Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

It tackled him shortly after Red had left—the thought which would not down—or, rather, the first of the two thoughts, for there were two with which he had to wrestle that long April night. It leaped at him suddenly, that first thought, and in an instant, it had him by the throat. Why not admit that Red was right, that the average chaplaincy in the army or navy was a soft, safe job, and not an honoured one at all? Why not let everything else go, resign his church, go back to Scotland, look up men of influence he knew there, and try for a commission? Why not? Why not—— Why not?

Would that mean that he would leave the ministry—permanently? More than likely it would. Well, what if it did? Could anything be better worth doing now than offering his life in the Great War? Why stay here, preaching flaming sentiment to a congregation who mostly thought him overwrought upon the whole subject? Why stay here, holding futile committee meetings, arguing ways and means with hard-headed business men who were everlastingly thinking him visionary and impractical? Why go on calling on old ladies and sick people—christening babies—reading funeral services—marrying people who would more than likely be better single? Why go on with the whole round of parish work, he, a man of military age, a crack shot—he had not spent all those years in the South for nothing!—possessed of a strong right arm, a genius for leadership—when an older man could do all these things for these people, and release him for work an older man couldn’t do? And if he were free——

Yes, it was here that his second temptation got in its startling work. If he were free—he would be free to do as other men did: marry a wife without regard to her peculiar fitness to be—a minister’s wife! It wouldn’t make any difference, then, if she never went to church, had no interest in any of the forms of religious life, didn’t read her Bible—didn’t even say her prayers when she went to bed—didn’t do anything orthodox—as he was pretty sure somebody he knew didn’t. What did all that matter, anyhow, so her heart was clean—as he knew it was!

Black pushed his revolving chair back from his desk so violently that it nearly tipped over. He began to pace up and down the study floor, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, a tense frown between his brows. He walked and walked and walked, getting nowhere in his mental discussion precisely as he got nowhere in actual distance with all that marching. And suddenly the similarity between the two processes struck him, and he rushed into the hall, seized hat and coat, put them on as a man does who finds himself late for a train, and let himself out into the April night where the air was heavy with a gathering storm. It was precisely midnight by the sounding of a distant tower clock as the manse door closed behind him.

Do you happen to know, by any analogous experience, just what sort of a night Robert Black spent, alone with himself? If you do, no need to describe it to you. If you have never wrestled with a great spiritual temptation, beating it off again and again only to have it steal up and grip you more powerfully than before, then you can have no conception of what that night brought to Black. A concrete temptation—one to steal or rape or kill—can have no comparison in insidiously disarming power with one made up of forces which cannot be definitely assigned to the right side or the wrong. When the thing one wants to do can be made to seem the right thing, when Satan masks as an angel of light, and only a faint inner voice tells one insistently that his premises, his deductions, his conclusions, are every one false, then indeed does the struggle become a thing of increasing torture, compared with which physical distress is to be welcomed.

It was four in the morning when Black let himself into the manse again, the light in his study seeming to him the only light there was left in the whole world, and that dim and unilluminating enough. Outside a heavy storm of wind had disabled the local electric service, and the streets for the last two hours had been dark as Erebus—and as Black’s own thoughts. He had been grateful for that darkness for a time; then suddenly it had oppressed him unbearably and he had fled back to his home as swiftly as he had left it. There—there, in the room where he was used to think things out, was the place for him to come to his decision.

As he came in at the manse door the lights flashed on again. It was undeniably warm and bright there in his study, but his heavy heart took no comfort from this. It was a physical relief to be inside out of the storm, but the storm in his soul abated not a jot at sight of the familiar place. The very look of the study table, filled with matters of one sort or another pertaining to his work—his writing pad, his loose-leaf notebook, his leather sermon-holder, the row of books with which he had lately been working and which were therefore lined up between heavy book-ends for convenience in laying his hand upon them—somehow the sight of these gave him a sense of their littleness, their futility, compared with the things he had been seeing as he walked. A rifle, with a bayonet fixed and gleaming at its end; a Scottish uniform, with chevrons on the sleeve and insignia on the shoulder—a worn, soiled uniform at that; men all about, real men, who did not fuss over trifles nor make too much of anything, men with whom he could be friend or enemy as he desired—these were what Black saw. He saw also the two brave lads who had gone to their death, his own blood, who had been coming over shortly to follow his lead in the big country where he had found room to breathe, and whose untimely end he longed personally to avenge. And he saw—Jane Ray, over there, herself in service, meeting him somewhere, when both had done their part, and joining her life with his in some further service to mankind, social, reconstructive, unhampered by the bonds of any religious sect——

Oh, well—perhaps you can’t see or feel it—perhaps to you the logical thing seems the very thing that so called to Robert Black. Why shouldn’t he listen—why shouldn’t he respond—why wasn’t this the real thing, the big thing, and why shouldn’t he dare to take it, and give God thanks that He had released him from too small, too cramped, too narrow a place of usefulness, into one which was bounded only by the edges of the great world of need? What was it that held him back—that so hardly held him back?

It was a little black-bound book which first began to turn the tide. It was lying on the study desk, pushed well back under some loose papers, but it was there all the time, and Black never once lost the remembrance that it was there. Again and again he wished it were not there, because he knew through it all that he could never settle the thing without reference to that little worn book. It was not the Bible, it was a ritual-book, containing all the forms of service in use in the Church to which Black belonged; it held, among others, the service for the ordination of ministers, and that very book had been used in the ordination of Black himself. As a man fighting to free himself from his marriage vows might struggle to turn his thoughts away from the remembrance of the solemn words he had once spoken, so did Black, in his present mood, strive to forget the very nearness at hand of that little book. And yet, at last, as he had known he would, he seized and opened it. After all, were such vows as he had made irrevocable? Many a man had forsaken them, first and last. Had none of these deserters been justified?

Yet, as he went over and over it, that which hit him so heavily was not the language of the ordination vows which he had been evading and which now struck him full in his unwilling conscience, gravely binding though the phrases were. Nor was it that of the closing prayer, well though he remembered how the words had thrilled him, and had thrilled him ever since, whenever he read them over: “Endue him with spiritual grace; help him perform the vow that he has made; and continuing faithful unto death may he at length receive the crown of life which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give him in that day.” No, it was not these words which held his reluctant gaze fast at last, but others, which he had written into the small blank space at the top of the page whereon the service began.