CHAPTER XX
NORMAN DOUGLAS SPEAKS OUT IN MEETING
"Where are you wandering, Anne o' mine?" asked the doctor, who evenyet, after twenty-four years of marriage, occasionally addressed hiswife thus when nobody was about. Anne was sitting on the veranda steps,gazing absently over the wonderful bridal world of spring blossom,Beyond the white orchard was a copse of dark young firs and creamy wildcherries, where the robins were whistling madly; for it was evening andthe fire of early stars was burning over the maple grove.
Anne came back with a little sigh.
"I was just taking relief from intolerable realities in a dream,Gilbert--a dream that all our children were home again--and all smallagain--playing in Rainbow Valley. It is always so silent now--but I wasimagining I heard clear voices and gay, childish sounds coming up as Iused to. I could hear Jem's whistle and Walter's yodel, and the twins'laughter, and for just a few blessed minutes I forgot about the guns onthe Western front, and had a little false, sweet happiness."
The doctor did not answer. Sometimes his work tricked him intoforgetting for a few moments the Western front, but not often. Therewas a good deal of grey now in his still thick curls that had not beenthere two years ago. Yet he smiled down into the starry eyes heloved--the eyes that had once been so full of laughter, and now seemedalways full of unshed tears.
Susan wandered by with a hoe in her hand and her second best bonnet onher head.
"I have just finished reading a piece in the Enterprise which told of acouple being married in an aeroplane. Do you think it would be legal,doctor dear?" she inquired anxiously.
"I think so," said the doctor gravely.
"Well," said Susan dubiously, "it seems to me that a wedding is toosolemn for anything so giddy as an aeroplane. But nothing is the sameas it used to be. Well, it is half an hour yet before prayer-meetingtime, so I am going around to the kitchen garden to have a littleevening hate with the weeds. But all the time I am strafing them I willbe thinking about this new worry in the Trentino. I do not like thisAustrian caper, Mrs. Dr. dear."
"Nor I," said Mrs. Blythe ruefully. "All the forenoon I preservedrhubarb with my hands and waited for the war news with my soul. When itcame I shrivelled. Well, I suppose I must go and get ready for theprayer-meeting, too."
Every village has its own little unwritten history, handed down fromlip to lip through the generations, of tragic, comic, and dramaticevents. They are told at weddings and festivals, and rehearsed aroundwinter firesides. And in these oral annals of Glen St. Mary the tale ofthe union prayer-meeting held that night in the Methodist Church wasdestined to fill an imperishable place.
The union prayer-meeting was Mr. Arnold's idea. The county battalion,which had been training all winter in Charlottetown, was to leaveshortly for overseas. The Four Winds Harbour boys belonging to it fromthe Glen and over-harbour and Harbour Head and Upper Glen were all homeon their last leave, and Mr. Arnold thought, properly enough, that itwould be a fitting thing to hold a union prayer-meeting for them beforethey went away. Mr. Meredith having agreed, the meeting was announcedto be held in the Methodist Church. Glen prayer-meetings were not aptto be too well attended, but on this particular evening the MethodistChurch was crowded. Everybody who could go was there. Even MissCornelia came--and it was the first time in her life that Miss Corneliahad ever set foot inside a Methodist Church. It took no less than aworld conflict to bring that about.
"I used to hate Methodists," said Miss Cornelia calmly, when herhusband expressed surprise over her going, "but I don't hate them now.There is no sense in hating Methodists when there is a Kaiser or aHindenburg in the world."
So Miss Cornelia went. Norman Douglas and his wife went too. AndWhiskers-on-the-moon strutted up the aisle to a front pew, as if hefully realized what a distinction he conferred upon the building.People were somewhat surprised that he should be there, since heusually avoided all assemblages connected in any way with the war. ButMr. Meredith had said that he hoped his session would be wellrepresented, and Mr. Pryor had evidently taken the request to heart. Hewore his best black suit and white tie, his thick, tight, iron-greycurls were neatly arranged, and his broad, red round face looked, asSusan most uncharitably thought, more "sanctimonious" than ever.
"The minute I saw that man coming into the Church, looking like that, Ifelt that mischief was brewing, Mrs. Dr. dear," she said afterwards."What form it would take I could not tell, but I knew from face of himthat he had come there for no good."
The prayer-meeting opened conventionally and continued quietly. Mr.Meredith spoke first with his usual eloquence and feeling. Mr. Arnoldfollowed with an address which even Miss Cornelia had to confess wasirreproachable in taste and subject-matter.
And then Mr. Arnold asked Mr. Pryor to lead in prayer.
Miss Cornelia had always averred that Mr. Arnold had no gumption. MissCornelia was not apt to err on the side of charity in her judgment ofMethodist ministers, but in this case she did not greatly overshoot themark. The Rev. Mr. Arnold certainly did not have much of thatdesirable, indefinable quality known as gumption, or he would neverhave asked Whiskers-on-the-moon to lead in prayer at a khakiprayer-meeting. He thought he was returning the compliment to Mr.Meredith, who, at the conclusion of his address, had asked a Methodistdeacon to lead.
Some people expected Mr. Pryor to refuse grumpily--and that would havemade enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet,unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorousvoice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr.Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in hisprayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the factthat they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr.Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, aspeople afterwards said, he thought he was safe in a church and that itwas an excellent chance to air certain opinions he dared not voiceelsewhere, for fear of being mobbed. He prayed that the unholy warmight cease--that the deluded armies being driven to slaughter on theWestern front might have their eyes opened to their iniquity and repentwhile yet there was time--that the poor young men present in khaki, whohad been hounded into a path of murder and militarism, should yet berescued--
Mr. Pryor had got this far without let or hindrance; and so paralysedwere his hearers, and so deeply imbued with their born-and-bredconviction that no disturbance must ever be made in a church, no matterwhat the provocation, that it seemed likely that he would continueunchecked to the end. But one man at least in that audience was nothampered by inherited or acquired reverence for the sacred edifice.Norman Douglas was, as Susan had often vowed crisply, nothing more orless than a "pagan." But he was a rampantly patriotic pagan, and whenthe significance of what Mr. Pryor was saying fully dawned on him,Norman Douglas suddenly went berserk. With a positive roar he boundedto his feet in his side pew, facing the audience, and shouted in tonesof thunder:
"Stop--stop--STOP that abominable prayer! What an abominable prayer!"
Every head in the church flew up. A boy in khaki at the back gave afaint cheer. Mr. Meredith raised a deprecating hand, but Norman waspast caring for anything like that. Eluding his wife's restraininggrasp, he gave one mad spring over the front of the pew and caught theunfortunate Whiskers-on-the-moon by his coat collar. Mr. Pryor had not"stopped" when so bidden, but he stopped now, perforce, for Norman, hislong red beard literally bristling with fury, was shaking him until hisbones fairly rattled, and punctuating his shakes with a luridassortment of abusive epithets.
"You blatant beast!"--shake--"You malignant carrion"--shake--"Youpig-headed varmint!"--shake--"you putrid pup"--shake--"you pestilentialparasite"--shake--"you--Hunnish scum"--shake--"you indecentreptile--you--you--" Norman choked for a moment. Everybody believedthat the next thing he would say, church or no church, would besomething that would have to be spelt with asterisks; but at thatmoment Norman encountered his wife's eye and he fell back with a thudon Holy Writ. "You whited sepulchre!" he bellowed, with a final shake,and c
ast Whiskers-on-the-moon from him with a vigour which impelledthat unhappy pacifist to the very verge of the choir entrance door. Mr.Pryor's once ruddy face was ashen. But he turned at bay. "I'll have thelaw on you for this," he gasped.
"Do--do," roared Norman, making another rush. But Mr. Pryor was gone.He had no desire to fall a second time into the hands of an avengingmilitarist. Norman turned to the platform for one graceless, triumphantmoment.
"Don't look so flabbergasted, parsons," he boomed. "You couldn't doit--nobody would expect it of the cloth--but somebody had to do it. Youknow you're glad I threw him out--he couldn't be let go on yammeringand yodelling and yawping sedition and treason. Sedition andtreason--somebody had to deal with it. I was born for this hour--I'vehad my innings in church at last. I can sit quiet for another sixtyyears now! Go ahead with your meeting, parsons. I reckon you won't betroubled with any more pacifist prayers."
But the spirit of devotion and reverence had fled. Both ministersrealized it and realized that the only thing to do was to close themeeting quietly and let the excited people go. Mr. Meredith addressed afew earnest words to the boys in khaki--which probably saved Mr.Pryor's windows from a second onslaught--and Mr. Arnold pronounced anincongruous benediction, at least he felt it was incongruous, for hecould not at once banish from his memory the sight of gigantic NormanDouglas shaking the fat, pompous little Whiskers-on-the-moon as a hugemastiff might shake an overgrown puppy. And he knew that the samepicture was in everybody's mind. Altogether the union prayer-meetingcould hardly be called an unqualified success. But it was remembered inGlen St. Mary when scores of orthodox and undisturbed assemblies weretotally forgotten.
"You will never, no, never, Mrs. Dr. dear, hear me call Norman Douglasa pagan again," said Susan when she reached home. "If Ellen Douglas isnot a proud woman this night she should be."
"Norman Douglas did a wholly indefensible thing," said the doctor."Pryor should have been let severely alone until the meeting was over.Then later on, his own minister and session should deal with him. Thatwould have been the proper procedure. Norman's performance was utterlyimproper and scandalous and outrageous; but, by George,"--the doctorthrew back his head and chuckled, "by George, Anne-girl, it wassatisfying."