The Wisdom of Fools. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

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СКАЧАТЬ reminded him, with a laugh.

      “Yes; but, Billy,” Amy Townsend insisted, “doesn’t it say somewhere that ‘confession is good for the soul’?”

      “Perhaps it is,” he said dryly, “but, generally speaking, it’s mighty bad for the mind.”

      There was an outcry at this from the two women.

      “Of course,” Mrs. Paul said, “simply gossiping about one’s self isn’t confession; but don’t you think, Mr. West, in the really deep relations of life, between friend and friend, or husband and wife, there should be no reserves?”

      “My dear Mrs. Paul,” he answered, with quick gravity, “there must be reserves—except with God. The human soul is solitary. But for confession, that is different; justice and reparation sometimes demand it; but, again, justice and courage sometimes forbid it. Unless it is necessary, it is flabby vanity. That’s why I said it was bad for the mind.”

      “Well,” said Amy, with some spirit, “I don’t believe in taking respect, or—or love, on false pretenses. If I had ever done any dreadful thing, I should want to confess; good gracious, for the mere comfort of it I should have to! It would be like walking on a volcano to keep a secret.”

      William West went over to the table where she was writing, and, finding a place among the clutter of presents to lean his elbow, sat down and looked at her with good-humored amusement.

      “Where are you going to draw the line? How far back are you going in confessing your sins? Please don’t tell me that you slapped your nurse when you were three. It would be a horrible shock, and make me very unhappy to discover such a crime.”

      “I shall go all the way back,” said Amy, with decision; “if I had done anything wrong, I mean very wrong, I should tell you—if I had only been a year old!”

      The minister laughed. “A desperate villain of one year!” he said; but as he spoke a puzzled look came into his eyes.

      “I think,” Amy Townsend proceeded, “that honor and fairness demand speaking out. And as for making some one else unhappy,” her voice dropped a little, and the color came up into her face, “where people love each other, they have a right to unhappiness.”

      “Listen to Amy clamoring for unhappiness!” John Paul commented. “Don’t worry, my child; you’ll get your share. There’s enough to go round, I’ve noticed.”

      Mrs. Paul laughed, but a note of reality had come into the careless talk that gave her a sense of being a third party.

      “John, you are flippant,” she said; “come, let’s leave these two poor things alone; they’re dying to get rid of us. And besides, if Amy is going to confess her sins since she was one year old, it will take time.”

      “That I consider a most uncalled for reference to my twenty-seven years,” Amy retorted; “and besides, I’ve two more notes to write.”

      “And I must go home,” William West said, rising in a preoccupied manner.

      “Why—but I thought you were going to stay to dinner!” Mrs. Paul protested, with dismay.

      “Oh, you must stay to dinner,” Amy urged.

      But her lover was resolute. Nor did he, as usual, try to lure her out into the hall that he might make his adieus. He said good-night, stopped a moment to discuss with his senior warden something about the appropriation for repairs at St. James, and then, with a sober abstraction deepening in his face, went home through the delicate June dusk, which was full of the scent of the roses that grow behind the garden walls of the old-fashioned part of Mercer.

III

       Table of Contents

      The Rev. William West went into his study and shut the door. He was a man who was always accessible to his people, yet his lips tightened with impatience when he found a parishioner awaiting him, and saw a pile of notes on his writing-table. But it was only for an instant; he listened to the anxieties of his caller with that concentration of sympathy which can put self aside; and when the man went away it was with the other man’s heartfelt grip of the hand, his heartfelt “I thank you for coming to me; God bless you, my friend, and give you wisdom.”

      The letters were not so easy; but he went through them faithfully, answering them or filing them away: appeals for help, or money, or work; two invitations; two letters from ladies of his congregation about their souls; the unmarried and interesting clergyman knows this sort of letter too well! He was aware of a sense of haste in getting through with these things; a sense of haste even in disposing of another caller, a boy, who came to say he had doubts about the existence of God, and who felt immensely important in consequence. “I tell you, Mr. West,” this youth declared, nodding his head, “of course I don’t mean to be hard on the church; of course I see the value of such a belief in keeping the masses straight, but, for thinking men!” To treat this sort of thing seriously and patiently is one of the trials of a thinking man who happens to be a minister. Then the Tenor came to give his side of the quarrel with the Bass, and the organist to say that quartette and chorus were all fools.

      One does not prove the existence of God, or pacify wounded artistic feelings easily; it was nearly midnight before the clergyman had his library to himself.

      With a sigh of relief he shut the door, and walked once or twice about the room, as though trying to shake off other people’s affairs; then he bit off the end of a cigar, struck a match, and sat down. He put his hands deep into his pockets, and stretched his feet straight out in front of him.

      “It must be five years since I’ve thought of it,” he said to himself.

      He held his lighted cigar between his fingers, his chin sunk on his breast, his mouth set in that hard line which refuses to extenuate or evade; his eyes narrowed with thought. Five years: Yes, the memory had so faded and lessened that by and by it had ceased, and now it was as though, as he walked along the level path of daily life, a serpent suddenly lifted its evil head from the dust, and struck at him, hissing.

      “I was eighteen,” he said to himself; “no, nineteen. And now I’m forty-two! Twenty-nine, thirty-nine—it’s twenty-three years ago.”

      There is a hideous consciousness which comes to most of us men and women at one time or another in our lives, of our inability to get away from the past. From out of the “roaring loom of Time” comes the fabric of our lives; white, run, perhaps, with a warp of silver in our latter years; set, even, by the mercy of God, with deep jewels of experience; spangled with golden threads of opportunity; but back, in its beginnings—what stains, what rents! dragged through what foul and primeval experiences of youth! Some, by environment and temperament, have nothing to blush for but follies; the joyous baseness of the young animal never broke through the conditions of their lives, or the dullness of their minds. But for most there are black spots from which, with wonder and disgust, the adult turns away his eyes: the cruelty and impurity of childhood; the ingratitude and meanness of youth. With the man, as with the race, that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural.

      Twenty-three years ago: is there any connection between a fault committed then and the William West of to-day? None! What has he in common with the boy of nineteen? Nothing!

      Suppose СКАЧАТЬ