In the Heart of a Fool

Then she called Laura into the kitchen and said, as she pressed out her black satin and tried to hide the threadbare seams that had been showing for years: “Mrs. Van Dorn, I’m going to do something you won’t like.” To Laura’s questioning eyes Violet answered: “I know your ma, or some one else has told you all about me–but,” she shut her mouth tightly and said slowly:

“But no matter what they say–I’m going to the Judge; he’s got to make the railroad company pay and pay well. It’s all I’ve got on earth–for the children. We have three dollars in my pocketbook and will have to wait until the fifteenth before I get his last month’s wages, and I know they’ll dock him up to the very minute of the day–that day! I wouldn’t do it for anything else on earth, Mrs. Van Dorn–wild horses couldn’t drag me there–but I’m going to the Judge–for the children. He can help.”

So, putting on her bedraggled black picture hat with the red ripped off, Violet Hogan mounted the courthouse steps and went to the office of the Judge. A sorry, broken, haggard figure she cut there in the Judge’s office. She would have told him her story–but he interrupted: “Yes, Violet–I read it in the Times. But what can I do–you know I’m not allowed to take a case and, besides, he was working for the railroad, and you know, Violet, he assumed the risk. What do they offer you?”

“Judge–for God’s sake don’t talk that way to me. That’s the way you used to talk to those miners’ wives–ugh!” she cried. “I remember it all–that assumed risk. Only this–he was working ten hours a day on a job that wouldn’t let him sleep, and he oughtn’t to be working but eight hours, if they hadn’t sneaked under the law. They’ve offered me five hundred, Judge–five hundred–for a man, five hundred for our three children–and me. You can make them do better–oh, I know you can. Oh, please for the sake–oh!”

She looked at him with her battered face, and as her mouth quivered, she tried to hide her broken teeth. He saw she was about to give way to tears. He dreaded a scene. He looked at her impatiently and finally gripping himself after a decision, he said:

“Now, Violet, take a brace. Five hundred is what they always give in these cases.” He smiled suavely at her and she noticed for the first time that his lip was bare and started at the cruel mouth that leered at her.

“But,” he added expansively, “for old sake’s sake–I’m going to do something for you.” He rose and stood over her. “Now, Violet,” he said, strutting the diagonal of his room, and smiling blandly at her, “we both know why I shouldn’t give you my personal check–nor why you shouldn’t have any cash that you cannot account for. But the superintendent of the smelter, who is also the general manager of the railroad, is under some obligations to me, and I’ll give you this note to him.” He sat down and wrote:

“For good reasons I desire one hundred dollars added to your check to the widow of Dennis Hogan who presents this, and to have the same charged to my personal account on your books.”

He signed his name with a flourish, and after reading the note handed it to the woman.

She looked at him and her mouth opened, showing her broken, ragged teeth. Then she rose.

“My God, Tom Van Dorn–haven’t you any heart at all! Six hundred dollars with three little children–and my man butchered by a law you made–oh,” she cried as she shook her head and stood dry-eyed and agonized before him–“I thought you were a man–that you were my friend way down deep in your heart–I thought you were a man.”

She picked up the paper, and at the door turned and said: “And you could get me thousands from the company for my hundreds by the scratch of your pen–and I thought you were a man.” She opened the door, looked at him beseechingly, and repeating her complaint, turned away and left him.

She heard the click of the door-latch behind her and she knew that the man behind the door in whom she had put her faith was laughing at her. Had she not seen him laugh a score of times in other years at the misery of other women? Had they not sat behind this door, he and she, and made sport of foolish women who came asking the disagreeable, which he ridiculed as the impossible? Had she not sat with him and laughed at his first wife, when she had gone away after some protest? The thought of his mocking face put hate into her heart and she went home hardened toward all the world. Laura Van Dorn was with the Hogan children, and when Violet entered the house, she gathered them to her heart with a mad passion and wept–a woman without hope–a woman spurned and mocked in the only holy place she had in her heart.

Laura saw the widowed mother hysterically fondling the children, madly caressing them, foolishly chattering over them, and when Violet made it clear that she wished to be alone, Laura left. But if she could have heard Violet babbling on during the evening, of the clothes she would buy for the youngsters, about the good times they would have with the money, about the ways they were going to spend the little fortune that was theirs, Laura Van Dorn–thrifty, frugal, shrewd Laura, might have helped the thoughtless woman before it was too late. But even if Laura had interfered, it would have been but for a few months or a few years at most.

The end was inevitable–whether it had been five hundred or six hundred or five thousand or six thousand. For Violet was a prodigal bred and born. At first she tried to get some work. But when she found she had to leave the children alone in the house or in care of a neighbor or on the streets, she gave up her job. For when she came home, she found the foolish frills and starched tucks in which she kept them, dirty and torn, and some way she felt that they were losing social caste by the low estate of their clothes, so she bought them silks and fine linens while her money lasted, and when it was gone in the spring–then they were hungry, and needy; and she could not leave them by day.

If the poor were always wise, and the rich were always foolish, if hardship taught us sense, and indulgence made us giddy, what a fine world it would be. How virtue would be rewarded. How vice would be rebuked. But wisdom does not run with social rank, nor with commercial rating. Some of us who are poor are exceedingly foolish, and some of those who are rich have a world of judgment. And Violet Hogan,–poor and mad with a mother love that was as insane as an animal’s when she saw her children hungry and needy, knew before she knew anything else that she must live with them by day. So she went out at night–went out into the streets–not of South Harvey–but over into the streets of Foley, down to Magnus and Plain Valley–out into the dark places. There Violet by night took up the oldest trade in the world, and came home by day a mad, half crazed mothering animal who covers her young in dread and fear.

When Laura knew the truth–knew it surely in spite of Violet’s studied deceptions, and her outright falsehoods, the silver in the woman’s laugh was muffled for a long time. She tried to help the mad mother; but the mother would not admit the truth, would not confess that she needed help. Violet maintained the fiction that she was working in the night shift at the glass factory in Magnus, and by day she starched and ironed and pressed and washed for the overdressed children and as she said, “tried to keep them somebody.” Moreover, she would not let them play with the dirty children of the neighborhood, but such is the fear of social taint among women, that soon the other mothers called their children home when the Hogan children appeared.

When Violet discovered that her trade was branding her children–she moved to Magnus and became part of the drab tide of life that flows by us daily with its heartbreak unheeded, its sorrows unknown, its anguish pent up and uncomforted.

Now much meditation on the fate of Violet Hogan and upon the luck of Margaret Van Dorn had made George Brotherton question the moral government of the universe and, being disturbed in his mind, he naturally was moved to language. So one raw spring day when no one was in the Amen Corner but Mr. Fenn, in a moment of inadvertent sobriety, Mr. Brotherton opened up his heart and spoke thus:

“Say, Henry–what’s a yogi?” Mr. Fenn refused to commit himself. Mr. Brotherton continued: “The Ex was in here the other day and she says that she thinks she’s going to become a yogi. I asked her to spell it, and I told her I’d be for her against all comers. Then she explained that a yogi was some kind of an adept who could transcend space and time, and–well say, I said ‘sure,’ and she went on to ask me if I was certain we were not thinking matter instead of realizing it, and I says:

“‘I bite; what’s the sell?’

“And the Ex says–‘Now, seriously, Mr. Brotherton, something tells me that you have in your mind, if you would only search it out, vague intimations, left-over impressions of the day you were an ox afield.’

“And, well say, Henry, I says, ‘No, madam, it is an ass that rises in me betimes.’

“And the Ex says, ‘George Brotherton, you just never can talk sense.’

“So while I was wrapping up ‘Sappho’ and ordering her a book with a title that sounded like a college yell, she told me she was getting on a higher plane, and I bowed her out. Say, Hen–now wouldn’t that jar you?–the Ex getting on a higher plane.”

Mr. Fenn grinned–a sodden grin with a four days’ beard on it, and dirty teeth, and heavy eyes, then looked stupidly at the floor and sighed and said,

“George, did you know I’ve quit?” To Mr. Brotherton’s kindly smile the other man replied:

“Yes, sir, sawed ’er right off short–St. Patrick’s Day. I thought I’d ought to quit last Fourth of July–when I tried to eat a live pinwheel. I thought I had gone far enough.” He lifted up his burned-out eyes in the faded smile that once shone like an arc light, and said:

“Man’s a fool to get tangled up with liquor. George, when I get my board bill paid–I’m going to quit the auctioning line, and go back to law. But my landlady’s needing that money, and I’m a little behind–”

Mr. Brotherton made a motion for his pocket. “No, I don’t want a cent of your money, George,” Fenn expostulated. “I was just telling you how things are. I knew you’d like to know.”

Mr. Brotherton came from behind the counter where he had been arranging his stock for the night, and grasped Henry Fenn’s hand. “Say, Henry–you’re all right. You’re a man–I’ve always said so. I tell you, Hen, I’ve been to lots of funerals in this town first and last as pall-bearer or choir singer–pretty nearly every one worth while, but say, I’m right here to tell you that I have never went to one I was sorrier over than yours, Henry–and I’m mighty glad to see you’re coming to again.”

Henry Fenn smiled weakly and said: “That’s right, George–that’s right.”

And Mr. Brotherton went on, “I claim the lady give you the final push–not that she needed to push hard of course; but a little pulling might have held you.”

Mr. Fenn rose to leave and sighed again as he stood for a moment in the doorway–“Yes, George, perhaps so–poor Maggie–poor Maggie.”

Mr. Brotherton looked at the man a moment–saw his round hat with neither back nor front and only the wreck of a band around it, his tousled clothes, his shoes with the soles curling at the sides and the frowsy face, from which the man peered out a second and then slunk back again, and Mr. Brotherton took to his book shelf, scratched his head and indicated by his manner that life was too deep a problem for him.

CHAPTER XXXIII

IN WHICH THE ANGELS SHAKE A FOOT FOR HENRY FENN

The business of life largely resolves itself into a preparation for the next generation. The torch of life moves steadily forward. For children primarily life has organized itself to satisfy decently and in order, the insatiate primal hungers that motive mankind. It was with a wisdom deeper than he understood that George Brotherton spoke one day, as he stood in his doorway and saw Judge Van Dorn hurrying across the street to speak to Lila. “There,” roared Mr. Brotherton to Nathan Perry, “well, say–there’s the substance all right, man.” And then as the Judge turned wearily away with slinking shoulders to avoid meeting the eyes of his wife, plump, palpable, and always personable, who came around the corner, Mr. Brotherton, with a haw-haw of appreciation of his obvious irony, cried, “And there’s the shadow–I don’t think.” But it was the substance and the shadow nevertheless, and possibly the Judge knew them as the considerations of his bargain with the devil. For always he was trying to regain the substance; to take Lila to his heart, where curiously there seemed some need of love, even in a heart which was consecrated in the very temple of love. Without realizing that he was modifying his habits of life, he began to drop in casually to see the children’s Christmas exercises, and Thanksgiving programs, and Easter services at John Dexter’s church. From the back seat where he always sat alone, he sometimes saw the wealth of affection that her mother lavished on Lila, patting her ribbons, smoothing her hair, straightening her dress, fondling her, correcting her, and watching the child with eyes so full of love that they did not refrain sometimes from smiling in kindly appreciation into the eager, burning, tired eyes of the Judge. The mother understood why he came to the exercises, and often she sent Lila to her father for a word. The town knew these things, and the Judge knew that the town knew, and even then he could not keep away. He had to carry the torch of life, whether he would or not, even though sometimes it must have scorched his proud, white hands. It was the only thing that burned with real fire in his heart.

With Laura Van Dorn the fact of her motherhood colored her whole life. Never a baby was born among her poor neighbors in the valley that she did not thrill with a keen delight at its coming, and welcome it with some small material token of her joy. In the baby she lived over again her own first days of maternity. But it was no play motherhood that restored her soul and refilled her receptacle of faith day by day. The bodily, huggable presence of her daughter continually unfolding some new beauty kept her eager for the day’s work to close in the Valley that she might go home to drop the vicarious happiness that she brought in her kindergarten for the real happiness of a home.

Often Grant Adams, hurrying by on his lonely way, paused to tell Laura of a needy family, or to bring a dirty, motherless child to her haven, or to ask her to go to some wayward girl, newly caught in the darker corners of the spider’s web.

Doggedly day by day, little by little, he was bringing the workmen of the Valley to see his view of the truth. The owners were paying spies to spy upon him and he knew it, and the high places of his satisfaction came when, knowing a spy and marking him for a victim, Grant converted him to the union cause. With the booming of the big guns of prosperity in Harvey, he was a sort of undertone, a monotonous drum, throbbing through the valley a menace beneath it all. Once–indeed, twice, as he worked, he organized a demand for higher wages in two or three of the mines, and keeping himself in the background, yet cautiously managing the tactics of the demand, he won. He held Sunday meetings in such halls as the men could afford to hire and there he talked–talked the religion of democracy. As labor moved about in the world, and as the labor press of the country began to know of Grant, he acquired a certain fame as a speaker among labor leaders. And the curious situation he was creating gave him some reputation in other circles. He was good for an occasional story in a Kansas City or Chicago Sunday paper; and the Star reporter, sent to do the feature story, told of a lonely, indomitable figure who was the idol of the laboring people of the Wahoo Valley; of his Sunday meetings; of his elaborate system of organization; of his peaceful demands for higher wages and better shop conditions; of his conversion of spies sent to hinder him, of his never-ceasing effort, unsupported by outside labor leaders, unvisited by the aristocracy of the labor world, yet always respecting it, to preach unionism as a faith rather than as a material means for material advancement.

Generally the reporters devoted a paragraph to the question–what manner of man is this?–and intimating more or less frankly that he was a man of one idea, or perhaps broadening the suggestion into a query whether or not a man who would work for years, scorning fame, scorning regular employment and promotion, neglecting opportunities to rise as a labor leader in his own world, was not just a little mad. So it happened that without seeking fame, fame came to him. All over the Missouri Valley, men knew that Grant Adams, a big, lumbering, red-polled, lusty-lunged man with one arm burned off–and the story of the burning fixed the man always in the public heart–with a curious creed and a freak gift for expounding it, was doing unusual things with the labor situation in the Harvey district. And then one day a reporter came from Omaha who uncovered this bit of news in his Sunday feature story:

“Last week the Wahoo district was paralyzed by the announcement that Nathan Perry, the new superintendent of the Independent mines had raised his wage scale, and had acceded to every change in working conditions that the local labor organizations under Adams had asked. Moreover, he has unionized his mine and will recognize only union grievance committees in dealing with the men. The effect of such an announcement in a district where the avowed purpose of the mine operators is to run their own business as they please, may easily be imagined.

“Perry is a civil engineer from Boston Tech., a rich man’s son, who married a rich man’s daughter, and then cut loose from his father and father-in-law because of a political disagreement over the candidacy of the famous Judge Thomas Van Dorn for a judicial nomination a few years ago. Perry belongs to a new type in industry–rather newer than Adams’s type. Perry is a keen eyed, boyish-looking young man who has no illusions about Adams’s democracy of labor.

“‘I am working out an engineering problem with men,’ said Perry to a reporter to-day. ‘What I want is coal in the cage. I figure that more wages will put more corn meal in a man’s belly, more muscle on his back, more hustle in his legs, and more blood in his brain. And primarily I’m buying muscle and hustle and brains. If I can make the muscle and hustle and brains I buy, yield better dividends than the stuff my competitors buy, I’ll hold my job. If not, I’ll lose it. I am certainly working for my job.’

“Of course the town doesn’t believe for a moment what Perry says. The town is divided. Part of the town thinks that Perry is an Adams convert and a fool, the other half of the town believes that the move is part of a conspiracy of certain eastern financial interests to get control of the Wahoo Valley properties by spreading dissension. Feeling is bitter and Adams and Perry are coming in for considerable abuse. D. Sands, the local industrial entrepreneur, has raised the black flag on his son-in-law, and an interesting time looms ahead.”

But often at night in Perry’s home in South Harvey, where Morty Sands and Grant Adams loved to congregate, there were hot discussions on the labor question. For Nathan Perry was no convert of Grant Adams.

As the men wrangled, many an hour sat Anne Perry singing the nest song as she made little things for the lower bureau drawer. Sometimes in the evening, Morty would sit by the kitchen stove, sadly torn in heart, between the two debaters, seeing the justice of Grant’s side as an ethical question, but admiring the businesslike way in which Nathan waved aside ethical considerations, damned Grant for a crazy man, and proclaimed the gospel of efficiency.

Often Grant walked home from these discussions with his heart hot and rebellious. He saw life only in its spiritual aspect and the logic of Nathan Perry angered him with its conclusiveness.

Often as he walked Kenyon was upon his heart and he wondered if Margaret missed the boy; or if the small fame that the boy was making with his music had touched her vanity with a sense of loss. He wondered if she ever wished to help the child. The whole town knew that the Nesbits were sending Kenyon to Boston to study music, and that Amos Adams and Grant could contribute little to the child’s support. Grant wondered, considering the relations between the Van Dorns and Nesbits, whether sometimes Margaret did not feel a twinge of irritation or regret at the course of things.

He could not know that even as he walked through the November night, Margaret Van Dorn, was sitting in her room holding in her hand a tiny watch, a watch to delight a little girl’s heart. On the inside of the back of the watch was engraved:

“To Lilafrom herFather, forHer 10th birthday.”

And opposite the inscription in the watch was pasted the photograph of the unhappy face of the donor. Margaret sat gazing at the trinket and wondering vaguely what would delight a little boy’s heart as a watch would warm the heart of a little girl. It was not a sense of loss, not regret, certainly not remorse that moved her heart as she sat alone holding the trinket–discovered on her husband’s dresser; it was a weak and footless longing, and a sense of personal wrong that rose against her husband. He had something which she had not. He could give jeweled watches, and she–

But if she only could have read life aright she would have pitied him that he could give only jeweled watches, only paper images of a dissatisfied face, only material things, the token of a material philosophy–all that he knew and all that he had, to the one thing in the world that he really could love. And as for Margaret, his wife, who lived his life and his philosophy, she, too, had nothing with which to satisfy the dull, empty feeling in her heart when she thought of Kenyon, save to make peace with it in hard metal and stupid stones. Thus does what we think crust over our souls and make us what we are.

Grant Adams, plodding homeward that night, turned from the thought of Margaret to the thought of Kenyon with a wave of joy, counting the days and weeks and the months until the boy should return for the summer. At home Grant sat down before the kitchen table and began a long talk that kept him until midnight. He had undertaken to organize all the unions of the place into a central labor council; the miners, the smeltermen, the teamsters, the cement factory workers, the workers in the building trades. It was an experimental plan, under the auspices of the national union officers. Only a man like Grant Adams, with something more than a local reputation as a leader, would have been intrusted with the work. And so, after his day’s toil for bread, he sat at his kitchen table, elaborately working his dream into reality.

That season the devil, if there is a devil who seeks to swerve us from what we deem our noblest purposes, came to Grant Adams disguised in an offer of a considerable sum of money to Grant for a year’s work in the lecture field. The letter bearing the offer explained that by going out and preaching the cause of labor to the people, Grant would be doing his cause more good than by staying in Harvey and fighting alone. The thought came to him that the wider field of work would give him greater personal fame, to be used ultimately for a wider influence. All one long day as he worked with hammer and saw at his trade, Grant turned the matter over in his mind. He could see himself in a larger canvas, working a greater good. Perhaps some fleeting unformed idea came to him of a home and a normal life as other men live; for at noon, without consciously connecting her with his dream, he took his problem to Laura Van Dorn at her kindergarten. That afternoon he decided to accept the offer, and put much of his reason for acceptance upon Kenyon and the boy’s needs. That night he penned a letter of acceptance to the lecture bureau and went to bed, disturbed and unsatisfied. Before he slept he turned and twisted, and finally threshed himself to sleep. It was a light fragmentary sleep, that moves in and out of some strange hypnoidal state where the lower consciousness and the normal consciousness wrestle for the control of reason. Then after a long period of half-waking dreams, toward morning, Grant sank into a profound sleep. In that sleep his soul, released from all that is material, rose and took command of his will.