Читать книгу In the Heart of a Fool - White William Allen - Страница 14

The soup had come and gone; great platters of fried chicken had disappeared, with incidental spinach and new peas and potatoes. A bowl of lettuce splashed with a French dressing had been mowed down as the grass, and the goodly company was surveying something less than an acre of strawberry shortcake at the close of a rather hilarious dinner–a spring dinner, to be exact. Rhoda Kollander was reciting with enthusiasm an elaborate and impossible travesty of a recipe for strawberry shortcake, which she had read somewhere, when the Doctor, in his nankeens, putting his hands on the table cloth as one who was about to deliver an oracle, ran his merry eyes down the table, gathering up the Adamses and Mortons and Mayor Brotherton and Morty Sands; fastened his glance upon the Van Dorns and cut in on the interminable shortcake recipe rather ruthlessly thus in his gay falsetto:

“Tom, here–thinks he’s pretty smart. And George Brotherton, Mayor of all the Harveys, thinks he is a pretty smooth article; and the Honorable Lady Satterthwaite here, she’s got a Maryland notion that she has second sight into the doings of her prince consort.” He chuckled and grinned as he beamed at his daughter: “And there is the princess imperial–she thinks she’s mighty knolledgeous about her father–but,” he cocked his head on one side, enjoying the suspense he was creating as he paused, drawling his words, “I’m just going to show you how I’ve got ’em all fooled.”

He pulled from his pocket a long, official envelope, pulled from the envelope an official document, and also a letter. He laid the official document down before him and opened the letter.

“Kind o’ seems to be signed by the Governor of the State,” he drolled: “And seems like the more I look at it the surer I am it’s addressed to Tom Van Dorn. I’m not much of an elocutionist and never could read at sight, having come from Eendiany, and I guess Rhody here, she’s kind of elocutionary and I’ll jest about ask her to read it to the ladies and gentlemen!” He handed Mrs. Kollander the letter and passed the sealed document to his son-in-law.

Mrs. Kollander read aloud:

“I take pleasure in handing you through the kindness of Senator James Nesbit your appointment to fill the vacancy in your judicial district created to-day by the resignation of Judge Arbuckle of your district to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court of this State created there by the resignation of Justice Worrell.”

Looking over his wife’s shoulder and seeing the significance of the letter, John Kollander threw back his head and began singing in his roaring voice, “For we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again, shouting the battle cry of freedom,” and the company at the table clapped its hands. And while George Brotherton was bellowing, “Well–say!” Judge Thomas Van Dorn kissed his wife and beamed his satisfaction upon the company.

When the commotion had subsided the chuckling little man, all a-beam with happiness, his pink, smooth face shining like a headlight, explained thus:

“I jest thought these Maryland Satterthwaites and Schenectady Van Dorns was a-gittin’ too top-lofty, and I’d have to register one for the Grand Duke of Griggsby’s Station, to sort of put ’em in their place!” He was happy; and his vernacular, which always was his pose under emotional stress, was broad, as he went on: “So I says to myself, the Corn Belt Railroad is mighty keen for a Supreme Court decision in the Missouri River rate case, and I says, Worrell J., he’s the boy to write it, but I says to the Corn Belt folks, says I, ‘It would shatter the respect of the people for their courts if Worrell J. should stay on the bench after writing the kind of a decision you want, so we’ll just put him in your law offices at twelve thousand per, which is three times what he is getting now, and then one idear brought on another and here’s Tom’s commission and three men and a railroad all made happy!” He threw back his head and laughed silently as he finished, “and all the justices concurring!” After the hubbub of congratulations had passed and the guests had moved into the parlor of the Nesbit home, the little Doctor, standing among them, regaled himself thus:

“Politics is jobs. Jobs is friends. Friends is politics. The reason why the reformers don’t get anywhere is that they have no friends in politics. They regard the people as sticky and smelly and low. Bedelia has that notion. But I love ’em! Love ’em and vote ’em!”

Amos Adams opened his mouth to protest, but the Doctor waved him into silence. “I know your idear, Amos! But when the folks get tired of politics that is jobs and want politics that is principles, I’ll open as fine a line of principles as ever was shown in this market!”

After the company had gone, Mrs. Nesbit faced her husband with a peremptory: “Well–will you tell me why, Jim Nesbit?” And he sighed and dropped into a chair.

“To save his self-respect! Self-respect grows on what it feeds on, my dear, and I thought maybe if he was a judge”–he looked into the anxious eyes of his wife and went on–“that might hold him!” He rested his head on a hand and drew in a deep breath. “‘Vanity, vanity,’ saith the Preacher–‘all is vanity!’ And I thought I’d hitch it to something that might pull him out of the swamp! And I happened to know that he had a sneaking notion of running for Judge this fall, so I thought I’d slip up and help him.”

He sighed again and his tone changed. “I did it primarily for Laura,” he said wearily, and: “Mother, we might as well face it.”

Mrs. Nesbit looked intently at her husband in understanding silence and asked: “Is it any one in particular, Jim–”

He hesitated, then exclaimed: “Oh, I may be wrong, but somehow I don’t like the air–the way that Mauling girl assumes authority at the office. Why, she’s made me wait in the outer office twice now–for nothing except to show that she could!”

“Yes, Jim–but what good will this judgeship do? How will it solve anything?” persisted the wife. The Doctor let his sigh precede his words: “The office will make him realize that the eyes of the community are on him, that he is in a way a marked man. And then the place will keep him busy and spur on his ambition. And these things should help.”

He looked tenderly into the worried face of his wife and smiled. “Perhaps we’re both wrong. We don’t know. Tom’s young and–” He ended the sentence in a “Ho–ho–ho–hum!” and yawned and rose, leading the way up stairs.

In the Van Dorn home a young wife was trying to define herself in the new relation to the community in which the evening’s news had placed her. She had no idea of divorcing the judgeship from her life. She felt that marriage was a full partnership and that the judgeship meant much to her. She realized that as a judge’s wife her life and her duties–and she was eager always to acquire new duties–would be different from her life and her duties as a lawyer’s wife or a doctor’s wife or a merchant’s wife, for example. For Laura Van Dorn was in the wife business with a consuming ardor, and the whole universe was related to her wifehood. To her marriage was the development of a two-phase soul with but one will. As the young couple entered their home, the wife was saying:

“Tom, isn’t it fine to think of the good you can do–these poor folk in the Valley don’t really get justice. And they’re your friends. They always help you and father in the election, and now you can see that they have their rights. Oh, I’m so glad–so glad father did it. That was his way to show them how he really loves them.”

The husband smiled, a husbandly and superior smile, and said absently, “Oh, well, I presume they don’t get much out of the courts, but they should learn to keep away from litigation. It’s a rich man’s game anyway!” He was thinking of the steps before him which might lead him to a higher court and still higher. His ambition vaulted as he spoke. “Laura, Father Jim wouldn’t mind having a son-in-law on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe we can work together and make it in twenty years more!”

As the young wife saw the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball of the future and saw its glistening chimera.

Perhaps the preceding dialogue wherein Dr. James Nesbit, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law have spoken may indicate that politics as the Doctor played it was an exceedingly personal chess game. We see him here blithely taking from the people of his state, their rights to justice and trading those rights cheerfully for his personal happiness as it was represented in the possible reformation of his daughter’s husband. He thought it would work–this curious bartering of public rights for private ends. He could not see that a man who could accept a judgeship as it had come to Tom Van Dorn, in the nature of things could not take out an essential self-respect which he had forfeited when he took the place. The Doctor was as blind as Tom Van Dorn, as blind as his times. Government was a personal matter in that day; public place was a personal perquisite.

As for the reformation of Tom Van Dorn, for which all this juggling with sacred things was done, he had no idea that his moral regeneration was concerned in the deal, and never in all the years of his service did the vaguest hint come to him that the outrage of justice had been accomplished for his own soul’s good.

The next morning Tom Van Dorn read of his appointment as Judge in the morning papers, and he pranced twice the length of Market Street, up one side and down the other, to let the populace congratulate him. Then with a fat box of candy he went to his office, where he gave the candy and certain other tokens of esteem to Miss Mauling, and at noon after the partnership of Calvin & Van Dorn had been dissolved, with the understanding that the young Judge was to keep his law books in Calvin’s office, and was to have a private office there–for certain intangible considerations. Then after the business with Joseph Calvin was concluded, the young Judge in his private office with his hands under his coattails preened before Miss Mauling and talked from a shameless soul of his greed for power! The girl before him gave him what he could not get at home, an abject adoration, uncritical, unabashed, unrestrained.

The young man whom the newly qualified Judge had inherited as court stenographer was a sadly unemotional, rather methodical, old maid of a person, and Tom Van Dorn could not open his soul to this youth, so he was wont to stray back to the offices of Joseph Calvin to dictate his instructions to juries, and to look over the books in his own library in making up his decisions. The office came to be known as the Judge’s Chambers and the town cocked a gay and suspicious eye at the young Judge. Mr. Calvin’s practice doubled and trebled and Miss Mauling lost small caste with the nobility and gentry. And as the summer deepened, Dr. James Nesbit began to see that vanity does not build self-respect.

When the young Judge announced his candidacy for election to fill out the two years’ unexpired term of his predecessor, no one opposed Van Dorn in his party convention; but the Doctor had little liking for the young man’s intimacy in the office of Joseph Calvin and less liking for the scandal of that intimacy which arose when the rich litigants in the Judge’s court crowded into Calvin’s office for counsel. The Doctor wondered if he was squeamish about certain matters, merely because it was his own son-in-law who was the subject of the disquieting gossip connected with Calvin’s practice in Van Dorn’s court. Then there was the other matter. The Doctor could notice that the town was having its smile–not a malicious nor condemning smile, but a tolerant, amused smile about Van Dorn and the Mauling girl; and the Doctor didn’t like that. It cut deeply into the Doctor’s heart that as the town’s smile broadened, his daughter’s face was growing perceptibly more serious. The joy she had shown when first she told him of the baby’s coming did not illumine her face; and her laughter–her never failing well of gayety–was in some way being sealed. The Doctor determined to talk with Tom on the Good of the Order and to talk man-wise–without feeling of course but without guile.

So one autumn afternoon when the Doctor heard the light, firm step of the young man in the common hallway that led to their offices over the Traders’ Bank, the Doctor tuned himself up to the meeting and cheerily called through his open door:

“Tom–Tom, you young scoundrel–come in here and let’s talk it all over.”

The young man slipped a package into his pocket, and came lightly into the office. He waved his hand gayly and called: “Well–well, pater familias, what’s on your chest to-day?” His slim figure was clad in gray–a gray suit, gray shirt, gray tie, gray shoes and a crimson rose bud in his coat lapel. As he slid into a chair and crossed his lean legs the Doctor looked him over. The young Judge’s corroding pride in his job was written smartly all over his face and figure. “The fairest of ten thousand, the bright and morning star, Tom,” piped the Doctor. Then added briskly, “I want to talk to you about Joe Calvin.” The young man lifted a surprised eyebrow. The Doctor pushed ahead as he pulled the county bar docket from his desk and pointed to it. “Joe Calvin’s business has increased nearly fifty per cent. in less than six months! And he has the money side of eighty per cent. of the cases in your court!”

“Well–” replied Van Dorn in the mushy drawl that he used with juries, “that’s enough! Joe couldn’t ask more.” Then he added, eying the Doctor closely, “Though I can’t say that what you tell me startles me with its suddenness.”

“That’s just my point,” cried the Doctor in his high, shrill voice. “That’s just my point, Thomas,” he repeated, “and here’s where I come in. I got you this job. I am standing for you before the district and I am standing for you now for this election.” The Doctor wagged his head at the young man as he said, “But the truth is, Tom, I had some trouble getting you the solid delegation.”

“Ah?” questioned the suave young Judge.

“Yes, Tom–my own delegation,” replied the Doctor. “You see, Tom, there is a lot of me. There is the one they call Doc Jim; then there’s Mrs. Nesbit’s husband and there’s your father-in-law, and then there’s Old Linen Pants. The old man was for you from the jump. Doc Jim was for you and Mrs. Nesbit’s husband was willing to go with the majority of the delegation, though he wasn’t strong for you. But I’ll tell you, Tom,” piped the Doctor, “I did have the devil of a time ironing out the troubles of your father-in-law.”

The Doctor leaned forward and pointed a fat, stern finger at his son-in-law. “Tom,” the Doctor’s voice was shrill and steely, “I don’t like your didos with Violet Mauling!” The face above the crimson flower did not flinch.

“I don’t suppose you’re making love to her. But you have no business fooling around Joe Calvin’s office on general principles. Keep out, and keep away from her.” And then the Doctor’s patience slipped and his voice rose: “What do you want to give her the household bills for? Pay ’em yourself or let Laura send her checks!” The Doctor’s tones were harsh, and with the amiable cast off his face his graying blond pompadour hair seemed to bristle militantly. The effect gave the Doctor a fighting face as he barked, “You can’t afford it. You must stop it. It’s no way to do. I didn’t think it of you, Tom!”

After Van Dorn had touched his black wing of hair, his soft mustache and the crimson flower on his coat, he had himself well in hand and had planned his defense and counter attacks. He spoke softly:

“Now, Father Jim–I’m not–” he put a touch of feeling in the “not,” “going to give up the Mauling girl. When I’m elected next month, I’m going to make her my court stenographer!” He looked the Doctor squarely in the face and paused for the explosion which came in an excited, piping cry:

“Why, Tom, are you crazy! Take her all over the three counties of this district with you? Why, boy–” But Judge Van Dorn continued evenly: “I don’t like a man stenographer. Men make me nervous and self-conscious, and I can’t give a man the best that’s in me. And I propose to give my best to this job–in justice to myself. And Violet Mauling knows my ways. She doesn’t interpose herself between me and my ideas, so I am going to make her court stenographer next month right after the election.”

When the Doctor drew in a breath to speak, Van Dorn put out a hand, checked the elder man and said blandly and smilingly, “And, Father Jim, I’m going to be elected–I’m dead sure of election.”

The Doctor thought he saw a glint of sheer malicious impudence in Van Dorn’s smile as he finished speaking: “And anyway, pater, we mustn’t quarrel right now–Just at this time, Laura–”

“You’re a sly dog, now, ain’t you! Ain’t you a sly dog?” shrilled the Doctor in sputtering rage. Then the blaze in his eyes faded and he cried in despair: “Tom, Tom, isn’t there any way I can put the fear of God into you?”

Van Dorn realized that he had won the contest. So he forbore to strike again.

“Doctor Jim, I’m afraid you can’t jar me much with the fear of God. You have a God that sneaks in the back door of matter as a kind of a divine immanence that makes for progress and Joe Calvin in there has a God with whiskers who sits on a throne and runs a sort of police court; but one’s as impossible as the other. I have no God at all,” his chest swelled magnificently, “and here’s what happens”:

He was talking against time and the Doctor realized it. But his scorn was crusting over his anger and he listened as the young Judge amused himself: “I’ve defended gamblers and thugs–and crooks, some rich, some poor, mostly poor and mostly guilty. And Joe has been free attorney for the law and order league and has given the church free advice and entertained preachers when he wasn’t hiding out from his wife. And he’s gone to conference and been a deacon and given to the Lord all his life. And now that it’s good business for him to have me elected, can he get a vote out of all his God-and-morality crowd? Not a vote. And all I have to do is to wiggle my finger and the whole crowd of thugs and blacklegs and hoodlums and rich and poor line up for me–no matter how pious I talk. I tell you, Father Jim–there’s nothing in your God theory. It doesn’t work. My job is to get the best out of myself possible.” But this was harking back to Violet Mauling and the young Judge smiled with bland impertinence as he finished, “The fittest survive, my dear pater, and I propose to keep fit–to keep fit–and survive!”

The Doctor’s anger cooled, but the pain still twinged his heart, the pain that came as he saw clearly and surely that his daughter’s life was bound to the futile task of making bricks without straw. Deep in his soul he knew the anguish before her and its vain, continual round of fallen hopes. As the young Judge strutted up and down the Doctor’s office, the father in the elder man dominated him and a kind of contemptuous pity seized him. Pity overcame rage, and the Doctor could not even sputter at his son-in-law. “Fit and survive” kept repeating themselves over in Dr. Nesbit’s mind, and it was from a sad, hurt heart that he spoke almost kindly: “Tom–Tom, my boy, don’t be too sure of yourself. You may keep fit and you may survive–but Tom, Tom–” the Doctor looked steadily into the bold, black eyes before him and fancied they were being held consciously from dropping and shifting as the Doctor cried: “For God’s sake, Tom, don’t let up! Keep on fighting, son, God or no God–you’ve got a devil–keep on fighting him!”

The olive cheeks flushed for a fleeting second. Van Dorn laughed an irritated little laugh. “Well,” he said, turning to the door, “be over to-night?–or shall we come over? Anything good for dinner?”

A minute later he came swinging into his own office. He pulled a package from his pocket. “Violet,” he said, going up to her writing desk and half sitting upon it, as he put the package before her, “here’s the candy.”

He picked up her little round desk mirror, smiled at her in it, and played rather idly about the desk for a foolish moment before going to his own desk. He sat looking into the street, folding a sheet of blank paper. When it became a wad he snapped it at the young woman. It hit her round, beautiful neck and disappeared into her square-cut bodice.

“Get it out for you if you want it?” He laughed fatuously.

The girl flashed quick eyes at him, and said, “Oh, I don’t know,” and went on with her work. He began to read, but in a few minutes laid his book down.

“How’d you like to be a court stenographer?” The girl kept on writing. “Honest now I mean it. If I win this election and get this job for the two years of unexpired term, you’ll be court stenographer–pays fifteen hundred a year.” The girl glanced quickly at him again, with fire in her eyes, then looked conspicuously down at the keyboard of the writing machine.

“I couldn’t leave home,” she said finally, as she pulled out a sheet of paper. “It wouldn’t be the thing–do you think so?”

He put his feet on the desk, showing his ankles of pride, and fingering his mustache, smiling a squinty smile with his handsome, beady eyes as he said: “Oh, I’d take care of you. You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

They both laughed. And the girl came over with a sheet of paper. “Here is that Midland Valley letter. Will you sign it now?”

He managed to touch her hand as she handed him the sheet, and again to touch her bare forearm as he handed it back after signing it. For which he got two darts from her eyes.

A client came in. Joseph Calvin hurried in and out, a busy little rat of a man who always wore shiny clothes that bagged at the knees and elbows. George Brotherton crashed in through the office on city business, and so the afternoon wore away. At the end of the day, Thomas Van Dorn and Miss Mauling locked up the office and went down the hall and the stairs to the street together. He released her arm as they came to the street, and tipped his hat as she rounded the corner for home. He saw the white-clad Doctor trudging up the low incline that led to Elm Street.

Dr. Nesbit was asking the question, Who are the fit? Who should survive? His fingers had been pinched in the door of the young Judge’s philosophy and the Doctor was considering much that might be behind the door. He wondered if it was the rich and the powerful who should survive. Or he thought perhaps it is those who give themselves for others. There was Captain Morton with his one talent, pottering up and down the town talking all kinds of weather, and all kinds of rebuffs that he might keep the girls in school and make them ready to serve society; yet according to Tom’s standards of success the Captain was unfit; and there was George Brotherton, ignorant, but loyal, foolishly blind, of a tender heart, yet compared with those who used his ignorance and played upon his blindness (and the Doctor winced at his part in that game) Mr. Brotherton was cast aside among the world’s unfit; and so was Henry Fenn, fighting with his devil like a soldier; and so was Dick Bowman going into the mines for his family, sacrificing light and air and the joy of a free life that the wife and children might be clad, housed and fed and that they might enjoy something of the comforts of the great civilization which his toil was helping to build up around them; yet in his grime Dick was accounted exceedingly unfit. Dick only had a number on the company’s books and his number corresponded to a share of stock and it was the business of the share of stock to get as much out of Dick and give him back as little, and to take as much from society in passing for coal as it could, and being without soul or conscience or feeling of any kind, the share of stock put the automatic screws on Dick–as their numbers corresponded. And for squeezing the sweat out of him the share was accounted unusually fit, while poor Dick–why he was merely a number on the books and was called a unit of labor. Then there was Daniel Sands. He had spread his web all over the town. It ran in the pipes under ground that brought water and gas, and the wires above ground, that brought light and power and communication. The web found its way into the earth–through deep cuts in the earth, worming along caverns where it held men at work; then the web ran into foul dens where the toilers were robbed of their health and strength and happiness and even of the money the toilers toiled for, and the web brought it all back slimey and stinking from unclean hands into the place where the spider sat spinning. And there was his son and daughter; Mr. Sands had married at least four estimable ladies with the plausible excuse that he was doing it only to give his children a home. Mr. Sands had given his son a home, to be sure; but his son had not taken a conscience from the home–for who was there at home to give it? Not the estimable ladies who had married Mr. Sands, for they had none or they would have been somewhere else, to be sure; not Mr. Sands himself, for he was busy with his web, and conscience rips such webs as his endways, and Daniel would have none of that. And the servants who had reared the youth had no conscience to give him; for it was made definite and certain in that home that they were paid for what they did, so they did what they were paid for, and bestowing consciences upon young gentlemen is no part of the duty of the “help” in a home like that.

As for his daughter, Anne, again one of God’s miracles was wrought. There she was growing in the dead atmosphere of that home–where she had known two mothers before she was ten and she saw with a child’s shrewd eyes that another was coming. Yet in some subsoil of the life about her the roots of her life were finding a moral sense. Her hazel eyes were questioning so curiously the old man who fathered her that he felt uncomfortable when she was near him. Yet for all the money he had won and all that money had made him, he was reckoned among the fit. Then there was the fit Mr. Van Dorn and the fit Mr. Calvin. Mr. Calvin never missed a Sunday in church, gave his tithe, and revered the law. He adjusted his halo and sang feelingly in prayer meeting about his cross and hoped ultimately for his crown as full and complete payment and return, the same being the legal and just equivalent for said hereinbefore named cross as aforesaid, and Mr. Calvin was counted among the fit, and the Doctor smiled as he put him in the list. And Mr. Van Dorn had confessed that he was among the fit and his fitness consisted in getting everything that he could without being caught.

But these reflections were vain and unprofitable to Dr. Nesbit, and so he turned himself to the consideration of the business in hand: namely, to make his calling and reëlection sure to the State Senate that November. So he went over Greeley County behind his motherly sorrel mare, visiting the people, telling them stories, prescribing for their ailments, eating their fried chicken, cream gravy and mashed potatoes, and putting to rout the forces of the loathed opposition who maintained that the Doctor beat his wife, by sometimes showing said wife as exhibit “A” without comment in those remote parts of the county where her proud figure was unknown.

In November he was reëlected, and there was a torchlight procession up the aisle of elms and all the neighbors stood on the front porch, including the Van Dorns and the Mortons and John Kollander in his blue soldier clothes, carrying the flag into another county office, and the Henry Fenns, while the Doctor addressed the multitude! And there was cheering, whereupon Mr. Van Dorn, Judge pro tem and Judge-elect, made a speech with eloquence and fire in it; John Kollander made his well-known flag speech, and Captain Morton got some comfort out of the election of Comrade Nesbit, who had stood where bullets were thickest and as a boy had bared his breast to the foe to save his country, and drawing the Doctor into the corner, filed early application to be made sergeant-at-arms of the State Senate and was promised that or Something Equally Good. The hungry friends of the new Senator so loaded him with obligations that blessed night that he again sold his soul to the devil, went in with the organization, got all the places for all his people, and being something of an organizer himself, distributed the patronage for half the State.