In the Heart of a Fool Part 55

Now they have capered through these pages of this chapter--all of the people in this story in their love affairs. Hand in hand, they have come to the footlights, hand in hand they have walked before us. We have seen that love is a pa.s.sion with many sides. It varies with each soul. In youth, in maturity, in courtship, in marriage, in widowhood, in innocence, and in the wisdom of serpents, love reflects the soul it shines on. For love is youth in the heart--youth that always beckons, that always shapes our visions. Love ever sheens and shimmers brightly from within us; but what it shows to the world--that is vastly different with each of us. For that is the shadow of his inmost being.

CHAPTER XLIII

WHEREIN WE FIND GRANT ADAMS CALLING UPON KENYON'S MOTHER, AND DARKNESS FALLS UPON TWO LOVERS

Once in a while an item appeared in the Harvey _Tribune_ that might have been found nowhere else, and for reasons. For instance, the issue of the _Tribune_ that contained the account of the Captain's party also contained this item, which Daniel Sands had kept out of every other paper in town:

"Mortimer Sands, son of D. Sands of the Traders' Bank, has returned from Arizona, where he has been seeking health. He is hopeful of ultimate recovery."

Another item of interest appeared in the same issue of the paper. It related that T. Van Dorn, former Judge of the District Court, is in Washington, D. C., on legal business.

The Adams family item, which the paper never failed to contain, was this:

"K. Adams will leave next week for New York, where his new opera, 'Rachel,' will have its first appearance next autumn. He will be missed in our midst."

And for a paper with no subscribers and no patronage, it is curious to note that the _Tribune_ carried the news above mentioned to all of Harvey, and all of Harvey discussed the news. Not that the town did not know more or less of the facts as hereinabove related; but when a fact is read in print it becomes something different from a fact. It becomes a public matter, an episode in the history of the world.

In the same issue of the paper was a statement from Grant Adams that he had decided to throw his life with the Socialists and with that group known as the revolutionary Socialists. Grant was enough of a personage, and the declaration was short enough and interesting enough, to give it a place in the newspapers of the country for a day. In the State where he lived, the statement created some comment--mostly adverse to Dr.

Nesbit, whose political a.s.sociation with Grant Adams had linked the Doctor's name with Grant's. Being out of power, Dr. Nesbit felt these flings. So it happened that when, the Sunday following the announcement, Grant came with his father and Kenyon in the rattling old buggy up to the Nesbit home on Elm Street, Amos Adams found a rollicking, frivolous, mischievous host--but Grant Adams found a natty, testy, sardonic old man, who made no secret of his ill-humor.

Kenyon found Lila, and the two with their music indoors made a background for the talk on the veranda. Nathan Perry, who came up for a pill or a powder for one of his flock, sat for a time on the veranda steps. For all his frivoling with the elder Adams, Nathan could see by the way the loose, wrinkled skin on the Doctor's face kept twitching when Grant spoke, that the old man had something on his mind.

"Grant," cried the Doctor, in his excited treble, "do you realize what an ornate, unnecessary, unmitigated conspicuous, and elaborate jack you've made of yourself? Do you--young man? Well, you have. Your revolution--your revolution!" shrilled the old man. "d.a.m.n sight of revolution you'll kick up charging over the country with your water-tank patriots--your--your box-car statesmen--now, won't you?"

"Here--Doctor,--come--be--"

But the Doctor would not let Grant talk. The chirrup of the shrill old voice bore in upon the younger man's protest with, "Now, you let me say my say. The world's moving along--moving pretty fast and generally to one end, and that end is to put food in the bellies, clothes on the back, and brains in the head of the working man. The whole trend of legislation all over the world has gone that way. h.e.l.l's afire, Grant--what more do you want? We've given you the inheritance tax and the income tax and direct legislation to manipulate it, and, by Ned, instead of staying with the game and helping us work these things out in wise administration, you fly the coop, and go squawking over the country with your revolution and leave me--d.a.m.n it, Grant," piped the little, high voice, sputtering with rage, "you leave me--with my linen pants on a clothes-line four miles from home!"

Then slowly the little lines began to break in his loose skin. A faint smile, then a grin and then a laugh, spread over the old face, and he wiped his watering eyes as he shook his head mournfully.

Grant was gathering himself to reply when Nate Perry rasped in with his high-keyed Yankee voice: "I guess that about covers my views, Grant--if any one should ask you."

The crusader rose in Grant: "It's you men who have no sense," he cried.

"You think because I declare war on the profit system that I propose to sail out and overturn it with a few bombs over night. Look here, men; what I propose to do is to demonstrate right here in the Wahoo Valley, where there are all sorts of laboring people, skilled, unskilled, continuous, overpaid and underpaid, foreign and American--utterly unlike, incoherent, racially and industrially--that they have in them capacities for organizing; unused abilities, untried talents that will make them worthy to take a higher place in the economic scale than they now have. If I can amalgamate them, if I can weld them into a consistent, coherent labor ma.s.s--the Irish, the Slav, the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, the French, the Dutch, the Letts, and the Mexicans--put to some purpose the love of the poor for the poor, so that it will count industrially, you can't stop the revolution." He was wagging his head, waving his stump of an arm and his face showed the temperamental excitement that was in him.

"Go ahead, Grant," said Perry. "Play out all your line--show us your game."

"Well, then--here's my game. For five years we've been collecting a district strike fund--all our own, that doesn't belong to any other organization or federation anywhere. It's ours here in the Wahoo. It's independent of any state or national control. I've collected it. It's been paid because these men here in the Valley have faith in me. We have practically never spent a penny of it. There are about ten thousand workers in the Valley--some, like the gla.s.sblowers, are the aristocracy of labor; others, like the breaker boys, are at the bottom of the scale.

But we've kept wages up, kept conditions as high as they are anywhere in the country--and we've done it without strikes. They have faith in me.

So we've a.s.sessed them according to their wages, and we have on hand, with a.s.sessments and interest, over a third of a million dollars."

He looked at Perry, and nodded his head at the Doctor. "You fellows think I'm a cream-puff reformer. I'm not. Now, then--I've talked it over with our board--we are going to invest that money in land up and down the Valley--put the women and children and old men on it--in tents--during the growing season, and cultivate that land in three-acre tracts intensively. Our Belgian gla.s.sblowers and smelter men have sent for their gardeners to teach us. Now it's merely a question of getting the land and doing the preliminary organization. We want to get as much land as we can. Now, there's my game. With that kind of a layout we can win any strike we call. And we can prove to the world that labor has the cohesive cooperating faculty required to manage the factories--to take a larger share of the income of industry, if you please. That's my revolution, gentlemen. And it's going to begin right here in the Wahoo Valley."

"Well," returned Nate Perry, "your revolution looks interesting. It's got some new gears, at least."

"Go it while you're young," piped the Doctor. "In just about eighteen months, you will be coming to me to go on your bond--to keep out of jail. I've seen new-fangled revolutions peter out before."

"Just the same," replied Grant, "I've pinned my faith to these men and women. They are now working in fear of poverty. Give them hope of better things instead of fear and they will develop out of poverty, just as the middle cla.s.s came out under the same stimulus."

"I don't know anything about that," interrupted Perry, "but I do know that I could take that money and put three thousand families to work on the land in the Wahoo Valley and develop the best labor in the country."

He laughed, and Grant gazed, almost flared, so eager was his look, at Perry for a moment, and said: "When the day of the democracy of labor comes--and it will come and come soon--men like you will take leadership."

There was more high talk, and Nathan Perry went home with his pill.

When he was gone, the music from indoors came to the three men. "That's from his new opera, father," said Grant, as his attention was attracted to the violin and piano.

"Good Lord," exclaimed the Doctor, "I've heard so much of that opera that I caught myself prescribing a bar from the opening chorus for the grip the other day!"

The two elder men looked at each other, and the Doctor said, "Well, Amos--that's mostly why I asked you to come up to-day. It wasn't for the society of your amateur revolutionist--you may be sure of that."

The Doctor tempered his words with a smile, but they had p.r.i.c.ks, and Grant winced. "I suppose we may as well consider Lila and Kenyon as before the house?"

"Kenyon came to me last night," said Grant, "wanting to know whether he should come to father first, or go to Dr. Nesbit, or--well, he wondered if it would be necessary to talk with Lila's own father." All the grimness in Grant's countenance melted as he spoke of Kenyon and the battered features softened.

"And that is what I wish to talk about, Grant," said the Doctor gently.

"They don't know who Kenyon is--I mean, they don't know about his parentage." Grant looked at the floor. Slowly as the old shame revived in him, its flush rose from his neck to his face and met his tousled hair. The two old men looked seriously at one another. The Doctor emphasized the solemnity of the occasion by lighting a pipe.

"I don't know--I really don't know what is right here," he said finally.

"Is it fair to Laura to let her daughter marry the son of a woman who, more than any other woman in the world, has wronged her? I'm sure Laura cherishes no malice toward Kenyon's mother. Yet, of course," the Doctor spoke deliberately and puffed between his words, "blood is blood. But I don't know how much blood is blood, I mean how much of what we call heredity in human beings is due to actual blood transmission of traits, and how much is due to the development of traits by family environment.

I'm not sure, Amos, that this boy's bad blood has not been entirely eliminated by the kindly, beautiful family environment he has had with you and yours. There seems to be nothing of the Mullers in him, but his face and his music--I take it his music is of German origin."

"I don't know--I don't know, Doctor," answered Amos. "I've tried to take him apart, and put him together again, but I can't find where the parts belong."

And so they droned on, those three wiseacres--two oldish gentlemen and a middle-aged man, thinking they could change or check or dam the course of true love. While inside at the piano on the tide of music that was washing in from G.o.d only knows what bourne where words are useless and pa.s.sions speak the primitive language of souls, Lila and Kenyon were solving all the problems set for them by their elders and betters. For they lived in another world from those who established themselves in the Providence business out on the veranda. And on this earth, even in the same houses, and in the same families, there is no communication between the worlds. With our powerful lenses of memory we men and women in our forties gaze earnestly and long at the distant planets of youth, wondering if they are really inhabited by real people--or mere animals, perchance--if they have human inst.i.tutions, reasonable aspirations or finite intelligences. We take temperatures, make blood counts and record blood pressure, reckon the heart-beats, and think we are wondrous wise.

But wig-wag as we may, signal with what mysterious wireless of evanescent youth-fire we still hold in our blood, we get nothing but vague hints, broken reminiscences, and a certain patchwork of our own subconscious chop logic of middle age in return. There is no real communication between the worlds. Youth remains another planet--even as age and childhood are other planets.

Now, after the three wise men had considered the star glowing before them, they decided thus:

"Well," quoth the Doctor, "it seems absolutely just that Lila should know who her husband is, and that Laura should know whom her child is marrying. So far as I am concerned, I know this Adams blood; I'll trust it to breed out any taint; but I have no right to decide for Lila; I have no right to say what Laura will do--though, Grant, I know in my heart that she would rather have her child marry yours than to have anything else come about that the world could hold for her. And yet--she should know the truth."

Grant sat with his head bowed, and his eyes on the floor, while the Doctor spoke. Without looking up, he said: "There's some one else to consider, Doctor--there's Margaret--after all, it's her son; it's her secret. It's--I don't know what her rights are--perhaps she's forfeited them. But she is at least physically his mother."

The Doctor looked up with a troubled face. He ran his hand over the place where his pompadour once used to rise, and where only a fuzz responded to the stroke of his dry palm, and answered:

"Grant--through it all--through all the tragedy that she has brought here, I've kept that secret for Margaret. And until she releases me, I can never break my silence. A doctor--one of the right sort--never could. Whatever you feel are her rights--you and she must settle. It must be you, not I, to tell this story, even to my own flesh and blood, Grant."

Grant rose and walked the long, straight stretch of the veranda. His shoulders, pugnacious, aggressive, and defiant, swayed as he walked heavily and he gazed at the floor as one in shame. Finally he whirled toward the Doctor and said:

"I'm going to his mother. I'm going now. She may have mighty few rights in this matter--she cast him off shamefully. But she has just one right here--the right to know that I shall tell her secret to Laura, and I'm going to talk to her before I tell Laura. Even if Margaret clamors against what I think is right, I shall not stop. But I'm not going to sneak her secret away without her knowing it. I suppose that's about the extent of her rights in Kenyon: to know before I tell his wife who he really is, so that Margaret will know who knows and who does not know her relation to him. It seems to me that is about the justice of the case." The Doctor puffed at his pipe, and nodded a slow a.s.sent.

"Now's as good a time as any," answered the Doctor, and added: "By the way, Amos--I had a telegram from Washington this morning, saying that Tom is to be made Federal judge in the new district. That's what he's doing in Washington just now. He is one of those ostensible fellows,"

piped the Doctor. "Ostensibly he's there trying to help land another man; but Tom's the Van Dorn candidate."