In the Heart of a Fool Part 49

Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge and said:

"Tom, this is our friend, Miss Van Dorn--I was just sending a message by her to a dear--a very dear friend I used to have, named Lila, who is gone. Miss Van Dorn knows Lila, and sees her sometimes. So now that you are here, I'm going to send this to Lila," he raised the girl's hand to his lips and awkwardly kissed it, as he said clumsily, "well, say, my dear--will you see that Lila gets that?"

Her father stepped toward the embarra.s.sed girl and spoke:

"Lila--Lila--can't you come here a moment, dear?"

He was standing by the smoldering fire, brus.h.i.+ng a rolled newspaper against his leg. Something within him--perhaps Mr. Brotherton's awkward kiss stirred it--was trying to soften the proud, hard face that was losing the mobility which once had been its charm. He held out a hand, and leaned toward the girl. She stepped toward him and asked, "What is it?"

An awkward pause followed, which the man broke with, "Well--nothing in particular, child; only I thought maybe you'd like--well, tell me how are you getting along in High School, little girl."

"Oh, very well; I believe," she answered, but did not lift her eyes to his. Mr. Brotherton moved back to his desk. Again there was silence. The girl did not move away, though the father feared through every painful second that she would. Finally he said: "I hear your mother is getting on famously down in South Harvey. Our people down there say she is doing wonders with her cooking club for girls."

Lila smiled and answered: "She'll be glad to know it, I'm sure." Again she paused, and waited.

"Lila," he cried, "won't you let me help you--do something for you?--I wish so much--so much to fill a father's place with you, my dear--so much."

He stepped toward her, felt for her hand, but could not find it. She looked up at him, and in her eyes there rose the old cloud of sadness that came only once in a long time. It was a puzzled face that he saw looking steadily into his.

"I don't know what you could do," she answered simply.

Something about the pathetic loneliness of his unfathered child, evidenced by the sadness that flitted across her face, touched a remote, unsullied part of his nature, and moved him to say:

"Oh, Lila--Lila--Lila--I need you--I need you--G.o.d knows, dear, how I do need you. Won't you come to me sometimes? Won't your mother ever relent--won't she? If she knew, she would be kind. Oh, Lila, Lila," he called as the two stood together there in the twilight with the glow of the coals in the fireplace upon them, "Lila, won't you let me take you home even--in my car? Surely your mother wouldn't care for that, would she?"

The girl looked into the fire and answered, "No," and shook her head.

"No--mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind to you--to be respectful to you, sir. I've tried to be, sir?"

Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and pleading, "Oh, come--won't you let me take you home in my car, Lila--it's getting late--won't you, Lila?"

But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her head:

"I think, sir, if you don't mind--I'd rather walk."

In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the word, "Lila," in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young miss--a Calvin young miss, in fact--running and waving her hands toward a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly belong--that he was rare and exotic. But as her father's car crept unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila's clear, merry laugh--a laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn's heart--rose above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and weaving about.

And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them, then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing, animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to the beautiful light.

But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of youth s.h.i.+ning through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat carrying its captive swooped around them--and then out into the darkness of his own charred world.

But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila, went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.

It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of the wind in the brown gra.s.s and in the bare trees by the creek had found their way into his soul. A curious soul it was--the soul of a poet, the soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew--the soul of a man in the body of a callow youth.

As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.

Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old gra.s.s faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences the words:

"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help."

And he had seemed to be forming a great heart-filling anthem. It was all on his tongue's tip, with the answering chorus coming from out of some vast mystery, "Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art fair--thou hast dove's eyes." There in the suns.h.i.+ne upon the prairie gra.s.s it was as real and vital a part of his soul's aspiration as though it had been reiterated in some glad symphony. But as he sat in the sunset trying to put into his voice the language that stirred his heart, he could only drum upon a box and look at the girl's blue eyes and her rosebud of a face and utter the copper coins of language for the golden yearning of his soul. She answered, thrilled by the radiance of his eyes:

"Isn't the young spring beautiful--don't you just love it, Kenyon? I do."

He rose and stood out in the sun on the lawn. The girl got up. She was abashed; and strangely self-conscious without reason, she began to pirouette down the walk and dance back to him, with her blue eyes fastened like a mystic sky-thread to his somber gaze. A thousand mute messages of youth twinkled across that thread. Their eyes smiled. The two stood together, and the youth kicked with his toes in the soft turf.

"Lila," he asked as he looked at the greening gra.s.s of spring, "what do you suppose they mean when they say, 'I will lift up mine eyes to the hills'? The line has been wiggling around in my head all morning as I walked over the prairie, that and another that I can't make much of, about, 'Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art fair.' Say, Lila," he burst out, "do you sometimes have things just pop into your head all fuzzy with--oh, well, say feeling good and you don't know why, and you are just too happy to eat? I do."

He paused and looked into her bright, unformed face with the fleeting cloud of sadness trailing its blind way across her heart.

"And say, Lila--why, this morning when I was out there all alone I just sang at the top of my voice, I felt so bang-up dandy--and--I tell you something--honest, I kept thinking of you all the time--you and the hills and a dove's eyes. It just tasted good way down in me--you ever feel that way?"

Again the girl danced her answer and sent the words she could not speak through her eyes and his to his innermost consciousness.

"But honest, Lila--don't you ever feel that way--kind of creepy with good feeling--tickledy and crawly, as though you'd swallowed a candy caterpillar and was letting it go down slow--slow, slow, to get every bit of it--say, honest, don't you? I do. It's just fine--out on the prairie all alone with big bursting thoughts b.u.mping you all the time--gee!"

They were sitting on the steps when he finished and his heel was denting the sod. She was entranced by what she saw in his eyes.

"Of course, Kenyon," she answered finally. "Girls are--oh, different, I guess. I dream things like that, and sometimes mornings when I'm wiping dishes I think 'em--and drop dishes--and whoopee! But I don't know--girls are not so woozy and slazy inside them as boys. Kenyon, let me tell you something: Girls pretend to be and aren't--not half; and boys pretend they aren't and are--lots more."

She gazed up at him in an unblinking joy of adoration as shameless as the heart of a violet baring itself to the sun. Then she shut her eyes and the lad caught up his instrument and cried:

"Come on, Lila,--come in the house. I've got to play out something--something I found out on the prairie to-day about 'mine eyes unto the hills' and 'the eyes of the dove' and the woozy, fuzzy, happy, creepy thoughts of you all the time."

He was inside the door with the violin in his hands. As she closed the door he put his head down to the brown violin as if to hear it sing, and whispered slowly:

"Oh, Lila--listen--just hear this."

And then it came! "The Spring Sun," it is known popularly. But in the book of his collected music it appears as "Allegro in B." It is the throb of joy of young life asking the unanswerable question of G.o.d: what does it mean--this new, fair, wonderful world full of life and birth, and joy; charged with mystery, enveloped in strange, unsolved grandeur, like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams's most beautiful and poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird, vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful, inexorable call of life to youth. Other messages of Kenyon Adams are more profound, more comforting to the hearts and the minds of reasoning, questioning men. But this Allegro in B is the song of youth, of early youth, bidding childhood adieu and turning to life with s.h.i.+ning countenance and burning heart.

When he had finished playing he was in tears, and the girl sitting before him was awestricken and rapt as she sat with upturned face with the miracle of song thrilling her soul. Let us leave them there in that first curious, unrealized signaling of soul to soul. And now let us go on into this story, and remember these children, as children still, who do not know that they have opened the great golden door into life!

CHAPTER XLI

HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS THIRD AND LAST DEVIL

In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism was.h.i.+ng in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams's s.h.i.+p of dreams was left high and dry in the salt marsh. Finally a time came when the tide began to boom in. But in no substantial way did his newspaper feel the impulse of the current. The _Tribune_ was an old hulk; it could not ride the tide. And its skipper, seedy, broken with the years, always too gentle for the world about him, even at his best, ever ready to stop work to read a book, Amos Adams, who had been a crank for a third of a century, remained a crank when much that he preached in earlier years was accepted by the mult.i.tude.

Amos Adams might have made the Harvey _Tribune_ a financial success if he could have brought himself to follow John Kollander's advice. But Amos could not abide the presence much less the counsel of the professional patriot, with his insistent blue uniform and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons.

Under an elaborate pretense of independence, John Kollander was a limber-kneed time-server, always keen-eyed for the crumbs of Dives'

table; odd jobs in receivers.h.i.+ps, odd jobs in lawsuits for Daniel Sands--as, for instance, furnis.h.i.+ng unexpected witnesses to prove improbable contentions--odd jobs in his church, odd jobs in his party organization, always carrying a per diem and expenses; odd jobs for the Commercial Club, where the pay was sure; odd jobs for Tom Van Dorn, spreading slander by innuendo where it would do the most good for Tom in his business; odd jobs for Tom and d.i.c.k and for Harry, but always for the immediate use and benefit of John Kollander, his heirs and a.s.signs.

But if Amos Adams ever thought of himself, it was by inadvertence. He managed, Heaven only knows how, to keep the _Tribune_ going. Jasper bought back from the man who foreclosed the mortgage, his father's homestead. He rented it to his father for a dollar a year and ostentatiously gave the dollar to the Lord--so ostentatiously, indeed, that when Henry Fenn gayly referred to Amos, Grant and Jasper as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the town smiled at his impiety, but the holy Jasper boarded at the Hotel Sands, was made a partner at Wright & Perry's, and became a bank director at thirty. For Jasper was a Sands!

The day after Amos Adams and Tom Van Dorn had met in the Serenity of Books and Wallpaper at Brotherton's, Grant was in the _Tribune_ office. "Grant," the father was getting down from his high stool to dump his type on the galley; "Grant, I had a tiff with Tom Van Dorn yesterday. Lord, Lord," cried the old man, as he bent over, straightening some type that his nervous hand had knocked down. "I wonder, Grant"--the father rose and put his hand on his back, as he stood looking into his son's face--"I wonder if all that we feel, all that we believe, all that we strive and live for--is a dream? Are we chasing shadows? Isn't it wiser to conform, to think of ourselves first and others afterward--to go with the current of life and not against it?

Of course, my guides--"