IN WHICH WE SEE HOW LIFE TRANSLATES ITSELF INTO THE MATERIALISM AROUND
IT
Coal and oil and gas and lead and zinc. The black sprite, the brown
sprite, the invisible sprite, the two gray sprites--elemental sprites
they were--destined to be bound servants of man. Yet when they came
rushing out of the earth there at Harvey, man groveled before them, and
sold his immortal soul to these trolls. Naturally enough Daniel Sands
was the high priest at their altar. It was fitting that a devil worship
which prostrated itself before coal and oil and gas and lead and zinc
should make a spider the symbol of its servility. So the spider's web,
all iron and steel in pipes below ground, all steel and iron and copper
in wires and rails above ground, spread out over the town, over the
country near the town, and all the pipes and tubes and rails and wires
led to the dingy little room where Daniel Sands sat spinning his web. He
was the town god. Even the gilded heifer of Baal was a nobler one. And
the curious thing about this orgy of materialism, was that Harvey and
all the thousands of Harveys great and small that filled America in
those decades believed with all their hearts--and they were essentially
kind hearts--that quick, easy and exorbitant profits, really made the
equality of opportunity which every one desired. They thought in terms
of democracy--which is at bottom a spiritual estate,--and they acted
like gross materialists. So they fooled the world, while they deceived
themselves. For the soul of America was not reflected in that debauch of
gross profit making. The soul of America still aspired for justice; but
in the folly of the day, believed quite complacently because a few men
got rich quick (stupid men too,) and many men were well-to-do, that
justice was achieved, and the world ready for the millennium. But there
came a day when Harvey, and all its kind saw the truth in shame.
And life in Harvey shaped itself into a vast greedy dream. A hard,
metallic timbre came into the soft, high voice of Dr. James Nesbit, but
did not warn men of the metallic plate that was galvanizing the Doctor's
soul; nor did it disturb the Doctor. Amos Adams saw the tinplate
covering, heard the sounding brass, and Mary his wife saw and heard too;
but they were only two fools and the Doctor who loved them laughed at
them and turned to the healing of the sick and the subjugation of his
county. So men sent him to the state Senate. Curiously Mrs. Nesbit--she
whom George Brotherton always called the General--she did not shake the
spell of the trolls from her heart. They were building wings and ells
and lean-tos on the house that she called her home, and she came to love
the witchery of the time and place and did not see its folly. Yet there
walked between these two entranced ones, another who should have
awakened. For she was young, fresh from the gods of life. Her eyes,
unflinching, glorious eyes, should have seen through the dream of that
day. But they were only a girl's eyes and were happy, so they could not
see beyond the spell that fell around them. And alas, even when the
prince arrived, his kiss was poisoned too.
When young Thomas Van Dorn came to the Nesbit house on a voyage of
exploration and discovery--came in a handsome suit of gray, with hat and
handkerchief to match, and a flowing crepe tie, black to harmonize with
his flowing mustache and his wing of fine jet black hair above his ivory
tinted face, Laura Nesbit considered him reflectively, and catalogued
him.
"Tom," explained the daughter to her father rather coldly one morning,
after the young man had been reading Swinburne in his deep, mellow
pipe-organ of a voice to the family until bedtime the night before, "Tom
Van Dorn, father, is the kind of a man who needs the influence of some
strong woman!"
Mrs. Nesbit glanced at her husband furtively and caught his grin as he
piped gayly:
"Who also must carry the night key!"
The three laughed but the daughter went on with the cataloguing: "He is
a young man of strong predilections, of definite purpose and more than
ordinary intellectual capacity."
"And so far as I have counted, Laura," her father interrupted again, "I
haven't found an honest hair in his handsome head; though I haven't
completed the count yet!" The father smiled amiably as he made the final
qualification.
The girl caught the mother's look of approval shimmering across the
table and laughed her gay, bell-like chime. "O, you've made a bad guess,
mother."
Again she laughed gayly: "It's not for me to open a school for the
Direction of Miscalculated Purposes. Still," this she said seriously, "a
strong woman is what he needs."
"Not omitting the latch-key," gibed her father, and the talk drifted
into another current.
The next Sunday afternoon young Tom Van Dorn appeared with Rossetti
added to his Swinburne, and crowded Morty Sands clear out of the hammock
so that Morty had to sleep in a porch chair, and woke up frequently and
was unhappy. While the gilded youth slept the Woman woke and listened,
and Morty was left disconsolate.
The shadows were long and deep when Tom Van Dorn rose from the hammock,
closed his book, and stood beside the girl, looking with a gentle
tenderness from the burning depths of his black eyes into her eyes. He
paused before starting away, and held up a hand so that she could see,
wound about it, a flaxen hair, probably drawn from the hammock pillow.
He smiled rather sadly, dropped his eyes to the book closed in his
hands, and quoted softly:
"'And around his heart, one strangling golden hair!'"
He did not speak again, but walked off at a great stride down the stone
path to the street. The next day Rossetti's sonnets came to Laura Nesbit
in a box of roses.
The Sunday following Laura Nesbit made it a point to go with her parents
to spend the day with the Adamses down by the river on their farm. But
not until the Nesbits piled into their phaeton to leave did Grant
appear. He met the visitors at the gate with a great bouquet of woods
flowers, saying, "Here, Mrs. Nesbit--I thought you might like them." But
they found Laura's hands, and he smiled gratefully at her for taking
them. As they drove off, leaving him looking eagerly after them, Dr.
Nesbit said when they were out of hearing, "I tell you, girls--there's
the makings of a man--a real man!"
That night Laura Nesbit in her room looking at the stars, rose and
smelled the woods flowers on her table beside some fading roses.
As her day dreams merged into vague pictures flitting through her drowsy
brain, she heard the plaintive, trembling voice of Morty Sands's
mandolin, coming nearer and nearer, and his lower whistle taking the
tune while the E string crooned an obligato; he passed the house, went
down the street to the Mortons' and came back and went home again, still
trilling his heart out like a bird. As the chirping faded into the night
sounds, the girl smiled compassionately and slept.
As she slept young Thomas Van Dorn walked alone under the elm trees that
plumed over the sidewalks in those environs with hands clasped behind
him, occasionally gazing into the twinkling stars of the summer night,
considering rather seriously many things. He had come out to think over
his speech to the jury the next day in a murder case pending in the
court. But the murderer kept sinking from his consciousness; the speech
would not shape itself to please him, and the young lawyer was forever
meeting rather squarely and abruptly the vision of Laura Nesbit, who
seemed to be asking him disagreeable and conclusive questions, which he
did not like to answer. Was she worth it--the sacrifice that marriage
would require of him? Was he in love with her? What is love anyway?
Wherein did it differ from certain other pleasurable emotions, to which
he was not a stranger? And why was the consciousness of her growing
larger and larger in his life? He tried to whistle reflectively, but he
had no music in his soul and whistling gave him no solace.
It was midnight when he found himself walking past the Nesbit home,
looking toward it and wondering which of the open windows was nearest to
her. He flinched with shame when he recollected himself before other
houses gazing at other windows, and he unpursed his lips that were wont
to whistle a signal, and went down the street shuddering. Then after an
impulse in which some good angel of remorse shook his teeth to rouse his
soul, he lifted his face to the sky and would have cried in his heart
for help, but instead he smiled and went on, trying to think of his
speech and resolving mightily to put Laura Nesbit out of his heart
finally for the night. He held himself to his high resolve for four or
five minutes. It is only fair to say that the white clad figure of the
Doctor coming clicking up the street with his cane keeping time to a
merry air that he hummed as he walked distracted the young man. His
first thought was to turn off and avoid the Doctor who came along
swinging his medicine case gayly. But there rushed over Van Dorn a
feeling that he would like to meet the Doctor. He recognized that he
would like to see any one who was near to Her. It was a pleasing
sensation. He coddled it. He was proud of it; he knew what it meant. So
he stopped the preoccupied figure in white, and cried, "Doctor--we're
late to-night!"
"Well, Tom, I've got a right to be! Two more people in Harvey to-night
than were here at five o'clock this afternoon because I am a trifle
behindhand. Girl at your partner's--Joe Calvin's, and a boy down at Dick
Bowman's!" He paused and smiled and added musingly, "And they're as
tickled down at Dick's as though he was heir to a kingdom!"
"And Joe--I suppose--not quite--"
"Oh, Joe, he's still in the barn, I dropped in to tell him it was a
girl. But he won't venture into the house to see the mother before noon
to-morrow! Then he'll go when she's asleep!"
"Dick really isn't more than two jumps ahead of the wolf, is he,
Doctor?"
"Well," grinned the elder man, "maybe a jump-and-a-half or two jumps."
The young man exclaimed, "Say, Doctor! I think it would be a pious act
to make the fellows put up fifty dollars for Dick to-night. I'll just go
down and raid a few poker games and make them do it."
The Doctor stopped him: "Better let me give it to Dick if you get it,
Tom!" Then he added, "Why don't you keep Christian hours, boy? You can't
try that Yengst case to-morrow and be up all night!"
"That's just what I'm out here for, Doctor--to get my head in shape for
the closing speech."
"Well," sniffed the Doctor, "I wish you no bad luck, but I hope you
lose. Yengst is guilty, and you've no business--"
"Doctor," cut in Van Dorn, "there's not a penny in the Yengst case for
me! He was a poor devil in trouble and he came to my office for help! Do
you consider the morals of your sick folks--whether they have lived
virtuous and upright lives when they come to you stricken and in pain?
They're just sick folks to you in your office, and they're just poor
devils in trouble for me."
The Doctor cocked his head on one side, sparrow-wise, looked for a
moment at the young man and piped, "You're a brassy pup, aren't you!"
A second later the Doctor was trudging up the street, homeward, humming
his bee-like song. Van Dorn watched him until his white clothes faded
into the shades of the night, then he turned and walked slowly townward,
with his hands behind him and his eyes on the ground. He forgot the
Yengst case, and everything else in the universe except a girl's gray
eyes, her radiant face, and the glory of her aspiring soul. It was
calling with all its power to Tom Van Dorn to rise and shine and take up
the journey to the stars. And when one hears that call, whether it come
from man or maid, from friend or brother, or sweetheart or child, or
from the challenge within him of the holy spirit, when he heeds its
call, no matter where he is while he hears, he walks with God!
So it came to pass the next day that Thomas Van Dorn went before the
jury and pleaded for the murderer in the Yengst case with the tongue of
men and of angels. For he knew that Dr. Nesbit was loitering in the
clerk's office, adjoining the courtroom to listen to the plea. Every
faculty of his mind and every capacity of his body was awake, and they
said around the court house that it was "the speech of Tom's life!" The
Doctor on the front steps of the courthouse met the young man in the
daze that follows an oratorical flight, munching a sandwich to relieve
his brain, while the multitude made way for him as he went to his
office.
"Well, Tom--" piped the Doctor as he grasped the sweaty, cold hands of
the young orator, "if Yengst had been innocent do you suppose you could
have done as well?"
Van Dora, gave his sandwich to a passing dog, and took the Doctor's arm
as they walked to their common stairway. Before they had walked a dozen
steps the Doctor had unfolded a situation in local politics that needed
attention, and Van Dorn could not lead the elder man back to further
praises of his speech. Yet the young lawyer knew that he had moved the
Doctor deeply.
That night in his office Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn sat with their feet
in the window sill, looking through the open window into the moon. In
their discourse they used that elaborate, impersonal anonymity that
youth engages to carry the baggage of its intimate confidences.
"I've got to have a pretty woman, Henry," quoth the lawyer to his
friend, while the moon blushed behind a cloud. "She must have beauty
above everything, and after that good manners, and after that good
blood."
The moon came out and smiled at Henry. "Tom, let me tell you something,
I don't care! I used to think I'd be pickey and choosey. But I know my
own heart. I don't care! I'm the kind of fellow, I guess, who just gets
it bad and comes down all broken out with it." He turned his glowing
smile into Tom Van Dorn's face, and finding no quick response smiled
whimsically back at the moon.
"Some fellows are that way, Henry," assented Van Dorn, "but not I! I
couldn't love a servant girl no matter how pretty she was--not for
keeps, and I couldn't love an ugly princess, and I'd leave a
bluestocking and elope with a chorus girl if I found the bluestocking
crocked or faded in the wash! Yet a beautiful woman, who remained a
woman and didn't become a moral guide--" he stared brazenly at the moon
and in the cloud that whisked by he saw a score of fancies of other
women whose faces had shone there, and had passed. He went on: "Oh, she
could hold me--she could hold me--I think!"
The street noises below filled the pause. Henry rose, looked eagerly
into the sky and wistfully at the moon as he spoke, "Hold me? Hold me?"
he cried. "Why, Tom, though I'd fall into hell myself a thousand
times--she couldn't lose me! I'd still--still," he faltered, "I'd
still--" He did not finish, but sat down and putting his hand on the arm
of his friend's chair, he bent forward, smiled into the handsome young
face in the moonlight and said: "Well--you know the kind of a fool I am,
Tom--now!"
"That's what you say, Henry--that's what you say now." Van Dorn turned
and looked at his friend. "You're sticking it out all right,
Henry--against the rum fiend--I presume? When does your sentence
expire?"
"Next October," answered Fenn.
"Going to make it then?"
"That's the understanding," returned Fenn.
"And you say you've got it bad," laughed Van Dorn. "And yet--say,
Henry--why didn't you do better with the jury this afternoon in the
Yengst case? Doesn't it--I mean that tremendous case you have on with
the Duchess of Mueller--doesn't it put an edge on you? What was the
matter with you to-day?"
Fenn shook his head slowly and said: "It's different with me. I just
couldn't help feeling that if I was worth any woman's giving
herself--was worth anything as a man, I'd want to be dead square with
that Yengst creature--and I got to thinking, maybe in his place, drunk
and hungry--well, I just couldn't, Tom--because--because of--well, I
wanted her to marry a human being first--not a county attorney!"
"You're a damn fool!" retorted Van Dorn. "Do you think you'll succeed in
this world on that basis! I tell you if I was in love with a woman I'd
want to take that Yengst case and lay it before her as a trophy I'd
won--lay it before her like a dog!"
Fenn hesitated. He disliked to give pain. But finally he said, "I
suppose, Tom, I'd like to lay it before her--like a man!"
"Hell's delight!" sneered Van Dorn, and they turned off the subject of
the tender passion, and went to considering certain stipulations that
Van Dorn was asking of the county attorney in another matter before the
court.
The next day young Thomas Van Dorn began rather definitely to prepare
his pleading in still another suit in another court, and before the
summer's end, Morty Sands's mandolin was wrapped in its chamois skin bag
and locked in its mahogany case. Sometimes Morty, whistling softly and
dolefully, would pass the Nesbit home late at night, hoping that his
chirping might reach her heart; at times he made a rather formal call
upon the entire Nesbit family, which he was obviously encouraged to
repeat by the elders. But Morty was inclined to hide in the thicket of
his sorrow and twitter his heart out to the cold stars. Tom Van Dorn
pervaded the Nesbit home by day with his flowers and books and candy,
and by night--as many nights a week as he could buy, beg or steal--by
night he pervaded the Nesbit home like an obstinate haunt.
He fell upon the whole family and made violent love to the Doctor and
Mrs. Nesbit. He read Browning to the Doctor and did his errands in
politics like a retrieving dog. Mrs. Nesbit learned through him to her
great joy that the Satterthwaite, who was the maternal grandfather of
the Tory governor of Maryland, was not descended from the same Satterlee
hanged by King John in his war with the barons, but from the Sussex
branch of the family that remained loyal to the Crown. But Tom Van Dorn
wasted no time or strength in foolishness with the daughter of the
house. His attack upon her heart was direct and unhalting. He fended off
other suitors with a kind of animal jealousy. He drove her even from so
unimportant a family friend as Grant Adams.
Gradually, as the autumn deepened into winter and Tom Van Dorn found
himself spending more and more time in the girl's company he had
glimpses of his own low estate through the contrast forced upon him
daily by his knowledge of what a good woman's soul was. The
self-revelation frightened him; he was afraid of what he saw inside
himself in those days, and there can be no doubt that for a season his
soul was wrestling with its doom for release. No make-believe passion
was it that spurred him forward in his attack upon the heart of Laura
Nesbit. Within him, there raged the fierce battle between the spirit of
the times--crass, material and ruthless--and the spirit of things as
they should be. It was the old fight between compromise and the ideal.
As for the girl, she was in that unsettled mind in which young women in
their first twenties often find themselves when sensing by an instinct
new to them the coming of a grown-up man with real matrimonial
intentions. Given a girl somewhat above the middle height, with a slim,
full-blown figure, with fair hair, curling and blowing about a pink and
white face, and with solemn eyes--prematurely gray eyes, her father
called them--with red lips, with white teeth that flashed when she
smiled, and with a laugh like the murmur of gay waters; given a more
than usual amount of inherited good sense, and combine that with a world
of sentiment that perfect health can bring to a girl of twenty-two; then
add one exceptionally fascinating man of thirty--more or less--a
handsome young man; a successful man as young men go, with the
oratorical temperament and enough of a head to be a good consulting
lawyer as well as a jury lawyer with more than local reputation; add to
the young man that vague social iridescence, or aura or halo that young
men wear in glamor, and that old men wear in shame--a past; and then let
public opinion agree that he is his own worst enemy and declare that if
he only had some strong woman to take hold of him--and behold there are
the ingredients of human gunpowder!
Doctor Nesbit smelled the burning powder. Vainly he tried to stamp out
the fire before the explosion.
"Bedelia," said the Doctor one day, as the parents heard the girl
talking eagerly with the young man, "what do you make out of this
everlasting 'Tom, Tom, Tom,' out there in the living room?"
Mrs. Nesbit rocked in her chair and shook an ominous head. Finally she
said: "I wish he'd Tom himself home and stay there, Doctor." The wife
spoke as an oracle with emphasis and authority. "You must speak to the
child!"
The little man puckered his loose-skinned face into a sad, absurdly
pitiful smile and shrilled back:
"Yes--I did speak to her. And she--" he paused.
"Well?" demanded the mother.
"She just fed me back all the decent things I have said of Tom when he
has done my errands." He drummed his fingers helplessly on his chair and
sighed mournfully: "I wonder why I said those things! I really wonder!"
But the voices of the young people rose gayly and disturbed his musings.
It is easy now after a quarter of a century has unfolded its events for
us to lay blame and grow wise in retrospect. It is easy to say that what
happened was foredoomed to happen; and yet here was a man, walking up
and down the curved verandahs that Mrs. Nesbit had added to the house at
odd times, walking up and down, and speaking to a girl in the moonlight,
with much power and fire, of life and his dreams and his aspirations.
Over and over he had sung his mating song. Formerly he had made love as
he tried lawsuits, exhibiting only such fervor as the case required.
There can be no doubt, however, that when he made love to Laura Nesbit,
it was with all the powers of his heart and mind. If he could plead with
a jury for hire, if he could argue with the court and wrangle with
council, how could he meet reason, combat objections, and present the
case of his soul and make up the brief for his own destiny?
He did not try to shield himself when he wooed Laura Nesbit, but she saw
all that he could be. A woman has her vanity of sex, her elaborate,
prematernal pride in her powers, and when man appeals to a woman's
powers for saving him, when he submits the proofs that he is worth
saving, and when he is handsome, with an education in the lore of the
heart that gives him charm and breaks down reserves and barriers--but
these are bygones now--bygones these twenty-five years and more. What
was to be had to be, and what might have been never was, and what their
hopes and high aims were, whose hearts glowed in the fires of life in
Harvey so long ago--and what all our vain, unfruited hopes are worth,
only a just God who reads us truly may say. And a just God would give to
the time and the place, the spirit of the age, its share in all that
followed.