It was noon when I awoke from the deep stupor rather than sleep into
which I had plunged. How swiftly, when one is waked out of sleep, comes
back the engrossing joy or grief which lay upon his heart when sleep
stole it away! But at this awakening I was conscious only of a strange,
dull sense of grief. I was for some time too much dazed to analyze my
sensations or to fully realize what had occurred in the past few days,
and on attempting to rise I found that I was stiff and sore, as after
unusual exertion.
The copy of the _Bitter Cry_ which I had left in my room the day before
lay on the floor. It served to recall to me the reality of the strange
circumstances into which I had fallen. I remember that a humorous
account of the Button Manufacturers’ plea before the Woman’s Executive
Committee to allow mankind to continue the use of buttons, first
caught my attention, and that afterward I read the following:
“LOVE WORKETH NO ILL TO HIS NEIGHBOUR.”
It was with more than his usual unction that the Rev. Jonathan
Holworthy announced his text one bright Sunday May morning, to the
distinctly rural congregation of Middlebrook.
Smoothing out with one soft, plump hand the pages of the large Bible
which lay on the pulpit cushion in front of him, he raised the other
impressively, and shot a comprehensive and penetrating glance toward
his humble and unpretending auditors. This glance, proceeding from
under a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and passing over the gold-rimmed
spectacles set low on his nose, was intended as a kind of preliminary
shot to awaken in the congregation any who were sleepily disposed,
and to draw the attention of each one of his parishioners to the
unusually “great effort” which he was about to make. And it must be
confessed that this impressive manner and sharp glance had the effect
of uncomfortably arousing several rather torpid individuals who had
settled themselves comfortably into their pews, and on whom the
ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had usually the effect of the
droning of a bumble bee in August.
“Wonder if we’re going to have another ‘Great Awakenin’’ such as I
remember forty years ago,” said Deacon Weatherby to himself. “The
minister ’pears to have something powerful on his mind.”
And Deacon Weatherby, like several others in the congregation, shook
off the sleepy fit which usually came on with great regularity as soon
as he had settled himself in his pew. He now sat bolt upright, with an
air of alertness that he did not manifest even in the numerous keen
horse trades in which he participated, and in which he was always
credited with coming off “first best.”
The Rev. Jonathan Holworthy, who had stood in silence with his hand
on the page of the open Bible, critically surveying the assembled
farmers and village folks of Middlebrook, appeared to be well satisfied
with the effect of his unusual impressiveness. He therefore proceeded
to deliberately announce his text, repeating it twice, slowly, as
if each word were heavy, and he had to lift it with an effort:
“Love-worketh-no-ill-to-his-neighbour--Love-worketh-no-ill-to-his-
neighbour.”
Having thus delivered his text with much solemnity, and having
apparently divided it in his mind under several heads, the Rev. Mr.
Holworthy first addressed himself to the subject of Love. But Love
cannot be said to have been the particular game which he was hunting
in the great oratorical effort which he had planned for himself that
morning. Beyond a few general platitudes interspersed with Scriptural
quotations, he did not, therefore, expatiate upon this branch of his
discourse. It was only when he came to consider the subject of “his
neighbour” that he may be said to have really struck the trail, and to
have warmed up in the pursuit of his argument. “Who is my neighbour?”
he suddenly demanded, with so much imperative force, that a half-witted
young man, who sat in the front row, promptly replied, “Ike Hunniwell,
the infidel.”
This reply to the minister’s inquiry produced a half-frightened
smile on the faces of some of the congregation. It must, however, be
admitted, that in general to the simple-minded farmers of Middlebrook,
unaccustomed as they were to much allegory or metaphor, their
“neighbours” were simply the plain, hard-featured, but kindly, men and
women who lived on the farms adjoining their own, and the but little
more stylish men and women whose humble homes lined the streets of
Middlebrook.
But the Rev. Mr. Holworthy was looking for a very different neighbour
from any of these, and he therefore only frowned at the reply of
half-witted Ira Aliter.
And in pursuit of this anomalous, hypothetical neighbour, the Rev. Mr.
Holworthy may then be said to have proceeded to compass sea and land.
He sought him in the far-off jungles of India, on the trackless wastes
of Africa, among the nomadic hordes of Tartary, and in the rigorous
confines of Siberia. No land known to be inhabited by the human
race was too distant or too inaccessible for the broad sweep of his
resistless benevolence to reach. Indeed, if man had been amphibious,
there is but little doubt that he would have dragged the sea in the
ardour of his all-pervading search for this neighbour to whom “love”
was to “work no ill.” But as man did not occupy the depths of the
sea, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy contented himself with traversing, in
his astonishing mental flight, all the most distant and uncivilized
countries known to the geographer.
And in all these far-away places, some of which the bewildered farmers
of Middlebrook had never heard of before, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had
no difficulty in triumphantly finding “his neighbour”; and having thus
found “his neighbour” at the uttermost ends of the earth, the Rev. Mr.
Holworthy unceremoniously haled him as it were, taking him by the
nape of the neck, metaphorically speaking, and holding him up for the
dumbfounded farmers of Middlebrook to gaze upon.
Having thus shown to the undiscriminating inhabitants of Middlebrook
who their real “neighbours” were, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy proceeded
to invest these “neighbours” with the garments made by the local
branch of the Missionary Society, putting these garments on to these
imaginary “neighbours” somewhat as a constable would clap handcuffs on
to a miserable wretch who had long eluded justice. Thus, the Rev. Mr.
Holworthy, to his own satisfaction, showed to his congregation that
through the efforts of their local branch of the Missionary Society
they were working no ill but positive good to their “neighbours” in
the antipodes. He then indulged in much self-gratulatory and flowery
complacence, assuring his congregation that they were sublimely proving
the Apostle Paul’s great sentence that “Love worketh no ill to his
neighbour.”
In the minister’s pew, a little way to the left of the front of the
pulpit, sat a pale and faded ghost of a woman. She sat in the middle
of the pew, and on her right, looking very uneasy in tight jackets and
broad white collars, sat five stout boys. On her left, in stiffly
starched sun-bonnets and white aprons, were four print and meek-faced
girls. Mrs. Holworthy was looking more than commonly pale and fragile
on this particular May morning. The delicate blue veins in her white
throat and in her slender wrists showed plainly. Two or three times
that morning Mr. Holworthy had sent peremptory word out from his
study that the children must be kept more quiet, as he was putting
the finishing touches on his great sermon, “Love worketh no ill to
his neighbour.” Two or three times that morning, while undergoing the
fatigues of preparing the children for church, Mrs. Holworthy had
stopped with a sudden fainting and fluttering at her heart. And now,
while she turned her white, patient face toward the pulpit, strange
fancies began to crowd her mind, interrupted only when Mr. Holworthy,
in rounding off one of his turgid periods, brought out with extra force
the beautiful words of St. Paul, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.”
In Mrs. Holworthy’s fancy, she seemed to see herself as she was at
eighteen, a joyous care-free girl, with many tastes for art and books,
and high companionships and charity, and great and noble deeds. Life,
then, had stretched before her like a flower-strewn pathway, not
devoid of suffering and sacrifice, to be sure, but the suffering and
the sacrifice were to have had the sweetness and recompense of being
her chosen own, freely accepted and joyfully submitted to with the
sublime consciousness of her own soul’s development thereby.
Then Mrs. Holworthy remembered with a sudden shudder in the retrospect,
of her meeting with Mr. Holworthy. Did she love the heavy, phlegmatic
young minister who visited at her father’s house so long ago? No, she
could see, oh, so clearly now, that she did not, that she had never
known love, that she was too young and inexperienced to divine the
depths of meaning in that word. She saw she had been somewhat flattered
by the attentions of the young minister, that she had been drawn into
marriage with him by the assiduous teaching that marriage was woman’s
sole sphere, and that marriage with a clergyman was eminently pure and
respectable. As she looked back over her married life, she saw that at
its very threshold she had been compelled to lay aside all her tastes
for art, her aspirations for doing something good and noble in her own
way, even her simple enjoyment of her own poor little life, all had
been ruthlessly sacrificed. From the day that her first child was born,
she had never known an unbroken night’s rest, she had scarcely looked
into a book, she had lost the use of her pen and pencil, the cares of
breeding had absorbed her whole life, and what had she to show for
them? Her children, to be sure; but even these could never compensate
her for her ruthless dispossession of all the golden opportunities and
innocent cravings of her own nature.
As Mrs. Holworthy mused thus over her mutilated past, the beautiful
text of Mr. Holworthy’s sermon began to mingle with her thoughts,
and to arouse strange questionings in her mind. Could these heathen
“neighbours,” whom Mr. Holworthy was seeking so strenuously in the
far-off Isles of the Sea, have a more unmitigated slavery than hers had
been? However unenlightened they might be, were they not quite as free
and happy as she, bound as she had been to bear children for this great
man, whether she wanted to or not, whether she was able to or not?
Surely, if any one deserved pity and needed succour, it was one whose
lot had been like hers. Her head began to feel strangely confused. She
repeated Mr. Holworthy’s text to herself, “Love worketh no ill to his
neighbour.” Beautiful words! What could they mean? It was plain that
something had worked ill to her unreconciled life, and therefore it
could not be love. No, it was a blinding mistake, a fearful travesty,
a hideous misnomer to call it love. “Love worketh no ill to his
neighbour,” she repeated till her brain was dizzy.
Just as the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had completed his great effort and
driven the last nail home, as it were, by reciting for the last
time the noble words of St. Paul which had formed the theme of his
discourse, there was a sudden stir in the congregation. Mrs. Holworthy
had fallen forward in her seat, and her children were peering at her
face with the unsuspecting curiosity of those who have experienced
neither care nor sorrow. When the kind-hearted women who came to her
relief had laid her on the cushioned seat, her lips moved as if she
were repeating something, but the only word they could catch was
“Love.” She had gone to a place where love truly “worketh no ill to his
neighbour.”
“This is indeed a mysterious dispensation of Providence,” said the Rev.
Mr. Holworthy to his awe-stricken parishioners.
But the village doctor, who was a man of few words, confided to his
wife that evening that he thought that Mrs. Holworthy had died of a
“dispensation of children.”
I had just finished reading this article in the _Bitter Cry_, when
there was a knock at my door, and Mr. Lister entered.
“Come Mr. Carford,” he said, “it is past two o’clock and as the women’s
parade will not pass through this street, we must take our luncheon at
once and go down to the public square.”
I sprang up. “Let us go,” I said. “I would not miss such a spectacle
for worlds. The sun never looked down on its like before, and it
probably never will again.”
And taking a hasty luncheon, we left the house.
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