In the Heart of a Fool

“Lila,” he asked as he looked at the greening grass 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 bumping 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 God: 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 shining 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 washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams’s ship 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 multitude.

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 brass buttons. 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 receiverships, odd jobs in lawsuits for Daniel Sands–as, for instance, furnishing 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 Dick and for Harry, but always for the immediate use and benefit of John Kollander, his heirs and assigns. 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–”

“Father,” cried Grant, “I saw Tom Van Dorn yesterday, too, in his big new car–and I don’t need your guides to tell me who is moving with the current and who is buffeting it. Oh, father, that hell-scorched face–don’t talk to me about his faith and mine!” The old man remounted his printer’s stool for another half-hour’s work before dusk deepened, and smiled as he pulled his steel spectacles over his clear old eyes.

One would fancy that a man whose face was as seamed and scarred with time and struggle as Grant Adams’s face, would have said nothing of the hell-scorched face of Tom Van Dorn. Yet for all its lines, youth still shone from Grant Adams’s countenance. His wide, candid blue eyes were still boyish, and a soul so eager with hope that it sometimes blazed into a mad intolerance, gazed into the world from behind them. Even his arm and claw became an animate hand when Grant waved them as he talked; and his wide, pugnacious shoulders, his shock of nonconforming red hair, his towering body, and his solid workman’s legs, firm as oak beams,–all,–claw, arms, shoulders, trunk and legs,–translated into human understanding the rebel soul of Grant Adams.

Yet the rebellion of Grant Adams’s soul was no new thing to the world. He was treading the rough road that lies under the feet of all those who try to divert their lives from the hard and wicked morals of their times. For the kingdoms of this earth are organized for those who devote themselves chiefly, though of course not wholly, to the consideration of self. The world is still vastly egoistic in its balance. And the unbroken struggle of progress from Abel to yesterday’s reformer, has been, is, and shall be the battle with the spirit that chains us to the selfish, accepted order of the passing day. So Grant Adams’s face was battle scarred, but his soul, strong and exultant, burst through his flesh and showed itself at many angles of his being. And a grim and militant thing it looked. The flinty features of the man, his coarse mouth, his indomitable blue eyes, his red poll, waving like a banner above his challenging forehead, wrinkled and seamed and gashed with the troubles of harsh circumstance, his great animal jaw at the base of the spiritual tower of his countenance–all showed forth the warrior’s soul, the warrior of the rebellion that is as old as time and as new as to-morrow.

Working with his hands for a bare livelihood, but sitting at his desk four or five days in the week and speaking at night, month after month, year after year, for nearly twenty years, without rest or change, had taken much of the bounce of youth from his body. He knew how the money from the accumulated dues was piling up in the Labor Union’s war chest in the valley. He had proved what a trade solidarity in an industrial district could do for the men without strikes by its potential strength. Black powder, which killed like the pestilence that stalketh in darkness, was gone. Electric lights had superseded torches in the runways of the mines. Bathhouses were found in all the shafts. In the smelters the long, killing hours were abandoned and a score of safety devices were introduced. But each gain for labor had come after a bitter struggle with the employers. So the whole history of the Wahoo Valley was written in the lines of his broken face.

The reformer with his iridescent dream of progress often hangs its realization upon a single phase of change. Thus when Grant Adams banished black powder from the district, he expected the whole phantasm of dawn to usher in the perfect day for the miners. When he secured electric lights in the runways and baths in the shaft house, he confidently expected large things to follow. While large things hesitated, he saw another need and hurried to it.

Thus it happened, that in the hurrying after a new need, Grant Adams had always remained in his own district, except for a brief season when he and Dr. Nesbit sallied forth in a State-wide campaign to defend the Doctor’s law to compel employers to pay workmen for industrial accidents, as the employers replace broken machinery–a law which the Doctor had pushed through the Legislature and which was before the people for a referendum vote. When Grant went out of the Wahoo Valley district he attracted curious crowds, crowds that came to see the queer labor leader who won without strikes. And when the crowds came under Grant’s spell, he convinced them. For he felt intensely. He believed that this law would right a whole train of incidental wrongs of labor. So he threw himself into the fight with a crusader’s ardor. Grant and the Doctor journeyed over the State through July and August; and in September the wily Doctor trapped Tom Van Dorn into a series of joint debates with Grant that advertised the cause widely and well. From these debates Grant Adams emerged a somebody in politics. For oratory, however polished, and scholarship, however plausible, cannot stand before the wrath of an indignant man in a righteous cause who can handle himself and suppress his wrath upon the platform.

As the week of the debate dragged on and as the pageant of it trailed clear across the State, with crowds hooting and cheering, Doctor Nesbit’s cup of joy ran over. And when Van Dorn failed to appear for the Saturday meeting at the capital, the Doctor’s happiness mounted to glee.

That night, long after the midnight which ended the day’s triumph, Grant and the Doctor were sitting on a baggage truck at a way station waiting for a belated train. Grant was in the full current of his passion. Personal triumph meant little to him–the cause everything. His heart was afire with a lust to win. The Doctor kept looking at Grant with curious eyes–appraising eyes, indeed–from time to time as the younger man’s interminable stream of talk of the Cause flowed on. But the Doctor had his passion also. When it burst its bonds, he was saying: “Look here, you crazy man–take a reef in your canvas picture of jocund day upon the misty mountain tops–get down to grass roots.” Grant turned an exalted face upon the Doctor in astonishment. The Doctor went on:

“Grant, I can give the concert all right–but, young man, you are selling the soap. That’s a great argument you have been making this week, Grant.”

“There wasn’t much to my argument, Doctor,” answered Grant, absently, “though it was a righteous cause. All I did was to make an appeal to the pocketbooks of Market Street all over the State, showing the merchants and farmers that the more the laboring man receives the more he will spend, and if he is paid for his accidents he will buy more prunes and calico; whereas, if he is not paid he will burden the taxes as a pauper. Tom couldn’t overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people.”

But Dr. Nesbit persisted with his figure. “Grant,” he piped, “you certainly can sell soap. Why don’t you sell some soap on your own hook? Why don’t you let me run you for something–Congress–governor, or something? We can win hands down.”

Grant did not wait for the Doctor to finish, but cried in violent protest: “No, no, no–Doctor–no, I must not do that. I tell you, man, I must travel light and alone. I must go into life as naked as St. Francis. The world is stirring as with a great spirit of change. The last night I was at home, up stepped a little Belgian glassblower to me. I’d never seen him before. I said, ‘Hello, comrade!’ He grasped my hands with both hands and cried ‘Comrade! So you know the password. It has given me welcome and warmth and food in France, in England, in Australia, and now here. Everywhere the workers are comrades!’ Everywhere the workers are comrades. Do you know what that means, Doctor?”

The Doctor did not answer. His seventy years, and his habit of thinking in terms of votes and parties and factions, made him sigh.

“Doctor,” cried Grant, “electing men to office won’t help. But this law we are fighting for–this law will help. Doctor, I’m pinning the faith of a decade of struggle on this law.”

The Doctor broke the silence that followed Grant’s declaration, to say: “Grant, I don’t see it your way. I feel that life must crystallize its progress in institutions–political institutions, before progress is safe. But you must work out your own life, my boy. Incidentally,” he piped, “I believe you are wrong. But after this campaign is over, I’m going up to the capital for one last fling at making a United States Senator. I’ve only a dozen little white chips in the great game, five in the upper house and seven in the lower house. But we may deadlock it, and if we do,–you’ll see thirty years drop off my head and witness the rejuvenation of Old Linen Pants.”

Grant began walking the platform again under the stars like an impatient ghost. The Doctor rose and followed him.

“Grant, now let me tell you something. I am half inclined at times to think it’s all moonshine–this labor law we’re working to establish. But Laura wants it, and God knows, Grant, she has little enough in her life down there in the Valley. And if this law makes her happy–it’s the least I can do for her. She hasn’t had what she should have had out of life, so I’m trying to make her second choice worth while. That’s why I’m on the soap wagon with you!” He would have laughed away this serious mood, but he could not.

Grant stared at the Doctor for a moment before answering: “Why, of course, Dr. Nesbit, I’ve always known that.

“But–I–Doctor–I am consecrated to the cause. It is my reason for living.”

The day had passed in the elder’s life when he could rise to the younger man’s emotions. He looked curiously at Grant and said softly:

“Oh, to be young–to be young–to be young!” He rose, touched the strong arm beside him. “‘And the young men shall see visions.’ To be young–just to be young! But ‘the old men shall dream dreams.’ Well, Grant, they are unimportant–not entirely pleasant. We young men of the seventies had a great material vision. The dream of an empire here in the West. It has come true–increased one hundred fold. Yet it is not much of a dream.”

He let the arm drop and began drumming on the truck as he concluded: “But it’s all I have–all the dream I have now. ‘All of which I saw, and part of which I was,’ yet,” he mused, “perhaps it will be used as a foundation upon which something real and beautiful will be builded.”

Far away the headlight of their approaching train twinkled upon the prairie horizon. The two men watched it glow into fire and come upon them. And without resuming their talk, each went his own wide, weary way in the world as they lay in adjoining berths on the speeding train.

At the general election the Doctor’s law was upheld by a majority of the votes in the State, but the Doctor himself was defeated for reëlection to the State Senate in his own district. Grant Adams waited, intently and with fine faith, for this law to bring in the millennium. But the Doctor had no millennial faith.

He came down town the morning after his defeat, gay and unruffled. He went toddling into the stores and offices of Market Street, clicking his cane busily, thanking his friends and joking with his foes. But he chirruped to Henry Fenn and Kyle Perry whom he found in the Serenity at the close of the day: “Well, gentlemen, I’ve seen ’em all! I’ve taken my medicine like a little man; but I won’t lick the spoon. I sha’n’t go and see Dan and Tom. I’m willing to go as far as any man in the forgiving and forgetting business, but the Lord himself hasn’t quit on them. Look at ’em. The devil’s mortgage is recorded all over their faces and he’s getting about ready to foreclose on old Dan! And every time Dan hears poor Morty cough, the devil collects his compound interest. Poor, dear, gay Morty–if he could only put up a fight!”

But he could not put up a fight and his temperature rose in the afternoon and he could not meet with his gymnasium class in South Harvey in the evening, but sent a trainer instead. So often weeks passed during which Laura Van Dorn did not see Morty and the daily boxes of flowers that came punctiliously with his cards to the kindergarten and to Violet Hogan’s day nursery, were their only reminders of the sorry, lonely, footless struggle Morty was making.

It was inevitable that the lives of Violet Hogan and Laura Van Dorn in South Harvey should meet and merge. And when they met and merged, Violet Hogan found herself devoting but a few hours a day to her day nursery, while she worked six long, happy hours as a stenographer for Grant Adams in his office at the Vanderbilt House. For, after all, it was as a stenographer that she remembered herself in the grandeur and the glory of her past. So Henry Fenn and Laura Van Dorn carried on the work that Violet began, and for them souls and flowers and happiness bloomed over the Valley in the dark, unwholesome places which death had all but taken for his own.

It was that spring when Dr. Nesbit went to the capital and took his last fling at State politics. For two months he had deadlocked his party caucus in the election of a United States Senator with hardly more than a dozen legislative votes. And he was going out of his dictatorship in a golden glow of glory.

And this was the beginning of the golden age for Captain Morton. The Morton-Perry Axle Works were thriving. Three eight-hour shifts kept the little plant booming, and by agreement with the directors of the Independent mine, Nathan Perry spent five hours a day in the works. He and the Captain, and the youngest Miss Morton, who was keeping books, believed that it would go over the line from loss to profit before grass came. The Captain hovered about the plant like an earth-bound spirit day and night, interrupting the work of the men, disorganizing the system that Nathan had installed, and persuading himself that but for him the furnaces would go dead and the works shut down.

It was one beautiful day in late March, after the November election wherein the Doctor’s law had won and the Doctor himself had lost, that Grant Adams was in Harvey figuring with Mr. Brotherton on supplies for his office. Captain Morton came tramping down the clouds before him as he swept into the Serenity and jabbed a spike through the wheels of commerce with the remark: “Well, George–what do you think of my regalia–eh?”

Mr. Brotherton and Grant looked up from their work. They beheld the Captain arrayed in a dazzling light gray spring suit–an exceedingly light gray suit, with a hat of the same color and gloves and shoe spats to match, with a red tie so red that it all but crackled. “First profits of the business. We got over the line yesterday noon, and I had a thousand to go on, and this morning I just went on this spree–what say?”

“Well, Cap, when Morty Sands sees you he will die of envy. You’re certainly the lily of the Valley and the bright and morning star–the fairest of ten thousand to my soul! Grant,” said Brotherton as he turned to his customer, “behold the plute!”