In the Heart of a Fool

Thomas Van Dorn believed that the world was full of a number of exceedingly pleasant things that might be had for the taking, and no questions asked. So when he felt the bee sting of gossip, he threw back his head, squared his face to the wind, put an extra kink of elegance into his raiment, a tighter crimp into his smile and an added ardor into his hale greeting, did some indispensable judicial favor to the old spider of commerce back of the brass sign at the Traders National, defied the town, and bade it watch him fool it. But the men who drove the express wagons knew that whenever they saw Judge Van Dorn take the train for the capital they would be sure to have a package from the capital the next day for Mrs. Fenn; sometimes it would be a milliner’s box, sometimes a jeweler’s, sometimes a florist’s, sometimes a dry-goods merchant’s, and always a candy maker’s.

At last the whole wretched intrigue dramatized itself in one culminating episode. It came in the spring. Dr. Nesbit had put on his white linens just as the trees were in their first gayety of foliage and the spring blooming flowers were at their loveliest.

After a morning in the dirt and grime and misery and injustice and wickedness that made the outer skin over South Harvey and Foley and Magnus and the mining and smelter towns of the valley, the Doctor came driving into the cool beauty of Quality Hill in Harvey with a middle aged man’s sense of relief. South Harvey and its neighbors disheartened him.

He had seen Grant Adams, a man of the Doctor’s own caste by birth, hurrying into a smelter on some organization errand out of overalls in his cheap, ill-fitting clothes, begrimed, heavy featured, dogged and rapidly becoming a part of the industrial dregs. Grant Adams in the smelter, preoccupied with the affairs of that world, and passing definitely into it forever, seemed to the Doctor symbolic of the passing of the America he understood (and loved), into an America that discouraged him. But the beauty and the calm and the restful elm-bordered lawns of Harvey always toned up his spirits. Here, he said to himself was the thing he had helped to create. Here was the town he had founded and cherished. Here were the people whom he really loved–old neighbors, old friends, dear in associations and sweet in memories.

It was in a cherubic complaisance with the whole scheme of the universe that the white-clad Doctor jogged up Elm Street behind his maternal sorrel in the phaëton, to get his noon day meal. He passed the Van Dorn home. Its beauty fitted into this mood and beckoned to him. For the whole joy of spring bloomed in flower and shrub and vine that bordered the house and clambered over the wide hospitable porch. The gay color of the spring made the house glow like a jewel. The wide lawn–the stately trees, the gorgeous flowers called to his heart, and seeing his daughter upon the piazza, the Doctor surrendered, drew up, tied the horse and came toddling along the walk to the broad stone steps, waving his hands gayly to her as he came. Little Lila, coming home from kindergarten and bleating through the house lamb-wise: “I’m hungry,” saw her grandfather, and ran down the steps to meet him, forgetting her pangs.

He lifted her high to his shoulder, and came up the porch steps laughing: “Here come jest and youthful jollity, my dear,” and stooping with his grandchild in his arms, kissed the beautiful woman before him.

“Some one is mighty sweet this morning,” and then seeing a package beside her asked: “What’s this–” looking at the address and the sender’s name. “Some one been getting a new dress?”

The child pulling at her mother’s skirts renewed her bleat for food. When Lila had been disposed of Laura sat by her father, took his fat, pudgy hand and said:

“Father, I don’t know what to do; do you mind talking some things over with me. I suppose I should have been to see you anyway in a few days. Have we time to go clear to the bottom of things now?”

She looked up at him with a serious, troubled face, and patted his hand. He felt instinctively the shadow that was on her heart, and his face may have winced. She saw or knew without seeing, the tremor in his soul.

“Poor father–but you know it must come sometime. Let us talk it all out now.”

He nodded his head. He did not trust his voice.

“Well, father dear,” she said slowly. She nodded at the package–a long dress box beside the porch post.

“That was sent to Margaret Fenn. It came here by mistake–addressed to me. There were some express charges on it. I thought it was for me; I thought Tom had bought it for me yesterday, when he was at the capital, so I opened it. There is a dress pattern in it–yellow and black–colors I never could wear, and Tom has an exquisite eye for those things, and also there is a pair of silk stockings to match. On the memoranda pinned on these, they are billed to Mrs. Fenn, but all charged to Tom. I hadn’t opened it when I sent the expressman to Tom’s office for the express charges, but when he finds the package has been delivered here–we shall have it squarely before us.” The daughter did not turn her eyes to her father as she went on after a little sigh that seemed like a catch in her side:

“So there we are.”

The Doctor patted his foot in silence, then replied:

“My poor, poor child–my poor little girl,” and added with a heavy sigh: “And poor Tom–Laura–poor, foolish, devil-ridden Tom.” She assented with her eyes. At the end of a pause she said with anguish in her voice:

“And when we began it was all so beautiful–so beautiful–so wonderful. Of course I’ve known for a long time–ever since before Lila came that it was slipping. Oh, father–I’ve known; I’ve seen every little giving of the tie that bound us, and in my heart deep down, I’ve known all–all–everything–all the whole awful truth–even if I have not had the facts as you’ve had them–you and mother–I suppose.”

“You’re my fine, brave girl,” cried her father, patting her trembling hand. But he could speak no further.

“Oh, no, I’m not brave–I’m not brave,” she answered. “I’m a coward. I have sat by and watched it all slip away, watched him getting further and further from me, saw my hold slipping–slipping–slipping, and saw him getting restless. I’ve seen one awful–” she paused, shuddered, and cried, “Oh, you know, father, that other dreadful affair. I saw that rise, burn itself out and then this one–” she turned away and her body shook.

In a minute she was herself: “I’m foolish I suppose, but I’ve never talked it out before. I won’t do it again. I’m all right now.” She took his hands and continued:

“Now, then, tell me–is there any way out? What shall we do to be saved–Tom and Lila and I?” She hesitated. “I’m afraid–Oh, I know, I know I don’t love Tom any more. How could I–how could I? But some way I want to mother him. I don’t want to see him get clear down. I know this woman. I know what she means. Let me tell you, father. For two years she’s been playing with Tom like a cat. I knew it when she began. I can’t say how I knew it; but I felt it–felt it reflected in his moods, saw him nervous and feverish. She’s been torturing him, father–she’s strong. Also she’s–she’s hard. Tom hasn’t–well, I mean she’s always kept the upper hand. I know that in my soul. And he’s stark, raving mad somewhere within him.” A storm of emotion shook her and then she cried passionately, “And, oh, father, I want to rescue him–not for myself. Oh, I don’t love him any more. That’s all gone. At least not in the old way, I don’t, but he’s so sensitive–so easy to hurt. And she’s slowly burning him alive. It’s awful.”

The little pink face of the Doctor began to harden. His big blue eyes began to look through narrow slits in his eyelids, and the pudgy, white-clad figure stood erect. The daughter’s voice broke and as she gripped herself the father reached his bristling pompadour and cried in wrath, “Let him burn–let him burn, girl–hell’s too good for him!”

His voice was high and harsh and merciless. It restored the woman’s poise and she shook her head sorrowfully as she resumed:

“I can’t bear to see it; I–I want to shield him–I must–if I can.” A tremor ran through her again. She caught hold of herself, then went on more calmly. “But things can’t go on this way. Here is this box–”

“Child–child,” cried the Doctor angrily, “you come right home–right home,” he piped with rising wrath. “Right home to mother and me.”

The wife shook her head and replied: “No, father, that’s the easy road. I must take the hard road.” Her father’s mobile face showed his pain and the daughter cried: “I know, father–I know how you would have stopped me before I chose this way. But I did choose and now here is Lila, and here is a home–a home–our home, father, and I mustn’t leave it. Here is my duty, here in this home, and I must not ran away. I must work out my life as it is–as before God and Lila–and Tom–yes, Tom, father, as before all three, I have my responsibility. I must not put away Tom–no matter–no matter how I feel–no matter what he has done. I won’t,” she repeated. “I won’t.”

The father turned an impatient face to his daughter, and retorted, “You won’t–you won’t leave that miserable cur–that–that woman hunting dog–won’t leave–”

The father’s rage sputtered on his lips, but the daughter caught his hand as it was beating his cane on the floor. “Stop, father,” she said gently, “it’s something more than women that’s wrong with Tom. Women are merely an outward and visible sign–it’s what he believes–and what he does, living his creed–always following the material thing. As a judge I thought he would see his way–must see his way to bring justice here–” She looked into the fume stained sky above South Harvey, and Foley and Magnus, far down the valley, and tightened her grip on her father’s hands. “But no–no,” she cried, “Tom doesn’t know justice–he only sees the law, the law and profits, and prosperity–only the eternal material. He sits by and sees the company settle for four and five hundred dollars for the lives of the men it wasted in the mine–yes, more than sits by–he stands at the door of justice and drives the widows and children into a settlement like an overseer. And he and Joe Calvin have some sort of real estate partnership–Oh–I know it’s dishonest, though I don’t know how. But it branches so secretly into the law and it all reaches down into politics. And the whole order here, father–Daniel Sands paying for politics, paying for government that makes the laws, paying for mayors and governors that enforce the laws and paying the judges to back them up–and all that poverty and wretchedness and wickedness down there and all this beauty and luxury and material happiness up here. It’s all, all wrong, father.” Her voice broke again in sobs, and tears were running down her cheeks as she continued. “How can we blame Tom for violating his vows to me? Where are all our vows to God to deal justly with His people–the widows and orphans and helpless ones, father?” She looked at her father through her tears, at her father, whose face was agape! He was staring into the wistaria vines as one who saw his world quaking. A quick bolt of sympathy shot through the daughter’s heart. She patted his limp hands and said softly, “So–father–I mustn’t leave Tom. He’s a poor, weak creature–a rotten stick–and because I know it–I must stay with him!”

Behind the screen of matter, the lusty fates were pulling at the screws of the rack. “Pull harder,” cried the first fate; “the little old pot-bellied rascal–make him see it: make him see how he warned her against the symptoms, but not the disease that was festering her lover’s soul!”

“Turn yourself,” cried the second, “make the forehead sweat as he sees how he has been delivering laws in a basket to grind iniquity through Tom Van Dorn’s mill! Turn–turn, turn you lout!”

“And you,” cried the third fate at the screw to the first, “twist that heart-string, twist it hard when he sees his daughter’s broken face and hears her sobbing!”

But the angels, the pitying angels, loosened the cords of the rack with their gentle tears.

As the taut threads of the rack slackened, he heard the soft voice of his daughter saying: “But of course, the most important thing is Lila–not that she means a great deal to him now. He doesn’t care much for children. He doesn’t want them–children.”

She turned upon her father and with anguished voice and with all her denied motherhood, she cried: “O, father–I want them–lots of them–arms full of them all the time.”

She stretched out her arms. “Oh, it’s been so hard, to feel my youth passing, and only one child–I wanted a whole house full. I’m strong; I could bear them. I don’t mind anything–I just want my babies–my babies that never have come.”

And then the pitiless fates turned the screws of the rack again and the father burst forth in his vain grief, with his high, soft, woman’s voice. “I wonder–I wonder–I wonder, what God has in waiting for you to make up for this?”

Before she could answer, the telephone bell rang. The wife stepped to the instrument. “Well,” she said when she came back. “The hour has struck; the expressman went to Tom for the express charges; he knows the package is here and,” she added after a sigh, “he knows that I know all about it.” She even smiled rather sadly, “So he’s coming out–on his wheel.”

CHAPTER XXII

IN WHICH TOM VAN DORN BECOMES A WAYFARING MAN ALSO

The father rose. His head was cast down. He poked a vine curling about the porch floor with his cane.

“I wonder, my dear,” he spoke slowly, and with great gentleness, “if maybe I shouldn’t talk with Tom–before you see him.”

He continued to poke the vine, and looked up at the daughter sadly. “Of course there’s Lila; if it is best for her–why that’s the thing to do–I presume.”

“But father,” broke in the daughter, “Tom and I can–”

But he entreated, “Won’t you let me talk with Tom? In half an hour–I’ll go. You and Lila slip over to mother’s for half an hour–come back at half past twelve. I’ll tell him where you are.”

The mother and child had disappeared around the corner of the house when the click of Van Dorn’s bicycle on the curbing told the Doctor that the young man was upon the walk. The package from the capital still lay beside the porch column. The Doctor did not lift his eyes from it as the younger man came hurrying up the steps. He was flushed, bright-eyed, a little out of breath, and his black wing of hair was damp. On the top step, he looked up and saw the Doctor.

“It’s all right, Tom–I understand things.” The Doctor’s eyes turned to the parcel on the floor between them.

The Doctor’s voice was soft; his manner was gentle, and he lifted his blue, inquiring eyes into the young Judge’s restless black ones. Dr. Nesbit put a fatherly hand on the young man’s arm, and said: “Shall we sit down, Tom, and take stock of things and see where we stand? Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

They sat down and the younger man eyed the package, turned it over, looked at the address nervously, pulled at his mustache as he sank back, while the elder man was saying: “I believe I understand you, Tom–better than any one else in the world understands you. I believe you have not a better friend on earth than I right at this minute.”

The Judge turned around and said in a disturbed voice, “I am sure that’s the God’s truth, Doctor Jim.” Then after a sigh he added, “And this is what I’ve done to you!”

“And will keep right on doing to me as long as you live,” piped the elder man, twitching his mouth and nose contemptuously.

“As long as I live, I fancy,” repeated the other. In the pause the young man put his hands to his hips and his chin on his breast as he slouched down in the chair and asked: “Where’s Laura?”

“Over at her mother’s,” replied the father. “Nobody will interrupt us–and so I thought we could get down to grass roots and talk this thing out.”

The Judge crossed his handsome ankles and sat looking at his trim toes.

“I suppose that idea is as good as any.” He put one long, lean, hairy hand on the short, fat knee beside him and said: “The whole trouble with our Protestant religion is that we have no confessor. So some of us talk to our lawyers, and some of us talk to our doctors, and in extreme unction we talk to our newspapers.”

He grinned miserably, and went on: “But we all talk to some one, and now I’m going to talk to you–talk for once, Doctor, right out of my soul–if I have one.”

He rose nervously, obeying some purely physical impulse, and then sat down again, with his hands in his thick, black hair, and his elbows on his bony knees.

“All right, Tom,” piped the Doctor, “go ahead.”

“Well, then,” he began as he looked at the floor before him, “do you suppose I don’t know that you know what I’m up to? Do you think I don’t know even what the town is buzzing about? Lord, man, I can feel it like a scorching fire. Why,” he exclaimed with emotion, “feeling the hearts of men is my job. I’ve been at it for fifteen years–”

He broke off and looked up. “How could I get up before a jury and feel them out man by man as I talked if I wasn’t sensitive to these things? You’ve seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn’t feel like crying myself. You’re a doctor–you know that. People forget what I am–what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women–these other women–when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it–for the exhilaration of it–for the joy of it!”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak. Van Dorn stopped him: “Don’t cut in, Doc Jim–let me say it all out. I’m young. I love the moonlight and the stars and I never go through a wood that I do not see trysting places there–and I never see a great stretch of prairie under the sunshine that I do not put in a beautiful woman and go following her–not for her–Doctor Jim, but for the joy of pursuit, for the thrill of uncovering a bared, naked soul, and the overwhelming danger of it. God–man, I’ve stood afraid to breathe, flattened against a wall and heard the man-beast growl and sniff, hunting me. I love to love and be loved; but not less do I love to hunt and be hunted. I’ve hidden under trees, I’ve skulked in the shadows, I’ve walked boldly in the sunlight with my life in my hand to meet a woman’s eyes, to feel her guilty shudder in my arms. Oh, Doctor Jim, you don’t understand the riot in my blood that the moon makes shining through the trees upon the water, with great, shadowy glades, and the tinkle of cow bells far away, and a woman afraid of me–and I afraid of her–and nothing but the stars and the night between us.”

He rose and began pacing the piazza as he continued speaking. “It’s always been so with me–as early as my boyhood it was so. I often wake in the lonely nights and think of them all over again–the days and nights, the girls and women who have flashed bright and radiant into my life. Over and over again, I repeat to my soul their names, over and over I live the hours we have spent together, the dangers, the delights, the cruel misery of it all and then at the turn of the street, at the corner of a room, in the winking of an eye I see another face, it looks a challenge at me and I am out on the high road of another romance. I’ve got to go! It’s part of my life; it’s the pulse of my blood.”

He stood excited with his deep, beady, black eyes burning and his proud, vain face flushed and his hands a-tremble. The Doctor saw that he was in the midst of a physical and mental turmoil that could not be checked.

Van Dorn went on: “And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura, God help her–she naturally–” he exclaimed. “But is the moon to be blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be muffled and mean no more than the scraping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to lose their scent, and grass and trees and birds to be blurred and turned drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a jury–what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn’t had an emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd wouldn’t say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud. They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes, then–by God they came to me. And yet you’ve been sitting there for years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying ‘Tom–Tom, why don’t you quit?’”

He was seated now, talking in a low, tense voice, looking the Doctor deeply in the eyes, and as he paused, the perspiration stood out upon his scarred forehead, and pink splotches appeared there and the veins of his temples were big and blue. The Doctor turned away his eyes and said coldly: “There’s Laura–Tom–Laura and little Lila.”

“Yes,” he groaned, rising. “There are Laura and Lila.”

He thrust his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down at the Doctor and sneered. “There’s the trap that snapped and took a paw, and I’m supposed to lick it and love it and to cherish it.”

He shuddered, and continued: “For once I’ll speak and tell it all. I’ll not be a hypocrite in this hour, though ever after I may lie and cringe. There are Laura and Lila and here am I. And out beyond is the wind in the elms and the sunshine upon the grass and the moving odor of flowers–flowers that are blushing with the joy of nature in her great perennial romance–and there’s Laura and Lila and here am I.”

His passion was ebbing; his face was hardening into its wonted vain, artificial contour, his eyes were losing their dilation, and he was sitting rather limply in his chair, staring into space. The Doctor came at him.

“You’re a fool. You had your fling; you’re along in your thirties, nearly forty now and it’s time to stop.” The younger man could not regain the height, but he could hide under his crust. So he parried back suavely, with insolence in his voice:

“Why stop at thirty–or even forty? Why stop at all?”

“Let me tell you something, Tom,” returned the Doctor. “It’s all very fine to talk this way; but this thing has become a fixed habit, just like the whiskey habit; and in fifteen or twenty years more you’ll be a chronic, physical, degenerate man. You’ll lose your self-respect. You’ll lose your quick wits, and your whole mind and body will be burning up with a slow fire.”

“Oh, you dear old fossil,” replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, “I’m no fool. I know what I’m doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I’m only a man,” he straightened up again, patted his mustache, and again tipped his hat into a cockey angle over his forehead, and went on, “not a monk.” He smiled, pivoted on his heel nervously and went on, “And what is more I can take care of myself.”

“Tom,” cried the Doctor in his treble, with excitement in his voice, “you can’t take care of yourself. No man ever lived who could. You may get away with your love affairs, and no one be the wiser; you may make a crooked or dirty million on a stock deal and no one be the wiser; but you’ll bear the marks to the grave.”

“So,” mocked the sneering voice of the young Judge, “I suppose you’ll carry the marks of all the men you’ve bought up in this town for twenty years.”

“Yes, Tom,” returned the Doctor pitifully, as he rose and stood beside the preening young man, “I’ll carry ’em to the grave with me, too; I’ve had a few stripes to-day.”

“Well, anyway,” retorted Van Dorn, pulling his hat over his eyes, restlessly, “you’re entitled to what you get in this life. And I’m going to get all I can, money and fun, and everything else. Morals are for sapheads. The preacher’s God says I can’t have certain things without His cracking down on me. Watch me beat Him at his own game.” It was all a make-believe and the Doctor saw that the real man was gone.