A FOOL'S ERRAND & Its Sequel, Bricks Without Straw. Albion Winegar Tourgée
CHAPTER XLV WISDOM AND FOLLY MEET TOGETHER
VARR. SERV. Thou art not altogether a fool.
FOOL. Nor thou altogether a wise man: as much foolery As I have, so much wit thou lackest. Timon of Athens.
Dedication
TO THE
ANCIENT AND HONORABLE FAMILY OF
FOOLS
THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY AND LOVINGLY
DEDICATED
BY ONE OF THEIR NUMBER.
LETTER TO THE PUBLISHERS
GENTLEMEN, — Your demand that I should write a "Preface" to the book you have printed seems to me utterly preposterous. It is like a man introducing himself, — always an awkward, and generally a useless piece of business. What is the use of the "prologue to the epic coming on,"anyhow, unless it be a sort of advertisement? and in that case you ought to write it. Whoever does that should be
"Wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a sort of wit."
That is not the kind of Fool I am. All such work I delegate to you, and hereby authorize and empower you to say what you please of what I have written, only begging you keep in mind one clear distinction. There are two kinds of Fools. The real Fool is the most sincere of mortals: the Court Fool and his kind — the trifling, jesting buffoon — but simulate the family virtue, and steal the family name, for sordid purposes.
The life of the Fool proper is full of the poetry of faith. He may run after a will-o'-the-wisp, while the Wise deride; but to him it is a veritable star of hope. He differs from his fellow-mortals chiefly in this, that he sees or believes what they do not, and consequently undertakes what they never attempt. If he succeed in his endeavor, the world stops laughing, and calls him a Genius: if he fail, it laughs the more, and derides his undertaking as A FOOL'S ERRAND.
So the same individual is often both fool and genius, — a fool all his life and a genius after his death, or a fool to one century and a genius to the next, or a fool at home and a prodigy abroad. Watt was a fool while he watched the tea-kettle, but a genius when he had caught the imp that tilted the lid. The gentle Genoese who wrested half the world from darkness was a fool to the age which sought for the Fountain of Youth; yet every succeeding one but multiplies his praises. These are but types. The poet has incorporated the recognized principle in the lines, —
"Great wits to madness, sure, are near allied,
And thin partitions do their walls divide."
It is, however, only in the element of simple, undoubting faith, that the kinship of genius and folly consists. One may be an unquestioned Fool without any chance of being taken for a Seer. This is, indeed, the case with most of the tribe. It is success alone that transforms the credulity of folly into acknowledged prophetic prevision.
Noah was one of the earliest of the Fools thus vindicated. The Wise Men of his day sat around on the dry-goods boxes, and whittled and whistled, and quizzed the queer craft on which he kept his sons and sons-in-law at work, till the keel was as old as the frigate "Constitution" before he was ready to lay her upper decks. If the rain had not come at last, they would never have got over laughing at his folly. The Deluge saved his reputation, and made his Ark a success. But it is not often that a Fool has a heavenly voice to guide him, or a flood to help him out.
This little tale is the narrative of one of Folly's failures. The hero can lay no claim to greatness. A believing Noah there is in it, a well-built ark, and an indubitable flood. But the waters prevailed, and the Fool went down, and many of the family with him. The Wise Men looked on and laughed.
The one merit which the story claims is that of honest, uncompromising truthfulness of portraiture. Its pictures are from life. And even in this which he boasts as a virtue may be found, perhaps, the greatest folly yet committed by
ONE OF THE FOOLS
SEPTEMBER 1879.
CHAPTER I
THE GENESIS OF FOLLY
THE Fool's patronymic was Servosse; his Christian name, Comfort. His father was descended from one of those Gallic families who abandoned the luxuries of la belle France for an Arcadia which in these later days has become synonymous with bleakness, if not sterility. It is supposable that his ancestors, before they adventured on the delights of Canadian winters in exchange for the coast of Normandy or the plains of Bordeaux, may have belonged to some noble family, who drew their blood, clear and blue, from the veins of a Martelian progenitor.
It is, perhaps, but fair to presume that the exchange of skies was made only for the glory of our gallant and good King Louis, and the advancement of the holy Catholic faith in the New World, rather than for the peace and quiet of the immediate vicinage in which the ancestor dwelt. However this may be, a later ancestor was among those, who, with that mixture of courage and suavity which enabled the voyageurs of that day so successfully to secure and hold the good will of the unsophisticated red-skin, pushed westward along the Great Lakes until they came to the Straits, where so many advantages of a trading-post were combined, that Detroit was there located and christened.
The mutations of government, the lapse of time, and the anglicization of their surroundings had robbed the descendants of the original Servosse of every trace of their Gallic ancestry except the name; and it is only mentioned here for the benefit of some curious student of mental phenomena with credence in hereditary traits, who may believe that an ancestor who could voluntarily abandon the champagnes of Burgundy for the Heights of Abraham, by whatever enticing name the same might be called, was quite capable of transmitting to his descendants such an accès de la folie as was manifested by our particular Fool.
Certainly, no such defect can be attributed to his maternal line: they knew on which side their bread was buttered. Of the truest of Puritan stock, the mother's family had found a lodgement on a little hillside farm carved out of the Hop-Brook Grant in Berkshire, which seemed almost as precarious in its rocky ruggedness and inaccessibility as the barn-swallow's nest, clinging in some mysterious way to the steep slope under the eaves of the old hip-roofed barn against which it was built. Yet, like the nest, the little hillside home had sufficed for the raising of many a sturdy brood, who had flown away to the constantly receding West almost before they had grown to full-fledged man- and womanhood. Brave-hearted, strong-limbed, and clear-headed, or, as they would now be called, level-headed, were these children of the Berkshire hills. There was no trace of mental unsoundness about any of them. Especially free from such imputation was Eliza Hall, the golden-haired, brown-eyed, youngest of nine, who, with her saucily upturning nose, a few freckles on her round cheeks, which made their peach-bloom all the more noticeable, — despite the entreaties of friends, the prayers of lovers, and the protest of parents, — would away to the West in her eighteenth year to become a Yankee schoolma'am in Michigan.
That the young lumberman, Michael Servosse, — rich in the limitless possibilities of a future cast in the way which had been marked out by nature as the path of advancing empire, a brave heart and unquenchable energy, to whom thousands of acres of unrivaled pine-lands yielded tribute, and