“Father,” she says with her eyes brimming, “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 God! 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 nobody’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 assent 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 318flowering 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 asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things I find happiness asserting 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 God’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 319vice, 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 God 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, God 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 God’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 chink 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.