The maid took him in, and Dr. Shotwell met him at the door of his study, a tall dour looking preacher with iron gray hair curling up defiantly on the top of his head. His low collar showed the strong sinews of his neck. The black tie had been furled with carelessness and melancholy. His face was gentle and forgiving, and yet the heavy eyebrows told that on principles he was uncompromising.
He talked to Chancey a long time about his poems and newspaper writing, then he took him down and outside where he produced a heavy key and unlocked the church door.
“Come in, my lad,” he said with a fierce tenderness. “I want you to bare your head in your own church. It’s been a long time since you were here and that’s a reproach to your Maker. Your family is responsible for this church in the first place. Your mother gave the land. Your grandmother lies, the first silent inhabitant of the churchyard. Your brother heads the council, a fine man and our next governor, everybody says. Your sisters and their families attend. It would make us all very happy if you could see the light and come, too. We have missed you, but whether you realize it or not, my lad, you have missed us too, and the peace and blessedness of giving up sin and the world.”
He said a great deal more than that. Chancey listened hungrily, wretchedly, bracing himself against any possible mention of Rosa’s name and yet all the while secretly thirsting for some word of charity for her that would lighten the leaden weight in his breast. But nothing rose to the good doctor’s lips save piety and justice and the uncompromising word of God. When Chancey left, all that persisted in his mind was the bitter thought that his sister, Sulie, could rest in peace in the sacred ground of Dr. Shotwell’s churchyard, but her half-sister Rosa must lie like an outcast in desolate and unhallowed ground.
Chancey never went back to his mother’s church, but sometimes he would slip into yellow-painted St. Martin’s on Willow Street. Not that Father Murtrie of St. Martin’s ever sent for Chancey, even to have a sermon printed in the paper. Tense and still the boy would sit there in the strange-smelling dimness hoping to find a moment of peace. St. Martin’s was not so large as his mother’s church, but no one had to unlock the door for him to enter. Nor on a weekday was it empty and deserted. The yellow flames of candles billowed in the dimness and the red of the sanctuary lamp glowed like a coal in the cold. Seldom did he sit long that others did not come to kneel at pews or altar or to make their round of the stations. The boy liked especially when he saw the white habit of St. Dominic nuns in the dark church and thought he could feel then how those white-clad forms must have looked coming through the dark forest to early Catholic settlers like the MacMahons, who, his mother said, had cried for joy at the sight.
When Father Murtrie saw Chancey, he stopped and spoke to him. He liked to tell about Father Guntz who had founded the mission. “I think your father and mother knew him,” he would say, though seldom would he go so far as concede that the early priest had been nursed by the boy’s mother once during a bad spell of woods fever. It was just that he didn’t like to admit the saintly priest’s debt to some one not of the faith, Chancey thought. Ever he gave Chancey the feeling of strength and secret martyrdom, of vast authority behind him and of the church’s closely guarded treasure of security and peace. If only, the boy thought, he could break into the papal fortress and take some of that peace for his own without giving his soul in exchange! Any word of cheer or reassurance for Rosa from Father Murtrie’s lips would have carried the weight of centuries with Chancey. The boy’s gaze hung wretchedly on the lips of the priest and on the signs of his office, hoping that he might recognize in his eyes the nature of his illness and cure it. Just a sentence of forgiveness for Rosa would do it. He must have known about her, Chancey thought, and his silence could only mean that the matter of lost souls was inexorably fixed and discussion futile forever.
His own mother and father were the last Chancey would have thought to go to for sympathy. Even should he die, all he would expect his mother to say was “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” But one Sunday when Sooth and Libby and their families had been invited home to dinner, an untoward thing happened. They were sitting around the table talking of Dr. Shotwell’s sermon. It must have been a powerful one, for Sooth kept referring to it uneasily until Chancey’s mother took a firm hand.
“Now that’s enough about hell,” she said. “I never was there, I don’t look to go there, and so long as we lead a decent life, none of us need to.”
“Not even Papa!” Sooth faltered.
A grave silence ran around the table.
“I think you have a better father than you have any idea of, Sooth,” her mother said calm as could be and with a still calmer look at Chancey’s father.
You could see that Dezia wasn’t satisfied.
“Well, I know one that’s not so far from us that’s burning in hell right now!” she came out with, which was as far as she dared say.
As her meaning fell over Chancey he pushed back his chair and hastily left the table. After perhaps a half hour there was a knock on his door.
“Papa wants to see you,” Massey called.
Chancey waited as long as he dared. He smelled his father’s cigar before he got there. His father had drawn on his long coat with the black satin collar and now stood in the hall waiting for him.
“Put on your hat and come along, Chancey,” he ordered. “I want to talk to you a little.”
Of late years this was the last thing Chancey wanted. There was no surer way to feel himself shrink to little or nothing than to walk out on the street beside his imposing father. The boy ever tried to avoid speaking to certain persons in this part of town, but his father greeted fearlessly everyone they passed. Sometimes his word was brief, sometimes cordial, sometimes severe, sometimes genial, but always with dignity and power.
Today he turned in at the silent courthouse and Chancey followed. The empty stairs and stale halls rang with their footsteps. Upstairs his father unlocked the door to his office. What was coming, Chancey wondered. His father did not take off his hat but seated himself in his immense red leather chair.
“I want to have a little talk with you, my boy.” He shook the ashes from his cigar to the bare floor as if to set an example to the boy not to take things too seriously. He went on not unkindly. “I’ve been watching you for some time, Chancey. You are too much like Sooth. You let things depress and upset you. Take for instance, the remark Dezia made at the table. Mark you this, my boy, there is nobody burning in hell right now. That is, nobody who has departed this life. The living may suffer, but the dead are free. Despite what your mother’s church tells her, she and I and you and all whom we know in Americus today will some day be only unthinking and unfeeling clods whirling on this dead planet. There was no heretofore to worry about, and there is no hereafter.”
He looked at the boy with beneficence, but instead of a feeling of relief, one of tragedy and horror sickened Chancey. His father went on.
“I want to give you a measure of counsel. Don’t give credence to everything you hear. There are a thousand conflicting religious beliefs. Reason should tell you that they can’t all be true. If you are wise, you won’t let yourself be deceived by any man-made theories of God. Formulate your own philosophy as you find it. Make that your religion. If your logic is sound, no one can hurt you, and you will never attempt the dangerous and impossible. I mean trying to right the mistakes of the dead. Justice must be shown during life. It cannot be administered to those who are gone. That’s why I brought you in here today. I want you to have a glimpse of my religion.”
Chancey stared. His father sat there noble and untouched. If he felt any shade of remorse or regret for the tragedy he had fathered and remained indifferent to all his life, he admirably concealed it. Rising, he led the boy through his private entrance to the court. The large white assembly room lay silent and peaceful. Golden October sunlight streamed through the long ecclesiastic-like windows and over the empty benches that might h
ave been pews.
“This is my church,” his father said with feeling. “And these are my altar and pulpit.” His hand indicated the platform and the raised white bar with the tall solemn bench, like pulpit chairs, behind it. “Here we dispense no superstitious punishment and reward for the dead, but practical justice to the living. Over there is our Amen corner, the honest seats of the jurors drawn from the people. This is our witness box and we admit no visions but the straight-forward testimony of competent men and women. The prisoner’s dock I call our judgment seat. Here the penitent or unrepentant sinner must have his innocence or guilt proved in the presence of living witnesses and a congregation drawn from the entire county. It’s very much of a religious service to me. Like my friends, the Catholics, I like to come to my church sometimes when no service is being held. I sit here in the peace and quiet and meditate on the justice meted out in this and similar institutions all over the world dedicated not to some unknown god but to man.”
He stopped. It was plain from his voice that he was greatly moved. But Chancey felt no tingle of contagion. Only a bleakness and numbness came over him as if he had been shown a vast world of desert and rock in which no spark or hope of life might flourish or be born. Was there no balm in Gilead then, the boy cried to himself, no rhyme or reason in living, no solace for the cheated and deprived dead!
Not until winter did Chancey dare to go back to Welsh Valley. Had it been summer or early fall, he felt, he could never have endured the warm sunshine, the trees still in leaf, the fields in their growth that he and Rosa had seen together. But now the warmth had vanished, the sun thinned, even the corn gone from the fields, the grass dead, the once green leaves withered and fallen. He took a satisfaction seeing it so, to pass under trees bare and frozen, to tramp on the lifeless leaves and grasses. If Rosa was dead, then it was right that so much of what she loved was dead too.
But the Griffins he found more alive than ever, their house laid about snugly with cornshocks. At his step they came to the door like bright-eyed woodchucks to the mouth of their burrow. But their cries of welcome at the sight of him soon turned to gravity as they took him to the warm kitchen. He had feared to explain why Rosa was not along but even here in Welsh Valley they knew all about it and, like true country folk, did not try to hide or gloss over the way she had died.
“Wasn’t it a pity?”
“Who would have reckoned that was the last time we’d see her.”
“You never know who’ll be next.”
“Why couldn’t it have been one of us old ones? Why did it have to be her?”
“What got into her? We always said we never knowed anybody happier than she was.”
“She wouldn’t have had to done it, would she?”
“No, because if it had anything wrong with her, she could have come out and lived with us.”
“Yes, we’d have took care of her—and everything that came along.”
At their honest declaration of friendship and bounty, something which for weeks had been frozen in Chancey melted like icicles in the sun.
“There was nothing wrong,” he told them with feeling.
“We didn’t think there was,” the middle one said quickly. “Not with her kind. But she could have stayed here just the same.”
“Yes, we have plenty of room.”
“It might as well have been her as Old Johnny. You know, he always comes with us for the winter. But he had lots of other friends he could go to.”
As they spoke, Old Johnny himself came out into the kitchen. Chancey looked at him with interest. So this was the man his mother used to talk so warmly about! Why he was just a simple old man, thin as a rail and dressed in bulging ragged clothes. His patched linsey shirt open at the neck showed a coarse coffee sack he must have slipped over his head for an undershirt. His waist and seat bulged as if with two or three pairs of pantaloons, one on top of the other. He shook off his shoes in the kitchen and padded around the floor in his bare feet.
“This here’s our friend we told you about,” the oldest Griffin said. “You know, his true love’s dead. She done away with herself.”
Old Johnny turned quickly at that and his eyes had a strange brightness in his witless face.
“She’s not dead!” he cried in his peculiar voice. “We’re the ones who sleep. She’s awake now to glory unknown and in a body unchanged. She’s in the new life. ‘Today thou shalt be with me in paradise.’ The son of David and the Lamb and Prince of Peace didn’t say, on resurrection morn. No, today she lives in Beulah Land. Hallelujah! Give glory to the Lamb! Oh, that man would praise the Lord for his wonderful goodness to the children of men!”
Chancey was too astonished to say anything. Old Johnny went on with fanatic zest.
“We were never born, my lad, and we never die. Before Abraham, I was. The sun sinks, but it shines on another land. Love never dies. If she loved you then, she loves you now. Emanuel saw the true vision. He laid eyes on those who had died and they were not in their graves, praise the Lord. Emanuel saw the blind see, the lame run, and the miserable happy. ‘And I will restore unto thee the year that the locust hath eaten.’ ‘Oh, death, where is thy victory! Oh, grave where is thy sting!’ Graves are empty, my lad. The dead are not there. Their joy is the happiness of the Lord. If they loved the good and beautiful here, they love it there. Call nobody damned, for the one the world calls damned may be the one the Lord loveth best. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ We’re all pilgrims on our way to heaven and there our true selves will be known. Praise the Lord.”
His unshaven face and dirty gray mane, his simple look and the wild gleam in his eye unsettled Chancey. The smell from his unwashed body repelled him. He tried to move away but the grotesquely clothed figure saw his advantage and pressed closer so that his breath and spittle nearly overwhelmed the boy. In the end Chancey left before he had intended, declining all invitations to stay.
“Take along some pearls of truth!” Old Johnny cried. His bare feet padded upstairs and when he returned he carried a book in his hands. Chancey thought he meant to give it to him but he only tore off some pages as if to start a fire and pressed them into his hands. “Read and be free. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!” When the boy got outside he found the pages weren’t from the Bible at all but from Heaven and Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg.
So that was Johnny Appleseed and his holy book, Chancey thought with distaste. And yet as he went down the lane and crossed the bridge to the road, he thought he felt a little better. At least now he could endure looking on the loveliness of Rosa’s beloved Welsh Creek, which he couldn’t when he came up. Certain sayings of the strange old man kept coming back to him, especially what he said about Rosa not being dead but living, that if she loved the good and beautiful here, she loved it there; and that the one the world called damned might be the one the Lord loved best.
Why, he wondered, did the philosophy of life that most eased and satisfied him have to come from a ragged, unwashed old beggar? Why was it, if such things were true, they couldn’t have been spoken by Dr. Shotwell or Father Murtrie or by his father or some other scholar of dignity and respect? Then he might have been able to receive and accept them. As it was, who could believe a fanatic voice crying in the wilderness, a lowly, unlearned wanderer who lived on the charity of the humble and the poor? By the time he reached the canal, a growing skepticism of the whole business had come over him, a sense of anger against his father and mother, against preachers and priests, philosophers and pioneers and all the rest who saw any good in the unjust and meaningless torment of life.
CHAPTER THIRTY
SAYWARD FEELS THE EARTH TURN
I propose to alter that old phrase, a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy. I am democratic and I am certainly not silent.
CHANCEY WHEELER
IT struck Sayward all of a heap the day Chancey told her he was leaving home. Oh, she couldn’t help noticing the bitter looks he had been giving them the last few months, but she hadn’
t looked for this.
“Can I ask, Chancey, where you’re going?” she said humbly and saw him set his lip.
“I’m of age now and intend to board with a family on Seventh Street,” he told her.
“You mean you’re staying right here in Americus!” was what came up in her mouth to cry out, but all she said was, “You got a home here, Chancey. You don’t need to pay board. We hoped you’d stay with us a long time yet.”
His thin face only hardened.
“I’ve let you support me too long now. It’s time I broke away and stood on my own feet and felt free to say the things I ought to say.”
“You can say anything you want to now, Chancey.”
“Not against you and Papa and what you stand for. Not when I sleep in your house and eat from your table.”
“What don’t you like about us that we stand for?” his mother asked him.
He threw her a look and met hers full on. She thought for a minute he was going to light into her for fair.
“Old time people would never understand,” was all he would tell her.
When Dezia came home and heard about it, she said Chancey was just plain spoiled and ungrateful, but Massey said it must be the new society Chancey had joined.
“You know that woman from Connecticut and Charley Hollenbeck are in it. They call it, I think, the American Peace Society. It’s all over the country. They’re cracked on peace and don’t believe in doing anything that might make friction. They say all this talk about freeing the slaves is criminal because it makes bad feeling between the North and the South. They claim Papa is a war maker because he’s such a strong abolitionist. And you’re the same, Mama, because you helped all those darkeys get away, especially the time you stood off the sheriff from Kentucky and gave my pink dress to that black wench in the cellar.”
Portius saw it a little differently.
“These societies are nothing to get agitated over,” he said magnanimously. “I’ve watched Chancey for a long time. And, I might say, some of the other young people, too. I see all this chiefly as a revolt of the young against the old. It has always been and, I suppose, always will be. The young—not all of them, but the weaker members—are easily bruised by the hardship of the world. They can’t endure it and think it shouldn’t be. Not having the experience of the old, they imagine they can form a society and do away with it. Perhaps,” he added gravely, “they can. We should let Chancey go and see what he and his kind can do. Perhaps they can move this dark old earth a little nearer to the sun. Certainly if they could wipe hardship from the face of the earth, they would be the greatest saviors of mankind.”
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