THE ADAMS FAMILY BIBLE LIES LIKE A GENTLEMAN
How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the ass speaks, or
the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either
man or ass, and in the dumb struggle for voice, if fate turns the screws
of destiny upon duty, there is tragedy. Only the consequences of a day
or a deed can decide whether it shall have the warm blessing of our
smiles or the bitter benediction of our tears.
This, one must remember in reading the chapter of this story that shall
follow. It is the close of the story to which Mary Adams, with her
memory book and notes and clippings, has contributed much. For of the
pile of envelopes all numbered in their order; the one marked "Margaret
Mueller" was the last envelope that she left. Now the package that
concerns Margaret Mueller may not be transcribed separately but must be
woven into the woof of the tale. The package contains a clipping, a
dozen closely written pages, and a photograph--a small photograph of a
girl. The photograph is printed on the picture of a scroll, and the
likeness of the girl does not throb with life as it did thirty years ago
when it was taken. Then the plump, voluptuous arm and shoulders in the
front of the picture seemed to exude life and to bristle with the
temptation that lurked under the brown lashes shading her big, innocent,
brown eyes. And her hair, her wonderful brown hair that fell in a great
rope to her knees, in this photograph is hidden, and only her frizzes,
covering a fine forehead, are emphasized by the picture maker. One may
smile at the picture now, but then when it was taken it told of the red
of her lips and the pink of her flesh, and the dimples that forever went
flickering across her face. In those days, the old-fashioned picture
portrayed with great clearness the joy and charm and impudence of that
beautiful face. But now the picture is only grotesque. It proves rather
than discloses that once, when she was but a young girl, Margaret Mueller
had wonderfully molded arms and shoulders, regular features and
enchanting eyes. But that is all the picture shows. In the photograph is
no hint of her mellow voice, of her eager expression and of the
smoldering fires of passion, ambition and purpose that smoked through
those gay, bewitching eyes. The old-fashioned frizzled hair on her
forehead, the obvious pose of her hand with its cheap rings, the curious
cut of her dress, made after that travesty of the prevailing mode which
country papers printed in their fashion columns, the black court-plaster
beauty spot on her cheek and the lace fichu draped over her head and
bare shoulders, all stand out like grinning gargoyles that keep much of
the charm she had in those days imprisoned from our eyes to-day. So the
picture alone is of no great service. Nor will the clipping tell much.
It only records:
"Miss Margaret Mueller, daughter of the late Herman Mueller of
Spring Township, this county, will teach school in District 18,
the Adams District in Prospect Township, this fall and winter.
She will board with the family of ye editor."
Now the reader must know that Margaret Mueller's eyes had been turned to
Harvey as to a magnet for three years. She had chosen the Adams district
school in Prospect Township, because the Adams district school was
nearer than any other school district to Harvey; she had gone to the
Adamses to board because the little bleak house near the Wahoo was the
nearest house in the district to Harvey and to a social circle which she
desired to enter--the best that Harvey offered.
She saw Grant, a rough, ruddy, hardy lad, of her own time of life,
moving in the very center of the society she cherished in her dreams,
and Margaret had no gay inadvertence in her scheme of creation. So when
the lank, strapping, red-headed boy of a man's height, with a man's
shoulders and a child's heart, started to Harvey for high school every
morning, as she started to teach her country school, he carried with
him, beside his lunch, a definite impression that Margaret was a fine
girl. Often, indeed, he thought her an extraordinarily fine girl. Tales
of prowess he brought back from the Harvey High School, and she listened
with admiring face. For they related to youths whose names she knew as
children of the socially elect.
A part of her admiration for Grant was due to the fact that Grant had
leaped the social gulf--deep even then in Harvey--between those who
lived on the hill, and the dwellers in the bottoms near the river.
This instinctively Margaret Mueller knew, also--though perhaps
unconsciously--that even if they lived in the bottoms, the Adamses were
of the aristoi; because they were friends of the Nesbits, and Mrs.
Nesbit of Maryland was the fountain head of all the social glory of
Harvey. Thus Margaret Mueller of Spring Township came to camp before
Harvey for a lifetime siege, and took her ground where she could aim
straight at the Nesbits and Kollanders and Sandses and Mortons and
Calvins. With all her banners flying, banners gaudy and beautiful,
banners that flapped for men and sometimes snapped at women, she set her
forces down before Harvey, and saw the beleaguered city through the
portals of Grant's fine, wide, blue eyes, within an easy day's walk of
her own place in the world. So she hovered over Grant, played her brown
eyes upon him, flattered him, unconsciously as is the way of the female,
when it would win favor, and because she was wise, wiser than even her
own head knew, she cast upon the youth a strange spell.
Those were the days when Margaret Mueller came first to early bloom. They
were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it
flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her
neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair
seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her
bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched,
after she was gone, thrilled him as though they were of her.
Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him
who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the
feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid
may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness
and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from
which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this
story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that
befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of
things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that
Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like
the rest of us in this world--only human; stricken with that
inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love
are most needing our care.
Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in
their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of
holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled,
red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and
generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker
playmates--it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such
grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and
there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased
his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her
bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manuscript
for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece,
"trippingly on the tongue," they harkened back over his ancestry to find
the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a
nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect
and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When
he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership
that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant's odd mania to take up
the cause of the weak--often foolish causes that revealed a kind of
fanatic chivalry in him--Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed
knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.
Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the
child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity
for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a
commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also--the very facts that
were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and
Amos that their son was setting out on his journey from the heart of his
childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands,
broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation
wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child's quick wit and merry
heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so
completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could
not see that his leadership in school came from the fact that a man was
rising in him--the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant
as destiny itself. They could not see the man's body; they saw only the
child's heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor
could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that
matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to
announce that he had been elected President of the senior class in the
Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at
commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed
found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands,
home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half
ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for
glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her
attention--great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant--even Morty arrayed in
his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy
for Grant had passed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as
a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin--and
always with an effect of inadvertence.
Now if a lad is an ass--and he is--how should a poor jack be supposed to
know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth
has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is
no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of
his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos,
Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not
realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a
load he carried--this ass of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden.
In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul
bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland at school,
Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of
Margaret Mueller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled
with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with
all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his
heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting
face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed
him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of
soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last
time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the
qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in
Heaven's reservoir, gushing from the almost limitlessly deep springs of
our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our
destinies. And so the ass, laden with this relay of life from the source
of life, that every young, blind ass brings into the world, floundered
in the flood.
Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of
man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a
new heaven and a new earth--strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to
his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and
fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that
unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind
paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new heights, to
feel impulses coming out of the dark that tremble like the blare of
trumpets in the soul,--this is the way of youth.
With all his loyalty for Laura Nesbit--loyalty that enshrined her as a
comrade and friend, such is the contradiction of youth that he was madly
jealous of every big boy at the country school who cast eyes at Margaret
Mueller. And because she was ages older than he, she knew it; and it
pleased her. She knew that she could make all his combs and crests and
bands and wattles and spurs glisten, and he knew in some deep instinct
that when she sang the emotion in her voice was a call to him that he
could not put into words. Thus through the autumn, Margaret and Grant
were thrown together daily in the drab little house by the river. Now a
boy and a girl thrown together commonly make the speaking donkeys of
comedy. Yet one never may be sure that they may not be the dumb
struggling creatures of the tragic muse. Heaven knows Margaret Mueller
was funny enough in her capers. For she related her antics--her grand
pouts, her elaborate condescensions, her crass coquetry and her hidings
and seekings--into what she called a "case." In the only wisdom she
knew, to open a flirtation was to have a "case." So Margaret ogled and
laughed and touched and ran and giggled and cried and played with her
prey with a practiced lore of the heart that was far beyond the boy's
knowledge. Grant did not know what spell was upon him. He did not know
that his great lithe body, his gripping hands, his firm legs and his
long arms that had in their sinews the power that challenged her to
wrestle when she was with him--he did not know what he meant to the girl
who was forever teasing and bantering him when they were alone. For it
was only when Margaret and Grant were alone or when no one but little
Jasper was with them, that Margaret indulged in the joys of the chase.
Yet often when other boys came to see her--the country boys from the
Prospect school district perhaps, or lorn swains trailing up from Spring
Township--Margaret did not conceal her fluttering delight in them from
Mary Adams. So the elder woman and the girl had long talks in which
Margaret agreed so entirely with Mary Adams that Mary doubted the
evidence of her eyes. And Amos in those days was much interested in
certain transcendental communications coming from his Planchette board
and purporting to be from Emerson who had recently passed over. So Amos
had no eyes for Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl's fine speech.
Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a
ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh--a high, hysterical
laugh--that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret's fair
speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret's wiles
with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of
women!
All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of
Margaret's enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit,
half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he
sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and
self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would
fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside
the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that
was clouding his heart.
But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the
angel--the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the
face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his
soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed
of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.
In May Margaret's school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain
with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy
days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a
newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in
July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that
Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some
excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon
with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw
Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard
Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary's voice lifted in prayer,
with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy,
but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the
two kneeling there with Margaret's shawl over the chair where Mary
knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy's shame to her God.
Death and partings have come across that threshold during these three
decades. Amos Adams has known anguish and has sat with grief many times,
but nothing ever has cut him to the heart like the dead, hopeless woe in
Mary's voice as she prayed there in the bedroom with Grant that August
night. A terrible half-hour came when Mary and Amos talked with
Margaret. For over their shame at what their son had done, above their
love for him, even beyond their high hope for him, rose their sense of
duty to the child who was coming. For the child they spent the passion
of their shame and love and hope as they pleaded with Margaret for a
child's right to a name. But she had hardened her heart. She shook her
head and would not listen to their pleadings. Then they sent Grant to
her. It is not easy to say which was more dreadful, the impudent smile
which she turned to the parents as she shook her head at them, or the
scornful laugh they heard when Grant sat with her. That was a long and
weary night they spent and the sun rose in the morning under a cloud
that never was lifted from their hearts.
In the six or seven sordid, awful weeks that followed before Kenyon was
born, they turned for comfort and for help to Dr. Nesbit. They made his
plan to save the child's good name, their plan. Of course--the Adamses
were selfish. They felt a blight was on their boy's life. They could not
understand that in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in
marriage; that when God sends a soul through the gates of earth it comes
in joy even though we greet it in sorrow. Their gloom should have been
lighted; part of its blackness was their own vain pride in Grant. Yet
they were none the less tender with Margaret, and when she went down
into the valley of the shadow, Mary went with her and stood and
supported the girl in the journey.
When Doctor Nesbit was climbing into the buggy at the gate, Grant,
standing by the hitching-post, said: "Doctor--sometime--when we are
both older--I mean Laura--" He got no further. The Doctor looked at the
boy's ashen face, and knew the cost of the words he was speaking. He
stopped, reached his hand out to Grant and touched his shoulder. "I
think I know, Grant--some day I shall tell her." He got into the buggy,
looked at the lad a moment and said in his high, squeaky voice: "Well,
Grant, boy, you understand after all it's your burden--don't you? Your
mother has saved Margaret's good name. But son--son, don't you let the
folks bear that burden." He paused a moment further and sighed: "Well,
good-by, kid--God help you, and make a man of you," and so turning his
cramping buggy, he drove away in the dusk.
Thus came Kenyon Adams, recorded in the family Bible as the third son of
Mary and Amos Adams, into the wilderness of this world.