In the Heart of a Fool

Van Dorn sprang up. He cried: “What business is it of yours? You she devil, what’s the boy to you? Can’t I run my own business? Why do you care so much for the Adams brat? Answer me, I tell you–answer me,” he cried, his wrath filling his voice.

“Oh, nothing, dawling,” she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: “Oh, nothing, Tom–only you see I might be his mother!”

She played with the vulgar diamonds that hid her fingers and looked down coyly as she smiled into his gray face.

“Great God,” he whispered, “were you born a–” he stopped, ashamed of the word in his mouth.

The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on one side as she replied: “Whatever I am, I’m the wife of Judge Van Dorn; so I’m quite respectable now–whatever I was once. Isn’t that lawvly, dawling!” She began talking in her baby manner.

Her husband was staring at her with doubt and fear and weak, footless wrath playing like scurrying clouds across his proud, shamed face.

“Oh, Margaret, tell me the truth,” he moaned, as the fear of the truth baffled him–a thousand little incidents that had attracted his notice and passed to be stirred up by a puzzled consciousness came rushing into his memory–and the doubt and dread overcame even his hate for a moment and he begged. But she laughed, and scouted the idea and then called out in anguish:

“Why–why have you a child to love–to love and live for even if you cannot be with her–why can I have none?”

“Tom,” she said coldly, “no matter why I’m fond of Kenyon Adams–that’s my business; Lila is your business, and I don’t interfere, do I? Well,” she said, looking the man in the eyes with a hard, mean, significant stare, “you let the boy alone–do you understand? Do what you please with Grant or Jasper or the old man; but Kenyon–hands off!”

She rose, slipped quickly to the stairway, and as she ran up she called, “Good night, dawling.” Before he was on his feet he heard the lock click in her door, and with a horrible doubt, an impotent rage, and a mantling shame stifling him, he went upstairs and from her distant room she heard the bolt click in the door of his room. And behind the bolted doors stood two ghosts–the ghosts of rejected children, calling across the years, while the smudge of the extinguished torch of life choked two angry hearts.

“My dear,” quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had discussed Lila’s adventure of the night before, “I saw Tom up town this morning and he didn’t seem to be exactly happy. I says, ‘Tom, I hear you beat God at his own game last night!’ and,” the Doctor chuckled, “Laura, do you know, he wouldn’t speak to me!” As he laughed, the daughter interrupted:

“Why, father–that was mean–”

“Of course it was mean. Why–considering everything, I’d lick a man if he’d talk that mean to me. But my Eenjiany devil kind of got control of my forbearing Christian spirit and I cut loose.”

The daughter smiled, then she sighed, and asked: “Father–tell me, why did that woman object to Tom’s use of Kenyon in the riot last night?”

Doctor Nesbit opened his mouth as if to answer her. Then he smiled and said, “Don’t ask me, child. She’s a bad egg!”

“Lila says,” continued the daughter, “that Margaret appears at every public place where Kenyon plays. She seems eager to talk to him about his accomplishments, and has a sort of fascinated interest in whatever he does, as nearly as I can understand it? Why, father? What do you suppose it is? I asked Grant, who was here this morning with a Croatian baby whose mother is in the glass works, and Grant only shook his head.” The father looked at his daughter over his glasses and asked:

“Well, father, I would. And when you get the dirt off they’re mostly just folks–just Indiany, as you call it. They all take my flower seeds. And they all love bright colors in their windows. And they are spreading the glow of blooms across the district, just as well as the Germans and the French and the Belgians and the Irish. And they are here for exactly the same thing which we are here for, father. We’re all in the same game.”

He looked at her blankly, and ventured, “Money?”

The Doctor had lighted his pipe, and was puffing meditatively. He liked to hear his daughter talk. He took little stock in what she said. But when she asked him for help–he gave it to her unstinted, but often with a large, tolerant disbelief in the wisdom of her request. As she paused he turned to her quickly, “Laura–tell me, what do you make out of Grant?”

He eyed her sharply as she replied: “Father, Grant is a lonely soul without chick or child, and I’m sorry for him. He goes–”

“Well, now, Laura,” piped the little man, “don’t be too sorry. Sorrow is a dangerous emotion.”

The daughter turned her face to her father frankly and said: “I realize that, father. Don’t concern yourself about that. But I see Grant some way, eating the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, calling out to a stiff-necked generation to repent. His eyes are focussed on to-morrow. He expects an immediate millennium. But he is at least looking forward, not back. And the world back of us is so full of change, that I am sure the world before us also must be full of change, and maybe sometime we shall arrive at Grant’s goal. He’s not working for himself, either in fame or in power, or in any personal thing. He’s just following the light as it is given him to see it, here among the poor.”

The daughter lifted a face full of enthusiasm to her father. He puffed in silence. “Well, my dear, that’s a fine speech. But when I asked you about Grant I was rising to a sort of question of personal privilege. I thought perhaps I would mix around at his meeting to-night! If you think I should, just kind of stand around to give him countenance–and,” he chuckled and squeaked: “To bundle up a few votes!”

“Do, father–do–you must!”

He was about to speak again when Laura interrupted him, “Oh, father–they’re not God’s poor, whose ever they are. Don’t say that. They’re Daniel Sands’s poor, and the Smelter Trust’s poor, and the Coal Trust’s poor, and the Glass and Cement and Steel company’s poor. I’ve learned that down here. Why, if the employers would only treat the workers as fairly as they treat the machines, keeping them fit, and modern and bright, God would have no poor!”

The Doctor rose and stretched and smiled indulgently at his daughter. “Heigh-ho the green holly,” he droned. “Well, have it your way. God’s poor or Dan’s poor, they’re my votes, if I can get ’em. So we’ll come to the meeting to-night and blow a few mouthfuls on the fires of revolution, for the good of the order!”

It was six o’clock, but the summer sun still was high and the traffic in the street was thick. For a time, while a woman with a child with shriveled legs was talking to Laura about the child’s education, the Doctor sat gazing into the street. When the room was empty, he exclaimed, “It’s a long weary way from the sunshine and prairie grass, child! How it all has changed with the years! Ten years ago I knew ’em all, the men and the employers. Now they are all newcomers–men and masters. Why, I don’t even know their nationalities; I don’t even know what part of the earth they come from. And such sad-faced droves of them; so many little scamps, underfed, badly housed for generations. The big, strapping Irish and Germans and Scotch and the wide-chested little Welshmen, and the agile French–how few of them there are compared with this slow-moving horde of runts from God knows where! It’s been a long time since I’ve been down here to see a shift change, Laura. Lord–Lord have mercy on these people–for no one else seems to care!”

“Amen, and Amen, father,” answered the daughter. “These are the people that Grant is trying to stir to consciousness. These are the people who–”

Towering above a group of workers from the South of Europe–a delegation from the new wire mill in Plain Valley, Grant Adams came swinging down the street, a Gulliver among his Lilliputians. Although it was not even twilight, it was evident to the Doctor that something more than the changing shifts in the mills was thickening the crowds in the street. Little groups were forming at the corners, good-natured groups who seemed to know that they were not to be molested. And the Doctor at his window watched Grant passing group after group, receiving its unconscious homage; just a look, or a waving hand, or an affectionate, half-abashed little cheer, or the turning of a group of heads all one way to catch Grant’s eyes as he passed.

At the Captain’s vacant lot, Grant rose before a cheering throng that filled the lot, and overflowed the sidewalk and crowded far down the street. Two flickering torches flared at his head. An electric in front of the Hot Dog and a big arc-light over the door of the smelter lighted the upturned faces of the multitude. When the crowd had ceased cheering, Grant, looking into as many eyes of his hearers as he could catch, began:

“I have come to talk to Esau–the disinherited–to Esau who has forfeited his birthright. I am here to speak to those who are toiling in the world’s rough work unrequited–I am here, one of the poor to talk to the poor.”

He spoke for a time upon the aims of organization, and set forth the doctrine of class solidarity. He told labor that in its ranks altruism, neighborly kindness that is the surest basis of progress, has a thousand disintegrated expressions. “The kindness of the poor to the poor, if expressed in terms of money, would pay the National debt over night,” he said, and, letting out his voice, and releasing his strength, he begged the men and women who work and sweat at their work to give that altruism some form and direction, to put it into harness–to form it into ranks, drilled for usefulness. Then he spoke of the day when class consciousness would not be needed, when the unions would have served their mission, when the class wrong that makes the class suffering and thus marks the class line, would disappear just as they have disappeared in the classes that have risen during the last two centuries.

They did not cheer as he talked. But they stood leaning forward intently listening. Some of his hearers had expected to hear class hatred preached. Others were expecting to hear the man lash his enemies and many had assumed that he would denounce those who had committed the mistakes of the night before. Instead of giving his hearers these things, he preached a gospel of peace and love and hope. His hearers did not understand that the maimed, lean, red-faced man before them was dipping deeply into their souls and that they were considering many things which they had not questioned before.

When he plunged into the practical part of his speech, an explanation of the allied unions of the Valley, he told in detail something of the ten years’ struggle to bring all the unions together under one industrial council in the Wahoo Valley, and listed something of the strength of the organization. He declared that the time had come for the organization to make a public fight for recognition; that organization in secret and under cover was no longer honorable. “The employers are frankly and publicly allied,” said Grant. “They have their meetings to talk over matters of common interest. Why should not the unions do the same thing? The smelter men, the teamsters, the miners, the carpenters, the steel workers, the painters, the glass workers, the printers–all the organized men and women in this district have the same common interests that their employers have, and we should in no wise be ashamed of our organization. This meeting is held to proclaim our pride in the common ground upon which organized labor stands with organized capital in the Wahoo Valley.”

“We have come to bring brotherhood into this earth. For in the union every man sacrifices something to the common good; mutual help means mutual sacrifice, and self-denial is brotherly love. Fraternity and democracy are synonymous. We must rise together by self-help. I know how easy it is for the rich man to become poor. I know that often the poor man becomes rich. But when Esau throws off the yoke of Jacob, when the poor shall rise and come into their own, the rise shall not be as individuals, but as a class. The glass workers are better paid than the teamsters; but their interests are common, and the better paid workers cannot rise except their poorly paid fellow workmen rise with them. It is a class problem and it must have a class solution.”

He paused as one looking for an answer–hesitant, eager, expectant. Then he drew a long breath, turned slowly and sadly and walked away.

No cheer followed him. The crowd was stirred too deeply for cheers. But the seed he had sown quickened in a thousand hearts even if in some hearts it fell among thorns, even if in some it fell upon stony ground. The sower had gone forth to sow.

The stage is dark. In the dim distance something is moving. It is a world hurrying through space. Somewhat in the foreground but enveloped in the murk sit three figures. They are tending a vast loom. Its myriad threads run through illimitable space and the woof of the loom is time. The three figures weaving through the dark do not know whence comes the power that moves the loom eternally. They have not asked. They work in the pitch of night.

From afar in the earth comes a voice–high-keyed and gentle:

A Voice, pianissimo:

“This business of governing a sovereign people is losing its savor. I must be getting some kind of spiritual necrosis. Generally speaking, about all the real pleasure a grand llama of politics finds in life, is in counting his ingrates–his governors and senators and congressmen! Why, George, it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve cussed out a senator or a governor, yet I read Browning with joy and the last time I heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, I went stark mad. But woe is me, George! Woe is me. When the Judge and Dan Sands named the postmaster last month without consulting me, I didn’t care. I tell you, George, I must be getting old!”

Second Voice, fortissimo:

Third Voice, adagio:

“James, my guides say that we’re beginning a great movement from the few to the many. That is their expression. Cromwell thinks it means economic changes; but I was talking with Jefferson the other night and he says no–it means political changes in order to get economic. He says Tilden tells him–”

The Second Voice, fortissimo:

“Who cares what Tilden says! My noodle tells me that there’s to be a big do in this world, and my control tinkles the cash register, pops into the profit account, eats up ten cent magazines, and gets away with five feet of literary dynamite fuse every week. I’m that old Commodore Noah that’s telling you to get out your rubbers for the flood.”

The First Voice, andante con expression:

“It’s a queer world–a mighty queer world. Here’s Laura’s kindergarten growing until it joins with Violet Hogan’s day nursery and Laura’s flower seeds splashing color out of God’s sunshine in front yards clear down to Plain Valley. Money coming in about as they need it. Dan Sands and Morty, Wright and Perry and the Dago saloon keeper, Joe Calvin, John Dexter and the gamblers–all the robbers, high and low, dividing their booty. With all the prosperity we are having, with all the opening of mills and factories–it’s getting easier to make money and consequently harder to respect it. The more money there is, the less it buys, and that is true in public sentiment just as it is in groceries and furniture. Do you fellows realize that it’s been ten years since the Times has run any of those ‘Pen Portraits of Self-Made Men’?” A silence, then the voice continues:

The voices cease. The earth whirls on. The brooding spirits at the loom muse in silence, for they need no voices.

The First Fate: “The birds! The birds! I seemed to hear the night birds twittering to bring in the dawn.”

The Second Fate: “The birds do not bring in the dawn. The dawn comes.”

The First Fate: “But always and always before the day, we hear these voices.”

The Third Fate: “World after world threads its time through our loom. We watch the pattern grow. Days and eras and ages pass. We know nothing of meanings. We only weave. We know that the pattern brightens as new days come and always voices in the dark tell us of the changing pattern of a new day.”

The First Fate: “But the birds–the birds! I seem to hear the night birds’ voices that make the dawn.”

The Second Fate: “They are not birds calling, but the whistle of shot and shell and the shrill, far cries of man in air. But still I say the dawn comes, the voices do not bring it.”

The Third Fate: “We do not know how the awakening voices in the dark know that the light is coming. We do not know what power moves the loom. We do not know who dreams the pattern. We only weave and muse and listen for the voices of change as a world threads its events through the woof of time on our loom.”

The stage is dark. The weavers weave time into circumstances and in the blackness the world moves on. Slowly it grays. A thousand voices rise. Then circumstance begins to run brightly on the loom, and a million voices join in the din of the dawn. The loom goes. The weavers fade. The light in the world pales the thread of time and the whirl of the earth no longer is seen. But instead we see only a town. Half of it shines in the morning sun–half of it hides in the smoke. In the sun on the street is a man.

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.

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.”

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:

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,” 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.”

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 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.”

“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.

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.”

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!

In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams’s ship of dreams was left high and dry in the salt marsh. Finally a time came when the tide began to boom in. But in no substantial way did his newspaper feel the impulse of the current. The Tribune was an old hulk; it could not ride the tide. And its skipper, seedy, broken with the years, always too gentle for the world about him, even at his best, ever ready to stop work to read a book, Amos Adams, who had been a crank for a third of a century, remained a crank when much that he preached in earlier years was accepted by the multitude.

The day after Amos Adams and Tom Van Dorn had met in the Serenity of Books and Wallpaper at Brotherton’s, Grant was in the Tribune office. “Grant,” the father was getting down from his high stool to dump his type on the galley; “Grant, I had a tiff with Tom Van Dorn yesterday. Lord, Lord,” cried the old man, as he bent over, straightening some type that his nervous hand had knocked down. “I wonder, Grant”–the father rose and put his hand on his back, as he stood looking into his son’s face–“I wonder if all that we feel, all that we believe, all that we strive and live for–is a dream? Are we chasing shadows? Isn’t it wiser to conform, to think of ourselves first and others afterward–to go with the current of life and not against it? Of course, my guides–”

“Father,” cried Grant, “I saw Tom Van Dorn yesterday, too, in his big new car–and I don’t need your guides to tell me who is moving with the current and who is buffeting it. Oh, father, that hell-scorched face–don’t talk to me about his faith and mine!” The old man remounted his printer’s stool for another half-hour’s work before dusk deepened, and smiled as he pulled his steel spectacles over his clear old eyes.

Yet the rebellion of Grant Adams’s soul was no new thing to the world. He was treading the rough road that lies under the feet of all those who try to divert their lives from the hard and wicked morals of their times. For the kingdoms of this earth are organized for those who devote themselves chiefly, though of course not wholly, to the consideration of self. The world is still vastly egoistic in its balance. And the unbroken struggle of progress from Abel to yesterday’s reformer, has been, is, and shall be the battle with the spirit that chains us to the selfish, accepted order of the passing day. So Grant Adams’s face was battle scarred, but his soul, strong and exultant, burst through his flesh and showed itself at many angles of his being. And a grim and militant thing it looked. The flinty features of the man, his coarse mouth, his indomitable blue eyes, his red poll, waving like a banner above his challenging forehead, wrinkled and seamed and gashed with the troubles of harsh circumstance, his great animal jaw at the base of the spiritual tower of his countenance–all showed forth the warrior’s soul, the warrior of the rebellion that is as old as time and as new as to-morrow.

The reformer with his iridescent dream of progress often hangs its realization upon a single phase of change. Thus when Grant Adams banished black powder from the district, he expected the whole phantasm of dawn to usher in the perfect day for the miners. When he secured electric lights in the runways and baths in the shaft house, he confidently expected large things to follow. While large things hesitated, he saw another need and hurried to it.

Thus it happened, that in the hurrying after a new need, Grant Adams had always remained in his own district, except for a brief season when he and Dr. Nesbit sallied forth in a State-wide campaign to defend the Doctor’s law to compel employers to pay workmen for industrial accidents, as the employers replace broken machinery–a law which the Doctor had pushed through the Legislature and which was before the people for a referendum vote. When Grant went out of the Wahoo Valley district he attracted curious crowds, crowds that came to see the queer labor leader who won without strikes. And when the crowds came under Grant’s spell, he convinced them. For he felt intensely. He believed that this law would right a whole train of incidental wrongs of labor. So he threw himself into the fight with a crusader’s ardor. Grant and the Doctor journeyed over the State through July and August; and in September the wily Doctor trapped Tom Van Dorn into a series of joint debates with Grant that advertised the cause widely and well. From these debates Grant Adams emerged a somebody in politics. For oratory, however polished, and scholarship, however plausible, cannot stand before the wrath of an indignant man in a righteous cause who can handle himself and suppress his wrath upon the platform.

As the week of the debate dragged on and as the pageant of it trailed clear across the State, with crowds hooting and cheering, Doctor Nesbit’s cup of joy ran over. And when Van Dorn failed to appear for the Saturday meeting at the capital, the Doctor’s happiness mounted to glee.

“Grant, I can give the concert all right–but, young man, you are selling the soap. That’s a great argument you have been making this week, Grant.”

“There wasn’t much to my argument, Doctor,” answered Grant, absently, “though it was a righteous cause. All I did was to make an appeal to the pocketbooks of Market Street all over the State, showing the merchants and farmers that the more the laboring man receives the more he will spend, and if he is paid for his accidents he will buy more prunes and calico; whereas, if he is not paid he will burden the taxes as a pauper. Tom couldn’t overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people.”

But Dr. Nesbit persisted with his figure. “Grant,” he piped, “you certainly can sell soap. Why don’t you sell some soap on your own hook? Why don’t you let me run you for something–Congress–governor, or something? We can win hands down.”

The Doctor did not answer. His seventy years, and his habit of thinking in terms of votes and parties and factions, made him sigh.

“Doctor,” cried Grant, “electing men to office won’t help. But this law we are fighting for–this law will help. Doctor, I’m pinning the faith of a decade of struggle on this law.”

The Doctor broke the silence that followed Grant’s declaration, to say: “Grant, I don’t see it your way. I feel that life must crystallize its progress in institutions–political institutions, before progress is safe. But you must work out your own life, my boy. Incidentally,” he piped, “I believe you are wrong. But after this campaign is over, I’m going up to the capital for one last fling at making a United States Senator. I’ve only a dozen little white chips in the great game, five in the upper house and seven in the lower house. But we may deadlock it, and if we do,–you’ll see thirty years drop off my head and witness the rejuvenation of Old Linen Pants.”

Grant began walking the platform again under the stars like an impatient ghost. The Doctor rose and followed him.

“Grant, now let me tell you something. I am half inclined at times to think it’s all moonshine–this labor law we’re working to establish. But Laura wants it, and God knows, Grant, she has little enough in her life down there in the Valley. And if this law makes her happy–it’s the least I can do for her. She hasn’t had what she should have had out of life, so I’m trying to make her second choice worth while. That’s why I’m on the soap wagon with you!” He would have laughed away this serious mood, but he could not.

Grant stared at the Doctor for a moment before answering: “Why, of course, Dr. Nesbit, I’ve always known that.

The day had passed in the elder’s life when he could rise to the younger man’s emotions. He looked curiously at Grant and said softly:

“Oh, to be young–to be young–to be young!” He rose, touched the strong arm beside him. “‘And the young men shall see visions.’ To be young–just to be young! But ‘the old men shall dream dreams.’ Well, Grant, they are unimportant–not entirely pleasant. We young men of the seventies had a great material vision. The dream of an empire here in the West. It has come true–increased one hundred fold. Yet it is not much of a dream.”

He let the arm drop and began drumming on the truck as he concluded: “But it’s all I have–all the dream I have now. ‘All of which I saw, and part of which I was,’ yet,” he mused, “perhaps it will be used as a foundation upon which something real and beautiful will be builded.”

Far away the headlight of their approaching train twinkled upon the prairie horizon. The two men watched it glow into fire and come upon them. And without resuming their talk, each went his own wide, weary way in the world as they lay in adjoining berths on the speeding train.

At the general election the Doctor’s law was upheld by a majority of the votes in the State, but the Doctor himself was defeated for reëlection to the State Senate in his own district. Grant Adams waited, intently and with fine faith, for this law to bring in the millennium. But the Doctor had no millennial faith.

But he could not put up a fight and his temperature rose in the afternoon and he could not meet with his gymnasium class in South Harvey in the evening, but sent a trainer instead. So often weeks passed during which Laura Van Dorn did not see Morty and the daily boxes of flowers that came punctiliously with his cards to the kindergarten and to Violet Hogan’s day nursery, were their only reminders of the sorry, lonely, footless struggle Morty was making.

It was inevitable that the lives of Violet Hogan and Laura Van Dorn in South Harvey should meet and merge. And when they met and merged, Violet Hogan found herself devoting but a few hours a day to her day nursery, while she worked six long, happy hours as a stenographer for Grant Adams in his office at the Vanderbilt House. For, after all, it was as a stenographer that she remembered herself in the grandeur and the glory of her past. So Henry Fenn and Laura Van Dorn carried on the work that Violet began, and for them souls and flowers and happiness bloomed over the Valley in the dark, unwholesome places which death had all but taken for his own.

It was that spring when Dr. Nesbit went to the capital and took his last fling at State politics. For two months he had deadlocked his party caucus in the election of a United States Senator with hardly more than a dozen legislative votes. And he was going out of his dictatorship in a golden glow of glory.

It was one beautiful day in late March, after the November election wherein the Doctor’s law had won and the Doctor himself had lost, that Grant Adams was in Harvey figuring with Mr. Brotherton on supplies for his office. Captain Morton came tramping down the clouds before him as he swept into the Serenity and jabbed a spike through the wheels of commerce with the remark: “Well, George–what do you think of my regalia–eh?”

Mr. Brotherton and Grant looked up from their work. They beheld the Captain arrayed in a dazzling light gray spring suit–an exceedingly light gray suit, with a hat of the same color and gloves and shoe spats to match, with a red tie so red that it all but crackled. “First profits of the business. We got over the line yesterday noon, and I had a thousand to go on, and this morning I just went on this spree–what say?”

“Well, Cap, when Morty Sands sees you he will die of envy. You’re certainly the lily of the Valley and the bright and morning star–the fairest of ten thousand to my soul! Grant,” said Brotherton as he turned to his customer, “behold the plute!”

The Captain stood grinning in pride as the men looked him over.

“’Y gory, boys, you’d be surprised the way that Household Horse has hit the trade. Orders coming in from automobile makers, and last week we decided to give up making the little power saver and make the whole rear axle. We’re going to call it the Morton-Perry Axle, and put in a big plant, and I was telling Ruthy this morning, I says, ‘Ruth,’ says I, ‘if we make the axle business go, I’ll just telephone down to Wright & Perry and have them send you out something nobby in husbands, and, ’y gory, a nice thousand-mile wedding trip and maybe your pa will go along for company–what say?’”

“Scared–scared plumb stiff–what say? I caught Marthy nodding at Ruth and Ruthy looking hard at Marthy, and then both of ’em went to the kitchen to talk over calling up Emmy and putting out fly poison for the women that are lying in wait for their pa. Scared–why, scared’s no name for it–what say?”

“Well, Captain,” answered Mr. Brotherton, “you are certainly voluptuous enough in your new stage setting to have your picture on a cigar box as a Cuban beauty or a Spanish señorita.”

The Captain was turning about, trying to see how the coat set in the back and at the same time watching the hang of the trousers. Evidently he was satisfied with it. For he said: “Well–guess I’ll be going. I’ll just mosey down to Mrs. Herdicker’s to give Emmy and Marthy and Ruthy something to keep ’em from thinking of their real troubles–eh?” And with a flourish he was gone.