THE HOUSE OF PEACE
Wingfield, Walsh and Paddock sat in melancholy council in Walsh’s glass
box of an office. The Blotter had been at it again. Wingfield had
suggested bringing Paddock into the matter, though Walsh had demurred
that it was hardly decent to use a preacher as a policeman. It was
Walsh’s idea that Wayne--who had used his motor car as a battering ram
against the austere walls of the county jail--should be dispatched to a
sanatorium for treatment. Paddock shook his head.
“Please--not yet!” begged the minister.
“But you’ve got to come to it sooner or later. It’s a disease in that
boy and we may as well handle it on that basis.”
Wingfield, who had consulted several medical friends as to the
treatment of dipsomania, confirmed and supported Walsh. Paddock smiled
sadly.
“I happen to know that he had been tried a good deal of late. He
has had a staggering blow or two. He had been straight for several
months--made a new record. And he ran against a very serious
proposition that was too much for him.”
“What’s that?” demanded Walsh bluntly.
“He told me last fall that he had decided to go to hell--in just those
words--he’s disappointed; he’s found out that it’s not so easy as he
thought.”
“Um,” grunted Walsh, feeling in his pocket for a cigar to chew.
“I mean,” said Paddock, “that he’s too much of a man for the devil to
handle. There’s real manhood in Wayne Craighill; he would be lonesome
in hell. And besides, the road downward isn’t so easy as it looks.
Please understand me, gentlemen, I’m not talking religion; I’m merely
stating the plain truth from my own observation and experience. I had
the same idea once myself. I’m not proud of it and mention it only to
illuminate my point. I used to get most beastly and hideously drunk, so
I don’t take a purely academic view of such cases, but where there’s
any manhood left in a fellow he can’t be as wicked as he wants to be.
I’ve had my eye on Wayne all winter. Good influences have touched him.
But with the good came unhappiness and he saw no way out but the red
door that pushes in on greased hinges. He’s like a child. When he can’t
get what he wants he vents his rage by getting drunk and trying to tear
the town to pieces. He will profit by a brief rustication in a safe
place where no one will bother him and where he won’t feel the shame of
being hustled into a drunkard’s cure somewhere. We can always fall back
on the doctors. Let’s send him to a place I know over here in Virginia
where they’re practising a new idea in just such cases----”
“Hypnotism, psychotherapy--what is it?” asked Wingfield.
“Bless you, no! It’s the idea I’ve already suggested, which was
developed by a friend of mine in the ministry, that no man can be
as base as he wants to be--an attack on sin on the score of its
futility. Wayne had begun to catch glimpses of that a little while
ago. He thought he saw a straight road right down to the bottom, but
he was surprised to find that it wasn’t such clear sailing after
all. Something happened very unexpectedly to make him pause; then he
couldn’t get what he wanted so he decided it was all off again and
he’s been drunk and disorderly. Now if you’ll let me have him for a
couple of weeks, I’ll see if we can’t give him a new idea or two, and
when you’ve interrupted the downward course several times--a score
if necessary--he’ll begin to understand that we don’t really fashion
our own lives at all. As I said before, we can’t be as wicked as we’d
like to be--assuming, of course, that we are not utterly depraved and
abandoned and that there’s still something left to nail to. All this
isn’t my idea--Paul Stoddard suggested it.”
“Stoddard--the Protestant monk,” remarked Wingfield doubtfully.
“Not in the mediæval sense, however,” replied Paddock. “He’s an
original, up-to-date monk. He takes cases that everybody else has given
up--and he has no failures.”
“Um. If you think praying over Wayne Craighill will cure him of
drunkenness you can do it,” growled Walsh, who had with difficulty
rescued Wayne from the clutches of the police only the night before.
“I’d rather try some other kind of medicine.”
“You needn’t be afraid of Stoddard. He won’t pray over Wayne or scold
him or preach to him.”
“You spoke of some hard blow Wayne had recently. Was it a woman?” asked
Wingfield.
“Yes,” the clergyman answered.
“What was the matter with her?” growled Walsh resentfully.
“I suppose it was my fault,” Paddock answered. “She is a fine
woman--but she wasn’t quite free, as we look at it in the Church.”
“And of course the Church couldn’t sacrifice itself,” Walsh grumbled.
“It wasn’t as easy as that, Mr. Walsh. There were three people to
consider, leaving the Church out entirely.”
“Well, I’m for trying the monastery,” said Wingfield. “It can do no
harm, and he may resume operations while we sit here talking about it.”
“Mr. Paddock,” began Walsh, as his visitors rose, “do I understand you
to say that a man can’t go to the bad if he works hard enough at it?”
Walsh frowned so fiercely that Paddock laughed.
“Oh, not so broad as that! But there are good influences at work in the
world--you see evidences of them all around--and they are increasing
all the time. And they make things harder for the ambitious sinner;
he’s engaged in a sort of obstacle race.”
“Um,” was Walsh’s only comment. He threw up the window of his cage
that looked upon the wintry street and watched Wingfield and the
clergyman picking their way cautiously through a battery of noisy
trucks. The porters and clerks saw his bald pate hanging ominously
above them in the crisp air, but the window closed with a bang without
the usual malediction. Walsh growled to himself for a while and then,
seeking an outlet for his emotions, summoned a frightened little
stenographer whom he had threatened with dismissal that morning and
raised her wages two dollars a week.
* * * * *
Wayne Craighill followed Paddock from the train at a station high in
the Virginia hills. The poison had been steamed out of him, but his
mind was still dull from its latest punishment. He had been glad in
the first hours of his reaction to have Paddock’s sympathy and he had
agreed to leave town with the minister without quite comprehending
where they were going.
A buckboard was waiting and they were soon off, threading their way
through the snowy hills. Wayne stared ahead indifferently, and when
they reached a lonely stone house, perched high on a rough crag, he
accepted this as their destination unquestioningly. And so he came to
the house of the Brothers of Bethlehem.
Stoddard himself flung the door open--a tall man of thirty-five, alert,
quick of movement and ready of speech. It was, it seemed, the most
natural thing in the world that Wayne Craighill should be there--no
questions asked, no discussion of the reasons for his coming, no time
fixed for his departure, no laying down of rules.
“We want you to make yourself perfectly at home, Mr. Craighill. The
walks are fairly well cleared in the neighbourhood and the air is the
finest on earth. We call this the House of Peace--no newspapers, mail
once a week, and telegrams are almost unknown. We have the place for
ourselves and our friends to rest in. You will find a schedule of the
day’s events in your room but don’t let the religious offices disturb
you. They go on all the time and it is not in the least necessary for
you to attend them. Please be free to do as you like. You and Paddock
are St. John’s boys--I’m one, too--five years ahead of you, though.”
He led the way to a small bedroom on the second floor, whose windows
framed at the moment the ruddy winter sunset. The room was severely
simple, its woodwork white and scrupulously clean, the furniture
limited to essentials.
“The best thing about the room is the view,” observed Stoddard and in
a moment he had gone, for it was the hour of vespers and the brothers
were already assembling in the little chapel below.
Wayne turned gloomily from the window.
“Stung! Kidnapped and smuggled into a monastery! Well, Jimmy Paddock,
you have your nerve! It’s all right with me, but how about that big
fellow--what is he, the abbot?--if he knew what an outlaw had got into
his joint he’d probably drop me into the valley down there. Are you
going to leave me here alone with nothing to do but say my prayers?”
“Sorry I’ve got to go, but I’m off to-night.”
“So you’ve brought me here to lose me! How long am I in for?”
“You can leave any time you want to and you can do as you please while
you’re here, just as Stoddard told you.”
“Thank you,” mocked Wayne. “I’m going to fool you by staying.”
The novelty of his situation, the strangeness of the life of a
religious house, and the quiet good fellowship of the men who gathered
at the common table of the refectory, clad in their brown robes,
interested Wayne in spite of himself. The brothers were all young
graduates of American colleges, vigorous, manly fellows, who did not
discuss religion to-night, but social and political questions just then
before the world. Stoddard asked Paddock for an account of his own work
at Ironstead and the minister described the general social conditions
of Pittsburg, throwing out questions to bring Wayne into the talk.
Wayne’s presence was accepted as a matter of course; no particular
importance attached to him as a guest, and he had not for a long time
felt so wholly at ease as among these young priests, whose aims were
utterly different from any idea he had ever entertained of religious
work. There were only ten of them and they had assembled for a period
of rest and discussion with their leader before separating to continue
their work in various parts of the country immediately after Christmas.
One of the brothers who particularly attracted Wayne had been a sailor.
He had spent his summers sailing in coastwise ships to earn his way
through college. Another had been a ranchman in Colorado and was to
leave shortly for work in Montana. At the end of the meal as at the
beginning they stood in their places and recited prayers, making the
sign of the cross. All but Stoddard, the Superior, went about their
affairs at once. He asked his guests into the library, a comfortable
lounging room where they continued the talk of the table until a
brother appeared to carry Paddock to the station.
Wayne rode down with them, returning to what seemed to be a deserted
house; but as he stood uncertainly in the hall he heard from the little
oratory the deep voice of Stoddard reciting compline. He went to the
door and peered in upon the brothers at prayer. The room was quite dark
and there were no lights for this service on the tiny altar. Stoddard’s
voice boomed through the little chapel; the kneeling priests in the
rough choir stalls responded in the antiphonals with deep, hearty
voices. There was nothing spectacular or theatrical in the scene; the
setting was too bare for this; and these men, Wayne reflected, were
seriously commending their souls to the mercy and protection of a God
in whom he did not believe. He went out into the night and followed the
rough road that climbed farther into the mountains, pausing now and
then, where breaks in the woodland offered clear, moonlit vistas, to
gaze across the valley to the hills beyond.
In the depression following his latest plunge into the depths, while
his head ached and his hands shook, a dark thought had crossed his
mind and it came back upon him now. A slip on the edge of one of these
iron crags and he would crash into oblivion, and that would be the end
of his troubles. If Paddock had lodged him here with the idea that he
might be won to a belief in religion he had made a stupid blunder. The
religion of emotion might in certain circumstances have appealed to
Wayne Craighill, but the religion of service as practised by Stoddard
and Paddock struck him as vain and futile.
The road followed a sharp defile and the sheer depths below invited
him. It would be quite decent of him to free the world of his wretched
self, that had given him no joy and that had become a byword and a
hissing wherever his name was known. He wondered why he had delayed so
long. Life was a prison-house and the labour was hard; below, there
in the snowy ravine, lay peace. He stopped abruptly by a clump of
cedars, clutched them and bent over to scan the depths. He could see
no bottom, and the place was so lone that they might not find him when
it was over. He felt that he had never before been so wholly master
of himself, and the thought steadied him; if he had ever been sane
it was now, when he was about to take French leave of a dreary and
unprofitable world. The moon looked down upon him coldly; the snow-clad
hills were indifferent; the wind lay still, waiting for this life to
slip away like a pebble into the gorge. The place was fitting; he chose
his spot and made ready for the leap.
Steps sounded behind him as of someone walking, but whoever came moved
deliberately along the shoulder of the hill toward the top. There was
no reason for delaying; ample time remained in which to step into the
gorge and be done with it. Wayne clung stubbornly to the slippery edge;
but the moments passed. The tall figure of Stoddard, the priest, drew
nearer, his head bowed and his arms folded under a long cloak. His
shovel hat gave a bizarre note to his costume. He gained the crown of
the ridge and lifted his head.
“Ah, you came out to watch the moon to bed! That, Mr. Craighill, is my
own privilege.”
Wayne stood doggedly by the ravine edge. It was on his lips to berate
the priest for appearing at this crucial moment, and Stoddard’s calm
manner angered him.
“This is the best view possible anywhere about here,” the priest
continued. “You have an eye for landscape, but the wind is rising; let
us walk on into the wood and get away from it.”
“Father Stoddard, you have done me an injury. If I had not heard your
step when I did I should be lying at the bottom of the gap.”
The reaction had been sudden and he was all unstrung. His voice was
strange in his own ears.
“Oh! You had intended doing that? I really can’t believe it.”
“You might as well believe it; it is quite true,” persisted Wayne,
irritably.
“Those things do occur to all of us sometimes,” replied the priest
calmly. “But in your own case it is quite impossible. I advise you to
dismiss the matter from your mind.”
“I tell you I was going to do it; a second more and I should have been
a dead man.”
The priest readjusted his cloak, throwing an end over his shoulder.
“Well, why don’t you go ahead?” he remarked carelessly. “I give you my
word I shall never mention it. But see--you haven’t the will to do it.
You yielded yourself for a moment to the absurd hallucination that your
life was a complete and finished thing, but it is not; I take it upon
myself, my dear Craighill, to say that it is not. There are many rough
edges; the design is incomplete. You will have to wait a little, my
friend. The will of God has not had its divine way with you yet.”
“The will of God!” cried Wayne, hardly knowing in his anger that he was
following the priest away from the precipice; “do you think I believe
any of that rot?”
“Then,” the tall priest replied, speaking brusquely, as was his way,
“we will say the way of the devil, if that pleases your humour better.
The devil, then, hasn’t made a very good job of you yet. He has his
sense of artistic completeness, and he can hardly look upon you as one
of his _chefs d’œuvre_. Even the devil requires time. It doesn’t strike
me off-hand, from my observation of his patterns, that he’s made much
headway with you. He would undoubtedly accomplish more in time; but you
are not ready for his collection yet. Let’s continue our walk. We must
have a good many ideas in common. In your day at St. John’s did they
afflict you with roast veal every Thursday? They did in my time and it
was always a trial to me. I remember----”
A light way, indeed, to treat the heroic impulse of a man ready, a
moment before, to plunge into the dark; but Paul Stoddard was not
without his wisdom.
He wrote a note to Paddock that night in which he said: “Craighill is a
good fellow and there is hope for him. He is a man in search of his own
soul and he will find it in time. Pray for him.”
* * * * *
The days passed. At the end of a week Wayne expected to leave; but the
freedom and peace were sweet. He was enjoying a luxury of unhappiness.
Christmas came, but it brought him no joy, only unhappy memories.
He kept clear of the oratory, where the recitation of offices was
interminable. The priests were happy souls to be able to believe in
such things! Brother Azarius, the sailor, asked him to walk to the
village for the mail after the midday meal, which was amplified into
a feast by gifts from the farmers of the valley. A novel Christmas
this, for Wayne Craighill, dining with priests in a mountain monastery,
but they were cheerful, wholesome fellows and he liked their talk,
which was utterly unaffected and interesting. He set out with Brother
Azarius for the village in the valley soon after dinner. When the
mail-bag was handed out at the general store Wayne felt a pang of
homesickness--his first--at beholding this tie between the quiet hills
and the throbbing world below. He had sent no message of any kind to
Fanny, who had always included him in the Christmas celebrations at
her house; she was still South when he left and unless Wingfield had
told her, she did not know his whereabouts. He wrote a telegram in the
railway station wishing her and her household a merry Christmas. “Don’t
trouble about me; I am perfectly well.”
He began a message to his father, paused uncertainly when he had
written the address, and tore it up, the old resentment on fire again.
He left the station but paused in the highway and went back. “Best
wishes for a happy Christmas,” he wrote to Jean at her boarding-house
address. He could not for the life of him add a word to this, though
he wasted half a dozen blanks in futile trials, while Brother Azarius
tramped up and down the station platform. Poor Wayne! Too bad life
isn’t all spelled out in the nursery picture books that we might know
the worst at the beginning and be done with it! It was well that
Brother Azarius had that capital story of his shipwreck off Martinique
up his sleeve for emergencies like this or Wayne might have found the
memory of Jean’s hand on his cheek too much for him--that dear, brave
hand that had known labour!
The brothers cut their own fuel and the next morning he found an axe
and plunged into the snowy wood. The priests had scattered widely and
only two remained at the house. Stoddard had gone West to be absent a
month, but Wayne was beginning to enjoy his security and isolation.
By noon he had blistered his hands, but he kept manfully at work. In a
few days he had developed skill and viewed the increase in his daily
product with satisfaction. His bodily health had never been so good. At
times he was almost happy and went whistling about his work. This was
what Jean had told him to do: find labour with his hands. And all these
days Jean was never out of his thoughts, never out of his heart.
So the weeks passed and Wayne lingered at the House of Peace, taking
long walks over the hills; talking with the brothers, whose circle
changed frequently; felling trees in the snowy wood, and performing
such other manual labour as offered. He saw the earliest vanguard of
spring steal into the hills, resisted, flung back, but camping at last
on the summits, smiling conquerors. He watched the swelling buds and
bore proudly home the first furtive arbutus. His blood was purified,
his spirit lightened in the lustral air. He read much, sending away for
books and periodicals; he wrote letters to Jean and tore them up; he
brooded, pondered, wondered, and walked the ridges with the stars.
One evening, near the end of April, Stoddard, who had just returned
after a long absence, came into his room.
“I’m sorry, Craighill, but your time is up. You must go home to-morrow.”
“But I’m not ready to leave yet! If you’ll let me go on chopping wood
and carrying water I’d like to stay. I’m a failure down below there--I
don’t want to go back; I can’t go back.”
“That is good; I’m glad you feel that way about it.”
“I can’t lie to you: I don’t believe in God. You’ve done a good deal
for me and I see things better; but I’m likely to stumble and fall
again the day I leave here.”
“That is quite likely, as you say,” said the priest. “There may be some
further struggles and difficulties; your old friend the devil isn’t so
easily shaken off; he has the pride of his craftsmanship, as I told you
the night you came. There are some men who, if they asked to be allowed
to remain here permanently to escape the dangers and temptations of
the world, I should not refuse. I should feel that way in the case of
weaklings, failures or cowards; but you are different, Craighill. You
do not fall within these classifications. The House of Peace is not for
you; you’ve got to go back into the world to wrestle with it, to get
under the devil’s heels perhaps, but to find your feet finally and in
time to become a man, honoured, respected and loved by men. I am not
a prophet, and have no knowledge of your future that I don’t read in
yourself; but I am not alone in my feeling about you. These members of
the Brotherhood see and feel it and they are, you may say, experts
in cases like yours. Without trying, you have made them like you. We
are all your friends. You don’t believe in God--the God we preach--and
I’m not going to discuss that with you. It is barely possible that you
are incapable of belief; but those things are a good deal a matter of
phrases and words. No two men of our brotherhood have exactly the same
idea of the person of God. No two souls are just alike any more than
the eyes of two persons respond to the same test. When I read I am
obliged to use a pair of glasses which would probably blind you utterly
and it would be absurd for me to force you to use them. And it is
equally far from my intention to force my religious ideas upon you.”
Wayne was silent for what seemed a long time, for he was half-ashamed
of the question he wished to ask.
“How did it happen that you found me that first night when I was
actually at the point of tumbling over the cliff out yonder?”
“My dear Craighill, I wish you wouldn’t ask me hard questions like
that,” laughed the big priest. “You may call that chance, if you
please. I did not follow you by intention, or know as a matter of fact
that you had gone in that direction.” Stoddard was silent for a moment;
then he laughed happily. “You don’t believe in my God, you tell me,
but, my dear fellow, I believe in yours!”
Wayne’s hand shook as he drew it across his face.
“Don’t send me away from here,” he pleaded huskily.
“This isn’t the place for you, my brother, my friend. The world isn’t
wholly bad--not by any means--you must go back to it,” said Stoddard
kindly. “If you feel at any time that I can help you, send for me; the
doors of this house are open to you day and night. We are often widely
scattered--only one brother remains here always and you can come at any
time without notice. But to-morrow you must go back and take your place
in the ranks of the fighting men.”
The priest rose. For a moment he rested his hands lightly on Wayne’s
shoulders.
“Good night. God bless you, Wayne Craighill.”
* * * * *
Wayne returned immediately to Pittsburg and to his father’s house.
Mrs. Blair, to whom he reported promptly by telephone, greeted him
in her usual excited fashion, but, having been charged by Wingfield,
through her husband, not to force Wayne to discuss his banishment, she
was obliged to forego the pleasure of acquainting herself with her
brother’s experience of the monastic life. His Christmas gifts from
her house were still piled on his dressing-table where he found also
the haberdashery his father always bestowed upon him; and there was a
book inscribed “Addie to Wayne, Christmas, 1907.” His father greeted
him with that urbane tolerance with which Wayne had long been familiar.
The prodigal’s place at the table was waiting, and no painful questions
were asked as to the cause of his absence. Mrs. Craighill showed her
brightest face, and no chance visitor would have known that the son
of the house had last appeared in it on the eve of a prolonged spree.
There was no exchange of confidences, no confessions, no exhortations
behind closed doors. Colonel Craighill talked of social affairs and of
the events of the new year, and Wayne added a word now and then when
Addie’s eyes beseeched his. He was sorry for Addie, who did not know
or care what progress was making in disarmament or whether the African
slave traffic had really been abolished.
The ways that had known Wayne knew him again. He returned to the
office, where little had changed; he met Wingfield at the Club and
learned all the gossip of the city. Walsh, in his glass cage, discussed
the profits of the mercantile company, and brought Wayne to date as to
the financial situation, over which he growled characteristically. He
answered Wayne’s questions as to Colonel Craighill’s affairs guardedly,
but from his manner Wayne assumed the worst. Walsh was reluctant to
discuss these matters, but he proposed, in his usual blunt fashion,
that Wayne join him in the management of the mercantile company.
“I’ve got too much to do down here. You can name your own salary, and
create your own job. We can double the territory we work now and it
would be a big help to me to have you. You’ve got your oats sowed now
and when I curl up with apoplexy some day you will be ready to continue
the business at the old stand.”
Wayne, touched by the old fellow’s generosity, asked a day or two to
think it over.
From Paddock, who called on him at the Craighill offices, Wayne learned
that Joe had recovered and had found employment with a sporting goods
house; but he asked no questions and Jean’s name was not spoken.
It was finally agreed that on the first of May Wayne should assume an
active part in the management of the mercantile company; but Wayne’s
life was not so easily to be brought to tranquil waters, as we shall
see.