In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

Or if it was not that item, perhaps it was this one from the South Harvey Derrick of January 7, that called forth the Peach Blow Philosopher’s remarks on Heaven:

“Mrs. Violet Hogan and family have rented the rooms adjoining Mrs. Van Dorn’s kindergarten. Mrs. Hogan has made arrangements to provide ladies of South Harvey and the Valley in general with plain sewing by the piece. A day nursery for children has been fitted up by our genial George Brotherton, former mayor of Harvey, where mothers sewing may leave their children in an adjoining room.”

Now the Heaven of the Peach Blow Philosopher is not gained at one bound. Even the painted, canvas Heaven of Thomas Van Dorn cost him something–to be exact, $100, which he took in “stock” of the Times company–which always had stock for sale, issued by a Price & Chanler Gordon job press whenever it was required. And the negotiations for the Judge’s painted Heaven made by his partner, Mr. Joseph Calvin, of the renewed and reunited firm of Van Dorn & Calvin, were not without their painful moments. As, for instance, when the editor of the Times complained bitterly at having it agreed that he would have to mention in the article the Judge’s “beautiful wife,” specifically and in terms, the editor was for raising the price to $150, by reason of the laughing stock it would make of the paper, but compromised upon the promise of legal notices from the firm amounting to $100 within the following six months. Also there was a hitch in the negotiations hereinbefore mentioned when the Times was required to refer to the National Bar Association meeting at all. For it was notorious that the Judge’s flourishing signature with “and wife” had been 383 photographed upon the register of a New York Hotel when he attended that meeting, whereas every one knew that Mrs. Van Dorn was in Europe that summer, and the photograph of the Judge’s beautifully flourishing signature aforesaid was one of the things that persuaded the Judge to enter the active practice and leave the shades and solitudes of the bench for more strenuous affairs. To allude to the Judge’s wife, and to mention the National Bar Association in the same article, struck the editor of the Times as so inauspicious that it required considerable persuasion on the part of the diplomatic Mr. Calvin, to arrange the matter.

So the Judge’s Heaven bellied on its canvas, full of vain east wind, and fooled no one–not even the Judge, least of all his beautiful wife, who, knowing of the Bar Association incident, laughed a ribald laugh. Moreover, having abandoned mental healing for the Episcopalian faith and having killed her mental healing dog with caramels and finding surcease in a white poodle, she gave herself over to a riot of earth thoughts–together with language thereunto appertaining of so plain a texture that the Judge all but limped in his strut for several hours.

But when the strut did come back, and the mocking echoes of the strident tones of “his beautiful wife” were stilled by several rounds of Scotch whisky at the Club, the Judge went forth into the town, waving his hands right and left, bowing punctiliously to women, and spending an hour in police court getting out of trouble some of his gambler friends who had supported him in politics.

He told every one that it was good to be off the bench and to be “plain Tom Van Dorn” again, and he shook hands up and down Market Street. And as “plain Tom Van Dorn” he sat down in the shop of the Paris Millinery Company, Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., and talked to the amiable Prop. for half an hour–casting sly glances at the handsome Miss Morton, who got behind him and made faces over his back for Mrs. Herdicker’s edification.

But as Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., made it a point–and kept it–never to talk against the cash drawer, “plain Tom Van Dorn” didn’t learn the truth from her. So he pranced up and down before his scenic representation of Heaven in 384the Times, and did not know that the whole town knew that his stage Heaven was the masque for as hot and cozy a little hell as any respectable gentleman of middle years could endure.

However clear he made it to the public, that he and Mrs. Van Dorn were passionately fond of each other; however evident he intended it to be that he was more than satisfied with the bargain that he had made when he took her, and put away his first wife; however strongly he played the card of the gallant husband and “dearied” her, and however she smirked at him and “dawlinged” him in public when the town was looking, every one knew the truth.

“We may,” says the Peach Blow Philosopher in one of his dissertations on the Illusion of Time, “counterfeit everything in this world–but sincerity.” So Judge Thomas Van Dorn–“plain Tom Van Dorn,” went along Market Street, and through the world, handing out his leaden gratuities. But people felt how greasy they were, how heavy they were, how soft they were; and threw them aside, and sneered.

As for the Heaven which the Peach Blow Philosopher may have found for Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan, it was a different affair, but of slow and uncertain growth. Henry Fenn went into the sewer gang the day after he found Violet in the railroad yards, and for two weeks he worked ten hours a day with the negroes and Mexicans in the ditch. It took him a month to get enough money ahead to pay for a room. Leaving the sewer gang, he was made timekeeper on a small paving contract. But every day he sent through the mails to Violet enough to pay her rent and feed the children–a little sum, but all he could spare. He did not see her. He did not write to her. He only knew that the money he was making was keeping her out of the night, so he bent to his work with a will.