Chapter 27

"I suppose that is what she feels, because she was anxious when she came to see me yesterday to divide her fortune with you other Clarks."

It was a daring move, and as he spoke the judge looked keenly into the young man's face.

"Did she?" Tom Clark inquired unconcernedly. "I know she's always on the square--there aren't many like her!"

"You may not know that if she should carry out her intention, she would strip herself of almost every dollar she possesses."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Her husband, I understand, conducted her affairs so badly that very nearly if not quite half the great fortune she received five years ago from her guardians has wasted away. I don't know what ultimately may be recovered from these California investments, but judging from what Mrs. Clark tells me I should say almost nothing. So that there can be left of the original estate only a little over two millions of dollars."

"Well, that's enough for any woman to worry along on," the mason grinned lightly.

"But not enough for her to pay out of it two and a half millions, which would have been the share of your grandfather's heirs."

"Hell! She ain't thinkin' of doin' that!"

"She certainly was. She would have made the proposal to you already, if I had not asked her to wait until I could advise with her again."

The young man's blue eyes opened wide in astonishment.

"What good would that do her?"

"It would give all of you California Clarks your slice of Clark's Field--how many of you are there?"

"I dunno exactly--maybe twenty or twenty-five--I haven't kep' count."

"Say there are twenty-five heirs of old Edward S. living. Each of them would have a hundred thousand dollars apiece roughly. That sum of money is not to be despised even to-day."

"You bet it ain't," murmured the mason feelingly. His face settled into a scowl; and leaning forward he demanded,--"What are you drivin' at anyway, Judge?"

The judge did not answer.

"You ain't goin' to let that woman hand over all her money to a lot of little no-'count people she's never laid eyes on, just because they are called 'Clark' instead of 'Smith' or some other name?"

"You happen to be one of them," the judge observed with a laugh.

"I know that,--and I guess I'm a pretty fair sample of the whole bunch,--but I ain't takin' charity from any woman!"

The judge settled back into his chair, a satisfied little smile on his lips. The mason's reaction was better than he had dared expect.

"It ought not to be called charity, exactly," he mused.

"What is it, then? It ain't law!"

"No, it wouldn't be legal either," the judge admitted. "But there are things that are neither legal nor charitable. There are," he suggested, "justice and wisdom and mercy!"

The mason could not follow such abstract thought. He looked blankly at the judge. His mind had done its best when it had rejected without hesitation the gift of Adelle's fortune because he happened to be a grandson of Edward S. Clark.

"Tell me," said the judge after a time, as if his mind had wandered to other considerations, "about these California Clarks--what do you know of them?"

The mason related for the judge's edification the scraps of family history and biography that he could recollect. Adelle, who had come into the room, listened to his story. Tom Clark might be limited in knowledge of his family as he was in education, but he was certainly literal and picturesque. He spared neither himself nor his brothers and sisters, nor his remoter cousins. The one whose career seemed to interest him most was that Stan Clark, the politician, who now represented Fresno County in the State Legislature. There was a curious mixture of pride and contempt in his feeling for this cousin, who had risen above the dead level of local obscurity.

"He thinks almighty well of himself," he concluded his portrait; "but there ain't a rottener peanut politician in the State of California, and that's sayin' some. He got into the legislater by stringin' labor, and now, of course, the S. P. owns him hide and clothes and toothpick. I hear he's bought a block of stores in Fresno and is puttin' the dough away thick. He don't need no Clark's Field! He's got the whole people of California for his pickings."

The judge turned to Adelle laughingly.

"Your cousin doesn't seem to see any good reason why the California Clarks should be chosen for Fortune's favor."

"Ain't one of 'em," the young man asserted emphatically, "so far as I know, would know what to do with a hundred dollars, would be any better off after a couple of years if he had it. That's gospel truth--and I ain't exceptin' myself!" he added after a moment of sober reflection.

Adelle made no comment. She did not seem to be thinking along the same line as the judge and the young mason. Since the yesterday her conception of her problem had changed and grown. Adelle was living fast these days, not in the sense in which she and Archie had lived fast according to their kind, but psychologically and spiritually she was living fast. Her state of yesterday had already given place to another broader, loftier one: she was fast escaping from the purely personal out into the freedom of the impersonal.

"Allowing for Mr. Clark's natural vivacity of statement," the judge observed with an appreciative chuckle, "these California relatives of yours, so far as I can see, are pretty much like everybody else in the world, struggling along the best they can with the limitations of environment and character which they have inherited.... And I am rather inclined to agree with Mr. Clark that it might be unwise to give them, most of them, any special privilege which they hadn't earned for themselves over their neighbors."

"What right have they got to it anyway?" the mason demanded.

"Oh, when you go into rights, Mr. Clark," the judge retorted, "the whole thing is a hopeless muddle. None of us in a very real sense has any rights--extremely few rights, at any rate."

"Well, then, they've no good reason for havin' the money."

"I agree with you. There is no good reason why these twenty-five Clarks, more or less, should arbitrarily be selected for the favors of Clark's Field. And yet they might prove to be as good material to work upon as any other twenty-five taken at random."

Adelle looked up expectantly to the judge. She understood that his mind was thinking forward to wider reaches than his words indicated.

"But you would want to know much more about them than you do now, to study each case carefully in all its bearings, and then doubtless you would make your mistakes, with the best of judgment!"

"I don't see what you mean," the mason said.

"Nor I," said Adelle.

"Let us have some lunch first," the judge replied. "We have done a good deal this morning and need food. Perhaps later we shall all arrive at a complete understanding."

* * * * *

At the close of their luncheon the judge remarked to Adelle,--

"Your cousin and I, Mrs. Clark, have talked over your idea of giving to him and his relatives what the law will not compel you to distribute of Clark's Field. He doesn't seem to think well of the idea."

"It's foolish," the mason growled.

Adelle looked at him swiftly, with a little smile that was sad.

"I was afraid he would say that, Judge," she said softly.

"You know any man would!... I ain't never begged from a woman yet."

"The woman, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the question," the judge put in.

"And it isn't begging," Adelle protested. "It's really yours, a part of it, as much as mine,--more, perhaps."

"It's nobody's by rights, so far as I can see!" the mason retorted with his dry laugh.

"Exactly!" the judge exclaimed. "Young man, you have pronounced the one final word of wisdom on the whole situation. With that for a premise we can start safely towards a conclusion. Clark's Field doesn't belong to you or to your cousin or to any of the Clarks living or dead. It belongs to itself--to the people who live upon it, who use it, who need it to get from it their daily bread and shelter."

"But," jeered the mason, "you can't call 'em out into the street and hand each of 'em a thousand-dollar bill."

"No, and you would make a lot of trouble for everybody if you did--especially for the Alton police courts, I am afraid! But you can act as trustees for Clark's Field--" He turned to Adelle and continued whimsically,--"That's what the old Field did for you, my dear, with my assistance. Its wealth was tied up for fifty years to be let loose in your lap! You found it not such a great gift, after all, so why not pour it back upon the Field?... Why not make a splendid public market on that vacant lot that's still left? And put some public baths in, and a public hall for everybody's use, and a few other really permanent improvements?--which I fear the city will never feel able to do! In that way you would be giving back to Clark's Field and its real owners what properly belongs to it and to them."

So the judge's thought was out at last. It did not take Adelle long to understand it now.

"I'll do it," she said simply, as if the judge had merely voiced the struggling ideas of her own brain. "But how shall I go to work?"

"I think your cousin can show you," the judge laughed. "He has many more ideas than I should dare call my own about what society should do for its disinherited. Suppose you talk it over with him and get his suggestions."

"My God!" the stone mason groaned enigmatically.

The sardonic smile spread over his lean face as he further explained himself,--

"It ain't exactly what I took this trip from California for."

"You didn't understand then," the judge remarked.

"And I didn't understand either," Adelle added.

"I guess I could keep you from getting into trouble with your money as well as the next man. I'd keep you out of the hands of the charity grafters anyhow!"

"I think," the judge summed up whimsically, "that you are one of the best persons in the world to advise on how to distribute the Clark millions. That is what should be done with every young anarchist--set him to work spending money on others. He would end up either in prison or among the conservatives."

"But," Adelle demurred finally, "that leaves the others--all the California Clarks--out of it for good."

"Where they belong," put in the mason.

"I'm not so sure of that," the judge added cautiously. And after further reflection he suggested, "Why shouldn't you two make yourselves into a little private and extra-legal Providence for these members of your family? Once, my dear," he said to Adelle, "I did the same for you! At considerable risk to your welfare I intervened and prevented certain greedy rascals from doing your aunt and you out of Clark's Field, you remember?"

He paused to relate for Tom Clark's benefit the story of the transaction with which we are fully familiar.

"Of course, if then I had known of the existence of our young friend and his family, I should have been obliged to include him in the beneficence of my Providence. But I didn't. It was left for you, my dear, to discover him!... There was a time when I felt that I had played the part of Providence rashly,"--he smiled upon Adelle, who recalled quite vividly the stern lecture that the court had given her when she was about to receive her fortune. "But now I feel that I did very well, indeed. In fact I am rather proud of my success as Providence to this young woman.... So I recommend the same rôle to you and Mr. Clark. Look up these California Clarks, study them, make up your minds what they need most, then act as wisely as you can, not merely in their behalf, but in behalf of us all, of all the people who find themselves upon this earth in the long struggle out of ignorance and misery upwards to light.... It will keep you busy," he concluded with his fine smile,--"busy, I think, for the better part of your two lives. But I can think of no more interesting occupation than to try to be a just and wise Providence!"

"It's some job," the mason remarked. "I don't feel sure we'd succeed in it much better than Fate."

"You will become a part of Fate," the judge said earnestly, "as we all are! Don't you see?"

"We'd better begin with Cousin Stan first," the mason shouted. "I'd like to be his fate, you bet!"

"What would you do with the Honorable Stanley Clark?" the judge asked.

"Boot him clear out of the State of California--show him up for what he is--a mean little cuss of a grafter; no friend of labor or anything else but his own pocket."

"Good! But it will take money to do that these days, a good deal of money! You will have to pay for publicity and court expenses and all the rest of it."

"Hoorah! I'd like to soak him one with his share of Clark's Field!"

"Providence blesses as well as curses," warned the old judge. "And it's chief work, I take it, is educational--to develop all that is possible from within. Remember that, sir, when you are 'soaking' Cousin Stan."

"The educational can wait until we've done some correctin'!"

They all laughed. And presently they parted. As they stood in the little front room waiting for Adelle's car to fetch her, the judge remarked with a certain solemnity,--

"Now at last I believe the fate of Clark's Field is settled. In that good old legal term, the title to the Field, so long restless and unsettled, at last is 'quieted,' I think for good and all, humanly speaking!"

"I think so," Adelle assented, with the same dreamy look in her gray eyes that had moved the judge to take her hand that morning. "At least I see quite clearly what I must do with my share of it."

"Come and see me again before you go away, as often as you can, both of you!" the judge said as they left. "Remember that I am an old man, and my best amusement is watching Providence working out its ways with us all. And you two are part of Providence:--come and tell me what you find!"

"We will!" they said.

After the door had swung to behind his visitors, the judge stood thoughtfully beside the window watching the cousins depart. As the young mason hopped into the car in response to Adelle's invitation, and clumsily swung the door after him with a bang, the judge smiled tenderly, murmuring to himself,--

"It's all education, and they'll educate each other!"

L

And here we must abandon Adelle Clark and Clark's Field, not that another volume might not be written concerning her further adventures with the old Field. But that would be an altogether different story. She went back to see Judge Orcutt, not only at this time, but many times later, as long as the judge lived. So he was able to watch the idea that had sprung into being, helped by his wise sympathy, grow and bear its slow fruit to his satisfaction. In starting this chance couple upon the quest of their scattered relatives, to play the part of Providence to all the little, unknown California Clarks, and also to restore to Clark's Field its own riches, which for two generations had been unjustly hoarded for the use of one human being, the judge was doubtless doing a dangerous and revolutionary thing, according to the belief of many good people, something certainly ill befitting a retired judge of the probate courts of his staid Commonwealth! Had he not been employed for forty years of his life in expounding and upholding that absurd code of inheritance and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have preserved from their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the lower Rhine? Nay, worse, was he not guilty of disrespect to the most sacred object of worship that the race has--the holy institution of private property, aiding and abetting an anarchist in his loose views upon this subject? I will not try to defend the judge. He seemed tranquil that first day as he hobbled up his old stairs to his study, as if he felt that he had done a good day's business and was enjoying the approval of a good conscience; also, the satisfaction of insight into human nature, which is one of the rare rewards of becoming old. Nor did he worry for one moment about our heroine Adelle. He thought Adelle one of the safest persons in the universe, because she could derive good from her mistakes, and any one who can get good out of evil is the safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of human souls. The judge may have been more doubtful about the stone mason, but in the young man's own phrase he considered him, too, a good bet in the human lottery.

As to what they might do to each other in the course of their mutual education, the judge left that wisely to that other Providence of his fathers, sure that Adelle this time would not take such a long and painful road to wisdom as she had done in marrying Archie. But we must not mistake the judge's last foolish remark,--interpret it, at least in a merely sentimental sense, too literally. Like a poet the judge spoke in symbols of matters that cannot be phrased in any tongue precisely. He did not think of their marrying each other, because they were deeply concerned together, although I am aware that my readers are speculating on this point already. The judge left that to Adelle and Tom Clark and Providence, and we can safely do the same thing. He set them forth on their jaunt after the stray members of the Clark tribe and other deeds with a favorable expectation that they would commit along the road only the necessary minimum of folly, and above all, sure of Adelle's destination. For at twenty-six she had passed through crude desire, through passion and pain and sorrow, and had discovered for herself the last commonplace of human thinking--that the end of life is not the "pursuit of happiness," as our materialistic forefathers put it in the Constitution they made for us, and cannot be "guaranteed" to any mortal. With that bedrock axiom of human wisdom embedded in her steadfast nature, to what heights might not the dumb Adelle, the pale, passive, inarticulate woman creature, ultimately rise?

There were many stations on her road. And first of all her husband, Archie. Adelle began to think again about Archie in the new light she had. She had not thought about him at all since she had dropped him so summarily from her life after the fire at Highcourt. She wrote him finally a considerable letter, in which she made plain the results of her thinking. It was a surprising letter, as Archie felt, not only in length, but in its point of view and its kindly tone. She seemed to see the great wrong she had ignorantly done to him. The youth she had blindly taken to gratify her green passion and to become the father of her only child! She had ruined him, as far as any one human being can ruin another, and now she knew it. She had been the stupid means of providing him with a feast of folly, and then had abandoned him when he behaved badly. So she wrote him gently, as one who at last comprehended that mercy and forgiveness are due all those whom we harm upon our road either consciously or ignorantly, giving them evil to eat. Yet she saw the crude folly of attempting to resume their marriage in any way, and did not for once consider it. They had sinned gravely against each other and must face life anew, separately, recognizing that theirs was an irreparable mistake. So she wrote unpassionately of the legal divorce which must come. And she gave him money, promising him more as he might need it, within reason. Archie straightway put a good part of it into oil wells because every one in California was talking oil, and of course lost it all. Then Adelle sent him money to buy a nut ranch, in one of the interior valleys, and there we may leave Archie growing English walnuts fitfully. At times he felt aggrieved with Adelle, complained that he had been abused as a man who had married a rich woman and then been thrown aside when he considered himself placed for life. But also at times he had a fleeting conception of Adelle's character, realized that she was not now the girl who had married him out of hand after a mad night ride across France. She was bigger and better than he now, and he was not really worthy of her. But these rare moments of insight usually came only when Adelle had answered favorably his pleas for more money.

* * * * *

One memory of her early years came back to Adelle at this time--a picture that had been dark to her then. It was when she first met her little Mexican friend at the fashionable boarding-school. She could not understand the girl's foreign name, and so the little Mexican had written it out in pencil,--"Diane Merelda," and underneath she wrote in tiny letters,--"F. de M."

"What do those mean?" Adelle had demanded, pointing to the mysterious letters.

"Fille de Marie," the little Catholic lisped, and translated,--"Daughter of the Blessed Virgin; you understand?"

Adelle had not understood then, nor had she thought of it all these years. But now the incident came back to her from its deep resting-place in her consciousness, and she understood its full meaning. She, too, was a child of God! albeit she had lived many years and done folly and suffered sorrow before she could recognize it.

And so Clark's Field had taught its last great lesson,--Clark's Field, that fifty acres of lean, level land with its crop of bricks and mortar, its heavy burden of human lives, the sacrificial altar of our economic system and our race prejudices,--Clark's Field! We pass it night and morning of all the days of our lives, but rarely see it--see, that is, more than its bricks and mortar and empty faces. It should be called, in the quaint phrase of the judge's people, "God's Acre!" One might say that the beauty, the supreme fruit of this Clark's Field, which never blossomed into flower and fruit all these years we have been concerned with its fate, was Adelle. Just Adelle! The judge thought that was enough. Adelle would go on, he believed, growing into new wisdom, slowly acquired according to her nature, and also into tranquillity, friendship, love, and motherhood-all the eternal rewards of right living. Would she accomplish this best through that other Clark--the workman--whom she had discovered for herself? The sentimental reader probably has this already settled to his satisfaction.

But I wonder!

THE END

By ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER

THE WOMEN WE MARRY

"Keen and incisive in character study, logical and life-like in plot invention and development, 'The Women We Marry,' is a novel that stands sturdily on its own merits. It is vigorous, frank and emotional in the best sense of that much-abused word, and there is little in it that is not faithfully representative of life." _Boston Transcript._

"The author of this realistic novel has not been afraid to endow his people richly with the ordinary faults and foibles of human nature.... Both his men and women are very real, human people." _New York Times._

"As a study of types, 'The Women We Marry' is one of the best things that American fiction has recently produced." _Springfield Republican._

By WILLA SIBERT CATHER

O PIONEERS!

"A great romantic novel, written with striking brilliancy and power, in which one sees emerge a new country and a new people.... Throughout the story one has the sense of great spaces; of the soil dominating everything, even the human drama that takes place upon it; renewing itself while the generations come and pass away."--_McClure's Magazine._

"The book is big in its conception and strikes many great live topics of the day--the feminist movement and the back-to-the-soil doctrines being two of the most conspicuous. There is a spirit of the open spaces about this story--a bigness that suggests that Miss Cather has taken more than her title from Whitman's hymn to progress, 'Pioneers, O Pioneers.'"--_San Francisco Chronicle._

By ELIA W. PEATTIE

THE PRECIPICE

"A frank and fearless study of the New Womanhood which we now see all around us ... done upon a broad canvas."--_The Bookman._