In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

Neither did Margaret know what to do, so she let her go and let her stay, and knew her old friend no more. For Margaret was rising in the world, and could have no encumbrances; and Miss Mauling disappeared in South Harvey and that New Year’s Eve marked the sad anniversary of the break in her relations with Mrs. Fenn. And it is all set down here on this anniversary to show what a jolty journey 159some of us make as we jog around the sun, and to show the gentle reader how the proud Mr. Van Dorn hunts his prey and what splendid romances he enjoys and what a fair sportsman he is.

But the old year is restless. It has painted the sky of South Harvey with the smoke of a score of smelter chimneys; it has burned in the drab of the dejected-looking houses, and it has added a few dozen new ones for the men and their families who operate the smelter.

Moreover, the old year has run many new, strange things through a little boy’s eyes as he looks sadly into a queer world–a little, black-eyed boy, while a grand lady with a high head sits on a piano bench beside the child and plays for him the grand music that was fashionable in her grand day. The passing year pressed into his little heart all that the music told him–not of the gray misery of South Harvey, not of the thousands who are mourning and toiling there, but instead the old year has whispered to the child the beautiful mystic tales of great souls doing noble deeds, of heroes who died that men might live and love, of beauty and of harmony too deep for any words of his that throb in him and stir depths in his soul to high aspiration. It has all gone through his ears; for his eyes see little that is beautiful. There is, of course, the beauty of the homely hours he spends with those who love him best, hours spent at school and joyous hours spent by the murmuring creek, and there is what the grand lady at the piano thinks is a marvel of beauty in the ornate home upon the hill. But the most beautiful thing he sees as the old year winds the passing panorama of life for his eyes is the sunshine and prairie grass. This comes to him of a Sunday when he walks with Grant–brother Grant, out in the fields far away from South Harvey–where the frosty breath of autumn has turned the grass to lavender and pale heliotrope, and the hills roll away and away like silent music and the clouds idling lazily over the hillsides afar off cast dark shadows that drift in the lavender sea. Now the smoke that the old year paints upon the blue prairie sky will fade as the year passes, and the great smelters may crumble and men may plow over the ground where they stand so proudly even to-day; but the music in 160the boy’s heart, put there by the passing year, and the glory of the sunshine and the prairie grass with the meadow lark’s sad evening song as it quivers for a moment in the sunset air,–these have been caught in the child’s soul and have passed through the strange alchemy of God’s great mystery of human genius into an art that is the heritage of the race. For into the mind of that child–that eyrie, large-eyed, wondering, silent, lonely-seeming child–the signals of God were passing. When he grew into his man’s estate and could give them voice, the winds of the prairie, low and gentle, the soft lisping of quiet waters, the moving passion of the hurricane, the idle dalliance of the clouds whose purple shadows combed the rolling hills, and all the ecstasy of the love cry of solitary prairie birds, found meaning and the listening world heard, through his music, God speaking to His children.

So the year moved quickly on. Its tasks were countless. It had another child to teach another message. There was a little girl in the town–a small girl with the bluest eyes in the world and tiny curls–yellow curls that wound so softly around her mother’s fingers that you would think that they were not curls at all but golden dreams of curls that had for the moment come true and would fade back into fairyland whence they came. And the passing year had to prop the child at a window while the dusk came creeping into the quiet house. There she sat waiting, watching, hoping that the proud, handsome man who came at twilight down the way leading to the threshold, would smile at her. She was not old enough to hope he would take her in his arms where she could cuddle and be loved. So the passing year had to take a fine brush and paint upon the small, wistful face a fleeting shadow, the mere ghost of a sadness that came and went as she watched and waited for the father love.

And Judge Thomas Van Dorn, the punctilious, gay, resistless, young Tom Van Dorn was deaf to the deeper voices that called to him and beckoned him to rest his soul. And soon upon the winds that roam the world and carry earth dreams back to ghosts, and bring ghosts of what we would be back to our dreams–the roaming winds bore away the 161passing year, but they could not take the shadows that it left upon the child’s tender heart.

Now, when the old year with all its work lay down in the innumerable company of its predecessors, and the bells rang and the whistles blew in South Harvey to welcome in the new year, the midnight sky was blazoned with the great torches from the smelter chimneys, and the pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the side of the dragon’s spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines. For money the cranes of the pumps creaked their monody. For money the half-naked men toiled to their death in the fumes of the smelter. So the New Year’s bells rang a pean of welcome to the money that the New Year would bring with its toll of death.

“Money,” clanged the church bells in the town on the hill. “Money makes wealth and since we have banished our kings and stoned our priests, money is the only thing in our material world that will bring power and power brings pleasure and pleasure brings death.”

“And death? and death? and death?” tolled the church bells that glad New Year, and then ceased in circling waves of sound that enveloped the world, still inquiring–“and death? and death?” fainter and fainter until dawn.

The little boy who heard the bells may have heard their plaintive question; for in the morning twilight, sitting in his nightgown on his high chair looking into the cheerful mouth of the glowing kitchen stove, while the elders prepared breakfast, the child who had been silent for a long time raised his face and asked:

“Grant–what is death?” The youth at his task answered by telling about the buried seed and the quickening plant. The child listened and shook his head.