When Theron woke next morning, Alice seemed to have dressed and left the room—a thing which had never happened before.
This fact connected itself at once in his brain with the recollection of her having made an exhibition of herself the previous evening—going forward before all eyes to join the unconverted and penitent sinners, as if she were some tramp or shady female, instead of an educated lady, a professing member from her girlhood, and a minister's wife. It crossed his mind that probably she had risen and got away noiselessly, for very shame at looking him in the face, after such absurd behavior.
Then he remembered more, and grasped the situation. He had fainted in church, and had been brought home and helped to bed. Dim memories of unaccustomed faces in the bedroom, of nauseous drugs and hushed voices, came to him out of the night-time. Now that he thought of it, he was a sick man. Having settled this, he went off to sleep again, a feverish and broken sleep, and remained in this state most of the time for the following twenty-four hours. In the brief though numerous intervals of waking, he found certain things clear in his mind. One was that he was annoyed with Alice, but would dissemble his feelings. Another was that it was much pleasanter to be ill than to be forced to attend and take part in those revival meetings. These two ideas came and went in a lazy, drowsy fashion, mixing themselves up with other vagrant fancies, yet always remaining on top.
In the evening the singing from the church next door filled his room. The Soulsbys' part of it was worth keeping awake for. He turned over and deliberately dozed when the congregation sang.
Alice came up a number of times during the day to ask how he felt, and to bring him broth or toast-water. On several occasions, when he heard her step, the perverse inclination mastered him to shut his eyes, and pretend to be asleep, so that she might tip-toe out again. She had a depressed and thoughtful air, and spoke to him like one whose mind was on something else. Neither of them alluded to what had happened the previous evening. Toward the close of the long day, she came to ask him whether he would prefer her to remain in the house, instead of attending the meeting.
“Go, by all means,” he said almost curtly.
The Presiding Elder and the Sunday-school superintendent called early Tuesday morning at the parsonage to make brotherly inquiries, and Theron was feeling so much better that he himself suggested their coming upstairs to see him. The Elder was in good spirits; he smiled approvingly, and even put in a jocose word or two while the superintendent sketched for the invalid in a cheerful way the leading incidents of the previous evening.
There had been an enormous crowd, even greater than that of Sunday night, and everybody had been looking forward to another notable and exciting season of grace. These expectations were especially heightened when Sister Soulsby ascended the pulpit stairs and took charge of the proceedings. She deferred to Paul's views about women preachers on Sundays, she said; but on weekdays she had just as much right to snatch brands from the burning as Paul, or Peter, or any other man. She went on like that, in a breezy, off-hand fashion which tickled the audience immensely, and led to the liveliest anticipations of what would happen when she began upon the evening's harvest of souls.
But it was something else that happened. At a signal from Sister Soulsby the steward got up, and, in an unconcerned sort of way, went through the throng to the rear of the church, locked the doors, and put the keys in their pockets. The sister dryly explained now to the surprised congregation that there was a season for all things, and that on the present occasion they would suspend the glorious work of redeeming fallen human nature, and take up instead the equally noble task of raising some fifteen hundred dollars which the church needed in its business. The doors would only be opened again when this had been accomplished.
The brethren were much taken aback by this trick, and they permitted themselves to exchange a good many scowling and indignant glances, the while their professional visitors sang another of their delightfully novel sacred duets. Its charm of harmony for once fell upon unsympathetic ears. But then Sister Soulsby began another monologue, defending this way of collecting money, chaffing the assemblage with bright-eyed impudence on their having been trapped, and scoring, one after another, neat and jocose little personal points on local characteristics, at which everybody but the individual touched grinned broadly. She was so droll and cheeky, and withal effective in her talk, that she quite won the crowd over. She told a story about a woodchuck which fairly brought down the house.
“A man,” she began, with a quizzical twinkle in her eye, “told me once about hunting a woodchuck with a pack of dogs, and they chased it so hard that it finally escaped only by climbing a butternut-tree. 'But, my friend,' I said to him, 'woodchucks can't climb trees—butternut-trees or any other kind—and you know it!' All he said in reply to me was: 'This woodchuck had to climb a tree!' And that's the way with this congregation. You think you can't raise $1,500, but you've GOT to.”
So it went on. She set them all laughing; and then, with a twist of the eyes and a change of voice, lo, and behold, she had them nearly crying in the same breath. Under the pressure of these jumbled emotions, brethren began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give. The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh contribution, and used it to screw up the general interest a notch further toward benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu exhortations and prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of duel of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men—Erastus Winch and Levi Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave his first $50; but when he rose again, half an hour afterward, and said that, owing to the high public position of some of the new members on probation, he foresaw a great future for the church, and so felt moved to give another $25, there was general amazement. Moved by a common instinct, all eyes were turned upon Levi Gorringe, and he, without the slightest hesitation, stood up and said he would give $100. There was something in his tone which must have annoyed Brother Winch, for he shot up like a dart, and called out, “Put me down for fifty more;” and that brought Gorringe to his feet with an added $50, and then the two went on raising each other till the assemblage was agape with admiring stupefaction.
This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby kept the list; but there had been a tremendous lot of money raised. Of that there could be no doubt.
The Presiding Elder now told Theron that the Quarterly Conference had been adjourned yesterday till today. He and Brother Davis were even now on their way to attend the session in the church next door. The Elder added, with an obvious kindly significance, that though Theron was too ill to attend it, he guessed his absence would do him no harm. Then the two men left the room, and Theron went to sleep again.
Another almost blank period ensued, this time lasting for forty-eight hours. The young minister was enfolded in the coils of a fever of some sort, which Brother Soulsby, who had dabbled considerably in medicine, admitted that he was puzzled about. Sometimes he thought that it was typhoid, and then again there were symptoms which looked suspiciously like brain fever. The Methodists of Octavius counted no physician among their numbers, and when, on the second day, Alice grew scared, and decided, with Brother Soulsby's assent, to call in professional advice, the only doctor's name she could recall was that of Ledsmar. She was conscious of an instinctive dislike for the vague image of him her fancy had conjured up, but the reflection that he was Theron's friend, and so probably would be more moderate in his charges, decided her.
Brother Soulsby showed a most comforting tact and swiftness of apprehension when Alice, in mentioning Dr. Ledsmar's name, disclosed by her manner a fear that his being sent for would create talk among the church people. He volunteered at once to act as messenger himself, and, with no better guide than her dim hints at direction, found the doctor and brought him back to the parsonage.
Dr. Ledsmar expressly disclaimed to Soulsby all pretence of professional skill, and made him understand that he went along solely because he liked Mr. Ware, and was interested in him, and in any case would probably be of as much use as the wisest of strange physicians—a view which the little revivalist received with comprehending nods of tacit acquiescence. Ledsmar came, and was taken up to the sick-room. He sat on the bedside and talked with Theron awhile, and then went downstairs again. To Alice's anxious inquiries, he replied that it seemed to him merely a case of over-work and over-worry, about which there was not the slightest occasion for alarm.
“But he says the strangest things,” the wife put in. “He has been quite delirious at times.”
“That means only that his brain is taking a rest as well as his body,” remarked Ledsmar. “That is Nature's way of securing an equilibrium of repose—of recuperation. He will come out of it with his mind all the fresher and clearer.”
“I don't believe he knows shucks!” was Alice's comment when she closed the street door upon Dr. Ledsmar. “Anybody could have come in and looked at a sick man and said, 'Leave him alone.' You expect something more from a doctor. It's his business to say what to do. And I suppose he'll charge two dollars for just telling me that my husband was resting!”
“No,” said Brother Soulsby, “he said he never practised, and that he would come only as a friend.”
“Well, it isn't my idea of a friend—not to prescribe a single thing,” protested Alice.
Yet it seemed that no prescription was needed, after all. The next morning Theron woke to find himself feeling quite restored in spirits and nerves. He sat up in bed, and after an instant of weakly giddiness, recognized that he was all right again. Greatly pleased, he got up, and proceeded to dress himself. There were little recurring hints of faintness and vertigo, while he was shaving, but he had the sense to refer these to the fact that he was very, very hungry. He went downstairs, and smiled with the pleased pride of a child at the surprise which his appearance at the door created. Alice and the Soulsbys were at breakfast. He joined them, and ate voraciously, declaring that it was worth a month's illness to have things taste so good once more.
“You still look white as a sheet,” said Alice, warningly. “If I were you, I'd be careful in my diet for a spell yet.”
For answer, Theron let Sister Soulsby help him again to ham and eggs. He talked exclusively to Sister Soulsby, or rather invited her by his manner to talk to him, and listened and watched her with indolent content. There was a sort of happy and purified languor in his physical and mental being, which needed and appreciated just this—to sit next a bright and attractive woman at a good breakfast, and be ministered to by her sprightly conversation, by the flash of her informing and inspiring eyes, and the nameless sense of support and repose which her near proximity exhaled. He felt himself figuratively leaning against Sister Soulsby's buoyant personality, and resting.
Brother Soulsby, like the intelligent creature he was, ate his breakfast in peace; but Alice would interpose remarks from time to time. Theron was conscious of a certain annoyance at this, and knew that he was showing it by an exaggerated display of interest in everything Sister Soulsby said, and persisted in it. There trembled in the background of his thoughts ever and again the recollection of a grievance against his wife—an offence which she had committed—but he put it aside as something to be grappled and dealt with when he felt again like taking up the serious and disagreeable things of life. For the moment, he desired only to be amused by Sister Soulsby. Her casual mention of the fact that she and her husband were taking their departure that very day, appealed to him as an added reason for devoting his entire attention to her.
“You mustn't forget that famous talking-to you threatened me with—that 'regular hoeing-over,' you know,” he reminded her, when he found himself alone with her after breakfast. He smiled as he spoke, in frank enjoyment of the prospect.
Sister Soulsby nodded, and aided with a roll of her eyes the effect of mock-menace in her uplifted forefinger. “Oh, never fear,” she cried. “You'll catch it hot and strong. But that'll keep till afternoon. Tell me, do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the trustees' meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't asked what happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday.”
Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. “If you knew how little I cared!” he said. “I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning that—and everything else connected with—the next door. You talk so much more interestingly about other things.”
“Here's gratitude for you!” exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay simulation of despair. “Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or three of the class-leaders—all on your account. The result was you went through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all over. You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you hear? On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't matter), and so you're in clover. And very friendly things were said about you, too.”
“It was very kind of you,” said Theron. “I am really extremely grateful to you.” He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be a lack of fervor in his tones.
“Well, then,” Sister Soulsby replied, “you pull yourself together, and take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.”
“Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?” asked Theron, with a faint play of irony about his lips.
“Yes, that's your ticket this election,” she answered briskly, “and mind you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.' That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a good old-fashioned jaw.”
The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three. It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of Gorringe—the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.
He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface smile of welcome, “It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember.”
The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course, noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.
All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the “debt-raising” evening, and read out its essentials as they had been embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash and promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter. There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
“I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read out,” put in Brother Pierce.
When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy or eighty other members of the congregation.
Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names. “They're of no concern whatever,” he said, despite the fact that his own might have been reached in time. “Those first names are what I was getting at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?”
“One has—the other not,” replied Gorringe.
“PRE-cisely,” remarked the senior trustee. “And I'm goin' to move that it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin' out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin' is myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake—he hadn't made a single penny.”
“Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction,” put in Erastus Winch, defiantly.
“Just so,” Brother Pierce went on. “He lost money. You have his own word for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent to touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his heart, while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not asked for it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my motion.”
“That is, YOU don't put it,” suggested Winch, correctingly. “You move it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and preside—he'll put it.”
There was a moment's silence. “You've heard the motion,” said Theron, tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him to glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and the look was freighted with satirical contempt.
The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. “All those in favor will say aye.”
Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident “Aye.”
“No, you don't!” interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering emphasis. “I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly well.”
“Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote,” decided Theron, with great calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface composure there were sharp flutterings.
“Very well, then,” said Gorringe. “I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this interesting arrangement shall go through or not.”
“Me?” said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had come all at once to him. “Me? Oh, I vote Aye.”
“Well, I did what you told me to do,” Theron Ware remarked to Sister Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room after the midday meal.
It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
“I did what you told me to do,” he repeated, looking up from his low easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; “and I dare say you won't be surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.”
“And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?” the woman said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with roguish, comprehending eyes. “Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend our lives doing that sort of thing.”
“I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,” said the young minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of the suggestion. “It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained and shocked at myself.”
Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous fingers on the desk-top. “I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down again,” she said gently. “You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see them differently when you're quite yourself again.”
“No, no,” pleaded Theron. “Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right. My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with you.”
“But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides—besides your conscience?” she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
Theron answered the glance rather than her words. “I know that you are my friend,” he said simply.
Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new intentness. “Well, then,” she began, “let's thrash this thing out right now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty work done by other people. That's it, isn't it?”
“The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his companion's face.
“Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,” she added, with a pleasant play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
“No,” he said, picking his words, “my point would rather be that—that there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this—this 'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling.”
“Now we're getting at it,” said Sister Soulsby, briskly. “My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken of their habit. It's my business—mine and Soulsby's—to do that sort of thing. We came here and we did it—did it up brown, too. We not only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight—is that worth while, or not?”
“I've told you that I am very grateful,” answered the minister, “and I say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But—but it was the means I had in mind.”
“Quite so,” rejoined the sister, patiently. “If you saw the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope. That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery—by organization. The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green—if you'll pardon me—that you want to sit down and cry because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such a goose!”
“I see what you mean,” Theron said, with an answering smile. He added, more gravely, “All the same, the Winch business seems to me—”
“Now the Winch business is my own affair,” Sister Soulsby broke in abruptly. “I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he presented them—that's all.”
“But—” Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him, and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind. Suddenly he raised his head. “Then you arranged with Winch to make those bogus offers—just to lead others on?” he demanded.
Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
“Let us talk of something else,” she said. “All that is past and gone. It has nothing to do with you, anyway. I've got some advice to give you about keeping up this grip you've got on your people.”
The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the room. After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
“I doubt if it's worth while going into that,” he said, in the solemn tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She waited to hear more, apparently. “I think I shall go away—give up the ministry,” he added.
Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he, unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a gaze of affectionate melancholy—one might say pity. She shook her head slowly.
“No—don't let any one else hear you say that,” she replied. “My poor young friend, it's no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best of what's going. I've known others who felt as you do—of course there are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that way—but there's no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke themselves. Those who stayed in, and made the best of it—well, one of them will be a bishop in another ten years.”
Theron had started walking again. “But the moral degradation of it!” he snapped out at her over his shoulder. “I'd rather earn the meanest living, at an honest trade, and be free from it.”
“That may all be,” responded Sister Soulsby. “But it isn't a question of what you'd rather do. It's what you can do. How could you earn a living? What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a living out of? Not one, my man, not one.”
Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came upon him with the force and effect of a blow.
“I don't discover, myself,” he began stumblingly, “that I'm so conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings, and very good ones, too.”
“Of course you're not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you're greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you. But you're what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try on being somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.”
The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving. “I know a Catholic priest,” he said irrelevantly, “who doesn't believe an atom in—in things.”
“Very likely,” said Sister Soulsby. “Most of us do. But you don't hear him talking about going and earning his living, I'll bet! Or if he does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They've got horse-sense, those priests. They're artists, too. They know how to allow for the machinery behind the scenes.”
“But it's all so different,” urged the young minister; “the same things are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister Lovejoy—did you see her?—coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish—I positively believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn't stand it. I can't stand it now. I won't go back to it! Nothing shall make me!”
“Oh-h, yes, you will,” she rejoined soothingly. “There's nothing else to do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in, and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be. You were speaking of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was saying—it's a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything else,—it's got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that people will listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say. Their church is chuck-full of authority—all the way from the Pope down to the priest—and accordingly they do as they're told. But the Protestants—your Methodists most of all—they say 'No, we won't have any authority, we won't obey any boss.' Very well, what happens? We who are responsible for running the thing, and raising the money and so on—we have to put on a spurt every once in a while, and work up a general state of excitement; and while it's going, don't you see that THAT is the authority, the motive power, whatever you like to call it, by which things are done? Other denominations don't need it. We do, and that's why we've got it.”
“But the mean dishonesty of it all!” Theron broke forth. He moved about again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. “The low-born tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at these people here again without disgust.”
“Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,” Sister Soulsby put in placidly. “These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people. They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks the whole country through.”
“I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference where—where this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say, tolerated,” insisted Theron.
“Perhaps you're right,” the other assented; “but that only shows that your people here are different from the others—not that they're worse. You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse, and full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other more niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while and rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course it's had a different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of scythe-steel, and the grinding's been too rough and violent for you. But you see what I mean. These people here really take their primitive Methodism seriously. To them the profession of entire sanctification is truly a genuine thing. Well, don't you see, when people just know that they're saved, it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they do. They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted in the interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. That's pure human nature. It's always been like that.”
Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. “That thought,” he said, in a vague, slow way, “seems to be springing up in my path, whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me—this idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that—”
“Never mind the dead men,” interposed Sister Soulsby. “Just you come and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm trying to talk to you.”
Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his with impressive steadiness.
“And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,” she began. “You mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling—I saw the book you were reading the first time I entered this room—and that made me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having it—for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me sail in and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for God's sake, keep them straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye open for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas as much as you like, read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about too much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own throats for pure moonshine, not to have a right to say that.”
Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.
“Well,” he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, “if we agree that it IS moonshine.”
“See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences: “I'll tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't be done a minute before.”
The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind, and smiled upon it.
“And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,” Sister Soulsby continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.
“I began life,” she said, “as a girl by running away from a stupid home with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported myself for a good many years—generally, at first, on the stage. I've been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record.”
Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.
“And now take Soulsby,” she went on. “Of course I take it for granted there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a good deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases—and he had HIS little turn with a grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular bad old rooster.”
Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment—save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
“Well, then,” she resumed, “so much for us apart. Now about us together. We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We had a little money—enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started in. We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at the local Methodist church, and we went every evening—at first just to kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement and general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too—that is, what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we figured on it all through the winter.—Well, to make a long story short, we finally went into the thing ourselves.”
“Tell me one thing,” interposed Theron. “I'm anxious to understand it all as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely converted?—that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of—you know what I mean!”
“Oh, bless you, yes,” responded Sister Soulsby. “Not only once—dozens of times—I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we weren't. But that's a matter of temperament—of emotions.”
“Precisely. That was what I was getting at,” explained Theron.
“Well, then, hear what I was getting at,” she went on. “You were talking very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows. Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more charitable man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit. The man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse; and when it died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it. Now that I call real piety, if you like.”
“So do I,” put in Theron, cordially.
“And this question of fraud,” pursued his companion,—“look at it in this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so couldn't break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin—he is full of sixths, you know—and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. He couldn't sing by himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a hair. Now that's machinery, management, organization. We take these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns. It's a fraud, yes; but it's a good fraud. So they are all good frauds. I say frankly that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help Soulsby and me to be good frauds.”
“And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,” commented the young minister.
She had risen, and he got to his feet as well. He instinctively sought for her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the head. “I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud,” she said. “You haven't got it in you. Your intentions are all right, but your execution is hopelessly clumsy. I came up to your bedroom there twice while you were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the while a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.”
“I must have thought it was my wife,” said Theron.