The Damnation of Theron Ware

H >> Harold Frederic >> The Damnation of Theron Ware


At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow
might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the
headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right
through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at
play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found
himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been
too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery
now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two
compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high
barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were
twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast
of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly
impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one
hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other
incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in
their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and
hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward
this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without
pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.

Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens
engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of
those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound
amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to
be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside
could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had
to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they
stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen
here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a
place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their
way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on
the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.

Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke
out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was
knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up
on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to
shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident
caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and
genial reconciliation.

Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of
thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he
should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that
lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the
question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would
bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for
a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two
smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded
blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.

"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest, in his cheeriest
manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all
clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his
own. "We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we
saw, here among the sinners!"

"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron, as he shook hands
with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. "I've had
five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've
bored the head off me."



CHAPTER XXIII


At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went
down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of
beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken
it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass
against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which
they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so
agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and
refreshing.

When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment
in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them.
Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest
him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they
reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls,
some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep
through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of
white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in
the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there
was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a
brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.

"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white
stockings of hers," remarked Celia; "some friend ought to tell her to
dye them."

"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. "I
daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with
you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"

Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. "I should say not!" he replied.

"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia. "You hear such racy
accounts of what goes on at them."

"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. "Don't
let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me
to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his
soul to any other person all day long."

"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the priest,
smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought, "it be by way of a genial
profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my
soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long
time. I daresay they're all dead."

"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first," remarked
Theron, musingly. "I date from that experience a whole new life. I have
been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'
to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over
again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being
frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.
The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over
fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work
conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures
of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.
You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were
there."

"There isn't so much difference as you think," said Father Forbes,
dispassionately. "Your people keep examining their souls, just as
children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there
any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell
governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once
before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't
new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in
races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands
of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are
concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous
wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.
They have always been like that."

"What nonsense!" cried Celia. "I have no patience with such gloomy
rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They
made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of
these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it
was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought
in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament,
and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church,
that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in
their churches by skulls and crossbones."

"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we
will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo
camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at
those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.
What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr.
Ware," he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we
are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical
and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the
destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen
there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German
beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and
far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.
The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play
second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a
drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even
fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of
himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more
sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of
melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at
his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all
that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink
the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few
generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He
will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with
the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in
Baltimore or Georgetown--will be the Church of America."

"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia. "This revolution
can't be hurried forward too rapidly."

Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in
jest, how much in earnest. "It seems to me," he said, "that as things
are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will
trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must
very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human
progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must
surely come to see in time."

Father Forbes laughed outright this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said,
as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been
brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural
impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and
that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and
that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively
with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan
religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because
it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm
and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always
remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious
superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very
little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole
soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful
forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged
man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the
pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks
he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best
enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superstitions alone.
That is always the ultimate view of the crowd."

"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all this is true, how
you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand
it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where
nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the
beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of
the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard
and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise."

"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest, "only it does
it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the
trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't
debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it
is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are
sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or
reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about
an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and
fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are
all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under
the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for
granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the
decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music"--he
made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the music at least is divine.
There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and
observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts
about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you
take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said,
an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish
civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process
down below there--and the social roughness of their church becomes
softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward
it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and
in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and
a new national church, each representative of the other."

"And all this is to be done by lager beer!" Theron ventured to comment,
jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of
his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.

The priest passed the pleasantry by. "No," he said seriously; "what you
must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a
police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.
It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth
of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for
marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching
up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents
for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as
a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent
organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just
as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to
exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and,
understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
and me."

Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow.
"Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it," he said, and fastened
his regard boldly this time upon the swings.

"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest, "at an
age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined
wisdom to buy a horse for them."

"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement,
"when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the
Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know
what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
different with me."

A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never
spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something
in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject
inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a
desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what
a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged
itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of
the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life
had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings
toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.

But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her--a tall
and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt,
hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He
had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to
Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.

"I can do nothing at all with him," this newcomer said to her. "He'll
not be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!"

"It's likely I'll go down there!" said Celia. "He may do what he likes
for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave
him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's
had, if he WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of
ours."

Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young
man. "Mr. Ware," said Celia, here, "let me introduce you to my brother
Michael--my full brother."

Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's
formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside
the church. But Celia held up her hand. "I'm afraid, Mr. Ware," she said
hurriedly, "that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will
apologize for the infliction in advance."

Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who
had come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The
minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of
almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was
a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the
handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling
countenance and unsteady step--his silk hat thrust back upon his head,
his frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and
saluted the company with amiability.

"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a thickened and
erratic utterance. "Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up
for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in
the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they
know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's
how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going
to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me.
The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes,
and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a
candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid
with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!"

The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker
had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. "No, no; you
must excuse me, Theodore," he said. "We mustn't meddle in politics, you
know."

"Politics be damned!" urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm,
and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. "I say, boys" he
shouted to those below, "here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come
down and address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a
drink with the boys!"

It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm
this time. "Go away with you!" she snapped in low, angry tones at the
intruder. "You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober
yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should
think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than
to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have
that much respect for me! And before strangers, too!

"Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?" remarked the peccant Theodore,
straightening himself with an elaborate effort. "You've bought these
woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for
every one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget
it."

"Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting
decent people," said Celia.

"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.
"Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right." He had not seemed to
be aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
turned to him now with a knowing grin. "I'm running for the Assembly,
Mr. Ware," he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid
the drunken elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, "and I
want you to fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over
to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and
I'll put a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you
want to see it."

As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his
wits together.

"You'd better not go this evening," he said, as convincingly as he
knew how; "because the gates will be closed very early, and the
Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite
reserved for those living on the grounds."

"Rats!" said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for
the bill. "Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too
drunk?"

"I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr.
Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.

"Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise
between us, Mr. Ware," cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor
in tone and mien. "And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of
'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their
own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a
Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into
the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books!
You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--"

These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a
hand abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a
tight grip around the young man's waist. "Come with me, Michael!" he
said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a
sharp pace off into the woods.

Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.
"It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him," he heard her say, as if
between clenched teeth.

The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were
still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a
Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck
as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten
together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless
rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her
form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond,
awed and frightened him.

Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew
her arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.