In the Heart of a Fool Part 51

"So old Henry hasn't been around since--isn't that joyous? Well--anyway, he'll show up to-day or to-morrow, for he's got the new coat; he got it this morning. Jasper was telling me."

In an hour Grant, returning after his morning's errands, was standing by the puny little blaze that John Dexter had stirred out of the logs in the Serenity. The two were standing together. Mr. Brotherton, reading his Kansas City paper at his desk, called to them: "Well, I see Doc Jim's still holding his deadlock and they can't elect a United States Senator without him!"

A telegraph messenger boy came in, looked into the Serenity, and said, "Mr. Adams, I was looking for you."

Grant signed the boy's book, read the telegram, and stood dumbly gazing at the fire, as he held the sheet in his hand.

The fire popped and snapped and the little blaze grew stronger when a log dropped in two. A customer came in--picked up a magazine--called, "Charge it, please," then went out. The door slammed. Another customer came and went. Miss Calvin stepped back to Mr. Brotherton. The bell of the cash register tinkled. Then Grant Adams turned, looked at the minister absently for a moment, and handed him the sheet. It read:

"I have pledged in writing five more votes than are needed to make you the caucus nominee and give you a majority on the joint ballot to-night for United States Senator. Come up first train."

It was signed "James Nesbit." The preacher dropped his hand still holding the yellow sheet, and looked into the fire.

"Well?" asked Grant.

"You say," returned John Dexter, and added: "It would be a great opportunity--give you the greatest forum for your cause in Christendom--give you more power than any other labor advocate ever held in the world before."

He said all this tentatively and as one asking a question. Grant did not reply. He sat pounding his leg with his claw, abstractedly.

"You needn't be a mere theorist in the Senate. You could get labor laws enacted that would put forward the cause of labor. Grant, really, it looks as though this was your life's chance."

Grant reached for the telegram and read it again. The telegram fluttering in his hands dropped to the floor. He reached for it--picked it up, folded it on his claw carefully, and put it away. Then he turned to the preacher and said harshly:

"There's nothing in it. To begin: you say I'll have more power than any other labor leader in the world. I tell you, labor leaders don't need personal power. We don't need labor laws--that is, primarily. What we need is sentiment--a public love of the under dog that will make our present laws intolerable. It isn't power for me, it isn't clean politics for the State, it isn't labor laws that's my job. My job, dearly beloved," he hooked the minister's hand and tossed it gently, "my job, oh, thou of little faith," he cried, as a flaming torch of emotion seemed to brush his face and kindle the fanatic glow in his countenance while his voice lifted, "is to stay right down here in the Wahoo Valley, pile up money in the war chest, pile up cla.s.s feeling among the men--comrades.h.i.+p--harness this love of the poor for the poor into an engine, and then some day slip the belt on that engine--turn on the juice and pull and pull and pull for some simple, elemental piece of justice that will show the world one phase of the truth about labor."

Grant's face was glowing with emotion. "I tell you, the day of the Kingdom is here--only it isn't a kingdom, it's Democracy--the great Democracy. It's coming. I must go out and meet it. In the dark down in the mines I saw the Holy Ghost rise into the lives of a score of men.

And now I see the Holy Ghost coming into a great cla.s.s. And I must go--go with neither purse nor script to meet it, to live for it, and maybe to die for it." He shook his head and cried vehemently:

"What a saphead I'd be if I fell to that bait!" He turned to the store and called to Miss Calvin. "Ave--is there a telegraph blank in the desk?"

Mr. Brotherton threw it, skidding, across the long counter. Grant fumbled in his vest for a pen, held the sheet firmly with his claw and wrote:

"You are kindness itself. But the place doesn't interest me.

Moreover, no man should go to the Senate representing all of a State, whose job it is to preach cla.s.s consciousness to a part of the State. Get a bigger man. I thank you, however, with all my heart."

Grant watched the preacher read the telegram. He read it twice, then he said: "Well--of course, that's right. That's right--I can see that. But I don't know--don't you think--I mean aren't you kind of--well, I can't just express it; but--"

"Well, don't try, then," returned Grant.

However, Doctor Nesbit, having something rather more than the ethics of the case at stake, was aided by his emotions in expressing himself. He made his views clear, and as Grant sat at his desk that afternoon, he read this in a telegram from the Doctor:

"Well, of all the d.a.m.n fools!"

That was one view of the situation. There was this other. It may be found in one of those stated communications from perhaps Ruskin or Kingsley, which the Peach Blow Philosopher sometimes vouchsafed to the earth and it read:

"A great life may be lived by any one who is strong enough to fail for an ideal."

Still another view may be had by setting down what John Dexter said to his wife, and what she said to him. Said he, when he had recounted the renunciation of Grant Adams:

"There goes the third devil. First he conquered the temptation to marry and be comfortable; next he put fame behind him, and now he renounces power."

And she said: "It had never occurred to me to consider Laura Van Dorn, or national reputation, or a genuine chance for great usefulness as a devil. I'm not sure that I like your taste in devils."

To which answer may be made again by Mr. Left in a communication he received from George Meredith, who had recently pa.s.sed over. It was verified by certain details as to the arrangement of the books on the little table in the little room in the little house on a little hill where he was wont to write, and it ran thus:

"Women, always star-hungry, ever uncompromising in their demand for rainbows, nibbling at the entre' and pus.h.i.+ng aside the roast, though often adoring primitive men who gorge on it, but ever in the end rewarding abstinence and thus selecting a race of spiritually-minded men for mates, are after all the world's materialists."

CHAPTER XLII

A CHAPTER WHICH IS CONCERNED LARGELY WITH THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF "THE FULL STRENGTH OF THE COMPANY"

This story, first of all, and last of all, is a love story. The emotion called love and its twin desire hunger, are the two primal pa.s.sions of life. From love have developed somewhat the great altruistic inst.i.tutions of humanity--the family, the tribe, the State, the nation, and the varied social activities--religion, patriotism, philanthropy, brotherhood. While from hunger have developed war and trade and property and wealth. Often it happens in the growth of life that men have small choice in matters of living that are motived by hunger or its descendant concerns; for necessity narrows the choice. But in affairs of the heart, there comes wide lat.i.tudes of choice. It is reasonably just therefore to judge a man, a nation, a race, a civilization, an era, by its love affairs. So a book that would tell of life, that would paint the manners of men, and thus show their hearts, must be a love story. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," runs the proverb, and, mind you, it says heart--not head, not mind, but heart; as a man thinketh in his heart, in that part of his nature where reside his altruistic emotions--so is he.

It is the sham and shame of the autobiographies that flood and dishearten the world, that they are so uncandid in their relation of those emotional episodes in life--episodes which have to do with what we know for some curious reason as "the softer pa.s.sions." Caesar's Gaelic wars, his bridges, his trouble with the impedimenta, his fights with the Helvetians--who cares for them? Who cares greatly for Napoleon's expedition against the Allies? Of what human interest is Grant's tale of the Wilderness fighting? But to know of Calpurnia, of her predecessors, and her heirs and a.s.signs in Caesar's heart; to know the truth about Josephine and the crash in Napoleon's life that came with her heartbreak--if a crash did come, or if not, to know frankly what did come; to know how Grant got on with Julia Dent through poverty and riches, through sickness and in health, for better or for worse--with all the strain and stress and struggle that life puts upon the yoke that binds the commonplace man to the commonplace woman rising to eminence by some unimportant quirk of his genius reacting on the times--these indeed would be memoirs worth reading.

And whatever worth this story holds must come from its value as a love-story,--the narrative of how love rose or fell, grew or withered, bloomed and fruited, or rotted at the core in the lives of those men and women who move through the scenes painted upon this canvas. After all, who cares that Thomas Van Dorn waxed fat in the land, that he received academic degrees from great universities which his masters supported, that he told men to go and they went, to come and they came? These things are of no consequence. Men are doing such things every minute of every day in all the year.

But here sits Thomas Van Dorn, one summer afternoon, with a young broker from New York--one of those young brokers with not too nice a conscience, who laughs too easily at the wrong times. He and Thomas Van Dorn are upon the east veranda of the new Country Club building in Harvey--the pride of the town--and Thomas is squinting across the golf course at a landscape rolling away for miles like a sea, a landscape rich in homely wealth. The young New Yorker comes with letters to Judge Van Dorn from his employers in Broad Street, and as the two sip their long cool gla.s.ses, and betimes smoke their long black cigars, the former judge falls into one of those self-revealing philosophical moods that may be called the hypnoidal semi-conscious state of common sense. Said Van Dorn:

"Well, boy--what do you think of the greatest thing in the world?" And not waiting for an answer the older man continued as he held his cigar at arm's length and looked between his elevated feet at the landscape: "'Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.'

Great old lover--Solomon. Rather out of the amateur cla.s.s--with his thousand wives and concubines; perhaps a virtuous man withal, but hardly a fanatic on the subject; and when he said he was sick of love--probably somewhere in his fifties,--Solomon voiced a profound man's truth. Most of us are. Speaking generally of love, my boy, I am with Solomon. There is nothing in it."

The cigar in his finely curved mouth--the sensuous mouth of youth, that had pursed up dryly in middle age--was pointed upward. It stood out from a reddish lean face and moved when the muscles of the face worked viciously in response to some inward reflection of Tom Van Dorn.

He drawled on, "Think of the time men fool away chasing calico. I've gone all the gaits, and I know what I'm talking about. Ladies and Judy O'Gradies, married and single, decent and indecent--it's all the same. I tell you, young man, there's nothing in it! Love," he laughed a little laugh: "Love--why, when I was in the business," he sniffed, "I never had any trouble loving any lady I desired, nor getting her if I loved her long enough and strong enough. When I was a young cub like you," Van Dorn waved his weed grandly toward the young broker, "I used to keep myself awake, cutting notches in my memory--naming over my conquests.

But now I use it as a man does the sheep over the fence, to put me to sleep, and I haven't been able to pa.s.s my fortieth birthday in the list for two years, without snoozing. What a fool a man can make of himself over calico! The ladies, G.o.d bless 'em, have got old John Barleycorn beaten a mile, when it comes to playing h.e.l.l with a man's life. Again speaking broadly, and allowing for certain exceptions, I should say--"

he paused to give the judicial pomp of reflection to his utterances--"the bigger fool the woman is, the greater fool a man makes of himself for her. And all for what?"

His young guest interjected the word "Love?" in the pause. The Judge made a wry face and continued:

"Love? Love--why, man, you talk like a school girl. There is no love.

Love and G.o.d are twin myths by which we explain the relation of our fates to our follies. The only thing about me that will live is the blood I transmit to my children! We live in posterity. As for love and all the mysteries of the temple--waugh--woof!" he shuddered.

He put back his cigar into the corner of his hard mouth. He was squinting cynically across the rolling golf course. What he saw there checked his talk. He opened his eyes to get a clearer view. His impression grew definite and unmistakable. There, half playing and half sporting, like young lambs upon the close-cropped turf, were Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn! They were unconscious of all that their gay antics disclosed. They were happy, and were trying only to express happiness as they ran together after the ball, that flew in front of them like a mad b.u.t.terfly. But in the sad lore of his bleak heart, the father read the meaning of their happiness. Youth in love was never innocent for him. Looking at Lila romping with her lover, he turned sick at heart. But he held himself in hand. Only the zigzag scar on his forehead flas.h.i.+ng white in the pink of his brow betrayed the turmoil within him. He tried to keep his eyes off the golf course. A sharp dread that he might transmit himself in nature to posterity only through the base blood of the Adamses, struck him. He closed his eyes. But the wind brought to him the merriment of the young voices. A jealousy of Kenyon, and an anger at him, flared up in the father. So Tom Van Dorn drew down the corners of his mouth--and batted his furtive eyes, and put on his bony knee a mottled, nervous hand, with brown splotches at the wrist, coming up over the veined furrows that led to his tapering fingers, as he cried harshly in a tone that once had been soft and mellifluous, and still was deep and chesty: "Still me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!"

He would have gone away from the torture that came, as he stared at the lovers, but his devil held him there. He was glad when a noise of saw and hammer at the lake drowned the voices on the lawn. His gladness lasted but a moment. For soon he saw the young people quit chasing their crazy b.u.t.terfly of a golf ball, and wander half way up the hill from the lake, to sit in the snug shade of a wide-spreading, low-branched elm tree. Then the father was nervous, because he could not hear their voices. As he sat with the young broker, snarling at the anonymous phantoms of his past which were bedeviling him, a gray doubt kept brus.h.i.+ng across his mind. He realized clearly that he had no legal right to question Lila's choice of companions. He understood that the law would not justify anything that he might do, or say, or think, concerning her and her fortunes. Yet there unmistakably was the Van Dorn set to her pretty head and a Van Dorn gesture in her gay hands that had come down from at least four generations in family tradition. And he had no right even to be offended when she would merge that Van Dorn blood with the miserable Adams heredity. His impotence in the situation baffled him, and angered him. The law was final to his mind; but it did not satisfy his wrathful questioning heart. For in his heart, he realized that denial was not escape from the responsibility he had renounced when he tripped down the steps of their home and left Lila pleading for him in her mother's arms. He bit his ragged cigar and cursed his G.o.d, while the young man with Tom Van Dorn thought, "Well, what a dour old Turk he is!"

The hammering and sawing, which drowned the voices of the young people under the tree, came from the new bathing pavilion near by. Grant Adams was working on a two days' job putting up the pavilion for the summer.

He was out of Van Dorn's view, facing another angle of the long three-faced veranda. Grant saw Kenyon lying upon the turf, slim and graceful and with the beauty of youth radiating from him, and Grant wondered, as he worked, why his son should be there playing among the hills, while the sons of other men, making much more money than he--much more money indeed than many of the others who flitted over the green--should toil in the fumes of South Harvey and in the great industrial Valley through long hard hours of work, that sapped their heads and hearts by its monotony of motion, and lack of purpose. As he gazed at the lovers, their love did not stick in his consciousness--even if he realized it. Their presence under the elm tree at midday rose as a problem which deepened a furrow here and there in his seamed face and he hammered and sawed away with a will, working out in his muscles the satisfaction which his mind could not bring him.

As the two fathers from different vistas looked upon their children, Kenyon and Lila beneath the elm tree were shyly toying with vagrant dreams that trailed across their hearts. He was looking up at her and saying:

"Lila--who are we--you and I? I have been gazing at you three minutes while you were talking, and I see some one quite different from the you I knew before. Looking up at you, instead of down at you, is like transposing you. You are strangely new in this other key."

The girl did not try to respond in kind--with her lips at least. She began teasing the youth about his crinkly hair. Breaking a twig as she spoke, she threw it carelessly at his hair, and it stuck in the closely curled locks. She laughed gayly at him. Perhaps in some way rather subtly than suddenly, as by a ghostly messenger from afar, he may have been made aware of her beautiful body, of the exquisite lines of her figure, of the pink of her radiant skin, or the red of her girlish lips.