THE BIG HOUSE OF PORTENTS

In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that was all strange.  Novel was the outer house with its high portico and fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window; its big front door with the polished brass knocker and the fan-light above.  Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new life to its very center.

For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought daily to their notice.  In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily, informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine wrath impressed upon them “when the memory is wax to receive and marble to retain.”

Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child, and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder.  But Clytie, who had said “I’ll make my own of them,” was tireless and not without ingenuity in opening the way of life to their little feet.

Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught many instructive bits chosen from the scrap-book in which her literary treasures were preserved.  His rendition of a passage from one of Mr. Spurgeon’s sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he listened.

“There is a place,” the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, “where the only music is the symphony of damned souls.  Where howling, groaning, moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert.  There is a place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire, torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water ­that water all denied.  When thou diest, O Sinner ­”

But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have to go to the kitchen for a drink of water.  Always he became thirsty here.  And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire his brother in the closing periods.

­“but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood, thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell’s unutterable torment.”

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled God with a little g.

As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty.  A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard.  She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going “down ­down ­DOWN ­into the bottomless depths of HELL!” Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was.  “But, my Land!” she would say, at each of his failures, “if you only could do it the way Mr. Murphy did ­and then he’d talk so plain and natural, too, ­just like he was associating with a body in their own parlour ­and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl.  My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he’d been!”

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy’s memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as: 

  “Xerxes the Great did die
  And so must you and I.”

  “As runs the glass
  Man’s life must pass.”

  “Thy life to mend
  God’s book attend.”

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being: 

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

  “I in the burying-place may see
  Graves shorter there than I.
  From Death’s arrest no age is free,
  Young children, too, may die.

  “My God, may such an awful sight
  Awakening be to me;
  Oh, that by early grace, I might
  For death prepared be!”

She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.

Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.

Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how God ordered the congregation to stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the Lord “made a breach” upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark to save it when the oxen stumbled.  The little boys were much impressed by this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to Uzza to have “a breach” made upon him.  The unwisdom of touching an Ark of the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly brought home to them.  They liked also to hear of the instruments played upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps, psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of fir-wood.

Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession “girded with a linen ephod,” which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed, it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David’s wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him “leaping and dancing before the Lord,” uncovered save for the presumably inadequate ephod of linen.  She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of David’s years and honour should “make himself ridiculous that way.”

So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it behooves those to walk who shall taste death.  And to the littler boy, prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the big house itself would at times be more than itself to him.  There was the Front Room.  Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in which he was accustomed to regard it.  Each Friday, when it was opened for a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold of its door.  It seemed to be an abode of dead joys ­a place where they had gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival.  And while he could not see God there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from the ceiling ­yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb ­an all-pervading thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and part of everything, even of himself when he looked in.  And this quality or spirit he conceived to be God ­the more as it came to him in a flash of divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark of the Covenant.

Thus the Front Room became what “Heaven” meant to him when he heard the word ­a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart; a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games and sweets and joyous idleness.

The word “God,” then, became at this time a word of evil import to the littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie’s, with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who, clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely, like very princes.

To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, “Oh, it must be awful, awful wicked ­because I want to do it very, very much! ­not like, going to church.”

Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation ­particularly when Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the care-free Sabbath loafers.

Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come to the Feet before he died.  “But I believe he will come to the Feet,” she added, “even if it’s on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat standing on his brow.  It would make a lovely tract ­him coming to the Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything.”

The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn’t come to the Feet.  It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn’t, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come.  During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet.  Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image:  the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway.  It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace.  It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe.  Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it ­and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet?  The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room ­particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.

During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity.  She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few.  One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State.  It began thus: 

  “New Hampshire is a pretty place,
  I did go there to see
  The maple-sugar being boiled
  By one that’s dear to me.”

Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza ­

  “I loved to hear the banjo hum,
  It sounds so very calmly;
  If a happy home you wish to find,
  Visit the Thompson family.”

After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice ­

  “At lovers’ promises fates grow merrilee;
  Some are made on land,
  Some on the deep sea. 
  Love does sometimes leave
    Streams of tears.”

He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.

Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself.  He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own: 

  “For her dear sake whom he did pity,
  He took her back to Jersey City.”

But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven.  And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands.  There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.

There was being good ­which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the Feet ­not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there was the matter of Blood.  There were hymns, for example, that left him confused.  The “fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins” sounded interesting.  Vividly he saw the “sinners plunged beneath that flood” losing all their guilty stains.  It was entirely reasonable, and with an assumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet.  But who was Immanuel?  And where was this excellent fountain?

Then there was being “washed in the blood of the lamb,” which was considerably simpler ­except for the matter of its making one “whiter than snow.”  He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only poetry-writing which doesn’t mean everything it says.  He meant to try this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as a desirable experiment.

But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more important and effectual ­if it were only practicable.  As the sinners came out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running with the Magnetic Ointment ­even redder!

The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed.  And if its inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces; where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of pétunias and fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.

Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.