 CHAPTER XX It was apparent to the Reverend Theron Ware, from the very first moment of waking next morning, that both he and the world had changed overnight. The metamorphosis in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring blindly so long was accomplished. He stood forth, so to speak, in a new skin, and looked about him with perceptions of quite an altered kind, upon what seemed in every way a fresh existence. He lacked even the impulse to turn round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged, let the past bury the past. He had no vestige of interest in it. The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself to be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all its requirements. It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast-table. They had exchanged no words since their parting at the depot-yard the previous evening, and a vent now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen, half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in. Ah! Potatoes warmed up in cream, he said, with hearty pleasure in his tone. What a mind-reader you are, to be sure! I'm glad you're feeling so much better, she said briefly, taking her seat. Better, he returned, I'm a new being. She ventured to look him over more freely upon this assurance. He perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was turning over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish grievance. Most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him where he had been till after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of the scattering fire of peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all. I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent up to-day. He announced presently, in a casual way. Why, Theron, can we afford it? The wife asked, regarding him with surprise. Oh, easily enough, he replied, lightheartedly. You know they've increased my salary. She shook her head. No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it. She went on dolefully. But you're getting so you don't tell me the least thing about your affairs nowadays. Theron laughed aloud. You ought to be grateful. Such melancholy affairs as mine have been till now, he declared. That is, if it weren't absurd to think such a thing. Then, more soberly, he explained. No, my girl, it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in my mind, big ambitious thoughts, and plans upon which great things depend. They no doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded. But it is a wife's part to understand and make allowances, and not intrude trifles which may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding, my girl. I only speak to reassure you, and-and help you to comprehend. Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my-my career. Of course not, responded Alice dubiously, but-but-but what Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the instant he reproached himself for the weakness of it. Well, I hardly know how to say it, she faltered. But it was nicer in the old days before you bothered your head about big projects in your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron! she broke forth suddenly with tearful zeal. I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to be a-a backslider. The husband sat upright and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and stupid epithet. These are things not to be said, he admonished her, after a moment's pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. Least of all are they to be said of a clergyman by his wife. It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, better by his wife than by outsiders, but she bit her lips, and kept the jive back. A rebuke of this form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it had been merited, troubled, even, while it did not convince her mind, and the puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face. Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing how much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years, and it was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a little. Then his brows relaxed slowly, and under the visible influence of melting considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly, and broke the silence with labored amiability. Come, come! the day began so pleasantly. It was so good to feel well again. Let us talk about the piano instead. That is, he added, with an obvious overture to playfulness, if the thought of having a piano is not too distasteful to you. Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together into the sitting-room to measure and decide between the two available spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over some sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in openly cheerful spirits. Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on the desk, and took down his scribbling book as well. But there his application flagged, and he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at the rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby patiently studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby not knowing at all how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile to his mind, and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out over his shoulder. That's what Chopin does, he sings. The spirit of that wonderful music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It seemed to raise itself up, a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known and felt and done before. This was his new birth, that marvelous night with the piano. The conceit pleased him, not the less because they're flashed along with it, the thought that it was a poet that had been born. Yes, the former country loud, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions, cringing at the scowl of mean pierces and winches, was dead. There was an end of him and good riddance. In his place there had been born a poet. He spelled the word out now unabashed, a child of light, a lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin and Celia. Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful reverie, a practical suggestion suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting out his letter-pad and riding hurriedly. Dear Miss Madden, life will be more tolerable to me if before nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it remains dumb it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it and imagine how a great master might make it speak. Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven this four noon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in selecting an instrument? Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall call at Thurston's at eleven and wait. Thanking you in anticipation, I am. Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough to spare on the point of his pen. But the right one was not easy to come at. Gratefully, faithfully, sincerely, truly, each in turn struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At last he decided to simply write the word yours, and then wavered between satisfaction at his boldness, dread, lest he had been overbold, and worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or the other. All the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat. There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the other way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the front door without a sound. Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind, a lad whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten cents on his return. He might report himself to his patron at the bookstore, Yonder. Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in the rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was not a mere customer demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no keeping thirstans out of conversations in this place. Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes in uniform binding huddled together under a cardboard label of imminent women's series. Oddly enough, one of these bore the title, George Sonde. Theron saw there must be some mistake as he took the book down and opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven. We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of life. He explained in self-defense to the old bookseller, then counting out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled and added, There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the clergyman's discount for a life of George Sonde. I don't know, answered the other, pleasantly. Guess she wasn't so much different from the rest of them, except that she didn't mind appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others. I must hurry, said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which he strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing things he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced itself more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented, with that half-contemptuous, yes, George something, upon his blundering ignorance. His mortification at having thus exposed his dull rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved. He had never before met a young unmarried woman who would have confessed to him any such knowledge. But then, of course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia in any other way. He recognized vaguely that he must provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which to measure and comprehend her. But it was, for the moment, more interesting to consider what her standards were. Did she object to George Sahn's behavior, or did she sympathize with that sort of thing? Did those statues, and the loose flowing diaphanous toga and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately sensuous music, was he to believe that they signified? Good morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of my punctual days, said Celia. She was standing on the doorstep at the entrance to the musical department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the sun was shining, the full glare of its strong light enveloping her figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower of softened color close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace, was what struck him now, first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her. Theron shook hands with her and found joy in the perception that his own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to him. It was generous of you, he said, to wait for me out here, where all my delight in the sight of you instead of squandering the privilege on a handful of clerks inside. This madden beamed upon him and nodded approval. Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment, she remarked. They went in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name. During the ensuing half-hour the young minister followed her about more humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a good many pianos in the big showroom overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the organist. She ordered them rolled around, this way or that, as if they had been so many checkers on a draft board. She threw back their covers with the scant ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening popper's mouths. She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands, not daining to seat herself, but just slight bending forward and sweeping her fingers up and down their keyboards. Abel, domineering fingers which pounded, tinkled, mediated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub. Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms and watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen showed to her as the rich Miss Madden seemed to him to be mixed with a certain assertion of the claims of good fellowship on the score of her being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of free masonry between them. They eluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked her too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that here also she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the memory of these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel himself an intruder and outsider among these piano forte experts. When it was all over, Seal you waved the others aside and talked with Theron. I suppose you want me to tell you the truth, she said. There's nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of the maker's direct. Do they sell on the installment plan? he asked. There was a wistful effect in his voice which caught her attention. She looked away, out through the window on the street below, for a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times. Oh, you wanted it once, I see. She remarked softly. Well, this Adelberger's the best value for the money. Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed toward the largest instrument in the room, a veritable Leviathan among pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as six hundred dollars. He turned over the fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and he found the courage to shake his head. It would be too large, much too large for the room, he explained. And besides, it is more than I like to pay, or can pay, for that matter. It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no help for it. They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair quality. Now, leave the bargaining to me, she adjured him. These prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All you have to do is tell them to send it to your house. You wanted it to-day, you said? Yes, in memory of yesterday, he murmured. She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings made salams to him as well. It would have been impossible to interpose anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of payment. I am ever so much obliged to you, he said fervently, in the comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at something in the book-department. Of course I was entirely at your service, don't mention it. She replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol. He held up instead the volume he had purchased. Guess what it is? You never would guess in this wide world. His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surreptitious. Well then, there's no good trying, is there? commented Silia, her glance roving again toward the shelves. It is a life of George Sand, whispered Theron. I've been reading it this morning, all the Chopin part, while I was waiting for you. To his surprise there was an apparently displeased contraction of her brows as he made this revelation. For the instant a dreadful fear of having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face cleared as if by magic. She smiled and let her eyes twinkle and laughter at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of admonition. Naughty, naughty, she murmured back with a roguishly solemn wink. He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol. The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words or even sequent thoughts. Upermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scutted the singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight he recognized it for one of the griefs of his life, and the darkness which followed seemed nothing but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would counterman the order, he would, but she was speaking again. They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of pianos. Therein with an effort pulled himself together and laid hold of her words. I suppose you will be going the other way, she was saying. I shall have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new mass over from Vienna, and I'm head over heels and work at it. I can have Father Forbes to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism and can't come out of his cave, thank heaven. And then she was receding from view up the sun-lit busy sidewalk, and therein, standing on the doorstep, roofily rubbed his chin. She had said he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal inclinations. Some of the passersby bowed to him, and one or two paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses mechanically but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction. XXI. Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of storefronts along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket fences enclosing domestic lawns forced upon Theron's attention the fact that he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. He was not in the least hungry, still lest did he feel any desire just now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at all? There was no reason whatever, save that Alice would be expecting him. On reflection that hardly amounted to a reason, wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very nature of things that it should be so. Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation entered the small temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls he ordered was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure. Yet nonetheless she smiled at him and spoke almost familiarly. I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside and you are keeping Bachelors Hall. Not quite that, he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meager and distasteful repast to avoid any further conversation. There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him when he paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but therein took for granted the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future than he had laterally done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside notion, why, that was the best of all. His fancy built-up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty. The fresh sea breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in his mind's eye, and brought the hearty flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks. He was prepared already, hardly to know her, so robust and revivified which she had become by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return. For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts subordinated themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the priests and the doctor's libraries. The thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well. The languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his reverie, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modeled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms. He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledzmar's house. His walk had brought him quite out of the town and up by a broad main highway, which yet took on all sorts of silven charms, to a commanding sight on the hillside. Below in the valley lay Octavius, at one end half hidden in factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface of a broad plain, piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly and congruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched a wide belt of dense artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the timber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the prophets of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road and the high weather-stained board fence of the race course on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture. Dr. Ledzmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly leading him, ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying order of old fashioned houses which men of leisure and means built for themselves, while the early traditions of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad low bulk, and its big double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself. Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech. I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill, he said, laying aside his hat. It's nothing at all, replied Ledzmar. Merely a stiff shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's it, throw those things on the floor. Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his feet and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, and corners of the floor were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and open books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave there new ideas about the value of Chinese servants. I must thank you, first of all, doctor, he began. For your kindness incoming when I was ill, I was sick and ye visited me. You mustn't think of it that way, said Ledzmar. Your friend came for me, and of course I went, and gladly too. There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend of yours, and his wife too, both quite out of the common. I don't know when I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have known more of them, are they still here? They went yesterday, therein replied. His earlier shyness had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease. I don't know, he went on, that the word genuine is just what would have occurred to me to describe the soulsbees. They are very interesting people, as you say, most interesting, and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them in their performance from the inside, like one on the stage of a theater, you know, instead of in the audience, and, well, I understand things better than I used to. The doctor looked over his spectacles at him, with the suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and therein continued, I had several long talks with her. She told me very frankly the whole story of her life, and, and it was decidedly queer, I can assure you, I may say to you, you will understand what I mean, that since my talk with you, and the books you lent me, I see things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it, sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use no word for my new state short of illumination. Dr. Ledzmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of illumination. I suppose, he said, after a little, no woman can come in contact with a priest for any length of time without telling him the story of her life, as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts to a law. The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use of the word priest in obvious illusion to himself. Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain, he said, that in her case it was only done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in many, many of my former views, and she was nervous lest this should lead me to throw up the priesthood, the doctor interposed, upon his hesitation. Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would have perished from the memory of mankind if it hadn't been for women. It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no one has gone resolutely in with the searchlight and exploited the whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in their waking hours. They pass through the lust for digging caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows, all remote ancestral impulses. They play games with stones, marbles, and so on, at regular stated periods of the year, which they instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and Heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this and leaves it behind him, so completely that the grown man feels himself much a stranger among boys of his own place, who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Eskimo. But the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in the Neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of medieval stage, or dawn of medievalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there, she dies there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hair. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity. Therein smiled. We priests, he said, and paused again to enjoy the words. I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong in the procession. We are considering the question impersonally, said the doctor. First of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens and respect auguries. Think of the broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of teagrowns. They make the constituency, to which an institution based on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest. Yes, assented Theron, there rose up before him on the instant the graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes. Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course, you Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this than celibates do, but even with you there's a great deal in it. Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests with fabulous gifts, until the passion for currying favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your Jerome. I will, certainly, said the listener, resolving to remember the name and refer it to the old bookseller. Well, whatever laws one sector or another makes, the woman's attitude toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by flower pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days, ugg, it makes one sick. Dr. Ledzmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little laugh. Come, let me show you round a bit, he said. My shoulder is easier walking than sitting. Have you ever written a book yourself, asked Theron, getting to his feet? I have a thing on serpent worship, the scientist replied, written years ago. I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it, urged the other. The doctor laughed again. You'll have to learn German, then, I'm afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. That was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton's Arabian knights. Come this way, and I will show you my laboratory. They moved out of the room and, through a passage, Ledzmar talking as he led the way. I took up that subject when I was at college by a curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall, it was in Germany. Some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening I had intended to be a lager. Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore. It was pleasanter in the conservatory, a low spacious structure, with broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious, but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made over them. The heat grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural, and delightfully free from pretense, in the big overgrown field of flowers and shrubs. Theron recalled, with some surprise, Celia's indictment of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul. You must be extremely fond of flowers, he remarked. Dr. Ledzmar shrugged his well shoulder. They have their points, he said briefly. These are all diocese here, over beyond are the monocious species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's theory that her mafridatism in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms. And is the theory right? Ask Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest. We may know, in the course of three or four hundred years, replied Ledzmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile. That is a very brief period for observation, when such a complicated question as sex is involved, he added, we have been studying the female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions. They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which we're beginning to show bloom. Here another task will begin next month, the doctor observed. These are sovias, and anterhinums, or snap-dragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humblebees bore holes through their base to save the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hivebees discover and utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the old, foggy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it. These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual. My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never got around to it. They say it pays pretty well, though. The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the epipactus latifolia, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, would pay, commented the doctor, not like a blue-rode edendron in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have achieved a half column in the Encyclopedia Britannica on a smaller basis than that. They stood now at the end of the garden before a small, dilapidated summer house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange, recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or it might be dead. Looking closer with a startled surprise, he made out the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his guide in the expectation of a scene. The doctor had already taken out a notebook and pencil, and was drawing his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer house, and, lifting the oriental's limp arm, took a count of his pulse. Then, with head bowed low, sideways, he listened for the heart action. Finally, he somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids and made a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the light, he inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out. In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper. This is one of my regular afternoon duties, he explained, again with the whimsical half-smile. I am increasing his dose monthly by regular stages, and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Here to fore, observations have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects. This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished, and watched over intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill you and me and every other vertebit creature on the premises, and he hasn't got even fairly underway yet. The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They walked together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of the hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers, the doctor was a beast. And yet, as they moved slowly through the garden, the thought took sudden shape in his mind, it would be only justice for him to get also the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and repelled him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of science, a philosopher. And what he had said about women, there was certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If he would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her relation with the priest, yes, Theron recognized now that there was nothing else that he so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father Forbes. He paused with a simulated curiosity about one of the flowerbeds. Speaking of women and religion, he began, in as casual atone as he could command, I noticed curiously enough in my own case that as I develop in what you may call the other direction, my wife, who formerly was not especially devoted, is being strongly attracted by the most unthinking and hysterical side of our church system. The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a stalk in the bed. And another case, Theron went on, of course it was also new and strange to me, but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy about the Catholic Church here, I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke. Letzmar stood up. My mind has better things to busy itself with than mad asses of that description, he replied. She is not worth talking about, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed ludeness. If she were even a type she might be worth considering, but she is simply an abnormal sport, with a little brain addled by notions that is like Hypatia, and a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she has money. Her father is a decent man, he ought to have her whipped. Mr. Ware drew himself erect as he listened to these outrageous words. It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent friend to pass unrebuke'd. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered. His mind, fluttering between these two extremes, allotted abruptly upon a compromise. He would speak so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to prevent his finding out what he wanted to know. The desire to hear Letzmar talk about Celia and the priest seemed now to have possessed him for a long time, to have dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have been growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be interested in orchids and bees and the drug Chinamen. It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke. I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady. He began, with rhetorical dignity, bless me, interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness. That is not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses. But therein went on, feeling his way. Of course I gathered that evening that you had prejudices in this matter, but these are rather apart from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember, of the traditional attitude of women toward priests, wanting to curl their hair and put flowers in it, you know. And that suggested to me some individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what were the relations between Miss Madden and Father Forbes. She said this morning, for instance, I happened to meet her, quite by accident, that she was going to the church to practice a new piece, and that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would be quite an impossible remark in our, that is, in any Protestant circles, and purely as a matter of comparison. I was curious to ask you just how much there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much, you have had exceptional opportunities for—a sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which had on the flash of Theron's turning, seemed given over to unmixed anger, took on an expression of bodily suffering instead. My shoulder has all at once grown excessively painful, he said hastily. I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware. Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way without a dew round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put his left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder, and his right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for him to shake hands with his guest in parting. You're sure there's nothing I can do, said Theron, lingering on the outer side of the gate. I used to rub my father's shoulders and back, I'd gladly—oh, not for worlds, groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that there had been no invitation to come again. Dr. Ledzmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following the retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with his right hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such thing as rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into the laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks of water. Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he looked from one tank to another with a pondering dilatory gaze. At last he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim, yellowish-green lizard with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist, darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny, forked tongue. The doctor held the thing up to the light and, scrutinizing it, through his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval, a grim smile curled in his beard. Yes, you are the type, he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in the conceit. Your name isn't Johnny any more, it's the Reverend Theron Ware. End of Chapter XXI The annual camp meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a little later than usual. Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday. On the noon of that day the Reverend Theron Ware escaped for some hours from the burden of work and incessant observation, which he shared with twenty other preachers and walked alone in the woods. The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a tennis court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the center was a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of horse sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees began, the eye-caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the supplings and underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully four-score tents were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement of semicircular form, facing that part of the ingirdling woods where the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheater cut in two. In the center, just under the edge of the roof of the boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level of its floor, there projected a platform railed round with aggressively rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform. At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house, or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers. Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendance did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses of nature about them. The real spectacle was in the evening, when, as the shadows gathered, big clusters of kerosene torches hung high on the trees facing the audience were lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending forward over rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the abashed faces of those on the anxious seat beneath him, borrowed an effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool night air which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood of those who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost barbarous license such as befitted the wilderness. But in the evening not all were worshipers. For a dozen miles round on the countryside, young farm workers and their girls regarded the camp meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year, no more to be missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many points of view, more opportunities for genuine entertainment than either. Their behavior when they came was pretty bad, not the less so because all the rules established by the presiding elders for the regulation of strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as they knew how. These sightseers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches where the light was dim. More often they stood outside in the circular space between the tents and the benches and mingled cat calls, drover's yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the amens of the earnest congregation. Their rough horseplay on the fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough. Everybody knew that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness. Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the camp meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight husking bees or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house. Sinek said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the large income they derived from the unruly visitors' gate money. This was unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was something else far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving in their poor modern way, the character and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs was preeminently a fighting religion which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in the storm. The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. The daylight services became more and more perfunctory as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason that then came the fierce wrestle with the Bielzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so one-sided a contest, either. No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of a sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing soul-commanding gleam in his eye, not at all to be resisted. These occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream to the benches under the pulpit, and to baste them there like worms in the dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders advance, and the torchfires would sway and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that went up in triumph from the brethren. These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the weekday evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dullness upon the Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three fourths of the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening the gates. The two presiding elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. The controversy reached a point where Theron's presiding elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders of the open Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath which ended all discussion. Sometimes its arguments seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were clothed in so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exultation that it was impossible to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate money. When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat entranced by the charm of the sermon. Then, glancing around at the empty benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that marvelous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their fight. The presiding elders wrung his hand with a magnificent grip. The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first time. He was the veritable hero of the weak. The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get away by himself next day and walk in the woods. A man of such power had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow. He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the message next day might be clearer and more luminous still. Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was well outside the more or less frequented neighborhoods of the camp. Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land, with that informing scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland, a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields. But he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted to go. Very soon he hid upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gate. Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore himself more erectly for one thing. His shoulders were thrown back and seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface. Under the chin were the suggestions of fullness, which bespeak an easy mind. His clothes were new. The frock coat fitted him, and the thin, dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining, tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it against low-hanging branches. All had gone well, more than well, with him. The second quarterly conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of his congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As for himself, he viewed with astonish delight the progress he had made in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Solzby's advice, and the results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had wracked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed all sorts of books, boldly now, from the Octavius Public Library, and could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper, and Leckie, and Lang, and the rest had hurled him. He dallyed pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him. They were all before him to choose, and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position, which softened bodily as well as mental fibers. He ceased to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and fingernails. Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter she now accepted whatever he did or said with admirable desility. It was months since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him. She had not wished to leave home for the seaside or any other resort during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual. This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday could ever have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an old thing. It had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare at first obliquely, then under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them. She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she made music which therein supposed was very good, for her. It pleased him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it, but he had a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memory of the yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the piano, or even sent a bill. This impressed him as being peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going near Thurston's at all. An hour-sharp walk, occasionally broken by shortcuts across open pastures, but for the most part, on forest paths, brought therein to the brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush and covered sparsely with beech trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of last year's foliage. The leaves above him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest. Thurston had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted and was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the beaches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes, there were certainly voices to be heard down in the hollow, and now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music. It was the nearest faint murmur of music, made up wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The sound grew louder as he advanced until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its place behind the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguished from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one. He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook much of what he had come to see. The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds were, one massed about an enclosure in which young men were playing at football, another gathered further off in a horseshoe curve at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third, thronging at a point where the shade of overhanging woods began, focused upon a center of interest which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream rippled over its black slate bed, some little boys with legs bared to the thighs were paddling about under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon the scene, pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures who nonetheless wore modern hats and superintended with knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school, and this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods round about. The noises which erode from this multitude, the shouts of the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings, the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent ordered strains of the dance music proceeding from some invisible distance in the green wood charmed his ears with their suggestion of universal merriment. He drew a long breath, half pleasure, half wistful regret, as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had left behind. At any rate it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow might bring. Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right through the beaches, making a detour under cover of the crowds at play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty men in their shirt sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in their place fresh foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar, and through the babble of eager voices rose without pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs. Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow citizens engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls, standing on the fringe of the crowd among the trees. Everywhere a remarkable good humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke out just at the end of the bar, nearest Theron, and one young man was knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to shake hands with his antagonist and join him in more beer. The incident caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought, in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank ingenial reconciliation. Perhaps there was something contagious about this wholesale display of thirst, for the reverend Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that Lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps someone would bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for a possible messenger. Turning he found himself face to face with two smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumbfounded plankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia. We stole down upon you unawares, said the priest, in his cheeriest manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes, hardly at all clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own. We could hardly believe our eyes, that it could be you whom we saw here among the sinners. I am in love with your sinners, responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and thrust himself to look fully into her eyes. I've had five days of the saints over in another part of the woods, and they've bored the head off me. END OF CHAPTER XXII At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of beer. It pleased the reverend Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so agreeable to the taste, as he had expected, but it was cold and refreshing. When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them. Beyond the bar Theron could catch now through the trees, regularly recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision as well. At the instant when they reached their highest forward point, the seats were filled with girls, some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celias, and there was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings. That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous with those white stockings of hers, remarked Celia, some friend ought to tell her to die them, or pad them, suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. I daresay the question of swings and lady stockings hardly arises with you over at the camp meeting, Mr. Ware. Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. I should say not, he replied. I'm just dying to see a camp meeting, said Celia. You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them. Don't go, I beg of you, urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. Don't let's talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon, as if there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp meeting. Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul to any other person all day long. I should think the assumption was a safe one, said the priest, smilingly, unless, he added, on afterthought, it be by way of a genial profanity. There used to be some old clear men who said, hell to my soul, when they missed at Coitz. But I haven't heard it for a long time. I daresay they're all dead. I shall never forget that deathbed, where I saw you first, remarked Theron musingly. I date from that experience a whole new life. I have been greatly struck lately in reading our northern Christian advocate to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being frightened by some illness of their own or some epidemic about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures of hellfire surrounding the sinner's deathbed than anything else. You could hear the same thing at our camp meeting tonight if you were there. There isn't so much difference as you think, said Father Forbes, dispassionately. Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see if there are any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a campfire. They have always been like that. What nonsense! cried Celia. I have no patience with such gloomy rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practiced the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early church was full of these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself. And it was only when your miserable Jerome's and Augustine's and Cyril's brought in the abominable meanness and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the church that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones. My dear Celia! interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently. We will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer. What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr. Ware, he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, that what we are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and theological revolution which in time will modify and control the destiny of the entire American people. You see these young Irishmen here, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt, more important and far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hingest and Horsa. The Kelt has come to grief here to four, or at least been forced to play second fiddle to other races, because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive imaginative even fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself to begin with than it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call porter, you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered Lager. Already many of them can out-drink the Germans at their own beverage. The Lager-drinking Irishmen in a few generations will be a new type of humanity, the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be the American. And his church with the Italian element thrown clean out of it and its Pope living, say in Baltimore or Georgetown, will be the Church of America. Let us have more Lager at once, put in Celia. This revolution can't be hurried forward too rapidly. Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in jest, how much in earnest. It seems to me, he said, that as things are going it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a universal skepticism. It is the nature of human progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in time. Father Forbes laughed outright this time, my dear Mr. Ware, he said, as they touched glasses again and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them. Of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as the idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion and it is the basis of the Christian religion simply because it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. Intelligent men, as you call them, really have very little influence even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of superstitions he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other people's superstitions alone. That is always the ultimate view of the crowd. But I don't see, observed Theron, granting that all this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything, except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast, nothing is elastic, there is no room for compromise. The Church is always compromising, explained the priest, only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the trick. No, the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't debate with skeptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music. He made a little mock bow here to Celia. The music, at least, is divine. There you have nothing to do but be agreeable and avoid scandal and observe the covenances. You are no more expected to express doubts about the immaculate conception than you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational Church for people to have. As the Irish civilize themselves, you observe them diligently engaged in the process down below there, and the social roughness of their Church becomes softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward it. In the end it will embrace them all and be modified by them and in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and a new national Church, each representative of the other. And all this to be done by Lager Bier, Theron ventured to comment, jokingly, he was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink. The priest passed the pleasantry by. No, he said seriously, what you must see is that there always must be a Church. If one did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. It is needed first and foremost as a police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earned their salaries as the agents of these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just as one hears of Freemasons who believe that the sun rises and sets to exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly and, understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you and me. Theron is sent into the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow. Yes, that is the idea, to make the best of it, he said, and fastened his regard boldly this time upon the swings. We are both ordained by our bishops, continued the priest, at an age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined wisdom to buy a horse for them. And I was married, broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement, when I had only just been ordained. At the worst, you had only the church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of that, but it is different with me. A marked silence followed this outburst. The Reverend Mr. Ware had never spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before, and something in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him. But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her, a tall and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt, hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman. But he was speaking to Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal. I can do nothing at all with them, this newcomer said to her. He'll not be said by me, perhaps he'll listen to you. It's likely I'll go down there, said Celia. He may do what he likes for all me. Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way and leave him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's had, if he will bring trouble on himself, let us make it no affair of ours. Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young man. Mr. Ware, said Celia here, let me introduce you to my brother Michael, my full brother. Mr. Ware remembered him now and began, in response to the other's formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark inside the church. But Celia held up her hand. I'm afraid, Mr. Ware, she said hurriedly, that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will apologize for the inflection in advance. Wonderingly Theron followed her look and saw another young man who had come up the path from the crowd below and was close upon them. The minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the center of almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling countenance and unsteady step. His silk hat thrust back upon his head, his frock coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neck wear disarranged, and saluted the company with amyability. I saw you up here, Father Forbes. He said with a thickened and erratic utterance. Why don't you come down and join us? I'm setting him up for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in the last sin I've got in the world for the boys every time, and they know it. They're solider for me than they ever wear for anybody. That's how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys will stand by you. I'm going to the assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me. The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address a few words to the meeting. Just mention that I'm a candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands over. That'll make you solid with the boys, and we'll all be good fellows together. Come on down. The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker had laid upon it and shook his head in genuine deprecation. No, no. You must excuse me, Theodore, he said. We mustn't meddle in politics, you know. Politics be damned, urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. I say, boys! He shouted to those below. Here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down and address the meeting. Come on, Father, come down and have a drink with the boys. It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm this time. Go away with you. She snapped in low, angry tones at the intruder. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you can't keep sober yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should think you'd have more decency when you're in such a state as this than to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have that much respect for me, and before strangers, too. Oh, I mustn't come where you are, eh? remarked the peckant Theodore, straightening himself with an elaborate effort. You've bought these woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here all the same. For every one you'll ever have in your life, Redhead, and don't you forget it. Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting decent people, said Celia. Before strangers, too! the young man called out, with weary sarcasm. Oh, we'll take care of strangers all right. He had not seemed to be aware of Theron's presence much less his identity before. But he turned to him now with a knowing grin. I'm running for the assembly, Mr. Ware. He said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken illisions and co-minglings to which his speech tended. And I want you to fix up the method as solid for me. I'm going to drive over to the camp meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put in a twenty dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you want to see it. As the young man began fumbling in a vest pocket, Theron gathered his wits together. You'd better not go this evening, he said, as convincingly as he knew how. Because the gates will be closed very early, and the Saturday evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite reserved for those living on the grounds. Rats! said Theodore, raising his head and abandoning the search for the bill. Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too drunk? I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr. Madden. murmured Theron, confusedly. Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise between us, Mr. Ware! cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor and tone and mean. And one of them is— Go away from me, Michael. One of them is— I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their own priests to make fools of themselves over without any sneak of a protestant parson coming meddling around them. You're a married man into the bargain, and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books. You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk, why? These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes had clapped a hand abruptly over the offending mouth and flung his free arm in a tight grip around the young man's waist. Come with me, Michael, he said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp pace off into the woods. Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth. It's the dirty, foley blood that's in him, he heard her say, as if between clenched teeth. The girl's big, brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were still fixed upon the screen of foliage and dilated like those of a Medusa mask. The blood had gone away and left the fair face and neck as white it seemed to him as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless rage, which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and frightened him. Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew her arm into his and turned their backs upon the picnic scene. Let us go a little up the path into the woods, he said, and get away from all this. The further away the better, she answered bitterly, and he felt the shiver run through her again as she spoke. The methodical waltz music from that unseen dancing platform rose again above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps insensibly falling into the rhythm of the strains, and vanished from sight among the trees. End of chapter 23