Chapter XXVII. The Wonderful
Summer on the Pleasure Island
MY next opportunity of earning money for my education came in a call to preach on Sundays in a little church sixty miles from the Seminary at a fashionable summer resort. The compensation to be ten dollars a week: compensation for three days’ absence from the Seminary, one hundred and twenty miles of travel and expenses, and the nervous exertion of preaching twice and teaching a Sunday-school class, not excluding pastoral work whenever opportunity should offer!
These weekly journeys began when I arose on Saturday morning at five o’clock, drank a hastily prepared cup of cocoa, and hurried off to the station for the six o’clock train. Then the train would start on its way through the snowdrifts, puffing and gasping down white aisles through rows of stiff, stately pines whose hands held puffy clouds of snow, and then followed a slow passage through miles of birches bending low under the weight of wet snow like robed saints humbled by too great a weight of glory. The railway trip was followed by a steamer journey of eight miles through a heavy, sad sea which never seemed to have any light in it, and in whose icy surface pretty grey and mottled gulls were not afraid to dip their palpitating breasts. The steamer put me ashore on an island whose centre was loaded with a serried row of little mountains. At the landing I found a stage and drove for eight miles over the island to my parish. The stage horse rushed us down dipping roads that threaded between precipitous mountain sides, whose summits were desert rocks and at whose feet had crumbled cliff after cliff of red rock, spread out like a rusty iron yard. Then the road became a climb until some highlands were attained and we sped through a little fishing village which nestled close to a mysterious, secluded cove, guarded by stern, fretted cliffs, a place where Stevenson would have had a cave of smugglers or the anchorage of a rakish pirate craft. Then came a turn in the road, where, behind a fringe of thick, old gold birches and in the midst of some dead oak stumps, nature had placed a cathedral pile of gigantic slabs of stone, one on another, as if to show to man what the angels of strength could do once they started to build with stone. Next followed a bewildering ride over a spiral road up a steep hill on which stood aristocratic summer homes. At a lookout where the road took a sudden dip, one saw the cold ocean far down below with its heavy, listless breakers pounding wearily against the iron cliffs, as if saying, “Why do the poets insist on our ceaselessly trying to shatter this cliff? I wish they would let us rest through the winter, till the summer visitors come: then I will pound like Vulcan’s hammer to please them!” In the distance, little dismal islands stood in the sea like burnt dumplings in gravy. Over them the gulls were screaming and wailing, adding to the solitude and the winter’s dreariness. Then the stage slanted down the hill and after a long, twisting ride drew up before the village post-office, where I met my host and was duly welcomed as the new minister.
Back and forth, week after week, returning to the Seminary on Monday evenings, I accomplished my journeys faithfully. Each week besides my studies I had to plan for the church. There was little time for idleness, for the hours of recreation were taken up in travel. On these trips I took a book and tried to have it read on my return.
But my reward was near at hand. The summer arrived, and with it an inflow of wealth, honor, and leisure to my parish. A wonderful transformation came over the island—the Pleasure Island. Boards were unscrewed from cottage windows. The dead grass gave way to green carpets. Lifeless sticks budded with colored foliage. The dead sea and the listless waves became animated with restless energy. The sun kissed the roads into smoothness and lined the highways with flowers. Fresh painted steamers, with flying banners, whistled into the wharves and unloaded crowds of visitors. Steam yachts lay at anchor in the cove. The white wings of yawls and catboats were dipping in the breeze. The mountain paths had been re-charted and were filled with adventurers. The pine groves and the quiet cliffs lured tired men and women to their restful silences. Trout fishers rubbed oil of camphor over their faces to restrain the ambitious stings of flies and mosquitoes, and sought the brook pools where Walton’s classic trout waited to be played with. My little rustic church became filled with city people, who not only sat in the pews, but sang in the choir, decorated the pulpit with flowers and grasses, and served on responsible committees.
Then, too, my rest and opportunity came, for we had a list of distinguished clergymen and professors who were to occupy my pulpit every Sunday morning, for the resort was very rich in clerical talent of a willing and gracious sort. We had so much professional talent indeed, that one morning near the post-office I beheld two bishops, two university presidents, two professors, and a world-famous author standing on less than two square yards of ground!
We left the doors and the windows of the church open while the noted men preached, and their voices had to vie with the song birds who perched on the waving trees outside the windows. The sea tang blew across the church, the sweetest of summer incense.
I had little enough to do, for the people were too busy with pleasure to be at home: they wanted me to sit on the cliffs with books and take a rest—on a salary.
But there came calls to preach on some of the outlying islands to which I was carried on different Sunday afternoons in a launch.
Then they all left us, tanned, virile, rested: the whole community took itself to the decks of the island steamers and was carried to the trains. The tennis courts were closed. The shutters were fastened over the display windows of the flower stand. Many pews were empty in my little, rustic church. The flowers and shrubs were bedded in straw. Soon the snow and frost and bleakness of winter would spread over the island. My second pastorate ended, too, for I had received a call to supply a larger church much nearer to the Seminary, a church where I intended to preach after my graduation from the Seminary.