HERE WE HAVE THE FELLOW AND THE GIRL BEGINNING TO PREPARE FOR THE LAST
CHAPTER
A tall, spare, middle-aged person was Thomas Van Dorn in the latter
years of the first decade of the twentieth century; tall and spare and
tight-skinned. The youthful olive texture of the skin was worn off and
had been replaced by a leathery finish--rather reddish brown in color.
The slight squint of his eyes was due somewhat to the little puffs under
them, and a suspicious, crafty air had grown into the full orbs, which
once glowed with emotion, when the younger man mounted in his oratorical
flights. His hands were gloved to match his exactly formal clothes, and
his hat--a top-hat when Judge Van Dorn was in the East, and a sawed-off
compromise with the local prejudice against top-hats when he was in
Harvey--was always in the latest mode. Often the hat was made to match
his clothes. He had become rigorous in his taste in neckties and only
grays and blacks and browns adorned the almost monkish severity of his
garb. Harsh, vertical lines had begun to appear at the sides of the
sensuous mouth, and horizontal lines--perhaps of hurt pride and
shame--were pressed into his wide, handsome forehead and the zigzag scar
was set white in a reddening field.
All these things a photograph would show. But there was that about his
carriage, about his mien, about the personality that emerged from all
these things which the photograph would not show. For to the eyes of
those who had known him in the flush of his youth, something--perhaps it
was time, perhaps the burden of the years--seemed to be sapping him,
seemed to be drying him out, fruitless, pod-laden, dry and listless,
with a bleached soul, naked to the winds that blow across the world. The
myriad criss-crosses of minute red veins that marked his cheek often
were wet with water from the eyes that used to glow out of a very
volcano of a personality behind them. But after many hours of charging
up and down the earth in his great noisy motor, red rims began to form
about the watery eyes and they peered furtively and savagely at the
world, like wolves from a falling temple.
As he stood by the fire in Mr. Brotherton's sanctuary, holding his
_Harper's Weekly_ in his hand, and glancing idly over the new books
carelessly arranged on the level of the eye upon the wide oak mantel,
the Judge came to be conscious of the presence of Amos Adams on a settee
near by.
"How do you do, sir?" The habit of speaking to every one persisted, but
the suave manner was affected, and the voice was mechanical. The old man
looked up from his book--one of Professor Hyslop's volumes, and
answered, "Why, hello, Tom--how are you?" and ducked back to his
browsing.
"That son of yours doesn't seem to have set the Wahoo afire with his
unions in the last two or three years, does he?" said Van Dorn. He could
not resist taking this poke at the old man, who replied without looking
up:
"Probably not."
Then fearing that he might have been curt the old man lifted his eyes
from his book and looking kindly over his glasses continued: "The Wahoo
isn't ablaze, Tom, but you know as well as I that the wage scale has
been raised twice in the mines, and once in the glass factory and once
in the smelter in the past three years without strikes--and that's what
Grant is trying to do. More than that, every concern in the Valley now
recognizes the union in conferring with the men about work conditions.
That's something--that's worth all his time for three years or so, if he
had done nothing else."
"Well, what else has he done?" asked Van Dorn quickly.
"Well, Tom, for one thing the men are getting class conscious, and in a
strike that will be a strong cement to make them stick."
Van Dorn's neck reddened, as he replied: "Yes--the damn
anarchists--class consciousness is what undermines patriotism."
"And patriotism," replied the old man, thumbing the lapel of his coat
that held his loyal legion button, "patriotism is the last resort--of
plutocrats!"
He laughed good-naturedly and silently. Then he rose and said as he
started to go:
"Well, Tom,--we won't quarrel over a little thing like our beloved
country. Why, Lila--" the old man looked up and saw the girl, "bless my
eyes, child, how you do grow, and how pretty you look in your new
ginghams--just like your mother, twenty years ago!" Amos Adams was
talking to a shy young girl--blue-eyed and brown-haired, who was walking
out of the store after buying a bottle of ink of Miss Calvin. Lila spoke
to the old man and would have gone with him, but for the booming voice
of Mr. Brotherton, the gray-clad benedict, who looked not unlike the
huge, pot-bellied gray jars which adorned "the sweet serenity of books
and wall paper."
Mr. Brotherton had glanced up from his ledger at Amos Adams's mention of
Lila's name. Coming forward, he saw her in her new dress, a bright
gingham dress that reached so nearly to her shoe tops that Mr.
Brotherton cried: "Well, look who's here--if it isn't Miss Van Dorn! And
a great pleasure it is to see and know you, Miss Van Dorn."
He repeated the name two or three times gently, while Lila smiled in shy
appreciation of Mr. Brotherton's ambushed joke. Her father, standing by
a squash-necked lavender jug in the "serenity," did not entirely grasp
Mr. Brotherton's point. But while the father was groping for it, Mr.
Brotherton went on:
"Miss Van Dorn, once I had a dear friend--such a dear little friend
named Lila. Perhaps you may see her sometimes? Maybe sometimes at night
she comes to see you--maybe she peeps in when you are alone and asks to
play. Well, say--Lila," called Mr. Brotherton as gently as a fog horn
tooting a nocturne, "if she ever comes, if you ever see her, will you
give her my love? It would be highly improper for a married gentleman
with asthmatic tendencies and too much waistband to send his love or
anything like it to Miss Van Dorn; it would surely cause comment. But if
Lila ever comes, Miss Van Dorn," frolicked the elephant, "give her my
love and tell her that often here in the serenity, I shut my eyes and
see her playing out on Elm Street, a teenty, weenty girl--with blue hair
and curly eyes--or maybe it was the other way around," Mr. Brotherton
heaved a prodigious sigh and waved a weary, fat hand--"and here, my
lords and gentlemen, is Miss Van Dorn with her dresses down to her shoe
tops!"
The girl was smiling and blushing, sheepishly and happily, while Mr.
Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle
fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her
first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather
subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge and said:
"Tom, this is our friend, Miss Van Dorn--I was just sending a message by
her to a dear--a very dear friend I used to have, named Lila, who is
gone. Miss Van Dorn knows Lila, and sees her sometimes. So now that you
are here, I'm going to send this to Lila," he raised the girl's hand to
his lips and awkwardly kissed it, as he said clumsily, "well, say, my
dear--will you see that Lila gets that?"
Her father stepped toward the embarrassed girl and spoke:
"Lila--Lila--can't you come here a moment, dear?"
He was standing by the smoldering fire, brushing a rolled newspaper
against his leg. Something within him--perhaps Mr. Brotherton's awkward
kiss stirred it--was trying to soften the proud, hard face that was
losing the mobility which once had been its charm. He held out a hand,
and leaned toward the girl. She stepped toward him and asked, "What is
it?"
An awkward pause followed, which the man broke with, "Well--nothing in
particular, child; only I thought maybe you'd like--well, tell me how
are you getting along in High School, little girl."
"Oh, very well; I believe," she answered, but did not lift her eyes to
his. Mr. Brotherton moved back to his desk. Again there was silence. The
girl did not move away, though the father feared through every painful
second that she would. Finally he said: "I hear your mother is getting
on famously down in South Harvey. Our people down there say she is doing
wonders with her cooking club for girls."
Lila smiled and answered: "She'll be glad to know it, I'm sure." Again
she paused, and waited.
"Lila," he cried, "won't you let me help you--do something for you?--I
wish so much--so much to fill a father's place with you, my dear--so
much."
He stepped toward her, felt for her hand, but could not find it. She
looked up at him, and in her eyes there rose the old cloud of sadness
that came only once in a long time. It was a puzzled face that he saw
looking steadily into his.
"I don't know what you could do," she answered simply.
Something about the pathetic loneliness of his unfathered child,
evidenced by the sadness that flitted across her face, touched a remote,
unsullied part of his nature, and moved him to say:
"Oh, Lila--Lila--Lila--I need you--I need you--God knows, dear, how I do
need you. Won't you come to me sometimes? Won't your mother ever
relent--won't she? If she knew, she would be kind. Oh, Lila, Lila," he
called as the two stood together there in the twilight with the glow of
the coals in the fireplace upon them, "Lila, won't you let me take you
home even--in my car? Surely your mother wouldn't care for that, would
she?"
The girl looked into the fire and answered, "No," and shook her head.
"No--mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind
to you--to be respectful to you, sir. I've tried to be, sir?"
Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and
pleading, "Oh, come--won't you let me take you home in my car,
Lila--it's getting late--won't you, Lila?"
But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her
head:
"I think, sir, if you don't mind--I'd rather walk."
In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and
the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face
twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of
pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward,
looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the
word, "Lila," in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young
miss--a Calvin young miss, in fact--running and waving her hands toward
a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping
up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and
Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to
watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle
box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys
played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as
Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut
hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not
quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly
belong--that he was rare and exotic. But as her father's car crept
unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no
way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the
children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila's clear, merry laugh--a
laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn's heart--rose
above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the
dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that
they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and
weaving about.
And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just
beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them,
then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and
whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing,
animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those
twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the
first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in
the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man
than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the
most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a
car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to
the beautiful light.
But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as
though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from
the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires
what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had
seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the
fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of
youth shining through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat
carrying its captive swooped around them--and then out into the darkness
of his own charred world.
But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and
criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or
lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila,
went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.
It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the
world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of
the wind in the brown grass and in the bare trees by the creek had found
their way into his soul. A curious soul it was--the soul of a poet, the
soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew--the soul of a man in
the body of a callow youth.
As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across
him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the
Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink
and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through
new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt
the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.
Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant
life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the
hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown
earth, and green wheat, and old grass faded from russet to lavender,
with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found
voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and
satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences
the words:
"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help."
And he had seemed to be forming a great heart-filling anthem. It was all
on his tongue's tip, with the answering chorus coming from out of some
vast mystery, "Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art
fair--thou hast dove's eyes." There in the sunshine upon the prairie
grass it was as real and vital a part of his soul's aspiration as though
it had been reiterated in some glad symphony. But as he sat in the
sunset trying to put into his voice the language that stirred his heart,
he could only drum upon a box and look at the girl's blue eyes and her
rosebud of a face and utter the copper coins of language for the golden
yearning of his soul. She answered, thrilled by the radiance of his
eyes:
"Isn't the young spring beautiful--don't you just love it, Kenyon? I
do."
He rose and stood out in the sun on the lawn. The girl got up. She was
abashed; and strangely self-conscious without reason, she began to
pirouette down the walk and dance back to him, with her blue eyes
fastened like a mystic sky-thread to his somber gaze. A thousand mute
messages of youth twinkled across that thread. Their eyes smiled. The
two stood together, and the youth kicked with his toes in the soft turf.
"Lila," he asked as he looked at the greening grass of spring, "what do
you suppose they mean when they say, 'I will lift up mine eyes to the
hills'? The line has been wiggling around in my head all morning as I
walked over the prairie, that and another that I can't make much of,
about, 'Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art fair.' Say,
Lila," he burst out, "do you sometimes have things just pop into your
head all fuzzy with--oh, well, say feeling good and you don't know why,
and you are just too happy to eat? I do."
He paused and looked into her bright, unformed face with the fleeting
cloud of sadness trailing its blind way across her heart.
"And say, Lila--why, this morning when I was out there all alone I just
sang at the top of my voice, I felt so bang-up dandy--and--I tell you
something--honest, I kept thinking of you all the time--you and the
hills and a dove's eyes. It just tasted good way down in me--you ever
feel that way?"
Again the girl danced her answer and sent the words she could not speak
through her eyes and his to his innermost consciousness.
"But honest, Lila--don't you ever feel that way--kind of creepy with
good feeling--tickledy and crawly, as though you'd swallowed a candy
caterpillar and was letting it go down slow--slow, slow, to get every
bit of it--say, honest, don't you? I do. It's just fine--out on the
prairie all alone with big bursting thoughts bumping you all the
time--gee!"
They were sitting on the steps when he finished and his heel was denting
the sod. She was entranced by what she saw in his eyes.
"Of course, Kenyon," she answered finally. "Girls are--oh, different, I
guess. I dream things like that, and sometimes mornings when I'm wiping
dishes I think 'em--and drop dishes--and whoopee! But I don't
know--girls are not so woozy and slazy inside them as boys. Kenyon, let
me tell you something: Girls pretend to be and aren't--not half; and
boys pretend they aren't and are--lots more."
She gazed up at him in an unblinking joy of adoration as shameless as
the heart of a violet baring itself to the sun. Then she shut her eyes
and the lad caught up his instrument and cried:
"Come on, Lila,--come in the house. I've got to play out
something--something I found out on the prairie to-day about 'mine eyes
unto the hills' and 'the eyes of the dove' and the woozy, fuzzy, happy,
creepy thoughts of you all the time."
He was inside the door with the violin in his hands. As she closed the
door he put his head down to the brown violin as if to hear it sing, and
whispered slowly:
"Oh, Lila--listen--just hear this."
And then it came! "The Spring Sun," it is known popularly. But in the
book of his collected music it appears as "Allegro in B." It is the
throb of joy of young life asking the unanswerable question of God: what
does it mean--this new, fair, wonderful world full of life and birth,
and joy; charged with mystery, enveloped in strange, unsolved grandeur,
like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform
and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into
nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams's most beautiful and
poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird,
vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height
again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and
the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful,
inexorable call of life to youth. Other messages of Kenyon Adams are
more profound, more comforting to the hearts and the minds of reasoning,
questioning men. But this Allegro in B is the song of youth, of early
youth, bidding childhood adieu and turning to life with shining
countenance and burning heart.
When he had finished playing he was in tears, and the girl sitting
before him was awestricken and rapt as she sat with upturned face with
the miracle of song thrilling her soul. Let us leave them there in that
first curious, unrealized signaling of soul to soul. And now let us go
on into this story, and remember these children, as children still, who
do not know that they have opened the great golden door into life!