"Your cousin and I, Mrs. Clark, have talked over your idea of giving to
him and his relatives what the law will not compel you to distribute of
Clark's Field. He doesn't seem to think well of the idea."
"It's foolish," the mason growled.
Adelle looked at him swiftly, with a little smile that was sad.
"I was afraid he would say that, Judge," she said softly.
"You know any man would!... I ain't never begged from a woman yet."
"The woman, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the question," the
judge put in.
"And it isn't begging," Adelle protested. "It's really yours, a part of
it, as much as mine,--more, perhaps."
"It's nobody's by rights, so far as I can see!" the mason retorted with
his dry laugh.
"Exactly!" the judge exclaimed. "Young man, you have pronounced the one
final word of wisdom on the whole situation. With that for a premise we
can start safely towards a conclusion. Clark's Field doesn't belong to
you or to your cousin or to any of the Clarks living or dead. It belongs
to itself--to the people who live upon it, who use it, who need it to
get from it their daily bread and shelter."
"But," jeered the mason, "you can't call 'em out into the street and
hand each of 'em a thousand-dollar bill."
"No, and you would make a lot of trouble for everybody if you
did--especially for the Alton police courts, I am afraid! But you can
act as trustees for Clark's Field--" He turned to Adelle and continued
whimsically,--"That's what the old Field did for you, my dear, with my
assistance. Its wealth was tied up for fifty years to be let loose in
your lap! You found it not such a great gift, after all, so why not pour
it back upon the Field?... Why not make a splendid public market on that
vacant lot that's still left? And put some public baths in, and a public
hall for everybody's use, and a few other really permanent
improvements?--which I fear the city will never feel able to do! In that
way you would be giving back to Clark's Field and its real owners what
properly belongs to it and to them."
So the judge's thought was out at last. It did not take Adelle long to
understand it now.
"I'll do it," she said simply, as if the judge had merely voiced the
struggling ideas of her own brain. "But how shall I go to work?"
"I think your cousin can show you," the judge laughed. "He has many more
ideas than I should dare call my own about what society should do for
its disinherited. Suppose you talk it over with him and get his
suggestions."
"My God!" the stone mason groaned enigmatically.
The sardonic smile spread over his lean face as he further explained
himself,--
"It ain't exactly what I took this trip from California for."
"You didn't understand then," the judge remarked.
"And I didn't understand either," Adelle added.
"I guess I could keep you from getting into trouble with your money as
well as the next man. I'd keep you out of the hands of the charity
grafters anyhow!"
"I think," the judge summed up whimsically, "that you are one of the
best persons in the world to advise on how to distribute the Clark
millions. That is what should be done with every young anarchist--set
him to work spending money on others. He would end up either in prison
or among the conservatives."
"But," Adelle demurred finally, "that leaves the others--all the
California Clarks--out of it for good."
"Where they belong," put in the mason.
"I'm not so sure of that," the judge added cautiously. And after further
reflection he suggested, "Why shouldn't you two make yourselves into a
little private and extra-legal Providence for these members of your
family? Once, my dear," he said to Adelle, "I did the same for you! At
considerable risk to your welfare I intervened and prevented certain
greedy rascals from doing your aunt and you out of Clark's Field, you
remember?"
He paused to relate for Tom Clark's benefit the story of the transaction
with which we are fully familiar.
"Of course, if then I had known of the existence of our young friend and
his family, I should have been obliged to include him in the beneficence
of my Providence. But I didn't. It was left for you, my dear, to
discover him!... There was a time when I felt that I had played the part
of Providence rashly,"--he smiled upon Adelle, who recalled quite
vividly the stern lecture that the court had given her when she was
about to receive her fortune. "But now I feel that I did very well,
indeed. In fact I am rather proud of my success as Providence to this
young woman.... So I recommend the same role to you and Mr. Clark. Look
up these California Clarks, study them, make up your minds what they
need most, then act as wisely as you can, not merely in their behalf,
but in behalf of us all, of all the people who find themselves upon this
earth in the long struggle out of ignorance and misery upwards to
light.... It will keep you busy," he concluded with his fine
smile,--"busy, I think, for the better part of your two lives. But I can
think of no more interesting occupation than to try to be a just and
wise Providence!"
"It's some job," the mason remarked. "I don't feel sure we'd succeed in
it much better than Fate."
"You will become a part of Fate," the judge said earnestly, "as we all
are! Don't you see?"
"We'd better begin with Cousin Stan first," the mason shouted. "I'd like
to be his fate, you bet!"
"What would you do with the Honorable Stanley Clark?" the judge asked.
"Boot him clear out of the State of California--show him up for what he
is--a mean little cuss of a grafter; no friend of labor or anything else
but his own pocket."
"Good! But it will take money to do that these days, a good deal of
money! You will have to pay for publicity and court expenses and all the
rest of it."
"Hoorah! I'd like to soak him one with his share of Clark's Field!"
"Providence blesses as well as curses," warned the old judge. "And it's
chief work, I take it, is educational--to develop all that is possible
from within. Remember that, sir, when you are 'soaking' Cousin Stan."
"The educational can wait until we've done some correctin'!"
They all laughed. And presently they parted. As they stood in the little
front room waiting for Adelle's car to fetch her, the judge remarked
with a certain solemnity,--
"Now at last I believe the fate of Clark's Field is settled. In that
good old legal term, the title to the Field, so long restless and
unsettled, at last is 'quieted,' I think for good and all, humanly
speaking!"
"I think so," Adelle assented, with the same dreamy look in her gray
eyes that had moved the judge to take her hand that morning. "At least I
see quite clearly what I must do with my share of it."
"Come and see me again before you go away, as often as you can, both of
you!" the judge said as they left. "Remember that I am an old man, and
my best amusement is watching Providence working out its ways with us
all. And you two are part of Providence:--come and tell me what you
find!"
"We will!" they said.
After the door had swung to behind his visitors, the judge stood
thoughtfully beside the window watching the cousins depart. As the young
mason hopped into the car in response to Adelle's invitation, and
clumsily swung the door after him with a bang, the judge smiled
tenderly, murmuring to himself,--
"It's all education, and they'll educate each other!"
L
And here we must abandon Adelle Clark and Clark's Field, not that
another volume might not be written concerning her further adventures
with the old Field. But that would be an altogether different story. She
went back to see Judge Orcutt, not only at this time, but many times
later, as long as the judge lived. So he was able to watch the idea that
had sprung into being, helped by his wise sympathy, grow and bear its
slow fruit to his satisfaction. In starting this chance couple upon the
quest of their scattered relatives, to play the part of Providence to
all the little, unknown California Clarks, and also to restore to
Clark's Field its own riches, which for two generations had been
unjustly hoarded for the use of one human being, the judge was doubtless
doing a dangerous and revolutionary thing, according to the belief of
many good people, something certainly ill befitting a retired judge of
the probate courts of his staid Commonwealth! Had he not been employed
for forty years of his life in expounding and upholding that absurd code
of inheritance and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have
preserved from their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the
lower Rhine? Nay, worse, was he not guilty of disrespect to the most
sacred object of worship that the race has--the holy institution of
private property, aiding and abetting an anarchist in his loose views
upon this subject? I will not try to defend the judge. He seemed
tranquil that first day as he hobbled up his old stairs to his study, as
if he felt that he had done a good day's business and was enjoying the
approval of a good conscience; also, the satisfaction of insight into
human nature, which is one of the rare rewards of becoming old. Nor did
he worry for one moment about our heroine Adelle. He thought Adelle one
of the safest persons in the universe, because she could derive good
from her mistakes, and any one who can get good out of evil is the
safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of human souls.
The judge may have been more doubtful about the stone mason, but in the
young man's own phrase he considered him, too, a good bet in the human
lottery.
As to what they might do to each other in the course of their mutual
education, the judge left that wisely to that other Providence of his
fathers, sure that Adelle this time would not take such a long and
painful road to wisdom as she had done in marrying Archie. But we must
not mistake the judge's last foolish remark,--interpret it, at least in
a merely sentimental sense, too literally. Like a poet the judge spoke
in symbols of matters that cannot be phrased in any tongue precisely. He
did not think of their marrying each other, because they were deeply
concerned together, although I am aware that my readers are speculating
on this point already. The judge left that to Adelle and Tom Clark and
Providence, and we can safely do the same thing. He set them forth on
their jaunt after the stray members of the Clark tribe and other deeds
with a favorable expectation that they would commit along the road only
the necessary minimum of folly, and above all, sure of Adelle's
destination. For at twenty-six she had passed through crude desire,
through passion and pain and sorrow, and had discovered for herself the
last commonplace of human thinking--that the end of life is not the
"pursuit of happiness," as our materialistic forefathers put it in the
Constitution they made for us, and cannot be "guaranteed" to any mortal.
With that bedrock axiom of human wisdom embedded in her steadfast
nature, to what heights might not the dumb Adelle, the pale, passive,
inarticulate woman creature, ultimately rise?
There were many stations on her road. And first of all her husband,
Archie. Adelle began to think again about Archie in the new light she
had. She had not thought about him at all since she had dropped him so
summarily from her life after the fire at Highcourt. She wrote him
finally a considerable letter, in which she made plain the results of
her thinking. It was a surprising letter, as Archie felt, not only in
length, but in its point of view and its kindly tone. She seemed to see
the great wrong she had ignorantly done to him. The youth she had
blindly taken to gratify her green passion and to become the father of
her only child! She had ruined him, as far as any one human being can
ruin another, and now she knew it. She had been the stupid means of
providing him with a feast of folly, and then had abandoned him when he
behaved badly. So she wrote him gently, as one who at last comprehended
that mercy and forgiveness are due all those whom we harm upon our road
either consciously or ignorantly, giving them evil to eat. Yet she saw
the crude folly of attempting to resume their marriage in any way, and
did not for once consider it. They had sinned gravely against each other
and must face life anew, separately, recognizing that theirs was an
irreparable mistake. So she wrote unpassionately of the legal divorce
which must come. And she gave him money, promising him more as he might
need it, within reason. Archie straightway put a good part of it into
oil wells because every one in California was talking oil, and of course
lost it all. Then Adelle sent him money to buy a nut ranch, in one of
the interior valleys, and there we may leave Archie growing English
walnuts fitfully. At times he felt aggrieved with Adelle, complained
that he had been abused as a man who had married a rich woman and then
been thrown aside when he considered himself placed for life. But also
at times he had a fleeting conception of Adelle's character, realized
that she was not now the girl who had married him out of hand after a
mad night ride across France. She was bigger and better than he now, and
he was not really worthy of her. But these rare moments of insight
usually came only when Adelle had answered favorably his pleas for more
money.
* * * * *
One memory of her early years came back to Adelle at this time--a
picture that had been dark to her then. It was when she first met her
little Mexican friend at the fashionable boarding-school. She could not
understand the girl's foreign name, and so the little Mexican had
written it out in pencil,--"Diane Merelda," and underneath she wrote in
tiny letters,--"F. de M."
"What do those mean?" Adelle had demanded, pointing to the mysterious
letters.
"Fille de Marie," the little Catholic lisped, and translated,--"Daughter
of the Blessed Virgin; you understand?"
Adelle had not understood then, nor had she thought of it all these
years. But now the incident came back to her from its deep resting-place
in her consciousness, and she understood its full meaning. She, too, was
a child of God! albeit she had lived many years and done folly and
suffered sorrow before she could recognize it.
And so Clark's Field had taught its last great lesson,--Clark's Field,
that fifty acres of lean, level land with its crop of bricks and mortar,
its heavy burden of human lives, the sacrificial altar of our economic
system and our race prejudices,--Clark's Field! We pass it night and
morning of all the days of our lives, but rarely see it--see, that is,
more than its bricks and mortar and empty faces. It should be called, in
the quaint phrase of the judge's people, "God's Acre!" One might say
that the beauty, the supreme fruit of this Clark's Field, which never
blossomed into flower and fruit all these years we have been concerned
with its fate, was Adelle. Just Adelle! The judge thought that was
enough. Adelle would go on, he believed, growing into new wisdom, slowly
acquired according to her nature, and also into tranquillity,
friendship, love, and motherhood-all the eternal rewards of right
living. Would she accomplish this best through that other Clark--the
workman--whom she had discovered for herself? The sentimental reader
probably has this already settled to his satisfaction.
But I wonder!