A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

One Sabbath morning in June he entered the pulpit in a Sinai mood, determined to read the Church Rules and to apply them severely. He began by selecting a condemnatory Psalm, took his text simply as a threat from Jeremiah in one of his bad moods, and after a severe hymn and a mournful Rachel prayer he arose, folded his spectacles and fixed his eyes burningly upon the innocent faces of his congregation, which had a "What have we done?" expression on them that would have moved an angel to impatience.

"Brethren and sisters," he said after a frightful spiritual pause, "it is my duty this morning to call you back out of the far country into which you have gone, to your Father's house. I blame myself for your dreadful condition. I have not had the courage to tell you of your faults as a preacher should tell his people when he sees them wandering in the forbidden paths of worldliness and sin. I have not been a faithful shepherd to you, and doubtless the Lord will lay your sins upon my head. But this morning I am resolved to do my duty by you, no matter what it costs."

The congregation took on the expression of a child about to be laid across the parent's knee. But when he opened the Discipline and proceeded to read the Rules, following each with solemn, almost personal applications to conditions under his very nose, in his own church, their countenances underwent a lightning change of almost happy relief. Never can I forget the naïve sweetness with which those people turned up their untroubled eyes to William and received his thundering exhortations. They seemed proud of his courage—for, indeed, he nearly broke his heart condemning them—and at the same time they seemed to be bearing with him as they would bear with the vagaries of a good and loving old father.

Sister C and Sister Z sat near the front, surrounded by their respective cherubim broods, looking up at him with tender humorous eyes. The children, indeed, felt something alien to peace in the atmosphere. They regarded him fearfully, then turned meek, inquisitive faces to their mothers; but those two extraordinary women never blinked or blushed from start to finish, although they were deeply dyed with all the guilt William mentioned. The one person present who received the discourse with almost vindictive signs of indorsement was Brother Billy Smithers, a man who had lived an exasperatingly regular life in the church for more than forty years. He sent up Amens fervid with the heat of his furious spirit at the end of each charge and condemnation.

CHAPTER IX

WILLIAM AND THE FEMININE SOUL

I do not know if I make you understand that all this time the years were passing—five, ten, fifteen, twenty—and in them we went together up and down and around our little world, William offering his Lord's salvation without any wisdom of words worth mentioning, yet with a wisdom as sweet, as redolent of goodness as the carnations in Heaven are of Paradise. And I followed after him, holding up his hands, often with my own eyes blindfolded to the spiritual necessities of the situation, praying when he prayed, though many a time I could have trusted our Father to do the square thing without so much knee-anguish of the soul; and this is how at the end of so many years in the itinerancy I began to take on the look of it—that is to say, I had faded; and although I still wore little decorative fragments of my wedding finery, my clothes in general had the peculiar prayer-meeting set that is observable in the garments of every Methodist preacher's wife at this stage of her fidelity to the cause. There is something solemn and uncompromising in her waist-line, something mournfully beseeching in the down-drooping folds of her skirt, and I do not know anything in Nature more pathetically honest than the way her neck comes up out of the collar and says: "Search me!"

All this is most noticeable when the circuit rider has brought her up from his country circuit to the town parsonage and the town church, where there is such a thing as "style" in sleeves and headgear. I should say in this connection that William did at last "rise" that much in the church: he occasionally became the pastor in a village with a salary of at most five hundred dollars. The wife at this time always looks like a poor little lady Rip Van Winkle in the congregation. And her husband invariably makes the better impression, because all those years while she was wearying and fading he was consciously or unconsciously cultivating his powers of personality, his black-coated ministerial presence, and even the full, rich tones of his preaching voice.

But I will say for William that he was as innocent as a lamb of any carnal intentions in these improvements. He was wedded to his white cravats as the angels are to their wings, and he was by nature so fastidiously neat that if he had been a cat instead of a man he would have spent much of his time licking his paws and washing his face. Besides, like all preachers' wives, I was anxious that he should look well in the pulpit, and therefore ready to sacrifice my own needs that he might buy new clothes, because he must appear so publicly every Sunday; especially as by this time I had the feeling of not appearing even when I was present. One of the peculiar experiences of a preacher's wife is to stand in the background at the end of every Sunday morning service and see her husband lionized by the congregation.