CHAPTER XI

HERE OUR FOOL GROPES FOR A SPIRIT AND CAN FIND ONLY DUST

Henry Fenn and Margaret Muller sat naming their wedding day, while Grant Adams walked home with his burden. Henry Fenn had been fighting through a long winter, against the l.u.s.t for liquor that was consuming his flesh.

At times it seemed to him that her presence as he fought his battle, helped him; but there were phases of his fight, when she too fashioned herself in his imagination as a temptress, and she seemed to blow upon the coals that were searing his weak flesh.

At such times he was taciturn, and went about his day's work as one who is busy at a serious task. He smiled his amiable smile, he played his man's part in the world without whimpering, and fought on like a gentleman. The night he met Grant and the child at the steps of the house where Margaret lived, he had called to set the day for their marriage. And that night she glowed before him and in his arms like a very brand of a woman blown upon by some wind from another world. When he left her his throat grew parched and dry and his lips quivered with a desire for liquor that seemed to simmer in his vitals. But he set his teeth, and ran to his room, and locked himself in, throwing the key out of the window into the yard. He sat shivering and whimpering and fighting, by turns conquering his devil, and panting under its weight, but always with the figure and face of his beloved in his eyes, sometimes beckoning him to fight on, sometimes coaxing him to yield and stop the struggle. But as the day came in he fell asleep with one more battle to his credit.

In Harvey for many years Henry Fenn's name was a byword; but the pitying angels who have seen him fight in the days of his strength and manhood--they looked at Henry Fenn, and touched reverent foreheads in his high honor. Then why did they who know our hearts so well, let the blow fall upon him, you ask. But there you trespa.s.s upon that old question that the Doctor and Amos Adams have thrashed out so long. Has man a free will, or has the illusion of time and s.p.a.ce wound him up in its predestined tangle, to act as he must and be what he is without appeal or resistance, or even hope of a pardon?

Doctor Nesbit and Amos Adams were trying to solve the mystery of human destiny at the gate of the Adams' home the day after the funeral. Amos had his foot on the hub of the Doctor's buggy and was saying: "But Doctor, can't you see that it isn't all material? Suppose that every atom of the universe does affect every other atom, and that the acc.u.mulated effect of past action holds the stars in their courses, and that if we knew what all the past was we should be able to foretell the future, because it would be mathematically calculable--what of it? That does not prove your case, man! Can't you see that in free will another element enters--the spiritual, if you please, that is not amenable to atomic action past or present?" Amos smiled deprecatingly and added sadly: "Got that last night from Schopenhauer." The Doctor, clearly unawed by Schopenhauer, broke out: "Aye, there I have you, Amos. Isn't the brain matter, and doesn't the brain secrete consciousness?"

"Does this buggy secrete distance, Jim? Go 'long with you, man." Before the Doctor could reply, around the corner of the house, bringing little Kenyon Adams in his best bib and tucker, came the lofty figure of Mrs.

Nesbit. With her came her daughter. Then up spoke Mrs. Bedelia Satterthwaite Nesbit of the Maryland Satterthwaites, "Look here, Amos Adams--I don't care what you say, I'm going to take this baby." There was strong emphasis upon the "I'm," and she went on: "You can have him every night, and Grant can take care of the child after supper when he comes home from work. But every morning at eight I'm going to have this baby." Further emphasis upon the first person. "I'm not going to see a child turned over to a hired girl all day and me with a big house and no baby and a daughter about to marry and leave me and a houseful of help, if I needed it, which thank Heavens I don't." She put her lips together sternly, and, "Not a word, Amos Adams," she said to Amos, who had not opened his mouth. "Not another word. Kenyon will be home at six o'clock."

She put the child into the Doctor's submissive arms--helped her daughter into the buggy, and when she had climbed in herself, she glared triumphantly over her gla.s.ses and above her Roman nose, as she said: "Now, Amos--have some sense. Doctor,--go on." And in a moment the buggy was spinning up the hill toward the town.

Thus it was that every day, rain or shine, until the day of her wedding, Laura Nesbit drove her dog cart to the Adamses before the men went to their work and took little Kenyon home with her and brought him back in the evening. And always she took him from the arms of Grant--Grant, red-headed, freckled, blue-eyed, who was hardening into manhood and premature maturity so fast that he did not realize the change that it made in his face. It grew set, but not hard, a woman's tenderness crept into the features, and with that tenderness came at times a look of petulant impatience. It was a sad face--a sadly fanatic face--yet one that lighted with human feeling under a smile.

Little by little, meeting daily--often meeting morning and evening, Grant and Laura established a homely, wholesome, comfortable relation.

One evening while Laura was waiting for Tom Van Dorn and Grant was waiting for Kenyon she and Grant sitting upon the veranda steps of the Nesbit home, looked into the serene, wide lawn that topped the hill above the quiet town. They could look across the white and green of the trees and houses, across the prosperous, solid, red roofs of the stone and brick stores and offices on Market Street, into the black smudge of smoke and the gray, unpainted, sprawling rows of ill-kept tenements around the coal mines, that was South Harvey. They could see even then the sky stains far down the Wahoo Valley, where the villages of Foley and Magnus rose and duplicated the ugliness of South Harvey.

The drift of the conversation was personal. The thoughts of youth are largely personal. The universe is measured by one's own thumb in the twenties. "Funny, isn't it," said Grant, playing with a honeysuckle vine that climbed the post beside him, "I guess I'm the only one of the old crowd who is outlawed in overalls. There's Freddie Kollander and Nate Perry and cousin Morty and little Joe Calvin, all up town counterjumping or working in offices. The girls all getting married." He paused. "But as far as that goes I'm making more money than any of the fellows!" He paused again a moment and added as he gazed moodily into the pillars of smoke rising above South Harvey, "Gee, but I'll miss you when you're gone--"

The girl's silvery laugh greeted his words. "Now, Grant," she said, "where do you think I'm going? Why, Tom and I will be only a block from here--just over on Tenth Street in the Perry House."

Grant grinned as he shook his head. "You're lost and gone forever, just the same, Miss Clementine. In about three years I'll probably be that 'red-headed boss carpenter in the mine----let me see, what's his name?'"

"Oh, Grant," scoffed the girl. She saw that his heart was sadder than his face.

She took courage and said: "Grant, you never can know how often I think of you--how much I want you to win everything worth while in this world, how much I want you to be happy--how I believe in you and--and--bet on you, Grant--bet on you!"

Grant did not answer her. Presently he looked up and over the broad valley below them. The sun behind the house was touching the limestone ledge far across the valley with golden rays. The smoke from South Harvey on their right was lighted also. The youth looked into the smoke.

Then he turned his eyes back from the glowing smoke and spoke.

"This is how I look at it. I don't mean you're any different from any one else. What I was trying to say was that I'm the only one of our old crowd in the High School you know that used to have parties and go together in the old days--I'm the only one that's wearing overalls, and my way is down there"; he nodded his head toward the mines and smelters and factories in the valley.

"Look at these hands," he said, solemnly spreading out his wide, muscular hands on his knees; showing one bruised blue-black finger nail.

The hands were flinty and hairy and brown, but they looked effective with an intelligence almost apart from the body which they served.

"I'm cut out for work. It's all right. That's my job, and I'm proud of it so far as that goes. I could get a place clerking if I wanted to, and be in the dancing crowd in six months, and be out to the Van Dorns for dinner in a year." He paused and looked into the distant valley and cried. "But I tell you--my job is down there. And I'm not going to quit them. G.o.d knows they're getting the rough end of it. If you knew," his voice raised slightly and a petulant indignation tempered it. "If you knew the gouging and pocket picking and meanness that is done by the people up town to the people down there in the smoke, you'd be one of those howling red-mouthed anarchists you read about."

The girl looked at him silently and at length asked: "For instance--what's just one thing?"

"Well, for instance--in the mines where I work all the men come up grimy and greasy and vile. They have to wash. In Europe we roughnecks know that wash-houses are provided by the company, but here," he cried excitedly, "the company doesn't provide even a faucet; instead the men--father and son and maybe a boarder or two have to go home--into those little one and two roomed houses the company has built, and strip to the hide with the house full of children and wash. What if your girlhood had been used to seeing things like that--could you laugh as you laugh now?" He looked up at her savagely. "Oh, I know they're ignorant foreigners and little better than animals and those things don't hurt them--only if you had a little girl who had to be in and out of the single room of your home when the men came home to wash up--"

He broke off, and then began again, "Why, I was talking to a dago last night at the shaft mouth going down to work on the graveyard shift and he said that he came here believing he would find a free, beautiful country in which his children could grow up self-respecting men and women, and then he told me about his little girls living down there where all the vice is scattered through the tenements, and--about this washing up proposition, and now one of the girls is gone and they can't find her." He threw out a despairing hand; "So I'm a roughneck, Laura--I'm a jay, and I'm going to stay with them."

"But your people," she urged. "What about them--your father and brothers?"

"j.a.p's climbing out. Father's too old to get in. And Kenyon--" he flinched, "I hope to G.o.d I'll have the nerve to stay when the test on him comes." He turned to the girl pa.s.sionately: "But you--you--oh, you--I want you to know--" He did not finish the sentence, but rose and walked into the house and called: "Dad--Kenyon--come on, it's getting late. Stars are coming out."

Half an hour later Tom Van Dorn, in white flannels, with a red silk tie, and with a white hat and shoes, came striding across the lawn. His black silky mustache, his soft black hair, his olive skin, his shining black eyes, his alert emotional face, dark and swarthy, was heightened even in the twilight by the soft white clothes he wore.

"h.e.l.lo, popper-in-law," he cried. "Any room left on the veranda?"

"Come in, Thomas," piped the older man. "The girls are doing the dishes, Bedelia and Laura, and we'll just sit out two or three dances."

The young man lolled in the hammock shaded by the vines. The elder smoked and reflected. Then slowly and by degrees, as men who are feeling their way to conversation, they began talking of local politics. They were going at a high rate when the talk turned to Henry Fenn. "Doing pretty well, Doctor," put in the younger man. "Only broke over once in eighteen months--that's the record for Henry. Shows what a woman can do for a man." He looked up sympathetically, and caught the Doctor's curious eyes.

The Doctor puffed, cleaned out his pipe, absently put it away, then rose and deliberately pulled his chair over to the hammock: "Tom--I'm a generation older than you--nearly. I want to tell you something--" He smiled. "Boy--you've got the devil's own fight ahead of you--did you know it--I mean," he paused, "the--well, the woman proposition."

Van Dorn fingered his mustache, and looked serious.

"Tom," the elder man chirped, "you're a handsome pup--a d.a.m.n handsome, lovable pup. Sometimes." He let his voice run whimsically into its mocking falsetto, "I almost catch myself getting fooled too."

They laughed.

"Boy, the thing's in your blood. Did you realize that you've got just as hard a fight as poor Henry Fenn? It's all right now--for a while; but the time will come--we might just as well look this thing squarely in the face now, Tom--the time will come in a few years when the devil will build the same kind of a fire under you he is building under Henry Fenn--only it won't be whisky; it will be the woman proposition. d.a.m.n it, boy," cried the elder man squeakily, "it's in your blood; you've let it grow in your very blood. I've known you ten years now, and I've seen it grow. Tom--when the time comes, can you stand up and fight like Henry Fenn--can you, Tom? And will you?" he cried with a piteous fierceness that stirred all the sympathy in the young man's heart.

He rose to the height of the Doctor's pa.s.sion. Tears came into Van Dorn's bright eyes. His breast expanded emotionally and he exclaimed: "I know what I am, oh, I know it. But for her--you and I together--you'll help and we'll stand together and fight it out for her." The father looked at the mobile features of his companion, and sensed the thin plating of emotion under the vain voice. Whereupon the Doctor heaved a deep, troubled sigh.

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho." He put his arm upon the broad, handsome, young shoulder. "But you'll try to be a good boy, won't you--" he repeated.

"Just try hard to be a good boy, Tom--that's all any of us can do," and turning away he whistled into the house and a girlish trill answered him.

After the Doctor had jogged down the hill behind his old horse making his evening professional visits, Mrs. Nesbit came out and made a show of sitting with the young people for a time. And not until she left did they go into those things that were near their hearts.

When Mrs. Nesbit left the veranda the young man moved over to the girl and she asked: "Tom, I wonder--oh, so much and so often--about the soul of us and the body of us--about the justice of things." She was speaking out of the heart that Grant had touched to the quick with his outburst about the poor. But Tom Van Dorn could not know what was moving within her and if he had known, perhaps he would have had small sympathy with her feeling. Then she said: "Oh, Tom, Tom, tell me--don't you suppose that our souls pay for the bodies that we crush--I mean all of us--all of us--every one in the world?"

The man looked at her blankly. Then he put his arm tenderly about her and answered: "I don't know about our souls--much--" He kissed her. "But I do know about you--your wonderful eyes--and your magic hair, and your soft cheek!" He left her in no doubt as to her lover's mood.

Vaguely the girl felt unsatisfied with his words. Not that she doubted the truth of them; but as she drew back from him she said softly: "But if I were not beautiful, what then?"

"Ah, but you are--you are; in all the world there is not another like you for me." In the rapture that followed, her soul grew in a wave of joy, yet she spoke shyly.

"Tom," she said wistfully, "how can you fail to see it--this great, beautiful truth that makes me glad: That the miracle of our love proves G.o.d."

He caressed her hands and pressed closer to her. "Call it what you will, little girl: G.o.d if it pleases you, I call it nature."

"Oh, it's bigger than that, Tom," and she shook a stubborn Satterthwaite head, "and it makes me so happy and makes me so humble that I want to share it with all the world." She laid an abashed cheek on his hands that were still fondling hers.

But young Mr. Van Dorn spoke up manfully, "Well, don't you try sharing it. I want all of it, every bit of it." He played with her hair, and relaxed in a languor of complete possession of her.

"Doesn't love," she questioned, "lift you? Doesn't it make you love every living thing?" she urged.