William White - In the Heart of a Fool

“Tom–why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class or of your kind. What’s your idea in cutting in between Jared and her; you’ll only make trouble.”

A smile, a gay, happy, and withal a seductive smile lit up the handsome, oval face of young Mr. Van Dorn. The smile became a laugh, a quiet, insinuating, good-natured, light-hearted laugh. As he laughed he replied:

“Lizzie’s all right, Henry–don’t worry about Lizzie.” Again he laughed a gentle, deep-voiced chuckle, and held up his hand in the moonlight. A brown scab was lined across the back of the hand and as Henry saw it Van Dorn spoke: “Present from Lizzie–little pussy.” Again he chuckled and added, “Nearly made the horse run away, too. Anyway,” he laughed pleasantly, “when I left her she promised to go again.”

But Henry Fenn returned to his point: “Tom,” he cried, “don’t play with Lizzie–she’s not your kind, and it’s breaking Jared’s heart. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’ll go down there a dozen times, make love to her, hold her hand and kiss her and go away and pick up another girl. But she’s the whole world and Heaven to boot for Jared. She’s his one little ewe lamb, Tom. And she’d be happy with Jared if–”

“If she wants Jared she can have him. I’m not holding her,” interrupted the youth. “And anyway,” he exclaimed, “what do I owe to Jared and what do I owe to her or to any one but myself!”

Fenn did not answer at once. At length he broke the silence. “Well, you heard what I said and I didn’t smile when I said it.”

But Tom Van Dorn did smile as he answered, a smile of such sweetness, and of such winning grace that it sugar-coated his words.

“Henry,” he cried in his gay, deep voice with the exuberance of youth ringing in it, “the world is mine. You know what I think about this whole business. If Lizzie doesn’t want me to bother her she mustn’t have such eyes and such hair and such lips. In this life I shall take what I find that I can get. I’m not going to be meek nor humble nor patient, nor forgiving and forbearing and I’m not going to refrain from a mutton roast because some one has a ewe lamb.”

He put a warm, kind, brotherly hand on the shoulder beside him. “Shocked, aren’t you, Henry?” he asked, laughing.

Henry Fenn looked up with a gentle, glowing smile on his rather dull face and returned, “No, Tom. Maybe you can make it go, but I couldn’t.”

“Well, I can. Watch me,” he cried arrogantly. “Henry, I want the advantage of my strength in this world and I’m not going to go puling around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless a ride. Let ’em walk. Let ’em fall. Let ’em rot for all I care. I’m not afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where man puts on trousers it’s a battle of thews and teeth. And nature never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly philosophy of Christ–it doesn’t fool me, Henry. I’m a pagan and I want the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to the full–live it hard–live it beautifully, but live it! live it! Henry, live it like a gentleman and not like an understrapper and bootlicker! I intend to command, not obey! Rule, not serve! I shall take and not give–not give save as it pleases me to have my hand licked now and then! As for Lizzie and Jared,” young Mr. Van Dorn waved a gay hand, “let them look out for themselves. They’re not my worries!”

“But, Tom,” remonstrated Henry as he looked at the ground, “it’s nothing to me of course, but Lizzie–”

“Ah, Henry,” Van Dorn laughed gayly, “I’m not going to hurt Lizzie. She’s good fun: that’s all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher–you come moralizing around me about what I’m doing to some one else, which after all is not my business but hers; and I’m right here to tell you, what you’re doing to yourself, and that’s your business and no one’s else. You’re drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Müller and his ‘pretty brown-eyed daughter’ as you called her, you forgot slick and clean the flaw in Morse’s deed.”

“I suppose you’re right, Tom. But I was feeling kind of off that day, mother’d been sick the night before and–”

“And so you filled up with a lot of bad whisky and driveled and wept and stumbled through the case and I beat you. I tell you, Henry, I keep myself fit. I have no time to look after others. My job is myself and you’ll find that unless you look after yourself no one else will, at least whisky won’t. If I find girling is beating me in my law cases I quit girling. But it doesn’t. Lord, man, the more I know of human nature, the more I pick over the souls of these country girls and blow open the petals of their pretty hearts, the wiser I am.”

“But the girls, Tom–the girls–” protested the somber-eyed Mr. Fenn.

“Ah, I don’t hurt ’em and they like it. And so long as your whisky hamestrings you and my girls give me what I need in my business–don’t talk to me.”

Tom Van Dorn left Fenn at his mother’s door and as Fenn saw his friend turn toward the south he called, “Aren’t you going to your room?”

“Why, it’s only eleven o’clock,” answered Van Dorn. To the inquiring silence Van Dorn called, “I’m going down to see Lizzie.”

Henry Fenn stood looking at his friend, who explained: “That’s all right. I said I’d be down to-night and she’ll wait.”

“Well–” said Fenn. But Van Dorn cut him short with “Now, Henry, I can take care of myself. Lizzie can take care of herself–and you’re the only one of us who, as I see it, needs careful nursing!” And with that he went striding away.

And three hours later when the moon was waning in the west a girl sitting by her window gazed at the red orb and dreamed beautiful dreams, such as a girl may dream but once, of the prince who had come to her so gloriously. While the prince strolled up the street with his coat over his arm, his hat in his hand, letting the night wind flutter the raven’s wing of hair on his brow, and as he went he laughed to himself softly and laughed and laughed. For are we not told of old to put not our trust in princes!

During those years in the late seventies and the early eighties, the genii on the Harvey job grunted and grumbled as they worked, for the hours were long and tedious and the material was difficult to handle. Kyle Perry’s wife died, and it was all the genii could do to find him a cook who would stay with him and his lank, slab-sided son, and when the genii did produce a cook–the famous Katrina, they wished her on Kyle and the boy for life, and she ruled them with an iron rod. And to even things up, they let Kyle stutter himself into a partnership with Ahab Wright–though Kyle was trying to tell Ahab that they should have a partition in their stable. But partition was too much of a mouthful and poor Kyle fell to stuttering on it and found himself sold into bondage for life by the genii, dispensing nails and cod-fish and calico as Ahab’s partner, before Kyle could get rid of the word partition.

The genii also had to break poor Casper Herdicker’s heart–and he had one, and a big one, despite his desire for blood and plunder; and they broke it when his wife Brunhilde deserted the hearthstone back of the shoe-shop, rented a vacant store room on Market Street and went into the millinery way of life. And it wasn’t enough that the tired genii had to gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel, witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn’t enough that they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn’t enough that the overworked genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with the railroad–and he was load enough for any engine; his heart itself weighed ten stone; it wasn’t enough that they had to find various and innumerable contraptions for Captain Morton to peddle, but there was Tom Van Dorn’s new black silk mustache to grow, and to be oiled and curled daily; so he had to go to the Palace Hotel barber shop at least once every day, and passing the cigar counter, he had to pass by Violet Mauling–pretty, empty-faced, doll-eyed Violet Mauling at the cigar stand. And all the long night and all the long day, the genii, working on the Harvey job, cast spells, put on charms, and did their deepest sorcery to take off the power of the magic runes that young Tom’s black art were putting upon her; and day after day the genii felt their highest potencies fail. So no wonder they mumbled and grumbled as they bent over their chores. For a time, the genii had tried to work on Tom Van Dorn’s heart after he dropped Lizzie Coulter and sent her away on a weary life pilgrimage with Jared Thurston, as the wife of an itinerant editor; but they found nothing to work on under Tom’s cigar holder–that is, nothing in the way of a heart. There was only a kind of public policy. So the genii made the public policy as broad and generous as they could and let it go at that.