XXXVIII. GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU…

XXXVIII. GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU

"My dear," quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had discussed Lila's adventure of the night before, "I saw Tom up town this morning and he didn't seem to be exactly happy. I says, 'Tom, I hear you beat God at his own game last night!' and," the Doctor chuckled, "Laura, do you know, he wouldn't speak to me!" As he laughed, the daughter interrupted:

"Why, father--that was mean--"

"Of course it was mean. Why--considering everything, I'd lick a man if he'd talk that mean to me. But my Eenjiany devil kind of got control of my forbearing Christian spirit and I cut loose."

The daughter smiled, then she sighed, and asked: "Father--tell me, why did that woman object to Tom's use of Kenyon in the riot last night?"

Doctor Nesbit opened his mouth as if to answer her. Then he smiled and said, "Don't ask me, child. She's a bad egg!"

"Lila says," continued the daughter, "that Margaret appears at every public place where Kenyon plays. She seems eager to talk to him about his accomplishments, and has a sort of fascinated interest in whatever he does, as nearly as I can understand it? Why, father? What do you suppose it is? I asked Grant, who was here this morning with a Croatian baby whose mother is in the glass works, and Grant only shook his head." The father looked at his daughter over his glasses and asked:

"Croatians, eh? That's what the new colony is down in Magnus. Well, we've got Letts and Lithuanians and why not Croatians? What a mix we have here in the Valley! I wouldn't wash 'em for 'em!"

"Well, father, I would. And when you get the dirt off they're mostly just folks--just Indiany, as you call it. They all take my flower seeds. And they all love bright colors in their windows. And they are spreading the glow of blooms across the district, just as well as the Germans and the French and the Belgians and the Irish. And they are here for exactly the same thing which we are here for, father. We're all in the same game."

He looked at her blankly, and ventured, "Money?"

"No--you stupid. You know better. It's children. They're here for their children--to lift their children out of poverty. It's the children who carry the banner of civilization, the hope of progress, the real sunrise. These people are all confused and more or less dumb and loggy about everything else in life but this one thing; they all hope greatly for their children. For their children they joyfully endure the hardships of poverty; the injustice of it; to live here in these conditions that seem to us awful, and to work terrible hours that their children may rise out of the worse condition that they left in Europe. And they have left Europe, father, spiritually as well as physically. Here they are reborn into America. The first generation may seem foreign, may hold foreign ways--on the outside. But these American born boys and girls, they are American--as much as we are, with all their foreign names. They are of our spirit. When America calls they will hear and follow. Whatever blood they will shed will be real American blood, because as children, born under the same aspiring genius for freedom under which we were born, as children they became Americans. Oh, father, it's for the children that these people here in Harvey--these exploited people everywhere in this country,--plant the flowers and brighten up their homes. It's for their children that they are going with Grant to organize for better things. The fire of life runs ahead of us in hope for our children, and if we haven't children or the love of them in our hearts--why, father, that's what's eating Tom's heart out, and blasting this miserable woman's life! Grant said to-day: 'This baby here symbolizes all that I stand for, all that I hope to do, all that the race dreams!"

The Doctor had lighted his pipe, and was puffing meditatively. He liked to hear his daughter talk. He took little stock in what she said. But when she asked him for help--he gave it to her unstinted, but often with a large, tolerant disbelief in the wisdom of her request. As she paused he turned to her quickly, "Laura--tell me, what do you make out of Grant?"

He eyed her sharply as she replied: "Father, Grant is a lonely soul without chick or child, and I'm sorry for him. He goes--"

"Well, now, Laura," piped the little man, "don't be too sorry. Sorrow is a dangerous emotion."

The daughter turned her face to her father frankly and said: "I realize that, father. Don't concern yourself about that. But I see Grant some way, eating the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, calling out to a stiff-necked generation to repent. His eyes are focussed on to-morrow. He expects an immediate millennium. But he is at least looking forward, not back. And the world back of us is so full of change, that I am sure the world before us also must be full of change, and maybe sometime we shall arrive at Grant's goal. He's not working for himself, either in fame or in power, or in any personal thing. He's just following the light as it is given him to see it, here among the poor."

The daughter lifted a face full of enthusiasm to her father. He puffed in silence. "Well, my dear, that's a fine speech. But when I asked you about Grant I was rising to a sort of question of personal privilege. I thought perhaps I would mix around at his meeting to-night! If you think I should, just kind of stand around to give him countenance--and," he chuckled and squeaked: "To bundle up a few votes!"

"Do, father--do--you must!"

"Well," squeaked the little voice, "so long as I must I'm glad to know that Tom made it easy for me, by turning all of Harvey and the Valley over to Grant at the riot last night. Why, if Tom tried to stop Grant's meeting to-night Market Street itself would mob Tom--mob the very Temple of Love." The Doctor chuckled and returned to his own affairs. "Being on the winning side isn't really important. But it's like carrying a potato in your pocket for rheumatism: it gives a feller confidence. And after all, the devil's rich and God's poor have all got votes. And votes count!" He grinned and revived his pipe.

He was about to speak again when Laura interrupted him, "Oh, father--they're not God's poor, whose ever they are. Don't say that. They're Daniel Sands's poor, and the Smelter Trust's poor, and the Coal Trust's poor, and the Glass and Cement and Steel company's poor. I've learned that down here. Why, if the employers would only treat the workers as fairly as they treat the machines, keeping them fit, and modern and bright, God would have no poor!"

The Doctor rose and stretched and smiled indulgently at his daughter. "Heigh-ho the green holly," he droned. "Well, have it your way. God's poor or Dan's poor, they're my votes, if I can get 'em. So we'll come to the meeting to-night and blow a few mouthfuls on the fires of revolution, for the good of the order!"

He would have gone, but his daughter begged him to stay and dine with her in South Harvey, before they went to the meeting. So for an hour the Doctor sat in his daughter's office by the window, sometimes giving attention to the drab flood of humanity passing along the street as the shifts changed for evening in the mines and smelters, and then listening to the day's stragglers who came and went through his daughter's office: A father for medicine for a child, a mother for advice, a breaker boy for a book, a little girl from the glass works for a bright bit of sewing upon which she was working, a woman from Violet Hogan's room with a heartbreak in her problem, a group of women from little Italy with a complaint about a disorderly neighbor in their tenement, a cripple from the mines to talk over his career, whether it should be pencils or shoe strings, or a hand organ, or some attempt at handicraft; the head of a local labor union paying some pittance to Laura, voted by the men to help her with her work; a shy foreign woman with a badly spelled note from her neighbor, asking for flower seeds and directions translated by Laura into the woman's own language telling how to plant the seeds; a belated working mother calling for the last little tot in the nursery and explaining her delay. Laura heard them all and so far as she could, she served them all. The Doctor was vastly proud of the effective way in which she dispatched her work.

It was six o'clock, but the summer sun still was high and the traffic in the street was thick. For a time, while a woman with a child with shriveled legs was talking to Laura about the child's education, the Doctor sat gazing into the street. When the room was empty, he exclaimed, "It's a long weary way from the sunshine and prairie grass, child! How it all has changed with the years! Ten years ago I knew 'em all, the men and the employers. Now they are all newcomers--men and masters. Why, I don't even know their nationalities; I don't even know what part of the earth they come from. And such sad-faced droves of them; so many little scamps, underfed, badly housed for generations. The big, strapping Irish and Germans and Scotch and the wide-chested little Welshmen, and the agile French--how few of them there are compared with this slow-moving horde of runts from God knows where! It's been a long time since I've been down here to see a shift change, Laura. Lord--Lord have mercy on these people--for no one else seems to care!"

"Amen, and Amen, father," answered the daughter. "These are the people that Grant is trying to stir to consciousness. These are the people who--"

"Well, yes," he turned a sardonic look upon his daughter, "they're the boys who voted against me the last time because Tom and Dan hired a man in every precinct to spread the story that I was a teetotaler, and that your mother gave a party on Good Friday--and all because Tom and Dan were mad at me for pushing that workingmen's compensation bill! But now I look at 'em--I don't blame 'em! What do they know about workingmen's compensation!" The Doctor stopped and chuckled; then he burst out: "I tell you, Laura, when a man gets enough sense to stand by his friends--he no longer needs friends. When these people get wise enough not to be fooled by Tom and old Dan, they won't need Grant! In the meantime--just look at 'em--look at 'em paying twice as much for rent as they pay up town: gouged at the company stores down here for their food and clothing; held up by loan sharks when they borrow money; doped with aloes in their beer, and fusil oil in their whiskey, wrapped up in shoddy clothes and paper shoes, having their pockets picked by weighing frauds at the mines, and their bodies mashed in speed-up devices in the mills; stabled in filthy shacks without water or sewers or electricity which we uptown people demand and get for the same money that they pay for these hog-pens--why, hell's afire and the cows are out--Laura! by Godfrey's diamonds, if I lived down here I'd get me some frisky dynamite and blow the whole place into kindling." He sat blinking his indignation; then began to smile. "Instead of which," he squeaked, "I shall endeavor by my winning ways to get their votes." He waved a gay hand and added, "And with God be the rest!"

Towering above a group of workers from the South of Europe--a delegation from the new wire mill in Plain Valley, Grant Adams came swinging down the street, a Gulliver among his Lilliputians. Although it was not even twilight, it was evident to the Doctor that something more than the changing shifts in the mills was thickening the crowds in the street. Little groups were forming at the corners, good-natured groups who seemed to know that they were not to be molested. And the Doctor at his window watched Grant passing group after group, receiving its unconscious homage; just a look, or a waving hand, or an affectionate, half-abashed little cheer, or the turning of a group of heads all one way to catch Grant's eyes as he passed.

At the Captain's vacant lot, Grant rose before a cheering throng that filled the lot, and overflowed the sidewalk and crowded far down the street. Two flickering torches flared at his head. An electric in front of the Hot Dog and a big arc-light over the door of the smelter lighted the upturned faces of the multitude. When the crowd had ceased cheering, Grant, looking into as many eyes of his hearers as he could catch, began:

"I have come to talk to Esau--the disinherited--to Esau who has forfeited his birthright. I am here to speak to those who are toiling in the world's rough work unrequited--I am here, one of the poor to talk to the poor."

His voice held back so much of his strength, his gaunt, awkward figure under the uncertain torches, his wide, impassioned gestures, with the carpenter's nail claw always before his hearers, made him a strange kind of specter in the night. Yet the simplicity of his manner and the directness of his appeal went to the hearts of his hearers. The first part of his message was one of peace. He told the workers that every inch they gained they lost when they tried to overcome cunning with force. "The dynamiter tears the ground from under labor--not from under capital; he strengthens capital," said Grant. "Every time I hear of a bomb exploding in a strike, or of a scab being killed I think of the long, hard march back that organized labor must make to retrieve its lost ground. And then," he cried passionately, and the mad fanatic glare lighted his face, "my soul revolts at the iniquity of those who, by craft and cunning while we work, teach us the false doctrine of the strength of force, and then when we use what they have taught us, point us out in scorn as lawbreakers. Whether they pay cash to the man who touched the fuse or fired the gun or whether they merely taught us to use bombs and guns by the example of their own lawlessness, theirs is the sin, and ours the punishment. Esau still has lost his birthright--still is disinherited."

He spoke for a time upon the aims of organization, and set forth the doctrine of class solidarity. He told labor that in its ranks altruism, neighborly kindness that is the surest basis of progress, has a thousand disintegrated expressions. "The kindness of the poor to the poor, if expressed in terms of money, would pay the National debt over night," he said, and, letting out his voice, and releasing his strength, he begged the men and women who work and sweat at their work to give that altruism some form and direction, to put it into harness--to form it into ranks, drilled for usefulness. Then he spoke of the day when class consciousness would not be needed, when the unions would have served their mission, when the class wrong that makes the class suffering and thus marks the class line, would disappear just as they have disappeared in the classes that have risen during the last two centuries.

"Oh, Esau," he cried in the voice that men called insane because of its intensity, "your birthright is not gone. It lies in your own heart. Quicken your heart with love--and no matter what you have lost, nor what you have mourned in despair, in so much as you love shall it all be restored to you."

They did not cheer as he talked. But they stood leaning forward intently listening. Some of his hearers had expected to hear class hatred preached. Others were expecting to hear the man lash his enemies and many had assumed that he would denounce those who had committed the mistakes of the night before. Instead of giving his hearers these things, he preached a gospel of peace and love and hope. His hearers did not understand that the maimed, lean, red-faced man before them was dipping deeply into their souls and that they were considering many things which they had not questioned before.

When he plunged into the practical part of his speech, an explanation of the allied unions of the Valley, he told in detail something of the ten years' struggle to bring all the unions together under one industrial council in the Wahoo Valley, and listed something of the strength of the organization. He declared that the time had come for the organization to make a public fight for recognition; that organization in secret and under cover was no longer honorable. "The employers are frankly and publicly allied," said Grant. "They have their meetings to talk over matters of common interest. Why should not the unions do the same thing? The smelter men, the teamsters, the miners, the carpenters, the steel workers, the painters, the glass workers, the printers--all the organized men and women in this district have the same common interests that their employers have, and we should in no wise be ashamed of our organization. This meeting is held to proclaim our pride in the common ground upon which organized labor stands with organized capital in the Wahoo Valley."

He called the rolls of the unions in the trades council and for an hour men stood and responded and reported conditions among workers in their respective trades. It was an impressive roll call. After their organization had been completed, a great roar of pride rose and Grant Adams threw out his steel claw and leaning forward cried:

"We have come to bring brotherhood into this earth. For in the union every man sacrifices something to the common good; mutual help means mutual sacrifice, and self-denial is brotherly love. Fraternity and democracy are synonymous. We must rise together by self-help. I know how easy it is for the rich man to become poor. I know that often the poor man becomes rich. But when Esau throws off the yoke of Jacob, when the poor shall rise and come into their own, the rise shall not be as individuals, but as a class. The glass workers are better paid than the teamsters; but their interests are common, and the better paid workers cannot rise except their poorly paid fellow workmen rise with them. It is a class problem and it must have a class solution."

Grant Adams stood staring at the crowd. Then he spread out his two gaunt arms and closed his eyes and cried: "Oh, Esau, Esau, you were faint and hungry in that elder day when you drank the red pottage and sold your birthright. But did you know when you bartered it away, that in that bargain went your children's souls? Down here in the Valley, five babies die in infancy where one dies up there on the hill. Ninety per cent. of the boys in jail come from the homes in the Valley and ten per cent. from the homes on the hill. And the girls who go out in the night, never to come home--poor girls always. Crime and shame and death were in that red pottage, and its bitterness still burns our hearts. And why--why in the name of our loving Christ who knew the wicked bargain Jacob made--why is our birthright gone? Why does Esau still serve his brother unrequited?" Then he opened his eyes and cried stridently--"I'll tell you why. The poor are poor because the rich are rich. We have been working a decade and a half in this Valley, and profits, not new capital, have developed it. Profits that should have been divided with labor in wages have gone to buy new machines--miles and miles of new machines have come here, bought and paid for with the money that labor earned, and because we have not the machines which our labor has bought, we are poor--we are working long hours amid squalor surrounded with death and crime and shame. Oh, Esau, Esau, what a pottage it was that you drank in the elder day! Oh, Jacob, Jacob, wrestle, wrestle with thy conscience; wrestle with thy accusing Lord; wrestle, Jacob, wrestle, for the day is breaking and we will not let thee go! How long, O Lord, how long will you hold us to that cruel bargain!"

He paused as one looking for an answer--hesitant, eager, expectant. Then he drew a long breath, turned slowly and sadly and walked away.

No cheer followed him. The crowd was stirred too deeply for cheers. But the seed he had sown quickened in a thousand hearts even if in some hearts it fell among thorns, even if in some it fell upon stony ground. The sower had gone forth to sow.

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Chapter XXXIX

BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL BUT AN INTERMEZZO BEFORE THE LAST MOVEMENT

The stage is dark. In the dim distance something is moving. It is a world hurrying through space. Somewhat in the foreground but enveloped in the murk sit three figures. They are tending a vast loom. Its myriad threads run through illimitable space and the woof of the loom is time. The three figures weaving through the dark do not know whence comes the power that moves the loom eternally. They have not asked. They work in the pitch of night.

From afar in the earth comes a voice--high-keyed and gentle:

A Voice, pianissimo:

"This business of governing a sovereign people is losing its savor. I must be getting some kind of spiritual necrosis. Generally speaking, about all the real pleasure a grand llama of politics finds in life, is in counting his ingrates--his governors and senators and congressmen! Why, George, it's been nearly ten years since I've cussed out a senator or a governor, yet I read Browning with joy and the last time I heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I went stark mad. But woe is me, George! Woe is me. When the Judge and Dan Sands named the postmaster last month without consulting me, I didn't care. I tell you, George, I must be getting old!"

Second Voice, fortissimo:

"No, Doc--you're not getting old--why, you're not sixty--a mere spring chicken yet--and Dan Sands is seventy-five if he's a day. What's the matter with you in this here Zeitgeist that Carlyle talks about! It's this restless little time spirit that's the matter with you. You're all broke out and sick abed with the Zeitgeist. You've got no more necrosis than a Belgian hare's got paresis--I'm right here to tell you and my diagnosis goes."

Third Voice, adagio:

"James, my guides say that we're beginning a great movement from the few to the many. That is their expression. Cromwell thinks it means economic changes; but I was talking with Jefferson the other night and he says no--it means political changes in order to get economic. He says Tilden tells him--"

The Second Voice, fortissimo:

"Who cares what Tilden says! My noodle tells me that there's to be a big do in this world, and my control tinkles the cash register, pops into the profit account, eats up ten cent magazines, and gets away with five feet of literary dynamite fuse every week. I'm that old Commodore Noah that's telling you to get out your rubbers for the flood."

The First Voice, andante con expression:

"It's a queer world--a mighty queer world. Here's Laura's kindergarten growing until it joins with Violet Hogan's day nursery and Laura's flower seeds splashing color out of God's sunshine in front yards clear down to Plain Valley. Money coming in about as they need it. Dan Sands and Morty, Wright and Perry and the Dago saloon keeper, Joe Calvin, John Dexter and the gamblers--all the robbers, high and low, dividing their booty. With all the prosperity we are having, with all the opening of mills and factories--it's getting easier to make money and consequently harder to respect it. The more money there is, the less it buys, and that is true in public sentiment just as it is in groceries and furniture. Do you fellows realize that it's been ten years since the Times has run any of those 'Pen Portraits of Self-Made Men'?" A silence, then the voice continues:

"George, I honestly believe, if money keeps getting crowded farther and farther into the background of life--we'll develop an honest politician. We know that to give a bribe is just as bad as to take one. Think of the men debauched with money disguised as campaign expenses, or with offices or with franks and passes and pull and power! Think of all the bad government fostered, all the injustices legalized, just to win a sordid game! The best I can do now is to cry, 'Lord have mercy on me, a sinner! The harlot and the thief are my betters.'"

The voices cease. The earth whirls on. The brooding spirits at the loom muse in silence, for they need no voices.

The First Fate: "The birds! The birds! I seemed to hear the night birds twittering to bring in the dawn."

The Second Fate: "The birds do not bring in the dawn. The dawn comes."

The First Fate: "But always and always before the day, we hear these voices."

The Third Fate: "World after world threads its time through our loom. We watch the pattern grow. Days and eras and ages pass. We know nothing of meanings. We only weave. We know that the pattern brightens as new days come and always voices in the dark tell us of the changing pattern of a new day."

The First Fate: "But the birds--the birds! I seem to hear the night birds' voices that make the dawn."

The Second Fate: "They are not birds calling, but the whistle of shot and shell and the shrill, far cries of man in air. But still I say the dawn comes, the voices do not bring it."

The Third Fate: "We do not know how the awakening voices in the dark know that the light is coming. We do not know what power moves the loom. We do not know who dreams the pattern. We only weave and muse and listen for the voices of change as a world threads its events through the woof of time on our loom."

* * * * *

The stage is dark. The weavers weave time into circumstances and in the blackness the world moves on. Slowly it grays. A thousand voices rise. Then circumstance begins to run brightly on the loom, and a million voices join in the din of the dawn. The loom goes. The weavers fade. The light in the world pales the thread of time and the whirl of the earth no longer is seen. But instead we see only a town. Half of it shines in the morning sun--half of it hides in the smoke. In the sun on the street is a man.

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Chapter XL

HERE WE HAVE THE FELLOW AND THE GIRL BEGINNING TO PREPARE FOR THE LAST CHAPTER

A tall, spare, middle-aged person was Thomas Van Dorn in the latter years of the first decade of the twentieth century; tall and spare and tight-skinned. The youthful olive texture of the skin was worn off and had been replaced by a leathery finish--rather reddish brown in color. The slight squint of his eyes was due somewhat to the little puffs under them, and a suspicious, crafty air had grown into the full orbs, which once glowed with emotion, when the younger man mounted in his oratorical flights. His hands were gloved to match his exactly formal clothes, and his hat--a top-hat when Judge Van Dorn was in the East, and a sawed-off compromise with the local prejudice against top-hats when he was in Harvey--was always in the latest mode. Often the hat was made to match his clothes. He had become rigorous in his taste in neckties and only grays and blacks and browns adorned the almost monkish severity of his garb. Harsh, vertical lines had begun to appear at the sides of the sensuous mouth, and horizontal lines--perhaps of hurt pride and shame--were pressed into his wide, handsome forehead and the zigzag scar was set white in a reddening field.

All these things a photograph would show. But there was that about his carriage, about his mien, about the personality that emerged from all these things which the photograph would not show. For to the eyes of those who had known him in the flush of his youth, something--perhaps it was time, perhaps the burden of the years--seemed to be sapping him, seemed to be drying him out, fruitless, pod-laden, dry and listless, with a bleached soul, naked to the winds that blow across the world. The myriad criss-crosses of minute red veins that marked his cheek often were wet with water from the eyes that used to glow out of a very volcano of a personality behind them. But after many hours of charging up and down the earth in his great noisy motor, red rims began to form about the watery eyes and they peered furtively and savagely at the world, like wolves from a falling temple.

As he stood by the fire in Mr. Brotherton's sanctuary, holding his Harper's Weekly in his hand, and glancing idly over the new books carelessly arranged on the level of the eye upon the wide oak mantel, the Judge came to be conscious of the presence of Amos Adams on a settee near by.

"How do you do, sir?" The habit of speaking to every one persisted, but the suave manner was affected, and the voice was mechanical. The old man looked up from his book--one of Professor Hyslop's volumes, and answered, "Why, hello, Tom--how are you?" and ducked back to his browsing.

"That son of yours doesn't seem to have set the Wahoo afire with his unions in the last two or three years, does he?" said Van Dorn. He could not resist taking this poke at the old man, who replied without looking up:

"Probably not."

Then fearing that he might have been curt the old man lifted his eyes from his book and looking kindly over his glasses continued: "The Wahoo isn't ablaze, Tom, but you know as well as I that the wage scale has been raised twice in the mines, and once in the glass factory and once in the smelter in the past three years without strikes--and that's what Grant is trying to do. More than that, every concern in the Valley now recognizes the union in conferring with the men about work conditions. That's something--that's worth all his time for three years or so, if he had done nothing else."

"Well, what else has he done?" asked Van Dorn quickly.

"Well, Tom, for one thing the men are getting class conscious, and in a strike that will be a strong cement to make them stick."

Van Dorn's neck reddened, as he replied: "Yes--the damn anarchists--class consciousness is what undermines patriotism."

"And patriotism," replied the old man, thumbing the lapel of his coat that held his loyal legion button, "patriotism is the last resort--of plutocrats!"

He laughed good-naturedly and silently. Then he rose and said as he started to go:

"Well, Tom,--we won't quarrel over a little thing like our beloved country. Why, Lila--" the old man looked up and saw the girl, "bless my eyes, child, how you do grow, and how pretty you look in your new ginghams--just like your mother, twenty years ago!" Amos Adams was talking to a shy young girl--blue-eyed and brown-haired, who was walking out of the store after buying a bottle of ink of Miss Calvin. Lila spoke to the old man and would have gone with him, but for the booming voice of Mr. Brotherton, the gray-clad benedict, who looked not unlike the huge, pot-bellied gray jars which adorned "the sweet serenity of books and wall paper."

Mr. Brotherton had glanced up from his ledger at Amos Adams's mention of Lila's name. Coming forward, he saw her in her new dress, a bright gingham dress that reached so nearly to her shoe tops that Mr. Brotherton cried: "Well, look who's here--if it isn't Miss Van Dorn! And a great pleasure it is to see and know you, Miss Van Dorn."

He repeated the name two or three times gently, while Lila smiled in shy appreciation of Mr. Brotherton's ambushed joke. Her father, standing by a squash-necked lavender jug in the "serenity," did not entirely grasp Mr. Brotherton's point. But while the father was groping for it, Mr. Brotherton went on:

"Miss Van Dorn, once I had a dear friend--such a dear little friend named Lila. Perhaps you may see her sometimes? Maybe sometimes at night she comes to see you--maybe she peeps in when you are alone and asks to play. Well, say--Lila," called Mr. Brotherton as gently as a fog horn tooting a nocturne, "if she ever comes, if you ever see her, will you give her my love? It would be highly improper for a married gentleman with asthmatic tendencies and too much waistband to send his love or anything like it to Miss Van Dorn; it would surely cause comment. But if Lila ever comes, Miss Van Dorn," frolicked the elephant, "give her my love and tell her that often here in the serenity, I shut my eyes and see her playing out on Elm Street, a teenty, weenty girl--with blue hair and curly eyes--or maybe it was the other way around," Mr. Brotherton heaved a prodigious sigh and waved a weary, fat hand--"and here, my lords and gentlemen, is Miss Van Dorn with her dresses down to her shoe tops!"

The girl was smiling and blushing, sheepishly and happily, while Mr. Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge and said:

"Tom, this is our friend, Miss Van Dorn--I was just sending a message by her to a dear--a very dear friend I used to have, named Lila, who is gone. Miss Van Dorn knows Lila, and sees her sometimes. So now that you are here, I'm going to send this to Lila," he raised the girl's hand to his lips and awkwardly kissed it, as he said clumsily, "well, say, my dear--will you see that Lila gets that?"

Her father stepped toward the embarrassed girl and spoke:

"Lila--Lila--can't you come here a moment, dear?"

He was standing by the smoldering fire, brushing a rolled newspaper against his leg. Something within him--perhaps Mr. Brotherton's awkward kiss stirred it--was trying to soften the proud, hard face that was losing the mobility which once had been its charm. He held out a hand, and leaned toward the girl. She stepped toward him and asked, "What is it?"

An awkward pause followed, which the man broke with, "Well--nothing in particular, child; only I thought maybe you'd like--well, tell me how are you getting along in High School, little girl."

"Oh, very well; I believe," she answered, but did not lift her eyes to his. Mr. Brotherton moved back to his desk. Again there was silence. The girl did not move away, though the father feared through every painful second that she would. Finally he said: "I hear your mother is getting on famously down in South Harvey. Our people down there say she is doing wonders with her cooking club for girls."

Lila smiled and answered: "She'll be glad to know it, I'm sure." Again she paused, and waited.

"Lila," he cried, "won't you let me help you--do something for you?--I wish so much--so much to fill a father's place with you, my dear--so much."

He stepped toward her, felt for her hand, but could not find it. She looked up at him, and in her eyes there rose the old cloud of sadness that came only once in a long time. It was a puzzled face that he saw looking steadily into his.

"I don't know what you could do," she answered simply.

Something about the pathetic loneliness of his unfathered child, evidenced by the sadness that flitted across her face, touched a remote, unsullied part of his nature, and moved him to say:

"Oh, Lila--Lila--Lila--I need you--I need you--God knows, dear, how I do need you. Won't you come to me sometimes? Won't your mother ever relent--won't she? If she knew, she would be kind. Oh, Lila, Lila," he called as the two stood together there in the twilight with the glow of the coals in the fireplace upon them, "Lila, won't you let me take you home even--in my car? Surely your mother wouldn't care for that, would she?"

The girl looked into the fire and answered, "No," and shook her head. "No--mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind to you--to be respectful to you, sir. I've tried to be, sir?"

Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and pleading, "Oh, come--won't you let me take you home in my car, Lila--it's getting late--won't you, Lila?"

But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her head:

"I think, sir, if you don't mind--I'd rather walk."

In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the word, "Lila," in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young miss--a Calvin young miss, in fact--running and waving her hands toward a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly belong--that he was rare and exotic. But as her father's car crept unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila's clear, merry laugh--a laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn's heart--rose above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and weaving about.

And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them, then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing, animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to the beautiful light.

But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of youth shining through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat carrying its captive swooped around them--and then out into the darkness of his own charred world.

But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila, went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.

It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of the wind in the brown grass and in the bare trees by the creek had found their way into his soul. A curious soul it was--the soul of a poet, the soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew--the soul of a man in the body of a callow youth.

As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.

Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old grass faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences the words:

"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help."

And he had seemed to be forming a great heart-filling anthem. It was all on his tongue's tip, with the answering chorus coming from out of some vast mystery, "Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art fair--thou hast dove's eyes." There in the sunshine upon the prairie grass it was as real and vital a part of his soul's aspiration as though it had been reiterated in some glad symphony. But as he sat in the sunset trying to put into his voice the language that stirred his heart, he could only drum upon a box and look at the girl's blue eyes and her rosebud of a face and utter the copper coins of language for the golden yearning of his soul. She answered, thrilled by the radiance of his eyes:

"Isn't the young spring beautiful--don't you just love it, Kenyon? I do."

He rose and stood out in the sun on the lawn. The girl got up. She was abashed; and strangely self-conscious without reason, she began to pirouette down the walk and dance back to him, with her blue eyes fastened like a mystic sky-thread to his somber gaze. A thousand mute messages of youth twinkled across that thread. Their eyes smiled. The two stood together, and the youth kicked with his toes in the soft turf.

"Lila," he asked as he looked at the greening grass of spring, "what do you suppose they mean when they say, 'I will lift up mine eyes to the hills'? The line has been wiggling around in my head all morning as I walked over the prairie, that and another that I can't make much of, about, 'Behold, thou art fair, my love--behold, thou art fair.' Say, Lila," he burst out, "do you sometimes have things just pop into your head all fuzzy with--oh, well, say feeling good and you don't know why, and you are just too happy to eat? I do."

He paused and looked into her bright, unformed face with the fleeting cloud of sadness trailing its blind way across her heart.

"And say, Lila--why, this morning when I was out there all alone I just sang at the top of my voice, I felt so bang-up dandy--and--I tell you something--honest, I kept thinking of you all the time--you and the hills and a dove's eyes. It just tasted good way down in me--you ever feel that way?"

Again the girl danced her answer and sent the words she could not speak through her eyes and his to his innermost consciousness.

"But honest, Lila--don't you ever feel that way--kind of creepy with good feeling--tickledy and crawly, as though you'd swallowed a candy caterpillar and was letting it go down slow--slow, slow, to get every bit of it--say, honest, don't you? I do. It's just fine--out on the prairie all alone with big bursting thoughts bumping you all the time--gee!"

They were sitting on the steps when he finished and his heel was denting the sod. She was entranced by what she saw in his eyes.

"Of course, Kenyon," she answered finally. "Girls are--oh, different, I guess. I dream things like that, and sometimes mornings when I'm wiping dishes I think 'em--and drop dishes--and whoopee! But I don't know--girls are not so woozy and slazy inside them as boys. Kenyon, let me tell you something: Girls pretend to be and aren't--not half; and boys pretend they aren't and are--lots more."

She gazed up at him in an unblinking joy of adoration as shameless as the heart of a violet baring itself to the sun. Then she shut her eyes and the lad caught up his instrument and cried:

"Come on, Lila,--come in the house. I've got to play out something--something I found out on the prairie to-day about 'mine eyes unto the hills' and 'the eyes of the dove' and the woozy, fuzzy, happy, creepy thoughts of you all the time."

He was inside the door with the violin in his hands. As she closed the door he put his head down to the brown violin as if to hear it sing, and whispered slowly:

"Oh, Lila--listen--just hear this."

And then it came! "The Spring Sun," it is known popularly. But in the book of his collected music it appears as "Allegro in B." It is the throb of joy of young life asking the unanswerable question of God: what does it mean--this new, fair, wonderful world full of life and birth, and joy; charged with mystery, enveloped in strange, unsolved grandeur, like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams's most beautiful and poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird, vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful, inexorable call of life to youth. Other messages of Kenyon Adams are more profound, more comforting to the hearts and the minds of reasoning, questioning men. But this Allegro in B is the song of youth, of early youth, bidding childhood adieu and turning to life with shining countenance and burning heart.

When he had finished playing he was in tears, and the girl sitting before him was awestricken and rapt as she sat with upturned face with the miracle of song thrilling her soul. Let us leave them there in that first curious, unrealized signaling of soul to soul. And now let us go on into this story, and remember these children, as children still, who do not know that they have opened the great golden door into life!

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Chapter XLI

HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS THIRD AND LAST DEVIL

In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams's ship of dreams was left high and dry in the salt marsh. Finally a time came when the tide began to boom in. But in no substantial way did his newspaper feel the impulse of the current. The Tribune was an old hulk; it could not ride the tide. And its skipper, seedy, broken with the years, always too gentle for the world about him, even at his best, ever ready to stop work to read a book, Amos Adams, who had been a crank for a third of a century, remained a crank when much that he preached in earlier years was accepted by the multitude.

Amos Adams might have made the Harvey Tribune a financial success if he could have brought himself to follow John Kollander's advice. But Amos could not abide the presence much less the counsel of the professional patriot, with his insistent blue uniform and brass buttons. Under an elaborate pretense of independence, John Kollander was a limber-kneed time-server, always keen-eyed for the crumbs of Dives' table; odd jobs in receiverships, odd jobs in lawsuits for Daniel Sands--as, for instance, furnishing unexpected witnesses to prove improbable contentions--odd jobs in his church, odd jobs in his party organization, always carrying a per diem and expenses; odd jobs for the Commercial Club, where the pay was sure; odd jobs for Tom Van Dorn, spreading slander by innuendo where it would do the most good for Tom in his business; odd jobs for Tom and Dick and for Harry, but always for the immediate use and benefit of John Kollander, his heirs and assigns. But if Amos Adams ever thought of himself, it was by inadvertence. He managed, Heaven only knows how, to keep the Tribune going. Jasper bought back from the man who foreclosed the mortgage, his father's homestead. He rented it to his father for a dollar a year and ostentatiously gave the dollar to the Lord--so ostentatiously, indeed, that when Henry Fenn gayly referred to Amos, Grant and Jasper as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the town smiled at his impiety, but the holy Jasper boarded at the Hotel Sands, was made a partner at Wright & Perry's, and became a bank director at thirty. For Jasper was a Sands!

The day after Amos Adams and Tom Van Dorn had met in the Serenity of Books and Wallpaper at Brotherton's, Grant was in the Tribune office. "Grant," the father was getting down from his high stool to dump his type on the galley; "Grant, I had a tiff with Tom Van Dorn yesterday. Lord, Lord," cried the old man, as he bent over, straightening some type that his nervous hand had knocked down. "I wonder, Grant"--the father rose and put his hand on his back, as he stood looking into his son's face--"I wonder if all that we feel, all that we believe, all that we strive and live for--is a dream? Are we chasing shadows? Isn't it wiser to conform, to think of ourselves first and others afterward--to go with the current of life and not against it? Of course, my guides--"

"Father," cried Grant, "I saw Tom Van Dorn yesterday, too, in his big new car--and I don't need your guides to tell me who is moving with the current and who is buffeting it. Oh, father, that hell-scorched face--don't talk to me about his faith and mine!" The old man remounted his printer's stool for another half-hour's work before dusk deepened, and smiled as he pulled his steel spectacles over his clear old eyes.

One would fancy that a man whose face was as seamed and scarred with time and struggle as Grant Adams's face, would have said nothing of the hell-scorched face of Tom Van Dorn. Yet for all its lines, youth still shone from Grant Adams's countenance. His wide, candid blue eyes were still boyish, and a soul so eager with hope that it sometimes blazed into a mad intolerance, gazed into the world from behind them. Even his arm and claw became an animate hand when Grant waved them as he talked; and his wide, pugnacious shoulders, his shock of nonconforming red hair, his towering body, and his solid workman's legs, firm as oak beams,--all,--claw, arms, shoulders, trunk and legs,--translated into human understanding the rebel soul of Grant Adams.

Yet the rebellion of Grant Adams's soul was no new thing to the world. He was treading the rough road that lies under the feet of all those who try to divert their lives from the hard and wicked morals of their times. For the kingdoms of this earth are organized for those who devote themselves chiefly, though of course not wholly, to the consideration of self. The world is still vastly egoistic in its balance. And the unbroken struggle of progress from Abel to yesterday's reformer, has been, is, and shall be the battle with the spirit that chains us to the selfish, accepted order of the passing day. So Grant Adams's face was battle scarred, but his soul, strong and exultant, burst through his flesh and showed itself at many angles of his being. And a grim and militant thing it looked. The flinty features of the man, his coarse mouth, his indomitable blue eyes, his red poll, waving like a banner above his challenging forehead, wrinkled and seamed and gashed with the troubles of harsh circumstance, his great animal jaw at the base of the spiritual tower of his countenance--all showed forth the warrior's soul, the warrior of the rebellion that is as old as time and as new as to-morrow.

Working with his hands for a bare livelihood, but sitting at his desk four or five days in the week and speaking at night, month after month, year after year, for nearly twenty years, without rest or change, had taken much of the bounce of youth from his body. He knew how the money from the accumulated dues was piling up in the Labor Union's war chest in the valley. He had proved what a trade solidarity in an industrial district could do for the men without strikes by its potential strength. Black powder, which killed like the pestilence that stalketh in darkness, was gone. Electric lights had superseded torches in the runways of the mines. Bathhouses were found in all the shafts. In the smelters the long, killing hours were abandoned and a score of safety devices were introduced. But each gain for labor had come after a bitter struggle with the employers. So the whole history of the Wahoo Valley was written in the lines of his broken face.

The reformer with his iridescent dream of progress often hangs its realization upon a single phase of change. Thus when Grant Adams banished black powder from the district, he expected the whole phantasm of dawn to usher in the perfect day for the miners. When he secured electric lights in the runways and baths in the shaft house, he confidently expected large things to follow. While large things hesitated, he saw another need and hurried to it.

Thus it happened, that in the hurrying after a new need, Grant Adams had always remained in his own district, except for a brief season when he and Dr. Nesbit sallied forth in a State-wide campaign to defend the Doctor's law to compel employers to pay workmen for industrial accidents, as the employers replace broken machinery--a law which the Doctor had pushed through the Legislature and which was before the people for a referendum vote. When Grant went out of the Wahoo Valley district he attracted curious crowds, crowds that came to see the queer labor leader who won without strikes. And when the crowds came under Grant's spell, he convinced them. For he felt intensely. He believed that this law would right a whole train of incidental wrongs of labor. So he threw himself into the fight with a crusader's ardor. Grant and the Doctor journeyed over the State through July and August; and in September the wily Doctor trapped Tom Van Dorn into a series of joint debates with Grant that advertised the cause widely and well. From these debates Grant Adams emerged a somebody in politics. For oratory, however polished, and scholarship, however plausible, cannot stand before the wrath of an indignant man in a righteous cause who can handle himself and suppress his wrath upon the platform.

As the week of the debate dragged on and as the pageant of it trailed clear across the State, with crowds hooting and cheering, Doctor Nesbit's cup of joy ran over. And when Van Dorn failed to appear for the Saturday meeting at the capital, the Doctor's happiness mounted to glee.

That night, long after the midnight which ended the day's triumph, Grant and the Doctor were sitting on a baggage truck at a way station waiting for a belated train. Grant was in the full current of his passion. Personal triumph meant little to him--the cause everything. His heart was afire with a lust to win. The Doctor kept looking at Grant with curious eyes--appraising eyes, indeed--from time to time as the younger man's interminable stream of talk of the Cause flowed on. But the Doctor had his passion also. When it burst its bonds, he was saying: "Look here, you crazy man--take a reef in your canvas picture of jocund day upon the misty mountain tops--get down to grass roots." Grant turned an exalted face upon the Doctor in astonishment. The Doctor went on:

"Grant, I can give the concert all right--but, young man, you are selling the soap. That's a great argument you have been making this week, Grant."

"There wasn't much to my argument, Doctor," answered Grant, absently, "though it was a righteous cause. All I did was to make an appeal to the pocketbooks of Market Street all over the State, showing the merchants and farmers that the more the laboring man receives the more he will spend, and if he is paid for his accidents he will buy more prunes and calico; whereas, if he is not paid he will burden the taxes as a pauper. Tom couldn't overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people."

But Dr. Nesbit persisted with his figure. "Grant," he piped, "you certainly can sell soap. Why don't you sell some soap on your own hook? Why don't you let me run you for something--Congress--governor, or something? We can win hands down."

Grant did not wait for the Doctor to finish, but cried in violent protest: "No, no, no--Doctor--no, I must not do that. I tell you, man, I must travel light and alone. I must go into life as naked as St. Francis. The world is stirring as with a great spirit of change. The last night I was at home, up stepped a little Belgian glassblower to me. I'd never seen him before. I said, 'Hello, comrade!' He grasped my hands with both hands and cried 'Comrade! So you know the password. It has given me welcome and warmth and food in France, in England, in Australia, and now here. Everywhere the workers are comrades!' Everywhere the workers are comrades. Do you know what that means, Doctor?"

The Doctor did not answer. His seventy years, and his habit of thinking in terms of votes and parties and factions, made him sigh.

"Doctor," cried Grant, "electing men to office won't help. But this law we are fighting for--this law will help. Doctor, I'm pinning the faith of a decade of struggle on this law."

The Doctor broke the silence that followed Grant's declaration, to say: "Grant, I don't see it your way. I feel that life must crystallize its progress in institutions--political institutions, before progress is safe. But you must work out your own life, my boy. Incidentally," he piped, "I believe you are wrong. But after this campaign is over, I'm going up to the capital for one last fling at making a United States Senator. I've only a dozen little white chips in the great game, five in the upper house and seven in the lower house. But we may deadlock it, and if we do,--you'll see thirty years drop off my head and witness the rejuvenation of Old Linen Pants."

Grant began walking the platform again under the stars like an impatient ghost. The Doctor rose and followed him.

"Grant, now let me tell you something. I am half inclined at times to think it's all moonshine--this labor law we're working to establish. But Laura wants it, and God knows, Grant, she has little enough in her life down there in the Valley. And if this law makes her happy--it's the least I can do for her. She hasn't had what she should have had out of life, so I'm trying to make her second choice worth while. That's why I'm on the soap wagon with you!" He would have laughed away this serious mood, but he could not.

Grant stared at the Doctor for a moment before answering: "Why, of course, Dr. Nesbit, I've always known that.

"But--I--Doctor--I am consecrated to the cause. It is my reason for living."

The day had passed in the elder's life when he could rise to the younger man's emotions. He looked curiously at Grant and said softly:

"Oh, to be young--to be young--to be young!" He rose, touched the strong arm beside him. "'And the young men shall see visions.' To be young--just to be young! But 'the old men shall dream dreams.' Well, Grant, they are unimportant--not entirely pleasant. We young men of the seventies had a great material vision. The dream of an empire here in the West. It has come true--increased one hundred fold. Yet it is not much of a dream."

He let the arm drop and began drumming on the truck as he concluded: "But it's all I have--all the dream I have now. 'All of which I saw, and part of which I was,' yet," he mused, "perhaps it will be used as a foundation upon which something real and beautiful will be builded."

Far away the headlight of their approaching train twinkled upon the prairie horizon. The two men watched it glow into fire and come upon them. And without resuming their talk, each went his own wide, weary way in the world as they lay in adjoining berths on the speeding train.

At the general election the Doctor's law was upheld by a majority of the votes in the State, but the Doctor himself was defeated for reëlection to the State Senate in his own district. Grant Adams waited, intently and with fine faith, for this law to bring in the millennium. But the Doctor had no millennial faith.

He came down town the morning after his defeat, gay and unruffled. He went toddling into the stores and offices of Market Street, clicking his cane busily, thanking his friends and joking with his foes. But he chirruped to Henry Fenn and Kyle Perry whom he found in the Serenity at the close of the day: "Well, gentlemen, I've seen 'em all! I've taken my medicine like a little man; but I won't lick the spoon. I sha'n't go and see Dan and Tom. I'm willing to go as far as any man in the forgiving and forgetting business, but the Lord himself hasn't quit on them. Look at 'em. The devil's mortgage is recorded all over their faces and he's getting about ready to foreclose on old Dan! And every time Dan hears poor Morty cough, the devil collects his compound interest. Poor, dear, gay Morty--if he could only put up a fight!"

But he could not put up a fight and his temperature rose in the afternoon and he could not meet with his gymnasium class in South Harvey in the evening, but sent a trainer instead. So often weeks passed during which Laura Van Dorn did not see Morty and the daily boxes of flowers that came punctiliously with his cards to the kindergarten and to Violet Hogan's day nursery, were their only reminders of the sorry, lonely, footless struggle Morty was making.

It was inevitable that the lives of Violet Hogan and Laura Van Dorn in South Harvey should meet and merge. And when they met and merged, Violet Hogan found herself devoting but a few hours a day to her day nursery, while she worked six long, happy hours as a stenographer for Grant Adams in his office at the Vanderbilt House. For, after all, it was as a stenographer that she remembered herself in the grandeur and the glory of her past. So Henry Fenn and Laura Van Dorn carried on the work that Violet began, and for them souls and flowers and happiness bloomed over the Valley in the dark, unwholesome places which death had all but taken for his own.

It was that spring when Dr. Nesbit went to the capital and took his last fling at State politics. For two months he had deadlocked his party caucus in the election of a United States Senator with hardly more than a dozen legislative votes. And he was going out of his dictatorship in a golden glow of glory.

And this was the beginning of the golden age for Captain Morton. The Morton-Perry Axle Works were thriving. Three eight-hour shifts kept the little plant booming, and by agreement with the directors of the Independent mine, Nathan Perry spent five hours a day in the works. He and the Captain, and the youngest Miss Morton, who was keeping books, believed that it would go over the line from loss to profit before grass came. The Captain hovered about the plant like an earth-bound spirit day and night, interrupting the work of the men, disorganizing the system that Nathan had installed, and persuading himself that but for him the furnaces would go dead and the works shut down.

It was one beautiful day in late March, after the November election wherein the Doctor's law had won and the Doctor himself had lost, that Grant Adams was in Harvey figuring with Mr. Brotherton on supplies for his office. Captain Morton came tramping down the clouds before him as he swept into the Serenity and jabbed a spike through the wheels of commerce with the remark: "Well, George--what do you think of my regalia--eh?"

Mr. Brotherton and Grant looked up from their work. They beheld the Captain arrayed in a dazzling light gray spring suit--an exceedingly light gray suit, with a hat of the same color and gloves and shoe spats to match, with a red tie so red that it all but crackled. "First profits of the business. We got over the line yesterday noon, and I had a thousand to go on, and this morning I just went on this spree--what say?"

"Well, Cap, when Morty Sands sees you he will die of envy. You're certainly the lily of the Valley and the bright and morning star--the fairest of ten thousand to my soul! Grant," said Brotherton as he turned to his customer, "behold the plute!"

The Captain stood grinning in pride as the men looked him over.

"'Y gory, boys, you'd be surprised the way that Household Horse has hit the trade. Orders coming in from automobile makers, and last week we decided to give up making the little power saver and make the whole rear axle. We're going to call it the Morton-Perry Axle, and put in a big plant, and I was telling Ruthy this morning, I says, 'Ruth,' says I, 'if we make the axle business go, I'll just telephone down to Wright & Perry and have them send you out something nobby in husbands, and, 'y gory, a nice thousand-mile wedding trip and maybe your pa will go along for company--what say?'"

He was an odd figure in his clothes--for they were ready-made--made for the figure of youth, and although he had been in them but a few hours, the padding was bulging at the wrong places; and they were wrinkled where they should be tight. His bony old figure stuck out at the knees, and the shoulders and elbows, and the high collar would not fit his skinny neck. But he was happy, and fancied he looked like the pictures of college boys in the back of magazines. So he answered Mr. Brotherton's question about the opinion of the younger daughter as to the clothes by a profound wink.

"Scared--scared plumb stiff--what say? I caught Marthy nodding at Ruth and Ruthy looking hard at Marthy, and then both of 'em went to the kitchen to talk over calling up Emmy and putting out fly poison for the women that are lying in wait for their pa. Scared--why, scared's no name for it--what say?"

"Well, Captain," answered Mr. Brotherton, "you are certainly voluptuous enough in your new stage setting to have your picture on a cigar box as a Cuban beauty or a Spanish señorita."

The Captain was turning about, trying to see how the coat set in the back and at the same time watching the hang of the trousers. Evidently he was satisfied with it. For he said: "Well--guess I'll be going. I'll just mosey down to Mrs. Herdicker's to give Emmy and Marthy and Ruthy something to keep 'em from thinking of their real troubles--eh?" And with a flourish he was gone.

When Grant's order was filled, he said, "Violet will call for this, George; I have some other matters to attend to."

As he assembled the goods for the order, Mr. Brotherton called out, "Well, how is Violet, anyway?" Grant smiled. "Violet is doing well. She is blooming over again, and when she found herself before a typewriter--it really seemed to take the curve out of her back. Henry declares that the typewriter put ribbon in her hair. Laura Van Dorn, I believe, is responsible for Violet's shirt waists. Henry Fenn comes to the office twice a day, to make reports on the sewing business. But what he's really doing, George, is to let her smell his breath to prove that he's sober, and so she runs the two jobs at once. Have you seen Henry recently?"

"Well," replied Brotherton, "he was in a month or so ago to borrow ten to buy a coat--so that he could catch up with the trousers of that suit before they grew too old. He still buys his clothes that way."

Grant threw back his red head and grinned a grim, silent grin: "Well, that's funny. Didn't you know what is keeping him away?" Again Grant grinned. "The day he was here he came wagging down with that ten-dollar bill, but his conscience got the best of him for lavishing so much money on himself, so he slipped it to Violet and told her to buy her some new teeth--you know she's been ashamed to open her mouth now for years. Violet promised she would get the teeth in time for Easter. And pretty soon in walks Mrs. Maurice Stromsky--who scrubs in the Wright & Perry Building, whose baby died last summer and had to be buried in the Potter's field--she came in; and she and Violet got to talking about the baby--and Violet up and gave that ten to Mrs. Stromsky, to get the baby out of the Potter's field."

Mr. Brotherton laughed his great laugh. Grant went on:

"But that isn't all. The next day in walks Mrs. Maurice Stromsky, penitent as a dog, and I heard her squaring herself with Violet for giving that old saw-buck of yours to the Delaneys, whose second little girl had diphtheria and who had no money for antitoxin. I never saw your ten again, George," said Grant. "It seemed to be going down for the last time." He looked at Brotherton quizzically for a second and asked:

"So old Henry hasn't been around since--isn't that joyous? Well--anyway, he'll show up to-day or to-morrow, for he's got the new coat; he got it this morning. Jasper was telling me."

In an hour Grant, returning after his morning's errands, was standing by the puny little blaze that John Dexter had stirred out of the logs in the Serenity. The two were standing together. Mr. Brotherton, reading his Kansas City paper at his desk, called to them: "Well, I see Doc Jim's still holding his deadlock and they can't elect a United States Senator without him!"

A telegraph messenger boy came in, looked into the Serenity, and said, "Mr. Adams, I was looking for you."

Grant signed the boy's book, read the telegram, and stood dumbly gazing at the fire, as he held the sheet in his hand.

The fire popped and snapped and the little blaze grew stronger when a log dropped in two. A customer came in--picked up a magazine--called, "Charge it, please," then went out. The door slammed. Another customer came and went. Miss Calvin stepped back to Mr. Brotherton. The bell of the cash register tinkled. Then Grant Adams turned, looked at the minister absently for a moment, and handed him the sheet. It read:

"I have pledged in writing five more votes than are needed to make you the caucus nominee and give you a majority on the joint ballot to-night for United States Senator. Come up first train."

It was signed "James Nesbit." The preacher dropped his hand still holding the yellow sheet, and looked into the fire.

"Well?" asked Grant.

"You say," returned John Dexter, and added: "It would be a great opportunity--give you the greatest forum for your cause in Christendom--give you more power than any other labor advocate ever held in the world before."

He said all this tentatively and as one asking a question. Grant did not reply. He sat pounding his leg with his claw, abstractedly.

"You needn't be a mere theorist in the Senate. You could get labor laws enacted that would put forward the cause of labor. Grant, really, it looks as though this was your life's chance."

Grant reached for the telegram and read it again. The telegram fluttering in his hands dropped to the floor. He reached for it--picked it up, folded it on his claw carefully, and put it away. Then he turned to the preacher and said harshly:

"There's nothing in it. To begin: you say I'll have more power than any other labor leader in the world. I tell you, labor leaders don't need personal power. We don't need labor laws--that is, primarily. What we need is sentiment--a public love of the under dog that will make our present laws intolerable. It isn't power for me, it isn't clean politics for the State, it isn't labor laws that's my job. My job, dearly beloved," he hooked the minister's hand and tossed it gently, "my job, oh, thou of little faith," he cried, as a flaming torch of emotion seemed to brush his face and kindle the fanatic glow in his countenance while his voice lifted, "is to stay right down here in the Wahoo Valley, pile up money in the war chest, pile up class feeling among the men--comradeship--harness this love of the poor for the poor into an engine, and then some day slip the belt on that engine--turn on the juice and pull and pull and pull for some simple, elemental piece of justice that will show the world one phase of the truth about labor."

Grant's face was glowing with emotion. "I tell you, the day of the Kingdom is here--only it isn't a kingdom, it's Democracy--the great Democracy. It's coming. I must go out and meet it. In the dark down in the mines I saw the Holy Ghost rise into the lives of a score of men. And now I see the Holy Ghost coming into a great class. And I must go--go with neither purse nor script to meet it, to live for it, and maybe to die for it." He shook his head and cried vehemently:

"What a saphead I'd be if I fell to that bait!" He turned to the store and called to Miss Calvin. "Ave--is there a telegraph blank in the desk?"

Mr. Brotherton threw it, skidding, across the long counter. Grant fumbled in his vest for a pen, held the sheet firmly with his claw and wrote:

"You are kindness itself. But the place doesn't interest me. Moreover, no man should go to the Senate representing all of a State, whose job it is to preach class consciousness to a part of the State. Get a bigger man. I thank you, however, with all my heart."

Grant watched the preacher read the telegram. He read it twice, then he said: "Well--of course, that's right. That's right--I can see that. But I don't know--don't you think--I mean aren't you kind of--well, I can't just express it; but--"

"Well, don't try, then," returned Grant.

However, Doctor Nesbit, having something rather more than the ethics of the case at stake, was aided by his emotions in expressing himself. He made his views clear, and as Grant sat at his desk that afternoon, he read this in a telegram from the Doctor:

"Well, of all the damn fools!"

That was one view of the situation. There was this other. It may be found in one of those stated communications from perhaps Ruskin or Kingsley, which the Peach Blow Philosopher sometimes vouchsafed to the earth and it read:

"A great life may be lived by any one who is strong enough to fail for an ideal."

Still another view may be had by setting down what John Dexter said to his wife, and what she said to him. Said he, when he had recounted the renunciation of Grant Adams:

"There goes the third devil. First he conquered the temptation to marry and be comfortable; next he put fame behind him, and now he renounces power."

And she said: "It had never occurred to me to consider Laura Van Dorn, or national reputation, or a genuine chance for great usefulness as a devil. I'm not sure that I like your taste in devils."

To which answer may be made again by Mr. Left in a communication he received from George Meredith, who had recently passed over. It was verified by certain details as to the arrangement of the books on the little table in the little room in the little house on a little hill where he was wont to write, and it ran thus:

"Women, always star-hungry, ever uncompromising in their demand for rainbows, nibbling at the entre' and pushing aside the roast, though often adoring primitive men who gorge on it, but ever in the end rewarding abstinence and thus selecting a race of spiritually-minded men for mates, are after all the world's materialists."

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Chapter XLII

A CHAPTER WHICH IS CONCERNED LARGELY WITH THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF "THE FULL STRENGTH OF THE COMPANY"

This story, first of all, and last of all, is a love story. The emotion called love and its twin desire hunger, are the two primal passions of life. From love have developed somewhat the great altruistic institutions of humanity--the family, the tribe, the State, the nation, and the varied social activities--religion, patriotism, philanthropy, brotherhood. While from hunger have developed war and trade and property and wealth. Often it happens in the growth of life that men have small choice in matters of living that are motived by hunger or its descendant concerns; for necessity narrows the choice. But in affairs of the heart, there comes wide latitudes of choice. It is reasonably just therefore to judge a man, a nation, a race, a civilization, an era, by its love affairs. So a book that would tell of life, that would paint the manners of men, and thus show their hearts, must be a love story. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," runs the proverb, and, mind you, it says heart--not head, not mind, but heart; as a man thinketh in his heart, in that part of his nature where reside his altruistic emotions--so is he.

It is the sham and shame of the autobiographies that flood and dishearten the world, that they are so uncandid in their relation of those emotional episodes in life--episodes which have to do with what we know for some curious reason as "the softer passions." Cæsar's Gaelic wars, his bridges, his trouble with the impedimenta, his fights with the Helvetians--who cares for them? Who cares greatly for Napoleon's expedition against the Allies? Of what human interest is Grant's tale of the Wilderness fighting? But to know of Calpurnia, of her predecessors, and her heirs and assigns in Cæsar's heart; to know the truth about Josephine and the crash in Napoleon's life that came with her heartbreak--if a crash did come, or if not, to know frankly what did come; to know how Grant got on with Julia Dent through poverty and riches, through sickness and in health, for better or for worse--with all the strain and stress and struggle that life puts upon the yoke that binds the commonplace man to the commonplace woman rising to eminence by some unimportant quirk of his genius reacting on the times--these indeed would be memoirs worth reading.

And whatever worth this story holds must come from its value as a love-story,--the narrative of how love rose or fell, grew or withered, bloomed and fruited, or rotted at the core in the lives of those men and women who move through the scenes painted upon this canvas. After all, who cares that Thomas Van Dorn waxed fat in the land, that he received academic degrees from great universities which his masters supported, that he told men to go and they went, to come and they came? These things are of no consequence. Men are doing such things every minute of every day in all the year.

But here sits Thomas Van Dorn, one summer afternoon, with a young broker from New York--one of those young brokers with not too nice a conscience, who laughs too easily at the wrong times. He and Thomas Van Dorn are upon the east veranda of the new Country Club building in Harvey--the pride of the town--and Thomas is squinting across the golf course at a landscape rolling away for miles like a sea, a landscape rich in homely wealth. The young New Yorker comes with letters to Judge Van Dorn from his employers in Broad Street, and as the two sip their long cool glasses, and betimes smoke their long black cigars, the former judge falls into one of those self-revealing philosophical moods that may be called the hypnoidal semi-conscious state of common sense. Said Van Dorn:

"Well, boy--what do you think of the greatest thing in the world?" And not waiting for an answer the older man continued as he held his cigar at arm's length and looked between his elevated feet at the landscape: "'Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.' Great old lover--Solomon. Rather out of the amateur class--with his thousand wives and concubines; perhaps a virtuous man withal, but hardly a fanatic on the subject; and when he said he was sick of love--probably somewhere in his fifties,--Solomon voiced a profound man's truth. Most of us are. Speaking generally of love, my boy, I am with Solomon. There is nothing in it."

The cigar in his finely curved mouth--the sensuous mouth of youth, that had pursed up dryly in middle age--was pointed upward. It stood out from a reddish lean face and moved when the muscles of the face worked viciously in response to some inward reflection of Tom Van Dorn.

He drawled on, "Think of the time men fool away chasing calico. I've gone all the gaits, and I know what I'm talking about. Ladies and Judy O'Gradies, married and single, decent and indecent--it's all the same. I tell you, young man, there's nothing in it! Love," he laughed a little laugh: "Love--why, when I was in the business," he sniffed, "I never had any trouble loving any lady I desired, nor getting her if I loved her long enough and strong enough. When I was a young cub like you," Van Dorn waved his weed grandly toward the young broker, "I used to keep myself awake, cutting notches in my memory--naming over my conquests. But now I use it as a man does the sheep over the fence, to put me to sleep, and I haven't been able to pass my fortieth birthday in the list for two years, without snoozing. What a fool a man can make of himself over calico! The ladies, God bless 'em, have got old John Barleycorn beaten a mile, when it comes to playing hell with a man's life. Again speaking broadly, and allowing for certain exceptions, I should say--" he paused to give the judicial pomp of reflection to his utterances--"the bigger fool the woman is, the greater fool a man makes of himself for her. And all for what?"

His young guest interjected the word "Love?" in the pause. The Judge made a wry face and continued:

"Love? Love--why, man, you talk like a school girl. There is no love. Love and God are twin myths by which we explain the relation of our fates to our follies. The only thing about me that will live is the blood I transmit to my children! We live in posterity. As for love and all the mysteries of the temple--waugh--woof!" he shuddered.

He put back his cigar into the corner of his hard mouth. He was squinting cynically across the rolling golf course. What he saw there checked his talk. He opened his eyes to get a clearer view. His impression grew definite and unmistakable. There, half playing and half sporting, like young lambs upon the close-cropped turf, were Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn! They were unconscious of all that their gay antics disclosed. They were happy, and were trying only to express happiness as they ran together after the ball, that flew in front of them like a mad butterfly. But in the sad lore of his bleak heart, the father read the meaning of their happiness. Youth in love was never innocent for him. Looking at Lila romping with her lover, he turned sick at heart. But he held himself in hand. Only the zigzag scar on his forehead flashing white in the pink of his brow betrayed the turmoil within him. He tried to keep his eyes off the golf course. A sharp dread that he might transmit himself in nature to posterity only through the base blood of the Adamses, struck him. He closed his eyes. But the wind brought to him the merriment of the young voices. A jealousy of Kenyon, and an anger at him, flared up in the father. So Tom Van Dorn drew down the corners of his mouth--and batted his furtive eyes, and put on his bony knee a mottled, nervous hand, with brown splotches at the wrist, coming up over the veined furrows that led to his tapering fingers, as he cried harshly in a tone that once had been soft and mellifluous, and still was deep and chesty: "Still me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!"

He would have gone away from the torture that came, as he stared at the lovers, but his devil held him there. He was glad when a noise of saw and hammer at the lake drowned the voices on the lawn. His gladness lasted but a moment. For soon he saw the young people quit chasing their crazy butterfly of a golf ball, and wander half way up the hill from the lake, to sit in the snug shade of a wide-spreading, low-branched elm tree. Then the father was nervous, because he could not hear their voices. As he sat with the young broker, snarling at the anonymous phantoms of his past which were bedeviling him, a gray doubt kept brushing across his mind. He realized clearly that he had no legal right to question Lila's choice of companions. He understood that the law would not justify anything that he might do, or say, or think, concerning her and her fortunes. Yet there unmistakably was the Van Dorn set to her pretty head and a Van Dorn gesture in her gay hands that had come down from at least four generations in family tradition. And he had no right even to be offended when she would merge that Van Dorn blood with the miserable Adams heredity. His impotence in the situation baffled him, and angered him. The law was final to his mind; but it did not satisfy his wrathful questioning heart. For in his heart, he realized that denial was not escape from the responsibility he had renounced when he tripped down the steps of their home and left Lila pleading for him in her mother's arms. He bit his ragged cigar and cursed his God, while the young man with Tom Van Dorn thought, "Well, what a dour old Turk he is!"

The hammering and sawing, which drowned the voices of the young people under the tree, came from the new bathing pavilion near by. Grant Adams was working on a two days' job putting up the pavilion for the summer. He was out of Van Dorn's view, facing another angle of the long three-faced veranda. Grant saw Kenyon lying upon the turf, slim and graceful and with the beauty of youth radiating from him, and Grant wondered, as he worked, why his son should be there playing among the hills, while the sons of other men, making much more money than he--much more money indeed than many of the others who flitted over the green--should toil in the fumes of South Harvey and in the great industrial Valley through long hard hours of work, that sapped their heads and hearts by its monotony of motion, and lack of purpose. As he gazed at the lovers, their love did not stick in his consciousness--even if he realized it. Their presence under the elm tree at midday rose as a problem which deepened a furrow here and there in his seamed face and he hammered and sawed away with a will, working out in his muscles the satisfaction which his mind could not bring him.

As the two fathers from different vistas looked upon their children, Kenyon and Lila beneath the elm tree were shyly toying with vagrant dreams that trailed across their hearts. He was looking up at her and saying:

"Lila--who are we--you and I? I have been gazing at you three minutes while you were talking, and I see some one quite different from the you I knew before. Looking up at you, instead of down at you, is like transposing you. You are strangely new in this other key."

The girl did not try to respond in kind--with her lips at least. She began teasing the youth about his crinkly hair. Breaking a twig as she spoke, she threw it carelessly at his hair, and it stuck in the closely curled locks. She laughed gayly at him. Perhaps in some way rather subtly than suddenly, as by a ghostly messenger from afar, he may have been made aware of her beautiful body, of the exquisite lines of her figure, of the pink of her radiant skin, or the red of her girlish lips. For the consciousness of these things seemed to spend his soul in joy.

The blazing eyes of Tom Van Dorn, squinting down upon the couple under the tree, could see the grace that shone from a thousand reactions of their bodies and faces. He opened his mouth to voice something from the bitterness of his heart but did not speak. Instead he yawned and cried: "And so we rot and we rot and we rot."

Now it matters little what the lovers chattered about there under the elm tree, as they played with sticks and pebbles. It was what they would have said that counts--or perhaps what they should have said, if they had been able to voice their sense of the gift which the gods were bestowing. But they were dumb humans, who threw pebbles at each other's toes, though in the deep places of their souls, far below the surface waves of bashful patter, heart might have spoken to heart in passing thus:

"Oh, Lila, what is beauty? What is it in the soul, running out glad to meet beauty, whether of line, of tone, of color, of form, of motion, of harmony?"

And the answer might have been trumpeted back through the deep:

"Maybe beauty is the God that is everywhere and everything, releasing himself in matter. Perhaps for our eyes and ears and fingers, the immanent God had an equation, whose answer is locked in our souls that are also a part of God--created in his image. And when in curve or line, in sequence of notes or harmony, or in thrilling touch sense, the equation is stated in terms of radiation, God seeking our soul's answer, speaks to us."

But none of this trumpet call of souls reached the two fathers who were watching the lovers. For one man was too old in selfishness to understand, and the other had grown too old in bearing others' burdens to know what voices speak through the soul's trumpet, when love first comes into the heart. So the hammers hammered and the saws groaned in the pavilion, and a hard heart hammered and a soul groaned and a tongue babbled folly on the veranda. But under the elm tree, eyes met, and across space went the message that binds lives forever. She picked up a twig longer than most twigs about her, reached with it and touched his forehead furtively, stroked his crinkled hair, blushing at her boldness. His head sank to the earth, he put his face upon the grass, and for a second he found joy in the rush of tears. They heard voices, bringing the planet back to them; but voices far away. On the hill across the little valley they could see two earnest golfers, working along the sky-line.

The couple on the sky-line hurried along in the heat. The man mopped his face, and his brown, hairy arms, and his big sinewy neck. The woman, rather thin, but fresh and with the maidenly look of one who isn't entirely sure what that man will do next, kept well in the lead.

"Well, Emma--there's love's young dream all right." He stopped to puff, and waved at the couple by the tree. Then he hitched up his loose, baggy trousers, gave a jerk to his big flowing blue necktie, let fly at the ball and cried "Fore." When he came up to the ball again, he was red and winded. "Emma," he said, "let's go have something to eat at the house--my figure'll do for an emeritus bridegroom--won't it?" And thus they strolled over the fields and out of the game.

But on another hill, another couple in the midst of a flock of children attracted by one of Mr. Brotherton's smashing laughs, looked down and saw Lila and Kenyon. The quick eyes of love caught the meaning of the figures under the tree.

"Look, mamma--look," said Nathan Perry, pointing toward the tree.

"Oh, Nate," cried Anne, "--isn't it nice! Lila and Kenyon!"

"Well, mamma--are you happy?" asked Nathan, as he leaned against the tree beside her. She nodded and directed their glances to the children and said gently, "And they justify it--don't they?"

He looked at her for a moment, and said, "Yes, dear--I suppose that's what the Lord gave us love for. That is why love makes the world go around."

"And don't the people who don't have them miss it--my! Nate, if they only knew--if these bridge-playing, childless ones knew how dear they are--what joy they bring--just as children--not for anything else--do you suppose they would--"

"Oh, you can't tell," answered the young father. "Perhaps selfish people shouldn't have children; or perhaps it's the children that make us unselfish, and so keep us happy. Maybe it's one of those intricate psychical reactions, like a chemical change--I don't know! But I do know the kids are the best things in the world."

She put her hand in his and squeezed it. "You know, Nate, I was just thinking to-day as I put up the lunch--I'm a mighty lucky woman. I've had all these children and kept every one so far; I've had such joy in them--such joy, and we haven't had death. Even little Annie's long sickness, and everything--Oh, dear, Nate--but isn't she worth it--isn't she worth it?"

He kissed her hand and replied, "You know I'm so glad we went down to South Harvey to live, Anne. I can see--well, here's the way it is. Lots of families down there--families that didn't have any more to go on than we had then, started out, as we did. They had a raft of kids--" he laughed, "just as we did. But, mamma--they're dead--or worse, they're growing up underfed, and are hurrying into the works or the breaker bins. I tell you, Anne--here's the thing. Those fathers and mothers didn't have any more money than we had--but we did have more and better training than they had. You knew better than to feed our kids trash, you knew how to care for them--we knew how to spend our little, so that it would count. They didn't. We have ours, and they have doctors' and undertakers' bills. It isn't blood that counts so much--as the difference in bringing up. We're lovers because of our bringing up. Otherwise, we'd be fighting like cats and dogs, I'd be drinking, you'd be slommicking around in wrappers, and the kids would be on the streets."

The children playing on the gravel bank were having a gay time. The mother called to them to be careful of their clothes, and then replied:

"Nate, honestly I believe if I had two or three million dollars, and could give every girl in South Harvey a good education--teach her how to cook and keep house and care for babies before she is eighteen, that we could change the whole aspect of South Harvey in a generation. If I had just two or three million dollars to spend--I could fill that town just as full as Harvey of happy couples like us. Of course there'd be the other kind--some of them--just as there are the other kind in Harvey--people like the Van Dorns--but they would be the exception in South Harvey, as the Van Dorns are the exception in Harvey. And two or three million dollars would do it."

"Yes, mamma,--that's the hell of it--the very hell of it that grinds my gizzard--your father and my father and the others who haven't done a lick of the work--and who are entitled only to a decent interest and promoters' profits, have taken out twenty million dollars from South Harvey in dividends in the last thirty years--and this is the result. Hell for forty thousand people down there, and--you and I and a few dozen educated happy people are the fruit of it. Sometimes, Anne, I look at our little flock and look at you so beautiful, and think of our life so glorious, and wonder how a just God can permit it."

They looked at the waving acres of blue-grass, dotted with trees, at the creek winding its way through the cornfields, dark green and all but ready to tassle, then up at the clear sky, untainted with the smoke of Harvey.

Then they considered the years that lay back of them. "I think, Nate," she answered, "that to love really and truly one man or one woman makes one love all men and women. I feel that way even about the little fellow that's coming. I love him so, that even he makes me love everything. And so I can't just pray for him--I have to pray for all the mothers carrying babies and all the babies in the world. I think when love comes into the world it is immortal. We die, but the sum of love we live, we leave; it goes on; it grows. It is the way God gets into the world. Oh, Nate," she cried, "I want to live in the next world--personally--with you--to know the very you. I don't want the impersonal immortality--I want just you. But, dear--I--why, I'd give up even that if I could be sure that the love we live would never leave this earth. Think what the love of Christ did for the earth and He is still with us in spirit. And I know when we go away--when any lovers go away, the love they have lived will never leave this earth. It will live and joy--yes, and agonize too at the injustice of the world--live and be crucified over and over again, so long as injustice exists. Only as love grows in the world, and is hurt--is crucified--will wrongs be righted, will the world be saved."

He patted her hand for a minute.

"Kyle, Nate, Annie--come here, children," cried the father. After some repetition of the calling, they came trooping up, asking: "What is it?"

"Nothing at all," answered the father, "we just wanted to kiss you and feel and see if your wings were sprouting, so that we could break them off before you fly away," whereupon there was a hugging bee all around, and while every one was loving every one else, a golf ball flew by them, and a moment later the white-clad, unbent figure of Mrs. Bedelia Satterthwaite Nesbit appeared, bare-headed and bare-armed, and behind her trotted the devoted white figure of the Doctor, carrying two golf sticks.

"Chained to her chariot--to make a Roman holiday," piped the Doctor. "She's taking this exercise for my health."

"Well, James," replied his wife rather definitely, "I know you need it!"

"And that settles it," cried the little man shrilly, "say, Nate, if we men ever get the ballot, I'm going to take a stand for liberty."

"I'm with you, Doctor," replied the young man.

"Nate," he mocked in his comical falsetto, "as you grow older and get further and further from your mother's loving care, you'll find that there was some deep-seated natural reason why we men should lead the sheltered life and leave the hurly-burly of existence to the women."

From long habit, in such cases Mrs. Nesbit tried not to smile and, from long habit, failed. "Doctor Jim," she cried as he picked up her ball, and set it for her, "don't make a fool of yourself."

The little man patted the earth under the ball, and looked up and said as he took her hand, and obviously squeezed it for the spectators, as he rose.

"My dear--it's unnecessary. You have made one of me every happy minute for forty years," and smiling at the lovers and their children, he took the hand held out for him after she had sent the ball over the hill, and they went away as he chuckled over his shoulder and cheeped: "Into the twilight's purple rim--through all the world she followed him," and trotting behind her as she went striding into the sunset, they disappeared over the hill.

When they had disappeared Anne began thinking of her picnic. She and Nathan left the children at the lake, and walked to the club house for the baskets. On the veranda they met Captain Morton in white flannels with a gorgeous purple necktie and a panama hat of a price that made Anne gasp. He came bustling up to Anne and Nathan and said:

"Surprise party--I'm going to give the girls a little surprise party next week--next Tuesday, and I want you to come--what say? Out here--next Tuesday night--going to have all the old friends--every one that ever bought a window hanger, or a churn, or a sewing machine, or a Peerless cooker, or a Household Horse--but keep it quiet--surprise on the girls, eh?"

When they had accepted, the Captain lowered his voice and said mysteriously: "'Y gory--the old man's got some ginger in him yet--eh?" and bustled away with a card in his hands containing the names of the invited guests, checking the Perrys from the list as he went.

As Captain Morton rounded the corner of the veranda and came into the out-of-door dining room, he found Margaret Van Dorn, sitting at a table by a window with Ahab Wright--flowing white side whiskers and white necktie inviolate and pristine in their perfection. Ahab was clearly confused when the Captain sailed into the room. For there was a breeziness about the Captain's manner, and although Ahab respected the Captain's new wealth, still his years of poverty and the meanness of his former calling as a peddler of insignificant things, made Ahab Wright feel a certain squeamishness when he had to receive Captain Morton upon the term which, in Ahab's mind, a man of so much money should be received.

Mrs. Van Dorn was using her eyes on Ahab. Perhaps they cast the spell. She was leaning forward with her chin in her hands, with both elbows on the table, and Ahab Wright, of the proud, prosperous and highly respectable firm of Wright & Perry, was in much the mental and moral attitude of the bird when the cat creeps up to the tree-trunk. He was not unhappy; not terrorized--just curious and rather resistless, knowing that if danger ever came he could fly. And Mrs. Van Dorn, who had tired of the toys at hand, was adventuring rather aimlessly into the cold blue eyes of Ahab, to see what might be in them.

"For many years," she was saying, and pronounced it "yee-ahs," having remembered at the moment to soften her "r's," "I have been living on a highah plane wheyah one ignoahs the futuah and foahgets the pahst. On this plane one rises to his full capacity of soul strength, without the hampah of remoahs or the terror of a vindictive Providence."

She might as well have been reciting the alphabet backwards so far as Ahab understood or cared what she said. He was fascinated by her resemblance to a pink and white marshmallow--rather over-powdered. But she was still fortifying herself from that little black box in the farthest corner in the bottom drawer of her dresser--and fortifying herself with two brown pellets instead of one. So she ogled Ahab Wright by way of diversion, and sat in the recesses of her soul and wondered what she would say next.

The Captain pulling his panama off made a tremendous bow as Margaret was saying: "Those who grahsp the great Basic Truths in the Science of Being--" and just as the Captain was about to open his mouth to invite Ahab Wright to his party, plumb came the ghastly consciousness to him that the Van Dorns were not on his list. For the Van Dorns, however securely they were entrenched socially among the new people who had no part in the town's old quarrel with Tom, however the oil and gas and smelter people and the coal magnates may have received the Van Dorns--still they were under the social ban of the only social Harvey that Captain Morton knew. So as a man falling from a balloon gets his balance, the Captain gasped as he came up from his low bow and said:

"Madam, I says to myself just now as I looks over to that elm tree yonder," he pointed to the place where Kenyon and Lila were sitting, "soon we'll be having the fourth generation here in Harvey, and I says, that will interest Tom! An 'y gory, ma'am, as I saw you sitting here, I says as it was well in my mind, 'Here's Tom's lady love, and I'll just go over and pass my congratulations on to Tom through the apple of his eye, as you may say, and not bother him and the young man around the corner there in their boss trade, eh?' What say?" He was flushed and red, and he did not know exactly where to stop, but it was out--and after a few sparring sentences, he broke away from the clutch of his bungling intrusion and was gone. But as the Captain left the couple at the table, the spell was broken. Life had intruded, and Ahab rose hastily and went his way.

Margaret Van Dorn sat looking out at a dreary world. Even the lovers by the elm tree did not quicken her pulse. Scarcely more did they interest her than her vapid adventure with Ahab Wright. All romantic adventure, personal or vicarious, was as ashes on her lips. But emotion was not all dead in her. As she gazed at Lila and Kenyon, Margaret wondered if her husband could see the pair. Her first emotional reaction was a gloating sense that he would be boiling with humiliation and rage when he saw his child so obviously and publicly, even if unconsciously, adoring an Adams. So she exulted in the Van Dorn discomfiture. As her first spiteful impulse wore away, a sense of desolation overcame Margaret Van Dorn. Probably she had no regrets that she had abandoned Kenyon. For years she had nursed a daily horror that the door which hid her secret might swing open, but that horror was growing stale. She felt that the door was forever sealed by time. So in the midst of a world at its spring, a budding world, a world of young mating, a gay world going out on its vast yearly voyage to hunt new life in new joy, a quest for ever new yet old as God's first smile on a world unborn, this woman sat in a drab and dreary desolation. Even her spite withered as she sat playing with her tall glass. And as spite chilled, her loneliness grew.

She knew better than any one else in Harvey--better even than the Nesbits--what Kenyon Adams really promised in achievement and fame. They knew that he had some European recognition. Margaret in Europe had been amazed to see how far he was going. In New York and Boston, she knew what it meant to have her son's music on the best concert programs. Her realization of her loss increased her loneliness. But regret did not produce remorse. She was always and finally glad that the door was inexorably sealed upon her secret. She saw only her husband angered by her son's association with her husband's daughter, and when malice spent itself, she was weary and lonely and out of humor, and longed to retire to her fortification.

After Captain Morton had bowed himself away from Margaret Van Dorn, he stood at the other end of the veranda looking down toward the lake. The carpenters were quitting work for the day on the new bathing pavilion and he saw the tall figure of Grant Adams in the group. He hurried down the steps near by, and came bustling over to Grant.

"Just the man I want to see! I saw Jap chasing around the golf course with Ruthie and invited him, but he said your pa wasn't very spry and mightn't be uptown to-morrow, so you just tell him for me that you and he are to come to my party here next Tuesday night--surprise party for the girls--going to break something to them they don't know anything about--what say? Tell your pa that his old army friend is going to send his car--my new car--great, big, busting gray battleship for your pa--makes Tom's car look like an ash cart. Don't let your pa refuse. I want to bring you all up here to the party in that car in style--you and Amos and Jap and Kenyon! eh? Say, Grant--tell me--" he wagged his head at Kenyon and Lila still loitering by the tree. "What's Kenyon's idea in loafing around so much here in Harvey? He's old enough to go to work. What say?" Grant tried to get it to the Captain that Kenyon's real job in the world was composing music, and that sometimes he tired of cities and came down to Harvey to get the sunshine and prairie grass and the woods and the waters of his childhood into his soul. But the Captain waved the idea aside, "Nothing in the fiddling business, Grant--two dollars a day and find yourself, is all the best of 'em make," protested the Captain. "Let him do like I done--get at something sound and practical early in life and 'y gory, man--look at me. What say?"

Grant did not answer, but when the Captain veered around to the subject of his party, Grant promised to bring the whole Adams family. A moment later the Captain saw the Sands's motor car on the road before them, and said:

"Excuse me, Grant--here are the Sandses--I've got to invite them--Hi there, Dan'l, come alongside." While the Captain was inviting Daniel Sands, the Doctor's electric came purring up the hill to the club house driven by Laura Van Dorn. Grant was trotting ahead to join the other carpenters who were going to the street-car station, when Laura passing, hailed him:

"Wait a minute, Grant, till I take this to father, and I'll go with you."

As Laura Van Dorn turned her car around the club house, she stopped it under the veranda overlooking the golf course and the rolling prairie furrowed by the slowly winding stream. The afternoon sun slanting upon the landscape brought out all its beauty--its gay greens, its somber, contrasting browns, and its splashing of color from the fruit trees across the valley that blushed pink and went white in the first unsure ecstasies of new life. Then she saw Kenyon and Lila slowly walking up the knoll to the road. The mother noted with quick instinct the way their hands jostled together as they walked. The look that flashed from their eyes when their hands touched--the look of proprietorship in each other--told Laura Van Dorn that her life's work with Lila was finished. The daughter's day of choice had come; and whatever of honesty, whatever of sense, and sentiment, whatever of courage or conscience the mother had put into the daughter's heart and mind was ready for its lifelong test. Lila had embarked on her own journey; and motherhood was ended for Laura Van Dorn.

As she looked at the girl, the mother saw herself, but she was not embittered at the sad ending of her own journey along the road which her daughter was taking. For years she had accepted as the fortunes of war, what had come to her with her marriage, and because she had the daughter, the mother knew that she was gainer after all. For to realize motherhood even with one child, was to taste the best that life held. So her face reflected, as a cloud reflects the glory of the dawn, something of the radiance that shone in the two young faces before her; and in her faith she laid small stress upon the particular one beside her daughter. Not his growing fame, not his probable good fortune, inspired her satisfaction. When she considered him at all as her daughter's lover, she only reflected on the fact that all she knew of Kenyon was honest and frank and kind. Then she dismissed him from her thoughts.

The mother standing on the hillock looking at the youth and maiden sauntering toward her, felt the serene reliance in the order of things that one has who knows that the worst life can do to a brave, wise, kind heart, is not bad. For she had felt the ruthless wrenches of the senseless wheels of fate upon her own flesh. Yet she had come from the wheels bruised, and in agony, but not broken, not beaten. Her peace of mind was not passive. It amounted to a militant pride in the strength and beauty of the soul she had equipped for the voyage. Laura Van Dorn was sure of Lila and was happy. Her eyes filled with grateful tears as she looked down upon her daughter.

Her father, toddling ahead of Mrs. Nesbit a hundred paces, reached the car first. She nodded at the young people trudging up the slope. "Yes," said the Doctor, "we have been watching them for half an hour. Seems like the voice of the turtle is heard in the land."

The daughter alighted from the runabout, her father got in and waited for his wife. The three turned their backs on the approaching lovers and pretended not to see them. As Laura walked around the corner of the house, she found Grant waiting for her at the car station, and the two having missed the car that the other carpenters had taken, stood under the shed waiting.

"Well--Laura," he asked, "are you leaving the idle rich for the worthy poor?" She laughed and explained:

"The electric was for father and mother, and so long as I have to go down to my girls' class in South Harvey this evening for their picnic, I'm going to ride in your car, if you don't mind?"

The street car came wailing down on them and when they had taken a rear seat on the trailer together, Grant began: "I'm glad you've come just now--just to-night. I've been anxious to see you. I've got some things to talk over--mighty big things--for me. In the first place--"

"In the first place and before I forget it, let me tell you the good news. A telegram has just come from the capital to father, saying that the State supreme court had upheld his labor bill--his and your bill that went through the referendum.

"'Referendum J.' probably was the judge who wrote the opinion," said Grant grimly. He took off his hat, and the cooling breeze of the late afternoon played with his hair, without fluttering the curly, wiry red poll, turning light yellow with the years. "Well, whoever influenced the court--I'm glad that's over. The men have been grumbling for a year and more because we couldn't get the benefits of the law. But their suits are pending--and now they ought to have their money."

As the car whined along through the prairie streets, Grant, who had started to speak twice, at last said abruptly, "I've got to cut loose." He turned around so that his eyes could meet hers and went on: "Your father and George Brotherton and a lot of our people seem to think that we can patch things up--I mean this miserable profit system. They think by paying the workmen for accidents and with eight hours, a living wage, and all that sort of thing, we can work out the salvation of labor. I used to think that too; but it won't do, Laura--I've gone clean to the end of that road, and there's nothing in it. And I'm going to cut loose. That's what I want to see you about. There's nothing in this step-at-a-time business. I'm for the revolution!"

She showed clearly that she was surprised, and he seemed to find some opposition in her countenance, for he hurried on: "The Kingdom--I mean the Democracy of labor--is at hand; the day is at its dawn. I want to throw my weight for the coming of the Democracy."

His voice was full of emotion as he cried:

"Laura--Laura, I know what you think; you want me to wait; you want me to help on the miserable patchwork job of repairing the profit system. But I tell you--I'm for the revolution, and with all the love in my heart--I'm going to throw myself into it!"

No one sat in the seat before them, as they whirled through the lanes leading to town, and he rested his head in his hand and put his elbow on the forward seat.

"Well, what do you think of it?" he asked, looking anxiously into her troubled face. "I have been feeling strongly now for a month--waiting to see you--also waiting to be dead sure of myself. Now I am sure!" The mad light in his eye and the zealot's enthusiasm flaming in his battered face, made the woman pause a moment before she replied:

"Well," she smiled as she spoke, "don't you think you are rather rushing me off my feet? I've seen you coming up to it for some time--but I didn't know you were so far along with your conviction."

She paused and then: "Of course, Grant, the Socialists--I mean the revolutionary group--even the direct action people--have their proper place in the scheme of things--but, Grant--" she looked earnestly at him with an anxious face, "they are the scouts--the pioneers ahead of the main body of the troops! And, Grant," she spoke sadly, "that's a hard place--can't you find enough fighting back with the main body of the troops--back with the army?"

He beat the seat with his iron claw impatiently and cried: "No--no--I'm without baggage or equipment. I'm traveling light. I must go forward. They need me there. I must go where the real danger is. I must go to point the way."

"But what is the way, Grant--what is it? You don't know--any more than we do--what is beyond the next decade's fight! What is the way you are going to point out so fine and gay--what is it?" she cried.

"I don't know," he answered doggedly. "I only know I must go. The scouts never know where they are going. Every great movement has its men who set out blindly, full of faith, full of courage, full of joy, happy to fail even in showing what is not the way--if they cannot find the path. I must go," he cried passionately, "with those who leave their homes to mark the trail--perhaps a guide forward, perhaps as a warning away--but still to serve. I'm going out to preach the revolution for I know that the day of the Democracy of labor is at hand! It is all but dawning."

She saw the exultation upon him that hallowed his seamed features and she could not speak. But when she got herself in hand she said calmly: "But, Grant--that's stuff and nonsense--there is no revolution. There can be no Democracy of labor, so long as labor is what it is. We all want to help labor--we know that it needs help. But there can be no Democracy of labor until labor finds itself; until it gets capacity for handling big affairs, until it sees more clearly what is true and what is false. Just now labor is awakening, is growing conscious--a little--but, Grant, come now, my good friend, listen, be sensible, get down to earth. Can't you see your fine pioneering and your grand scouting won't help--not now?"

"And can't you understand," he replied almost angrily, "that unless I or some one else who can talk to these people does go out and preach a definite ideal, a realizable hope--even though it may not be realized, even though it may not take definite shape--they will never wake up? Can't you see, girl, that when labor is ready for the revolution--it won't need the revolution? Can't you see that unless we preach the revolution, they will never be ready for it? When the workers can stand together, can feel class consciousness and strike altogether, can develop organizing capacity enough to organize, to run their own affairs--then the need for class consciousness will pass, and the demand for the revolution will be over? Can't you see that I must go out blindly and cry discontent to these people?"

She smiled and shook her head and answered, "I don't know, Grant--I don't know."

They were coming into town, and every few blocks the car was taking on new passengers. She spoke low and almost whispered when she answered:

"I only know that I believe in you--you are my faith; you are my social gospel." She paused, hesitated, flushed slightly, and said, "Where you go I shall go, and your people shall be my people! Only do--Oh, do consider this well before you take the final step."

"Laura, I must go," he returned stubbornly. "I am going to preach the revolution of love--the Democracy of labor founded on the theory that the Holy Ghost is in every heart--poor as well as rich--rich as well as poor. I'm not going to preach against the rich--but against the system that makes a few men rich without much regard to their talent, at the expense of all the rest, without much regard to their talents."

The woman looked at him as he turned his blue eyes upon her in a kind of delirium of conviction. He hurried on as their car rattled through the town:

"We must free master as well as slave. For while there is slavery--while the profit system exists--the mind of the slave and the mind of the master will be cursed with it. There can be no love, no justice between slave and master--only deceit and violence on each side, and I'm going out to preach the revolution--to call for the end to a system that keeps love out of the world."

"Well, then, Grant," said the woman as the car jangled its way down Market Street, "hurrah for the revolution."

She smiled up at him, and they rode without speaking until they reached South Harvey. He left her at the door of her kindergarten, and a group of young girls, waiting for her, surrounded her.

When he reached his office, he found Violet Hogan working at her desk.

"You'll find all your mail opened, and I've noted the things that have been attended to," she said, as she turned to him. "I'm due over to the girls' class with Miss Laura--I'm helping her to-night with her picnic."

Grant nodded, and fell to his work. Violet went on:

"The letters for your signature are here on my desk. Money seems to be coming in. New local showing up down in Magnus--from the tile works." She rose, put on her coat and hat, and said as she stood in the door, "To-morrow will be your day in--won't it?" He nodded at his work, and she called out, "Well,--bye, bye--I'll be in about noon."

Daylight faded and he turned on the electric above his desk and was going over his work, making notations on letters for Violet, when he heard a footstep on the stairs. He recognized the familiar step of Henry Fenn.

"Come in--come in, Henry," cried Grant.

Fenn appeared, saw Grant at his work, slipped into a chair, and said:

"Now go right on--don't mind me, young man." Fenn pulled a newspaper from his cheap neat coat, and sat reading it, under a light that he made for himself at Violet's desk. The light fell on his thin whitening hair--still coarse, and close cropped. In his clean, washed-out face there was the faded glow of the man who had been the rising young attorney thirty years before. Grant knew that Fenn did not expect the work to stop, so he went on with it. "I'm going to supper about eight o'clock," said Grant, and asked: "Will that be all right?"

"Don't mind me," returned Fenn, and smiled with a dim reflection of the old incandescence of his youth.

Fenn's hands trembled a little, but his eyes were steady and his voice clear. His clothes were shabby but decent, and his whole appearance was that of one who is making it a point to keep up. When Grant had finished his correspondence, and was sealing up his letters, Fenn lent a hand and began:

"Well, Grant, I'm in trouble--Oh, it's not that," he laughed as Grant looked quickly into the clean, alert old face. "That's not bothered me for--Oh, for two years now. But it's Violet--she wants me to marry her." He blurted it out as if it had been pent in, and was hard to hold.

"Why--well--what makes you--well, has she proposed, Henry?" asked the younger man.

"Naw--of course not," answered Fenn. "Boy, you don't know anything about women."

Fenn shook his head knowingly, and winked one eye slowly. "Children--she's set the children on me. You know, Grant--" he turned his smile on with what candlepower he could muster, "that's my other weakness--children. And they're the nicest children in the world. But I can't--I tell you, man, I can't," protested Mr. Fenn, as if he believed Grant in league with the woman to kidnap him.

"Well, then, don't," said Grant, rising and gathering up his mail.

"But how can I help it?" Fenn cried helplessly. "What can a man do? Those kids need a father. I need a family--I've always needed a family--but I don't want Violet--nor any one else." Grant towed him along to the restaurant, and they sat alone. After Grant had ordered his supper he asked, "Henry--why can't you marry Violet? She's a sensible, honest woman--she's got over her foolishness; what's wrong with her?"

"Why, of course, she is a good woman. If you'd see her chasing out nights--picking up girls, mothering 'em, loving 'em, working with 'em--she knows their language; she can talk to 'em so they get it. And I've known her time and again to get scent of a new girl over there at Bessie Wilson's and go after her and pull her out and start her right again. I tell you, Grant, Violet has her weaknesses--as to hair ribbons and shirtwaists and frills for the kids--but she's got a heart, Grant--a mighty big heart."

"Then why not marry her?" persisted Grant.

"That's just it," answered Fenn.

He looked hopelessly at Grant and finally said as he reached his hands across the table and grasped Grant's big flinty paw, "Grant--let me tell you something--it's Margaret. I'm a fool--a motley fool i' the forest, Grant, but I can't help it; I can't help it," he cried. "So long as she lives--she may need me. I don't trust that damn scoundrel, Grant. She may need me, and I stand ready to go to hell itself with her if I live a thousand years. It's not that I want her any more; but, Grant--maybe you know her; maybe you understand. She used to hate you for some reason, and maybe that will help you to know how I feel. But--I know I'm weak--God knows I'm putty in my soul. And I'm ashamed. But I mustn't get married. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be square to Violet, nor the kids, nor to any one. So long as Margaret is on this earth--it's my job to stand guard and wait till she needs me."

He turned a troubled, heartbroken face up to the younger man and concluded, "I know she despises me--that she loathes me. But I can't help it, Grant--and I came to you to kind of help me with Violet. It wouldn't be right to--well, to let this thing go on." He heaved a deep sigh, then he added as he fumbled with the red tablecloth, "What a fool a man is--Lord, what a fool!"

In the end, Grant had to agree to let Violet know, by some round about procedure devised by Mr. Fenn's legal mind, that he was not a marriageable person. At the same time, Grant had to agree not to frighten away the Hogan children.

The next morning as Grant and his father rode from their home into town, Grant told his father of the invitation to the Captain's party.

"If your mother could have lived just to see the Captain on his grand plutocratic spree, Grant--" said his father. He did not finish the sentence, but cracked the lines on the old mare's back and looked at the sky. He turned his white beard and gentle eyes upon his son and said, "There was a time last night, before you came in, when I thought I had her. Some one was greatly interested in you and some new project you have in mind. Emerson thinks well of it," said Amos, "though," he added, "Emerson thinks it won't amount to much--in practical immediate results. But I think, Grant, now of course, I can't be sure," the father rubbed his jaw and shook a meditative head, "it certainly did seem to me mother was there for a time. Something kept bothering Emerson--calling Grantie--the way she used to--all the time he was talking!"

The father let Grant out of the buggy at the Vanderbilt House in South Harvey, and the old mare and her driver jogged up town to the Tribune office. There he creaked out of the buggy and went to his work. It was nine o'clock before the Captain came capering in, and the two old codgers in their seventies went into the plot of the surprise party with the enthusiasm of boys.

After the Captain had explained the purpose of the surprise, Amos Adams sat with his hands on his knees and smiled. "Well--well, Ezry--I didn't realize it. Time certainly does fly. And it's all right," he added, "I'm glad you're going to do it. She certainly will approve it. And the girls--" the old man chuckled, "you surely will settle them for good and all."

He laughed a little treble laugh, cracked and yet gleeful. "Nice girls--all of 'em. But Grant says Jap's a kind of shining around your Ruth--that's the singing one, isn't it? Well, I suppose, Ezry, either of 'em might do worse. Of course, this singing one doesn't remember her mother much, so I suppose she won't be much affected by your surprise?" He asked a question, but after his manner went on, "Well, maybe it was Jap and Ruth that was bothering Mary last night. I kind of thought someway, for the first time maybe I'd get her. But nothing much came of it," he said sadly. "It's funny about the way I've never been able to get her direct, when every one else comes--isn't it?"

The Captain was in no humor for occult things, so he cut in with: "Now listen here, Amos--what do you think of me asking Mrs. Herdicker to sit at one end of the table, eh? Of course I know what the girls will think--but then," he winked with immense slyness, "that's all right. I was talking to her about it, and she's going to have a brand new dress--somepin swell--eh? By the jumping John Rogers, Amos--there's a woman--eh?"

And tightening up his necktie--a scarlet creation of much pride--he pulled his hat over his eyes, as one who has great affairs under it, and marched double-quick out of the office.

You may be sure that some kind friend told the Morton girls of what was in store for them, the kind friend being Mr. George Brotherton, who being thoroughly married, regarded any secret from his wife in the light of a real infidelity. So he told her all that he and Market Street knew. Now the news of the party--a party in whose preparations they were to have no share, roused in the Misses Morton, and their married sister, jointly and severally, that devil of suspicion which always tormented their dreams.

"And, Emma," gasped Martha, when Emma came over for her daily visit, "just listen! Mrs. Herdicker is having the grandest dress made for the party! She told the girls in the store she had twenty-seven dollars' worth of jet on it--just jet alone." Here the handsome Miss Morton turned pale with the gravity of the news. "She told the girls to-day, this very afternoon, that she was going to take the three o'clock morning train right after the party for New York to do her fall buying. Fall buying, indeed! Fall buying," the handsome Miss Morton's voice thickened and she cried, "just because papa's got a little money, she thinks--"

But what she thought Miss Morton never said, for Mrs. Brotherton, still familiar with the gossip of the schoolhouse, cut in to say: "And, Martha, what do you think those Copini children say? They say father's got their father's orchestra to practice all the old sentimental music you ever heard of--'Silver Threads Among the Gold,' and 'Do You Love Me, Molly Darling,' and 'Lorena,' and 'Robin Adair,'--and oh," cried Mrs. Brotherton, shaking a hopeless head, "I don't know what other silly things."

"And yes, girls," exclaimed the youngest Miss Morton flippantly, "he's sent around to the Music School for Miss Howe to come and sing 'O Promise Me'!"

"The idea!" cried the new Mrs. Brotherton.

"Why, the very idea!" broke out the handsome Miss Morton, sitting by the dining-room table.

"The idea!" echoed the youngest Miss Morton, putting away her music roll, and adding in gasping excitement: "And that isn't the worst. He sent word for her to sing it just after the band had finished playing the wedding march!"

Now terror came into the house of Morton, and when the tailor's boy brought home a package, the daughters tore it open ruthlessly, and discovered--as they sat limply with it spread out in its pristine beauty on the sofa before them--a white broadcloth dinner suit--with a watered silk vest. Half an hour later, when a pleated dress shirt with pearl buttons came, it found three daughters sitting with tight lips waiting for their father--and six tigers' eyes glaring hungrily at the door through which he was expected. At six o'clock, when they heard his nimble step on the porch, they looked at one another in fear, and as he burst into the room, each looked decisively at the other as indicating a command to begin.

He came in enveloping them in one all-encompassing hug and cried:

"Well 'y gory, girls, you certainly are the three graces, the three fates, and the world, the flesh and the devil all in one--what say?"

But the Morton daughters were not to be silenced. Ruth took in a deep breath and began:

"Well, now see here, father, do you know what people are saying about--"

"Of course--I was just coming to that, Ruthie," answered the Captain. "Amos Adams he says, 'Well, Cap,' say he, 'I was talking to Cleopatra and she says Queen Victoria had a readin' to the effect that there was a boy named Amos Ezra Morton Adams over on one of the stars in the southwest corner of the milky way that would be busting into this part of the universe in about three years, more or less'--what say?"

The old man laughed and Ruth flushed red, and ran away. The Captain saw his suit lying on the sofa.

"Somepin new--" interjected the Captain. "Thought I'd kind o' bloom out; sort o' to let folks know that the old man had a little kick in him yet--eh? And now, girls--listen; let's all go out to the Country Club for dinner to-night, and I'll put on my new suit and you kind of rig up in your best, and we'll make what George calls a killing--what say?" He put his hands in his pockets and looked critically at his new clothes. The flight of Ruth had quieted Emma, but Martha came swooping down on him with "Now, father--look here--about that Country Club party--"

The Captain shot a swift glance at Martha, and saw Emma looking at him from the kitchen door.

"What party?" he exclaimed. "Can't I ask my girls out for a little innocent dinner without its being called a party--eh? Now, you girls get your things on and come on. As for me, the limousine will be at the door at eight!"

He disappeared up the stairs and in the Morton household, two young women, woeful and heavy hearted, went about their toilets, while in the Brotherton establishment, one large fat man in suspenders felt the rush of sudden tears on his shirt front and marveled at the ways of the sex. When the Mortons were in the midst of their moist and lugubrious task, the thin, cracked little voice of the Captain called out:

"Girls--before you go, don't forget to put that cold beef on and stew it to-night for hash in the morning--eh?"

It was a beautiful party that Captain Morton gave at the Country Club house that evening. And at the end of a most gorgeously elaborate dinner, wherein were dishes whose very names the Captain did not know, he rose among his guests seated at the U-shaped table in the big dining room with the heavy brown beams in the ceiling, a little old man by his big chair, which stood beside a chair unoccupied.

"Friends," he said, "when a man gets on in his seventies, at that uncertain time, when he does not know whether to be ashamed of his years or proud of his age," he smiled at Daniel Sands, who clicked his false-teeth in appreciation of the phrase, "it would seem that thoughts of what the poet calls 'the livelier iris' on the 'burnished dove' would not inconvenience him to any great extent--eh? At seventy-five a young fellow's fancy ought to be pretty well done lightly turning to thoughts of love--what say? But by cracky--they don't."

He paused. The Morton girls in shame looked at their plates. "So, I just thought I'd have this little party to tell you about it. I wanted to surprise the girls." There was only a faint clapping of hands; for tears in the eyes of the three Morton daughters discouraged merriment.

"A man, as I was saying, never gets too old--never gets too crabbed, for what my friend Amos's friend Emerson calls 'a ruddy drop of manly blood'--eh? So, when that 'ruddy drop of manly blood' comes a surging up in me, I says I'll just about have a party for that drop of manly blood! I'm going to tell you all about it. There's a woman in my mind--a very beautiful woman; for years--a feller just as well breakdown and confess--eh?--well for years she's been in my mind pretty much all the time--particularly since Ruthie there was a baby and left alorn and alone--as you may say--eh? And so," he reached down and grasped a goblet of water firmly, and held it before him, "and so," he repeated, and his old eyes glistened and his voice broke, "as it was just fifty years ago to-night that heaven opened and let her come to me, before I marched off to war--so," he hurried along, "I give you this toast--the vacant chair--may it always, always, always be filled in my heart of hearts!"

He could not drink, but sank with his head on his arms, and when they had ceased clapping their hands, the old man looked up, signaled to the orchestra, and cried in a tight, cracked voice, "Now, dern ye--begin yer fiddlin'!"

Whereupon the three Morton daughters wept and the old ladies gathered about them and wept, and Mrs. Hilda Herdicker's ton of jet heaved as in a tidal wave, and the old men dried their eyes, and only Lila Van Dorn and Kenyon Adams, holding hands under the table, really knew what it was all about.

Now they have capered through these pages of this chapter--all of the people in this story in their love affairs. Hand in hand, they have come to the footlights, hand in hand they have walked before us. We have seen that love is a passion with many sides. It varies with each soul. In youth, in maturity, in courtship, in marriage, in widowhood, in innocence, and in the wisdom of serpents, love reflects the soul it shines on. For love is youth in the heart--youth that always beckons, that always shapes our visions. Love ever sheens and shimmers brightly from within us; but what it shows to the world--that is vastly different with each of us. For that is the shadow of his inmost being.

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Chapter XLIII

WHEREIN WE FIND GRANT ADAMS CALLING UPON KENYON'S MOTHER, AND DARKNESS FALLS UPON TWO LOVERS

Once in a while an item appeared in the Harvey Tribune that might have been found nowhere else, and for reasons. For instance, the issue of the Tribune that contained the account of the Captain's party also contained this item, which Daniel Sands had kept out of every other paper in town:

"Mortimer Sands, son of D. Sands of the Traders' Bank, has returned from Arizona, where he has been seeking health. He is hopeful of ultimate recovery."

Another item of interest appeared in the same issue of the paper. It related that T. Van Dorn, former Judge of the District Court, is in Washington, D. C., on legal business.

The Adams family item, which the paper never failed to contain, was this:

"K. Adams will leave next week for New York, where his new opera, 'Rachel,' will have its first appearance next autumn. He will be missed in our midst."

And for a paper with no subscribers and no patronage, it is curious to note that the Tribune carried the news above mentioned to all of Harvey, and all of Harvey discussed the news. Not that the town did not know more or less of the facts as hereinabove related; but when a fact is read in print it becomes something different from a fact. It becomes a public matter, an episode in the history of the world.

In the same issue of the paper was a statement from Grant Adams that he had decided to throw his life with the Socialists and with that group known as the revolutionary Socialists. Grant was enough of a personage, and the declaration was short enough and interesting enough, to give it a place in the newspapers of the country for a day. In the State where he lived, the statement created some comment--mostly adverse to Dr. Nesbit, whose political association with Grant Adams had linked the Doctor's name with Grant's. Being out of power, Dr. Nesbit felt these flings. So it happened that when, the Sunday following the announcement, Grant came with his father and Kenyon in the rattling old buggy up to the Nesbit home on Elm Street, Amos Adams found a rollicking, frivolous, mischievous host--but Grant Adams found a natty, testy, sardonic old man, who made no secret of his ill-humor.

Kenyon found Lila, and the two with their music indoors made a background for the talk on the veranda. Nathan Perry, who came up for a pill or a powder for one of his flock, sat for a time on the veranda steps. For all his frivoling with the elder Adams, Nathan could see by the way the loose, wrinkled skin on the Doctor's face kept twitching when Grant spoke, that the old man had something on his mind.

"Grant," cried the Doctor, in his excited treble, "do you realize what an ornate, unnecessary, unmitigated conspicuous, and elaborate jack you've made of yourself? Do you--young man? Well, you have. Your revolution--your revolution!" shrilled the old man. "Damn sight of revolution you'll kick up charging over the country with your water-tank patriots--your--your box-car statesmen--now, won't you?"

"Here--Doctor,--come--be--"

But the Doctor would not let Grant talk. The chirrup of the shrill old voice bore in upon the younger man's protest with, "Now, you let me say my say. The world's moving along--moving pretty fast and generally to one end, and that end is to put food in the bellies, clothes on the back, and brains in the head of the working man. The whole trend of legislation all over the world has gone that way. Hell's afire, Grant--what more do you want? We've given you the inheritance tax and the income tax and direct legislation to manipulate it, and, by Ned, instead of staying with the game and helping us work these things out in wise administration, you fly the coop, and go squawking over the country with your revolution and leave me--damn it, Grant," piped the little, high voice, sputtering with rage, "you leave me--with my linen pants on a clothes-line four miles from home!"

Then slowly the little lines began to break in his loose skin. A faint smile, then a grin and then a laugh, spread over the old face, and he wiped his watering eyes as he shook his head mournfully.

Grant was gathering himself to reply when Nate Perry rasped in with his high-keyed Yankee voice: "I guess that about covers my views, Grant--if any one should ask you."

The crusader rose in Grant: "It's you men who have no sense," he cried. "You think because I declare war on the profit system that I propose to sail out and overturn it with a few bombs over night. Look here, men; what I propose to do is to demonstrate right here in the Wahoo Valley, where there are all sorts of laboring people, skilled, unskilled, continuous, overpaid and underpaid, foreign and American--utterly unlike, incoherent, racially and industrially--that they have in them capacities for organizing; unused abilities, untried talents that will make them worthy to take a higher place in the economic scale than they now have. If I can amalgamate them, if I can weld them into a consistent, coherent labor mass--the Irish, the Slav, the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, the French, the Dutch, the Letts, and the Mexicans--put to some purpose the love of the poor for the poor, so that it will count industrially, you can't stop the revolution." He was wagging his head, waving his stump of an arm and his face showed the temperamental excitement that was in him.

"Go ahead, Grant," said Perry. "Play out all your line--show us your game."

"Well, then--here's my game. For five years we've been collecting a district strike fund--all our own, that doesn't belong to any other organization or federation anywhere. It's ours here in the Wahoo. It's independent of any state or national control. I've collected it. It's been paid because these men here in the Valley have faith in me. We have practically never spent a penny of it. There are about ten thousand workers in the Valley--some, like the glassblowers, are the aristocracy of labor; others, like the breaker boys, are at the bottom of the scale. But we've kept wages up, kept conditions as high as they are anywhere in the country--and we've done it without strikes. They have faith in me. So we've assessed them according to their wages, and we have on hand, with assessments and interest, over a third of a million dollars."

He looked at Perry, and nodded his head at the Doctor. "You fellows think I'm a cream-puff reformer. I'm not. Now, then--I've talked it over with our board--we are going to invest that money in land up and down the Valley--put the women and children and old men on it--in tents--during the growing season, and cultivate that land in three-acre tracts intensively. Our Belgian glassblowers and smelter men have sent for their gardeners to teach us. Now it's merely a question of getting the land and doing the preliminary organization. We want to get as much land as we can. Now, there's my game. With that kind of a layout we can win any strike we call. And we can prove to the world that labor has the cohesive coöperating faculty required to manage the factories--to take a larger share of the income of industry, if you please. That's my revolution, gentlemen. And it's going to begin right here in the Wahoo Valley."

"Well," returned Nate Perry, "your revolution looks interesting. It's got some new gears, at least."

"Go it while you're young," piped the Doctor. "In just about eighteen months, you will be coming to me to go on your bond--to keep out of jail. I've seen new-fangled revolutions peter out before."

"Just the same," replied Grant, "I've pinned my faith to these men and women. They are now working in fear of poverty. Give them hope of better things instead of fear and they will develop out of poverty, just as the middle class came out under the same stimulus."

"I don't know anything about that," interrupted Perry, "but I do know that I could take that money and put three thousand families to work on the land in the Wahoo Valley and develop the best labor in the country."

He laughed, and Grant gazed, almost flared, so eager was his look, at Perry for a moment, and said: "When the day of the democracy of labor comes--and it will come and come soon--men like you will take leadership."

There was more high talk, and Nathan Perry went home with his pill.

When he was gone, the music from indoors came to the three men. "That's from his new opera, father," said Grant, as his attention was attracted to the violin and piano.

"Good Lord," exclaimed the Doctor, "I've heard so much of that opera that I caught myself prescribing a bar from the opening chorus for the grip the other day!"

The two elder men looked at each other, and the Doctor said, "Well, Amos--that's mostly why I asked you to come up to-day. It wasn't for the society of your amateur revolutionist--you may be sure of that."

The Doctor tempered his words with a smile, but they had pricks, and Grant winced. "I suppose we may as well consider Lila and Kenyon as before the house?"

"Kenyon came to me last night," said Grant, "wanting to know whether he should come to father first, or go to Dr. Nesbit, or--well, he wondered if it would be necessary to talk with Lila's own father." All the grimness in Grant's countenance melted as he spoke of Kenyon and the battered features softened.

"And that is what I wish to talk about, Grant," said the Doctor gently. "They don't know who Kenyon is--I mean, they don't know about his parentage." Grant looked at the floor. Slowly as the old shame revived in him, its flush rose from his neck to his face and met his tousled hair. The two old men looked seriously at one another. The Doctor emphasized the solemnity of the occasion by lighting a pipe.

"I don't know--I really don't know what is right here," he said finally. "Is it fair to Laura to let her daughter marry the son of a woman who, more than any other woman in the world, has wronged her? I'm sure Laura cherishes no malice toward Kenyon's mother. Yet, of course," the Doctor spoke deliberately and puffed between his words, "blood is blood. But I don't know how much blood is blood, I mean how much of what we call heredity in human beings is due to actual blood transmission of traits, and how much is due to the development of traits by family environment. I'm not sure, Amos, that this boy's bad blood has not been entirely eliminated by the kindly, beautiful family environment he has had with you and yours. There seems to be nothing of the Müllers in him, but his face and his music--I take it his music is of German origin."

"I don't know--I don't know, Doctor," answered Amos. "I've tried to take him apart, and put him together again, but I can't find where the parts belong."

And so they droned on, those three wiseacres--two oldish gentlemen and a middle-aged man, thinking they could change or check or dam the course of true love. While inside at the piano on the tide of music that was washing in from God only knows what bourne where words are useless and passions speak the primitive language of souls, Lila and Kenyon were solving all the problems set for them by their elders and betters. For they lived in another world from those who established themselves in the Providence business out on the veranda. And on this earth, even in the same houses, and in the same families, there is no communication between the worlds. With our powerful lenses of memory we men and women in our forties gaze earnestly and long at the distant planets of youth, wondering if they are really inhabited by real people--or mere animals, perchance--if they have human institutions, reasonable aspirations or finite intelligences. We take temperatures, make blood counts and record blood pressure, reckon the heart-beats, and think we are wondrous wise. But wig-wag as we may, signal with what mysterious wireless of evanescent youth-fire we still hold in our blood, we get nothing but vague hints, broken reminiscences, and a certain patchwork of our own subconscious chop logic of middle age in return. There is no real communication between the worlds. Youth remains another planet--even as age and childhood are other planets.

Now, after the three wise men had considered the star glowing before them, they decided thus:

"Well," quoth the Doctor, "it seems absolutely just that Lila should know who her husband is, and that Laura should know whom her child is marrying. So far as I am concerned, I know this Adams blood; I'll trust it to breed out any taint; but I have no right to decide for Lila; I have no right to say what Laura will do--though, Grant, I know in my heart that she would rather have her child marry yours than to have anything else come about that the world could hold for her. And yet--she should know the truth."

Grant sat with his head bowed, and his eyes on the floor, while the Doctor spoke. Without looking up, he said: "There's some one else to consider, Doctor--there's Margaret--after all, it's her son; it's her secret. It's--I don't know what her rights are--perhaps she's forfeited them. But she is at least physically his mother."

The Doctor looked up with a troubled face. He ran his hand over the place where his pompadour once used to rise, and where only a fuzz responded to the stroke of his dry palm, and answered:

"Grant--through it all--through all the tragedy that she has brought here, I've kept that secret for Margaret. And until she releases me, I can never break my silence. A doctor--one of the right sort--never could. Whatever you feel are her rights--you and she must settle. It must be you, not I, to tell this story, even to my own flesh and blood, Grant."

Grant rose and walked the long, straight stretch of the veranda. His shoulders, pugnacious, aggressive, and defiant, swayed as he walked heavily and he gazed at the floor as one in shame. Finally he whirled toward the Doctor and said:

"I'm going to his mother. I'm going now. She may have mighty few rights in this matter--she cast him off shamefully. But she has just one right here--the right to know that I shall tell her secret to Laura, and I'm going to talk to her before I tell Laura. Even if Margaret clamors against what I think is right, I shall not stop. But I'm not going to sneak her secret away without her knowing it. I suppose that's about the extent of her rights in Kenyon: to know before I tell his wife who he really is, so that Margaret will know who knows and who does not know her relation to him. It seems to me that is about the justice of the case." The Doctor puffed at his pipe, and nodded a slow assent.

"Now's as good a time as any," answered the Doctor, and added: "By the way, Amos--I had a telegram from Washington this morning, saying that Tom is to be made Federal judge in the new district. That's what he's doing in Washington just now. He is one of those ostensible fellows," piped the Doctor. "Ostensibly he's there trying to help land another man; but Tom's the Van Dorn candidate."

He smoked until his pipe revived and added, "Well, Tom can afford it; he's got all the money he needs."

Grant, who heard the Doctor's news, did not seem to be disturbed by it. His mind was occupied with more personal matters. He stood by a pillar, looking off into the summer day.

"Well, I suppose," he looked at his clothes, brushed the dust from the top of his shoes by rubbing them separately against the calves of his legs, straightened his ready-made tie and felt of the buttons on his vest, "I suppose," he repeated, "I may just as well go now as at any other time," and he strode down the steps and made straight for the Van Dorn home.

When he came to the Van Dorn house he saw Margaret sitting alone in the deep shade of a vine-screened piazza. She wore a loose flowing purple house garment, of a bizarre pattern which accented her physical charms. But not until he had begun to mount the steps before her did he notice that she was sound asleep in a gaping and disenchanting stupor. Yet his footstep aroused her, and she started and gazed wildly at him: "Why--why--you--why, Grant!"

"Yes, Margaret," he answered as he stood hat in hand on the top step before her, ignoring her trembling and the terror in her eyes. "I've come to have a talk with you--about Kenyon."

She looked about her, listened a second, shuddered, and said with quivering facial muscles and shaky voice, "Yes--oh, yes--about Kenyon--yes--Kenyon Adams. Yes, I know."

The eyes she turned on him were dull and her face was slumped, as though the soul had gone from it. A tremor was visible in her hands, and the color was gone from her drooping lips. She stared at him for a moment, stupidly, then irritation came into her voice, as he sat unbidden in a porch chair near her. "I didn't tell you to sit down."

"No." He turned his face and caught her eyes. "But I'll be comfortable sitting down, and we've got more or less talking to do."

He could see that she was perturbed, and fear wrote itself all over her face. But he did not know that she was vainly trying to get control of herself. The power of the little brown pellets left her while she slept, and she was uncertain of herself and timid. "I--I'm sick--well--I--I--why, I can't talk to you now. Go 'way," she cried. "Go 'way, won't you, please--please go 'way, and come some other time."

"No--now's as good a time as any," he replied. "At any rate, I'll tell you what's on my mind. Mag, now pay attention." He turned his face to her. "The time has come when Lila Van Dorn and her mother must know who Kenyon is."

She looked vacantly at him, then started and chattered, "Wh-wh-wh-wha-what are you s-s-sas-saying--do you mean?"

She got up, closed the door into the house, and came tottering back and stood by her chair, as the man answered:

"I mean, Maggie, exactly what I said. Kenyon wants to marry Lila. But I think, and Doctor Nesbit thinks, that before it is settled, Lila and her mother, and you might as well include Mrs. Nesbit, must know just who their daughter is marrying--I mean what blood. Now do you get my idea?"

As he spoke, the woman, clutching at her chair back, tried to quiet her fluttering hands. But she began panting and a sickly pallor overcame her and she cried feebly: "Oh, you devil--you devil--will you never let me alone?"

He answered, "Look here, Mag--what's the matter with you? I'm only trying to play fair with you. I wouldn't tell 'em until you--"

"Ugh!" She shut her eyes. "Grant--wait a minute. I must get my medicine. I'll be back." She turned to go. "Oh, wait a minute--I'll be back in five minutes--I promise, honest to God, I'll be right back, Grant." She was at the door. As she fumbled with the screen, he nodded his assent and smiled grimly as he said, "All right, Maggie."

When he was alone, he looked about him, at the evidence of the Van Dorn money in the temple of Love. The outdoor room was furnished with luxuries he had never seen. He sniffed as though he smelled the money that was evident everywhere. Beside Margaret's chair, where she had dropped it when she went to sleep, was a book. It was a beautifully bound copy of the Memoirs of some titled harlot of the old French court. He was staring absent-mindedly at the floor where the book lay when she came to the door.

She came out, sat down, looked steadily at him and began calmly: "Now, what is it you desire?"

She said "desiah," and Grant grunted as she went on: "I'm shuah no good can come and only hahm, great suffering--and Heaven knows what wrong, by this--miserable plan. What good can it do?"

Her changed attitude surprised him. "Well, now, Maggie," he returned, "since you want to talk it over sensibly, I'll tell you how we feel--at least how I feel. The chief business of any proper marriage is children. This marriage between Kenyon and Lila--if it comes--should bring forth fruit. I claim Lila has a right to know that he has my blood and yours in him before she goes into a life partnership with him."

"Oh, Grant, Grant," cried Margaret passionately, "the sum of your hair-splitting is this: that you bring shame upon your child's mother, and then cant like a Pharisee about its being for a good purpose. That's the way with you--you--you--" She could not quite finish the sentence.

She sat breathing fast, waiting for strength to come to her from the fortifying little pill. Grant picked up his hat. "Well--I've told you. That's what I came for."

She caught his arm and cried, "Sit down--haven't I a right to be heard? Hasn't a mother any rights--"

"No," cut in Grant, "not when she strangles her motherhood!"

"But how could I take my motherhood without disgracing my boy?" she asked.

He met her eyes. They were steady eyes, and were brightening. The man stared at her and answered: "When I brought him to you after mother died, a little, toddling, motherless boy, when I wanted you to come with us to mother him--and I didn't want you, Maggie, any more than you wanted me, but I thought his right to a mother was greater than either of our rights to our choice of mates--then and there, you made your final choice."

"What does God mean," she whined, "by hounding me all my life for that one mistake!"

"Maggie--Maggie," answered the man, sitting down as she sank into a chair, "it wasn't the one mistake that has made you unhappy."

"That's twaddle," she retorted, "sheer twaddle. Don't I know how that child has been a cancer in my very heart--burning and gnawing and making me wretched? Don't I know?"

"No, you don't, Mag. If you want the truth," replied Grant bluntly, "you looked upon the boy as a curse. He has threatened you every day of your life. The very love you think you have for him, which I don't doubt for a minute, Mag, made you do a mad, foolish, infinitely cruel, spiteful thing--that night at the South Harvey riot. Perhaps you might care for Kenyon's affection now, but you can't have that even remotely. For all his interest in you is limited by the fact that you robbed Lila of her father. All your cancer and heart burnings, Mag, have been your own selfishness. Lord, woman--I know you."

He turned his hard gaze upon her and she winced. But she clearly was enjoying the quarrel. It stimulated her taut nerves. The house behind her was empty. She felt free to brawl.

"And you? And you?" she jeered. "I suppose he's made a saint of you."

The man's face softened, as he said simply, "I don't claim to be a saint, Mag. But I owe Kenyon everything I am in the world--everything."

"Well, it isn't much of a debt," she laughed.

"No," he repeated, "it's not much of a debt." After a moment he added, "Doctor Nesbit has kept this secret all these years. Now it's time to let these people know. You can see why, and the only reason I came to you--"

"You came to me, Grant," she cried, "to tell me you were going to shame me before that--that--before her--that old, yellow-haired tabby, who goes around doing good! Ugh--"

Grant stared at her blankly a full, uncomprehensive minute. Finally Margaret went on: "And I suppose the next thing you long-nosed busybodies will do will be to get chicken hearted about Tom Van Dorn's rights in the matter. Ah, you hypocrites!" she cried.

"Well, I don't know," answered Grant sternly; "if Lila should go to her father for advice--why shouldn't he have all the facts?"

Margaret rose. Her bright, glassy eyes flashed. Anger colored her face. Her bosom rose and fell as she exclaimed: "But she'll not go to him. Oh, he's perfectly foolish about her. Every time a photographer in this town takes her picture, he snoops around and gets one. He has her picture in his watch, in which he thinks she looks like the Van Dorns. When he goes away he takes her picture in a leather frame and puts it on his table in the hotel--except when I'm around." She laughed. "Ain't it funny? Ain't it funny," she chattered hysterically, "him doddering the way he does about her, and her freezing the life out of him?" She shook with mirth, and went on: "Oh, the devil's coming round for Tom Van Dorn's soul--and all there is of it--all there is of it is the little green spot where he loves this brat. The rest's all rotted out!"

She laughed foolishly. Then Grant said:

"Well, Mag--I must be going. I just thought it would be square to tell you before I go any further. About the other--the affair of Lila and her father is no concern of mine. That's for Lila and her mother to settle. But you and I and Kenyon are bound together by the deepest tie in the world, Maggie. And I had to come to you." She stared into his gnarled face, then shut her eyes, and in an instant wherein they were closed she lapsed into her favorite pose and disappeared behind her mask.

"Vurry kind of you, I'm shuah. Chahmed to have this little talk again."

He gazed at the empty face, saw the drugged eyes, and the smirking mouth, and felt infinitely sad as a flash of her girlhood came back to his memory. "Well, good-by, Mag," he said gently, and turned and went down the steps.

The messenger boy whom Grant Adams passed as he went down the walk to the street from the Van Dorn home, put a telegram into Mrs. Van Dorn's lap. It was from Washington and read:

"Appointment as Federal Judge assured. Notify Sands. Have Calvin prepare article for Monday's Times and other papers."

She re-read it, held it in her hand for a time as she looked hungrily into the future.

While Grant Adams and Margaret were talking, the two old men on the porch, who once would have grappled with the problems of the great first cause, dropped into cackling reminiscences of the old days of the sixties and seventies when they were young men in their twenties and Harvey was an unbleached yellow pine stain on the prairie grass. So they forgot the flight of time, and forgot that indoors the music had stopped, and that two young voices were cooing behind the curtains. Upstairs, Laura Van Dorn and her mother, reading, tried with all their might and main to be oblivious to the fact that the music had stopped, and that certain suppressed laughs and gasps and long, silent gaps in the irregular conversation meant rather too obvious love-making for an affair which had not been formally recognized by the family. Yet the formality was all that was lacking. For if ever an affair of the heart was encouraged, was promoted, was greeted with everything but hurrahs and hosannas by the family of the lady thereunto appertaining, it was the love affair of Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn.

The youth and the maiden below stairs were exceedingly happy. They went through the elaborate business of love-making, from the first touch of thrilling fingers to such passionately rapturous embraces as they might steal half watched and half tolerated, and the mounting joy in their hearts left no room for fear of the future. As they sat toying and frivoling behind the curtains of the wide living room in the Nesbit home, they saw Grant Adams's big, awkward figure hurrying across the lawn. He walked with stooping shoulders and bowed head, and held his claw hand behind him in his flinty, red-haired hand.

"Where has he been?" asked Kenyon, as he peered through the open curtain, with his arm about the girl.

"I don't know. The Mortons aren't at home this afternoon; they all went out in the Captain's big car," answered the girl.

"Well,--I wonder--" mused the youth.

Lila snatched the window curtain, and closing it, whispered: "Quick--quick--we don't care--quick--they may come in when he gets on the porch."

Through a thin slit in the closed curtains they watched the gaunt figure climb the veranda steps and they heard the elders ask:

"Well?" and the younger man replied, "Nothing--nothing--" he repeated, "but heartbreak."

Then he added as he walked to the half-open door, "Doctor--it seems to me that I should go to Laura now; to Laura and her mother."

"Yes," returned the Doctor, "I suppose that is the thing to do."

Grant's hand was on the door screen, and the Doctor's eyes grew bright with emotion, as he called:

"You're a trump, boy."

The two old men looked at each other mutely and watched the door closing after him. Inside, Grant said: "Lila--ask your mother and grandmother if they can come to the Doctor's little office--I want to speak to them." After the girl had gone, Grant stood by Kenyon, with his arm about the young man, looking down at him tenderly. When he heard the women stirring above on the stairs, Grant patted Kenyon's shoulder, while the man's face twitched and the muscles of his hard jaw worked as though he were chewing a bitter cud.

The three, Grant and the mother and the mother's mother, left the lovers in such awe as love may hold in the midst of its rapture, and when the office door had closed, and the women were seated, Grant Adams, who stood holding to a chair back, spoke:

"It's about Kenyon. And I don't know, perhaps I should have spoken sooner. But I must speak now."

The two women gazed inquiringly at him with sympathetic faces. He was deeply embarrassed, and his embarrassment seemed to accentuate a kind of caste difference between them.

"Yes, Grant," said Mrs. Nesbit, "of course, we know about Lila and Kenyon. Nothing in the world could please us more than to see them happy together."

"I know, ma'am," returned Grant, twirling his chair nervously. "That's just the trouble. Maybe they can't be happy together."

"Why, Grant," exclaimed Laura, "what's to hinder?"

"Stuff!" sniffed Mrs. Nesbit.

He looked up then, and the two women could see that he flinched.

"Well,--I don't know how to say it, but you must know it." He stopped, and they saw anguish in his face. "But I--Laura," he turned to the younger woman and made a pitiful gesture with his whole hand, "do you remember back when you were a girl away at school and I stopped writing to you?"

"Yes, Grant," replied Laura, "so well--so well, and you never would say--"

"Because I had no right to," he cut in, "it was not my secret--to tell--then."

Mrs. Nesbit sat impatiently on her chair edge, as one waiting for a foolish formality to pass. She looked at the clumsy, bulky figure of a man in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and obviously was rather irritated at his ill-timed interjection of his own childhood affair into an entirely simple problem of true love running smoothly. But her daughter, seeing the anguish in the man's twisted face, was stricken with a terror in her heart. Laura knew that no light emotion had grappled him, and when her mother said, "Well?" sharply, the daughter rose and went to him, touching his hand gently that had been gripping the chair-back. She said, "Yes, Grant, but why do you have to tell it now?"

"Because," he answered passionately, "you should know, and Lila should know and your mother should know. Your father and I and my father all think so."

Mrs. Nesbit sat back further in her chair. Her face showed anxiety. She looked at the two others and when Laura's eyes met her mother's, there was a warning in the daughter's glance which kept her mother silent.

"Grant," said Laura, as she stood beside the gaunt figure, on which a mantle of shame seemed to be falling, "there is nothing in the world that should be hard for you to tell me--or mother."

"It isn't you," he returned, and then lifting his face and trying to catch the elder woman's eyes, he said slowly:

"Mrs. Nesbit--I'm Kenyon's father."

He caught Laura's hand in his own, and held her from stepping back. Laura did not speak. Mrs. Nesbit gazed blankly at the two and in the silence the little mantel clock ticked into their consciousnesses. Finally the elder woman, who had grown white as some old suspicion or fatal recollection flashed through her mind, asked in an unsteady voice: "And his mother?"

"His mother was Margaret Müller, Mrs. Nesbit," answered the man.

Then anger glowed in the white face as Mrs. Nesbit rose and stepped toward the downcast man. "Do you mean to tell me you--" She did not finish, but began again, not noticing that the door behind her had let in her husband: "Do you mean to say that you have let me go on all these years nursing that--that, that--creature's child and--"

"Yes, my dear," said the Doctor, touching her arm, and taking her hand, "I have." She turned on her husband her startled, hurt face and exclaimed, "And you, Jim--you too--you too?"

"What else could I do in honor, my dear? And it has been for the best."

"No," she cried angrily; "no, see what you have brought to us, Jim--that hussy's--her, why, her very--"

The years had told upon Doctor Nesbit. He could not rise to the struggle as he could have risen a decade before. His hands were shaking and his voice broke as he replied: "Yes, my dear--I know--I know. But while she bore him, we have formed him." To her darkening face he repeated: "You have formed him--and made him--you and the Adamses--with your love. And love," his soft, high voice was tender as he concluded, "love purges everything--doesn't it, Bedelia?"

"Yes, father,--love is enough. Oh, Grant, Grant--it doesn't matter--not to me. Poor--poor Margaret, what she has lost--what she has lost!" said the younger woman, as she stood close to Grant and looked deeply into his anguished face. Mrs. Nesbit stood wet-eyed, and spent of her wrath, looking at the three before her.

"O God--my God, forgive me--but I can't--Oh, Laura--Jim--I can't, I can't, not that woman's--not her--her--" She stopped and cried miserably, "You all know what he is, and whose he is." Again she stopped and looked beseechingly around. "Oh, you won't let Lila--she wouldn't do that--not take that woman's--that woman who disgraced Lila's mother--Lila must not take her child--Oh, Jim, you won't let that--"

As she spoke Mrs. Nesbit sank to a sofa near the door, and turned her face to the pillow. The three who watched her turned blank, inquiring faces to one another.

"Perhaps," the Doctor began hesitatingly and impotently, "Lila should--"

"What does she know--what can a child of twenty know," answered the grandmother from her pillow, "of the taint of that blood, of the devil she will transmit? Why, Jim--Oh, Jim--Lila's not old enough to decide. She mustn't--she mustn't--we mustn't let her." Mrs. Nesbit raised her body and asked as one who grasps a shadow, "Won't you ask her to wait--to wait until she can understand?"

A question passed from face to face among those who stood beside the elder woman, and Dr. Nesbit answered it. Strength--the power that came from a habit of forty years of dominating situations--came to him and he stepped to his wife's side. The two stood together, facing the younger pair. The Doctor spoke, not as an arbiter, but as an advocate:

"Laura, your mother has her right to be considered here. All three of you; Kenyon himself, and you and Lila--she has reared. She has made you all what you are. Her wishes must be regarded now." Mrs. Nesbit rose while the Doctor was speaking. He took her hand as was his wont and turned to her, saying: "Mother, how will this do: Let's do nothing now, not to-day at any rate. You must all adjust yourselves to the facts that reveal this new relation before you can make an honest decision. When we have done that, let Laura and her mother tell Lila the truth, and let each tell the child exactly how she feels; and then, if you can bring yourself to it, leave it to her; if she will wait for a time until she understands her grandmother's point of view--very well. If not--"

"If not, mother, Lila's decision must stand." This came from Laura, who stepped over and kissed her mother's hand. The father looked tenderly at his daughter and shook his head as he answered softly: "If not--no, I shall stand with mother--she has her right--the realest right of all!"

And so it came to pass that the course of true love in the hearts of Lila Van Dorn and Kenyon Adams had its first sharp turning. And all the world was overclouded for two souls. But they were only two souls and the world is full of light. And the light falls upon men and women without much respect for class or station, for good deeds or bad deeds, for the weak or for the strong, for saints or sinners. For know well, truly beloved, that chance and circumstance fall out of the great machine of life upon us, hodge podge and helter skelter; good is not rewarded by prizes from the wheel of fortune nor bad punished by its calamities. Only as our hearts react on life, do we get happiness or misery, not from the events that follow the procession of the days.

Now for a moment let us peep through the clouds that lowered over the young souls aforesaid. Clouds in youth are vastly black; but they are never thick. And peering through those clouds, one may see the lovers, groping in the umbrage. It does not matter much to us, and far less does it matter to them how they have made their farewell meeting. It is night and they are coming from Captain Morton's.

Hand in hand they skip across the lawn, and soon are hidden in the veranda. They sit arm in arm, on a swinging porch chair, and have no great need for words. "What is it--what is the reason?" asked the youth.

"Well, dear"--it is an adventure to say the word out loud after whispering it for so many days--"dear," she repeated, and feels the pressure of his arm as she speaks, "it's something about you!"

"But what?" he persisted.

"We don't know now," she returns. "And really what does it matter, only we can't hurt grandma, and it won't be for long. It can't be for long, and then--"

"We don't care now,--not to-night, do we?" She lifts her head from his shoulder, and puts up her lips for the answer. It is all new--every thrill of the new-found joy of one another's being is strange; every touch of the hands, of cheeks, every pressure of arms--all are gloriously beautiful.

Once in life may human beings know the joy these lovers knew that night. The angels lend it once and then, if we are good, they let us keep it in our memories always. If not, then God sends His infinite pity instead.

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Chapter XLIV

IN WHICH WE SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN, WITH GEORGE BROTHERTON, AND IN GENERAL CONSIDER THE HABITANTS OF THE KINGDOM

Mr. Brotherton had been pacing the deck of his store like the captain of a pirate ship in a storm. Nothing in the store suited him; he found Miss Calvin's high façade of hair too rococo for the attenuated lines of gray and lavender and heliotrope that had replaced the angular effects in red and black and green and brown of former years. He had asked her to tone it down to make it match the long-necked gray jars and soft copper vases that adorned the gray burlapped Serenity, and she had appeared with it slopping over her ears, "as per yours of even date!" And still he paced the deck.

He picked up Zola's "Fecundité," which he had taken from stock; tried to read it; put it down; sent for "Tom Sawyer"; got up, went after Dickens's "Christmas Books," and put them down; peeped into "Little Women," and watched the trade, as Miss Calvin handled it, occasionally dropping his book for a customer; hunted for "The Three Bears," which he found in large type with gorgeous pictures, read it, and decided that it was real literature.

Amos Adams came drifting in to borrow a book. He moved slowly, a sort of gray wraith almost discarnate and apart from things of the earth. Brotherton, looking at the old man, felt a candor one might have in addressing a state of mind. So the big voice spoke gently:

"Here, Mr. Adams," called Brotherton. "Won't you come back here and talk to me?" But the shopkeeper felt that he should put the elder man at his ease, so he added: "You're a wise guy, as the Latin fathers used to say. Anyway, if Jasper ever gets to a point where he thinks marriage will pay six per cent. over and above losses, you may be a kind of step-uncle-in-law of mine. Tell me, Mr. Adams--what about children--do they pay? You know, I've always wanted children. But now--well, you see, I never thought but that people just kind of picked 'em off the bushes as you do huckleberries. I'm getting so that I can't look at a great crowd of people without thinking of the loneliness, suffering and self-denial that it cost to bring all of them into the world. Good Lord, man, I don't want lots of children--not now. And yet, children--children--why, if we could open a can and have 'em as we do most things, from sardines to grand opera, I'd like hundreds of them. Yet, I dunno," Mr. Brotherton wagged a thoughtful head.

But Amos Adams rejoined: "Ah, yes, George, but when you think of what it means for two people to bring a child into the world--what the journey means--the slow, inexorable journey into the valley of the shadow means for them, close together; what tenderness springs up; what sacrifices come forth; what firm knitting of lives; what new kind of love is bred--you are inclined to think maybe Providence knew what it was about when it brought children into life by the cruel path."

Mr. Brotherton nodded a sympathetic head.

"Let me tell you something, George," continued Amos. "It's through their hope of bettering the children that Grant has moved his people in the Valley out on the little garden plots. There they are--every warmish day thousands of mothers and children and old men, working their little plots of ground, trudging back to the tenements in the evening. The love of children is the one steady, unswerving passion in these lives, and Grant has nearly harnessed it, George. And it's because Nate Perry has that love that he's giving freely here for those poor folks a talent that would make him a millionaire, and is running his mines, and his big foundry with Cap Morton besides. It's perfectly splendid to see the way a common fatherhood between him and the men is making a brotherhood. Why, man," cried Amos, "it refreshes one's faith like a tragedy."

"Hello, Aunt Avey," piped the cheery voice of the little old Doctor, as he came toddling through the front door. "It's a boy--Joe Calvin the Third." The Doctor came back to the desk where Amos was standing and took a chair, and as Amos drifted out of the store as impersonally as he came, the Doctor began to grin.

"We were just talking of children," said Brotherton with studied casualness. "You know, Doctor," Brotherton smiled abashed, "I've always thought I'd like lots of children. But now--"

"I see 'em come, and I see 'em go every day. I'm kind of getting used to death, George. But the miracle of birth grows stranger and stranger."

"So young Joe Calvin's a proud parent, is he? Boy, you say?"

"Boy," chuckled the Doctor, "and old Joe's out there having a nervous breakdown. They've had ten births in the Calvin family. I've attended all of 'em, and this is the first time old Joe's ever been allowed in the house. To-day the old lady's out there with a towel around her head, practically having that baby herself. The poor daughter-in-law hasn't seen it. You'd think she was only invited in as a sort of paying guest. And old lady Calvin comes in every few minutes and delivers homilies on the joys of large families!"

The Doctor laughed until his blue old eyes watered, and he chirped when he had his laugh out: "How soon we forget! Which, I presume, is one of God's semi-precious blessings!"

When the Doctor went out, Brotherton found the store deserted, except for Miss Calvin, who was in front. Brotherton carried a log to the fireplace, stirred up the fire, and when he had it blazing, found Laura Van Dorn standing beside him.

"Well, George," she said, "I've just been stealing away from my children in the Valley for a little visit with Emma."

"Very well, then," said Mr. Brotherton, "sit down a minute with me. Tell me, Laura--about children--are they worth it?"

She was a handsome woman, with youth still in her eyes and face, who sat beside George Brotherton, looking at the fire that March day. "George--good old friend," she said gently, "there's nothing else in the world so worth it as children."

She hesitated before going so deeply into her soul, perhaps picking her verbal way. "George--no man ever degraded a woman more than I was degraded. Yet I brought Lila out of it, and I thank God for her, and I don't mind the price--not now." She turned to look at Mr. Brotherton inquiringly as she said: "But what I come in to talk to you about, George, was Grant. Have you noticed in the last few months--that growing--well--it's more than enthusiasm, George; it's a fanaticism. Since he has been working on the garden plan--Grant has been getting wilder and wilder in his talk about the Democracy of labor. Have you noticed it--or am I oversensitive?"

Brotherton, poking idly in the fire, did not answer at once. At length he said:

"Grant's a zealot. He's full of this prisms, prunes and peace idea, this sweetness and light revolution, this notion of hitching their hop-dreams to these three-acre plots, and preaching non-resistance. It's coming a little fast for me, Laura--just a shade too many at times. But, on the other hand--there's Nate Perry. He's as cold-blooded a Yankee as ever swindled a father--and he's helping with the scheme. He's--"

"He has no faith in the Democracy of Labor. He hoots," interrupted Laura. "What he's doing is working for a more efficient lot of laboring men, so that when the time comes when the unions shall ask and get more definite control of the factories and mines, in the way of wage-setting, and price-making, they will bring some sense with their control. He's merely looking after himself--in the last analysis; but Grant's going mad. George, he actually believes that when this thing wins here in the Valley--the peaceful strike, the rise of labor, and the theory of non-resistance--he's going over the world, and in a few years will have labor emancipated. Have you heard him--that is, recently?"

"Well, yes, a week or so ago," answered Brotherton, "and he was going it at a pretty fair clip for a minute then. Well, say--I mean--what should we do?" he asked, drumming with the poker on the hearth. "Laura," Brotherton ran his eyes from the poker until they met her frank, gray eyes, "Grant would listen to you before he would listen to any one else on earth or in Heaven--I'm sure of that."

"Then what shall we do?" she asked. "We mustn't let him wreck himself--and all these people? What ought I--"

A shadow fell across the door, and in another moment there stood in the opening of the alcove the tall, lean figure of Thomas Van Dorn.

When Laura was gone, Van Dorn, after more or less polite circumlocution, began to unfold a plan of Market Street to buy the Daily Times and bring Jared Thurston back to Harvey to run it in the interests of the property owners in the town and in the Valley. Incidentally he had come to warn George on behalf of Market Street that he was harboring Grant Adams, contrary to the judgment of Market Street. But George Brotherton's heart was far from Market Street; it was out on the hill with Emma, his wife, and his mouth spoke from the place of his treasure.

"Tom--tell me, as between man and man, what do you think of children? You're sort of in the outer room of the Blue Lodge of grandfatherdom, with Lila and Kenyon getting ready for the preacher, and you ought to know, Tom--honest, man, how about it?"

A wave of self-pity enveloped the Judge. His voice broke as he answered: "George, I haven't any little girl--she never even has spoken to me about this affair that the whole town knows about. Oh, I haven't any child at all."

He looked a miserable moment at Brotherton, perhaps reviewing the years which they had lived and grown from youth to middle age together and growled: "Not a thing--not a damned thing in it--George, in all this forty years of fighting to keep ahead of the undertaker! Not a God damned thing!" And so he left the Sweet Serenity of Books and Wall Paper and went back to the treadmill of life, spitting ashes from his gray lips!

And then Daniel Sands toddled in to get the five-cent cigars which he had bought for a generation--one at a time every day, and Brotherton came to Daniel with his problem.

The old man, whose palsied head forever was denying something, as if he had the assessor always in his mind, shut his rheumy eyes and answered: "My children--bauch--" He all but spat upon their names. "Morty--moons around reading Socialist books, with a cold in his throat and dishwater in his brains. And the other, she's married a dirty traitor and stands by him against her own flesh and blood. Ba-a-a-ch!" He showed his blue, old mouth, and cried:

"I married four women to give those children a home--and what thanks do I get? Ingrates--one a milk-sop--God, if he'd only be a Socialist and get out and throw dynamite; but he won't; he won't do a thing but sit around drooling about social justice when I want to eat my meals in peace. And he goes coughing all day and night, and grunting, and now he's wearing a pointed beard--he says it's for his throat, but I know--it's because he thinks it's romantic. And that Anne--why, she's worse," but he did not finish the sentence. His old head wagged violently. Evidently another assessor had suddenly pounced in upon his imagination. For he shuffled into the street.

Mr. Brotherton sat by the fire, leaning forward, with his fingers locked between his knees. The warning against Grant Adams that Tom Van Dorn had given him had impressed him. He knew Market Street was against Grant Adams. But he did not realize that Market Street's attitude was only a reflex of the stir in the Valley. All Market streets over the earth feel more or less acutely changes which portend in the workshops, often before those changes come. We are indeed "members one of another," and the very aspirations of those who dream of better things register in the latent fears of those who live on trade. We are so closely compact in our organization that a man may not even hope without crowding his neighbor. And in that little section of the great world which men knew as Market Street in Harvey, the surest evidence of the changing attitude of the men in the Valley toward their work, was found not in the crowds that gathered in Belgian Hall week after week to hear Grant Adams, not in the war-chest which was filling to overflowing, not in the gardens checkered upon the hillsides, but rather in the uneasiness of Market Street. The reactions were different in Market Street and in the Valley; but it was one vision rising in the same body, each part responding according to its own impulses. Of course Market Street has its side, and George Brotherton was not blind to it. Sitting by his fire that raw March day, he realized that Market Street was never a crusader, and why. He could see that the men from whom the storekeepers bought goods on ninety days' time, 3 per cent. off for cash, were not crusaders. When a man turned up among them with a six-months' crusade for an evanescent millennium, flickering just a few years ahead, the wholesalers of the city and the retailers of Market Street nervously began thumbing over their rapidly accumulating "bills payable" and began using crisp, scratchy language toward the crusader.

It made Brotherton pause when he thought how they might involve and envelop him--as a family man. For as he sat there, the man's mind kept thinking of children. And his mind wandered to the thought of his wife and his home--and the little ones that might be. As his mind clicked back to Amos Adams, and to the strange family that would produce three boys as unlike as Grant and Jasper and Kenyon, he began to consider how far Kenyon had come for a youth in his twenties. And Brotherton realized that he might have had a child as old as Kenyon. Then Mr. Brotherton put his hands over his face and tried to stop the flying years.

A shadow fell, and Brotherton greeted Captain Morton, in a sunburst of mauve tailoring. The Captain pointed proudly to a necktie pin representing a horse jumping through a horseshoe, and cried: "What you think of it? Real diamond horseshoe nails--what say?"

"Now, Captain, sit down here," said Mr. Brotherton. "You'll do, Captain--you'll do." But the subject nearest the big man's heart would not leave it. "Cap," he said, "what about children--do they pay?"

"That's just it," put in the Captain. "That's just what I said to Emmy this morning. I was out to see her after you left and stayed until Laura Van Dorn came and chased me off. Emmy's mighty happy, George--mighty, mighty happy--eh? Her mother always was that way. I was the one that was scared." George nodded assent. "But to-day--well, we just sat there and cried--she's so happy about it--eh? Wimmin, George, ain't scared a bit. I know 'em. I've been in their kitchins for thirty years, George, and let me tell you somepin funny," continued the Captain. "Old Ahab Wright has taken to smoking in public to get the liberal vote! Let me tell you somepin else. They've decided to put the skids under Grant Adams and his gang down in the Valley, and the other day they ran into a snag. You know Calvin & Calvin are representing the owners since Tom's got this life job, though he's got all his money invested down there and still advises 'em. Well, anyway, they decided to put a barbed-wire trocha around all the mines and the factories. Well, four carloads of wire and posts shows up down in the Valley this week, and, 'y gory, man,--they can't get a carpenter in town or down there to touch it. Grant's got 'em sewed up. But Tom says he'll fix 'em one of these days, if they get before him in his court--what say?"

"I suppose he will, Captain," replied Mr. Brotherton, and took up his theme. "But getting back to the subject of children--I've been talking all morning about 'em to all kinds of folks, and I've decided the country's for 'em. Children, Cap," Mr. Brotherton rose, put on his coat and took the Captain's arm, "children, Captain," he repeated, as they reached the sidewalk and were starting for the street car, "children, I figure it out--children are the see-ment of civilization! Well, say--thus endeth the reading of the first lesson!"

As they stood in the corner transfer shed waiting for the car, Grant Adams came up. "Say, Grant," called Brotherton, "what you goin' to do about that barbed wire trocha?"

"Oh," smiled Grant, "I've just about settled it. The boys will begin on it this afternoon. A lot of them were angry when they heard what the owners were up to, but I said, 'Here: we've got justice on our side. We claim a partnership interest in all those mines and factories down there. We contend that we who labor there now are the legatees of all the labor that's been killed and maimed and cheated by long hours and low wages down in the Valley for thirty years, and if we have a partnership right in those mines and factories, it's our business to protect them.' So I talked the boys into putting up the trocha. I tell you, George," said Grant, and the tremor of emotion strained his voice as he spoke, "it won't be long until we'll have a partnership in that trocha, just as we'll have an interest in every hammer and bolt, and ledge and vein in the Valley. It's coming, and coming fast--the Democracy of Labor. I have faith, the men and women have faith--all over the Valley. We've found the right way--the way of peace. When labor has proved its efficiency--"

"Ah--you're crazy, Grant," snapped the Captain. "This class of people down here--these ignorant foreigners--why, they couldn't run a peanut stand--eh?"

Dick Bowman and his son came up, and not knowing a discussion was in the wind, Dick shook hands around. And after the Captain had taken his uptown car, Grant stood apart, lost in thought, but Dick said: "Well, Benny, we got here in time for the car!" Then craning his long neck, the father laughed: "Ben, here's a laboring man and his shift goes on at one--so he's in a hurry, but we'll make it."

"Dick," began Brotherton, looking at the thin shadow of a man who was hardly Brotherton's elder by half a dozen years. "Dick, you're a kind of expert father, you and Joe Calvin, and to-day Joe's a granddaddy--tell me about the kiddies--are they worth it?"

Bowman threw his head back and craned his long neck. "Not for us--not for us poor--maybe for you people here," said Bowman, who paused and counted on his fingers: "Eight born, three dead--that's too many. Joe Calvin, he's raised all his and they're doing fairly well. That's his girl in here--ain't it?" Bowman sighed. "Her and my Jean played together back in their little days; before we moved to South Harvey." He lowered his voice.

"George, mother hasn't heard from Jean for going on two year, now. She went off with a fellow; told us she married him--she was just a child--but had been working around in the factories--and, well, I don't say so, but I guess she just has got where she's ashamed to write--maybe."

His voice rose in anger as he cried: "Why didn't she have a show, like this girl of Joe's? He's no better than I. And you know my wife--well, she's no Mrs. Joe Calvin--she's been as happy about 'em when they came as if they were princes of the blood." He stopped.

"Then there's Mugs--I dunno, George,--it seems like we tried with Mugs, but all them saloons and--well, the gambling and the women under his nose from the time he was ten years old--well, I can't make him work. Little Jack is steady enough for a boy of twenty--he's in the Company mines, and we've put Ben in this year. He is twelve--though, for Heaven's sake, don't go blabbing it; he's supposed to be fourteen. And little Betty, she's in school yet. I don't know how she'll turn out. No, George," he went on, "children for us poor, children's a mighty risky, uncertain crop. But," he smiled reflectively, "I'm right here to tell you they're lots of fun as little shavers--growing up. Why, George, you ought to hear Benny sing. Them Copinis of the Hot Dog found he had a voice, and they've taught him some dago songs." Ben was a bright-faced boy of twelve--big for his age, with snappy, brown eyes and apples of cheeks and curly hair. He slipped away to look into a store window, leaving the two men alone. Mr. Brotherton was in a mellow mood. He put his great paw on the small man's shoulder and said huskily:

"Say, Dick, honest, I'd rather have just one boy like that than the whole damn Valley--that's right!"

The car came bowling up and the South Harvey people boarded it. Grant Adams rode down into the Valley with great dreams in his soul. He talked little to the Bowmans, but looked out of the window and saw the dawn of another day. It is the curse of dreamers that they believe that when they are convinced of a truth, they who have pursued it, who have suffered for it, who have been exalted by it, they have only to pass out their truth to the world to remake the universe. But the world is made over only when the common mind sees the truth, and the common heart feels it. So the history of reform is a history of disappointment. The reform works, of course. But in working it does only the one little trick it is intended to do, and the long chain of incidental blessings which should follow, which the reformers feel must inevitably follow, wait for other reformers to bring them into being. So there is always plenty of work for the social tinker, and no one man ever built a millennium. For God is ever jealous for our progeny, and leaves an unfinished job always on the work bench of the world.

Grant Adams believed that he had a mission to bring labor into its own. The coming of the Democracy of Labor was a real democracy to him--no mere shibboleth. And as he rode through the rows of wooden tenements, where he knew men and women were being crushed by the great industrial machine, he thought of the tents in the fields; of the women and children and of the old and the sick going out there to labor through the day to piece out the family wage and secure economic independence with wholesome, self-respecting work. It seemed to him that when he could bring the conditions that were starting in Harvey, to every great industrial center, one great job in the world would be done forever.

So he drummed his iron claw on the seat before him, put his hard hand upon his rough face, and smiled in the joy of his high faith.

Dick Bowman and his boy left Grant at the car. He waved his claw at little Ben when they parted, and sighed as he saw the little fellow scampering to shaft No. 3 of the Wahoo Fuel Company's mines. There Grant lost sight of the child, and went to his work. In two hours he and Violet Hogan had cleaned off his desk. He had promised the Wahoo Fuel Company to see that the work of constructing the trocha was started that afternoon, and when Violet had telephoned to Mechanics' Hall, Grant and a group of men went to the mines to begin on the trocha. They passed down the switch into the yards, and Grant heard a brakeman say:

"That Frisco car there has a broken brake--watch out for her."

And a switchman reply:

"Yes--I know it. I tried to get the yardmaster not to send her down. But we'll do what we can."

The brakeman on the car signaled for the engineer to pull the other cars away, and leave the Frisco car at the top of a slight grade, to be shoved down by the men when another car was needed at the loading chute. Grant walked toward the loading chute, and a roar from the falling coal filled his ears. He saw little Ben under a car throwing back the coal falling from the faulty chute on to the ground.

Through the roar Grant heard a yell as from a man in terror. He looked back of him and saw the Frisco car coming down the grade as if shot from a monster catapult!

"The boy--the boy--!" he heard the man on the car shriek. He tried to clamber over the coal to the edge of the car, but before he could reach the side, the Frisco car had hit the loading car a terrific blow, sending it a car length down the track.

One horrible scream was all they heard from little Ben. Grant was at his side in a moment. There, stuck to the rail, were two little legs and an arm. Grant stooped, picked up the little body, pulled it loose from the tracks, and carried it, running, to the company hospital.

As Grant ran, tears fell in the little, coal-stained face, and made white splotches on the child's cheeks.

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