In the Heart of a Fool.

by William Allen White.

CHAPTER I

BEING STAGE DIRECTIONS, AND A CAST OF CHARACTERS

Sunshine and prairie gra.s.s--well in the foreground. For the background, perhaps a thousand miles away or more than half a decade removed in time, is the American Civil War. In the blue sky a meadow lark's love song, and in the gra.s.s the boom of the prairie chicken's wings are the only sounds that break the primeval silence, excepting the lisping of the wind which dimples the broad acres of tall gra.s.s--thousand upon thousand of acres--that stretch northward for miles. To the left the prairie gra.s.s rises upon a low hill, belted with limestone and finally merges into the mirage on the knife edge of the far horizon. To the southward on the canvas the prairie gra.s.s is broken by the heavy green foliage above a sluggish stream that writhes and twists and turns through the prairie, which rises above the stream and meets another limestone belt upon which the waving ripples of the unmowed gra.s.s wash southward to the eye's reach.

Enter R. U. E. a four-ox team hauling a cart laden with a printing press and a printer's outfit; following that are other ox teams hauling carts laden with tents and bedding, household goods, lumber, and provisions. A four-horse team hauling merchandise, and a span of mules. .h.i.tched to a spring wagon come crashing up through the timber by the stream. Men and women are walking beside the oxen or the teams and are riding in the covered wagons. They are eagerly seeking something. It is the equality of opportunity that is supposed to be found in the virgin prairies of the new West. The men are nearly all veterans of the late war, for the most part bearded youngsters in their twenties or early thirties. The women are their fresh young wives. As the procession halts before the canvas, the men and women begin to unpack the wagons and to line out on each side of an imaginary street in the prairie. The characters are discovered as follows:

Amos Adams, a red-bearded youth of twenty-nine and Mary Sands, his wife.

They are printers and begin unpacking and setting up the printing material in a tent.

Dr. James Nesbit and Bedelia Satterthwaite, his wife, in the tent beside the Adamses.

Captain Ezra Morton, and Ruth his wife; he is selling a patent, self-opening gate.

Ahab Wright, in side whiskers, white necktie, flannel shirt and carefully considered trousers tucked in shiny boots.

Daniel Sands, Jane, his young wife, and Mortimer, her infant stepson.

Daniel owns the merchandise in the wagon.

Casper Herd.i.c.ker, cobbler, and Brunhilde Herd.i.c.ker, his wife.

Herman Muller, bearded, coa.r.s.e-featured, noisy; a Pennsylvania Dutchman, his faded, rope-haired, milk-eyed, sickly wife and Margaret, their baby daughter.

Kyle Perry, owner of the horses and spring wagon.

d.i.c.k Bowman, Ira Dooley, Thomas Williams, James McPherson, Dennis Hogan, a boy, laborers.

As other characters enter during the early pages of the story they shall be properly introduced.

As the actors unload their wagons the spectators may notice above their heads bright, beautiful and evanescent forms coming and going in and out of being. These are the visions of the pioneers, and they are vastly more real than the men and women themselves. For these visions are the forces that form the human crystal.

Here abideth these three: sunshine and prairie gra.s.s and blue sky, cloud laden. These for ages have held domain and left the scene unchanged.

When lo--at Upper Middle Entrance,--enter love! And love witched the dreams and visions of those who toiled in the sunshine and prairie gra.s.s under the blue sky cloud laden. And behold what they visioned in the witchery of love, took form and spread upon the prairie in wood and stone and iron, and became a part of the life of the Nation. Blind men in other lands, in other times looked at the Nation and saw only wood and stone and iron. Yet the wood and stone and iron should not have symbolized the era in America. Rather should the dreams and visions of the pioneers, of those who toiled under the sunshine and in the prairie gra.s.s have symbolized our strength. For half a century later when the world was agonizing in a death grapple with the mad G.o.ds of a cra.s.s materialism, mankind saw rising from the wood and stone and iron that had seemed to epitomize this Nation, a spirit which had lain hidden yet dormant in the Nation's life--a beautiful spirit of idealism strong, brave and humbly wise; the child of the dreams and visions and the love of humanity that dwelled in the hearts of the pioneers of that earlier time.

But this is looking forward. So let us go back to scene one, act one, in those days before the sunshine was shaded, the prairie gra.s.s worn off, and the blue sky itself was so stained and changed that the meadow-lark was mute!

And now we are ready for the curtain: and--music please.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE FOOL AND HIS LADY FAIR AND WHAT HE SAID IN HIS HEART--THE SAME BEING THE THEME AND THESIS OF THIS STORY

A story is a curious thing, that grows with a kind of consciousness of its own. Time was, in its invertebrate period of gestation when this story was to be Amos Adams's story. It was to be the story of one who saw great visions that were realized, who had from the high G.o.ds whispers of their plans. What a book it would have been if Amos and Mary could have written it--the story of dreams come true. But alas, the high G.o.ds mocked Amos Adams. Mary's clippings from the Tribune--a great litter of them, furnished certain dates and incidents for the story.

Often when the Tribune was fresh from the press Mary and Amos would sit together in the printing office and Mary eaten with pride would clip from the damp paper the grandiloquent effusions of Amos that seemed to fit into other items that were to remind them of things which they could not print in their newspaper but which would be material for their book.

What a bundle of these clippings there is! And there was the diary, or old-fashioned Memory Book of Mary Adams. What a pile of neatly folded sheets covered with Mary Adams' handwriting are there on the table by the window! What memories they revive, what old dead joys are brought to life, what faded visions are repainted. This is to be the Book--the book that they dreamed of in their youth--even before little Kenyon was born, before Jasper was born, indeed before Grant was born.

But now the years have written in many things and it will not be even their story. Indeed as life wrote upon their hearts its mysterious legend--the legend that erased many of their n.o.ble dreams and put iron into their souls, there is evidence in what they wrote that they thought it would be Grant's story. Most parents think their sons will be heroes.

But their boy had to do his part in the world's rough work and before the end the clippings and the notes in the Memory Book show that they felt that a hero in blue overalls would hardly answer for their Book.

Then there came a time when Amos alone in his later years thought that it might be Kenyon's story; for Kenyon now is a fiddler of fame, and fiddlers make grand heroes. But as the clippings and the notes show forth still another story, the Book that was to be their book and story, may not be one man's or one woman's story. It may not be even the story of a town; though Harvey's story is tragic enough. (Indeed sometimes it has seemed that the story of Harvey, rising in a generation out of the sunshine and prairie gra.s.s, a thousand flued h.e.l.l, was to be the story of the Book.) But now Harvey seems to be only a sign of the times, a symptom of the growth of the human soul. So the Book must tell the tale of a time and a place where men and women loved and strove and joyed or suffered and lost or won after the old, old fashion of our race; with only such new girdles and borders and frills in the record of their work and play as the changing skirts of pa.s.sing circ.u.mstance require. The Book must be more than Amos Adams's or his son's or his son's son's story or his town's, though it must be all of these. It must be the story of many men and many women, each one working out his salvation in his own way and all the threads woven into the divine design, carrying along in its small place on the loom the inscrutable pattern of human destiny. But most of all it should be the story which shall explain the America that rose when her great day came--exultant, triumphant to the glorious call of an ideal, arose from sordid things environing her body and soul, and consecrated herself without stint or faltering hand to the challenge of democracy.

In the old days--the old days when Amos Adams was young--he printed the Harvey _Tribune_ on a hand press. Mary spread the ink upon the types; he pulled the great lever that impressed each sheet; and as they worked they sang about the coming of the new day. As a soldier--a commissioned officer he had fought in the great Civil War for the truth that should make men free. And he was sure in those elder days that the new day was just dawning. And Mary was sure too; so the readers of the Tribune were a.s.sured that the dawn was at hand. The editor knew that there were men who laughed at him for his hopes. But he and Mary, his wife, only laughed at men who were so blind that they could not see the dawn. So for many years they kept on rallying to whatever faith or banner or cause seemed surest in its promise of the sunrise.

Green-backers, Grangers, Knights of Labor, Prohibitionists--these two crusaders followed all of the banners. And still there came no sunrise.

Farmers' Alliance, Populism, Free Silver--Amos marched with each cavalcade. And was hopeful in its defeat.

And thus the years dragged on and made decades and the decades marshaled into a generation that became an era, and a city rose around a mature man. And still in his little office on a rickety side street, the _Tribune_, a weekly paper in a daily town, kept pointing to the sunrise; and Amos Adams, editor and proprietor, an old fool with the faith of youth, for many years had a book to write and a story to tell--a story that was never told, for it grew beyond him.

He printed the first edition of the _Tribune_ in his tent under an elm tree in a vast, unfenced meadow that rose from the fringe of timber that shaded the Wahoo. Volume one, number one, told a waiting world of the formation of the town company of Harvey with Daniel Sands as president. It was one of thousands of towns founded after the Civil War--towns that were bursting like mushrooms through the prairie soil.

After that war in which millions of men gave their youth and myriads gave their lives for an ideal, came a reaction. And in the decades that followed the war, men gave themselves to an orgy of materialism. Harvey was a part of that orgy. And the Ohio crowd, the group that came from Elyria--the Sandses, the Adamses, Joseph Calvin, Ahab Wright, Kyle Perry, the Kollanders[1] and all the rest except the Nesbits--were so considerable a part of Harvey in the beginning, that probably they were as guilty as the rest of the country in the cra.s.s riot of greed that followed the war. They brought Amos Adams to Harvey because he was a printer and in those halcyon days all printers were supposed to be able to write; and he brought Mary--but did he bring Mary? He was never sure whether he brought her or she brought him. For Mary Sands--dear, dear Mary Sands--she had a way with her. She was not Irish for nothing, G.o.d bless her.

Amos always tried to be fair with Daniel Sands because he was Mary's brother; even though there was a time after he came home a young soldier from the war and found that Daniel Sands who hired a subst.i.tute and stayed at home, had won Esther Haley, who was pledged to Amos,--a time when Amos would have killed Daniel Sands. That pa.s.sed, Mary, Daniel's sister, came; and for years Amos Adams bore Daniel Sands no grudge. What has all his money done for Daniel. It has ground the joy out of him--for one thing. And as for Esther, somewhere about Elyria, Ohio, the gra.s.s is growing over her grave and for forty years only Mortimer, her son, with her eyes and mouth and hair, was left in the world to remind Amos of the days when he was stark mad; and Mary, dear, dear, Irish Mary Sands, caught his heart upon the bounce and made him happy.

So let us say that Mary brought Amos to Harvey with the Ohio crowd, as Daniel Sands and his followers were known, The other early settlers came to grow up with the country and to make their independent fortunes; but Mary and Amos came to see the sunrise. For they were sure that men and women starting in a new world having found equality of opportunity, would not make this new world sordid, unfair and cruel as the older world was around them in those days.

Amos and Mary took up their homestead just south of the town on the Wahoo, and started the Tribune, and Mary hoped the high hopes of the Irish while Amos wrote his part of the news, set his share of the type, ran the errands for the advertising and bragged of the town in their editorial columns with all the faith of an Irishman by marriage.

What a fairy story the history of Harvey would be if it should be written only as it was. For one could even begin it once upon a time.

Once upon a time, let us say, there was a land of sunshine and prairie gra.s.s. And then great genii came and set in little white houses and new unpainted barns, thumbed in faint green hedgerows and board fences, that checkered in the fields lying green or brown or loam black by the sluggish streams that gouged broad, zigzag furrows in the land. And upon a hill that overlooked a rock-bottomed stream the genii, the spirit of the time, sat a town. It glistened in the sunshine and when the town was over a year old, it was so newly set in, that its great stone schoolhouse all towered and tin-corniced, beyond the scattered outlying residences, rose in the high, untrodden gra.s.s. The people of Harvey were vastly proud of that schoolhouse. The young editor and his wife used to gaze at it adoringly as they drove to and from the office morning and evening; and they gilded the town with high hopes. For then they were in their twenties. The population of Harvey for the most part those first years was in its twenties also, when gilding is cheap. But thank Heaven the gilding of our twenties is lasting.

It was into this gilded world that Grant Adams was born. Suckled behind the press, cradled in the waste basket, toddling under hurrying feet, Grant's earliest memories were of work--work and working lovers, and their gay talk as they worked wove strange fancies in his little mind.

It was in those days that Amos Adams and his wife, considering the mystery of death, tried to peer behind the veil. For Amos tables tipped, slates wrote, philosophers, statesmen and conquerors flocked in with grotesque advice, and all those curious phenomena that come from the activities of the abnormal mind, appeared and astounded the visionaries as they went about their daily work. The boy Grant used to sit, a wide-eyed, freckled, sun-browned little creature, running his skinny little hands through his red hair, and wondering about the unsolvable problems of life and death.

But soon the problems of a material world came in upon Grant as the child became a boy: problems of the wood and field, problems of the constantly growing herd at play in water, in snow, on the ice and in the prairie; and then came the more serious problems of the wood box, the stable and farm. Thus he grew strong of limb, quick of hand, firm of foot and sure of mind. And someway as he grew from childhood into boyhood, getting hold of his faculties--finding himself physically, so Harvey seemed to grow with him. All over the town where men needed money Daniel Sands's mortgages were fastened--not heavily (nothing was heavy in that day of the town's glorious youth) but surely. Dr. Nesbit's gay ruthless politics, John Kollander's patriotism, leading always to the court house and its emoluments, Captain Morton's inventions that never materialized, the ever coming sunrise of the Adams--all these things became definitely a part of the changeless universe of Harvey as Grant's growing faculties became part of his consciousness.

And here is a mystery: the formation of the social crystal. In that crystal the outer facets and the inner fell into shape--the Nesbits, the Kollanders, the Adamses, the Calvins, the Mortons, and the Sandses, falling into one group; and the Williamses, the Hogans, the Bowmans, the McPhersons, the Dooleys and Casper Herd.i.c.ker falling into another group.

The hill separated from the valley. The separation was not a matter of moral sense; for John Kollander and Dan Sands and Joseph Calvin touched zero in moral intelligence; and it could not have been business sense, for Captain Morton for all his dreams was a child with a dollar, and Dr.

Nesbit never was out of debt a day in his life; without his salary from tax-payers John Kollander would have been a charge on the county. In the matter of industry Daniel Sands was a marvel, but Jamie McPherson toiling all day used to come home and start up his well drill and its clatter could be heard far into the night, and often he started it hours before dawn. Nor could aspirations and visions have furnished the line of cleavage; for no one could have hopes so high for Harvey as Jamie, who sank his drill far into the earth, put his whole life, every penny of his earnings and all his strength into the dream that some day he would bring coal or oil or gas to Harvey and make it a great city. Yet when he found the precious vein, thick and rich and easy to mine, Daniel Sands and Joseph Calvin took his claim from him by chicanery as easily as they would have robbed a blind man of a penny, and Jamie went to work in the mines for Daniel Sands grumbling but faithful. Williams and Dooley and Hogan and Herd.i.c.ker bent at their daily tasks in those first years, each feeling that the next day or the next month or at most the next year his everlasting fortune would be made. And d.i.c.k Bowman, cohort of Dr. Nesbit, many a time and oft would wash up, put on a clean suit, and go out and round up the voters in the Valley for the Doctor's cause and scorn his task with a hissing; for d.i.c.k read Karl Marx and dreamed of the day of the revolution. Yet he dwelled with the sons of Essua, who as they toiled murmured about their stolen birthright. When a decade had pa.s.sed in Harvey the social crystal was firm; the hill and the valley were cast into the solid rock of things as they are. No one could say why; it was a mystery. It is still a mystery. As society forms and reforms, its cleavages follow unknown lines.

It was on a day in June--late in the morning, after Grant and Nathan Perry--son of the stuttering Kyle of that name, had come from a cool hour in the quiet pool down on the Wahoo and little Grant, waiting like a hungry pup for his lunch, that was tempting him in the basket under the typerack, was counting the moments and vaguely speculating as to what minutes were--when he looked up from the floor and saw what seemed to him a visitor from another world.[2]

The creature was talking to Amos Adams sitting at the desk; and Amos was more or less impressed with the visitor's splendor. He wore exceedingly tight trousers--checked trousers, and a coat cut grandly and extravagantly in its fullness, a high wing collar, and a soup dish hat.

He was such a figure as the comic papers of the day were featuring as the exquisite young man of the period.

Youth was in his countenance and lighted his black eyes. His oval, finely featured face, his blemishless olive skin, his strong jaw and his high, beautiful forehead, over which a black wing of hair hung carelessly, gave him a distinction that brought even the child's eyes to him. He was smiling pleasantly as he said,

"I'm Thomas Van Dorn--Mr. Adams, I believe?" he asked, and added as he fastened his fresh young eyes upon the editor's, "you scarcely will remember me--but you doubtless remember the day when father's hunting party pa.s.sed through town? Well--I've come to grow up with the country."

The editor rose, roughed his short, sandy beard and greeted the youth pleasantly. "Mr. Daniel Sands sent me to you, Mr. Adams--to print a professional card in your paper," said the young man. He p.r.o.nounced them "cahd" and "papuh" and smiled brightly as his quick eyes told him that the editor was conscious of his eastern accent. While they were talking business, locating the position of the card in the newspaper, the editor noticed that the young man's eyes kept wandering to Mary Adams, typesetting across the room. She was a comely woman just in her thirties and Amos Adams finally introduced her. When he went out the Adamses talked him over and agreed that he was an addition to the town.