Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

Jane gave him a sparkling smile. “Very well, Cary Ray. It will be your fault if we feel like fish very much out of water and don’t know how to act. I haven’t been in a church in at least three years.”

“The more shame to you. Most of them are mighty comfortable places in which to sit and pursue your own train of thought, and on that ground alone you should be a constant attendant. Though I doubt very much if we are able to pursue any train of thought, within hearing of R. Black, except the one he chooses to put up to us. The more I’ve seen of him the more I’ve discovered of his little tendency to keep one occupied with him exclusively. Well, if you’ll go I’ll have a clean shave and look up my best gloves. We’ll give him a bit of a surprise. To tell the truth, I’m beginning to think we owe it to him.”

There could be small doubt of this. In the three months which had intervened between Cary Ray’s arrival—for all hope there seemed of him, both physically and morally down and out—Robert Black had stood steadily by him. His comradeship had been a direct challenge to Cary’s better self, and all that was good in the young man—and there was undoubtedly very much—had rallied to meet the sturdy beckoning of this new friend. At an early date the two had discovered that, different as they were in character, they had one thing mightily in common—the delights and tortures of the creative brain. Jane had called Cary a genius, and so he was—perhaps in the lesser and more commonly used meaning of the too much used word. His articles on any theme were always welcomed in certain of the best newspaper and magazine offices, and only his lack of dependability and his erratic ways of working had kept him from rapid advancement in his world.

Black, discovering almost at once that he had to deal with a brain which, if it could be freed from the handicap of dissipation, would be capable of production worth any effort to salvage from the threatened wreck, had thrown himself, heart and soul, into winning Cary’s friendship on the ground of their common interest and understanding. To do this he had used every particle of skill he possessed, and his reward had been the knowledge of the steadily lengthening periods of Cary’s reasonableness and his response to the stimulus which will always be greater than almost any other—the demand of a friend who cares that we live up to his belief in us. Cary had come to think of Robert Black as the best friend he had in the world, after his sister, and to look forward to the hours the two spent together as the brightest spots in a life which had become dimmed at an age when it should have known its fullest zest.

Thus it came about that Robert Black, entering his pulpit that Sunday morning, and presently taking estimate of his congregation, as a preacher must do if he is to know how to aim accurately and fire straight, caught sight of two people whose presence before him gave him a distinct shock of surprise. He had been sure he would some time get that shock, but it had been long delayed, and he had rather doggedly persisted in withholding the direct invitation, reasoning with himself that he would rather have Jane and Cary come for any other reason than the paying of the debt he knew they must feel they owed him.

And now they were there before him—rather near him, too. Young Perkins, one of the ushers for the middle aisle, had pounced on them as a pair who would do credit to his natural desire to have all the best dressed and most distinguished looking strangers placed where they would do the most good to the personnel of the congregation. He knew Jane for what he called “a stunner,” thereby paying youthful tribute to her looks and quiet perfection of dress. As for Cary, one glance of appraisal had placed him, for Perkins, in the class of the “classy,” than which there is no greater compliment in the vocabulary of the Perkinses. Therefore it was that Perkins, leading Jane and Cary down the middle aisle, had complacently slipped them into the pew of one of the leading members—to-day out of town, as he knew—and thus had left them within exceedingly close range of whatever gunfire might be at the command of the pulpit. Perkins, having hurriedly scanned the headlines of the morning papers, had a hunch that it was going to be one of those mornings when the congregation would be likely to leave the church with its hair a trifle rampant on its brow from excited thrustings—or with its hats a little askew from agitated noddings or shakings. He had come to look forward to such Sundays with increasing zest. There was something else to stake quarters on with the other ushers, these days, than on how late Doctor Burns was going to be at church, or how short a time he would be permitted to remain there. Perkins was beginning to wonder how he had ever endured the dull times of Black’s immediate predecessor; certainly he was rejoicing that they were over.

Frances Fitch, in the Lockhart pew, just across the aisle and two rows behind Jane and Cary, found the pair a particularly interesting study. Through Tom she had heard much of Cary; she had caught only unsatisfying glimpses before. As he sat at the end of the pew nearest the aisle she had a full view of that profile which had first assured Black that Cary was indeed Jane’s brother, and it now struck Miss Fitch as one of the most attractive masculine outlines she had ever seen. Cary was still distinctly pale, but his pallor was becoming more healthy with each succeeding day of Jane’s skillful feeding, and his manner had lost its excessive nervousness. To the eye, by now, he merely looked the interesting convalescent from a possibly severe illness, with every probability of a complete return to full fitness of body. As to his mind—one glance at him could hardly help suggesting to the intelligent observer that here was a young man who possessed brains trained to the point of acuteness and efficiency in whatever lines they might be employed.

To look at either Cary or Jane, moreover, one would hardly have said that church was to them so unaccustomed a place. Jane, sitting or rising with the rest, sharing hymn-book or printed leaf of the responsive service with her brother, appeared the most decorous of regular communicants. For herself, however, she was experiencing many curious reactions, the most distinct of which, throughout the preliminary service, was caused by the sight of Robert McPherson Black, in his gown, and with the high gravity upon him which she had never before seen in precisely its present quality. Could this be the spirited young man who came so often to spend an hour with Cary, his face and manner full of a winning gayety or of an equally winning vigour of speech and action? This was another being indeed who confronted her, a being removed from her as by a great gulf fixed, his fine eyes by no chance meeting hers, his voice by no means addressed to her, but to the remotest person in his audience, far back under the gallery. For the first time Jane Ray was realizing that well as it had seemed to her that she had come to know the man Black, she actually knew him hardly at all, for here, in this place to her so unfamiliar, was his real home!

And then, very soon came an equally strong reaction from this first impression of remoteness. For, the moment the anthems and the responses and the rest of the preliminary service was over, and Black had been for three minutes upon his feet in his office of preacher, the whole situation was reversed. No longer did he seem to be sending that trained and reverent voice of his to every quarter of the large, hushed audience room; but in a new and arresting way he was addressing Jane Ray very directly, he was speaking straight to her, and she had quite forgotten that there was any one else there to hear. If this impression of hers was precisely like that which reached each person within sound of his voice who possessed the intelligence to listen, that was nothing to her—nor to them. The simple fact was that when Robert Black spoke to an audience as from his very first word he was speaking now, that audience had no choice but to listen, and it listened as individuals, with each of whom he was intimately concerned.

As for Cary Ray—perhaps there was nobody in that whole audience so well qualified to measure the speaker’s ability and power as he. He had spent no small portion of his early after-college days in reporting for a great city daily, and his assignment very often had been the following up of one noted speaker after another. He had listened to eloquence of all sorts, spurious and real; had come to be a judge of quality in human speech in all its ramifications; was by now himself a literary critic of no inferior sort. His mind, at its best—and it was not far short of its best on this Sunday morning—was keen and clear. As he gave himself up to Black as one gives himself up to a friend who is setting before him a matter of import, he was a hearer of the sort whom speakers would go far to find.