In the Heart of a Fool Part 58

Hand in hand they skip across the lawn, and soon are hidden in the veranda. They sit arm in arm, on a swinging porch chair, and have no great need for words. "What is it--what is the reason?" asked the youth.

"Well, dear"--it is an adventure to say the word out loud after whispering it for so many days--"dear," she repeated, and feels the pressure of his arm as she speaks, "it's something about you!"

"But what?" he persisted.

"We don't know now," she returns. "And really what does it matter, only we can't hurt grandma, and it won't be for long. It can't be for long, and then--"

"We don't care now,--not to-night, do we?" She lifts her head from his shoulder, and puts up her lips for the answer. It is all new--every thrill of the new-found joy of one another's being is strange; every touch of the hands, of cheeks, every pressure of arms--all are gloriously beautiful.

Once in life may human beings know the joy these lovers knew that night.

The angels lend it once and then, if we are good, they let us keep it in our memories always. If not, then G.o.d sends His infinite pity instead.

CHAPTER XLIV

IN WHICH WE SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN, WITH GEORGE BROTHERTON, AND IN GENERAL CONSIDER THE HABITANTS OF THE KINGDOM

Mr. Brotherton had been pacing the deck of his store like the captain of a pirate ship in a storm. Nothing in the store suited him; he found Miss Calvin's high facade of hair too rococo for the attenuated lines of gray and lavender and heliotrope that had replaced the angular effects in red and black and green and brown of former years. He had asked her to tone it down to make it match the long-necked gray jars and soft copper vases that adorned the gray burlapped Serenity, and she had appeared with it slopping over her ears, "as per yours of even date!" And still he paced the deck.

He picked up Zola's "Fecundite," which he had taken from stock; tried to read it; put it down; sent for "Tom Sawyer"; got up, went after d.i.c.kens's "Christmas Books," and put them down; peeped into "Little Women," and watched the trade, as Miss Calvin handled it, occasionally dropping his book for a customer; hunted for "The Three Bears," which he found in large type with gorgeous pictures, read it, and decided that it was real literature.

Amos Adams came drifting in to borrow a book. He moved slowly, a sort of gray wraith almost discarnate and apart from things of the earth.

Brotherton, looking at the old man, felt a candor one might have in addressing a state of mind. So the big voice spoke gently:

"Here, Mr. Adams," called Brotherton. "Won't you come back here and talk to me?" But the shopkeeper felt that he should put the elder man at his ease, so he added: "You're a wise guy, as the Latin fathers used to say.

Anyway, if Jasper ever gets to a point where he thinks marriage will pay six per cent. over and above losses, you may be a kind of step-uncle-in-law of mine. Tell me, Mr. Adams--what about children--do they pay? You know, I've always wanted children. But now--well, you see, I never thought but that people just kind of picked 'em off the bushes as you do huckleberries. I'm getting so that I can't look at a great crowd of people without thinking of the loneliness, suffering and self-denial that it cost to bring all of them into the world. Good Lord, man, I don't want lots of children--not now. And yet, children--children--why, if we could open a can and have 'em as we do most things, from sardines to grand opera, I'd like hundreds of them.

Yet, I dunno," Mr. Brotherton wagged a thoughtful head.

But Amos Adams rejoined: "Ah, yes, George, but when you think of what it means for two people to bring a child into the world--what the journey means--the slow, inexorable journey into the valley of the shadow means for them, close together; what tenderness springs up; what sacrifices come forth; what firm knitting of lives; what new kind of love is bred--you are inclined to think maybe Providence knew what it was about when it brought children into life by the cruel path."

Mr. Brotherton nodded a sympathetic head.

"Let me tell you something, George," continued Amos. "It's through their hope of bettering the children that Grant has moved his people in the Valley out on the little garden plots. There they are--every warmish day thousands of mothers and children and old men, working their little plots of ground, trudging back to the tenements in the evening. The love of children is the one steady, unswerving pa.s.sion in these lives, and Grant has nearly harnessed it, George. And it's because Nate Perry has that love that he's giving freely here for those poor folks a talent that would make him a millionaire, and is running his mines, and his big foundry with Cap Morton besides. It's perfectly splendid to see the way a common fatherhood between him and the men is making a brotherhood.

Why, man," cried Amos, "it refreshes one's faith like a tragedy."

"h.e.l.lo, Aunt Avey," piped the cheery voice of the little old Doctor, as he came toddling through the front door. "It's a boy--Joe Calvin the Third." The Doctor came back to the desk where Amos was standing and took a chair, and as Amos drifted out of the store as impersonally as he came, the Doctor began to grin.

"We were just talking of children," said Brotherton with studied casualness. "You know, Doctor," Brotherton smiled abashed, "I've always thought I'd like lots of children. But now--"

"I see 'em come, and I see 'em go every day. I'm kind of getting used to death, George. But the miracle of birth grows stranger and stranger."

"So young Joe Calvin's a proud parent, is he? Boy, you say?"

"Boy," chuckled the Doctor, "and old Joe's out there having a nervous breakdown. They've had ten births in the Calvin family. I've attended all of 'em, and this is the first time old Joe's ever been allowed in the house. To-day the old lady's out there with a towel around her head, practically having that baby herself. The poor daughter-in-law hasn't seen it. You'd think she was only invited in as a sort of paying guest.

And old lady Calvin comes in every few minutes and delivers homilies on the joys of large families!"

The Doctor laughed until his blue old eyes watered, and he chirped when he had his laugh out: "How soon we forget! Which, I presume, is one of G.o.d's semi-precious blessings!"

When the Doctor went out, Brotherton found the store deserted, except for Miss Calvin, who was in front. Brotherton carried a log to the fireplace, stirred up the fire, and when he had it blazing, found Laura Van Dorn standing beside him.

"Well, George," she said, "I've just been stealing away from my children in the Valley for a little visit with Emma."

"Very well, then," said Mr. Brotherton, "sit down a minute with me. Tell me, Laura--about children--are they worth it?"

She was a handsome woman, with youth still in her eyes and face, who sat beside George Brotherton, looking at the fire that March day.

"George--good old friend," she said gently, "there's nothing else in the world so worth it as children."

She hesitated before going so deeply into her soul, perhaps picking her verbal way. "George--no man ever degraded a woman more than I was degraded. Yet I brought Lila out of it, and I thank G.o.d for her, and I don't mind the price--not now." She turned to look at Mr. Brotherton inquiringly as she said: "But what I come in to talk to you about, George, was Grant. Have you noticed in the last few months--that growing--well--it's more than enthusiasm, George; it's a fanaticism.

Since he has been working on the garden plan--Grant has been getting wilder and wilder in his talk about the Democracy of labor. Have you noticed it--or am I oversensitive?"

Brotherton, poking idly in the fire, did not answer at once. At length he said:

"Grant's a zealot. He's full of this prisms, prunes and peace idea, this sweetness and light revolution, this notion of hitching their hop-dreams to these three-acre plots, and preaching non-resistance. It's coming a little fast for me, Laura--just a shade too many at times. But, on the other hand--there's Nate Perry. He's as cold-blooded a Yankee as ever swindled a father--and he's helping with the scheme. He's--"

"He has no faith in the Democracy of Labor. He hoots," interrupted Laura. "What he's doing is working for a more efficient lot of laboring men, so that when the time comes when the unions shall ask and get more definite control of the factories and mines, in the way of wage-setting, and price-making, they will bring some sense with their control. He's merely looking after himself--in the last a.n.a.lysis; but Grant's going mad. George, he actually believes that when this thing wins here in the Valley--the peaceful strike, the rise of labor, and the theory of non-resistance--he's going over the world, and in a few years will have labor emanc.i.p.ated. Have you heard him--that is, recently?"

"Well, yes, a week or so ago," answered Brotherton, "and he was going it at a pretty fair clip for a minute then. Well, say--I mean--what should we do?" he asked, drumming with the poker on the hearth. "Laura,"

Brotherton ran his eyes from the poker until they met her frank, gray eyes, "Grant would listen to you before he would listen to any one else on earth or in Heaven--I'm sure of that."

"Then what shall we do?" she asked. "We mustn't let him wreck himself--and all these people? What ought I--"

A shadow fell across the door, and in another moment there stood in the opening of the alcove the tall, lean figure of Thomas Van Dorn.

When Laura was gone, Van Dorn, after more or less polite circ.u.mlocution, began to unfold a plan of Market Street to buy the _Daily Times_ and bring Jared Thurston back to Harvey to run it in the interests of the property owners in the town and in the Valley. Incidentally he had come to warn George on behalf of Market Street that he was harboring Grant Adams, contrary to the judgment of Market Street. But George Brotherton's heart was far from Market Street; it was out on the hill with Emma, his wife, and his mouth spoke from the place of his treasure.

"Tom--tell me, as between man and man, what do you think of children?

You're sort of in the outer room of the Blue Lodge of grandfatherdom, with Lila and Kenyon getting ready for the preacher, and you ought to know, Tom--honest, man, how about it?"

A wave of self-pity enveloped the Judge. His voice broke as he answered: "George, I haven't any little girl--she never even has spoken to me about this affair that the whole town knows about. Oh, I haven't any child at all."

He looked a miserable moment at Brotherton, perhaps reviewing the years which they had lived and grown from youth to middle age together and growled: "Not a thing--not a d.a.m.ned thing in it--George, in all this forty years of fighting to keep ahead of the undertaker! Not a G.o.d d.a.m.ned thing!" And so he left the Sweet Serenity of Books and Wall Paper and went back to the treadmill of life, spitting ashes from his gray lips!

And then Daniel Sands toddled in to get the five-cent cigars which he had bought for a generation--one at a time every day, and Brotherton came to Daniel with his problem.

The old man, whose palsied head forever was denying something, as if he had the a.s.sessor always in his mind, shut his rheumy eyes and answered: "My children--bauch--" He all but spat upon their names. "Morty--moons around reading Socialist books, with a cold in his throat and dishwater in his brains. And the other, she's married a dirty traitor and stands by him against her own flesh and blood. Ba-a-a-ch!" He showed his blue, old mouth, and cried:

"I married four women to give those children a home--and what thanks do I get? Ingrates--one a milk-sop--G.o.d, if he'd only be a Socialist and get out and throw dynamite; but he won't; he won't do a thing but sit around drooling about social justice when I want to eat my meals in peace. And he goes coughing all day and night, and grunting, and now he's wearing a pointed beard--he says it's for his throat, but I know--it's because he thinks it's romantic. And that Anne--why, she's worse," but he did not finish the sentence. His old head wagged violently. Evidently another a.s.sessor had suddenly pounced in upon his imagination. For he shuffled into the street.

Mr. Brotherton sat by the fire, leaning forward, with his fingers locked between his knees. The warning against Grant Adams that Tom Van Dorn had given him had impressed him. He knew Market Street was against Grant Adams. But he did not realize that Market Street's att.i.tude was only a reflex of the stir in the Valley. All Market streets over the earth feel more or less acutely changes which portend in the workshops, often before those changes come. We are indeed "members one of another," and the very aspirations of those who dream of better things register in the latent fears of those who live on trade. We are so closely compact in our organization that a man may not even hope without crowding his neighbor. And in that little section of the great world which men knew as Market Street in Harvey, the surest evidence of the changing att.i.tude of the men in the Valley toward their work, was found not in the crowds that gathered in Belgian Hall week after week to hear Grant Adams, not in the war-chest which was filling to overflowing, not in the gardens checkered upon the hillsides, but rather in the uneasiness of Market Street. The reactions were different in Market Street and in the Valley; but it was one vision rising in the same body, each part responding according to its own impulses. Of course Market Street has its side, and George Brotherton was not blind to it. Sitting by his fire that raw March day, he realized that Market Street was never a crusader, and why.

He could see that the men from whom the storekeepers bought goods on ninety days' time, 3 per cent. off for cash, were not crusaders. When a man turned up among them with a six-months' crusade for an evanescent millennium, flickering just a few years ahead, the wholesalers of the city and the retailers of Market Street nervously began thumbing over their rapidly acc.u.mulating "bills payable" and began using crisp, scratchy language toward the crusader.

It made Brotherton pause when he thought how they might involve and envelop him--as a family man. For as he sat there, the man's mind kept thinking of children. And his mind wandered to the thought of his wife and his home--and the little ones that might be. As his mind clicked back to Amos Adams, and to the strange family that would produce three boys as unlike as Grant and Jasper and Kenyon, he began to consider how far Kenyon had come for a youth in his twenties. And Brotherton realized that he might have had a child as old as Kenyon. Then Mr. Brotherton put his hands over his face and tried to stop the flying years.

A shadow fell, and Brotherton greeted Captain Morton, in a sunburst of mauve tailoring. The Captain pointed proudly to a necktie pin representing a horse jumping through a horseshoe, and cried: "What you think of it? Real diamond horseshoe nails--what say?"

"Now, Captain, sit down here," said Mr. Brotherton. "You'll do, Captain--you'll do." But the subject nearest the big man's heart would not leave it. "Cap," he said, "what about children--do they pay?"