In the pause before the service began, Margaret’s eyes drifted
aimlessly about the dim body of the small but pretentious seaside
chapel. It held the same incongruous gathering so often to be seen
at coast resorts, a mingling of ultra-fashionable summer visitors,
and homely and uncomfortably well-dressed village folk. There was
Mrs. Atherton, whose bounty had elevated the parish from a threadbare
existence, with simple service and plain altar furniture, to a devout
adherence to High Church methods, with candles and rich vestments, and
a never-failing welcome for stylish visiting clergymen from the city;
there was the wife of the proprietor of the Beach Hotel, whose costumes
were always faithful second editions of Mrs. Atherton’s; there were
the rector’s two daughters and the usual sprinkling of familiar faces
that she had passed on the drive or the beach walk.
The lawn outside was shimmering with the heat that had followed an
over-night shower, and the pewed calm oppressed her. Her limbs were
nettled with teasing pricks of restlessness.
The open windows let in a heavy, drenched rose-odor, tinged with a
distant salt smell of sea. The air was weighted with it--it was the
same mingled odor that had filled her nostrils when she stood with
Daunt on the shore, with the wet wind in their faces and fluttering
petals of the crushed roses she had worn staining the dun sand and
crisp, strown seaweed like great drops of blood. It overpowered her
senses. She breathed it deeply, feeling a delicious intoxication, and
its suggested memory ran through her veins like an ethereal ichor,
tingling to her finger ends.
Her eyes, heavy and swimming, were full of the iridescent colors of the
stained-glass window opposite, with the dull yellow aureole about the
head of the central figure. The hues wove and blended in a background
of subdued harmony, lending life and seeming movement to the features.
“A man somewhat tall and comely, his hair the color of a ripe chestnut,
curling and waving.” The description recurred to her, not as though
written to the Roman Senate by Lentulus, Governor of Judea, but as if
printed in bossed letters about the rim of the picture. “In the middle
of his head a seam parteth it, after the manner of the Nazarites. His
forehead is plain and very delicate, his face without spot or wrinkle,
beautified with a lovely red; his nose and mouth of charming symmetry.
His look is very innocent and mature; his eyes gray, clear and quick.
His body is straight and well proportioned, his hands and arms most
delectable to behold.”
“His eyes gray, clear and quick.” From the window they followed
her--the eyes that had looked into hers on the beach, full of longing
light--the eyes that had charmed her and had seemed to draw up her soul
to look back at them.
She dragged her gaze away with a quick shudder, to a realization of
her surroundings. A paining recoil seized her at the temerity of her
thought, and her imaginings shrank within themselves. A vivid shame
bathed her soul. She felt half stifled.
The dulled and droning intonation of the reader came to her as
something banal and shop-worn. He was large and heavy-voiced.
His hair was sandy and thin, and his skin was of that peculiar
pallor and pursiness bred of lack of exercise and a full diet. It
reminded her irresistibly of pink plush. He had a double chin, and
he intoned with eyes cast down, and his large hands clasped before
him, after the fashion affected by the higher church. His monotonous
and nasal utterance glossed the periods with unctuous and educated
mispronunciation. The congregation was punctuated with nodding heads.
To Margaret, listening dully, there seemed to be an inexpressible
incongruity between the man and the office, between the face and
the robes, which should have lent a spirituality. She looked about
her furtively. Surely, surely she must see that thought reflected
from other faces; but her range of vision took in only countenances
overflowing with conscious Sabbath rectitude, heads nodding with
rhythmic sleepiness and eyes shining with churchly complacency.
Suddenly through the rolling periods the meaning struck through to
Margaret, and her wandering mind was instantly arrested.
“_For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are of the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be
carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and
peace._”
She heard the words with painful eagerness. Her mind seemed suddenly as
acute, as quick to record impressions as though she had just awakened
from a long sleep.
A woman in a pew to Margaret’s right dropped her prayer-book with a
smart crash onto the wooden floor. The smooth brows drew together
sharply and his voice, pauseless, took on a note of asperity, of
irritated displeasure. Reading was a specialty of his, and to be
interrupted spoiled the general effect and displeased him.
“_Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be._”
“_So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God._”
An old man, bent and deaf, sat close up under the reader’s desk. He
leaned forward with elbow on knee and one open palm behind a hairy
ear. His eyes were raised, and his look was rapt. Margaret could see
his side-face from where she sat. He saw only the sanctified figure of
the priest and heard no human monotone, but the voice of God, speaking
through the lips of His anointed. He was a real worshipper. For her
the spiritual was swallowed up. That one bodily image stood before her
inner self. It had blotted out her diviner view; it had even thrust
itself behind the flowing robes and sandaled feet and had dared to
usurp the place of the eternal symbol of human spirituality!
She locked her hands about her prayer-book, pinching them between her
knees. The woman directly in front of her wore a hot, figured silk
and a drab mull boa that looked dreadfully like bunched caterpillars.
The riotous rose-odor made her faint and sick, and she had a horrible
feeling that the carved heads of the jutting stone work were laughing
evilly at her.
A strangling terror of herself seized her--a terror of this new and
hideous darkness that had descended upon her spirit--a terror of
this overmastering impulse which threatened her soul. It was part of
the dominance of the flesh that its senses should be opened only to
itself, only to the earthy and the lower. This penalty was already upon
her; of all in that congregation, she, only she, must see the bestial
lurking everywhere, even in God’s house, and in the vestments of His
minister.
“_So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God._”
It was part of their punishment that they could no longer please
themselves. Out from every shape of nature and art, from the shadows
of grove and the sunshine of open plain, from the crowded street and
from the silent church must start forever this spectre, this unsightly
comrade of fleshly imagination. This was what it meant to be carnally
minded. Margaret’s soul was weak and dizzy with pain.
* * * * *
For in some such way will every woman cry. The very purity of her
soul will rise to bar out the love that is of earth, earthy--the
beautiful human love so young, so tender-eyed and warm-fingered, and
with the lovely earth-light that is about its brows. And then, when
the soul grows weary of the pallid thoughts, when the chill of the
shadows strikes through--when the walls grow cold and the soul lifts
iron bar and chain to let in the human sunshine, then the pale images
that throng the house gather and are frightened at the very joy of the
sun, and they try to shut the door again against the shining, and sit
sorrowful in a trembling dark.
The cry of the woman is, “Give me soul! Give me spirituality!” Oh,
loved hand! Oh, eyes! Oh, kissed lips and fondled hair! The woman’s
love gives to each of you a soul. You will shine for her in her
nethermost heaven.
“Tell me not of my love,” she cries, “that it is corporeal and must
fade! Tell me only that it is of the spirit, a fond and heavenly light,
such as never was in earthly sunrise or in evening star! A soul, but
not a body! An essence, but no substance! It is too lovely to be of
earth, too sweet to be only of this failing human frame. Its speech is
the speech of angels, and its eyes are like the cherubim. Tell me not
that it is not all of the soul!” So, until she dreams the last dream of
love in earth-gardens, until she closes her soul’s eyes to dream of the
humanity of love, the dignity of human passion, until then she perfumes
the lily and paints the rose.
When the temperament that loves much and is oversensitive opens the
gates of its sense to human passion, if its spiritual side recoils,
it recoils with self-renunciation and with tears. The pain of such
renunciation makes woman’s soul weak. Its self-probings and the whips
of its conscience, made a very inquisitor, form for her a present
horror. She cries out for the old dream, the old ideal, the old faith!
It is the tears she sheds for this which drop upon the wall of the
world’s convention and temper it to steel.
“_Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live
after the flesh. For, if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but
if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall
live._”
The droning voice of the reader hummed in Margaret’s ears. She came
to herself again, almost with a start, dimly conscious that the woman
in crêpe in the next pew was watching her narrowly. She must sit out
the service. She fell to studying the pattern of the embroidery on the
altar cloths. It was in curiously woven arabesques, grouped about the
monogram of Christ. Anything to withdraw her eyes from the face of the
reader, for which she was beginning to feel a growing and unreasoning
repulsion.
Throughout the remainder of the sermon she kept her gaze upon her open
Bible, turning up mechanically all the cross references to the word
“flesh.” She followed the contradistinction of flesh and spirit through
the New Testament. It was the _flesh_ lusting against the _spirit_, and
the _spirit_ against the _flesh_, contrary the one to the other. The
lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life--these
all of the world.
The voice of the priest ran along in pauseless flow. It seemed to
Margaret that he was repeating, with infinite variations, the same
words over and over: “So they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”
As she rose for the final benediction, her knees felt weak and she
trembled violently. She remembered what happened afterward only
confusedly. The next thing she really knew was the sense of a moist
apostolic palm pressed against her forehead as she half sat on the
stone bench to the right of the entrance, and a smooth, rounded voice
saying:
“Mrs. Atherton! Mrs. Starr! will you come back here a moment? This dear
young woman appears to be overcome with the heat!”