Chapter 23

IN WHICH TOM VAN DORN BECOMES A WAYFARING MAN ALSO

The father rose. His head was cast down. He poked a vine curling about the porch floor with his cane.

"I wonder, my dear," he spoke slowly, and with great gentleness, "if maybe I shouldn't talk with Tom--before you see him."

He continued to poke the vine, and looked up at the daughter sadly. "Of course there's Lila; if it is best for her--why that's the thing to do--I presume."

"But father," broke in the daughter, "Tom and I can--"

But he entreated, "Won't you let me talk with Tom? In half an hour--I'll go. You and Lila slip over to mother's for half an hour--come back at half past twelve. I'll tell him where you are."

The mother and child had disappeared around the corner of the house when the click of Van Dorn's bicycle on the curbing told the Doctor that the young man was upon the walk. The package from the capital still lay beside the porch column. The Doctor did not lift his eyes from it as the younger man came hurrying up the steps. He was flushed, bright-eyed, a little out of breath, and his black wing of hair was damp. On the top step, he looked up and saw the Doctor.

"It's all right, Tom--I understand things." The Doctor's eyes turned to the parcel on the floor between them.

The Doctor's voice was soft; his manner was gentle, and he lifted his blue, inquiring eyes into the young Judge's restless black ones. Dr. Nesbit put a fatherly hand on the young man's arm, and said: "Shall we sit down, Tom, and take stock of things and see where we stand? Wouldn't that be a good idea?"

They sat down and the younger man eyed the package, turned it over, looked at the address nervously, pulled at his mustache as he sank back, while the elder man was saying: "I believe I understand you, Tom--better than any one else in the world understands you. I believe you have not a better friend on earth than I right at this minute."

The Judge turned around and said in a disturbed voice, "I am sure that's the God's truth, Doctor Jim." Then after a sigh he added, "And this is what I've done to you!"

"And will keep right on doing to me as long as you live," piped the elder man, twitching his mouth and nose contemptuously.

"As long as I live, I fancy," repeated the other. In the pause the young man put his hands to his hips and his chin on his breast as he slouched down in the chair and asked: "Where's Laura?"

"Over at her mother's," replied the father. "Nobody will interrupt us--and so I thought we could get down to grass roots and talk this thing out."

The Judge crossed his handsome ankles and sat looking at his trim toes.

"I suppose that idea is as good as any." He put one long, lean, hairy hand on the short, fat knee beside him and said: "The whole trouble with our Protestant religion is that we have no confessor. So some of us talk to our lawyers, and some of us talk to our doctors, and in extreme unction we talk to our newspapers."

He grinned miserably, and went on: "But we all talk to some one, and now I'm going to talk to you--talk for once, Doctor, right out of my soul--if I have one."

He rose nervously, obeying some purely physical impulse, and then sat down again, with his hands in his thick, black hair, and his elbows on his bony knees.

"All right, Tom," piped the Doctor, "go ahead."

"Well, then," he began as he looked at the floor before him, "do you suppose I don't know that you know what I'm up to? Do you think I don't know even what the town is buzzing about? Lord, man, I can feel it like a scorching fire. Why," he exclaimed with emotion, "feeling the hearts of men is my job. I've been at it for fifteen years--"

He broke off and looked up. "How could I get up before a jury and feel them out man by man as I talked if I wasn't sensitive to these things? You've seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn't feel like crying myself. You're a doctor--you know that. People forget what I am--what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women--these other women--when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it--for the exhilaration of it--for the joy of it!"

The Doctor's mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak. Van Dorn stopped him: "Don't cut in, Doc Jim--let me say it all out. I'm young. I love the moonlight and the stars and I never go through a wood that I do not see trysting places there--and I never see a great stretch of prairie under the sunshine that I do not put in a beautiful woman and go following her--not for her--Doctor Jim, but for the joy of pursuit, for the thrill of uncovering a bared, naked soul, and the overwhelming danger of it. God--man, I've stood afraid to breathe, flattened against a wall and heard the man-beast growl and sniff, hunting me. I love to love and be loved; but not less do I love to hunt and be hunted. I've hidden under trees, I've skulked in the shadows, I've walked boldly in the sunlight with my life in my hand to meet a woman's eyes, to feel her guilty shudder in my arms. Oh, Doctor Jim, you don't understand the riot in my blood that the moon makes shining through the trees upon the water, with great, shadowy glades, and the tinkle of cow bells far away, and a woman afraid of me--and I afraid of her--and nothing but the stars and the night between us."

He rose and began pacing the piazza as he continued speaking. "It's always been so with me--as early as my boyhood it was so. I often wake in the lonely nights and think of them all over again--the days and nights, the girls and women who have flashed bright and radiant into my life. Over and over again, I repeat to my soul their names, over and over I live the hours we have spent together, the dangers, the delights, the cruel misery of it all and then at the turn of the street, at the corner of a room, in the winking of an eye I see another face, it looks a challenge at me and I am out on the high road of another romance. I've got to go! It's part of my life; it's the pulse of my blood."

He stood excited with his deep, beady, black eyes burning and his proud, vain face flushed and his hands a-tremble. The Doctor saw that he was in the midst of a physical and mental turmoil that could not be checked.

Van Dorn went on: "And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura, God help her--she naturally--" he exclaimed. "But is the moon to be blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be muffled and mean no more than the scraping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to lose their scent, and grass and trees and birds to be blurred and turned drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a jury--what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn't had an emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd wouldn't say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud. They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes, then--by God they came to me. And yet you've been sitting there for years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying 'Tom--Tom, why don't you quit?'"

He was seated now, talking in a low, tense voice, looking the Doctor deeply in the eyes, and as he paused, the perspiration stood out upon his scarred forehead, and pink splotches appeared there and the veins of his temples were big and blue. The Doctor turned away his eyes and said coldly: "There's Laura--Tom--Laura and little Lila."

"Yes," he groaned, rising. "There are Laura and Lila."

He thrust his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down at the Doctor and sneered. "There's the trap that snapped and took a paw, and I'm supposed to lick it and love it and to cherish it."

He shuddered, and continued: "For once I'll speak and tell it all. I'll not be a hypocrite in this hour, though ever after I may lie and cringe. There are Laura and Lila and here am I. And out beyond is the wind in the elms and the sunshine upon the grass and the moving odor of flowers--flowers that are blushing with the joy of nature in her great perennial romance--and there's Laura and Lila and here am I."

His passion was ebbing; his face was hardening into its wonted vain, artificial contour, his eyes were losing their dilation, and he was sitting rather limply in his chair, staring into space. The Doctor came at him.

"You're a fool. You had your fling; you're along in your thirties, nearly forty now and it's time to stop." The younger man could not regain the height, but he could hide under his crust. So he parried back suavely, with insolence in his voice:

"Why stop at thirty--or even forty? Why stop at all?"

"Let me tell you something, Tom," returned the Doctor. "It's all very fine to talk this way; but this thing has become a fixed habit, just like the whiskey habit; and in fifteen or twenty years more you'll be a chronic, physical, degenerate man. You'll lose your self-respect. You'll lose your quick wits, and your whole mind and body will be burning up with a slow fire."

"Oh, you dear old fossil," replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, "I'm no fool. I know what I'm doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I'm only a man," he straightened up again, patted his mustache, and again tipped his hat into a cockey angle over his forehead, and went on, "not a monk." He smiled, pivoted on his heel nervously and went on, "And what is more I can take care of myself."

"Tom," cried the Doctor in his treble, with excitement in his voice, "you can't take care of yourself. No man ever lived who could. You may get away with your love affairs, and no one be the wiser; you may make a crooked or dirty million on a stock deal and no one be the wiser; but you'll bear the marks to the grave."

"So," mocked the sneering voice of the young Judge, "I suppose you'll carry the marks of all the men you've bought up in this town for twenty years."

"Yes, Tom," returned the Doctor pitifully, as he rose and stood beside the preening young man, "I'll carry 'em to the grave with me, too; I've had a few stripes to-day."

"Well, anyway," retorted Van Dorn, pulling his hat over his eyes, restlessly, "you're entitled to what you get in this life. And I'm going to get all I can, money and fun, and everything else. Morals are for sapheads. The preacher's God says I can't have certain things without His cracking down on me. Watch me beat Him at his own game." It was all a make-believe and the Doctor saw that the real man was gone.

"Tom," sighed the Doctor, "here's the practical question--you realize what all this means to Laura? And Lila--why, Tom, can't you see what it's going to mean to her--to all of us as the years go by?"

Their eyes met and turned to the parcel on the floor. "You can't afford--well, that sort of thing," the Doctor punched the parcel contemptuously with his cane. "It's all bad enough, Tom, but that way lies hell!"

Van Dorn turned upon the Doctor, and squared his jaw and said: "Well then--that's the way I'm going--that way"--he nodded toward the package--"lies romance for me! There is the road to the only joy I shall ever know in this earth. There lies life and beauty and all that I live for, and I'm going that way."

The Judge met the father's beseeching face, with an angry glare--defiant and insolent.

The Doctor had no time to reply. There was a stir in the house, and a child's steps came running through the hall. Lila stopped on the porch, hesitating between the two men. The Doctor put out his arms for her. Van Dorn casually reached out his hand. She ran to her father and cried, "Up--Daddy--up," and jumped to his shoulder as he took her. The Doctor walked down the steps as his daughter came out of the door.

The man and the woman looked at one another, but did not speak. The father put the child down and said:

"Now, Lila, run with grandpa and get a cooky from granny while your mother and I talk."

She looked up at him with her blue eyes and her sadly puckered little face, swallowed her disappointed tears and trudged down the steps after the white-clad grandfather who was untying his horse.

When the child and the grandfather were gone the wife said in a dead, emotionless voice, looking at the parcel on the floor, "Well, Tom?"

"Well, Laura," he repeated, "that's about the size of it--there it is--and you know all about it. I shall not lie--this time. It's not worth while--now."

The woman sat in a porch chair. The man hesitated, and she said: "Sit down, Tom. I don't know what to do or what to say," she began. "If there were just you and me to consider, I suppose I'd say we'd have to quit. But there's Lila. She is here and she does love you--and she has her right--the greatest right in the world to--well, to us--to a home, and a home means a father and a mother." The man rose. He put his hands in his coat pockets and stood by the porch column, making no reply.

The wife continued, "I can't even speak of what you have done to me, Tom. But it will hurt when I'm an old woman--I want to hide my face from every one--even from God--when I think of what you have used me for."

He dropped into the chair beside her, looking at the floor. Her voice had stirred some chord in his thousand-stringed heart. He reached out a hand to her.

"No, Tom," said the wife, "I don't want your pity."

"No, Laura," the husband returned quickly, "no, you don't need my pity; it's not pity that I am trying to give you. I only wished you to listen to what I have to say." The wife looked at her husband for a second in fear as she apprehended what he was about to utter. He turned his eyes from her and went on: "It was a mistake, a very nightmare of a mistake--my mistake--all my mistake--but still just an awful mistake. We couldn't make life go. All this was foredoomed, Laura, and now--now--" his eyes were upon the parcel on the floor, "here I am sure I have found the thing my life needs. And it is my life--my life." He saw his wife go pale, then flush; but he went on. "After all, it is one's own life that commands him, and nothing else in the world. And now I must follow my destiny."

"But, Tom," asked the wife, "you aren't going to this woman? You aren't going to leave us? You surely won't break up this home--not this home, Tom?"

The man hesitated before answering, then spoke directly: "I must follow my destiny--work it out as I see it. You have no right, no one has any right--even I have no right to compromise with my destiny. I live in this world just once!"

"But what is your destiny, Tom?" answered the wife. "Leave me out of it: but aren't the roots you have put down in this home, this career you are building; our child's normal girlhood with a father's care--aren't these the big things in your destiny? Lila's life--growing up under the shame that follows a child of parents divorced for such base reasons as these? Lila's life is surely a part of your destiny. Surely, surely you have no rights apart from her and hers!"

His quick mind was ready. "I have my own life to live, my own destiny to follow; my individual equation to solve, and for me nothing exists in the universe. As for my career--I'll take care of that. That's mine also!"

The wife threw out an appealing hand. "Tom, I can't help wanting to pick you up and shield you. It will be awful--awful--that thing you are trying to go into. You've always chosen the material thing--the practical thing--and she--she's a practical woman. Oh, Tom--I'm not jealous--not a bit. If I thought she would enrich your soul--if I thought she would give you what I've wanted to give you--what I've prayed God night after night to let me give you--I'd take even Lila and go away and give you your chance for a love such as I've had. Can you see, Tom, I'm not jealous? I'm not even angry."

He turned upon her suddenly and said: "You don't know what you're talking about. Anyway--she suits me--she'll enrich me as you call it all right. I'm sure of that."

"No, Tom," said the wife quietly, "she'll not enrich you--not spiritually. No one can do that--for any one. It must come from within. I've poured my very heart over you, Tom, and you didn't want it--you only wanted--oh, God--hide my shame--my shame--my shame." Her voice rose for a moment and she muffled it with her face in her arms.

"Tom--" she faltered, "Tom--I am going to make one last plea--for Lila's sake won't you put it all away--won't you?" she shuddered. "It is killing all my self-respect, Tom--but I must. Won't you--won't you please for Lila's sake come back, break this off--and see if we can't patch up life?"

"No," he answered.

Their eyes met; his shifting, beady eyes were held forcibly with many a twitching, by her gray eyes. For two awful seconds they stood taking farewell of each other.

"No," he repeated, dropping his glance.

Then he put out his hand with a gesture of finality, "I'm going now. I don't know when--or--well, whether I'll come--" He picked up the package. He was going down the steps with the package in his hands when he heard the patter of little feet and a little voice calling:

"Daddy--daddy--" and repeated, "daddy."

He did not turn, but walked quickly to the sidewalk. As far as he could hear, that childish voice called to him.

And he heard the cry in his dreams.