On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
“Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.”
The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron
was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the
little morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but
returned after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to
have his hat brushed afresh by her.
“Wonders will never cease,” she said jocosely. “With you getting
particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
that can't happen now!”
“One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,” he made answer.
“Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will
deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,” he added,
watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, “I'm
thinking some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.”
“Why don't you, then?” she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.
“You are quite sure, now, pet,” he made haste to change the subject,
“that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?”
“Oh, MY, yes!” Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
back his hair behind his ears. “She'd only be in the way now. You see,
with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
her will almost half pay for the piano.”
“But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?” he urged.
“Like a shot!” she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
started out again on his momentous mission.
“Thurston's” was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper
after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
“Thurston's,” as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers
asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an
establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different
points, and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
for more than they would cost from the jobber? The little boot and
shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in
carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household
utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical
instruments, and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the
others were at “Thurston's.”
The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this
subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances
in Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the
place--a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of
a bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long
talk with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information
that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now
showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five
thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good
ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two
survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a
nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, “Thurston's”
advertised it at eighty-nine cents--and in any case at a profit of only
two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's
patronage--to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was
destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the
community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular
literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its
stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
On the other hand, “Thurston's” dealt with nothing save the demand of
the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week.
Thus, in plain words, the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was
the same with pretty nearly every other trade.
Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that
he desired her to make no purchases whatever at “Thurston's.” He
even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of
admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes
for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse
without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten
days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
using them that coming Sunday.
On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
unhesitatingly down the main street to “Thurston's,” and entered without
any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked
by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the
sign, “Pianos on the Instalment Plan.”
He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little
at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as
if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling
admirers.
It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what
kind of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard
them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that
several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very
cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
from one to another of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought
of something.
“I would rather not decide for myself,” he said, “I know so little about
it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in--in her
judgment.” He added hurriedly, “It will involve only a day or two's
delay.”
The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano
for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the
request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for
ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the
question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was
buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's
gossip occurred to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then
all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right
somehow. Everything did.
He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over
on the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
“Thurston's” had had the effect of putting him on his honor when
they asked, “Would there be anything else?” and he had followed them
unresistingly.
He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
construction of “Abraham” should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.
Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
the precious bundle as fast as he could.
“I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,” he
explained about the piano at dinner-time. “In such a matter as this,
the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
we ought to have.”
“And while he's about it,” said Alice, “you might ask him to make a
little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
you know.”
“Yes, I know,” put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this “principal
musician” was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other.
The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
commented upon it.
“A penny for your thoughts!” she said, with cheerful briskness. This
ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.
“I am going to begin my book this afternoon,” he remarked impressively.
“There is a great deal to think about.”
It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
week, had faded away like a dream.
This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
laughed at with deserved contempt.
Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
discovered his shortcomings.
He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
at their beggarly showing.
“The Land and the Book,” in three portly volumes, was the most
pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
Beside it he laid out “Bible Lands,” “Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,”
“Bible Manners and Customs,” the “Genesis and Exodus” volume of Whedon's
Commentary, some old numbers of the “Methodist Quarterly Review,” and a
copy of “Josephus” which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.
Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.
The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.
I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
book called “Ruth the Moabitess,” written by a clergyman he knew very
well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--
It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose
and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose
as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him.
Perhaps--yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the
Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because
Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference, and affected an intolerable
superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general
satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken
down a peg.
Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that
casual allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He
recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who
the Turanians were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter
more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to
that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not
detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes
must have.
“Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah'
yet?'”
It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting
in her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
correcting twinkle in her eyes.
“I haven't got to anybody yet,” answered Theron, absently. “These big
things must be approached slowly.”
“Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,” said Alice.
The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep
abstraction. His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah,
the second wife, urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for
daring to usurp Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said
next to nothing. He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting
with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose
abruptly.
“I've got a call to make--something with reference to the book,” he
said. “I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.”
He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of
the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened.
There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered
aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as
the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.