Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  "We must jest let the Lord do what he will with us and ours."

  "I hev let him how was I goin' to help it?"

  "We mustn't murmur," continued the Deacon in a feebler voice, as he saw that his exhortation was not hopefully received.

  "Who's ben a murmurin? I haint!"

  "Then you feel resigned, don't you?"

  "I can't help myself. I've got to make the best on't," said Zeph, trying to out−walk him.

  "But you know "

  "LET ME ALONE, can't ye?" cried Zeph in a voice of thunder; and the Deacon, scared and subdued, dropped behind, murmuring, "Drefful state o' mind! poor critter, so unreconciled! really awful!"

  CHAPTER XXVIII. DOLLY AT THE WICKET GATE.

  THE next Sunday rose calm and quiet over the hills of Poganuc.

  There was something almost preternatural in the sense of stillness and utter repose which the Sabbath day used to bring with it in those early times. The absolute rest from every earthly employment, the withholding even of conversation from temporal things, marked it off from all other days. To the truly devout the effect was something the same as if the time had been spent in heaven.

  On this particular dewy, fresh summer morning it seemed as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of a higher sphere. Dolly stood at her open window looking out on the wooded hills opposite, feathered with their varied green, on the waving meadows with their buttercups and daisies, on the old apple tree in the corner of the lot where the bobolink was tilting up and down, chattering and singing with all his might. She was thinking of what she had heard her father saying to her mother at breakfast: how the sickness and death of one good woman had been blessed to all that neighborhood, and how a revival of religion was undoubtedly begun there.

  All this made Dolly very serious. She thought a great deal about heaven, and perfectly longed to be quite sure she ever should get there. She often had wished that there were such a thing in reality as a Wicket Gate, and an old Interpreter's house, and a Palace Beautiful, for then she would set right off on her pilgrimage at once, and in time get to the Celestial City. But how to get this spiritual, intangible preparation she knew not.

  To−day she knew was a sacramental Sunday, and she should see all the good people taking that sacrificial bread and wine, but she should be left out.

  And how to get in! There were no Sunday−schools in those days, no hymns or teachings specially adapted to the child; and Dolly remembered to have heard serious elderly people tell of how they were brought "under CHAPTER XXVIII. DOLLY AT THE WICKET GATE.

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  conviction" and suffered for days and weeks before the strange secret of mercy was revealed to them, and she wondered how she ever should get this conviction of sin. Poor Dolly had often tried to feel very solemn and sad and gloomy, and to think herself a dreadful sinner, but had never succeeded. She was so young and so healthy the blood raced and tingled so in her young veins; and if she was pensive and sad a little while, yet, the first she knew, she would find herself racing after Spring, or calling to her brothers, or jumping up and down with her skipping rope, and feeling full as airy and gay as the bobolink across in the meadow. This morning she was trying her best to feel her sins and count them up; but the birds and the daisies and the flowers were a sad interruption, and she went to meeting quite dissatisfied.

  When she saw the white simple table and the shining cups and snowy bread of the Communion she inly thought that the service could have nothing for her it would be all for those grown−up, initiated Christians.

  Nevertheless, when her father began to speak she was drawn to listen to him by a sort of pathetic earnestness in his voice.

  The Doctor was feeling very earnestly and deeply, and he had chosen a theme to awaken responsive feeling in his church. His text was the declaration of Jesus: "I call you not servants, but friends;" and his subject was Jesus as the soul−friend offered to every human being. Forgetting his doctrinal subtleties, he spoke with all the simplicity and tenderness of a rich nature concerning the faithful, generous, tender love of Christ, how he cared for the soul's wants, how he was patient with its errors, how he gently led it along the way of right, how he was always with it, teaching its ignorance, guiding its wanderings, comforting its sorrows, with a love unwearied by faults, unchilled by ingratitude, till he brought it through the darkness of earth to the perfection of heaven.

  Real, deep, earnest feeling inclines to simplicity of language, and the Doctor spoke in words that even a child could understand. Dolly sat absorbed, her large blue eyes gathering tears as she listened; and when the Doctor said, "Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful Friend," Dolly's little heart throbbed "I will." And she did. For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not had any conviction of sin; but like a flash came the thought that Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could trust him for the whole. And so her little earnest child−soul went out to the wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed, with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new joy. She went up to her father's study and fell into his arms, saying, "Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and he has taken me."

  The Doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and his tears dropped on her head.

  "Is it so?" he said. "Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day."

  CHAPTER XXIX. THE CONFLICT.

  THERE is one class of luckless mortals in this world of ours whose sorrows, though often more real than those of other people, never bring them any sympathy. It is those in whom suffering excites an irritating conflict, which makes them intolerable to themselves and others. The more they suffer the more severe, biting and bitter become their words and actions. The very sympathy they long for, by a strange contrariness of nature they throw back on their friends as an injury. Nobody knows where to have them, or how to handle them, and when everybody steers away from them they are inwardly desolate at their loneliness.

  After the funeral train had borne away from the old brown farm−house the silent form of her who was its peace, its light, its comfort, Zeph Higgins wandered like an unquiet spirit from room to room, feeling every silent memorial of her who was no longer there as a stab in the yet throbbing wound. Unlovely people are often cursed with an intense desire to be loved, and the more unlovely they grow the more intense becomes CHAPTER XXIX. THE CONFLICT.

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  this desire. His love for his wife had been unusually strong in the sense of what is often called loving that is, he needed her, depended on her, and could not do without her. He was always sure that she loved him; he was always sure of her patient ear to whatever he wished to say, of her wish to do to her utmost whatever he wanted her to do. Then he was not without a certain sense of the beauty and purity of her character, and had a sort of almost superstitious confidence in her prayers and goodness, like what the Italian peasant has in his patron saint. He felt a sort of helplessness and terror at the idea of facing life without her. Besides this, he was tormented by a secret unacknowledged sense of his own unloveliness: he was angry with himself cursed himself, called himself hard names; and he who quarrels with himself has this disadvantage, that his adversary is inseparably his companion lies down and rises, eats, drinks and sleeps with him.

  What intensified this conflict was the remembrance of his wife's dying words, enjoining on him the relinquishment of the bitter quarrel which had alienated him from his church and his neighbors, and placed her in so false a position. He knew that he was in the wrong; he knew that she was in the right, and that those words spoken on her death−bed were God's voice to him. But every nerve and fiber in him seemed to rebel and resist; he would not humble himself; he would not confess; he would not take a step toward reconciliation.

  The storm that was raging within expressed itself outwardly in an impatience a
nd irritability which tried his children to the utmost. Poor Nabby did her best to assume in the family all her mother's cares, but was met at every turn by vexatious fault−finding.

  "There now!" he said, coming out one morning, "where's my stockings? Everything's being neglected not a pair to put on!"

  "Oh yes, Father, I sat up and mended your stockings last night before I went to bed. I didn't go into your room, because I was afraid of waking you; but here they are on my basket."

  "Give 'em here, then!" said Zeph harshly. "I want my things where I know where they are. Your mother always had everything ready so I didn't have to ask for it."

  "Well, I never shall be as good as Mother if I try till I'm gray," said Nabby, impatiently.

  "Don't you be snapping back at me," said Zeph. "But it's jest so everywhere. Nobody won't care for me now. I don't expect it." "Well, Father, I'm sure I try the best I can, and you keep scolding me all the time. It's discouraging."

  "Oh, yes, I'm a devil, I suppose. Everybody's right but me. Well, I shall be out of the way one of these days, and nobody'll care. There ain't a critter in the world cares whether I'm alive or dead not even my own children."

  The sparks flashed through the tears in Nabby's eyes. She was cut to the soul by the cruel injustice of these words, and a hot and hasty answer rose to her lips, but was smothered in her throat.

  Nabby had become one of the converts of the recently−commenced revival of religion, and had begun to lay the discipline of the Christian life on her temper and her tongue, and found it hard work. As yet she had only attained so far as repression and indignant silence, while the battle raged tempestuously within.

  "I'd like just to go off and leave things to take care of themselves," she said to herself, "and then he'd see whether I don't do anything. Try, and try, and try, and not a word said nothing but scold, scold, scold. It's too bad! Flesh and blood can't stand everything! Mother did, but I ain't Mother. I must try to be like her, though; but it's dreadful hard with Father. How did Mother ever keep so quiet and always be so pleasant? She CHAPTER XXIX. THE CONFLICT.

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  used to pray a great deal. Well, I must pray."

  Yet if Nabby could have looked in at that moment and seen the misery in her father's soul her indignation would have been lost in pity; for Zeph in his heart knew that Nabby was a good, warm−hearted girl, honestly trying her very best to make her mother's place good. He knew it, and when he was alone and quiet he felt it so that tears came to his eyes; and yet this miserable, irritable demon that possessed him had led him to say these cruel words to her words that he cursed himself for saying, the hour after. But on this day the internal conflict was raging stronger than ever. The revival in the neighborhood was making itself felt and talked about, and the Friday evening prayer−meeting in the school−house was at hand.

  Zeph was debating with himself whether he would take the first step towards reconciliation with his church by going to it. His wife's dying words haunted him, and he thought he might at least go as far as this in the right direction; but the mere suggestion of the first step roused a perfect whirlwind of opposition within him.

  Certain moral conditions are alike in all minds, and this stern, gnarled, grizzled old New England farmer had times when he felt exactly as Milton has described a lost archangel as feeling:

  "Oh, then, at last relent! Is there no place Left for repentance? none for pardon left? None left but by submission, and that word Disdain forbids me and my dread of shame."

  It is curious that men are not generally ashamed of any form of anger, wrath or malice; but of the first step towards a nobler nature the confession of a wrong they are ashamed.

  Never had Zeph been more intolerable and unreasonable to his sons in the field−work than on this day.

  He was too thoroughly knit up in the habits of a Puritan education to use any form of profane language, but no man knew so well how to produce the startling effect of an oath without swearing; and this day he drove about the field in such a stormy manner that his sons, accustomed as they were to his manners, were alarmed.

  "Tell you what," said one of the boys to Abner, "the old man's awful cranky to−day. Reely seems as if he was a little bit sprung. I don't know but he's going crazy!"

  CHAPTER XXX. THE CRISIS.

  IT was a warm, soft June evening. The rosy tints of sunset were just merging into brown shadows over the landscape, the frogs peeped and gurgled in the marshes, and the whippoorwills were beginning to answer each other from the thick recesses of the trees, when the old ministerial chaise of Dr. Cushing might have been seen wending its way up the stony road to the North Poganuc school−house.

  The Doctor and his wife were talking confidentially, and Dolly, seated between them, entered with eager sympathy into all they were saying.

  They were very happy, with a simple, honest, earnest happiness, for they hoped that the great object of his life and labors was now about to be accomplished, that the power of a Divine Influence was descending to elevate and purify and lift the souls of his people to God.

  "My dear, I no longer doubt," he said. "The presence of the Lord is evidently with us. If only the church will fully awaken to their duty we may hope for a harvest now."

  "What a pity," answered Mrs. Cushing, "that that old standing quarrel of Zeph Higgins and the church cannot CHAPTER XXX. THE CRISIS.

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  be made up; his children are all deeply interested in religion, but he stands right in their way."

  "Why don't you talk to him, Papa?" asked Dolly.

  "Nobody can speak to him but God, my child; there's a man that nobody knows how to approach."

  Dolly reflected silently on this for some minutes, and then said,

  "Papa, do you suppose Christ loves him? Did he die for him?"

  "Yes, my child. Christ loved and died for all."

  "Do you think he believes that?" asked Dolly, earnestly.

  "I'm afraid he doesn't think much about it," answered her father.

  Here they came in sight of the little school−house. It seemed already crowded. Wagons were tied along the road, and people were standing around the doors and windows.

  The Doctor and Mrs. Cushing made their way through the crowd to the seat behind the little pine table. He saw in the throng not merely the ordinary attendance at prayer−meetings, but many of the careless and idle class who seldom were seen inside a church. There were the unusual faces of Abe Bowles and Liph Kingsley and Mark Merrill, who had left the seductions of Glazier's bar−room to come over and see whether there was really any revival at North Poganuc, and not perhaps without a secret internal suggestion that to be converted would be the very best thing for them temporally as well as spiritually. Liph's wife, a poor, discouraged, forsaken−looking woman, had persuaded him to come over with her, and sat there praying, as wives of drunken men often pray, for some help from above to save him, and her, and her children.

  Nothing could be rougher and more rustic than the old school−house, its walls hung with cobwebs; its rude slab benches and desks hacked by many a schoolboy's knife; the plain, ink−stained pine table before the minister, with its two tallow candles, whose dim rays scarcely gave light enough to read the hymns. There was nothing outward to express the real greatness of what was there in reality.

  There are surroundings that make us realize objectively the grandeur of the human soul, and the sublimity of the possibilities which Christianity opens to it. The dim cathedral, whose arches seem to ascend to the skies, from whose distant recesses pictured forms of saints and angels look down, whose far−reaching aisles thrill with chants solemn and triumphant, while clouds of incense arise at the holy altar, and white−robed priests and kneeling throngs prostrate themselves before the Invisible Majesty all this "pomp of dreadful sacrifice"

  enkindles the ideas of the infinite and the eternal, and makes us feel how great, ho
w glorious, how mysterious and awful is the destiny of man.

  But the New England Puritan had put the ocean between him and all such scenic presentations of the religious life. He had renounced every sensuous aid, and tasked himself to bring their souls to face the solemn questions of existence and destiny in their simple nakedness, without drapery or accessories; there were times in the life of an earnest minister when these truths were made so intensely vivid and effective as to overbear all outward disadvantages of surrounding; and to−night the old school−house, though rude and coarse as the manger of Bethlehem, like that seemed hallowed by the presence of a God.

  From the moment the Doctor entered he was conscious of a present Power. There was a hush, a stillness, and the words of his prayer seemed to go out into an atmosphere thrilling with emotion. and when he rose to speak he saw the countenances of his parishioners with that change upon them which comes from the waking CHAPTER XXX. THE CRISIS.

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  up of the soul to higher things. Hard, weather−beaten faces were enkindled and eager; every eye was fixed upon him; every word he spoke seemed to excite a responsive emotion.

  The Doctor read from the Old Testament the story of Achan. He told how the host of the Lord had been turned back because there was one in the camp who had secreted in his tent an accursed thing. He asked,

  "Can it be now, and here, among us who profess to be Christians, that we are secreting in our hearts some accursed thing that prevents the good Spirit of the Lord from working among us? Is it our pride? Is it our covetousness? Is it our hard feeling against a brother? Is there anything that we know to be wrong that we refuse to make right anything that we know belongs to God that we are withholding? If we Christians lived as high as we ought, if we lived up to our professions, would there be any sinners unconverted? Let us beware how we stand in the way. If the salt have lost its savor wherewith shall it be salted? Oh, my brethren, let us not hinder the work of God. I look around on this circle and I miss the face of a sister that was always here to help us with her prayers; now she is with the general assembly and church of the first−born, whose names are written in heaven, with the spirits of the just made perfect. But her soul will rejoice with the angels of God if she looks down and sees us all coming up to where we ought to be. God grant that her prayers may be fulfilled in us. Let us examine ourselves, brethren; let us cast out the stumbling−block, that the way of the Lord may be prepared."