Читать книгу Flamsted quarries - Mary E. Waller - Страница 9

The priest, after leaving the theatre, walked rapidly down Broadway past the marble church, that had been shown on the stage, and still straight on for two miles at the same rapid gait, past the quiet churchyards of St. Paul's and Trinity into the comparative silence of Battery Park and across to the sea wall. There he leaned for half an hour, reliving in memory not only the years since his seven-year old feet had crossed this threshold of the New World, but recalling something of his still earlier childhood in his native France. The child's song had been an excitant to the memory in recalling those first years in Auvergne.

"There is a green hill far away

Without a city wall."

How clearly he saw that! and his peasant father and mother as laborers on or about it, and himself, a six-year old, tending the goats on that same green hill or minding the geese in the meadows at its foot.

All this he saw as he gazed blankly at the dark waters of the bay, saw clearly as if visioned in crystal. But of subsequent movings and wanderings there was a blurred reflection only, till the vision momentarily brightened, the outlines defined themselves again as he saw his tired drowsy self put to bed in a tiny room that was filled with the fragrance of newly baked bread. He remembered the awakening in that small room over a bread-filled shop; it belonged to a distant great-uncle baker on the mother's side, a personage in the family because in trade. He could remember the time spent in that same shop and the brick-walled, brick-floored, brick-ovened room behind it. He recalled having stood for hours, it might have been days, he could not remember—for then Time was forever and its passing of no moment—before the deep ovens with a tiny blue-eyed slip of a girl. P'tite Truite, Little Trout, they called her, the great-uncle baker's one grandchild.

And the shop—he remembered that, so light and bright and sweet and clean, with people coming and going—men and women and children—and the crisp yard-long loaves carried away in shallow baskets on many a fine Norman head in the old seaport of Dieppe. And always the Little Trout was by his side, even when the great-uncle placed him in one of the huge flat-bottomed bread baskets and drew the two up and down in front of the shop. Then all was dim again; so dim that except for the lap and backward sucking of the waters against the sea wall, whereon he leaned, he had scarcely recalled a ship at the old pier of Dieppe, and the Little Trout standing beside her grandfather on the stringer, frantically waving her hand as the ship left her moorings and the prow nosed the first heavy channel sea that washed against the bulkhead and half-drowned her wailing cry:

"Jean—mon Jean!"

The rest was a blank until he landed here almost on this very spot in old Castle Garden and, holding hard by his father's hand, was bidden to look up at the flag flying from the pole at the top of the queer round building—a brave sight even for his young eyes: all the red and white and blue straining in the freshening wind with an energy of motion that made the boy dance in sympathetic joy at his father's side—

And what next?

Again a confusion of journeyings, and afterwards quiet settlement in a red brick box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac. He could still hear the clang of the mill-gates, the ringing of the bells, the hum and whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles, the clacking crash of the ponderous shifting frames. He could still see with the inner eye the hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun, or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on the black waters of the canal. There on the bank, at the entrance to the footbridge, the boy was wont to take his stand regularly at six o'clock of a winter's day, and wait for the hoisting of the mill-gates and the coming of his father and mother with the throng of toilers.

So he saw himself—himself as an identity emerging at last from the confusion of time and place and circumstance; for there followed the public school, the joys of rivalry, the eager outrush for the boy's Ever New, the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports, the battle royal for the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet "Johnny Frog" by the belligerent youth, American born, and the victorious outcome for the "foreigner"; the Auvergne blood was up, and the temperament volcanic like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in hot, out-welling waters. And afterwards, at home, there were congratulations and comfortings, plus applications of vinegar and brown butcher's paper to the severely smitten nose of this champion of his new Americanhood. But at school and in the street, henceforth there was due respect and a general atmosphere of "let bygones be bygones."

Ah, but the pride of his mother in her boy's progress! the joy over the first English-French letter that went to the great-uncle baker; the constant toil of both parents that the savings might be sufficient to educate their one child—that the son might have what the parents lacked. Already the mother had begun to speak of the priesthood: she might yet see her son Jean a priest, a bishop, and archbishop. Who could tell? America is America, and opportunities infinite—a cardinal, perhaps, and the gift of a red hat from the Pope, and robes and laces! There was no end to her ambitious dreaming.

But across the day-dreams fell the shadow of hard times: the shutting down of the mills, the father's desperate illness in a workless winter, his death in the early spring, followed shortly by that of the worn-out and ill-nourished mother—and for the twelve-year-old boy the abomination of desolation, and world and life seen dimly through tears. Dim, too, from the like cause, that strange passage across the ocean to Dieppe—his mother's uncle having sent for him to return—a weight as of lead in his stomach, a fiery throbbing in his young heart, a sickening craving for some expression of human love. The boyish tendrils, although touched in truth by spring frosts, were outreaching still for some object upon which to fasten; yet he shrank from human touch and sympathy on that voyage in the steerage lest in his grief and loneliness he scream aloud.

Dieppe again, and the Little Trout with her grandfather awaiting him on the pier; the Little Trout's arms about his neck in loving welcome, the boy's heart full to bursting and his eyelids reddened in his supreme effort to keep back tears. Dependent, an orphan, and destined for the priesthood—those were his life lines for the next ten years. And the end? Revolt, rebellion, partial crime, acquittal under the law, but condemnation before the tribunal of his conscience and his God.

There followed the longing to expiate, to expiate in that America where he was not known but where he belonged, where his parents' dust mingled with the soil; to flee to the Church as to a sanctuary of refuge, to be priest through expiation. And this he had been for years while working among the Canadian rivermen, among the lumbermen of Maine, sharing their lives, their toil, their joys and sorrows, the common inheritance of the Human. For years subsequent to his Canadian mission, and after his naturalization as an American citizen, he worked in town and city, among high and low, rich and poor, recognizing in his catholicity of outlook but one human plane: that which may be tested by the spirit level of human needs. Now, at last, he was priest by conviction, by inner consecration.

He stood erect; drew a long full breath; squared his shoulders and looked around him. He noticed for the first time that a Staten Island ferryboat had moved into the slip near him; that several passengers were lingering to look at him; that a policeman was pacing behind him, his eye alert—and he smiled to himself, for he read their thought. He could not blame them for looking. He had fancied himself alone with the sea and the night and his thoughts; had lost himself to his present surroundings in the memory of those years; he had suffered again the old agony of passion, shame, guilt, while the events of that pregnant, preparatory period in France, etched deep with acid burnings into his inmost consciousness, were passing during that half hour in review before his inner vision. Small wonder he was attracting attention!

He bared his head. A new moon was sinking to the Highlands of the Navesink. The May night was mild, the sea breeze drawing in with gentle vigor. He looked northwards up the Hudson, and southwards to the Liberty beacon, and eastwards to the Sound. "God bless our Land" he murmured; then, covering his head, bowed courteously to the policeman and took his way across the Park to the up-town elevated station.

Yes, at last he dared assert it: he was priest by consecration; soul, heart, mind, body dedicate to the service of God through Humanity. That service led him always in human ways. A few nights ago he saw the poster: "The Little Patti". A child then? Thought bridged the abyss of ocean to the Little Trout. Some rescue work for him here, possibly; hence his presence in the theatre.