In the Heart of a Fool Part 71

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

"'Promise me and make--others; you won't tell. I know father--he won't.

They're not--it's--society. Just that,' he said. 'This was society!' He had to stop. I felt his hand squeeze. 'I'm--so--happy,' he said one word at a time, gripping my hand tighter and tighter till it ached."

Brotherton put out his great hand, and looked at it impersonally, as one introducing a stranger for witness. Then Brotherton lifted his eyes to Laura's and took up his story:

"'That's hers,' he said; 'the letter,' and then 'my messages--happy.'"

The woman pressed her letter to her lips and looked at the white door.

She rose and, holding her letter to her bosom, closed her eyes and stood with a hand on the k.n.o.b. She dropped her hand and turned from the white door. The dawn was graying in the ugly street. But on the clouds the glow of sunrise blushed in promise. She walked slowly toward the street.

She gazed for a moment at the glorious sky of dawn.

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

"Give me your hand--that hand!"

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

"Oh, you don't think he's there--there in the night--behind the door? We know--oh, we do know he's out here--out here in the dawn."

CHAPTER LI

IN WHICH WE END AS WE BEGAN AND ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER

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

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

And the fellowship that came into the world as Grant Adams went out of it, touched a wider circle than the group with whom he lived and labored. The sad sincerity with which he worked proved to Market Street that the man was consecrated to a n.o.ble purpose, and Market Street's heart learned a lesson. Indeed the lives of that long procession of working men who have given themselves so freely--where life was all they had to give--for the freedom of their fellows from the bondage of the times, the lives of these men have found their highest value in making the Market Street eternal, realize its own shame. So Grant Adams lay down in the company of his peers that Market Street might understand in his death what his fellows really hoped for. He was a seed that is sown and falls upon good ground. For Market Street after all is not a stony place; seeds sown there bring forth great harvests. And while the harvest of Grant Adams's life is not at hand; the millennium is not here; the seed is quickening in the earth. And great things are moving in the world.

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

And in due course they appeared, Rev. Dr. John Dexter leading the way, followed by a thin, dark-skinned young man with eyes to match and a rather slight, shortish girl, blond and pink with happy tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and real pearls on her eyelashes. The children jabbered, and the women wept and the men wiped their eyes, and it was altogether a gay occasion. Just as the young people were ready to look the world squarely in the face, George Brotherton, thinking he heard some one moving outside in the deep, dark veranda, flicked on the porch light, and through the windows he saw--and the merry company could not help seeing two faces--two wan, unhappy faces, staring hungrily in at the bridal pair. They stood at different corners of the house and did not seem to know of one another's presence until the light revealed them. Only an instant did their faces flash into the light, as John Dexter was reading from the Bible a part of the service that he loved to put in, "and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." The faces vanished, there was a scurrying across the cement floor of the veranda and two figures met on the lawn in shame and anger.

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

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

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

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

"But, Amos," cried the Captain, "under the law, no man wearing that b.u.t.ton," and the Captain looked at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion, proudly adorning the shiny coat, "no soldier under the law, has to go out there. They've got to keep you here in town, and besides you're ent.i.tled to a whopping lot of pension money for all these unclaimed years."

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER LII

NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A Q E D OR A HIC FABULA DOCET

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

And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent--rich, cra.s.s, material, beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the G.o.d of gross and palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American spirit--the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the seas, had bid them fight kings and princ.i.p.alities and powers, had forced them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it "the homestead of the free"; the spirit that had called them by the millions to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.

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

And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her sh.o.r.es. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that G.o.d had departed from it.

Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans to go forth and fight in the Great War--not for themselves, not for their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world.

And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how G.o.d's truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own was won.

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

To have lived in the generation now pa.s.sing, to have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the hearts of the people, to have watched the steady triumph in our American life of the spirit of justice, of fellowship over the spirit of greed, to have seen the Holy Ghost rise in the life of a whole nation, was a blessed privilege. And if this tale has reflected from the shallow paper hearts of those phantoms flitting through its pages some glimpse of their joy in their pilgrimage, the story has played its part. If the fable of Grant Adams's triumphant failure does not dramatize in some way the victory of the American spirit--the Puritan conscience--in our generation, then, alas, this parable has fallen short of its aim. But most of all, if the story has not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the scornful, and to deny the reality of G.o.d's purpose in this world, even though it is denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so desolate as it is in the heart of a fool.

THE END