Old Crow

by Alice Brown

"Oh," said Raven, without raising his eyes from the page, "sleighing, most likely."

But the minute she left the window, he put down his book, got his hat and coat from the hall, and went out through the kitchen where Charlotte was sponging bread.

"Going to the meeting?" he asked her.

"No," said Charlotte, absorbedly dissolving her yeast cake. "I never take much stock in——" There she paused, lest she might be uncharitably expansive, and found refuge in Jerry. "He says Isr'el Tenney ain't so much of a man, when all's said an' done, an' don't seem as if he could stan' seein' him on his knees. But there!"

Raven went on through the shed and up the road, to Nan's. She had seen him from the window and came down the path.

"Knew I'd come, did you?" he grumbled.

"Yes," said Nan. "We'd really better go."

Raven hated it all, out of his element as he was, going to spy on Tenney and hear him pray. What other reason was there? He and Nan simply wanted to search out the reactions in Tenney's spiritual insides in order to defeat him the more neatly.

The house was brightly lighted downstairs. Six or eight sleighs stood in the shelter of the long open shed at right angles to the barn. The horses had been taken in and blanketed. When Raven and Nan arrived, no one else was outside, and he was about to knock when Nan, who remembered the ways of neighborhood prayer-meetings, opened the door and stepped in. Men and women were seated in a couple of rows about the walls of the two front rooms, and Tenney stood in the square entry beside a table supplied with a hymn-book, a Bible, and a lamp. He had the unfamiliar aspect of a man reduced to discomfort of mind by the strictures of a Sunday suit. His eyes were burning and his mouth compressed. What did they mean, that passion of the distended pupil, that line of tightened lip? Was it the excitement of leadership, the responsibility of being "in charge" of the solemn convention of prayer-meeting? It was the face, Nan thought, of one who knew the purposes of God from the first word of creation to the last, and meant to enforce them by every mastery known to man: persuasion, rage, and cruelty. She gave him a good evening and he jerked his head slightly in response. The occasion was evidently too far out of the common to admit of ordinary greetings. A man and woman just inside the doorway of the front room moved along, and signed Raven and Nan to take their vacated seats. As soon as they were settled Tenney began to "lead in prayer," and Raven, his mind straying from the words as negligible and only likely to increase his aversion to the man, sat studying the furnishings of the room, a typical one, like all the parlors of the region from the time of his boyhood to that of his father and Old Crow. There was the center table with the album and three red volumes of Keepsakes and Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother, painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was black walnut upholstered with horsehair. Tenney was of the more prosperous line of farmers. And yet he had not begun so. All this represented the pathetic ideal of one who toiled and saved and bought after the fashion of his type.

Raven's eyes strayed to the faces about him: these were the younger set, boys and girls from sixteen to twenty. The first two or three had, by chance perhaps, dropped into this room and the rest gravitated shyly to it. There was always a line of cleavage at prayer-meeting, as at teas and "socials," between old and young. Raven was glad he had chosen the room at random. He liked the atmosphere of half-awed, half-tittering youth. They were always on the verge, always ready to find hilarity in untoward circumstance, and yet trained to a respect for meeting, doing their conventional best. What hard red cheeks there were, what great brown hands of boys, awkwardly holding hats, and yet, taken into the open, how unerringly they gripped the tasks that fell to them. All of them, boys and girls alike, were staring at him and Nan: at Nan with a frank admiration, the girls perhaps with envy. At the corner of the room corresponding to his own, two chairs had been left vacant, and when his eyes came to them he saw a blue scarf depending from the back of one; it had been dropped when the occupant of the chair had left it. It was Tira's chair, and Tira herself appeared from the door opposite, leading from the kitchen, crossed the room, took the scarf and wrapped it about her shoulders and sat down. She had been called out, perhaps in response to a cry from the child who seemed to be the center of commotion in this house, though so mysteriously inactive. Raven felt the blood mounting to his face, she was so movingly beautiful in this scene of honest but unlovely mediocrity. Even her walk across the room, unconscious of herself, yet with the rhythmic step of high processionals—how strange a part she was of this New England picture! He could not see her now, without turning, and tried to summon his mind home from her, to fix it on Tenney, who, having finished his prayer, was calling on one and another, with an unction that seemed merely a rejoicing tyranny, for testimony. It was a scene of tension. Church members were timid before the ordeal of experience or pleading, and the unconverted were strained to the verge of hysteria over a prospect of being haled into the open and prayed for. Neither Raven nor Nan knew how unpopular Tenney had become, because he could not enter the conventional limits of a prayer-meeting without turning it into something too tense, too exciting, the atmosphere of the revival. Yet, though his fellow Christians blamed him for it, they sought it like a drug. He played on their unwilling nerves and they ran to be played on. He was their opera, their jazz. Breath came faster and eyes shone. The likelihood of a hysterical giggle was imminent, and some couples, safely out of range of Tenney's gaze, were "holding hands" and mentally shuddering at their own temerity.