The Sociable
Christmas time with its free days and its social gatherings was at hand;
and the Church folk must needs respond to the spirit of the season with
a "sociable." In such a meeting, the young minister is king--that is the
tradition--and on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the
heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was
quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free,
and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of
Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is
shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over
toward Belle, to consult, to whisper, to linger.
For such affairs there is a time-honoured and established programme that
was fairly well adhered to at least in the early part. They met at the
church parlours and gossiped; had a prayer, then more gossip; next
followed tea and cakes in a poisonous abundance, and more gossip. Now
the older preacher, as expected, read a chapter out of some safe story
book, amid gossip--harmless in the main, but still gossip. Next the
musical geniuses of the congregation were unchained. A perfectly
well-meaning young lady sang, "Be kind to your brother, he may not last
long," to an accompaniment of squeaks on the melodeon--and gossip. A boy
orator recited "Chatham's speech on American Independence," and received
an outburst of applause which, for a moment, overpowered the gossip.
Lou-Jane Hoomer, conspicuous for her intense hair and noisy laugh, had
been active in getting up the sociable, and now she contributed of her
talents by singing "Home, Sweet Home." About the middle of the second
period, according to custom, the preacher should recite "Barbara
Frietchie" to a whispering chorus of gossip. But Jim was brought up in a
land not reached by Barbara's fame and he made a new departure by giving
a Fenian poem--"Shamus O'Brien"--with such fervour that, for the moment,
the whisperers forgot to gossip.
Belle, as the manager of the affair, was needed everywhere and all the
time, but made no contribution to the programme. Lou-Jane scored such a
success with "Home, Sweet Home" that she was afterward surrounded by a
group of admirers, among them Jim Hartigan.
"Sure," he said, she "was liable to break up the meeting making every
one so homesick," and she replied that "it would never break up as long
as he was there to attract them all together."
John Higginbotham, with his unfailing insurance eye, pointed out that
the stove-pipe wire had sagged, bringing the pipe perilously near the
woodwork, and then gossiped about the robberies his company had
suffered. A game of rhymes was proposed. In this one person gives a word
and the next to him must at once match it with an appropriate rhyme.
This diversion met with little enthusiasm and the party lagged until
some one suggested that Jim recite. He chose a poem from Browning, "How
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." He put his very soul in
those galloping horses and wondered why the poet said so much about the
men and so little about the steeds. Dr. Jebb could not quite "see the
lesson," but the fire and power of the rendering gripped the audience.
Dr. Carson said, "Now you're doing real stuff! If you'd cut out all your
piffling goody talk and give us life like that, you'd have all the town
with you."
Lou-Jane was actually moved, and Belle glowed with pride to see her hero
really touching the nobler strings of human emotion--strings that such a
community is apt to lose sight of under cobwebs of long disuse but they
are there and ready to resound to the strong, true soul that can touch
them with music.
But what was it in the trampling horses that stirred some undiscovered
depth in his own heart? How came it that those lines drove fogbanks back
and showed another height in his soul, a high place never seen before,
even by himself? And, as those simple townfolk, stirred they knew not
how, all clamoured for another song, he felt the thrill that once was
his in the far-off stable yard of Links, when Denny Denard, brandishing
a dung-fork, chanted "The Raiding of Aymal." Now it all came back and
Hartigan shouted out the rede:
"Haakon is dead! Haakon is dead!
Haakon of the bronze-hilt sword is dead.
His son's in his stead;
Aymal, tall son of Haakon,
Swings now the bronze-hilt sword of his father.
He is gone to the High-fielden
To the high pasture to possess the twelve mares of his father;
Black and bay and yellow, as the herdsman drave them past him;
Black and yellow, their manes on the wind;
And galloped a colt by the side of each."
So he sang in a chant the saga-singer's tale of the king killing all the
colts save one that it might have the nursing of the twelve. His eye
sparkled and glowed; his colour mounted; his soul was so stirred with
the story that his spirit could fill the gaps where his memory failed.
The sense of power was on him; he told the swinging tale as though it
were in verity his own; and the hearers gazed intensely, feeling that he
sang of himself. It was no acting, but a king proclaiming himself a
king, when he told of the world won by the bronze sword bearer mounted
on the twelve-times-nourished stallion colt; and he finished with a
royal gesture and injunction:
"Ho! ye, ye seven tall sons of Aymal,
Comes there a time when face you many trails;
Hear this for wisdom now;
Twelve colts had I and all save one I slew.
The twelve-times-nourished charger grew
And round the world he bore me
And never failed; so all the world was mine
And all the world I ruled.
Ho, children of the bronze-hilt sword,
Take this for guiding creed:
Pick out your one great steed
And slay the rest and ride."
And when he smote the table with his fist the folk in that poor, simple
hall were hushed with awe. They had no words to clothe the thoughts that
came, no experience of their own to match them. There was a pauses--a
silence; a slow, uncertain sounding of applause. Carson glared half
hypnotized; then said to himself: "This is not Jim Hartigan; this is the
royal saga who sang."
What he clearly expressed, the others vaguely but deeply felt. As for
Belle, the passion and the power of it possessed her. She was deeply
moved--and puzzled, too. It was a side of Jim she had not known before.
Later, as they went home together hand on arm, she held on to him very
tightly and said softly: "Now I know that you are marked for big things
in the world."