“Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!”
Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,
clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
“Come out a minute, Theron!” she called again; and in obedience to the
summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress
expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill,
crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a
long satisfied breath.
“What a beautiful morning!” he exclaimed. “The elms over there are full
of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.”
His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
her hand.
“Guess what he tells me!” she said. “It wasn't a mistake at all, our
getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.”
“What's the matter, boy?” asked the young minister, drawling his words
a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. “Don't the cows
give milk on Sunday, then?”
The boy was not going to be chaffed. “Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,” he said with nonchalance.
“Only it won't last long.”
“How do you mean--'won't last long'?”, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
half-defiant tone.
“The thing of it's this,” he explained. “Every new minister starts in
saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.”
The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
beside his wife. “What's that you say?” he interjected. “Don't THEY take
milk on Sundays?”
“Nope!” answered the boy.
The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
then broke into a laugh.
“Well, we'll try it, anyway,” said the preacher. “You can go on bringing
it Sundays till--till--”
“Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,” put in the boy. “All right!” and
he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
pail as he went.
The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner
of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's
face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of
its place in the straight and gently firm profile.
“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “'The Puritan's
idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'”
The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by
last year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
with what matchless charm came the song of the robins, freshly installed
in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them, in the
fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light and
the purification of spring.
Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
“What matter anyone's ideas of hell,” he said, in soft, grave tones,
“when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with?
It seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.”
The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
“Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,” she
said, “to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.”
“I suppose every little does help,” commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. “I tell you what let's
do!” he exclaimed. “Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--”
“You forget,” put in Mrs. Ware,--“those trustees are coming at eleven.”
“So they are!” assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
and, turning, went indoors.
He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
Finally he did take down “Paley's Evidences,” and seated himself in
the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
half closed themselves in sign of revery.
This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
going to dislike so much.
The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of “milkers” coming
lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
abundant and free.
It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the
world that their young minister should be visibly “taken” with her.
Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was
to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
while she was “visiting round” their countryside. In part by jocose
inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences
of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of
the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they
had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and
winter with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say
good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a
“donation”--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his
own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their
contributions in the house where he boarded.
He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
beginning.
The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home in an
adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
Methodism--came straight to the house which their new congregation
rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
their lives as they did now in these first months--over their weird
ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
shortcomings of their “donation” outfit; over the thousand and one
quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the
congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.
Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to
get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve
to open to him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of
religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land
of manhood, and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and
aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. People had prized
him for his innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his
pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average, but it
had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent funny side.
But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a quandary over the
complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all day,
and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and
half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage from
the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and sympathetic a
husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew by
swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her amusement. From
this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor of his own,
doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found himself
discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced up,
unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip
and whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a
swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being
thus enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful
of womankind.
This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm.
The Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among
the denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably
sinking state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and
then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by
marrying a black man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this.
Within a month the report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was
crowding the church building to its utmost capacity--and that, too,
with some of Tyre's best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of
jollity and juvenile high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under
these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
wherever they went.
Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
upward to dazzling heights of greatness.
At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
were eight hundred dollars in debt.
The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
dollars in debt meant.
It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.
The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as “poor pay,” they
dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
grew rare.
By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of
the congregation, the trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.
Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was
relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the
circumstances, and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third
year, to pay his debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to
its dregs.
The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year,
in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for.
An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom
Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of
the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and
electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their
old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the
suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched
them, and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of
interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he
proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves
perfectly easy about it, and never return it at all unless they could
spare it sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted to
do so. As this amazing windfall finally took shape, it enabled the Wares
to live respectably through the year, and to leave Tyre with something
over one hundred dollars in hand.
It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set
to work now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its
superstructure. He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked
daily with Alice about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who
had so darkened his life and crushed the first happiness out of his
home, he withheld himself from any oratorical display which could afford
them gratification. He put aside, as well; the thought of attracting
once more the non-Methodists of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had
spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet. He practised effects now
by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. An
ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous, possessed him.
He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest,
upon that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind
him, and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity
had been given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his
quality. He had risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached
a great sermon in a manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He
had made his most powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved
success--and had been banished instead to Octavius!
The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had
taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual
gain. The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of
prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon
him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been
so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded
his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth
from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased
beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. He smiled to remember
that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him
whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for
him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
chance offered. It amazed him now to recall that he had taken this
hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books
law-students began upon.
Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant
and imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no
fibre of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his
eyes, to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.
The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his
meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the
kitchen.
“You'll have to go to the door, Theron!” she warned him, in a loud,
swift whisper. “I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.”
“All right,” he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
feet. “I'll go.”
“And don't forget,” she added strenuously; “I believe in Levi Gorringe!
I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
down a solitary cent on that sidewalk.”
“All right,” said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
door.