I remained in the little house between the hills, walking about, attending to my few wants, receiving an occasional visitor in a sort of trance of sorrow. William had always meant more to me than Heaven. I had endured poverty, prayers, persecutions and revivals for his sake. And now I had lost him. The very thought was immeasurable. I wore it for mourning. I missed him when I looked down the bridle path into the valley, and I missed him when I looked at the stars. Nothing meant anything to me without him. Then suddenly the veil lifted. I seemed at last to have conceded him to what is beyond the grave. At once my own mind came back to me, not the humble, church-censored mind I had during his life, but my very own, and it was like another conversion. I remembered scenes and thoughts and faces that I had not recalled since girlhood. The innocent gayety of my youth came back to me, and I recalled distinctly with what naïve, happy worldliness I faced the world then, and not the Kingdom of Heaven that I have been staring at since through William's eyes for thirty years.
The next Sunday I went to church as usual, but I did not go up near the front, which had always been my custom. It occurred to me that now I did not have to sit in the saint neighborhood, but might sit back with the honester human beings. The preacher was a young man of the progressive new order, who sustained the same relation as pastor to the church that an ambitious foreman sustains to a business that must be renovated and improved. He was taking up his foreign missionary collection very much after the manner of an auctioneer:
"Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars: who gives five dollars that the Gospel may be spread in China and Siam? Who gives five dollars that there may be light in India and to save women from casting their innocent babes into the Ganges? Thank you, Sister Tuttle. The women are leading off, getting ahead of you, brethren. Put down five dollars from Sister Tuttle. Now, who will give four dollars?" and so on down till even the sinners on the back benches subscribed a rattle of dimes. I listened with comfortable indifference. I thought of how William died without enough oil in him to grease his joints. And how many more like him had died too weak and depleted to have even "assurance" of their own salvation. I remembered how I wished toward the last that I could afford a few delicacies, for William liked cordials and real cream which might have strengthened and cheered him. Then and there I resolved never to give another cent to foreign missions. I am not opposed to foreign missions, you understand. William and I did without much that the heathen might have missionaries, and the gospel preached to them. But that is just it. We did without too much. I am not saying that anyone else ought to lessen their contribution to this cause. Let them give even more. But I am certain they ought to treble their contribution to old preachers. There is something fearful in the Bible like this:
"But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel." That Scripture expressed my feelings exactly as I listened to the preacher take up his foreign missionary collection and remembered William's dreadful poverty. So, I say, I made up my own private mind that there is something wrong with the way church collections are distributed, and that if I ever had any spare money it should be devoted to purchasing a taller tombstone for William.
Immediately I felt my own "I am," sitting up in me and taking courage. It was a grand sensation. For so many years I had not belonged to myself. I was simply a prayer-meeting numeral, William's personal dynamo at the women's societies. Suddenly it came to me that I was a free moral agent for the first time in my life—widows are the only women who are. The scandalous reflection took hold of me as I listened to the collection and reflected that never again would I have to worry lest William fail to raise all his "assessments," that I should never be anxious now for fear his sermons might not please the "prominent" members of his church. But the most refreshing, rejuvenating of all was the thought that at last I could be a little less good. I looked at the slattern-formed men and women sitting in still rows across the little church, with their faces lit like candles from the preacher's face, and I experienced a peaceful remoteness from them and from the pulpit light.
CHAPTER XVII
BACK AGAIN TO THE WORLD
The carnal man never dies in us, nor the carnal woman, either, for that matter. We only say so in our prayers and rituals because we do not know yet how to be spiritually truthful about our own flesh and blood. But God, who knew very well what He was about when He made us carnal, sees to it that in spite of our egregious pretensions we remain honest Adams and Adamesses to the end. So, for years, without acknowledging it to myself, I had been homesick for the world and the things of the world. I did not want to "sin," I simply longed to be natural; to live a trifle less perpendicularly in my soul. There had been so many prayer-meeting nights when I would rather have been at the grand opera. Not that William's prayer-meeting talks were not the very bread of life—they were; but there is such a thing as losing one's appetite for just one kind of bread. I have always thought one of the notable things about the Israelites' journey through the wilderness was the amazing fortitude with which they accepted their manna diet. Anyhow, it is not in the power of words to tell how I pined for the real laughter and lightness and play of life.
William had needed them no less, but the difference was he never knew it. When he felt world-hungry he thought it was a sign of spiritual anaemia and prayed for a closer walk with God—as if God was not also the God of the world even more than He is the caste Deity of any church or creed. I am not reflecting on William in saying this—I'd sooner reflect upon one of the Crown Jewels of Heaven, but I am reflecting upon his understanding. It was not sufficiently earthly—no good priest's is. Still, I had been his faithful wife for thirty years and a consistent member of a church which forbids nearly every form of amusement that cannot be taken at a Sunday-school picnic, a church festival or at an Epworth League convention.