Chapter XVII: Back Again to the World

The carnal man never dies in us, nor the carnal woman, either, for that matter. We only say so in our prayers and rituals because we do not know yet how to be spiritually truthful about our own flesh and blood. But God, who knew very well what He was about when He made us carnal, sees to it that in spite of our egregious pretensions we remain honest Adams and Adamesses to the end. So, for years, without acknowledging it to myself, I had been homesick for the world and the things of the world. I did not want to "sin," I simply longed to be natural; to live a trifle less perpendicularly in my soul. There had been so many prayer-meeting nights when I would rather have been at the grand opera. Not that William's prayer-meeting talks were not the very bread of life--they were; but there is such a thing as losing one's appetite for just one kind of bread. I have always thought one of the notable things about the Israelites' journey through the wilderness was the amazing fortitude with which they accepted their manna diet. Anyhow, it is not in the power of words to tell how I pined for the real laughter and lightness and play of life.

William had needed them no less, but the difference was he never knew it. When he felt world-hungry he thought it was a sign of spiritual anaemia and prayed for a closer walk with God--as if God was not also the God of the world even more than He is the caste Deity of any church or creed. I am not reflecting on William in saying this--I'd sooner reflect upon one of the Crown Jewels of Heaven, but I am reflecting upon his understanding. It was not sufficiently earthly--no good priest's is. Still, I had been his faithful wife for thirty years and a consistent member of a church which forbids nearly every form of amusement that cannot be taken at a Sunday-school picnic, a church festival or at an Epworth League convention.

I did not wait to speak to the people after the sermon, the way a preacher's wife must do to show her friendliness and interest. I hurried out and around behind the church to where he lay folded deep beneath the pine shadows. And there I had it out with him, as sometimes we had it out together in other days, I doing all the talking, and he no less silent than usual there in his holy grave. We had never quarreled as man and wife, because he would not do his part of the contending. I untied my bonnet strings, took it off and laid it on the grass, sat down by his headstone and cried--not so much for him as for fear he would not understand. He never had.

William's greatest limitation as a minister was his firm conviction that the world was a drawback to Heaven. He fought it and abused it to the last, as if God had not made it and designed it to furnish properly-chastened material for His higher Kingdom. And somehow, as I wept and talked down to him in his dust I felt wonderfully like the young woman that had loved him and feared him during those first rebellious years when I was still so much the Episcopalian and so little the Methodist.

The next day I sent a letter to my sister Sarah, a widow living with her two grown daughters in New York. For years I had kept up no relations with my own family. They were of the world, prosperous, and I felt that they could not understand William nor the soul-steepling way we lived. But now I was writing to accept the invitation Sarah sent me just after William's death, to make my home with her.

A week later I packed my things, borrowed my church letter, locked my door and took the train at Royden for New York. I told the neighbors I was going for a visit to New York, but really I was on my way to find the world again. And I found it. You cannot find anything else in New York.

Sarah and the girls met me at the Grand Central Station and they spent more kisses welcoming me than I had received since my bridal days. Sarah is two years older than I am, but she looks ten years younger, and there is not the mark of a prayer on her smooth face, while I feel as if I might have the doxology stamped in wrinkles above my eyebrows.

Everything is different from the way it is at home. We do not have dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am carrying on. But I cannot help it; I must have a little spell of world life. That other in which I qualified with him for Heaven was too stretching to something in me that grew mortally tired of stretching. I have set myself with all diligence to enjoy the things of this world in the time that's left me. The more I think of it the more nearly certain I am that they were meant for us.

One thing alone troubles me--that is, the thought of William going up and down these thirty years just preaching and praying and bearing other people's burdens and never once having the right to step aside and rest his soul from being just good; never once having a natural human vacation in the natural human world; always praying and preaching and fasting that he might pray and preach better, always scrimping that he might be able to pay more to the cause of missions, always a little threadbare, and often a little breathless spiritually, but always persistently stalking Peter and Paul and the angels through the Scriptures up the high and higher altitudes of his own beautiful imagination. No matter how rested he is now in Heaven, no matter how much he may be enjoying himself, my heart aches for him because of the innocent happiness he missed here.

Sometimes, when I am with Sarah's girls at a play like Sudermann's "John the Baptist," as the curtain rises and falls upon the great scenes I sit and think of him and what it would have meant to him if in all those poverty-stricken years of his ministry he could have had such a vision of his dear Bible people at home in Judaea. It's foolish, of course, but I still long to do something for him, something to make up for the weariness and blindness through which he passed with such simple dignity up to God, who never meant for him to make such a hard journey of it. No one knew it, probably, save a few of the angels, but he was a great man.

Since I have been here where everybody and every thought of everybody is so different from him and his thinking, I can see him plainer, understand him better than I did living side by side with him. This is why I have been spending my time between tea parties and lectures on art and evolution, and receptions and theaters, writing these letters as a memorial of him.

I used to wish I could have a portrait of him painted by a great artist as he looked sometimes on a Sabbath day when he had a baby to baptize, or when he'd be bending above an altar full of penitents. There was a grandeur in William's faith that gave him an awful near likeness to immortality even in his flesh at such times. But, of course, we could never think of the portrait, so in these letters I have tried to draw a likeness of him. Every line and shadow of it is as true as I can make it to what he really was. I reckon plenty of people back there on his circuits will recognize it, although I have changed names so as not to be too personal. They will remember him, although he was not what is known as an up-to-date preacher.

I have often thought about it since I have been up here, what William didn't know or dream of. I never heard him mention evolution. His doubts were not intellectual and his troubles were just spiritual. He never suspected that there were two Isaiahs, never discovered that David did not write his own Psalms, or that Genesis was considered a fable, never noticed anything queer about the way Moses kept on writing about himself after he was dead and his death certificate properly recorded by himself in the Scriptures. He was a man of faith. All of his ideas came out of that one little mustard seed. I doubt if he'd have been surprised if some day he had come upon a burning bush along one of the bridle paths of his circuit.

As for me, I do not care what they say here in New York, or even in the Pentateuch, I'd have a sight more confidence in that Scripture of the burning bush if William had recorded it instead of Moses--I never set much store by Moses as a truth teller. He may have been a good hand at chiseling out the Ten Commandments in the tables of stone, and he may have been strong enough to tote them down by himself from Sinai, but Moses was too much of a hero to tell the truth and nothing but the truth about himself. I never knew a hero who could do it. Their courage gets mixed with their imagination.

Then again, you can see that I could not write about a man like William in the modern forked-lightning literary style, as if he was a new brand of spiritual soap or the dime-novel hero of a fashionable congregation. The people he served were not like those in New York, who appear to have been created by electricity, with a spiritual button for a soul, that you press into a religious fervor by rendering an organ opera behind the pulpit. Or, maybe the preacher does it with a new-fangled motor notion that demonstrates a scientific relation between some other life and this one.

The people William served were backwoods and mountain folk, for the most part, who grew out of the soil, as much a part of it as the red oaks and the hills. They were not happy nor good, but they were Scriptural. The men were in solemn bondage to Heaven. Religion was a sort of life sentence they worked out with awful diligence. And the women seemed "born again" just to fade and pray, not as these women of the world fade, utterly, but like fair tea-roses plucked for an altar, that wither soon. In Heaven you will not find them herded in the Hosannah Chorus with the great, good women of history, like Jane Addams and Frances E. Willard, but they will be there in some dim cove of the celestial hills, sweetly sorrow-browed still, spinning love upon the distaffs of Heaven, weaving yarn feathers for the younger angels.

I say, it is impossible to write of such a preacher and such people as if they were characters in an electric religious fancy. Walking to and from church here in this city I have almost wondered if they were ever real. Thinking of them sets me to recalling stanzas from Watts's hymns. I smell the thyme upon their hills. It seems as if my adjectives were beginning to grow like flowers upon William's grave. I can see the candles lit for evening services in Heaven, and him sitting in the amen corner away from the flashing-winged, fashionable saints, comparing notes with Moses and Elijah in his deep organ undertones.

The trouble with William was that he was the hero of another world in this one, handcuffed by a Church Discipline. And the trouble with the average New York preacher is that he is barely a foreigner in this world, who is apologizing continually to his congregation for half-way believing in his own other country. But now I have finished this poor drawing of William's character. If I could have made it enough like him it might have been fit for one of the family portraits of the saints in Heaven. And I have often wondered why the monument builders have never thought to raise a statue to the Methodist circuit rider. The D. A. R.'s and the other daughters of this and that raise monuments to men who were only brave, but no one has thought yet to erect a statue to the memory of the Methodist circuit riders, who are not less brave, but who have doubtless broken some Heaven records in simple goodness and self-sacrifice.