How gaily we used to chant it over Yen Sin's scow when I was a boy on
Urkey water-front, and how unfailingly it brought the minister charging
down upon us. I can see him now, just as he used to burst upon our
vision from the wharf lane, face paper-white, eyes warm with a holy
wrath, lips moving uncontrollably. And I can hear his voice trembling at
our heels as we scuttled off:
"For shame, lads! Christ died for him, lads! For shame! Shame!"
And looking back I can see him there on the wharf above the scow, hands
hanging, shoulders falling together, brooding over the unredeemed.
Minister Malden had seen "the field" in a day of his surging youth--seen
it, and no more. He had seen it from the deck of the steamer by which he
had come out, and by which he had now to return, since his seminary
bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor
clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of
the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast,
dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling
blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the
boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with
the fierce sweet name of the Cross--and now could not.
Poor young Minister Malden, he turned his face away. He gave up "the
field" for the bride, and when the bride went out in mid-ocean, he had
neither bride nor field. He drifted back to New England, somehow or
other, and found Yen Sin.
He found another bride too; Minister Malden was human. It was a mercy of
justice, folks said, when Widow Gibbs got a man like Minister Malden.
Heaven knows she had had bad enough luck with Gibbs, a sallow devil of a
whaler who never did a fine act in his life till he went down with his
vessel and all hands in the Arctic one year and left Sympathy Gibbs
sitting alone in the Pillar House on Lovett's Court, pretty, plump, and
rather well-to-do as Urkey goes.
Everybody in the island was glad enough when those two undertook to mend
each other's blasted life--everybody but Mate Snow. He had been thinking
of Sympathy Gibbs himself, they said; and they said he stood behind the
prescription screen in his drug-store far into the night, after the
betrothal was given out in Center Church, his eyes half-closed, his thin
lips bluish white, and hell-fire smouldering out of sight in him. And
they said Mate was the kind that never forget. That was what made it so
queer.
It seems to me that I must remember the time when the minister lived in
the Pillar House with Sympathy Gibbs.
Back there in the mists of youth I seem to see them walking home
together after the Sunday morning preaching, arm in arm and full of a
sedate joy; turning in between the tubbed box-trees at Lovett's Court,
loitering for a moment to gaze out over the smooth harbor and nod to the
stragglers of the congregation before they entered the big green door
flanked by the lilac panes.
Perhaps it was told me. There can be no question, though, that I
remember the night when Minister Malden came home from the Infield
Conference, a father of two days' standing. Urkey village made a
festival of that homecoming to the tiny daughter he had never seen, and
to Sympathy Gibbs, weak and waiting and radiant. Yes, I remember.
We were all at the landing, making a racket. The minister looked ill
when he came over the packet's side, followed by Mate Snow, who had gone
to Conference with him as lay delegate from Center Church. Our welcome
touched him in a strange and shocking way; he staggered and would have
fallen had it not been for Mate's quick hand. He had not a word to say
to us; he walked up the shore street between the wondering lines till he
came to the Pillar House, and there he stood for a moment, silhouetted
against the open door, a drooping, hunted figure, afraid to go in.
We saw his shadow later, moving uncertainly across the shades in the
upper chamber where Sympathy Gibbs lay with her baby, his hand lifted
once with the fingers crooked in mysterious agony. Some one started a
hymn in the street below and people took it up, bawling desperately for
comfort to their souls. Mate Snow didn't sing. He stood motionless
between the box-trees, staring up at the lighted window shades, as if
waiting. By-and-by Minister Malden came down the steps, and moving away
beside him like a drunken man, went to live in the two rooms over the
drugstore. And that was the beginning of it.
* * *
Folks said Mate Snow was not the kind to forget an injury, and yet it
was Mate who stood behind the minister through those first days of shock
and scandal, who out-faced the congregation with his stubborn, tight
lips, and who shut off the whisperings of the Dorcas Guild with the
sentence which was destined to become a sort of formula on his tongue
through the ensuing years:
"You don't know what's wrong, and neither do I; but we can all see the
man's a saint, can't we?"
"But the woman?" some still persisted.
"Sympathy Gibbs? You ought to know Sympathy Gibbs by this time."
And if there was a faint curling at the corners of his lips, they were
all too dull to wonder at it. As for me, the boy, I took the changing
phenomena of life pretty well for granted, and wasted little of my
golden time speculating about such things. But as I look back now on the
blunt end of those Urkey days, I seem to see Minister Malden growing
smaller as he comes nearer, and Mate Snow growing larger--Mate Snow
browbeating the congregation with a more and more menacing
righteousness--Minister Malden, in his protecting shadow, leaner,
grayer, his eyes burning with an ever fiercer zeal, escaping Center
Church and slipping away to redeem the Chinaman.
"There is more joy in heaven over one sinner," was his inspiration, his
justification, and, I suspect, his blessed opiate.
But it must have been hard on Yen Sin. I remember him now, a
steam-blurred silhouette, earlier than the earliest, later than the
latest, swaying over his tubs and sad-irons in the shanty on the
stranded scow by Pickett's wharf, dreaming perhaps of the populous
rivers of his birth, or of the rats he ate, or of the opium he smoked at
dead of night, or of those weird, heathen idols before which he bowed
down his shining head--familiar and inscrutable alien.
An evening comes back to me when I sat in Yen Sin's shop and waited for
my first "stand up" collar to be ironed, listening with a kind of awe to
the tide making up the flats, muffled and unfamiliar, and inhaling the
perfume compounded of steam, soap, hot linen, rats, opium, tea, idols
and what-not peculiar to Yen Sin's shop and to a thousand lone shops in
a thousand lone villages scattered across the mainland. When the
precious collar was at last in my hands, still limp and hot from its
ordeal, Yen Sin hung over me in the yellow nimbus of the lamp, smiling
at my wonder. I stared with a growing distrust at the flock of tiny
bird-scratches inked on the band.
"What," I demanded suspiciously, "is _that_?"
"Lat's Mista You," he said, nodding his head and summoning another
hundred of wrinkles to his damp, polished face.
"That ain't my name. You don't know my name," I accused him.
"Mista Yen Sin gottee name, allee light."
The thing fascinated me, like a serpent.
"Whose name is _that_, then?" I demanded, pointing to a collar on the
counter between us. The band was half-covered with the cryptic
characters, done finely and as if with the loving hand of an artist.
Yen Sin held it up before his eyes in the full glow of the lamp. His
face seemed incredibly old; not senile, like our white-beards mumbling
on the wharves, but as if it had been a long, long time in the making
and was still young. I thought he had forgotten me, he was so engrossed
in his handiwork.
"Lat colla?" he mused by-and-by. "Lat's Mista Minista, boy."
"Mister Minister _Malden_?"
And there both of us stared a little, for there was a voice at the door.
"Yes? Yes? What is it?"
Minister Malden stood with his head and shoulders bent, wary of the low
door-frame, and his eyes blinking in the new light. I am sure he did not
see me on the bench; he was looking at Yen Sin.
"How is it with you to-night, my brother?"
The Chinaman straightened up and faced him, grave, watchful.
"Fine," he said. "Mista Yen Sin fine. Mista Minista fine, yes?"
He bowed and motioned his visitor to a rocker, upholstered with a worn
piece of Axminster and a bit of yellow silk with half a dragon on it.
The ceremony, one could see, was not new. Vanishing into the further
mysteries of the rear, he brought out a bowl of tea, steaming, a small
dish of heathenish things, nuts perhaps, or preserves, deposited the
offering on the minister's pointed knees, and retired behind the counter
to watch and wait.
An amazing change came over the minister. Accustomed to seeing him
gentle, shrinking, illusively non-resisting, I scarcely knew this white
flame of a man, burning over the tea-bowl!
"You are kind to me," he cried, "and yet your heart is not touched. I
would give up my life gladly, brother, if I could only go up to the
Throne and say to Jesus, 'Behold, Lord, Thy son, Yen Sin, kneeling at
the foot of the Cross. Thou gavest me the power, Lord, and the glory is
thine!' If I could say that, brother, I--I--"
His voice trailed off, though his lips continued to move uncertainly.
His face was transfigured, his eyes filmed with dreams. He was looking
beyond Yen Sin now, and on the lost yellow millions. The tea, untasted,
smoked upward into his face, an insidious, narcotic cloud. I can think
of him now as he sat there, wresting out of his easeless years one
moment of those seminary dreams; the color of far-away, the sweet shock
of the alien and the bizarre, the enormous odds, the Game. The walls of
Yen Sin's shop were the margins of the world, and for a moment the
missionary lived.
"He would soften your heart," he murmured. "In a wondrous way. Have you
never thought, Yen Sin, 'I would like to be a good man'?"
The other spread his right hand across his breast.
"Mista Yen Sin velly humble dog. Mista Yen Sin no good. Mista Yen Sin's
head on le glound. Mista Yen Sin velly good man. Washy colla fine."
It was evidently an old point, an established score for the heathen.
"Yes, I must say, you do do your work. I've brought you that collar for
five years now, and it still seems new." The minister's face fell a
little. Yen Sin continued grave and alert.
"And Mista Matee Snow, yes? His colla allee same like new, yes?"
"Yes, I must say!" The other shook himself. "But it's not that, brother.
We're all of us wicked, Yen Sin, and unless we--"
"Mista Minista wickee?"
For a moment the minister's eyes seemed fascinated by the Chinaman's;
pain whitened his face.
"All of us," he murmured uncertainly, "are weak. The best among us sins
in a day enough to blacken eternity. And unless we believe, and have
faith in the Divine Mercy of the Father, and confess--confession--" His
voice grew stronger and into it crept the rapt note of one whose auditor
is within. "Confession! A sin confessed is no longer a sin. The word
spoken out of the broken and contrite heart makes all things right. If
one but had faith in that! If--if one had Faith!"
The life went out of his voice, the fire died in his eyes, his fingers
drooped on the tea-bowl. The Chinaman's clock was striking the half
after seven. He stared at the floor, haggard with guilt.
"Dear me, I'm late for prayer-meeting again. Snow will be looking for
me."
I slipped out behind him, glad enough of Urkey's raw air after that
close chamber of mysteries. I avoided the wharf-lane, however, more than
a little scared by this sudden new aspect of the Minister, and got
myself out to the shore street by Miah White's yard and the grocery
porch, and there I found myself face to face with Mate Snow. That
frightened me still more, for the light from Henny's Notions' window was
shining oddly in his eyes.
"You're lookin' for the minister," I stammered, ducking my head.
He stopped and stared down at me, tapping a sole on the cobbles.
"What's this? What's this?"
"He--he says you'd be lookin' for 'im, an' I seen 'im to the Chinaman's
an' he's comin' right there, honest he is, Mr. Snow."
"Oh! So? I'd be looking for him, would I?"
"Y--y--yessir."