In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

An hour later an old man sitting in the dusk with a pencil in his left hand, was startled to see these two women descending upon him, to tell him the news. He kissed them both with his withered lips, and rubbed the soft cheek of the maiden against his old gray beard.

And when they were gone, he picked up the pencil again, 577and sat dumbly waiting, while in his heart he called eagerly across the worlds: “Mary–Mary, are you there? Do you know? Oh, Mary, Mary!”

The funeral of the young men killed in the shaft house brought a day of deepening emotion to Harvey. Flags were at half mast and Market Street was draped in crape. The stores closed at the tolling of bells which announced the hour of the funeral services. Two hundred automobiles followed the soldiers who escorted the bodies to the cemetery, and when the bugle blew taps, tears stood in thousands of eyes.

The moaning of the great-throated regimental band, the shrilling of the fife and the booming of the drum; the blare of the bugle that sounded taps stirred the chords of hate, and the town came back from burying its dead a vessel of wrath. In vain had John Dexter in his sermon over Fred Kollander tried to turn the town from its bitterness by preaching from the text, “Ye are members one of another,” and trying to point the way to charity. The town would have no charity.

The tragedy of the shaft house and the imprisonment of Grant Adams had staged for the day all over the nation in the first pages of the newspapers an interesting drama. Such a man as Grant Adams was a figure whose jail sentence under military law for defending the rights of a free press, free speech, free assemblage and trial by jury, was good for a first page position in every newspaper in the country–whatever bias its editorial columns might take against him and his cause. Millions of eyes turned to look at the drama. But there were hundreds among the millions who saw the drama in the newspapers and who decided they would like to see it in reality. Being foot loose, they came. So when the funeral procession was hurrying back into Harvey and the policemen and soldiers were dispersing to their posts, they fell upon half a dozen travel-stained strangers in the court house yard addressing the loafers there. Promptly the strangers were haled before the provost marshal, and promptly landed in jail. But other strangers appeared on the streets from time to time as the freight trains came clanging through town, and by sundown a score of young men were in the town 578lockup. They were happy-go-lucky young blades; rather badly in need of a bath and a barber, but they sang lustily in the calaboose and ate heartily and with much experience of prison fare. One read his paperbound Tolstoy; another poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town knew that a plague was upon them.

Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke the sound of hurrying feet–always the feet of the young men. For Youth goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade. So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over, there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with archaic ideas of morality–ideas perhaps of property and morals that were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust, and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden, golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger, played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found their danger in fighting for free speech, and free assemblage. They were tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war comes.

579And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Constitution of the United States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of diversion for the police, the more did the wooden head of Market Street throb with rage and the more did the people imagine a vain thing.

And when seventy of them had crowded the jail, and their leaders blandly announced that they would eat the taxes all out of the county treasury before they stopped the fight for free speech, Market Street awoke. Eating taxes was something that Market Street could understand. So the police began clubbing the strangers. The pilgrims were meeting Danger, their lost comrade, and youth’s blood ran wild at the meeting and there were riots in Market Street. A lodging house in the railroad yards in South Harvey was raided one night–when the strike was ten days old, and as it was a railroadmen’s sleeping place, and a number of trainmen were staying there to whom the doctrines of peace and non-resistance did not look very attractive under a policeman’s ax-handle–a policeman was killed.

Then the Law and Order League was formed. Storekeepers, clerks, real estate men, young lawyers, the heart of that section of the white-shirted population whom Grant Adams called the “poor plutes,” joined this League. And deaf John Kollander was its leader. Partly because of his bereavement men let him lead, but chiefly because his life’s creed seemed to be vindicated by events, men turned to him. The bloodshed on Market Street, the murder of a policeman and the dynamiting of the shaft house with their sons inside, had aroused a degree of passion that unbalanced men, and John Kollander’s wrath was public opinion dramatized. The police gave the Law and Order League full swing, and John Kollander was the first chief in the city. Prisoners arrested for speaking without a permit were turned over to the Law and Order League at night, and taken in the city auto-truck to the far limits of the city, and there–a mile 580from the residential section, in the high weeds that fringed the town and confined the country, the Law and Order League lined up under John Kollander and with clubs and whips and sticks, compelled the prisoners to run a gauntlet to the highroad that leads from Harvey. Men were stripped, and compelled to lean over and kiss an American flag–spread upon the ground, while they were kicked and beaten before they could rise. This was to punish men for carrying a red flag of socialism, and John Kollander decreed that every loyal citizen of Harvey should wear a flag. To omit the flag was to arouse suspicion; to wear a red necktie was to invite arrest. It was a merry day for blithe devotees of Danger; and they were taking their full of her in Harvey.

The Law and Order League was one of those strange madnesses to which any community may fall a victim. Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright–with Jasper Adams a nimble echo, church men, fathers, husbands, solid business men, were its leaders.