In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from which 41pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like the rest of us in this world–only human; stricken with that inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love are most needing our care.

Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled, red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker playmates–it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manuscript for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece, “trippingly on the tongue,” they harkened back over his ancestry to find the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant’s odd mania to take up the cause of the weak–often foolish causes that revealed a kind of fanatic chivalry in him–Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.

Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also–the very facts that were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and Amos that their son was setting out on his journey 42from the heart of his childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands, broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child’s quick wit and merry heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could not see that his leadership in school came from the fact that a man was rising in him–the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant as destiny itself. They could not see the man’s body; they saw only the child’s heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to announce that he had been elected President of the senior class in the Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands, home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her attention–great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant–even Morty arrayed in his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy for Grant had passed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin–and always with an effect of inadvertence.

Now if a lad is an ass–and he is–how should a poor jack be supposed to know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos, Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a load he carried–this ass of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden. In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland 43at school, Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of Margaret Müller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in Heaven’s reservoir, gushing from the almost limitlessly deep springs of our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our destinies. And so the ass, laden with this relay of life from the source of life, that every young, blind ass brings into the world, floundered in the flood.

Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a new heaven and a new earth–strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new heights, to feel impulses coming out of the dark that tremble like the blare of trumpets in the soul,–this is the way of youth.

With all his loyalty for Laura Nesbit–loyalty that enshrined her as a comrade and friend, such is the contradiction of youth that he was madly jealous of every big boy at the country school who cast eyes at Margaret Müller. And because she was ages older than he, she knew it; and it pleased her. She knew that she could make all his combs and crests and bands and wattles and spurs glisten, and he knew in some deep instinct that when she sang the emotion in her voice was a call to him that he could not put into words. Thus through the autumn, Margaret and Grant were thrown together daily in the drab little house by the river. Now a boy and a girl thrown together commonly make the speaking 44donkeys of comedy. Yet one never may be sure that they may not be the dumb struggling creatures of the tragic muse. Heaven knows Margaret Müller was funny enough in her capers. For she related her antics–her grand pouts, her elaborate condescensions, her crass coquetry and her hidings and seekings–into what she called a “case.” In the only wisdom she knew, to open a flirtation was to have a “case.” So Margaret ogled and laughed and touched and ran and giggled and cried and played with her prey with a practiced lore of the heart that was far beyond the boy’s knowledge. Grant did not know what spell was upon him. He did not know that his great lithe body, his gripping hands, his firm legs and his long arms that had in their sinews the power that challenged her to wrestle when she was with him–he did not know what he meant to the girl who was forever teasing and bantering him when they were alone. For it was only when Margaret and Grant were alone or when no one but little Jasper was with them, that Margaret indulged in the joys of the chase. Yet often when other boys came to see her–the country boys from the Prospect school district perhaps, or lorn swains trailing up from Spring Township–Margaret did not conceal her fluttering delight in them from Mary Adams. So the elder woman and the girl had long talks in which Margaret agreed so entirely with Mary Adams that Mary doubted the evidence of her eyes. And Amos in those days was much interested in certain transcendental communications coming from his Planchette board and purporting to be from Emerson who had recently passed over. So Amos had no eyes for Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl’s fine speech. Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh–a high, hysterical laugh–that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret’s fair speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret’s wiles with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of women!

All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of Margaret’s enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit, half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he sat alone for long night 45hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that was clouding his heart.

But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the angel–the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.

In May Margaret’s school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary’s voice lifted in prayer, with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy, but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the two kneeling there with Margaret’s shawl over the chair where Mary knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy’s shame to her God.

Death and partings have come across that threshold during these three decades. Amos Adams has known anguish and has sat with grief many times, but nothing ever has cut him to the heart like the dead, hopeless woe in Mary’s voice as she prayed there in the bedroom with Grant that August night. A terrible half-hour came when Mary and Amos talked with Margaret. For over their shame at what their son had done, above their love for him, even beyond their high hope for him, rose their sense of duty to 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 46a 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.