William White - In the Heart of a Fool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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