BEING NOT A CHAPTER BUT AN INTERLUDE
Here and now this story must pause for a moment. It has come far from
the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have
grown from the saplings that were stuck in the sod thirty years before,
and they limit the vision. No longer can one see over the town across
the roofs of Market Street into the prairie. No longer even can one see
from Harvey the painted sky at night that marks South Harvey and the
industrial towns of the Wahoo Valley. Harvey is shut in; we all are
sometimes by our comforts. The dreams of the pioneers that haloed the
heads of those who came to Harvey in those first days--those dreams are
gone. Here and there one is trapped in brick or wood or stone or iron;
and another glows in a child or walks the weary ways of man as a custom
or an institution or as a law that brought only a part of the blessings
which it promised.
And the equality of opportunity for which these pioneers crossed the
Mississippi and came into the prairie uplands of the West--where is that
evanescent spirit? Certainly it touched Daniel Sands's shoulder and he
followed it; it beckoned Dr. Nesbit and he followed it a part of the
journey. Surely Kyle Perry saw it for years, and Captain Morton was
destined to find it, gorgeous and iridescent. Amos Adams might have had
it for the asking, but he sought it only for others. It never came to
Dooley and Hogan, and Williams and Bowman and those who went into the
Valley. Did it die, one may ask; or did it vanish like a prairie stream
under the sand to flow on subterranean and appear again strong, purified
and refreshed, a powerful current to carry mankind forward? The world
that was in the flux of dreams that day when Harvey began, had hardened
to reality thirty years after. Men were going their appointed ways
working out in circumstances the equation of their life's philosophy.
And now while the story waits, we may well look at three pictures. They
do not speed the narrative; they hardly point morals to adorn this tale.
But they may show us how living a creed consistently colors one's life.
For after all the realities of life are from within. Events,
environment, fortune good or bad do not color life, or give it richness
and form and value. But in living a creed one makes his picture. So let
us look at Thomas Van Dorn, who boasted that he could beat God at his
own game, and did. For all that he wanted came to him, wealth and fame
and power, and the women he desired.
Judge and Mrs. Van Dorn and her dog are riding by in their smart rubber
tired trap, behind a highly checked horse and with the dog between them.
They are not talking. The man is looking at his gloved hands, at the
horse, at the street,--where occasionally he bows and smiles and never
by any chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be
passing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight
ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her.
Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it
is all there--and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom,
is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends
of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile,
with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to
convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is
beautiful, exceedingly beautiful--but only as a picture. When the smile
is garnished with words the voice is low and musical--but too low and
too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van
Dorn--the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Township
fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The
soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn--where is
it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed
every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into
books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing
the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She
is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her
head ache, and is repeating over and over, "God is good, and I am God,"
as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere
repetition of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside
her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as
a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.
When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he
speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted
cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the
muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft,
black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely
sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes
have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the
mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject
of "wherewithal shall ye be clothed," that the thought in some queer
spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his
artificial tailored skin, that seems to be a part of another
consciousness than his own.
Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped
the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland,
complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism
arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of
his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines
have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is
peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in
the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence.
His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and
mottled and leathery. His lips--his lips once full and red, are pursing
and leadening.
Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights
begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the
big black mass of the temple of love that looms among the young trees
upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon
the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She
takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on the ground. The man gathers
the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar,
and says behind his hands: "I'm going back downtown."
"Oh, you are?" echoes the woman.
"Yes, I am," replies the man sharply.
The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no
reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting
the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner.
Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase,
through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of
Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege.
So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live
rather quiet lives.
On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room
by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in
disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention--poetry annoys her;
fiction--the book of the moment, which happened to be "The Damnation of
Theron Ware," makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading
stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious
novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her
cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down
the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate
is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks
up "The Harmonious Universe," and walks with some show of grandeur in
her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.
"You up?" he asks. He glances at the book and continues: "Reading that
damn trash? Why don't you read Browning or Thackeray or--if you want
philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That's rot."
He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest,
falsest, baby voice the woman answers:
"My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper
harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like
I've been doing to-night."
The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far
beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane
sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly
mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes
to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and
then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, "God is good and I am God,"
many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly
in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully
disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a
footnote to this picture may we not ask:
Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The
trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of
pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask
with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying
they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes
they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends
were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they
made--or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly
miserable when they began to "live happily ever after"? A symposium
entitled "Is Love Really Worth It?" by such distinguished characters as
Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading,
if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of
dissimulation and deceit.
But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we
have the Morton family.
The Captain's feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in the
stove. It is May. But it is the Captain's habit to warm his feet there
when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon
the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper;
then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal
discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always
voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over
and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he
gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this:
"Curious thing about spring." The world of education, reading its
examination papers, concurs in silence. The worlds of fashion and of the
fine arts also assenting, the Captain goes on: "Down in South Harvey
to-day; kind o' dirty down there; looks kind of smoky and tin cannery,
and woe-begone, like that class of people always looks, but 'y gory,
girls, it's just as much spring down there as it is up here, only more
so! eh? I says to Laura, looking like a full bloom peach tree herself in
her kindergarten, says I, 'Laura, it's terrible pretty down here when
you get under the smoke and the dirt. Every one just a lovin',' says I,
'and going galloping into life kind of regardless. There's Nate and
Anne, and there's Violet and Hogan, and there's a whole mess of fresh
married couples in Little Italy, and the Huns and Belgians are all broke
out with the blamedest dose of love y' ever see! And they's whole rafts
of 'em to be married before June!' Well, Laura, she laughed and if it
wasn't like pouring spring itself out of a jug. Spring," he mused,
"ain't it curious about spring!"
Champing his apple the Captain gesticulates slowly with his open pocket
knife, "Love"--he reflects; then backs away from his discussion and
begins anew: "Less take--say Anne and Nate, a happy couple--him a lean,
eagle-beaked New England kind of a man; her--a little quick-gaited,
big-eyed woman and sping! out of the Providence of Goddlemighty comes a
streak of some kind of creepy, fuzzy lightning and they're struck dumb
and blind and plumb crazy--eh?"
He champs for a time on the apple, "Eighteen sixty-one--May,
sixty-one--me a tidy looking young buck--girl--beautiful girl with
reddish brown hair and bluest eyes in the world. Sping! comes the
lightning, and melts us together and the whole universe goes pink and
rose-colored. No sense--neither of us--no more'n Anne and Nate, just one
idea. I can't think of nothing but her--war isn't much; shackles on four
millions slaves--no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his
tent the day I left for the army; union forever--mere circumstance in
the lives of two crazy people--in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft
hands and whispers and flowers, eh--and--" The Captain does not finish
his sentence.
He rises, puts his apple core on the table, and says after a great sigh:
"And so we bloomed and blossomed and come to fruit and dried up and
blowed away, and here they are--all the rest of 'em--ready to bloom--and
may God help 'em and keep 'em." He pauses, "Help 'em and keep 'em and
when they have dried up and blowed away--let 'em remember the perfume
clean to the end!" He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his
gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: "Well, girls, how
about hash for breakfast--what say?"
The wheels of the Judge's buggy grate upon the curbing nearby and the
Captain remarks: "Judge Tom gets in a little later every night now. I
heard him dump her in at eight, and here it is nearly eleven--pretty
careless,--pretty careless; he oughtn't to be getting in this late for
four or five years yet--what say?" Public opinion again is divided.
Fashion and the fine arts hold that it is Margaret's fault and that she
is growing to be too much of a poseur; but the schools, which are the
bulwarks of our liberties, maintain that he is just as bad as she. And
what is more to the point--such is the contention of the eldest Miss
Morton of the fourth grade in the Lincoln school, he has driven around
to the school twice this spring to take little Lila out riding, and even
though her mother has told the teachers to let the child go if she cared
to, the little girl would not go and he was mean to the principal and
insolent, though Heaven knows it is not the principal's fault, and if
the janitor hadn't been standing right there--but it really makes little
difference what would have happened; for the janitor in every school
building, as every one knows, is a fierce and awesome creature who keeps
more dreadful things from happening that never would have happened than
any other single agency in the world.
The point which the eldest Miss Morton was accenting was this, that he
should have thought of Lila before he got his divorce.
Now the worlds of fashion and the fine arts and the schools themselves,
bulwarks that they are, do not realize how keenly a proud man's heart
must be touched if day by day he meets the little girl upon the street,
sees her growing out of babyhood into childhood, a sweet, bright,
lovable child, and he yearns for something sincere, something that has
no poses, something that will love him for himself. So he swallows a
lump of pride as large as his handsome head, and drives to the school
house to see his child--and is denied. In the Captain's household they
do not know what that means. For in the Captain's household which
includes a six room house--not counting the new white painted bathroom,
the joint product of the toil of the handsome Miss Morton and the eldest
Miss Morton, and not counting the basket for the kitten christened
Epaminondas, and maintained by the youngest Miss Morton over family
protests--in the Captain's household there is peace and joy, if one
excepts the numbing fear of a "step" that sometimes prostrates the
eldest Miss Morton and her handsome sister; a fear that shelters their
father against the wily designs of their sex upon a meek and defenseless
and rather obliging gentleman. So they cannot put themselves in the
place of the rich and powerful neighbors next door. The Mortons hear the
thorns crackling under the pot, but they cannot appreciate the heat.
And now we come to the last picture.
It is still an evening in May!
"Well, how is the missionary to South Harvey," chirrups the Doctor as he
mounts the steps, and sees his daughter, waiting for him on the veranda.
She looks cool and fresh and beautiful. Her eyes and her skin glow with
health and her face beams upon him out of a soul at peace.
"She's all right," returns the daughter, smiling. "How's the khedive of
Greeley county?"
As the Doctor mounts the steps she continues: "Sit down, father--I've
something on my mind." To her father's inquiring face she replied, "It's
Lila. Her father has been after her again. She just came home crying as
though her little heart would break. It's so pitiful--she loves him;
that is left over from her babyhood; but she is learning
someway--perhaps from the children, perhaps from life--what he has
done--and when he tries to attract her--she shrinks away from him."
"And he knows why--he knows why, Laura." The Doctor taps the floor
softly with his cane. "It isn't all gone--Tom's heart, I mean.
Somewhere deep in his consciousness he is hungering for affection--for
respect--for understanding. You haven't seen Tom's eyes recently?" The
daughter makes no reply. "I have," he continues. "They're burned
out--kind of glassy--scummed over with the searing of the hell he
carries in his heart--like the girls' eyes down in the Row. For he is
dying at the heart--burning out with everything he has asked for in his
hands, yet turning to Lila!"
"Father," she says with her eyes brimming, "I'm not angry with Tom--only
sorry. He hasn't hurt me--much--when it's all figured out. I still have
my faith--my faith in folks--and in God! Really to take away one's faith
is the only wrong one can do to another!"
The father says, "The chief wrong he did you was when he married you. It
was nobody's fault; I might have stopped it--but no man can be sure of
those things. It was just one of the inevitable mistakes of youth, my
dear, that come into our lives, one way or another. They fall upon the
just and the unjust--without any reference to deserts."
She nods her assent and they sit listening to the sounds of the closing
day--to the vesper bell in the Valley, to the hum of the trolley
bringing its homecomers up from the town; to the drone of the five
o'clock whistles in South Harvey, to the rattle of homebound buggies.
Twice the daughter starts to speak. The second time she stops the Doctor
pipes up, "Let it come--out with it--tell your daddy if anything is on
your mind." She smiles up into his mobile face, to find only sympathy
there. So she speaks, but she speaks hesitatingly.
"I believe that I am going to be happy--really and truly happy!" She
does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand
and pats it. "I am finding my place--doing my work--creating
something--not the home that I once hoped for--not the home that I would
have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect
in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South
Harvey. All over the place I find its roots--the shrivelled parching
roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect.
Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a
window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a
struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a
dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front
bedroom--in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America
asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things
I find happiness asserting itself in my life. So it's my job, my
consecrated job in this earth--to water the geranium, to prune the rose,
to mulch the roots of self-respect among these people, and I am happy,
father, happier every day that I walk that way."
She looks wistfully into her father's face. "Father, you won't quite
understand me when I tell you that the tomato cans with their geraniums
behind those gray lace curtains, that make Harvey people smile, are
really not tomato cans at all. They are social dynamite bombs that one
day will blow into splinters and rubbish the injustices, the cruel
injustices of life that the poor suffer at the hands of their
exploiters. The geranium is the flower, the spring flower of the divine
discontent, which some day shall bear great and wonderful fruit."
"Rather a swift pace you're setting for a fat man, Laura," pipes the
Doctor, adding earnestly: "There you go talking like Grant Adams! Don't
let Grant Adams fool you, child: the end of the world isn't here.
Grant's a good boy, Laura, and I like him; but he's getting a kind of
Millerite notion that we're about to put on white robes and go straight
up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few
years, and there's nothing to it. Grant's a good son, and a good
brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but"--the Doctor pounds his
chair arm vehemently, "there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just
the same. Don't get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to
jump into the crack o' doom for the established order!"
The daughter smiles at him, but she answers:
"Perhaps Grant is touched--touched with the mad impatience of God's
fools, father. I don't always follow Grant. He goes his way and I go
mine. But I am sure of this, that the thing which will really start
South Harvey, and all the South Harveys in the world out of their dirt
and misery, and vice, is not our dreams for them, but their dreams for
themselves. They must see the vision. They must aspire. They must feel
the impulse to sacrifice greatly, to consecrate themselves deeply, to
give and give and give of themselves that their children may know better
things. And it is my work to arouse their dreams, to inspire their
visions, to make them yearn for better living. I am trying to teach them
to use and to love beautiful things, that they may be restless among
ugly things. I think beauty only serves God as the handmaiden of
discontent! And, father, way down deep in my heart--I know--I know
surely that I must do this--that it is my reason for being--now that
life has taken the greater joy of home from me. So," she concludes
solemnly; "these people whom I love, they need me, but father, God and
you only know how I need them. I don't know about Grant,--I mean why he
is going his solitary way, but perhaps somewhere in his heart there is a
wound! Perhaps all of God's fools--those who live queer, unnormal
self-forgetting lives, are the broken and rejected pieces of life's
masonry which the builder is using in his own wise way. As for the plan,
it is not ours. Grant and I, broken spawl in the rising edifice, we and
thousands like us, odd pieces that chink in yet hold the strain--we must
be content to hold the load and know always--always know that after all
the wall is rising! That is enough."
And now we must put aside the pictures and get on with the story.