He had opened his mouth to disclaim any such strength, to say that they had been misinformed, for his whole system was crying out for the comfort of a smoke, but a distraction suddenly occurred, and caution held him back from contradicting it later. Besides, the entire company seemed to have heard it about him that he did not smoke, and he dared not attempt to invent a story that would show they were mistaken. If he was supposed to be that kind of young man, better let it stand. He could all the more easily slip away unobserved without their immediate alarm.
So now in the quiet of his own room, he longed fiercely for a smoke. But he had not a cent in his pocket. There had not been a chance for an instant all day when he could have purchased cigarettes unobserved, and if he had them in his hand he would not dare to smoke there in Mrs. Summers’ house. She hated it. She would smell it. She would think him a hypocrite. Somehow he did not want Mrs. Summers to think ill of him. Of course he was a hypocrite, but somehow he didn’t want her to know it. She had been kind to him, and he liked her. She was what seemed to him like a real mother, and he reverenced her. If he stayed and enjoyed her home and the position which he was supposed to fill, he would also have to live up to the character he was supposed to be, and that would include not smoking, even when he got a chance and the money to purchase the smokes. Could he stand it? Was it worth the trouble?
And yet when he came to think about it, was not that perhaps the very best disguise he could have, not to smoke? He had been an inveterate smoker. Everybody who knew him knew that. If he was made over into a new man, the old man in him unrecognizable, he must seek to obliterate all signs of the old man. Well, could he do it?
He had settled down into the big chair to think, to decide what to do, and suddenly a great drowsiness overtook him. With a quick impulse of old habit he got up and began to undress without more protest. He would have another good night’s rest before he did anything about it anyway. He could not run far with sleep like this in possession of his faculties. And in three minutes he snapped out the light and was in bed. At least he was probably safe till morning. The man Murray could not very well turn up at that time of night.
Chapter 16
Murray wondered again the next morning when Warren stepped in with a note from Mr. Harper while he was eating his breakfast, and insisted on waiting and walking down to the bank with him. It did seem uncanny. Were all these people in collusion somehow to prevent his being left alone an instant?
It would have been a startling thought to him had someone suggested that each one was working out the divine will for his good, and that though he might flee to the uttermost part of the earth, even there an all-seeing care would be about him, reaching to draw him to a God he had never known.
Murray liked Warren. He seemed quite companionable. He wondered if he played golf or had a car. But it annoyed him to be under such continual supervision. Although he had about decided to remain in Marlborough for the present, at least until he got his first week’s pay, if that were possible, still he did not like the feelingthat he was being forced to do this. He cast about in his mind for an excuse that would leave him free, but Warren was so altogether genial that there seemed nothing else to do but make the best of it. Surely they would not have lunch parties on the roof of the bank building every day of the week. There would certainly come a letup sometime.
So they walked downtown together, and Murray discovered that Warren was married and lived in a little cottage two blocks above Mrs. Summers. Warren said they wanted him to come to dinner some night just as soon as Elizabeth got back. Elizabeth was away in Vermont, visiting her mother.
Elizabeth! Would he never get away from thoughts of Bessie Chapparelle?
Warren confided in Murray that he was saving for a car, just a little coupe—he couldn’t afford anything else yet—but it would be nice for Elizabeth to take the baby out in. There was a nice, eager, domestic air about him that was different from anything Murray had experienced among his young men friends, even the married ones. He did not remember that any of them had babies, or if they had they did not speak about them. They were tucked away somewhere with their nurses out of sight till they should be old enough to burst upon the world full-fledged in athletics or society. There was something pleasant about the thought of a girl taking her baby out for a ride in a little coupe, even if it was a cheap one. And a cottage! He had never been to dinner at a cottage. It occurred to him that Bessie would have been the kind of motherwho would have taken her baby out for a ride. Bessie! Oh Bessie! Why had he not thought of Bessie before and kept in touch with her? But when he did find her, he had killed her! He had thought this terrible depression at remembrance of her would pass away in a few days, but it did not. It only grew worse! Someday it might drive him mad! This was no way to begin a day!
But he entered the bank committed to take a hike with Warren that afternoon after closing time, and Warren was to come home to dinner that night with him. Mrs. Summers had asked him at the breakfast table. So the pleasant ties that were binding him to Marlborough multiplied and weakened his purpose of leaving, and from day to day he held on, each day thinking to go the next. If he had had money, even a little, or any sense of where he might go, it would have been different, perhaps, for ever over him hung the fear of the return of the real Murray, though each day, no, each hour that passed in security weakened his realization of it and at times almost obliterated the thought of it as a possibility.
Then there began to happen the strangest things that he had to do, things utterly alien to all of his former life.
There was the first Sunday. It came like a shock to him.
Saturday afternoon he and Warren took a hike, and on the way back he asked when Murray would like to go again.
“Why not tomorrow?” answered Murray, remembering that there would be no bank open on Sunday.
“Why, that’s Sunday, old man,” said Warren, laughing.
There was such a look of amusement on Warren’s face thatit warned Murray. Sunday! What the dickens difference did that make, he wondered. But he caught himself quickly. It must make some difference or Warren would not look like that, so he responded with a laugh.
“Oh, that’s so. Got my dates mixed, didn’t I? Well, let’s see. What do we do in Marlborough? How is the day laid out on Sunday? Much doing?”
“Well, not much time for idling, of course. We have our Ushers’ Association meeting in the morning before church. They’ll be sure to elect you to that. They were speaking about it.”
“Ushers’ Association?” said Murray, puzzled.
“Yes, I s’pose you belonged at home. In fact, they said you did. Well, we meet at quarter to ten. Then the regular morning service is quarter to eleven, and Sunday school is in the afternoon. Have they asked you to take a class yet? Well, they will. Then the Christian Endeavor meets at seven. They’re planning to make you president at the next election. Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you that, but it’s a foregone conclusion, of course. And the evening service is eight o’clock. Of course, it’s short and snappy and gets out by nine fifteen, but it’s a full day. Not much time left for your family if you go to everything.”
“No, I suppose not,” murmured Murray, trying to keep the amazement out of his voice. It was his policy to agree with everybody, as far as possible, until he had further insight, but was it possible that grown men and women went to Sunday school? Some nurse of his childhood had taken him for a few monthsonce when he was quite young, but he had always supposed it was a matter merely for children. Yet Warren spoke as if he went to Sunday school. What was he letting himself in for if he stayed in this strange place? Could he possibly go through with it? And what were these “services” that he spoke of? Just church? Well, he could get out of that probably. Say he had a headache.
But when Sunday morning came and he sat down at the little round breakfast table opposite Mrs. Summers and ate the delicate omelet, fresh brown bread, sweet baked apples with cream, and drank the amber coffee that composed the
Sunday breakfast and heard her talk, it was not so easy to get out of it.
“There’s an article in this week’s Presbyterian I’d like you to read. It speaks of that very subject we were talking about last night. You’ll have plenty of time to read it before we go to church. I left it over on the Morris chair for you,” she said. It was very plain she was counting on his going to church. Indeed, he had been made to understand everywhere all the week from many different people that church was where he was expected to be whenever there was service there, and he sighed and wondered how long he would be able to keep up this religious bluff. If he only had thought to profess to be going to spend the weekend with some old friend a few miles away, it would have given him freedom for a few hours, at least, and a start of almost two days on his pursuers, in case he decided not to return.
But then there was the old question again: Where could he go, how would he get another name, and why try to find a better placeof hiding when this one seemed fairly crying out for him? Then, too, where would justice be less likely to search for him than in a church?
So he settled into the Morris chair with a sigh and took up the paper to read an article, the like of which he had never read nor heard before, and the meaning of which touched him no more than if it were written in a foreign tongue.
The article was about church unity. He gathered there was a discussion of some sort around, some theological crisis imminent. The article was couched in terms he had never even heard before, so far as he remembered—the Atonement, Calvary, the Authenticity of the Scriptures, the Virgin Birth, the New Birth, the Miracles. What was it all about, anyway? There seemed no sense to it. He read it over again, trying to get a few phrases in case someone began to talk in this strange jargon, and he was evidently expected to be a connoisseur in such things. He must master enough to put him beyond suspicion.
Take, for instance, that phrase “the new birth”; how strangely like the sentence he had seen in the trolley car, “Ye must be born again!” It had come from the Bible. He had discovered that the first night he spent in this house. There must be some slogan like that in all this discussion. He was rather interested to know what it all meant. It fitted so precisely in with his own needs. He was trying so hard to be born again, and he felt so uncertain whether he was going to succeed or not. Perhaps if he read this paper he would discover something more about it. At any rate it wouldmake the good lady with whom he lived feel that he was interested in what she had been saying, and he had taken good care that she did the talking when she got on such topics, too. So he asked if he might take the paper up to his room for further perusal. Mrs. Summers said yes, of course, but it was time to start to church, and he must get his hat and come right down. And in spite of his desire to remain at home, he found himself yielding to her firm but pleasantly expressed wishes.
The sermon that morning was short and direct. The text was, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to give account of the deeds done in the body,” and from the time those firm, mobile lips of the pastor began to repeat the words, and the clear, almost piercing eyes began to look straight down at him from the pulpit, Murray never took his eyes from the preacher’s face.
It was, perhaps, the first real sermon he had ever listened to in his life. Oh, he had been to church now and then through the years, of course—mostly to weddings, now and then to a funeral, occasionally a vesper service where something unusual was going on and his mother wished him to escort her, once or twice to a baccalaureate sermon. That was all. Never to hear a direct appeal of the gospel. It was all new to him.
The minister was an unusual man. He knew scripture by heart, chapter after chapter. When he read the lesson he scarcely looked at the page, but repeated the words as if it were something he had seen happen, or had heard spoken, and about which he was merely telling in clear, convincing tones. His sermon was rich inquotations. The quotations clinched every statement that he made. Murray heard for the first time about the great white throne and the books to be opened, and the other book that was to be opened, where inside were written names, the Lamb’s Book of Life. And whoever’s name was not found written there was to go away into everlasting punishment.
Everlasting punishment! That was what he was under now. Life as himself, the Murray Van Rensselaer that he had started out to be, was done with so far as this life was concerned. His punishment could only end with death, and now this that the preacher was saying made it pretty sure that it would not end even then. He had somehow felt all along ever since the accident that if he could only die, all this trouble would be over, and he would have a square deal, as he called it, again, but it seemed not. It seemed things of this life were carried over into the next. If what this preacher said was true, all this about the books and the dead, small and great, being judged out of what was written against them, why, then there was no chance for him. The preacher further stated that those whose names were written in that other book, who were not to be punished, were the “born again ones.” That was what that “born again” meant that he had been hearing about so much. Or what was it, after all? Nobody had said. The “born again ones.” He had been trying to be born again and had taken a new name, but what were the chances that Allan Murray any more than Murray Van Rensselaer would be a born again one? Well, pretty good, if all they said about him were true, only if he was dead he wouldbe over there himself and would preempt his own name, and besides, Murray had a sudden realization that there would be no chance of deception over there in the other world.
The preacher’s words were very clear, very simple, very convincing. The words he repeated from the Bible were still more awe-inspiring. Murray walked silently back to the house beside Mrs. Summers with a deep depression upon him. He felt that he had taken out from that church the heavy burden of an unforgiven sin—that there was no place of repentance, though he might carefully seek it with tears, and that he must bear the consequences of his sin through all eternity.
He could not understand his feeling. It was not at all like himself, and he could not shake it off. He sat in his room for a few minutes looking into the red glow of the coals on his hearth and thinking about it, while Mrs. Summers put the dinner on the table. It somehow did not seem fair. When you came to consider it, he had not meant to be a murderer. There was not anyone he would have protected sooner than Bessie. He was just having a good time. It was not quite fair for him to bear unforgivable punishment the rest of his life for a thing he had not meant to do. Of course the law of the land was that way. It had to be to protect everybody. But the law had no right to you after you were dead. You had satisfied it. But if, after having escaped punishment in this life, he had yet to meet the judgment seat of an angry God, what hope had he?
He dwelt for a moment upon those whose names were writtenin the other book, the “born again” ones. Mrs. Summers was likely one of those, if there was any such thing. Yes, and Mrs. Chapparelle. She read the Bible and believed it. He remembered the stories she read them Sunday afternoons. And was Bessie? Yes, she must have been. It must have been that which gave her that look of set-apartness, that sort of peace in her eyes—well, these were odd things he was thinking about. Strange they never came his way before. He had never really taken it in before what it would be to die—to be done with this earth forever! Bessie was gone! And he would be judged for it! Even if he escaped a court of justice, he would be judged. What was the use? Why not go home and take his chances? But no, that would drag his mother and father through all that muck.…Bah! He would stay where he was—awhile.
The little tinkling bell broke in upon his thoughts, and he found he was tremendously hungry, in spite of his serious thoughts. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and gravy over delicately browned slices of toast! A quivering mold of currant jelly! Little white onions in a cream dressing, a custard pie for desert. It all had a wonderful taste that seemed better than anything he knew, and he really enjoyed sitting there with her eating it. It seemed so cozy and pleasant. Even
the blessing at the beginning was rather a pleasant novelty. She had asked him again to take the head of the table and ask the blessing, but he had looked at her with a most engaging smile and said, “Oh, you say it, won’t you? I like to hear you.” And she had smiled and complied, so now hewas not anymore worried about that. If ever he were asked, he had learned what words were used. He could get away with it, though somehow he did not like to be faking a thing like that. It was strange, but he did not. He had never felt so before about anything. He wondered why.
He helped Mrs. Summers carry the dishes out to the kitchen, and while he was doing it the doorbell rang, and Jane presented herself. She announced that she had come as a representative of her class to ask Mr. Murray to be their teacher. She flattered him with her beseeching eyes while she pleaded with him not to say no.
“Class? What class?” he asked blankly, wondering what doggone thing he was going to run into now.
“Why, our Sunday school class. There are twelve of us girls. You know our teacher was Miss Phelps, and she’s gone away for the winter to California. Perhaps she won’t ever come back. Her sister lives out there. She resigned the class before she went away, and we haven’t elected anyone else to fill her place. We were sort of waiting to see if you wouldn’t take it. I hope nobody else has gotten ahead of us. I tried to see you this morning, but there were so many people speaking to you. Now, you will be our teacher, won’t you?”
Chapter 17
Murray was appalled! He was aghast! He simply could not take this extraordinary request seriously. It seemed as if he must somehow get back to his former companions and tell them the joke. They wanted him to teach a Sunday school class of young ladies! Was ever anything more terribly ludicrous in all the world?