ON SURVIVING THE IDOLS WE BUILD

It is the way of life to be forever building new idols in place of the old.  Into the fabric of these the most of us put so much of ourselves that a little of us dies each time a cherished image crumbles from age or is shattered by some lightning-stroke of truth from a cloud electric with doubt.  This is why we fade and wither as the leaf.  Could we but sweep aside the wreck without dismay and raise a new idol from the overflowing certainty of youth, then indeed should we have eaten from that other tree in Eden, for the defence of which is set the angel with the flaming sword.  But this may not be.  Fatuously we stake our souls on each new creation ­deeming that here, in sooth, is one that shall endure beyond the end of time.  To the last we are dull to the truth that our idols are meant to be broken, to give way to other idols still to be broken.

And so we lose a little of ourselves each time an idol falls; and, learning thus to doubt, wistfully, stoically we learn to die, leaving some last idol triumphantly surviving us.  For ­and this is the third lesson from that tree of Truth ­we learn to doubt, not the perfection of our idols, but the divinity of their creator.  And it would seem that this is quite as it should be.  So long as the idol-maker will be a slave to his creatures, so long should the idol survive and the maker go back to useful dust.  Whereas, did he doubt his idols and never himself ­but this is mostly a secret, for not many common idolmongers will cross that last fence to the west, beyond the second field, where the cattle are strange and the hour so late that one must turn back for bed and supper.

To one who accepts the simple truth thus put down precisely, it will be apparent that the little boy was destined to see more than one idol blasted before his eyes; yet, also, that he was not come to the foolish caution of the wise, whom failure leads to doubt their own powers ­as if we were not meant to fail in our idols forever!  Being, then, not come to this spiritual decrepitude, fitted still to exercise a blessed contempt for the Wisdom of the Ages, it is plain that he could as yet see an idol go to bits without dismay, conscious only of the need for a new and a better one.

Not all one’s idols are shattered in a day.  This were a catastrophe that might wrench even youth’s divine credulity.

Not until another year had gone, with its heavy-gaited school-months and its galloping vacation-days, did the little boy come to understand that Santa Claus was not a real presence.  And instead of wailing over the ruins of this idol, he brought a sturdy faith to bear, building in its place something unseen and unheard of any save himself ­an idol discernible only by him, but none the less real for that.

The Imp with the hammer being no respecter of dignities, the idol of the Front Room fell next, increasing the heap of ruins that was gathering about his feet.  Tragically came a day one spring, a cold, cloudy, rational day, it seemed, when the Front Room went down; for the little boy saw all its sanctities violated, its mysteries laid bare.  And the Front Room became a mere front room.  Its shutters were opened and its windows raised to let in light and common fresh air; its carpet was on the line outside to be scourged of dust; the black, formidable furniture was out on the wide porch to be re-varnished, like any common furniture, plainly needing it; the vases of dyed grass might be handled without risk; and the dark spirit that had seemed to be in and over all was vanished.  Even the majestic Ark of the Covenant, which the sinful Uzza once died for so much as touching reverently, was now seen to be an ordinary stove for the burning of anthracite coal, to be rattled profanely and polished for an extra quarter by Sherman Tranquillity Tyler after he had finished whitewashing the cellar.  Fearlessly the little boy, grown somewhat bigger now, walked among the debris of this idol, stamping the floor, sounding the walls, detecting cracks in the ceiling, spots on the wall-paper and cobwebs in the corners.  Yet serene amid the ruins towered his valiant spirit, conscious under the catastrophe of its power to build other and yet stauncher idols.

Thus was it one day to stretch itself with new power amid the base ruins of Cousin Bill J., though the time was mercifully deferred ­that his soul might gain strength in worship to put away even that which it worshipped when the day of new truth dawned.

When Cousin Bill J., in the waning of that first winter, began actually to refine his own superlative elegance by spraying his superior garments with perfume, by munching tiny confections reputed to scent the breath desirably, by a more diligent grooming of the always superb moustache, the little boy suspected no motive.  He saw these works only as the outward signs of an inward grace that must be ever increasing.  So it came that his amazement was above that of all other persons when, at Spring’s first breath of honeyed fragrance, Cousin Bill J. went to be the husband of Miss Alvira Abney.  He had not failed to observe that Miss Alvira sang alto, in the choir, out of the same book from which Cousin Bill J. produced his exquisite tenor.  But he had reasoned nothing from this, beyond, perhaps, the thought that Miss Alvira made a poor figure beside her magnificent companion, even if her bonnet was always the gayest bonnet in church, trembling through every season with the blossoms of some ageless springtime.  For the rest, Miss Alvira’s face and hair and eyes seemed to be all one colour, very pale, and her hands were long and thin, with far too many bones in them for human hands, the little boy thought.

Yet when he learned that the woman was not without merit in the sight of his clear-eyed hero, he, too, gave her his favour.  At the marriage he felt in his heart a certain high, pure joy that must have been akin to that in the bride’s own heart, for their faces seemed to speak much alike.

Tensely the little boy listened to the words that united these two, understanding perfectly from questions that his hero endowed the woman at his side with all his worldly goods.  Even a less practicable person than Miss Alvira would have acquired distinction in this light ­being endowed with the gold horse, to say nothing of the carven cigar-holder or the precious jewel in the scarlet cravat.  Probably now she would be able to throw her thumbs out of joint, too!

But to the little boy chiefly the thing meant that Cousin Bill J. would stay close at hand, to be a joy forever in his sight and lend importance to the town of Edom.  For his hero was to go and live in the neat rooms of Miss Alvira over her millinery and dressmaking shop, and never return to the scenes of his early prowess.

After the wedding the little boy, on his way to school of a morning, would watch for Cousin Bill J. to wheel out on the sidewalk the high glass case in which Miss Alvira had arranged her pretty display of flowered bonnets.  And slowly it came to life in his understanding that between the not irksome task of wheeling out this case in the morning and wheeling it back at night, Cousin Bill J. now enjoyed the liberty that a man of his parts deserved.  He was free at last to sit about in the stores of the village, or to enthrone himself publicly before them in clement weather, at which time his opinion upon a horse, or any other matter whatsoever, could be had for the asking.  Nor would he be invincibly reticent upon the subject of those early exploits which had once set all of Chautauqua County marvelling at his strength.

At first the little boy was stung with jealousy at this.  Later he came to rejoice in the very circumstance that had brought him pain.  If his hero could not be all his, at least the world would have to blink even as he had blinked, in the dazzling light of his excellences ­yes, and smart under the lash of his unequalled sarcasm.

It should, perhaps, be said that dissolution by slow poison is not infrequently the fate of an idol.

Doubtless there was never a certain day of which the little boy could have said “that was the first time Cousin Bill J. began to seem different.”  Yet there came a moment when all was changed ­a time of question, doubt, conviction; a terrible hour, in short, when, face to face with his hero, he suffered the deep hurt of knowing that mentally, morally, and even esthetically, he himself was the superior of Cousin Bill J.

He could remember that first he had heard a caller say to Clytie of Miss Alvira, “Why, they do say the poor thing has to go down those back stairs and actually split her own kindlings ­with that healthy loafer setting around in the good clothes she buys him, in the back room of that drug-store from morning till night.  And what’s worse, he’s been seen with that eldest ­”

Here the caller’s eyes had briefly shifted sidewise at the small listener, whereupon Clytie had urged him to run along and play like a good boy.  He pondered at length that which he had overheard and then he went to Miss Alvira’s wood-pile at the foot of her back stairs, reached by turning up the alley from Main Street.  He split a large pile of kindling for her.  He would have been glad to do this each day, had not Miss Alvira proved to be lacking in delicacy.  Instead of ignoring him, when she saw him from her back window, where she was second-fitting Samantha Rexford’s pink waist, she came out with her mouth full of pins and gave him five cents and tried to kiss him.  Of course, he never went back again.  If that was the kind she was she could go on doing the work herself.  He was no Ralph Overton or Ben Holt, to be shamed that way and made to feel that he had been Doing Good, and be spoken of all the time as “our Hero.”

As for Cousin Bill J., of course he was a loafer!  Who wouldn’t be if he had the chance?  But it was false and cruel to say that he was a healthy loafer.  When Cousin Bill J. was healthy he had been able to fell an ox with one blow of his fist.

Nor was he disturbed seriously by rumours that his hero was a “come-outer”; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could be heard at the barbershop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh; but he couldn’t have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against reason and nature; and, if you found one part of the Bible wasn’t so, how could you tell the rest of it wasn’t a lot of grandmother’s tales?

Nor did he feel anything but sympathy for a helpless man imposed upon when he heard Mrs. Squire Cumpston say to Clytie, “Do you know that lazy brute has her worked to a mere shadow; she just sits in that shop all day long and lets tears fall every minute or so on her work.  She spoiled five-eighths of a yard of three-inch lavender satin ribbon that way, that was going on to Mrs. Beasley’s second-mourning bonnet.  And she’s had to cut him down to twenty-five cents a day for spending-money, and order the stores not to trust him one cent on her account.”

He was sorry to have Miss Alvira crying so much.  It must be a sloppy business, making her hats and things.  But what did the woman expect of a man like Cousin Bill J., anyway?

Yet somehow it came after a few years the new light upon his old idol.  One day he found that he neither resented nor questioned a thing he heard Clytie herself say about Cousin Bill J.:  “Why, he don’t know as much as a goat.”  Here she reconsidered, with an air of wanting to be entirely fair: ­“Well, not as much as a goat really ought to know!” And when he overheard old Squire Cumpston saying on the street, a few days later, “Of all God’s mean creatures, the meanest is a male human that can keep his health on the money a woman earns!” it was no shock, though he knew that Cousin Bill J. was meant.

Departed then was the glory of his hero, his splendid dimensions shrunk, his effective lustre dulled, his perfect moustache rusted and scraggly, his chin weakened, his pale blue eyes seen to be in force like those of a china doll.

He heard with interest that Squire Cumpston had urged Miss Alvira to divorce her husband, that she had refused, declaring God had joined her to Cousin Bill J. and that no man might put them asunder; that marriage had been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament and was now indissoluble ­an emblem, indeed, of Christ’s union with His Church; and that, as she had made her bed, so would she lie upon it.

Nor was the boy alone in regarding as a direct manifestation of Providence the sudden removal of Cousin Bill J. from this life by means of pneumonia.  For Miss Alvira had ever been esteemed and respected even by those who considered that she sang alto half a note off, while her husband had gradually acquired the disesteem of almost the entire village of Edom.  Many, indeed, went so far as to consider him a reproach to his sex.

Yet there were a few who said that even a pretended observance of the decencies would have been better.  Miss Alvira disagreed with them, however, and after all, as the village wag, Elias Cuthbert, said in the post-office next day, “It was her funeral.”  For Miss Alvira had made no pretense to God; and, what is infinitely harder, she would make none to the world.  She rode to the last resting-place of her husband ­Elias also made a funny joke about his having merely changed resting-places ­decked in a bonnet on which were many blossoms.  She had worn it through years when her heart mourned and life was bitter, when it seemed that God from His infinity had chosen her to suffer the cruellest hurts a woman may know ­and now that He had set her free she was not the one to pretend grief with some lying pall of crepe.  And on the new bonnet she wore to church, the first Sabbath after, there still flowered above her somewhat drawn face the blossoms of an endless girlhood, as if they were rooted in her very heart.  Beneath these blossoms she sang her alto ­such as it was ­with just a hint of tossing defiance.  Yet there was no need for that.  Edom thought well of her.

No one was known to have mourned the departed save an inferior dog he had made his own and been kind to; but this creature had little sympathy or notice, though he was said to have waited three days and three nights on the new earth that topped the grave of Cousin Bill J. For, quite aside from his unfortunate connection, he had not been thought well of as a dog.