In the Heart of a Fool

“Well, boy–what do you think of the greatest thing in the world?” And not waiting for an answer the older man continued as he held his cigar at arm’s length and looked between his elevated feet at the landscape: “‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.’ Great old lover–Solomon. Rather out of the amateur class–with his thousand wives and concubines; perhaps a virtuous man withal, but hardly a fanatic on the subject; and when he said he was sick of love–probably somewhere in his fifties,–Solomon voiced a profound man’s truth. Most of us are. Speaking generally of love, my boy, I am with Solomon. There is nothing in it.”

The cigar in his finely curved mouth–the sensuous mouth of youth, that had pursed up dryly in middle age–was pointed upward. It stood out from a reddish lean face and moved when the muscles of the face worked viciously in response to some inward reflection of Tom Van Dorn.

He drawled on, “Think of the time men fool away chasing calico. I’ve gone all the gaits, and I know what I’m talking about. Ladies and Judy O’Gradies, married and single, decent and indecent–it’s all the same. I tell you, young man, there’s nothing in it! Love,” he laughed a little laugh: “Love–why, when I was in the business,” he sniffed, “I never had any trouble loving any lady I desired, nor getting her if I loved her long enough and strong enough. When I was a young cub like you,” Van Dorn waved his weed grandly toward the young broker, “I used to keep myself awake, cutting notches in my memory–naming over my conquests. But now I use it as a man does the sheep over the fence, to put me to sleep, and I haven’t been able to pass my fortieth birthday in the list for two years, without snoozing. What a fool a man can make of himself over calico! The ladies, God bless ’em, have got old John Barleycorn beaten a mile, when it comes to playing hell with a man’s life. Again speaking broadly, and allowing for certain exceptions, I should say–” he paused to give the judicial pomp of reflection to his utterances–“the bigger fool the woman is, the greater fool a man makes of himself for her. And all for what?”

His young guest interjected the word “Love?” in the pause. The Judge made a wry face and continued:

“Love? Love–why, man, you talk like a school girl. There is no love. Love and God are twin myths by which we explain the relation of our fates to our follies. The only thing about me that will live is the blood I transmit to my children! We live in posterity. As for love and all the mysteries of the temple–waugh–woof!” he shuddered.

He put back his cigar into the corner of his hard mouth. He was squinting cynically across the rolling golf course. What he saw there checked his talk. He opened his eyes to get a clearer view. His impression grew definite and unmistakable. There, half playing and half sporting, like young lambs upon the close-cropped turf, were Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn! They were unconscious of all that their gay antics disclosed. They were happy, and were trying only to express happiness as they ran together after the ball, that flew in front of them like a mad butterfly. But in the sad lore of his bleak heart, the father read the meaning of their happiness. Youth in love was never innocent for him. Looking at Lila romping with her lover, he turned sick at heart. But he held himself in hand. Only the zigzag scar on his forehead flashing white in the pink of his brow betrayed the turmoil within him. He tried to keep his eyes off the golf course. A sharp dread that he might transmit himself in nature to posterity only through the base blood of the Adamses, struck him. He closed his eyes. But the wind brought to him the merriment of the young voices. A jealousy of Kenyon, and an anger at him, flared up in the father. So Tom Van Dorn drew down the corners of his mouth–and batted his furtive eyes, and put on his bony knee a mottled, nervous hand, with brown splotches at the wrist, coming up over the veined furrows that led to his tapering fingers, as he cried harshly in a tone that once had been soft and mellifluous, and still was deep and chesty: “Still me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!”

He would have gone away from the torture that came, as he stared at the lovers, but his devil held him there. He was glad when a noise of saw and hammer at the lake drowned the voices on the lawn. His gladness lasted but a moment. For soon he saw the young people quit chasing their crazy butterfly of a golf ball, and wander half way up the hill from the lake, to sit in the snug shade of a wide-spreading, low-branched elm tree. Then the father was nervous, because he could not hear their voices. As he sat with the young broker, snarling at the anonymous phantoms of his past which were bedeviling him, a gray doubt kept brushing across his mind. He realized clearly that he had no legal right to question Lila’s choice of companions. He understood that the law would not justify anything that he might do, or say, or think, concerning her and her fortunes. Yet there unmistakably was the Van Dorn set to her pretty head and a Van Dorn gesture in her gay hands that had come down from at least four generations in family tradition. And he had no right even to be offended when she would merge that Van Dorn blood with the miserable Adams heredity. His impotence in the situation baffled him, and angered him. The law was final to his mind; but it did not satisfy his wrathful questioning heart. For in his heart, he realized that denial was not escape from the responsibility he had renounced when he tripped down the steps of their home and left Lila pleading for him in her mother’s arms. He bit his ragged cigar and cursed his God, while the young man with Tom Van Dorn thought, “Well, what a dour old Turk he is!”

The hammering and sawing, which drowned the voices of the young people under the tree, came from the new bathing pavilion near by. Grant Adams was working on a two days’ job putting up the pavilion for the summer. He was out of Van Dorn’s view, facing another angle of the long three-faced veranda. Grant saw Kenyon lying upon the turf, slim and graceful and with the beauty of youth radiating from him, and Grant wondered, as he worked, why his son should be there playing among the hills, while the sons of other men, making much more money than he–much more money indeed than many of the others who flitted over the green–should toil in the fumes of South Harvey and in the great industrial Valley through long hard hours of work, that sapped their heads and hearts by its monotony of motion, and lack of purpose. As he gazed at the lovers, their love did not stick in his consciousness–even if he realized it. Their presence under the elm tree at midday rose as a problem which deepened a furrow here and there in his seamed face and he hammered and sawed away with a will, working out in his muscles the satisfaction which his mind could not bring him.

As the two fathers from different vistas looked upon their children, Kenyon and Lila beneath the elm tree were shyly toying with vagrant dreams that trailed across their hearts. He was looking up at her and saying:

“Lila–who are we–you and I? I have been gazing at you three minutes while you were talking, and I see some one quite different from the you I knew before. Looking up at you, instead of down at you, is like transposing you. You are strangely new in this other key.”

The girl did not try to respond in kind–with her lips at least. She began teasing the youth about his crinkly hair. Breaking a twig as she spoke, she threw it carelessly at his hair, and it stuck in the closely curled locks. She laughed gayly at him. Perhaps in some way rather subtly than suddenly, as by a ghostly messenger from afar, he may have been made aware of her beautiful body, of the exquisite lines of her figure, of the pink of her radiant skin, or the red of her girlish lips. For the consciousness of these things seemed to spend his soul in joy.

The blazing eyes of Tom Van Dorn, squinting down upon the couple under the tree, could see the grace that shone from a thousand reactions of their bodies and faces. He opened his mouth to voice something from the bitterness of his heart but did not speak. Instead he yawned and cried: “And so we rot and we rot and we rot.”

Now it matters little what the lovers chattered about there under the elm tree, as they played with sticks and pebbles. It was what they would have said that counts–or perhaps what they should have said, if they had been able to voice their sense of the gift which the gods were bestowing. But they were dumb humans, who threw pebbles at each other’s toes, though in the deep places of their souls, far below the surface waves of bashful patter, heart might have spoken to heart in passing thus:

“Oh, Lila, what is beauty? What is it in the soul, running out glad to meet beauty, whether of line, of tone, of color, of form, of motion, of harmony?”

And the answer might have been trumpeted back through the deep:

“Maybe beauty is the God that is everywhere and everything, releasing himself in matter. Perhaps for our eyes and ears and fingers, the immanent God had an equation, whose answer is locked in our souls that are also a part of God–created in his image. And when in curve or line, in sequence of notes or harmony, or in thrilling touch sense, the equation is stated in terms of radiation, God seeking our soul’s answer, speaks to us.”

But none of this trumpet call of souls reached the two fathers who were watching the lovers. For one man was too old in selfishness to understand, and the other had grown too old in bearing others’ burdens to know what voices speak through the soul’s trumpet, when love first comes into the heart. So the hammers hammered and the saws groaned in the pavilion, and a hard heart hammered and a soul groaned and a tongue babbled folly on the veranda. But under the elm tree, eyes met, and across space went the message that binds lives forever. She picked up a twig longer than most twigs about her, reached with it and touched his forehead furtively, stroked his crinkled hair, blushing at her boldness. His head sank to the earth, he put his face upon the grass, and for a second he found joy in the rush of tears. They heard voices, bringing the planet back to them; but voices far away. On the hill across the little valley they could see two earnest golfers, working along the sky-line.

The couple on the sky-line hurried along in the heat. The man mopped his face, and his brown, hairy arms, and his big sinewy neck. The woman, rather thin, but fresh and with the maidenly look of one who isn’t entirely sure what that man will do next, kept well in the lead.

“Well, Emma–there’s love’s young dream all right.” He stopped to puff, and waved at the couple by the tree. Then he hitched up his loose, baggy trousers, gave a jerk to his big flowing blue necktie, let fly at the ball and cried “Fore.” When he came up to the ball again, he was red and winded. “Emma,” he said, “let’s go have something to eat at the house–my figure’ll do for an emeritus bridegroom–won’t it?” And thus they strolled over the fields and out of the game.

But on another hill, another couple in the midst of a flock of children attracted by one of Mr. Brotherton’s smashing laughs, looked down and saw Lila and Kenyon. The quick eyes of love caught the meaning of the figures under the tree.

“Look, mamma–look,” said Nathan Perry, pointing toward the tree.

“Oh, Nate,” cried Anne, “–isn’t it nice! Lila and Kenyon!”

“Well, mamma–are you happy?” asked Nathan, as he leaned against the tree beside her. She nodded and directed their glances to the children and said gently, “And they justify it–don’t they?”

He looked at her for a moment, and said, “Yes, dear–I suppose that’s what the Lord gave us love for. That is why love makes the world go around.”

“And don’t the people who don’t have them miss it–my! Nate, if they only knew–if these bridge-playing, childless ones knew how dear they are–what joy they bring–just as children–not for anything else–do you suppose they would–”

“Oh, you can’t tell,” answered the young father. “Perhaps selfish people shouldn’t have children; or perhaps it’s the children that make us unselfish, and so keep us happy. Maybe it’s one of those intricate psychical reactions, like a chemical change–I don’t know! But I do know the kids are the best things in the world.”

She put her hand in his and squeezed it. “You know, Nate, I was just thinking to-day as I put up the lunch–I’m a mighty lucky woman. I’ve had all these children and kept every one so far; I’ve had such joy in them–such joy, and we haven’t had death. Even little Annie’s long sickness, and everything–Oh, dear, Nate–but isn’t she worth it–isn’t she worth it?”

He kissed her hand and replied, “You know I’m so glad we went down to South Harvey to live, Anne. I can see–well, here’s the way it is. Lots of families down there–families that didn’t have any more to go on than we had then, started out, as we did. They had a raft of kids–” he laughed, “just as we did. But, mamma–they’re dead–or worse, they’re growing up underfed, and are hurrying into the works or the breaker bins. I tell you, Anne–here’s the thing. Those fathers and mothers didn’t have any more money than we had–but we did have more and better training than they had. You knew better than to feed our kids trash, you knew how to care for them–we knew how to spend our little, so that it would count. They didn’t. We have ours, and they have doctors’ and undertakers’ bills. It isn’t blood that counts so much–as the difference in bringing up. We’re lovers because of our bringing up. Otherwise, we’d be fighting like cats and dogs, I’d be drinking, you’d be slommicking around in wrappers, and the kids would be on the streets.”

The children playing on the gravel bank were having a gay time. The mother called to them to be careful of their clothes, and then replied:

“Nate, honestly I believe if I had two or three million dollars, and could give every girl in South Harvey a good education–teach her how to cook and keep house and care for babies before she is eighteen, that we could change the whole aspect of South Harvey in a generation. If I had just two or three million dollars to spend–I could fill that town just as full as Harvey of happy couples like us. Of course there’d be the other kind–some of them–just as there are the other kind in Harvey–people like the Van Dorns–but they would be the exception in South Harvey, as the Van Dorns are the exception in Harvey. And two or three million dollars would do it.”

“Yes, mamma,–that’s the hell of it–the very hell of it that grinds my gizzard–your father and my father and the others who haven’t done a lick of the work–and who are entitled only to a decent interest and promoters’ profits, have taken out twenty million dollars from South Harvey in dividends in the last thirty years–and this is the result. Hell for forty thousand people down there, and–you and I and a few dozen educated happy people are the fruit of it. Sometimes, Anne, I look at our little flock and look at you so beautiful, and think of our life so glorious, and wonder how a just God can permit it.”

They looked at the waving acres of blue-grass, dotted with trees, at the creek winding its way through the cornfields, dark green and all but ready to tassle, then up at the clear sky, untainted with the smoke of Harvey.

Then they considered the years that lay back of them. “I think, Nate,” she answered, “that to love really and truly one man or one woman makes one love all men and women. I feel that way even about the little fellow that’s coming. I love him so, that even he makes me love everything. And so I can’t just pray for him–I have to pray for all the mothers carrying babies and all the babies in the world. I think when love comes into the world it is immortal. We die, but the sum of love we live, we leave; it goes on; it grows. It is the way God gets into the world. Oh, Nate,” she cried, “I want to live in the next world–personally–with you–to know the very you. I don’t want the impersonal immortality–I want just you. But, dear–I–why, I’d give up even that if I could be sure that the love we live would never leave this earth. Think what the love of Christ did for the earth and He is still with us in spirit. And I know when we go away–when any lovers go away, the love they have lived will never leave this earth. It will live and joy–yes, and agonize too at the injustice of the world–live and be crucified over and over again, so long as injustice exists. Only as love grows in the world, and is hurt–is crucified–will wrongs be righted, will the world be saved.”

He patted her hand for a minute.

“Kyle, Nate, Annie–come here, children,” cried the father. After some repetition of the calling, they came trooping up, asking: “What is it?”

“Nothing at all,” answered the father, “we just wanted to kiss you and feel and see if your wings were sprouting, so that we could break them off before you fly away,” whereupon there was a hugging bee all around, and while every one was loving every one else, a golf ball flew by them, and a moment later the white-clad, unbent figure of Mrs. Bedelia Satterthwaite Nesbit appeared, bare-headed and bare-armed, and behind her trotted the devoted white figure of the Doctor, carrying two golf sticks.

“Chained to her chariot–to make a Roman holiday,” piped the Doctor. “She’s taking this exercise for my health.”

“Well, James,” replied his wife rather definitely, “I know you need it!”

“And that settles it,” cried the little man shrilly, “say, Nate, if we men ever get the ballot, I’m going to take a stand for liberty.”

“I’m with you, Doctor,” replied the young man.

“Nate,” he mocked in his comical falsetto, “as you grow older and get further and further from your mother’s loving care, you’ll find that there was some deep-seated natural reason why we men should lead the sheltered life and leave the hurly-burly of existence to the women.”

From long habit, in such cases Mrs. Nesbit tried not to smile and, from long habit, failed. “Doctor Jim,” she cried as he picked up her ball, and set it for her, “don’t make a fool of yourself.”

The little man patted the earth under the ball, and looked up and said as he took her hand, and obviously squeezed it for the spectators, as he rose.

“My dear–it’s unnecessary. You have made one of me every happy minute for forty years,” and smiling at the lovers and their children, he took the hand held out for him after she had sent the ball over the hill, and they went away as he chuckled over his shoulder and cheeped: “Into the twilight’s purple rim–through all the world she followed him,” and trotting behind her as she went striding into the sunset, they disappeared over the hill.

When they had disappeared Anne began thinking of her picnic. She and Nathan left the children at the lake, and walked to the club house for the baskets. On the veranda they met Captain Morton in white flannels with a gorgeous purple necktie and a panama hat of a price that made Anne gasp. He came bustling up to Anne and Nathan and said:

“Surprise party–I’m going to give the girls a little surprise party next week–next Tuesday, and I want you to come–what say? Out here–next Tuesday night–going to have all the old friends–every one that ever bought a window hanger, or a churn, or a sewing machine, or a Peerless cooker, or a Household Horse–but keep it quiet–surprise on the girls, eh?”

When they had accepted, the Captain lowered his voice and said mysteriously: “’Y gory–the old man’s got some ginger in him yet–eh?” and bustled away with a card in his hands containing the names of the invited guests, checking the Perrys from the list as he went.

As Captain Morton rounded the corner of the veranda and came into the out-of-door dining room, he found Margaret Van Dorn, sitting at a table by a window with Ahab Wright–flowing white side whiskers and white necktie inviolate and pristine in their perfection. Ahab was clearly confused when the Captain sailed into the room. For there was a breeziness about the Captain’s manner, and although Ahab respected the Captain’s new wealth, still his years of poverty and the meanness of his former calling as a peddler of insignificant things, made Ahab Wright feel a certain squeamishness when he had to receive Captain Morton upon the term which, in Ahab’s mind, a man of so much money should be received.

Mrs. Van Dorn was using her eyes on Ahab. Perhaps they cast the spell. She was leaning forward with her chin in her hands, with both elbows on the table, and Ahab Wright, of the proud, prosperous and highly respectable firm of Wright & Perry, was in much the mental and moral attitude of the bird when the cat creeps up to the tree-trunk. He was not unhappy; not terrorized–just curious and rather resistless, knowing that if danger ever came he could fly. And Mrs. Van Dorn, who had tired of the toys at hand, was adventuring rather aimlessly into the cold blue eyes of Ahab, to see what might be in them.

“For many years,” she was saying, and pronounced it “yee-ahs,” having remembered at the moment to soften her “r’s,” “I have been living on a highah plane wheyah one ignoahs the futuah and foahgets the pahst. On this plane one rises to his full capacity of soul strength, without the hampah of remoahs or the terror of a vindictive Providence.”

She might as well have been reciting the alphabet backwards so far as Ahab understood or cared what she said. He was fascinated by her resemblance to a pink and white marshmallow–rather over-powdered. But she was still fortifying herself from that little black box in the farthest corner in the bottom drawer of her dresser–and fortifying herself with two brown pellets instead of one. So she ogled Ahab Wright by way of diversion, and sat in the recesses of her soul and wondered what she would say next.

The Captain pulling his panama off made a tremendous bow as Margaret was saying: “Those who grahsp the great Basic Truths in the Science of Being–” and just as the Captain was about to open his mouth to invite Ahab Wright to his party, plumb came the ghastly consciousness to him that the Van Dorns were not on his list. For the Van Dorns, however securely they were entrenched socially among the new people who had no part in the town’s old quarrel with Tom, however the oil and gas and smelter people and the coal magnates may have received the Van Dorns–still they were under the social ban of the only social Harvey that Captain Morton knew. So as a man falling from a balloon gets his balance, the Captain gasped as he came up from his low bow and said:

“Madam, I says to myself just now as I looks over to that elm tree yonder,” he pointed to the place where Kenyon and Lila were sitting, “soon we’ll be having the fourth generation here in Harvey, and I says, that will interest Tom! An ’y gory, ma’am, as I saw you sitting here, I says as it was well in my mind, ‘Here’s Tom’s lady love, and I’ll just go over and pass my congratulations on to Tom through the apple of his eye, as you may say, and not bother him and the young man around the corner there in their boss trade, eh?’ What say?” He was flushed and red, and he did not know exactly where to stop, but it was out–and after a few sparring sentences, he broke away from the clutch of his bungling intrusion and was gone. But as the Captain left the couple at the table, the spell was broken. Life had intruded, and Ahab rose hastily and went his way.

Margaret Van Dorn sat looking out at a dreary world. Even the lovers by the elm tree did not quicken her pulse. Scarcely more did they interest her than her vapid adventure with Ahab Wright. All romantic adventure, personal or vicarious, was as ashes on her lips. But emotion was not all dead in her. As she gazed at Lila and Kenyon, Margaret wondered if her husband could see the pair. Her first emotional reaction was a gloating sense that he would be boiling with humiliation and rage when he saw his child so obviously and publicly, even if unconsciously, adoring an Adams. So she exulted in the Van Dorn discomfiture. As her first spiteful impulse wore away, a sense of desolation overcame Margaret Van Dorn. Probably she had no regrets that she had abandoned Kenyon. For years she had nursed a daily horror that the door which hid her secret might swing open, but that horror was growing stale. She felt that the door was forever sealed by time. So in the midst of a world at its spring, a budding world, a world of young mating, a gay world going out on its vast yearly voyage to hunt new life in new joy, a quest for ever new yet old as God’s first smile on a world unborn, this woman sat in a drab and dreary desolation. Even her spite withered as she sat playing with her tall glass. And as spite chilled, her loneliness grew.