Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/284

278 worship gave reason wherefore the holy words should have been carpentered together. Then he prayed aloud, and then first the monster found tongue, voice, articulation. If this was worship, surely it was the monster's own worship of itself. No God were better than one to whom such were fittng words of prayer. What passed in the man's soul God forbid I should judge: I speak but of the words that reached the ears of men.

And over all the vast of London lay the monster, filling it like the night — not in churches and chapels only — in almost all theatres and most houses — most of all in rich houses: everywhere he had a foot, a tail, a tentacle or two — everywhere suckers that drew the life-blood from the sickening and somnolent soul.

When the deacon — a little brown man, about five and thirty — had ended his prayer, he read another hymn of the same sort — one of such as form the bulk of most collections, and then looked meaningly at Mr. Graham, whom he had seen in the chapel on Sunday with his brother deacon, and therefore judged one of consequence, who had come to the meeting with an object, and ought to be propitiated: he had intended speaking himself. After having thus for a moment regarded him, "Would you favor us with a word of exhortation, sir?" he said in a stage-like whisper.

Now the monster had by this time insinuated a hair-like sucker into the heart of the schoolmaster, and was busy. But at the word, as the Red-cross Knight when he heard Orgoglio in the wood staggered to meet him, he rose at once, and, although his umbrella slipped and fell with a loud discomposing clatter, calmly approached the reading-desk. To look at his outer man, this knight of the truth might have been the very high priest of the monster, which, while he was sitting there, had been twisting his slimy, semi-electric, benumbing tendrils around his heart. His business was nevertheless to fight him, though to fight him in his own heart and that of other people at one and the same moment he might well find hard work. And the loathly worm had this advantage over the knight, that it was the first time he had stood up to speak in public since his failure thirty years ago. That hour again for a moment overshadowed his spirit. It was a wavy harvest morning in a village of the north. A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in the sunny blue. The church was full of well-known faces, upturned, listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes and write Te Deums on their coffin-lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapor from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual squalor and destitution in his very soul. He had tried to pray his own prayer while the deacon prayed his, but there had come to him no reviving, no message for this handful of dull souls — there were nine of them in all — and his own soul crouched hard and dull within his bosom. How to give them one deeper breath? How to make them know they were alive? Whence was his aid to come?

His aid was nearer than he knew. There were no hills to which he could lift his eyes, but help may hide in the valley as well as come down from the mountain, and he found his under the coal-scuttle bonnet of the woman that swept out and dusted the chapel. She was no interesting young widow. A life of labor and vanished children lay behind as well as before her. She was sixty years of age, seamed with the small-pox, and in every seam the dust and smoke of London had left a stain. She had a troubled eye, and a gafe that seemed to ask of the universe why it had given birth to her. But it was only her face that asked the question: her mind was too busy with the ever-recurring enigma, which, answered this week, was still an enigma for the next: — how she was to pay her rent — too busy to have any other question to ask. Or would she not rather, have gone to sleep altogether, under the dreary fascination of the slug monster, had she not had a severe landlady who would be paid punctually or turn her out? Anyhow, every time and all the time she sat in the chapel she was brooding over ways and means, calculating pence and shillings — the day's charing she had promised her, and the chances of more — mingling faint regrets over past indulgences — the extra half-pint of beer she drank on Saturday, the bit of cheese she bought on Monday. Of this face of care, revealing a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight — caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down-trodden, mire-fouled humanity which the Man in whom he believed had loved because it was his Father's humanity divided into brothers, and had died straining to lift back to the bosom of that Father. Oh 