|He bore the name of Adam Wick. There seemed to be something primitive
in his temperament to fit it. By primitive we mean of such times as may
have furnished single-eyed passions that did not argue. He was a small,
thin, stooping man, with a sharp nose and red-lidded eyes. Sarah Wick,
his daughter, was a dry-faced woman of thirty, and lived with him.
His house stood on a hill looking over the village of Preston
Plains, which lay in a flat valley. In the middle of the village the
church-steeple shot up tapering and tall.
It was a bickering community. The church was a centre of interest. The
outlines of the building were clean and shapely, but in detail it stood
for a variety of opinions. A raised tracery ran along the pseudo-classic
frieze of its front, representing a rope of flowers with little cupids
holding up the loops. They may have been cherubs. The community had
quarrelled about them long ago when the church was building, but that
subject had given way to other subjects.
The choir gallery bulged over the rear seats, as if to dispute the
relative importance of the pulpit. That was nothing. But it needed
bracing. The committee decided against a single pillar, and erected two,
one of them in the middle of Adam Wick's pew.
Adam looked at things simply. It seemed to his simplicity that the
community had conspired to do him injustice. The spirit of nonconformity
stirred within him. He went to the minister.
“Andrew Hill, nor any other man, nor committeeman's got no rights in my
pew.”
The minister was dignified.
“The pew, Mr. Wick, belongs to the church.”
“No such thing! I sat twenty-four years in that pew.”
“But that, though very creditable--”
“No such thing! I'll have no post in my pew, for Andrew Hill nor no
minister neither.”
“Mr. Wick--”
“You take that post out o' my pew.”
He stumped out of the minister's green-latticed doorway and down the
gravel path. His eyes on either side of his sharp nose were like
those of an angry hawk, and his stooping shoulders, seen from behind,
resembled the huddled back of the hawk, caged and sullen.
The minister watched him. Properly speaking, a primitive nature is an
unlimited monarchy where ego is king, but the minister's reflections did
not run in these terms. He did not even go so far as to wonder whether
such primitive natures did not render the current theory of a church
inaccurate. He went so far as to wonder what Adam Wick would do.
One dark, windy night, near midnight, Adam Wick climbed in at the
vestibule window of the church, and chopped the pillar in two with an
axe. The wind wailed in the belfry over his head. The blinds strained,
as if hands were plucking at them from without. The sound of his blows
echoed in the cold, empty building, as if some personal devil were
enjoying the sacrilege. Adam was a simple-minded man; he realized that
he was having a good time himself.
It was three days before the church was opened. What may have been
Adam's primitive thoughts, moving secretively among his townsmen? Then
a sudden rumor ran, a cry went up, of horror, of accusation, of the
lust of strife. Before the accusation Adam did not hesitate to make his
defiance perfect. The primitive mind was not in doubt. With a blink of
his red eyelids, he answered:
“You tell Andrew Hill, don't you put another post in my pew.”
A meeting was held; a majority voted enthusiastically to strike his name
from the rolls for unchristian behavior and to replace the pillar. A
minority declared him a wronged man. That was natural enough in Preston
Plains. But Adam Wick's actions at this point were thought original and
effective by every one.
He sat silently through the proceedings in the pew with the hacked
pillar, his shoulders hunched, his sharp eyes restless.
“Mr. Wick,” said the minister, sternly, “have you anything to say?”
Adam rose.
“I put fifty-six dollars into this meetin'-house. Any man deny that?”
No man denied it.
“Humph!” said Adam.
He took the hymn-book from the rack, lifted the green cushion from the
seat, threw it over his shoulder, and walked out.
No man spoke against it.
“There's no further business before this meeting,” said Chairman Hill.
It was a Sunday in August and nearly noon. From the side porch of Adam
Wick's house on the hill the clustered foliage of the village below was
the centre of the landscape. The steeple and ridgepole of the church
rose out of the centre of the foliage.
The landscape could not be fancied without the steeple. The dumb
materials of the earth, as well as the men who walk upon it, acquire
habits. You could read on the flat face of the valley that it had grown
accustomed to Preston Plains steeple.
On the side porch stood a long, high-backed bench. It was a close
imitation of the pews in the church below among the foliage, with the
long green cushion on the seat and a chair facing it with a hymn-book
on it. Adam sat motionless on the bench. His red-lidded eyes were fixed
intently on the steeple.
A hen with a brood of downy yellow chickens pecked about the path.
A turkey strutted up and down. The air was sultry, oppressive. A low
murmur of thunder mingled with the sleepy noises of creaking crickets
and clucking hen.
Adam Wick's bench and rule of Sabbath observance had been common talk in
Preston Plains. But it had grown too familiar, for subjects of dispute
ever gave way there to other subjects. Some one said it was pathetic.
The minority thought it a happy instance to throw in the face of
the bigoted majority, that they had driven from the church a man
of religious feeling. The minister had consulted Andrew Hill, that
thick-set man with the dry mouth and gray chin-beard.
“Not take out that pillar!” said Andrew Hill. “Ah,” said the minister,
“I'm afraid that wouldn't do. It would seem like--”
“I wouldn't move that pillar if the whole town was sidin' with him.”
“Oh, now--”
“Not while I'm alive. Adam Wick, he's obstinate.” Mr. Hill shut his
mouth grimly.
“Religious! Humph! Maybe he is.”
The minister moved away. They were a stiff-necked people, but after all
he felt himself to be one of them. It was his own race. He knew how
Andrew Hill felt, as if something somewhere within him were suddenly
clamped down and riveted. He understood Adam too, in his private pew on
the side porch, the hymn-book on the chair, his eyes on Preston Plains
steeple, fixed and glittering. He thought, “We don't claim to be
altogether lovely.”
Adam was in his own eyes without question a just man suffering
injustice. His fathers in their Genesis and Exodus had so suffered,
faced stocks, pillory, the frowning edge of the wilderness, and
possessed their souls with the same grim congratulation. No generation
ever saw visions and sweat blood, and left a moderate-minded posterity.
Such martyrs were not surer that the God of Justice stood beside them
than Adam was sure of the injustice of that pillar in that pew, nor
more resolved that neither death nor hell should prevail against the
faithfulness of their protest.
And the turkey strutted in the yard, the chickens hurried and peeped,
the thunder muttered at intervals as if the earth were breathing heavily
in its hot sleep.
The church-bell rang for the end of the morning service. It floated up
from the distance, sweet and plaintive.
Adam rose and carried the cushion, chair, and hymn-book into the house.
The storm was rising, darkening. It crouched on the hills. It seemed to
gather its garments and gird its loins, to breathe heavily with crowded
hate, to strike with daggers of lightning right and left.
Adam came out again and sat on the bench. The service being over, it was
no longer a pew.
Carriages, one after another, drove out of the foliage below, and along
the five roads that ran out of Preston Plains between zigzag fences and
low stone walls. They were hurrying, but from that distance they seemed
to crawl.
The Wick carriage came up the hill and through the gate--creaking
wheels, a shambling white horse, Sarah jerking the reins with monotonous
persistence. She stepped down and dusted off her cotton gloves. Adam
walked out to take the horse.
“Wherefore do ye harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh
hardened their hearts?”
Adam seemed puzzled, blinked his eyes, seemed to study carefully the
contents of his own mind.
“I do' know,” he said at last.
“First Samuel, seven, six,” said Sarah.
Adam led the horse away despondently. Halfway to the bam he stopped and
called out:
“Did he preach at me?”
“No.”
The minister had chosen a text that Adam did not know, and made no
reference to him, although the text was a likely one. Adam felt both
slights in a dim way, and resented them. He came back to the house and
sat in the front room before the window.
The valley was covered with a thick veil of gray rain. The black cloud
above it cracked every moment with sudden explosions, the echoes of them
tumbling clumsily among the hills. Preston Plains steeple faded away
and the foliage below it became a dim blot. A few drops struck the
window-pane at Adam's face, then a rush and tumult of rain. Dimmer still
the valley, but the lightning jabbed down into it incessantly, unseen
batteries playing attack and defence over Preston Plains steeple.
It was a swift, sudden storm, come and gone like a burst of passion. The
imminent crack and crash of the thunder ceased, and only rumblings were
heard, mere memories, echoes, or as if the broken fragments of the
sky were rolling to and fro in some vast sea-wash. The valley and the
village trees came slowly into view.
“Dinner's ready,” said Sarah, in the next room.
She had a strident voice, and said dinner was ready as if she expected
Adam to dispute it. There was no answer from the window.
“Pa! Aren't you comin'?”
No answer. Sarah came to the door.
“Pa!”
His face was close to the rain-washed window-pane. Something rattled in
his throat. It seemed like a suppressed chuckle. He rested his chin on
his hand and clawed it with bony fingers.
“Pa!”
He turned on her sternly.
“You needn't be shoutin' on the Lord's day. Meetin'-house steeple's
a-fire.”
From Adam Wick's nothing could be seen but the slow column of smoke
rising and curling around the slender steeple. But under the foliage
Preston Plains was in tumult.
By night the church was saved, but the belfry was a blackened ruin
within. The bell had fallen, through floor, cross-beams, and ceiling,
and smashed the front of the choir gallery, a mass of fallen pillar,
railing, and broken plaster on the floor.
Andrew Hill called a meeting. Adam Wick came, entered his cluttered pew
and sat on the pillar that lay prostrate across it. He perched on it
like a hawk, with huddled back and red-lidded eyes blinking. It was the
sense of the meeting that modern ideas demanded the choir should sit
behind the minister. The ruined gallery must be removed. Adam Wick rose.
“You've got no place in this meetin',” said Andrew Hill. “Set down.”
Adam kept his place scornfully.
“Can't I subscribe twenty dollars to this church?” The chairman stroked
his beard and a gleam of acrid humor lit his face for a moment.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose you can.”
And the eyes of all present looked on Adam Wick favorably.
The minister rose to speak the last word of peace.
“My friends, the Lord did it. He is righteous--”
“That's my idea!” said Adam Wick, like a hawk on his fallen pillar,
red-lidded, complacent. “He did what was right.”
The minister coughed, hesitated, and sat down. Andrew Hill glowered from
his chair.
“There's no further business before this meetin'.”