But here sits Thomas Van Dorn, one summer afternoon, with a young broker from New York–one of those young brokers with not too nice a conscience, who laughs too easily at the wrong times. He and Thomas Van Dorn are upon the east veranda of the new Country Club building in Harvey–the pride of the town–and Thomas is squinting across the golf course at a landscape rolling away for miles like a sea, a landscape rich in homely wealth. The young New Yorker comes with letters to Judge Van Dorn from his employers in Broad Street, and as the two sip their long cool glasses, and betimes smoke their long black cigars, the former judge falls into one of those self-revealing philosophical moods that may be called the hypnoidal semi-conscious state of common sense. Said Van Dorn:
“Well, boy–what do you think of the greatest thing in the world?” And not waiting for an answer the older man continued as he held his cigar at arm’s length and looked between his elevated feet at the landscape: “‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.’ Great 470old lover–Solomon. Rather out of the amateur class–with his thousand wives and concubines; perhaps a virtuous man withal, but hardly a fanatic on the subject; and when he said he was sick of love–probably somewhere in his fifties,–Solomon voiced a profound man’s truth. Most of us are. Speaking generally of love, my boy, I am with Solomon. There is nothing in it.”
The cigar in his finely curved mouth–the sensuous mouth of youth, that had pursed up dryly in middle age–was pointed upward. It stood out from a reddish lean face and moved when the muscles of the face worked viciously in response to some inward reflection of Tom Van Dorn.
He drawled on, “Think of the time men fool away chasing calico. I’ve gone all the gaits, and I know what I’m talking about. Ladies and Judy O’Gradies, married and single, decent and indecent–it’s all the same. I tell you, young man, there’s nothing in it! Love,” he laughed a little laugh: “Love–why, when I was in the business,” he sniffed, “I never had any trouble loving any lady I desired, nor getting her if I loved her long enough and strong enough. When I was a young cub like you,” Van Dorn waved his weed grandly toward the young broker, “I used to keep myself awake, cutting notches in my memory–naming over my conquests. But now I use it as a man does the sheep over the fence, to put me to sleep, and I haven’t been able to pass my fortieth birthday in the list for two years, without snoozing. What a fool a man can make of himself over calico! The ladies, God bless ’em, have got old John Barleycorn beaten a mile, when it comes to playing hell with a man’s life. Again speaking broadly, and allowing for certain exceptions, I should say–” he paused to give the judicial pomp of reflection to his utterances–“the bigger fool the woman is, the greater fool a man makes of himself for her. And all for what?”
His young guest interjected the word “Love?” in the pause. The Judge made a wry face and continued:
“Love? Love–why, man, you talk like a school girl. There is no love. Love and God are twin myths by which we explain the relation of our fates to our follies. The only thing about me that will live is the blood I transmit to my 471children! We live in posterity. As for love and all the mysteries of the temple–waugh–woof!” he shuddered.
He put back his cigar into the corner of his hard mouth. He was squinting cynically across the rolling golf course. What he saw there checked his talk. He opened his eyes to get a clearer view. His impression grew definite and unmistakable. There, half playing and half sporting, like young lambs upon the close-cropped turf, were Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn! They were unconscious of all that their gay antics disclosed. They were happy, and were trying only to express happiness as they ran together after the ball, that flew in front of them like a mad butterfly. But in the sad lore of his bleak heart, the father read the meaning of their happiness. Youth in love was never innocent for him. Looking at Lila romping with her lover, he turned sick at heart. But he held himself in hand. Only the zigzag scar on his forehead flashing white in the pink of his brow betrayed the turmoil within him. He tried to keep his eyes off the golf course. A sharp dread that he might transmit himself in nature to posterity only through the base blood of the Adamses, struck him. He closed his eyes. But the wind brought to him the merriment of the young voices. A jealousy of Kenyon, and an anger at him, flared up in the father. So Tom Van Dorn drew down the corners of his mouth–and batted his furtive eyes, and put on his bony knee a mottled, nervous hand, with brown splotches at the wrist, coming up over the veined furrows that led to his tapering fingers, as he cried harshly in a tone that once had been soft and mellifluous, and still was deep and chesty: “Still me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!”
He would have gone away from the torture that came, as he stared at the lovers, but his devil held him there. He was glad when a noise of saw and hammer at the lake drowned the voices on the lawn. His gladness lasted but a moment. For soon he saw the young people quit chasing their crazy butterfly of a golf ball, and wander half way up the hill from the lake, to sit in the snug shade of a wide-spreading, low-branched elm tree. Then the father was nervous, because he could not hear their voices. As he sat with the young broker, snarling at the anonymous phantoms of his past which were 472bedeviling him, a gray doubt kept brushing across his mind. He realized clearly that he had no legal right to question Lila’s choice of companions. He understood that the law would not justify anything that he might do, or say, or think, concerning her and her fortunes. Yet there unmistakably was the Van Dorn set to her pretty head and a Van Dorn gesture in her gay hands that had come down from at least four generations in family tradition. And he had no right even to be offended when she would merge that Van Dorn blood with the miserable Adams heredity. His impotence in the situation baffled him, and angered him. The law was final to his mind; but it did not satisfy his wrathful questioning heart. For in his heart, he realized that denial was not escape from the responsibility he had renounced when he tripped down the steps of their home and left Lila pleading for him in her mother’s arms. He bit his ragged cigar and cursed his God, while the young man with Tom Van Dorn thought, “Well, what a dour old Turk he is!”
The hammering and sawing, which drowned the voices of the young people under the tree, came from the new bathing pavilion near by. Grant Adams was working on a two days’ job putting up the pavilion for the summer. He was out of Van Dorn’s view, facing another angle of the long three-faced veranda. Grant saw Kenyon lying upon the turf, slim and graceful and with the beauty of youth radiating from him, and Grant wondered, as he worked, why his son should be there playing among the hills, while the sons of other men, making much more money than he–much more money indeed than many of the others who flitted over the green–should toil in the fumes of South Harvey and in the great industrial Valley through long hard hours of work, that sapped their heads and hearts by its monotony of motion, and lack of purpose. As he gazed at the lovers, their love did not stick in his consciousness–even if he realized it. Their presence under the elm tree at midday rose as a problem which deepened a furrow here and there in his seamed face and he hammered and sawed away with a will, working out in his muscles the satisfaction which his mind could not bring him.
As the two fathers from different vistas looked upon their 473children, Kenyon and Lila beneath the elm tree were shyly toying with vagrant dreams that trailed across their hearts. He was looking up at her and saying: