IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE FOOL AND HIS LADY FAIR AND WHAT HE SAID IN HIS
HEART--THE SAME BEING THE THEME AND THESIS OF THIS STORY
A story is a curious thing, that grows with a kind of consciousness of
its own. Time was, in its invertebrate period of gestation when this
story was to be Amos Adams's story. It was to be the story of one who
saw great visions that were realized, who had from the high gods
whispers of their plans. What a book it would have been if Amos and Mary
could have written it--the story of dreams come true. But alas, the high
gods mocked Amos Adams. Mary's clippings from the Tribune--a great
litter of them, furnished certain dates and incidents for the story.
Often when the Tribune was fresh from the press Mary and Amos would sit
together in the printing office and Mary eaten with pride would clip
from the damp paper the grandiloquent effusions of Amos that seemed to
fit into other items that were to remind them of things which they could
not print in their newspaper but which would be material for their book.
What a bundle of these clippings there is! And there was the diary, or
old-fashioned Memory Book of Mary Adams. What a pile of neatly folded
sheets covered with Mary Adams' handwriting are there on the table by
the window! What memories they revive, what old dead joys are brought to
life, what faded visions are repainted. This is to be the Book--the book
that they dreamed of in their youth--even before little Kenyon was born,
before Jasper was born, indeed before Grant was born.
But now the years have written in many things and it will not be even
their story. Indeed as life wrote upon their hearts its mysterious
legend--the legend that erased many of their noble dreams and put iron
into their souls, there is evidence in what they wrote that they thought
it would be Grant's story. Most parents think their sons will be heroes.
But their boy had to do his part in the world's rough work and before
the end the clippings and the notes in the Memory Book show that they
felt that a hero in blue overalls would hardly answer for their Book.
Then there came a time when Amos alone in his later years thought that
it might be Kenyon's story; for Kenyon now is a fiddler of fame, and
fiddlers make grand heroes. But as the clippings and the notes show
forth still another story, the Book that was to be their book and story,
may not be one man's or one woman's story. It may not be even the story
of a town; though Harvey's story is tragic enough. (Indeed sometimes it
has seemed that the story of Harvey, rising in a generation out of the
sunshine and prairie grass, a thousand flued hell, was to be the story
of the Book.) But now Harvey seems to be only a sign of the times, a
symptom of the growth of the human soul. So the Book must tell the tale
of a time and a place where men and women loved and strove and joyed or
suffered and lost or won after the old, old fashion of our race; with
only such new girdles and borders and frills in the record of their work
and play as the changing skirts of passing circumstance require. The
Book must be more than Amos Adams's or his son's or his son's son's
story or his town's, though it must be all of these. It must be the
story of many men and many women, each one working out his salvation in
his own way and all the threads woven into the divine design, carrying
along in its small place on the loom the inscrutable pattern of human
destiny. But most of all it should be the story which shall explain the
America that rose when her great day came--exultant, triumphant to the
glorious call of an ideal, arose from sordid things environing her body
and soul, and consecrated herself without stint or faltering hand to the
challenge of democracy.
In the old days--the old days when Amos Adams was young--he printed the
Harvey _Tribune_ on a hand press. Mary spread the ink upon the
types; he pulled the great lever that impressed each sheet; and as they
worked they sang about the coming of the new day. As a soldier--a
commissioned officer he had fought in the great Civil War for the truth
that should make men free. And he was sure in those elder days that the
new day was just dawning. And Mary was sure too; so the readers of the
Tribune were assured that the dawn was at hand. The editor knew that
there were men who laughed at him for his hopes. But he and Mary, his
wife, only laughed at men who were so blind that they could not see the
dawn. So for many years they kept on rallying to whatever faith or
banner or cause seemed surest in its promise of the sunrise.
Green-backers, Grangers, Knights of Labor, Prohibitionists--these two
crusaders followed all of the banners. And still there came no sunrise.
Farmers' Alliance, Populism, Free Silver--Amos marched with each
cavalcade. And was hopeful in its defeat.
And thus the years dragged on and made decades and the decades marshaled
into a generation that became an era, and a city rose around a mature
man. And still in his little office on a rickety side street, the
_Tribune_, a weekly paper in a daily town, kept pointing to the
sunrise; and Amos Adams, editor and proprietor, an old fool with the
faith of youth, for many years had a book to write and a story to
tell--a story that was never told, for it grew beyond him.
He printed the first edition of the _Tribune_ in his tent under an
elm tree in a vast, unfenced meadow that rose from the fringe of timber
that shaded the Wahoo. Volume one, number one, told a waiting world of
the formation of the town company of Harvey with Daniel Sands as
president. It was one of thousands of towns founded after the Civil
War--towns that were bursting like mushrooms through the prairie soil.
After that war in which millions of men gave their youth and myriads
gave their lives for an ideal, came a reaction. And in the decades that
followed the war, men gave themselves to an orgy of materialism. Harvey
was a part of that orgy. And the Ohio crowd, the group that came from
Elyria--the Sandses, the Adamses, Joseph Calvin, Ahab Wright, Kyle
Perry, the Kollanders[1] and all the rest except the Nesbits--were so
considerable a part of Harvey in the beginning, that probably they were
as guilty as the rest of the country in the crass riot of greed that
followed the war. They brought Amos Adams to Harvey because he was a
printer and in those halcyon days all printers were supposed to be able
to write; and he brought Mary--but did he bring Mary? He was never sure
whether he brought her or she brought him. For Mary Sands--dear, dear
Mary Sands--she had a way with her. She was not Irish for nothing, God
bless her.
Amos always tried to be fair with Daniel Sands because he was Mary's
brother; even though there was a time after he came home a young soldier
from the war and found that Daniel Sands who hired a substitute and
stayed at home, had won Esther Haley, who was pledged to Amos,--a time
when Amos would have killed Daniel Sands. That passed, Mary, Daniel's
sister, came; and for years Amos Adams bore Daniel Sands no grudge. What
has all his money done for Daniel. It has ground the joy out of him--for
one thing. And as for Esther, somewhere about Elyria, Ohio, the grass is
growing over her grave and for forty years only Mortimer, her son, with
her eyes and mouth and hair, was left in the world to remind Amos of the
days when he was stark mad; and Mary, dear, dear, Irish Mary Sands,
caught his heart upon the bounce and made him happy.
So let us say that Mary brought Amos to Harvey with the Ohio crowd, as
Daniel Sands and his followers were known, The other early settlers came
to grow up with the country and to make their independent fortunes; but
Mary and Amos came to see the sunrise. For they were sure that men and
women starting in a new world having found equality of opportunity,
would not make this new world sordid, unfair and cruel as the older
world was around them in those days.
Amos and Mary took up their homestead just south of the town on the
Wahoo, and started the Tribune, and Mary hoped the high hopes of the
Irish while Amos wrote his part of the news, set his share of the type,
ran the errands for the advertising and bragged of the town in their
editorial columns with all the faith of an Irishman by marriage.
What a fairy story the history of Harvey would be if it should be
written only as it was. For one could even begin it once upon a time.
Once upon a time, let us say, there was a land of sunshine and prairie
grass. And then great genii came and set in little white houses and new
unpainted barns, thumbed in faint green hedgerows and board fences, that
checkered in the fields lying green or brown or loam black by the
sluggish streams that gouged broad, zigzag furrows in the land. And upon
a hill that overlooked a rock-bottomed stream the genii, the spirit of
the time, sat a town. It glistened in the sunshine and when the town was
over a year old, it was so newly set in, that its great stone
schoolhouse all towered and tin-corniced, beyond the scattered outlying
residences, rose in the high, untrodden grass. The people of Harvey were
vastly proud of that schoolhouse. The young editor and his wife used to
gaze at it adoringly as they drove to and from the office morning and
evening; and they gilded the town with high hopes. For then they were in
their twenties. The population of Harvey for the most part those first
years was in its twenties also, when gilding is cheap. But thank Heaven
the gilding of our twenties is lasting.
It was into this gilded world that Grant Adams was born. Suckled behind
the press, cradled in the waste basket, toddling under hurrying feet,
Grant's earliest memories were of work--work and working lovers, and
their gay talk as they worked wove strange fancies in his little mind.
It was in those days that Amos Adams and his wife, considering the
mystery of death, tried to peer behind the veil. For Amos tables tipped,
slates wrote, philosophers, statesmen and conquerors flocked in with
grotesque advice, and all those curious phenomena that come from the
activities of the abnormal mind, appeared and astounded the visionaries
as they went about their daily work. The boy Grant used to sit, a
wide-eyed, freckled, sun-browned little creature, running his skinny
little hands through his red hair, and wondering about the unsolvable
problems of life and death.
But soon the problems of a material world came in upon Grant as the
child became a boy: problems of the wood and field, problems of the
constantly growing herd at play in water, in snow, on the ice and in the
prairie; and then came the more serious problems of the wood box, the
stable and farm. Thus he grew strong of limb, quick of hand, firm of
foot and sure of mind. And someway as he grew from childhood into
boyhood, getting hold of his faculties--finding himself physically, so
Harvey seemed to grow with him. All over the town where men needed money
Daniel Sands's mortgages were fastened--not heavily (nothing was heavy
in that day of the town's glorious youth) but surely. Dr. Nesbit's gay
ruthless politics, John Kollander's patriotism, leading always to the
court house and its emoluments, Captain Morton's inventions that never
materialized, the ever coming sunrise of the Adams--all these things
became definitely a part of the changeless universe of Harvey as Grant's
growing faculties became part of his consciousness.
And here is a mystery: the formation of the social crystal. In that
crystal the outer facets and the inner fell into shape--the Nesbits, the
Kollanders, the Adamses, the Calvins, the Mortons, and the Sandses,
falling into one group; and the Williamses, the Hogans, the Bowmans, the
McPhersons, the Dooleys and Casper Herdicker falling into another group.
The hill separated from the valley. The separation was not a matter of
moral sense; for John Kollander and Dan Sands and Joseph Calvin touched
zero in moral intelligence; and it could not have been business sense,
for Captain Morton for all his dreams was a child with a dollar, and Dr.
Nesbit never was out of debt a day in his life; without his salary from
tax-payers John Kollander would have been a charge on the county. In the
matter of industry Daniel Sands was a marvel, but Jamie McPherson
toiling all day used to come home and start up his well drill and its
clatter could be heard far into the night, and often he started it hours
before dawn. Nor could aspirations and visions have furnished the line
of cleavage; for no one could have hopes so high for Harvey as Jamie,
who sank his drill far into the earth, put his whole life, every penny
of his earnings and all his strength into the dream that some day he
would bring coal or oil or gas to Harvey and make it a great city. Yet
when he found the precious vein, thick and rich and easy to mine, Daniel
Sands and Joseph Calvin took his claim from him by chicanery as easily
as they would have robbed a blind man of a penny, and Jamie went to work
in the mines for Daniel Sands grumbling but faithful. Williams and
Dooley and Hogan and Herdicker bent at their daily tasks in those first
years, each feeling that the next day or the next month or at most the
next year his everlasting fortune would be made. And Dick Bowman, cohort
of Dr. Nesbit, many a time and oft would wash up, put on a clean suit,
and go out and round up the voters in the Valley for the Doctor's cause
and scorn his task with a hissing; for Dick read Karl Marx and dreamed
of the day of the revolution. Yet he dwelled with the sons of Essua, who
as they toiled murmured about their stolen birthright. When a decade had
passed in Harvey the social crystal was firm; the hill and the valley
were cast into the solid rock of things as they are. No one could say
why; it was a mystery. It is still a mystery. As society forms and
reforms, its cleavages follow unknown lines.
It was on a day in June--late in the morning, after Grant and Nathan
Perry--son of the stuttering Kyle of that name, had come from a cool
hour in the quiet pool down on the Wahoo and little Grant, waiting like
a hungry pup for his lunch, that was tempting him in the basket under
the typerack, was counting the moments and vaguely speculating as to
what minutes were--when he looked up from the floor and saw what seemed
to him a visitor from another world.[2]
The creature was talking to Amos Adams sitting at the desk; and Amos was
more or less impressed with the visitor's splendor. He wore exceedingly
tight trousers--checked trousers, and a coat cut grandly and
extravagantly in its fullness, a high wing collar, and a soup dish hat.
He was such a figure as the comic papers of the day were featuring as
the exquisite young man of the period.
Youth was in his countenance and lighted his black eyes. His oval,
finely featured face, his blemishless olive skin, his strong jaw and his
high, beautiful forehead, over which a black wing of hair hung
carelessly, gave him a distinction that brought even the child's eyes to
him. He was smiling pleasantly as he said,
"I'm Thomas Van Dorn--Mr. Adams, I believe?" he asked, and added as he
fastened his fresh young eyes upon the editor's, "you scarcely will
remember me--but you doubtless remember the day when father's hunting
party passed through town? Well--I've come to grow up with the country."
The editor rose, roughed his short, sandy beard and greeted the youth
pleasantly. "Mr. Daniel Sands sent me to you, Mr. Adams--to print a
professional card in your paper," said the young man. He pronounced them
"cahd" and "papuh" and smiled brightly as his quick eyes told him that
the editor was conscious of his eastern accent. While they were talking
business, locating the position of the card in the newspaper, the editor
noticed that the young man's eyes kept wandering to Mary Adams,
typesetting across the room. She was a comely woman just in her thirties
and Amos Adams finally introduced her. When he went out the Adamses
talked him over and agreed that he was an addition to the town.
Within a month he had formed a partnership with Joseph Calvin, the
town's eldest lawyer; and young Henry Fenn, who had been trying for a
year to buy a partnership with Calvin, was left to go it alone. So Henry
Fenn contented himself with forming a social partnership with his young
rival. And when the respectable Joseph Calvin was at home or considering
the affairs of the Methodist Sunday School of which he was
superintendent, young Mr. Fenn and young Mr. Van Dorn were rambling at
large over the town and the adjacent prairie, seeking such diversion as
young men in their exceedingly early twenties delight in: Mr. Riley's
saloon, the waters of the Wahoo, by moonlight, the melliferous strains
of "Larboard watch," the shot gun, the quail and the prairie chicken,
the quarterhorse, and the jackpot, the cocktail, the Indian pony, the
election, the footrace, the baseball team, the Sunday School picnic, the
Fourth of July celebration, the dining room girls at the Palace Hotel,
the cross country circus and the trial of the occasional line fence
murder case--all were divertissements that engaged their passing young
attention.
If ever the world was an oyster for a youth the world of Harvey and the
fullness thereof was an oyster to Thomas Van Dorn. He had all that the
crude western community cherished: the prestige of money, family,
education, and that indefinable grace and courtesy of body and soul that
we call charm. And Harvey people seemed to be made for him. He liked
their candor, their strength, their crass materialism, their bray and
bluster, their vain protests of democracy and their unconscious regard
for his caste and culture. So whatever there was of egoism in his nature
grew unchecked by Harvey. He was the young lord of the manor. However
Harvey might hoot at his hat and gibe at his elided R's and mock his
rather elaborate manners behind his back; nevertheless he had his way
with the town and he knew that he was the master. While those about him
worked and worried Tom Van Dorn had but to rub lightly his lamp and the
slave appeared and served him. Naturally a young man of his conspicuous
talents in his exceedingly early twenties who has the vast misfortune to
have a lamp of Aladdin to rub, asks genii first of all for girls and
girls and more girls. Then incidentally he asks for business and perhaps
for politics and may be as an afterthought and for his own comfort he
may pray for the good will of his fellows. Tom Van Dorn became known in
the vernacular as a "ladies man." It did not hurt his reputation as a
lawyer, for he was young and youth is supposed to have its follies so
long as its follies are mere follies. No one in that day hinted that Tom
Van Dorn was anything more dangerous than a butterfly. So he flitted
from girl to girl, from love affair to love affair, from heart to heart
in his gay clothes with his gay manners and his merry face. And men
smiled and women and girls whispered and boys hooted and all the world
gave the young lord his way. But when he included the dining room girls
at the Palace Hotel in his list of conquests, Dr. Nesbit began squinting
seriously at the youth and, late at night coming from his professional
visits, when the doctor passed the young fellow returning from some
humble home down near the river, the Doctor would pipe out in the night,
"Tut, tut, Tom--this is no place for you."
But the Doctor was too busy with his own affairs to assume the
guardianship of Tom Van Dorn. As Mayor of Harvey the Doctor made the
young man city attorney, thereby binding the youth to the Mayor in the
feudal system of politics and attaching all the prestige and charm and
talent of the boy to the Doctor's organization.
For Dr. Nesbit in his blithe and cock-sure youth was born to politics as
the sparks fly upward. Men looked to him for leadership and he blandly
demanded that they follow him. He was every man's friend. He knew the
whole county by its first name. The men, the women, the children, the
dogs, the horses knew him and he knew and loved them all. But in return
for his affection he expected loyalty. He was a jealous leader who
divided no honors. Seven months in the year he wore white linen clothes
and his white clad figure bustling through a crowd on Market Street on
Saturday or elbowing its way through a throng at any formal gathering,
or jogging through the night behind his sorrel mare or moving like a
pink-faced cupid, turned Nemesis in a county convention, made him a
marked man in the community. But what was more important, his
distinction had a certain cheeriness about it. And his cheeriness was
vocalized in a high, piping, falsetto voice, generally gay and nearly
always soft and kindly. It expressed a kind of incarnate good nature
that disarmed enmity and drew men to him instinctively. And underneath
his amicability was iron. Hence men came to him in trouble and he healed
their ills, cured their souls, went on their notes and took their hearts
for his own, which carried their votes for his uses. So he became calif
of Harvey.
Even deaf John Kollander who had political aspirations of a high order
learned early that his road to glory led through obedience to the
Doctor. So John went about the county demanding that the men who had
saved the union should govern it and declaring that the flag of his
country should not be trailed in the dust by vandal hands--meaning of
course by "vandal hands" the opposition candidate for register of deeds
or county clerk or for whatever county office John was asking at that
election; and at the convention John's old army friends voted for the
Doctor's slate and in the election they supported the Doctor's ticket.
But tall, deaf John Kollander in his blue army clothes with their brass
buttons and his campaign hat, always cut loose from Dr. Nesbit's
paternal care after every election. For the Doctor, after he had tucked
John away in a county office, asked only to appoint John's deputies and
that Mrs. Kollander keep out of the Doctor's office and away from his
house.
"I have no objections," the Doctor would chirrup at the ample,
good-natured Rhoda Kollander who would haunt him during John's periods
of political molting, pretending to advise with the Doctor on her
husband's political status, "to your society from May until November
every two years, Rhody, but that's enough. Now go home! Go home, woman,"
he commanded, "and look after your growing family."
And Rhoda Kollander would laugh amiably in telling it and say, "Now I
suppose some women would get mad, but law, I know Doc Jim! He doesn't
mean a thing!" Whereupon she would settle down where she was stopping
until meal time and reluctantly remain to eat. As she settled
comfortably at the table she would laugh easily and exclaim: "Now isn't
it funny! I don't know what John and the boys will have. There isn't a
thing in the house. But, law, I suppose they can get along without me
once in a lifetime." Then she would laugh and eat heartily and sit
around until the crisis at home had passed.
But the neighbors knew that John Kollander was opening a can of
something, gathering the boys around him and as they ate, recounting the
hardships of army life to add spice to an otherwise stale and
unprofitable meal. Afterward probably he would go to some gathering of
his comrades and there fight, bleed and die for his country. For he was
an incorrigible patriot. The old flag, his country's honor, and the
preservation of the union were themes that never tired him. He organized
his fellow veterans in the town and county and helped to organize them
in the state and was forever going to other towns to attend camp fires
and rallies and bean dinners and reunions where he spoke with zeal and
some eloquence about the danger of turning the country over to the
southern brigadiers. He had a set speech which was greatly admired at
the rallies and in this speech it was his wont to reach for one of the
many flags that always adorned the platform on such occasions, tear it
from its hanging and wrapping it proudly about his gaunt figure, recite
a dialogue between himself and the angel Gabriel, the burden of which
was that so long as John Kollander had that flag about him at the
resurrection, no question would be asked at Heaven's gate of one of its
defenders. Now the fact was that John Kollander was sent to the war of
the rebellion a few weeks before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, as
Daniel Sands's paid substitute and his deafness was caused by firing an
anvil at the peace jubilee in Cincinnati, the powder on the anvil being
the only powder John Kollander ever had smelled. But his descriptions of
battle and the hardships and horrors of war were none the less vivid and
harrowing because he had never crossed the Ohio.
Those were the days when the _Tribune_ was at its zenith--the days
when Jared Thurston was employed as its foreman and Lizzie Coulter,
pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired Lizzie Coulter helped Mary Adams to set
the type. It was not a long Day of Triumph, but while it lasted Mary and
Amos made the most of it and spoke in a grand way about "the office
force." They even had vague notions of starting a daily and many a night
Jared and Amos pored over the type samples in the advertising in Rounds
Printer's Cabinet, picked out the type they would need and the other
equipment necessary for the new venture. But it was only a dream. For
gradually Jared found Lizzie's eyes and he found more to interest him
there than in the type-book, and so the dream faded and was gone.
Also as Lizzie's eyes began to glow in his sky, Jared let his interest
lag in the talk at Casper Herdicker's shoe shop, though it was tall
talk, and Jared sitting on a keg in a corner with little Tom Williams,
the stone mason, beside him on a box, and Denny Hogan near him on a
vacant work bench and Ira Dooley on the window ledge would wrangle until
bed time many a night as Dick Bowman, wagging a warlike head, and Casper
pegging away at his shoes, tore society into shreds, smashed idols and
overturned civilization. Up to this point there was complete agreement
between the iconoclasts. They went so far together that they had no
quarrel about the route of the mob down Fifth Avenue in New York--which
Dick knew only as a legend but which Casper had seen; and they were one
in the belief that Dan Sands's bank and Wright & Perry's store should
fall early in the sack of Market Street. But when it came to
reconstructing society there was a clash that mounted to a cataclysm.
For Dick, shaking his head violently, demanded a government that should
regulate everything and Casper waving a vicious, flat-nosed hammer,
battered down all government and stood for the untrammeled and
unhampered liberty of the individual. Night after night they looted
civilization and stained the sky with their fires and the ground with
the oppressor's blood, only to sink their claws and tusks into each
other's vitals in mortal combat over the spoil.
About the time that Jared Thurston found the new stars that had ranged
across his ken, Tom Van Dorn, the handsome, cheerful, exquisite Tom Van
Dorn began to find the debates between Casper and Dick Bowman diverting.
So many a night when the society of the softer sex was either cloying or
inconvenient, the dapper young fellow would come dragging Henry Fenn
with him, to sit on a rickety chair and observe the progress of the
revolution and to enjoy the carnage that always followed the downfall of
the established order. He used to sit beside Jared Thurston who, being a
printer, was supposed to belong to the more intellectual of the crafts
and hence more appreciative than Williams or Dooley or Hogan, of his
young lordship's point of view; and as the debate waxed warm, Tom was
wont to pinch the lean leg of Mr. Thurston in lieu of the winks Tom
dared not venture. But a time came when Jared Thurston sat apart from
Van Dorn and stared coldly at him. And as Tom and Henry Fenn walked out
of the human slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a
particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn
walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while
Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his
face, looked at Tom with great, bright, sympathetic eyes and cut in:
"Tom--why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class
or of your kind. What's your idea in cutting in between Jared and her;
you'll only make trouble."
A smile, a gay, happy, and withal a seductive smile lit up the handsome,
oval face of young Mr. Van Dorn. The smile became a laugh, a quiet,
insinuating, good-natured, light-hearted laugh. As he laughed he
replied:
"Lizzie's all right, Henry--don't worry about Lizzie." Again he laughed
a gentle, deep-voiced chuckle, and held up his hand in the moonlight. A
brown scab was lined across the back of the hand and as Henry saw it Van
Dorn spoke: "Present from Lizzie--little pussy." Again he chuckled and
added, "Nearly made the horse run away, too. Anyway," he laughed
pleasantly, "when I left her she promised to go again."
But Henry Fenn returned to his point: "Tom," he cried, "don't play with
Lizzie--she's not your kind, and it's breaking Jared's heart. Can't you
see what you're doing? You'll go down there a dozen times, make love to
her, hold her hand and kiss her and go away and pick up another girl.
But she's the whole world and Heaven to boot for Jared. She's his one
little ewe lamb, Tom. And she'd be happy with Jared if--"
"If she wants Jared she can have him. I'm not holding her," interrupted
the youth. "And anyway," he exclaimed, "what do I owe to Jared and what
do I owe to her or to any one but myself!"
Fenn did not answer at once. At length he broke the silence. "Well, you
heard what I said and I didn't smile when I said it."
But Tom Van Dorn did smile as he answered, a smile of such sweetness,
and of such winning grace that it sugar-coated his words.
"Henry," he cried in his gay, deep voice with the exuberance of youth
ringing in it, "the world is mine. You know what I think about this
whole business. If Lizzie doesn't want me to bother her she mustn't have
such eyes and such hair and such lips. In this life I shall take what I
find that I can get. I'm not going to be meek nor humble nor patient,
nor forgiving and forbearing and I'm not going to refrain from a mutton
roast because some one has a ewe lamb."
He put a warm, kind, brotherly hand on the shoulder beside him.
"Shocked, aren't you, Henry?" he asked, laughing.
Henry Fenn looked up with a gentle, glowing smile on his rather dull
face and returned, "No, Tom. Maybe you can make it go, but I couldn't."
"Well, I can. Watch me," he cried arrogantly. "Henry, I want the
advantage of my strength in this world and I'm not going to go puling
around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless
a ride. Let 'em walk. Let 'em fall. Let 'em rot for all I care. I'm not
afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place
where man puts on trousers it's a battle of thews and teeth. And nature
never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of
things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly
philosophy of Christ--it doesn't fool me, Henry. I'm a pagan and I want
the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to
live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to
the full--live it hard--live it beautifully, but live it! live it!
Henry, live it like a gentleman and not like an understrapper and
bootlicker! I intend to command, not obey! Rule, not serve! I shall take
and not give--not give save as it pleases me to have my hand licked now
and then! As for Lizzie and Jared," young Mr. Van Dorn waved a gay hand,
"let them look out for themselves. They're not my worries!"
"But, Tom," remonstrated Henry as he looked at the ground, "it's nothing
to me of course, but Lizzie--"
"Ah, Henry," Van Dorn laughed gayly, "I'm not going to hurt Lizzie.
She's good fun: that's all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher--you come
moralizing around me about what I'm doing to some one else, which after
all is not my business but hers; and I'm right here to tell you, what
you're doing to yourself, and that's your business and no one's else.
You're drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky
never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I
beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Mueller
and his 'pretty brown-eyed daughter' as you called her, you forgot slick
and clean the flaw in Morse's deed."
"I suppose you're right, Tom. But I was feeling kind of off that day,
mother'd been sick the night before and--"
"And so you filled up with a lot of bad whisky and driveled and wept and
stumbled through the case and I beat you. I tell you, Henry, I keep
myself fit. I have no time to look after others. My job is myself and
you'll find that unless you look after yourself no one else will, at
least whisky won't. If I find girling is beating me in my law cases I
quit girling. But it doesn't. Lord, man, the more I know of human
nature, the more I pick over the souls of these country girls and blow
open the petals of their pretty hearts, the wiser I am."
"But the girls, Tom--the girls--" protested the somber-eyed Mr. Fenn.
"Ah, I don't hurt 'em and they like it. And so long as your whisky
hamestrings you and my girls give me what I need in my business--don't
talk to me."
Tom Van Dorn left Fenn at his mother's door and as Fenn saw his friend
turn toward the south he called, "Aren't you going to your room?"
"Why, it's only eleven o'clock," answered Van Dorn. To the inquiring
silence Van Dorn called, "I'm going down to see Lizzie."
Henry Fenn stood looking at his friend, who explained: "That's all
right. I said I'd be down to-night and she'll wait."
"Well--" said Fenn. But Van Dorn cut him short with "Now, Henry, I can
take care of myself. Lizzie can take care of herself--and you're the
only one of us who, as I see it, needs careful nursing!" And with that
he went striding away.
And three hours later when the moon was waning in the west a girl
sitting by her window gazed at the red orb and dreamed beautiful dreams,
such as a girl may dream but once, of the prince who had come to her so
gloriously. While the prince strolled up the street with his coat over
his arm, his hat in his hand, letting the night wind flutter the raven's
wing of hair on his brow, and as he went he laughed to himself softly
and laughed and laughed. For are we not told of old to put not our trust
in princes!
[Footnote 1: The reader may be interested in seeing one of Mary Adams's
clippings with a note attached. Here is one concerning Mrs. John
Kollander. The clipping from the Harvey _Tribune_ of June, 1871,
reads:
"Mrs. Rhoda Byrd Kollander arrived to-day from Elyria, Ohio. It is her
first visit to Harvey and she was greeted by her husband, Hon. John
Kollander, Register of Deeds of Greeley County, with a handsome new home
in Elm Street."
Then under it is this note:
"Of all the women of the Elyria settlers, Rhoda Kollander would not come
with us and face the hardships of pioneer life; but she made John come
out, get an office and build her a cabin before she would come. Rhoda
will not be happy as an angel unless they have rocking chairs in
Heaven."]
[Footnote 2: Let us read Mary Adams's clipping and note on the arrival
of young Thomas Van Dorn in Harvey. The clipping which is from the local
page of the paper reads:
"Thomas Van Dorn, son of the late General Nicholas Van Dorn of
Schenectady, New York, has located in Harvey for the practice of law and
his advertising card appears elsewhere. Mr. Van Dorn is a Yale man and a
law graduate of that school as well as an alumnus of the college. As a
youth with his father young Thomas stopped in Harvey the day the town
was founded. He was a member of the hunting party organized by Wild Bill
which under General Van Dorn's patronage escorted the Russian Grand Duke
Alexis over this part of the state after buffalo and wild game. Mr.
Thomas Van Dorn remembers the visit well, and old settlers will recall
the fact that Daniel Sands that day sold for $100 in gold to the General
the plot now known as Van Dorn's addition to Harvey. Mr. Thomas Van Dorn
still has the deed to the plot and will soon put the lots on the market.
He was a pleasant caller at the _Tribune_ office this week. Come
again, say we."
And upon a paper whereon the clipping is pasted is this in Mary Adams's
hand:
"The famous Van Dorn baby! How the years have flown since the scandal of
his mother's elopement and his father's duel with Sir Charles shook two
continents. What an old rake the General was. And the boy's mother after
two other marriages and a sad period on the variety stage died alone in
penury! And Amos says that the General was so insolent to his men in the
war, that he dared not go into action with them for fear they would
shoot him in the back. Yet the boy is as lovely and gentle a creature as
one could ask to meet. This is as it should be."]