Held to Answer/Chapter 19
Yet once out of the pulpit, John's sense of terror seemed to leave him. With some of the people coming forward to press his hand and even to wring it; with the Angel of the Chair giving him a wonderful look from her luminous eyes, he began to feel strangely, happily satisfied with himself,—as though adrift upon an unknown sea but without fear and joyously eager for the next adventure.
That adventure came when blue-eyed Helen of the Infant Class said pleadingly:
"Oh, Brother Hampstead! Will you call on Sister Showalter this afternoon and read a chapter? She is very ill and lonely."
"Yes," assented John recklessly. "But explain who it is that's coming—a book agent—to read to her."
John had no idea who Mrs. Showalter was; but they gave him a number. He had no idea what a professional clergyman reads to a sick woman; but that afternoon he pushed his little New Testament in his hip pocket somewhat as Brother Charles Thompson Campbell used to do, and went out upon his errand.
A faded, hollow-eyed, middle-aged woman met him at the door, with a face so somber that in his instant thought and ever after, John dubbed her the Gloom Woman.
"My name is Hampstead," he explained. "I called to see the sick lady."
"My mother!" answered the woman, in tones as somber as her countenance. "She has been asking for you for an hour. She is very low to-day. The doctor is with her and he is apprehensive."
Through air that was close with a sickish, sweetish smell, accounted for by large vases of flowers and by a small Chinese censer with incense burning in it, past furnishings, that were meager, stuffy, and old-fashioned, John was conducted to a large square room with the blinds drawn low. In the center of this room was a huge black walnut bedstead, with the head rising pompously high. By the far side of the bed sat a professional looking man in the fifties, with his chin buried in his hand and his eyes meditatively fixed upon a very old and dreary face amid the banked-up pillows,—a face of purplish hue that seemed without expression except for a lipless, sunken mouth, and eyes that glowed dully under sagging heavy lids.
"Mother!" said the woman, speaking loudly, as if to waken a soul from the depths, "this is Brother Hampstead!"
The aged eyes roamed the shadows anxiously for a moment, while a withered purple hand felt its way about upon the coverlet till John touched it timidly with his. Instantly and convulsively the old fingers gripped the young, with a pressure that to the caller was damp and deathly.
The woman appeared to John almost lifeless. He felt embarrassment and resentment. Why didn't they tell him she was like this?
The hand was tugging at him, too, like a sort of undertow, pulling him down and over. The watery old eyes were fixed upon him. John's embarrassment increased. What did the poor creature want? To kiss him? What does a minister do in such a case, he wondered, sweat breaking out on his brow.
"I think she wants to say something; bend low so you can hear her," suggested the mournful voice of the Gloom Woman. John bent over till he felt the patient's hectic breath upon his cheek, and shrank from it.
"The minister of God!" croaked the voice so faintly that the words barely traveled the necessary six inches to his ear.
No man ever felt less like the minister of God. Hampstead was hot, flustered, self-conscious, almost irritated.
But again he felt the hand like an undertow, tugging him down.
"Read to me!" croaked the ghost of a voice.
This was something to do. A curtain was raised slightly so that the visitor could see, and he read the twenty-third Psalm and the twenty-fourth.
As Hampstead read, his embarrassment departed. He began to find a joy in what he was doing. He let his rich voice play upon the lines sympathetically and had a suspicion that he could feel the strength of the sick woman reviving as he read.
"She likes to have the minister pray with her," said the voice of the Gloom Woman from the background, when the reading was concluded.
Again John stood gazing helplessly, till the old hand dragged him down, and sinking upon his knees beside the bed, he found that words came to him, and he lost himself in them. His sympathy, his faith, his own sore heart and its needs, all poured themselves into that prayer.
Once or twice as words flowed on, Hampstead felt the old hand tugging, as though the undertow were pulling at it, and then he noticed after a time that he did not feel these tuggings any more; but when the prayer was finished and he rose from his knees, the grip of the hand did not release itself. Instead, the fingers hung on, rather like hooks, so that John darted a look of inquiry at the purplish face upon the pillows. To his surprise, the chin had dropped and the eyes had closed sleepily.
The doctor, who had been sitting with his hand upon the pulse, gently placed the wrist which he had held across the aged breast and stood erect, with an expression of decision which no one could misread.
"Oh!" sobbed a voice from the gloom.
Hampstead felt a sudden sense of shock, and his knees swayed under him sickeningly. That was death there upon the pillow; and that was death with its bony hooks about his palm. Sister Showalter had gone out with the undertow that pulled at her while he was praying.
John lifted his hand helplessly.
"It—it doesn't let go," he whispered.
The doctor glanced at the embarrassed Hampstead searchingly, then reached over and straightened the aged fingers.
"Young man," said the physician earnestly and even reverently. "She clung to you as she went down into the waters. For a time I felt your young strength actually holding her back, and then your words seemed to make her strong enough to push off boldly of her own accord. It is a great thing, my friend," and the doctor seemed deeply affected, "to have strength enough and sympathy and faith enough to rob death of its terror for a feeble soul like that—a very great thing!"
The earnestness of the doctor brought a lump into John's throat.
"Thank you, sir," he murmured, but immediately was lost in looking curiously at the thing upon the pillows.
"You have another duty," said the physician, nodding toward the shadows at the back, where a single heart-broken wail had been followed by a convulsive sobbing.
John went and stood beside the Gloom Woman.
"Mother is go—h-h-gone!" she sobbed.
"Yes," said Hampstead simply.
And somehow he didn't feel embarrassed at all now by the presence of death. He did not hesitate as to what to do. He just put out his hand and laid it in a brotherly way on the woman's shoulder, noticing as he did so that it was a frail, bony shoulder, and that it trembled as much from weakness as with emotion.
"Let the tears flow, sister," he suggested, "it is good for you."
And the tears did flow, like rivers, and all the while John's speech was flowing in much the same way, and with tears in it, until presently the woman looked up at him, surprised both at the manner and the matter of his speech. Was it he who had spoken,—this man who said he was only a book agent?
John too was surprised at his words, at their tone, at the superior faith and wisdom which they expressed. He really did not know he was going to say them. When spoken, it did not seem as if it could have been he that had uttered them, and he had again that awesome sense of a power within him not himself.
"You are a minister of God!" declared the Gloom Woman with sudden conviction.
Hampstead trembled. This was what the dead had whispered to him. It frightened him then, it frightened him now. He was not a minister of God. He was a man misplaced. He wanted to get out and fly. Yet before he could check her, the Gloom Woman had raised his hand and kissed it.
This made him want to fly more than ever; but he managed first to ask: "Is there anything more that I can do?"
There was, it seemed, and he did it; and then, getting into the outside as expeditiously as possible, he filled his lungs with long, refreshing drafts of the sun-filtered ozone and found his footsteps leading him, as if by a kind of instinct of their own, down one of the short side streets to where the waters of the Bay lapped soothingly against the sea-wall.
But the Bay zephyrs could not wash that series of vivid experiences, half-ghastly and half-inspiring, out of mind.
He had blundered, all unprepared, into the presence of death. His sense of the fitness of things revolted. He was unworthy—unable—unclean. He—a book agent! a rate clerk! an actor! who had held Marien Dounay in his arms and felt his body thrill at the beating of her heart!
Yet this old woman had called him a minister of God! This Gloom Woman too had called him the same. Minister! Minister! What was it? Minister meant to serve. A servant of God! But he had not served God! At least not consciously. He had only served humanity a little. He had served the old woman as a prop to her fears, like an anchor to her soul when she drifted out into the deeper running tide that ebbs but never floods. He had served the Gloom Woman when he stood beside her while she opened the tear-gates of her grief.
It was very little! Yet that much he had really served. To reflect upon it now gave him a sense of elation greater than when he had beaten Scofield and his tariff department; greater than when he had quelled the mob at the People's; greater than when he had crushed Marien in his arms like a flower; greater even than when Bessie had looked her love into his eyes.
He began to perceive that his life was surely mounting from one plane to another and reflected that he had reached the highest plane of all to-day when the Angel of the Chair had pinned upon his coat the badge of Holy Orders; when this other saint, sinking into the dark tide, had hailed him a minister of God! Highest of all, when this Gloom Woman, out of her soul's Gethsemane, had wrung his hand and kissed it so purely and also hailed him as Minister of God!
For some weeks the little chapel in Encina, its troubles and its troubled members, continued to exercise a strange fascination over John. Each Sunday he shepherded the Sunday school and talked a blundering quarter of an hour to the older folk who gathered; while between Sundays he devoted an astonishing portion of his time to visiting these wrangling Christians in their homes, for the ambition to heal this disgraceful quarrel had taken hold on him like some knightly passion.
And in the midst of all these busy comings and goings, odd, half-humorous reflections upon his own status used to break in upon John's mind. Not a self-respecting church in the communion, he knew, but would have eyed him askance because he had been an actor. Only this little helpless church, whose condition was so miserable it could not reject any real help, accepted him; and that merely in a relation that was entirely unofficial and undefined. Still a sense of his fitness for this particular task grew upon him continually; and it was really astonishing how every experience through which he had passed had equipped him for his peacemaker task: most of all those pangs endured because of his break with Bessie, which, although eating into his heart like an acid, yielded a kind of ascetic joy in the pain as if some sort of character bleaching and expiation were at work within him.
In the meantime, an arbitration committee consisting of the District Evangelist, Brother Harding, and Professor Hamilton, the Dean of the Seminary, was at work upon the affairs of the little church. Both wings consented to this, but with misgivings, since the one man they were really coming to trust was Hampstead himself; and when the night for the report of the arbitration committee arrived, each faction turned out in full strength, with suspicions freshly roused, and all a-buzz with angry conversation as if the church were a nest of wasps.
"Things are pretty hot," remarked the Dean under his breath, coming up to read the report.
"They are awful," groaned the District Evangelist.
John presided, standing carefully on his neutral patch in the carpet, and was dismayed and sickened by this new and terrible display of feeling. He had come to know a very great deal about these people in the last few weeks; he had seen how some of these men struggled to make a living; how some of these women bore awful crosses in their hearts; how sickness was in some houses, cold despair in others; how much each needed the strength, the joy, the consolation of religion, and how large a mission there was for this church and for its minister.
But the Dean was reading his report now, in a high, lecture-room voice. It was very brief.
"As for the matters at issue," it confessed, "your committee finds it humanly impossible to place the responsibility for this regretful division. It believes the only future for the congregation is in a wise, constructive, forward-moving leadership which can forget the past entirely.
"It finds that such a leadership now exists in one thoroughly familiar with the difficulties of the situation and enjoying the confidence of both factions; and it recommends that this congregation make sure the future by calling to its pastorate the one man whom the committee believes supremely fitted for the task, our wise and faithful brother, John Hampstead."
The congregation had not thought of Hampstead as a minister. He had not permitted them to do so. To them this recommendation was a surprise.
But to John it was a shock! His face turned a faded yellow. His eyes wandered in a hunted way from the face of the Dean to that of the Evangelist, and then slowly they swept the congregation to meet everywhere looks of approval at the Dean's words.
"But," he protested breathlessly, like a man fighting for air, "I am not a minister. I am a book agent. I have been an actor. I am unfit to stand before the table of the Lord, to hold the hand of the dying, to speak consolation to the living beside the open grave! I am unfit—unfit—for any holy office!"
But his desperate protestation sounded unconvincing even to himself. He had been doing some of these things already and with a measure at least of acceptation. All at once it seemed as if there was no resisting, as if a trap had been laid for him and for his liberties; and he struck out more vehemently:
"Think what it means, you young men! I ask you especially—" and John held out his hands towards them, scattered through the audience—"What it means to abandon life and the world by donning the uniform of the professional clergyman! Wherever you go, in a train, in a restaurant, upon a street, you are no longer free, but a slave—to forms and to conventions. You must live up, not to your ideal of what a minister is, but to the popular ideal of how a minister should appear. It is a vow to hypocrisy!
"It is a vow also to loneliness. The minister is cut off from the life of other men. No man thereafter feels quite at ease in his presence, but puts on something or puts off something, and the minister never sees or feels the real man except by accident.
"For a few weeks," and John lowered his voice to a more tempered note, "I have been happy to do some service among you; but I was free! As I walked down the street I wore the uniform of business. No man could say: 'There goes a priest; watch him!'
"Listen!" In the silence John himself appeared to be listening to some debate that went on within himself, and when he began to speak once more it was with the chastened utterance of one who takes his hearers into a sacred confidence.
"I have had ambitions, brethren, and I have given them up. I have had a great love and all but lost it. Failures have humbled me. Disappointment and surrenders have taught me some of the true values of life. I have tried to gain things for myself and lost them. When I think of seeking anything for myself again, after my experiences, I feel very weak and can command no resolution; but when I think of seeking happiness for others, for little children in particular, for wives and mothers, for all women, in fact, with their capacity to love and trust; for striving, up-climbing men—yes, and the weak ones too, for I have learned that the flesh is very weak—when I think of seeking the good of humanity at large, I feel immensely strong and immensely determined. For that I am ready to bury my life in the soil of sacrifice, but not professionally!
"I hate sham. I hate professionalism. I am done with part-playing. I will not do it. I cannot be your minister!"
John's last words rang out sharply, and the audience, seeing that the heart of a man with an experience had been shown to them, sat breathless and still expectant.
In the silence, the voice of the District Evangelist was presently audible.
"Brother Hampstead," he was saying quietly, "is a man I don't exactly understand, but I think in his very words of protest he has given us the reasons why he should be a minister, and he has revealed to us why he has gained your confidence. Because of his humility and his sincerity, I feel that I can trust him. You feel that you can."
"But," protested John, with a gesture of desperation, "I am not educated for the ministry."
"You have something more needed here than education," interjected the Dean of the Seminary, still in his lecture-room voice. "Besides, the seminary is but ten miles away, by street car. You may complete the full three years' course at the same time you are making this little church into a big one!"
Something in John's breast leaped at the prospect of a college course, and the idea of making a little church into a big one appealed to his inborn passion for definite achievement; yet with it all came once more the feeling that he was being hopelessly and helplessly entangled.
"But," he struggled, looking with moist, appealing eyes, first at Hamilton and then at Harding, "I have not been ordained, and I have no call!"
"No call?" queried Dean Hamilton, laughing nervously, as was his way of modifying the intensity of the situation. "Your capacity to do is your call."
"Being honest with yourself, do you not believe that you can save this church?" argued Brother Harding.
John felt that he could, but his soul still strained within him, and his eyes roved over the audience, the corners of the room and the very beams in the ceiling, as if seeking a way of escape.
Suddenly a man stood up in the back of the church.
"Will he take a side?" this man demanded excitedly, with hoarse impatience. "What side is he on?"
The very crassness of this partisan creature, so seething with personal feeling that he understood nothing of the young man's agony of soul, lashed the tender sensibilities of Hampstead like a scourge, so that all his nature rose in protest. From a figure of cowering doubt, he suddenly stood forth bold and challenging.
"No!" he thundered. "I will not take a side! The curse of God is upon sides, and every man and every woman who takes a side in His church! I will take the Lord's side. I challenge every one of you who is willing to leave his or her petty personal feeling in this controversy, for to-night and forever, to come out here and stand beside me. I place my life career upon the issue. I will let your coming be my call. If you call me, I will answer. If you do not, God has set me free from any responsibility to you."
The questioning partisan sank down abashed before such prophetic fervor. John stood waiting. No eye looked at any other eye but his. The silence was electric and pregnant, but brief, broken almost immediately by a low, rumbling sound and the rattle of wheels against chairs. The Angel of the Chair, propelling her vehicle herself, was coming to take her place beside John.
She had barely reached the front when the tall form of Elder Burbeck was seen to advance stiffly and offer his hand to Hampstead.
The venerable Elder Lukenbill, goat-whiskered and doddering, leader of the Aleshire faction, hesitated only long enough to gloat a little at this spectacle of his rival, Burbeck, eating humble pie, and then, prodded from behind, arose and careened on weak knees down the aisle.
Others began to follow, till presently it seemed that the whole church was moving; everybody stood up, everybody slipped forward, or tried to. Failing that, they spoke, or laughed, or sobbed, or shook hands with themselves or some one near; then craned on tiptoe to see what was happening down where half the church was massed about the two elders, about the Dean and the Evangelist and John.
Abruptly the tall forms of these men sank from view; then the front ranks of people, crowding around, also began to sink, almost as ripe grain bows before a breeze, until even the people at the back could see that Brother Hampstead was kneeling, with the yellow crest of his hair falling in abandon about his face.
The long, skeleton hand of Elder Lukenbill was sprawled over John's bowed head, overlapped aggressively by the stout, red fingers of Elder Burbeck, while the dapper digits of the Dean of the Seminary capped and clasped the two hands and tangled nervously in the tawny locks themselves.
"With this laying on of hands," the Dean was saying, still in that high lecture-room cackle, although his tone was deeply impressive, "I ordain thee to the ministry of Jesus Christ!"
When, succeeding this, the voice of the District Evangelist had been heard in prayer, there followed an impressive waiting silence, in which no one seemed to know quite what to do, except to gaze fixedly at the face of John Hampstead, which continued as bloodless and as motionless as chiseled marble; until, bowed in her chair, as if she brooded like a real angel over the kneeling congregation, the rich contralto voice of Mrs. Burbeck began to sing:
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee,
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love."
Presently her voice changed to "Nearer My God to Thee", while other voices joined until the whole church was filled with the sound, and when the last note had died, the very air of the little chapel seemed tear-washed and clear.
In this atmosphere John Hampstead arose, and when one hand swept back the yellow mass of hair, a kind of glory appeared upon his brow. Once an actor, once a man of ambition, he was now consecrated to the service of humanity.
But he had not surrendered his love for Bessie Mitchell, and Marien Dounay was still in the world, mounting higher and higher toward the goal she had imperiously set for herself.