“He that is down need fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride,”
said Lester Knapp aloud to himself. It was a great pleasure to him to be able to say the strong short Saxon words aloud. For years he had been shutting into the cage of silence all the winged beautiful words which came flying into his mind! And beautiful words which you do not pronounce aloud are like children always forced to “be quiet” and “sit still.” They droop and languish.
But before this it would have been too foolish to repeat the lovely lines that came into his mind. What would Harvey Bronson have thought to hear “the army of unalterable law” pronounced in the office of Willing’s Emporium? Lester Knapp smiled to himself at the idea! And if it hadn’t been Harvey Bronson at hand it would have been some one else just as scandalized.
But now there was no one to hear, no one but little Stephen playing with his toy train on the newspapers spread out over the floor. A blessed healing solitude lay about Lester as he sat in his wheel chair in the sunny kitchen peeling a panful of potatoes. It had been when he looked down at the gingham apron spread over his paralyzed knees that the song of the little shepherd had come to his mind. A gingham apron on a man! And peeling potatoes!
He supposed that Harvey Bronson would die of shame if anybody put a gingham apron on him and expected him to peel potatoes. And yet there was nobody who talked louder than he about the sacred dignity of the home which ennobled all the work done for its sake—that was for Mrs. Harvey Bronson of course!
Lester Knapp smiled again, his slow, whimsical smile which Harvey Bronson especially detested and feared. Then he stopped thinking about his old associate at the office. The lines which had come into his mind brought with them all the world to which they belonged, the strong-hearted, simple, passionate world of the old cobbler-pilgrim. Where were those lines? Towards the end of the book, wasn’t it, just below that quaint marginal note of Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation. It was where the pilgrims were going—yes, now he remembered the very words with that exactitude of memory which had been such a golden thing in his life, “They were going along talking and espied a boy feeding his father’s sheep. The boy was in very mean clothes, but of a fresh, well-favored countenance; and as he sat by himself he sang. ‘Hark!’ said Mr. Greatheart, ‘to what the shepherd’s boy saith.’ So they harkened.”
Lester Knapp, peeling his potatoes, harkened with them as he said aloud again,
“He that is down need fear no fall,
He that is low no pride.