THE SHORT-CIRCUIT
And at last we arrived at the old snowball guarding the open gate of the
Little House and we went under its low boughs and up the walk. But we
did not march to an undisputed and stealthy raid on the tea cake box
above the kitchen table. The Little House was no longer the deserted
scene I had left it, but was teeming with human and juvenile activities
which streamed out to meet us at the door.
"You can't come in here, Auntie Charlotte," was the command that greeted
me at the very doorstep as young Charlotte faced me with short skirts
outspread determinedly, while behind her Mikey of the red head, Jimmy,
Sue, Maudie, the sister of Mikey, and other known and unknown juveniles,
presented a solid support of defiance. "We are doing some Lord's work
and we don't need you, but we'll let the nice little boy and the lovely
dog come in. We do need them. Come in, little boy!" and as she spoke
Charlotte held out a welcoming hand to the Stray, who faltered and
looked up into my face to see if he might accept the invitation which
evidently swayed him by its commanding tone.
"Couldn't I come in for just a second?" I asked with all due meekness.
"Not for even a second," answered Charlotte sternly. "You'd interrupt
Minister. You go away and leave the boy."
"Then how'll I get him back to his mother?" I pleaded, but as I spoke I
allowed the little fingers to slip from mine and I pushed the waif
towards Charlotte with the greatest confidence, which evidently
communicated itself to both him and the dog, for they left me
simultaneously and went towards the enemy's camp.
"Shoo, it's only little Stray Ensley. I'll take him home when I go," the
redoubtable Mikey assured me with a wide smile at the kiddie, which was
answered with a rapture of hero worship.
"What's his name?" demanded Charlotte as if seeking a passport.
"Just Stray," answered Mikey in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "He
ain't got no father, dead or alive."
"Then Stray is just short for stranger, because everybody else has
fathers, dead, alive or drunk," said Charlotte, in the same
matter-of-fact tone that Mikey had used, and he in no way seemed to feel
her remark personally derogatory to his paternal parent.
"Well, let's take him to Minister to be learned his verses of the song
and dance. Come on, for we are keeping him and the Lord waiting," said
Charlotte as she marshaled them all into the Little House and calmly
shut the door in my face and left me standing alone in the middle of the
walk. Even the yellow pup had squeezed into the door before it was shut
and only I was left in the outer darkness away from the grand opera
voice that I could hear booming with a juvenile chorus out at the back
of the cottage where I knew the rehearsal was being held under the twin
of the old apple tree from which the front roof tree over my head was
eternally separated by the Little House. With actual sadness and a queer
feeling of shut-outness I did the only thing left to me and sauntered
slowly on up the hill under the tall old elm trees that the Town had
planted a century ago to keep the heat from the heads of the like of me
while the toilers down in the Settlement had no such proof of ancestral
care.
"They are producing in the sweat of their brows while I--saunter," I
said to myself, as I stretched out my bare arm from which the white silk
sleeve had been rolled away after the prevailing mode of the sport for
which it was designed, and flexed and regarded the bunch of muscles that
knotted themselves on my smooth, tanned forearm.
"It _could_ swing a wash tub as well as the best racquet this side of
the Meadowbrook Club," I added aloud with a queer kind of primitive
shame mixed with my physical pride in myself.
"Or juggle a heavy baby and a kitchen stove into a square meal?" added a
laughing voice as the Jaguar padded up beside my shoulder on his tennis
shoes before I had heard him at all, so deep was my absorption in my own
judgment and absolution of myself.
"Still I was put out just a few minutes ago by a woman half my size," I
laughed in return as the long strides shortened into harmony with mine.
"I heard about it and ran after you to ask you to come back or, if you
refused, to let me go with you wherever you are going. I left Mother
Spurlock in charge of the newly installed Epworth Leaguers. Charlotte
disapproved of my coming and said so," and we both laughed in delight
over my strenuous name-daughter.
"Are you asking me _quo vadis?_" I demanded, with a look at him out of a
corner of my eye that got in return a glint of the jewels under dull
gold that always infuriated as well as interested me.
"'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge--'"
the parson suddenly chanted under his breath, using the old Gregorian
measure for the few words of the oldest song of impersonal love extant.
"Thank you for bringing Martha's boy up to the Little House. Jacob has
refused both Mother Spurlock and me to let him come."
"I didn't bring him. He and the pup brought me and then he was stolen
from me into the fold, as it were," I answered as I paused at the front
gate of the Poplars, which had a white clematis drifting over its tall
stone pillars and clutching at the straight iron bars as if trying to
keep me out of even my own fold. "Will you come in with me?" I asked
with a laugh, as I flung the old gate wide in spite of the tendril
fingers.
The parson laughed, whistled a strain of his "whither thou goest" chant
to me and followed me across the lawn to the foot of the poplars. On the
bench surrounding their trunks I found my basket with the fine seam I
was sewing for the Suckling in it and I dropped upon the thick mat of
grass on the very edge of the shadow from the silver branches above and
began to hunt for my thimble, leaving the Jaguar standing over me.
"Stop looking down on me and come tell me what particular religious
incantations were going on from which Charlotte so violently barred me,"
I laughed up at him, as I threw a flat grass cushion a little way from
my skirts, upon which he immediately sank and seemed to curl up at my
feet.
"I had the whole bunch rehearsing the children's part in the dedication
services of our chapel. Do you know that small Sue can really sing? The
rest stagger well but Susan sings. It is delicious. It is going to be
hard on you women folks to hear her chant her responses to me on that
great day." And as he spoke he looked beyond me over to his beautiful
shimmering gray chapel and there was not a glint in his eyes that showed
me he was trying to sound out my intentions about attendance on that
ceremony.
"Please, Mr. Goodloe, don't be serious in saying as you did last night
that you are not going to dedicate your chapel until I--I help you," in
all gentleness I said.
"I can't do it until you come," he answered me with just as great
gentleness and he turned his head away from me, but not before I saw a
glow in his eyes that made me suddenly strong and calm and curiously
humble.
"I--I could go as your guest," I faltered, offering a compromise which I
felt sure would not be accepted.
"I can't, I just can't dedicate the chapel until you echo my ceremony in
your heart," he answered me with his eyes still turned away from me and
looking with the greatest sadness out on Paradise Ridge.
"Why?" I asked with a simple directness that the situation demanded and
with no trace of the coquetry the question might have held.
"Shall I tell you all of the reason with no reservations?" the parson
asked, as he swung around on his mat and faced me, with his eyes looking
straight into mine.
"All," I answered.
"In every community there is one soul which holds the real leadership of
the souls of those surrounding them. God seems to appoint captains of
the regiments of His people to lead them along the way, Christ the
captain of all the hosts. Spiritually you are more evolved than any
other person in this town and with you doubting I cannot get the others
to see. You are so gorgeous and so brilliant that you blind them all.
They have always followed your lead--up or down. There are a few like
Mother Spurlock who have gained their Christ knowledge through
suffering, but they are not of the calibre to help others to gain
theirs. With your hand in mine I can make this whole community see and
know; separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do
nothing. You simply short-circuit my force and I am helpless without
you." He spoke very simply and directly down into my heart.
"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual
decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of
having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.
"The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but
the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are
responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I
represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for
you to make them see."
"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it
hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force
that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or
understand.
"They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might
have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into
the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had
swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple
conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the
arraignment.
"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of
my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one
reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the
religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race
into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion,
with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful
eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it
will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes
me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and
work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the
robust kind of immortality that alone seems worth while to me. Your Son
of Man walked from town to town in the hot sun and taught the people,
healed the multitude and yet had not where to lay his head to rest. His
church has lost His vigor. Your whole scheme hasn't enough action in it.
Your organization is too easy and too full of surface observances. It is
conducted with slipshod business methods and there is no force in it to
help me. If I join any church ever it will have to be a new one that can
compare with modern business in its efficiency. Your scheme of
redemption to immortality through an efficient mediation is perfectly
sound, but you don't back it up."
"The Church of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost
two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you
say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a
new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you
recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is
from the inside, not the outside. These people _must_ get their vision
_now_. Will you come and help me?" As he spoke he looked again down into
the depths from which I had been trying to translate some of the
hieroglyphics to him and he held out his long powerful hand to me in an
entreaty that shook my very foundations.
"You make me want to do as you ask me, but I do not see what it is we
should strive for, what it is from which we should be saved. There are
tears in my eyes but do you want my emotions without my reason?" And I
asked my question with a quiver almost of timidity.
"No, both!" he answered me, as he dropped his hand and arm from their
attitude of entreaty, shook his head sadly and again turned from me and
looked out on the dim distance of Old Harpeth. Suddenly I had the
feeling of having a great door shut in my face, and a terror of being
left all alone in the world came over me. Without knowing what I did I
stretched out my hand and caught at his arm and moved closer to him,
suddenly cold in the sunshine.
"I'm frightened," I whispered, as I bowed my head on my hand, clutching
his arm.
"Poor little wandering, hunting lamb," he crooned to me as he laid a
tender hand on my bowed head. "Keep watch over her, Lord Jesus," he
prayed under his breath and then as suddenly as I had felt the fear I
found again my courage.
"That cry was woman to man, not child to priest. It is only honest to
tell you so," I said, as I suddenly raised my head and threw another
gauntlet that I knew would bring on another battle. "I hate myself for
it."
"I wanted to win you for God and have you come to me then as a gift
from Him, but it may have to be the other way round," was the answer he
struck out at me with, and as he spoke he clasped my hand in his with a
force that seemed to create the great silent, untenanted space around us
as it had that night he had sung the Tristan music to me in the
moonlight. "I'm going to save you and--and _have_ you."
"No, no!" I cried, as I tried to draw my hand away, found it held beyond
my effort and then suddenly released.
"I knew the first minute I looked into your eyes, but I'll wait," he
said softly into the silence around us.
"No, no, don't even think such a thing," I exclaimed, and I wanted to
rise to my feet and break the spell of that space around us, but I could
only cower closer to him on the grass beneath the rustling silver
leaves. "I'm going to marry Nickols in a few months and then I'm going
out of this world of yours and you can lead them all to--to safety."
"No, it's in God's hands. He'll keep you and give you to me when the
time comes. It all may mean suffering to us both, probably does, but I
accept the cup--in His good time," and as he spoke he looked again into
my eyes with a lonely sadness that I could not endure.
"I want to get away from you," I gasped and I felt that I must get out
of the aloneness with him.
"We are in God's hands," he said again, as his warm hands found and held
mine. "We must wait on Him with--" Then suddenly the world closed in on
us again and we were on our feet--apart.