III
The next morning, at breakfast, Herman said, as he seized a hot biscuit, "We'll dispense with grace this morning, and till after the war is over." But Wallace blessed his bread in a silent prayer, and Mattie thought it very brave of him to do so.
Herman was full of mockery. "The sun rises just the same, whether it's 'sprinkling' or 'immersion.' It's lucky Nature don't take a hand in these theological contests. She doesn't even referee the scrap; she never seems to care whether you are sparring for points or fighting to a finish. What you theologic middle-weights are really fighting for I can't see—and I don't care, till you fall over the ropes on to my corns."
Stacey listened in a daze to Herman's tirade. He knew it was addressed to Allen, and that it deprecated war, and that it was mocking. The fresh face and smiling lips of the young girl seemed to put other affairs very far away. It was such a beautiful thing to sit at table with a lovely girl.
After breakfast he put on his cap and coat, and went out into the clear, cold November air. All about him the prairie outspread, marked with farm-houses and lined with leafless hedges. Artificial groves surrounded each homestead, and these relieved, to some degree, the desolateness of the fields.
Down the road he saw the spire of a small white church, and as he walked briskly toward it, Herman's description of it came to his mind.
As he drew near, the ruined sheds, the rotting porch, and the windows boarded up told a sorry story, and his face grew sad. He tried one of the doors, and found it open. Some tramp had broken the lock. The inside was even more desolate than the outside. It was littered with rotting straw and plum stones and melon seeds. Obscene words were scrawled on the walls, and even on the pulpit itself.
Taken altogether, it was an appalling picture to the young servant of the Man of Galilee—a blunt reminder of the inherent ferocity and depravity of man.
As he pondered the fire burned, and there rose again the flame of his resolution. He lifted his face and prayed that he might be the one to bring these people into the living union of the Church of Christ.
His blood set toward his heart with tremulous action.
His eyes glowed with zeal like that of the prophets of the Middle Ages. He saw the people united once more in this desecrated hall. He heard the bells ringing, the sound of song, the voices of love and fellowship filling the anterooms where hate had scrawled hideous blasphemy against woman and against God.
As he sat there Herman came in, his keen eyes seeking out every stain and evidence of vandalism.
"Cheerful prospect, isn't it?"
Wallace looked up with the blaze of his resolution still in his eyes. His pale face was sweet and solemn.
"Oh, how these people need Christ!"
Herman turned away. "They need killing—about two dozen of 'em. I'd like to have the job of indicating which ones. I wouldn't miss the old man, you bet!" he added, with cordial resentment.
Wallace was helpless in the face of such reckless thought, and so sat silently watching the handsome young fellow as he walked about.
"Well, now, Stacey, I guess you'll need to move. I had another session with the old man, but he won't give in, so I'm off for Chicago. Mother's brother, George Chapman, who lives about as near the schoolhouse on the other side, will take you in. I guess we'd better go right down now and see about it. I've said good-by to the old man—for good this time; we didn't shake hands, either," he said, as they started down the road together. He was very stern and hard. Something of the father was hidden under his laughing exterior.
Stacey regretted deeply the necessity which drove him out of Allen's house. Mrs. Allen and Mattie had appealed to him very strongly. For years he had lived far from young women, and there was a magical power in the intimate home actions of this young girl. Her bare head, with simple arrangement of hair, someway seemed the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He thought of her that night, as he sat at the table with Chapman and his aged mother. They lived alone, and their lives were curiously silent. Once in a while a low-voiced question, and that was all. George read the Popular Science, Harper's Monthly Magazine, and the Open Court, and brooded over them with slow intellectual movement. It was wonderful the amount of information he secreted from these periodicals. He was better informed than many college graduates. He had little curiosity about the young stranger. He understood that he was to teach the school; beyond that he did not care to go.
He tried Wallace once or twice on the latest discoveries of John Fiske and Edison, and then gave him up and retired to his seat beside the sitting-room stove.
On the following Monday morning school began, and as Wallace took his way down the lane the wrecked church came again to his eyes. He walked past it with slow feet. His was a deeply religious nature, one that sorrowed easily over sin. Suffering of the poor did not trouble him; hunger seemed a little thing beside losing one's everlasting soul. Therefore, to come from his studies upon such a monument of human depravity as this rotting church was to receive a shock and to hear a call to action.
Approaching the schoolhouse, his thought took a turn toward the scholars and toward Mattie. He had forgotten to ask her if she intended to be one of his pupils.
There were several children already gathered at the weather-beaten door as he came up. It was all very American—the box-like house of white, the slender teacher approaching, the roughly clad urchins waiting.
He said, "Good morning, scholars!"
They chorused a queer croak in reply—hesitating, inarticulate, shy. He unlocked the door and entered the cold, bare room—familiar, unlovely, with a certain power of primitive associations. In such a room he had studied his primer and his Ray's Arithmetic. In such a room he had made gradual recession from the smallest front seat to the back wall seat; and from one side of such a room to the other he had furtively worshipped a graceful, girlish head.
He allowed himself but a moment of such dreaming before assuming command, and with his ready helpers a fire was soon started. Other children came in, timorous as rabbits, slipping by, each with an eye fixed on him like a scared chicken. They pre-empted their seats by putting down books and slates, and there arose sly wars for possession, which he watched with amusement—it was so like his own life at that age.
He assumed control as nearly in the manner of the old-time teachers as he could recall, and the work of his teaching was begun. The day passed quickly, and, as he walked homeward again, there stood that rotting church, and in his mind there rose a surging emotion larger than he could himself comprehend—a desire to rebuild it by uniting the warring factions, of whose lack of Christianity this deserted chapel was a fatal witness.