Here there is never the Sabbath stiffness of my childhood. Here the front pew does not straighten my spine intolerably. Rather I turn half about, run a careless arm along the pewrail, and chat huskily with my rear neighbor until church begins, and even in service I may nod encouragement to the choir if they happen to be brought to confusion in the Te Deum, or in the very sermon I may peep under some little flowered straw hat and get a delighted grin in response. When service is over I shall be a long time getting to the door, having so many hands I want to shake, for we do not call my little town, Parish; we call it home.
XXI
Genus Clericum
I WAS a ministerial child rather by birth than by conviction. To one born on the march there may come to be in the end a mystic home-sense in the loneliness of tents, but in the beginning the army child may perhaps have his own opinion of the rigors of camp life and prefer his morning snooze to the summons of the bivouac. Analogously, the children of the clerical class may come into existence with a leaning toward the world, the flesh, and the devil, and may long conceal, beneath an outward conformity and a due filial reticence, an infant resentment against the preoccupation of their parents with the salvation of souls.
I think I speak for many ministerial children when I say that the attitude of my infancy toward its environment was mainly one of protest, broken by passionate upheavals of partisanship. Sometimes I sympathized with little neighbors who limped shamelessly through the catechism or went out of church before the sermon, but as often I longed to shake them and thrust them, well-prodded, upon their duties.
The mere external discipline of the church militant came easily to me because I was so early inured to it. It is back of my memory, but I have ascertained that it was at the age of two and under that I learned rigidity of muscle in the sanctuary, where I sat holding immobile on the pew cushion legs too short to crook, while my fingers, in white cotton gloves, were extended in stiff separation each from each. The hat upon my head was in itself an early example of ministerial adjustment to parochial issues. Two ladies who were rivals in missionary zeal had each been moved to present me with a hat. That neither hat suited either my face or my mother’s taste was, of course, mere incident. The claims both of courtesy and of equity necessitated my wearing the hats in impartial regularity, on alternate Sundays. Thus before the beginnings of memory, and through the medium of a baby’s hat, did I become acquainted with the potency, in our domestic concerns, of that great public called Parish.
It must have been at about this period that I experienced one of my intermittent attacks of partisanship, desiring with my clear infant voice to rebuke the lukewarm responses of the congregation, and remodeling the unintelligible stretches of the Litany by the stentorian variation, “Lord have mercy upon us, miserable scissors!” The words of liturgy and hymn did not, however, long confound me. I had the concentration of many a sanctuary hour to devote to their meaning, so that by six years old even the Trinity had become a term of crystalline comprehension. By this time, also, other ministerial babykins had come toddling into the march in my rear, to share with me the soberness and separation of our calling. It was, on the whole, well disciplined, our little army corps, although we recognized the latent twinkle in the eyes of the mother who generaled us with a clever balancing of motive between our well-being and that of the Parish. Both she and we were occasionally flabbergasted, sometimes by our public performance of private virtues, sometimes by our private performance of public ones. For example, at the home table we were always exhorted to conscientious chewing; it did not, therefore, occur to us to accelerate the process at a Sunday-School picnic. The sylvan board had long been deserted by others, but we, the Rector’s children, a faithful little line, longing to be on the merry-go-round, in the swings, on the boats, still sat and dutifully chewed and chewed and chewed. I vividly recall the bewildering onslaught of our mother leading a bevy of church ladies in search of the missing. Ignominiously were we whirled off to join the sports of less seeming-famished companions.
On the other hand, in public, in the Sunday School, were we early made to understand that all the law and the prophets hung upon the catechism; a pink-paper catechism, frank in its woodcuts and facile in its explanation of the mysteries of the sacraments. Since this pink catechism was a lamp unto our feet, we suggested, during a thrilling burglar epidemic, that copies be left on the thresholds of rectory bedchambers. The burglar would pause to read, and there would ensue his immediate conversion and our resultant security. The parental laughter at our expense shook the foundations of our faith.
Such a severe consistency of behavior in regard to the lessons taught in the rectory and those taught in the sanctuary is a state of mind early outgrown by any intelligent ministerial child. Such crudity of conduct was a stage in the march that we had all passed by the age of ten. By that time we had an unerring sense of what was due to the Parish and what was due to ourselves, with the result that our outward conformity was about balanced by our inward misanthropy at having to conform. We attended, muttering imprecations up to the very door, the infant missionary society that filched our Saturday afternoons, we tore up futile scraps of calico to jab them together again with accursed “over-and-over” stitches, we gazed at pictures in which splendid blanketed braves, or splendid unclothed Samoans, were seen to exchange romance for religion in the shape of conversion and white cottas. Our souls loathed patchwork and missions, but, on the other hand, how we thrilled to the righteousness of reward when the visiting missionary, male or female, became our own particular guest! The ecstasy as one flirted one’s Sunday flounces before the eyes of less favored neighbors because one was walking to church, holding the hand of a genuine Arctic archdeacon! And then the Bishop’s visits, when we were whisked into cubbyhole and closet out of our crowded nursery that it might be converted into a prophet’s chamber! Which one of my schoolmates had ever passed the right reverend plate at supper? And the honor of the Bishop’s petting afterwards! The episcopal lap, the high general’s knee, is the prerogative of the captain’s children only, the same that never miss church and know all their collects.
Slowly we grew accustomed to the pressure of the knapsack upon our shoulders, that weight of clerical example which did not burden our irresponsible playmates. We knew that the Minister’s children were different. We did not want it to be so, but we began to see why it was so. True, we protested when our father would not pause to tell us stories or our mother stay at home from calls to play with dolls, yet in the silent thinking-places of our little hearts we began to divine the beauty of the midnight sick-watches, of the valiancy of Sunday-School labors, of the brave weariness of sewing societies, of the heaven-born patience with Parish bores. As we watched the sleeker parents of our schoolmates, there dawned in us realization of what our parents had given up, and silent shame for our jealousy of their devotion. Few children are hurt by being shoved aside a little because of an ideal. The hours when our parents played with us are still passing precious, but it is because of the other hours that there was born in us a shamefaced sense of the meaning of the banner under which we trudged.
Isolation is the chief inconvenience of having an ideal in the family. We were apart from other youngsters, partly because we knew it incumbent upon us to set them an example, since, early enough and sadly enough, we had acquired self-consciousness from the frank criticism of all our conduct made by any parishioner so minded, and partly were we cut off by the vow of poverty taken by our parents. Other families may look forward to easier times; no ministerial household has any such illusions. The tiniest child of the ministry knows that after forty the father will not receive a call; the veriest baby of us knows what happens to old ministers, because so many pitiful, decrepit old soldiers have from time to time found shelter in our tent.