THE LITTLE ITINERANT--AND OTHERS
On this circuit, in a house nearly as open as a barn, on a freezing
winter night, our baby was born. The gaunt, dark room, the roaring
fire upon the wide hearth, the ugly little kettle of herb tea steaming
on the live coals, and the old mountain midwife, bending with her
hideous scroll face over me, are all a part of the memory of an
immortal pain. At the end of a dreadful day she had turned with some
contempt from the fine lady on the bed, who could not give birth to her
child, and said simply, as if with the saying she washed her hands of
the whole matter:
"She ain't doin' right. I reckon somethin' is wrong."
William had ridden forth in the driving storm of snow and ice for the
doctor, who lived ten miles distant across the mountain. And then the
hours came and sat around the awful bed and would not pass, nor let
even midnight come. Now and again the old scroll face peeped down at
me with an expression of extreme terror. The firelight made a red mist
over the dark walls and the steam of the herbs filled my nostrils with
a sickening odor.
At last there was an end of endurance; the hours lifted their leaden
wings and hurried away; the old midwife changed to a dragon-faced
butterfly, and I knew no more till the dawn and the snow spread a pale
light over the world outside. Within, the fires still blazed, but the
herb kettle was gone and the ring of ghosts coals lay whitening in
their ashes where it spouted and steamed; the old hag sat asleep in the
chimney corner, with her hands hanging down, her head thrown back, and
her warped mouth gaping wide at the rafters above. Over a little table
by the door a fine white tablecloth was spread. I wondered at it dimly
and what it concealed. I felt William's shaggy head bowed upon the bed
and a peace in my body akin to the peace of death. Laboriously my eyes
traveled back to the fine white cloth over the table. I knew all about
it, but could not remember. Only, nothing in the world mattered to me
but that, whatever it was, under the cloth on the table. Presently,
soft as a shade returns, it came to me, and I knew the little shape,
barely curving the cloth, was my baby. Grief was an emotion I had not
the strength to afford. I closed my eyes and felt tears press through
the lids, and then a gruff voice sounded close to me on the other side
of the bed.
"Thank God!"
Opening my eyes again with a great effort and looking up I beheld him,
the old, burly country doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers
on my wrist. But now a great emergency confronted me. My guardian
angel, who has never ceased to be very high-church, urged me to meet it.
"William, William," I whispered, and felt his kiss answer me, "he must
be baptized!"
"But he is dead, my darling!" he replied.
"Not really dead, William; he must be alive somewhere or I cannot bear
it, and I cannot have him going where he will be, unbaptized."
So it was done, the doctor, the old woman and William standing around
the little bier, and William saying the holy words himself. And there,
high up on the mountain under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in
his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little
itinerant, with his dust properly baptized, when they come on the last
day to awaken and gather up those very least babies who died so soon
they will not understand the resurrection call when they hear it.
After that we took more interest in the children. They seemed real to
us and nearer, whereas, before, they had simply passed in and out
before us like little irresponsible figureheads of the future, with
whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it
was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when
invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it was
curious, the way the innocent little things invariably hived there, no
matter how awful and accusing the invitation would be--to those "dead
in trespasses and sins, who felt themselves lost and undone."
So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided
angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of
William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a
particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that
there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his
mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not,
but they are infallible natural critics.
This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in
dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in
a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of
his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew
nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often the case with the
very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to
their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as
wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did
not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his
spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa
Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical
acquaintance with Adam and Eve.
The thought of little children passing through the Christmas season
without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of
William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being
bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith
as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A
week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and
carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains
that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and
would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings.
He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the
generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything
good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the
children received his confidences with apathy and silence.
Never, even at the end of a conference year, have I seen William so
industrious and so much the mendicant. He persecuted the merchants in
the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not
thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressing
doll babies. He shamed the stingiest man in the town into giving him a
flour sack full of the most disgraceful-looking candy I ever saw.
"William!" I exclaimed, when he brought home this last trophy, "you
will kill them."
"But," he replied, "for one little hour they will be happy and the next
time I tell them anything, though it should be compound Scriptures,
they will believe me."
The distribution of gifts was made very secretly some days beforehand.
We climbed mountain roads to little brown cabins in all directions,
leaving mysterious bags and parcels with lonesome-looking mother-women.
In one cabin, on top of what was known as Crow's Mountain, we found a
very handsome healthy boy, four months old, clad in a stocking leg and
the sleeve of an old coat, that had been cunningly cut and sewed to fit
him as close as a squirrel's skin. In another place William discovered
a boy of seven, who declined to believe or even to hope in Santa Clans.
He was thin, with sad, hungry eyes, ragged and bare-footed as usual.
He had no animation, he simply could not summon enough energy to
believe in the incredible.
I shall never forget this child's face. The Sabbath after Christmas we
had a voluntary Sunday school on our hands. A score of odd-looking
little boy and girl caterpillars appeared at church, excited,
mysteriously curious, like queer young creatures who have experienced a
miracle. They entered immediately into full fellowship with William.
They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried
the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he
said to the uttermost. Only once was there any symptom of higher
criticism. This was a certain Sabbath morning in the Sunday school
when William told the story of the forty and two children who were
devoured by two she bears because they had made fun of a bald-headed
man.
"I don't believe that tale!" was the astounding irreverent comment. It
proceeded from the same incipient agnostic who could not believe in
Santa Clans.
"Why?" William was indiscreet enough to ask.
"Because if only two bears had eat that many children it would have
busted 'em wide open."
No one smiled. William faced five little grimy-faced boys on the bench
before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational
interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the
retina of each, and it was too much for him.
"We will pass on to the next verse," he announced, leaving the
bear-expositor mystified, but in stubborn possession of his convictions.
Sometimes in these latter years, when things went hard with us, there
would come a flash of memory and William and I would see the face of
some child always as if the sun was shining on it, looking at us,
believing in us from far down the years. And it has helped, often more
than the recollection of older, wiser saints. Our experience was that
the faces of the children we had known lasted better in memory than
those of older people. And they always look right, as if God had just
made them.
It was always nip and tuck, in the records of William's ministry,
whether he would perform more marriage ceremonies or preach more
funerals. Some years the weddings would have it. Then again, the dead
got the better of it. As a rule, the poorer the people we served the
more weddings we helped to celebrate, and if the heroes and heroines of
them did not live happy ever after, at least they lived together.
There is no hour of the day or night that William has not sanctified
with somebody's marriage vows. Once, about two o'clock in the morning,
there was a furious rap at the door of the parsonage. William stuck
his head out of the window overhead and beheld a red-faced young farmer
standing in the moonlight, holding the hand of his sweetheart, who was
looking up at him with the expression that a white rose wears in a
storm.
"Come down and tie us, Parson," called the groom. "You ain't got time
to dress. They air after us hot-footed."
William slipped on his longtailed coat over his pajamas, hurried
downstairs and married them there in the moonlight, after having
examined the license the young man handed in through the parlor window.
And he looked well enough from the sill up, but from the sill down I
doubt if his costume would have passed muster.
Fortunately, no one thought of divorces in those days. Women stayed
with their husbands at the sacrifice of self-respect and everything
else save honor. And they were better women, more respected than those
who kick up so much divorce dust in society nowadays. Part of their
dissatisfaction comes from bad temper and bad training, and a good deal
of it comes from getting foolish notions out of books about the way
husbands do or do not love their wives. It seems they can't be
satisfied how they do it or how they don't do it. But back there
William and I never had any biological suspicions about the nature of
love, and the people he married to one another did not have any, either.
Once I remember a bridegroom who blushingly confessed that he was too
poor to pay the fee usually offered the preacher.
"But I'll pay you, Parson," he whispered as he swung his bride up
behind him upon his horse; "I'll pay as soon as I'm able."
[Illustration: "I'll Pay You, Parson. I'll Pay as Soon as I'm Able."]
Ten years passed and William was sent back to the same circuit. One
day, as he was on his way to an appointment, he met a man and woman in
a buggy. The woman had a baby at her breast, and the bottom of the
buggy looked like a human birdnest, it was so full of young, tow-headed
children.
"Hold on!" said the man, pulling up his horse; "ain't this Brother
Thompson?"
"Yes."
"Well, here's ten dollars I owe you."
"What for?" demanded William, holding back from the extended hand with
the fluttering bill in it.
"You don't remember it, I reckon, but you married us ten years ago. I
was so poor at the time I couldn't pay you for the greatest service one
man ever done another. We ain't prospered since in nothing except
babies, or I'd be handin' you a hundred instead of ten."
I have never heard a man compliment his wife since then that I do not
instinctively compare it with the compliment this mountain farmer paid
his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife
misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers of our times that I do not
recall the charming testimony of this husband against the injustice and
indecency of their views.