Four Girls at Chautauqua Part 12

Ruth said this calmly enough. She was not particularly disturbed; she did not belong to them, you know; but for all that she was remotely connected with those who did, and was just enough jarred to make her give this quiet home thrust. Oddly enough it struck Marion as it never had before, although the same idea had been suggested to her by other nettled mortals. It was true that she had realized how the practicing ought to be done, and a vague wish that she _did_ believe in it all, and could work by their professed standard with _all her soul_, flitted over her.

Meantime Flossy was being educated. The morning work had touched her from a different standpoint. She had not heard Dr. Walden; instead she had wandered into a bit of holy ground. She began by losing her way. It is one of the easiest things to do at Chautauqua. The avenues cross and recross in an altogether bewildering manner to one not accustomed to newly laid-out cities; and just when one imagines himself at the goal for which he started, lo! there is woods, and nothing else anywhere.

Another attempt patiently followed for an hour has the exasperating effect of bringing him to the very point from which he started. Such an experience had Flossy, when by reason of her loitering propensities she became detached from her party, and tried to find her own way to the stand. A whole hour of wandering, then a turn into perfect chaos. She had no more idea where she was than if she had been in the by-ways of London. Clearly she must inquire the way. She looked about her. It was queer to be lost in the woods, and yet be surrounded by tents and people. She stooped and peeped timidly into a tent, the corner of which was raised to admit air, and from which the sound of voices issued.

"Come in," said a pleasant voice, and the bright-faced hostess arose from the foot of her bed and came forward with greeting, exactly as though they had been waiting for Flossy all the morning. "Would you like to rest? Come right in, we have plenty of room and the most lovely accommodations," and a silvery laugh accompanied the words, while the little lady whisked a tin basin from a low stool, and dusting it rapidly with her handkerchief proffered her guest a seat, with as graceful an air as though the stool had been an easy-chair upholstered in velvet.

The only other sitting-place, the low bed, was full, there being three ladies tucked about on it in various stages of restful work, for they had books and papers strewn about, and each held a pencil poised as if ready for action at a moment.

"I'm afraid I intrude," Flossy said, sweetly; "but the truth is, I have lost my friends and my way, and I really am an object of pity, for I have been wandering up hill and down, till my strength is less than it was."

"Poor child!" came sympathetically from the bed, spoken by the eldest of the ladies, while another rapidly improvised a fan out of the _Sunday-School Times_, and pa.s.sed it to her.

Meantime Flossy looked about her in secret delight. Something about the air of the tent and the surroundings, and an indefinite something about every one of the ladies, told her as plainly as words could have done that she was among the workers; that she had unwittingly and gracefully slipped behind the scenes, and had been cordially admitted to one of the work-shops of Chautauqua; and there were _so_ many things she wanted to know!

CHAPTER XII.

FLOSSY AT SCHOOL.

She hadn't the least idea who they were, but, like an earnest little diplomatist, she set to work to find out.

"I started for the auditorium," she said. "I wanted to hear Dr. Walden, but he has had time to make a long speech and get through since I first started. I think it must be nearly eleven."

"No," they said laughing, "it is only half past ten." Her wanderings had not been so long as they seemed; but it was hardly worth while to try to hear anything from him now, she would not be at all likely to get a seat; and, besides, his time was nearly over. She would better wait and go down with them in time for Mrs. Miller.

"We were obliged to miss Dr. Walden," the elder lady explained. "We disliked to very much; probably it was as instructive as anything we shall get; but we had work that had to be done, so we ran away."

"Do you have to bring work to Chautauqua with you?" Flossy asked, with insinuating sweetness. "How very busy you must be! I would have tried to run away from my work for two weeks if I had been you."

The bright little hostess laughed.

"Chautauqua _makes_ work," she said, "and somebody has to get ready for it. This lady beside me expects an overwhelming Sabbath cla.s.s here, and much time has to be given to the lesson. We lesser mortals are ostensibly going to help her, but in reality we are going to look and see how she does it."

"Have you found out?" Flossy asked in a little tremor of delight. This was what she wanted, to know how to do it all.

The lady who had been pointed out as teacher answered her quickly, so far as her words could be said to be an answer:

"Are you a Sabbath-school teacher?"

"No," Flossy said, flushing and feeling like a naughty child whose curiosity had led her into mischief. "No, I am not _anything_, but I want to be; I don't know how to work at all in any way, but I want to learn."

"Are you looking for work to do for the Master?" the same lady asked, with a sweet cheery voice and smile, not at all as if this were a subject which she must touch cautiously.

"Yes," Flossy said, her cheeks all in a glow. "She did not know how to work, she had but just found out that she wanted to; indeed she had but yesterday known anything of Him."

Then this unusual company of ladies came with one consent and eager eyes and voices and took her hand, and said how glad they were to welcome her to the ranks. They knew she would love the work, and the rewards were so sure and so precious. All this was new and strange and delightful to Flossy. Then they began each eagerly to tell about their work; they were all infant or primary cla.s.s teachers, and all enthusiasts. Who that has to do with the teaching of little children and attains to any measure of success but is largely gifted with this same element? They had been talking over and preparing their lesson together, and they talked it over again before the bewildered Flossy, who had no idea that there was such a wonderful story in all the Bible as they were developing out of a few bare details.

"We had just reached the vital point of the entire lesson," explained the leader, "the place where every true teacher needs most help; where, having arranged all her facts and got them in martial order in her brain, she wants to know the best way of making those facts of practical _present_ service to the little children who will be before her, and at this point I think every teacher needs to go to the fountain head for help. We were just going to pray; you would like, perhaps, to join us for just a few moments."

"If she wouldn't intrude," Flossy said, timidly, in a tremor of satisfaction; and then for the first time in her life she bowed with a company of her own s.e.x, and heard the simple earnest voice of prayer.

The words were startlingly direct and simple, and Flossy, who had been full of mysterious awe on this question, and who much doubted whether her timid whispers alone in her tent could have been called prayer, was rea.s.sured and comforted.

If _this_ were prayer, it was simply talking in a sweet, natural voice, and in the most simple and natural language, with a dear and wise friend. It was the most quiet and yet the most confident way of asking for just what one wanted, and nothing more. It was what Flossy needed.

She took long strides in her religious education there on her knees; and as they went out from that tent and down the hill to the meeting, there was born in her heart an eager determination to enter the lists as a Sabbath-school teacher the very first opportunity, and to pray her lessor into her heart, having done what she could to get it into her head. If her anxious and well-nigh discouraged pastor could have been gifted with supernatural and prophetic vision, and could have seen that resolve, and, looking ahead, the fruit that was to be borne from it, how would his anxious soul have thanked G.o.d and taken courage!

In this mood came Flossy to listen to the story of "The Parish of Fair Haven," as it flowed down to her in Mrs. Miller's smooth-toned musical voice. One who comes from her knees to listen is sure to find the seed if it has been put in. Flossy found hers.

Often in the course of her young life she had been at church and sat in the att.i.tude of listener while a missionary sermon was preached. She had heard, perhaps, ten sentences from those sermons, not ten consecutive sentences, but words scattered here and there through the whole; from these she had gathered that there was to be a collection taken for the cause of Missions. Just where the money was to go, and just what was to be done with it when it arrived, what had been accomplished by missionary effort, what the Christian world was hoping for in that direction--all these things Flossy Shipley knew no more about than her kitten did.

Perhaps it was not strange then, that although abundantly supplied with pin-money, she had never in her life given anything to the work of Missions. Not that she would not willingly have deposited some of her money in the box for whatever use the authorities chose to make of it had she happened to have any; but young ladies as a rule have been educated to imagine that there is one day in the week in which their portmonnaies can be off duty. There being no shopping to be done, no worsteds to match, no confectionary to tempt what earthly use for money?

So it was locked up at home. This, at least, is the way in which Flossy Shipley had argued, without knowing that she argued at all.

Now she was looking at things with new eyes; the same things that she had heard of hundreds of times, but how different they were! What a remarkable scheme it was, this carrying the story of Jesus to those miserable ignorant ones, getting them ready for the heaven that had been made ready for them! The people of "Fair Haven" did not appear to her like lunatics, as they did to Ruth Erskine. She was not, you will remember, of the cla.s.s who had argued this question in their ignorance, and quieted their consciences with the foolish a.s.sertion that the church collections went to pay secretaries and treasurers and erect splendid public buildings. She belonged, rather, to that less hopeless cla.s.s who had never thought at all. Now, as she listened, her eyes brightened with feeling and her cheeks glowed. The whole sublime _romance_ of Missions was being mapped out to her on the face of that quaint allegory, and her heart responded warmly.

Curiously enough, her first throbs of conscience were not for herself but for her father. The portly gentleman who occasionally sat at the head of the Shipley pew, and who certainly never parted company with his pocket-book on Sabbath or on any other day, did _he_ give liberally to Foreign Missions?

She could not determine as to the probabilities of the case. He was counted a liberal man--people liked to come to him to start subscriptions; but Flossy felt instinctively that a subscription paper with her father's name leading it was different, someway, from a quiet, baize-lined box, and no noise nor words. She doubted whether the cause had been materially helped by him.

She lost some sentences of the story while she planned ways for interesting her father and securing liberal donations from him; and then she was suddenly startled back to personality by hearing some astounding statements from the reader.

"It would be _so_ easy to drop into a household box the price of an apple, or a paper, or a gla.s.s of peanuts, and yet who does it? Why, there are young ladies who will actually not give two cents a week from the money that they waste!"

The rich blood mounted in waves to Flossy's forehead. Apples and papers were not in her line, but _peanuts_! wasn't there a certain stand which she pa.s.sed almost daily on her way down town, and did she ever pa.s.s it without indulging in a gla.s.s of peanuts? Neither was that the end. Why, once started on that list, and her wastes were almost numberless. How fond she was of cream dates, and how expensive they were; and oranges, the tempting yellow globes were always shining at her from certain windows as she pa.s.sed.

Oh, they were just endless, her temptations and her falls in that direction--only who had ever supposed that there was any harm in this lavish treatment of herself and of any friends whom she happened to meet? Yet it was true that she had never given any money at all to the work of sending the Bible to those who are without it.

"They will not give two cents a week," said Mrs. Miller. It was true: she had not given "two cents a week," or even two cents a year--she had simply ignored the existence of such a need for money. True, she had not been a Christian; but she was surprised to see how little this refuge served her.

"I have been a human being," she told herself, with a flush on her face, "and I ought to have had sufficient interest in humanity to have wanted those poor creatures civilized."

But there was another thrust preparing for Flossy. The reader presently touched upon one item of expenditure common to ladies, namely, kid gloves; and made the bewildering statement that economy in this matter, to the degree that needless purchases should be avoided, would treble the fund in the missionary treasury! It could not be that from among that sea of faces the speaker had singled out Flossy Shipley, and yet that is the way it seemed to her. If there was any one expense which stood out glaringly above another in her list of luxuries it was kid gloves. They must be absolutely immaculate as to quality, shade and fit, and she remorselessly consigned them to the waste-bag at the first hint of rip or change of color. How strange that Mrs. Miller should have pitched upon just that item, and what an amazing declaration to make concerning it!

It was very strange, had any one been looking on to observe it, the manner in which this young girl was being educated. It is doubtful if a whole year of church work in the regular home routine, listening to the stated, statistical sermon of her pastor, that sermon which presupposes so much more knowledge than people possess, would have _begun_ to do for Flossy what the strange, fanciful, pungent story of "Fair Haven" did.

Before that hour was closed she had settled within her resolute little heart a plan that should henceforth put her in close communion and sympathy with mission work--not exactly the plans of operation, except that kid gloves and peanuts took stern places in the background, but this was simply the foundation for a resolute system of education, carried all through her future life.

What a pity it seems sometimes that people cannot read the hearts and watch the springs of action of those around them. If Mrs. Miller, as she closed her paper and moved away from the platform, could have seen the earnest purpose glowing and throbbing in Flossy's heart, and have known that it was born of words of hers, what a glad and thankful heart would she have carried back to her tent!

Also, if the much troubled pastor at home could have taken peeps into the future and seen what Flossy Shipley's resolves would do for Missions, how glad he would have been!

Perhaps it would be better to lay all the troubles and the tangles down in the Hand that overrules it all, and say, in peace and restfulness, "He knoweth the end from the beginning."