CHAPTER VII

THE LITTLE ITINERANT—AND OTHERS

On this circuit, in a house nearly as open as a barn, on a freezing winter night, our baby was born. The gaunt, dark room, the roaring fire upon the wide hearth, the ugly little kettle of herb tea steaming on the live coals, and the old mountain midwife, bending with her hideous scroll face over me, are all a part of the memory of an immortal pain. At the end of a dreadful day she had turned with some contempt from the fine lady on the bed, who could not give birth to her child, and said simply, as if with the saying she washed her hands of the whole matter:

"She ain't doin' right. I reckon somethin' is wrong."

William had ridden forth in the driving storm of snow and ice for the doctor, who lived ten miles distant across the mountain. And then the hours came and sat around the awful bed and would not pass, nor let even midnight come. Now and again the old scroll face peeped down at me with an expression of extreme terror. The firelight made a red mist over the dark walls and the steam of the herbs filled my nostrils with a sickening odor.

At last there was an end of endurance; the hours lifted their leaden wings and hurried away; the old midwife changed to a dragon-faced butterfly, and I knew no more till the dawn and the snow spread a pale light over the world outside. Within, the fires still blazed, but the herb kettle was gone and the ring of ghosts coals lay whitening in their ashes where it spouted and steamed; the old hag sat asleep in the chimney corner, with her hands hanging down, her head thrown back, and her warped mouth gaping wide at the rafters above. Over a little table by the door a fine white tablecloth was spread. I wondered at it dimly and what it concealed. I felt William's shaggy head bowed upon the bed and a peace in my body akin to the peace of death. Laboriously my eyes traveled back to the fine white cloth over the table. I knew all about it, but could not remember. Only, nothing in the world mattered to me but that, whatever it was, under the cloth on the table. Presently, soft as a shade returns, it came to me, and I knew the little shape, barely curving the cloth, was my baby. Grief was an emotion I had not the strength to afford. I closed my eyes and felt tears press through the lids, and then a gruff voice sounded close to me on the other side of the bed.

"Thank God!"

Opening my eyes again with a great effort and looking up I beheld him, the old, burly country doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers on my wrist. But now a great emergency confronted me. My guardian angel, who has never ceased to be very high-church, urged me to meet it.

"William, William," I whispered, and felt his kiss answer me, "he must be baptized!"

"But he is dead, my darling!" he replied.

"Not really dead, William; he must be alive somewhere or I cannot bear it, and I cannot have him going where he will be, unbaptized."

So it was done, the doctor, the old woman and William standing around the little bier, and William saying the holy words himself. And there, high up on the mountain under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little itinerant, with his dust properly baptized, when they come on the last day to awaken and gather up those very least babies who died so soon they will not understand the resurrection call when they hear it.

After that we took more interest in the children. They seemed real to us and nearer, whereas, before, they had simply passed in and out before us like little irresponsible figureheads of the future, with whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it was curious, the way the innocent little things invariably hived there, no matter how awful and accusing the invitation would be—to those "dead in trespasses and sins, who felt themselves lost and undone."

So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not, but they are infallible natural critics.

This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often the case with the very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical acquaintance with Adam and Eve.

The thought of little children passing through the Christmas season without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings. He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the children received his confidences with apathy and silence.

Never, even at the end of a conference year, have I seen William so industrious and so much the mendicant. He persecuted the merchants in the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressing doll babies. He shamed the stingiest man in the town into giving him a flour sack full of the most disgraceful-looking candy I ever saw.

"William!" I exclaimed, when he brought home this last trophy, "you will kill them."

"But," he replied, "for one little hour they will be happy and the next time I tell them anything, though it should be compound Scriptures, they will believe me."

The distribution of gifts was made very secretly some days beforehand. We climbed mountain roads to little brown cabins in all directions, leaving mysterious bags and parcels with lonesome-looking mother-women. In one cabin, on top of what was known as Crow's Mountain, we found a very handsome healthy boy, four months old, clad in a stocking leg and the sleeve of an old coat, that had been cunningly cut and sewed to fit him as close as a squirrel's skin. In another place William discovered a boy of seven, who declined to believe or even to hope in Santa Clans. He was thin, with sad, hungry eyes, ragged and bare-footed as usual. He had no animation, he simply could not summon enough energy to believe in the incredible.

I shall never forget this child's face. The Sabbath after Christmas we had a voluntary Sunday school on our hands. A score of odd-looking little boy and girl caterpillars appeared at church, excited, mysteriously curious, like queer young creatures who have experienced a miracle. They entered immediately into full fellowship with William. They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he said to the uttermost. Only once was there any symptom of higher criticism. This was a certain Sabbath morning in the Sunday school when William told the story of the forty and two children who were devoured by two she bears because they had made fun of a bald-headed man.

"I don't believe that tale!" was the astounding irreverent comment. It proceeded from the same incipient agnostic who could not believe in Santa Clans.

"Why?" William was indiscreet enough to ask.

"Because if only two bears had eat that many children it would have busted 'em wide open."

No one smiled. William faced five little grimy-faced boys on the bench before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the retina of each, and it was too much for him.

"We will pass on to the next verse," he announced, leaving the bear-expositor mystified, but in stubborn possession of his convictions.

Sometimes in these latter years, when things went hard with us, there would come a flash of memory and William and I would see the face of some child always as if the sun was shining on it, looking at us, believing in us from far down the years. And it has helped, often more than the recollection of older, wiser saints. Our experience was that the faces of the children we had known lasted better in memory than those of older people. And they always look right, as if God had just made them.

It was always nip and tuck, in the records of William's ministry, whether he would perform more marriage ceremonies or preach more funerals. Some years the weddings would have it. Then again, the dead got the better of it. As a rule, the poorer the people we served the more weddings we helped to celebrate, and if the heroes and heroines of them did not live happy ever after, at least they lived together.

There is no hour of the day or night that William has not sanctified with somebody's marriage vows. Once, about two o'clock in the morning, there was a furious rap at the door of the parsonage. William stuck his head out of the window overhead and beheld a red-faced young farmer standing in the moonlight, holding the hand of his sweetheart, who was looking up at him with the expression that a white rose wears in a storm.

"Come down and tie us, Parson," called the groom. "You ain't got time to dress. They air after us hot-footed."

William slipped on his longtailed coat over his pajamas, hurried downstairs and married them there in the moonlight, after having examined the license the young man handed in through the parlor window. And he looked well enough from the sill up, but from the sill down I doubt if his costume would have passed muster.

Fortunately, no one thought of divorces in those days. Women stayed with their husbands at the sacrifice of self-respect and everything else save honor. And they were better women, more respected than those who kick up so much divorce dust in society nowadays. Part of their dissatisfaction comes from bad temper and bad training, and a good deal of it comes from getting foolish notions out of books about the way husbands do or do not love their wives. It seems they can't be satisfied how they do it or how they don't do it. But back there William and I never had any biological suspicions about the nature of love, and the people he married to one another did not have any, either.

Once I remember a bridegroom who blushingly confessed that he was too poor to pay the fee usually offered the preacher.

"But I'll pay you, Parson," he whispered as he swung his bride up behind him upon his horse; "I'll pay as soon as I'm able."



Ten years passed and William was sent back to the same circuit. One day, as he was on his way to an appointment, he met a man and woman in a buggy. The woman had a baby at her breast, and the bottom of the buggy looked like a human birdnest, it was so full of young, tow-headed children.

"Hold on!" said the man, pulling up his horse; "ain't this Brother Thompson?"

"Yes."

"Well, here's ten dollars I owe you."

"What for?" demanded William, holding back from the extended hand with the fluttering bill in it.

"You don't remember it, I reckon, but you married us ten years ago. I was so poor at the time I couldn't pay you for the greatest service one man ever done another. We ain't prospered since in nothing except babies, or I'd be handin' you a hundred instead of ten."

I have never heard a man compliment his wife since then that I do not instinctively compare it with the compliment this mountain farmer paid his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers of our times that I do not recall the charming testimony of this husband against the injustice and indecency of their views.



CHAPTER VIII

I HOLD THE STAGE

So far, the circuit rider has been the hero of these letters, but in this one his wife shall be the heroine, behind the throne at least, for scarcely any other woman looks or feels less like one in the open.

The Methodist ministry is singularly devastating in some ways upon the women who are connected with it by marriage. For one thing, it tends to destroy their aesthetic sensibilities. They lack very often the good taste of thrift in poverty, not so much because of the poverty, but because they never get settled long enough to develop the hen-nesting instinct and house pride that is dormant in us all. They simply make a shift of things till the next conference meets, when they will be moved to another parsonage.

A woman has not the heart to plant annuals, much less perennials, under such circumstances. Let the Parsonage Aid Society do it, if it must be done. And the Parsonage Aid Society does do it. You will see in many Methodist preachers' front yards fiercely-thorny, old-lady-faced roses—the kind that thrive without attention—planted always by the president of the Parsonage Aid Society. And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial to this flower, but because it is not easily killed by neglect. They choose the hardiest, ugliest known shrubs for the parsonage yard because they last best.

On every circuit, in every charge, you will find the Parsonage Aid Society a band of faithful, fretted, good housekeepers who worry and wrangle over furnishing the parsonage as they worried and wrangled when they were little girls over their communistic "playhouses." The effects in the parsonage are not harmonious, of course. As a rule, every piece of furniture in it contradicts every other piece, each having been contributed by rival women or rival committees in the society.

And this has its deadening effect upon the preacher's wife's taste, else she must go mad, living in a house where, say, there is a strip of worn church-aisle carpet down the hall—bought at a bargain by the thrifty Aid Society—a cherry-colored folding bed in the parlor along with a "golden oak" table, a home-made bookcase, four different kinds of chairs, a patent-medicine calendar on the wall and a rag carpet on the floor, with a "flowered" washbowl and pitcher on a plain deal table in the corner, confessing that, after all, it is not a parlor, but the presiding elder's bedroom when he comes to hold "quarterly meeting." Still, if I had anything to do with the new-monument-raising business in this country I would have a colossal statue raised to the living women of the Methodist Parsonage Aid Societies.

But the worst effect of the itinerancy upon its ministers' wives is the evil information they must receive in it about other people. If I had to select the woman in all the world best informed about the faults, sins and weaknesses of mankind, I should not choose the sophisticated woman of the world, but I should point without hesitation to the little, pale, still-faced Methodist preacher's wife. The pallor is the pallor of hardship, often of the lack of the right kind of nourishment, but the stillness is not the result of inward personal calm and peace. It is the shut-door face of a woman who knows all about everybody she meets with that thin little smile and quiet eye. The reason for this is that the preacher's wife is the vat for receiving all the circuit scandal actually intended for her husband's ears.

The most conscienceless gossips in this world are to be found always among the thoroughly-upright, meanly-impeccable members of any and every church. They are the Scribes and Pharisees who contribute most to the building of fine houses of worship; they give most to its causes. They are the "right hands" of all the preachers from their youth up. They have never been truthful sinners. They were the pale, pious little boys and girls who behaved, and who graduated from the Sunday schools long ago without ever being converted to the church. And there you see them, the fat, duty-doing, self-satisfied "firsts" in this world, who shall be last and least in the world to come. Those least inclined to tattle about their neighbors, I found, were poor, pathetic sinners with damaged reputations, who could not afford to talk about others. They belonged humbly to the church, but never figured loudly in it. And if God is God, as I do firmly believe in spite of all I have heard to the contrary, there will be something "doing" in Heaven when these saint-pecked sinners are all herded in. They will wear the holy seal of His tender forgiveness through all eternity and get most of the high offices in Paradise, just as a matter of simple justice.

What I have suffered morally from them cannot be put into words. Within a week of our arrival on a new work one of them would be sure to call. There was Sister Weekly, for example, on the Gourdville Circuit, and the parsonage here was in the little village of Gourdville. William was out making his first pastoral visits when there came a gentle knock at the door. I untied my kitchen apron, smoothed my hair, sighed—for I knew from past experience it would be the church's arch gossip—and opened the door. A round old lady tied up in a sanctified black widow's bonnet stood on the step.

"I am Mrs. Weekly," she explained, "and I reckon you are Sister Thompson, the new preacher's wife. Both my sons are stewards. And I thought I'd come over and get acquainted and give you a few p'inters. It's so hard for a stranger in a strange place to know which is which."

"I am glad to see you. Won't you come in?" I said pleasantly.

She settled herself in the rocker before the fire in our "front room," looked down at the rug and exclaimed:

"My! ain't this rug greasy! Our last pastor's wife was a dreadful careless housekeeper."

She had a white, seamless face, sad, prayerful blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones of an egg-laying hen:

"Your husband's goin' to have an awful hard time here, Sister Thompson. The church is split wide open about the organ. Old man Walker wants it on the right-hand side of the pulpit, and my sons have put it on the left-hand side, where the light is good and the choir can see the music better. It ain't decent, the way Walker makes himself prominent in the church, nohow. They say he killed a man in Virginia before he came here. I might as well tell you, for you are bound to hear it anyhow. My sons say they are going to pull out and go to the Presbyterian church if Walker don't quit carryin' on so about the organ. Their father was Presbyterian, and I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped out in them. But it'll be bad for our church if they do. They pay half of the preacher's salary, and Walker scarcely pays at all. Seems to me he ought to keep his mouth shut. And Richard Brown has took the homestead law to keep from paying his debts. Now maybe he'll drop behind in his subscription, too. He was a right smart help in the church, though I never thought much of him morally. They say he drinks and cusses both when he goes off to Augusta. And it's a plumb shame that his wife's president of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. She's all right now, I reckon, but folks 'talked' about her when she was a girl." She paused to get her second wind, folded her hands as if in prayer, turned her divine old eyes up to the ceiling and continued:

"But the Epworth League is the worst. I've always had my doubts about it. 'T won't do to git too many young folks together in a bunch. I don't care how religious they are, they'll just bust up and turn natural if you git too many of 'em together. That's what's happened here. The Epworth League kept on flourishin' so, we didn't understand it. It met every Saturday night as prayerful and punctual as clocks. But as soon as the old folks left they shet the doors, and then they'd dance like sin—been doing it for months before anybody found out. Oh! I'll tell you everything is on the downward road in this church, and your husband is going to have his hands full even if he don't starve to death!"

Every preacher's wife is the victim of such women. If she is supernaturally wise she does not handicap her husband by repeating their gossip to him. Personally, I prayed more earnestly to be delivered from this particular temptation than from any other. But never once was the Lord able to do it. Sooner or later I invariably told William every word of scandal I heard.

He never served but one church where the people in it did not "talk" about one another. I will call the place Celestial Bells, although that is not the real name of it.

The congregation was a small one, composed of well-bred, worldly-minded folk. They all danced a little, went to the theater often, wore golden ornaments and otherwise perjured themselves in the light of the membership vows in our Church Discipline. What I wonder is, will the good, patient God—who knows that since the days of David we have had dancing dust in us, who has Himself endowed us so abundantly with the dramatic instinct, who even hid His gold about with which we bedeck and enrich ourselves—will He, I say, damn those honest, world-loving, church-giving people most, or will He take it out of the religious topknots of the church who tempted them with these "Rules" in the Discipline?

Poor William had a scandalous time at that place readjusting his moral focus so that it would rest upon his people. Sister C and Sister Z were admirable wives and mothers. He had never had more intelligently helpful women in his congregation. That is to say, they were patiently faithful in their attendance upon its services, they professed often to be "benefited" by his sermons, they brought up their children in a new kind of nurture and admonition of the Lord; but if he went to pay them a pastoral call and have prayers with them, apt as not he would find that they had gone to take the children to the matinee. And Brother A and Brother I were the best stewards he ever had, but they would do anything from wearing a tuxedo to going to a circus. I can never forget Brother I's prayers. Although he was modest and retiring to the point of shyness he was one of the few members in the church at Celestial Bells who could be depended upon to lead in prayer. This was frequently William's experience. Oftener than not the brother who could slap him on the back or sing a bass in the choir that made the chandeliers rattle would turn pale and fall into a panic if he was called on to pray. Somehow one got the notion that he felt his voice would not carry in that direction. But Brother I could open his heart at once in prayer, and do it so naturally every one of us felt that we were ourselves uttering the same prayer. He never ornamented his petitions with any high sounding phrases. He was not so much a man carrying on in a loud voice before his Maker as he was a little boy with a sore toe and troubles appertaining to his littleness and inexperience, and faults and forgetfulness, all of which he let out with the emotion of a child to his father, and with such reality of detail that the whole congregation accompanied him with his lamentations and regrets. Whenever I lifted my head after one of Brother I's prayers, I felt better, like a child who has taken some great Elder Person into its confidence.

While I am on this subject of prayer, I must not forget an incident connected with Brother A. He was the most belligerent looking peaceful man I ever saw. His brows were black and so thick they amounted to whiskers above his large pale blue eyes. He wore a military moustache of the same color and preferred to talk through his teeth. And aside from being very prosperous and a good friend, his distinction was that he knew how to do the will of his Father with as much directness and dispatch as if it had been an ordinary business proposition. If William wanted the church moved off a side street in a hollow, he was the man who could drag it a quarter of a mile and set it on a hill, yoked up, of course, with as many other stewards as he could get. If there was anything to be done he could do it, and in the right spirit. But he was one of God's dumb saints. He had faith and he had works, but he couldn't pray, that is, not in public. This led to the incident to which I have already referred.

We had just come to Celestial Bells, and seeing Brother A so active, like a pillar of cloud and fire, in the church, we did not suspect his other-world muteness. William was closing his first Sunday night service. The congregation was large and in the front midst of it sat Brother A. Immediately behind him sat Brother B, a fluent and enthusiastic steward. I was in the Amen Corner as usual, because it is only from this vantage ground that a preacher's wife can keep her eye properly upon his congregation and be able to estimate the causes and effects of his discourse. I have sometimes suspected, indeed, that better saints occupy this Amen Corner for a less excusable curiosity about the doings in the congregation. William closed the hymn-book, looked out over the blur of faces before him, and said:

"Brother A will lead us in prayer."

If he had suddenly struck a short circuit and let loose a flash of electricity in the house the shock would not have been more perceptible. Everybody knew that Brother A could not lead in prayer, except William, who was already on his knees with closed eyes and the Patmos look on his blind face. Every head was bowed except those of Brother A and Brother B. They were whispering over the back of the bench that separated them. The sweat was standing out on Brother A's forehead, his brows bristled with horror, while Brother B smiled calmly at him.

"Go on, B! you know I can't pray in public!" I heard him say.

"He didn't ask me, he called on you," retorted Brother B.

Thus they had it back and forth for more than a minute. Then William groaned, which added the one touch that rendered Brother A frantic. Casting a ferociously damaging look at Brother B, he nudged the lady sitting beside him and whispered:

"Lead this prayer, madam, I can't!"

And she led it in a sweet high treble that must have surprised William and even the angels in Heaven, if they were expecting to hear the petition in the ordinary masculine bass which is usually characteristic of such petitions.

But I was going to tell how disconcerting it was to William to serve people who were apparently religious and worldly-minded at the same time. He could not reconcile this kind of diphthong living with his notions of piety. At least their sins lay heavily on his conscience.

One Sabbath morning in June he entered the pulpit in a Sinai mood, determined to read the Church Rules and to apply them severely. He began by selecting a condemnatory Psalm, took his text simply as a threat from Jeremiah in one of his bad moods, and after a severe hymn and a mournful Rachel prayer he arose, folded his spectacles and fixed his eyes burningly upon the innocent faces of his congregation, which had a "What have we done?" expression on them that would have moved an angel to impatience.

"Brethren and sisters," he said after a frightful spiritual pause, "it is my duty this morning to call you back out of the far country into which you have gone, to your Father's house. I blame myself for your dreadful condition. I have not had the courage to tell you of your faults as a preacher should tell his people when he sees them wandering in the forbidden paths of worldliness and sin. I have not been a faithful shepherd to you, and doubtless the Lord will lay your sins upon my head. But this morning I am resolved to do my duty by you, no matter what it costs."

The congregation took on the expression of a child about to be laid across the parent's knee. But when he opened the Discipline and proceeded to read the Rules, following each with solemn, almost personal applications to conditions under his very nose, in his own church, their countenances underwent a lightning change of almost happy relief. Never can I forget the naive sweetness with which those people turned up their untroubled eyes to William and received his thundering exhortations. They seemed proud of his courage—for, indeed, he nearly broke his heart condemning them—and at the same time they seemed to be bearing with him as they would bear with the vagaries of a good and loving old father.

Sister C and Sister Z sat near the front, surrounded by their respective cherubim broods, looking up at him with tender humorous eyes. The children, indeed, felt something alien to peace in the atmosphere. They regarded him fearfully, then turned meek, inquisitive faces to their mothers; but those two extraordinary women never blinked or blushed from start to finish, although they were deeply dyed with all the guilt William mentioned. The one person present who received the discourse with almost vindictive signs of indorsement was Brother Billy Smithers, a man who had lived an exasperatingly regular life in the church for more than forty years. He sent up Amens fervid with the heat of his furious spirit at the end of each charge and condemnation.



CHAPTER IX

WILLIAM AND THE FEMININE SOUL

I do not know if I make you understand that all this time the years were passing—five, ten, fifteen, twenty—and in them we went together up and down and around our little world, William offering his Lord's salvation without any wisdom of words worth mentioning, yet with a wisdom as sweet, as redolent of goodness as the carnations in Heaven are of Paradise. And I followed after him, holding up his hands, often with my own eyes blindfolded to the spiritual necessities of the situation, praying when he prayed, though many a time I could have trusted our Father to do the square thing without so much knee-anguish of the soul; and this is how at the end of so many years in the itinerancy I began to take on the look of it—that is to say, I had faded; and although I still wore little decorative fragments of my wedding finery, my clothes in general had the peculiar prayer-meeting set that is observable in the garments of every Methodist preacher's wife at this stage of her fidelity to the cause. There is something solemn and uncompromising in her waist-line, something mournfully beseeching in the down-drooping folds of her skirt, and I do not know anything in Nature more pathetically honest than the way her neck comes up out of the collar and says: "Search me!"

All this is most noticeable when the circuit rider has brought her up from his country circuit to the town parsonage and the town church, where there is such a thing as "style" in sleeves and headgear. I should say in this connection that William did at last "rise" that much in the church: he occasionally became the pastor in a village with a salary of at most five hundred dollars. The wife at this time always looks like a poor little lady Rip Van Winkle in the congregation. And her husband invariably makes the better impression, because all those years while she was wearying and fading he was consciously or unconsciously cultivating his powers of personality, his black-coated ministerial presence, and even the full, rich tones of his preaching voice.

But I will say for William that he was as innocent as a lamb of any carnal intentions in these improvements. He was wedded to his white cravats as the angels are to their wings, and he was by nature so fastidiously neat that if he had been a cat instead of a man he would have spent much of his time licking his paws and washing his face. Besides, like all preachers' wives, I was anxious that he should look well in the pulpit, and therefore ready to sacrifice my own needs that he might buy new clothes, because he must appear so publicly every Sunday; especially as by this time I had the feeling of not appearing even when I was present. One of the peculiar experiences of a preacher's wife is to stand in the background at the end of every Sunday morning service and see her husband lionized by the congregation.

Another thing happened as we went on, far more important than the casting of me out of the fashion of the times. This was the change in the quality of spirituality with which William had to deal in his more cultivated congregations.

I cannot tell exactly where we made the transit, but somewhere in the latter years of his ministry he stepped out of one generation into another where the ideals of the Christian life were more intelligent, but less Heavenly. The things that preachers had told about God to scare the people forty years before had come up and flowered into heresies and unbelief in their children. William actually had to quit preaching about Jonah and the whale. He had an excellent sermon on the crucial moment of Jonah's repentance, with which in the early part of his ministry he often awakened the Nineveh consciences of his people; but when he preached the same sermon twenty years later in a suburban town the young people laughed.

For the first time he came in contact with that element in the modern church that is afflicted with spiritual invalidism. It is composed of women for the most part, who hunger and thirst after a kind of gruel gospel, and who are forever wanting to consult the pastor between times about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings. They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I would not believe they had souls at all if I had not seen them develop the diabolical soul to such amazing degrees of perversity. But of all people I have the least hope of their redemption, because they are too smart to be convicted of their real sins.

Back upon the old, weatherbeaten circuits we met no such examples of mock spirituality. The men and women there had too little sense and too much virtue to go through such complicated intellectual processes to deceive themselves and others; they took narrow, almost persecuting views of right and wrong. But these teething saints in the town churches had a too broadminded way of speculating upon their very narrow moral margins and too few steadfast convictions of any sort.

The women were the worst, as I have already intimated. Many of them were in a fluid state, dissolved by their own minds; others sustained the same relation to their souls that young and playful kittens do to their tails. They were always chasing them and never really finding them. But the most dangerous of them all is the one who refuses to take up her bed and walk spiritually and who wants the preacher to assist her at every step. There is something infernal about a woman who cannot distinguish between her sentimental emotions and a spiritual ambition.

This is why, when we hear of a minister who has disgraced himself with some female member of his flock, my sympathies are all with the preacher. I know exactly what has happened. Some sad, Trilby-faced lady who has been "awakened" from a silent, cold, backslidden state by his sermons goes to see him in his church study. (They who build studies for their preachers in the back part of the church surround him with the four walls of moral destruction and invite it for him. The place for a minister's study is in his own home, with his wife passing in and out, if he has female spiritual invalids calling on him.) She is perfectly innocent in that she has not considered her moral responsibility to the preacher she is about to victimize. She is very modest, really and truly modest. He is a little on his guard till he discovers this. First, she tells him that she is "unhappy at home," has a sacrilegious husband most likely. I have never known one who spoke well of her husband. She has been perishing spiritually for years in this "brutal" atmosphere, and she dwells upon it till the preacher's heart is wrung with compassion for what this delicate nature has suffered in the unhallowed surroundings of her home.

But now, she goes on, with a sweet light in her eyes, his sermons have aroused in her a desire to overcome such difficulties and to live on a higher plane. Could he give her some advice? He can. He is so full of real, honest, truthful kindness he almost wants to hold her hands while he bestows it. Nothing is further from his mind than evil. The preacher, in particular, must think no evil. This places him within easy reach of the morbid woman, who can do a good deal of evil before she thinks it.

After a few visits she professes a very real "growth" spiritually, but—she hesitates, lowers her gentle head and, finally, confesses that she is troubled with "temptations." She shows her angelic confidence in him by telling them, and he is deeply moved at the almost childish innocency of what she calls her temptations. No honest woman could possibly regard them as such, if he only knew it. But he doesn't know it. He sees her reduced to tears over her would-be transgressions, and before he considers what he is about he has kissed the "dear child." That is the way it happens nine times out of ten, a good man damned and lost by some frail angel of his church.

A minister is always justified in suspecting the worst of a pretty woman who wants to consult him privately about her soul, whether she has sense enough to suspect herself or not.

After observing William very carefully for thirty years I reached the conclusion that the wisest preacher knows nothing about the purely feminine soul, and the less he has to do with it the better. The thing, whatever it is, is so intimately connected with her nervous system that only her Heavenly Father can locate it from day to day. And I have observed that the really good women are never guilty of the sacrilege of showing their immortality to preachers. I lived with William for thirty years, and had more than my share of spiritual difficulties. But I would have as soon asked him how to cut out my dress as what to do with my soul. No man's preaching benefited me more, but in so far as my soul was feminine and peculiar to me I took it as an indication that Providence meant it to remain so, and I never betrayed it, not even to him.

But I could not keep other women from doing so. There was a beautiful lady in the church at Orionville who gave "Bible readings" as if they were soprano solos. She was always beautifully gowned for the occasion, and had an expression of pretty, pink piety that was irresistible. She was "not happy at home" and candidly confessed it. The lack of congeniality grew out of the fact that her husband was a straightforward business man who took no interest in her Bible readings. But he was about the only man in the church who did not. And it is only a question of time when she would have betrayed William in the Second Book of Samuel if I had not intervened.

She had been coming to the parsonage regularly for a month, consulting him about her "interpretation" of these Scriptures. She asked for him at the door as simply as if I had been his office-boy. And William was always cheered and invigorated by her visits. He would come out of his study to tea after her departure, rubbing his hands and praising the beautiful, spiritual clearness of her mind, which he considered very remarkable in a woman.

Poor William! I never destroyed his illusions, for they were always founded upon the goodness and simplicity of his own nature. But when Mrs. Billywith began to spend three afternoons of the week with him in his study, with nobody but the dead-and-gone Second Samuel to chaperon them, and when William began to neglect his pastoral visiting on this account, I couldn't have felt the call to put an end to the "interpretations" stronger than I did if I had been his guardian angel. The next time she came he was out visiting the sick.

"Come right in, Mrs. Billywith," I said, leading her into the study and seating myself opposite her when she had chosen her chair. "William is out this afternoon, but possibly I can help you with the kind of interpretation you ought to do now, better than he can." She stared at me with a look of proud surprise.

"You and William have spent a very profitable month, I reckon, on Second Samuel; but I've been thinking that maybe you ought to have a change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel. Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me a neglected prophet, Mrs. Billywith, and needs his spiritual faculties exercised and strengthened more than William does. Besides——"

I never finished the sentence. Mrs. Billywith rose with the look of an angel who has been outraged, floated through the open door and disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even suspected, why she discontinued so interesting a study, nor why he could never again induce her to give one of her beautiful "Bible readings" on prayer-meeting nights.

You will say, of course, that I was jealous of my husband. But I was not jealous for him only as a husband, I was even more jealous for him as the simplest, best, most saintly man I had ever known. And the preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to him in protecting him from such women—whose souls are merely mortal and who are to be found in so many congregations—may have a damaged priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. Ever after it sits uneasy in him. It aches and cries out in darkness even at noonday, and you have to go and do it all over again—the restoring.

Some one who understands real moral values ought to make a new set of civil laws that would apply to the worst class of criminals in society: not the poor hungry, simple-minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should have a very different class of people in the penitentiaries, and not the least numerous among them would be the women who make a religion of sneaking up on the blind male side of good men, without a thought of the consequences.



CHAPTER X

WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL

William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion he made away from God in his own mind. And as the first trip led to the second I will begin with that.

There was a young man in William's class at college named Horace Pendleton, who entered the ministry with him, and joined the North Georgia Conference at the same time. William had that devotion for him one often sees in a good man for just a smart one. He placed an extravagant value upon his gifts, and he was one of the heroes of our younger married years, about whom he talked with affectionate blindness.

And there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton had a gift, the gift of rising. You might have thought he was in the world instead of the church, he went up so fast. He had been ordained scarcely long enough to become a deacon before he was well enough known to be preaching commencement sermons at young ladies' seminaries and delivering lectures everywhere. He had that naive bravery of intelligence which enabled him to accept with dignity an invitation to lecture on any subject from "Sunshine" to the "Psychology of St. Paul."

I remember him very well in those days, a thin, long, young man with a face so narrow and tight and bright that when he talked in his high metallic voice one received the impression of light streaming in up his higher nature through a keyhole. I specify higher nature, because Pendleton never addressed himself to any other part of the spiritual anatomy. I always had the feeling when I heard him that he inflated each word, so that some of the weightiest and most ancient verbs in the Scriptures floated from his lips as lightly as if they had been the cast-off theological tail-feathers of a growing angel. His grandest thoughts (and he was as full of them as an egg is of meat) seemed to cut monkeyshines and to make faces back at him the moment he uttered them. Personally, I never liked him. He talked too much about sacrifice and was entirely too fortunate himself. Maybe I was jealous of him.

The contrast between his career in the ministry and that of William was certainly striking. He had been made a Doctor of Divinity and was filling the best churches in his Conference, while William and I were still serving mountain circuits. And it was not long before none of the churches in our Conference were good enough for him, so he had to be transferred to get one commensurate with his ability. Even then he had enough surplus energy to run a sideline in literature. I have always thought that if he had been a land agent, instead of a preacher, he could have sold the whole of Alaska and the adjacent icebergs in one quadrennium.

And I reckon I may as well admit that there was an invincible streak of meanness in me which prevented my admiring him, for, from start to finish, he was a man of impeccable reputation, and undoubtedly irreproachable character, as we use those words, and I could have admired him as anything else but a preacher. It was his shockingly developed talent for worldly success that revolted me. To this day, the gospel, the real "lose-your-life-for-my-sake" gospel sounds better, more like gospel to me if it is preached by a man who is literally poor. Maybe it is because I learned to revere this trait in William.

But in every way, always William could surpass me in the dignity of love. So he went on loving Horace Pendleton. He believed that the Lord was lavish in favors to him because of his superior worth, and this accounted for his good fortune, and I never interfered with any of William's idolatries; they were all creditable to him.

At last the time came when he received an invitation from Pendleton (who was now pastor of the leading Methodist Church in a flourishing city in another state) to visit him. They had always kept up a sort of desultory correspondence, and I am sure Pendleton never received finer laurels of praise than William sent him in his letters.

We were in a small town that year in the malarial district and William's health was not good. It was early spring, before the revival season opened, and it so happened that there was some kind of political convention on hand, which enabled him to secure special rates on the railroad. So one morning in April, I plumed and preened him in his best clothes and sent him on his happy journey. When he returned a week later William was a changed man. He talked with a breadth and intelligence upon many old and new subjects, that I had never observed in him before. Yet it seemed to me that something great in him had faded. He was stuffed to the neck with ethics as loose fitting morally as the sack coat of worldly-mindedness, and he did not suspect it. His very expression had changed. He looked, well, to put it as mildly as I can, William looked sophisticated, and it is as belittling a look as a good man can wear. There is a Moses simplicity about goodness that has never been improved upon by the wisest ape-expression of the smartest man that ever lived, and William's simplicity had been blurred.

"Mary," he said to me, as we sat at our evening meal the day after his return, "I must read and study more. This visit has been an eye-opener to me. I am sadly behind the times."

"Yes, William," I replied shrewdly, for I had never heard him talk so "fresh" before, "you must read and study more, for a preacher has something bigger than 'the times' on his conscience."

"What do you mean?"

"That the times are so transient, that a preacher is called to deliver a message about what is far more permanent."

"I think, Mary," he went on, assuming the reasoning air that a man always takes when he thinks he is trying to make a woman think, but when he is only trying to make her agree with what he thinks, "I think one reason why Pendleton has gotten on in the Church and been of so much more service there than I have is because he has kept up with his times. He is a very learned man, and he preaches right up to the present moment. I'd scarcely have recognized some of the Scriptures as he interpreted them in the light of modern criticism and conditions."

"You are right, William, there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton has risen in the Church and been of more service to the Church than you have been because he knows so much better than you do how to make it worldly-minded and how to intone the gospel to the same tune, but you, William, are you going to begin to interpret the Scriptures just to suit your times and modern conditions? I thought Scriptures had nothing to do with mere 'times,' that they belonged to the ever-lasting Order of Things."

"I fear you are prejudiced against Pendleton, and incapable of seeing the good in what he says. Yet he showed a great interest in me, and he talked to me very seriously about the limitations of my ministry."

"What did he say?"

"For one thing, he said I was identified with a view of God and Man and the world such as no intelligent, healthy disciple of Christ after the fashion of John Wesley ever held."

"Could you tell what his view of God was?"

"No, I could not. That was my ignorance. I could not keep up with him. He preached a very powerful sermon from one of the best texts in the New Testament the Sunday I was there. He couldn't have done that unless he had had a very plain view of God."

"Oh, yes, he could," I retorted. "You can preach a much more satisfactorily powerful sermon in a fashionable modern church if you don't see God than if you do."

Still William persisted. He began to read strange books that Pendleton had loaned him, and the more he read the gloomier he looked. His vocabulary changed. In the course of fourteen days, I remember, the word "salvation" did not pass his lips and I could have prayed as good a prayer as he prayed any night as we knelt together. The time came, indeed, when I seriously considered making him the object of special prayer on the sly, only William was so really good I was ashamed to show this lack of confidence in him to the Lord.

Meanwhile the Sabbath in June, when the protracted meeting usually began, approached, and I knew if things did not change it would be a flat failure. For William was in a blue funk spiritually.

"I cannot think what is the matter with me," he complained to me late one afternoon as we sat on the parsonage steps waiting for the prayer meeting bell to ring.

"You have backslid, William. That is what is the matter with you! You listened to the voice of Horace Pendleton till you cannot hear the voice of God. You no longer have the single eye. It has been bunged up, put out!"

That was the first and last sermon I ever preached to William. It was a short one, but it brought him forward for prayers, so to speak, and for the next few days we had a terrible time at the parsonage. He was an honest man, and he was not slow to recognize his condition once it was pointed out to him.

It is not so bad to lose the "witness of the Spirit," because you can still believe in God, and presently the witness is there again, but when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe, when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, because William really had a soul. (I am not saying Pendleton did not have, you understand; I am an agnostic on that subject.) But to have a soul and to be without an immediate Almighty is to experience a frightful tragedy. If a man never recognizes this diviner part of himself, he may live and die in the comfort or discomfort of any other mere creature. But once you realize your own immortality (I make a distinction here between the self-consciousness of immortality and the loud preaching of it that a man may do just from biblical hearsay), you are a lonesome waif in a bad storm. This was William's fix. He was exposed, all at once, to the inclemencies of the Infinitudes. But I ceased to worry once he began to really pray and scourge himself, and I did not interrupt the chastening. Usually, when he insisted upon fasting all day Friday, I provided little intelligent temptations to food at the earliest possible moment. But this time I let him starve to his heart's content. I reckon I am a worldly-minded woman and always shall be, but I know another, higher minded man when I see one, and I have always been careful not to drag William down. Now I was equally determined that Horace Pendleton should not.

Once, during the dreadful time, he came out of his study and looked at me vaguely, pleadingly, as if he wanted help.

"Don't look at me that way, William," I cried, "I can't do anything but kiss you. I never did know where your God was, but you knew, and you'll just have to go back the way you came to Him. All I know for certain is that there is a God, your kind, or you could never have lived the way you have lived, nor accomplished the things you have accomplished. You couldn't have; you haven't sense enough. And for this reason you'd better not try to think your way back. If God is God, He is far beyond our little thinking. You had better feel your way to him. It is what you call Faith in your sermons!"

Something like this is what I said to him standing before him with my head on his breast, wiping the tears from my eyes. Really a spiritually sick preacher is about the most depressing thing a woman can have in the house. And when I looked at William, pale, hollow-eyed, with his mouth puckered into a penitential angle I longed to lay Horace Pendleton across my knees and give him what he deserved for disturbing a better man's peace.

About the middle of Saturday afternoon, however, I knew that his clouds were breaking. I heard him in his study singing:

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."



Later on, at bed-time, he chose a cheerful psalm to read and I heard the happy rustling of his wings in the prayer he made.

The next evening had been chosen for the initial service of the protracted meeting and I remember his text:

"I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him."

I remember it because I remember William so well that evening. He fitted into it as if it was his home. The great words seemed to belong to him. They were his experience literally. They had the authority of another simple, faithful, brave life behind them besides that of St. Paul. And the people who listened knew it. If William had made a great name and fame for himself out of preaching, if he had earned fancy salaries as the pastor in rich churches it would have been different. I don't know, of course, but it seems to me in that case they might have clanged a little like sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

He stood in the little dim pulpit, the summer evening was fading, the lamps in the church had not been lighted, and the faces of the village folk were softened, sweetened in the gentle Sabbath gloom. He drew a picture of Paul in prison at Rome, old and in anticipation of his end. William never knew how to use words fancifully, therefore they used to gather together truthfully in his sermons, as if he had wove them in. And so now we had not an elegantly-painted portrait of St. Paul, but we saw him really, the man who actually had counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus—so out of his bonds in the spirit. It takes a rare preacher to portray one "found in Christ." He cannot do it with the best theological vocabulary, nor the finest scientific terms. But William, I cannot tell how he did it—all I know is that every time he put his sentences together, they cast again the image of the Saviour upon every heart before him. He stood like a man who has his hand upon the latch-string of the door of his Father's house, counting over one by one the things to be lost and gained there. Nothing remained but a few simple things like loving one another. He removed the world and the cares of it and set our feet in the way of life like a wise man guiding little children.

If Horace Pendleton had put all he knew into one discourse, garnished it with a thousand terms taken from the "new theology," he could not have approached the awful simplicity and the high sweetness of that sermon.

But one thing I must remember to tell; as long as he lived William loved and honored this man with perfect devotion. That is the wonderful thing about being good. You see it always, your eyes are happily holden to evil. On the other hand, I had occasion to learn after William's death that Pendleton regarded him with good-natured derision. He thought him a stupid man bound down to the earth by a meager theology. He even wrote an obituary notice of William that must have made his guardian angel long to kick him—all a grand toot to show the contrast between a preacher like himself and a foolish old stutterer like William.



CHAPTER XI

FINANCES AND FASHIONS

It is curious what things are revealed to us as we go along. I used to wonder, because William wondered, where, in what year, Paul did this or that which is recorded in Acts. I remember how William used to get down his commentaries and squint everywhere along margins for dates to discover exactly where he was in the spring, say, of 54 A. D. At the time it was passing strange to me that no exact record of dates was taken concerning the doings of a man who occasionally turned the world upside down as he went through it. But now it is perfectly clear. Those who wrote never specified whether it was the first or second Sunday that Paul said thus and so at Antioch. The record was merely of the timeless truth he uttered, because Paul and the rest of them engaged in this Scripture-making and doing back there were already out of time in their consciousness. They were figures in Eternity making the great journey by another calendar than ours.

Since I have been writing this poor record of William, it is not time that matters to me. I forget to tell of his years in each chapter, or to describe the changes in his appearance. The things he did, the prayers he prayed, the faith he exercised, these crowd the memory—all so much alike, as one day resembles another day, and as one prayer resembles another prayer. But the dates have long since faded from my mind. I cannot recall, for example, when his shoulders first began to stoop, nor when he ceased to go clean-shaven, nor the year it was that his hair and beard whitened, nor when the hollows deepened to stay beneath his eyes. All I remember for certain was the changeless spirit of him, and the unconquerable courage he showed about getting ready to put off his mortality and the definite curious vividness with which he anticipated immortality.

And in other ways I have unusual difficulty in telling here what he said and did. The activities of a minister's life differ so widely from the activities of any other life that even to set them down requires a peculiar vocabulary. One cannot find the right kind even in church reports and statistics, but they must bear some great likeness to the words used in the Acts of the Apostles. I do not know how to describe them, but every man knows them when he hears them, for the language of Christianity is the one language that never changes. It gets a new translation now and then, but it is always informed with the same spirit, the same lofty pilgrim-phrases and prayer-sounding verbs. And the minister learns them because he needs them in the world where he moves.

I make an exception here of those preachers who develop a gift for church enterprise, for getting up funds for "improvements" of one sort and another. The account they give of their stewardship is not very different from that of any other business man. And they are needed. They do the greater part towards keeping the church housed, conspicuously steepled and visible to the world that passes by. They are the preachers in every Conference who are sent to "works" where a new church or a new parsonage is needed. And some of them have heroic records in collecting for these purposes. I would not take a single dollar from the sum of their renown. But this is a memorial to William, and he was not one of these. He was really an excellent preacher, a devoted pastor, but he had more spiritual intuitions than common sense about managing the practical details of the pastorate. I recognized this deficiency in him as we went along together in the itinerancy, and feeling that it was important for the Presiding Elder to have a good opinion of him in every way, I must have perjured myself to every one of them year by year, singing William's praises as a business man when I knew he was as innocent of business as the angels in Heaven. If he had been the kind of man I represented him to be, he would have been a sort of hallelujah cross and crisscross between Daniel Webster, John D. Rockefeller and St. Paul. And I remember the genial patience with which the gray-headed elders used to listen to my Williamanic paeans. But they could not have believed me, for he was never sent to a place where visible mortar and stone work had to be accomplished for the advancement of the church. And now, when it is all over, when the violets are blooming so much at home above his dear dust, I feel at last that I can afford to confess his beautiful limitations.

After you are dead it doesn't matter if you were not successful in a business way. No one has yet had the courage to memorialize his wealth on his tombstone. A dollar mark would not look well there. The best epitaph proclaims simple old Scripture virtues, like honesty and diligence and patience. And you will observe that when the meanest skinflint or the most disgracefully avaricious millionaire dies, his tombstone never refers to his most notorious characteristics. His friends speak not of his scandalous speculations, but of his benevolences. Thus some of the most conscienceless rogues in a generation go down to posterity with expurgated tablets to their memory, which of course is best for posterity.

So I do not mind now admitting that William was a poor money-getter, but he actually did have the virtues that look well recorded on his tombstone. I can even recall, with a sort of tearful humor, some of his efforts at practical church thinking. He entertained with naive enthusiasm, for example, a certain proposition for regulating the support of the ministry, and would have sent it as a memorial to the General Conference, but for my interference. He had elaborated a plan by which every Methodist preacher should receive his salary on the pro rata basis as the superannuates do, according to the funds in hand, and according to their needs. It would be taken like any other Conference collection, turned in like any other to the treasury for this purpose. But the preacher on a mountain circuit with a wife and eight children would receive twenty-five hundred dollars, and the one with only a wife, even though he might be the pastor of a rich city church, would receive only a thousand dollars.

Such a distribution of income would have placed a premium upon ministerial posterity and would have been as fatal as socialism to competition for the best pulpits in the Church connection. But I did not use this argument to William. He could not appreciate it. He was even capable of claiming that it proved the virtue of his proposition.

"William," I exclaimed, when he confided in me, "promise me that you will never mention this dreadful plan, not even to a steward or to the Presiding Elder. It tends to Socialism, Communism and to Church volcanics generally. Your reputation would be ruined if you were suspected of entertaining such incendiary ideas!"

He was aghast, having always regarded the very terms I used to describe his plan with righteous horror. And that was the last I ever heard of his pro rata salary system.

Still, if all the preachers in the Church were as literally in earnest about living just to preach the gospel as William was, it would have been a good one. The fact is they are not. The very gifted, highly educated pastor of a rich city church feels it down to his spiritual bones that his gospel is worth more than that of the simple-minded itinerant on a country circuit. And most of them would have to experience something more illuminating and stringent even than the "second blessing" before they could be made to see the matter differently. And I do not blame them. We just can't get over being human and greedy and covetous anywhere, it seems, especially in a rich pulpit. William stood a better chance for developing the right heavenly mind in his part of the vineyard. And I ought to have been satisfied to see the way he grew in grace, and in that finer, sweeter knowledge of the Lord and his ways, but I never was.

I used to think, too, that his gospel was worth more than some other preacher's who received a better salary. But it comforts me now to know that he never thought it. If William was covetous about anything it was salvation. He was never satisfied with being as good as he was. He was always longing and praying and going about in the effort just to be a better man, more worthy of the message he had to deliver. These were the kind of seraphic pleasures he took in living. And there was no mortal power, no poverty or hardship that could do him out of them. He would come back from feeding some vicious sinner with his gospel substances exhilarated. It seemed to strengthen his spirit to drive five miles through freezing winter weather to some country church to preach to half a dozen men and women who may have only come on such a bad day with the hope of finding that the preacher failed to come, a shepherd unfaithful to his flock in a trying season. And of course, if you are called to preach, this is the way to be, but if you are called to be just the wife of a preacher, it is different. I do not say it ought to be, but it is. I used to get tired of being poor in spirit. There came days when I wanted to inherit the earth, the real earth, you understand. The figure of speech might have been better for my soul, but what I hankered after was something opulent and comfortable for just the human me. And this brings to mind an incident that happened when I was in one of these moods.

We were stationed that year at Celestial Bells, a place where, as I have already intimated, the people had some kind of happy beam in their eye. They were not only willing to be Christians, they were determined to be. But they were equally determined to enjoy every other good thing they saw in sight. This led to many social occasions, afternoon teas, receptions, innocent entertainments, to no end of visiting and to a fashionableness in everybody's appearance that was scandalously fascinating to me.

Now and then I have heard some stupid stranger refer to Celestial Bells as an ugly little town, but in my memory it is spread forever in the sun, sweetly shining like a flower-garden wing of Paradise. It was there after so many years that I came in contact again with simple human gayety, with women prettily gowned, with the charming clatter of light conversation and within the sound of music that was not always hymnal. I do not say, mind you, that I did not listen always reverently and gratefully to William's higher talk, nor that I have ever ceased to enjoy good church music, but I am confessing that, in spite of long training in experience-meeting monologues and organ tunes, I was still ecstatically capable of this other kind of delight.

As the Minister's Wife I was asked everywhere. In all well-bred communities the preacher's wife is given the free moral agent's opportunity to draw her own line between the world and the church. If she refuses a series of invitations to teas and clubs and receptions, it is understood that she is not of the world, will have none of it, and she is left to pursue her pious way to just the church services and missionary meetings. But I refused to draw the spiritual line between tea parties and the bible-class study evening. I accepted every invitation with alacrity. There was nothing radically wrong, I believe, with my heavenly mind, it simply extended further down and around about than that of some others in my position.

One circumstance only interfered with my pleasures. This was the curious sag and limpness, and color and style of my clothes. It is no mystery to me why dress fashions for women connected with the itinerancy tend to mourning shades. When you put the world out of your life, you put the sweet vanity of color out. You eschew red and pink and tender sky-blues and present your bodies living sacrifices in black materials. I do not believe that God requires it. The Maker of the heavens and the earth, of the green boughs and of the myriad-faced flowers must be a lover of colors. But I cannot recall ever having seen a Circuit Rider's Wife in my life whose few garments were not pathetically dashed with this gloom of mourning darkness.

So, when we came to Celestial Bells, I say, I had a black sateen waist and a gray cheviot skirt still worthy to be worn to church and prayer meeting services, and a sadder blacker gown that had done service for four years upon funeral occasions and others equally as solemn, like weddings. These were all, except the calicos I wore at home. The result was that I must have looked like some sort of sacrilegious crow at every social function in Celestial Bells during the first few months. But as the Spring advanced, I took my courage in my hands and resolved to have a blue foulard silk. It was frightfully expensive, seventy-five cents a yard, in fact, to say nothing of a white lace yoke and a black panne velvet belt. But no bride ever contemplated her "going away" gown with more satisfaction. I pictured myself in it before I even purchased it attending Sister Z's tea party, looking like other women! I do not recommend this as high ambition, but those preachers' wives in the remote places who have worn drab and sorrowfully cut clothes for years will know how I felt. I think there is something pitiful in women just here. No matter how old and consecrated they get, they do in their secret hearts often long to be pretty, to look well dressed and—yes, light-hearted. The latter is so becoming to them.

But it is in the itinerancy as it is in other walks of life. Just as you think you are about to get your natural heart's desire somebody slams the Bible down on it, or gets an answer to prayer that spoils your pleasure in it. So it was in my case.

It was the first foreign missionary meeting of the new fiscal year, one day in March. We met at Sister MacL's house. The jonquils were in bloom, the world was fair, and out in the orchards we could see the peach trees one mass of pink blossoms. I never felt more religious or thankful in my life, there in the little green parlor listening to the opening hymn. The roll was called, showing that we had an unusually full meeting. The minutes were read, then came a discussion concerning dues for the coming year. All this time Sister Shaller had been presiding with her usual dignity. She was a beautiful woman, childless, and much praised for her interest in church works. She was rich and enjoyed the peculiar distinction of wearing very fashionable gowns even to church. Upon this occasion something reserved, potential and authoritative in her manner made me nervous. I had a premonition that she was after somebody's dearest idol. And I was not left long in suspense as to whose it was.

Fixing her wide brown eyes upon us with hypnotic intensity she said she had felt moved, unaccountably moved, to tell the Auxiliary that we must support a foreign female missionary this coming year. The silence that met this announcement was sad and submissive. We were already paying all the dues we could afford, this meant fifty dollars extra, and not a single one of us wanted to send the missionary except Sister Shaller.

She went on to say, in her deep mezzo soprano voice, that she knew it meant sacrifice for us, but that it was by just such sacrifices that we grew in grace, and she desired to suggest the nature of the sacrifice, one that we would probably feel the most, and would therefore be the most beneficial.

"Suppose each of us resolves to do without our Spring gown for Easter. Oh, my sisters! we could probably send two instead of one missionary then. And we will have at the same time curbed the weakness and vanity of our female natures!"

The rich plumes in her hat trembled with the depth of her emotions, her pretty silk skirts rustled softly. But the silence continued. If she had asked for the sacrifice of any but our Easter things, I reckon we could have borne it better, but probably there was not a woman in the room whose imagination had not already been cavorting under her prospective Easter bonnet. As for me, I never felt so circumvented and outraged in the whole course of my life as a preacher's wife. I had the samples in my bag at that moment, and was only waiting for the adjournment of the meeting to go to the store on my way home to purchase my foulard.

There is one thing we have all noticed about a silence, especially in a company of friends, if it lasts too long it gets sullen, and pregnant with the animosity of unspoken thoughts. When the silence was approaching this stage, Sister MacL, who had a sort of cradle heart for soothing everyone, murmured in her crooning voice:

"Let us take it to the Lord in prayer!"

And we were about to rise and kneel like a set of angry children before our smiling Heavenly Father, when something either moral or immoral stiffened in me, and I startled even myself with these words, that seemed to come of their own accord out of my mouth:

"I'll do nothing of the kind!"

I was oblivious to the horrified gaze of my companions. I felt some spirit strengthen me and give me courage. I had a quick tear-blinded vision of the years behind me, and of the figure I made walking always down the aisle of some church by William in my dismal black dress, or sitting at a funeral or even at a feast, always in that ugly black garment.

"Sister Shaller," I said, looking steadily at her as a child looks at another child who is trying to take some cherished plaything from it, "you can do as you please about sending that missionary. You are perfectly able to do without new Easter clothes. As for me, I have promised the Lord to dress better, more like a human being and less like a woman-raven, and I intend to do it. I am tired of sitting in retired corners at parties and receptions because I look as if I belonged to a funeral. It is a matter of conscience with me, just as the missionary is with you."

I never told William what I had done. It was one of those good works that he could not have measured or appreciated. And I never knew whether Sister Shaller sent her missionary or not. She was a good woman and perfectly capable of doing it. But the other women were as grateful as if I had rescued their Easter things from a highwayman.

This was the only place William ever served where the people of the world flocked in and filled his church. I used to think maybe it was a way they had of returning my social friendliness to them. I accepted all of their invitations I dared to accept, and they accepted all of William's. They not only crowded in to hear him preach, they were singularly amiable about coming up to the altar if he extended an invitation to penitents who were sorry for their sins. The trouble with those people was the exceedingly small number of things they would admit were sins. But it made no difference in William's exhortations as sometimes he bent above the gayly flowered heads in his altar. It was always

"Give up every thing and follow Christ."

And if he did them no good certainly he did them no harm.



CHAPTER XII

THE CHEERFUL LITTLE DOG THAT LED THE BLIND MAN

The fact that I had a worldly mind was in some ways very fortunate for William. For, when all is said, this is the world we live in, not the Kingdom of Heaven. And while I never knew any man who understood the archangelic politics of the latter place better than he did, there were constantly occurring occasions down here on the earth, between his pulpit and the Post Office, when this same New Jerusalem statescraft rendered him one of the most obtuse and stubborn men in creation. It was then that I used to feel like one of those cheerful, clever little dogs we sometimes see leading a blind man through a dangerously crowded thoroughfare. It was then only that I ever had the delightful sensation of filling the star role in the really great drama of life we were acting together. And it was usually a deliciously double role, for William never knew that he was led by anything but the voice of God and the peculiar Scripture wisdom of the prophets, and the man of the world in the situation who had to be corraled and brought back into the fold rarely suspected, either, what was happening to him.

In regard to the latter I will say I think some very good people will be obliged to wait until they actually get in the Kingdom of Heaven before they experience the shine and illumination of a spiritual nature. I have seen many a one of this class on William's Circuits, and they are about the most difficult saints of all to manage, because they could do what they conceived to be their duty and listen a lifetime to the gospel without ever catching the least hint of its real significance. The strongest sermon William could preach on "Sell all your goods and follow me" never induced a single rich man to do it. He was fortunate if such a man gave five dollars extra to foreign missions on the strength of the appeal.

The wonderful thing about William was that these facts never clouded his convictions or discouraged him. He had a faith over and above the vain pomps and show of this world. He wore clothes so old they glistened along every seam, and little thin white ties, and darned shirts, and was forever stinting himself further for the sake of some collection to which he wanted to contribute. And all these made him an embarrassingly impressive figure when he looked out over the gew-gaws of his Sunday congregation, calling upon them to sell all their goods to feed the poor, or to lay down their life for Him, or to put on the whole armor of God and present their bodies a living sacrifice, which was their reasonable service. Maybe if he had especial "liberty" in his delivery there would be a lively response of "Amens" from the brethren. Maybe some old black bonneted sister would slap her hands and shout a little on the side, but nobody ever really did the things he told them to do. If they had, William alone could have revolutionized human society in the course of his ministry. But he was never aware of his failure. He was like a man holden in a heavenly vision, a man supping in one long dream upon the milk and honey of far off Canaan.

For this reason, as I have said, he sometimes blundered in the world about him and I had to come to the rescue.

We were stationed at Arkville, a small village with two country churches attached to make up the Circuit, when this incident happened which will serve to illustrate what I mean. The congregation was composed for the most part of men and women who worked in a cotton factory, and of one rich man who owned it. He was that most ferocious thing in human shape, a just man, with a thimble-headed soul, a narrow mind and a talent for making money. He had built the church at Arkville and he paid nearly all the assessments. He was a despot, with a reputation among his employees of having mercy upon whom he would have mercy. William never understood him. He regarded Brother Sears as a being remarkably generous, and capable of growing in grace. Sears accordingly flattered and honored the church with his presence every Sunday during the first six months of his ministry.

But there came a dreadful Sabbath when William read for his New Testament lesson the story of Dives's extraordinary prosperity in this world, dwelt with significant and sympathetic inflection upon the needy condition of Lazarus lying neglected outside his gate, afflicted with sores. Then he capped the climax, after the singing of the second hymn, by reading out in a deep, sonorous, judgment-trumpet voice:

"And Dives being in torment lifted up his eyes to Abraham in heaven and begged for a drop of water to cool his parched tongue."

It was a tropical text and William preached a burning sermon from it. As he grew older the vision of hell seemed to fade and he laid the scenes of his discourses nearer and nearer the fragrant outskirts of Heaven, but he was now in his hardy old age, and occasionally took a severely good man's obtuse pleasure in picturing the penitentiary pangs of sinners.

I shall always retain a vivid memory of that service—William standing in the little yellow pine-box pulpit with his long gray beard spread over his breast, and his blue eyes shadowed with his dark thoughts of Dives's torment. I can still see, distinctly enough to count them, the rows of sallow-faced men and women with their hacking concert cough, casting looks of livid venom at Sears sitting by the open window on the front bench, a great red-jowled man who was regarding the figure in the pulpit with such a blaze of fury one might have inferred that he had already swallowed a shovelful of live coals. Nevertheless William went on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I longed to leap to my feet and exclaim:

"William, stop! You are hurting Brother Sears's feelings and appealing to the worst passions in the rest of your congregation!"

But it was too late. Suddenly Sears arose and strode out of the house. Five minutes later William closed with a few leaping flame sentences and sat down, so much carried away with the sincerity of his own performance that he had not even noticed Sears's departure.

When he discovered the sensation he had created and the enormity of his chief steward's indignation, he was far from repentant. He simply withdrew and devoted an extra hour a day to special prayer for Brother Sears. It was no use to advise him that he might as well cut off the electric current and then try to turn on the light as to pray for a man like Sears. He had a faith in prayer that no mere reasoning could obstruct or circumvent. And the nearer I come to the great answer to all prayers, the more I am convinced that he was right. But in those days I almost suspected William of cheating in the claims he made for the efficacy of prayer. Thus, in the case of Brother Sears, to all appearances it was I who brought about a reconciliation by readjusting one of the little short circuits of his perverse nature.

Brothers Sears was a man who loved to excel his fellow-man even in the smallest things. He not only felt a first-place prominence in the little society of the village, he strove to surpass the least person in it if there was any point of competition between them. It would have been a source of mortification to him if the shoemaker had grown a larger turnip than he had grown.

William and I were walking by his garden one day, after he had sulked for a month, and saw him standing in the midst of it with a lordly air. William would have passed him by with a sorrowful bow, but I hailed him:

"Good afternoon, Brother Sears! You have a beautiful garden, but I believe our pole beans are two inches taller than yours on the cornstalk."

He was all competitive animation at once, measured the curling height of his tallest bean vine, and insisted upon coming home with us to measure ours, which, thank heavens, were four inches shorter.

He was so elated over this victory that he apparently forgave William on the spot for his Dives sermon, and handed him ten dollars on quarterage to indicate the return of his good will.

"Mary," said William, staring down happily at the crisp bill in his hand as Sears disappeared, "never say again that the Lord does not answer prayer!"

For a moment I felt a flash of resentment. Who was it that had had the courage to beard Sears in his own garden? Who had tolled him all the way across town into our garden to measure our bean stalk? Who was it that had thought up this method of natural reconciliation, anyhow? Not William, walking beside us in sad New Testament silence. Then, suddenly, my crest fell. After all, I was merely the instrument chosen by which William's prayers for Sears had been answered. To his faith we owed this reaction of grace, not to me, who had not uttered a single petition for the old goat.

From time to time William had queer experiences with the political element in his churches. This is composed usually, not of bad men, but of men who have Democratic or Republican immortalities. Apt as not the leading steward would be the manager of the political machine in that particular community. There was Brother Miller, for example, at Hartsville, a splendid square-looking man, with a strong face, a still eye, and an impeccable testimony at "experience" meetings. He held up William's hands for two years without blinking, and professed the greatest benefits from his sermons. No man could pray a more open-faced, self-respecting prayer, and not one was more conscientious in the discharge of his duties to the church and the pastor. It never seemed to disturb him that the portion of the community which was opposed to the "machine" that elected everything from the village coroner to the representative, regarded him as the most debauched and unscrupulous politician in that part of the State. He simply accepted this as one of his crosses, bore it bravely, and went on perfecting his remarkably perfect methods for excluding all voters who did not vote for his candidate. He would confide in William sundry temptations he had, enlisted his sympathy and admiration because of the struggle he professed to have in regard to strong drink, although he never actually touched intoxicants, but never once did he mention or admit his real besetting sin. He was willing to repent of everything else, but not of his politics. And St. Paul himself could not have dragged him across the Democratic party line in that county, not even if he had showed him the open doors of Heaven.

I do not know what is to become of such Christians. The country is full of them, and if they cause as many panics and slumps and anxieties in the next world as they do in this one we shall have a lot more trouble there than we have been led to believe from reading Revelations.



CHAPTER XIII

WILLIAM WRESTLING WITH TRAVELING ANGELS

I have had little to say about the joy of William, although he was one of the most joyful men I have ever known. The reason is I never understood it. His joy was not natural like mine (in so far as I had any)—it was supernatural, and not at all dependent upon the actual visible circumstance about him. It used to frighten me sometimes to face the last month before quarterly conference with only two dollars, half a sack of flour and the hock end of a ham. But then it was that William rose to the heights of a strange and almost exasperating cheerfulness. He could see where he was going plainer. Our extremity gave him an opportunity to trust more in the miracles of providence, and that afforded him the greatest pleasure. He was never weary of putting his faith to the test. He was like a strong wrestling Jacob, going about looking for new angels to conquer. And I am bound to confess that his Lord never really failed him, although he sometimes came within five minutes of doing so.

One Sabbath, I remember, he had an appointment at a church ten miles distant where he was to begin a protracted meeting. At the last moment his horse went lame. It so happened that some weeks previous William had overreached himself in a horse trade. He had swapped an irritable crop-eared mare for a very handsome animal who proved to have a gravel in one of his fore feet. This horse would lay his tail over the dashboard and travel like inspiration for days at a time up and down the long country roads; then, suddenly, if there was a hurried message to go somewhere to comfort a dying man or preach his funeral, the creature would begin to limp as if he never expected to use but three legs again. I believe William suspected the devil had something to do with this diabolical gravel, for he never gave way to impatience as a natural man would have done in such a predicament. Upon the occasion I have mentioned, he helped the old hypocrite back into the stable with a mildness that exasperated me as I watched with my hat on from the window, for it was already past the time when we should have started.

"Silas is too lame to travel to-day," said he a moment later as he entered the kitchen.

"But what will you do, William?" I exclaimed, provoked in spite of myself at his serenity. "It will be dreadful if you miss your appointment at the beginning of the meeting."

"I can do nothing but pray. Mine is the Lord's work. Doubtless he will provide a way for me to get to it," he answered, withdrawing into the parlor and closing the door after him.

I knew that meant wrestling with one of the traveling angels, and held my tongue, but the natural temper in my blood was not so easily controlled. I flopped down in the chair, laid my head upon the window sill and yielded to tears. I was far along in my middle years then, but never to the end did I get accustomed to the stubbornness of William's faith. I always wanted to do something literal and effective myself in the emergency. I seemed to be made so that I couldn't look to God for help until I had worn myself out.

While I sat there, in a sort of tearful rage with William and the horse, there was a sound of wheels at the front gate. I arose, hastily wiping my eyes, and was just in time to face William's smiling countenance in the parlor doorway.

"Mary, Sister Spindle is not well, and Brother Spindle has driven by to offer us seats in his carriage."

Brother Spindle was the only man in the community who owned a carriage and horses. I flung my arms around William's neck and whispered:

"Forgive me, William, I never can get used to it that the Lord is illogically and incredibly good to you. But I am glad to tag along after you in His mercies."

He had a gentle way of enjoying these triumphs over me. He would cast the blue beam of his eye humorously over me, and then kiss me as if I was still young and beautiful.

Never in all our married life did he get the best of me in an argument. His arguing faculty was not highly developed. It was easier to silence him than to stir him into opposing speech. But whenever he entered the sacred parsonage parlor and closed the door after him, I always knew he would have the best of me one way or another when he came out.

But it was not this faith in prayer that confused me most, it was the answers that William, and others like him, received to their prayers. We never went to any church where there was not at least one man or woman who knew, actually knew, how to reach his or her empty hands up to God and get them filled. And they were always people of rare dignity in the community, although some of them bordered on the simplicity of childhood mentally.

I recall in this connection Sister Carleton. She was a very old woman who seemed to have settled down to be mostly below her waist. Her shoulders were thin, her bosom flat, but she widened out in the hips amazingly. Her face was the most beautifully wrinkled countenance I ever beheld. Every line seemed to enhance some celestial quality in her expression. And she had the dim look of the very old after they begin to recede spiritually from the ruthlessness of mere realities. She had palsy and used to sit in the Amen Corner of the church at Eureka, gently, incessantly wagging her lovely old head beneath a little black horseshoe bonnet that was tied under her chin with long black ribbons. Sabbath after Sabbath, year after year she was always to be seen there, sweetly abstracted like an old saint in a dream. She had one thought, one purpose left in life. This was to live to see all of her "boys saved." These were three middle-aged men, all of whom had been wild in their youth. Her one connection now with the church was expressed, not by any personal interest in the preacher or his sermons, but in this thought for her children. Some time during every experience meeting we always knew that Sister Carleton would rise trembling to her feet, steady herself with both hands on the bench in front of her, look about her vaguely and ask the prayers of "all Christian people" that her boys might repent and be saved from their sins. They were already excellent and prosperous citizens and remarkable for their devotion to her, but she was not the woman to mince matters. They had not been converted, therefore she prayed for them as if they were still dead in their trespasses and sins.

The first year of William's ministry in this place the two younger sons were converted and joined the church, but the oldest still "held out," as the saying was. In fact, he stayed out of the church literally, never coming to any service.

The next year Sister Carleton had grown very feeble, but at a consecration meeting held one afternoon before the regular revival service at night, she appeared as usual. Before the closing hymn she arose, clasped her old hands over the back of the bench in front of her and made her last petition for the "prayers of all Christian people."

"Brother Thompson," she concluded in the deep raucous voice of extreme age, "I have prayed for my youngest boy fifty years, and for my second boy fifty-two years, and for my oldest son nearly sixty years. The two youngest air saved now, but t'other is still out of the fold. I ain't losin' faith, but I'm gittin' tired. Seems as if I couldn't hold out much longer. But I can't go till Jimmy is saved. I ain't got nothin' else keepin' me but that." She paused, looked about her as if she felt a memory brush past. "When he was jest a little one, no higher 'an that, he was afeerd of the dark. I always had to set by him till he was asleep. And now, seems as if I couldn't leave him for good out in the dark. I want to ast you to pray, not that he may be converted, but that he may be converted this very night. I ain't got time to wait no longer—seems as if I'm jest obliged to git still and rest soon."