Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

Black looked up, startled. “Oh, I can’t let you——”

“Who’s going to do it? If you must preach, you don’t want to go to it looking like a pugilist, do you? Though I’m not so sure——” Red left the sentence unfinished, while a wicked smile played round his lips.

“I’ll do it myself—or send for a barber.”

“Oh, come on, Black! I’m perfectly competent to do the job, and now I’ve got my hand in on you I’d like to leave you looking the part you wouldn’t insist on playing if you weren’t pretty game. I’m not so sure I ought to let you——”

“I’d like to see you help it,” declared Black, and now he was smiling, too, and feeling distinctly better.

So it ended by Red’s going upstairs after the shaving materials, and then shaving Black, and doing it with decidedly less finish of style than might have been expected of a crack surgeon with a large reputation. He cut his victim once, and Black, putting up a hand and getting it all blood and lather, grinned up into Red’s face, who grinned back and expressed his regret at the slip. This does not mean that they had become friends—not from Red’s standpoint, at least, who would have befriended a sick dog and then shot him without compunction because he didn’t want him around. But it does mean that at last the two had met, on a man-to-man basis, and that Red’s respect for the man he had been in no hurry to meet had been considerably augmented. Black was pretty sure of this, and it helped to brace him more than the stimulant had done.

Two hours later Red cut a call on a rich patient much shorter than was politic, in order to get to the Stone Church in time to slip into a back pew. Before going in he gave young Perkins instructions not to call him out before the sermon ended for anything short of murder on the church doorstep, surprising that lively usher very much, since it was the first time such a thing had ever happened. In making this effort Red had Black in mind as a patient rather than a minister. A severe dislocation must naturally cause a certain amount of nervous shock which might prove disastrous to a man attempting to carry through a long service and spend most of the period upon his feet, within two hours after the accident occurred. Game though Black might be—well—Red admitted to himself that he rather wanted to see how the fellow whom he could no longer call “the Kid” would see the thing through.

Reactions are curious things. In this case, though it was true that Black had to steady himself more than once to keep his congregation from whirling dizzily and disconcertingly before his eyes, had to set his teeth and summon every ounce of will he possessed to keep on through the first three quarters of his service, after all it was Red who got the most of the reaction. For the sermon which Black preached contained a bomb thrown straight at the heads of a parish which, with half the world at war, was in its majority distinctly pacifist—as was many another church during the year of 1916. Black, before his sermon was done, had taken an out-and-out, unflinching stand for the place of the Church in times of war, and had declared that it must be on the side of the sword, when the sword was the only weapon which could thrust its way to peace.

Red, listening closely, forgetting that the man before him was his patient, found himself involuntarily admitting that whatever else he was, Robert McPherson Black was fearless in his speech. And there was probably no use in denying that the fellow had a way of putting things that, as James Macauley had asserted, effectually prevented the man in the pew from becoming absorbed in reveries of his own. It had been by no means unusual for R. P. Burns, surgeon, expecting to do a critical operation on Monday morning, to perform that operation in detail on Sunday morning, while sitting with folded arms and intent expression before a man who was endeavouring to interest him in spiritual affairs. On the present occasion, however, though the coming Monday’s clinical schedule was full to the hatches, Red was unable to detach himself for a moment from the subject being handled so vigorously by Black. Thus, listening through to the closing words, he discovered himself to be aflame with fires which another hand had kindled, and that hand, most marvellously, a preacher’s.

Young Perkins, hovering close to the rear seat into which Red had stolen upon coming in just before the sermon, considered the embargo raised with the closing words of Black, and had his whispered summons ready precisely as Black began his brief closing prayer. The scowl with which Red motioned him away surprised Perkins very much, causing him to retreat to the outer door, where in due season he delivered his message to the leisurely departing doctor—departing leisurely because he was eavesdropping.