A book of martyrs

by Cornelia A. P. Comer

SERENE’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE; AN INLAND STORY

Serene and young Jessup, the school-teacher, were leaning over the front gate together in the warm summer dusk.

“See them sparkin’ out there?” inquired Serene’s father, standing at the door with his hands in his pockets, and peering out speculatively.

“Now, father, when you know that ain’t Serene’s line.”

It was Mrs. Sayles who spoke. Perhaps there was the echo of a faint regret in her voice, for she wished to see her daughter “respectit like the lave”; but “sparkin’” had never been Serene’s line.

“Serene wouldn’t know how,” said her big brother.

“There’s other things that’s a worse waste o’ time,” observed Mr. Sayles, meditatively, “and one on ’em’s ’Doniram Jessup’s ever-lastin’ talk-talk-talkin’ to no puppus. He’s none so smart if he does teach school. He’d do better on the farm with his father.”

“He’s more’n three hundred dollars ahead, and goin’ to strike out for himself, he says,” observed the big brother, admiringly.

“Huh! My son, I’ve seen smart young men strike out for themselves ’fore ever you was born, and I’ve seen their fathers swim out after ’em—and sink,” said Mr. Sayles, oracularly.

Outside the June twilight was deepening, but Serene and the school-teacher still leaned tranquilly over the picket-gate. The fragrance of the lemon-lilies that grew along the fence was in the air, and over Serene’s left shoulder, if she had turned to look, she would have seen the slight yellow crescent of the new moon sliding down behind the trees.

They were talking eagerly, but it was only about what he had written in regard to “Theory and Practice” at the last county examination.

“I think you carry out your ideas real well,” Serene said, admiringly, when he had finished his exposition. “’Tisn’t everybody does that. I know I’ve learned a good deal more this term than I ever thought to when I started in.”

The teacher was visibly pleased. He was a slight, wiry little fellow, with alert eyes, a cynical smile, and an expression of self-confidence, which was justifiable only on the supposition that he had valuable information as to his talents and capacity unknown to the world at large.

“I think you have learned a good deal of me,” he observed, condescendingly; “more than any of the younger ones. I have taken some pains with you. It’s a pleasure to teach willing learners.”

At this morsel of praise, expressed in such a strikingly original manner, Serene flushed and looked prettier than ever. She was always pretty, this slip of a girl, with olive skin, pink cheeks, and big, dark eyes, and she always looked a little too decorative, too fanciful, for her environment in this substantial brick farm-house, set in the midst of fat, level acres of good Ohio land. It was as if a Dresden china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.

Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he scarcely knew; it is as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart.

“He gives them to me because he thinks I look like that,” she thought with a quick, happy thrill.

“Yes,” he went on, rather confusedly, his mind being divided between what he was saying and a curiosity to find out if she would be as angry as she was the last time if he should try to kiss the nearest pink cheek; “I think it would be a good idea for you to keep on with your algebra by yourself, and you might read that history you began. I don’t know who’s going to have the school next fall. Now, if I were going to be here this summer, I——”

“Why, Don,” Serene interrupted him, using the name she had not often spoken since Adoniram Jessup, after a couple of years in the High School, had come back to live at home, and to teach in their district—“why, Don, I thought your mother said you were going to help on the farm this summer.”

Adoniram smiled, a thin-lipped, complacent little smile.

“Father did talk that some, but I’ve decided to go West—and I start to-morrow.”

To-morrow! And that great, hungry West, which swallows up people so remorselessly! Something ailed Serene’s heart; she hoped he could not hear it beating, and she waited a minute before saying, quietly:

“Isn’t this sort of sudden?”

“I don’t like to air my plans too much. There’s many a slip, you know.”

“You’ll want to come to the house and say good-by to the folks, and tell us all about it?” As he nodded assent, she turned and preceded him up the narrow path.

“When will you be back?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Maybe never. If I have any luck, I’d like the old people to come out to me. I’m not leaving anything else here.”

“You needn’t have told me so,” said Serene to herself.

“Father, boys, here’s Don come in to say good-by. He’s going West to-morrow.”

“Well, ’Doniram Jessup! Why don’t you give us a s’prise party and be done with it?”

Don smiled cheerfully at this tribute to his secretive powers, and sitting down on the edge of the porch, began to explain.

Serene glanced around to see that all were listening, and then slipped quietly out through the kitchen to the high back porch, where she found a seat behind the new patent “creamery,” and leaning her head against it, indulged in the luxury of a few dry sobs. Tears she dared not shed, for tears leave traces. Though “sparkin’” had not been Serene’s line, love may come to any human creature, and little Serene had learned more that spring than the teacher had meant to impart or she to acquire.

When the five minutes she had allotted to her grief were past she went back to the group at the front of the house as unnoticed as she had left them. Her father was chaffing Jessup good-naturedly on his need of more room to grow in, and Don was responding with placid ease. It was not chaff, indeed, that could disturb his convictions as to his personal importance to the development of the great West. Presently he rose and shook hands with them all, including herself—for whom he had no special word—said a general good-by, and left them.

“He’s thinking of himself,” thought Serene a little bitterly, as she watched him go down the yard; “he is so full of his plans and his future he hardly knows I am here. I don’t believe he ever knew it!”

To most people the loss of the possible affection of Don Jessup would not have seemed a heavy one, but the human heart is an incomprehensible thing, and the next six weeks were hard for Serene. For the first time in her life she realized how much we can want that which we may not have, and she rebelled against the knowledge.

“Why?” she asked herself, and “why?” Why should she have cared, since he, it seemed, did not? Why couldn’t she stop caring now? And, oh, why had he been so dangerously kind when he did not care? Poor little Serene! she did not know that we involuntarily feel a tenderness almost as exquisite as that of love itself toward whatever feeds the fountain of our vanity.

Presently, tired of asking herself, she turned to asking Heaven, which is easier. For we cannot comfortably blame ourselves for the inability to answer our own inconvenient inquiries, but Heaven we can both ask and blame. Serene had never troubled Heaven much before, but now, in desperation, she battered at its portals night and day. She did not pray, you understand, to be given the love which many small signs had taught her to believe might be hers, the love that, nevertheless, had not come near to her. Though young, she was reasonable. She instinctively recognized that when we cannot be happy it is necessary for us to be comfortable, if we are still to live. So, after a week or two of rebellion, she asked for peace, sure that if it existed for her anywhere in the universe, God held it in His keeping, for, now, no mortal did.

She prayed as she went about her work by day; she prayed as she knelt by her window at evening, looking out on the star-lit world; she prayed when she woke late in the night and found her room full of the desolate white light of the waning moon, and always the same prayer.

“Lord,” said Serene, “this is a little thing that I am going through. Make me feel that it is a little thing. Make me stop caring. But if you can’t, then show me that you care that I am not happy. If I could feel you knew and cared, I think I might be happier.”

But in her heart she felt no answer, and peace did not come to fill the place of happiness.

In our most miserable hours fantastic troubles and apprehensions of the impossible often come to heap themselves upon our real griefs, making up a load which is heavier than we can bear. Serene began to wonder if God heard—if He was there at all.

Her people noticed that she grew thin and tired-looking, and attributed it to the fierce hot weather. For it was the strange summer long remembered in the inland country where they lived as the season of the great drought. There had been a heavy snowfall late in April; from that time till late in August no rain fell. The heat was terrible. Dust was everywhere. The passage of time from one scorching week to another was measured by the thickening of its heavy inches on the highway; it rose in clouds about the feet of cattle in the burnt-up clover-fields. The roadside grass turned to tinder, and where a careless match had been dropped, or the ashes shaken from a pipe, there were long, black stretches of seared ground to tell the tale. The resurrection of the dead seemed no greater miracle than these blackened fields should shortly turn to living green again, under the quiet influence of autumn rains.

And now, in the early days of August, when the skies were brass, the sun a tongue of flame, and the yellow dust pervaded the air like an ever-thickening fog, a strange story came creeping up from the country south of them. “Down in Paulding,” where much of the land still lay under the primeval forest, and solitary sawmills were the advance-guards of civilization; where there were great marshes, deep woods, and one impenetrable tamarack swamp, seemed the proper place for such a thing to happen if it were to happen at all. The story was of a farmer who went out one Sunday morning to look at his corn-field, forty good acres of newly cleared land, ploughed this year only for the second time. The stunted stalks quivered in the hot air, panting for water; the blades were drooping and wilted like the leaves of a plant torn up from the ground. He looked from his blasted crop to the pitiless skies, and, lifting a menacing hand, cursed Heaven because of it. Those who told the story quoted the words he used, with voices awkwardly lowered; but there was nothing impressive in his vulgar, insensate defiance. He was merely swearing a shade more imaginatively than was his wont. The impressive thing was that, as he stood with upraised hand and cursing lips, he was suddenly stricken with paralysis, and stood rooted to the spot, holding up the threatening arm, which was never to be lowered. This was the first story. They heard stranger things afterward: that his family were unable to remove him from the spot; that he was burning with an inward fire which did not consume, and no man dared to lay hand on him, or even approach him, because of the heat of his body.

It was said that this was clearly a judgment, and it was much talked of and wondered over. Serene listened to these stories with a singular exultation, and devoutly trusted that they were true. She had needed a visible miracle, and here was one to her hand. Why should not such things happen now as well as in Bible days? And if the Lord descended in justice, why not in mercy? The thing she hungered for was to know that He kept in touch with each individual human life, that He listened, that He cared. If He heard the voice of blasphemy, then surely He was not deaf to that of praise—or agony. She said to herself, feverishly, “I must know, I must see for myself, if it is true.”

She said to her father: “Don’t you think I might go down to Aunt Mari’s in Paulding for a week? It does seem as if it might be cooler down there in the woods,” and her tired face attested her need of change and rest. He looked at her with kindly eyes.

“Don’t s’pose it will do you no great harm, if your mother’ll manage without you; but your Aunt Mari’s house ain’t as cool as this one, Serene.”

“It’s different, anyhow,” said the girl, and went away to write a postal-card to Aunt Mari and to pack her valise.

When she set out, in a day or two, it was with as high a hope as ever French peasant maid took on pilgrimage to Loretto. She hoped to be cured of all her spiritual ills, but how, she hardly knew. The trip was one they often made with horses, but Serene, going alone, took the new railroad that ran southward into the heart of the forests and the swamps. Her cousin Dan, with his colt and road-cart, met her at the clearing, where a shed beside a water-tank did duty for town and station, and drove her home. Her Aunt Mari was getting dinner, and, after removing her hat, Serene went out to the kitchen, and sat down on the settee. The day was stifling, and the kitchen was over-heated, but Aunt Mari was standing over the stove frying ham with unimpaired serenity.

“Well, and so you thought it would be cooler down here, Serene? I’m real glad to see you, but I can’t promise much of nothin’ about the weather. We’ve suffered as much as most down here.”

Serene saw her opportunity.

“We heard your corn was worse than it is with us. What was there in that story, Aunt Mari, about the man who was paralyzed on a Sunday morning?”

“Par’lyzed, child? I don’t know as I just know what you mean.”

“But he lived real near here,” persisted Serene—“two miles south and three east of the station, they said. That would be just south of here. And we’ve heard a good deal about it. You must know, Aunt Mari.”

“Must be old man Burley’s sunstroke. That’s the only thing that’s happened, and there was some talk about that. He’s a Dunkard, you know, and they are mightily set on their church. Week ago Sunday was their day for love-feast, and it was a hundred an’ seven in the shade. He hadn’t been feelin’ well, and his wife she just begged him not to go out; but he said he guessed the Lord couldn’t make any weather too hot for him to go to church in. So he just hitched up and started, but he got a sunstroke before he was half-way there, and they had to turn round and bring him home again. He come to all right, but he ain’t well yet. Some folks thinks what he said ’bout the weather was pretty presumpshus, but I dunno. Seems if he might use some freedom of speech with the Lord if anybody could, for he’s been a profitable servant. A good man has some rights. I don’t hold with gossipin’ ’bout such things, and callin’ on ’em ‘visitations’ when they happen to better folks than me—why, Serene! what’s the matter?” in a shrill crescendo of alarm, for the heat, the journey, and the disappointment had been too much for the girl. Her head swam as she grasped the gist of her aunt’s story, and perceived that upon this simple foundation must have been built the lurid tale which had drawn her here, and for the first time in her healthy, unemotional life she quietly fainted away.

When she came to herself she was lying on the bed in Aunt Mari’s spare room. The spare room was under the western eaves, and there were feathers on the bed. Up the stairway from the kitchen floated the pervasive odor of frying ham. A circle of anxious people, whose presence made the stuffy room still stuffier, were eagerly watching her. Opening her languid eyes to these material discomforts of her situation, she closed them again. She felt very ill, and the only thing in her mind was the conviction that had overtaken her just as she fainted—“Then God is no nearer in Paulding than at home.”

As the result of closing her eyes seemed to be the deluging of her face with water until she choked, she decided to reopen them.

“Well,” said Aunt Mari, heartily, “that looks more like. How do you feel, Serene? Wasn’t it singular that you should go off so, just when I was tellin’ you ’bout ’Lishe Burley’s sunstroke? I declare, I was frightened when I looked around and saw you. Your uncle would bring you up here and put you on the bed, though I told him ’twas cooler in the settin’-room. But he seemed to think this was the thing to do.”

“I wish he’d take me down again,” said Serene, feebly and ungratefully, “and” (after deliberation) “put me in the spring-house.”

“What you need is somethin’ to eat,” said Aunt Mari with decision. “I’ll make you a cup of hot tea, and” (not heeding the gesture of dissent) “I don’t believe that ham’s cold yet.”

Serene had come to stay a week, and a week accordingly she stayed. The days were very long and very hot; the nights on the feather-bed under the eaves still longer and hotter. She had very little to say for herself, and thought still less. There is a form of despair which amounts to coma.

“Serene’s never what you might call sprightly,” observed Aunt Mari in confidence to Uncle Dan’el, “but this time, seems if—well, I s’pose it’s the weather. Wonder if I’ll ever see any weather on this earth to make me stop talkin’?” It was a relief all around when the day came for her departure.

“I’ll do better next time, Aunt Mari,” said Serene as she stepped aboard the train; but she did not greatly care that she had not done well this time.

When the short journey was half over, the train made a longer stop than usual at one of the way stations. Then, after some talking, the passengers gradually left the car. Serene noticed these things vaguely, but paid no attention to their meaning. Presently a friendly brakeman approached and touched her on the shoulder.

“Didn’t you hear ’em say, Miss, there was a freight wreck ahead, and we can’t go on till the track is clear?”

“How long will it be?” asked Serene, slowly finding the way out of her reverie.

“Mebbe two hours now, and mebbe longer. I’ll carry your bag into the depot, if you like,” and he possessed himself of the shiny black valise seamed with grayish cracks, and led the way out of the car.

The station at Arkswheel is a small and grimy structure set down on a cinder bank. Across the street on one corner is a foundry, and opposite that a stave-factory with a lumber-yard about it. In the shadow of the piled-up staves, like a lily among thorns, stands a Gothic chapel, small, but architecturally good. Serene, looking out of the dusty window, saw it, and wondered that a church should be planted in such a place. When, presently, although it was a week-day, the bell began to ring, she turned to a woman sitting next to her for an explanation.

“That’s the church Mr. Bellington built. He owns the foundry here. They have meeting there ’most any time. ’Piscopal, it is.”

“I don’t know much about that denomination,” observed Serene, sedately.

“My husband’s sister-in-law that I visit here goes there. She says her minister just does take the cake. They think the world an’ all of him.”

Serene no longer looked interested. The woman rose, and walked about the room, examining the maps and time-tables. By and by she came back and stopped beside Serene.

“If we’ve got to wait till nobody knows when, we might just as well go over there and see what’s goin’ on—to the church, I mean. Mebbe ’twould pass the time.”

Inside the little church the light was so subdued that it almost produced the grateful effect of coolness. As they sat down behind the small and scattered congregation, Serene felt that it was a place to rest. The service, which she had never heard before, affected her like music that she did not understand. The rector was a young man with a heavily lined face. His eyes were dark and troubled, his voice sweet and penetrating. When he began his sermon she became suddenly aware that she was hearing some one to whom what he discerned of spiritual truth was the overwhelmingly important thing in life, and she listened eagerly. This was St. Bartholomew’s day, it appeared. Serene did not remember very clearly who he was, but she understood this preacher when, dropping his notes and leaning over his desk, he seemed to be scrutinizing each individual face in the audience before him to find one responsive to his words.

He was not minded, he said, to talk to them of any lesson to be drawn from the life of St. Bartholomew, of whom so little was known save that he lived in and suffered for the faith. The one thought that he had to give had occurred to him in connection with that bloody night’s work in France so long ago, of which this was the anniversary, when thousands were put to death because of their faith.

“Such things do not happen nowadays,” he went on. “That form of persecution is over. Instead of it, we have seen the dawning of what may be a darker day, when those who profess the faith of Christ have themselves turned to persecute the faith which is in their hearts. Faith—the word means to me that trust in God’s plans for us which brings confidence to the soul even when we stand in horrible fear of life, and mental peace even when we are facing that which we cannot understand. We persecute our faith in many ingenious ways, but perhaps those torture themselves most whose religion is most emotional—those who are only sure that God is with them when they feel the peace of His presence in their hearts. A great divine said long ago that to love God thus is to love Him for the spiritual loaves and fishes, which He does not mean always to be our food. But for those who think that He is not with them when they are unaware of His presence so, I have this word: When you cannot find God in your hearts, then turn and look for Him in your lives. When you are soul-sick, discouraged, unhappy; when you feel neither joy nor peace, nor even the comfort of a dull satisfaction in earth; when life is nothing to you, and you wish for death, then ask yourself, What does God mean by this? For there is surely some lesson for you in that pain which you must learn before you leave it. You are not so young as to believe that you were meant for happiness. You know that you were made for discipline. And the discipline of life is the learning of the things God wishes us to know, even in hardest ways. But He is in the things we must learn, and in the ways we learn them. There is a marginal reading of the first chapter of the revised version of the Gospel of St. John which conveys my meaning: ‘That which hath been made was life in Him, and the life [or, as some commentators read, and I prefer it, simply life] was the light of men.’ That is, before Christ’s coming the light of men was in the experience to be gained in the lives He gave them. And it is still true. Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life is the light of men. I sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ—to refuse to find Him in the life He gives us.”

Serene heard no more. What else was said she did not know. She had seized upon his words, and was applying them to her own experiences with a fast-beating heart, to see if haply she had learned anything by them that “God wanted her to know.” She had loved unselfishly. Was not that something? She had learned that despair and distrust are not the attitudes in which loss may be safely met. She had become conscious in a blind way that the world was larger and nearer to her than it used to be, and she was coming to feel a sense of community in all human suffering. Were not all these good things?

When the congregation knelt for the last prayer, Serene knelt with them, but did not rise again. She did not respond even when her companion touched her on the shoulder before turning to go. She could not lift her face just then, full as it was of that strange rapture which came of the sudden clear realization that her life was the tool in the hands of the Infinite by which her soul was shaped. “Let me be chastened forever,” the heart cries in such a moment, “so that I but learn more of thy ways!”

Some one came slowly down the aisle at last, and stopped, hesitating, beside the pew where she still knelt. Serene looked up. It was the rector. He saw a slender girl in unbecoming dress, whose wild-rose face was quivering with excitement. She saw a man, not old, whose thin features nevertheless wore the look of one who has faced life for a long time dauntlessly—the face of a good fighter.

“Oh, sir, is it true what you said?” she demanded, breathlessly.

“It is what I live upon,” he answered, “the belief that it is true.” And then, because he saw that she had no further need of him, he passed on, and left her in the little church alone. When at length she recrossed the street to the station, the train was ready, and in another hour she was at home.

They were glad to see her at home, and they had a great deal to tell that had happened to them in the week. They wondered a little that she did not relate more concerning her journey, but they were used to Serene’s silences, and her mother was satisfied with the effect of the visit when she observed that Serene seemed to take pleasure in everything she did, even in the washing of the supper-dishes.

There were threatening clouds in the sky that evening, as there had often been before that summer, but people were weary of saying that it looked like a shower. Nevertheless, when Serene woke in the night, not only was there vivid lightning in the sky, and the roll of distant but approaching thunder, but there was also the unfamiliar sound of rain blown sharply against the roof, and a delicious coolness in the room. The long drought was broken.

She sat up in her white bed to hear the joyous sound more clearly. It was as though the thunder said, “Lift up your heart!” And the rapturous throbbing of the rain seemed like the gracious downpouring of a needed shower on her own parched and thirsty life.