In the Heart of a Fool
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“My God, Margaret–what does this mean?” he almost whispered in terror.
“It means,” returned the strident voice of the woman, “that when you sent for your car and the driver told me he was going to Adamses–I knew why–from what you said, and now, by God,” she screamed, “give me that boy–or this girl goes to the union men as their shield.”
Van Dorn did not speak. His mouth seemed about to begin, but she stopped him, crying:
“And if you touch her I’ll kill you both. And the child goes first.”
The woman had lost control of her voice. She swung a pistol toward the child.
“Give me that boy!” she shrieked, and Van Dorn, dumb and amazed, stood staring at her. “Tell them to bring that boy before I count five: One, two,” she shouted, “three–”
“Oh, Joe,” called Van Dorn as his whole body began to tremble, “bring the Adams boy quick–here!” His voice broke into a shriek with nervous agitation and the word “here” was uttered with a piercing yell, that made the crowd wince.
Calvin brought Kenyon out and sent him across the street. Grant opened a window and called out: “Get into the car with Lila, Kenyon–please.”
The woman in the car cried: “Grant, Grant, is that you up there? They were going to murder the boy, Grant. Do you want his child up there?”
She looked up and the arc light before the hotel revealed her tragic, shattered face–a wreck of a face, crumpled and all out of line and focus as the flickering glare of the arc-light fell upon it. “Shall I send you his child?” she babbled hysterically, keeping the revolver pointed at Lila–“His child that he’s silly about?”
Van Dorn started for her car, but Brotherton at the window bellowed across a gun sight: “Move an inch and I’ll shoot.”
Grant called down: “Margaret, take Lila and Kenyon home, please.”
Then, with Mr. Brotherton’s gun covering the father in the street below, the driver of the car turned it carefully through the parting crowd, and was gone as mysteriously and as quickly as he came.
“Now,” cried Mr. Brotherton, still sighting down the gun barrel pointed at Van Dorn, standing alone in the middle of the street, “you make tracks, and don’t you go to that saloon either–you go home to the bosom of your family. Stop,” roared Mr. Brotherton, as the man tried to break into a run. Van Dorn stopped. “Go down to the Company store where the union men are,” commanded Mr. Brotherton. “They will take you home.
“Hey–you Local No. 10,” howled the great bull voice of Brotherton. “You fellows take this man home to his own vine and fig tree.”
Van Dorn, looking ever behind him for help that did not come, edged down the street and into the arms of Local No. 10, and was swallowed up in that crowd. A rock from across the street crashed through the window where the gun barrels were protruding, but there was no fire in return. Another rock and another came. But there was no firing.
Grant, who knew something of mobs, felt instinctively that the trouble was over. Nathan and Brotherton agreed. They stood for a time–a long time it seemed to them–guarding the stairs. Then some one struck a match and looked at his watch. It was half past eight. It was too late for Grant to hold his meeting. But he felt strongly that the exit of Van Dorn had left the crowd without a leader and that the fight of the night was won.
“Well,” said Grant, drawing a deep breath. “They’ll not run me out of town to-night. I could go to the lot now and hold the meeting; but it’s late and it will be better to wait until to-morrow night. They should sleep this off–I’m going to talk to them.”
He stepped to an iron balcony outside the window and putting his hands to his mouth uttered a long horn-like blast. The men saw him across the street. “Come over here, all of you–” he called. “I want to talk to you–just a minute.”
The crowd moved, first one or two, then three or four, then by tens. Soon the crowd stood below looking up half curiously–half angrily.
“You see, men,” he smiled as he shoved his hand in his pocket, and put his head humorously on one side:
“We are more hospitable when you all come than when you send your delegations. It’s more democratic this way–just to kind of meet out here like a big family and talk it over. Some way,” he laughed, “your delegates were in a hurry to go back and report. Well, now, that was right. That is true representative government. You sent ’em, they came; were satisfied and went back and told you all about it.” The crowd laughed. He knew when they laughed that he could talk on. “But you see, I believe in democratic government. I want you all to come and talk this matter over–not just a few.”
He paused; then began again: “Now, men, it’s late. I’ve got so much to say I don’t want to begin now. I don’t like to have Tom Van Dorn and Joe Calvin divide time with me. I want the whole evening to myself. And,” he leaned over clicking his iron claw on the balcony railing while his jaw showed the play of muscles in the light from below, “what’s more I’m going to have it, if it takes all summer. Now then,” he cried: “The Labor Council of the Wahoo Valley will hold its meeting to-morrow night at seven-thirty sharp on Captain Morton’s vacant lot just the other side of the Hot Dog saloon. I’ll talk to that meeting. I want you to come to that meeting and hear what we have to say about what we are trying to do.”
A few men clapped their hands. Grant Adams turned back into the room and in due course the crowd slowly dissolved. At ten o’clock he was standing in the door of the Vanderbilt House looking at his watch, ready to turn in for the night. Suddenly he remembered the Captain. He hurried around to the Hot Dog, and there peering into the darkness of the vacant lot saw the Captain with his gun on his shoulder pacing back and forth, a silent, faithful sentry, unrelieved from duty.
When Grant had relieved him and told him that the trouble was over, the little old man looked up with his snappy eyes and his dried, weazened smile and said: “’Y gory, man–I’m glad you come. I was just a-thinking I bet them girls of mine haven’t cooked any potatoes to go with the meat to make hash for breakfast–eh? and I’m strong for hash.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
IN WHICH WE WITNESS A CEREMONY IN THE TEMPLE OF LOVE
George Brotherton took the Captain to the street car that night. They rode face to face and all that the Captain had seen and more, outside the Vanderbilt House, and all that George Brotherton had seen within its portals, a street car load of Harvey people heard with much “’Y gorying” and “Well–saying,” as the car rattled through the fields and into Market Street. Amiable satisfaction with the night’s work beamed in the moon-face of Mr. Brotherton and the Captain was drunk with martial spirit. He shouldered his gun and marched down the full length of the car and off, dragging Brotherton at his chariot wheels like a spoil of battle.
“Come on, George,” called the Captain as the audience in the car smiled. “Young man, I need you to tell the girls that their pa ain’t gone stark, staring mad–eh? And I want to show ’em a hero!–What say? A genuine hee-ro!”
It was half an hour after the Captain bursting upon his hearthstone like a martial sky rocket, had exploded the last of his blue and green candles. The three girls, sitting around the cold base burner, beside and above which Mr. Brotherton stood in statuesque repose, heard the Captain’s tale and the protests of Mr. Brotherton much as Desdemona heard of Othello’s perils. And when the story was finished and retold and refinished and the Captain was rising with what the girls called the hash-look in his snappy little eyes, Martha saw Ruth swallow a vast yawn and Martha turned to Emma an appreciative smile at Ruth’s discomfiture.
But Emma’s eyes were fixed upon Mr. Brotherton and her face turned toward him with an aspect of tender adoration. Mr. Brotherton, who was not without appreciation of his own heroic caste, saw the yawn and the smile and then he saw the face of Emma Morton.
It came over him in a flash of surprise that Ruth and Martha were young things, not of his world; and that Emma was of his world and very much for him in his world. It got to him through the busy guard of his outer consciousness with a great rush of tenderness that Emma really cared for the dangers he had faced and was proud of the part he had played. And Mr. Brotherton knew that, with Ruth and Martha, it was a tale that was told.
As he saw her standing among her sisters, his heart hid from him the little school teacher with crow’s feet at her eyes, but revealed instead the glowing heart of an exalted woman, who did not realize that she was uncovering her love, a woman who in the story she had heard was living for a moment in high romance. Her beloved, imperiled, was restored to her; the lost was found and the journey which ends so happily in lovers’ meetings was closing.
His eyes filled and his voice needed a cough to prime it. The fire, glowing in Emma Morton’s eyes, steamed up George Brotherton’s will–the will which had sent him crashing forward in life from a train peddler to a purveyor of literature and the arts in Harvey. Deeds followed impulses with him swiftly, so in an instant the floor of the Morton cottage was shaking under his tread and with rash indifference, high and heroic, ignoring with equal disdain two tittering girls, an astonished little old man and a cold base burner, the big man stalked across the room and cried:
“Well, say–why, Emma–my dear!” He had her hands in his and was putting his arm about her as he bellowed: “Girls–” his voice broke under its heavy emotional load. “Why, dammit all, I’m your long-lost brother George! Cap, kick me, kick me–me the prize jackass–the grand sweepstake prize all these years!”
“No, no, George,” protested the wriggling maiden. “Not–not here! Not–”
“Don’t you ‘no–no’ me, Emmy Morton,” roared the big man, pulling her to his side. “Girl–girl, what do we care?” He gave her a resounding kiss and gazed proudly around and exclaimed, “Ruthie, run and call up the Times and give ’em the news. Martha, call up old man Adams–and I’ll take a bell to-morrow and go calling it up and down Market Street. Then, Cap, you tell Mrs. Herdicker. This is the big news.” As he spoke he was gathering the amazed Ruth and Martha under his wing and kissing them, crying, “Take that one for luck–and that to grow on.” Then he let out his laugh. But in vain did Emma Morton try to squirm from his grasp; in vain she tried to quiet his clatter. “Say, girls, cluster around Brother George’s knee–or knees–and let’s plan the wedding.”
“You are going to have a wedding, aren’t you, Emma?” burst in Ruth, and George cut in:
“Wedding–why, this is to be the big show–the laughing show, all the wonders of the world and marvels of the deep under one canvas. Why, girls–”
“Well, Emma, you’ve just got to wear a veil,” laughed Martha hysterically.
“Veil nothing–shame on you, Martha Morton. Why, George hasn’t asked–”
“Now ain’t it the truth!” roared Brotherton. “Why veil! Veil?” he exclaimed. “She’s going to wear seven veils and forty flower girls–forty–count ’em–forty! And Morty Sands best man–”
“Keep still, George,” interrupted Ruth. “Now, Emma, when–when, I say, are you going to resign your school?”
Mr. Brotherton gave the youngest and most practical Miss Morton a look of quick intelligence. “Don’t you fret; Ruthie, I’m hog tied by the silken skein of love. She’s going to resign her school to-morrow.”
“Indeed I am not, George Brotherton–and if you people don’t hush–”
But Mr. Brotherton interrupted the bride-to-be, incidentally kissing her by way of punctuation, and boomed on in his poster tone, “Morty Sands best man with his gym class from South Harvey doing ground and lofty tumbling up and down the aisles in pink tights. Doc Jim in linen pants whistling the Wedding March to Kenyon Adams’s violin obligato, with the General hitting the bones at the organ! The greatest show on earth and the baby elephant in evening clothes prancing down the aisle like the behemoth of holy writ! Well, say–say, I tell you!”
The Captain touched the big man on the shoulder apologetically. “George, of course, if you could wait a year till the Household Horse gets going good, I could stake you for a trip to the Grand Canyon myself, but just now, ’y gory, man!”
“Grand Canyon!” laughed Brotherton. “Why, Cap, we’re going to go seven times around the world and twice to the moon before we turn up in Harvey. Grand Canyon–”
“Well, at least, father,” cried Martha, “we’ll get her that tan traveling dress and hat she’s always wanted.”
“But I tell you girls to keep still,” protested the bride-to-be, still in the prospective groom’s arms and proud as Punch of her position. “Why, George hasn’t even asked me and–”
“Neither have you asked me, Emma, ’’eathen idol made of mud what she called the Great God Buhd.’” He stooped over tenderly and when his face rose, he said softly, “And a plucky lot she cared for tan traveling dresses when I kissed her where she stud!” And then and there before the Morton family assembled, he kissed his sweetheart again, a middle-aged man unashamed in his joy.
It was a tremendous event in the Morton family and the Captain felt his responsibility heavily. The excited girls, half-shocked and half-amused and wholly delighted, tried to lead the Captain away and leave the lovers alone after George had hugged them all around and kissed them again for luck. But the Captain refused to be led. He had many things to say. He had to impress upon Mr. Brotherton, now that he was about to enter the family, the great fact that the Mortons were about to come into riches. Hence a dissertation on the Household Horse and its growing popularity among makers of automobiles; Nate Perry’s plans in blue print for the new factory were brought in, and a wilderness of detail spread before an ardent lover, keen for his first hour alone with the woman who had touched his bachelor heart. A hundred speeches came to his lips and dissolved–first formal and ardent love vows–while the Captain rattled on recounting familiar details of his dream.
Then Ruth and Martha rose in their might and literally dragged their father from the room and upstairs. Half an hour later the two lovers in the doorway heard a stir in the house behind them. They heard the Captain cry:
“The hash–George, she’s the best girl–’Y gory, the best girl in the world. But she will forget to chop the hash over night!”
As George Brotherton, bumping his head upon the eternal stars, turned into the street, he saw the great black hulk of the Van Dorn house among the trees. He smiled as he wondered how the ceremonies were proceeding in the Temple of Love that night.
It was not a ceremony fit for smiles, but rather for the tears of gods and men, that the priest and priestess had performed. Margaret Van Dorn had taken Kenyon home, then dropped Lila at the Nesbit door as she returned from South Harvey. When she found that her husband had not reached home, she ran to her room to fortify herself for the meeting with him. And she found her fortifications in the farthest corner of the bottom drawer of her dresser. From its hiding place she brought forth a little black box and from the box a brown pellet. This fortification had been her refuge for over a year when the stress of life in the Temple of Love was about to overcome her. It gave her courage, quickened her wits and loosened her tongue. Always she retired to her fortress when the combat in the Temple threatened to strain her nerves. So she had worn a beaten path of habit to her refuge.
Then she made herself presentable; took care of her hair, smoothed her face at the mirror and behind the shield of the drug she waited. She heard the old car rattling up the street, and braced herself for the struggle. She knew–she had learned by bitter experience that the first blow in a rough and tumble was half the battle. As he came raging through the door, slamming it behind him, she faced him, and before he could speak, she sneered:
“Ah, you coward–you sneaking, cur coward–who would murder a child to win–Ach!” she cried. “You are loathsome–get away from me!”
The furious man rushed toward her with his hands clinched. She stood with her arms akimbo and said slowly:
“You try that–just try that.”
He stopped. She came over and rubbed her body against his, purring, with a pause after each word:
“You are a coward–aren’t you?”
She put her fingers under his jaw, and sneered, “If ever you lay hands on me–just one finger on me, Tom Van Dorn–” She did not finish her sentence.
The man uttered a shrill, insane cry of fury and whirled and would have run, but she caught him, and with a gross physical power, that he knew and dreaded, she swung him by force into a chair.
“Now,” she panted, “sit down like a man and tell me what you are going to do about it? Look up–dawling!” she cried, as Van Dorn slumped in the chair.
The man gave her a look of hate. His eyes, that showed his soul, burned with rage and from his face, so mobile and expressive, a devil of malice gaped impotently at his wife, as he sat, a heap of weak vanity, before her. He pulled himself up and exclaimed:
“Well, there’s one thing damn sure, I’ll not live with you any more–no man would respect me if I did after to-night.”
“And no man,” she smiled and said in her mocking voice, “will respect you if you leave me. How Laura’s friends will laugh when you go, and say that Tom Van Dorn simply can’t live with any one. How the Nesbit crowd will titter when you leave me, and say Tom Van Dorn got just what he had coming! Why–go on–leave me–if you dare! You know you don’t dare to. It’s for better or worse, Tom, until death do us part–dawling!”
She laughed and winked indecently at him.
“I will leave you, I tell you, I will leave you,” he burst forth, half rising. “All the devils of hell can’t keep me here.”
“Except just this one,” she mocked. “Oh, you might leave me and go with your present mistress! By the way, who is our latest conquest–dawling? I’m sure that would be fine. Wouldn’t they cackle–the dear old hens whose claws scratch your heart so every day?” She leaned over, caressing him devilishly, and cried, “For you know when you get loose from me, you’ll pretty nearly have to marry the other lady–wouldn’t that be nice? ‘Through sickness and health, for good or for ill,’–isn’t it nice?” she scoffed. Then she turned on him savagely, “So you will try to hide behind a child, and use him for a shield–Oh, you cur–you despicable dog,” she scorned. Then she drew herself up and spoke in a passion that all but hissed at him. “I tell you, Tom Van Dorn, if you ever, in this row that’s coming, harm a hair of that boy’s head–you’ll carry the scar of that hair to your grave. I mean it.”
Van Dorn sprang up. He cried: “What business is it of yours? You she devil, what’s the boy to you? Can’t I run my own business? Why do you care so much for the Adams brat? Answer me, I tell you–answer me,” he cried, his wrath filling his voice.
“Oh, nothing, dawling,” she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: “Oh, nothing, Tom–only you see I might be his mother!”
She played with the vulgar diamonds that hid her fingers and looked down coyly as she smiled into his gray face.
“Great God,” he whispered, “were you born a–” he stopped, ashamed of the word in his mouth.
The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on one side as she replied: “Whatever I am, I’m the wife of Judge Van Dorn; so I’m quite respectable now–whatever I was once. Isn’t that lawvly, dawling!” She began talking in her baby manner.
Her husband was staring at her with doubt and fear and weak, footless wrath playing like scurrying clouds across his proud, shamed face.
“Oh, Margaret, tell me the truth,” he moaned, as the fear of the truth baffled him–a thousand little incidents that had attracted his notice and passed to be stirred up by a puzzled consciousness came rushing into his memory–and the doubt and dread overcame even his hate for a moment and he begged. But she laughed, and scouted the idea and then called out in anguish:
“Why–why have you a child to love–to love and live for even if you cannot be with her–why can I have none?”
Her voice had broken and she felt she was losing her grip on herself, and she knew that her time was limited, that her fortifications were about to crumble. She sat down before her husband.
“Tom,” she said coldly, “no matter why I’m fond of Kenyon Adams–that’s my business; Lila is your business, and I don’t interfere, do I? Well,” she said, looking the man in the eyes with a hard, mean, significant stare, “you let the boy alone–do you understand? Do what you please with Grant or Jasper or the old man; but Kenyon–hands off!”
She rose, slipped quickly to the stairway, and as she ran up she called, “Good night, dawling.” Before he was on his feet he heard the lock click in her door, and with a horrible doubt, an impotent rage, and a mantling shame stifling him, he went upstairs and from her distant room she heard the bolt click in the door of his room. And behind the bolted doors stood two ghosts–the ghosts of rejected children, calling across the years, while the smudge of the extinguished torch of life choked two angry hearts.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU
“My dear,” quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had discussed Lila’s adventure of the night before, “I saw Tom up town this morning and he didn’t seem to be exactly happy. I says, ‘Tom, I hear you beat God at his own game last night!’ and,” the Doctor chuckled, “Laura, do you know, he wouldn’t speak to me!” As he laughed, the daughter interrupted:
“Why, father–that was mean–”
“Of course it was mean. Why–considering everything, I’d lick a man if he’d talk that mean to me. But my Eenjiany devil kind of got control of my forbearing Christian spirit and I cut loose.”
The daughter smiled, then she sighed, and asked: “Father–tell me, why did that woman object to Tom’s use of Kenyon in the riot last night?”
Doctor Nesbit opened his mouth as if to answer her. Then he smiled and said, “Don’t ask me, child. She’s a bad egg!”
“Lila says,” continued the daughter, “that Margaret appears at every public place where Kenyon plays. She seems eager to talk to him about his accomplishments, and has a sort of fascinated interest in whatever he does, as nearly as I can understand it? Why, father? What do you suppose it is? I asked Grant, who was here this morning with a Croatian baby whose mother is in the glass works, and Grant only shook his head.” The father looked at his daughter over his glasses and asked:
“Croatians, eh? That’s what the new colony is down in Magnus. Well, we’ve got Letts and Lithuanians and why not Croatians? What a mix we have here in the Valley! I wouldn’t wash ’em for ’em!”
“Well, father, I would. And when you get the dirt off they’re mostly just folks–just Indiany, as you call it. They all take my flower seeds. And they all love bright colors in their windows. And they are spreading the glow of blooms across the district, just as well as the Germans and the French and the Belgians and the Irish. And they are here for exactly the same thing which we are here for, father. We’re all in the same game.”
He looked at her blankly, and ventured, “Money?”
“No–you stupid. You know better. It’s children. They’re here for their children–to lift their children out of poverty. It’s the children who carry the banner of civilization, the hope of progress, the real sunrise. These people are all confused and more or less dumb and loggy about everything else in life but this one thing; they all hope greatly for their children. For their children they joyfully endure the hardships of poverty; the injustice of it; to live here in these conditions that seem to us awful, and to work terrible hours that their children may rise out of the worse condition that they left in Europe. And they have left Europe, father, spiritually as well as physically. Here they are reborn into America. The first generation may seem foreign, may hold foreign ways–on the outside. But these American born boys and girls, they are American–as much as we are, with all their foreign names. They are of our spirit. When America calls they will hear and follow. Whatever blood they will shed will be real American blood, because as children, born under the same aspiring genius for freedom under which we were born, as children they became Americans. Oh, father, it’s for the children that these people here in Harvey–these exploited people everywhere in this country,–plant the flowers and brighten up their homes. It’s for their children that they are going with Grant to organize for better things. The fire of life runs ahead of us in hope for our children, and if we haven’t children or the love of them in our hearts–why, father, that’s what’s eating Tom’s heart out, and blasting this miserable woman’s life! Grant said to-day: ‘This baby here symbolizes all that I stand for, all that I hope to do, all that the race dreams!”