CHAPTER XXIX
BEING NOT A CHAPTER BUT AN INTERLUDE
Here and now this story must pause for a moment. It has come far from the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have grown from the saplings that were stuck in the sod thirty years before, and they limit the vision. No longer can one see over the town across the roofs of Market Street into the prairie. No longer even can one see from Harvey the painted sky at night that marks South Harvey and the industrial towns of the Wahoo Valley. Harvey is shut in; we all are sometimes by our comforts. The dreams of the pioneers that haloed the heads of those who came to Harvey in those first days–those dreams are gone. Here and there one is trapped in brick or wood or stone or iron; and another glows in a child or walks the weary ways of man as a custom or an institution or as a law that brought only a part of the blessings which it promised.
And the equality of opportunity for which these pioneers crossed the Mississippi and came into the prairie uplands of the West–where is that evanescent spirit? Certainly it touched Daniel Sands’s shoulder and he followed it; it beckoned Dr. Nesbit and he followed it a part of the journey. Surely Kyle Perry saw it for years, and Captain Morton was destined to find it, gorgeous and iridescent. Amos Adams might have had it for the asking, but he sought it only for others. It never came to Dooley and Hogan, and Williams and Bowman and those who went into the Valley. Did it die, one may ask; or did it vanish like a prairie stream under the sand to flow on subterranean and appear again strong, purified and refreshed, a powerful current to carry mankind forward? The world that was in the flux of dreams that day when Harvey began, had hardened to reality thirty years after. Men were going their appointed ways working out in circumstances the equation of their life’s philosophy.
And now while the story waits, we may well look at three pictures. They do not speed the narrative; they hardly point morals to adorn this tale. But they may show us how living a creed consistently colors one’s life. For after all the realities of life are from within. Events, environment, fortune good or bad do not color life, or give it richness and form and value. But in living a creed one makes his picture. So let us look at Thomas Van Dorn, who boasted that he could beat God at his own game, and did. For all that he wanted came to him, wealth and fame and power, and the women he desired.
Judge and Mrs. Van Dorn and her dog are riding by in their smart rubber tired trap, behind a highly checked horse and with the dog between them. They are not talking. The man is looking at his gloved hands, at the horse, at the street,–where occasionally he bows and smiles and never by any chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be passing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her. Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it is all there–and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom, is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile, with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is beautiful, exceedingly beautiful–but only as a picture. When the smile is garnished with words the voice is low and musical–but too low and too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van Dorn–the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Township fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn–where is it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her head ache, and is repeating over and over, “God is good, and I am God,” as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere repetition of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.
When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft, black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject of “wherewithal shall ye be clothed,” that the thought in some queer spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his artificial tailored skin, that seems to be a part of another consciousness than his own.
Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His lips–his lips once full and red, are pursing and leadening.
Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the big black mass of the temple of love that looms among the young trees upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on the ground. The man gathers the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar, and says behind his hands: “I’m going back downtown.”
“Oh, you are?” echoes the woman.
“Yes, I am,” replies the man sharply.
The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner.
Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege. So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live rather quiet lives.
On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention–poetry annoys her; fiction–the book of the moment, which happened to be “The Damnation of Theron Ware,” makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks up “The Harmonious Universe,” and walks with some show of grandeur in her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.
“You up?” he asks. He glances at the book and continues: “Reading that damn trash? Why don’t you read Browning or Thackeray or–if you want philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That’s rot.”
He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest, falsest, baby voice the woman answers:
“My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like I’ve been doing to-night.”
The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, “God is good and I am God,” many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a footnote to this picture may we not ask:
Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they made–or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly miserable when they began to “live happily ever after”? A symposium entitled “Is Love Really Worth It?” by such distinguished characters as Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading, if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of dissimulation and deceit.
But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we have the Morton family.
The Captain’s feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in the stove. It is May. But it is the Captain’s habit to warm his feet there when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper; then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this:
“Curious thing about spring.” The world of education, reading its examination papers, concurs in silence. The worlds of fashion and of the fine arts also assenting, the Captain goes on: “Down in South Harvey to-day; kind o’ dirty down there; looks kind of smoky and tin cannery, and woe-begone, like that class of people always looks, but ’y gory, girls, it’s just as much spring down there as it is up here, only more so! eh? I says to Laura, looking like a full bloom peach tree herself in her kindergarten, says I, ‘Laura, it’s terrible pretty down here when you get under the smoke and the dirt. Every one just a lovin’,’ says I, ‘and going galloping into life kind of regardless. There’s Nate and Anne, and there’s Violet and Hogan, and there’s a whole mess of fresh married couples in Little Italy, and the Huns and Belgians are all broke out with the blamedest dose of love y’ ever see! And they’s whole rafts of ’em to be married before June!’ Well, Laura, she laughed and if it wasn’t like pouring spring itself out of a jug. Spring,” he mused, “ain’t it curious about spring!”
Champing his apple the Captain gesticulates slowly with his open pocket knife, “Love”–he reflects; then backs away from his discussion and begins anew: “Less take–say Anne and Nate, a happy couple–him a lean, eagle-beaked New England kind of a man; her–a little quick-gaited, big-eyed woman and sping! out of the Providence of Goddlemighty comes a streak of some kind of creepy, fuzzy lightning and they’re struck dumb and blind and plumb crazy–eh?”
He champs for a time on the apple, “Eighteen sixty-one–May, sixty-one–me a tidy looking young buck–girl–beautiful girl with reddish brown hair and bluest eyes in the world. Sping! comes the lightning, and melts us together and the whole universe goes pink and rose-colored. No sense–neither of us–no more’n Anne and Nate, just one idea. I can’t think of nothing but her–war isn’t much; shackles on four millions slaves–no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his tent the day I left for the army; union forever–mere circumstance in the lives of two crazy people–in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft hands and whispers and flowers, eh–and–” The Captain does not finish his sentence.
He rises, puts his apple core on the table, and says after a great sigh: “And so we bloomed and blossomed and come to fruit and dried up and blowed away, and here they are–all the rest of ’em–ready to bloom–and may God help ’em and keep ’em.” He pauses, “Help ’em and keep ’em and when they have dried up and blowed away–let ’em remember the perfume clean to the end!” He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: “Well, girls, how about hash for breakfast–what say?”
The wheels of the Judge’s buggy grate upon the curbing nearby and the Captain remarks: “Judge Tom gets in a little later every night now. I heard him dump her in at eight, and here it is nearly eleven–pretty careless,–pretty careless; he oughtn’t to be getting in this late for four or five years yet–what say?” Public opinion again is divided. Fashion and the fine arts hold that it is Margaret’s fault and that she is growing to be too much of a poseur; but the schools, which are the bulwarks of our liberties, maintain that he is just as bad as she. And what is more to the point–such is the contention of the eldest Miss Morton of the fourth grade in the Lincoln school, he has driven around to the school twice this spring to take little Lila out riding, and even though her mother has told the teachers to let the child go if she cared to, the little girl would not go and he was mean to the principal and insolent, though Heaven knows it is not the principal’s fault, and if the janitor hadn’t been standing right there–but it really makes little difference what would have happened; for the janitor in every school building, as every one knows, is a fierce and awesome creature who keeps more dreadful things from happening that never would have happened than any other single agency in the world.
The point which the eldest Miss Morton was accenting was this, that he should have thought of Lila before he got his divorce.
Now the worlds of fashion and the fine arts and the schools themselves, bulwarks that they are, do not realize how keenly a proud man’s heart must be touched if day by day he meets the little girl upon the street, sees her growing out of babyhood into childhood, a sweet, bright, lovable child, and he yearns for something sincere, something that has no poses, something that will love him for himself. So he swallows a lump of pride as large as his handsome head, and drives to the school house to see his child–and is denied. In the Captain’s household they do not know what that means. For in the Captain’s household which includes a six room house–not counting the new white painted bathroom, the joint product of the toil of the handsome Miss Morton and the eldest Miss Morton, and not counting the basket for the kitten christened Epaminondas, and maintained by the youngest Miss Morton over family protests–in the Captain’s household there is peace and joy, if one excepts the numbing fear of a “step” that sometimes prostrates the eldest Miss Morton and her handsome sister; a fear that shelters their father against the wily designs of their sex upon a meek and defenseless and rather obliging gentleman. So they cannot put themselves in the place of the rich and powerful neighbors next door. The Mortons hear the thorns crackling under the pot, but they cannot appreciate the heat.
And now we come to the last picture.
It is still an evening in May!
“Well, how is the missionary to South Harvey,” chirrups the Doctor as he mounts the steps, and sees his daughter, waiting for him on the veranda. She looks cool and fresh and beautiful. Her eyes and her skin glow with health and her face beams upon him out of a soul at peace.
“She’s all right,” returns the daughter, smiling. “How’s the khedive of Greeley county?”
As the Doctor mounts the steps she continues: “Sit down, father–I’ve something on my mind.” To her father’s inquiring face she replied, “It’s Lila. Her father has been after her again. She just came home crying as though her little heart would break. It’s so pitiful–she loves him; that is left over from her babyhood; but she is learning someway–perhaps from the children, perhaps from life–what he has done–and when he tries to attract her–she shrinks away from him.”
“And he knows why–he knows why, Laura.” The Doctor taps the floor softly with his cane. “It isn’t all gone–Tom’s heart, I mean. Somewhere deep in his consciousness he is hungering for affection–for respect–for understanding. You haven’t seen Tom’s eyes recently?” The daughter makes no reply. “I have,” he continues. “They’re burned out–kind of glassy–scummed over with the searing of the hell he carries in his heart–like the girls’ eyes down in the Row. For he is dying at the heart–burning out with everything he has asked for in his hands, yet turning to Lila!”
“Father,” she says with her eyes brimming, “I’m not angry with Tom–only sorry. He hasn’t hurt me–much–when it’s all figured out. I still have my faith–my faith in folks–and in God! Really to take away one’s faith is the only wrong one can do to another!”
The father says, “The chief wrong he did you was when he married you. It was nobody’s fault; I might have stopped it–but no man can be sure of those things. It was just one of the inevitable mistakes of youth, my dear, that come into our lives, one way or another. They fall upon the just and the unjust–without any reference to deserts.”
She nods her assent and they sit listening to the sounds of the closing day–to the vesper bell in the Valley, to the hum of the trolley bringing its homecomers up from the town; to the drone of the five o’clock whistles in South Harvey, to the rattle of homebound buggies. Twice the daughter starts to speak. The second time she stops the Doctor pipes up, “Let it come–out with it–tell your daddy if anything is on your mind.” She smiles up into his mobile face, to find only sympathy there. So she speaks, but she speaks hesitatingly.
“I believe that I am going to be happy–really and truly happy!” She does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand and pats it. “I am finding my place–doing my work–creating something–not the home that I once hoped for–not the home that I would have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South Harvey. All over the place I find its roots–the shrivelled parching roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect. Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front bedroom–in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things I find happiness asserting itself in my life. So it’s my job, my consecrated job in this earth–to water the geranium, to prune the rose, to mulch the roots of self-respect among these people, and I am happy, father, happier every day that I walk that way.”
She looks wistfully into her father’s face. “Father, you won’t quite understand me when I tell you that the tomato cans with their geraniums behind those gray lace curtains, that make Harvey people smile, are really not tomato cans at all. They are social dynamite bombs that one day will blow into splinters and rubbish the injustices, the cruel injustices of life that the poor suffer at the hands of their exploiters. The geranium is the flower, the spring flower of the divine discontent, which some day shall bear great and wonderful fruit.”
“Rather a swift pace you’re setting for a fat man, Laura,” pipes the Doctor, adding earnestly: “There you go talking like Grant Adams! Don’t let Grant Adams fool you, child: the end of the world isn’t here. Grant’s a good boy, Laura, and I like him; but he’s getting a kind of Millerite notion that we’re about to put on white robes and go straight up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few years, and there’s nothing to it. Grant’s a good son, and a good brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but”–the Doctor pounds his chair arm vehemently, “there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just the same. Don’t get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to jump into the crack o’ doom for the established order!”
The daughter smiles at him, but she answers:
“Perhaps Grant is touched–touched with the mad impatience of God’s fools, father. I don’t always follow Grant. He goes his way and I go mine. But I am sure of this, that the thing which will really start South Harvey, and all the South Harveys in the world out of their dirt and misery, and vice, is not our dreams for them, but their dreams for themselves. They must see the vision. They must aspire. They must feel the impulse to sacrifice greatly, to consecrate themselves deeply, to give and give and give of themselves that their children may know better things. And it is my work to arouse their dreams, to inspire their visions, to make them yearn for better living. I am trying to teach them to use and to love beautiful things, that they may be restless among ugly things. I think beauty only serves God as the handmaiden of discontent! And, father, way down deep in my heart–I know–I know surely that I must do this–that it is my reason for being–now that life has taken the greater joy of home from me. So,” she concludes solemnly; “these people whom I love, they need me, but father, God and you only know how I need them. I don’t know about Grant,–I mean why he is going his solitary way, but perhaps somewhere in his heart there is a wound! Perhaps all of God’s fools–those who live queer, unnormal self-forgetting lives, are the broken and rejected pieces of life’s masonry which the builder is using in his own wise way. As for the plan, it is not ours. Grant and I, broken spawl in the rising edifice, we and thousands like us, odd pieces that chink in yet hold the strain–we must be content to hold the load and know always–always know that after all the wall is rising! That is enough.”
And now we must put aside the pictures and get on with the story.