II

The priest, after leaving the theatre, walked rapidly down Broadway past

the marble church, that had been shown on the stage, and still straight

on for two miles at the same rapid gait, past the quiet churchyards of

St. Paul's and Trinity into the comparative silence of Battery Park and

across to the sea wall. There he leaned for half an hour, reliving in

memory not only the years since his seven-year old feet had crossed this

threshold of the New World, but recalling something of his still earlier

childhood in his native France. The child's song had been an excitant to

the memory in recalling those first years in Auvergne.

"There is a green hill far away

Without a city wall."

How clearly he saw that! and his peasant father and mother as laborers

on or about it, and himself, a six-year old, tending the goats on that

same green hill or minding the geese in the meadows at its foot.

All this he saw as he gazed blankly at the dark waters of the bay, saw

clearly as if visioned in crystal. But of subsequent movings and

wanderings there was a blurred reflection only, till the vision

momentarily brightened, the outlines defined themselves again as he saw

his tired drowsy self put to bed in a tiny room that was filled with the

fragrance of newly baked bread. He remembered the awakening in that

small room over a bread-filled shop; it belonged to a distant

great-uncle baker on the mother's side, a personage in the family

because in trade. He could remember the time spent in that same shop and

the brick-walled, brick-floored, brick-ovened room behind it. He

recalled having stood for hours, it might have been days, he could not

remember--for then Time was forever and its passing of no moment--before

the deep ovens with a tiny blue-eyed slip of a girl. _P'tite Truite_,

Little Trout, they called her, the great-uncle baker's one grandchild.

And the shop--he remembered that, so light and bright and sweet and

clean, with people coming and going--men and women and children--and the

crisp yard-long loaves carried away in shallow baskets on many a fine

Norman head in the old seaport of Dieppe. And always the Little Trout

was by his side, even when the great-uncle placed him in one of the huge

flat-bottomed bread baskets and drew the two up and down in front of the

shop. Then all was dim again; so dim that except for the lap and

backward sucking of the waters against the sea wall, whereon he leaned,

he had scarcely recalled a ship at the old pier of Dieppe, and the

Little Trout standing beside her grandfather on the stringer,

frantically waving her hand as the ship left her moorings and the prow

nosed the first heavy channel sea that washed against the bulkhead and

half-drowned her wailing cry:

"Jean--mon Jean!"

The rest was a blank until he landed here almost on this very spot in

old Castle Garden and, holding hard by his father's hand, was bidden to

look up at the flag flying from the pole at the top of the queer round

building--a brave sight even for his young eyes: all the red and white

and blue straining in the freshening wind with an energy of motion that

made the boy dance in sympathetic joy at his father's side--

And what next?

Again a confusion of journeyings, and afterwards quiet settlement in a

red brick box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac. He could still

hear the clang of the mill-gates, the ringing of the bells, the hum and

whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles, the clacking crash of the

ponderous shifting frames. He could still see with the inner eye the

hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun,

or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on

the black waters of the canal. There on the bank, at the entrance to the

footbridge, the boy was wont to take his stand regularly at six o'clock

of a winter's day, and wait for the hoisting of the mill-gates and the

coming of his father and mother with the throng of toilers.

So he saw himself--himself as an identity emerging at last from the

confusion of time and place and circumstance; for there followed the

public school, the joys of rivalry, the eager outrush for the boy's Ever

New, the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports, the battle royal for

the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet "Johnny Frog" by the

belligerent youth, American born, and the victorious outcome for the

"foreigner"; the Auvergne blood was up, and the temperament volcanic

like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in

hot, out-welling waters. And afterwards, at home, there were

congratulations and comfortings, plus applications of vinegar and brown

butcher's paper to the severely smitten nose of this champion of his new

Americanhood. But at school and in the street, henceforth there was due

respect and a general atmosphere of "let bygones be bygones."

Ah, but the pride of his mother in her boy's progress! the joy over the

first English-French letter that went to the great-uncle baker; the

constant toil of both parents that the savings might be sufficient to

educate their one child--that the son might have what the parents

lacked. Already the mother had begun to speak of the priesthood: she

might yet see her son Jean a priest, a bishop, and archbishop. Who could

tell? America is America, and opportunities infinite--a cardinal,

perhaps, and the gift of a red hat from the Pope, and robes and laces!

There was no end to her ambitious dreaming.

But across the day-dreams fell the shadow of hard times: the shutting

down of the mills, the father's desperate illness in a workless winter,

his death in the early spring, followed shortly by that of the worn-out

and ill-nourished mother--and for the twelve-year-old boy the

abomination of desolation, and world and life seen dimly through tears.

Dim, too, from the like cause, that strange passage across the ocean to

Dieppe--his mother's uncle having sent for him to return--a weight as of

lead in his stomach, a fiery throbbing in his young heart, a sickening

craving for some expression of human love. The boyish tendrils, although

touched in truth by spring frosts, were outreaching still for some

object upon which to fasten; yet he shrank from human touch and sympathy

on that voyage in the steerage lest in his grief and loneliness he

scream aloud.

Dieppe again, and the Little Trout with her grandfather awaiting him on

the pier; the Little Trout's arms about his neck in loving welcome, the

boy's heart full to bursting and his eyelids reddened in his supreme

effort to keep back tears. Dependent, an orphan, and destined for the

priesthood--those were his life lines for the next ten years. And the

end? Revolt, rebellion, partial crime, acquittal under the law, but

condemnation before the tribunal of his conscience and his God.

There followed the longing to expiate, to expiate in that America where

he was not known but where he belonged, where his parents' dust mingled

with the soil; to flee to the Church as to a sanctuary of refuge, to be

priest through expiation. And this he had been for years while working

among the Canadian rivermen, among the lumbermen of Maine, sharing their

lives, their toil, their joys and sorrows, the common inheritance of the

Human. For years subsequent to his Canadian mission, and after his

naturalization as an American citizen, he worked in town and city, among

high and low, rich and poor, recognizing in his catholicity of outlook

but one human plane: that which may be tested by the spirit level of

human needs. Now, at last, he was priest by conviction, by inner

consecration.

He stood erect; drew a long full breath; squared his shoulders and

looked around him. He noticed for the first time that a Staten Island

ferryboat had moved into the slip near him; that several passengers were

lingering to look at him; that a policeman was pacing behind him, his

eye alert--and he smiled to himself, for he read their thought. He could

not blame them for looking. He had fancied himself alone with the sea

and the night and his thoughts; had lost himself to his present

surroundings in the memory of those years; he had suffered again the old

agony of passion, shame, guilt, while the events of that pregnant,

preparatory period in France, etched deep with acid burnings into his

inmost consciousness, were passing during that half hour in review

before his inner vision. Small wonder he was attracting attention!

He bared his head. A new moon was sinking to the Highlands of the

Navesink. The May night was mild, the sea breeze drawing in with gentle

vigor. He looked northwards up the Hudson, and southwards to the Liberty

beacon, and eastwards to the Sound. "God bless our Land" he murmured;

then, covering his head, bowed courteously to the policeman and took his

way across the Park to the up-town elevated station.

Yes, at last he dared assert it: he was priest by consecration; soul,

heart, mind, body dedicate to the service of God through Humanity. That

service led him always in human ways. A few nights ago he saw the

poster: "The Little Patti". A child then? Thought bridged the abyss of

ocean to the Little Trout. Some rescue work for him here, possibly;

hence his presence in the theatre.