Loe raamatut: «In the Heart of a Fool», lehekülg 20

CHAPTER XXV
IN WHICH WE SEE TWO TEMPLES AND THE CONTENTS THEREOF

It was an old complaint in Harvey that the Harvey Tribune was too much of a bulletin of the doings of the Adams family and their friends. But when a man sets all the type on a paper, writes all the editorials and gets all the news he may be pardoned if he takes first such news as is near his hand. Thus in the May that followed events set down in the last chapter we find in the Tribune a few items of interest to the readers of this narrative. We learn for instance that Captain Ezra Morton who is introducing the Nonesuch Sewing Machine, paid his friends in Prospect school district a visit; that Jasper Adams has been promoted to superintendent of deliveries in Wright & Perry’s store; that Kenyon Adams entertained his friends in the Fifth Grade of the South Harvey schools with a violin solo on the last day of school; that Grant Adams had been made assistant to the secretary of the National Building Trades Association in South Harvey; that Mr. George Brotherton with Miss Emma Morton and Martha and Ruth had enjoyed a pleasant visit with the Adamses Sunday afternoon and had resumed an enjoyable buggy ride after partaking of a chicken dinner. In the editorial column were some reflections evidently in Mr. Left’s most lucid style and a closing paragraph containing this: “Happiness and character,” said the Peach Blow Philosopher, “are inseparable: but how easy it is to be happy in a great, beautiful house; or to be unhappy if it comes to that in a great, beautiful house: Environment may influence character; but all the good are not poor, nor all the rich bad. Therefore, the Peach Blow Philosopher takes to the woods. He is willing to leave something to the Lord Almighty and the continental congress. Selah!”

As Dr. Nesbit sat reading the items above set forth upon the broad new veranda of the residence that he was so proud to call his home, he smiled. It was late afternoon. He had done a hard day’s work–some of it among the sick, some of it among the needy–the needy in the Doctor’s bright lexicon being those who tried to persuade him that they needed political offices. “I cheer up the sick, encourage the needy, pray for ’em both, and sometimes for their own good have to lie to ’em all,” he used to say in that day when the duties of his profession and the care of his station as a ruling boss in politics were oppressing him. Dr. Nesbit played politics as a game. But he played always to win.

“Old Linen Pants is a bland old scoundrel,” declared Public Opinion, about the corridors of the political hotel at the capital. “But he is as ruthless as iron, as smooth as oil, and as bitter as poison when he sets his head on a proposition. Buy?–he buys men in all the ways the devil teaches them to sell–offices, power, honor, cash in hand, promises, prestige–anything that a man wants, Old Linen Pants will trade for, and then get that man. Humorous old devil, too,” quoth Public Opinion. “Laughs, quotes scripture, throws in a little Greek philosophy, and knows all the new stories, but never forgets whose play it is, nor what cards are out.” Thus was he known to others.

But as he remained longer and longer in the game, as his fourth term as state Senator began to lengthen, the game here and there began to lose in his mouth something of its earlier savor. That afternoon as he sat on the veranda overlooking the lawn shaded by the elm trees of his greatest pride, Dr. Nesbit was discoursing to Mrs. Nesbit, who was sewing and paid little heed to his animadversions; it was a soliloquy rather than a conversation–a soliloquy accompanied by an obligate of general mental disagreement from the wife of his bosom, who expressed herself in sniffs and snorts and scornful staccato interjections as the soliloquy ran on. Here are a few bars of it transcribed for beginners:

From the Doctor’s solo: “Heigh-ho–ho hum–Two United States Senators, one slightly damaged Governor, marked down, five congressmen and three liars, one supreme court justice, also a liar, a working interest in a second, and a slight equity in a third; organization of the Senate, speaker of the house,–forty liars and thirty thieves–that’s my political assets, my dear.”

“I wish you’d quit politics, Doctor, and attend to your practice,” this by way of accompaniment from Mrs. Nesbit. The Doctor was in a playful and facetious mood that pleasant afternoon.

He leaned back in his chair, reached up in the air with outstretched arms, clapped his hands three times, gayly, kicked his shoe-heels three times at the end of his short little legs, smiled and proceeded: “Liabilities of James Nesbit, dealer in public grief, licensed dispenser of private joy, purveyor of Something Equally Good, item one, forty-nine gentlemen who think they’ve been promised thirty-six jobs–but they are mistaken, they have been told only that I’ll do what I can for them–which is true; item two, three hundred friends who want something and may ask at any minute; item three, seventy-five men who will be or have been primed up by the loathed opposition to demand jobs; item four, Tom Van Dorn who is as sure as guns to think in about a year he has to have a vindication, by running for another term; item five–”

“He can’t have it,” from Mrs. Nesbit, and then the piping voice went on:

“Item six, a big, husky fight in Greeley county for the maharaja of Harvey and the adjoining provinces.” A deep sigh rose from the Doctor, then followed more clapping of hands and kicking of heels and some slapping of suspenders, as the voices of Kenyon and Lila came into the veranda from the lawn, and the Doctor cast up his accounts: “Let’s see now–naught’s a naught and figure’s a figure and carry six, and subtract the profits and multiply the trouble and you have a busted community. Correct,” he piped, “Bedelia, my dear, observe a busted community. Your affectionate lord and master, kind husband, indulgent father, good citizen gone but not forgotten. How are the mighty fallen.”

“Doctor,” snapped Mrs. Nesbit, “don’t be a fool; tell me, James, will Tom Van Dorn want to run again?”

Making a basket with his hands for the back of his head the Doctor answered slowly, “Ho-ho-ho! Oh, I don’t know–I should say–yes. He’ll just about have to run–for a Vindication.”

“Well, you’ll not support him! I say you’ll not support him,” Mrs. Nesbit decided, and the Doctor echoed blandly:

“Then I’ll not support him. Where’s Laura?” he asked gently.

“She went down to South Harvey to see about that kindergarten she’s been talking of. She seems almost cheerful about the way Kenyon is getting on with his music. She says the child reads as well as she now and plays everything on the violin that she can play on the piano. Doctor,” added Mrs. Nesbit meditatively, “now about those oriental rugs we were going to put upstairs–don’t you suppose we could take the money we were going to put there and help Laura with that kindergarten? Perhaps she’d take a real interest in life through those children down there.” The wife hesitated and asked, “Would you do it?”

The Doctor drummed his chair arm thoughtfully, then put his thumbs in his suspenders. “Greater love than this hath no woman shown, my dear–that she gives up oriental rugs for a kindergarten–by all means give it to her.”

“James, Lila still grieves for her father.”

“Yes,” answered the Doctor sadly, “and Henry Fenn was in the office this morning begging me to give him something that would kill his thirst.”

The doctor brought his hands down emphatically on his chair arms. “Duty, Bedelia, is the realest obligation in the world. Here are Lila and Henry Fenn. What a miserable lot of tommy rot about soul-mating Tom and this Fenn woman conjured up to get away from their duty to child and husband. They have swapped a place with the angels for a right to wallow with the hogs; that’s what all their fine talking amounts to.” The Doctor’s shrill voice rose. “They don’t fool me. They don’t fool any one; they don’t even fool each other. I tell you, my dear,” he chirped as he rose from his chair, “I never saw one of those illicit love affairs in life or heard of it in literature that was not just plain, old fashion, downright, beastly selfishness. Duty is a greater thing in life than what the romance peddlers call love.”

The Doctor stood looking at his wife questioningly–waiting for some approving response. She kept on sewing. “Oh you Satterthwaites with hearts of marble,” he cried as he patted the cast iron waves of her hair and went chuckling into the house.

Mrs. Nesbit was aroused from her reverie by the rattle of the Adams buggy. When it drew up to the curb Laura and Grant climbed out and came up the walk. Laura wore a simple summer dress that brought out all the exquisite coloring of her skin, and made her light hair shine in a kind of haloed glory. It had been months since the mother had seen in her daughter’s face such a smile as the daughter gave to the man beside her–red-faced, angular, hard muscled, in his dingy blue carpenter’s working clothes with his measuring rule and pencil sticking from his apron pocket, and with his crippled arm tipped by its steel tool-holder.

“Grant is going to take that box of Lila’s toys down to the kindergarten, mother,” she explained.

When they had disappeared up the stairs Mrs. Nesbit could hear them on the floor above and soon the heavy feet of the man carrying a burden were on the stairs and in another minute the young woman was saying:

“Leave them by the teacher’s desk, Grant,” and as he untied the horse, she called, “Now you will get that door in to-night without fail–won’t you? I’ll be down and we’ll put in the south partition in the morning.” As she turned from the door she greeted her mother with a smile and dropped wearily into a chair.

“Oh mother,” she cried, “it’s going to be so fine. Grant has the room nearly finished and he’s interesting the wives of the union men in South Harvey and George Brotherton is going to give us every month all the magazines and periodicals that are not returnable and George brought down a lot of Christmas numbers of illustrated papers, and we’re cutting the bright pictures out and pinning them on the wall and George himself worked with us all afternoon. George says he is going to make every one of his lodges contribute monthly to the kindergarten–he belongs to everything but the Ladies of the G. A. R.–” she smiled and her mother smiled with her,–“and Grant says the unions are going to pay half of the salary of the extra teacher. That makes it easier.”

“Well, Laura, don’t you think–”

But her daughter interrupted her. “Now, mother,” she went on, “don’t you stop me till I’m done–for this is the best yet. Morty Sands came down to-day to help–” Laura laughed a little at her mother’s surprised glance, “and Morty promised to give us $200 for the kindergarten just as soon as he can worm it out of his father for expense money.” She drew in a deep, tired breath, “There,” she sighed, “that’s all.”

Her own child came up and the mother caught the little girl and began playing with her, tying her hair ribbon, smoothing out her skirts, rubbing a dirt speck from her nose, and cuddling the little one rapturously in her arms. When the two women were alone, Laura sat on the veranda steps with her head resting upon her mother’s knee. The mother touched the soft hair and said: “Laura, you are very tired.”

“Yes, mother,” the daughter answered. “The mothers are so hungry for help down there in South Harvey, and,” she added a little drearily–“so am I; so we are speaking a common language.”

She nestled her head in the lap above her. “And I’m going to find something worth doing–something fine and good.”

She watched the lazy clouds, “You know I’m glad about Morty Sands. Grant thinks Morty sincerely wants to amount to something real–to help and be more than a money grubber! If the old spider would just let him out of the web!” The mother stared at her daughter a second.

“Well, Laura, about the only money grubbing Morty seems to be doing is grubbing money out of his father to maintain his race horse.”

The daughter smiled and the mother went on with her work. “Mother, did you know that little Ruth Morton is going to begin taking vocal lessons this summer?” The mother shook her head. “Grant says Mr. Brotherton’s paying for it. He thinks she has a wonderful voice.”

“Voice–” cut in Mrs. Nesbit, “why Laura, the child’s only fourteen–voice–!”

Laura answered, “Yes, mother, but you’ve never heard her sing; she has a beautiful, deep, contralto voice, but the treble above ‘C’ is a trifle squeaky, and Mr. Brotherton says he’s ‘going to have it oiled’; so she’s to ‘take vocal’ regularly.”

On matters musical Mrs. Nesbit believed she had a right to know the whole truth, so she asked: “Where does Mr. Brotherton come in, Laura?”

“Oh, mother, he’s always been a kind of god-father to those girls. You know as well as I that Emma’s been playing with that funeral choir of yours and Mr. Brotherton’s all these years, only because he got her into it, and Grant says he’s kept Mrs. Herdicker from discharging Martha for two years, just by sheer nerve. Of course Grant gets it from Mr. Brotherton but Grant says Martha is so pretty she’s such a trial to Mrs. Herdicker! I like Martha, but, mother, she just thinks she should be carried round on a chip because of her brown eyes and red hair and dear little snubby nose. Grant says Mr. Brotherton is trying to get the money someway to float the Captain’s stock company and put his Household Horse on the market. I think Mr. Brotherton is a fine man, mother–he’s always doing things to help people.”

Mrs. Nesbit folded up her work, and began to rise. “George Brotherton, Laura,” said her mother as she stood at full length looking down upon her child, “has a voice of an angel, and perhaps the heart of a god, but he will eat onions and during the twenty years I’ve been singing with him I’ve never known him to speak a correct sentence. Common, Laura–common as dishwater.”

As Laura Van Dorn talked the currents of life eddying about her were reflected in what she said. But she could not know the spirit that was moving the currents; for with a neighborly shyness those who were gathering about her were careful to seem casual in their kindness, and she could not know how deeply they were moved to help her. Kindergartens were hardly in George Brotherton’s line; yet he untied old bundles of papers, ransacked his shop and brought a great heap of old posters and picture papers to her. Captain Morton brought a beloved picture of his army Colonel to adorn the room, and deaf John Kollander, who had a low opinion of the ignorant foreigners and the riff-raff and scum of society, which Laura was trying to help, wished none the less to help her, and came down one day with a flag for the schoolroom and insisted upon making a speech to the tots about patriotism. He made nothing clear to them but he made it quite clear to himself that they were getting the flag as a charity, which they little deserved, and never would return. And to Laura he conveyed the impression that he considered her mission a madness, but for her and the sorrow which she was fighting, he had appreciative tenderness. He must have impressed his emotions upon his wife for she came down and talked elaborately about starting a cooking school in the building, and after planning it all out, went away and forgot it. The respectable iron gray side-whiskers of Ahab Wright once relieved the dingy school room, when Ahab looked in and the next day Kyle Perry on behalf of the firm of Wright & Perry came trudging into the kindergarten with a huge box which he said contained a p-p-p-p-p-pat-a-p-p-p-pppat-pat–here he swallowed and started all over and finally said p-p-patent, and then started out on a long struggle with the word swing, but he never finished it, and until Laura opened the box she thought Mr. Perry had brought her a soda fountain. But Nathan Perry, his son, who came wandering down to the place one afternoon with Anne Sands, put up the swing, and suggested a half dozen practical devices for the teacher to save time and labor in her work, while Anne Sands in her teens looked on as one who observes a major god completing a bungling job of the angels on a newly contrived world.

Sometimes coming home from his day’s work Amos Adams would drop in for a chat with the tired teacher, and he refreshed her curiously with his quiet manner and his unsure otherworldliness, and his tough, unyielding optimism. He had no lectures for the children. He would watch them at their games, try to play with them himself in a pathetic, old-fashioned way, telling them fairy stories of an elder and a grimmer day than ours. Sometimes Doctor Nesbit, coming for Laura in his buggy, would find Amos in the school room, and they would fall to their everlasting debate upon the reality of time and space with the Doctor enjoying hugely his impious attempt to couch the terminology of abstract philosophy in his Indiana vernacular.

Lida Bowman bringing her little brood sometimes would sit silently watching the children, and look at Laura as if about to speak, but she always went away with her mind unrelieved. Violet Hogan, who brought her beruffled and bedizened eldest, made up for Mrs. Bowman’s reticence. Moreover Violet brought other mothers and there was much talk on the topics of the day–talk that revealed to Laura Nesbit a whole philosophy that was new to her–the helpfulness of the poor to the poor.

But if others brought to Laura Van Dorn material strength and spiritual comfort in her enterprise, Grant Adams waved the wand of his steel claw over the kindergarten and made it live. For he was a power in the Wahoo Valley. Her friends knew that his word gave the kindergarten the endorsement of every union there and thus brought to it mothers with children and with problems as well as children, whom Laura Van Dorn otherwise never could have reached. The unions made a small donation monthly to the work which gave them the feeling of proprietorship in the place and the mothers and children came in self-respect. But if Grant gave life to the kindergarten, he got more than he gave. For the restraining hand of Laura Van Dorn always was upon him, and his friends in the Valley came to realize her friendship for them and their cause. They knew that many a venture of Grant’s Utopia would have been a wild goose chase but for the wisdom of her counsel. And the two came to rely upon each other unconsciously.

So in the ugly little building near Dooley’s saloon in South Harvey the two towns met and worked together; and all to heal a broken heart, a bruised life. From out of the unexplored realm where our dreams are blooming into the fruit of reality one evening came Mr. Left with this message: “Whoever in the joy of service gives part of himself to the vast sum of sacrificial giving that has remained unspent, since man began to walk erect, is adding to humanity’s heritage, is building an unseen temple wherein mankind is sheltered from its own inhumanity. This sum of sacrificial giving is the temple not made with hands!”

Now the foundations of that part of the temple not made with hands in South Harvey, may be said to have been laid and the watertable set on the day when Laura Van Dorn first laughed the bell-chime laugh of her girlhood. And that day came well along in the summer. It was twilight and the Doctor was sitting with his wife and daughter on their east veranda when Morty Sands came flitting across the lawn like a striped miller moth in a broad-banded outing suit. He waved gayly to the little company in the veranda and came up the steps at two bounds, though he was a man of thirty-eight and just the least bit weazened.

“Well,” he said, with his greetings scarcely off his lips, “I came to tell you I’ve sold the colt!”

The chorus repeated his announcement as a question.

“Yes, sold the colt,” solemnly responded Morty. And then added, “Father just wouldn’t! I tried to get that two hundred in various ways–adding it to my cigar bill; slipping it in on my bill for raiment at Wright & Perry’s, but father pinned Kyle down, and he stuttered out the truth. I tried to get the horse-doctor to charge the two hundred into his bill and when father uncovered that–I couldn’t wait any longer so I’ve sold the colt!”

“Well, Morty, what for in Heaven’s name?” asked Laura. Morty began fumbling in his pockets before he spoke. He did not smile, but as his hand came out of an inside pocket, he said gently: “For two hundred and seventeen dollars and a half! I fought an hour for that half dollar!” He handed it to the Doctor, saying: “It’s for the kindergarten. You keep it for her, Doctor Jim!”

When Morty had gone Mrs. Nesbit said: “What queer blood that Sands blood is, Doctor. There is Mary Sands’s heart in that boy, and Daniel has bred nothing into him. They must have been a queer breed a generation or two back!”

The Doctor did not answer. He took the money which Morty had given to him, handed it to Laura and said: “And now my dear, accept this token of devotion from Sir Mortimer Sands, of the golden heart and wooden head!” And then Laura laughed, not in derision, not in merriment even, but in sheer joy that life could mean so much. And as she laughed the temple not made with hands began to rise strong and beautiful in her heart and in the hearts of all who touched her.

How they would have sneered at Laura Van Dorn’s niche in the temple, those practical folk who helped her because they loved her. How George Brotherton would have laughed; with what suspicion John Kollander would have viewed the kindergarten, if he had been told that it was part of a temple. For he had no sort of an idea of letting the rag-tag and bob-tail of South Harvey into a temple; he knew very well they deserved no temple. They were shiftless and wicked. How Wright & Perry would have sniffed at any one who would have called the dreary little shack, where Laura Van Dorn held forth, a temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts they knew the truth. It is the American way to mask the beauty of our nobler selves, or real selves under a gibing deprecation. So we wear the veneer of materialism, and beneath it we are intense idealists. And woe to him who reckons to the contrary!

Perhaps the town’s views on temples in general and Laura’s temple in particular, was summed up by Hildy Herdicker, Prop., when she read Mr. Left’s reflections in the Tribune. “Temples–eh?–temples not made with hands–is it? Well, Miss Laura can get what comfort she can out of her baby shop; but me? Every man to his trade as Kyle Perry said when he tried to buy a dozen scissors and got a sewing machine–me?–I get my heart balm selling hats, and if others gets theirs coddling brats–’tis the good God’s wisdom that makes us different and no business of mine so long as they bring grist to the profit mill! The trouble with their temples is that they don’t pay taxes!”

So in the matter of putting up temples–particularly in the matter of erecting temples not made with hands, the town worked blindly. But so far as Laura Van Dorn was concerned, while she was working on her part of the temple, she had the vision of youth still in her heart. Youth indeed is that part of every soul that life has not tarnished, and if we keep our faith, hold ourselves true and bow to no circumstance however arrogant it may be, youth still will abide in our hearts through many years. Now Laura, who was born Nesbit and became Van Dorn, was taking up life with that large charity that comes to every unconquered soul. She held her illusions, she believed in herself, and youth shone like a beacon from her face and glowed in her body.

For Thomas Van Dorn, who had been her husband, she had trained herself to hold no unkind thought. She even taught Lila–when the child asked for him–to harbor no rancor toward him. So the child turned to her father when they met, the natural face of a child; it was a sad little face that he saw–though no one else ever saw it sad; but the child smiled when she spoke and looked gently at him, in the hope that some day he would come back to her.

Now it happened that on the night when Laura’s laugh first echoed through her temple another rising temple witnessed a ceremony entirely befitting its use.

That night–late that night when a pale moon was climbing over the valley below the town, Margaret and her lover stood alone in the great unfinished house which they were building.

Through the uncurtained windows the moonlight was streaming, making white splashes upon the floors. Across the plank pathways they wandered locating the halls, the great living-room, the spacious dining-room, the airy, comfortable bedrooms exposed to the south, the library, the kitchen, and the ballroom on the third floor. It was to be a grand house–this house of Van Dorn. And in their fancy the man and the woman called it the temple of love erected as an altar to the love god whom they worshiped. They peopled it with many a merry company. They saw the rich and the great in the dining-room. They pictured in this vision pleasure capering through the ball room. They enshrined wisdom and contentment in the library. In the great living-room they installed elegance and luxury, and hospitality beckoned with ostentatious pride for the coming of such of the nobility as Harvey and its environs and the surrounding state and Nation could produce. A grand, proud temple, a rich, beautiful temple, a strong, masterful temple would be this temple of love.

“And, dearest,” said he–the master of the house, as he held her in his arms at the foot of the stairway that swept down into the broad hall like the ghost of some baronial grandeur, “dearest, what do we care what they say! We have built it for ourselves–just for you, I want it–just for you; not friends, not children, not any one but you. This is to be our temple of love.”

She kissed him, and whined wordless assent. Then she whispered: “Just you–you, you, and if man, woman or child come to mar our joy or to lessen our love, God pity the intruder.” And like a flaming torch she fluttered in his arms.

The summer breeze came caressingly through an unclosed window into the temple. It seemed–the summer breeze which fell upon their cheeks–like the benediction of some pagan god; their god of love perhaps. For the grand house, the rich house, the beautiful, masterful temple of their mad love was made for summer breezes.

But when the rain came, and the storms fell and beat upon that house, they found that it was a house built upon sand. But while it stood and even when it fell there was a temple, a real temple, a temple made with hands–a temple that all Harvey and all the world could understand!