The real crises of life are those that the stories leave untold.
It is not the sudden blow, but the learning how to bear the bruise
afterwards, that constitutes experience; not the delirium of fever,
but the weariness of convalescence. What does one do the Monday
morning after the funeral? How does one meet the grocery bills when
the property is gone? How does a man act when his reputation is
ruined by the span of an afternoon? Fiction does not tell us, but
fact omits nothing of the grim details; spares not the least stroke
of that black perplexity which, next to the insecurity of life, is
the hardest thing about it.
You men of affairs, give a moment’s manly sympathy to the position
of a young fellow like yourselves, halting just over the line
between education and a life’s work, trained for a calling which
the worldliest soul among you respects as nobler and higher than
your own, tripped at the outset by one of its lower and more
ignoble accidents; a man who will not lie to God or his own soul,
who has scorned the consequences of being simply true, but must
bear them for all that, like other men. For the holiest dedications
in this world suffer the taint thereof; and it is at once the
saddest and the healthiest thing about the work of a man of God
that it is subject to market laws, to fashion, to prejudice, to
envy, and to poor judgment, like other work.
It seems a little thing to write about, but at the time it was not
the least aspect of the great crisis into which Emanuel Bayard
had arrived, that, when he came out into the strong, salt breeze
of Windover that afternoon, it suddenly occurred to the heretic
minister that he had nowhere to spend the night. Alas for the
bright and solemn festival in which his should have been the
crowned hero’s part! He heard the excited women of the parish
asking each other:--
“Who is going to eat up that collation?”
“What is ever going to become of all that one-two-three-four cake?”
“Feed those old ministers _now_? Not a sandwich! Let ’em go home
where they belong. If we’re going to have no minister, they shall
have no supper! We’ll settle him in spite of ’em!”
Thus the Ladies’ Aid Association, with flushed cheeks and shrill
voices. But the deacons and the pillars of the disturbed church
collected in serious groups, and discussed the catastrophe with the
dignity of the voting and governing sex.
Sick at heart, and longing to escape from the whole miserable
scene, Bayard walked down the street alone. His steps bent blindly
to the station. When he had bought his ticket to Boston, it came to
him for the first time to ask himself where he was going. Home?
What home? Whose? Hermon Worcester’s? That glance at his uncle’s
rigid face which he had allowed himself back there in the church
recurred to him. The incensed and disappointed man had suffered
his smitten boy to go forth from that furnace without a sign of
sympathy. He had given Emanuel one look: the pupils of his eyes
were dark and dilated with indignation of the kind that a gentleman
does not trust himself to express.
“I cannot go home,” said Emanuel suddenly, half aloud. “I forgot
that. I shall not be wanted.”
He put his ticket in his wallet and turned away. Some people were
hurrying into the station, and he strode to a side door to escape
them. The handsome knob of an Oriental grapestick touched his arm.
The white face of the Professor of Theology looked sternly into his.
“Suppose you come out to Cesarea with me to-night? We can
talk this unfortunate affair over quietly, and--I am sure you
misapprehend the real drift of some of these doctrines that disturb
you. I believe I could set you right, and possibly--another
examination--before a different Council”--
Bayard’s head swam for an instant. A girl in a muslin dress stood
at the meeting of the arms of the great cross in the Seminary lawn.
It was moonlight, and it was June, and this dreadful thing had
never happened. He was in that state when a woman’s sympathy is
the only one delicate enough for a man’s bruised nature to bear. He
quivered at the thought of being touched by anything harsher than
the compassionate approval, the indignant sorrow, the intelligent
heart--
“No,” he said, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation. “Thank you,
Professor--I can’t do it. I should only disappoint you. I am almost
too tired to go all over the ground again. Good-by, Professor.”
He held out his hand timidly. The thin, high-veined hand of the
Professor shook as he responded to the grasp.
“I didn’t know,” he said more gently, “but you would be more
comfortable. Your uncle”--the Professor hesitated.
“Thank you,” said the young man again. “That was thoughtful in you.
If your theology were half as tender as your heart, Professor!”
added the poor fellow, trying to smile with the old audacity of
Professor Carruth’s pet student. But he shook his head, and pushed
out of the door into the street.
There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest
of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination.
It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there
so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his
affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought
of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pang that he
had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not
asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not
occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no
opportunity.
He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek
shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a
plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized
her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been
comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly
to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known
trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear.
“Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the
trouble to come to say good-by to _me_?”
“You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick
abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if
you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr.
Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl,
we couldn’t _bear_ to see you going off so! We’d take it for an
honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!”
“I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain
words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs.
Granite, “He had not where,” they ran,--“He had not where to lay
his head.”
The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of
the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night.
Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for
the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the
new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a
Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases
are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s
anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the
high school, called it meningitis.
But here again fact dealt with Emanuel Bayard as no respectable
fiction could be expected to. An interesting delirium or deadly
fever might have changed the whole course of his life. Had he
fallen then and there a martyr to his fate, the sympathy of the
town, the interest of the denomination, the affection of his lost
parish, the penitent anxiety of Mr. Hermon Worcester, would--how
easily!--have marked out his future for him in flower-beds that
seemed forsooth to be the vineyard of the Lord; and he might have
done a deal of pleasant hoeing and trimming there, like other men,
till harvest time. But floriculture is small pastime for the sinew
elected to cut thickets and to blaze forests; and he arose to tear
and bleed at his self-chosen brambles as God decreed.
He had not meningitis; he suffered no mortal malady; he did but
lie helpless for two weeks under one of those serious nervous
collapses which seem ignominy to a young man. During these critical
days his people elect and lost had plenty of time to quarrel over
him, or to send him currant jelly. And the wife of the treasurer
was reported to have said that he ought to be in her house. But
Mrs. Granite and Jane nursed him adoringly, and as soon as the
doctor permitted, Jane brought the patient his mail. It contained a
curt but civil letter from his uncle, regretting to learn that he
had been indisposed, and requesting an interview.
As soon as he was able to travel, Emanuel went to Boston.
An unexpected incident which happened on the morning that he left
Windover gave back something of the natural fire to his eyes, and
he looked less ill than Mr. Worcester had expected, when they met
in the library on Beacon Street.
This circumstance checked the slightly rising tide of sympathy in
his uncle’s feeling; and it was with scarcely more than civility
that the elder man opened the conversation.
“I wish to discuss this situation with you, Emanuel, once for all.
You have for some time avoided the issue between us which is bound
to come.”
“I have avoided nothing,” interrupted Emanuel proudly.
“It is the same thing. You have never met me halfway. The time has
come when we must have it out. You know, of course, perfectly well
what a blow this thing has been to me--the mortification--the....
After all I have done for you”--
The cold, clear-cut features of Hermon Worcester’s face became
suffused; he put his hand against his heart, and gasped. For the
first time it occurred to the young man that the elder, too, had
suffered; with a quick exclamation of sympathy or anxiety, he
turned to reply, but Mr. Worcester got to his feet, and began to
pace the library hotly.
“What do you propose to do?” he cried. “Seven years of
higher education, and--how many trips to Europe? And all
the--that--feeling a man has for a child he has brought up--wasted,
worse than wasted! What do you propose to do? Thirty years old, and
a failure at the start! A disgrace to the faith of your fathers! A
blot on an old religious name! Come, now! what next?... I suppose
I could find you a place to sweep a store,” added Hermon Worcester
bitingly.
Emanuel had flushed darkly, and then his swift pallor came on.
“Uncle,” he said distinctly, “I think this interview we have been
preparing for so long may as well be dispensed with. It seems to me
quite useless. I can only grieve you, sir; and you cannot comfort
me.”
“Comfort!” sneered the other, with his least agreeable expression;
for Hermon Worcester had many, in frequent use.
“Well,” said Emanuel, “yes. There are times when even a heretic may
need something of that sort. But I was about to say that I think it
idle for us to talk. My plans are now quite formed.”
“Indeed, sir!” said Mr. Worcester, stopping short.
“I have been invited by a minority of my people to start a new work
in Windover, of which they propose that I shall become the leader.”
“Not the pastor!” observed Mr. Worcester.
“Yes, the pastor,--that was the word. It will be a work quite
independent of the old church.”
“And of the old faith, eh?”
“Of the old traditions, some of them,” replied Emanuel gently; “not
of the old truth, I hope. I cannot hope for your sympathy in this
step. I have decided to take it. It strikes me, Uncle, that we had
better not discuss the matter.”
“His mother before him!” cried Hermon Worcester, violently striding
up and down the velvet carpet of the library, “I went through it
with his mother before him,--this abhorrent indifference to the
demands of birth and training, this scandal, this withdrawal from
the world, this publicity given to family differences, the whole
miserable business! She for love, and you for--I suppose you call
it religion! I can’t go through it again, and I won’t! It is asking
too much of me!”
“I ask nothing of you, Uncle,” said the young man, rising.
“You’ll end in infidelity, sir. You will be an agnostic in a year’s
time. You’ll be preaching positivism! I will have nothing to do
with it! I warned you before, Manuel,--back there in Cesarea. I
am forced to repeat myself. Under the circumstances, you will not
expect a dollar from me. I would as soon leave my property to
an atheist club as to you, and your second probations, and your
uninspired Bibles!”
Mr. Worcester snapped in the private drawer of his desk, and locked
it with unnecessary force and symbolism.
“I don’t forbid you my house, mind. I sha’n’t turn you into the
street. You’ll starve into your senses fast enough on any salary
that the rabble down in that fishing-town can raise for you. When
you do--come back to me. Keep your latch-key in your pocket. You
will want to use it some day.”
“I must run my chances, sir,” said Bayard in a voice so low that
it was scarcely audible. Instinctively he drew his latch-key from
his pocket and held it out; but Mr. Hermon Worcester did not deign
to notice it. “I have never thought about your money, Uncle. I’m
not that kind of fellow, exactly. You have always been good to me,
Uncle Hermon!” He choked, and held out his hand to say good-by.
“But look here--see here--you’ll stay to dinner? You’ll go up to
your room, Manuel?” stammered the elder man. “I explicitly told
you that I didn’t drive you out of your home. I don’t desire any
scene--any unnecessary scandal. I wish you to understand that you
are not turned into the street.”
“I have promised to be in Windover this evening, to settle this
matter,” replied Bayard. He looked over his uncle’s head, through
the old, purple, Beacon Street glass, upon the waters of Charles
River; then softly closed the library door, looked for a moment
about the dark, familiar hall, took his hat from the peg on the
carved mahogany tree where he had hung his cap when he was a little
boy in Latin School, and went down the long, stone steps.
It occurred to him to go back and tell Partredge and Nancy to look
after his uncle carefully, but he remembered that he had no reason
to give them for his indefinite absence, bethought himself of his
uncle’s horror of airing family affairs before servants, and so
went on.
He walked up the street slowly, for he was weak yet. At the door of
an old friend, he was tempted to pause and rest, but collected his
senses, and struggled on.
He turned to look for a cab; then remembered that he had no longer
fifty cents to waste upon so mere a luxury as the economy of
physical strength. It was his first lesson in poverty,--that a
sick man must walk, because he could not afford to ride. Besides,
it proved to be a private carriage that he had seen. The elderly
coachman, evidently a family retainer, had just shut the door and
clambered to the box; he was waiting to tuck the green cloth robe
deliberately about his elegant legs, when a low exclamation from
the coach window caused Bayard to look back.
Helen Carruth had opened the door, and stood, irresolute, with one
foot upon the step, as if half her mind were in, and half were out
the carriage. She was richly dressed in purple cloth, and had that
fashionable air which he could not conceive of her as dispensing
with if she were a missionary in Tahiti. She looked vivid, vital,
warm, and somehow, gorgeous to him.
“_You?_” she cried joyously; then seemed to recall herself, and
stepped back.
He went up to her at once.
“I have been staying with Clara Rollins for a week,” she hastened
to say. “I am just going home. It’s her afternoon at the Portuguese
Mission, so she could not see me off. I did not know you were in
town, Mr. Bayard.”
“I am not,” said Bayard, smiling wanly. “I am on my way to
Windover; I am late to my train now.”
“Why, jump in!” said the young lady heartily. “We are going the
same way; and I’m sure Mrs. Rollins would be delighted to have
you. _She_’s at the Woman’s Branch.”
“The Woman’s who?” asked Bayard, laughing for the first time for
many days. He had hesitated for a moment; then stepped into the
carriage, and shut the door.
“I presume you’ve been in this vehicle before?” began Miss Carruth.
He nodded, smiling still.
“At intervals, as far back as I can remember. Miss Clara and I used
to go to the same dancing-school.”
“Mrs. Rollins was saying only yesterday what an age it was since
they had seen you--Mr. Bayard!” she broke off, “you look ill. You
are ill.”
He had sunk back upon the olive satin cushions. The familiar sense
of luxury and ease came upon him like a wave of mortal weakness.
For a moment he did not trust himself to look at the girl beside
him. Her beauty, her gayety, her health, her freedom from care,
something even in her personal elegance overcame him. She seemed to
whirl before his eyes, the laughing figure of a happy Fortune, the
dainty symbol of the life that he had left and lost. The deliberate
coachman was now driving rapidly, and they were well on their way
over Beacon Hill. She gave Bayard one of her long, steady looks.
Something of timidity stole over her vivacious face.
“Mr. Bayard,” she said in a changed tone, “I have heard all about
it from my father. I wanted to tell you, but I had no way. I am
glad to have a chance to say--I am sorry for you with all my heart.
And with all my soul, I honor you.”
“Do you?” said the disheartened man. “Then I honor myself the more.”
He turned now, and looked at her gratefully. This first drop of
human sympathy from man or woman of his own kind was inexpressibly
sweet to him. He could have raised her hand to his lips. But they
were in Mrs. Rollins’s carriage, and on Beacon Street.
“Oh!” cried Helen suddenly. “Look there! No, _there_! See that
poor, _horrible_ fellow! Why, he’s arrested! The policemen are
carrying him off.”
They had now reached Tremont Street, where the young lady had an
errand which had decided her direction to the northern stations.
But for the trifling circumstance that Helen Carruth had promised
her mother to bring out from a famous Boston grocer’s that
particular brand of olive oil which alone was worthy of a salad
for the Trustees’ lunch, the event which followed would never have
occurred. Thus may the worry of a too excellent housekeeper lay its
petty finger upon the future of a man or of an enterprise.
Bayard looked out of the carriage window, and uttered a disturbed
exclamation. Struggling in the iron grip of two policemen of
assorted sizes, the form and the tongue of Job Slip were forcibly
ornamenting Tremont Row.
“I must go. I must leave you. Excuse me. Drive on without me, Miss
Carruth. That is a friend of mine in trouble there.”
Bayard stopped the coachman with an imperious tap, and a “Hold on,
John!”
“A _what_ of yours?” cried Helen.
“It is one of my people,” explained Bayard curtly. He leaped from
the carriage, raised his hat, and ran.
“Just release this man, if you please,” he said to the police
authoritatively. “I know him; I am his minister. I’m going on the
train he meant to take. I’ll see him safely home. I’ll answer for
him.”
“Well--I don’t know about that, sir,” replied the smaller policeman
doubtfully.
But the larger one looked Bayard over, and made answer: “Oh,
bejabers, Tim, let ’im goa!”
Job, who was not too far gone to recognize his preserver, now threw
his arms affectionately around Bayard’s recoiling neck, and became
unendurably maudlin. In a voice audible the width of the street,
and with streaming tears and loathsome blessings, he identified
Bayard as his dearest, best, nearest, and most intimate of friends.
A laughing crowd collected and followed, as Bayard tried to hurry
to the station, encumbered by the grip of Job’s intoxicated
affection. Now falling, now staggering up, now down again, and
ever firmly held, Job looked up drunkenly into the white, delicate
face that seemed to rise above him by a space as far as the span
between the heavens and the earth. Stupidly he was aware that
the new minister was doing something by him that was not exactly
usual. He began to talk in thick, hyphenated sentences about his
wife and home, his boy, and the trip he had taken to Georges’. He
had made, he averred, a hundred dollars (which was possible), and
had two dollars and thirty-seven cents left (which was altogether
probable). Job complained that he had been robbed in Boston of the
difference, and, weeping, besought the new minister to turn back
and report the theft to the police.
“We shall lose the train, Job,” said Bayard firmly. “We must get
home to your wife and little boy.”
“Go wherever y’ say!” cried Job pleasantly. “Go to h---- along of
you, if you say so!”
There was something so grotesque in the situation that Bayard’s
soul recoiled within him. He was not used to this kind of thing. He
was no Christ, but a plain human man, and a young man at that. His
sense of dignity was terribly hurt. Without turning his head, he
knew when the carriage drove on. He felt her eyes upon him; he knew
the moment when she took them off; Job was attempting to kiss him
at that particular crisis.
Bayard managed to reach the last platform of the last car as it
moved out of the station, and to get his charge to Windover without
an accident. He had plenty of time for reflection on the trip; but
he reflected as little as possible. With his arm linked firmly
through Job’s and his eyes closed, he became a seer of visions,
not a thinker of thoughts. Her face leaned out of the carriage
window,--faded, formed, and dimmed, and formed again. He saw the
velvet on her dress, the little dash of gold color on her purple
bonnet, the plain distinguished fashion of her yellow hair about
her forehead. He saw the astonishment leap into her brown eyes, and
that look which no sibyl could have interpreted, forming about her
merry lips. He heard the coachman say, “Shall I drive on, Miss?”
And the answer, “Yes, John, drive on. I must not miss the train.”
He opened his eyes, and saw the sullen horizon of the sea across
the marshes, and the loathsome face of Job leaning against the
casement of the car window at his side.
By the time they had reached Windover, Slip was sleepy and quite
manageable. Bayard consulted his watch. It was the hour for his
evening appointment with the officers of the new parish.
“_Again!_” he thought. He looked at the drunkard wearily. Then the
flash of inspiration fired his tired face.
“Come, Job,” he said suddenly. “Never mind our suppers. Come with
me.”
He took Job as he was,--torpid, sodden, disgusting, a creature
of the mud, a problem of the mire. The committee sat in the
anxious conclave of people embarked upon a doubtful and unpopular
enterprise. Emanuel Bayard pushed Job Slip before him into the
pretty parlors of the ex-treasurer of the old First Church. For the
treasurer had followed the come-outers. He had joined the poor and
humble people who, in fear and faith, had tremblingly organized
the experiment for which, as yet, they had no other name than that
they gave it in their prayers. Christ’s work, they called it, then.
The treasurer was their only man of property. His jaw dropped when
he saw Job.
“Gentlemen,” said the young pastor, “gentlemen, I have brought you
a sample of the material under discussion. What are we going to do
with _this_?”