In the Heart of a Fool

he bellowed.

“Now, l-l-listen, T-T-Tom,” insisted Perry. “I t-t-tell you the bunch has g-g-got Grant Adams and the old man out there in the g-g-golf l-links and they heard you were h-h-here and they s-s-sent me to tell you they were g-g-going to g-g-give him all the d-d-degrees and they w-w-want to t-t-tie a s-s-sign on him when they t-t-turn him loose and h-h-head him for Om-m-ma-h-ha–”

“B-b-better h-h-h-head him for h-h-hell,” mocked the Judge.

“Well, they’ve g-got an iron b-b-band they’ve b-b-bound on h-h-him and they’ve got a b-b-board and some t-t-tar and they w-w-want a m-motto.”

The Judge reached for his fountain pen in his white vest and when the waiter had brought a sheet of paper, he scribbled while he sang sleepily:

“Here,” he pushed the paper to Perry, who saw the words:

“That’s k-k-kind of t-t-tame, don’t y-y-you think?” said Kyle.

“That’s all right, Kyle–anyway, what I’ve written goes:

He sang and waved Kyle proudly away. And in another hour the waiter had put him to bed.

She had come through rain from Harvey. As she came into the dreary, shabby, little room in South Harvey, with its artificial palms and artificial wreaths–cheap, commercial habiliments of ostentatious mourning, Laura Van Dorn thought how cruel it was that he should be there, in a public place at the end, with only the heavy hands of paid attendants to do the last earthly services for him–whose whole life was a symbol of love.

But her heart was stricken, deeply, poignantly stricken by the great peace she found behind the white door. Yet thus the dust touches our souls’ profoundest depths–always with her memory of that great peace, comes the memory of the odor of varnish and carbolic acid and the drawn, spent face of George Brotherton, as he stood before her when she closed the door. He gazed at her piteously, a wreck of a man, storm-battered and haggard. His big hands were shaking with a palsy of terrible grief. His moon face was inanimate, and vagrant emotions from his heart flicked across his features in quivers of anguish. His thin hair was tousled and his clothes were soiled and disheveled.

The man broke into tears, but bit his lips and continued: “Oh, they ran like snakes then–like snakes–like snakes, and we came crashing down to the tree and in a moment the last machine had piked–but I know ’em, every man-jack!” he cried. “There was the old man, tied hand and foot, three yards from the tree, and there, half leaning, half sitting by the tree, the boy, the big, red-headed, broken and crippled boy–was panting his life out.” Brotherton caught her inquiring eyes. “It was all gone, Laura,” he said softly, “all gone. He was the boy, the shy, gentle boy that we used to know–and always have loved. All this other that the years have brought was wiped from his eyes. They were so tender and–” He could go no further. She nodded her understanding. He finally continued: “The first thing he said to me was, ‘It’s all right, George.’ He was tied, they had pulled the claw off and his poor stumped arm was showing and he was bleeding–oh, Laura.”

Brotherton fumbled in his pocket and handed an envelope to her.

“‘George,’ he panted, as I tried to make him comfortable–‘have Nate look after father.’ And when Nate had gone he whispered between gasps, ‘that letter there in the court room–’ He had to stop a moment, then he whispered again, ‘is for her, for Laura.’ He tried to smile, but the blood kept bubbling up. We lifted him into an easier position, but nothing helped much. He realized that and when we quit he said:

“‘Now then, George, promise me this–they’re not to blame. John Kollander isn’t to blame. It was funny; Kyle Perry saw him as I did, and Kyle–’ he almost laughed, Laura.

“‘Kyle,’ he repeated, ‘tried to yell at old John, but got so excited stuttering, he couldn’t! I’m sure the fellows didn’t intend–’ he was getting weak; ‘this,’ he said.

“‘That’s hers,’ he said; ‘the letter,’ and then ‘my messages–happy.’”

The woman pressed her letter to her lips and looked at the white door. She rose and, holding her letter to her bosom, closed her eyes and stood with a hand on the knob. She dropped her hand and turned from the white door. The dawn was graying in the ugly street. But on the clouds the glow of sunrise blushed in promise. She walked slowly toward the street. She gazed for a moment at the glorious sky of dawn.

When her eyes met her friend’s, she cried:

“Give me your hand–that hand!”

She seized it, gazed hungrily at it a second, then kissed it passionately. She looked back at the white door, and shook with sobs as she cried:

“Oh, you don’t think he’s there–there in the night–behind the door? We know–oh, we do know he’s out here–out here in the dawn.”

The great strike in the Wahoo Valley now is only an episode in the history of this struggle of labor for its rights. The episode is receding year by year further and more dimly into the past and is one of the long, half-forgotten skirmishes wherein labor is learning the truth that only in so far as labor dares to lean on peace and efficiency can labor move upward in the scale of life. The larger life with its wider hope, requires the deeper fellowship of men. The winning or losing of the strike in the Wahoo meant little in terms of winning or losing; but because the men kept the peace, kept it to the very end, the strike meant much in terms of progress. For what they gained was permanent; based on their own strength, not on the weakness of those who would deny them.

But the workers in the mines and mills of the Wahoo Valley, who have gone to and from their gardens, planting and cultivating and harvesting their crops for many changing seasons, hold the legend of the strong man, maimed and scarred, who led them in that first struggle with themselves, to hold themselves worthy of their dreams. In a hundred little shacks in the gardens, and in dingy rooms in the tenements may be found even to-day newspaper clippings pinned to the wall with his picture on them, all curled up and yellow with years. Before a wash-stand, above a bed or pasted over the kitchen stove, soiled and begrimed, these clippings recall the story of the man who gave his life to prove his creed. So the fellowship he brought into the world lives on.

Of course, there came a time in Harvey, even in the house of Nesbit, when there was marrying and giving in marriage. It was on a winter’s night when the house inside the deep, dark Moorish verandas, celebrating Mrs. Nesbit’s last bout with the spirit of architecture, glowed with a jewel of light.

But they in the house did not know of the meeting. For everybody was kissing everybody else, and the peppermint candy in little Grant Brotherton’s mouth tasted on a score of lips in three minutes, and a finger dab of candy on Jasper Adams’s shirt front made the world akin.

After the guests had gone, three old men lingered by the smoldering logs. “Well, now, Doc Jim,” asked Amos, “why shouldn’t I? Haven’t I paid taxes in Greeley County for nearly fifty years? Didn’t I make the campaign for that home in the nineties, when they called it the poor house–most people call it that now. I only stay there when I am lonesome and I go out in a taxi-cab at the county’s expense like a gentleman to his estate. And I guess it is my estate. I was talking to Lincoln about it the other night, and he says he approves. Ruskin says I am living my religion like a diamond in the rock.”

To the Captain’s protest he answered, “Oh, yes, I know that–but that would be charity. My pencils and shoestrings and collar buttons and coat hangers keep me in spending money. I couldn’t take charity even from you men. And Jasper’s money,” the gray poll wagged, and he cried, “Oh, no–not Ahab Wright’s and Kyle Perry’s–not that money. Kenyon is forever slipping me fifty. But I don’t need it. John Dexter keeps a room always ready for me, and I like it at the Dexters’ almost as much as I do at the county home. So I don’t really need Kenyon’s money, however much joy he takes in giving it. And I raise the devil’s own fuss to keep him from doing it.”

The Doctor puffed, and the Captain in his regal garments paraded the long room, with his hands locked under his coattails.

The white old head shook and the pursed old lips smiled, as the thin little voice replied, “Not yet, Ezra–not yet–I don’t need the pension yet. And as for the Home–it’s not lonesome there. A lot of ’em are bedfast and stricken and I get a certain amount of fun–chirping ’em up on cloudy days. They like to hear from Emerson and John A. Logan, and Sitting Bull and Huxley and their comrades. So I guess I’m being more or less useful.” He stroked his scraggy beard and looked at the fire. “And then,” he added, “she always seems nearer where there is sorrow. Grant, too, is that way, though neither of ’em really has come.”

The Captain finding that his money was ashes in his hands, and not liking the thought and meditation of death, changed the subject, and when the evening was old, Amos Adams called a taxi-cab, and at the county’s expense rode home.

At the end of a hard winter day, descending tardily into the early spring, they missed him at the farm. No one knew whether he had gone to visit the Dexters, as was his weekly wont, or whether he was staying with Captain Morton in town, where he sometimes spent Saturday night after the Grand Army meeting.

The next day the sun came out and melted the untimely snow banks. And some country boys playing by a limestone ledge in a wide upland meadow above the Wahoo, far from the smoke of town, came upon the body of an old man. Beside him was strewn a meager peddler’s kit. On his knees was a tablet of paper; in his left hand was a pencil tightly gripped. On the tablet in a fine, even hand were the words: “I am here, Amos,” and his old eyes, stark and wide, were drooped, perhaps to look at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion that shone on his shrunken chest and told of a great dream of a nation come true, or perhaps in the dead, stark eyes was another vision in another world.

And so as in the beginning, there was blue sky and sunshine and prairie grass at the end.

“And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!” And this fable teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of progress that God has been working in this America of ours during these splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.

And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent–rich, crass, material, beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the god of gross and palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American spirit–the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the seas, had bid them fight kings and principalities and powers, had forced them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it “the homestead of the free”; the spirit that had called them by the millions to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.

This spirit met the god of things as they are, and for a generation grappled in a mighty struggle.

Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans to go forth and fight in the Great War–not for themselves, not for their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world. And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how God’s truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own was won.

So it came to pass that the richness of the continent was poured out for an ideal, that the genius of those who had seemed to be serving only Mammon was devoted passionately to a principle, and that the blood of those who came in seeming greed to America was shed gloriously in the high emprise which called America to this new world crusade. Moses in the burning bush speaking with God, Saul on the road to Damascus, never came closer to the force outside ourselves which makes for righteousness,–the force that has guided humanity upward through the ages,–than America has come in this hour of her high resolve. And yet for fifty years she has come into this holy ground steadily, and unswervingly; indeed, for a hundred years, for three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to the red fields of France, America has come a long and perilous way–yet always sure, and never faltering.

THE END

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