Part 9

|He bore the name of Adam Wick. There seemed to be something primitive in his temperament to fit it. By primitive we mean of such times as may have furnished single-eyed passions that did not argue. He was a small, thin, stooping man, with a sharp nose and red-lidded eyes. Sarah Wick, his daughter, was a dry-faced woman of thirty, and lived with him.

His house stood on a hill looking over the village of Preston Plains, which lay in a flat valley. In the middle of the village the church-steeple shot up tapering and tall.

It was a bickering community. The church was a centre of interest. The outlines of the building were clean and shapely, but in detail it stood for a variety of opinions. A raised tracery ran along the pseudo-classic frieze of its front, representing a rope of flowers with little cupids holding up the loops. They may have been cherubs. The community had quarrelled about them long ago when the church was building, but that subject had given way to other subjects.

The choir gallery bulged over the rear seats, as if to dispute the relative importance of the pulpit. That was nothing. But it needed bracing. The committee decided against a single pillar, and erected two, one of them in the middle of Adam Wick's pew.

Adam looked at things simply. It seemed to his simplicity that the community had conspired to do him injustice. The spirit of nonconformity stirred within him. He went to the minister.

“Andrew Hill, nor any other man, nor committeeman's got no rights in my pew.”

The minister was dignified.

“The pew, Mr. Wick, belongs to the church.”

“No such thing! I sat twenty-four years in that pew.”

“But that, though very creditable--”

“No such thing! I'll have no post in my pew, for Andrew Hill nor no minister neither.”

“Mr. Wick--”

“You take that post out o' my pew.”

He stumped out of the minister's green-latticed doorway and down the gravel path. His eyes on either side of his sharp nose were like those of an angry hawk, and his stooping shoulders, seen from behind, resembled the huddled back of the hawk, caged and sullen.

The minister watched him. Properly speaking, a primitive nature is an unlimited monarchy where ego is king, but the minister's reflections did not run in these terms. He did not even go so far as to wonder whether such primitive natures did not render the current theory of a church inaccurate. He went so far as to wonder what Adam Wick would do.

One dark, windy night, near midnight, Adam Wick climbed in at the vestibule window of the church, and chopped the pillar in two with an axe. The wind wailed in the belfry over his head. The blinds strained, as if hands were plucking at them from without. The sound of his blows echoed in the cold, empty building, as if some personal devil were enjoying the sacrilege. Adam was a simple-minded man; he realized that he was having a good time himself.

It was three days before the church was opened. What may have been Adam's primitive thoughts, moving secretively among his townsmen? Then a sudden rumor ran, a cry went up, of horror, of accusation, of the lust of strife. Before the accusation Adam did not hesitate to make his defiance perfect. The primitive mind was not in doubt. With a blink of his red eyelids, he answered:

“You tell Andrew Hill, don't you put another post in my pew.”

A meeting was held; a majority voted enthusiastically to strike his name from the rolls for unchristian behavior and to replace the pillar. A minority declared him a wronged man. That was natural enough in Preston Plains. But Adam Wick's actions at this point were thought original and effective by every one.

He sat silently through the proceedings in the pew with the hacked pillar, his shoulders hunched, his sharp eyes restless.

“Mr. Wick,” said the minister, sternly, “have you anything to say?”

Adam rose.

“I put fifty-six dollars into this meetin'-house. Any man deny that?”

No man denied it.

“Humph!” said Adam.

He took the hymn-book from the rack, lifted the green cushion from the seat, threw it over his shoulder, and walked out.

No man spoke against it.

“There's no further business before this meeting,” said Chairman Hill.

It was a Sunday in August and nearly noon. From the side porch of Adam Wick's house on the hill the clustered foliage of the village below was the centre of the landscape. The steeple and ridgepole of the church rose out of the centre of the foliage.

The landscape could not be fancied without the steeple. The dumb materials of the earth, as well as the men who walk upon it, acquire habits. You could read on the flat face of the valley that it had grown accustomed to Preston Plains steeple.

On the side porch stood a long, high-backed bench. It was a close imitation of the pews in the church below among the foliage, with the long green cushion on the seat and a chair facing it with a hymn-book on it. Adam sat motionless on the bench. His red-lidded eyes were fixed intently on the steeple.

A hen with a brood of downy yellow chickens pecked about the path. A turkey strutted up and down. The air was sultry, oppressive. A low murmur of thunder mingled with the sleepy noises of creaking crickets and clucking hen.

Adam Wick's bench and rule of Sabbath observance had been common talk in Preston Plains. But it had grown too familiar, for subjects of dispute ever gave way there to other subjects. Some one said it was pathetic. The minority thought it a happy instance to throw in the face of the bigoted majority, that they had driven from the church a man of religious feeling. The minister had consulted Andrew Hill, that thick-set man with the dry mouth and gray chin-beard.

“Not take out that pillar!” said Andrew Hill. “Ah,” said the minister, “I'm afraid that wouldn't do. It would seem like--”

“I wouldn't move that pillar if the whole town was sidin' with him.”

“Oh, now--”

“Not while I'm alive. Adam Wick, he's obstinate.” Mr. Hill shut his mouth grimly.

“Religious! Humph! Maybe he is.”

The minister moved away. They were a stiff-necked people, but after all he felt himself to be one of them. It was his own race. He knew how Andrew Hill felt, as if something somewhere within him were suddenly clamped down and riveted. He understood Adam too, in his private pew on the side porch, the hymn-book on the chair, his eyes on Preston Plains steeple, fixed and glittering. He thought, “We don't claim to be altogether lovely.”

Adam was in his own eyes without question a just man suffering injustice. His fathers in their Genesis and Exodus had so suffered, faced stocks, pillory, the frowning edge of the wilderness, and possessed their souls with the same grim congratulation. No generation ever saw visions and sweat blood, and left a moderate-minded posterity. Such martyrs were not surer that the God of Justice stood beside them than Adam was sure of the injustice of that pillar in that pew, nor more resolved that neither death nor hell should prevail against the faithfulness of their protest.

And the turkey strutted in the yard, the chickens hurried and peeped, the thunder muttered at intervals as if the earth were breathing heavily in its hot sleep.

The church-bell rang for the end of the morning service. It floated up from the distance, sweet and plaintive.

Adam rose and carried the cushion, chair, and hymn-book into the house.

The storm was rising, darkening. It crouched on the hills. It seemed to gather its garments and gird its loins, to breathe heavily with crowded hate, to strike with daggers of lightning right and left.

Adam came out again and sat on the bench. The service being over, it was no longer a pew.

Carriages, one after another, drove out of the foliage below, and along the five roads that ran out of Preston Plains between zigzag fences and low stone walls. They were hurrying, but from that distance they seemed to crawl.

The Wick carriage came up the hill and through the gate--creaking wheels, a shambling white horse, Sarah jerking the reins with monotonous persistence. She stepped down and dusted off her cotton gloves. Adam walked out to take the horse.

“Wherefore do ye harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts?”

Adam seemed puzzled, blinked his eyes, seemed to study carefully the contents of his own mind.

“I do' know,” he said at last.

“First Samuel, seven, six,” said Sarah.

Adam led the horse away despondently. Halfway to the bam he stopped and called out:

“Did he preach at me?”

“No.”

The minister had chosen a text that Adam did not know, and made no reference to him, although the text was a likely one. Adam felt both slights in a dim way, and resented them. He came back to the house and sat in the front room before the window.

The valley was covered with a thick veil of gray rain. The black cloud above it cracked every moment with sudden explosions, the echoes of them tumbling clumsily among the hills. Preston Plains steeple faded away and the foliage below it became a dim blot. A few drops struck the window-pane at Adam's face, then a rush and tumult of rain. Dimmer still the valley, but the lightning jabbed down into it incessantly, unseen batteries playing attack and defence over Preston Plains steeple.

It was a swift, sudden storm, come and gone like a burst of passion. The imminent crack and crash of the thunder ceased, and only rumblings were heard, mere memories, echoes, or as if the broken fragments of the sky were rolling to and fro in some vast sea-wash. The valley and the village trees came slowly into view.

“Dinner's ready,” said Sarah, in the next room.

She had a strident voice, and said dinner was ready as if she expected Adam to dispute it. There was no answer from the window.

“Pa! Aren't you comin'?”

No answer. Sarah came to the door.

“Pa!”

His face was close to the rain-washed window-pane. Something rattled in his throat. It seemed like a suppressed chuckle. He rested his chin on his hand and clawed it with bony fingers.

“Pa!”

He turned on her sternly.

“You needn't be shoutin' on the Lord's day. Meetin'-house steeple's a-fire.”

From Adam Wick's nothing could be seen but the slow column of smoke rising and curling around the slender steeple. But under the foliage Preston Plains was in tumult.

By night the church was saved, but the belfry was a blackened ruin within. The bell had fallen, through floor, cross-beams, and ceiling, and smashed the front of the choir gallery, a mass of fallen pillar, railing, and broken plaster on the floor.

Andrew Hill called a meeting. Adam Wick came, entered his cluttered pew and sat on the pillar that lay prostrate across it. He perched on it like a hawk, with huddled back and red-lidded eyes blinking. It was the sense of the meeting that modern ideas demanded the choir should sit behind the minister. The ruined gallery must be removed. Adam Wick rose.

“You've got no place in this meetin',” said Andrew Hill. “Set down.”

Adam kept his place scornfully.

“Can't I subscribe twenty dollars to this church?” The chairman stroked his beard and a gleam of acrid humor lit his face for a moment.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose you can.”

And the eyes of all present looked on Adam Wick favorably.

The minister rose to speak the last word of peace.

“My friends, the Lord did it. He is righteous--”

“That's my idea!” said Adam Wick, like a hawk on his fallen pillar, red-lidded, complacent. “He did what was right.”

The minister coughed, hesitated, and sat down. Andrew Hill glowered from his chair.

“There's no further business before this meetin'.”

THE EMIGRANT EAST

|The old book-shop on Cripple Street in the city of Hamilton was walled to its dusky ceiling with books. Books were stacked on the floor like split wood, with alleys between. The long table down the centre was piled with old magazines and the wrecks of paper-covered novels. School arithmetics and dead theologies; Annuals in faded gilt, called “Keepsake,” or “Friendship's Offering”; little leathern nubbins of books from the last century, that yet seemed less antique than the Annuals which counted no more than forty years--so southern and early-passing was the youth of the Annual; Bohn's translations, the useful and despised; gaudy, glittering prints of the poets and novelists; all were crowded together without recognition of caste, in a common Bohemia. Finding a book in that mystical chaos seemed to establish a right to it of first discovery. The pretty girl, who sat in one of the dim windows and kept the accounts, looked Oriental but not Jewish, and wore crimson ribbons in her black hair and at her throat. She read one of the Annuals, or gazed through the window at Cripple Street. A show-case in the other window contained stamp collections, Hindoo, Chinese, and Levantine coinage.

Far back in the shop a daring explorer might come upon a third window, gray, grimy, beyond which lay the unnamable backyards between Cripple and Academy Streets. It could not be said to “open on” them, for it was never opened, or “give a view” of them, being thick with gray dust. But if one went up to it and looked carefully, there in the dim corner might be seen an old man with a long faded black coat, rabbinical beard, dusky, transparent skin, and Buddha eyes, blue, faint, far away, self-abnegating, such as under the Bo-tree might have looked forth in meek abstraction on the infinities and perceived the Eightfold Principle. It was always possible to find Mr. Barria by steering for the window. So appeared the old bookshop on Cripple Street, Mr. Barria, the dealer, and his granddaughter, Janey.

Nature made Cripple Street to be calm and dull; for the hand of man, working through generations, is the hand of nature, as surely as in nature the oriole builds its nest or the rootlets seek their proper soil. Cripple Street ran from Coronet to Main Street and its paving was bad. There were a few tailors and bookbinders, a few silent, clapboarded houses.

But two doors from the corner on Coronet Street stood Station No. 4, of the Fire Brigade, and Cripple Street was the nearest way to Main Street, whither No. 4 was more likely to be called than elsewhere. So that, though nature made Cripple Street to be calm and dull, No. 4, Fire Brigade, sometimes passed it, engine, ladder, and hose, in the splendor of the supernatural, the stormy pageantry of the gods; and one Tommy Durdo drove the engine.

Durdo first came into Mr. Barria's shop in search of a paper-covered novel with a title promising something wild and belligerent. It was a rainy, dismal day, and Janey sat among the dust and refuse of forgotten centuries.

“My eyes!” he thought. “She's a peach.”

He lost interest in any possible belligerent novel, gazed at her with the candor of his youthfulness, and remarked, guilefully:

“I bet you've seen me before now.”

“You drive the engine,” said Janey, with shining eyes.

“Why, this is my pie,” thought Durdo, and sat down by her on a pile of old magazines. He was lank, muscular, with a wide mouth, lean jaws, turn-up nose, and joyful eyes. The magazines contained variations on the loves of Edwards, Eleanors, and other people, well-bred, unfortunate, and possessed of sentiments. Durdo was not well-bred, and had not a presentable sentiment in his recollection. He had faith in his average luck, and went away from Mr. Barria's shop at last with a spot in the tough texture of his soul that felt mellow.

“J. Barria, bookdealer,” he read from the sign. “J! That's Janey, ain't it? Hold on. She ain't the bookdealer. She ain't any ten-cent novel either. She's a Rushy bound, two dollar and a half a copy, with a dedication on the fly-leaf, which”--Tommy stopped suddenly and reflected--“which it might be dedicated to Tommy.”

It came near to being a sentiment. The possibility of such a thing rising from within him seemed impressive. He walked back to No. 4 thoughtfully, and thrust himself into a fight with Hamp Sharkey, in which it was proved that Hamp was the better man. Tommy regained his ordinary reckless cheerfulness. But when a man is in a state of mind that it needs a stand-up and knock-down fight to introduce cheerfulness, he cannot hope to conceal his state of mind.

Cripple Street drowsed in the sunshine one August afternoon. A small boy dug bricks out of the sidewalk with a stick. It seemed to emphasize the indifferent calm that no one took that interest in Cripple Street to come and stop him. The clangor of the fire-bells broke across the city. For a moment the silence in Cripple Street seemed more deathly than before. Then the doors of the tailors and bookbinders flew open. The Fire Company came with leap and roar, ladder, engine, and hose, rattle of wheels and thud of steam. Passing Mr. Barria's Durdo turned his head, saw Janey in the door, and beamed on her.

“Hooray,” he shouted.

“It's Tommy's girl,” thundered Hamp Sharkey, from the top of his jingling ladders. Fire Brigade No. 4 cheered, waved its helmet, wherever it had a hand free, and in a moment was gone, leaving the drift of its smoke in the air, the tremble of its passing, and Janey flushed and thrilled. Hook and ladder and all had hailed her with honor as Tommy's girl. A battalion of cavalry, with her lover at the head, dashing up to salute, say, her battlemented or rose-embowered window--both terms occur in the Annuals--and galloping away to the wars, might have been better theoretically, but Janey was satisfied. She had no defence against such battery. Power, daring, and danger were personified in Tommy. He had brought them all to her feet. This it was to live and be a woman. She turned back into the dim shop, her eyes shining. The backs of the dusty books seemed to quiver and glow, even those containing arithmetic, dead philosophies, and other cool abstractions, as if they forgot their figures and rounded periods, and thought of the men who wrote them, how these once were young.

Durdo found it possible, by spending his off hours in Mr. Barria's shop, to keep cheerful without fighting Hamp Sharkey. A row now and then with a smaller man than Hamp was enough to satisfy the growing mellowness of his soul. His off hours began at four. He passed them among the Annuals and old magazines in a state of puzzled and flattered bliss. He fell so far from nature as to read the Annuals where Janey directed, to conclude that what was popularly called “fun” was vanity and dust in the mouth; that from now on he would be decent, and that any corner or hole in the ground which contained Janey and Tommy would suit him forever. No doubt he was wrong there.

Mr. Barria's memories of all that had befallen him within or without, in the journey of this life, before his entry on the Path of Quietness, and his consciousness of all external objects and occurrences since, were clear enough, but only as little white clouds in the open sky are clear, whose business it is to be far away and trouble us with no insistent tempest. They never entered the inner circle of his meditation. They appeared to be distant things. He had no sense of contact with them. His abstractions had formed a series of concentric spheres about him. In some outer sphere lay a knowledge of the value of books as bought and sold, which enabled him to buy and sell them with indifferent profit, but it entered his central absorption no more than the putting on and off of his coat.

He was not absorbed in books. He did not seem to care for them, beyond the fourscore or more worn volumes that were piled about his table by the gray window, many of them in tattered paper covers bearing German imprints, some lately rebound by a Cripple Street bookbinder. He did not care for history or geography, not even his own. He did not care where he was born or when, where he was now, or how old.

Once--whether forty years gone or four hundred, would have seemed to him a question of the vaguest import--he had taught Arabic and Greek in a university town, which looks off to mountains that in their turn look off to the Adriatic Sea. There was a child, a smaller Julian Barria. Somewhere about this time and place he began explorations in more distant Eastern languages. The date was unnoted, obscure, traditional. The interest in language soon disappeared. It was a period of wonder and searching. After the moral fierceness of the Arab and Mohammedan, the Hindoo's and Buddhist's calm negations and wide mental spaces first interested him by contrast, then absorbed him. He began to practise the discipline, the intense and quiet centring on one point, till the sense of personality should slip away and he and that point be one. There was no conviction or conversion, for the question never seemed put to him, or to be of any value, whether one thing was true and another not true. But the interest gradually changed to a personal issue. All that he now heard and saw and spoke to, objects in rest or in motion, duties that called for his performance, became not so much vaguer in outline as more remote in position. In comparison with his other experiences they were touched with a faint sense of unreality. The faces of other men were changed in his eyes. He sometimes noticed and wondered, passingly, that they seemed to see no change in him, or if any change, it was one that drew them more than formerly to seek his sympathy. He observed himself listening to intimate confessions with a feeling of patient benevolence that cost him no effort, and seemed to him something not quite belonging to him as a personal virtue, but which apparently satisfied and quieted the troubled souls that sought him.

About this later time--a reference to the histories would fix the date at 1848--a civil war swept the land, and the University was closed. The younger Julian Barria was involved in the fall of the revolutionists and fled from the country. The late teacher of Greek and Arabic crossed the ocean with him. It was a matter of mild indifference. He gave his sympathy to all, gently and naturally, but felt no mental disturbance. Neither did the change of scene affect him. Everywhere were earth beneath and sky above, and if not it were no matter. Everywhere were men and women and children, busy with a multitude of little things, trembling, hurrying, crying out among anxieties. It was all one, clear enough, but remote, touched with the same sense of unreality, and like some sad old song familiar in childhood and still lingering in the memory.

The book-shop on Cripple Street at one time dealt also in newspapers and cigars. They were more to the younger Barria's talent, more to his taste the stirring talk of men who live in their own era and congregate wherever there are newspapers and tobacco. Afterward he went away into the West, seeking a larger field for his enterprise than Cripple Street, and the newspaper and cigar business declined and passed away. The show-case fell to other uses. The elder Barria sat by the square rear window, and the gray dust gathered and dimmed it. Ten years flowed like an unruffled stream; of their conventional divisions and succeeding events he seemed but superficially conscious. Letters came now and then from the West, announcing young Barria's journeys and schemes, his marriage in the course of enterprise, finally his death. The last was in a sprawling hand, and said:

“Jules missus is ded to an thars a kid. Jules sez take her to the ol man Jake when ye go est in the spring. I am Jake. He is wooly in his hed sez he but he is a good man sez he. He got a soul like Mondays washin on Tewsday mornin sez he spekin in figgers an menin you. Them was Jules last word.”