O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 22

"I had thought so." Her loquacity this evening was amazing. Simpson thought he saw an opening to her confidence and plunged in. "And he is a priest. It is bad, that. Here are sheep without a shepherd."

"_Quoi_?"

"Here are many people--all good Christians." Simpson, eager and hopeful, leaned forward in his chair. His gaunt face with the down-drawn mouth and the hungry eyes--grown more hungry in the last three weeks--glowed, took on fervour; his hand shot out expressive fingers. The woman raised her head slowly, staring at him; more slowly still she seated herself at the table that stood between them. She rested her arms on it, and narrowed her eyelids as he spoke till her eyes glittered through the slits of them.

"All good Christians," Simpson went on; "and there is none to lead them save a black----" He slurred the word just in time. The woman's eyes flashed open and narrowed again. "Save a renegade priest,"

Simpson concluded. "It is wrong, is it not? And I knew it was wrong, though I live far away and came--was led--here to you." His voice, though it had not been loud, left the room echoing. "It was a real call." He whispered that.

"You are a Catholic?" asked Madame Picard.

"Yes. Of the English Catholic Church." He suspected that the qualifying adjective meant nothing to her, but let the ambiguity rest.

"I was not sure," she said slowly, "though you told the boy." Her eyes, velvet-black in the shadow upcast by the lamp, opened slowly.

"There has been much trouble with Father Antoine, and now small numbers go to ma.s.s or confession." Her voice had the effect of shrillness though it remained low; her hands flew out, grasping the table-edge at arms' length with an oddly masculine gesture. "He deserved that! To tell his _canaille_ that I--that we----He dared! But now--now--we shall see!"

Her voice rasped in a subdued sort of a shriek; she sprang up from her chair, and stood for the fraction of a second with her hands raised and her fists clinched. Simpson, puzzled, amazed, and a little scared at last, had barely time to notice the position before it dissolved.

The child, frightened, screamed from the floor.

"_Taisez-vous--taisez-vous, mon enfant. Le temps vient_."

She was silent for a long time after that. Simpson sat wondering what she would do next, aware of an uncanny fascination that emanated from her. It seemed to him as though there were subterranean fires in the ground that he walked on.

"You shall teach us," she said in her usual monotone. "You shall teach us--preach to many people. No house will hold them all." She leaned down and caressed the child. "_Le temps vient, mon pet.i.t. Le temps vient_."

Under Simpson's sudden horror quivered an eerie thrill. He mistook it for joy at the promised fulfilment of his dreams. He stepped to his own doorway and hesitated there with his hand on the latch.

"To many people? Some time, I hope."

"Soon." She looked up from the child; there was a snakiness in the angle of her head and neck. "Soon."

He opened the door, slammed it behind him, and dropped on tense knees beside his bed. In the kitchen the cripple laughed--laughed for a long time. Simpson's tightly pressed palms could not keep the sound from his ears.

IV

Each night the gathering at Vieux Michaud's became larger; it grew too large for the house, and presently overflowed into the yard behind, where Michaud kept his lumber. Generally thirty or forty natives collected between six and seven in the evening, roosting on the piled boards or sitting on the dusty ground in little groups, their cigarettes puncturing the blue darkness that clung close to the earth under the young moon. There were few women among them at first and fewer young men; Simpson, who knew that youth ought to be more hospitable to new ideas than age, thought this a little strange and spoke to Michaud about it.

"But they are my friends, m'sieu'," answered Michaud.

The statement might have been true of the smaller group that Simpson had first encountered at the carpenter's house; it was not true of the additions to it, for he was evidently not on intimate terms with them.

Nor did he supply rum for all of them; many brought their own. That was odd also, if Simpson had only known it; the many _cantinas_ offered attractions which the carpenter's house did not. That fact occurred to him at length.

"They have heard of you, m'sieu'--and that you have something new to say to them. We Haytians like new things."

Thus, very quietly, almost as though it had been a natural growth of interest, did Simpson's ministry begin. He stepped one evening to the platform that overhung the carpenter's backyard, and began to talk.

Long study had placed the missionary method at his utter command, and he began with parables and simple tales which they heard eagerly.

Purposely, he eschewed anything striking or startling in this his first sermon. It was an attempt to establish a sympathetic understanding between himself and his audience, and not altogether an unsuccessful one, for his motives were still unmixed. He felt that he had started well; when he was through speaking small groups gathered around him as children might have done, and told him inconsequent, wandering tales of their own--tales which were rather fables, folklore transplanted from another hemisphere and strangely crossed with Christianity. He was happy; if it had not been that most of them wore about their necks the leather pouches that were not scapulars he would have been happier than any man has a right to be. One of these pouches, showing through the ragged shirt of an old man with thin lips and a squint, was ripped at the edge, and the unmistakable sheen of a snake's scale glistened in the seam. Simpson could not keep his eyes from it.

He dared to be more formal after that, and on the next night preached from a text--the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us." That sermon also was effective: toward the end of it two or three women were weeping a little, and the sight of their tears warmed him with the sense of power. In that warmth certain of his prejudices and inhibitions began to melt away; the display of feelings and sensibilities could not be wicked or even undesirable if it prepared the way for the gospel by softening the heart. He began to dabble in emotion himself, and that was a dangerous matter, for he knew nothing whatever about it save that, if he felt strongly, he could arouse strong feeling in others. Day by day he unwittingly became less sure of the moral beauty of restraint, and ardours which he had never dreamed of began to flame free of his soul.

He wondered now and then why Madame Picard, who almost from the first had been a constant attendant at his meetings, watched him so closely, so secretly--both when he sat with her and the cripple at meals and at the carpenter's house, where he was never unconscious of her eyes. He wondered also why she brought her baby with her, and why all who came fondled it so much and so respectfully. He did not wonder at the deference, almost the fear, which all men showed her--that seemed somehow her due. She had shed her taciturnity and was even voluble at times. But behind her volubility lurked always an inexplicable intensity of purpose whose cause Simpson could never fathom and was afraid to seek for. It was there, however--a nervous determination, not altogether alien to his own, which he a.s.sociated with religion and with nothing else in the world. Religiosity, he called it--and he was not far wrong.

Soon after his first sermon he began little by little to introduce ritual into the meetings at Michaud's, so that they became decorous; rum-drinking was postponed till after the concluding prayer, and that in itself was a triumph. He began to feel the need of hymns, and, since he could find in French none that had a.s.sociations for himself, he set about translating some of the more familiar ones, mostly those of a militant nature. Some of them, especially "The Son of G.o.d goes forth to war," leaped into immediate popularity and were sung two or three times in a single service. He liked that repet.i.tion; he thought it laid the groundwork for the enthusiasm which he aroused more and more as time went on, and which he took more pains to arouse.

Nevertheless, the first time that his feverish eloquence brought tears and incoherent shoutings from the audience, he became suddenly fearful before the ecstasies which he had touched to life, he faltered, and brought his discourse to an abrupt end. As the crowd slowly quieted and reluctantly began to drift away there flashed on him with blinding suddenness the realization that his excitement had been as great as their own; for a moment he wondered if such pa.s.sion were G.o.dly. Only for a moment, however, of course it was G.o.dly, as any rapture informed by religion must be. He was sorry he had lost courage and stopped so soon. These were an emotional and not an intellectual people--if they were to be reached at all, it must be through the channels of their emotions. Thus far he thought clearly, and that was as far as he did think, for he was discovering in himself a capacity for religious excitement that was only in part a reflex of the crowd's fervour, and the discovery quickened and adorned the memory of the few great moments of his life. Thus had he felt when he resolved to take orders, thus, although in a less degree, because he had been doubtful and afraid, had he felt when he heard the Macedonian cry from this West Indian island. He had swayed the crowd also as he had always believed that he could sway crowds if only the spirit would burn in him brightly enough; he had no doubt that he could sway them again, govern them completely perhaps. That possibility was cause for prayerful and lonely consideration, for meditation among the hills, whence he might draw strength. He hired a pony forthwith and set out for a few days in the hinterland.

It was the most perilous thing he could have done. There is neither sanct.i.ty nor holy calm in the tropic jungle, nothing of the hallowed quietude that, in northern forests, clears the mind of life's muddle and leads the soul to G.o.d. There lurks instead a poisonous anodyne in the heavy, scented air--a drug that lulls the spirit to an evil repose counterfeiting the peacefulness whence alone high thoughts can spring.

In the North, Nature displays a certain restraint even in her most flamboyant moods: the green fires of spring temper their sensuousness in chill winds, and autumn is rich in suggestion not of love, but of gracious age, having the aloof beauty of age and its true estimates of life. The perception of its loveliness is impersonal and leaves the line between the aesthetic and the sensuous clearly marked. Beneath a straighter sun the line is blurred and sometimes vanishes: no orchid-musk, no azure and distant hill, no tinted bay but accosts the senses, confusing one with another, mingling all the emotions in a single cup, persuading man that he knows good from evil as little as though he lived still in Eden. From such stealthy influences the man of rigid convictions is often in more danger than the man of no convictions at all, for rigid convictions rather often indicate inexperience and imperfect observation; experience, therefore--especially emotional experience--sometimes warps them into strange and hideous shapes.

Simpson did not find in the bush the enlightenment that he had hoped for. He did, however, anaesthetize his mind into the belief that he had found it. Returning, he approached Port au Prince by a route new to him. A well-beaten trail aroused his curiosity and he followed it into a grove of ceiba and mahogany. It was clear under foot, as no tropic grove uncared for by man can be clear; in the middle of it lay the ashes of a great fire, and three minaca-palm huts in good repair huddled almost invisible under the vast trees. The ground, bare of gra.s.s, was trodden hard, as though a mult.i.tude had stamped it down--danced it down, perhaps--and kept it bare by frequent use.

"What a place for a camp-meeting!" thought Simpson as he turned to leave it. "G.o.d's cathedral aisles, and roofed by G.o.d's blue sky."

His pony shied and whirled around, a long snake--a fer-de-lance--flowed across the path.

The desire to hold his services in the grove remained in his mind; the only reason he did not transfer them there at once was that he was not yet quite sure of his people. They came eagerly to hear him, they reflected his enthusiasm at his behest, they wept and praised G.o.d.

Yet, underneath all his hopes and all his pride in what he had done ran a cold current of doubt, an undefined and indefinable fear of something devilish and malign that might thwart him in the end. He thrust it resolutely out of his mind.

V

"I have told your people--your _canaille_," said Father Antoine, "that I shall excommunicate them all."

The priest had been graver than his wont--more dignified, less volcanic, as though he was but the mouthpiece of authority, having none of it himself.

"They are better out of your Church than in it," Simpson answered.

Father Antoine trembled a little; it was the first sign he had given that his violent personality was still alive under the perplexing new power that had covered it.

"You are determined?" Simpson nodded with compressed lips. "Their d.a.m.nation be on your head, then."

The priest stood aside. Simpson squeezed by him on the narrow sidewalk; as he did so, Antoine drew aside the skirts of his ca.s.sock.

From the beginning Simpson had preached more of h.e.l.l than of heaven; he could not help doing so, for he held eternal punishment to be more imminent than eternal joy, and thought it a finer thing to scare people into heaven than to attract them thither. He took an inverted pleasure also in dwelling on the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, and had combed the minor prophets and Revelation for threatening texts to hurl at his congregation. Such devil-worship, furthermore, gave him greater opportunity for oratory, greater immediate results also; he had used it sometimes against his better judgment, and was not so far gone that he did not sometimes tremble at the possible consequences of its use.

His encounter with the priest, however, had driven all doubts from his mind, and that evening he did what he had never done before--he openly attacked the Roman Church.

"What has it done for you?" he shouted, and his voice rang in the rafters of the warehouse where a hundred or so Negroes had gathered to hear him. "What has it done for you? You cultivate your ground, and its t.i.thes take the food from the mouths of your children. Does the priest tell you of salvation, which is without money and without price, for all--for all--for all? Does he live among you as I do? Does he minister to your bodies? Or your souls?"

There was a stir at the door, and the eyes of the congregation turned from the platform.

"Father Antoine!" shrieked a voice. It was Madame Picard's; Simpson could see her in the gloom at the far end of the hall and could see the child astride of her hip. "Father Antoine! He is here!"

In response to the whip of her voice there was a roar like the roar of a train in a tunnel. It died away; the crowd eddied back upon the platform. Father Antoine--he was robed, and there were two acolytes with him, one with a bell and the other with a candle--began to read in a voice as thundering as Simpson's own.

"_Excommunicado_ ----"

The Latin rolled on, sonorous, menacing. It ceased; the candle-flame snuffed out, the bell tinkled, there was the flash of a cope in the doorway, and the priest was gone.

"He has excommunicated you!" Simpson shouted, almost shrieked. "Thank G.o.d for that, my people!"