In the Heart of a Fool. White William Allen
the child who was coming. For the child they spent the passion of their shame and love and hope as they pleaded with Margaret for a child’s right to a name. But she had hardened her heart. She shook her head and would not listen to their pleadings. Then they sent Grant to her. It is not easy to say which was more dreadful, the impudent smile which she turned to the parents as she shook her head at them, or the scornful laugh they heard when Grant sat with her. That was a long and weary night they spent and the sun rose in the morning under a cloud that never was lifted from their hearts.
In the six or seven sordid, awful weeks that followed before Kenyon was born, they turned for comfort and for help to Dr. Nesbit. They made his plan to save the child’s good name, their plan. Of course–the Adamses were selfish. They felt a blight was on their boy’s life. They could not understand that in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage; that when God sends a soul through the gates of earth it comes in joy even though we greet it in sorrow. Their gloom should have been lighted; part of its blackness was their own vain pride in Grant. Yet they were none the less tender with Margaret, and when she went down into the valley of the shadow, Mary went with her and stood and supported the girl in the journey.
When Doctor Nesbit was climbing into the buggy at the gate, Grant, standing by the hitching-post, said: “Doctor–sometime–when we are both older–I mean Laura–” He got no further. The Doctor looked at the boy’s ashen face, and knew the cost of the words he was speaking. He stopped, reached his hand out to Grant and touched his shoulder. “I think I know, Grant–some day I shall tell her.” He got into the buggy, looked at the lad a moment and said in his high, squeaky voice: “Well, Grant, boy, you understand after all it’s your burden–don’t you? Your mother has saved Margaret’s good name. But son–son, don’t you let the folks bear that burden.” He paused a moment further and sighed: “Well, good-by, kid–God help you, and make a man of you,” and so turning his cramping buggy, he drove away in the dusk.
Thus came Kenyon Adams, recorded in the family Bible as the third son of Mary and Amos Adams, into the wilderness of this world.
CHAPTER V
IN WHICH MARGARET MÜLLER DWELLS IN MARBLE HALLS AND HENRY FENN AND KENYON ADAMS WIN NOTABLE VICTORIES
The world into which Kenyon Adams came was a busy and noisy and ruthless world. The prairie grass was leaving Harvey when Grant Adams came, and the meadow lark left in the year that Jasper came. When Kenyon entered, even the blue sky that bent over it was threatened. For Dr. Nesbit returning from the Adamses the evening that Kenyon came to Harvey found around the well-drill at Jamey McPherson’s a great excited crowd. Men were elbowing each other and craning their necks, and wagging their heads as they looked at the core of the drill. For it contained unmistakably a long worm of coal. And that night saw rising over Harvey such dreams as made the angels sick; for the dreams were all of money, and its vain display and power. And when men rose after dreaming those dreams, they swept little Jamey McPherson away in short order. For he had not the high talents of the money maker. He had only persistence, industry and a hopeful spirit and a vague vision that he was discovering coal for the common good. So when Daniel Sands put his mind to bear upon the worm of coal that came wriggling up from the drilled hole on Jamey’s lot, the worm crawled away from Jamey and Jamey went to work in the shaft that Daniel sank on his vacant lot near the McPherson home. The coal smoke from Daniel Sands’s mines began to splotch the blue sky above the town, and Kenyon Adams missed the large leisure and joyous comraderie that Grant had seen; indeed the only leisurely person whom Kenyon saw in his life until he was–Heaven knows how old–was Rhoda Kollander. The hum and bustle of Harvey did not ruffle the calm waters of her soul. She of all the women in Harvey held to the early custom of the town of going out to spend the day.
“So that Margaret’s gone,” she was saying to Mary Adams sometime during a morning in the spring after Kenyon was born. “Law me–I wouldn’t have a boarder. I tell John, the sanctity of the home is invaded by boarders these days; and her going out to the dances in town the way she does, I sh’d think you’d be glad to be alone again, and to have your own little flock to do for. And so Grant’s going to be a carpenter–well, well! He didn’t take to the printing trade, did he? My, my!” she sighed, and folded her hands above her apron–the apron which she always put on after a meal, as if to help with the dishes, but which she never soiled or wrinkled–“I tell John I’m so thankful our little Fred has such a nice place. He waits table there at the Palace, and gets all his meals–such nice food, and can go to school too, and you wouldn’t believe it if I’d tell you all the nice men he meets–drummers and everything, and he’s getting such good manners. I tell John there’s nothing like the kind of folks a boy is with in his teens to make him. And he sees Tom Van Dorn every day nearly and sometimes gets a dime for serving him, and now, honest, Mary, you wouldn’t believe it, but Freddie says the help around the hotel say that Mauling girl at the cigar stand thinks Tom’s going to marry her, but law me–he’s aiming higher than the Maulings. The old man is going to die–did you know it? They came for John to sit up with him last night. John’s an Odd Fellow, you know. But speaking of that Margaret, you know she’s a friend of Violet’s and slips into the cigar stand sometimes and Violet introduces Margaret to some nice drummers. And I heard John say that when Margaret gets this term of school taught here, the Spring Township people have made Doc Jim get her a job in the court house–register of deeds office. But I tell John–law me, you men are the worst gossips! Talk about women!”
Little Kenyon in his crib was restless, and Mary Adams was clattering the dishes, so between the two evils, Mrs. Kollander picked up the child, and rocked him and patted him and then went on: “I was over and spent the day with the Sandses the other day. Poor woman, she’s real puny. Ann’s such a pretty child and Mrs. Sands says that Morty’s not goin’ back to college again. And she says he just moons around Laura Nesbit. Seems like the boy’s got no sense. Why, Laura’s just a child–she’s Grant’s age, isn’t she–not more than eighteen or nineteen, and Morty must be nearly twenty-three. My–how they have sprung up. I tell John–why, I’ll be thirty-six right soon now, and here I’ve worked and slaved my youth away and I’ll be an old woman before we know it.” She laughed good naturedly and rocked the fretting child. “Law me, Mary Adams, I sh’d think you’d want Grant to stay with George Brotherton there in the cigar stand, instead of carpentering. Such elegant people he can meet there, and such refined influences since Mr. Brotherton’s put in books and newspapers, and he could work in the printing office and deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago dailies for Mr. Brotherton, and do so much better than he can carpentering. I tell John, if we can just keep our boy among nice people until he’s twenty-five, he’ll stay with ’em. Now look at Lide Bowman. Mary Adams, we know she was a smart woman until she married Dick and now just see her–living down there with the shanty trash and all those ignorant foreigners, and she’s growing like ’em. She’s lost two of her babies, and that seems to be weighing on her mind, and I can’t persuade her to pick up and move out of there. It’s like being in another world. And Mary Adams–let me tell you–Casper Herdicker has gone into the mine. Yes, sir, he closed his shop and is going to work in the mine, because he can make three dollars a day. But law me! you’ll not see Hildy Herdicker moving down there. She’ll keep her millinery store and live with the white folks.”
The dishes were put away, and in the long afternoon Mary Adams sat sewing as Rhoda Kollander rambled on. For the third time Rhoda came back to comment upon the fact that Grant Adams had quit working in the printing office–a genteel trade, and had stopped delivering papers for Mr. Brotherton’s newspaper stand–a rather high vocation, and was degrading himself by learning the carpenter’s trade, when Mary Adams cut into the current of the stream of talk.
“Well, my dear, it was this way. There are two reasons why Grant is learning the carpenter’s trade. In the first place, the boy has some sort of a passion to cast his lot among the poor. He feels they are neglected and–well, he has a sort of a fierce streak in him to fight for the under dog, and–”
“Well, law me, Mary–don’t I know that? Hasn’t Freddie told me time and again how Grant used to fight for Freddie when he was a little boy and the big boys plagued him. Grant whipped the whole school for teasing a little half-witted boy once–did you know that?” Mary Adams shook