The preacher began to speak with a quietness in almost startling
contrast to his own evident emotion, and to the excitement in the
audience room. He made no allusion to the fact that this was his
first appearance among his people since the wreck of the Clara Em,
and the all but mortal illness which had followed his personal
share in that catastrophe. Quite in his usual manner he conducted
his Sunday evening service; a simple religious talk varied by
singing, and a few words from the New Testament. Bayard never read
“chapters;” a phrase sufficed, a narrative or a maxim: sometimes
he stopped at a single verse. The moment that the fishermen’s eyes
wandered, the book closed. It was his peculiarity that he never
allowed the Bible to bore his listeners; he trained them to value
it by withholding it until they did. It was long remembered of him
among the people of the coast that he made use of public prayer
with a reserve and a power entirely unknown to the pulpits and
the vestries. The ecclesiastical “long prayer” was never heard
in Angel Alley. Bayard’s prayers were brief, and few. He prayed
audibly before his people only when he could not help it. It seemed
sometimes as if his heart broke in the act.
On this evening, no prayer had as yet passed his lips; the
stranger, with a slight frown, noticed this fact. But now, the
preacher brushed aside his notes, and, clearing the desk, crossed
his hands upon it, and leaned forward with a marked change of
manner. Suddenly, without a hint of his purpose, the young
minister’s gentle voice rose into the tones of solemn arraignment.
“I came here,” he said, “a stranger to this town and to its
customs. It has taken me all this while to learn what your virtues
and your vices are. I have dealt with you gently, preaching
comfortable truths as I have been expected to preach them. I have
worked in ignorance. I have spoken soft words. Now I speak them
no more! Your sin and your shame have entered like iron into my
soul. People of Windover! I accuse you in the name of Christ, whose
minister I am!”
The expression of affectionate reverence with which his audience
had listened to Bayard up to this moment now changed into a
surprise that resembled fear. Before he had spoken ten words
more, it became evident that the young preacher was directing the
full force of his conscience and his intelligence to a calm and
deliberate attack upon the liquor habit and the liquor traffic--one
of the last of the subjects (as it is well known) conceded to be
the business of a clergyman to meddle with in any community, and
the very last which Windover had been trained to hear herself held
to account for by her clerical teachers. At the hour when he came
nearest to the adoration of those who adore without thought, when
they saw him through the mist of romance, when the people, carried
on a wave of hero-worship, lay for the first time at his feet,
Bayard for the first time opened fire upon their favorite sin.
Shot after shot poured down from those delicate, curving lips.
Broadside followed broadside, and still the fire fell. He captured
for them the elusive statistics of the subject; he confronted
them with its appalling facts; he pelted them with incidents such
as the soul sickens to relate or to remember. He denied them
the weak consolation of condoning in themselves a moral disease
too well known to be the vice of the land, and of the times. He
scored them with rebuke under which his leading men grew pale
with alarm. Nothing could have been more unlike the conventional
temperance address, yet nothing could have been more simple, manly,
reasonable, and fearless.
“For every prayer that goes up to God from this room,” he said,
“for every hymn, for every sacred word and vow of purity, for every
longing of a man’s heart to live a noble life, there open fifty
dens of shame upon this street to blast him. We are pouring holy
oil upon a sea of mud. That is not good religion, and it is not
good sense. We must prove our right to represent the Christian
religion in Angel Alley. We must close its dens, or they ought
to close our lips. I am ready to try,” he added with his winning
simplicity, “if you are. I shall need your help and your advice,
for I am not educated in these matters as I ought to be. I was
not taught how to save drunken men in the schools where clergymen
are trained. I must learn now--we must learn together--as best
we can.... Oh, my people!” His voice passed from the tone of
loving entreaty into that of prayer; by one of those moving
transformations peculiar to himself, wherein those who heard him
scarce could tell the moment when he ceased to speak to men and
began to talk with God.
“People of the Church of the Love of Christ! Approach God, for He
is close at heart.... Thou great God! Holy, Almighty, Merciful!
Make us know how to deal with sin, in our own souls, and in the
lives of others. For the sake of Thy Son whose Name we dare to
bear. Amen.”
As the words of this outcry, this breath of the spirit, rose and
ceased, the silence in the room was something so profound that a
girl’s sigh was heard far back by the door.
The hush was stung by a long, low, sibilant sound; a single hiss
insulted that sacred stillness. Then a man purple to the brows,
rose and went out. It was old Trawl, whose saloon had been a
landmark in Angel Alley for fifty years.
The stranger, who had been more moved than it seemed he cared to
show by what he had heard and seen, passed slowly with the crowd
down the long stairs, and reached the outer air. As the salt wind
struck in his face, a hand was laid upon his shoulder. The young
minister, looking pale and tired, but enviably calm, drew the
visitor’s hand through his arm.
“I saw you, Fenton,” he said quietly, “when you first came in.
You’ll come straight to my lodgings with me.... Won’t you?” he
added wistfully, fancying that Fenton hesitated. “You can’t know
how much it will mean to me. I haven’t seen anybody--why, I haven’t
seen a fellow since I came to Windover.”
“You must lead rather an isolated life, I should think,” observed
Fenton with some embarrassment, as the two stood to hail the
electric car that ran by Mrs. Granite’s humble door.
“We’ll talk when we get there,” replied Bayard, rather shortly for
him. “The car will be full of people,” he added apologetically.
“One lives in a glass bell here. Besides, I’m a bit tired.”
He looked, indeed, exhausted, as the electric light smote his thin
face; his eyes glowed like fire fed by metal, and his breath came
short. He leaned his head back against the car window.
“You cough, I see,” said Fenton, who was not an expert in silence.
“Do I? Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it.” He said nothing more until
they had reached his lodgings. Fenton began to talk about the
wreck and the rescue. He said the usual things in the usual way,
offering, perforce, the tribute of a man to a manly deed.
Bayard nodded politely; he would not talk about it.
Jane Granite opened the door for them. She looked at the minister
with mute, dog-like misery in her young eyes.
“You look dead beat out, sir,” she said. But Ben Trawl stood
scowling in the door of the sitting-room; he had not chosen to go
to the service, nor to allow her to go without him. Jane thought it
was religious experience that made this such a disappointment to
her.
“Ah, Trawl,” said the minister heartily, “I’m glad to see you here.”
He did not say, “I am sorry you were not at church,” as Ben Trawl
pugnaciously expected.
Bayard led his guest upstairs, and shut and locked the study door.
“There!” he said faintly. “Now, George Fenton, talk! Tell me all
about it. You can’t _think_ how I am going to enjoy this! I wish I
had an easy-chair for you. Will this rocker do? If you don’t mind,
I think I’ll just lie down a minute.”
He flung himself heavily upon the old carpet-covered lounge. Fenton
drew up the wooden rocking-chair to the cylinder stove, in which a
low fire glimmered, and put his feet on top of the stove, after the
manner of Cesarea and Galilee Hall.
“Well,” he began, in his own comfortable way, “I’ve accepted the
call.”
“I supposed you would,” replied Bayard, “when I heard it was under
way. I am glad of it!” he said cordially. “The First Church is a
fine old church. You’re just the man for them. They’ll ordain you
as easily as they swallow their native chowders. You came right
over from their evening service to our place to-night? You must
have hurried.”
“I did,” said the guest, with a certain air of condescension. “I
wanted to hear you, you know--once, at least.”
“When you are settled, you can’t come, of course,” observed Bayard
quickly. “I understand that.”
“Well--you see--I shall be--you know--in a very delicate position,
when I become the pastor of that church.”
Fenton’s natural complacency forsook him for the instant, and
something like embarrassment rested upon his easy face; he showed
it by the way he handled Mrs. Granite’s poker.
“It’s 72° in this room already,” suggested Bayard, smiling. “Would
you poke that fire any more?... Oh, come, Fenton! I understand.
Don’t bother your head about me, or how I may feel. A man doesn’t
choose to be where I am, to waste life in considering his feelings;
those are the least important items in his natural history. Just
stick to your subject, man. It’s _you_ I want to hear about.”
“Well,” replied the guest, warming to the theme with natural
enthusiasm, “the call was unanimous. Perfectly so.”
“That must be delightful.”
“Why, so it is--it is, as you say, delightful. And the
salary--they’ve raised the salary to get me, Bayard. You see it had
got out that I had refused--ah--hum--several calls. And they’d been
without a man so long, I fancy they’re tired of it. Anyhow, I’m to
have three thousand dollars.”
“That is delightful too,” said Bayard cordially. He turned over on
his old lounge, coughing, and doubled the thin, cretonne pillow
under his head; he watched his classmate with a half-quizzical
smile; his eyes and brow were perfectly serene.
“I shall be ordained immediately,” continued Fenton eagerly, “and
bring my wife. They are refitting the parsonage. I went in last
night to see that the carpets and papers and all that were what
they should be. I am going to be married--Bayard, I am going to be
married next week.”
“And that is best of all,” said Bayard in a low voice.
“She is really a lovely girl,” observed Fenton, “though somewhat
limited in her experience. I’ve known her all my life--where I came
from, in the western part of the State. But I think these gentle,
country girls make the best ministers’ wives. They educate up to
the position rapidly.”
Bayard made no answer to this scintillation; a spark shot over his
soft and laughing eyes; but his lips opened only to say, after a
perceptible pause,--
“Where is Tompkinton--he of the long legs and the army cape?”
“Settled somewhere near you, I hear; over across the Cape. He has a
fine parish. He’s to have two thousand--that’s doing well for a man
of his stamp.”
“I don’t think Tompkinton is the kind of man to think much about
the salary,” observed Bayard gravely. “He struck me as the other
sort of fellow. What’s become of Bent?”
“Graduates this summer, I suppose. I hear he’s called to Roxbury.
He always aimed at a Boston parish. He’s sure to boom.”
“And that brakeman--Holt? He who admired Huxley’s ‘Descent of Man’?”
“Oh, _he_ is slumming in New York city. They say he is really
very useful. He has some sort of mission work, there, at the Five
Points. I’m told he makes a specialty of converted burglars.”
“I haven’t been able to follow any of the boys,” said Bayard,
coughing. “I can’t very well--as I am situated. It does me good to
hear something about somebody. Where’s that round fellow--Jaynes?
With the round glasses? I remember he always ate two Baldwins, two
entire Baldwin apples.”
“Gone West, I believe. He’s admirably adapted to the West,” replied
Fenton, settling his chair in his old comfortable way.
“What an assorted lot we were!” said Bayard dreamily. “And what a
medley we were taught! I haven’t opened one of my note-books since
I came here.”
“Oh, in _your_ work,” said Fenton, “you don’t need to read, I
should think.”
Bayard’s eyes sought his library; rested lovingly on its full and
well-used shelves; then turned away with the expression of one
who says to a chosen friend: “We understand. Why need anything be
said?” He did not otherwise reply.
“Were you ever ordained over your present charge?” asked his
visitor suddenly, balancing the poker on the top curl of the iron
angel that ornamented the cylinder stove. “How did you manage it?
Did any of the--regular clergy--recognize the affair?”
“I was not ordained,” replied Bayard, smiling contentedly. “I
sought nothing of the kind. But a few of the country ministers
wished us Godspeed. There was one dear old man--he was my moderator
at that Council--he came over and put his hands on my head, and
gave me the blessing.”
“Oh--the charge to the pastor?”
“We didn’t call it that. We did not steal any of the old phrases.
He prayed and blessed me, that was all. He is a sincere, good man,
and he made something impressive out of it, my people said. At all
events they were satisfied. We have to do things in our own way,
you know. We are experimenting, of course.”
“I should say that was a pretty serious experiment you inaugurated
to-night in your service. If you’ll allow me to say so, I should
call it very ill-advised.”
“It _is_ a serious experiment,” replied Bayard gravely.
“Expect to succeed in it?”
“God knows.”
“Bound to go on with it?”
“Till I succeed or fail.”
“What do you propose? To turn temperance lecturer, and that sort of
thing? I suppose you’ll be switching off your religious services
into prohibition caucuses, and so forth.”
“I propose nothing of the kind. I am not a politician. I am a
preacher of the Christian religion.”
“I always knew you were eccentric, of course, Bayard. Everybody
knows that. But I never expected to see you leading such a
singular life. I never took you for this sort of fanatic. It seems
so--common for a man of your taste and culture, and there can be no
doubt that it is unwise, from every point of view, even from your
own, I should think. I don’t deny that your work impressed me, what
I saw of it to-night. Your gifts tell--even here. It is a pity to
have them misapplied. Now, what was your motive in that outbreak
to-night? I take it, it was the first time you had tackled the
subject.”
“To my shame--yes. It was the first time. I have had reasons
to look into it, lately--that’s all. You see, my ignorance on
the subject was colossal, to start in. We were not taught such
things in the Seminary. Cesarea does as well as any of them--but
no curriculum recognizes Job Slip. Oh, when I think about
it--Predestination, foreordination, sanctification, election, and
botheration,--and never a lesson on the Christian socialism of our
day, not a lecture to tell us how to save a poor, lost woman, how
to reform a drunkard, what to do with gamblers and paupers and
thieves, and worse, how to apply what we believe to common life and
common sense--how to lift miserable creatures, scrambling up, and
falling back into the mud as fast as they can scramble--people of
no religion, no morals, no decency, no hope, no joy--who never see
the inside of a church”--
“They ought to,” replied Fenton severely. “That’s their fault, not
ours. And all seminaries have a course on Pastoral Theology.”
“I visited sixteen of the dens of this town this last week,”
replied Bayard. “I took a policeman, and went through the whole
thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t go to church if I were they.
I shall dream about what I saw--I don’t know that I shall ever stop
dreaming about it. It is too horrible to tell. I wouldn’t even
_speak_ what I saw men and women _live_. The old sailors who have
seen a good many ports, call it a hell of a town. My own idea is,
that it isn’t a particle worse than other places of its class. I
fancy it’s a fair, average seaport town. Six thousand seamen sail
this harbor every year. I can’t get at the number of dens they
support; such figures are runaway lunatics, you understand; they
have a genius for hiding; and nobody _wants_ to find them. But
put it low--call it two hundred--in this little town. If it isn’t
the business of a Christian church to shut them--whose is it? If
it isn’t the business of religious people to look after these
fellows--whose is it? I say, religious people are answerable for
them, and for their vices! The best people are responsible for the
worst, or there’s no meaning in the New Testament, and no sense in
the Christian religion. Oh,” said Bayard, with a sound that was
more like a moan than a sigh, “if Christ could come into Angel
Alley--just this one street! If He could take this little piece
of a worldful of human woe--modern human misery, you understand,
all the new forms and phases that Palestine knew nothing about--if
He could sweep it clean, and show us how to do it _now_! Think,
Fenton, think, how He would go to work--what that would be!...
sometimes I think it would be worth dying for.”
“It strikes me it is harder to guess than predestination,--what He
would do if He were reincarnated,” replied Fenton gravely.
“It had not struck me so,” answered Bayard gently, “but there may
be something in that.”
“Now,” continued Fenton, “take yourself. I fancy you believe--Do
you suppose _you_ are doing the kind of thing He would set about,
if He were in your place?”
“How can I tell?” replied Bayard in a voice so low that it was
scarcely articulate. “How can a man _know_? All I do know is, that
I try. That is what--and that is all--I try to do. And I shall keep
on trying, till I die.”
He spoke with a solemnity which admitted of no light response, even
from a worldly man. Fenton was not that, and his eyes filled.
“Well,” he said, after a silence, “you are a good man, Emanuel
Bayard. God go with you.”
“And with you,” replied Bayard, holding out his hand. “Our roads
lie different ways. We shall not talk like this again.”
“You won’t mind that? You won’t feel it,” said Fenton
uncomfortably, for he had risen to leave, and the conversation
hung heavily on his heart, “if I don’t run across your way,
often? It would hardly do, you see. My people--the church--the
circumstances”--
He brought the poker down hard upon the cerebrum of the iron angel,
who resented the insult by tumbling over on the funnel; thence,
with a slam, to the floor. Fenton picked up the ornament with a red
face, and restored it to its place. He felt, as a man sometimes
does, more rebuked than irritated by the inanimate thing.
“Good-by,” said Bayard gently. It was all he said. He still held
out his hand. His classmate wrung it, and passed, with bowed head,
from his presence.
* * * * *
The happy weather held over into the next day; and the harbor
wore her celestial smile. The gentleness of summer clothed in the
colors of spring rested upon the wooded coast beyond the long
cliff-outline, upon the broken scallops of the beaches, and the
moss-green piers of the docks, upon the waves swelling without
foam, and the patched sails of the anchored fleet unfurled to dry.
The water still held the blue and gray tints that betoken cold
weather too recently past or too soon returning to be forgotten.
But the wind was south; and the saxifrage was in bud upon the downs
in the clefts of the broken rocks between the boulders.
Bayard was a weak and weary man that day,--the events of the
previous evening had told upon him more than he would have supposed
possible,--and he gave himself a luxury. He put the world and the
evil of it from his heart and brain, and went out on Windover
Point, to sun himself, alone; crawling along, poor fellow, at a
sad pace, stopping often to rest, and panting as he pushed on.
He had been an athletic lad, a vigorous, hearty man; illness and
its subtle train of physical and mental consequences spoke in the
voices of strangers to him.
“They will pass on,” he thought.
Bayard was such a lovable, cordial, human man, that the isolation
of his life in Windover had affected him more than it might have
done a natural recluse. Solitude is the final test of character as
well as of nature.
The romance of consecration has its glamour as well as the romance
of love. Bayard had felt his way into this beautiful mist with
a stout, good sense which is rare in the devotee, and which was
perhaps his most remarkable quality. This led him to accept without
fruitless resistance a lot which was pathetically alien to him. He
was no gray-bearded saint, on whose leathern tongue joy had turned
to ashes; to whom renunciation was the last throw left in the game
of life. He was a young man, ardent, eager, buoyant, confiding in
hope because he had not tested it; believing in happiness because
he had not known it: full of untried, untamed capacity for human
delight, and with the instinct (generations old) of a luxurious
training toward human ease. He had cut the silken cords between
himself and the world of his old habits, ambitions, and friends
with a steady stroke; he had smitten the soft network like a man,
and flung it from him like a spirit; but there were hours when
he felt as if he were bleeding to death, inwardly, from sheer
desolation.
“That call of George Fenton’s upset me last night,” he said aloud,
as he sank down at the base of a big boulder in the warm sand.
He sometimes talked to the sea; nothing else in Windover could
understand him; he was acquiring some of the habits of lonely
people who live apart from their own class. How impossible it would
have been in Cambridge, in Boston, or in Cesarea to be caught
talking aloud! His pale face flushed, and he drew his hat over it,
thanking Heaven that rocks were deaf and the downs were dumb, that
the sun would never tell, and the harbor was too busy to listen.
He had lain there in the sand for some time, as motionless as a
mollusk at low water.
“All a man needs is a little common rest,” he thought. The April
sun seemed to sink into his brain and heart with the healing touch
that nothing human ever gives. He pushed his hat away from his
face, and looked up gratefully, as if he had been caressed.
As he did so, he heard footsteps upon the crisp, red-cupped moss
that surrounded the base of the boulder. He rose instinctively, and
confronted a woman--a lady. She had been walking far and fast, and
had glorious color. The skirt of her purple gown was splashed with
little sticks and burrs and bits of moss; her hands were full of
saxifrage. She was trying in the rising wind to hold a sun-umbrella
over her head, for she wore the street or traveling dress of the
town, and her little bonnet gave her as much protection from the
sun as a purple butterfly whose wings were dashed with gold.
Oddly enough, he recognized the costume before he did the wearer;
so incredible did he find it that she should stand there living,
glowing, laughing,--a sumptuous beauty, stamped against the
ascetic sky of Windover.
“_You!_” he cried.
“Oh, I did not expect--I did not think”--she stammered. He had
never seen Helen Carruth disconcerted. But she blushed like a
schoolgirl when she gave him, saxifrage and all, her ungloved hand.