"Madam, I do not know what you mean by your astral shape, but I do not have to pant like a lizard to keep in touch with my soul!"

But she bore with him, showing far more calmness than he as she went on to describe the wonderful power of spirit she had developed. She had even gone so far, she said, as a matter of experiment, to "put her thought" upon the unborn child of a friend, and when the child came it was not like its own mother or father, but her exact image. Now, she declared, she was sure it was her own "thought" child. And what was more convincing still, she had at last attained to a "sky-blue aura"--she added this with an indescribable air of triumph. William tightened his spectacles on his nose, drew his face close and stared at her with the sort of scandalized sunsmile Moses must have worn the first time he caught sight of the golden calf.

"Madam," he exclaimed after a dreadful inquisitive silence, "I can see no signs of an aura, either blue or otherwise; but if you actually did try to steal another woman's child with your thoughts you have been guilty of an unimaginable meanness, and you should go down on your knees to Almighty G.o.d for forgiveness!"

But William was never at his best when he was brought into contrast morally or intellectually with the temporary illusions of modern times.

They cast him "out of drawing" and gave him a look of the grotesque, as a great and solemn figure on a vaudeville stage suggests the comical.

He belonged to a time when the scriptures of men's hearts had not suffered the moderation and sacrilege of the sense of humor. He had a mind illumined with the old Eden figures of speech, and loved to refer to the "thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler."

There were occasions, indeed, when I could not preserve a proper inner reverence for his favorite hymns, as, for example, when he would be standing during a revival season behind an altar heavily laden with "dying souls" who had come up for prayers. In order to interpret for them a proper frame of mind he would sometimes choose one of Watts'

famous hymns. He would stand with his feet wide apart, his fingers interlaced, palms downward, eyes lifted in anguished supplication and sing in his great organ ba.s.s:

"Inspire a feeble worm to rush into Thy Kingdom, Lord, And take it as by storm!"

Still, if you do not dwell upon the vision of the suddenly valorous worm, the words express a higher form of courage than that denoted in Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "The Last Word;" and I have seen many a "worm" rise shouting from the altar rail under their inspired meaning.

The sense of humor has, in my opinion, very little to do with poetry or salvation. It belongs entirely to the critical human faculties, and I have found it one of the greatest limitations in my own spiritual development. And as time went on I was more and more convinced that this was an evidence of a lower imaginative faculty in me rather than in him. He had less humor, but he had infinitely more of the grace that belongs to immortality. He had a spirit that withstood adversity, hardship, failure, with a sort of ancient dignity and that could face tragedy with Promethean fort.i.tude. And I love best to think of him in relation to the bare and awful sorrows that show so nakedly in the lives of poor, simple folk. I can see him now in the dismal twilight of one winter evening, as he started on that strange mission to Mrs.

Martin, looking like an old, weatherbeaten angel breasting a storm.

The wide brim of his black hat flared up from his face in the wind, his long, gray beard was blown over the shoulders of his greatcoat. He had started without his m.u.f.fler. I ran out to fetch it and, winding it about his neck, I saw the blue bloom of Heaven in his eyes, that always turned young when he was on his way to roll the stones away from the door of some sinner's heart.

"William," I cried, "it's going to be an awful night; don't go--she is not a member of your church."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It's Going To Be an Awful Night; Don't Go--She Is Not a Member of Your Church."]

"Nor of any other; but she is all the more in need of help," he replied, putting his foot in the stirrup to mount his horse.

Mrs. Martin was a vague little woman, superst.i.tious about dreams, a widow, who lived with her two small children in a thickly-populated neighborhood about a stone quarry. The day before, the community had been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors.

Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the messenger had come, and William made haste to go to her.

He found her sitting the very figure of desolation in the midst of her bed, with her face thinned and whitened to the little white hull of a prayer. The moment she was alone with him she poured forth such a tale of degradation as rarely pa.s.ses the lips of a woman. Since a year after her husband's death she had been the mistress of the manager of the quarry. She had lived in the most atrocious debauchery for years; no one had suspected, and she had not suffered a qualm. But two nights since she had gone to the bed where her two little girls lay asleep, and suddenly it had come upon her that she was to be discovered, now very soon, not by strangers, but by her own children growing old enough to observe and understand. Moreover, that her degradation would become theirs. And then it came--the horror that had convinced her the only way out was to kill them and afterward herself. Now, what was to be done? She was not insane. She was just a sinner who felt obliged to be d.a.m.ned!

G.o.d had at least a dozen ways of inspiring William, and not all of them orthodox. Instead of harrowing this woman with a prayer he took on a competent executive air.

"You are to do nothing," he told her, "and be sure you do not confess your sin to anyone else. Leave everything to me. We will see about the forgiveness later; now you are to rest and not think till I get the way clear for your feet." He went out, told the attendants that Mrs.

Martin was not insane, but had suffered a shock and would now be all right. They thought he had achieved a miracle when they had returned to the room and found her weeping like any other sane woman.

Before daylight he had escorted the manager of the quarry to the nearest railway station with instructions never to return, so emphatically given that he never did. He prayed earnestly for the unfortunate woman himself, but he forbade her to pray for herself until long afterward, when she had resumed existence upon the simple basis of being the innocent mother of her innocent children.

"If she begins to agonize in prayer," he explained to me, "she will go mad again. So soon as she recovers from the insanity of evil she may pray, but not now."

CHAPTER XV

SKELETONS IN WILLIAM'S DOCTRINAL CLOSET

I have often wondered what a writer of fiction would have made out of such a story. As a matter of fact, the woman is living to-day, highly respected, serenely proud of her two grown daughters; and I believe William simply covered up her sin so deep with his wisdom that she has forgotten it. His Methodist doctrinal closet has more than one skeleton like this in it.

"Repentance is not remorse," he used to argue upon rare occasions when I dragged them out. "Mrs. Martin could not make the proper distinction. G.o.d understood."

I have no doubt his conference would have fired him for fathering very curious heresies, if all his doings with sinners had been published.

There was the apostate, for example, whom he tried to save at the expense of one of the doctrines of his church. Just as Baptists believe in "election" and Presbyterians in predestination, the Methodists believe in apostasy--that is, that G.o.d will forsake a man and never answer his prayers if the man waits too long before he begins to pray; and that if after he has been converted he leaves the way of righteousness there is always danger that G.o.d will abandon him in his sins.

A most desperate situation is that of the Methodist apostate, because there is so much elasticity about grace in our church, and it is so easy to fall from it that a modest man is, by the very delicacy and humility of his spirit, apt to fall under the delusion that G.o.d has had enough patience with him, that he has "sinned away his day of grace."

I recall the day William came home and burned seven of his best sermons on such texts as this: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." It was after he had read the burial service over the body of Philip Hale, who killed himself because he had "lost G.o.d and could not find Him." Hale had been a Methodist, brought up in that faith literally by parents who had had him baptized when he was an infant and who had kept the promise made then to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

They did, and he was converted at an early age before the tide of adolescence set in. It seems that he "sinned away his day of grace"

during this dangerous period.

When William came on the circuit where he lived he was a sad, middle-aged man who spent much of his spare time looking for G.o.d and praying for the witness of His Spirit. His was the most tragic figure I ever saw in the house of G.o.d. He was a large, dark man with a blasted look on his somber face. For years it was said that he was the first to accept the invitation to sinners to the altar for prayers and the last to leave it, always with that lost look--never blessed, never forgiven. William stood before him powerless. He could cast no light in that darkness; it was literally the outer darkness where light cannot be created. Toward the end of a revival, during which he had wandered back and forth from the altar night after night like a dazed sleepwalker, he went out and shot himself.

The fate of this man was one of the tragedies in William's life. He must have had much the same feeling toward him that a surgeon feels toward a patient who dies on the operating table. If he had survived he would have lived. I never heard him preach after that about the "dead line" in the spiritual life.

One thing impressed me even more than it did William: he never was able to reach the chief sinners in his congregation. Some of them sat in such high places in the church--perhaps behind him in the pulpit.

Compared with these the reprobates on the back benches were easily stirred and awakened to a sense of their lost condition. Sometimes one of these members would confess to feeling "cold" spiritually, but I do not now recall a single one who really confessed his sins or renounced them.

Suppose a steward owns a big flour mill and can afford to pay the preacher liberally, bear more than his share of the "a.s.sessments," and own an automobile besides, because he cheats every customer out of a few ounces of real flour by subst.i.tuting "fancy flour." What shall he do--sacrifice the auto and the church "causes"? He never does, because at bottom he has a sneaking conviction that the auto in particular is worth more than his kind of a soul, and he is shockingly correct in his estimate of values. If there really are any apostates in this world they belong to this spiritually-refrigerated cla.s.s to be found in every religious denomination.

But if he did not close in often with the chief sinners, William occasionally came upon a rare saint. I mean "rare" in the scientific, spiritual sense--that is, different, moving in time, but not of it--the unconscious prophet of a new order in the souls of mankind. And it was a grand sight to see him measure the sword of his spirit with one of these.

The last encounter he had of this kind, I remember, was on the Bowtown Circuit not long before he was superannuated, and it was with a woman.

She was called Sal Prout. The omission of the last syllable of her given name implied social ostracism and personal contempt. And she deserved both, having been a notorious woman in her younger days. We heard of her first from Brother Rheubottom. He was the shriveled, grizzled local preacher who furnished a kind of gadfly gospel to the church at Bowtown when he was invited to fill the pulpit, which was no oftener than could be helped. He called to tell William about the "Prout woman" before we had had time to unpack our clothes and commentaries.

"She's been a terrible creature," he explained, wagging his hard old hickorynut head and clawing his beard with a kind of spiritual rapacity for devouring the worst of Sal's character.

"She's done more harm than a dozen wildcat stills. Then all at once, here about five years ago she turned good, 'lowed she'd heerd from G.o.d.

It was blasphemous. Seems she hadn't went to church since she was a gal. I don't say she ain't behavin' herself and all that, but 'tain't orthodox for a person like that to jest set down before her do' in the gra.s.s and git religion without ever goin' nigh a church and makin'

public confession of her sins--not that everybody don't know what she has been!

"If them kind of heresies spread, where will the church be? What's the use of havin' churches? We want you to go down there and 'tend to her, Brother Thompson. Some folks in this community have been worried ever since she done it.

"We ain't satisfied with her experience after the way she's carried on--talks as if she'd found G.o.d as easy as if she'd been an innocent child, when some of us that have lived honorable and decent all our lives had to mourn and repent and take on like a house afire before we could claim the blessin'."

"I'll look into Sister Prout's condition as soon as possible, Brother Rheubottom," said William, folding one long leg over the other and fidgeting in his chair, because he wanted to be back at his bookshelves, settling the relations of his commentaries for the coming year.

"She ain't even a sister," retorted our visitor, who had risen and was on his way to the door. "She's never j'ined the church. When somebody named it to her as a duty if she'd repented of her sins she jest laughed and said she wouldn't. Not bein' respectable enough to belong in with church folks she 'lowed she'd stay outside with the wicked where she belonged and not embarra.s.s n.o.body by settin' by 'em in church. 'Lowed she reckoned she could find enough to do out there instead of 'h'isting herself up with respectable women in the foreign missionary society.' That's the way she talks, Brother Thompson, and there can't n.o.body stop her!"

Bowtown was an ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the wicked. She could do anything from pulling fodder to nursing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get her was to need her.

This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work.

A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year; and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night, wondering what G.o.d was going to do about it, for I knew we could not expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will find out that there is a real sure-enough good G.o.d who numbers the remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last, when we never could have made it if it had not been for just G.o.d.

And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep.

She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories--yet there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins.

"I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me.