"My G.o.d, may such an awful sight Awakening be to me; Oh, that by early grace, I might For death prepared be!"
She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.
Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.
Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how G.o.d ordered the congregation to stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the Lord "made a breach" upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark to save it when the oxen stumbled. The little boys were much impressed by this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to Uzza to have "a breach" made upon him. The unwisdom of touching an Ark of the Covenant, under any circ.u.mstances, could not have been more clearly brought home to them. They liked also to hear of the instruments played upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps, psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of fir-wood.
Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession "girded with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed, it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David"s wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him "leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of David"s years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."
So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy, p.r.o.ne to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys--a place where they had gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not see G.o.d there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed gra.s.s, nor in the center-table with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from the ceiling--yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb--an all-pervading thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or spirit he conceived to be G.o.d--the more as it came to him in a flash of divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark of the Covenant.
Thus the Front Room became what "Heaven" meant to him when he heard the word--a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart; a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously pleasant h.e.l.l, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games and sweets and joyous idleness.
The word "G.o.d," then, became at this time a word of evil import to the littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie"s, with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who, clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely, like very princes.
To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, "Oh, it must be awful, _awful_ wicked--because I want to do it very, very much!--not like, going to church."
Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation--particularly when Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the care-free Sabbath loafers.
Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come to the Feet before he died. "But I believe he _will_ come to the Feet,"
she added, "even if it"s on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat standing on his brow. It would make a lovely tract--him coming to the Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything."
The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn"t come to the Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn"t, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had pa.s.sed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it--and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room--particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because G.o.d seemed to take more notice than on week-days.
During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State. It began thus:
"New Hampshire is a pretty place, I did go there to see The maple-sugar being boiled By one that"s dear to me."
Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza--
"I loved to hear the banjo hum, It sounds so very calmly; If a happy home you wish to find, Visit the Thompson family."
After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice--
"At lovers" promises fates grow merrilee; Some are made on land, Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave Streams of tears."
He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.
Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:
"For her dear sake whom he did pity, He took her back to Jersey City."
But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven. And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands. There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this G.o.d that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white pa.s.sion each Sabbath.
There was being good--which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like Milo Barrus and spell G.o.d with a little g; and there was Coming to the Feet--not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there was the matter of Blood. There were hymns, for example, that left him confused. The "fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel"s veins"
sounded interesting. Vividly he saw the "sinners plunged beneath that flood" losing all their guilty stains. It was entirely reasonable, and with an a.s.sumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet. But who was Immanuel?
And where was this excellent fountain?
Then there was being "washed in the blood of the lamb," which was considerably simpler--except for the matter of its making one "whiter than snow." He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only poetry-writing which doesn"t mean everything it says. He meant to try this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as a desirable experiment.
But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more important and effectual--if it were only practicable. As the sinners came out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running with the Magnetic Ointment--even redder!
The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed. And if its inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces; where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of petunias and fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.
Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.
CHAPTER V
THE LIFE OF CRIME IS APPRAISED AND CHOSEN
It came to seem expedient to Bernal, however, in the first spring of his new life, to make a final choice between early death and a life, of sin.
Matters came to press upon him, and since virtue was useful only to get one into Heaven, it was not worth the effort unless one meant to die at once. This was an alternative not without its lures, despite the warnings preached all about him. It would surely be interesting to die, if one had come properly to the Feet. Even coming to but one of the Feet, as he had, might make it still more interesting. Perhaps he would not, for this reason, be always shut up in Heaven. In his secret heart was a lively desire to see just what they did to Milo Barrus, if he _should_ continue to spell G.o.d with a little g on his very death-bed--that is, if he could see it without disadvantage to himself: But then, you could save that up, because you _must_ die sometime, like Xerxes the Great; and meantime, there was the life of evil now opening wide to the vision with all enticing refreshments.
First, it meant no school. He had ceased to picture relief in this matter by the school-house burning some morning, preferably a Monday morning, one second after school had taken in. For a month he had daily dramatised to himself the building"s swift destruction amid the kind and merry flames. But Allan, to whom he had one day hinted the possibility of this gracious occurrence, had reminded him brutally that they would probably have school in the Methodist church until a new school-house could be built. For Allan loved his school and his teacher.
But a life of evil promised other joys besides this negative one of no school. In his latest Sunday-school book, Ralph Overton, the good boy, not only attended school slavishly, so that at thirteen he "could write a good business hand"; but he practised those little tricks of picking up every pin, always untying the string instead of cutting it, keeping his shoes neatly polished and his hands clean, which were, in a simpler day, held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic. Besides this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his widowed mother after school; and every Sat.u.r.day afternoon he went, sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady.
This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr.
Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors. Such was the barren tale of Virtue"s gain. But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this book was one Budd Jackson, who led a life of voluptuous sloth, except at times when the evil one moved him to activity. At these bad moments he might go bobbing for catfish on a Sabbath, or purloin fruit from the orchard of Farmer Haskins (who would gladly have given some to him if he had but asked for it civilly, so the book said); or he might bully smaller boys whom he met on their way to school, taking their sailor hats away from them, or jeering coa.r.s.ely at their neatly brushed garments. When Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly to his vicious nature. He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor and played a game called pin-pool with a "flashy stranger" at the tavern; hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.
This touch about the circus, well-intended, to be sure, was yet fatal to all good the tale might have done the little boy. Clytie, who read most of the story to him, declared Budd Jackson to be "a regular mean one." But in his heart Bernal, thinking all at once of the circus, sickened unutterably of Virtue. To drive eight spirited white horses, seated high on one of those gay closed wagons--those that went through the street with that delicious hollow rumble--hearing perchance the velvet tread, or the clawing and snarling of some pent ferocity--a leopard, a lion, what not; to hear each day that m.u.f.fled, flattened beating of a ba.s.s drum and cymbals far within the big tent, quick and still more quickly, denoting to the experienced ear that pink and spangled Beauty danced on the big white horse at a deathless gallop; to know that one might freely enter that tented elysium--if it were possible he would run off with a circus though it meant that he had the morals of a serpent!
Now, eastward from the big house lay the village and its churches: thither was tame virtue. But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance. Still more remotely far, at the hill"s rim, was a blur of woods beyond which the sun went down each night. This, in the little boy"s mind, was the highway to the glad free Life of Evil. Many days he looked to that western wood when the sky was a gush of colour behind its furred edge, perceiving all manner of allurements to beckon him, hearing them plead, feeling them tug. Daily his spirit quickened within him to their solicitations, leaping out and beyond him in some magic way to bring back veritable meanings and values of the future.
Then a day came when the desire to be off was no longer resistible. There was a month of school yet; an especially bitter thought, for had he not lately been out of school a week with mumps; and during that very week had not the teacher"s father died, so that he was cheated out of the resulting three-days" vacation, other children being free while he lay on a bed of pain--if you tasted pickles or any sour thing? Not only was it useless to try to learn to write "a good business hand," like Ralph Overton--he took the phrase to mean one of those pictured hands that were always pointing to things in the newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts--but there was the circus and other evil things--and he was getting on in years.
It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. To-morrow would be too late. He knew he would not be allowed to start on the Sabbath, even in a career that was to be all wickedness. In the grape-arbour he ma.s.sed certain articles necessary for the expedition: a very small strip of carpet on which he meant to sleep; a copy of "_Golden Days_," with an article giving elaborate instructions for camping in the wilderness. He was compelled to disregard all of them, but there was comfort and sustenance in the article itself.
Then there was the gun that came at Christmas. It shot a cork as far as the string would let it go, with a fairly satisfying report (he would have that string off, once he was in the woods!). Also there were three gla.s.s alleys, two agate taws and thirty-eight commies. And to hold his outfit there was a rather sizable box which he with his own hands had papered inside and out from a remnant of gorgeously flowered wall-paper.
When all was ready he went in to break the news to Clytie. She, busy with her baking, heard him declare:
"Now--I"m going to leave this place!" with the look of one who will not be coaxed nor in any manner dissuaded. He thought she took it rather coolly, though Allan ran, as promptly as he could have wished, to tell his grandfather.
"I"m going to be a regular mean one--_worse"n_ Budd Jackson!" he continued to Clytie. He was glad to see that this brought her to her senses.
"Will you stay if I give you--an orange?"
"No, _sir;_--you"ll never set eyes on _me_ again!"
"Oh, now!--two oranges?"
"I can"t--I _got_ to go!" in a voice tense with effort.
"All right! Then I"ll give them to Allan."