Chapter 14

Fergimme, O Gawd, if it makes Thou mad fer to be prayed to by a sneakin' boiglar, but help me t'roo dis one job and I'll go straight from now on, so help me. Don't let dis guy find me crackin' his safe, so's I won't have to kill 'im. Help me make a clean getaway and I'll toin over a noo leaf, I will. I'll send money to me mudder, and I'll go to choich reg'lar and I'll never do nuttin' crooked again. On'y dis one time, O Gawd.

* * * * *

God closed His eyes and smiled the sorrowful smile of the All-knowing, the All-pitying, the Unknown, the Unpitied, and He said to Him who sat at His side:

"They call these Prayers! They will wonder why I have not finished the tasks they set Me nor accepted the bribes they offered. And to-morrow they will rebuke Me as a faithless, indolent servant who has disobeyed!"

PAIN

I

"How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! When the heart under conviction of sin for the violation of one of God's laws writhes and cries aloud in repentance and remorse, then, ah, then, is true suffering. What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing! Noth--"

The clergyman's emphatic fist did not thump the Scriptures the second time. He checked it in air; for a woman stood up straight and stared at him straight. Her thin mouth seemed to twist with a sneer. He thought he read on her lips words not quite uttered. He read:

"You fool! You fool!"

Then Miss Straley sidled from the family pew to the aisle and marched up it and out of the church.

Doctor Crosson was shocked doubly. The woman's action was an outrage upon the holy composure of the Sabbath, and it would remind everybody that he was an old lover of Irene Straley's.

The neatly arranged congregational skulls were disordered now, some still tilted forward in sleep, some tilted back to see what the pastor would do, some craned round to observe the departer, some turned inward in whispering couples.

Such a thing had never happened before in all the parsoning of Doctor Crosson--the D.D. had been conferred on him by the small theological institute where he had imbibed enough dogmas in two years to last him a lifetime.

Some of his dogmas were so out of fashion that he felt them a trifle shabby even for village wear. He had laid aside the old red hell-fire dogma for a new one of hell-as-a-state-of-mind. He was expounding that doctrine this morning again. He had never heard any complaint of it. But his mind was so far from his memory that he hardly knew what he had just uttered. He wondered what he could have said to offend Miss Straley.

But he must not stand there gaping and wondering before his gaping and wondering congregation. He must push on to his _lastly's_. His mind retraced his words, and he repeated:

"What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing! As I said before--nothing!"

And then he understood why Irene Straley had walked out. The realization deranged him so that only the police-force every one has among his faculties coerced him into going on with his sermon.

It was a good sermon. It was his own, too; for at last he had paid the final instalment on the clergyman's library which contained a thousand sermons as aids to overworked, underinspired evangelists. He had built this discourse from well-seasoned timbers. He had used it in two pulpits where he had visited, and now he was giving it to his own flock. He knew it well enough to trust his oratorical machinery with its delivery, while the rest of his mind meditated other things.

Often, while preaching, a portion of his brain would be watching the effect on his congregation, another watching the clock, another thinking of dinner, another musing over the scandals he knew in the lives of the parishioners.

But now all his by-thoughts were scattered at the abrupt deed of Irene Straley. She was the traffic of his other brains now, while his lips went on enouncing the phrases of his discourse and his fists thudded the Bible for emphasis. He was remembering his boyhood and his infatuation for Irene Straley. That was before he was sure of his call to the ministry. If he had married her, he might not have heard the call.

Doctor Crosson hoped that he was not regretting that sacrament! Sweat came out on his brow as he understood the blasphemy of noting (even here on the rostrum with his mouth pouring forth sacred eloquence) that Irene Straley as she marched out of the church was still slender and flexile, virginal. Doctor Crosson mopped his brow at the atrocity of his thoughts this morning. The springtime air was to blame. The windows were open for the first time. The breeze that lolled through the church had no right there. It was irreverent and frivolous. It was amused at the people. It rippled with laughter at the preacher's heavy effort to start a jealousy between the pangs of the flesh and the pangs of the soul.

It brought into church a savor of green rushes growing in the warm, wet thickets where Doctor Crosson--once Eddie Crosson--had loved to go hunting squirrels and rabbits, and wild duck in season. Those were years of depravity, but they were entrancing in memory. He felt a Satanic whisper: "Order these old fogies out into the fields and let them worship there. It is May, you fool!"

"You fool!" That was what Irene Straley had seemed to whisper. Only, the breeze made a soft, sweet coo of the word that had been so bitter on her lips.

Across the square of a window near the pulpit a venerable locust-tree brandished a bough dripping with blossoms. Countless little censers of white spice swung frankincense and myrrh for pagan nostrils.

There was a beckoning in the locust bough, and in the air an incantation that made a folly of sermons and souls and old maids' resentments and gossips' queries. The preacher fought on, another Saint Anthony in a cloud of witches.

He could hear himself intoning the long sermon with the familiar pulpiteering rhythms and the final upsnap of the last syllable of each sentence. He could see that the congregation was already drowsily forgetful of Irene Straley's absence. But, to save his soul, he could not keep his mind from following her out into the leafy streets and on into the past where she had been the prize he and young Drury Boldin had contended for--a past in which he had never dreamed that his future was a pulpit in his home town.

He was the manlier of the two, for Drury was a delicate boy, too sensitive for the approval of his Spartan fellows. They made fun of his gentleness. He hated to wreathe a fishing-worm on a hook! He loathed to wrench a hook from a fish's gullet! The nearest he had ever come to fighting was in defense of a thousand-legged worm that one of the boys had stuck a pin through, to watch it writhe and bite itself behind the pin.

Irene Straley was a sentimental girl. That was right in a girl, but silly in a boy.

Once when Eddie Crosson stubbed his toe and it swelled up to great importance, Irene Straley wept when she saw it, while Drury Boldin turned pale and sat down hard. Once when Drury cut his thumb with a penknife he fainted at the sight of his own blood!

Eddie Crosson was a real boy. He smoked cubeb cigarettes with an almost unprecedented precocity. He nearly learned to chew tobacco. He could snap a sparrow off a telegraph-wire with a nigger-shooter almost infallibly. He had the first air-gun in town and a shot-gun at fifteen. He thought that he was manlier than Drury because he was wiser and stronger. It never occurred to him that Drury might suffer more because he was more finely built, that his nerves were harp-strings while Crosson's were fence-wire.

So Crosson called Drury a milksop because he would not go hunting. He called himself one of the sons of Nimrod.

For a time he gained prestige with Irene Straley, especially as he gave her bright feathers now and then, an oriole's gilded mourning, or a tanager's scarlet vesture.

One day Drury Boldin was at her porch when Ed came in from across the river with a brace of duck.

"You can have these for your dinner to-morrow, Reny," he said, as he laid the limp, silky bodies on the porch floor.

Their bills and feet were grotesque, but there was something about their throats, stretched out in waning iridescence, that asked for regret.

"Oh, much obliged!" Irene cried. "That's awful nice of you, Eddie. Duck cook awful good."

And then her enthusiasm ebbed, for she caught the look of Drury Boldin as he bent down and stroked the glossy mantle of the birds, not with zest for their flavor, nor envy of the skill that had fetched them from the sky, but with sorrow for their ended careers, for the miracle gone out of their wings, and the strange fact that they had once quawked and chirruped in the high air and on hidden waters--and would never fly or swim again. "I wonder if they had souls," he mumbled.

Eddie Crosson winked at Irene. There was no use getting mad at Drury. Eddie only laughed:

"'Course not, you darn galoot!"

"How do you know?" Drury asked.

"Anybody knows that much," was Crosson's sufficient answer, and Drury changed to another topic. He asked:

"Did it hurt 'em much to die?"

"'Course not," Eddie answered, promptly. "Not the way I got 'em. They just stopped sailin' and dropped. I lost one, though. He was goin' like sixty when I drew bead on him. Light wasn't any too good and I just nipped one wing. You ought to seen him turning somersets, Reny. He lit in a swampy spot, though, and I couldn't find him. I hunted for an hour or more, but I couldn't find him and it was growin' dark, so I come home."

Drury spoke up quickly: "You didn't kill him?"

"I don't guess so. He was workin' mighty hard when he flopped."

"Oh, that's terrible!" Drury groaned. "He must be layin' out there now somewheres--sufferin'. Oh, that's terrible!"

"Aw, what's it your business?" was Crosson's gruff comment. But there was uneasiness in his tone, for Drury had set Irene to wringing her hands nervously, and Crosson felt a trifle uncomfortable himself. Twilight always made him susceptible to emotions that daylight blinded him to, as to the stars. He remembered that boyhood emotion now in his pulpit, and his shoulder-blades twitched; an icy finger seemed to have written something on them. He was casting up his eyes and his hands in a familiar gesture and quoting a familiar text:

"'Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.'"

From the roof of the church he seemed to see that wounded wild duck falling, turning in air, striking at the air frantically with his good wing and feebly with the one that bled. Down he fell, struggling somewhere among the pews.

A fantastic notion drifted into the preacher's mind--that Satan had shot up a bullet from hell and it had lodged among the feathers of Jehovah the protector, and He was falling and lost among that congregation in which so often the preacher had failed to find God.

Doctor Crosson shook his head violently to fling away such madnesses, and he propounded his next "furthermore" with added energy. But he could not shake off the torment in the recollection of Drury Boldin's nagging interest in that wild duck.

II

Drury insisted on knowing where the wild duck fell, and Crosson told him that it was "near where the crick emptied into the sluice, where the cat-tails grew extra high."

He went on home to his supper, but the thought of the suffering bird had seized his mind; it flopped and twisted at the roots of his thoughts.

A few days later Drury met him and asked him again where the duck had fallen.

"I can't find it where you said," he said.

"You ain't been lookin' for it, have you?"

"Yes, for days."

"What'd you do if you found it?" Crosson asked.

"Kill it," Drury answered. It was a most unexpectable phrase from him.

"That sounds funny, comin' from you," Crosson snickered. Then he spoke gruffly to conceal his own misgivings. "Aw, it's dead long ago."

"I'd feel better if I was sure," said Drury.

Crosson called him a natural-born idiot, but the next day Crosson himself was across the river, dragged by a queer mood. He took his bearings from the spot where he had fired his shot-gun and then made toward the place where the duck fell.

He stumbled about in slime and snarl for an hour in vain. Suddenly he was startled by the sound of something floundering through the reeds. He was afraid that it might be a wild animal, a traditional bear or a big dog. But it was Drury Boldin. And Irene Straley was with him.

They were covered with mud. Crosson was jealous and suspicious and indignant. They told him that they were looking for the hurt bird. He was furious. He advised them to go along about their own business. It was his bird.

"Who gave it to you?" Drury answered, with a battling look in his soft eyes.

"The Lord and my shot-gun."

"What right you got to go shootin' wild birds, anyway?" Drury demanded.

Crosson was even then devoted to the Bible for its majestic music, if for nothing else. He quoted the phrase about the dominion over the fowls of the air given to man for his use.

Drury would not venture to contradict the Scriptures, and so he turned away silenced. But he continued his search. And Irene followed him.

In sullen humor Crosson also searched, till he heard Drury cry out; then he ran to see what he had found.

Irene and Drury were shrinking back from something that even the son of Nimrod regarded with disquiet. The duck, one wing caked and festered, and busy with ants and adrone with flies, was still alive after all those many days.

Its flat bill was opening and shutting in hideous awkwardness, its hunger-emaciated frame rising and falling with a kind of lurching breath, and the film over its eyes drawing together and rolling back miserably.

At the sight of the three visitors to its death-chamber it made a hopeless effort to lift itself again to the air of its security. It could not even lift its head.

Drury fell to one knee before it, and a swarm of flies zooned angrily away. He put out his hand, but he was afraid to touch, and he only added panic to the bird's wretchedness.

He rose and backed away. The three stood off and stared. Crosson felt the guilt of Cain, but when Irene moaned, "What you goin' to do?" he shook his head. He could not finish his task.

It was Drury Boldin, weak-kneed and putty-faced, who went hunting now. He had to look far before he found a heavy rock. He lugged it back and said, "Go on away, Reny."

She hurried to a distance, and even Crosson turned his head aside.

On the way home they were all three tired and sick, and Drury had to stop every now and then to sit down and get strength into his knees.

But there was a sense of grim relief that helped them all, and the bird, once safely dead, was rapidly forgotten. After that Crosson seemed to lose his place in Irene's heart, and Drury won all that Crosson lost, and more. Before long it was understood that Drury and Irene had agreed to get married as soon as he could earn enough to keep them. All four parents opposed the match; Irene's because Drury was "no 'count," and Drury's for much the same reason.

Old Boldin allowed that Irene would be added to his family, for meals and lodgin', if she married his son; and old Straley guessed that it would be the other way round, and the Boldin boy would come over to his house to live.

Also, Drury could get no work in Carthage. Eventually he went to Chicago to try his luck there. Crosson seized the chance to try to get back to Irene. One Sunday he took his shot-gun out in the wilderness and brought down a duck whose throat had so rich a glimmer that he believed it would delight Irene. He took it to her.

She was out in her garden, and she looked at his gift with eyes so hurt by the pity of the bird's drooping neck that they were blind to its beauty.

While Crosson stood in sheepish dismay, recognizing that Drury was present still in his absence, the minister appeared at his elbow. It was not the wrecked career of the fowl that shocked the pastor, but the broken Sabbath.

"It seems to me, Eddie," he said, "that it is high time you were beginning to take life seriously. Come to church to-night and make up for your ungodliness."

Crosson consented. It was a good way of making his escape from Irene's haunted eyes.

The service that night had little influence on his heart, but a month later a revivalist came into Carthage with a great fanfare of attack on the hosts of Lucifer. This man was an emotionalist of irresistible fire. He reasoned less than he sang. His voice was as thrilling as a trombone, and his words did not matter. It was his tone that made the heart resound like a smitten bell.

The revivalist struck unsuspected chords of emotion in Eddie Crosson and made him weep! But he wept tears of a different sort from the waters of grief. His unusual tears were a tribute to eloquence. Sonorous words and noble thoughts thrilled Eddie Crosson then as ever after.

He had loved to speak pieces at school. Whether it were Spartacus exhorting his brawny slaves to revolt, or Daniel Webster upholding the Union now and forever, one and inseparable, he had felt an exaltation, an exultation that enlarged him to the clouds. He loved the phrase more than the meaning. What was well worded was well reasoned.

His passion for elocution had inclined him at first to be a lawyer, but when he visited the county courthouse the attorneys he listened to had such dull themes to expound that he felt no call to the law. What glory was there in pleading for the honor of an old darky chicken-thief when everybody knew at once that he was guilty of stealing the chickens in question, or would have been if he had known of their accessibility? What rapture was there in insisting that a case in an Alabama court eight years before furnished an exact precedent in the matter of a mechanic's lien in Carthage?

So Crosson chilled toward the legal profession. His father urged him to come into the Crosson hardware emporium, but Eddie hated the silent trades. The revivalist decided him, and he began to make his heart ready for the clerical life. His father opposed him heathenishly and would not pay for his seminary course.

For several months Crosson waited about, becalmed in the doldrums. There was little to interest him in town except a helpless espionage on Irene's loyalty to Drury Boldin. Her troth defied both time and space. She went every day to the post-office to mail a heavy letter and to receive the heavy letter she was sure to find there.

She became a sort of tender joke at the post-office, and on the street as well, for she always read her daily letter on the way home. She would be so absorbed in the petty chronicles of Drury's life that she would stroll into people and bump into trees, or fetch up short against a fence. She sprained her ankle once walking off the walk. And once she marched plump into the parson's horrified bosom.

Crosson often stood in ambush so that she would run into him. She was very soft and delicate, and she usually had flowers pinned at her breast.

Crosson would grin as she stumbled against him; then the lovelorn girl would stare up at him through the haze of the distance her letter had carried her to, and stammer excuses and fall back and blush, and glide round him on her way. Crosson would laugh aloud, bravely, but afterward he would turn and stare at her solemnly enough when she resumed her letter and strolled on in the rosy cloud of her communion with her far-off "fellow."

One day Crosson had to run after her, because when she thought she was turning into her own yard her absent mind led her to unlatch the gate to a pasture where a muley cow with a scandalous temper was waiting for her with swaying head.

Irene laughed at her escape, with an unusual mirth for her. She explained it by seizing Crosson's sleeve and exclaiming:

"Oh, Eddie, such good news from Drury you never heard! He's got a position with a jewelry-store, the biggest in Chicago. And they put him in the designing department at ten dollars a week, and they say he's got a future. Isn't it simply glorious?"

She held Crosson while she read the young man's hallelujahs. They sounded to Crosson like a funeral address.

Irene's mother was even prouder of Drury's success than the daughter was. She bragged now of the wedding she had dreaded before. Finally Irene proclaimed the glorious truth that Drury's salary had been boosted again and they would wait no longer for wealth. He was awful busy, and so he'd just run down for a couple of days and marry her and run back with her to Chicago and jewelry. This arrangement ended Irene's mother's dreams of a fine wedding and relieved the townspeople of the expense of wedding-presents.

The sudden announcement of the wedding shocked Crosson. He endured a jealousy whose intensity surprised him in retrospect. He endured a good deal of humor, too, from village cut-ups, who teased him because his best girl was marrying the other fellow.

Crosson felt a need of solitude and a fierce desire to kill something. He got his abandoned gun and went hunting to wear out his wrath. He wore himself out, at least. He shot savagely at all sorts of life. He followed one flitting, sarcastic blue-jay with a voice like a village cut-up, all the way home without getting near enough to shoot.

He came down the long hill with the sunset, bragging to himself that he was reconciled to Irene's marriage with anybody she'd a mind to.

He could see her from a distance, sitting on the porch alone. She was all dressed up and rocking impatiently. Evidently the train was late again, as always. From where he was, Crosson could see the track winding around the hills like a little metal brook. The smoke of the engine was not yet pluming along the horizon. The train could not arrive for some minutes yet.

To prove his freedom from rancor and his emancipation from love, but really because he could not resist the chance to have a last word with Irene, he went across lots to her father's back yard and came round to the porch. He forgot to draw the shells from his gun.

In the sunset, with his weapon a-shoulder, he must have looked a bit wild, for Irene jumped when he spoke to her. He sought an excuse for his visit and put at her feet the game he had bagged--a squirrel, a rabbit, and a few birds--the last he ever shot.

The moment the dead things were there he regretted the impulse. He was reminded of his previous quarry and its ill success. Irene was reminded, too, for she thanked him timidly and asked if he had left any wounded birds in the field. He laughed "No" with a poor grace.

She said: "I'd better get these out of sight before Drury comes. He doesn't like to see such things."

She lifted them distastefully and went into the house. She came out almost at once, for she heard a train. But it was not the passenger swooping south; it was the freight trudging north. There was only a single track then, and no block system of signals.

Irene no sooner recognized the lumbering, jostling drove of cattle-cars and flats going by than she gasped:

"That freight ought not to be on that track--now!"

She was frozen with dread. Crosson understood, too. Then from the distance came the whistle of the express, the long hurrah of its approach to the station. The freight engineer answered it with short, sharp blasts of his whistle. He kept jabbing the air with its noise.

There was the grind of the brakes on the wheels. The cars tried to stop, like a mob, but the rear cars bunted the front cars forward irresistibly. The cattle aboard lowed and bellowed. The brakemen, quaint silhouettes against the red sky, ran along the tops of the box-cars, twisting the brake-wheels.