In the Heart of a Fool

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN ACCOUNT IN HIS LEDGER

Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the Times one November day after he had come home from his political campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills–a campaign in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted glasses of the Harvey Daily Times as one of the men who had saved the country–when the town read that cold paragraph beginning: “A decree of divorce was issued to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem Calvin in the district court,” and ending with these words: “Mrs. Van Dorn declined through her attorney to participate in a division of the property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter, aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street”–when the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van Dorn.

Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, “Wanted, pupils for the piano–Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street.”

Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward.

But he was free–the burden of matrimony was lifted. He felt that the whole world of women was his now for the choosing, and of all that world, he turned in wanton fancy to the beckoning arms of Margaret Fenn. But the feeling of freedom, the knowledge that he could speak to any woman as he chose and no one could gainsay him legally, the consciousness that he had no ties which the law recognized–and with him law was the synonym of morality–the exuberant sense of relief from a bondage that was oppressive to him, overbore all the influence of the town’s spirit of wrath in the air about him.

As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery–he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and forget all about him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done.

He seemed to be free, yet was he free?

Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life. Counting the courtship during which he and this woman had been associated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of his manhood–and that half the most active and effective part, had been spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her; when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten years, always the chain of associated thought led back to the image of her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers together.

For whom God had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no God, and the law was the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.

For our lives are not material, whatever our bodies may be. Our lives are the accumulations of consciousness, the assembling of our memories, our affections, our judgments, our aspirations, our weaknesses, our strength–the vast sum of all our impressions, good or bad, made upon a material plate called the brain. The brain is of the dust. The picture–which is a human life–is of the spirit. And the spirit is of God. And when by whatever laws of chance or greed, or high purpose or low desire two lives are joined until the cement of years has united the myriads of daily sensations that make up a segment of these lives, they are thus joined in the spirit forever.

Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering him. His meals, his clothes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold creature comforts that he prized–all the associations of his life with home–came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged rents in the fabric of his new freedom.

And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible for one child–one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face and eager eyes–to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores; hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his presence shamed her with her playmates.

He had never in his heart believed that the child meant much to him. She was merely part of the chain that held him, and yet now that she was not of him or his interests, it seemed to Thomas Van Dorn that she made a piteous figure upon the street, and that the sadness that flitted over her face when she saw him, in some way reproached him, and yet–what right had she in him–or why should he let her annoy him, or disturb his peace and the happiness that his freedom brought. Materially he noticed that she was well fed, well dressed, and he knew that she was well housed. What more could she have–but that was absurd. He couldn’t wreck his life for the mere chance that a child should be petted a little. There was no sense in such a proposition. And Thomas Van Dorn’s life was regulated by sense–common sense–horse sense, he called it.

It is curious–and scores of Tom Van Dorn’s friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them. Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him, sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade–a glow that brought out hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal. He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted her in thought with the wife he had put away, told Margaret that Laura was always puling about duty and getting her conscience pinched and whining about it. They agreed sitting there under the lamp, that they had been mates in some far-off jungle, that they had been parted and had been seeking one another through eons, and that when their souls met one of the equations of the physical universe was solved, and that their happiness was the adjustment of ages of wrong. She thought him the most brilliant of men; he deemed her the most wonderful of women, and the devil checked off two drunken fools in his inventory.

It was in those halcyon days of his courtship of Margaret Fenn, when he felt the pride of conquest of another soul and body strongly upon him, that Judge Thomas Van Dorn began to acquire–or perhaps to exhibit noticeably–the turkey gobbler gait, that ever afterward went with him, and became famous as the Van Dorn Strut. It was more than mere knee action–though knee action did characterize it prominently. The strut properly speaking began at the tip of his hat–his soft, black hat that sat so cockily upon his head. His head was thrown back as though he had been pulled by a check-rein. His shoulders swung jauntily–more than jauntily, call it insolently–as he walked, and his trunk swayed with some stateliness as his proud hands and legs performed their grand functions. But withal he bowed and smiled–with much condescension–and lifted his hat high from his handsome head, and when women passed he doffed it like a flag in a formal salute, and while his body spelled complacence, his face never lost the charm and grace and courtesy that drew men to him, and held them in spite of his faults.

One bitter cold December day, when the wind was blowing sleet down Market Street, and hardly a passer-by darkened the doors of the stores, the handsome Judge sailed easily into the Amen Corner, fumbled over the magazines, picked out a pocketful of cigars from the case, without calling Mr. Brotherton who was in the rear of the store working upon his accounts, lighted a cigar, and stood looking out of the frosted window at the deserted gray windy street, utterly ignoring the presence of Captain Morton who was pretending to be deeply buried in the National Tribune, but who was watching the Judge and trying to summon courage to speak. The Judge unbuttoned his modish gray coat that nearly reached his heels and put his hands behind him for a moment, as he puffed and pondered–apparently debating something.

“Judge,” said the Captain suddenly and then the Captain’s courage fell and he added, “Bad morning.”

“Yes,” acquiesced the Judge from his abstraction. In a long pause that followed, Captain Morton swallowed at least a peck of Adam’s apples that kept coming up to choke him, and then he cleared his throat and spoke:

“Tom–Tom Van Dorn–look around here.” He lowered his voice and went on, “I want to talk to you.” The Captain edged over on the bench.

“Sit down here a minute–I’ve been wanting to see you for a month.” Captain Morton spoke all but in a whisper. The Adam’s apple kept strangling him. The Judge saw that the old man was wrestling with some heavy problem. He turned, and looking down at the little wizened man, asked: “Well, Captain?”

The Captain moistened his lips, patted his toes on the floor, and twirled his fingers. He took a deep breath and said: “Tom, I’ve known you since you were twenty-one years old. Do you remember how we took you in the first night you came to town–me and mother? before the hotel was done, eh?” A smile on the Judge’s face emboldened the Captain. “You’ve got brains, Tom–lots of brains–I often say Tom Van Dorn will sit in the big chair at the White House yet–what say? Well, Tom–” Now there was the place to say it. But the Captain’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively in a second silence. He decided to take a fresh start: “Tom, you’re a sensible man–? I says to myself I’m going to have a plain talk to that man. He’s smart; he’ll appreciate it. Just the other day–George back there, and John Kollander and Dick Bowman and old man Adams, and Joe Calvin, and Kyle Perry were in here talking and I says–Gentlemen, that boy’s got brains–lots of brains–eh? and he’s a prince; ’y gory a prince, that’s what Tom Van Dorn is, and I can go to him–I can talk to him–what say?” The Captain was on the brink again. Slowly there mantled over the face of the prince the gray scum of a fear. And the scar on his forehead flashed crimson. The Captain saw that he had been anticipated. He began patting his toes on the floor. Judge Van Dorn’s face was set in a cement of resistance.

“Well?” barked the Judge. The little man’s lips dried, he smiled weakly, and licked his lips and said: “It was about my sprocket–my Household Horse–I says, Tom Van Dorn understands it if you gentlemen don’t and some day him and me will talk it over and ’y gory–he’ll buy some stock–he’ll back me.”

The Captain’s nervous voice had lifted and he was talking so that the clerk and Mr. Brotherton both in the back part of the store might hear. The cement of the Judge’s countenance cracked in a smile, but the gray mantle of fear still fluttered across his eyes.

“All right, Captain,” he answered, “some other time–not now–I’m in a hurry,” and went strutting out into the storm.

Mr. Brotherton with his moon face shining into the ledger laughed a great clacking laugh and got up from his stool to come to the cigar case, saying, “Well, say–Cap–if you’d a’ went on with what you started out to say, I’d a’ give fi’ dollars–say, I’d a’ made it ten dollars–say!” And he laughed again a laugh that seemed to set all the celluloid in the plush covered, satin lined toilet cases on the new counter a-flutter. He walked down the store with elephantine tread, as he laughed, and then the door opened and Dr. Nesbit came in. Five months had put a perceptible bow into his shoulders, and an occasional cast of uncertainty into his twinkling eyes.

Mr. Brotherton called half down the store, “Say, Doc–you should have been here a minute ago, and seen the Captain bristle up to Tom Van Dorn about his love affair and then get cold feet and try to sell him some Household Horse stock.” The Captain grinned sheepishly, the Doctor patted the Captain affectionately on the shoulder and chirped.

“So you went after him, did you, Ezry?” The loose skin of his face twitched, “Poor Tom–packing up his career in a petticoat and going forth to fuss with God–no sense–no sense,” piped the Doctor, glancing over the headlines in his Star. The Captain, still clinging to the subject that had been too much for him, remarked: “Doc–don’t you think some one ought to tell him?” The Doctor put down his paper, stroked his pompadour and looking over his glasses, answered:

“Ezry–if some one hasn’t told him–no one ever can. I tried to tell him once myself. I talked pretty middlin’ plain, Ezry.” He was speaking softly, then he piped out, “But what a man’s heart doesn’t tell him, his friends can’t. Still, Ezry, a strong friend is often a good tonic for a weak heart.” The Doctor looked at the Captain, then concluded: “That was a brave, kind act you tried to do–and I warrant you got it to him–some way. He’s a keen one–Ezry–a mighty keen one; and he understood.”

Mr. Brotherton went back to his ledger; the Doctor plunged into the Star, the Captain folded up his newspaper and began studying the trinkets in the holiday stock in the show case under the new books. A comb and brush with tortoise shell backs seemed to arrest his eyes. “Doc,” he mused, “Christmas never comes that I don’t think of–her–mother! I guess I’d just about be getting that comb and brush for her.” The Doctor casually looked through the show case and saw what had attracted the Captain. “Doc,” again the Captain spoke, bending over the case with his face turned from his auditor: “You’re a doctor and are supposed to know lots. Tell me this: How does a man break it to a woman when he wants to leave her–eh?” Without waiting for an answer the Captain went on: “And this is what puzzles me–how does he get used to another one–with that one still living? You tell me that. I’d think he’d be scared all the time that he would do something the way his first wife had trained him not to. Of course,” meditated the Captain, “right at first, I suppose a man may feel a little coltish and all. But, Doc, honest and true, when mother first left I kind of thought–well, I used to enjoy swearing a little before we was married, and I says to myself I guess I may as well have a damn or two as I go along–but, Doc, I can’t do it. Eh? Every time I set off the fireworks–she fizzles; I can see mother looking at me that way.” The old man went on earnestly: “Tell me, Doc, you’re a smart man–how Tom Van Dorn can do it. What say? ’Y gory I’d be scared–right now! And if I thought I had to get used all over again to another woman, and her ways of doing things–say of setting her bread Friday night, and having a hot brick for her feet and putting her hair in her teeth when she done it up, and dosing the children with sassafras tea in spring–I’d just naturally take to the woods, eh? And as for learning over again all the peculiarities of a new set of kin and what they all like to eat and died of, and how they all treated their first wives, and who they married–Doc? Doc?” The Captain shook a dubious and doleful head. “Fourteen years, Doc,” sighed the Captain. “Pretty happy years–children coming on,–trouble visiting us with the rest; sorrow–happiness–skimping and saving; her a-raking and scraping to make a good appearance, and make things do; me trying one thing and another, to make our fortune and her always kind and encouraging, and hopeful; death standing between us and both of us sitting there by the kitchen stove trying to make up some kind of prayer to comfort the other. Fourteen years of it, Doc–her and me, and her so patient, so forbearing–Doc–you’re a smart man–tell me, Doc, how did Tom Van Dorn get around to actually doing it? What say?”

The Doctor waved his folded paper in an impatient gesture at the Captain.

“We are all products of our yesterdays, Ezry; we are what we were, and we will be what we were. Man is queer. Sometimes out of the depth of him a god rises–sometimes it’s a beast. I’ve sat by the bed and seen life gasp into being; I’ve stood in the ranks and fought with men as you have, and have seen them fight and then again have seen them turn tail like cowards. I have sat by the bed and seen life sigh into the dust. What is life–what is the God that quickens and directs us,–why and how and whence?–Ezry Morton, man–I don’t know. And as for Tom–into that roaring hell of lust and lying and cheap parching pride where he is plunging–why, Ezry, I could almost cry for the fool; the damned beforehand fool!”

As the Doctor went whistling homeward through the storm that winter night he wondered how many more months the black spell of grief and despair would cover his daughter. Five months had passed since that summer day when her home had fallen. He knew how tragic her struggle was to fit herself into her new environment. She was dwelling, but not living in the Nesbit home. It was the Nesbit home; a kindly abode, but not her home. Her home was gone. The severed roots of her life kept stirring in her memory–in her heart, and outwardly, her spirit showed a withered and unhappy being, trying to rebuild life, to readjust itself after the shock that all but kills. The Doctor realized what an agony the new growth was bringing, and that night, stirred somewhat to somber meditation by Captain Morton’s reflections, the Doctor’s tune was a doleful little tune as he whistled into the wind. Excepting Kenyon Adams, who still came daily bringing his violin and was rapidly learning all that she knew of the theory of music, Laura Van Dorn had no interest in life outside of her family. When the Adamses came to dinner as frequently they came–Laura seemed to feel no constraint with them. Grant had even made her laugh with stories of Dick Bowman’s struggles to be a red card socialist, and to vote the straight socialist ticket and still keep in ward politics in which he had been a local heeler for nearly twenty years. Laura was interested in the organization of the unions, and though the Doctor carped at it and made fun of Grant, it was largely to stir up a discussion in which his daughter would take a vital interest.

Grant was getting something more than a local reputation in labor circles as an agitator, and was in demand as an organizer in different parts of the valley. He worked at his trade more or less, having rigged up a steel device on the stump of his right forearm that would hold a saw, a plane or a hammer. But he was no longer a boss carpenter at the mines. His devotion to the men and in the work they were doing seemed to the Nesbits to awaken in their daughter a new interest in life, and so they made many obvious excuses to have the Adamses about the Nesbit home.

Kenyon was growing into a pale, dreamy child with wonderful eyes, lustrous, deep, thoughtful and kind. He was music mad, and read all the poetry in the Nesbit library–and the Doctor loved poetry as many men love wine. Hero-tales and mythology, romances and legends Kenyon read day after day between his hours of practice, and for diversion the boy sat before the fire or in the sun of a chilly afternoon, retailing them in such language as little Lila could understand. So in the black night of sorrow that enveloped her, Laura Nesbit often spent an hour with Grant Adams, and talked of much that was near her heart.

He was strong, sometimes she thought him coarse and raw. He talked the jargon of the agitator with the enthusiasm of a dervish and the vernacular of the mine and the shop and the forge. But in him she could see the fire of a mad consuming passion for humanity.

During those days of shame and misery, when the old interests of life were dying in her heart, interests upon which she had built since her childhood–the interests of home, of children, of wifehood and motherhood, to which in joy she had consecrated herself, she listened often to Grant Adams. Until there came into her life slowly and feebly, and almost without her conscious realization of it, a new vision, a new hope, a new path toward usefulness that makes for the only happiness.