"When some beloved voice, that was to you
Both sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,
And silence, against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new--
What hope? What help? What music will undo
That silence to your sense?"
"I'll tell you, hopeless grief is passionless."
It was the season of the half-yearly revival meetings in Jamestown.
The little Methodist Church filled rapidly. There was a _soupçon_ of
pleasurable excitement about a revival which was very enticing to the
youth of Jamestown. Besides, all the "stiddy" young men were expected
to go, and they always did what was expected of them.
Mrs. Deans came in with the minister, her face, with its self-important
expression, irradiated with the glow of spiritual as well as worldly
well-being. She had proffered her bid for the company of the
officiating ministers in good season, and the first of them had been
knocked down to her in consequence, much to the chagrin of the Mesdames
White, Wilson, Disney, and the rest, for they knew that the second
minister on the list was an old personal friend of Mrs. Deans and would
doubtless elect to stay at her house; thus they would have no
opportunity to display their pious zeal and forehanded housekeeping.
Mrs. Deans' self-complacency was veiled, but not obscured, by an
anxious air, as who should say, "I am not free of responsibility if all
does not go off well."
It is a weakness of such women to consider themselves divinely
appointed judges of the souls of their neighbors and friends.
The minister with her was pretty well hidden among the cluster of men
and women to whom Mrs. Deans was introducing him. She introduced him
with discrimination, however. She did not propose giving any one the
chance of prefixing a remark with "The other night when I was speaking
to Mr. Hardman," or "Mr. Hardman said to me the other day," unless she
felt quite sure the recipient of the honor was worthy of it.
But to her consternation, Mr. Hardman broke bounds, passed the confines
of the little group of important church members, and went out from one
to another of the men and women, picking out, with the unerring
divination of a man whose heart is in sympathy with the sorrows rather
than the joys of mankind, the oldest, most forlorn, most
miserable-looking of his prospective hearers.
To see the minister thus throwing away the apostolic benediction of his
smile upon old Ann Lemon and Clem Humphries whilst Mrs. White stood
with uplifted nose in the doorway, unnoticed, was an unholy thing, more
particularly as Mrs. White, willing to have her discomfiture shared by
some one else, turned to Mrs. Deans with a surprised air, and said:
"Why, I thought the minister was with you?"
"So he is," Mrs. Deans was fain to avow. "We came a few minutes ago.
He is great on missions, I think, and young." The latter half of her
sentence was given in the tone of a hostess who excuses a guest. For
the rest, it is probable that both ladies regarded his present
occupation as distinctly a missionary effort.
Presently the minister straightened himself and proceeded up the aisle
to the platform. Mrs. Deans' expression changed from an anxious,
proprietary one to one of spiritualized commiseration. Was the
misguided man actually going to begin service without asking one word
about the ordinary routine of services in Jamestown Methodist Church?
If so, he would make a fine hash of it.
Besides she had not informed him that a collection was to be taken up
to defray the cost of extra lighting, etc., and she had promised Mr.
White at class-meeting to do so. She had thought of telling Mr.
Hardman, but preferred waiting until the minister sought for
information before imparting it. His opportunity for that was now
past, unless, indeed, he descended from the platform to do so. A
pleasing thrill, inspired by this idea, turned to a chill as she saw
Mr. Hardman take from his pocket a well-thumbed and shabby little
Testament, and, opening it, seem to find a place. Then he laid it
down, open, upon the big church Bible, and rose to pray.
Mrs. Deans' expression of anxiety was now unalleviated by any spiritual
exaltation; it was unvariegated gloom. Any man who could disregard the
gilt edges, thick covers, and ornate binding of that book, and leave it
closed whilst he read from what her experienced eye told her was a
Bible Society Testament that probably cost ten cents, was certainly in
need of anxious watching. Nor was it to be supposed that a discourse
begun upon lines like these would be productive of much good. How many
sermons she had heard rounded off by the banging of those covers
together! How many final injunctions had been given a dramatic and
artistic interest by the holding of that book, half-open, ready to put
a period to the peroration by a sanctified thud!
Well--Mrs. Deans sighed audibly.
Mr. Hardman began to read in a deep and sympathetic voice. He was a
tall man, of twenty-eight, muscularly built, but not brawny; his
studies had been too close to admit of that. He had square shoulders,
rather higher than they should be, and rounded with the stoop that the
scholar and the ploughman share. His hands, as he raised them in
infrequent gestures, were seen to be rather broad and short--hands, it
would seem, of a mechanic, but not toil-stained. Indeed, their
whiteness so ill agreed with their shape that a sense of something
incongruous forced itself upon one when looking at them. His hair was
almost black, and was tossed and disarranged by his habit of running
his fingers through it. His face was pale.
His brow was square and overhanging--of the penthouse order, rather
forbidding; the brow inherited from a generation of toilers, men who,
from their own bleak corner of the world, looked forth at the panorama
of life with sombre eyes, intrenching themselves behind a barrier of
silent endurance, concealing their weakness, their wants, their hopes
and fears, their few joys and pitiful ambitions behind an impenetrable
mask, until it would seem that their lineaments adjusted themselves to
their mental attitudes; and this, their son, presented to the world
this square brow, strong, secret, sad. But its sternness, and alas! a
great deal of its strength, was negatived by the eyes which looked out
from beneath it. Very dark-gray these eyes were, and made eloquent by
the expression of infinite love and sympathy for his kind; but their
dilating pupils evidenced an emotional nature, and they were somewhat
too soft for a man. Yet, looking in steady kindness at the world, they
often seemed fit eyes for a strong, calm soul.
But Philip Hardman felt himself neither calm nor strong. As he looked
upon the expectant faces of those before him, the doubt which was
gnawing at the heart-strings of belief suddenly seemed to grip his own
heart and brain and threaten each.
He had no message to give these people! What were they there for? Was
it not all a myth and a delusion? Was it?
Then he broke the spell which held him, and his words rushed forth.
His congregation stirred and swayed and yielded--not to persuasion, for
of that there was none; not to the minister's personality, for they had
forgotten him; not in the hope of reward, for he spoke but of wrath and
pitiless requital of sin, and merciless judgment, and endless woe--they
yielded to their own fears.
For this man was lashing his own soul with the copy-righted invective
of his sect, pronouncing against himself and (as in the midst of his
mental agony he realized) against all mankind a doom of woe and wrath
if they did not believe. He strove to terrify his own soul into the
submission it denied, and strove to awaken in the people before him a
reflex of the emotion he fain would feel. They responded to his words,
but not to his feeling. They wept and abased themselves because of the
fear, not because they feared unbelief.
Cold drops trickled down Mrs. Deans' face and be-dabbled her
second-best bonnet-strings. Mrs. Wilson, grew almost hysterical. Ann
Lemon wondered vaguely if she had "the horrors," and held on to the pew
with both hands, whilst she looked about her with bewildered,
lack-lustre eyes. Clem Humphries sat outwardly unmoved, but inwardly
vowing if he "once got out of this he'd never be wheedled into a
revival meeting again."
The younger men thought revival meetings "no slouch," as Gamaliel Deans
expressed it; and, comparing the excitement with that of a cock-fight
he had attended _sub rosa_ in the old brewery, he decided in favor of
the revival.
The minister's voice failed and faltered. Like all magnetic natures,
his exhausted itself. He paused, looked at the men and women before
him, and, realizing the shallowness of their facile emotions, felt the
pall of self-disgust envelop his soul. A horrible contempt for himself
and them, even for the religion that had inspired this mental debauch,
overwhelmed him. He shuddered as he realized the impiousness of his
own thought, left the platform, went swiftly down the aisle and out
into the darkness.
Mr. White closed the meeting, and prayed enthusiastically for the
"young brother who had so awakened them," and ended amid a chorus of
ejaculations.
Mrs. Deans, finding herself so agreeably disappointed, went home
content. She wished to-morrow night were come. What crises of emotion
might not be expected then! She found Mr. Hardman pacing the veranda
slowly, his brow bare to the stars; his frame was relaxed and weary,
his eyes tired. He refused any refreshment, and long into the night
Mrs. Deans heard him pacing back and forth.
* * * * * *
Another night had come, and Philip Hardman was again to stand before an
assembly of his fellows and voice the truths they held eternal. Mrs.
Deans had no doubts now as to his competency. She anticipated an
exciting struggle with spiritual foes, and the better to gird herself
for the fray, went early, leaving Mr. Hardman to follow. She felt this
implied a delicate compliment to the preacher, recognizing in it a
simulacrum of John the Baptist's mission in the wilderness.
So Philip Hardman was left to walk the mile from the Deans farm-house
to the village alone. It was evening--late evening in summer. The air
was filled with that indefinite, receptive murmur the earth gives forth
as it opens its pores to the dew. Without wind, there was yet a sense
of motion in the atmosphere, at once calming and exhilarating. It
brought a keen sense of the fact that the world is rushing through
space, with its puny burden of men and their works. The sun had set,
but the western sky was radiant with an amber afterglow, against which
the tree-tops in Mr. Deans' woodland showed a mass of dark, billowy
green, the light behind them intensifying the depth of their color, so
that they showed sombrely against the sky.
Before him stretched the dusty road, the grass at either side parched
by the heat; now and then a maple overshadowed him; now and then he
startled nested birds from out the low-growing trees of the wild plum.
He walked swiftly, the grasshoppers and little whirring insects and
dragon-flies flitting about his path.
At a turn in the road, where Mr. Deans' land joined Mr. White's, was
wedged in the little cemetery of Jamestown. It was fenced with
sharp-pointed palings, over which the native virgin bower clematis
clung in feathery festoons, just blossoming out in fragile
greenish-white flowers. Within, he saw the untidy graves and
inebriated gravestones of a country churchyard. Those slanting stones
and graves, almost obliterated by masses of periwinkle and white-leaved
balm and ribbon grass, appealed to him strongly.
He looked at his watch. He had started in fair time, but, lost in
thought, had walked very quickly. He had time to linger a few minutes
here. Perhaps amid the graves of Jamestown's dead he might learn the
open sesame to the hearts of the living.
He entered through a gap in the palings, pushing his way through a
little thicket of thorny locust bushes that had sprung up in a
scattered cluster. The graves were nearly all marked by gravestones.
In Jamestown it was considered a mark of respectability to erect a
memorial to one's dead, but this done, all care for their graves
ceased. Philip Hardman wandered about, noting the weather-beaten
grayness of the older stones and reading their inscriptions almost
mechanically. One broad, thin slab, with a weeping-willow sculptured
upon it, bore a legend in memory of "Amelia Warner, beloved wife of
Josiah Warner, aged sixteen years." Poor little wife! In the fifty
years of her rest her grave had sunken almost level with the path; the
lichen on the stone was striving to obliterate her name there, even as
it had been long ago forgotten upon earth. A wild hawthorn bush was
springing from under one corner of her tombstone and tilting it over
perilously.
Some of the more recent graves had odd little jingles of original rhyme
carven upon their stones. One, of but a year before, bore the brief
prayer, too human for its glistening coldness, "Meet me in Heaven."
Hardman read the name on this grave with a little start--"Jennie Best,
wife of William Best." Yesterday Mrs. Deans had pointed out William
Best and his new-made bride. How futile and absurd the little legend
seemed! But Jennie Best slept as securely and as sweetly as though her
husband still cherished in his inmost heart these last words of hers
and walked as though he hoped to realize them, instead of writing them
upon her tombstone and marrying within a year of her death.
There were graves of old and young in this little churchyard--men and
women, boys and girls, infants of days, and men of many years. Beneath
one stone slept seven friends, who "perished in the yacht _Foam_ off
the coast"--a narrow space, truly, for seven to occupy, set in this
out-of-the-way village; seven such as these who had hoped to fill great
places in the world before their lives were laughed out by the little
ripples of the lake.
The shadows lengthened. Gleaming through the dusk, Hardman noticed a
white stone with gilt lettering. "Homer Wilson" was the name it bore,
but it meant nothing to the preacher; only he sighed as he noted the
age of the man sleeping there, and a half-envious thought crossed him,
as he looked around, that "these had completed their journey."
Philip Hardman turned his steps to the road again, but he paused yet
once more. Close under the shadow of the high stone wall which bounded
the graveyard on the village side, he almost stumbled over a woman's
figure, which, in the deepening gloom, he had not observed. She was
almost prone beside a little mound whereon the sods had not yet taken
root. The woman's arms were outstretched toward the grave--almost
embraced it. Her whole attitude spoke eloquently of a hopeless and
passive despair.
Hardman stopped a moment irresolutely; she had not observed him.
"You are in great trouble," he said, bending down and touching her
shoulder.
"Yes," she answered, raising her head without a start. "Yes."
Her voice was painfully constrained. The words seemed to issue with
difficulty, and the tones were harsh. Speech seemed strangely
dissonant with the hour and place. Her mute despair seemed the only
fitting emotion for the scene. Her eyes, from out a pallid face,
looked up at him, filmed by misery. Her cheeks were hollowed in
delicate shadows. Her pale lips drooped. She seemed the Mourning
Spirit of the place.
"Come and pray," he said, looking at her with infinite pity in his kind
eyes. "Come," he urged.
He waited for her reply, but none came. She was sitting by the grave
now, her hands locked round her knees, her eyes looking hungrily into
vacancy and seeing neither hope nor recompense for her pain.
A bat held its angled flight past them. He roused himself to a sense
of time. He looked down upon the woman at his feet, an expression of
ineffable compassion lit his face; then he turned to go.
As his eyes left that pallid face the scene seemed to darken suddenly.
He realized the lateness of the hour, and, finding his way out of the
graveyard, strode rapidly to the church.
After all, he was in time--indeed, had a few minutes to spare. He did
not, however, again shock Mrs. Deans by a promiscuous friendliness. He
went straight to the platform and sat down behind the reading-desk.
His thoughts reverted to the woman whom he had just seen, and he felt
he ought to have made a more eloquent appeal to her to come to church.
Mental habit led him to decide at once that prayer was the only
efficacious cure for grief such as hers. It was thus with this man
always. In calm moments, when all went well with him, he strove to
elucidate those problems of reason and right which presented themselves
to him in season and out of season--strove to live a life of austere
truth without factitious aid of self-delusion, without hope of ultimate
reward.
But in times of distress or pain, whether his own or others', he turned
again to his old beliefs, and prayer appealed to him as the only
panacea. Orthodox folk plead this as a triumphant and sure vindication
of the truth of their creeds. It may be in some cases, but in Philip
Hardman's it was only the result of inherent weakness of will and
vacillating decision, and, alas! a cowardly shrinking from mental
torture. Face to face with grief such as this woman's, he could not
bear to look the inevitability of such bereavements in the face; could
not endure to think of the irreparable loss of a vanished life; could
not calmly recognize one single instance of what he was ever mourning
over--the sadness and futility of life.
He must hallow each blow as a "merciful dispensation;" muffle it from
prying eyes with the tabooed veil of "sacred predestination"; set it
beyond close scrutiny by asserting to himself the impiety of
questioning "divine will"; and at such times the beauty of his solacing
faith lit in his soul fresh fervor for the cause.
For a few moments Philip Hardman sat motionless. The hands of the
clock reached the hour for service to begin. His audience settled
themselves in the pews and stilled themselves to attention.
Mrs. Deans ostentatiously ceased her whispered remarks to Mrs. Wilson,
straightened herself in her seat, looked about with a critical and
judicial eye, and then, convinced that all was well, hemmed several
times expectantly.
Philip Hardman rose, and, in brief words, asked for Divine guidance
through the service. He ceased. The bowed heads were raised. He was
about to begin the reading of the Scriptures, when, silently, slowly,
Myron Holder entered the open door and, advancing only to the nearest
seat, which happened to be in the farthest back pew, sat down. So
quiet were her movements that, save by a few of the young men who had
taken the rear seats the better to observe the antics of the elect, she
was unobserved.
Philip Hardman, however, had seen her. He changed his intention of
reading, and announced a hymn instead. He wanted a few minutes to
familiarize himself with that tragic face before attempting to utter
any message of love or hope to the woman who had thus obeyed his
suggestion. While the singing went on he looked at his audience, and,
in a flash, their narrow, sordid, often miserable lives seemed revealed
to him. These were the people he had lashed with spiritual fears the
night before. As he recalled it, his heart smote him with terrible
reproach. His eyes grew dim as he looked at the people before him and
saw, shining through their midst, the pallid face of Myron Holder.
By what strange chance had this woman come to Jamestown? For he
decided at once she was no native of the village. The purely cut,
martyr face; the broad brow, sensitive lips, and cameo-like nostrils
were too utterly unlike the other faces in the church to be for one
moment associated with them.
There came to him a fantastic thought, that this woman was sent to bear
the griefs of this village, even as One long since--the Carpenter's
Son--had borne the griefs of the world and become a "Man of Sorrows and
acquainted with grief." But alas! this woman had no divine message to
give; instead, she was wandering in the wilderness of hopeless despair.
But--and Hardman's hand tightened on his Testament--a message she
should have.
"Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.
Leave, oh, leave me not alone!
Oh, protect and comfort me!"
So they sang. Philip Hardman found his place--
"All my hopes on Thee are stayed,
All my wants to Thee I bring;
Cover my defenceless head
With the shadow of Thy wing."
Rapt in an infinite sorrow for his kind--inspired by the need of this
woman of help--exalted by the dependence and confidence expressed in
the hymned words--seeing in all his audience but one pallid
face--Philip Hardman rose to speak.
This choosing of a subject upon the spur of the moment, to meet the
needs of one woman, was no disadvantage to him, for he was a fluent and
ready speaker, and his whole training had been that spontaneity was
absolutely essential. He had none of the measured method that develops
a subject into "three heads and an application." The evangelistic sect
to which he belonged abjures notes, and hops along to the halting
cadence of a quasi-inspiration.
Happily, however, it has now and then a man like Philip Hardman, whose
words flow freely forth, and never so eloquently as when heart and
sympathies are touched. Hardman was never at a loss for words of his
own to translate his feelings into language; but this night his sermon
was but the enunciation of a sweet and comforting doctrine uttered in
the language of the Book which has preserved it.
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest," he said, and held out as a free gift the inestimable boon of
peace. "I will not leave you comfortless," uttered in his vibrant
tones, bore the assurance of divinest aid. "Let not your heart be
troubled," he voiced as a sacred command to cease from grief, and then
the general invitation, "Let whosoever will drink of the water of life
freely."
With these words as a thesis, a human heart to be comforted, a soul
alight with belief and confidence, a rare natural eloquence to frame
his plea--was there any wonder that the sermon was effective, any
wonder that to the weary heart of the listening woman it appealed
almost irresistibly?
Perhaps Philip Hardman dwelt too exclusively upon the blessings of his
religion, ignored too utterly the thorn in the crown--offered it too
freely, avowed it too confidently. But what will you? Even the
greatest purists in religions faith find it hard to disabuse their
minds of the idea that martyrdom means and merits the Kingdom, and
Philip Hardman's theology was not of the sternest sort.
He felt, somehow, that this woman had suffered enough to win Heaven,
whether she merited it in other respects or not. So he set himself to
present his faith to her in the most glowing aspect, always seconding
his message with his eyes.
Just as Philip Hardman saw but one face in his audience, so Myron
Holder was, after the first few moments, unconscious of any other
presence save his. Her eyes had won a straight path to his face
between the heads and shoulders, and her gaze never faltered. There
was a tall, white-shaded lamp on each side of the desk. As she looked,
his figure, in strong relief against the light-blue background of the
walls, seemed to absorb and radiate the light. It was simply an
ordinary optical effect, and Myron Holder herself recognized vaguely
that it was "only the light," and yet that pale irradiation around his
head seemed to add a dignity and sanctity to the man and lend his
utterance a deeper, higher import.
Her eyes never left his face--that kind, weak face, so full of
contradictions, whose beetling brow seemed ready to do battle for his
Faith, whose lips quivered with the feeling in his own voice.
Her eyes were hot and dilated from the long strain when, with hands
upraised above the standing people, he uttered the benediction, "Peace
I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth
give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be
afraid. Amen."
Philip Hardman descended from the platform and strove to make his way
toward Myron, but he was hemmed in by outstretched hands, and had to
make his way slowly through a throng, all eager to say "Good-bye," for
he left on the morrow. Myron was just stepping out of the shelter of
the porch when he overtook her. He held out his hand, which she took,
her own toil-hardened one trembling in the clasp of his softer fingers.
He looked down at her and spoke with great gentleness:
"Did you take the message I gave you to-night?"
"Is it for me?" she asked.
"Surely," he answered.
"You do not know me; you cannot tell. If you knew"----
"Whosoever will," he replied, with steady emphasis. And in his heart
he marvelled at the humbleness of this woman, whose candid brow and
clear eyes bespoke her life.
Then, the man mingling with the priest in him, he continued, still more
gently:
"The message is even to the greatest sinner. To see you is to know you
have the right of one of the least."
She put up two hands, clasped in miserable deprecation; her cheeks
flamed red an instant, then paled to a ghastly white; she turned
silently, and swiftly went down two steps of the broad entrance stair;
then pausing and looking back at him with a gaze such as one might fix
upon the flames before he steps into them, she said clearly:
"Ask Mrs. Deans who Myron Holder is!" She slipped away, the gloom of
the unlighted street absorbing her figure, as though it gathered to
itself its righteous belonging.