It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our
hopes and our fears.
The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife
had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted
for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text
"Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to
hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going
down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse,
husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became
embarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture
lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'
wives with him into the ark."
That has been our fat neighbor's best joke ever since, though he always
says after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs.
Fontenette! Little did we think," etc. But he has never even suspected
their secret.
The entomologist was the last of our pew-full to give heed to the pulpit.
When the preacher said that because it was a year of state elections, for
which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse
touched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showed
no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that
because the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terrible
visitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous
crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel
it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little
home from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all.
But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now the
application of this great command to the individual life and character of
man and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closest
listener in the crowded throng.
The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions with
which the speaker defined personal purity and the various false
conceptions of it that pass current; abandoning the entrenched hills, so
to speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventional
rules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his least
persuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, to
surround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditional
surrender. His periods were not as embarrassing to a mixed audience as my
citations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wisely
subordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only in
minds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be specially
impressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence of
the main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attention
was provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming to
birth in him.
In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has a
rightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delight
need be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share as
senior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritual
participation it could not be clean, though church, state, and society
should jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truth
of these things; I believe them, but that is quite outside of our story.
The commonest error, he said, of those who covet spiritual cleanness is to
seek a purification of self for self-purification's sake.
The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten his
surroundings.
Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive,
condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the general
happiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, or
in but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fall
into manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, are
clean within.
Because women, he went on, are in every way more delicately made than men,
we easily take it for granted they are more spiritual. From Genesis to
Revelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense of
condemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_
of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed's
performance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you," he really said,
and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of
them--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without
reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their
nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends.
Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; and
nothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to be
so without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, no
uncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or for
righteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, invents
some eleventh commandment to call that common which God hath cleansed; to
call anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred to
spotless affections.
The Baron muttered something in German, and Fontenette shut his mouth
tight and straightened up in approbation.
At the close of the service we were not out of the pew before our escort
was introducing Senda to his friends in front and behind as busily and
elaborately as if that was what we had come for. Twice and again she cast
so anxious an eye upon her husband--from whom Mrs. Fontenette had wisely
taken shelter behind hers--that I softly said to her, "We'll take care of
him."
A care he was! All the way down the aisle, amid the peals of the organ, he
commented on the sermon aloud, mostly to himself but also to whichever of
us he could rub his glasses against. Sometimes he mistook others for us
until they stared. His face showed a piteous, weary distress, his thin
hair went twenty ways, he seemed scarcely to know where he was or how to
take his steps, and presently was saying to a strange lady crowded against
him, as though it was with her he had been talking all along:
"Undt vhy shall we haf t'at owfool troubple? No-o, t'at vould kill me! I
am not a cat to keep me alvays clean--no more as a hogk to keep me always
not clean. No, I keep me--owdside--inside--always so clean as it comes
eassy, undt I leave me so dirty as it comes eassy."