Chapter VIII: I Hold the Stage

So far, the circuit rider has been the hero of these letters, but in this one his wife shall be the heroine, behind the throne at least, for scarcely any other woman looks or feels less like one in the open.

The Methodist ministry is singularly devastating in some ways upon the women who are connected with it by marriage. For one thing, it tends to destroy their aesthetic sensibilities. They lack very often the good taste of thrift in poverty, not so much because of the poverty, but because they never get settled long enough to develop the hen-nesting instinct and house pride that is dormant in us all. They simply make a shift of things till the next conference meets, when they will be moved to another parsonage.

A woman has not the heart to plant annuals, much less perennials, under such circumstances. Let the Parsonage Aid Society do it, if it must be done. And the Parsonage Aid Society does do it. You will see in many Methodist preachers' front yards fiercely-thorny, old-lady-faced roses--the kind that thrive without attention--planted always by the president of the Parsonage Aid Society. And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial to this flower, but because it is not easily killed by neglect. They choose the hardiest, ugliest known shrubs for the parsonage yard because they last best.

On every circuit, in every charge, you will find the Parsonage Aid Society a band of faithful, fretted, good housekeepers who worry and wrangle over furnishing the parsonage as they worried and wrangled when they were little girls over their communistic "playhouses." The effects in the parsonage are not harmonious, of course. As a rule, every piece of furniture in it contradicts every other piece, each having been contributed by rival women or rival committees in the society.

And this has its deadening effect upon the preacher's wife's taste, else she must go mad, living in a house where, say, there is a strip of worn church-aisle carpet down the hall--bought at a bargain by the thrifty Aid Society--a cherry-colored folding bed in the parlor along with a "golden oak" table, a home-made bookcase, four different kinds of chairs, a patent-medicine calendar on the wall and a rag carpet on the floor, with a "flowered" washbowl and pitcher on a plain deal table in the corner, confessing that, after all, it is not a parlor, but the presiding elder's bedroom when he comes to hold "quarterly meeting." Still, if I had anything to do with the new-monument-raising business in this country I would have a colossal statue raised to the living women of the Methodist Parsonage Aid Societies.

But the worst effect of the itinerancy upon its ministers' wives is the evil information they must receive in it about other people. If I had to select the woman in all the world best informed about the faults, sins and weaknesses of mankind, I should not choose the sophisticated woman of the world, but I should point without hesitation to the little, pale, still-faced Methodist preacher's wife. The pallor is the pallor of hardship, often of the lack of the right kind of nourishment, but the stillness is not the result of inward personal calm and peace. It is the shut-door face of a woman who knows all about everybody she meets with that thin little smile and quiet eye. The reason for this is that the preacher's wife is the vat for receiving all the circuit scandal actually intended for her husband's ears.

The most conscienceless gossips in this world are to be found always among the thoroughly-upright, meanly-impeccable members of any and every church. They are the Scribes and Pharisees who contribute most to the building of fine houses of worship; they give most to its causes. They are the "right hands" of all the preachers from their youth up. They have never been truthful sinners. They were the pale, pious little boys and girls who behaved, and who graduated from the Sunday schools long ago without ever being converted to the church. And there you see them, the fat, duty-doing, self-satisfied "firsts" in this world, who shall be last and least in the world to come. Those least inclined to tattle about their neighbors, I found, were poor, pathetic sinners with damaged reputations, who could not afford to talk about others. They belonged humbly to the church, but never figured loudly in it. And if God is God, as I do firmly believe in spite of all I have heard to the contrary, there will be something "doing" in Heaven when these saint-pecked sinners are all herded in. They will wear the holy seal of His tender forgiveness through all eternity and get most of the high offices in Paradise, just as a matter of simple justice.

What I have suffered morally from them cannot be put into words. Within a week of our arrival on a new work one of them would be sure to call. There was Sister Weekly, for example, on the Gourdville Circuit, and the parsonage here was in the little village of Gourdville. William was out making his first pastoral visits when there came a gentle knock at the door. I untied my kitchen apron, smoothed my hair, sighed--for I knew from past experience it would be the church's arch gossip--and opened the door. A round old lady tied up in a sanctified black widow's bonnet stood on the step.

"I am Mrs. Weekly," she explained, "and I reckon you are Sister Thompson, the new preacher's wife. Both my sons are stewards. And I thought I'd come over and get acquainted and give you a few p'inters. It's so hard for a stranger in a strange place to know which is which."

"I am glad to see you. Won't you come in?" I said pleasantly.

She settled herself in the rocker before the fire in our "front room," looked down at the rug and exclaimed:

"My! ain't this rug greasy! Our last pastor's wife was a dreadful careless housekeeper."

She had a white, seamless face, sad, prayerful blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones of an egg-laying hen:

"Your husband's goin' to have an awful hard time here, Sister Thompson. The church is split wide open about the organ. Old man Walker wants it on the right-hand side of the pulpit, and my sons have put it on the left-hand side, where the light is good and the choir can see the music better. It ain't decent, the way Walker makes himself prominent in the church, nohow. They say he killed a man in Virginia before he came here. I might as well tell you, for you are bound to hear it anyhow. My sons say they are going to pull out and go to the Presbyterian church if Walker don't quit carryin' on so about the organ. Their father was Presbyterian, and I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped out in them. But it'll be bad for our church if they do. They pay half of the preacher's salary, and Walker scarcely pays at all. Seems to me he ought to keep his mouth shut. And Richard Brown has took the homestead law to keep from paying his debts. Now maybe he'll drop behind in his subscription, too. He was a right smart help in the church, though I never thought much of him morally. They say he drinks and cusses both when he goes off to Augusta. And it's a plumb shame that his wife's president of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. She's all right now, I reckon, but folks 'talked' about her when she was a girl." She paused to get her second wind, folded her hands as if in prayer, turned her divine old eyes up to the ceiling and continued:

"But the Epworth League is the worst. I've always had my doubts about it. 'T won't do to git too many young folks together in a bunch. I don't care how religious they are, they'll just bust up and turn natural if you git too many of 'em together. That's what's happened here. The Epworth League kept on flourishin' so, we didn't understand it. It met every Saturday night as prayerful and punctual as clocks. But as soon as the old folks left they shet the doors, and then they'd dance like sin--been doing it for months before anybody found out. Oh! I'll tell you everything is on the downward road in this church, and your husband is going to have his hands full even if he don't starve to death!"

Every preacher's wife is the victim of such women. If she is supernaturally wise she does not handicap her husband by repeating their gossip to him. Personally, I prayed more earnestly to be delivered from this particular temptation than from any other. But never once was the Lord able to do it. Sooner or later I invariably told William every word of scandal I heard.

He never served but one church where the people in it did not "talk" about one another. I will call the place Celestial Bells, although that is not the real name of it.

The congregation was a small one, composed of well-bred, worldly-minded folk. They all danced a little, went to the theater often, wore golden ornaments and otherwise perjured themselves in the light of the membership vows in our Church Discipline. What I wonder is, will the good, patient God--who knows that since the days of David we have had dancing dust in us, who has Himself endowed us so abundantly with the dramatic instinct, who even hid His gold about with which we bedeck and enrich ourselves--will He, I say, damn those honest, world-loving, church-giving people most, or will He take it out of the religious topknots of the church who tempted them with these "Rules" in the Discipline?

Poor William had a scandalous time at that place readjusting his moral focus so that it would rest upon his people. Sister C and Sister Z were admirable wives and mothers. He had never had more intelligently helpful women in his congregation. That is to say, they were patiently faithful in their attendance upon its services, they professed often to be "benefited" by his sermons, they brought up their children in a new kind of nurture and admonition of the Lord; but if he went to pay them a pastoral call and have prayers with them, apt as not he would find that they had gone to take the children to the matinee. And Brother A and Brother I were the best stewards he ever had, but they would do anything from wearing a tuxedo to going to a circus. I can never forget Brother I's prayers. Although he was modest and retiring to the point of shyness he was one of the few members in the church at Celestial Bells who could be depended upon to lead in prayer. This was frequently William's experience. Oftener than not the brother who could slap him on the back or sing a bass in the choir that made the chandeliers rattle would turn pale and fall into a panic if he was called on to pray. Somehow one got the notion that he felt his voice would not carry in that direction. But Brother I could open his heart at once in prayer, and do it so naturally every one of us felt that we were ourselves uttering the same prayer. He never ornamented his petitions with any high sounding phrases. He was not so much a man carrying on in a loud voice before his Maker as he was a little boy with a sore toe and troubles appertaining to his littleness and inexperience, and faults and forgetfulness, all of which he let out with the emotion of a child to his father, and with such reality of detail that the whole congregation accompanied him with his lamentations and regrets. Whenever I lifted my head after one of Brother I's prayers, I felt better, like a child who has taken some great Elder Person into its confidence.

While I am on this subject of prayer, I must not forget an incident connected with Brother A. He was the most belligerent looking peaceful man I ever saw. His brows were black and so thick they amounted to whiskers above his large pale blue eyes. He wore a military moustache of the same color and preferred to talk through his teeth. And aside from being very prosperous and a good friend, his distinction was that he knew how to _do_ the will of his Father with as much directness and dispatch as if it had been an ordinary business proposition. If William wanted the church moved off a side street in a hollow, he was the man who could drag it a quarter of a mile and set it on a hill, yoked up, of course, with as many other stewards as he could get. If there was anything to be done he could do it, and in the right spirit. But he was one of God's dumb saints. He had faith and he had works, but he couldn't pray, that is, not in public. This led to the incident to which I have already referred.

We had just come to Celestial Bells, and seeing Brother A so active, like a pillar of cloud and fire, in the church, we did not suspect his other-world muteness. William was closing his first Sunday night service. The congregation was large and in the front midst of it sat Brother A. Immediately behind him sat Brother B, a fluent and enthusiastic steward. I was in the Amen Corner as usual, because it is only from this vantage ground that a preacher's wife can keep her eye properly upon his congregation and be able to estimate the causes and effects of his discourse. I have sometimes suspected, indeed, that better saints occupy this Amen Corner for a less excusable curiosity about the doings in the congregation. William closed the hymn-book, looked out over the blur of faces before him, and said:

"Brother A will lead us in prayer."

If he had suddenly struck a short circuit and let loose a flash of electricity in the house the shock would not have been more perceptible. Everybody knew that Brother A could not lead in prayer, except William, who was already on his knees with closed eyes and the Patmos look on his blind face. Every head was bowed except those of Brother A and Brother B. They were whispering over the back of the bench that separated them. The sweat was standing out on Brother A's forehead, his brows bristled with horror, while Brother B smiled calmly at him.

"Go on, B! you know I can't pray in public!" I heard him say.

"He didn't ask me, he called on you," retorted Brother B.

Thus they had it back and forth for more than a minute. Then William groaned, which added the one touch that rendered Brother A frantic. Casting a ferociously damaging look at Brother B, he nudged the lady sitting beside him and whispered:

"Lead this prayer, madam, I can't!"

And she led it in a sweet high treble that must have surprised William and even the angels in Heaven, if they were expecting to hear the petition in the ordinary masculine bass which is usually characteristic of such petitions.

But I was going to tell how disconcerting it was to William to serve people who were apparently religious and worldly-minded at the same time. He could not reconcile this kind of diphthong living with his notions of piety. At least their sins lay heavily on his conscience.

One Sabbath morning in June he entered the pulpit in a Sinai mood, determined to read the Church Rules and to apply them severely. He began by selecting a condemnatory Psalm, took his text simply as a threat from Jeremiah in one of his bad moods, and after a severe hymn and a mournful Rachel prayer he arose, folded his spectacles and fixed his eyes burningly upon the innocent faces of his congregation, which had a "What have we done?" expression on them that would have moved an angel to impatience.

"Brethren and sisters," he said after a frightful spiritual pause, "it is my duty this morning to call you back out of the far country into which you have gone, to your Father's house. I blame myself for your dreadful condition. I have not had the courage to tell you of your faults as a preacher should tell his people when he sees them wandering in the forbidden paths of worldliness and sin. I have not been a faithful shepherd to you, and doubtless the Lord will lay your sins upon my head. But this morning I am resolved to do my duty by you, no matter what it costs."

The congregation took on the expression of a child about to be laid across the parent's knee. But when he opened the Discipline and proceeded to read the Rules, following each with solemn, almost personal applications to conditions under his very nose, in his own church, their countenances underwent a lightning change of almost happy relief. Never can I forget the naïve sweetness with which those people turned up their untroubled eyes to William and received his thundering exhortations. They seemed proud of his courage--for, indeed, he nearly broke his heart condemning them--and at the same time they seemed to be bearing with him as they would bear with the vagaries of a good and loving old father.

Sister C and Sister Z sat near the front, surrounded by their respective cherubim broods, looking up at him with tender humorous eyes. The children, indeed, felt something alien to peace in the atmosphere. They regarded him fearfully, then turned meek, inquisitive faces to their mothers; but those two extraordinary women never blinked or blushed from start to finish, although they were deeply dyed with all the guilt William mentioned. The one person present who received the discourse with almost vindictive signs of indorsement was Brother Billy Smithers, a man who had lived an exasperatingly regular life in the church for more than forty years. He sent up Amens fervid with the heat of his furious spirit at the end of each charge and condemnation.