A Circuit Rider's Wife Part 4

Opening my eyes again with a great effort and looking up I beheld him, the old, burly country doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers on my wrist. But now a great emergency confronted me. My guardian angel, who has never ceased to be very high-church, urged me to meet it.

"William, William," I whispered, and felt his kiss answer me, "he must be baptized!"

"But he is dead, my darling!" he replied.

"Not really dead, William; he must be alive somewhere or I cannot bear it, and I cannot have him going where he will be, unbaptized."

So it was done, the doctor, the old woman and William standing around the little bier, and William saying the holy words himself. And there, high up on the mountain under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little itinerant, with his dust properly baptized, when they come on the last day to awaken and gather up those very least babies who died so soon they will not understand the resurrection call when they hear it.

After that we took more interest in the children. They seemed real to us and nearer, whereas, before, they had simply pa.s.sed in and out before us like little irresponsible figureheads of the future, with whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it was curious, the way the innocent little things invariably hived there, no matter how awful and accusing the invitation would be--to those "dead in trespa.s.ses and sins, who felt themselves lost and undone."

So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not, but they are infallible natural critics.

This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew nothing of happy antic.i.p.ations, and, as is so often the case with the very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical acquaintance with Adam and Eve.

The thought of little children pa.s.sing through the Christmas season without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings.

He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the children received his confidences with apathy and silence.

Never, even at the end of a conference year, have I seen William so industrious and so much the mendicant. He persecuted the merchants in the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressing doll babies. He shamed the stingiest man in the town into giving him a flour sack full of the most disgraceful-looking candy I ever saw.

"William!" I exclaimed, when he brought home this last trophy, "you will kill them."

"But," he replied, "for one little hour they will be happy and the next time I tell them anything, though it should be compound Scriptures, they will believe me."

The distribution of gifts was made very secretly some days beforehand.

We climbed mountain roads to little brown cabins in all directions, leaving mysterious bags and parcels with lonesome-looking mother-women.

In one cabin, on top of what was known as Crow's Mountain, we found a very handsome healthy boy, four months old, clad in a stocking leg and the sleeve of an old coat, that had been cunningly cut and sewed to fit him as close as a squirrel's skin. In another place William discovered a boy of seven, who declined to believe or even to hope in Santa Clans.

He was thin, with sad, hungry eyes, ragged and bare-footed as usual.

He had no animation, he simply could not summon enough energy to believe in the incredible.

I shall never forget this child's face. The Sabbath after Christmas we had a voluntary Sunday school on our hands. A score of odd-looking little boy and girl caterpillars appeared at church, excited, mysteriously curious, like queer young creatures who have experienced a miracle. They entered immediately into full fellows.h.i.+p with William.

They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he said to the uttermost. Only once was there any symptom of higher criticism. This was a certain Sabbath morning in the Sunday school when William told the story of the forty and two children who were devoured by two she bears because they had made fun of a bald-headed man.

"I don't believe that tale!" was the astounding irreverent comment. It proceeded from the same incipient agnostic who could not believe in Santa Clans.

"Why?" William was indiscreet enough to ask.

"Because if only two bears had eat that many children it would have busted 'em wide open."

No one smiled. William faced five little grimy-faced boys on the bench before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the retina of each, and it was too much for him.

"We will pa.s.s on to the next verse," he announced, leaving the bear-expositor mystified, but in stubborn possession of his convictions.

Sometimes in these latter years, when things went hard with us, there would come a flash of memory and William and I would see the face of some child always as if the sun was s.h.i.+ning on it, looking at us, believing in us from far down the years. And it has helped, often more than the recollection of older, wiser saints. Our experience was that the faces of the children we had known lasted better in memory than those of older people. And they always look right, as if G.o.d had just made them.

It was always nip and tuck, in the records of William's ministry, whether he would perform more marriage ceremonies or preach more funerals. Some years the weddings would have it. Then again, the dead got the better of it. As a rule, the poorer the people we served the more weddings we helped to celebrate, and if the heroes and heroines of them did not live happy ever after, at least they lived together.

There is no hour of the day or night that William has not sanctified with somebody's marriage vows. Once, about two o'clock in the morning, there was a furious rap at the door of the parsonage. William stuck his head out of the window overhead and beheld a red-faced young farmer standing in the moonlight, holding the hand of his sweetheart, who was looking up at him with the expression that a white rose wears in a storm.

"Come down and tie us, Parson," called the groom. "You ain't got time to dress. They air after us hot-footed."

William slipped on his longtailed coat over his pajamas, hurried downstairs and married them there in the moonlight, after having examined the license the young man handed in through the parlor window.

And he looked well enough from the sill up, but from the sill down I doubt if his costume would have pa.s.sed muster.

Fortunately, no one thought of divorces in those days. Women stayed with their husbands at the sacrifice of self-respect and everything else save honor. And they were better women, more respected than those who kick up so much divorce dust in society nowadays. Part of their dissatisfaction comes from bad temper and bad training, and a good deal of it comes from getting foolish notions out of books about the way husbands do or do not love their wives. It seems they can't be satisfied how they do it or how they don't do it. But back there William and I never had any biological suspicions about the nature of love, and the people he married to one another did not have any, either.

Once I remember a bridegroom who blus.h.i.+ngly confessed that he was too poor to pay the fee usually offered the preacher.

"But I'll pay you, Parson," he whispered as he swung his bride up behind him upon his horse; "I'll pay as soon as I'm able."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I'll Pay You, Parson. I'll Pay as Soon as I'm Able."]

Ten years pa.s.sed and William was sent back to the same circuit. One day, as he was on his way to an appointment, he met a man and woman in a buggy. The woman had a baby at her breast, and the bottom of the buggy looked like a human birdnest, it was so full of young, tow-headed children.

"Hold on!" said the man, pulling up his horse; "ain't this Brother Thompson?"

"Yes."

"Well, here's ten dollars I owe you."

"What for?" demanded William, holding back from the extended hand with the fluttering bill in it.

"You don't remember it, I reckon, but you married us ten years ago. I was so poor at the time I couldn't pay you for the greatest service one man ever done another. We ain't prospered since in nothing except babies, or I'd be handin' you a hundred instead of ten."

I have never heard a man compliment his wife since then that I do not instinctively compare it with the compliment this mountain farmer paid his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers of our times that I do not recall the charming testimony of this husband against the injustice and indecency of their views.

CHAPTER VIII

I HOLD THE STAGE

So far, the circuit rider has been the hero of these letters, but in this one his wife shall be the heroine, behind the throne at least, for scarcely any other woman looks or feels less like one in the open.

The Methodist ministry is singularly devastating in some ways upon the women who are connected with it by marriage. For one thing, it tends to destroy their aesthetic sensibilities. They lack very often the good taste of thrift in poverty, not so much because of the poverty, but because they never get settled long enough to develop the hen-nesting instinct and house pride that is dormant in us all. They simply make a s.h.i.+ft of things till the next conference meets, when they will be moved to another parsonage.

A woman has not the heart to plant annuals, much less perennials, under such circ.u.mstances. Let the Parsonage Aid Society do it, if it must be done. And the Parsonage Aid Society does do it. You will see in many Methodist preachers' front yards fiercely-th.o.r.n.y, old-lady-faced roses--the kind that thrive without attention--planted always by the president of the Parsonage Aid Society. And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial to this flower, but because it is not easily killed by neglect.

They choose the hardiest, ugliest known shrubs for the parsonage yard because they last best.

On every circuit, in every charge, you will find the Parsonage Aid Society a band of faithful, fretted, good housekeepers who worry and wrangle over furnis.h.i.+ng the parsonage as they worried and wrangled when they were little girls over their communistic "playhouses." The effects in the parsonage are not harmonious, of course. As a rule, every piece of furniture in it contradicts every other piece, each having been contributed by rival women or rival committees in the society.

And this has its deadening effect upon the preacher's wife's taste, else she must go mad, living in a house where, say, there is a strip of worn church-aisle carpet down the hall--bought at a bargain by the thrifty Aid Society--a cherry-colored folding bed in the parlor along with a "golden oak" table, a home-made bookcase, four different kinds of chairs, a patent-medicine calendar on the wall and a rag carpet on the floor, with a "flowered" washbowl and pitcher on a plain deal table in the corner, confessing that, after all, it is not a parlor, but the presiding elder's bedroom when he comes to hold "quarterly meeting."

Still, if I had anything to do with the new-monument-raising business in this country I would have a colossal statue raised to the living women of the Methodist Parsonage Aid Societies.

But the worst effect of the itinerancy upon its ministers' wives is the evil information they must receive in it about other people. If I had to select the woman in all the world best informed about the faults, sins and weaknesses of mankind, I should not choose the sophisticated woman of the world, but I should point without hesitation to the little, pale, still-faced Methodist preacher's wife. The pallor is the pallor of hards.h.i.+p, often of the lack of the right kind of nourishment, but the stillness is not the result of inward personal calm and peace.

It is the shut-door face of a woman who knows all about everybody she meets with that thin little smile and quiet eye. The reason for this is that the preacher's wife is the vat for receiving all the circuit scandal actually intended for her husband's ears.

The most conscienceless gossips in this world are to be found always among the thoroughly-upright, meanly-impeccable members of any and every church. They are the Scribes and Pharisees who contribute most to the building of fine houses of wors.h.i.+p; they give most to its causes. They are the "right hands" of all the preachers from their youth up. They have never been truthful sinners. They were the pale, pious little boys and girls who behaved, and who graduated from the Sunday schools long ago without ever being converted to the church.