In the Heart of a Fool

“Probably not.”

Then fearing that he might have been curt the old man lifted his eyes from his book and looking kindly over his glasses continued: “The Wahoo isn’t ablaze, Tom, but you know as well as I that the wage scale has been raised twice in the mines, and once in the glass factory and once in the smelter in the past three years without strikes–and that’s what Grant is trying to do. More than that, every concern in the Valley now recognizes the union in conferring with the men about work conditions. That’s something–that’s worth all his time for three years or so, if he had done nothing else.”

“Well, what else has he done?” asked Van Dorn quickly.

“Well, Tom, for one thing the men are getting class conscious, and in a strike that will be a strong cement to make them stick.”

Van Dorn’s neck reddened, as he replied: “Yes–the damn anarchists–class consciousness is what undermines patriotism.”

“And patriotism,” replied the old man, thumbing the lapel of his coat that held his loyal legion button, “patriotism is the last resort–of plutocrats!”

He laughed good-naturedly and silently. Then he rose and said as he started to go:

“Well, Tom,–we won’t quarrel over a little thing like our beloved country. Why, Lila–” the old man looked up and saw the girl, “bless my eyes, child, how you do grow, and how pretty you look in your new ginghams–just like your mother, twenty years ago!” Amos Adams was talking to a shy young girl–blue-eyed and brown-haired, who was walking out of the store after buying a bottle of ink of Miss Calvin. Lila spoke to the old man and would have gone with him, but for the booming voice of Mr. Brotherton, the gray-clad benedict, who looked not unlike the huge, pot-bellied gray jars which adorned “the sweet serenity of books and wall paper.”

Mr. Brotherton had glanced up from his ledger at Amos Adams’s mention of Lila’s name. Coming forward, he saw her in her new dress, a bright gingham dress that reached so nearly to her shoe tops that Mr. Brotherton cried: “Well, look who’s here–if it isn’t Miss Van Dorn! And a great pleasure it is to see and know you, Miss Van Dorn.”

He repeated the name two or three times gently, while Lila smiled in shy appreciation of Mr. Brotherton’s ambushed joke. Her father, standing by a squash-necked lavender jug in the “serenity,” did not entirely grasp Mr. Brotherton’s point. But while the father was groping for it, Mr. Brotherton went on:

“Miss Van Dorn, once I had a dear friend–such a dear little friend named Lila. Perhaps you may see her sometimes? Maybe sometimes at night she comes to see you–maybe she peeps in when you are alone and asks to play. Well, say–Lila,” called Mr. Brotherton as gently as a fog horn tooting a nocturne, “if she ever comes, if you ever see her, will you give her my love? It would be highly improper for a married gentleman with asthmatic tendencies and too much waistband to send his love or anything like it to Miss Van Dorn; it would surely cause comment. But if Lila ever comes, Miss Van Dorn,” frolicked the elephant, “give her my love and tell her that often here in the serenity, I shut my eyes and see her playing out on Elm Street, a teenty, weenty girl–with blue hair and curly eyes–or maybe it was the other way around,” Mr. Brotherton heaved a prodigious sigh and waved a weary, fat hand–“and here, my lords and gentlemen, is Miss Van Dorn with her dresses down to her shoe tops!”

The girl was smiling and blushing, sheepishly and happily, while Mr. Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge and said:

“Tom, this is our friend, Miss Van Dorn–I was just sending a message by her to a dear–a very dear friend I used to have, named Lila, who is gone. Miss Van Dorn knows Lila, and sees her sometimes. So now that you are here, I’m going to send this to Lila,” he raised the girl’s hand to his lips and awkwardly kissed it, as he said clumsily, “well, say, my dear–will you see that Lila gets that?”

Her father stepped toward the embarrassed girl and spoke:

“Lila–Lila–can’t you come here a moment, dear?”

He was standing by the smoldering fire, brushing a rolled newspaper against his leg. Something within him–perhaps Mr. Brotherton’s awkward kiss stirred it–was trying to soften the proud, hard face that was losing the mobility which once had been its charm. He held out a hand, and leaned toward the girl. She stepped toward him and asked, “What is it?”

An awkward pause followed, which the man broke with, “Well–nothing in particular, child; only I thought maybe you’d like–well, tell me how are you getting along in High School, little girl.”

“Oh, very well; I believe,” she answered, but did not lift her eyes to his. Mr. Brotherton moved back to his desk. Again there was silence. The girl did not move away, though the father feared through every painful second that she would. Finally he said: “I hear your mother is getting on famously down in South Harvey. Our people down there say she is doing wonders with her cooking club for girls.”

Lila smiled and answered: “She’ll be glad to know it, I’m sure.” Again she paused, and waited.

“Lila,” he cried, “won’t you let me help you–do something for you?–I wish so much–so much to fill a father’s place with you, my dear–so much.”

He stepped toward her, felt for her hand, but could not find it. She looked up at him, and in her eyes there rose the old cloud of sadness that came only once in a long time. It was a puzzled face that he saw looking steadily into his.

“I don’t know what you could do,” she answered simply.

Something about the pathetic loneliness of his unfathered child, evidenced by the sadness that flitted across her face, touched a remote, unsullied part of his nature, and moved him to say:

“Oh, Lila–Lila–Lila–I need you–I need you–God knows, dear, how I do need you. Won’t you come to me sometimes? Won’t your mother ever relent–won’t she? If she knew, she would be kind. Oh, Lila, Lila,” he called as the two stood together there in the twilight with the glow of the coals in the fireplace upon them, “Lila, won’t you let me take you home even–in my car? Surely your mother wouldn’t care for that, would she?”

The girl looked into the fire and answered, “No,” and shook her head. “No–mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind to you–to be respectful to you, sir. I’ve tried to be, sir?”

Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and pleading, “Oh, come–won’t you let me take you home in my car, Lila–it’s getting late–won’t you, Lila?”

But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her head:

“I think, sir, if you don’t mind–I’d rather walk.”

In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the word, “Lila,” in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young miss–a Calvin young miss, in fact–running and waving her hands toward a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly belong–that he was rare and exotic. But as her father’s car crept unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila’s clear, merry laugh–a laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn’s heart–rose above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and weaving about.

And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them, then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing, animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to the beautiful light.

But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of youth shining through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat carrying its captive swooped around them–and then out into the darkness of his own charred world.

But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila, went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.

It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of the wind in the brown grass and in the bare trees by the creek had found their way into his soul. A curious soul it was–the soul of a poet, the soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew–the soul of a man in the body of a callow youth.

As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.

Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old grass faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences the words:

“I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”

And he had seemed to be forming a great heart-filling anthem. It was all on his tongue’s tip, with the answering chorus coming from out of some vast mystery, “Behold, thou art fair, my love–behold, thou art fair–thou hast dove’s eyes.” There in the sunshine upon the prairie grass it was as real and vital a part of his soul’s aspiration as though it had been reiterated in some glad symphony. But as he sat in the sunset trying to put into his voice the language that stirred his heart, he could only drum upon a box and look at the girl’s blue eyes and her rosebud of a face and utter the copper coins of language for the golden yearning of his soul. She answered, thrilled by the radiance of his eyes:

“Isn’t the young spring beautiful–don’t you just love it, Kenyon? I do.”

He rose and stood out in the sun on the lawn. The girl got up. She was abashed; and strangely self-conscious without reason, she began to pirouette down the walk and dance back to him, with her blue eyes fastened like a mystic sky-thread to his somber gaze. A thousand mute messages of youth twinkled across that thread. Their eyes smiled. The two stood together, and the youth kicked with his toes in the soft turf.

“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!