Читать книгу A Singular Life - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps - Страница 7

Table of Contents

It is manifestly as unfair to judge of a place by its March as to judge a man’s disposition by the hour before dinner. As the coldest exteriors may conceal the warmest loves, so the repelling Cesarean winter holds in store one of the most alluring summers known to inland New England. The grass is riper, the flowers richer, the ranks of elms are statelier, the skies are gentler, and the people happier than could be expected of Cesarean theology. Nay, theology itself unbends in April, softens in May, warms in June, and grows sunny and human by the time the students are graduated and turned loose upon the world—a world which is, on the whole, so patient with their inexperience, and so ready to accept as spiritual leaders men whose own life’s lessons are yet to be learned, and whose own views of the great mysteries which they dare to interpret are so much more assured than they will be ten years later.

Emanuel Bayard and Helen Carruth walked together beneath the ancient trees that formed the great cross upon the Seminary green.

The snow professor was melted out of existence; head of ice and lecture of sleet had vanished months ago. Dandelions glittered in the long grass. Sparrows built nests under the awful chapel eaves. It was moonlight and warm—a June night—and the elms cast traceries of fine shadows, like a net, about the feet of the young people; they seemed to become entangled in the meshes, as they strolled up and down and to and fro, after the simple fashion of the town; which pays no more attention to a couple sauntering in broad day, or broad moonlight, in the sight of gods and men, across the Seminary “yard,” than it does to the sparrows in the chapel eaves.

They were not lovers, these two; hardly friends, at least in the name of the thing; she was not an accessible girl, and he was a preoccupied man. A certain comfortable acquaintance, such as grows without drama in the quiet society of university towns, had brought them together, as chance led, without distinct volition on the part of either. He would graduate in three days. He had called to say good-by to the Professor’s family, and had taken Miss Helen out to see the shadows on the cross where the paths met—the mild and accepted form of dissipation in Cesarea; for Professors’ daughters. They walked without agitation, and talked without sentiment. Truth to tell, their talk was serious, above their years, and beyond their relation.

The fact was that Emanuel Bayard had that spring with difficulty received his license to preach. There was a flaw in his theology. The circumstance was momentous to him. His uncle, for one thing, had been profoundly displeased; had rebuked, remonstrated, and commanded; had indeed gone so far as to offend his nephew with threats of a nature which the young man did not divulge to Miss Carruth, for his natural reserve was deep. She had noticed that he did not confide in her as readily as the other students she had known. But he had told her enough. The Professor’s daughter, too well used to the ecclesiastical machinery and ferment of the day, was as familiar with its phases and phrases as other girls are with the steps of a cotillion or the matrimonial chances of a watering-place. She knew quite well the tremendous importance of what had happened.

“I understand,” she said in her deep, rich, almost boyish voice, “I understand it all perfectly. You wouldn’t say you did, when you didn’t.”

“How could I?” interrupted Bayard.

“You couldn’t, and so they stirred up that fuss. You were more honest than the other fellows. And you were punished for it.”

“You are good to put it in that way, but what right have I to take it in that way?” urged Bayard wistfully. “The other fellows are just as good men as I; better, most of them. Fenton passed all right, and the rest. I don’t feel inclined to parade my ecclesiastical honesty and set myself above them—in my own mind, I mean. I have dropped below them in everybody else’s; of course I know that.”

“Whom do you mean by everybody else?” demanded Helen quickly. “Your uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester? The Trustees? The Faculty? And those old men on the council? Oh, I know them! Haven’t I dined and breakfasted on Councils and Faculties ever since we came here? Haven’t I eaten and drunken and breathed Trustees and doctrines, and what is sound, and what isn’t, and—Don’t you tell, but I never was afraid of a Trustee in my life—never! I don’t know another soul in Cesarea who isn’t—not even my father. When I was a little girl, I used to ruffle up their beaver hats the wrong way, out in the hall, so they would look dissipated when they went over to the chapel. Then I hid behind the door to see. But I never told of it—before. You won’t tell your uncle, will you? I hid a kitten in his hat, once, and when he came out of the study the hat was walking all over the hall floor, without visible means of locomotion.”

Bayard laughed, as she had meant he should. The tense expression of his face relaxed; she watched him narrowly.

“Come,” she said in a changed tone, “take me home, please. The house is full of Anniversary company. I ought to be there.”

He turned at her command, and took her towards her father’s house. They walked in silence down the long Seminary path. She was dressed in light muslin with a violet on it, and wore ribbons that matched the violet. She had a square of white lace thrown over her bright hair. The meshes of the tracery from the elm-trees fell thickly under her quick tread. At the stone posts which guarded the great lawns, she hesitated; then set her feet resolutely out from the delicate net into the bright spaces of the open road.

“Mr. Bayard,” she said in her clear voice, “you are an honest man. It is better to be that than to be a minister.”

“If one cannot be both,” amended Bayard. “But to start in like this, with a slur attached to one’s name at the beginning—I don’t suppose you understand how it dooms a fellow, Miss Carruth. Its equivalent would be almost enough to disbar a man in law, or to ruin him in medicine.”

“I understand the whole miserable subject!” cried Helen hotly. “I am sick to my soul of it! I wish”—She checked herself. “Let me see,” she added more calmly. “What was it they tormented you about? Eternal punishment?”

“I managed to escape on that,” said Bayard. “I don’t know anything about it, and I said so. I think, myself, there is a good deal of cheap talk afloat on that subject. Our newspapers and novels are full of it. It is about the only difficult doctrine in theology that outsiders understand the relations of; so they stick on that, and make the most of it. It is an easy way of making the Christian religion intolerable—if one wants to. My difficulty was rather with—I see you know something of our technical terms—with what we call verbal inspiration.”

“Oh yes.” Helen nodded. “Whether ‘The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation’ was inspired by Almighty God; or ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,’ and all that. I know. … Inspired moonshine! I am a little bit of a heretic myself, Mr. Bayard; but I’m not—I’m not as honest as you; I’m not pious, either.”

“I hope you don’t think I am pious!” began Bayard resentfully.

But she laughed sweetly in his frowning face. They stood at her father’s high stone steps. The Anniversary company were chatting in the parlors.

“Good-night,” she said in a lower tone; and then more gently, “and good-by.”

He started slightly at the word; turned as if he would have said something, but said it not. He took her hand in silence; then perceived that she had withdrawn it suddenly, coldly, it seemed, and had vanished from him up the steps of stone.

He walked back to Galilee Hall slowly. His bent eyes traced the net of shadows around his reluctant feet. What was that? Inspired moonshine? Inspired moonshine! He lifted his face and looked abroad on Cesarea Hill.

His head was heavy, and his heart throbbed. Perhaps at that moment, if he had been asked which was the greater mystery, God or woman, this honest man could not have answered.

With sudden hunger for solitude, he went to his room. But it was full of fellow-students. Fenton was there, and Tompkinton, Jaynes, Bent, and Holt, and the middler. They received him noisily, and he sat down among them. They related the stories current in denominational circles—ecclesiastical jokes and rumors of sectarian conflicts; they interchanged gossip about who was called where, and what churches were said to lack supplies, the figures of salaries, the statistics of revivals, and the prospects of settlement open to the senior class.

Bayard listened silently. His heart was not with them, nor in their talk. Yet he criticised himself for criticising them. Besides, he had received no call to settle anywhere.

Almost alone among the intellectual men of his class, he found himself, at the end of his preparatory education, undesired and unsummoned by the churches to fill a pulpit of them all.

He had done his share, like the rest, of that preliminary preaching which decides the future of a man in his profession; but he stood, on the eve of his graduation, among his mates, marked and quivering—this sensitive fellow—that most miserable of all educated, restless, and wretched young men with whom our land abounds, “a minister without a call.”

He had said nothing to Helen Carruth about this. A man does not tell a woman such things until he has to.

Something in his face struck the students quiet after a while, and they dropped away from the room. His friend Fenton made the move.

“It is said,” he whispered to Tompkinton, as they clattered down the dusty stairs of Galilee Hall, “that his trouble with that New Hampshire Council has followed him. It is reported that his license did not come easily. It has got abroad that he is not sound. Nothing could be more unfortunate—or more unnecessary,” added Fenton in his too cheerful voice. There had been no doubt of his theology. He had received three calls. As yet he had accepted none. He expected to be married in the fall, and looked for a larger salary.

Suddenly he stopped and clapped his hands to his head.

“Bayard!” he called loudly. “Bayard, come to the window a minute!”

The outline of Bayard’s fine head appeared faintly in the third-story window, against the background of his unlighted room. The moon was so bright that his face seemed to be a white flame, as he looked down on his classmates from that height.

“I brought up your mail,” said Fenton, “and forgot to tell you. You’ll find a letter lying on your table behind the third volume of Dean Alford. You keep your room so dark I was afraid you mightn’t see it.”

Bayard thanked him, and groped for the letter; but he did not light the lamp to read it; he sat on in the moonlit room, alone and still. His heart was hot within him as he remembered how the students talked. That vision which sets a man apart from his fellows, and thus makes him miserable or blessed, or both, beckoned to him with distant, shining finger. His face fell into his hands. Great God! what did it mean to take upon one’s self that sacred Name in which a Christian preacher stands before his fellow-men? What had common pettiness or envy, narrow fear or little weakness, to do with the soul of a teacher of holiness? How easy to quibble and evade, and fall into rank! How hard to stand apart, to look the cannon in the eye, alone!

It is not easy for men of the world, of ordinary business, pleasure, politics, and those professions whose standards are pliable, to understand the noble civil war between the nature and the position of a man like Bayard; and yet it might be worth while to try.

There is something so much higher and more delicate than our own common standards of ethics that it is refining to respect, even if we fail to comprehend, the struggles of a man who aspires to the possession of perfect spiritual honor.

Bayard had not moved nor lifted his face from his hands, when a step which he recognized heavily struck and slowly mounted the lower flight of the old stairs of Galilee Hall. It was his uncle, Trustee of Cesarea Seminary, and of the faith of its founders, returning from the home of the Professor of Hebrew, where he had been entertained on Anniversary week.

Bayard sighed and groped for a match. This interview could not be evaded, but he winced away from it in every nerve. It is easier to face the obloquy of the world than the frown of the man or woman who has brought us up.

Hermon Worcester was bitterly mortified that Emanuel had received no “call.” He had not said so, yet, but his nephew knew that this well-bred reserve had reached its last breath. As Bayard struck the light, he perceived the forgotten letter in his hand, and, perhaps thinking to defer a painful scene for a moment, said, “Your pardon, Uncle,” and tore the envelope.

The letter contained a formal and unanimous call from the seaside parish whose vacant pulpit he had been supplying for six weeks to become their pastor.

“Helen! Helen!”

The mild, cultivated whine of the Professor’s wife complained through the hot house.

Helen ran in dutiful response. It was late, and the Anniversary guests had scattered to their rooms. The girl was partly undressed for the night, and stood in her doorway gathering her cashmere wrapper about her tall, rich form. Mrs. Carruth looked through the half-open door of her own room.

“I cannot get your father out of his study, Helen,” she urged plaintively. “He has one of his headaches at the base of the brain—and those extra Faculty meetings before him this week, with all the rest. Do go down and see if you can’t send him up to bed.”

Helen buttoned her white gown to the throat, and ran softly downstairs to the study. The Professor of Theology sat at his study table with a knot between his eyes. A pile of catalogues lay before him; he was jotting down statistics with his gold pencil on old-fashioned foolscap paper. He pushed the paper aside when he saw his daughter, and held out his hand to her, smiling. She went straight to him as if she had been a little girl, and knelt beside him, crossing her hands on his knee. He put his arm around her; his stern face relaxed.

“You are to put the entire system of Orthodox theology away and come to bed, Papa,” she said, with her sweet imperiousness. “Mother says you have a headache at the base of something. It is pretty late—and it worries her. What are you doing? Counting theologues? Counting theologues! At your time of life! As if you couldn’t find anything better to do! What is this?” She caught up a stray slip of paper. “ ‘Deaf—deaf as an adder: 10. Blind—stone-blind: 6.’ What in the name of—Anniversary week does that mean?”

“That is a personal memorandum,” said the Professor, flushing. “Tear it up, Helen.”

“I know,” said Helen, nodding. “It’s a private classification of theologues. Which does it catalogue, their theology or their intellects? Come, Papa!”

“I’ll never tell you!” laughed the Professor, shutting his thin, scholarly lips. And he never did. But the laugh had gained the point, as she intended. He took his German student lamp and started upstairs. Helen walked through the long, dim hall with her two hands clasped lovingly upon his arm.

“I am bothered,” admitted the Professor, stopping at the foot of the stairs, “about one of my boys. He is rather a favorite with me. There isn’t a finer intellect in the senior class.”

“But how about his Christianity, Father?” asked the girl mischievously.

“His Christianity is all right, so far as I know,” admitted the Professor slowly. “It is his theology that is the hitch. He isn’t sound. He has received no call.”

“Do I know him?” asked Helen in a different tone.

The Professor of Theology turned, and held his student lamp at arm’s length above his daughter’s face, which he scanned in silence before he said:—

“I am not prepared to answer that question, Helen. Whether you know him I can’t say; I really cannot say whether you know him or not. I’m not sure whether I do, myself. But I am much annoyed about the matter. It is a misfortune to the Seminary, and a mortification to the young man.”

He kissed his daughter tenderly, and went upstairs with the weary tread of a professional man at the end of a long day’s work.

Helen went to her own room and shut the door. But she did not light the candles. She sat down at her open window, in the hot, night wind. She leaned her cheek against her bare arm, from which the loose sleeve fell away. The elms were in such rich leaf that she could see the Seminary buildings only in broken outline now. But there was wind enough to lift and toss the branches, and through one of the rifts in the green wall she noticed that a light was burning in the third-story northwest corner of Galilee Hall.

It was past midnight before she went to bed. As she closed her blinds, for the first time in her life, the Professor’s daughter did deliberately, and of self-acknowledged intention, stoop to take a look at the window of a student.

“His light is still burning,” she thought. “What can be the matter?”

Then she flushed red with a beautiful self-rebuke, and fled to her white pillow.

Night deepened into perfect silence on Cesarea Hill. The last light in Galilee Hall went out. The moon rode on till morning. In the deserted green the clear-cut paths shone wide and long, and the great white cross lay as if nailed to its place, all night, between the Seminary and the Professor’s house.