In the Heart of a Fool Part 66

"Oh, mamma--mamma--I'm so sorry--so sorry--you had to see." The proud woman looked up from her work and sniffed:

"That whippersnapper--that--that--" she did not finish. The Doctor drew his daughter to him and kissed her. "Oh, my poor little girl--they wouldn't have done that ten years ago--"

"Father," interrupted the daughter, "is Kenyon all right?"

"Just one little bone broken in his leg. He'll be out from under the ether in a second. But I'll--Oh, I'll make that Calvin outfit sweat; I'll--"

"Oh, no, you won't, father--little Joe doesn't know any better. Mamma can just forget to invite his wife to our next party--which I won't let her do--not even that--but it would avenge my wrongs a thousand times over."

Lila had Kenyon's hand, and Mrs. Nesbit was rubbing his brow, when he opened his eyes and smiled. Laura and the Doctor, knowing their wife and mother, had left her and Lila together with the awakening lover. His eyes first caught Mrs. Nesbit's who bent over him and whispered:

"Oh, my brave, brave boy--my n.o.ble--chivalrous son--"

Kenyon smiled and his great black eyes looked into the elder woman's as he clutched Lila's hand.

"Lila," he said feebly, "where is it--run and get it."

"Oh, it's up in my room, grandma--wait a minute--it's up in my room."

She scurried out of the door and came dancing down the stairs in a moment with a jewel on her finger. The grandmother's eyes were wet, and she bent over and kissed the young, full lips into which life was flowing back so beautifully.

"Now--me!" cried Lila, and as she, too, bent down she felt the great, strong arms of her grandmother enfolding her in a mighty hug. There, in due course, the Doctor and Laura found them. A smile, the first that had wreathed his wrinkled face for an hour, twitched over the loose skin about his old lips and eyes.

"The Lord," he piped, "moves in a mysterious way--my dear--and if Laura had to go to jail to bring it--the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away--blessed be--"

"Well, Kenyon," the grandmother interrupted the Doctor, stooping to put her fingers lovingly upon his brow, "we owe everything to you; it was fine and courageous of you, son!"

And with the word "son" the Doctor knew and Laura knew, and Lila first of all knew that Bedelia Nesbit had surrendered. And Kenyon read it in Lila's eyes. Then they all fell to telling Kenyon what a grand youth he was and how he had saved the Doctor's life, and it ended as those things do, most undramatically, in a chorus of what I saids, and you saids to me, and I thought, and you did, and he should have done, until the party wore itself out and thought of Lila, sitting by her lover, holding his hands. And then what with a pantomime of eyes from Laura and the Doctor to Mrs. Nesbit, and what with an empty room in a big house, with voices far--exceedingly far--obviously far away, it ended with them as all journeys through this weary world end, and must end if the world wags on.

CHAPTER XLVIII

WHEREIN WE ERECT A HOUSE BUILT UPON A ROCK

That evening in the late twilight, two women stood at the wicket of a cell in the jail and while back of the women, at the end of a corridor, stood a curious group of reporters and idlers and guards, inside the wicket a tall, middle-aged man with stiff, curly, reddish hair and a homely, hard, forbidding face stood behind the bars. The young woman put her hand with the new ring on it through the wicket.

"It's Kenyon's ring--Kenyon's," smiled Lila, and to his questioning look at her mother, the daughter answered: "Yes, grandma knows. And what is more, grandpa told us both--Kenyon and me--what was bothering grandma--and it's all--all--right!"

The happy eyes of Laura Van Dorn caught the eyes of Grant as they gazed at her from some distant landscape of his turbulent soul. She could not hold his eyes, nor bring them to a serious consideration of the occasion. His heart seemed to be on other things. So the woman said: "G.o.d is good, Grant." She watched her daughter and cast a glance at the s.h.i.+ning ring. Grant Adams heard and saw, but while he comprehended definitely enough, what he saw and heard seemed remote and he repeated:

"G.o.d is good--infinitely good, Laura!" His eyes lighted up. "Do you know this is the first strike in the world--I believe, indeed the first enterprise in the world started and conducted upon the fundamental theory that we are all G.o.ds. Nothing but the divine spark in those men would hold them as they are held in faith and hope and fellows.h.i.+p. Look at them," he lifted his face as one seeing Heavenly legions, "ten thousand souls, men and women and children, cheated for years of their rights, and when they ask for them in peace, beaten and clubbed and killed, and still they do not raise their hands in violence! Oh, I tell you, they are getting ready--the time must be near." He shook his head in exultation and waved his iron claw.

Laura said gently, "Yes, Grant, but the day always is near. Whenever two or three are gathered--"

"Oh, yes--yes," he returned, brus.h.i.+ng her aside, "I know that. And it has come to me lately that the day of the democracy is a spiritual and not a material order. It must be a rising level of souls in the world, and the mere dawn of the day will last through centuries. But it will be nonetheless beautiful because it shall come slowly. The great thing is to know that we are all--the wops and dagoes and the hombres and the guinnies--all G.o.ds! to know that in all of us burns that divine spark which environment can fan or stifle--that divine spark which makes us one with the infinite!" He threw his face upward as one who saw a vision and cried: "And America--our America that they think is so sordid, so cra.s.s, so debauched with materialism--what fools they are to think it!

From all over the world for three hundred years men and women have been hurrying to this country who above everything else on earth were charged with aspiration. They were lowly people who came, but they had high visions; this whole land is a crucible of aspirations. We are the most sentimental people on earth. No other land is like it, and some day--oh, I know G.o.d is charging this battery full of His divine purpose for some great marvel. Some time America will rise and show her face and the world will know us as we are!"

The girl, with eyes fascinated by her engagement ring, scarcely understood what the man was saying. She was too happy to consider problems of the divine immanence. There was a little mundane talk of Kenyon and of the Nesbits and then the women went away.

An hour later an old man sitting in the dusk with a pencil in his left hand, was startled to see these two women descending upon him, to tell him the news. He kissed them both with his withered lips, and rubbed the soft cheek of the maiden against his old gray beard.

And when they were gone, he picked up the pencil again, and sat dumbly waiting, while in his heart he called eagerly across the worlds: "Mary--Mary, are you there? Do you know? Oh, Mary, Mary!"

The funeral of the young men killed in the shaft house brought a day of deepening emotion to Harvey. Flags were at half mast and Market Street was draped in c.r.a.pe. The stores closed at the tolling of bells which announced the hour of the funeral services. Two hundred automobiles followed the soldiers who escorted the bodies to the cemetery, and when the bugle blew taps, tears stood in thousands of eyes.

The moaning of the great-throated regimental band, the shrilling of the fife and the booming of the drum; the blare of the bugle that sounded taps stirred the chords of hate, and the town came back from burying its dead a vessel of wrath. In vain had John Dexter in his sermon over Fred Kollander tried to turn the town from its bitterness by preaching from the text, "Ye are members one of another," and trying to point the way to charity. The town would have no charity.

The tragedy of the shaft house and the imprisonment of Grant Adams had staged for the day all over the nation in the first pages of the newspapers an interesting drama. Such a man as Grant Adams was a figure whose jail sentence under military law for defending the rights of a free press, free speech, free a.s.semblage and trial by jury, was good for a first page position in every newspaper in the country--whatever bias its editorial columns might take against him and his cause. Millions of eyes turned to look at the drama. But there were hundreds among the millions who saw the drama in the newspapers and who decided they would like to see it in reality. Being foot loose, they came. So when the funeral procession was hurrying back into Harvey and the policemen and soldiers were dispersing to their posts, they fell upon half a dozen travel-stained strangers in the court house yard addressing the loafers there. Promptly the strangers were haled before the provost marshal, and promptly landed in jail. But other strangers appeared on the streets from time to time as the freight trains came clanging through town, and by sundown a score of young men were in the town lockup. They were happy-go-lucky young blades; rather badly in need of a bath and a barber, but they sang l.u.s.tily in the calaboose and ate heartily and with much experience of prison fare. One read his paperbound Tolstoy; another poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town knew that a plague was upon them.

Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke the sound of hurrying feet--always the feet of the young men. For Youth goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade.

So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over, there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with archaic ideas of morality--ideas perhaps of property and morals that were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust, and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden, golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever m.u.f.fled, these hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger, played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found their danger in fighting for free speech, and free a.s.semblage. They were tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war comes.

And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Const.i.tution of the United States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of diversion for the police, the more did the wooden head of Market Street throb with rage and the more did the people imagine a vain thing.

And when seventy of them had crowded the jail, and their leaders blandly announced that they would eat the taxes all out of the county treasury before they stopped the fight for free speech, Market Street awoke.

Eating taxes was something that Market Street could understand. So the police began clubbing the strangers. The pilgrims were meeting Danger, their lost comrade, and youth's blood ran wild at the meeting and there were riots in Market Street. A lodging house in the railroad yards in South Harvey was raided one night--when the strike was ten days old, and as it was a railroadmen's sleeping place, and a number of trainmen were staying there to whom the doctrines of peace and non-resistance did not look very attractive under a policeman's ax-handle--a policeman was killed.

Then the Law and Order League was formed. Storekeepers, clerks, real estate men, young lawyers, the heart of that section of the white-s.h.i.+rted population whom Grant Adams called the "poor plutes,"

joined this League. And deaf John Kollander was its leader. Partly because of his bereavement men let him lead, but chiefly because his life's creed seemed to be vindicated by events, men turned to him. The bloodshed on Market Street, the murder of a policeman and the dynamiting of the shaft house with their sons inside, had aroused a degree of pa.s.sion that unbalanced men, and John Kollander's wrath was public opinion dramatized. The police gave the Law and Order League full swing, and John Kollander was the first chief in the city. Prisoners arrested for speaking without a permit were turned over to the Law and Order League at night, and taken in the city auto-truck to the far limits of the city, and there--a mile from the residential section, in the high weeds that fringed the town and confined the country, the Law and Order League lined up under John Kollander and with clubs and whips and sticks, compelled the prisoners to run a gauntlet to the highroad that leads from Harvey. Men were stripped, and compelled to lean over and kiss an American flag--spread upon the ground, while they were kicked and beaten before they could rise. This was to punish men for carrying a red flag of socialism, and John Kollander decreed that every loyal citizen of Harvey should wear a flag. To omit the flag was to arouse suspicion; to wear a red necktie was to invite arrest. It was a merry day for blithe devotees of Danger; and they were taking their full of her in Harvey.

The Law and Order League was one of those strange madnesses to which any community may fall a victim. Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright--with Jasper Adams a nimble echo, church men, fathers, husbands, solid business men, were its leaders.

They endorsed and partic.i.p.ated in brutalities, cowardly cruelties at which in their saner moments they could only shudder in horror. But they made Jared Thurston chairman of the publicity committee and the _Times_, morning after morning, fanned the pa.s.sions of the people higher and higher. "Skin the Rats," was the caption of his editorial the morning after a young fellow was tarred and feathered and beaten until he lost consciousness and was left in the highway. The editorial under this heading declared that anarchy had lifted its hydra head; that Grant Adams preaching peace in the Valley was preparing to let in the jungle, and that the b.u.ms who were flooding the city jail were Adams's tools, who soon would begin dynamiting and burning the town, when it suited his purpose, while his holier-than-thou dupes in the Valley were conducting their goody-goody strike.

Plots of dynamiting were discovered. Hardly a day pa.s.sed for nearly a week that the big black headlines of the _Times_ did not tell of dynamite found in obviously conspicuous places--in the court house, in the Sands opera house, in the schoolhouses, in the city hall. So Harvey grew cla.s.s conscious, property conscious, and the town went stark mad.

It was the gibbering fear of those who make property of privilege, and privilege of property, afraid of losing both.

But for a week and a day the motive power of the strike was Grant Adams's indomitable will. Hour after hour, day after day he paced his iron floor, and dreamed his dream of the conquest of the world through fellows.h.i.+p. And by the power of his faith and by the example of his imprisonment for his faith, he held his comrades in the gardens, kept the strikers on the picket lines and sustained the courage of the delegates in Belgian Hall, who met inside a wall of blue-coated policemen. The mind of the Valley had reached a place where sympathy for Grant Adams and devotion to him, imprisoned as their leader, was stronger than his influence would have been outside. So during the week and a day, the waves of hate and the winds of adverse circ.u.mstance beat upon the house of faith, which he had builded slowly through other years in the Valley, and it stood unshaken.

CHAPTER XLIX

HOW MORTY SANDS TURNED AWAY SADLY AND JUDGE VAN DORN UNCOVERED A SECRET

Grant Adams sat in his cell, with the jail smell of stone and iron and damp in his nostrils. As he read the copy of Tolstoy's "The Resurrection," which his cell-mate had left in his hurried departure the night before, Grant moved unconsciously to get into the thin direct rays of the only sunlight--the early morning sunlight, that fell into his cage during the long summer day. The morning _Times_ lay on the floor where Grant had dropped it after reading the account of what had happened to his cell-mate when the police had turned him over to the Law and Order League, at midnight. To be sure, the account made a great hero of John Kollander and praised the patriotism of the mob that had tortured the poor fellow. But the fact of his torture, the fact that he had been tarred and feathered, and turned out naked on the golf links of the country club, was heralded by the _Times_ as a warning to others who came to Harvey to preach Socialism, and flaunt the red flag.

Grant felt that the jailer's kindness in giving him the morning paper so early in the day, was probably inspired by a desire to frighten him rather than to inform him of the night's events.

Gradually he felt the last warmth of the morning sun creep away and he heard a new step beside the jailer's velvet footfall in the corridor, and heard the jailer fumbling with his keys and heard him say: "That's the Adams cell there in the corner," and an instant later Morty Sands stood at the door, and the jailer let him in as Grant said:

"Well, Morty--come right in and make yourself at home."

He was not the das.h.i.+ng young blade who for thirty years had been the Beau Brummel of George Brotherton's establishment; but a rather weazened little man whose mind illumined a face that still clung to sportive youth, while premature age was claiming his body.