The Damnation of Theron Ware Part 23

They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair quality. "Now leave all 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 to tell them to send it to your house--you wanted it today, 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 salaams 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 that is! You never would guess in this wide world!" His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surrept.i.tious.

"Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?" commented Celia, 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 by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in 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. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded 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 countermand 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. Theron 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 Ma.s.s over from Vienna, and I'm head over heels in 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 sunlit, busy sidewalk, and Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully 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 pa.s.sers-by 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.

CHAPTER XXI

Deliberate as his progress was, the diminis.h.i.+ng number of store-fronts 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 less 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. Upon 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 none the less she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly--"I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?"

"Not quite that," he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.

There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him when he had 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 Theron 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 latterly 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 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 sh.e.l.ls, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would she have 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 n.o.body dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the priest's 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 revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.

He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar'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 sylvan charms, to a commanding site 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 incongruous 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 lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road, and the nigh, 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. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was of that s.p.a.cious and satisfying order of old-fas.h.i.+oned houses which men of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a spa.r.s.e and contented h.o.m.ogeneous 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 Ledsmar. "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, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into the bar of suns.h.i.+ne streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.

"I must thank you, first of all, doctor," he began, "for your kindness in coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'"

"You mustn't think of it that way," said Ledsmar; "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," Theron 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 Soulsbys. 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 and their performance from the inside--like one on the stage of a theatre, 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 a suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron 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 a.s.sure 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 many 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. Ledsmar 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 allusion 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--to--"

"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 a search-light 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 pa.s.s through the l.u.s.t 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 more 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 Esquimaux. 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 mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy pa.s.ses her, as the tortoise did the hare. 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."

Theron 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 superst.i.tious 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 tea-grounds. They make the const.i.tuency to which an inst.i.tution based on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest."

"Yes," a.s.sented Ware. 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 is a great deal in it.

Why, the very inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sion 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 sect or another makes, the woman's att.i.tude 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. Ugh!

It makes one sick!"

Dr. Ledsmar 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 never written a book yourself?" asked Theron, getting to his feet.

"I have a thing on serpent-wors.h.i.+p," the scientist replied--"written years ago."

"I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it," urged the other.