I BUILD FOR MYSELF A MONUMENT MORE ENDURING THAN BRASS
As Sister Glory White had predicted, I "came down to it" at once and
soon learned to perform the usual feminine miracles in the bread-tray
and skillets. Our happiness did not differ from the happiness of other
young married people except that it was abashed morning and evening
with family prayers--occasions when Thomas, the cat, invariably arose
with an air of outraged good-breeding and withdrew to the back yard.
William had long, active, itinerating legs in those days, a slim,
graceful body, a countenance like that of Sir Walter Raleigh and eyes
that must have been like Saint John's. They were blue and had in them
the "far, eternal look." And in the years to come I was to learn how
much the character of the man resembled both that of the cavalier and
the saint. Also, I was to learn that it was no light matter for one's
husband to have descended from an ecclesiastical family that had found
its way up through church history by prayer and fasting.
A Presbyterian may make the most abiding forefather, because his
doctrinal convictions are so strong they prenatally crimp the morals of
those who come after him; and it may be that a Methodist ancestor
counts for less in the third and fourth generation because his theology
is too genially elastic to take a Calvinistic grip upon posterity, but
it is certain that he will impart a wrestling-Jacob disposition to his
descendants which nothing can change. So it was with William; he was
often without "the witness of the Spirit," but I never knew him to let
his angel go. He had a genius for wrestling in prayer as another man
might have for writing great poetry. His words flew together into
coveys when he fell upon his knees, and rose like mourning doves to
Heaven, or they would be like high notes out of a black-Saul mood of
the soul, and then they thundered forth from his lips as if he were
about to storm the gates of Paradise. And sometimes, in the dramatic
intensity of his emotions, he would ask for the most terrifying things.
At first as we knelt together there in the quiet little house with no
one near for help but the hills, I was alarmed less Heaven should take
him at his word, for if half his petitions had been granted we could
not have lived in this world. We should have been scattered like the
fine dust of a too great destiny. But presently, when nothing adequate
to them happened during the night, I learned to have more confidence in
the wisdom of God and less in William's. With him prayer was simply a
spiritual obsession based upon a profound sense of mortal weakness and
very mystifying to his young wife, who had cheerfully said her orisons
from a book night and morning with an easy Canterbury conscience.
The Saturday after our marriage I accompanied him to Redwine, his
regular appointment. It was the custom then to have preaching Saturday
and Sunday. The church was withdrawn from the road into a dim forest
of pines, black and mournful. Here and there, horses and mules bearing
saddles or dangling harness stood slipshod in the shade, switching
their tails at innumerable flies. Near the door was the group of men
one always sees about a country church on meeting days. They are
farmers who have an instinct for the out-of-doors and who, for this
reason, will not go in till the last moment. Beyond the church, in the
thicker shadows, lay its dead beneath a colony of staggering gray
stones. Upon one grave, I remember, where the clay was freshly turned,
there was a bouquet of flowers--love's protest against the sonorous
sentence--"earth to earth and dust to dust"--which the other graves
confirmed. The pine needles lay thick above them, and not a flower
distinguished them from the common sod. They had the look of deeper
peace, the long, untroubled peace of sleepers who have passed out of
the memory of living, worrying men. These churchyards for the dead
were characteristic features in country circuits, and I mention this
one because ever after it seemed to me to be just inside the gateway of
the Methodist itinerancy, and because, in the end, it came to be the
home place of my heart.
I had never before been in a Methodist church. A certain Episcopalian
conceit prevented my straying into the one at Edenton. And I was
shocked now at the Old Testament severity of this one. There was no
compromise with human desires in it, not a touch of color except the
brown that time gives unpainted wood, not an effort anywhere to appeal
to the imagination or suggest holy imagery. Only the semicircular
altar rail about the narrow box pulpit suggested human frailty, prayer
and repentance. On the men's side--for the law of sex was observed to
the point of segregation in all our churches--there was a sprinkling of
men with red, strong, craggy faces who appeared to have the Adam clod
highly developed in them, a world-muteness in expression that seemed to
set them back in the garden and to hide them from God on account of
their sins. On the other side there was more lightness, more life and
hope expressed in the faces of the younger women. But in the faces of
the old there was the same outdone look of Nature facing God.
There was no service, from the standpoint of my Episcopal rearing; just
a hymn, a prayer, and then William took his text, the Beatitudes--all
of them. I have since heard better sermons on one of them, but the
figure of him standing there behind the high pulpit in the darkened
church with his eyes lifted, as if he saw angels above our heads, has
never faded from my memory, nor have the faces of the old women in
their black sunbonnets upturned to him, nor the drooping shoulders of
the old men sitting in the amen corner with bowed heads. Somehow,
there was a reality about the whole scene that we did not have at home
with all the fine music and Heaven-hinting accessories.
He had reached the promise to the blessed peacemakers in the course of
his sermon, the vision-seeing calm growing deeper in his eyes and the
high look whitening on his brow, when suddenly a woman on the front
seat stood up, laid her sleeping infant on the floor with careful
deliberation, took off her black calico bonnet, stepped into the aisle,
slapped her hands together and began to spin around and around upon her
toes with incredible celerity. Her homespun skirt ballooned about her,
the ruffle of her collar stood out like a little frill of white neck
feathers. She had a fixed, foolish expression, maintained an energy of
motion that was persistent and amazing, and gave out at regular
intervals a short, staccato squeal that was scarcely human in sound.
Not a word was spoken; William himself was silenced as he watched the
strange phenomenon. And I have often wondered since at the quality of
that courage in an otherwise shrinking country woman which could cause
her to rise, take the service out of the preacher's hands as serenely
as if she had been sent from God. And this is what she really
believed. And every other member of the congregation, including
William, shared the belief that she had got an extraordinary blessing
that day.
After all, it is a tremendous blessing to believe that one's God is
within immediate blessing distance. In this connection I venture to
add that it has always seemed to me a lack of comprehension which gives
the Methodists the chief reputation for emotional religion, and it is
certainly cheating the Episcopalians. For every time the service is
read in an Episcopal church the congregation shouts the responses,
quietly, of course, and by the book, but it is shouting just the same,
and with a beseeching use of words both joyful and agonizing that
surpasses any sporadic shouting of the Methodists.
After the sermon we had dinner on the grounds, for this was an all-day
meeting with another service at the end of the day. And Saturday
dinner on the grounds of a Methodist church thirty years ago was a
function that appealed to the threefold nature of man as nothing else I
have ever seen did. Socially speaking, all the best people in the
community were present; the real best people, you understand.
Spiritually, it was an occasion hallowed by grave conversation; for
were we not within the shadow of God's house, in the sacred presence of
the dead? It was gruesome if you had an Episcopalian temperament, but
certainly it conduced to good breeding and sobriety. But, more
particularly, there was the dinner itself set out of huge hampers on
white cloths that appealed to the natural primitive man simply and
honestly, without a single pretense of delicacy to hide the real
grossness of the human appetite.
On this day plenty strewed the ground from Sister Glory White's basket
to Sister Amy Jurdon's and Sister Salter's. There were biscuit the
size of saucers and of the thickness of bread loaves, hams, baked hens,
roasted pigs, more biscuit, cucumber pickles six inches in length,
green-grape pies, custards of every kind and disposition, and cakes
that proclaimed the skill of every woman in the church.
William advised me to eat as I had never eaten before or the women
would think I did not like their cooking and would be correspondingly
offended. I was expected to consume at least three of the great
biscuit and everything else in proportion. Fortunately, I sat near a
tangle of vines in which I discovered a dog was hiding, a hound who
gazed imploringly at me through the leaves with the forlorn,
backslidden-sinner expression peculiar to his species, as much as to
say: "Don't tell I am here; maybe then I'll get a few crumbs later on."
I not only did not tell, but I fed him eight of the biscuit, five
slices of ham, and nearly everything else in reach of me except the
cucumber pickles. I never saw a dog eat more furtively or so well.
Meanwhile, I was raising for myself a monument more enduring than brass
in the hearts of my husband's people, as a hardy woman who could make
herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the
dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last man staggered
surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my
only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit.
After the night service it was arranged that we should go home with the
Salters to spend the night. Sister Salter was the woman who had
received the blessing. Brother Salter was not a brother at all--he was
still in the world, a little, twopenny man with a thin black beard, sad
black eyes and a perch mouth. But he was not proud of his godless
state, especially as it compared with his wife's radiant experience; he
was literally an humble sinner and showed it. We took our places
behind them in split-bottom chairs in the one-horse wagon. Sister
Salter was still in her baptismal mood and, as we rumbled on into the
deepening twilight through the sweeting spring woods, she continued to
sing snatches from the old hymns. Higher and higher her fine treble
voice arose till the homing birds answered and every living thing in
the forest felt the throb of the poignant melody--everything except the
baby on her breast. It slept on as soundly as if it breathed her peace
into its soft little body.
Night had fallen when we reached the house, a one-room log cabin.
"Light and go in," said Brother Salter. "I reckon the children air all
in bed. You 'uns kin ondress and git in while me and Sally unhitches
the horse."
We "lit" and entered the large room flooded with moonshining. There
was a bed in each corner, and all occupied save one. This was
evidently the "company bed." We knew by its opulent feather paunch, by
the white-fringed counterpane and by the pillow-shams bearing soporific
mottoes worked in turkey-red thread. One could not tell the age of or
how many persons were already asleep in the other beds; but, judging
from the number and varying sizes of the shoes that staggered and
kicked up on the floor beside them, there must have been a hearty
dozen, ranging all the way from adolescence down to infancy.
It is needless to add that we were apparently asleep and the covers
over my horrified head when the elder Salters entered. Where they
slept is still a mystery. But we were awakened very early the next
morning by the sound of Sister Salter's voice singing, "His loving
kindness, oh, how good!" as she rattled the stove doors beneath the
cookshed in the yard. Three very young children were sitting half
under our bed examining our shoes and other articles of apparel, and as
many older heads stared at us from the opposite beds. My anguish can
be better imagined than described, and the nonchalance with which
William arose and assumed his trousers did not add to my opinion of
him. I afterward learned that nothing was more common than this
populous way of entertaining guests, and that he had long since become
hardened to the indelicacies of such situations.