“Half-past ten, the last bell rings,” said Mrs. Garwood.
“My goodness!” her son exclaimed, as he hurriedly snapped his watch lid shut, “I thought it was at eleven o’clock.”
The old lady’s face winced with a jealous resentment.
“You’re thinkin’ of the ’piscopalian church,” she answered significantly; “they always does things different.”
They walked to church while the bells were ringing, the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches tolling their bells one after another, a note at a time, each tolerantly waiting its turn, though the different keys in which their bells were pitched rang out in a sharp disharmony their doctrinal distinctions. Far away over on the East Side, Garwood heard the chimes of the Catholic church, holding aloof from all this dissonance of the clamoring creeds, while the Episcopalians had no bell in their church, disdaining with a fine superior quality of respectability to enter into the brazen polemics.
The last bell had just stopped ringing, and its dying tones were still vibrating through the building when they reached the Methodist church, and were shown down the aisle to Mrs. Garwood’s pew, although there was a pretense of free pews in that church. Garwood could feel the glances of the congregation upon him as he took his seat, and he liked the little distinction, although he had grown used, in the last two months, to being the central figure of public gatherings. He recalled how carefully the Monday morning papers chronicled the church goings of the presidential candidates with the fact that the preacher had added something to his sermon that pledged a providential interest in the success of the nominee who had distinguished that preacher’s church with his presence, and Garwood tried to conduct himself as a great man should, or as he imagined he would appear when, a little later, he should become a great man. He bent his head during the prayer, not so low as his mother did, but at an angle that would express a dignified unworthiness to join in public prayer, though giving the assurance at the same time of his respect for it.
During the services, especially during the preaching, Garwood had much time for thought and meditation. His meditations were idle and incoherent, running on Emily, and the afternoon he would spend with her; on his campaign and its impending close. Through them all ran a certain minor chord of sadness and reproach, particularly when he looked at his mother sitting there beside him, her eyes raised behind their gold spectacles in the very acme of respectful attention as she tried to pierce the meaning the preacher sought to crowd into his sermon without making it too long to offend the Longworths, the rich family of the congregation, who, striving to wear the impressive aspect of prominence in the community, filled a whole pew. Garwood found his thoughts hardly tolerable so long as he allowed them to rest in the present. He could grasp at happiness and comfort only when they built on the surer, brighter future which soon would open to him. He found it hard, however, to keep them always building air castles; they persisted in returning to the present, to Emily, to Rankin, to the campaign, to the mortgage. He was depressed and longed for the services to end. They seemed to stretch themselves out interminably, with prayers and hymns and anthems, with announcements and collections, finally, after the sermon, with the baptism of a crying child. He felt as when a little boy he had squirmed during the long two hours, and as a boy was glad when service was over—he was particularly glad that it had not proved to be communion Sunday, for that would have made it necessary for him once more to face a moral problem; to decide on a course of action; and he was wearied with moral problems and decisions.
The heavy feeling that oppressed Garwood in church, the chill that checked the felicity he felt himself now entitled to, remained with him. At times he would forget and become happy, but as soon as he was conscious that he was happy, he would remember that there was some reason why he should not be happy, and then his memory would swiftly bring back to him the thing he had done. By afternoon this constant recurrence irritated him, and he half pitied himself, thinking it unjust that he should be thus annoyed when he was so anxious to be contented and at peace, especially after all the sacrifices he had made to his mother’s wishes during the last sixteen hours. And so when he set out in the clear, shining afternoon to go to Emily, he resolved to throw off this feeling; to cast it from him; to have done with it for all time. Physically he expressed this resolve by the fling of his head, and the way he set his shoulders back, holding them high with the will to be all he wished to be.
The house-maid was out for her Sunday afternoon holiday, and Emily herself swung back the door in answer to Garwood’s ring. The girl smiled radiantly when she saw him and, with a lover’s pretense about her spiritual prescience of all his movements, said she knew it was he at the door. He told her that she had never looked so beautiful before, and there was much of truth in this, for she wore, with an effect of having shown it at church for the first time that morning, a new fall suit, the skirt of which vouched for the jacket that had been laid aside for the greater comfort of a blue silk bodice, which billowed modestly at her young breast, giving her an air of slightness and accentuating the delicacy of her whole person. Her eyes and cheeks were bright with health and her lover’s coming, so that her natural color, which made the wearing of dark costumes an easy thing for her, was thereby heightened.
In the moment they lingered in the hall, she laid her soft hands on his shoulders, reaching up to him with a smile of propitiation to say: