Part 38 (2/2)
As the men wrangled, many an hour sat Anne Perry singing the nest song as she made little things for the lower bureau drawer. Sometimes in the evening, Morty would sit by the kitchen stove, sadly torn in heart, between the two debaters, seeing the justice of Grant's side as an ethical question, but admiring the businesslike way in which Nathan waved aside ethical considerations, d.a.m.ned Grant for a crazy man, and proclaimed the gospel of efficiency.
Often Grant walked home from these discussions with his heart hot and rebellious. He saw life only in its spiritual aspect and the logic of Nathan Perry angered him with its conclusiveness.
Often as he walked Kenyon was upon his heart and he wondered if Margaret missed the boy; or if the small fame that the boy was making with his music had touched her vanity with a sense of loss. He wondered if she ever wished to help the child. The whole town knew that the Nesbits were sending Kenyon to Boston to study music, and that Amos Adams and Grant could contribute little to the child's support. Grant wondered, considering the relations between the Van Dorns and Nesbits, whether sometimes Margaret did not feel a twinge of irritation or regret at the course of things.
He could not know that even as he walked through the November night, Margaret Van Dorn, was sitting in her room holding in her hand a tiny watch, a watch to delight a little girl's heart. On the inside of the back of the watch was engraved:
”To Lila from her Father, for Her 10th birthday.”
And opposite the inscription in the watch was pasted the photograph of the unhappy face of the donor. Margaret sat gazing at the trinket and wondering vaguely what would delight a little boy's heart as a watch would warm the heart of a little girl. It was not a sense of loss, not regret, certainly not remorse that moved her heart as she sat alone holding the trinket--discovered on her husband's dresser; it was a weak and footless longing, and a sense of personal wrong that rose against her husband. He had something which she had not. He could give jeweled watches, and she--
But if she only could have read life aright she would have pitied him that he could give only jeweled watches, only paper images of a dissatisfied face, only material things, the token of a material philosophy--all that he knew and all that he had, to the one thing in the world that he really could love. And as for Margaret, his wife, who lived his life and his philosophy, she, too, had nothing with which to satisfy the dull, empty feeling in her heart when she thought of Kenyon, save to make peace with it in hard metal and stupid stones. Thus does what we think crust over our souls and make us what we are.
Grant Adams, plodding homeward that night, turned from the thought of Margaret to the thought of Kenyon with a wave of joy, counting the days and weeks and the months until the boy should return for the summer. At home Grant sat down before the kitchen table and began a long talk that kept him until midnight. He had undertaken to organize all the unions of the place into a central labor council; the miners, the smeltermen, the teamsters, the cement factory workers, the workers in the building trades. It was an experimental plan, under the auspices of the national union officers. Only a man like Grant Adams, with something more than a local reputation as a leader, would have been intrusted with the work.
And so, after his day's toil for bread, he sat at his kitchen table, elaborately working his dream into reality.
That season the devil, if there is a devil who seeks to swerve us from what we deem our n.o.blest purposes, came to Grant Adams disguised in an offer of a considerable sum of money to Grant for a year's work in the lecture field. The letter bearing the offer explained that by going out and preaching the cause of labor to the people, Grant would be doing his cause more good than by staying in Harvey and fighting alone. The thought came to him that the wider field of work would give him greater personal fame, to be used ultimately for a wider influence. All one long day as he worked with hammer and saw at his trade, Grant turned the matter over in his mind. He could see himself in a larger canvas, working a greater good. Perhaps some fleeting unformed idea came to him of a home and a normal life as other men live; for at noon, without consciously connecting her with his dream, he took his problem to Laura Van Dorn at her kindergarten. That afternoon he decided to accept the offer, and put much of his reason for acceptance upon Kenyon and the boy's needs. That night he penned a letter of acceptance to the lecture bureau and went to bed, disturbed and unsatisfied. Before he slept he turned and twisted, and finally threshed himself to sleep. It was a light fragmentary sleep, that moves in and out of some strange hypnoidal state where the lower consciousness and the normal consciousness wrestle for the control of reason. Then after a long period of half-waking dreams, toward morning, Grant sank into a profound sleep. In that sleep his soul, released from all that is material, rose and took command of his will.
When Grant awoke, it was still black night. For a few seconds he did not know where he was--nor even who he was, nor what. He was a mere consciousness. The first glimmer of ident.i.ty that came to him came with a roaring ”No,” that repeated itself over and over, ”No--no,” cried the voice of his soul--”you are no mere word spinner; you are a fighter; you are pledged, body and soul; you are bought with a price--no, no, no.”
And then he knew where he was and he knew surely and without doubt or quaver of faith that he must not give up his place in the fight. When he thought of Kenyon living on the bounty of the Nesbits, he thought also of d.i.c.k Bowman, ordering his own son under the sliding earth to hold the shovel over Grant's face in the mine.
So Grant Adams bent his shoulders to this familiar burden. In the early morning, before his father and Jasper were up, the gaunt, ungainly figure hurried with his letter of refusal to the South Harvey Station and put the letter on the seven-ten train for Chicago.
That evening, sitting on their front porch, the Dexters talked over Grant's decision. ”Well,” said John Dexter, looking up into the mild November sky, and seeing the brown gray smudge of the smelter there, ”so Grant has sidled by another devil in his road. We have seen that women won't stop him; it's plain that money nor fame won't stop him, though they clearly tore his coat tails. I imagine from what Laura says he must have decided once to accept.”
”Yes,” answered his wife, ”but it does seem to me, if my old father needed care as his does, and my brother had to accept charity, I'd give that particular devil my whole coat and see if I couldn't make a bargain with him for a little money, at some small cost.”
”Mother Eve--Mother Eve,” smiled the minister, ”you women are so practical--we men are the real idealists--the only dreamers who stand by our dreams in this wicked, weary world.”
He leaned back in his chair. ”There is still one more big black devil waiting for Grant: Power--the love of power which is the l.u.s.t of usefulness--power may catch Grant after he has escaped from women and money and fame. Vanity--vanity, saith the preacher--Heaven help Grant in the final struggle with the big, black devil of vanity.”
Yet, after all, vanity has in it the seed of a saving grace that has lifted humanity over many pitfalls in the world. For vanity is only self-respect multiplied; and when that goes--when men and women lose their right to lift their faces to G.o.d, they have fallen upon bad times indeed. It was even so good a man as John Dexter himself, who tried to put self-respect into the soul of Violet Hogan, and was mocked for it.
”What do they care for me?” she cried, as he sat talking to her in her miserable home one chill November day. ”Why should I pay any attention to them? Once I chummed with Mag Muller, before she married Henry Fenn, and I was as good as she was then--and am now for that matter. She knew what I was, and I knew what she was going to be--we made no bones of it.
We hunted in pairs--as women like to. And I know Mag Muller. So why should I keep up for her?”
The woman laughed and showed her hollow mouth and all the wrinkles of her broken face, that the paint hid at night. ”And as for Tom Van Dorn--I was a decent girl before I met him, Mr. Dexter--and why in G.o.d's name should I try to keep up for him?”
She shuddered and would have sobbed but he stopped her with: ”Well, Violet--wife and I have always been your friends; we are now. The church will help you.”
”Oh, the church--the church,” she laughed. ”It can't help me. Fancy me in church--with all the wives looking sideways at all the husbands to see that they didn't look too long at me. The church is for those who haven't been caught! G.o.d knows if there is a place for any one who has been caught--and I've been caught and caught and caught.” She cried.
”Only the children don't know--not yet, though little Tom--he's the oldest, he came to me and asked me yesterday why the other children yelled when I went out. Oh, h.e.l.l--” she moaned, ”what's the use--what's the use--what's the use!” and fell to sobbing with her head upon her arms resting upon the bare, dirty table.
It was rather a difficult question for John Dexter. Only one other minister in the world ever answered it successfully, and He brought public opinion down on Him. The Rev. John Dexter rose, and stood looking at the shattered thing that once had been a graceful, beautiful human body enclosing an aspiring soul. He saw what society had done to break and twist the body; what society had neglected to do in the youth of the soul--to guide and environ it right--he saw what poverty had done and what South Harvey had done to cheat her of her womanhood even when she had tried to rise and sin no more; he remembered how the court-made law had cheated her of her rightful patrimony and cast her into the streets to spread the social cancer of her trade; and he had no answer. If he could have put vanity into her heart--the vanity which he feared for Grant Adams, he would have been glad. But her vanity was the vanity of motherhood; for herself she had spent it all. So he left her without answering her question. Money was all he could give her and money seemed to him a kind of curse. Yet he gave it and gave all he had.
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