Atlantic Classics, Second Series

by Unknown

DO you remember the little old white church which, when we were boys, we attended more or less unwillingly, according to the season, with its stiff-backed pews in which we sat aching, counting the pipes in the organ and the balusters in the altar-rail and the dentils in the moulding of the pulpit? Of course you remember it, and the little old lady who sat in a corner ejaculating her hallelujahs and amens with the regularity of a cuckoo-clock, and the solemn precentor who sawed out the time with his hand, and the preacher who took his texts from the Old Testament and rolled the names of the Ten Tribes and their enemies as a sweet morsel under his tongue. The little old lady, you recollect, was valiant in prayer-meeting. She was not afraid to criticize the minister, or to repeat week by week the story of her conversion in her ninth year. Nor did she fail continually to impress upon us boys—facing us sometimes, with uplifted finger—the immanence of him who goeth to and fro in the earth and rageth like a lion, seeking whom he may devour. Ah, those prayer-meetings! Shall we, shall we ever forget them? Or the references to the sinners who sat on the back row (where we always sat)? Or the wailing hymns, or the dismal testimonies, or the waves of dejection that swept over us during the cataloguing of our omissions and commissions?

And there was always a boy! Do you remember him? A boy of our own age, mind you, a boy who ostentatiously arose and, with the decorum of a deacon, dwelt upon his former iniquities and present beatitude. We expected this of an occasional girl, yet the girls never did it; a mumbled text, a flurried word or two, were the extent of their temerity. As for us, it was not our custom to discuss our souls, even among ourselves. It is said that to forget the existence of a stomach is the best symptom of health in that useful organ, and, if the analogy holds, our souls must have been singularly robust. We were bashful about our virtues and vices; we could not fathom the sentiments of Take Time to be Holy; we were in mortal fear that some day somebody might convict us of sin and hale us forthwith into the fold of the elect. Yet here was a boy who flaunted his goodness in our faces. It was evident that he was not normal, that it lay with us as a duty to puncture the bubble of his presumptuousness.

The time came, you remember, very opportunely. On a memorable evening it was announced that this Infant Samuel, as the little old lady called him, was to recite to the congregation the entire Book of Esther from memory. For us, who found it beyond our power to remember a Golden Text of ten words for ten minutes, such a performance was unbelievable. We put our heads together and evolved a plot, dark, yet charming in its simple effectiveness. We decided to make faces at him.

We were expert in the art of face-making, because we had practiced it for weeks upon our sisters who sang in the choir. They had suffered, but were now immune. The grimaces of a Grimaldi could not have ruffled the calm of their scornful features.

We planted ourselves in the front row, and the boy began his recital. In time his preoccupied and lack-lustre eye wandered in our direction and rested upon us. He started, looked away, stammered, recovered, and went bravely on. But we knew that he would look back. We dared not glance at our neighbors, but had faith that each was doing his duty.

Of course he did look back, but why prolong the mournful tale? It is sufficient to say that Esther and Ahasuerus remained unwedded and Haman unhung; and that our victim retired amid the titterings of the judicious and the commiserations of the pious, while we plumed ourselves upon a difficult task laudably accomplished.

I have indulged in this long reminiscence, which probably can be matched in the experience of most of my masculine readers, because it is provocative of thoughts that deserve to be aired. An essay might be written upon the pathos that lies in the spectacle of a boy who is incited to a public display of his goodness; in the docility which is as clay in the hands of deluded adults. That he suffered there can be no doubt—not one half so much under the ordeal of our contriving, which, I hope, cured him, as under the isolation which his dedication to goodness made inevitable. He was a lonely boy, though he may not have realized that he was. That he could ever understand his fellows, or be understood by them, was impossible. He was the victim of the most perverse fate that can afflict a boy: he had been born in the bosom of a family whose piety contained not a grain of the salt of humor, not a particle of the leaven of imagination, not—But I am forgetting. I wish to ask the reader's consideration, not of the victim, but of the tormentors.

Why is it that boys are suspicious of that approximate moral perfection called goodness? Girls find a deep satisfaction in being good—in being neat, in being clean, in being decorous. If they are not these, we call them tomboys, still casting the onus of sinfulness upon the other sex. When we boys confided our exploit to the little girls, we found that they openly defended the boy, though, it must be admitted, they privately admired us, as is the way of their sex. Our fathers, informed by our sisters, and instigated by our mothers, solemnly reproached us, but with a twinkle that would not be hidden. Manifestly, the trail of the serpent was over them, too. They were sorry that they had not sat in the choir.

The meekest of men love to tell how bad they were as boys, hugging their fiction of early depravity with an unregenerate glee. The more innocuous they may be now, the more they love to boast—especially to their wives—of these phantasmal wild oats. The ladies pretend to be shocked at the stories, but are glad to believe them; and so it is not surprising if some men, in their fear of being mistaken for saints, remain boys all their lives.

The pursuit of the ideal is complicated by man's suspicion of goodness, and by woman's curious, but characteristic, indecision whether to espouse perfection or imperfection. Gifted with a natural propensity toward virtue and propriety and neatness and respectability and all the other approximate perfections of life, attaining them with ease and wearing them with grace, she of course values them little enough in man. His foibles interest her more than his virtues. She admires even while she condemns. He, because he is a man, prefers admiration to commendation.