THE REVELATION OF HALLELUJAH JONES
Hallelujah Jones was in his element. With his wheezy melodeon, his
gasoline flare and his wild earnestness, he crowded the main street of
the little mining-town, making the engagement of the "San Francisco
Amazons" at the clapboard "opera house" a losing venture. The effete
civilization of wealthy bailiwicks did not draw forth his powers as did
the open and unveneered debaucheries of less restricted settlements.
Against these he could inveigh with surety, at least, of an appreciative
audience.
He had not lacked for listeners here, for he was a new sensation. His
battered music-box, with its huge painted text, was far and away more
attractive than the thumping pianolas of the saloons or the
Brobdignagian gramophone of the dance-hall, and his old-fashioned songs
were enthusiastically encored. When he lit his flare in the court-house
square at dusk on the second evening, the office of the Mountain Valley
House was emptied and the bar-rooms and gaming-tables well-nigh
deserted of their patrons.
Jessica had seen the mustering crowd from the hotel entrance. Mrs.
Halloran had welcomed her errand that day and given her her best room, a
chamber overlooking the street. She had persuaded her visitor to spend
the afternoon and insisted that she stay to supper, "just to see how she
would like it for a steady diet." Now, as Jessica passed along toward
the mountain road, the spectacle chained her feet on the outskirts of
the gathering. She watched and listened with a preoccupied mind; she was
thinking that on her way to the sanatorium she would cross to the cabin
for a good-night word with the man upon whom her every thought centered.
As it happened, however, Harry was at that moment very near her. Alone
on the mountain, the perplexing conflict of feeling had again descended
upon him. He had fought it, but it had prevailed, and at nightfall had
driven him down to the town, where the street preacher now held forth.
He stood alone, unnoted, a little distance away, near the court-house
steps, where, by reason of the crowd, Jessica could see neither him nor
the dog which sniffed at the heels of the circle of bystanders as if to
inquire casually of salvation.
Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher, shaking back his
long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and
struck up a gospel song:
"My days are gliding swiftly by,
And I, a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
These hours of toil and danger.
For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand,
Our friends are passing over,
And just before the shining shore
We may almost discover."
The song ended, he mounted his camp-stool to propound his usual fiery
text.
The watcher by the steps was gazing with a strange, alert intentness.
Something in the scene--the spluttering, dripping flame, the music, the
forensic earnestness of the pilgrim--held him enthralled. The dormant
sense that in the recent weeks had again and again stirred at some
elusive touch of memory, was throbbing. Since last night, with its
sudden lightning flash of the past that had faded again into blankness,
he had been as sensitive as a photographic plate.
Hallelujah Jones knew the melodramatic value of contrast. As his mood
called, he passed abruptly from exhortation to song, from prayer to
fulmination, and he embellished his harangue with anecdotes drawn from
his lifelong campaign against the Arch-Enemy of Souls. Of what he had
said the solitary observer had been quite unconscious. It was the
_ensemble_--the repetition of something experienced somewhere
before--that appealed to him. Suddenly, however, a chance phrase pierced
to his understanding.
Another moment and he was leaning forward, his eyes fixed, his breath
straining at his breast. For each word of the speaker now was knocking a
sledge-hammer blow upon the blank wall in his brain. Hallelujah Jones
had launched into the recital of an incident which had become the _chef
d'ouvre_ of his repertory--a story which, though the stern charge of a
bishop had kept him silent as to name and locality, yet, possessing the
vividness of an actual experience, had lost little in the telling. It
was the tale of an evening when he had peered through the tilted window
of a chapel, and seen its dissolute rector gambling on the table of the
Lord.
Back in the shadow the listener, breathless and staring, saw the scene
unroll like the shifting slide of a stereopticon--the epitaph on his own
dead self. Nerve and muscle and brain tightened as if to withstand a
shock, for the man who moved through the pictures was himself! He saw
the cards and counters falling on the table, the entrance of the two
intruding figures, heard Hugh's wild laugh as he fled, and the grate of
the key in the lock behind him as he stood in his study. He heard the
rush of the wind past the motor-car, the rustle of dry corn in the
hedges, and felt the mist beating on his bare head--
"Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory
I shall wear!"
He did not know that it was the voice of the street preacher which was
singing now. The words shrieked themselves through his brain. Harry
Sanderson, not Hugh Stires! Not an outcast! Not criminal, thief and
forger! The curtain was rent. The dead wall in his brain was down, and
the real past swept over him in an ungovernable flood. Hallelujah Jones
had furnished the clue to the maze. His story was the last great wave,
which had crumbled, all at once, the cliff of oblivion that the normal
process of the recovered mind had been stealthily undermining. The
formula, lost so long in the mysterious labyrinth of the brain, had
reestablished itself, and the thousand shreds of recollection that he
had misconstrued had fallen into their true place in the old pattern.
Harry Sanderson at last knew his past and all of puzzlement and distress
that it had held.
Shaking in every limb and feeling all along the court-house wall like a
drunken man, he made his way to the further deserted street. A passer-by
would have shrunk at sight of his face and his burning eyes.
For these months, he, the Reverend Henry Sanderson, disgraced, had
suffered eclipse, had been sunk out of sight and touch and hearing like
a stone in a pool. For these months--through an accidental facial
resemblance and a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances--he had owned
the name and ignominy of Hugh Stires. And Jessica? Deceived no less than
he, dating her piteous error from that mistaken moment when she had torn
the bandage from her eyes on her wedding-day. She had never seen the
real Hugh in Smoky Mountain. She must learn the truth. Yet, how to tell
her? How could he tell her _all_?
At any hour yesterday, hard as the telling must have been, he could have
told her. Last night the hour passed. How could he tell her now? Yet she
was the real Hugh's wife by law and right; he himself could not marry
her! If God would but turn back the universe and give him yesterday!
Why not _be_ Hugh Stires? The wild idea came to him to throw away his
own self for ever, never to tell her, never to return to Aniston, to
live on here or fly to some distant place, till years had made
recognition impossible. He struck his forehead with his closed hand. He,
a priest of God, to summon her to an illegal union? To live a serial
story of hypocrisy, with the guilty shadow of the living Hugh always
between them, the sword of Damocles always suspended above their heads,
to cleave to the heart of his Fool's Paradise? The mad thought died. Yet
what justice of Heaven was it that Jessica, whose very soul had been
broken on the wheel, should now, through no conscious fault, be led by
his hand through a new Inferno of suffering?
His feet dragging as though from cold, he climbed the mountain road. As
he walked he took from his pocket the little gold cross, and his
fingers, numb with misery, tied it to his thong watch-guard. It had been
only a bauble, a pocket-piece acquired he knew not when or how; now he
knew it for the badge of his calling. He remembered now that, pressed a
certain way, it would open, and engraved inside were his name and the
date of his ordination.
He might shut the cabin door, but he could not forbid the torturer that
came with him across the threshold. He might throw himself upon his
knees and bury his face in the rough skin of the couch, but he could not
shut out words that blent in golden-lettered flashes across his
throbbing eyeballs: _Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife_.
So he crouched, a man under whose feet life had crashed, leaving him
pinned beneath the wreck, to watch the fire that must creep nearer and
nearer.