NORMAN DOUGLAS SPEAKS OUT IN MEETING
"Where are you wandering, Anne o' mine?" asked the doctor, who even
yet, after twenty-four years of marriage, occasionally addressed his
wife thus when nobody was about. Anne was sitting on the veranda steps,
gazing absently over the wonderful bridal world of spring blossom,
Beyond the white orchard was a copse of dark young firs and creamy wild
cherries, where the robins were whistling madly; for it was evening and
the fire of early stars was burning over the maple grove.
Anne came back with a little sigh.
"I was just taking relief from intolerable realities in a dream,
Gilbert--a dream that all our children were home again--and all small
again--playing in Rainbow Valley. It is always so silent now--but I was
imagining I heard clear voices and gay, childish sounds coming up as I
used to. I could hear Jem's whistle and Walter's yodel, and the twins'
laughter, and for just a few blessed minutes I forgot about the guns on
the Western front, and had a little false, sweet happiness."
The doctor did not answer. Sometimes his work tricked him into
forgetting for a few moments the Western front, but not often. There
was a good deal of grey now in his still thick curls that had not been
there two years ago. Yet he smiled down into the starry eyes he
loved--the eyes that had once been so full of laughter, and now seemed
always full of unshed tears.
Susan wandered by with a hoe in her hand and her second best bonnet on
her head.
"I have just finished reading a piece in the Enterprise which told of a
couple being married in an aeroplane. Do you think it would be legal,
doctor dear?" she inquired anxiously.
"I think so," said the doctor gravely.
"Well," said Susan dubiously, "it seems to me that a wedding is too
solemn for anything so giddy as an aeroplane. But nothing is the same
as it used to be. Well, it is half an hour yet before prayer-meeting
time, so I am going around to the kitchen garden to have a little
evening hate with the weeds. But all the time I am strafing them I will
be thinking about this new worry in the Trentino. I do not like this
Austrian caper, Mrs. Dr. dear."
"Nor I," said Mrs. Blythe ruefully. "All the forenoon I preserved
rhubarb with my hands and waited for the war news with my soul. When it
came I shrivelled. Well, I suppose I must go and get ready for the
prayer-meeting, too."
Every village has its own little unwritten history, handed down from
lip to lip through the generations, of tragic, comic, and dramatic
events. They are told at weddings and festivals, and rehearsed around
winter firesides. And in these oral annals of Glen St. Mary the tale of
the union prayer-meeting held that night in the Methodist Church was
destined to fill an imperishable place.
The union prayer-meeting was Mr. Arnold's idea. The county battalion,
which had been training all winter in Charlottetown, was to leave
shortly for overseas. The Four Winds Harbour boys belonging to it from
the Glen and over-harbour and Harbour Head and Upper Glen were all home
on their last leave, and Mr. Arnold thought, properly enough, that it
would be a fitting thing to hold a union prayer-meeting for them before
they went away. Mr. Meredith having agreed, the meeting was announced
to be held in the Methodist Church. Glen prayer-meetings were not apt
to be too well attended, but on this particular evening the Methodist
Church was crowded. Everybody who could go was there. Even Miss
Cornelia came--and it was the first time in her life that Miss Cornelia
had ever set foot inside a Methodist Church. It took no less than a
world conflict to bring that about.
"I used to hate Methodists," said Miss Cornelia calmly, when her
husband expressed surprise over her going, "but I don't hate them now.
There is no sense in hating Methodists when there is a Kaiser or a
Hindenburg in the world."
So Miss Cornelia went. Norman Douglas and his wife went too. And
Whiskers-on-the-moon strutted up the aisle to a front pew, as if he
fully realized what a distinction he conferred upon the building.
People were somewhat surprised that he should be there, since he
usually avoided all assemblages connected in any way with the war. But
Mr. Meredith had said that he hoped his session would be well
represented, and Mr. Pryor had evidently taken the request to heart. He
wore his best black suit and white tie, his thick, tight, iron-grey
curls were neatly arranged, and his broad, red round face looked, as
Susan most uncharitably thought, more "sanctimonious" than ever.
"The minute I saw that man coming into the Church, looking like that, I
felt that mischief was brewing, Mrs. Dr. dear," she said afterwards.
"What form it would take I could not tell, but I knew from face of him
that he had come there for no good."
The prayer-meeting opened conventionally and continued quietly. Mr.
Meredith spoke first with his usual eloquence and feeling. Mr. Arnold
followed with an address which even Miss Cornelia had to confess was
irreproachable in taste and subject-matter.
And then Mr. Arnold asked Mr. Pryor to lead in prayer.
Miss Cornelia had always averred that Mr. Arnold had no gumption. Miss
Cornelia was not apt to err on the side of charity in her judgment of
Methodist ministers, but in this case she did not greatly overshoot the
mark. The Rev. Mr. Arnold certainly did not have much of that
desirable, indefinable quality known as gumption, or he would never
have asked Whiskers-on-the-moon to lead in prayer at a khaki
prayer-meeting. He thought he was returning the compliment to Mr.
Meredith, who, at the conclusion of his address, had asked a Methodist
deacon to lead.
Some people expected Mr. Pryor to refuse grumpily--and that would have
made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet,
unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous
voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr.
Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his
prayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact
that they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr.
Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, as
people afterwards said, he thought he was safe in a church and that it
was an excellent chance to air certain opinions he dared not voice
elsewhere, for fear of being mobbed. He prayed that the unholy war
might cease--that the deluded armies being driven to slaughter on the
Western front might have their eyes opened to their iniquity and repent
while yet there was time--that the poor young men present in khaki, who
had been hounded into a path of murder and militarism, should yet be
rescued--
Mr. Pryor had got this far without let or hindrance; and so paralysed
were his hearers, and so deeply imbued with their born-and-bred
conviction that no disturbance must ever be made in a church, no matter
what the provocation, that it seemed likely that he would continue
unchecked to the end. But one man at least in that audience was not
hampered by inherited or acquired reverence for the sacred edifice.
Norman Douglas was, as Susan had often vowed crisply, nothing more or
less than a "pagan." But he was a rampantly patriotic pagan, and when
the significance of what Mr. Pryor was saying fully dawned on him,
Norman Douglas suddenly went berserk. With a positive roar he bounded
to his feet in his side pew, facing the audience, and shouted in tones
of thunder:
"Stop--stop--STOP that abominable prayer! What an abominable prayer!"
Every head in the church flew up. A boy in khaki at the back gave a
faint cheer. Mr. Meredith raised a deprecating hand, but Norman was
past caring for anything like that. Eluding his wife's restraining
grasp, he gave one mad spring over the front of the pew and caught the
unfortunate Whiskers-on-the-moon by his coat collar. Mr. Pryor had not
"stopped" when so bidden, but he stopped now, perforce, for Norman, his
long red beard literally bristling with fury, was shaking him until his
bones fairly rattled, and punctuating his shakes with a lurid
assortment of abusive epithets.
"You blatant beast!"--shake--"You malignant carrion"--shake--"You
pig-headed varmint!"--shake--"you putrid pup"--shake--"you pestilential
parasite"--shake--"you--Hunnish scum"--shake--"you indecent
reptile--you--you--" Norman choked for a moment. Everybody believed
that the next thing he would say, church or no church, would be
something that would have to be spelt with asterisks; but at that
moment Norman encountered his wife's eye and he fell back with a thud
on Holy Writ. "You whited sepulchre!" he bellowed, with a final shake,
and cast Whiskers-on-the-moon from him with a vigour which impelled
that unhappy pacifist to the very verge of the choir entrance door. Mr.
Pryor's once ruddy face was ashen. But he turned at bay. "I'll have the
law on you for this," he gasped.
"Do--do," roared Norman, making another rush. But Mr. Pryor was gone.
He had no desire to fall a second time into the hands of an avenging
militarist. Norman turned to the platform for one graceless, triumphant
moment.
"Don't look so flabbergasted, parsons," he boomed. "You couldn't do
it--nobody would expect it of the cloth--but somebody had to do it. You
know you're glad I threw him out--he couldn't be let go on yammering
and yodelling and yawping sedition and treason. Sedition and
treason--somebody had to deal with it. I was born for this hour--I've
had my innings in church at last. I can sit quiet for another sixty
years now! Go ahead with your meeting, parsons. I reckon you won't be
troubled with any more pacifist prayers."
But the spirit of devotion and reverence had fled. Both ministers
realized it and realized that the only thing to do was to close the
meeting quietly and let the excited people go. Mr. Meredith addressed a
few earnest words to the boys in khaki--which probably saved Mr.
Pryor's windows from a second onslaught--and Mr. Arnold pronounced an
incongruous benediction, at least he felt it was incongruous, for he
could not at once banish from his memory the sight of gigantic Norman
Douglas shaking the fat, pompous little Whiskers-on-the-moon as a huge
mastiff might shake an overgrown puppy. And he knew that the same
picture was in everybody's mind. Altogether the union prayer-meeting
could hardly be called an unqualified success. But it was remembered in
Glen St. Mary when scores of orthodox and undisturbed assemblies were
totally forgotten.
"You will never, no, never, Mrs. Dr. dear, hear me call Norman Douglas
a pagan again," said Susan when she reached home. "If Ellen Douglas is
not a proud woman this night she should be."
"Norman Douglas did a wholly indefensible thing," said the doctor.
"Pryor should have been let severely alone until the meeting was over.
Then later on, his own minister and session should deal with him. That
would have been the proper procedure. Norman's performance was utterly
improper and scandalous and outrageous; but, by George,"--the doctor
threw back his head and chuckled, "by George, Anne-girl, it was
satisfying."