The Damnation of Theron Ware Part 25

Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.

Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland--a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields--but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.

Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface.

Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind. His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin, dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it against low-hanging branches.

All had gone well--more than well--with him. The second Quarterly Conference had pa.s.sed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of G.o.d himself, as a woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and finger nails.

Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months since he could remember her venturing upon a critical att.i.tude toward him.

She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort, during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual.

This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and embarra.s.sed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.

She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three months had pa.s.sed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going near Thurston's at all.

An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered spa.r.s.ely with beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.

Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!

there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost wholly of groaning ba.s.s notes, but it was enough. He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.

He reached a place from which, himself un.o.bserved, he could overlook much of what he had come to see.

The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds were--one ma.s.sed about an enclosure in which young men were playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.

And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods round about. The noises which arose from this mult.i.tude--the shouts of the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings, the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent, ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible distance in the greenwood--charmed his ears with their suggestion of universal merriment. He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful regret--as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had left behind.

At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other incessantly sweeping off rows of empty gla.s.ses, and tossing forward in their place fresh, foaming gla.s.ses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.

Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to be always in front, emptying the gla.s.ses faster than the busy men inside could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads gla.s.ses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.

Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought, in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and genial reconciliation.

Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he should like to try a gla.s.s of beer. He recalled having heard that lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would bring him out a gla.s.s, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.

"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest, in his cheeriest manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own. "We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we saw, here among the sinners!"

"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. "I've had five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've bored the head off me."

CHAPTER XXIII

At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three gla.s.ses of beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his gla.s.s against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.

When the boy had returned with the gla.s.ses, the three stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.

Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls, some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.

"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white stockings of hers," remarked Celia; "some friend ought to tell her to dye them."

"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. "I daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"

Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. "I should say not!" he replied.

"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia. "You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them."

"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. "Don't let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.

Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul to any other person all day long."

"I should think the a.s.sumption was a safe one," said the priest, smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought, "it be by way of a genial profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'h.e.l.l to my soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. I daresay they're all dead."

"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first," remarked Theron, musingly. "I date from that experience a whole new life. I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'

to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.

The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures of h.e.l.l-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.

You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were there."

"There isn't so much difference as you think," said Father Forbes, dispa.s.sionately. "Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of h.e.l.l governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.

They have always been like that."

"What nonsense!" cried Celia. "I have no patience with such gloomy rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones."

"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.

What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.

Ware," he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.

The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown--will be the Church of America."

"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia. "This revolution can't be hurried forward too rapidly."

Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in jest, how much in earnest. "It seems to me," he said, "that as things are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the ma.s.ses must surely come to see in time."

Father Forbes laughed outright this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched gla.s.ses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that all the spirits and demons and G.o.ds occupy themselves exclusively with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of superst.i.tions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superst.i.tions alone.

That is always the ultimate view of the crowd."

"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where n.o.body seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise."

"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest, "only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and be d.a.m.ned. There is something intelligible and fine about an att.i.tude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music"--he made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the music at least is divine.

There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process down below there--and the social roughness of their church becomes softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and a new national church, each representative of the other."

"And all this is to be done by lager beer!" Theron ventured to comment, jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.

The priest pa.s.sed the pleasantry by. "No," he said seriously; "what you must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.

It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and, understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you and me."

Theron a.s.sented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow.

"Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it," he said, and fastened his regard boldly this time upon the swings.

"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest, "at an age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined wisdom to buy a horse for them."

"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement, "when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is different with me."