Dominie Dean: A Novel

by Ellis Parker Butler

In the self-centered little town there were good people and bad and, as is the case everywhere, fewer actively vicious than we are pleased to assume. David cherished a philosophy of pity for these. If old Wiggett had so much good in him, and 'Thusia, who was now as faithful a wife and mother as Riverbank could boast, had once been on the verge of being cold-shouldered into a life of triviality, if not of shame, no doubt all these others, if they had been properly guided in the beginning, might have been as normal as old Mrs. Grelling, or the absolutely colorless Mr. Prell. With all this willingness to make allowances for the sinner, David had a hard, uncompromising, Presbyterian hatred for the sin. In one of his sermons he put it thus: “To sin is human; the sin is of the devil.” It was in this spirit David began his long fight against Mac-dougal Graham's personal devil.

When David Dean came to Riverbank Mack Graham had been a bright-eyed, saucy, curly-haired little fellow of five or six; a “why!” sort of boy—“Why do you wear a white necktie? Why do you have to stand in the pulpit! Why did Mr. Wiggett get up and go out! Why's that horse standing on three legs!” Certain ladies of the church made a great pet of Mack and helped spoil him, for he was as handsome as he was saucy. An only son, born late in his parents' lives, they prepared the way for his disgrace. It may be well enough, as Emerson advises, to “cast the bantling on the rocks,” but leaving an only son to his own devices on the theory that he is the finest boy in creation and can do no wrong does not work out as well. At nineteen Mack was wild, unruly and drinking himself to ruin.

David's first knowledge of the state into which Mack had fallen came from 'Thusia. There had been one of those periodical church squabbles in which the elder members had locked horns with the younger and more progressive over some unimportant question that had rapidly grown vital, and David had, for a while, been busy impoverishing the little conflagration so that it might burn out the more quickly. The church was subject to these little affairs. In the fifteen years of his ministry David had seen the church change slowly as a natural result of children reaching maturity, and the passing of the aged. Some, who liked David's sermons left other churches and joined the congregation, and there were a few accretions of newcomers, but from the first the older members had resented any interference with their management on the part of new and younger members. A change in the choir, an effort to have the dingy interior of the church redecorated, any one of a thousand petty matters would, if suggested by the newer members, throw the older men into a line of battle.

It was, in a way, a quarrelsome church. It was, indeed, not only in Riverbank but throughout the country, a quarrelsome time. The first rills of broader doctrine were beginning to permeate the hot rock of petrified religion and where they met there was sure to be steam and boiling water and discomfort for the minister, whether he held with one side or the other, or tried to be neutral. The Riverbank church, because of the conservatism of the older members, was particularly prone to petty quarrels, and this was one of David's greatest distresses. At heart he was with those who favored the broader view, but he was able to appreciate the fond jealousy of the older men and women for old thoughts and ways.

It was after one of these quarrels, when he had found himself unduly busied healing wounds, that 'Thusia came running across from the Mannings', opposite the manse, and tapped on David's study door.

“Yes! Come in!” he said.

“David! It's Mack—Mack Graham—he is drunk!”

“Mack drunk!” David cried, for he could not believe he had heard aright. “Not our Mack!”

David, his lanky form slid down in his great chair so that he was sitting on the small of his back, had been thinking over his sermon for the next Sunday. No one could sit in David's great chair without sliding down and down and down into comfort or into extreme discomfort. It had taken David a long time to become part of the chair, so that he could feel the comfort of utter relaxation of body it demanded. In time the chair grew to be a part of the David we all knew. Those of us who knew him best can never forget him as he was when he sat in that old chair, his feet on the floor, his knees almost as high as his chin, his hands loosely folded over his waist, so that his thin, expressive thumbs could tap together in, emphasis as he talked, and his head forward so that his chin rested on the bosom of his shirt. Slumped down like this in the great chair, he talked to us of things we talked of nowhere else. We could talk religion with David when he was in his chair quite as if it were an interesting subject. Many of us can remember his smile as he listened to our feeble objections to his logic, or how he ran his hand through his curls and tossed one knee on top of the other when it was time to bring the full battery of his mind against us. It was while slumped into his great chair that David had most of his famous word battles with old Doc Benedict, and there, his fine brow creased, he listened when Rose Hinch told of someone in need or in trouble. When we happened in and David was out and we waited for him in his study that chair was the emptiest chair man ever saw in the world. The hollows of the threadbare old green rep always seemed to hunger for David as no other chair ever hungered for any other man. No other man or woman ever fitted the chair. I always felt like an overturned turtle in it, with my neck vainly trying to get my head above the engulfing hollow. Only David and little children felt comfortable in the chair, for in it little children—David's own or others—could curl up as comfortably as a kitten in a rug.

It was out of this chair David scrambled, full of fight, when 'Thusia brought him the news that Mack was drunk.