Crosson had tried afterward to forget. It had been hard at first, but in
time he had forgotten. He had gone to a theological school and learned
to chide people for their complaints and to administer well-phrased
anodynes. During his vacations he had avoided Irene. When he had been
graduated he had been first pulpited in a far-off city.
Years afterward he had been invited to supply an empty pulpit in his
home town. He had not succeeded with life. He lacked the flame or the
luck or the tact--something. He had come back to the place he started
from. He had renewed old acquaintances, laughed over the ancient jokes,
and said he was sorry for those who had had misfortune. When he met
Irene Straley he hardly recalled his love, except to smile at it as a
boyish whim. He had forgotten the pangs of that as one forgets almost
all his yester aches. He had forgotten the pains he had seen others
suffer, even more easily than he forgot his own.
To-day his sermon on the triviality of bodily discomfort had flung Irene
Straley back into the caldron of that old torment. She had made that
silent protest against the iniquitous cruelty of his preachment. She had
dragged him backward into the living presence of his past.
She had not forgotten. She had been faithful to Drury Boldin while he
was working in a distant city. She was faithful to him still in that
Farthest Country. She had the genius of remembrance.
These were Doctor Crosson's ulterior thoughts while he harangued his
flock visibly and audibly. His thoughts had not needed the time their
telling requires. They gave him back his scenes in pictures, not in
words; in heartaches and heartbreaks and terrors and longings, not in
limping syllables that mock the vision with their ineptitude.
He felt anew what he had felt and seen, and he could not give any verve
to the peroration of his sermon. He could not even change it. It had
been effective when he had preached it previously. But now he parroted
with unconscious irony the phrases he had once so admired. He came to
the last word.
"And so, to repeat: How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the
anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! What are the
fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the
soul's despair? Nothing, nothing."
His congregation felt a lack of warmth in his tone. His hand fell limply
on the Bible and the sermon was done. The only stir was one of relief at
its conclusion.
He gave out the final hymn, and he sat through it while the people
dragged it to the end. He gave forth the benediction "in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," and he made short work of
the dawdlers who waited to exchange stupidities with him. He took refuge
from his congregation in his study, locked the door, and gave himself up
to meditation.
Somehow pain had suddenly come to mean more to him than it had yet
meant. He had known it, groaned under it, lived it down, and let it go.
He had felt sorry for other people and got rid of their woes as best as
he could with the trite expressions in use, and had forgotten whether
they were hushed by health or by death.
And so he had let the old-fashioned hell go by with other dogmas out of
style. He had fashioned a new Hades to frighten people with, that they
might not find sin too attractive and imperilous.
Now he was suddenly convinced that if there must be hell, it must be
such as Dante set to rhyme and the old hard-shell preachers preached: a
region where flames sear and demons pluck at the frantic nerves, playing
upon them fiendish tunes.
Yet he could not reconcile that hell with the God that made the
lilac-bush whose purple clusters shook perfume and little flowers
against his window-sill, while the old locust in rivalry bent down and
flaunted against the lilacs its pendants of ivory grace and heavenly
fragrance.
Against that torment of beauty came glimpses of Drury and Irene in the
lurid cavern under the wreck. Beyond those delicate blossoms he imagined
the battle-fields of Europe and the ruined vessels where hurt souls
writhed in multitudes.
He could not be satisfied with any theory of the world. He could not
find that pain was punishment here, or see how it could follow the soul
after the soul had left behind it the fleshly instrument of torture. The
why of it escaped his reason utterly; for Drury had been good, and he
had come upon an honorable errand when he fell into the pit.
Doctor Crosson stood at his window and begged the placid sky for
information. He looked through the lilacs and the locusts and all the
green wilderness where beauty beat and throbbed like a heart in bliss.
It was the Sabbath, and he was not sure. But he was sure of a melting
tenderness in his heart for Irene Straley, and he felt that her power to
feel sorry for her lover--sorry enough to defy all the laws in his
behalf--was a wonderful power. He longed for her sympathy.
By and by he began to feel a pain, the pain of Drury Boldin. He was
glad. He groaned. "I hurt! I hope that I may hurt terribly."
Suddenly it seemed that he actually was Drury Boldin in the throes of
every fierce and spasmic thrill. Again he most vividly was Irene Straley
watching her lover till she could not endure his torture or her own, and
with one desperate challenge sent him back to the mystery whence he
came.
Doctor Crosson, when he came back to himself, could not solve that
mystery or any mystery. He knew one reality, that it hurts to be alive;
that everybody is always hurting, and that human heart must help human
heart as best it can. Pain is the one inescapable fact; the rest is
theory.... He prayed with a deeper fervor than he had ever known:
"God give me pain, that I may understand, that I may understand!"