“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 271great 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, 272coming 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, 273since 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.