OF gardens “so much has been said and on the whole so well said,” that I might perhaps restrain my pen from turning up that overworked soil. But yet the gardens of which I write have not been like the gardens of the published page. They have not brought forth generously either prose of lusty vegetable or poetry of spicy blossom. Although the gardens have been many, they might almost be described, so alike have they been, as if they were one, an itinerant garden that has accompanied us from one little hill village to another; for I write of the stony, arid, sterile garden-plot of a country parish.
Now, however forbidding the garden that has stretched rearward of each new domicile, my mother has always fallen upon it with a valiance of hope that neither years nor disappointment can destroy. She always thinks that things are going to grow in her gardens, and things do grow in them, too; but they are not always the things my mother has led me to expect. For her, I hope she will find the garden of her dreams in Paradise; for me, this earth will do, even this small, hill-circled scrap of it; for I am no gardener in my heart, only an observer of gardens. I own to an unregenerate enjoyment in watching my mother’s vegetables misbehave, just as, surreptitiously, I can’t help loving the whimsical goats of my father’s rustic flock.
As I glance back over the unwritten journal of my childhood, I find the words Choir, Vestry, Garden always printed in capital letters. The Gardener was a figure as momentous in my infant horizon as was the Senior Warden. In respect to gardens my mother has never had any confidence in the assistance of her own family. There have been occasions when some son or daughter, temporarily in favor, has been allowed to hoe softly, under supervision; but as to her husband, banishment is the sole decree. In fact, my father, genuine old English, imported direct from Trollope, does not show to best advantage in a garden. In general I have observed that our country clericals are likely to be at quarrel with the soil, that arid independent old soil which will grow things in its own way, in utter despite of parsons. My father’s original sin was due to the usual pastoral reluctance to let the tares and the wheat grow together unto the harvest, and it was when he mistook our infant carrots for Heaven-knows-what seed of the Enemy that the decree of banishment against him as a marauder occurred. Rather than initiate one of her own home-circle into her garden mysteries, my mother has chosen the unlikeliest outsider, and solicited advice from the most unprecedented sources, or by any methods of cajolery; she has been no stickler in regard to any man’s creed or practice when it has been a question of so vital a matter as cucumbers.
My retrospect shows our gardeners stretching back to the bounds of my memory, a lean, gnarled, hoary procession. One of the earliest of them is Father Time himself, with hoe instead of scythe, and with white locks rippling down his back. Father Time’s frank admission when engaged might have daunted some, but did not daunt my mother, for he confided to her at once that he could hoe but could not walk. He proved useful when carefully hauled from spot to spot, but our garden was cultivated that season in circles, of which the hoe was the radius and Father Time the center.
Another of our ancient hoe-bearers was a veteran. I do not know whether he had lost his eye on the battlefield or elsewhere, but certainly he had not exchanged it for wisdom. That is why he is the favorite of my mother’s recollections. She likes her gardeners a little imbecile. They are more manageable that way. The burden of their intelligence is the more usual trouble. A simple faith united to an instant obedience is the desideratum in gardeners; usually a gardener is as obstinate as he is conservative, and this is not at all to my mother’s mind. She loves to glean garden-lore from every source, but better still she loves to invent garden-lore of her own. She likes to be allowed to set out on an entirely new tack with some poor erring cabbage, and it is all she can do to hold on to her ministerial temper when she finds that her gardener has ruined the work of regeneration by some old-fashioned disciplinary notions of his own. Our ancient warrior, however, had no notions of his own, disciplinary or other, and that is why he possesses a shrine apart in our memories. He was as meek in my mother’s hands as his own hoe, and he never did anything she did not wish him to do except when he died!
On a bad eminence of contrast my memory declares another figure. I do not remember whether it was an invincible audacity, or an utter despair of securing likelier assistance, that led us that year to employ our own sexton. It is an axiom known to every ministerial household that it is unwise ever to put any member of your own flock to domestic use. A brawny Romanist, if such can be obtained, for laundry purposes, a Holy Roller for the furnace, and a Seventh-Day Baptist for the garden—these are samples of our principle of selection. I do not know just why those of our own fold are undesirable,—it is wiser perhaps that the silly sheep should not see the antic gamboling of the sober shepherd behind his own locked door, or guess what internal levities spice the discreet external conduct of his family. I do not know how it was that we fell so utterly from the grace of common sense as to employ our own sexton that summer. Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the most mettlesome man that grows, and not at all to be subdued to the ignoble uses of a hoe. This sexton was an agony to my father in the sanctuary, and an anguish to my mother in the garden. He went about with a chip in his mouth, and he always held it in one corner of his lips and chewed it aggressively and bitterly, and with the other corner he talked, just as bitterly. Within his own house he must have exchanged the chip for a pipe, for although I never saw him smoke, the fragrant tobacco fumes of him were spread through the house after every back-door colloquy. He talked more willingly than he worked, and that summer was a lean and sorrowful season, when the garden languished and my mother was browbeaten, unable, all because he was the sexton, to bring the man to order with the sharp nip of her words across his naughty pate.
We were more cautious next time and availed ourselves of one no less meek than a certain village ancient prominently known to be an Anarchist and a Methodist. The combination is unusual, I admit, but you may look for almost anything in a gardener. As an infant, I used to scan his person for a glimpse of the red shirt, and his lips for a spark of the incendiary eloquence, but no symptom of either ever showed. He was old and underfed and taciturn, and he gardened exactly as he wished to, without paying the tribute even of a comment to my mother’s suggestions. He had such original methods of his own that, for very amazement, she gave up her own initiative for the pleasure of watching his. Once when he was seen solemnly planting stones in one earthy mound after another, he did break his icy reserve to answer her irrepressible inquiry; he believed that potatoes grew better that way, since the roots did not have to pierce the earth for themselves but could wriggle through the friendly interstices of the stones. That summer was one of cheerful surprises. This singular spirit had, I believe, a genuine sympathy for the poor toiling vegetables; I remember that he spent one afternoon in tying up his tomatoes in copies of a certain sectarian sheet he brought with him for the purpose. A sportive wind arose in the night, to die before the Sabbath morning, on which we beheld not only our rectory lawn, but the utterly Episcopal precincts of the church, bestrewn with “Glad Tidings of Zion.” He was a lonely soul and dwelt apart, chiefly in a wheelbarrow. The vehicle was one of his idiosyncracies. He never appeared without it. Up and down our leafy streets would he trundle it; but yet I never saw anything in the wheelbarrow except the gardener. He appeared to push it ever before him for the sole purpose of having something to sit on when he wished, from the philosophic heights of his theological and sociological principles, to ruminate upon the evil behavior of “cabbages and kings.”
As I look back over a long succession of gardeners, I see it, punctuated as it may be here and there by some salient personality, for the most part stretching a weary line of the aged and infirm of mind and body, and I wonder by what survival of the unfittest society devotes to gardening purposes only those already devoted to decrepitude. As a matter of fact, the more one becomes acquainted with the vagaries of growing things, the more one is convinced that it requires nimble wits and supple muscles to subjugate the army of iniquitous vegetables the humblest garden can produce. The more you know of the deception and ingratitude to be experienced in the vegetable world, the sadder you become. In addition to sharpened brain and taut sinews, the worker in gardens needs a heart packed with optimism. This last my mother possesses, and though garden after garden may have gone back on her, nothing can prevent her running with overtures of salvation to meet the next little grubby potato-patch life offers her. With hope indomitable my parents survey each new glebe, while I, the incredulous, secretly meditate upon the kinship in conduct of all parochial gardens, expecting only that the sheep and the potatoes will find some new way of going astray; and may Heaven forgive me that I should be diverted by their versatility of naughtiness! For example, you can never tell what you may expect from a tomato, for your tomato is a vegetable of temperament. Poetically sensitive to atmospheric environment, it fades to earth under the mildest sun, wilts at a frost imperceptible to its more prosaic neighbors. Capricious ever, it will sometimes, in mock of its own cherished nervous system, exhibit a sturdiness out of pure perversity. One chill June morning we found our young tomato plants flat to earth, a black and hopeless ruin. We bought new ones and set them out in their stead, whereupon the old plants popped up and sprouted to wantonness,—nothing but the elemental energy of jealousy. The tomato is like to be as barren of production as the human sentimentalist, either bringing forth a green bower of leafage, or drooping to earth with the weight of crimson globes that, lifted, show a corroding hole of black rot.
In homely contrast consider the bean. The bean is the kindliest vegetable there is. From the seed up, it is well-intentioned, for the bean may be eaten through and through by worms, and yet, planted, will sprout and spring, and bring forth fruit out of the very stones.
The beet is another simple-minded, dependable member of the congregation, and even more generous in contribution to the minister’s support than is the bean, for the beet yields top and bottom, root and branch. In summer the beet-top furnishes the first succulent taste of green, and afterwards the round red root of him is a defense against the lean and hungry winter months.
But for the most part vegetables are an ill-behaving lot. The cabbage inflates itself with an appearance of pompous righteousness, the longer to deceive our hopes and the more largely to conceal its heart of rot. The radish sends up generous leaves as if it meant to fulfill all the mendacious promises of the seed-catalogue, and when uprooted exhibits the pink tenuity of an angle-worm. The cucumber is at first, for all our ministrations, hesitant and coy of leaf within its box, and then suddenly bursts into a riot of leafiness whereby it does its best to conceal from our inquiring eye its swelling green cylinders. Corn, deceptive like the radish, is prone to put forth a hopeful fountain of springing green, only to ear out prematurely, and reward us with kernels blackened and corroded.
In the parochial garden the pea is one to tease us always with its might-be and might-have-been. If peas are to grow beyond “the kid’s lip, the stag’s antler,” they require the moral support of brush, and brush is something a minister’s family, aided only by a decrepit gardener, cannot always supply. Unsupported by brush, our fair peas lie along the ground, an ever-present disappointment.
Two vegetables have always haunted my mother’s aspirations, in vain. I hope they grow in heaven, for it is in the nature of things that celery and asparagus should be denied to a nomadic earthly clergy, requiring, as the one does, richness of soil, and as the other, permanence. Illusory asparagus, it takes three years to grow him! Of course if some disinterested predecessor had planted him, we might in our turn eat him. But our too itinerant clergy do not give overmuch thought to their successors. Barren parochial gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about letting Apollos water.
But it is not the vegetables alone that strain my mother’s sturdy optimism. All gardens are subject to invasion by marauding animals, differing in size and soul and species, all the way from the microscopic tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and playful puppy, up to the cow, ruminating our young corn-shoots beneath the white summer moon, on to my father himself, planting aberrant feet where his holden ministerial eyes behold no springing seedlings in the blackness of the soil. But our worst enemies are hens, and as it happens at present, dissenting hens, sallying forth from the barnyard fastnesses of the Baptist parsonage upon our helpless Anglican garden, plucking our young peas up out of the soil, and then later and more brazenly prying them out of the very pod! Forthwith they fall upon our lettuce-beds, scratching away with fanatic fervor, as if for all the world they meant to uproot Infant Baptism from out the land. All this is too much for my mother. On the vantage-ground of the back doorsill she stands and hurls coal out of the kitchen scuttle at the sectarian fowls,—coal and anathema, low-voiced and virulent. Hers is no mere vulgar many-mouthed abuse. There is nothing of so delicate pungency as the vituperation of a minister’s wife, really challenged to try the subtleties of English and yet offend no convention of seemliness. Add to the fact of the challenge, another fact, that she is of Irish blood, and that her gallery gods are just inside the door, and it is a pity her audience should be merely the hens and I.
Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly applausive of my mother’s defense of her garden, secretly appreciative of the devious ways of vegetables, witnessing—to forgive—the wanderings of my father’s flock. For if all the flock were abstemious and orthodox instead of being, as some are, frankly given over to alcoholism and agnosticism and what not; and if the gardens grew, as gardens should grow, into honest, God-fearing cabbages and potatoes; if the righteous corn parted green lips from kernels firm and white as a dentist’s placard, how then should the parish gardens that dot our hill-strewn countryside bring forth that fruit of laughter which consoles the dwellers in these our tiny strongholds of lonely effort?
VIVIDLY at times my memory restores to me the sensation of the eternal Sabbath. Beyond the stained-glass windows, the sunshine is sifted over daisied graves. Perhaps, for all one knows, the grown-up angels are letting the little ones sport over those graves at this very minute, even though it is Sunday, for there are no parishes in heaven to say no to naughtiness. My mother is held home from the sanctuary that morning. The three of us sit a-row in the front pew. Above us our father thunders forth his sermon, to which we give but scant attention, that roar in his voice being part of the programme of this one day in seven. Against my own shoulder drowses my little sister’s head. On my other side, my little brother conceals his yawns by receiving them into a little brown paw, and then, as it were, softly sliding them into his pocket, as if his hand had other business there. But I, I sit erect and unwinking, for I am the minister’s eldest, and the Parish is at my back.
While the younger ones nodded, while the infant angels played hide-and-seek out in the graveyard sunshine, of what was I thinking? This: of the minister’s daughter who had lived in that Parish before me. A great girl of five she had been when she used, having waited until her father was engrossed in his sermon, to slip from that very front pew in which I sat, to steal up into the chancel, and there, all silently but with impish grimace and antics, would she hold the horrified gaze of the Parish so fascinated that her father would at length be diverted from his eloquence, and forthwith, swooping from the pulpit all in a swirl of wrathful surplice, would bear his small daughter into the vestry room and lock her there before resuming his sermon. She was very naughty, but oh, what larks, what larks! So I thought then, and still to-day I am querying whether that little girl—inevitably though she must, under steady parochial pressure, have been subdued to a womanhood of decency and decorum—does not to-day in middle life rejoice that once upon a time, at five, she had her little fling in her father’s chancel!
But we were children of no such independent pattern; and so on every Sabbath we presented to the Parish’s criticism unwriggling infant backs, little ramrods of religion, while our thoughts went flying off on impish business of their own; and, as the years flowed by, on and up to man’s estate we tramped, always thrusting forward in sight of the Parish, fashionable, urban, critical, our shabby best foot, skittish though that foot might be. Holding well together, on we went, running the gantlet of many parishes, until at last we trudged us into Littleville. We supposed my little town would be a parish too, but it is not.
Cozily remote and forgotten among its blue hills, Littleville has preserved a primitive hospitality, so that, battered nomads of much clerical adventuring, we sank gratefully into its little rectory. There was perhaps a reason for our sincerity of welcome, for if we had had our parishes, so, too, had Littleville had its parsons. It belongs to that class of far-away, wee congregations whither they send old ministers outwearied, to be alone with old age and memories beside the empty, echoing churches reminiscent of the days when farmers attended service. And if among these venerable shepherds there have fallen to Littleville’s lot some whose scholarly old wits had gone a bit doddering, so that they believed and preached whimsical doctrine, or could no longer trace without assistance the labyrinth of the liturgy, or others, younger, who had proved ministerial shipwrecks because they were burdened by some fatal handicap in child or wife,—if such have come to Littleville, Littleville has been very kindly. My little town has accepted its hay-crop as the rain has willed, and its ministers as the bishop has sent them. Its views on both visitations are produced in a spirit of comment rather than criticism; its conduct toward both is that of adaptation rather than argument.
For instance, there was that bachelor-rector who preferred the society of beasts to that of his parishioners in the rectory, and to that of his fellow saints in the new Jerusalem. During his incumbency a setting-hen occupied the fireplace in the spare room, and a dog sat on a chair at his celibate table, and crouched before the pulpit during service. Littleville did not protest; rather, of a week-day, the female members from time to time descended upon the unhappy man in his retirement, and with broom and mop-pail cleaned him up most thoroughly; and of a Sunday the whole body of the congregation listened unwinking while their rector’s brandished fist demanded from their stolid faces eternal salvation for his Rover,—listened with those inscrutable eyes I have come to respect: for I know that while Littleville never argued with their parson the point of kennels in the skies, they will turn this theological morsel under their tongues down at the hardware store unto the third and fourth generation.
Then there was the vicar whose poor boy was scarred in a way that Littleville, sympathetic but always delightedly circumstantial, has painted upon my imagination. When, during this rectorate, rival sectarians would point to the goodly ruddiness of some Baptist or Methodist scion, the Littleville Anglicans would loyally argue that Seth Lawson over at Hyde’s Crossing had a little girl who had four thumbs, and Seth was just a plain man, and no minister.
Tradition tells also of a parson who trod the mazes of the ritual so uncertainly that he was just as likely to jump backwards as forwards in the psalter. With inimitable delicacy Littleville would stand holding its prayer-books at attention, ready to jump with him, whichever way he went. However, certain women have confided to me how fearful they were, on their wedding-day, lest this retrograde movement might occur during the solemnization of matrimony.
Thus it came about, I fancy, that Littleville received us with relief as well as warmth, for our theology was so simple and sound that hardly could the agnostic barber find fault with it; a family studiously normal, we showed
and we proved able to conduct service with sonorous equilibrium.
Here we have been accepted and courteously entreated. Here we have not had to live up to any parochial pretensions, for my little town does not play bridge or give dinner-parties. Here in my little town we need not rise betimes to perform miracles of domestic service on the sly in order to be free to attend on the lordly city parishioner possessed of maidservants and manservants. Rather we may wear our gingham pinafores on the front porch, and pop our peas under the very nose of the senior warden, and very probably with his assistance, if he perchance slouch down beside us, blue-overalled and genial.
Littleville, always leisurely, took its time about getting acquainted with us. It hurtled us through no round of teas, it did not put us through the paces of a parish reception. Rather it came and hammered together our broken furniture, decayed by much moving, it stole in at the back door to help us when we were sick, it let us know it missed us when we went worldward, visiting. Of such as it had, it made us gifts,—a yellow pumpkin vaulting our back fence, potatoes rattling into our cellar-bins unannounced while we were still abed, golden maple syrup flowing for us at the time when tin pails gleam all up and down the street, and the sap-vats bubble and steam pungently; or perhaps the gift is the reward of the gunning season, as when a vestryman-huntsman, as we stand about the social door after church, darts aside into the coalbin and thence presents a newspaper package streaked with pink; peeped at to please his beaming eye, it exhibits a brace of skinned squirrels, which we bear oozily homeward from divine service.
There is in the mere aspect of Littleville a latent friendliness perceptible to all eyes that give more than a touring-car glance. Over our hilly streets slumbers eternal leisure. Whatever it is, Littleville always has time to talk about it. When anything happens we all go running out of our front doors to discuss it, but otherwise our streets are very still: rows of farmhouses planted side by side for sociability, while behind each stretch its acres of stony pasture and half-shorn woodland. At night, silence and darkness settle upon us early. By nine even the hotel has gone to bed, so that it would with difficulty be summoned forth in protesting pajamas if a late traveler should clamor at the door. Of a starless night you may look forth at eight and see no glimmer of light or life all up and down the street. When we come to church of a winter evening, we carry lanterns as we plod a drifted path in high-girt skirts and generous goloshes. One’s sleep is sometimes startled by a flare of light that streams from wall to wall and passes, as some mysterious late lantern-bearer goes by, leaving the night again all blackness, pierced sometimes by the crazy laughter of an owl, or beaten upon by the insistent clamor of frogs.
Those who live by Littleville’s quiet streets have had time to have their little ways. For example, they still have “comp’ny” in Littleville. In other places they no longer have comp’ny, no longer sacrifice for unprotesting hours and days and weeks all domestic peace and privacy to the exigencies of an intrusive guest. Comp’ny, imminent, instant, or past, is discussed in bated whispers at back doors. Assistance and sympathy are proffered as in a run of fever. As for the comp’ny itself, it knows its privileges and never resigns its prerogatives. However efficient at home, when a-visiting, it can sit on the barnyard bars in its best store suit and without an emotion of conscience watch its host milk twenty cows, or within doors it can fold its house-wifely hands upon its waistline, regard without compunction a lap for once apronless, and rock and chatter hour after hour while its hostess pants and perspires to feed it. But Littleville has one revenge: one day, it, too, can put on its best and drive off, and itself be somebody’s comp’ny.
Comp’ny by definition comes from abroad, invading our peaceful citadel from some hillside farm or neighboring village; within our own bulwarks we are all too neighborly for any such alien stiffness. Our streets are cheery with greeting. Among the younger fry, “Hello” is the universal term of accost. “Hello!” some youngster yodels to me from across the street, “hello,” supplemented by the frank employment of my baptismal name, sign and seal of my adoption. We are careless of the little formalities of Miss and Mr. here, just as our gentlemen are careless of their hat-raising. Why should Littleville man endanger head and health from false deference to his hearty, workaday comrade, woman? From the older men, surely, twinkle and grin are greeting enough without any up-quirking of rheumatic elbows; and as for the younger men, I have a fondness for their method of raising the right index finger to the hat-brim, with a smile that points in the same direction.
Although we are without formality, certain conventions always belong to a call. The popular hours are two and six, with the tacit exemption of Saturday evening, for then we might inconsiderately intercept the gentleman of the house en route from his steaming wash-tub in the kitchen to his ice-bound bedroom. We have our set forms of greeting and departure. A hostess must always meet a caller with a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a stranger.” A caller must always remain a cordial two hours, and rising to leave must invariably say, “Well, I’m making a visit, not a call”; to which the hostess responds, “Why, what’s your hurry?” Conversation must hold itself subject to interruption, must be prepared to arrest itself in the midst of the most lurid recital in order that all may fly to the window if man or beast or both pass by.
As to that conversation itself, we really do not care for feverish animation. We allow ourselves long pauses while we creak our rockers, pleasantly torpid. Should our emptiness become too acute, there is always one subject that can fill it. We always have the sick. We report to each other anxiously that So-and-So is having “a poor spell,” a condition that, if obstinate, will result in the poor man or woman’s “doctoring,” a perilous substitute for home treatment. We have our hereditary nostrums of combinations quainter than Shakespeare’s cauldron, and home-made brews of herbs that sound almost Chaucerian. There is suggestion still more remote in “hemlock tea.” I am not certain of its ingredients, but its effect is to produce a state of affairs known as a “hemlock sweat.” A “hemlock sweat” is the last resort before sending for the doctor, and it generally brings him.
If our interest in our diseases should ever flag, we have, of course, always, our neighbors. In Littleville, gossip has become an art, in so far as it possesses the perfection of pungency without taint of malice, like the chat of an inquisitive Good Samaritan. When Littleville talks about its neighbors, I listen in reverence before a penetration I have never seen anywhere else. Littleville has not gone abroad to study human nature; it has stayed at home, and watched every flicker of its neighbor’s eyelash, has marked each step taken from toddling infancy to toddling old age, has listened to every word uttered from babyhood to senility. Oh, Littleville knows its own; and knowing its own, knows other folk too. New-comer though I am, I should venture no pretense in the face of that slumbering twinkle in Littleville’s eyes,—Littleville, sharp of tongue and genial in deeds.
This grace of Littleville charity, charity, keen-eyed yet tender, can be, I suppose, the possession of stationary people only; of people who have been babies together, have wedded and worked, been born and been buried together, whose parents and grandparents also are unforgotten, whose dead lie on white-dotted hillsides in every one’s knowledge. The thought of this bond of permanence, of memories, has its wistfulness for us others. You can never be very hard on the woman, however fallen, who was once the little Sallie to share her cooky with you at recess; and, however his poor grizzled head be addled now with drink and failure, a man is still the little Joey whose bare feet trod with yours the stubble of forbidden midnight orchards.
All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and we are gypsies, we clericals; yet never gypsies more involuntary, more home-loving at heart. We are pilgrims, never dropping, as we sojourn in parish after parish, the pilgrim cloak of an affable reserve. Back to the edges of my memory, we ourselves have been always the Ministry. Sundays in that straight front pew, week-days in that well-watched rectory, always the Ministry, never ourselves. But here at last in my little town, is that straight cloak of ministerial decorum slipping from us? May we set down our scrip and staff? At last do we dare to be ourselves, neighbors with neighbors? Do we dare to be part of a place? Perhaps.
Already in brief years I have acquired a little of that admitted intimacy with a community that comes only through knowing some bit of its history for one’s self and not on hearsay; for I have observed the course of several of our thrifty Littleville courtships whereby our youngsters in their later teens set themselves sturdily beneath the yoke of matrimony, promptly bringing forth a procession of babes, as promptly led to baptism. Also I have stood with the rest in our little graveyard when some old neighbor has been laid to rest. I share with the rest the memory of kind old hands grown motionless, and chirrupy old voices now stilled; so that some of these graves, turning slowly from raw soil to kindlier green, are mine, the stranger’s.
Because those newer graves are mine, I may linger in more assured friendliness among the older ones, for to me these brief white-portaled streets of this other Littleville are kindly too; so that I like to go a-calling here also, letting my fancy knock at these low green mounds beneath the mat of periwinkle, above which sometimes flash the blue wings of birds or of sailing butterfly, while just beyond the fence the bobolinks go singing above the clover-fields. Country graveyards are pleasant places; at least ours has no gloom of tangled undergrowth and dank cypress shadow, for we are a house-wifely company, and we like all things well swept and shipshape, even cemeteries.
Even the tragedies the marbles tell are softened now. There are many little gravestones in our cemetery, recording little lives long ago cut short. Many of them belong to that winter I have heard about, a winter long before antitoxin or even disinfectants, when one Sunday in Littleville twenty children lay dead. It was sad then, but to-day to the tune of soaring bobolinks I must be thinking how gayly the little ones put on their winglets all together, and, a white flock, went trooping off, shepherded by angels. In a village graveyard where the dead lie so cozily close to home, in a graveyard so blue above and green below, one has to remember how many things are sadder than death.
I come back from reverie as the ’bus bell goes tinkling by, beyond the white-arched gate, and I rise to gaze to see who has come to us from the world, for the ’bus comes from the train, and the train comes from far away, where the world runs its whirligig, far from Littleville.
The ’bus connects us with life. When one arrives at home, usually at nightfall, there always is the old ’bus man at the train step, peering up and stretching out both welcoming arms to receive our packages and bags. When he has stowed all away, in he climbs rheumatically, and off we trundle, rattling and wheezing along, for driver and horses and ’bus are all in the last stages of decrepitude. The lantern hung between the shafts plays out its straight jet of light, but within it is so dark that I cannot guess our whereabouts until we draw up at the hotel. The hotelkeeper comes out in his shirt-sleeves to receive the fat agents we have brought him, and, peering hospitably into the dark recesses, gives me welcome too. Off and on we rumble, and as we draw rein at the post-office, the post-master, shouldering the mail-bag, spies me and extends his hearty handshake; from the newspaper office near by, where the editor is working, comes a hazarded greeting, to which I respond cheerily from my dark hole, and become forthwith one of to-morrow’s items.
On and up the hill. I can just discern the white belfry against the blue-black sky. Beyond the church is the rectory, and there a lantern on the step and a ruddy door flung wide. I have drawn up, returning, to rectory doors before, but somehow in Littleville it is different; to-morrow, on Sunday, Littleville will be glad I have come back, and will say so, at church, for in Littleville Sunday is different, too.
Here there is never the Sabbath stiffness of my childhood. Here the front pew does not straighten my spine intolerably. Rather I turn half about, run a careless arm along the pewrail, and chat huskily with my rear neighbor until church begins, and even in service I may nod encouragement to the choir if they happen to be brought to confusion in the Te Deum, or in the very sermon I may peep under some little flowered straw hat and get a delighted grin in response. When service is over I shall be a long time getting to the door, having so many hands I want to shake, for we do not call my little town, Parish; we call it home.
I WAS a ministerial child rather by birth than by conviction. To one born on the march there may come to be in the end a mystic home-sense in the loneliness of tents, but in the beginning the army child may perhaps have his own opinion of the rigors of camp life and prefer his morning snooze to the summons of the bivouac. Analogously, the children of the clerical class may come into existence with a leaning toward the world, the flesh, and the devil, and may long conceal, beneath an outward conformity and a due filial reticence, an infant resentment against the preoccupation of their parents with the salvation of souls.
I think I speak for many ministerial children when I say that the attitude of my infancy toward its environment was mainly one of protest, broken by passionate upheavals of partisanship. Sometimes I sympathized with little neighbors who limped shamelessly through the catechism or went out of church before the sermon, but as often I longed to shake them and thrust them, well-prodded, upon their duties.
The mere external discipline of the church militant came easily to me because I was so early inured to it. It is back of my memory, but I have ascertained that it was at the age of two and under that I learned rigidity of muscle in the sanctuary, where I sat holding immobile on the pew cushion legs too short to crook, while my fingers, in white cotton gloves, were extended in stiff separation each from each. The hat upon my head was in itself an early example of ministerial adjustment to parochial issues. Two ladies who were rivals in missionary zeal had each been moved to present me with a hat. That neither hat suited either my face or my mother’s taste was, of course, mere incident. The claims both of courtesy and of equity necessitated my wearing the hats in impartial regularity, on alternate Sundays. Thus before the beginnings of memory, and through the medium of a baby’s hat, did I become acquainted with the potency, in our domestic concerns, of that great public called Parish.
It must have been at about this period that I experienced one of my intermittent attacks of partisanship, desiring with my clear infant voice to rebuke the lukewarm responses of the congregation, and remodeling the unintelligible stretches of the Litany by the stentorian variation, “Lord have mercy upon us, miserable scissors!” The words of liturgy and hymn did not, however, long confound me. I had the concentration of many a sanctuary hour to devote to their meaning, so that by six years old even the Trinity had become a term of crystalline comprehension. By this time, also, other ministerial babykins had come toddling into the march in my rear, to share with me the soberness and separation of our calling. It was, on the whole, well disciplined, our little army corps, although we recognized the latent twinkle in the eyes of the mother who generaled us with a clever balancing of motive between our well-being and that of the Parish. Both she and we were occasionally flabbergasted, sometimes by our public performance of private virtues, sometimes by our private performance of public ones. For example, at the home table we were always exhorted to conscientious chewing; it did not, therefore, occur to us to accelerate the process at a Sunday-School picnic. The sylvan board had long been deserted by others, but we, the Rector’s children, a faithful little line, longing to be on the merry-go-round, in the swings, on the boats, still sat and dutifully chewed and chewed and chewed. I vividly recall the bewildering onslaught of our mother leading a bevy of church ladies in search of the missing. Ignominiously were we whirled off to join the sports of less seeming-famished companions.
On the other hand, in public, in the Sunday School, were we early made to understand that all the law and the prophets hung upon the catechism; a pink-paper catechism, frank in its woodcuts and facile in its explanation of the mysteries of the sacraments. Since this pink catechism was a lamp unto our feet, we suggested, during a thrilling burglar epidemic, that copies be left on the thresholds of rectory bedchambers. The burglar would pause to read, and there would ensue his immediate conversion and our resultant security. The parental laughter at our expense shook the foundations of our faith.
Such a severe consistency of behavior in regard to the lessons taught in the rectory and those taught in the sanctuary is a state of mind early outgrown by any intelligent ministerial child. Such crudity of conduct was a stage in the march that we had all passed by the age of ten. By that time we had an unerring sense of what was due to the Parish and what was due to ourselves, with the result that our outward conformity was about balanced by our inward misanthropy at having to conform. We attended, muttering imprecations up to the very door, the infant missionary society that filched our Saturday afternoons, we tore up futile scraps of calico to jab them together again with accursed “over-and-over” stitches, we gazed at pictures in which splendid blanketed braves, or splendid unclothed Samoans, were seen to exchange romance for religion in the shape of conversion and white cottas. Our souls loathed patchwork and missions, but, on the other hand, how we thrilled to the righteousness of reward when the visiting missionary, male or female, became our own particular guest! The ecstasy as one flirted one’s Sunday flounces before the eyes of less favored neighbors because one was walking to church, holding the hand of a genuine Arctic archdeacon! And then the Bishop’s visits, when we were whisked into cubbyhole and closet out of our crowded nursery that it might be converted into a prophet’s chamber! Which one of my schoolmates had ever passed the right reverend plate at supper? And the honor of the Bishop’s petting afterwards! The episcopal lap, the high general’s knee, is the prerogative of the captain’s children only, the same that never miss church and know all their collects.
Slowly we grew accustomed to the pressure of the knapsack upon our shoulders, that weight of clerical example which did not burden our irresponsible playmates. We knew that the Minister’s children were different. We did not want it to be so, but we began to see why it was so. True, we protested when our father would not pause to tell us stories or our mother stay at home from calls to play with dolls, yet in the silent thinking-places of our little hearts we began to divine the beauty of the midnight sick-watches, of the valiancy of Sunday-School labors, of the brave weariness of sewing societies, of the heaven-born patience with Parish bores. As we watched the sleeker parents of our schoolmates, there dawned in us realization of what our parents had given up, and silent shame for our jealousy of their devotion. Few children are hurt by being shoved aside a little because of an ideal. The hours when our parents played with us are still passing precious, but it is because of the other hours that there was born in us a shamefaced sense of the meaning of the banner under which we trudged.
Isolation is the chief inconvenience of having an ideal in the family. We were apart from other youngsters, partly because we knew it incumbent upon us to set them an example, since, early enough and sadly enough, we had acquired self-consciousness from the frank criticism of all our conduct made by any parishioner so minded, and partly were we cut off by the vow of poverty taken by our parents. Other families may look forward to easier times; no ministerial household has any such illusions. The tiniest child of the ministry knows that after forty the father will not receive a call; the veriest baby of us knows what happens to old ministers, because so many pitiful, decrepit old soldiers have from time to time found shelter in our tent.
Yet the ministry is the best place in the world to learn that poverty is a nut that yields good meat if you crack it boldly. Well I remember an icy rectory which had but one register in the Arctic regions of the second story. At bedtime we would gather about this register to warm our toes. Each blanketed to the ears like a little Indian, we would discourse as serenely and acutely as any schoolmen, of the nature of angels, for was not the whole realm of heaven and earth ours for the mere talking? Pinched and patched we might be, but bold to meet penury with a consciousness of princely possessions. I did not so much think well of myself for this superiority to worldly comforts as I thought scorn of those who did not have it. Very early I had a contempt for a child who could not evolve a game from a clothespin or set a pageant moving forth from a box of buttons. I had a veritable snobbishness of disdain for a youngster who had to be amused.
Necessarily one requires respect for inward resources when the only things one has ever had enough of are bread and butter and books. Every ministerial child breathes book-madness and burns for an education. When at the age of five you have known your father to go without boots for a book, and then to caper like a weanling lamb on the volume’s arrival, you have acquired something more potent than a mere conscientious respect for literature; rather you have learned to regard the book-world as a place of bacchanal liberty and delight forever open to you. I do not know whether it tended toward my humanizing or against it that the dominant beings of my young imagination were Books, while those of my girl friends were Boys.
There is nothing more effective than clerical penury to teach one the cheapness of dreams. The door of fantasy stands always open for the rectory household to enter, singly or together. I think every ministerial family cherishes that one dear dream of all unwilling gypsies. They always hope somehow, somewhere, sometime, to find a house that shall be a home. Do what you may, a rectory is always house, not home. It may always belong to some one else next month. If only it were worth while to plant perennials in our flower-beds! If only it were worth while to plant friendships to bear fruit in after years! Yet this last we can never help doing as we pass from parish to parish, being at heart most human of wanderers. It must be very beautiful to belong somewhere, to have, for instance, cousinships in the neighborhood. There are never any family parties in the ministry. There are never any gentle grandsires to come forth from their kindly crypts and give guarantee of our characters to the community. On each new camping-ground we stand, a huddled family group, completely dependent on our own efforts for introduction.
These new-parish sensations tempt to generalizations, for they are so alike, in town after town. The zest of a new call wears away even in one’s infancy. Perhaps the captain still expects to find his tents pitched in Arcady, but not so his family; we meet the Parish’s reception acutely on our good behavior, exquisitely affable to all, but our inner motto is, “Watch out!” It is usually those parishioners who give us most effusive welcome who will be readiest to desire our godspeed. It is those who stand back and look us over who will be our firmest friends. We cannot resent their attitude because it is exactly our own. We, too, are looking them over.
When we go into a new parish the first person we meet is some one who isn’t there, namely, our predecessor, that thorn in the flesh of the most righteous saint and soldier. There is always a predecessor, and however dead or distant, he is always there, in the hearts of the Parish, and quite frequently he is in their homes as well. However callous, however courteous one may endeavor to be, one cannot escape a slight sensation of stiffening when parishioners want The Other One to marry or bury them. Think of the well-bred wrangle that sometimes occurs in settling the clerical rights to a corpse! In all my ministerial experience I never knew a predecessor and a successor who loved each other. Yet I speak without bitterness, for one of the proudest and pleasantest sensations of our ministry has been that of being a predecessor ourself.
To an unwilling nomad there is nothing so monotonous as change, yet the very constancy of our march engenders an amazing ease of adjustment to each new environment. In our relations to people, we clericals learn an adaptability almost pathetically perfect. We succeed in being all things to all men by never being all ourselves to any man. Our affability is the armor that protects the inner sensitive personality. Perhaps we are naturally expansive, but we early learn the perils of frankness, so that it comes about that along our pilgrimage we are friendly, but have few friends, those few, however, the tenderest, trustiest friends in the world, those few, rare spirits of a keenness and a kindness to penetrate the steel-strong armor of ministerial reserve. Very young, we clerical sons and daughters learn to pass from millionaire to laundress with no change of manner. The reason is not far to seek; we own senior warden and washerwoman as our parishioners, equally, because warden and washerwoman, equally, feel that they own us. With equal freedom the two censure or serve, love or hate, us. Recognizing the proprietory rights of each, we realize that each may be equally our bane or our blessing. Yet our democracy goes deeper than all this. Half-hearted soldiers we may often be, but we never doubt the sincerity of our flag. We had the luck to be born into the household of the consecrated, whether we wanted to be or not; we are genuinely democratic for the same reason that the apostles were.
Perhaps there is another reason, and a wickeder one, why all men stand in our sight naked of all accidental social trappings; and that is that we know them all so well! I cannot determine how clearly the world may see into rectory windows, but certainly one sees pretty clearly from rectory windows. It is a heart-searching and heart-revealing relation, that of a parish to its parson. The completely voluntary nature of all church effort and church organization affords an exhibition of idiosyncrasies not to be found in any other association. When I think of the crimes and the crankiness sometimes committed in the name of religion, I thank Heaven that the effect of these in a ministerial household is more often amusement than cynicism. I was grown up before I realized that the ostensible purpose of a choir is to praise the Lord: in my youth I always thought of a choir solely as a means of perfecting a rector in patience.
But always there exists the other side in the parochial relation, the side not of badness, but of beauty. Personally I perceive no stronger argument against the charge of present-day irreligion than the tribute of trust paid to any sincere minister. From my childhood on I have seen it everywhere, the respect for consecration. Everywhere I have heard it, the belief in the man who believes, ring confident as the cry of the roadside beggar upon the Nazarene.
Few people think it worth while to put on pretense with a clergyman; they rarely try to make him think them better than they are; yet he generally does think so. It is frequently the alertness to protect the captain against his own unworldliness that teaches his family their sanity and sureness of insight. This very insight may, however, make them poorer-spirited than their superior officer, craven and fain to capitulate. In a parish skirmish they are likely to be divided between hot loyalty to his cause and a vain hope that he won’t think it necessary to fight. I can picture the probable domestic anxiety in the house of Calchas when in pursuit of his calling he found it necessary to stand up to the king of men, Agamemnon!
Long campaigning is likely to make ministerial offspring lovers of peace, yet I believe I am not really unwilling to fight the Devil. The trouble is that we of the ministry so often fight him when he isn’t there. I wish our young theologues could be taught the sound and shape of Satan. Frankly I arraign the theological seminary as a very poor military school. It sends forth a soldier who does not know so much as how to set up a tent, whose idea of the Enemy is a mediæval bugaboo in a book. I would establish two new chairs in our seminaries, a chair of agriculture, rudimentary, perhaps, but sufficient to teach the difference between tares and wheat, which Nature, uninstructed in any isms, still ordains shall grow together unto the harvest; and a second chair, in common sense, to dispense instruction in human nature. The average theologue is deep-read in Hebrew Scripture, but ignorant of the A B C of the tongue in which is written the Bible of man’s soul. Doctors may dispute the divine inspiration of the former, but who of us is infidel enough to dispute the divine inspiration of the latter? Perhaps the more reprehensible fault of the seminary is not so much deficiency in the matter of its teaching as deficiency in its maturity. No thinking person wishes to receive his spiritual guidance from an unthinking boy. I am constantly puzzled by the ill-logic of our ministerial preparation when I reflect that the foundation of its teaching is the fact that God Himself thought it necessary to be thirty years a man with men before He was ready to teach or to preach.
Considering his inadequate equipment, so inferior in the relation of means to end to that of the social worker, the average minister of to-day does better than his preparation deserves. If he has devotion, devotion will, in the long run, counteract his blunders. People will put up with almost anything from a man so long as he’s a man. There never was a time when respect for a clerical coat, as a coat, was less; there never was a time when reverence for the man within the coat, as a man, was greater. Because of this fact, we of the ministry who best know the seamy side of an ideal know also best its beauty.
I was born beneath a banner I did not choose, but like many another ministerial child, I have grown from a mere external allegiance to a real one. I think the angels of birth were a little distraught when they dropped me in the tents of the righteous, but on the whole I am reconciled. I have traveled to and fro and far, but only the rectory tent is home, there alone exists the nomad’s intense family friendship which is a home’s sole enduring furniture. I have wandered so far among other men and other manners and morals that sometimes our little band has seemed but a faint dot on the spaces of a universe undreamed of within the limitations of rectory walls. Wandering thus, I have questioned many things unquestioned in my childhood. Only ministerial children themselves can estimate how open they are to doubt’s attacks. The very intensity of partisanship and narrowness of creed and practice in which they have been brought up are sources of danger, while, having always been nourished on the glory of the mind, they will always in their traveling gravitate to the places of intellect, only to find their little faith regarded there as one more soap-bubble to be tossed about. Accustomed at home to the old-fashioned unquestioning distinctions, the minister’s son or daughter will discover that there no longer exists the old sharp fight between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, because each side recognizes far too well a kinship in weakness and wistfulness. There was a time when to take a man’s faith from him was a fair game, for it was his own affair to guard a castle aggressively inviting attack. Now even infidels are too pitiful to steal another man’s God.
It is not so simple an adjustment as perhaps it externally appears, the return to the tiny clerical camp whence once we issued forth to our education. Perhaps I have thrilled to the trumpets of larger armies, perhaps our little troop of skirmishers seems to me a sorry one now, and perhaps, darker treachery still, the hosts of Midian do not loom so big and black to me as of old, perhaps I have even made some charming friends among the Hittites and the Jebusites, but it is astonishing how, when I am back in the old conditions, the enemy’s ranks resume their old color and proportion.
When I am abroad I am no stickler for church attendance, yielding myself sometimes to the call of a “heaven-kissing hill” or to the spell of woods sacredly serene; but at home I am accustomed by contagion to look darkly askance at Sunday picknickers or lazy stay-at-homes. They should come and hear my father preach! Yet I myself feel God nearer on a hilltop than at the altar, and I own, as closest comrades and most inspiring, men and women whose souls never bow in worship anywhere. They belong to another army, that army of social betterment which is so curiously blind to its own pillar of fire. My creed is to their minds a child’s lisping, they ask neither a God nor an immortality, they ask only that they may lift the burdened man upright. If we cannot worship, let us work, people say to-day, and do not dream that never before in history was there enough religion in the world to make theirs a plausible deduction.
These my friends belong to the army of non-church-goers arraigned in the little village church where I kneel to say my prayers. It is very strange, they say to me,—these soldiers of an army grown far larger now than our thinning ranks,—very strange to me that you should need a religion; and I answer it is very strange to me that you cannot hear above the blackness of your hosting, your own prophet voices choiring a midnight mass to Heaven.
There are divers ways of worship and I acknowledge that my own way, minister’s daughter though I am, exemplary in externals, is not always that which would appear best in accord with my bowed head and practiced knees. There is much in your full-sized Anglican that is bigger than his Prayer Book, although I loyally hold that an inspired document of Christian common sense. Many a windy, rolling thought comes to me when I am kneeling in secret rebellion at the abasement of the Litany, irreverent, meseemeth, to the souls cast in God’s image, but who am I that I should think scorn of any words by which people climb to Heaven? Suppose I should compose prayers for my father’s congregation, think how bewildered the good people in our pews would become if they should find, writ out for their repeating, the calls of birds and the voices of winds, which I know would sing themselves into any prayer of my making.
No, in its prayers and in its practice, I find myself ever turning quietly back to the faith of my fathers, that banner of my clan. Perhaps I may think its gold tarnished with mediævalism, its silk worn very thin, but are not all banners merely the work of men’s hands? And what matter of the ensign so long as it holds skyward? I, within the ministry, may sometimes question our methods of warfare, thinking them valiant against obsolete bugaboos and oblivious of a more subtle Satan, but, doubtful how better to direct the age-old campaign, uncertain what newer weapons to endue, I would rather still be on the side of a blind and passionate ideal, for energies may sometimes be wasted, but ideals are never wasted.
Perhaps I have sometimes thought to join that other army, of man’s social progress, a noble army the thunder of whose modern warfare rolls ever louder and louder through the land. But I a deserter from the thin, faint brigade that belongs to an older fashion? A deserter now, when, in our little rectory corps, I see the hands that grasp the sword growing weaker, and the hands that uphold the sword-bearer’s growing frailer, and when, in eyes keen to pierce the Enemy’s darkness, I read the growing peace prophetic of the battle over? Back to my place in the ranks, back beneath our tattered pennon! What better service have I craved? What braver banner? For on the ensigns of many creeds I have searched, after all, only for that one sure device which shines upon my fathers’ faith. That device is a Face, even the face of the leader of all the host, and as on and on I follow the march of our ministry,—