William White - In the Heart of a Fool

As he tripped down the hill from the Nesbit home that spring night, he wondered what Laura Nesbit meant when she spoke of Grant Adams, and his love for the motherless baby. The idea that this love bore any sort of resemblance to the love of educated, cultivated people as found in the love that Laura and her intended husband bore toward each other, puzzled the young lawyer. Being restless, he turned off his homeward route, and walked under the freshly leaved trees. Over and over again the foolish phrases and sentences from Laura Nesbit’s love making, many other nights in which she seemed to assume the unquestioned truth of the hypothesis of God, also puzzled him. Whatever his books had taught him, and whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word for explaining one’s failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars, wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction, and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where the blue and green and yellow flames from the smelters and the belching black smoke from the factories hid the low-hanging stars and marked the seething hell of injustice and vice and want and woe that he knew was in South Harvey, and he held the glowing cigarette stub in his hand and laughed when he thought of God. “Free will,” says “Mr. Left” in one of his rather hazy and unconvincing observations, “is of limited range. Man faces two buttons. He must choose the material or the spiritual–and when he has chosen fate plays upon his choice the grotesque variation of human destiny. But when the cloth of life is finished, the pattern of the passing events may be the same in either choice, riches or poverty, misery or power, only the color of the cloth differs; in one piece, however rich, the pattern is drab with despair, the other cloth sheens in happiness.” Which Mr. Van Dorn in later life, reading the Psychological Journal , turned back to a second time, and threw aside with a casual and unappreciative, “Oh hell,” as his only comment.

Mrs. Nesbit tried to put the Doctor into his Sunday blacks the day of her daughter’s wedding, but he would have none of them. He appeared on Market Street and went his rounds among the sick in his linen clothes with his Panama hat and his pleated white shirt. He did not propose to have the visiting princes, political and commercial, who had been summoned to honor the occasion, find him in his suzerainty without the insignia of his power. For it was “Old Linen Pants,” not Dr. James Nesbit, who was the boss of the northern district and a member of the State’s triumvirate. So the Doctor in the phaëton, drawn by his amiable, motherly, sorrel mare, the Doctor, white and resplendent in a suit that shimmered in the hot June sun, flaxed around town, from his office to the hotel, from the hotel to the bank, from the bank to South Harvey. As a part of the day’s work he did the honors of the town, soothed the woes of the weary, healed the sick, closed a dying man’s eyes, held a mother’s hands away from death as she brought life into the world, made a governor, paid his overdue note, got a laborer work, gave a lift to a fallen woman, made two casual purchases: a councilman and a new silk vest, with cash in hand; lent a drunkard’s wife the money for a sack of flour, showed three Maryland Satterthwaites where to fish for bass in the Wahoo, took four Schenectady Van Dorns out to lunch, and was everywhere at once doing everything, clicking his cane, whistling gently or humming a low, crooning tune, smiling for the most part, keeping his own counsel and exhibiting no more in his face of what was in his heart than the pink and dimpled back of a six-months’ baby.

To say that the Doctor was everywhere in Harvey is inexact. He was everywhere except on Quality Hill in Elm Street. There, from the big, bulging house with its towers and minarets and bow windows and lean-tos, ells and additions, the Doctor was barred. There was chaos, and the spirit that breathed on the face of the waters was the Harvey representative of the Maryland Satterthwaites, with her crimping pins bristling like miniature gun barrels, and with the look of command upon her face, giving orders in a firm, cool voice and then executing the orders herself before any one else could turn around. She could call the spirits from the vasty deep of the front hall or the back porch and they came, or she knew the reason why. With an imperial wave of her hand she sent her daughter off to some social wilderness of monkeys with all the female Satterthwaites and Van Dorns and Mrs. Senators and Miss Governors and Misses Congressmen, and with the offices of Mrs. John Dexter, Mrs. Herdicker, the ladies’ hatter, and two Senegambian slaveys, Mrs. Nesbit brought order out of what at one o’clock seemed without form and void.

It was late in the afternoon, almost evening, though the sun still was high enough in the heavens to throw cloud shadows upon the hills across the valley when the Doctor stabled his mare and came edging into the house from the barn. He could hear the clamor of many voices; for the Maryland Satterthwaites had come home from the afternoon’s festivity. He slipped into his office-study, and as it was stuffy there he opened the side door that let out upon the veranda. He sat alone behind the vines, not wishing to be a part of the milling in the rooms. His heart was heavy. He blinked and sighed and looked across the valley, and crooned his old-fashioned tune while he tried to remember all of the life of the little girl who had come out of the mystery of birth into his life when Elm Street was a pair of furrows on a barren, wind-swept prairie hill; tried to remember how she had romped in girlhood under the wide sunshine in the prairie grass, how her little playhouse had sat where the new dining-room now stood, how her dolls used to litter the narrow porch that grew into the winding, serpentine veranda that belted the house, how she read his books, how she went about with him on his daily rounds, and how she had suddenly bloomed into a womanhood that made him feel shy and abashed in her presence. He wondered where it was upon the way that he had lost clasp of her hand: where did it drop from him? How did the little fingers that he used to hold so tightly, slip into another’s hand? Her life’s great decision had been made without consulting him; when did he lose her confidence? She had gone her way an independent soul–flown like a bird from the cage, he thought, and was going a way that he felt would be a way of pain, and probably sorrow, yet he could not stop her. All the experience of his life was worthless to her. All that he knew of men, all that he feared of her lover, were as chaff in the scales for her.

The Doctor, the boss, the friend, the man, withdrew from his consciousness as he sat behind the vines and he became the impersonal, universal father, wondering at the mystery of life. As he sat musing, he heard a step behind him, and saw his daughter coming across the porch to greet him. “Father,” she said, “I have just this half hour that’s to be ours. I’ve planned for it all day. Mother has promised to keep every one away.”

The father’s jaw began to tremble and his cherubic face to wrinkle in an emotional pucker. He put the girl’s arm about his neck, and rubbed her hand upon his cheek. Then the father said softly:

“I never felt poor before until this minute.” The girl looked inquiringly at him and was about to protest. He stopped her: “Money wouldn’t do you much good–not all the money in the world.”

“Well, father, I don’t want money: we don’t need it,” said the girl. “Why, we have a beautiful home and Tom is making–”