Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

He had blundered, all unprepared, into the presence of death. His sense of the fitness of things revolted. He was unworthy—unable—unclean. He—a book agent! a rate clerk! an actor! who had held Marien Dounay in his arms and felt his body thrill at the beating of her heart!

Yet this old woman had called him a minister of God! This Gloom Woman too had called him the same. Minister! Minister! What was it? Minister meant to serve. A servant of God! But he had not served God! At least not consciously. He had only served humanity a little. He had served the old woman as a prop to her fears, like an anchor to her soul when she drifted out into the deeper running tide that ebbs but never floods. He had served the Gloom Woman when he stood beside her while she opened the tear-gates of her grief.

It was very little! Yet that much he had really served. To reflect upon it now gave him a sense of elation greater than when he had beaten Scofield and his tariff department; greater than when he had quelled the mob at the People's; greater than when he had crushed Marien in his arms like a flower; greater even than when Bessie had looked her love into his eyes.

He began to perceive that his life was surely mounting from one plane to another and reflected that he had reached the highest plane of all to-day when the Angel of the Chair had pinned upon his coat the badge of Holy Orders; when this other saint, sinking into the dark tide, had hailed him a minister of God! Highest of all, when this Gloom Woman, out of her soul's Gethsemane, had wrung his hand and kissed it so purely and also hailed him as Minister of God!

For some weeks the little chapel in Encina, its troubles and its troubled members, continued to exercise a strange fascination over John. Each Sunday he shepherded the Sunday school and talked a blundering quarter of an hour to the older folk who gathered; while between Sundays he devoted an astonishing portion of his time to visiting these wrangling Christians in their homes, for the ambition to heal this disgraceful quarrel had taken hold on him like some knightly passion.

And in the midst of all these busy comings and goings, odd, half-humorous reflections upon his own status used to break in upon John's mind. Not a self-respecting church in the communion, he knew, but would have eyed him askance because he had been an actor. Only this little helpless church, whose condition was so miserable it could not reject any real help, accepted him; and that merely in a relation that was entirely unofficial and undefined. Still a sense of his fitness for this particular task grew upon him continually; and it was really astonishing how every experience through which he had passed had equipped him for his peacemaker task: most of all those pangs endured because of his break with Bessie, which, although eating into his heart like an acid, yielded a kind of ascetic joy in the pain as if some sort of character bleaching and expiation were at work within him.

In the meantime, an arbitration committee consisting of the District Evangelist, Brother Harding, and Professor Hamilton, the Dean of the Seminary, was at work upon the affairs of the little church. Both wings consented to this, but with misgivings, since the one man they were really coming to trust was Hampstead himself; and when the night for the report of the arbitration committee arrived, each faction turned out in full strength, with suspicions freshly roused, and all a-buzz with angry conversation as if the church were a nest of wasps.

"Things are pretty hot," remarked the Dean under his breath, coming up to read the report.

"They are awful," groaned the District Evangelist.

John presided, standing carefully on his neutral patch in the carpet, and was dismayed and sickened by this new and terrible display of feeling. He had come to know a very great deal about these people in the last few weeks; he had seen how some of these men struggled to make a living; how some of these women bore awful crosses in their hearts; how sickness was in some houses, cold despair in others; how much each needed the strength, the joy, the consolation of religion, and how large a mission there was for this church and for its minister.