PAIN

I

"How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the anguishes of the soul

than any mere bodily distress! When the heart under conviction of sin

for the violation of one of God's laws writhes and cries aloud in

repentance and remorse, then, ah, then, is true suffering. What are the

fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the

soul's despair? Nothing! Noth--"

The clergyman's emphatic fist did not thump the Scriptures the second

time. He checked it in air; for a woman stood up straight and stared at

him straight. Her thin mouth seemed to twist with a sneer. He thought he

read on her lips words not quite uttered. He read:

"You fool! You fool!"

Then Miss Straley sidled from the family pew to the aisle and marched up

it and out of the church.

Doctor Crosson was shocked doubly. The woman's action was an outrage

upon the holy composure of the Sabbath, and it would remind everybody

that he was an old lover of Irene Straley's.

The neatly arranged congregational skulls were disordered now, some

still tilted forward in sleep, some tilted back to see what the pastor

would do, some craned round to observe the departer, some turned inward

in whispering couples.

Such a thing had never happened before in all the parsoning of Doctor

Crosson--the D.D. had been conferred on him by the small theological

institute where he had imbibed enough dogmas in two years to last him a

lifetime.

Some of his dogmas were so out of fashion that he felt them a trifle

shabby even for village wear. He had laid aside the old red hell-fire

dogma for a new one of hell-as-a-state-of-mind. He was expounding that

doctrine this morning again. He had never heard any complaint of it. But

his mind was so far from his memory that he hardly knew what he had just

uttered. He wondered what he could have said to offend Miss Straley.

But he must not stand there gaping and wondering before his gaping and

wondering congregation. He must push on to his _lastly's_. His mind

retraced his words, and he repeated:

"What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and

flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing! As I said before--nothing!"

And then he understood why Irene Straley had walked out. The realization

deranged him so that only the police-force every one has among his

faculties coerced him into going on with his sermon.

It was a good sermon. It was his own, too; for at last he had paid the

final instalment on the clergyman's library which contained a thousand

sermons as aids to overworked, underinspired evangelists. He had built

this discourse from well-seasoned timbers. He had used it in two pulpits

where he had visited, and now he was giving it to his own flock. He knew

it well enough to trust his oratorical machinery with its delivery,

while the rest of his mind meditated other things.

Often, while preaching, a portion of his brain would be watching the

effect on his congregation, another watching the clock, another thinking

of dinner, another musing over the scandals he knew in the lives of the

parishioners.

But now all his by-thoughts were scattered at the abrupt deed of Irene

Straley. She was the traffic of his other brains now, while his lips

went on enouncing the phrases of his discourse and his fists thudded the

Bible for emphasis. He was remembering his boyhood and his infatuation

for Irene Straley. That was before he was sure of his call to the

ministry. If he had married her, he might not have heard the call.

Doctor Crosson hoped that he was not regretting that sacrament! Sweat

came out on his brow as he understood the blasphemy of noting (even here

on the rostrum with his mouth pouring forth sacred eloquence) that Irene

Straley as she marched out of the church was still slender and flexile,

virginal. Doctor Crosson mopped his brow at the atrocity of his thoughts

this morning. The springtime air was to blame. The windows were open

for the first time. The breeze that lolled through the church had no

right there. It was irreverent and frivolous. It was amused at the

people. It rippled with laughter at the preacher's heavy effort to start

a jealousy between the pangs of the flesh and the pangs of the soul.

It brought into church a savor of green rushes growing in the warm, wet

thickets where Doctor Crosson--once Eddie Crosson--had loved to go

hunting squirrels and rabbits, and wild duck in season. Those were years

of depravity, but they were entrancing in memory. He felt a Satanic

whisper: "Order these old fogies out into the fields and let them

worship there. It is May, you fool!"

"You fool!" That was what Irene Straley had seemed to whisper. Only, the

breeze made a soft, sweet coo of the word that had been so bitter on her

lips.

Across the square of a window near the pulpit a venerable locust-tree

brandished a bough dripping with blossoms. Countless little censers of

white spice swung frankincense and myrrh for pagan nostrils.

There was a beckoning in the locust bough, and in the air an incantation

that made a folly of sermons and souls and old maids' resentments and

gossips' queries. The preacher fought on, another Saint Anthony in a

cloud of witches.

He could hear himself intoning the long sermon with the familiar

pulpiteering rhythms and the final upsnap of the last syllable of each

sentence. He could see that the congregation was already drowsily

forgetful of Irene Straley's absence. But, to save his soul, he could

not keep his mind from following her out into the leafy streets and on

into the past where she had been the prize he and young Drury Boldin had

contended for--a past in which he had never dreamed that his future was

a pulpit in his home town.

He was the manlier of the two, for Drury was a delicate boy, too

sensitive for the approval of his Spartan fellows. They made fun of his

gentleness. He hated to wreathe a fishing-worm on a hook! He loathed to

wrench a hook from a fish's gullet! The nearest he had ever come to

fighting was in defense of a thousand-legged worm that one of the boys

had stuck a pin through, to watch it writhe and bite itself behind the

pin.

Irene Straley was a sentimental girl. That was right in a girl, but

silly in a boy.

Once when Eddie Crosson stubbed his toe and it swelled up to great

importance, Irene Straley wept when she saw it, while Drury Boldin

turned pale and sat down hard. Once when Drury cut his thumb with a

penknife he fainted at the sight of his own blood!

Eddie Crosson was a real boy. He smoked cubeb cigarettes with an almost

unprecedented precocity. He nearly learned to chew tobacco. He could

snap a sparrow off a telegraph-wire with a nigger-shooter almost

infallibly. He had the first air-gun in town and a shot-gun at fifteen.

He thought that he was manlier than Drury because he was wiser and

stronger. It never occurred to him that Drury might suffer more because

he was more finely built, that his nerves were harp-strings while

Crosson's were fence-wire.

So Crosson called Drury a milksop because he would not go hunting. He

called himself one of the sons of Nimrod.

For a time he gained prestige with Irene Straley, especially as he gave

her bright feathers now and then, an oriole's gilded mourning, or a

tanager's scarlet vesture.

One day Drury Boldin was at her porch when Ed came in from across the

river with a brace of duck.

"You can have these for your dinner to-morrow, Reny," he said, as he

laid the limp, silky bodies on the porch floor.

Their bills and feet were grotesque, but there was something about their

throats, stretched out in waning iridescence, that asked for regret.

"Oh, much obliged!" Irene cried. "That's awful nice of you, Eddie. Duck

cook awful good."

And then her enthusiasm ebbed, for she caught the look of Drury Boldin

as he bent down and stroked the glossy mantle of the birds, not with

zest for their flavor, nor envy of the skill that had fetched them from

the sky, but with sorrow for their ended careers, for the miracle gone

out of their wings, and the strange fact that they had once quawked and

chirruped in the high air and on hidden waters--and would never fly or

swim again. "I wonder if they had souls," he mumbled.

Eddie Crosson winked at Irene. There was no use getting mad at Drury.

Eddie only laughed:

"'Course not, you darn galoot!"

"How do you know?" Drury asked.

"Anybody knows that much," was Crosson's sufficient answer, and Drury

changed to another topic. He asked:

"Did it hurt 'em much to die?"

"'Course not," Eddie answered, promptly. "Not the way I got 'em. They

just stopped sailin' and dropped. I lost one, though. He was goin' like

sixty when I drew bead on him. Light wasn't any too good and I just

nipped one wing. You ought to seen him turning somersets, Reny. He lit

in a swampy spot, though, and I couldn't find him. I hunted for an hour

or more, but I couldn't find him and it was growin' dark, so I come

home."