They walked without speaking except when Carl Miller acknowledged
automatically the existence of passers-by. Rudolph's uneven breathing
alone ruffled the hot Sunday silence.
His father stopped decisively at the door of the church.
"I've decided you'd better go to confession again. Go in and tell Father
Schwartz what you did and ask God's pardon."
"You lost your temper, too!" said Rudolph quickly.
Carl Miller took a step toward his son, who moved cautiously backward.
"All right, I'll go."
"Are you going to do what I say?" cried his father in a hoarse whisper.
"All right."
Rudolph walked into the church, and for the second time in two days
entered the confessional and knelt down. The slat went up almost at
once.
"I accuse myself of missing my morning prayers."
"Is that all?"
"That's all."
A maudlin exultation filled him. Not easily ever again would he be able
to put an abstraction before the necessities of his ease and pride. An
invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware of his
isolation--aware that it applied not only to those moments when he was
Blatchford Sarnemington but that it applied to all his inner life.
Hitherto such phenomena as "crazy" ambitions and petty shames and fears
had been but private reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of
his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously that his private
reservations were himself--and all the rest a garnished front and a
conventional flag. The pressure of his environment had driven him into
the lonely secret road of adolescence.
He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt
up--when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the
seat--and tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge. Beside
him his father prayed that God would forgive Rudolph, and asked also
that his own outbreak of temper would be pardoned. He glanced sidewise
at this son, and was relieved to see that the strained, wild look had
gone from his face and that he had ceased sobbing. The Grace of God,
inherent in the Sacrament, would do the rest, and perhaps after Mass
everything would be better. He was proud of Rudolph in his heart, and
beginning to be truly as well as formally sorry for what he had done.
Usually, the passing of the collection box was a significant point for
Rudolph in the services. If, as was often the case, he had no money to
drop in he would be furiously ashamed and bow his head and pretend not
to see the box, lest Jeanne Brady in the pew behind should take notice
and suspect an acute family poverty. But to-day he glanced coldly into
it as it skimmed under his eyes, noting with casual interest the large
number of pennies it contained.
When the bell rang for communion, however, he quivered. There was no
reason why God should not stop his heart. During the past twelve hours
he had committed a series of mortal sins increasing in gravity, and he
was now to crown them all with a blasphemous sacrilege.
"_Domini, non sum dignus; ut interes sub tectum meum; sed tantum dic
verbo, et sanabitur anima mea...._"
There was a rustle in the pews, and the communicants worked their ways
into the aisle with downcast eyes and joined hands. Those of larger
piety pressed together their finger-tips to form steeples. Among these
latter was Carl Miller. Rudolph followed him toward the altar-rail and
knelt down, automatically taking up the napkin under his chin. The bell
rang sharply, and the priest turned from the altar with the white Host
held above the chalice:
"_Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam
æternam._"
A cold sweat broke out on Rudolph's forehead as the communion began.
Along the line Father Schwartz moved, and with gathering nausea Rudolph
felt his heart-valves weakening at the will of God. It seemed to him
that the church was darker and that a great quiet had fallen, broken
only by the inarticulate mumble which announced the approach of the
Creator of Heaven and Earth. He dropped his head down between his
shoulders and waited for the blow.
Then he felt a sharp nudge in his side. His father was poking him to sit
up, not to slump against the rail; the priest was only two places away.
"_Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam
æternam._"
Rudolph opened his mouth. He felt the sticky wax taste of the wafer on
his tongue. He remained motionless for what seemed an interminable
period of time, his head still raised, the wafer undissolved in his
mouth. Then again he started at the pressure of his father's elbow, and
saw that the people were falling away from the altar like leaves and
turning with blind downcast eyes to their pews, alone with God.
Rudolph was alone with himself, drenched with perspiration and deep in
mortal sin. As he walked back to his pew the sharp taps of his cloven
hoofs were loud upon the floor, and he knew that it was a dark poison he
carried in his heart.
V
"_Sagitta Volante in Dei_"
The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that
sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his sin
to Father Schwartz--and the square of sunshine in which he sat had moved
forward half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become less frightened
now; once eased of the story a reaction had set in. He knew that as long
as he was in the room with this priest God would not stop his heart, so
he sighed and sat quietly, waiting for the priest to speak.
Father Schwartz's cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet pattern on
which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines
and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked insistently toward
sunset, and from the ugly room and from the afternoon outside the window
arose a stiff monotony, shattered now and then by the reverberate
clapping of a far-away hammer on the dry air. The priest's nerves were
strung thin and the beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like
snakes upon the green felt of his table top. He could not remember now
what it was he should say.
Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of this
little boy's eyes--the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them
reluctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more.
For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited, and the
priest struggled to remember something that was slipping farther and
farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken house. Then
Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar
voice:
"When a lot of people get together in the best places things go
glimmering."
Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz's face.
"I said--" began the priest, and paused, listening. "Do you hear the
hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that's no good. The
thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever
that happens to be. Then"--his watery eyes widened knowingly--"things go
glimmering."
"Yes, Father," agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened.
"What are you going to be when you grow up?"
"Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while," answered
Rudolph nervously, "but I don't think that's a very good ambition, so I
think I'll be an actor or a Navy officer."
Again the priest stared at him.
"I see _exactly_ what you mean," he said, with a fierce air.
Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the implication
that he had, he became more uneasy.
"This man is crazy," he thought, "and I'm scared of him. He wants me to
help him out some way, and I don't want to."
"You look as if things went glimmering," cried Father Schwartz wildly.
"Did you ever go to a party?"
"Yes, Father."
"And did you notice that everybody was properly dressed? That's what I
mean. Just as you went into the party there was a moment when everybody
was properly dressed. Maybe two little girls were standing by the door
and some boys were leaning over the banisters, and there were bowls
around full of flowers."
"I've been to a lot of parties," said Rudolph, rather relieved that the
conversation had taken this turn.
"Of course," continued Father Schwartz triumphantly, "I knew you'd agree
with me. But my theory is that when a whole lot of people get together
in the best places things go glimmering all the time."
Rudolph found himself thinking of Blatchford Sarnemington.
"Please listen to me!" commanded the priest impatiently. "Stop worrying
about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the
supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?"
Rudolph had not the faintest idea what Father Schwartz was talking
about, but he nodded and the priest nodded back at him and returned to
his mysterious preoccupation.
"Why," he cried, "they have lights now as big as stars--do you realize
that? I heard of one light they had in Paris or somewhere that was as
big as a star. A lot of people had it--a lot of gay people. They have
all sorts of things now that you never dreamed of."
"Look here--" He came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew away, so
Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his eyes dried out
and hot. "Did you ever see an amusement park?"
"No, Father."
"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely.
"It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night
and stand a little way off from it in a dark place--under dark trees.
You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long
slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and
a smell of peanuts--and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you
of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like
a colored balloon--like a big yellow lantern on a pole."
Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.
"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do you'll
only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."
All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph,
because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his
beautiful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath
his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There
was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with
God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original
lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make
things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his
admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud. At the moment when he
had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pennon had flapped out into the
breeze somewhere and there had been the crunch of leather and the shine
of silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green
hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breastplates like the
picture at home of the German cuirassiers at Sedan.
But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken words,
and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open
window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz
collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back
against a chair.
"Oh, my God!" he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the floor.
Then a human oppression rose from the priest's worn clothes, and mingled
with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp
cry and ran in a panic from the house--while the collapsed man lay there
quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it
was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of
laughter.
Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls
with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields,
calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in
the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham,
and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now
hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three
hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls
and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under
the moon.
RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF
W-LES
The _Majestic_ came gliding into New York harbor on an April morning.
She sniffed at the tugboats and turtle-gaited ferries, winked at a gaudy
young yacht, and ordered a cattle-boat out of her way with a snarling
whistle of steam. Then she parked at her private dock with all the fuss
of a stout lady sitting down, and announced complacently that she had
just come from Cherbourg and Southampton with a cargo of the very best
people in the world.
The very best people in the world stood on the deck and waved
idiotically to their poor relations who were waiting on the dock for
gloves from Paris. Before long a great toboggan had connected the
_Majestic_ with the North American continent, and the ship began to
disgorge these very best people in the world--who turned out to be
Gloria Swanson, two buyers from Lord & Taylor, the financial minister
from Graustark with a proposal for funding the debt, and an African king
who had been trying to land somewhere all winter and was feeling
violently seasick.
The photographers worked passionately as the stream of passengers flowed
on to the dock. There was a burst of cheering at the appearance of a
pair of stretchers laden with two Middle-Westerners who had drunk
themselves delirious on the last night out.
The deck gradually emptied, but when the last bottle of Benedictine had
reached shore the photographers still remained at their posts. And the
officer in charge of debarkation still stood at the foot of the gangway,
glancing first at his watch and then at the deck as if some important
part of the cargo was still on board. At last from the watchers on the
pier there arose a long-drawn "Ah-h-h!" as a final entourage began to
stream down from deck B.
First came two French maids, carrying small, purple dogs, and followed
by a squad of porters, blind and invisible under innumerable bunches and
bouquets of fresh flowers. Another maid followed, leading a sad-eyed
orphan child of a French flavor, and close upon its heels walked the
second officer pulling along three neurasthenic wolfhounds, much to
their reluctance and his own.
A pause. Then the captain, Sir Howard George Witchcraft, appeared at the
rail, with something that might have been a pile of gorgeous silver-fox
fur standing by his side.
Rags Martin-Jones, after five years in the capitals of Europe, was
returning to her native land!
Rags Martin-Jones was not a dog. She was half a girl and half a flower,
and as she shook hands with Captain Sir Howard George Witchcraft she
smiled as if some one had told her the newest, freshest joke in the
world. All the people who had not already left the pier felt that smile
trembling on the April air and turned around to see.
She came slowly down the gangway. Her hat, an expensive, inscrutable
experiment, was crushed under her arm, so that her scant boy's hair,
convict's hair, tried unsuccessfully to toss and flop a little in the
harbor wind. Her face was like seven o'clock on a wedding morning save
where she had slipped a preposterous monocle into an eye of clear
childish blue. At every few steps her long lashes would tilt out the
monocle, and she would laugh, a bored, happy laugh, and replace the
supercilious spectacle in the other eye.
Tap! Her one hundred and five pounds reached the pier and it seemed to
sway and bend from the shock of her beauty. A few porters fainted. A
large, sentimental shark which had followed the ship across made a
despairing leap to see her once more, and then dove, broken-hearted,
back into the deep sea. Rags Martin-Jones had come home.
There was no member of her family there to meet her, for the simple
reason that she was the only member of her family left alive. In 1913
her parents had gone down on the _Titanic_ together rather than be
separated in this world, and so the Martin-Jones fortune of seventy-five
millions had been inherited by a very little girl on her tenth birthday.
It was what the consumer always refers to as a "shame."
Rags Martin-Jones (everybody had forgotten her real name long ago) was
now photographed from all sides. The monocle persistently fell out, and
she kept laughing and yawning and replacing it, so no very clear picture
of her was taken--except by the motion-picture camera. All the
photographs, however, included a flustered, handsome young man, with an
almost ferocious love-light burning in his eyes, who had met her on
the dock. His name was John M. Chestnut, he had already written the
story of his success for the _American Magazine_, and he had been
hopelessly in love with Rags ever since the time when she, like the
tides, had come under the influence of the summer moon.
When Rags became really aware of his presence they were walking down the
pier, and she looked at him blankly as though she had never seen him
before in this world.
"Rags," he began, "Rags----"
"John M. Chestnut?" she inquired, inspecting him with great interest.
"Of course!" he exclaimed angrily. "Are you trying to pretend you don't
know me? That you didn't write me to meet you here?"
She laughed. A chauffeur appeared at her elbow, and she twisted out of
her coat, revealing a dress made in great splashy checks of sea-blue and
gray. She shook herself like a wet bird.
"I've got a lot of junk to declare," she remarked absently.
"So have I," said Chestnut anxiously, "and the first thing I want to
declare is that I've loved you, Rags, every minute since you've been
away."
She stopped him with a groan.
"Please! There were some young Americans on the boat. The subject has
become a bore."
"My God!" cried Chestnut, "do you mean to say that you class _my_ love
with what was said to you on a _boat_?"
His voice had risen, and several people in the vicinity turned to hear.
"Sh!" she warned him, "I'm not giving a circus. If you want me to even
see you while I'm here, you'll have to be less violent."
But John M. Chestnut seemed unable to control his voice.
"Do you mean to say"--it trembled to a carrying pitch--"that you've
forgotten what you said on this very pier five years ago last Thursday?"
Half the passengers from the ship were now watching the scene on the
dock, and another little eddy drifted out of the customs-house to see.
"John"--her displeasure was increasing--"if you raise your voice again
I'll arrange it so you'll have plenty of chance to cool off. I'm going
to the Ritz. Come and see me there this afternoon."
"But, Rags!" he protested hoarsely. "Listen to me. Five years ago----"
Then the watchers on the dock were treated to a curious sight. A
beautiful lady in a checkered dress of sea-blue and gray took a brisk
step forward so that her hands came into contact with an excited young
man by her side. The young man retreating instinctively reached back
with his foot, but, finding nothing, relapsed gently off the thirty-foot
dock and plopped, after a not ungraceful revolution, into the Hudson
River.
A shout of alarm went up, and there was a rush to the edge just as his
head appeared above water. He was swimming easily, and, perceiving this,
the young lady who had apparently been the cause of the accident leaned
over the pier and made a megaphone of her hands.
"I'll be in at half past four," she cried.
And with a cheerful wave of her hand, which the engulfed gentleman was
unable to return, she adjusted her monocle, threw one haughty glance at
the gathered crowd, and walked leisurely from the scene.