It was an old complaint in Harvey that the Harvey Tribune was too much of a bulletin of the doings of the Adams family and their friends. But when a man sets all the type on a paper, writes all the editorials and gets all the news he may be pardoned if he takes first such news as is near his hand. Thus in the May that followed events set down in the last chapter we find in the Tribune a few items of interest to the readers of this narrative. We learn for instance that Captain Ezra Morton who is introducing the Nonesuch Sewing Machine, paid his friends in Prospect school district a visit; that Jasper Adams has been promoted to superintendent of deliveries in Wright & Perry’s store; that Kenyon Adams entertained his friends in the Fifth Grade of the South Harvey schools with a violin solo on the last day of school; that Grant Adams had been made assistant to the secretary of the National Building Trades Association in South Harvey; that Mr. George Brotherton with Miss Emma Morton and Martha and Ruth had enjoyed a pleasant visit with the Adamses Sunday afternoon and had resumed an enjoyable buggy ride after partaking of a chicken dinner. In the editorial column were some reflections evidently in Mr. Left’s most lucid style and a closing paragraph containing this: “Happiness and character,” said the Peach Blow Philosopher, “are inseparable: but how easy it is to be happy in a great, beautiful house; or to be unhappy if it comes to that in a great, beautiful house: Environment may influence character; but all the good are not poor, nor all the rich bad. Therefore, the Peach Blow Philosopher takes to the woods. He is willing to leave something to the Lord Almighty and the continental congress. Selah!”
As Dr. Nesbit sat reading the items above set forth upon 265the broad new veranda of the residence that he was so proud to call his home, he smiled. It was late afternoon. He had done a hard day’s work–some of it among the sick, some of it among the needy–the needy in the Doctor’s bright lexicon being those who tried to persuade him that they needed political offices. “I cheer up the sick, encourage the needy, pray for ’em both, and sometimes for their own good have to lie to ’em all,” he used to say in that day when the duties of his profession and the care of his station as a ruling boss in politics were oppressing him. Dr. Nesbit played politics as a game. But he played always to win.
“Old Linen Pants is a bland old scoundrel,” declared Public Opinion, about the corridors of the political hotel at the capital. “But he is as ruthless as iron, as smooth as oil, and as bitter as poison when he sets his head on a proposition. Buy?–he buys men in all the ways the devil teaches them to sell–offices, power, honor, cash in hand, promises, prestige–anything that a man wants, Old Linen Pants will trade for, and then get that man. Humorous old devil, too,” quoth Public Opinion. “Laughs, quotes scripture, throws in a little Greek philosophy, and knows all the new stories, but never forgets whose play it is, nor what cards are out.” Thus was he known to others.
But as he remained longer and longer in the game, as his fourth term as state Senator began to lengthen, the game here and there began to lose in his mouth something of its earlier savor. That afternoon as he sat on the veranda overlooking the lawn shaded by the elm trees of his greatest pride, Dr. Nesbit was discoursing to Mrs. Nesbit, who was sewing and paid little heed to his animadversions; it was a soliloquy rather than a conversation–a soliloquy accompanied by an obligate of general mental disagreement from the wife of his bosom, who expressed herself in sniffs and snorts and scornful staccato interjections as the soliloquy ran on. Here are a few bars of it transcribed for beginners:
From the Doctor’s solo: “Heigh-ho–ho hum–Two United States Senators, one slightly damaged Governor, marked down, five congressmen and three liars, one supreme court justice, also a liar, a working interest in a second, 266and a slight equity in a third; organization of the Senate, speaker of the house,–forty liars and thirty thieves–that’s my political assets, my dear.”
“I wish you’d quit politics, Doctor, and attend to your practice,” this by way of accompaniment from Mrs. Nesbit. The Doctor was in a playful and facetious mood that pleasant afternoon.
He leaned back in his chair, reached up in the air with outstretched arms, clapped his hands three times, gayly, kicked his shoe-heels three times at the end of his short little legs, smiled and proceeded: “Liabilities of James Nesbit, dealer in public grief, licensed dispenser of private joy, purveyor of Something Equally Good, item one, forty-nine gentlemen who think they’ve been promised thirty-six jobs–but they are mistaken, they have been told only that I’ll do what I can for them–which is true; item two, three hundred friends who want something and may ask at any minute; item three, seventy-five men who will be or have been primed up by the loathed opposition to demand jobs; item four, Tom Van Dorn who is as sure as guns to think in about a year he has to have a vindication, by running for another term; item five–”
“He can’t have it,” from Mrs. Nesbit, and then the piping voice went on:
“Item six, a big, husky fight in Greeley county for the maharaja of Harvey and the adjoining provinces.” A deep sigh rose from the Doctor, then followed more clapping of hands and kicking of heels and some slapping of suspenders, as the voices of Kenyon and Lila came into the veranda from the lawn, and the Doctor cast up his accounts: “Let’s see now–naught’s a naught and figure’s a figure and carry six, and subtract the profits and multiply the trouble and you have a busted community. Correct,” he piped, “Bedelia, my dear, observe a busted community. Your affectionate lord and master, kind husband, indulgent father, good citizen gone but not forgotten. How are the mighty fallen.”
“Doctor,” snapped Mrs. Nesbit, “don’t be a fool; tell me, James, will Tom Van Dorn want to run again?”
Making a basket with his hands for the back of his head the Doctor answered slowly, “Ho-ho-ho! Oh, I don’t 267know–I should say–yes. He’ll just about have to run–for a Vindication.”
“Well, you’ll not support him! I say you’ll not support him,” Mrs. Nesbit decided, and the Doctor echoed blandly:
“Then I’ll not support him. Where’s Laura?” he asked gently.
“She went down to South Harvey to see about that kindergarten she’s been talking of. She seems almost cheerful about the way Kenyon is getting on with his music. She says the child reads as well as she now and plays everything on the violin that she can play on the piano. Doctor,” added Mrs. Nesbit meditatively, “now about those oriental rugs we were going to put upstairs–don’t you suppose we could take the money we were going to put there and help Laura with that kindergarten? Perhaps she’d take a real interest in life through those children down there.” The wife hesitated and asked, “Would you do it?”
The Doctor drummed his chair arm thoughtfully, then put his thumbs in his suspenders. “Greater love than this hath no woman shown, my dear–that she gives up oriental rugs for a kindergarten–by all means give it to her.”
“James, Lila still grieves for her father.”
“Yes,” answered the Doctor sadly, “and Henry Fenn was in the office this morning begging me to give him something that would kill his thirst.”
The doctor brought his hands down emphatically on his chair arms. “Duty, Bedelia, is the realest obligation in the world. Here are Lila and Henry Fenn. What a miserable lot of tommy rot about soul-mating Tom and this Fenn woman conjured up to get away from their duty to child and husband. They have swapped a place with the angels for a right to wallow with the hogs; that’s what all their fine talking amounts to.” The Doctor’s shrill voice rose. “They don’t fool me. They don’t fool any one; they don’t even fool each other. I tell you, my dear,” he chirped as he rose from his chair, “I never saw one of those illicit love affairs in life or heard of it in literature that was not just plain, old fashion, downright, beastly selfishness. Duty is a greater thing in life than what the romance peddlers call love.”
268The Doctor stood looking at his wife questioningly–waiting for some approving response. She kept on sewing. “Oh you Satterthwaites with hearts of marble,” he cried as he patted the cast iron waves of her hair and went chuckling into the house.
Mrs. Nesbit was aroused from her reverie by the rattle of the Adams buggy. When it drew up to the curb Laura and Grant climbed out and came up the walk. Laura wore a simple summer dress that brought out all the exquisite coloring of her skin, and made her light hair shine in a kind of haloed glory. It had been months since the mother had seen in her daughter’s face such a smile as the daughter gave to the man beside her–red-faced, angular, hard muscled, in his dingy blue carpenter’s working clothes with his measuring rule and pencil sticking from his apron pocket, and with his crippled arm tipped by its steel tool-holder.
“Grant is going to take that box of Lila’s toys down to the kindergarten, mother,” she explained.
When they had disappeared up the stairs Mrs. Nesbit could hear them on the floor above and soon the heavy feet of the man carrying a burden were on the stairs and in another minute the young woman was saying:
“Leave them by the teacher’s desk, Grant,” and as he untied the horse, she called, “Now you will get that door in to-night without fail–won’t you? I’ll be down and we’ll put in the south partition in the morning.” As she turned from the door she greeted her mother with a smile and dropped wearily into a chair.
“Oh mother,” she cried, “it’s going to be so fine. Grant has the room nearly finished and he’s interesting the wives of the union men in South Harvey and George Brotherton is going to give us every month all the magazines and periodicals that are not returnable and George brought down a lot of Christmas numbers of illustrated papers, and we’re cutting the bright pictures out and pinning them on the wall and George himself worked with us all afternoon. George says he is going to make every one of his lodges contribute monthly to the kindergarten–he belongs to everything but the Ladies of the G. A. R.–” she smiled and 269her mother smiled with her,–“and Grant says the unions are going to pay half of the salary of the extra teacher. That makes it easier.”
“Well, Laura, don’t you think–”
But her daughter interrupted her. “Now, mother,” she went on, “don’t you stop me till I’m done–for this is the best yet. Morty Sands came down to-day to help–” Laura laughed a little at her mother’s surprised glance, “and Morty promised to give us $200 for the kindergarten just as soon as he can worm it out of his father for expense money.” She drew in a deep, tired breath, “There,” she sighed, “that’s all.”
Her own child came up and the mother caught the little girl and began playing with her, tying her hair ribbon, smoothing out her skirts, rubbing a dirt speck from her nose, and cuddling the little one rapturously in her arms. When the two women were alone, Laura sat on the veranda steps with her head resting upon her mother’s knee. The mother touched the soft hair and said: “Laura, you are very tired.”
“Yes, mother,” the daughter answered. “The mothers are so hungry for help down there in South Harvey, and,” she added a little drearily–“so am I; so we are speaking a common language.”
She nestled her head in the lap above her. “And I’m going to find something worth doing–something fine and good.”
She watched the lazy clouds, “You know I’m glad about Morty Sands. Grant thinks Morty sincerely wants to amount to something real–to help and be more than a money grubber! If the old spider would just let him out of the web!” The mother stared at her daughter a second.
“Well, Laura, about the only money grubbing Morty seems to be doing is grubbing money out of his father to maintain his race horse.”
The daughter smiled and the mother went on with her work. “Mother, did you know that little Ruth Morton is going to begin taking vocal lessons this summer?” The mother shook her head. “Grant says Mr. Brotherton’s paying for it. He thinks she has a wonderful voice.”
270“Voice–” cut in Mrs. Nesbit, “why Laura, the child’s only fourteen–voice–!”
Laura answered, “Yes, mother, but you’ve never heard her sing; she has a beautiful, deep, contralto voice, but the treble above ‘C’ is a trifle squeaky, and Mr. Brotherton says he’s ‘going to have it oiled’; so she’s to ‘take vocal’ regularly.”
On matters musical Mrs. Nesbit believed she had a right to know the whole truth, so she asked: “Where does Mr. Brotherton come in, Laura?”
“Oh, mother, he’s always been a kind of god-father to those girls. You know as well as I that Emma’s been playing with that funeral choir of yours and Mr. Brotherton’s all these years, only because he got her into it, and Grant says he’s kept Mrs. Herdicker from discharging Martha for two years, just by sheer nerve. Of course Grant gets it from Mr. Brotherton but Grant says Martha is so pretty she’s such a trial to Mrs. Herdicker! I like Martha, but, mother, she just thinks she should be carried round on a chip because of her brown eyes and red hair and dear little snubby nose. Grant says Mr. Brotherton is trying to get the money someway to float the Captain’s stock company and put his Household Horse on the market. I think Mr. Brotherton is a fine man, mother–he’s always doing things to help people.”
Mrs. Nesbit folded up her work, and began to rise. “George Brotherton, Laura,” said her mother as she stood at full length looking down upon her child, “has a voice of an angel, and perhaps the heart of a god, but he will eat onions and during the twenty years I’ve been singing with him I’ve never known him to speak a correct sentence. Common, Laura–common as dishwater.”
As Laura Van Dorn talked the currents of life eddying about her were reflected in what she said. But she could not know the spirit that was moving the currents; for with a neighborly shyness those who were gathering about her were careful to seem casual in their kindness, and she could not know how deeply they were moved to help her. Kindergartens were hardly in George Brotherton’s line; yet he untied old bundles of papers, ransacked his shop and brought a 271great heap of old posters and picture papers to her. Captain Morton brought a beloved picture of his army Colonel to adorn the room, and deaf John Kollander, who had a low opinion of the ignorant foreigners and the riff-raff and scum of society, which Laura was trying to help, wished none the less to help her, and came down one day with a flag for the schoolroom and insisted upon making a speech to the tots about patriotism. He made nothing clear to them but he made it quite clear to himself that they were getting the flag as a charity, which they little deserved, and never would return. And to Laura he conveyed the impression that he considered her mission a madness, but for her and the sorrow which she was fighting, he had appreciative tenderness. He must have impressed his emotions upon his wife for she came down and talked elaborately about starting a cooking school in the building, and after planning it all out, went away and forgot it. The respectable iron gray side-whiskers of Ahab Wright once relieved the dingy school room, when Ahab looked in and the next day Kyle Perry on behalf of the firm of Wright & Perry came trudging into the kindergarten with a huge box which he said contained a p-p-p-p-p-pat-a-p-p-p-pppat-pat–here he swallowed and started all over and finally said p-p-patent, and then started out on a long struggle with the word swing, but he never finished it, and until Laura opened the box she thought Mr. Perry had brought her a soda fountain. But Nathan Perry, his son, who came wandering down to the place one afternoon with Anne Sands, put up the swing, and suggested a half dozen practical devices for the teacher to save time and labor in her work, while Anne Sands in her teens looked on as one who observes a major god completing a bungling job of the angels on a newly contrived world.
Sometimes coming home from his day’s work Amos Adams would drop in for a chat with the tired teacher, and he refreshed her curiously with his quiet manner and his unsure otherworldliness, and his tough, unyielding optimism. He had no lectures for the children. He would watch them at their games, try to play with them himself in a pathetic, old-fashioned way, telling them fairy stories of an elder and a grimmer day than ours. Sometimes Doctor Nesbit, 272coming for Laura in his buggy, would find Amos in the school room, and they would fall to their everlasting debate upon the reality of time and space with the Doctor enjoying hugely his impious attempt to couch the terminology of abstract philosophy in his Indiana vernacular.
Lida Bowman bringing her little brood sometimes would sit silently watching the children, and look at Laura as if about to speak, but she always went away with her mind unrelieved. Violet Hogan, who brought her beruffled and bedizened eldest, made up for Mrs. Bowman’s reticence. Moreover Violet brought other mothers and there was much talk on the topics of the day–talk that revealed to Laura Nesbit a whole philosophy that was new to her–the helpfulness of the poor to the poor.
But if others brought to Laura Van Dorn material strength and spiritual comfort in her enterprise, Grant Adams waved the wand of his steel claw over the kindergarten and made it live. For he was a power in the Wahoo Valley. Her friends knew that his word gave the kindergarten the endorsement of every union there and thus brought to it mothers with children and with problems as well as children, whom Laura Van Dorn otherwise never could have reached. The unions made a small donation monthly to the work which gave them the feeling of proprietorship in the place and the mothers and children came in self-respect. But if Grant gave life to the kindergarten, he got more than he gave. For the restraining hand of Laura Van Dorn always was upon him, and his friends in the Valley came to realize her friendship for them and their cause. They knew that many a venture of Grant’s Utopia would have been a wild goose chase but for the wisdom of her counsel. And the two came to rely upon each other unconsciously.
So in the ugly little building near Dooley’s saloon in South Harvey the two towns met and worked together; and all to heal a broken heart, a bruised life. From out of the unexplored realm where our dreams are blooming into the fruit of reality one evening came Mr. Left with this message: “Whoever in the joy of service gives part of himself to the vast sum of sacrificial giving that has remained unspent, 273since man began to walk erect, is adding to humanity’s heritage, is building an unseen temple wherein mankind is sheltered from its own inhumanity. This sum of sacrificial giving is the temple not made with hands!”
Now the foundations of that part of the temple not made with hands in South Harvey, may be said to have been laid and the watertable set on the day when Laura Van Dorn first laughed the bell-chime laugh of her girlhood. And that day came well along in the summer. It was twilight and the Doctor was sitting with his wife and daughter on their east veranda when Morty Sands came flitting across the lawn like a striped miller moth in a broad-banded outing suit. He waved gayly to the little company in the veranda and came up the steps at two bounds, though he was a man of thirty-eight and just the least bit weazened.
“Well,” he said, with his greetings scarcely off his lips, “I came to tell you I’ve sold the colt!”
The chorus repeated his announcement as a question.
“Yes, sold the colt,” solemnly responded Morty. And then added, “Father just wouldn’t! I tried to get that two hundred in various ways–adding it to my cigar bill; slipping it in on my bill for raiment at Wright & Perry’s, but father pinned Kyle down, and he stuttered out the truth. I tried to get the horse-doctor to charge the two hundred into his bill and when father uncovered that–I couldn’t wait any longer so I’ve sold the colt!”
“Well, Morty, what for in Heaven’s name?” asked Laura. Morty began fumbling in his pockets before he spoke. He did not smile, but as his hand came out of an inside pocket, he said gently: “For two hundred and seventeen dollars and a half! I fought an hour for that half dollar!” He handed it to the Doctor, saying: “It’s for the kindergarten. You keep it for her, Doctor Jim!”
When Morty had gone Mrs. Nesbit said: “What queer blood that Sands blood is, Doctor. There is Mary Sands’s heart in that boy, and Daniel has bred nothing into him. They must have been a queer breed a generation or two back!”
The Doctor did not answer. He took the money which Morty had given to him, handed it to Laura and said: “And 274now my dear, accept this token of devotion from Sir Mortimer Sands, of the golden heart and wooden head!” And then Laura laughed, not in derision, not in merriment even, but in sheer joy that life could mean so much. And as she laughed the temple not made with hands began to rise strong and beautiful in her heart and in the hearts of all who touched her.
How they would have sneered at Laura Van Dorn’s niche in the temple, those practical folk who helped her because they loved her. How George Brotherton would have laughed; with what suspicion John Kollander would have viewed the kindergarten, if he had been told that it was part of a temple. For he had no sort of an idea of letting the rag-tag and bob-tail of South Harvey into a temple; he knew very well they deserved no temple. They were shiftless and wicked. How Wright & Perry would have sniffed at any one who would have called the dreary little shack, where Laura Van Dorn held forth, a temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts they knew the truth. It is the American way to mask the beauty of our nobler selves, or real selves under a gibing deprecation. So we wear the veneer of materialism, and beneath it we are intense idealists. And woe to him who reckons to the contrary!
Perhaps the town’s views on temples in general and Laura’s temple in particular, was summed up by Hildy Herdicker, Prop., when she read Mr. Left’s reflections in the Tribune. “Temples–eh?–temples not made with hands–is it? Well, Miss Laura can get what comfort she can out of her baby shop; but me? Every man to his trade as Kyle Perry said when he tried to buy a dozen scissors and got a sewing machine–me?–I get my heart balm selling hats, and if others gets theirs coddling brats–’tis the good God’s wisdom that makes us different and no business of mine so long as they bring grist to the profit mill! The trouble with their temples is that they don’t pay taxes!”
So in the matter of putting up temples–particularly in the matter of erecting temples not made with hands, the town worked blindly. But so far as Laura Van Dorn was concerned, while she was working on her part of the temple, 275she had the vision of youth still in her heart. Youth indeed is that part of every soul that life has not tarnished, and if we keep our faith, hold ourselves true and bow to no circumstance however arrogant it may be, youth still will abide in our hearts through many years. Now Laura, who was born Nesbit and became Van Dorn, was taking up life with that large charity that comes to every unconquered soul. She held her illusions, she believed in herself, and youth shone like a beacon from her face and glowed in her body.
For Thomas Van Dorn, who had been her husband, she had trained herself to hold no unkind thought. She even taught Lila–when the child asked for him–to harbor no rancor toward him. So the child turned to her father when they met, the natural face of a child; it was a sad little face that he saw–though no one else ever saw it sad; but the child smiled when she spoke and looked gently at him, in the hope that some day he would come back to her.
Now it happened that on the night when Laura’s laugh first echoed through her temple another rising temple witnessed a ceremony entirely befitting its use.
That night–late that night when a pale moon was climbing over the valley below the town, Margaret and her lover stood alone in the great unfinished house which they were building.
Through the uncurtained windows the moonlight was streaming, making white splashes upon the floors. Across the plank pathways they wandered locating the halls, the great living-room, the spacious dining-room, the airy, comfortable bedrooms exposed to the south, the library, the kitchen, and the ballroom on the third floor. It was to be a grand house–this house of Van Dorn. And in their fancy the man and the woman called it the temple of love erected as an altar to the love god whom they worshiped. They peopled it with many a merry company. They saw the rich and the great in the dining-room. They pictured in this vision pleasure capering through the ball room. They enshrined wisdom and contentment in the library. In the great living-room they installed elegance and luxury, and hospitality beckoned with ostentatious pride for the coming of such of the nobility as Harvey and its environs and the 276surrounding state and Nation could produce. A grand, proud temple, a rich, beautiful temple, a strong, masterful temple would be this temple of love.
“And, dearest,” said he–the master of the house, as he held her in his arms at the foot of the stairway that swept down into the broad hall like the ghost of some baronial grandeur, “dearest, what do we care what they say! We have built it for ourselves–just for you, I want it–just for you; not friends, not children, not any one but you. This is to be our temple of love.”
She kissed him, and whined wordless assent. Then she whispered: “Just you–you, you, and if man, woman or child come to mar our joy or to lessen our love, God pity the intruder.” And like a flaming torch she fluttered in his arms.
The summer breeze came caressingly through an unclosed window into the temple. It seemed–the summer breeze which fell upon their cheeks–like the benediction of some pagan god; their god of love perhaps. For the grand house, the rich house, the beautiful, masterful temple of their mad love was made for summer breezes.
But when the rain came, and the storms fell and beat upon that house, they found that it was a house built upon sand. But while it stood and even when it fell there was a temple, a real temple, a temple made with hands–a temple that all Harvey and all the world could understand!
The Van Dorns opened their new house without ostentation the day after their marriage in October. There was no reception; the handsomest hack in town waited for them at the railway station, as they alighted from the Limited from Chicago. They rode down Market Street, up the Avenue to Elm Crest Place, drove to the new house, and that night it was lighted. That was all the ceremony of housewarming which the place had. The Van Dorns knew what the town thought of them. They made it plain what they thought of the town. They allowed no second rate people to crowd into the house as guests while the first rate people smiled, and the third rate people sniffed. The Judge had some difficulty keeping Mrs. Van Dorn to their purpose. She was impatient–having nothing in particular to think about, and being proud of her furniture. Naturally, there were calls–a few. And they were returned with some punctiliousness. But the people whom the Van Dorns were anxious to see did not call. In the winter, the Van Dorns went to Florida for a fortnight, and put up at a hotel where they could meet a number of persons of distinction whom they courted, and whom the Van Dorns pressed to visit them. When she came home from the winter’s social excursion, Mrs. Van Dorn went straight to the establishment of Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., and bought a hat; and bragged to Mrs. Herdicker of having met certain New York social dignitaries in Florida whose names were as familiar to the Harvey women as the names of their hired girl’s beaux! Then having started this tale of her social prowess on its career, Margaret was more easily restrained by her husband from offering the house to the Plymouth Daughters for an entertainment. It was in that spring that Margaret began–or 278perhaps they both began to put on what George Brotherton called the “Van Dorn remnant sale.” The parade passed down Market Street every morning at eight thirty. It consisted of one handsome rather overdressed man and one beautiful rather conspicuously dressed woman. On fair days they rode in a rakish-looking vehicle known as a trap, and in bad weather they walked through Market Street. At the foot of the stairs leading to the Judge’s office they parted with all the voltage of affection permitted by the canons of propriety and at five in the evening, Mrs. Van Dorn reappeared on Market Street, and at the foot of the stairs before the Judge’s office, the parade resumed its course.
“Well–say,” said George Brotherton, “right smart little line of staple and fancy love that firm is carrying this season. Rather nice titles too; good deal of full calf bindings–well, say–glancing at the illustrations, I should like to read the text. But man–say–hear your Uncle George! With me it’s always a sign of low stock when I put it all in the window and the show case! Well, say–” and he laughed like the ripping of an earthquake. “It certainly looks to me as if they were moving the line for a quick turnover at a small profit! Well say!”
But without the complicated ceremony required to show the town that he was pleased with his matrimonial bargain, the handsome Judge was a busy man. Every time he saw Dr. Nesbit toddling up or down Market Street, or through South Harvey, or in the remotenesses of Foley or Magnus, the Judge whipped up his energies. For he knew that the Doctor never lost a fight through overconfidence. So the Judge, alone for the first time in his career, set out to bring about his nomination, where a nomination meant an election. Now a judge who showed the courage of his convictions, as Judge Van Dorn had shown his courage in forcing settlements in the mine accident cases and in similar matters of occasional interest, was rather more immediately needed by the mine owners of Harvey than the political boss, who merely used the mine owner’s money to encompass his own ends, and incidentally work out the owner’s salvation. Daniel Sands played both sides, which was all that Van Dorn could ask. But when the Doctor saw that Sands 279was giving secret aid to Van Dorn, the Doctor’s heart was hot within him. And Van Dorn continued to rove the district day and night, like a dog, hunting for its buried bone.
It was in the courthouse that Van Dorn made his strongest alliance–in the courthouse, where the Doctor was supposed to be in supreme command. A capricious fate had arranged it so that nearly all the county officers were running for their second terms, and a second term was a time honored courtesy. Van Dorn tied himself up with them by maintaining that his was a second term election also,–and a second regular four year term it was. His appointment, and his election to fill out the remainder of his predecessor’s term, he waved aside as immaterial, and staged himself as a candidate for his second term. The Doctor tried to break the combination between the Judge and the second term county candidates by ruthlessly bringing out their deputies against the second termers as candidates. But the scheme provoked popular rebellion. The Doctor tried bringing out one young lawyer after another against the Judge, but all had retainers from the mine owners, and no one in the county would run against Van Dorn, so the Doctor had to pick his candidate from outside of the county, in a judicial convention wherein Greeley County had a majority of the votes. But Van Dorn knew that for all the strategy of the situation, the Doctor might be able to mass the town’s disapproval of Van Dorn, socially, into a political majority in the convention against him. So the handsome Judge, with his matrimonial parade to give daily, his political fortunes to consider every hour, and withal, a court to hold, and a judicial serenity to maintain, was a busy young man–a rather more than passing busy young man!
As for the Doctor, he threw himself into the contest against Van Dorn with no mixed motives. “There,” quoth the Doctor, to the wide world including his own henchmen, yeomen, heralds, and outriders, “is one hound pup I am going to teach house manners!” And failing to break Van Dorn’s alliance in the courthouse, and failing to bulldoze Daniel Sands out of a secret liaison with Van Dorn, failing to punish those of his courthouse friends who permitted Van Dorn to stand with them on their convention tickets in the 280primary, the Doctor went forth with his own primary ticket, and announced that he proposed to beat Van Dorn in the convention single handed and alone.
And so quiet are the wheels of our government, that few heard them grinding during the spring and early summer–few except the little coterie of citizens who pay attention to the details of party politics. Yet underneath and over the town, and through the very heart of it wherever the web of the spider went, there was a cruel rending. Two men with hate in their hearts were pulling at the web, wrenching its filaments, twisting it out of shape, ripping its texture, in a desperate struggle to control the web, and with that control to govern the people.
Then Dr. Nesbit pushed his way into the very nest of the spider, and bolted into Daniel Sands’s office to register a final protest against Sands’s covert alliance with the Judge. He plunked angrily into the den of the spider, shut the door, turned the spring lock, and looking around saw not Sands, but Van Dorn himself.
The Doctor burst out: “Well, young man! So you’re here, eh!” Van Dorn nodded pleasantly, and replied graciously: “Yes, Doctor, here I am, and I believe we have met here before–at one time or another.”
The Doctor sat down and slapping a fat hand on a chair arm, cried angrily: “Thomas, it can’t be did–you can’t cut ’er.”
Judge Van Dorn answered blandly, rather patronizingly: “Yes, Dr. Jim, it can be done. And I shall do it.”
“Have you let ’em fool you–the fellows on the street?” asked the Doctor.
Judge Van Dorn tapped on the desk beside him meditatively, then answered slowly: “No–I should say they mostly lied to me–they’re not for me–excepting, maybe, Captain Morton, who tried to say he was opposed to me–but couldn’t–quite. No–Doctor–no–Market Street didn’t fool me.”
He was so suave about it, so naïve, and yet so cock-sure of his success, that the Doctor was impatient: “Tom,” he piped, “I tell you, they’re too strong to bluff and too many to buy. You can’t make it.”
281The younger man shut one eye, knocked with his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and then said as he looked insolently into the Doctor’s face:
“Well, to begin–what’s your price?”
The Doctor flushed; his loose skin twitched around his nostrils, and he gripped his chair arms. He did not answer for nearly a minute, during which the Judge tilted back in his chair beside the desk and looked at the elder man with some show of curiosity, if not of interest.
“My price,” sneered the Doctor, “is a little mite low to-day. It’s a pelt–a hound pup’s pelt and you are going to furnish it, if you’ll stop strutting long enough for me to skin you!”
The two men glared at each other. Then Van Dorn, regaining his poise, answered: “Well, sir, I’m going to win–no matter how–I’m going to win. I’ve sat up with this situation every night for six months–Oh, for a year. I know it backwards and forwards, and you can’t trip me any place along the line. I’ve counted you out.” He went on smiling:
“What have I done that is not absolutely legal? This is a government of law, Doctor–not of hysteria. The trouble with you,” the Judge settled down to an upright position in his chair, “is that you’re an old maid. You’re so–so” he drawled the “so” insolently, “damn nice. You’re an old maid, and you come from a family of old maids. I warrant your grandmother and her mother before her were old maids. There hasn’t been a man in your family for five generations.” The Doctor rose, Van Dorn went on arrogantly, “Doctor James Nesbit, I’m not afraid of you. And I’ll tell you this: If you make a fight on me in this contest, when I’m elected, we’ll see if there isn’t one less corrupt boss in this state and if Greeley County can’t contribute a pompadour to the rogues’ gallery and a tenor voice to the penitentiary choir.”
During the harangue of the Judge, the Doctor’s full lips had begun to twitch in a smile, and his eyes to twinkle. Then he chirped gaily:
“Heap o’ steam for the size of the load and weight of your biler, Tom. Better hoop ’em up!”
282And with a laugh, shaking his little round stomach, he toddled out of the room into the corridor, and began whistling the tune that tells what will happen when Johnny comes marching home.
So the Doctor whistled about his afternoon’s work and did not realize that the whistling was a form of nervousness.
That evening the Doctor and Laura began to read their Browning where they had left off the night before. They were in the midst of “Paracelsus,” when the father looked up and said:
“Laura, you know I’m going to fight Tom Van Dorn for another term as district judge?”
“Why, of course you should, father–I didn’t expect he’d ask it again!” said the daughter.
“We had a row this afternoon–a miserable, bickering row. He got on his hind legs and snarled and snapped at me, and made me mad, I guess. So I got to thinking why I should be against him, and it came to me that a man who had violated the decencies as he has and whose decisions for the old spider have been so raw, shouldn’t be judge in this district. Lord, what will young fellows think if we stand for him! So I have kind of worked myself up,” the Doctor smiled deprecatingly, “to a place where I seem to have a sacred duty in the matter of licking him for the sake of general decency. Anyway,” he concluded in his high falsetto, “old Browning’s diver, here, fits me. He goes down a pauper and, with his pearl, comes up a prince.”
“Festus,” cried the Doctor, waving the book, “I plunge.”
Thus through the pique of pride, and through the sting of scorn, a force of righteousness came into the world of Harvey. For our miracles of human progress are not always done with prunes and prisms. The truth does not come to men always, nor even, generally, as they are gazing in joyful admiration at the good and the beautiful. Sudden conversions of men to good causes are rare, and often unstable and sometimes worthless. The good Lord would find much of the best work of the world undone if he waited until men guided by purely altruistic motives and inspired by new impulses to righteousness, did it. The world’s work is done by ladies and gentlemen 283who, for the most part, are largely clay, working in the clay, for clay rewards, with just enough of the divine impulse moving them to keep their faces turned forward and not back.
Public opinion in the Amen Corner, voiced by Mr. Brotherton, spoke for Harvey and said: “Well, say–what do you think of Old Linen Pants bucking the whole courthouse just to get the hide of Judge Van Dora? Did you ever see such a thing in your whole life?” emphasizing the word “whole” with fine effect.
Mr. Brotherton sat at his desk in the rear of his store, contemplating the splendor of his possessions. Gradually the rear of the shop had been creeping toward the alley. It was filled with books, stationery, cigars and smoker’s supplies. The cigars and smoker’s supplies were crowded to a little alcove near the Amen Corner, and the books–school books, pirated editions of the standard authors, fancy editions of the classics, new books copyrighted and gorgeously bound in the fashion of the hour, were displayed prominently. Great posters adorned the vacant spaces on the walls, and posters and enlarged magazine covers adorned the bulletin boards in front of the store. Piles of magazines towered on the front counters–and upon the whole, Mr. Brotherton’s place presented a fairly correct imitation of the literary tendencies of the period in America just before the Spanish war.
Amos Adams came in, with his old body bent, his hands behind him, his shapeless coat hanging loosely from his stooped shoulders, his little tri-colored button of the Loyal Legion in his coat lapel, being the only speck of color in his graying figure. He peered at Mr. Brotherton over his spectacles and said: “George–I’d like to look at Emerson’s addresses–the Phi Beta Kappa Address particularly.” He nosed up to the shelves and went peering along the books in sets. “Help yourself, Dad, help yourself–Glad you like Emerson–elegant piece of goods; wrapped one up last week and took it home myself–elegant piece of goods.”
“Yes,” mused the reader, “here is what I want–I had a talk with Emerson last night. He’s against the war; not that he is for Spain, of course, but Huxley,” added Amos, as 284he turned the pages of his book, “rather thinks we should fight–believes war lies along the path of greatest resistance, and will lead to our greater destiny sooner.” The old man sighed, and continued: “Poor Lincoln–I couldn’t get him last night: they say he and Garrison were having a great row about the situation.”
The elder stroked his ragged beard meditatively. Finally he said: “George–did you ever hear our Kenyon play?”
The big man nodded and went on with his work. “Well, sir,” the elder reflected: “Now, it’s queer about Kenyon. He’s getting to be a wonder. I don’t know–it all puzzles me.” He rose, put back the book on its shelf. “Sometimes I believe I’m a fool–and sometimes things like this bother me. They say they are training Kenyon–on the other side! Of course he just has what music Laura and Mrs. Nesbit could give him; yet the other day, he got hold of a piano score of Schubert’s Symphony in B flat and while he can’t play it, he just sits and cries over it–it means so much to the little fellow.”
The gray head wagged and the clear, old, blue eyes looked out through the steel-rimmed glasses and he sighed: “He is going ahead, making up the most wonderful music–it seems to me, and writing it down when he can’t play it–writing the whole score for it–and they tell me–” he explained deprecatingly, “my friends on the other side, that the child will make a name for himself.” He paused and asked: “George–you’re a hardheaded man–what do you think of it? You don’t think I’m crazy, do you, George?”
The younger man glanced up, caught the clear, kindly eye of Amos Adams looking questioningly down.
“Dad,” said Mr. Brotherton, hammering his fat fist on the desk, “‘there’s more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio’–well say, man–that’s Shakespeare. We sell more Shakespeares than all the other poets combined. Fine business, this Shakespeare. And when a man holds the lead in the trade as this Shakespeare has done ever since I went into the Red Line poets back in the eighties–I’m pretty nearly going to stay by him. And when he says, ‘Don’t be too damn sure you know it all–’ or words to that effect–and holds the trade saying 285it–well, say, man–your spook friends are all right with me, only say,” Mr. Brotherton shuddered, “I’d die if one came gliding up to me and asked for a chew of my eating tobacco–the way they do with you!”
“Well,” smiled Amos Adams, “much obliged to you, George–I just wanted your ideas. Laura Van Dorn has sent Kenyon’s last piece back to Boston to see if by any chance he couldn’t unconsciously have taken it from something or some one. She says it’s wonderful–but, of course,” the old man scratched his chin, “Laura and Bedelia Nesbit are just as likely to be fooled in music as I am with my controls.” Then the subject drifted into politics–the local politics of the town, the Van Dorn-Nesbit contest.
And at the end of their discussion Amos rubbed his bony, lean, hard, old hands, and looked away through the books and the brick wall and the whole row of buildings before him into the future and smiled. “I wonder–I wonder if the country ever will come to see the economic and social and political meaning of this politics that we have now–this politics that the poor man gets through a beer keg the night before election, and that the rich man buys with his ‘barl.’”
He shook his head. “You’ll see it–you and Grant–but it will be long after my time.” Amos lifted up his old face and cried: “I know there is another day coming–a better day. For this one is unworthy of us. We are better than this–at heart! We have in us the blood of the fathers, and their high visions too. And they did not put their lives into this nation for this–for this cruel tangle of injustice that we show the world to-day. Some day–some day,” Amos Adams lifted up his face and cried: “I don’t know! May be my guides are wrong but my own heart tells me that some day we shall cease feeding with the swine and return to the house of our father! For we are of royal blood, George–of royal blood!”
“Why, hello, Morty,” cut in Mr. Brotherton. “Come right in and listen to the seer–genuine Hebrew prophet here–got a familiar spirit, and says Babylon is falling.”
“Well, Uncle Amos,” said Morty Sands, “let her fall!” Old Amos smiled and after Morty had turned the talk from falling Babylon to Laura Van Dorn’s kindergarten, Amos 286being reminded by Laura of Kenyon and his music, unfolded his theory of the occult source of the child’s musical talent, and invited George and Morty to church to hear Kenyon play.
So when Sunday came, with it came full knowledge that most members of the congregation were to hear Kenyon Adams’ new composition, which had been rather widely advertised by his friends; and Rev. John Dexter, feeling himself a fifth wheel, discarded his sermon and in humility and contrition submitted some extemporaneous remarks on the passion for humanity of “Christ and him crucified.”
A little boy was Kenyon Adams–a slim, great-eyed, serious faced, little boy in an Eton jacket and knickerbockers–not so much larger than his violin that he carried under his arm. His little hand shook, but Grant caught his gaze and with a tender, earnest reassurance put sinews into the small arms, and stilled an unsteady jaw. The organ was playing the prelude, when the little hand with the bow went out in a wide, sure, strong curve, and when the bow touched the strings, they sang from a soul depth that no child’s experience could know.
It was the first public rendering of the now famous Adagio in C minor, known sometimes as “The Prairie Wind,” or perhaps better as the Intermezzo between the second and third acts of the opera that made Kenyon Adams’ fame in Europe before he was twenty. It has been changed but little since that first hearing there in John Dexter’s church with the Sands Memorial organ, built in the early eighties for Elizabeth Page Sands, mother of Anne of that tribe. The composition is simplicity itself–save for the mystical questioning that runs through it in the sustained sevenths–a theme which Captain Morton said always reminded him of a meadow lark’s evening song, but which repeats itself over and over plaintively and sadly as the stately music swells to its crescendo and dies with that unanswered cry of heartbreak echoing in the last faint notes of the closing bar.
When it was finished, those who had ears heard and understood and those who had not said, “Well,” and waited for public opinion, unless they were fools, in which case they said they would have preferred something to whistle. But 287because the thing impressed itself upon hundreds of hearts that hour, many in the congregation came forward to greet the child.
Among these, was a tall, stately young woman in pure white with a rose upon her hat so deeply red that it seemed guilty of a shame. But her lips were as red as the red of the rose and her eyes glistened and her face was wrought upon by a great storm in her heart. Behind her walked a proud gentleman, a lordly gentleman who elbowed his way through the throng as one who touches the unclean. The pale child stood by Grant Adams as they came. Kenyon did not see the beautiful woman; the child’s eyes were upon the man. He knew the man; Lila had poured out her soul to the boy about the man and in his child’s heart he feared and abhorred the man for he knew not what. The man and woman kept coming closer. They were abreast as they stepped into the pulpit where the child stood. By his own music, his soul had been stirred and riven and he was nervous and excited. As the woman beside the man stretched out her arms, with her face tense from some inner turmoil, the child saw only the proud man beside her and shrank back with a wild cry and hid in his father’s breast. The eyes of Grant and Margaret met, but the child only cuddled into the broad breast before him and wept, crying, “No–no–no–”
Then the proud man turned back, spurned but not knowing it, and the beautiful woman with red shame in her soul followed him with downcast face. In the church porch she lifted up her face as she said with her fair, false mouth: “Tom, isn’t it funny how those kind of people sometimes have talent–just like the lower animals seem to have intelligence. Dear me, but that child’s music has upset me!”
The man’s heart was full of pride and hate and the woman’s heart was full of pride and jealousy. Still the air was sweet for them, the birds sang for them, and the sun shone tenderly upon them. They even laughed, as they went their high Jovian way, at the vanities of the world on its lower plane. But their very laughter was the crackling of thorns under a pot wherein their hearts were burning.
“Life,” writes Mr. Left, using the pseudonym of the Peachblow philosopher, “disheartens us because we expect the wrong things of it. We expect material rewards for spiritual virtues, material punishments for spiritual transgressions; when even in the material world, material rewards and punishments do not always follow the acts which seem to require them. Yet the only sure thing in the world is that our spiritual lapses bring spiritual punishments, and our spiritual virtues have their spiritual rewards.”
Now these observations of Mr. Left might well be taken for the thesis of this story. Tom Van Dorn’s spiritual transgressions had no material punishments and the good that was in Grant Adams had no material reward. Yet the spiritual laws which they obeyed or violated were inexorable in their rewards and punishments.
Once there entered the life of Judge Van Dorn, from the outside, the play of purely spiritual forces, which looped him up and tripped him in another man’s game, and Tom, poor fellow, may have thought that it was a special Providence around with a warrant looking after him. Now this statement hangs on one “if,”–if you can call Nate Perry a man! “One generation passeth and another cometh on,” saith the Preacher. Perhaps it has occurred to the reader that the love affairs of this book are becoming exceedingly middle aged; some have only the dying glow of early reminiscence. But here comes one that is as young as spring flowers; that is–if Nate Perry is a man, and is entitled to a love affair at all. Let’s take a look at him: long legged, lean faced, keen eyed, razor bodied, just back from College where he has 289studied mining engineering. He is a pick and shovel miner in the Wahoo Fuel Company’s mine, getting the practical end of the business. For he is heir apparent of stuttering Kyle Perry, who has holdings in the mines. Young Nate’s voice rasps like the whine of a saw and he has no illusions about the stuff the world is made of. For him life is atoms flopping about in the ether in an entirely consistent and satisfactory manner. Things spiritual don’t bother him. And yet it was in working out a spiritual equation in Nate Perry’s life that Providence tipped over Tom Van Dorn, in his race for Judgeship.
And now let us put Mr. Brotherton on the stand:
“Showers,” exclaims Mr. Brotherton, “showers for Nate and Anne,–why, only yesterday I sent him and Grant Adams over to Mrs. Herdicker’s to borrow her pile-driver, and spanked him for canning a dog, and it hasn’t been more’n a week since I gave Anne a rattle when her father brought her down town the day after the funeral, as he was looking over Wright & Perry’s clerks for the fourth Mrs. Sands–and here’s showers! Well, say, isn’t time that blue streak! Showers! Say, I saw Tom Van Dorn’s little Lila in the store this morning–isn’t she the beauty–bluest eyes, and the sweetest, saddest, dearest little face–and say, man–I do believe Tom’s kind of figuring up what he missed along that line. He tried to talk to her this morning, but she looked at him with those blue eyes and shrank away. Doc Jim bought her a doll and a train of cars. That was just this morning, and well, say–I wouldn’t be surprised if when I come down and unlock the store to-morrow morning, some one will be telling me she’s having showers. Isn’t time that old hot-foot?”
“Showers–kitchen showers and linen showers, and silver showers for little Anne–little Anne with the wide, serious eyes, ‘the home of silent prayer’;–well, say, do you know who said that? It was Tennyson. Nice, tasty piece of goods–that man Tennyson. I’ve handled him in padded leather covers; fancy gilt cloth, plain boards, deckle-edges, wide margins, hand-made paper, and in thirty-nine cent paper–and he is a neat, nifty piece of goods in all of them–always easy to move and no come backs.” After this pean to the poet, 290Mr. Brotherton turned again to his meditations, “Little Anne–Why, it’s just last week or such a matter I wrapped up Mother Goose for her–just the other day she came in when they sent her off to school, and I gave her a diary–and now it’s showers–” He shook his great head, “Well, say–I’m getting on.”
And while Mr. Brotherton mused the fire burned–the fire of youth that glowed in the heart of Nathan Perry. When he wandered back from college no one in particular had noticed him. But Anne Sands was no one in particular. And as no one in particular was looking after Anne and her affairs, as a girl in her teens she had focused her heart upon the gangling youth, and there grew into life one of those matter-of-fact, unromantic love affairs that encompass the whole heart. For they are as commonplace as light and air and are equally vital. Because their course is smooth, such affairs seem shallow. But let unhappy circumstance break the even surface, and behold, from their depths comes all the beauty of a great force diverted, all the anguish of a great passion curbed and thwarted.
In this democratic age, when deep emotional experiences are not the privilege of the few, but the lot of many, heart break is almost commonplace. We do not notice it as it may have been noted in those chivalric days when only the few had the finer sensibilities that may make great mental suffering possible. So here in the commonplace town of Harvey, in their commonplace homes, amid their commonplace friends and relatives, two commonplace hearts were aching all unsuspected by a commonplace world. And it happened thus:
Anne Sands had opinions about the renomination and reëlection of Judge Van Dorn. For Judge Van Dorn’s divorce and remarriage had offended Anne Sands.
On the other hand, to Nathan Perry the aspirations of Judge Van Dorn meant nothing but the ambition of a politician in politics. So when Anne and he had fallen into the inevitable discussion of the Van Dorn case, as a part of an afternoon’s talk, indignation flashed upon indifference and the girl saw, or thought she saw such a defect in the character of her lover that, being what she was, she had to protest, and he being what he was–he was hurt to the heart. Both 291lovers spoke plainly. The thing sounded like a quarrel–their first; and coming from the Sands house into the summer afternoon, Nate Perry decided to go to Brotherton’s. He reflected as he walked that Mr. Brotherton’s remarks on “showers,” which had come to Anne and Nate, might possibly be premature. And the reflection was immensely disquieting.
A practical youth was Nathan Perry, with a mechanical instinct that gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to get excited about over the renomination and election of Judge Van Dorn. The men in the mine where the youth was working as a miner hated Van Dorn, the people seemed to distrust him as a man more or less, but if he controlled the nominating convention that ended it with Nathan Perry. The Judge’s family affairs were in no way related to the nomination, as the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry’s love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him–the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, half poet and half tinker, fell upon the problem with unbending will and open mind.
So it came to pass that there entered into the affairs of Judge Thomas Van Dorn, an element upon which he did not calculate. For he was dealing only with the material elements of a material universe!
When Nathan Perry came to Brotherton’s he sat down in the midst of a discussion of the Judgeship that began in rather etherial terms. For Doctor Nesbit was saying:
“Amos, I’ve got you cornered if you consider the visible universe. She works like a watch; she’s as predestined as a corn sheller. But let me tell you something–she isn’t all visible. There’s something back of matter–there’s another side to the shield. I know mighty well there’s a time when my medicine won’t help sick folks–and yet they get well. 292I’ve seen a great love flame up in a man’s heart or a woman’s heart or a child’s in a bed of torture, and when medicine wouldn’t take hold I’ve seen love burn through the wall between the worlds, and I have seen help come just as sure as you see the Harvey Hook and Ladder Company coming rattling down Market Street! Funny old world–funny old world–seventy rides around the sun–and then the fireworks.” After puffing away to revive his pipe he said: “I sort of got into this way of thinking recently going over this judgeship fight.” He smoked meditatively then broke out, “Lord, Lord, what an iron-clad, hog-tight, rock-ribbed, copper-riveted material proposition it is that Tom is putting up. He’s bound self-interest with self-interest everywhere. He and Joe Calvin have roped old man Sands in, and every material interest in this whole district is tied up in the Van Dorn candidacy. I’m a child in a cyclone in this fight. The self-interest of the county candidates, of all the deputies who hope two years from now to be county candidates, and all their friends, every straw boss at the shops, in the smelters, in the mines–and all the men who are near them and want to be straw bosses, every merchant who is caught in the old spider’s web with a ninety-day note; every street-car conductor, every employee of the light company, every man at the waterworks plant, every man at the gas plant, the telephone linemen–every human being that dances in the great woof of this little spider’s web feels the pull of devilish material power.”
Amos Adams threw back his grizzled head in a laugh that failed to vocalize. “Well, Jim, according to your account you’re liable to get burned and singed and disfigured until you’re as useless in politics as this old Amos Adams–the spook chaser!”
There was no bitterness in Amos Adams’s voice. “It’s all right, Jim–I have no complaint to make against life. Forty years ago Dan Sands got the first girl I ever loved. I went to war; he paid his bounty and married the girl. That was a long time ago. I often think of the girl–it’s no lack of faith to Mary. And I have the memory of the war–of that Day at Peach Tree Creek with all the wonderful exulting joy of that charge and what God gave me to do. This button,” 293he put his thumb under the Loyal Legion emblem in his warped coat lapel, “this button is more fragrant than any flower on earth to my heart. Dan Sands has had five wives; he missed the hardship of the war. He has a son by her. Jim,” said Amos Adams as he opened his eyes, “if you knew how it has cut into my heart year by year to see the beautiful soul that Hester Haley gave to Morty decay under the blight of his father–but you can’t.” He sighed. “Yet there is still her soul in him–gentle, kind, trying to do the right thing–but tied and hobbled by life with his father. Grant may be wrong, Doctor,” cried the father, raising his hand excitedly, “he may be crazy, and I know they laugh at him up town here–for a fool and the son of a fool; he certainly doesn’t know how he is going to do all the things he dreams of doing–but that is not the point. The important thing is that he is having his dream! For by the Eternal, Jim Nesbit, I’d rather feel that my boy was even a small part of the life force of his planet pushing forward–I’d rather be the father of that boy–I’d rather be old Amos Adams the spook chaser–than Dan Sands with his million. I’ve been happier, Jim, with the memory of my Mary than he with his five wives. I’d rather be on the point of the drill of life and mangled there, than to have my soul rot in greed.”
The Doctor puffed on his pipe. “Well, Amos,” he returned quietly, “I suppose if a man wants to get all messed up as one of the points of the drill of life, as you call it–it’s easy enough to find a place for the sacrifice. I admire Grant; but someway,” his falsetto broke out, “I have thought there was a little something in the bread-and-butter proposition.”
“A little, Doctor Jim–but not as much as you’d think!” answered Amos.
“Nevertheless in this fight here in Greeley County, I’m quietly lining up a few county delegates, and picking out a few trusty friends who will show up at the caucuses, and Grant has a handful of crazy Ikes that I am going to use in my business, and if we win it will be a practical proposition–my head against Tom’s.”
The Doctor rose. Amos Adams stopped him with “Don’t be too sure of that, Jim; I got a writing from Mr. Left last night and he says–”
294“Hold on, Amos–hold on,” squeaked the Doctor’s falsetto; “until Mr. Left is registered in the Third Ward–we won’t bother with him until after the convention.”
The Doctor left the place smiling at Amos and glancing casually at young Mr. Perry. The dissertation had been a hard strain on the practical mind of young Mr. Perry, and while he was fumbling his way through the mazes of what he had heard, Amos Adams left the shop and another practical man very much after Nathan Perry’s own heart came in. Daniel Sands had no cosmic problems on his mind with which to befuddle young Perry. Daniel Sands was a seedy little old man of nearly three score years and ten; his dull, fishy eyes framed in red lids looked shiftily at one as though he was forever preoccupied in casting up sums in interest. His skin was splotched and dirty, a kind of scale seemed to be growing over it, and his long, thin nose stuck out of his shaggy, ill-kept whiskers like a sharp snout, attenuated by rooting in money. When he smiled, which was rarely, the false quality of his smile seemed expressed by his false teeth that were forever falling out of place when he loosed his facial muscles. He walked rather stealthily back to the desk where the proprietor of the shop was working; but he spoke loud enough for Nate Perry’s practical ear to comprehend the elder man’s mission.
“George, I’ve got to be out of town for the next ten days, and the county convention will meet when I’m gone.” He stopped, and cleared his throat. Mr. Brotherton knew what was coming. “I just called to say that we’re expecting you to do all you can for Tom.” He paused. Mr. Brotherton was about to reply when the old man smiled his false smile and added:
“Of course, we can’t afford to let our good Doctor’s family affairs interfere with business. And George,” he concluded, “just tell the boys to put Morty on in my place. And George, you kind of sit by Morty, and see that he gets his vote in right. Morty’s a good boy, George–but he someway doesn’t get interested in things as I like to see him. He’ll be all right if you’ll just fix his ballot in the convention and see that he votes it.” He blinked his dull, red eyes at the book seller and dropped his voice.
295“I noticed your paper as I passed the note counter just now; some of it will be due while I’m gone; I’ll tell ’em to renew it if you want it.” He smiled again, and Mr. Brotherton answered, “Very well–I’ll see that Morty votes right, Mr. Sands,” and solemnly went back to his ledger. And thus the practical mind of Nathan Perry had its first practical lesson in practical politics–a lesson which soon afterwards produced highly practical results.
Up and down Market Street tiptoed Daniel Sands that day, tightening his web of business and politics. Busily he fluttered over the web, his water pipes, his gas pipes, his electric wires. The pathway to the trade of the miners and the men in the shops and smelters lay through his door. Material prosperity for every merchant and every clerk in Market Street lay in the paunch of the old spider, and he could spin it out or draw it in as he chose. It was not usual for him to appear on Market Street. Dr. Nesbit had always been his vicegerent. And often it had pleased the Doctor to pretend that he was seeking their aid as friends and getting it solely upon the high grounds of friendship.
But as the Doctor stood by his office window that day and saw the old spider dancing up and down the web, Dr. Nesbit knew the truth–and the truth was wormwood in his mouth–that he had been only an errand boy between greed in the bank and self-interest in the stores. In a flash, a merciless, cynical flash, he looked into his life in the capital, and there he saw with sickening distinctness that with all his power as a boss, with his control over Senators and Governors and courts and legislatures, he was still the errand boy–that he reigned as boss only because he could be trusted by those who controlled the great aggregations of capital in the state–the railroads, the insurance companies, the brewers, the public service corporations. In the street below walked a flashy youth who went in and out of the saloons in obvious pride of being. His complacent smile, his evident glory in himself, made Dr. Nesbit turn away and shut his eyes in shame. He had loathed the youth as a person unspeakable. Yet the youth also was a messenger–the errand boy of vice in South Harvey who doubtless thought himself a person of great power and consequence. And the difference between an 296errand boy of greed and the errand boy of vice was not sufficient to revive the Doctor’s spirits. So the Doctor, sadly sobered, left the window. The gay enthusiasm of the diver plunging for the pearl was gone from the depressed little white clad figure. He was finding his pearl a burden rather than a joy.
That evening Morty Sands, resplendent in purple and fine linen–the purple being a gorgeous necktie, and the fine linen a most sumptuous tailor-made shirt waist above a pair of white broadcloth trousers and silk hose, and under a fifty dollar Panama hat, tripped into the Brotherton store for his weekly armload of reading and tobacco.
“Morty,” said Mr. Brotherton, after the young man had picked out the latest word in literature and nicotine, “your father was in here to-day with instructions for me to chaperone you through the county convention Saturday,–you’ll be on the delegation.”
The young man blinked good naturedly. “I haven’t got the intellect to go through with it, George.”
“Oh, yes, you have, Morty,” returned Mr. Brotherton, expansively. “The Governor wants me to be sure you vote for Van Dorn–that’s about all there is in the convention. Old Linen Pants is to name the delegates to the State and congressional conventions–they’re trying to let the old man down easy–not to beat him out of his State and congressional leadership.”
The young man thought for a moment then smiled up into the big moon-face of Brotherton–“All right, Georgie, I suppose I’ll have to cast my unfettered vote for Van Dorn, though as a sporting proposition my sympathies are with the other side.”
“Well, say–you orter ’a’ heard a talk I heard Doc Nesbit give this afternoon. That old sinner will be shouting on the mourner’s bench soon–if he doesn’t check up.”
Morty looked up from his magazine to say: “George–it’s Laura. A man couldn’t go with her through all she’s gone through without being more of a man for it. When I took a turn in the mining business last spring I found that the people down in South Harvey just naturally love her to death. They’ll do more or less for Grant Adams. He’s 297getting the men organized and they look up to him in a way. But they get right down on their marrow bones and love Laura.”
Morty smiled reflectively: “I kind of got the habit myself once–and I seem someway never to have got over it–much! But, she won’t even look my way. She takes my money–for her kindergarten. But that is all. She won’t let me take her home in my trap, nor let me buy her lunch–why she pays more attention to Grant Adams with his steel claw than to my strong right arm! About all she lets me do is distribute flower seeds. George,” he concluded ruefully, “I’ve toted around enough touch-me-nots and coxcomb seeds this spring for that girl to paint South Harvey ringed, streaked and striped.”
There the conversation switched to Captain Morton’s stock company, and the endeavor to get the Household Horse on the market. The young man listened and smiled, was interested, as George Brotherton intended he should be. But Morty went out saying that he had no money but his allowance–which was six months overdrawn–and there the matter rested.
In a few days, a free people arose and nominated their delegates to the Greeley County convention and the night before the event excitement in Harvey was intense. There could be no doubt as to the state of public sentiment. It was against Tom Van Dorn. But on the other hand, no one seriously expected to defeat him. For every one knew that he controlled the organization–even against the boss. Yet vaguely the people hoped that their institutions would in some way fail those who controlled, and would thus register public sentiment. But the night the delegates were elected, it seemed apparent that Van Dorn had won. Yet both sides claimed the victory. And among others of the free people elected to the Convention to cast a free vote for Judge Van Dorn, was Nathan Perry. He was put on the delegation to look after his father’s interests. Van Dorn was a practical man, Kyle Perry was a practical man and they knew Nate Perry was a practical youth. But while Tom Van Dorn slept upon the assurance of victory, Nate Perry was perturbed.