A Circuit Rider's Wife Part 7

"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 bra.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.ses 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 nave 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 compet.i.tion 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-cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mvented 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 G.o.d 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.