night, then he turned and walked slowly townward,
with his hands behind him and his eyes on the ground. He forgot the
Yengst case, and everything else in the universe except a girl's gray
eyes, her radiant face, and the glory of her aspiring soul. It was
calling with all its power to Tom Van Dorn to rise and shine and take up
the journey to the stars. And when one hears that call, whether it come
from man or maid, from friend or brother, or sweetheart or child, or
from the challenge within him of the holy spirit, when he heeds its
call, no matter where he is while he hears, he walks with God!
So it came to pass the next day that Thomas Van Dorn went before the
jury and pleaded for the murderer in the Yengst case with the tongue of
men and of angels. For he knew that Dr. Nesbit was loitering in the
clerk's office, adjoining the courtroom to listen to the plea. Every
faculty of his mind and every capacity of his body was awake, and they
said around the court house that it was "the speech of Tom's life!" The
Doctor on the front steps of the courthouse met the young man in the
daze that follows an oratorical flight, munching a sandwich to relieve
his brain, while the multitude made way for him as he went to his
office.
"Well, Tom--" piped the Doctor as he grasped the sweaty, cold hands of
the young orator, "if Yengst had been innocent do you suppose you could
have done as well?"
Van Dora, gave his sandwich to a passing dog, and took the Doctor's arm
as they walked to their common stairway. Before they had walked a dozen
steps the Doctor had unfolded a situation in local politics that needed
attention, and Van Dorn could not lead the elder man back to further
praises of his speech. Yet the young lawyer knew that he had moved the
Doctor deeply.
That night in his office Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn sat with their feet
in the window sill, looking through the open window into the moon. In
their discourse they used that elaborate, impersonal anonymity that
youth engages to carry the baggage of its intimate confidences.
"I've got to have a pretty woman, Henry," quoth the lawyer to his
friend, while the moon blushed behind a cloud. "She must have beauty
above everything, and after that good manners, and after that good
blood."
The moon came out and smiled at Henry. "Tom, let me tell you something,
I don't care! I used to think I'd be pickey and choosey. But I know my
own heart. I don't care! I'm the kind of fellow, I guess, who just gets
it bad and comes down all broken out with it." He turned his glowing
smile into Tom Van Dorn's face, and finding no quick response smiled
whimsically back at the moon.
"Some fellows are that way, Henry," assented Van Dorn, "but not I! I
couldn't love a servant girl no matter how pretty she was--not for
keeps, and I couldn't love an ugly princess, and I'd leave a
bluestocking and elope with a chorus girl if I found the bluestocking
crocked or faded in the wash! Yet a beautiful woman, who remained a
woman and didn't become a moral guide--" he stared brazenly at the moon
and in the cloud that whisked by he saw a score of fancies of other
women whose faces had shone there, and had passed. He went on: "Oh, she
could hold me--she could hold me--I think!"
The street noises below filled the pause. Henry rose, looked eagerly
into the sky and wistfully at the moon as he spoke, "Hold me? Hold me?"
he cried. "Why, Tom, though I'd fall into hell myself a thousand
times--she couldn't lose me! I'd still--still," he faltered, "I'd
still--" He did not finish, but sat down and putting his hand on the arm
of his friend's chair, he bent forward, smiled into the handsome young
face in the moonlight and said: "Well--you know the kind of a fool I am,
Tom--now!"
"That's what you say, Henry--that's what you say now." Van Dorn turned
and looked at his friend. "You're sticking it out all right,
Henry--against the rum fiend--I presume? When does your sentence
expire?"
"Next October," answered Fenn.
"Going to make it then?"
"That's the understanding," returned Fenn.
"And you say you've got it bad," laughed Van Dorn. "And yet--say,
Henry--why didn't you do better with the jury this afternoon in the
Yengst case? Doesn't it--I mean that tremendous case you have on with
the Duchess of Müller--doesn't it put an edge on you? What was the
matter with you to-day?"
Fenn shook his head slowly and said: "It's different with me. I just
couldn't help feeling that if I was worth any woman's giving
herself--was worth anything as a man, I'd want to be dead square with
that Yengst creature--and I got to thinking, maybe in his place, drunk
and hungry--well, I just couldn't, Tom--because--because of--well, I
wanted her to marry a human being first--not a county attorney!"
"You're a damn fool!" retorted Van Dorn. "Do you think you'll succeed in
this world on that basis! I tell you if I was in love with a woman I'd
want to take that Yengst case and lay it before her as a trophy I'd
won--lay it before her like a dog!"
Fenn hesitated. He disliked to give pain. But finally he said, "I
suppose, Tom, I'd like to lay it before her--like a man!"
"Hell's delight!" sneered Van Dorn, and they turned off the subject of
the tender passion, and went to considering certain stipulations that
Van Dorn was asking of the county attorney in another matter before the
court.
The next day young Thomas Van Dorn began rather definitely to prepare
his pleading in still another suit in another court, and before the
summer's end, Morty Sands's mandolin was wrapped in its chamois skin bag
and locked in its mahogany case. Sometimes Morty, whistling softly and
dolefully, would pass the Nesbit home late at night, hoping that his
chirping might reach her heart; at times he made a rather formal call
upon the entire Nesbit family, which he was obviously encouraged to
repeat by the elders. But Morty was inclined to hide in the thicket of
his sorrow and twitter his heart out to the cold stars. Tom Van Dorn
pervaded the Nesbit home by day with his flowers and books and candy,
and by night--as many nights a week as he could buy, beg or steal--by
night he pervaded the Nesbit home like an obstinate haunt.
He fell upon the whole family and made violent love to the Doctor and
Mrs. Nesbit. He read Browning to the Doctor and did his errands in
politics like a retrieving dog. Mrs. Nesbit learned through him to her
great joy that the Satterthwaite, who was the maternal grandfather of
the Tory governor of Maryland, was not descended from the same Satterlee
hanged by King John in his war with the barons, but from the Sussex
branch of the family that remained loyal to the Crown. But Tom Van Dorn
wasted no time or strength in foolishness with the daughter of the
house. His attack upon her heart was direct and unhalting. He fended off
other suitors with a kind of animal jealousy. He drove her even from so
unimportant a family friend as Grant Adams.
Gradually, as the autumn deepened into winter and Tom Van Dorn found
himself spending more and more time in the girl's company he had
glimpses of his own low estate through the contrast forced upon him
daily by his knowledge of what a good woman's soul was. The
self-revelation frightened him; he was afraid of what he saw inside
himself in those days, and there can be no doubt that for a season his
soul was wrestling with its doom for release. No make-believe passion
was it that spurred him forward in his attack upon the heart of Laura
Nesbit. Within him, there raged the fierce battle between the spirit of
the times--crass, material and ruthless--and the spirit of things as
they should be. It was the old fight between compromise and the ideal.
As for the girl, she was in that unsettled mind in which young women in
their first twenties often find themselves when sensing by an instinct
new to them the coming of a grown-up man with real matrimonial
intentions. Given a girl somewhat above the middle height, with a slim,
full-blown figure, with fair hair, curling and blowing about a pink and
white face, and with solemn eyes--prematurely gray eyes, her father
called them--with red lips, with white teeth that flashed when she
smiled, and with a laugh like the murmur of gay waters; given a more
than usual amount of inherited good sense, and combine that with a world
of sentiment that perfect health can bring to a girl of twenty-two; then
add one exceptionally fascinating man of thirty--more or less--a
handsome young man; a successful man as young men go, with the
oratorical temperament and enough of a head to be a good consulting
lawyer as well as a jury lawyer with more than local reputation; add to
the young man that vague social iridescence, or aura or halo that young
men wear in glamor, and that old men wear in shame--a past; and then let
public opinion agree that he is his own worst enemy and declare that if
he only had some strong woman to take hold of him--and behold there are
the ingredients of human gunpowder!
Doctor Nesbit smelled the burning powder. Vainly he tried to stamp out
the fire before the explosion.
"Bedelia," said the Doctor one day, as the parents heard the girl
talking eagerly with the young man, "what do you make out of this
everlasting 'Tom, Tom, Tom,' out there in the living room?"
Mrs. Nesbit rocked in her chair and shook an ominous head. Finally she
said: "I wish he'd Tom himself home and stay there, Doctor." The wife
spoke as an oracle with emphasis and authority. "You must speak to the
child!"
The little man puckered his loose-skinned face into a sad, absurdly
pitiful smile and shrilled back:
"Yes--I did speak to her. And she--" he paused.
"Well?" demanded the mother.
"She just fed me back all the decent things I have said of Tom when he
has done my errands." He drummed his fingers helplessly on his chair and
sighed mournfully: "I wonder why I said those things! I really wonder!"
But the voices of the young people rose gayly and disturbed his musings.
It is easy now after a quarter of a century has unfolded its events for
us to lay blame and grow wise in retrospect. It is easy to say that what
happened was foredoomed to happen; and yet here was a man, walking up
and down the curved verandahs that Mrs. Nesbit had added to the house at
odd times, walking up and down, and speaking to a girl in the moonlight,
with much power and fire, of life and his dreams and his aspirations.
Over and over he had sung his mating song. Formerly he had made love as
he tried lawsuits, exhibiting only such fervor as the case required.
There can be no doubt, however, that when he made love to Laura Nesbit,
it was with all the powers of his heart and mind. If he could plead with
a jury for hire, if he could argue with the court and wrangle with
council, how could he meet reason, combat objections, and present the
case of his soul and make up the brief for his own destiny?
He did not try to shield himself when he wooed Laura Nesbit, but she saw
all that he could be. A woman has her vanity of sex, her elaborate,
prematernal pride in her powers, and when man appeals to a woman's
powers for saving him, when he submits the proofs that he is worth
saving, and when he is handsome, with an education in the lore of the
heart that gives him charm and breaks down reserves and barriers--but
these are bygones now--bygones these twenty-five years and more. What
was to be had to be, and what might have been never was, and what their
hopes and high aims were, whose hearts glowed in the fires of life in
Harvey so long ago--and what all our vain, unfruited hopes are worth,
only a just God who reads us truly may say. And a just God would give to
the time and the place, the spirit of the age, its share in all that
followed.
CHAPTER VIII
CAPTAIN MORTON ACTS AS COURT HERALD AND MORTY SANDS AND GRANT ADAMS HEAR
SAD NEWS
Spring in Mrs. Nesbit's garden, even in those days when a garden in
Harvey meant chiefly lettuce and radishes and peas, was no casual event.
Spring opened formally for the Nesbits with crocuses and hyacinths;
smiled genially in golden forsythia, bridal wreath and tulips, preened
itself in flags and lilacs before glowing in roses and peonies. Now the
spring is always wise; for it knows what the winter only hopes or fears.
Events burst forth in spring that have been hidden since their seedtime.
And it was with the coming of the first crocuses that Dr. Nesbit found
in his daughter's eyes a joyous look, new and exultant--a look which
never had been inspired by the love he lavished upon her. It was not
meant for him. Yet it was as truly a spring blossom as any that blushed
in the garden. When it came and when the father realized that the mother
also saw it, they feared to speak of it--even to themselves and by
indirection.
For they knew their winter conspiracies had failed. In vain was the trip
to Baltimore; in vain was the week with grand opera in New York, and
they both knew that the proposed trip to Europe never would occur. When
the parents saw that look of triumphant joy in their daughter's face,
when they saw how it lighted up her countenance like a flame when Tom
Van Dorn was near or was on his way to her, they knew that from the
secret recesses of her heart, from the depths of her being, love was
springing. They knew that they could not uproot it, and they had no
heart to try. For they accepted love as a fact of life, and felt that
when once it has seeded and grown upon a heart, it is a part of that
heart and only God's own wisdom and mercy may change the destiny that
love has written upon the life in which love rests. So in the wisdom of
the spring, the parents were mute and sad.
There was no hint of anger in their sorrow. They realized that if she
was wrong, and they were right, she needed them vastly more than if they
were wrong and she was right, and so they tried to rejoice with her--not
of course expressly and baldly, but in a thousand ways that lay about
them, they made her as happy as they could. Their sweet acquiescence in
what she knew was cutting the elders to the quick, gave the girl many an
hour of poignant distress. Yet the purpose of her heart was not moved.
The Satterthwaite in her was dominant.
"Doctor," spoke the wife one morning as they sat alone over their
breakfast, "I think--" She stopped, and he knew she was listening to the
daughter, who was singing in an undertone in the garden.
"Yes," he answered, "so do I. I think they have settled it."
The man dropped his glance to the table before him, where his hands
rested helplessly and cried, "Bedelia--I don't--I don't like it!"
The color of her woe darkened Mrs. Nesbit's face as her features
trembled for a second, before she controlled herself. "No, Jim--no--no!
I don't--I'm afraid--afraid, of I don't know what!"
"Of course, he's of excellent family--the very best!" the wife ventured.
"And he's making money--and has lots of money from his people!" returned
the father.
"And he's a man among men!" added the mother.
"Oh, yes--very much that,--and he's trying to be decent! Honestly,
Bedelia, I believe the fellow's got a new grip on himself!" The Doctor's
voice had regained its timbre; it was just a little hard, and it broke
an instant later as he cried: "O Lord, Lord, mother--we can't fool
ourselves; let's not try!" They looked into the garden, where the girl
stood by the blooming lilacs with her arms filled with blossoms.
At length the mother spoke, "What shall we do?"
"What can we do?" the Doctor echoed. "What can any human creatures do in
these cases! To interfere does no good! The thing is here. Why has it
come? I don't know." He repeated the last sentence piteously, and went
on gently:
"'They say it was a stolen tide--the Lord who sent it, He knows all!'
But why--why--why--did it wash in here? What does it mean? What have we
done--and what--what has she done?"
The little Doctor looked up into the strong face of his wife rather
helplessly, then the time spirit that is after all our sanity--touched
them, and they smiled. "Perhaps, Jim," the smile broke into something
almost like a laugh, "father said something like that to mother the day
I stood among the magnolias trying to pluck courage with the flowers to
tell him that I was going with you!"
They succeeded in raising a miserable little laugh, and he squeezed her
hand.
The girl moved toward the house. The father turned and put on his hat as
he went to meet her. She was a hesitant, self-conscious girl in pink,
who stopped her father as he toddled down the front steps with his
medicine case, and she put her hand upon him, saying:
"Father," she paused, looking eagerly at him, then continued, "there's
the loveliest yellow flag over here." The father smiled, put his arm
about the girl and piped: "So the pink rosebud will take us to the
yellow flag!" They walked across the garden to the flower and she
exclaimed: "Oh, father--isn't it lovely!"
The father looked tenderly into her gray eyes, patted her on the
shoulder and with his arm still about her, he led her to a seat under
the lilacs before the yellow flower. He looked from the flower to her
face and then kissed her as he whispered: "Oh my dear, my dear." She
threw her arms about him and buried her face, all flushed, upon his
shoulder. He felt her quiver under the pressure of his arm and before
she could look at him, she spoke:
"Oh, father! Father! You--you won't--you won't blame--" Then she lifted
up her face to his and cried passionately: "But all the world could not
stop it now--not now! But, oh, father, I want you with me," and she
shook his arm. "You must understand. You must see Tom as I see him,
father." She looked the question of her soul in an anxious, searching
glance. Her father reached for one of her hands and patted it. He gazed
downward at the yellow iris, but did not see it.
"Yes, dear, I know--I understand."
"I was sure that you would know without my spelling it all out to you.
But, oh, father," she cried, "I don't want you and mother to feel as you
do about Tom, for you are wrong. You are all--all wrong!"
The Doctor's fat hand pressed the strong hand of the girl. "Well," he
began slowly, his high-keyed voice was pitched to a soft tone and he
spoke with a woman's gentleness, "Tom's quite a man, but--" he could
only repeat, "quite a man." Then he added gently: "And I feel that he
thinks it's genuine now--his--love for you, daughter." The Doctor's face
twitched, and he swallowed a convulsive little sob as he said,
"Laura--child--can't you see, it really makes no difference about
Tom--not finally!" He blinked and gulped and went on with renewed
courage. "Can't you see, child--you're all we've got--mother and I--and
if you want Tom--why--" his face began to crumple, but he controlled it,
and blurted out, "Why by johnnie you can have him. And what's more," his
voice creaked with emotion as he brought his hand down on his knee, "I'm
going to make Tom the best father-in-law in the whole United States."
His body rocked for a moment as he spurred himself to a last effort.
Then he said: "And mother--mother'll be--mother will--she'll make him--"
he could get no further, but he felt the pressure of her hand, and knew
that she understood. "Mother and I just want you to be happy and if it
takes Tom for that--why Tom's what it takes, I guess--and that's all we
want to know!"
The girl felt the tears on his face as she laid her cheek against his.
Then she spoke: "But you don't know him, father! You don't understand
him! It's beautiful to be able to do what I can do--but," she shuddered,
"it's so awful--I mean all that devil that used to be in him. He is so
ashamed, so sorry--and it's gone--all gone--all, every bit of it gone,
father!" She put her father's hand to her flaming cheek and whispered,
"You think so, don't you, father?"
The father's eyes filled again and his throat choked. "Laura," he said
very gently, "my professional opinion is this: You've a fighting chance
with Tom Van Dorn--about one in ten. He's young. You're a strong,
forceful woman--lots of good Satterthwaite in you, and precious little
of the obliging Nesbits. Now I'll tell you the truth, Laura; Tom's got a
typical cancer on his soul. But he's young; and you're young, and just
now he's undergoing a moral regeneration. You are new blood. You may
purify him. If the moral tissue isn't all rotten, you may cure him."
The girl gripped her father's hand and cried: "But you think I
can--father, you think I can?"
"No," piped the little man sadly, "no, daughter, I don't think you can.
But I hope you can; and if you'd like to know, I'm going to pray the God
that sent me to your mother to give you the sense and power He gave
her." The Doctor smiled, withdrew his arm, and started for the street.
He turned, "And if you do save him, Laura, I'll be mighty proud of you.
For," he squeaked good naturedly, "it's a big job--but when you've done
it you'll have something to show for it--I'll say that for him--you'll
certainly have something to show for it," he repeated. He did not
whistle as he walked down the street and the daughter thought that he
kept his eyes upon the ground. As he was about to pass from her view, he
turned, waved his hand and threw her a kiss, and with it she felt a
blessing.
But curiously enough she saw only one of the goodly company of Doctor
Nesbits that trudged down the hill in his white linen suit, under his
broad-brimmed panama hat. Naturally she hardly might be expected to see
the conscienceless boss of Hancock and Greely counties, who handled the
money of privilege seekers and bought and sold men gayly as a part of
the day's work. Nor could she be expected to see the helpless little man
whose face crumpled, whose heart sank and whose courage melted as he
stood beside her in the garden, the sad, hopeless little man who, as he
went down the hill was captain of the groups that walked under his hat
that hour. The amiable Doctor, who was everybody's friend and was loyal
to those who served him, the daughter neglected that day; and the State
Senator did not attract her. She saw only a gentle, tender,
understanding father, whose love shone out of his face like a beacon and
who threw merry kisses as he disappeared down the hill--a ruddy-faced,
white phantom in a golden spring day!
Some place between his home and Market Street the father retired and the
politician took command of Dr. Nesbit's soul. And he gave thought to the
Nesbit machine. The job of the moment before the machine was to make
George Brotherton, who had the strength of a man who belonged to all the
lodges in town, mayor of Harvey. "Help Harvey Hump" was George's
alliterative slogan, and the translation of the slogan into terms of
Nesbitese was found in a rather elaborate plan to legalize the issuance
of bonds by the coal and oil towns adjacent to Harvey, so that Daniel
Sands could spin out his web of iron and copper and steel,--rails and
wires and pipes into these huddles of shanties that he might sell them
light and heat and power and communication and transportation.
Even the boss--even Old Linen Pants--was not without his sense of humor,
nor without his joyous moments when he relished human nature in large,
raw portions. As he walked down the hill there flashed across his mind a
consciousness of the pride of George Brotherton in his candidacy. That
pride expressed itself in a feud George had with Violet Mauling who,
having achieved stenography, was installed in the offices of Calvin &
Van Dorn as a stenographer--the stenographer in fact. She on her part
was profoundly proud of her job and expressed her pride in overhanging
and exceeding mischievous looking bangs upon her low and rather narrow
brow. In the feud between George and Violet, it was her consecrated task
to keep him waiting as long as possible before admitting him to Van
Dorn's inner room, and it was Mr. Brotherton's idea never to call her by
her right name, nor by any name twice in succession. She was Inez or
Maude or Mabel or Gwendolyn or Pet or Sweetheart or Dearest, in rapid
succession, and in return for his pseudonymnal attentions, Mr.
Brotherton always was sure of receiving from Miss Mauling upon leaving
the office, an elaborately turned-up nose. For Miss Mauling was peevish
and far from happy. She had been conscious for nearly a year that her
power over young Mr. Van Dorn was failing, or that her charms were
waning, or that something was happening to clog or cloy her romance. On
a certain May morning she had sat industriously writing, "When in the
course of human events," "When in the course of human events it becomes
necessary," "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for
a people to separate--" upon her typewriter, over and over and over
again, while she listened to Captain Morton selling young Mr. Van Dorn a
patent churn, and from the winks and nods and sly digs and nudges the
Captain distributed through his canvass, it was obvious to Miss Mauling
that affairs in certain quarters had reached a point.
That evening at Brotherton's Amen corner, where the gay young blades of
the village were gathered--Captain Morton decided that as court herald
of the community he should proclaim the banns between Thomas Van Dorn
and Laura Nesbit. Naturally he desired a proper entrance into the
conversation for his proclamation, but with the everlasting ting-aling
and tym-ty-tum of Nathan Perry's mandolin and the jangling accompaniment
of Morty's mandolin, opening for the court herald was not easy. Grant
Adams was sitting at the opposite end of the bench from the Captain,
deep in one of Mr. Brotherton's paper bound books--to-wit, "The Stones
of Venice," and young Joe Calvin sadly smoking his first stogy, though
still in his knickerbockers, was greedily feasting his eyes upon a copy
of the pink Police _Gazette_ hanging upon a rack above the counter.
Henry Fenn and Mr. Brotherton were lounging over the cigar case,
discussing matters of state as they affected a county attorney and a
mayor, when the Captain, clearing his throat, addressed Mr. Brotherton
thus:
"George--I sold two patent churns to two bridegrooms to-day--eh?" As the
music stopped the Captain, looking at Henry Fenn, added reflectively:
"Bet you four bits, George, you can't name the other one--what say?" No
one said and the Captain took up his solo. "Well--it's this-away: I see
what I see next door. And I hear what my girls say. So this morning I
sashays around the yard till I meets a certain young lady a standing by
the yaller rose bush next to our line fence and I says: 'Good morning
madam,' I says, 'from what I see and hear and cogitate,' I says, 'it's
getting about time for you to join my list of regular customers.' And
she kind of laughs like a Swiss bellringer's chime--the way she laughs;
and she pretended she didn't understand. So I broadens out and says, 'I
sold Rhody Kollander her first patent rocker the day she came to town to
begin housekeeping with. I sold your pa and ma a patent gate before they
had a fence. I sold Joe Calvin's woman her first apple corer, and I
started Ahab Wright up in housekeeping by selling him a Peerless cooker.
I've sold household necessities to every one of the Mrs. Sandses' and 'y
gory, madam,' I says, 'next to the probate court and the preacher, I'm
about the first necessity of a happy marriage in this man's town,' I
says, 'and it looks to me,' I says, 'it certainly looks to me--' And I
laughs and she laughs, all redded up and asts: 'Well, what are you
selling this spring, Captain?' And I says, 'The Appomattox churn,' and
then one word brought on another and she says finally, 'You just tell
Tom to buy one for the first of our Lares and Penates,' though I got the
last word wrong and tried to sell him Lares and spuds and then Lares and
Murphies before he got what I was drivin' at. But I certainly sold the
other bridegroom, Henry--eh?"
A silence greeted the Captain's remarks. In it the "Stones of Venice"
grew bleak and cold for Grant Adams. He rose and walked rather aimlessly
toward the water cooler in the rear of the store and gulped down two
cups of water. When he came back to the bench the group there was busy
with the Captain's news. But the music did not start again. Morty Sands
sat staring into the pearl inlaid ring around the hole in his mandolin,
and his chin trembled. The talk drifted away from the Captain's
announcement in a moment, and Morty saw Grant Adams standing by the
door, looking through a window into the street. Grant seemed a tower of
strength. For a few minutes Morty tried to restore his soul by thrumming
a tune--a sweet, tinkly little tune, whose words kept dinging in his
head:
"Love comes like a summer sigh, softly o'er us stealing;
Love comes and we wonder why, at love's shrine we're kneeling!"
But that only unsteadied his chin further. So he tucked his mandolin
under his arm, and moved rather stupidly over to Grant Adams. To Morty,
Grant Adams, even though half a dozen years his junior, represented
cousinship and fellowship. As Morty rose Grant stepped through the open
door into the street and stood on the curb. Morty came tiptoeing up to
the great rawboned youth and whispered:
"Grant--Grant--I'm so--so damned unhappy! You don't mind my telling
you--do you?" Grant felt the arm of his cousin tighten around his own
arm. Grant stared at the stars, and Morty gazed at the curb; presently
he drew a deep sigh and said: "Thank you, Grant." He relaxed his hold of
the boy's arm and walked away with his head down, and disappeared around
the corner into the night. Slowly Grant followed him. Once or twice or
perhaps three times he heard Morty trying vainly to thrum the sad little
tune about the waywardness of love.
CHAPTER IX
WHEREIN HENRY FENN MAKES AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT
The formal announcement of the engagement of Laura Nesbit and Thomas Van
Dorn came when Mrs. Nesbit began tearing out the old floors on the
second story of the Nesbit home and replacing them with hardwood floors.
Having the carpenters handy she added a round tower with which to
impress the Schenectady Van Dorns with the importance of the Maryland
Satterthwaites. In this architectural outburst the town read the news of
the engagement. The town was so moved by the news that Mrs. Hilda
Herdicker was able to sell to the young women of her millinery
suzerainty sixty-three hats, which had been ordered "especially for
Laura Nesbit," at prices ranging from $2.00 to $57. Each hat was
carefully, indeed furtively, brought from under the counter, or from the
back room of the shop or from a box on a high shelf and secretly
exhibited and sold with injunctions that the Nesbits must not be told
what Mrs. Herdicker had done. One of these hats was in reach of Violet
Mauling's humble twenty dollars! Poor Violet was having a sad time in
those days. No candy, no soda water, no ice cream, no flowers; no buggy
rides, however clandestine, nor fervid glances--nothing but hard work
was her unhappy lot and an occasional clash with Mr. Brotherton. Thus
the morning after the newly elected Mayor had heard the formal
announcement of the engagement, he hurried to the offices of Calvin &
Van Dorn to congratulate his friend:
"Hello, Maudie," said Mr. Brotherton. "Oh, it isn't Maudie--well then,
Trilby, tell Mr. Van Dorn the handsome gentleman has came."
Hearing Brotherton's noise Van Dorn appeared, to summon his guest to the
private office.
"Well, you lucky old dog!" was Mr. Brotherton's greeting. "Well,
say--this is his honor, the Mayor, come up to collect your dog tax!
Well, say!" As he walked into the office all the secret society pins and
charms and signets--the Shriners' charm, the Odd Fellows' links, the
Woodmen's ax, the Elks' tooth, the Masons' square and compass, the
Knights Templars' arms, were glistening upon his wrinkled front like a
mosaic of jewels!
Mr. Brotherton shook his friend's hand, repeating over and over, "Well,
say--" After the congratulatory ceremony was finished Mr. Brotherton
cried, "You old scoundrel--I'd rather have your luck than a license to
steal in a mint!" Then with an eye to business, he suggested: "I'll just
about open a box of ten centers down at my home of the letters and arts
for you when the boys drop around!" He backed out of the room still
shaking Mr. Van Dorn's hand, and still roaring, "Well, say!" In the
outer office he waved a gracious hand at Miss Mauling and cried, "Three
sugars, please, Sadie--that will do for cream!" and went laughing his
seismic laugh down the stairs.
That evening the cigar box stood on the counter in Brotherton's store.
It was wreathed in smilax like a votive offering and on a card back of
the box Mr. Brotherton had written these pious words:
"In loving memory of the late Tom Van Dorn,
Recently engaged.
For here, kind friends, we all must lie;
Turn, Sinner, turn before ye die!
_Take_ one."
Seeing the box in the cloister and the brotherhood assembled upon the
walnut bench Dr. Nesbit, who came in on a political errand, sniffed, and
turned to Amos Adams. "Well, Amos," piped the Doctor, "how's Lincoln
this evening?"
The editor looked up amiably at the pudgy, white-clad figure of the
Doctor, and replied casually though earnestly, "Well, Doc Jim, I
couldn't seem to get Lincoln to-day. But I did have a nice chat with
Beecher last night and he said: 'Your friend, Dr. Nesbit, I observe, is
a low church Congregationalist.' And when I asked what he meant Beecher
replied, 'High church Congregationalists believe in New England; low
church Congregationalists believe in God!' Sounds like him--I could just
see him twitching his lips and twinkling his eyes when it came!" Captain
Morton looked suspiciously over his steel-bowed glasses to say testily:
"'Y gory, Amos--that thing will get you yet--what say?" he asked,
turning for confirmation to the Doctor.
Amos Adams smiled gently at the Captain, but addressed the Doctor
eagerly, as one more capable of understanding matters occult: "And I'll
tell you another thing--Mr. Left is coming regularly now."
"Mr. Left?" sniffed the Captain.
"Yes," explained the editor carefully, "I was telling the Doctor last
week that if I go into a dark room and blindfold myself and put a pencil
in my left hand, a control who calls himself Mr. Left comes and writes
messages from the Other Side."
"Any more sense to 'em than your crazy planchette?" scoffed Captain
Morton.
The editor closed his eyes in triumph. "Read our editorial this week on
President Cleveland and the Money Power?" he asked. The Captain nodded.
"Mr. Left got it without the scratch of a 't' or the dot of an 'i' from
Samuel J. Tilden." He opened his eyes to catch the astonishment of the
listeners.
"Humph!" snorted the Doctor in his high, thin voice, "Old Tilden seems
to have got terribly chummy with Karl Marx in the last two years."
"Well, I didn't write it, and Mary says it's not even like my handwrite.
And that reminds me, Doctor, I got to get her prescription filled again.
That tonic you give her seems to be kind of wearing off. The baby you
know--" he stopped a moment vaguely. "Someway she doesn't seem strong."
Only the Doctor caught Grant's troubled look.
The Doctor snapped his watch, and looked at Brotherton. The Doctor was
not the man to loaf long of an autumn evening before any election, and
he turned to Amos and said: "All right, Amos--we'll fix up something for
Mary a little later. Now, George--get out that Fourth Ward voters' list
and let's get to work!"
The group turned to the opening door and saw Henry Fenn, resplendent in
a high silk hat and a conspicuously Sunday best suit, which advertised
his condition, standing in the open door. "Good evening, gentlemen," he
said slowly.
A look of common recognition of Fenn's case passed around the group in
the corner. Fenn saw the look as he came in. He was walking painfully
straight. "I may," he said, lapsing into the poetry that came welling
from his memory and marked him for a drunken fool, "I may," opening his
ardent eyes and glancing affectionately about, "have been toying with
'lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon' and my feet may be 'uncertain, coy
and hard to please,'" he grinned with wide amiability, "but my head is
clear as a bell." His eyes flashed nervously about the shop, resting
upon nothing, seeing everything. He spied Grant, "Hello, Red," exclaimed
Mr. Fenn, "glad to see you back again. 'M back again myself. Ye crags
'n' peaks 'm with you once again." As he nourished his silk hat he saw
the consternation on Brotherton's big, moon face. Walking behind the
counter he clapped both hands down on Brotherton's big shoulders.
"Georgy, Georgy," he repeated mournfully:
"Old story, Georgy. Fight--fight, fight, then just a little, just a very
little surrender; not going to give in, but just a nip for old sake's
sake.
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