Two vegetables have always haunted my mother’s aspirations, in vain. I hope they grow in heaven, for it is in the nature of things that celery and asparagus should be denied to a nomadic earthly clergy, requiring, as the one does, richness of soil, and as the other, permanence. Illusory asparagus, it takes three years to grow him! Of course if some disinterested predecessor had planted him, we might in our turn eat him. But our too itinerant clergy do not give overmuch thought to their successors. Barren parochial gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about letting Apollos water.
But it is not the vegetables alone that strain my mother’s sturdy optimism. All gardens are subject to invasion by marauding animals, differing in size and soul and species, all the way from the microscopic tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and playful puppy, up to the cow, ruminating our young corn-shoots beneath the white summer moon, on to my father himself, planting aberrant feet where his holden ministerial eyes behold no springing seedlings in the blackness of the soil. But our worst enemies are hens, and as it happens at present, dissenting hens, sallying forth from the barnyard fastnesses of the Baptist parsonage upon our helpless Anglican garden, plucking our young peas up out of the soil, and then later and more brazenly prying them out of the very pod! Forthwith they fall upon our lettuce-beds, scratching away with fanatic fervor, as if for all the world they meant to uproot Infant Baptism from out the land. All this is too much for my mother. On the vantage-ground of the back doorsill she stands and hurls coal out of the kitchen scuttle at the sectarian fowls,—coal and anathema, low-voiced and virulent. Hers is no mere vulgar many-mouthed abuse. There is nothing of so delicate pungency as the vituperation of a minister’s wife, really challenged to try the subtleties of English and yet offend no convention of seemliness. Add to the fact of the challenge, another fact, that she is of Irish blood, and that her gallery gods are just inside the door, and it is a pity her audience should be merely the hens and I.
Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly applausive of my mother’s defense of her garden, secretly appreciative of the devious ways of vegetables, witnessing—to forgive—the wanderings of my father’s flock. For if all the flock were abstemious and orthodox instead of being, as some are, frankly given over to alcoholism and agnosticism and what not; and if the gardens grew, as gardens should grow, into honest, God-fearing cabbages and potatoes; if the righteous corn parted green lips from kernels firm and white as a dentist’s placard, how then should the parish gardens that dot our hill-strewn countryside bring forth that fruit of laughter which consoles the dwellers in these our tiny strongholds of lonely effort?
XX
My Little Town
VIVIDLY at times my memory restores to me the sensation of the eternal Sabbath. Beyond the stained-glass windows, the sunshine is sifted over daisied graves. Perhaps, for all one knows, the grown-up angels are letting the little ones sport over those graves at this very minute, even though it is Sunday, for there are no parishes in heaven to say no to naughtiness. My mother is held home from the sanctuary that morning. The three of us sit a-row in the front pew. Above us our father thunders forth his sermon, to which we give but scant attention, that roar in his voice being part of the programme of this one day in seven. Against my own shoulder drowses my little sister’s head. On my other side, my little brother conceals his yawns by receiving them into a little brown paw, and then, as it were, softly sliding them into his pocket, as if his hand had other business there. But I, I sit erect and unwinking, for I am the minister’s eldest, and the Parish is at my back.
While the younger ones nodded, while the infant angels played hide-and-seek out in the graveyard sunshine, of what was I thinking? This: of the minister’s daughter who had lived in that Parish before me. A great girl of five she had been when she used, having waited until her father was engrossed in his sermon, to slip from that very front pew in which I sat, to steal up into the chancel, and there, all silently but with impish grimace and antics, would she hold the horrified gaze of the Parish so fascinated that her father would at length be diverted from his eloquence, and forthwith, swooping from the pulpit all in a swirl of wrathful surplice, would bear his small daughter into the vestry room and lock her there before resuming his sermon. She was very naughty, but oh, what larks, what larks! So I thought then, and still to-day I am querying whether that little girl—inevitably though she must, under steady parochial pressure, have been subdued to a womanhood of decency and decorum—does not to-day in middle life rejoice that once upon a time, at five, she had her little fling in her father’s chancel!
But we were children of no such independent pattern; and so on every Sabbath we presented to the Parish’s criticism unwriggling infant backs, little ramrods of religion, while our thoughts went flying off on impish business of their own; and, as the years flowed by, on and up to man’s estate we tramped, always thrusting forward in sight of the Parish, fashionable, urban, critical, our shabby best foot, skittish though that foot might be. Holding well together, on we went, running the gantlet of many parishes, until at last we trudged us into Littleville. We supposed my little town would be a parish too, but it is not.
Cozily remote and forgotten among its blue hills, Littleville has preserved a primitive hospitality, so that, battered nomads of much clerical adventuring, we sank gratefully into its little rectory. There was perhaps a reason for our sincerity of welcome, for if we had had our parishes, so, too, had Littleville had its parsons. It belongs to that class of far-away, wee congregations whither they send old ministers outwearied, to be alone with old age and memories beside the empty, echoing churches reminiscent of the days when farmers attended service. And if among these venerable shepherds there have fallen to Littleville’s lot some whose scholarly old wits had gone a bit doddering, so that they believed and preached whimsical doctrine, or could no longer trace without assistance the labyrinth of the liturgy, or others, younger, who had proved ministerial shipwrecks because they were burdened by some fatal handicap in child or wife,—if such have come to Littleville, Littleville has been very kindly. My little town has accepted its hay-crop as the rain has willed, and its ministers as the bishop has sent them. Its views on both visitations are produced in a spirit of comment rather than criticism; its conduct toward both is that of adaptation rather than argument.
For instance, there was that bachelor-rector who preferred the society of beasts to that of his parishioners in the rectory, and to that of his fellow saints in the new Jerusalem. During his incumbency a setting-hen occupied the fireplace in the spare room, and a dog sat on a chair at his celibate table, and crouched before the pulpit during service. Littleville did not protest; rather, of a week-day, the female members from time to time descended upon the unhappy man in his retirement, and with broom and mop-pail cleaned him up most thoroughly; and of a Sunday the whole body of the congregation listened unwinking while their rector’s brandished fist demanded from their stolid faces eternal salvation for his Rover,—listened with those inscrutable eyes I have come to respect: for I know that while Littleville never argued with their parson the point of kennels in the skies, they will turn this theological morsel under their tongues down at the hardware store unto the third and fourth generation.
Then there was the vicar whose poor boy was scarred in a way that Littleville, sympathetic but always delightedly circumstantial, has painted upon my imagination. When, during this rectorate, rival sectarians would point to the goodly ruddiness of some Baptist or Methodist scion, the Littleville Anglicans would loyally argue that Seth Lawson over at Hyde’s Crossing had a little girl who had four thumbs, and Seth was just a plain man, and no minister.