In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

310And now while the story waits, we may well look at three pictures. They do not speed the narrative; they hardly point morals to adorn this tale. But they may show us how living a creed consistently colors one’s life. For after all the realities of life are from within. Events, environment, fortune good or bad do not color life, or give it richness and form and value. But in living a creed one makes his picture. So let us look at Thomas Van Dorn, who boasted that he could beat God at his own game, and did. For all that he wanted came to him, wealth and fame and power, and the women he desired.

Judge and Mrs. Van Dorn and her dog are riding by in their smart rubber tired trap, behind a highly checked horse and with the dog between them. They are not talking. The man is looking at his gloved hands, at the horse, at the street,–where occasionally he bows and smiles and never by any chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be passing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her. Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it is all there–and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom, is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile, with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is beautiful, exceedingly beautiful–but only as a picture. When the smile is garnished with words the voice is low and musical–but too low and too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van Dorn–the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Township fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn–where is it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her head ache, 311and is repeating over and over, “God is good, and I am God,” as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere repetition of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.

When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft, black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject of “wherewithal shall ye be clothed,” that the thought in some queer spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his artificial tailored skin, that seems to be a part of another consciousness than his own.

Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His lips–his lips once full and red, are pursing and leadening.

Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the big black mass of the temple of love that looms among the young trees upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on 312the ground. The man gathers the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar, and says behind his hands: “I’m going back downtown.”

“Oh, you are?” echoes the woman.

“Yes, I am,” replies the man sharply.

The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner.

Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege. So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live rather quiet lives.

On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention–poetry annoys her; fiction–the book of the moment, which happened to be “The Damnation of Theron Ware,” makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks up “The Harmonious Universe,” and walks with some show of grandeur in her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.