There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the
night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and
long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our
Lord. Sometimes, near four o'clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls
along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a
terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come.
At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times
he had walked past Romberg's Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow
lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were
gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately
sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing
confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other
side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward
before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense,
toward the summer moon.
But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o'clock. From his
window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of
the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet
pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding
through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.
One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down
like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful,
intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat
down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk,
pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that some one
had come into his haunted room.
Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous,
staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment
their expression startled him--then he saw that his visitor was in a
state of abject fear.
"Your mouth is trembling," said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.
The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.
"Are you in trouble?" asked Father Schwartz, sharply. "Take your hand
away from your mouth and tell me what's the matter."
The boy--Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner,
Mr. Miller, the freight-agent--moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth
and became articulate in a despairing whisper.
"Father Schwartz--I've committed a terrible sin."
"A sin against purity?"
"No, Father ... worse."
Father Schwartz's body jerked sharply.
"Have you killed somebody?"
"No--but I'm afraid--" the voice rose to a shrill whimper.
"Do you want to go to confession?"
The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared his
throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind
thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act
like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in
return God would help him to act correctly.
"Tell me what you've done," said his new soft voice.
The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured by the
impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created.
Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller
began to tell his story.
"On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to
confession, because I hadn't been for a month, and the family they go
every week, and I hadn't been. So I just as leave go, I didn't care. So
I put it off till after supper because I was playing with a bunch of
kids and father asked me if I went, and I said 'no,' and he took me by
the neck and he said 'You go now,' so I said 'All right,' so I went over
to church. And he yelled after me: 'Don't come back till you go.'..."