Part 33 (2/2)
Fas.h.i.+on and the fine arts hold that it is Margaret's fault and that she is growing to be too much of a poseur; but the schools, which are the bulwarks of our liberties, maintain that he is just as bad as she. And what is more to the point--such is the contention of the eldest Miss Morton of the fourth grade in the Lincoln school, he has driven around to the school twice this spring to take little Lila out riding, and even though her mother has told the teachers to let the child go if she cared to, the little girl would not go and he was mean to the princ.i.p.al and insolent, though Heaven knows it is not the princ.i.p.al's fault, and if the janitor hadn't been standing right there--but it really makes little difference what would have happened; for the janitor in every school building, as every one knows, is a fierce and awesome creature who keeps more dreadful things from happening that never would have happened than any other single agency in the world.
The point which the eldest Miss Morton was accenting was this, that he should have thought of Lila before he got his divorce.
Now the worlds of fas.h.i.+on and the fine arts and the schools themselves, bulwarks that they are, do not realize how keenly a proud man's heart must be touched if day by day he meets the little girl upon the street, sees her growing out of babyhood into childhood, a sweet, bright, lovable child, and he yearns for something sincere, something that has no poses, something that will love him for himself. So he swallows a lump of pride as large as his handsome head, and drives to the school house to see his child--and is denied. In the Captain's household they do not know what that means. For in the Captain's household which includes a six room house--not counting the new white painted bathroom, the joint product of the toil of the handsome Miss Morton and the eldest Miss Morton, and not counting the basket for the kitten christened Epaminondas, and maintained by the youngest Miss Morton over family protests--in the Captain's household there is peace and joy, if one excepts the numbing fear of a ”step” that sometimes prostrates the eldest Miss Morton and her handsome sister; a fear that shelters their father against the wily designs of their s.e.x upon a meek and defenseless and rather obliging gentleman. So they cannot put themselves in the place of the rich and powerful neighbors next door. The Mortons hear the thorns crackling under the pot, but they cannot appreciate the heat.
And now we come to the last picture.
It is still an evening in May!
”Well, how is the missionary to South Harvey,” chirrups the Doctor as he mounts the steps, and sees his daughter, waiting for him on the veranda.
She looks cool and fresh and beautiful. Her eyes and her skin glow with health and her face beams upon him out of a soul at peace.
”She's all right,” returns the daughter, smiling. ”How's the khedive of Greeley county?”
As the Doctor mounts the steps she continues: ”Sit down, father--I've something on my mind.” To her father's inquiring face she replied, ”It's Lila. Her father has been after her again. She just came home crying as though her little heart would break. It's so pitiful--she loves him; that is left over from her babyhood; but she is learning someway--perhaps from the children, perhaps from life--what he has done--and when he tries to attract her--she shrinks away from him.”
”And he knows why--he knows why, Laura.” The Doctor taps the floor softly with his cane. ”It isn't all gone--Tom's heart, I mean.
Somewhere deep in his consciousness he is hungering for affection--for respect--for understanding. You haven't seen Tom's eyes recently?” The daughter makes no reply. ”I have,” he continues. ”They're burned out--kind of gla.s.sy--sc.u.mmed over with the searing of the h.e.l.l he carries in his heart--like the girls' eyes down in the Row. For he is dying at the heart--burning out with everything he has asked for in his hands, yet turning to Lila!”
”Father,” she says with her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g, ”I'm not angry with Tom--only sorry. He hasn't hurt me--much--when it's all figured out. I still have my faith--my faith in folks--and in G.o.d! Really to take away one's faith is the only wrong one can do to another!”
The father says, ”The chief wrong he did you was when he married you. It was n.o.body's fault; I might have stopped it--but no man can be sure of those things. It was just one of the inevitable mistakes of youth, my dear, that come into our lives, one way or another. They fall upon the just and the unjust--without any reference to deserts.”
She nods her a.s.sent and they sit listening to the sounds of the closing day--to the vesper bell in the Valley, to the hum of the trolley bringing its homecomers up from the town; to the drone of the five o'clock whistles in South Harvey, to the rattle of homebound buggies.
Twice the daughter starts to speak. The second time she stops the Doctor pipes up, ”Let it come--out with it--tell your daddy if anything is on your mind.” She smiles up into his mobile face, to find only sympathy there. So she speaks, but she speaks hesitatingly.
”I believe that I am going to be happy--really and truly happy!” She does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand and pats it. ”I am finding my place--doing my work--creating something--not the home that I once hoped for--not the home that I would have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South Harvey. All over the place I find its roots--the shrivelled parching roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect.
Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front bedroom--in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America a.s.serting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things I find happiness a.s.serting itself in my life. So it's my job, my consecrated job in this earth--to water the geranium, to prune the rose, to mulch the roots of self-respect among these people, and I am happy, father, happier every day that I walk that way.”
She looks wistfully into her father's face. ”Father, you won't quite understand me when I tell you that the tomato cans with their geraniums behind those gray lace curtains, that make Harvey people smile, are really not tomato cans at all. They are social dynamite bombs that one day will blow into splinters and rubbish the injustices, the cruel injustices of life that the poor suffer at the hands of their exploiters. The geranium is the flower, the spring flower of the divine discontent, which some day shall bear great and wonderful fruit.”
”Rather a swift pace you're setting for a fat man, Laura,” pipes the Doctor, adding earnestly: ”There you go talking like Grant Adams! Don't let Grant Adams fool you, child: the end of the world isn't here.
Grant's a good boy, Laura, and I like him; but he's getting a kind of Millerite notion that we're about to put on white robes and go straight up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few years, and there's nothing to it. Grant's a good son, and a good brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but”--the Doctor pounds his chair arm vehemently, ”there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just the same. Don't get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to jump into the crack o' doom for the established order!”
The daughter smiles at him, but she answers:
”Perhaps Grant is touched--touched with the mad impatience of G.o.d's fools, father. I don't always follow Grant. He goes his way and I go mine. But I am sure of this, that the thing which will really start South Harvey, and all the South Harveys in the world out of their dirt and misery, and vice, is not our dreams for them, but their dreams for themselves. They must see the vision. They must aspire. They must feel the impulse to sacrifice greatly, to consecrate themselves deeply, to give and give and give of themselves that their children may know better things. And it is my work to arouse their dreams, to inspire their visions, to make them yearn for better living. I am trying to teach them to use and to love beautiful things, that they may be restless among ugly things. I think beauty only serves G.o.d as the handmaiden of discontent! And, father, way down deep in my heart--I know--I know surely that I must do this--that it is my reason for being--now that life has taken the greater joy of home from me. So,” she concludes solemnly; ”these people whom I love, they need me, but father, G.o.d and you only know how I need them. I don't know about Grant,--I mean why he is going his solitary way, but perhaps somewhere in his heart there is a wound! Perhaps all of G.o.d's fools--those who live queer, unnormal self-forgetting lives, are the broken and rejected pieces of life's masonry which the builder is using in his own wise way. As for the plan, it is not ours. Grant and I, broken spawl in the rising edifice, we and thousands like us, odd pieces that c.h.i.n.k in yet hold the strain--we must be content to hold the load and know always--always know that after all the wall is rising! That is enough.”
And now we must put aside the pictures and get on with the story.
CHAPTER x.x.x
GRANT ADAMS PREACHING A MESSAGE OF LOVE RAISES THE VERY DEVIL IN HARVEY
The most dramatic agency in life is time--time that escapes the staged drama. The pa.s.sing years, the ceaseless chiselling of continuous events upon a soul, the reaction of a creed upon the material routine of the days, the humdrum living through of life that brings to it its final color and form--these things shape us and guide us, make us what we are, and alas, the story and the stage may only mention them. It is all very fine to say that as the years of work and aspiration pa.s.sed, Grant Adams's channel of life grew narrower. But what does that tell? Does it tell of the slow, daily sculpturing upon his character of the three big, emotional episodes of his life? To be a father in boyhood, a father ashamed, yet in duty bound to love and cherish his child; to face death in youth horribly and escape only when other men's courage save him; to react upon that experience in a great spiritual awakening that all but touched madness; and to face unspeakable pain and terror and possible death to justify one's fanatic consecration. Then day by day to renounce ambition, to feel no desire for those deeper things of the heart that gather about a home and the joys of a home; to be atrophied where others are quick and to be supersensitive and highstrung where others are dull; these are facts of Grant Adams's life, but the greater facts are hidden; for they pa.s.s under the slow and inexorably moving current of life. They are that part of the living through of life that may not be staged nor told.
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