IN WHICH WE CONSIDER THE LADIES--GOD BLESS 'EM!
During those years in the late seventies and the early eighties, the
genii on the Harvey job grunted and grumbled as they worked, for the
hours were long and tedious and the material was difficult to handle.
Kyle Perry's wife died, and it was all the genii could do to find him a
cook who would stay with him and his lank, slab-sided son, and when the
genii did produce a cook--the famous Katrina, they wished her on Kyle
and the boy for life, and she ruled them with an iron rod. And to even
things up, they let Kyle stutter himself into a partnership with Ahab
Wright--though Kyle was trying to tell Ahab that they should have a
partition in their stable. But partition was too much of a mouthful and
poor Kyle fell to stuttering on it and found himself sold into bondage
for life by the genii, dispensing nails and cod-fish and calico as
Ahab's partner, before Kyle could get rid of the word partition.
The genii also had to break poor Casper Herdicker's heart--and he had
one, and a big one, despite his desire for blood and plunder; and they
broke it when his wife Brunhilde deserted the hearthstone back of the
shoe-shop, rented a vacant store room on Market Street and went into the
millinery way of life. And it wasn't enough that the tired genii had to
gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to
dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel,
witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn't enough that
they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging
strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn't enough that the overworked
genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with the
railroad--and he was load enough for any engine; his heart itself
weighed ten stone; it wasn't enough that they had to find various and
innumerable contraptions for Captain Morton to peddle, but there was Tom
Van Dorn's new black silk mustache to grow, and to be oiled and curled
daily; so he had to go to the Palace Hotel barber shop at least once
every day, and passing the cigar counter, he had to pass by Violet
Mauling--pretty, empty-faced, doll-eyed Violet Mauling at the cigar
stand. And all the long night and all the long day, the genii, working
on the Harvey job, cast spells, put on charms, and did their deepest
sorcery to take off the power of the magic runes that young Tom's black
art were putting upon her; and day after day the genii felt their
highest potencies fail. So no wonder they mumbled and grumbled as they
bent over their chores. For a time, the genii had tried to work on Tom
Van Dorn's heart after he dropped Lizzie Coulter and sent her away on a
weary life pilgrimage with Jared Thurston, as the wife of an itinerant
editor; but they found nothing to work on under Tom's cigar holder--that
is, nothing in the way of a heart. There was only a kind of public
policy. So the genii made the public policy as broad and generous as
they could and let it go at that.
Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn rioted in their twenties. John Hollander
saved a bleeding country, pervaded the courthouse and did the housework
at home while Rhoda, his wife, who couldn't cook hard boiled eggs,
organized the French Cooking Club. Captain Ezra Morton spent his mental
energy upon the invention of a self-heating molasses spigot, which he
hoped would revolutionize the grocery business while his physical energy
was devoted to introducing a burglar proof window fastener into the
proud homes that were dotting the tall grass environs of Harvey. Amos
Adams was hearing rappings and holding-high communion with great spirits
in the vasty deep. Daniel Sands, having buried his second wife, was
making eyes at a third and spinning his financial web over the town. Dr.
and Mrs. Nesbit were marvelling at the mystery of a child's soul, a
maiden's soul, reaching out tendril after tendril as the days made
years. The Dick Bowman's were holding biennial receptions to the little
angels who came to the house in the Doctor's valise--and welcomed,
hilariously welcomed babies they were--welcomed with cigars and free
drinks at Riley's saloon by Dick, and in awed silence by Lida, his
wife--welcomed even though the parents never knew exactly how the
celestial guests were to be robed and harped; while the Joe Calvins of
proud Elm Street, opulent in an eight room house, with the town's one
bath tub, scowled at the angels who kept on coming nevertheless--for
such is the careless and often captious way of angels that come to the
world in the doctor's black bag--kept on coming to the frowning house of
Calvin as frequently and as idly as they came to the gay Bowmans.
Looking back on those days a generation later, it would seem as if the
whole town were a wilderness of babies. They came on the hill in Elm
Street, a star-eyed baby named Ann even came to the Daniel Sandses, and
a third baby to the Ezra Mortons and another to the Kollanders (which
gave Rhoda an excuse for forming a lifelong habit of making John serve
her breakfast in bed to the scorn of Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Herdicker who
for thirty years sniffed audibly about Rhoda's amiable laziness) and the
John Dexters had one that came and went in the night. But down by the
river--there they came in flocks. The Dooleys, the McPhersons, the
Williamses and the hordes of unidentified men and women who came to saw
boards, mix mortar, make bricks and dig--to them the kingdom of Heaven
was very near, for they suffered little children and forbade them not.
And also, because the kingdom was so near--so near even to homes without
sewers, homes where dirt and cold and often hunger came--the children
were prone to hurry back to the Kingdom discouraged with their little
earthly pilgrimages. For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and
drawn water in the town's first days seemed by some specific gravity of
the social system to be holding their places at those lower
levels--always reaching vainly and eagerly, but always reaching a little
higher and a little further from them for that equality of opportunity
which seemed to lie about them that first day when the town was born.
In the upper reaches of the town Henry Fenn's bibulous habits became
accepted matters to a wider and wider circle and Tom Van Dorn still had
his way with the girls while the town grinned at the two young men in
gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn,
cryptic messages for the young men--from Tom's mother and Henry's
father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages
with incidental admonitions of his own--kind, gentle and gorgeously
ineffective. Then he would return to his office with a serene sense of a
duty well done, and meet and feast upon the eyes of Mary, his wife,
keen, hungry eyes, filled with more or less sinful pride in his
strength.
No defeat that ever came to Amos Adams, and because he was born out of
his time, defeat was his common portion, and no contumely ever was his
in a time when men scorned the evidence of things not seen, no failure,
no apparent weakness in her husband's nature, ever put a tremor in her
faith in him. For she knew his heart. She could hear his armor clank and
see it shine; she could feel the force and the precision of his lance
when all the world of Harvey saw only a dreamer in rusty clothes,
fumbling with some stupid and ponderous folly that the world did not
understand. The printing office that Mary and Amos thought so grand was
really a little pine shack, set on wooden piers on a side street. Inside
in the single room, with the rough-coated walls above the press and
type-cases covered with inky old sale bills, and specimens of the
_Tribune's_ printing--inside the office which seemed to Mary and
Amos the palace of a race of giants, others saw only a shabby, inky,
little room, with an old fashioned press and a jobber among the type
racks in the gloom to the rear. Through the front window that looked
into a street filled with loads of hay and wood, and with broken wagons,
and scrap iron from a wheelwright's shop, Amos Adams looked for the
everlasting sunrise, and Mary saw it always in his face.
But this is idling; it is not getting on with the Book. A score of men
and women are crowding up to these pages waiting to get into the story.
And the town of Harvey, how it is bursting its bounds, how it is
sprawling out over the white paper, tumbling its new stores and houses
and gas mains and water pipes all over the table; with what a clatter
and clamor and with what vain pride! Now the pride of those years in
Harvey came with the railroad, and here, pulling at the paper, stands
big George Brotherton with his ten stone heart. He has been sputtering
and nagging for a dozen pages to swing off the front platform of the
first passenger car that came to town. He was a fat, overgrown youth in
his late teens, but he wore the uniform of a train newsboy, and any
uniform is a uniform. His laugh was like the crash of worlds--and it is
to-day after thirty years. When the road pushed on westward Brotherton
remained in Harvey and even though the railroad roundhouse employed five
hundred men and even though the town's population doubled and then
trebled, still George Brotherton was better than everything else that
the railroad brought. He found work in a pool and billiard hall; but
that was a pent-up Utica for him and his contracted powers sent him to
Daniel Sands for a loan of twenty-five dollars. The unruffled exterior,
the calm impudence with which the boy waived aside the banker's request
for a second name on George's note, and the boy's obvious eagerness to
be selling something, secured the money and established him in a cigar
store and news stand. Within a year the store became a social center
that rivaled Riley's saloon and being near the midst of things in
business, attracted people of a different sort from those who frequented
Casper Herdicker's debating school in the shoe shop. To the cigar stand
by day came Dr. Nesbit with his festive but guileful politics, Joe
Calvin, Amos Adams, stuttering Kyle Perry, deaf John Kollander,
occasionally Dick Bowman, Ahab Wright in his white necktie and formal
garden whiskers, Rev. John Dexter and Captain Morton; while by night the
little store was a forum for young Mortimer Sands, for Tom Van Dorn, for
Henry Fenn, for the clerks of Market Street and for such gay young
blades as were either unmarried or being married were brave enough to
break the apron string. For thirty years, nearly a generation, they have
been meeting there night after night and on rainy days, taking the world
apart and putting it together again to suit themselves. And though
strangers have come into the council at Brotherton's, Captain Morton
remains dean. And though the Captain does not know it, being corroded
with pride, there still clings about the place a tradition of the day
when Captain Morton rode his high wheeled bicycle, the first the town
ever had seen, in the procession to his wife's funeral. They say it was
the Captain's serene conviction that his agency for the
bicycle--exclusive for five counties--would make him rich, and that it
was no lack of love and respect for his wife but rather an artist's
pride in his work as the distributor of a long-felt want which perched
Ezra Morton on that high wheel in the funeral procession. For Mary Adams
who knew, who was with the stricken family when death came, who was in
the lonely house when the family came home from the cemetery, says that
Ezra's grief was real. Surely thirty years of singlehearted devotion to
the three motherless girls should prove his love.
Those were gala days for Captain Morton; the whole universe was
flowering in his mind in schemes and plans and devices which he hoped to
harness for his power and glory. And the forensic group at Mr.
Brotherton's had much first hand information from the Captain as to the
nature of his proposed activities and his prospective conquests. And
while the Captain in his prime was surveying the world that was about to
come under his domain the house of Adams, little and bleak and poor,
down near the Wahoo on the homestead which the Adamses had taken in the
sixties became in spite of itself, a gay and festive habitation.
Childhood always should make a home bright and there came a time when
the little house by the creek fairly blossomed with young faces. The
children of the Kollanders, the Perrys, the Calvins, the Nesbits, and
the Bowmans--girls and boys were everywhere and they knew all times and
seasons. But the red poll and freckled face of Grant Adams was the
center of this posy bed of youth.
Grant was a shrill-voiced boy, impulsive and passionately generous and
all but obsessed with a desire to protect the weak. Whether it was bug,
worm or dog, or hunted animal or bullied child or drunken man,
fly-swarmed and bedeviled of boys in the alley, or a little girl teased
by her playmates, Grant--fighting mad, came rushing in to do battle for
the victim. Yet he was no anemic child of ragged nerves. His fist went
straight when he fought, and landed with force. His eyes saw accurately
and his voice carried terror in it.
He was a vivid youth, and without him the place down by the river would
have been bleak and dreary. But because Grant was in the world, the
rusty old phaeton in which Amos and Mary rode daily from the farm to
their work, gradually bedecked itself with budding childhood blooming
into youth, and it was no longer drab and dusty, but a veritable chariot
of life. When Grant was a sturdy boy of eight, little Jasper Adams came
into this big bewildering world. And after Grant and his gardenful of
youth were gone, Jasper's garden followed. And there was a short season
when the two gardens were growing together. It was in that season while
Grant was just coming into shoeblacking and paper collars, that in some
indefinite way, Laura Nesbit, daughter of the Doctor and Bedelia
Satterthwaite, his blue blooded Maryland wife, separated herself from
the general beauty of the universe and for Grant, Laura became a
particular person. In Mary Adams's note book she writes with maternal
pride of his fancy for Laura: "It is the only time in Grant's life when
he has looked up instead of down for something to love." And the mother
sets down a communication from Socrates through the planchette to Amos,
declaring that "Love is a sphere center"--a message which doubtless the
fond parents worked into tremendous import for their child. Though a
communication from some anonymous sage called the Peach Blow
Philosopher, who began haunting Amos as a familiar spirit about this
time recorded the oracle, also carefully preserved by Mary in her book
among the prophecies for Grant that, "Carrots, while less fragrant than
roses, are better for the blood." And while the cosmic forces were
wrestling with these problems for Grant and Laura, the children were
tripping down their early teens all innocent of the uproar they were
making among the sages and statesmen and conquerors who flocked about
the planchette board for Amos every night. For Laura, Grant carved tiny
baskets from peach-pits and coffee beans; for her he saved red apples
and candy globes that held in their precious insides gorgeous pictures;
for her he combed his hair and washed his neck; for her he scribbled
verses wherein eyes met skies, and arts met hearts, and beams met dreams
and loves the doves.
The joy of first love that comes in early youth--and always it does come
then, though it is not always confessed--is a gawky and somewhat guilty
joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of
self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his
versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly Yours" and leave
her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted.
And she in his autograph album could only trust herself--though
naturally being female she was bolder--to the placid depths of "As ever
your friend." Though in lean, hungry-eyed Nathan Perry's book she burst
into glowing words of deathless remembrance and Grant wrote in Emma
Morton's album fervid stanzas wherein "you" rimed with "the wandering
Jew" and "me" with "eternity." At school where the subtle wisdom of
childhood reads many things not writ in books, the names of Grant and
Laura were linked together, in the innocent gossip of that world.
They say that modern thought deems these youthful experiences dangerous
and superfluous; and so probably they will end, and the joy of this
earliest mating season will be bottled up and stored for a later
maturity. God is wise and good. Doubtless some new and better thing will
take the place of this first moving of the waters of life in the heart;
but for us of the older generation that is beginning to fade, we are
glad that untaught and innocent, our lips tasted from that spring when
in the heart was no knowledge of the poison that might come with the
draft.
A tall, shy, vivid girl, but above everything else, friendly, was Laura
Nesbit in her middle teens; and though Grant in later years remembered
her as having wonderful gray eyes, the elder town of Harvey for the most
part recollects her only as a gay and kindly spirit looking out into the
world through a happy, inquiring face. But the elder town could not in
the nature of things know Laura Nesbit as the children knew her. For the
democracy of childhood has its own estimates of its own citizens and the
children of Harvey--the Dooleys and the Williamses and the Bowmans as
well as the Calvins, the Mortons, the Sandses and the Kollanders,
remember Laura Nesbit for something more than her rather gawky body. To
the children, she was a bright soul. They remember--and the Bowmans
better than any one else--that Laura Nesbit shared what she had with
every one. She never ate a whole stick of candy in her life. From her
school lunch-basket, the Dooleys had their first oranges and the
Williamses their first bananas. Apples for the Bowmans and maple
sugar--a rare delicacy on the prairies in those days--for every one came
from her wonderful basket. And though her mother kept Laura in white
aprons when the other girls were in ginghams and in little red and black
woolen, though the child's wonderful yellow hair, soft and wavy like her
father's plumey roach, was curled with great care and much pride, it was
her mother's pride--the grim Satterthwaite demand for caste in any
democracy. But even with those caste distinctions there was the face
that smiled, the lips that trembled in sympathy, the heart that felt the
truth.
"Jim," quoth the mother on a day when the yard was full of Dooleys and
Bowmans and Calvins--Calvins, whom Mrs. Nesbit regarded as inferior even
to the Dooleys because of the vast Calvin pretense--"Jim, Laura has
inherited that common Indiana streak of yours. I can't make her a
Satterthwaite--she's Indiana to the bone. Why, when I go to town with
her, every drayman and ditch digger and stableman calls to her, and the
yard is always full of their towheaded children. I'll give her up."
And the Doctor gurgled a chuckle and gave her up also.
She always came with her father to the Adamses on Sunday afternoons, and
while the Doctor and Amos Adams on the porch went into the matter of the
universe as either a phantasm superinduced by the notion of time, or the
notion of time as an hallucination of those who believed in space, down
by the creek Grant and Laura sitting under the oak near the silent,
green pool were feeling their way around the universe, touching shyly
and with great abasement the cords that lead from the body to the soul,
from material to the spiritual, from dust to God.
It is a queer world, a world that is past finding out. Here are two
children, touching souls in the fleetest, lightest way in the world, and
the touch welds them together forever. And along come two others, and
even as the old song has it, "after touch of wedded hands," they are
strangers yet. No one knows what makes happiness in love. Certainly
marriage is no part of it. Certainly it is not first love, for first
lovers often quarrel like cats. Certainly it is not separation, for
absence, alas, does not make the heart grow fonder; nor is it
children--though the good God knows that should help; for they are love
incarnate. Certainly it is not respect, for respect is a stale, cold
comforter, and love is deeper than respect, and often lives without
it--let us whisper the truth in shame. What, then, is this irrational
current of the stuff of life, that carries us all in its sway, that
brings us to earth, that guides our destiny here--makes so vastly for
our happiness or woe, gives us strength or makes us weak, teaches us
wisdom or leads us into folly unspeakable, and all unseen, unmeasured
and infinitely mysterious?
There was young Tom Van Dorn. Love was a pleasurable emotion, and
because it put a joyous fever in his blood, it enhanced his life. But he
never defined love; he merely lived on it. Then there was Ahab Wright
who regarded love as a kind of sin and when he married the pale,
bloodless, shadowy bookkeeper in Wright & Perry's store, he regarded the
charivari prepared by Morty Sands and George Brotherton as a shameful
rite and tried for an hour to lecture the crowd in his front yard on the
evils of unseemly conduct before he gave them an order on the store for
a bucket of mixed candy. If Ahab had defined love he would have put
cupid in side whiskers and a white necktie and set the fat little god to
measuring shingle nails, cod-fish and calico on week days and sitting
around in a tail coat and mouse-colored trousers on Sunday, reading the
_Christian Evangel_ and the _Price Current_. And again there
was Daniel Sands who married five women in a long and more or less
useful life. He would have defined love as the apotheosis of comfort.
Finally there was Henry Fenn to whom love became the compelling force of
his being. Love is many things: indeed only this seems sure. Love is the
current of our lives, and like minnows we run in schools through it,
guided by instinct and by herd suggestions; and some of us are washed
ashore; some of us are caught and devoured, and others fare forth in joy
and reach the deep.
One rainy day when the conclave in Brotherton's cigar store was weary of
discussing the quarrel of Mr. Conklin and Mr. Blaine and the
eccentricities of the old German Kaiser, the subject of love came before
the house for discussion. Dr. Nesbit, who dropped in incidentally to buy
a cigar, but primarily to see George Brotherton about some matters of
state in the Third ward, found young Tom Van Dorn stroking his new silky
mustache, squinting his eyes and considering himself generally in the
attitude of little Jack Horner after the plum episode.
"Speaking broadly," squeaked the Doctor, breaking irritably into the
talk, "touching the ladies, God bless 'em--from young Tom's angle,
there's nothing to 'em. Broad is the petticoat that leadeth to
destruction." The Doctor turned from young Van Dorn, and looked
critically at some obvious subject of Van Dorn's remarks as she picked
her way across the muddy street, showing something more than a wink of
striped stockings, "Tom, there's nothing in it--not a thing in the
world."
"Oh,--I don't know," returned the youth, wagging an impudent, though
good-natured head at the Doctor; "what else is there in the world if not
in that? The world's full of it--flowers, trees, birds, beasts, men and
women--the whole damn universe is afire with it. It's God; there is no
other God--just nature building and propagating and perpetuating
herself."
"I suppose," squeaked the Doctor with a sigh, as he reached for his
morning paper, "that if I had nothing else to do for a living except
practice law with Joe Calvin on the side and just be twenty-five years
old three hundred days in the year, and no other chores except to help
old man Sands rib up his waterworks deal, I would hold some such general
views myself. But when I was twenty-five, young man, Bedelia and I were
running a race with the meal ticket, and our notions as to the moral
government of the universe came hard and were deepset, and we can't
change them now."
George Brotherton, Henry Fenn, Captain Morton and Amos Adams came in
with a kind of Greek chorus of general agreement with the Doctor. Van
Dorn cocked his hat over his eyes and laughed, and then the Doctor went
on in his high falsetto:
"It's all right, Tom; go it while you're young. But that kind of love's
young dream generally ends in a nightmare." He hesitated a minute, and
then said: "Well, so long as we're all here in the family, I'll tell you
about a case I had last night. There's an old fellow--old Dutchman to be
exact, down in Spring township; he came here with us when we founded the
town; husky old boy, that is, he used to be fifteen years ago. And he
had Tom's notion about the ladies, God bless 'em, when he was Tom's age.
When I first knew him his notion was causing him trouble, and had
settled in one leg, and last night he died of the ladies, God bless
'em."
The Doctor's face flinched with pain, and his treble voice winced as he
spoke: "Lord, but he suffered, and to add to his physical torment, he
knew that he had to leave his daughter all alone in the world--and
without a mother and without a dollar; but that isn't the worst, and he
knew it--at the last. This being twenty-five for a living is the hardest
job on earth--when you're sixty, and the old man knew that. The girl has
missed his blood taint; she's not scarred nor disfigured. It would be
better if she were; but he gave her something worse--she's his child!"
For a moment the Doctor was silent, then he sighed deeply and shut his
eyes as he said: "Boys, for a year and more he's been seeing all that he
was, bud like a glorious poison in his daughter."
Van Dorn smiled, and asked casually, "Well, what's her name?" The rest
of the group in the store looked down their noses and the Doctor, with
his paper under his arm, obviously ignored the question and only stopped
in the door to pipe out: "This wasn't the morning to talk to me of the
ladies--God bless 'em."
The men in the store watched him as he started across the street, and
then saw Laura skip gayly toward him, and the two, holding hands,
crossed the muddy street together. She was laughing, and the joy of her
soul--a child's soul, shone like a white flame in the dull street and
George Brotherton, who saw the pair in the street, roared out: "Well,
say--now isn't that something worth looking at? That beats Niagara Falls
and Pike's Peak--for me."
Captain Morton looked at the gay pair attentively for a moment and
spoke: "And I have three to his one; I tell you, gentlemen--three to his
one; and I guess I haven't told you gentlemen about it, but I got the
exclusive agency for seven counties for Golden's Patent Self-Opening
Fruit Can, an absolute necessity for every household, and in another
year my three will be wearing their silks and diamonds!" He smiled
proudly around the group and added: "My! that doesn't make any
difference. Silk or gingham, I know I've got the best girls on
earth--why, if their mother could just see 'em--see how they're
unfolding--why, Emma can make every bit as good hash as her mother," a
hint of tears stood in his blue eyes. "Why--men, I tell you sometimes I
want to die and go right off to Heaven to tell mother all the fine news
about 'em--eh?" Deaf John Kollander, with his hand to his less affected
ear, nodded approval and said, "That's what I always said, James G.
Blaine never was a true friend of the soldier!"
Van Dorn had been looking intently at nothing through the store window.
When no one answered Captain Morton, Van Dorn addressed the house rather
impersonally:
"Man is the blindest of the mammals. You'd think as smart a man as Dr.
Nesbit would see his own vices. Here he is mayor of Harvey, boss of the
town. He buys men with Morty's father's money and sells 'em in politics
like sheep--not for his own gain; not for his family's gain; but just
for the joy of the sport; just as I follow the ladies, God bless 'em;
and yet he stands up and reads me a lecture on the wickedness of a
little more or less innocent flirting." The young man lighted his cigar
at the alcohol flame on the counter. "Morty," he continued, squinting
his eyes and stroking his mustache, and looking at the boy with vast
vanity, "Morty, do you know what your old dad and yon virtuous Nesbit
pasha are doing? Well, I'll tell you something you didn't learn at
military school. They're putting up a deal by which we've voted one
hundred thousand dollars' worth of city bonds as bonus in aid of a
system of city water works and have given them to your dad outright, for
putting in a plant that he will own and control; and that he will build
for seventy-five thousand dollars." Van Dorn smiled a placid, malevolent
smile at the group and went on: "And the sheik of the village there
helped Daniel Sands put it through; helped him buy me as city attorney,
with your father's bank's legal business; helped buy Dick Bowman, poor
devil with a houseful of children for a hundred dollars for his vote in
the council, helped work George here for his vote in the council by
lending money to him for his business; and so on down the line. The Doc
calls that politics, and regards it as one of his smaller vices; but
me?" scoffed the young man, "when I go gamboling down the primrose path
of dalliance with a lady on each arm--or maybe more, I am haled before
the calif and sentenced to his large and virtuous displeasure.
Man,"--here young Mr. Van Dorn drummed his fingers on the showcase and
considered the universe calmly through the store window--"man is the
blindest of mammals." After which smiling deliverance, Thomas Van Dorn
picked up his morning paper, and his gloves, and stalked with some
dignity into the street.
"Well, say,"--Brotherton was the first to speak--"rather cool--"
"Shame, shame!" cried John Kollander, as he buttoned up his blue coat
with its brass buttons. "Where was Blaine when the bullets were
thickest? Answer me that." No one answered, but Captain Morton began:
"Now, George, why, that's all right. Didn't the people vote the bonds
after you fellows submitted 'em? Of course they did. The town wanted
waterworks; Daniel Sands knew how to build 'em--eh? The people couldn't
build 'em themselves, could they?" asked the Captain triumphantly.
Brotherton laughed; Morty Sands grinned,--and, shame be to Amos Adams,
the rugged Puritan, who had opposed the bonds in his paper so boldly, he
only shook a sorrowful head and lifted no voice in protest. Such is the
weakness of our thunderers without their lightning! Brotherton, who
still seemed uneasy, went on: "Say, men, didn't that franchise call for
a system of electric lights and gas in five years and a telephone system
in ten years more--all for that $100,000; I'm right here to tell you we
got a lot for our money."
Again Amos Adams swallowed his Adam's apple and cut in as boldly as a
man may who thinks with his lead pencil: "And don't forget the street
car franchises you gave away at the same time. Water, light, gas,
telephone and street car franchises for fifty years and one hundred
thousand to boot! It seemed to me you were giving away a good deal!"
But John Kollander's approving nod and George Brotherton's great laugh
overcame the editor, and the talk turned to other things.
There came a day in Harvey when men, looking back at events from the
perspective of another day, believed that in those old days of Harvey,
Daniel Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit was servant. And there was much
evidence to indicate that Daniel's was the master spirit of those early
times. But the evidence was merely based on facts, and facts often are
far from the truth. The truth is that Daniel Sands was the beneficiary
of much of the activity of Doctor Nesbit in those days, but the truth is
also that Doctor Nesbit did what he did--won the county seat for Harvey,
secured the railroad, promoted the bond election, which gave Daniel
Sands the franchises for the distribution of water, gas and
electricity--not because the Doctor had any particular regard for Daniel
Sands but because, first of all, the good of the town, as the Doctor saw
it, seemed to require him to act as he acted; and second, because his
triumph at any of these elections meant power, and he was greedy for
power. But he always used his power to make others happy. No man ever
came to the Doctor looking for work that he could not find work for that
man. Men in ditches, men on light poles, men in the court house, men at
Daniel Sands's furnaces, men grading new streets, men working on city or
county contracts knew but one source of authority in Harvey, and that
was Doctor James Nesbit. Daniel Sands was a mere money grubbing incident
of that power. Daniel could have won no one to vote with him; the county
seat would have gone to a rival town, the railroad would not have veered
five miles out of its way to reach Harvey, and a dozen promoters would
have wrangled for a dozen franchises but for Dr. Nesbit.
And if Dr. Nesbit made it his business to see that Dick Bowman had work,
it was somewhat because he knew how badly the little Bowmans needed
food. And if he saw to it that Dick's vote in the council occasionally
yielded him a substantial return from those whom that vote benefited so
munificently, it was partly because the Doctor felt how sorely Lida
Bowman, silently bending over her washtub, needed the little comforts
which the extra fifty-dollar bill would bring that Dick sometimes found
in his monthly pay envelope. And if the Doctor saw to it that Ira Dooley
was made foreman of the water works gang, or that Tom Williams had the
contract for the stone work on the new court house, it was largely in
payment for services rendered by Ira and Tom in bringing in the Second
Ward for John Kollander for county clerk. The rewards of Ira and Tom in
working for the Doctor were virtue's own; and if re-marking a hundred
ballots was part of that blessed service, well and good. And also it
must be recorded that the foremanship and the stone contract were
somewhat the Doctor's way of showing Mrs. Dooley and Mrs. Williams that
he wished them well.
Doctor Nesbit's scheme of politics included no punishments for his
enemies, and he desired every one for his friend. The round, pink face,
the high-roached, yellow hair, the friendly, blue eyes, had no place for
hate in them, and in the high-pitched, soft voice was no note of terror
to evil doers. His countenance did not betray his power; that was in his
tireless little legs, his effective hands, and his shrewd brain motived
by a heart too kind for the finer moral distinctions that men must make
who go far in this world. Yet because he had a heart, a keen mind, even
without much conscience, and a vision larger than those about him, Dr.
Nesbit was their leader. He did not move in a large sphere, but in his
small sphere he was the central force, the dominating spirit. And off in
a dark corner, Daniel Sands, who was hunger incarnate and nothing more,
spun his web, gathered the dust and the flies and the weaker insects and
waxed fat. To say that his mind ruled Dr. Nesbit's, to say that Daniel
Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit servant in those first decades of
Harvey--whatever the facts may seem in those later days--is one of those
ornately ridiculous travesties upon the truth that facts sometimes are
arranged to make. But how little did they know what they were building!
For they and their kind all over America working in the darkness of
their own selfish desires, were laying footing stones--quite substantial
yet necessary--for the structure of a growing civilization which in its
time, stripped of its scaffolding and extraneous debris, was to stand
among the nations of the earth as a tower of righteousness in a stricken
world.