In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

The girl looked into the fire and answered, “No,” and shook her head. “No–mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind to you–to be respectful to you, sir. I’ve tried to be, sir?”

Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and pleading, “Oh, come–won’t you let me take you home in my car, Lila–it’s getting late–won’t you, Lila?”

But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her head:

“I think, sir, if you don’t mind–I’d rather walk.”

In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the word, “Lila,” in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young miss–a Calvin young miss, in 449fact–running and waving her hands toward a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly belong–that he was rare and exotic. But as her father’s car crept unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila’s clear, merry laugh–a laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn’s heart–rose above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and weaving about.

And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them, then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing, animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to the beautiful light.

But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires what he had 450cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of youth shining through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat carrying its captive swooped around them–and then out into the darkness of his own charred world.

But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila, went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.

It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of the wind in the brown grass and in the bare trees by the creek had found their way into his soul. A curious soul it was–the soul of a poet, the soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew–the soul of a man in the body of a callow youth.

As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.