“Well, I did what you told me to do,” Theron Ware remarked to Sister Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room after the midday meal.
It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her new friend\'s departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.
“I did what you told me to do,” he repeated, looking up from his low easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; “and I dare say you won\'t be surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it.”
“And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?” the woman said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with roguish, comprehending eyes. “Yes, that\'s the way we\'re built. We spend our lives doing that sort of thing.”
“I don\'t know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,” said the young minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of the suggestion. “It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained and shocked at myself.”
Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous fingers on the desk-top. “I guess maybe you\'d better go and lie down again,” she said gently. “You\'re a sick man, still, and it\'s no good your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You\'ll see them differently when you\'re quite yourself again.”
“No, no,” pleaded Theron. “Do let us have our talk out! I\'m all right. My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I\'ve really counted on this talk with you.”
“But there\'s something else to talk about, isn\'t there, besides—besides your conscience?” she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.
Theron answered the glance rather than her words. “I know that you are my friend,” he said simply.
Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new intentness. “Well, then,” she began, “let\'s thrash this thing out right now, and be done with it. You say it\'s hurt your conscience to do just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I\'m not quarrelling, and I\'m not thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty work done by other people. That\'s it, isn\'t it?”
“The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his companion\'s face.
“Oh, we were going to be frank, you know,” she added, with a pleasant play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.
“No,” he said, picking his words, “my point would rather be that—that there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this—this \'dirty work.\' THAT is my feeling.”
“Now we\'re getting at it,” said Sister Soulsby, briskly. “My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference. That\'s a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken of their habit. It\'s my business—mine and Soulsby\'s—to do that sort of thing. We came here and we did it—did it up brown, too. We not only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for you. It isn\'t only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of the congregation is changed toward you now. You\'ll see that they\'ll be asking to have you back here, next spring. And you\'re solid with your Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight—is that worth while, or not?”
“I\'ve told you that I am very grateful,” answered the minister, “and I say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But—but it was the means I had in mind.”
“Quite so,” rejoined the sister, patiently. “If you saw the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn\'t be able to stomach it. Did you ever see a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you\'ll understand when I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope. That doesn\'t prove that the play, out in front, isn\'t beautiful and affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery—by organization. The trouble is that you\'ve been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you\'re so green—if you\'ll pardon me—that you want to sit down and cry because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don\'t be such a goose!”
“I see what you mean,” Theron said, with an answering smile. He added, more gravely, “All the same, the Winch business seems to me—”
“Now the Winch business is my own affair,” Sister Soulsby broke in abruptly. “I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he presented them—that\'s all.”
“But—” Theron began, and then paused. Something had occurred to him, and he knitted his brows to follow its course of expansion in his mind. Suddenly he raised his head. “Then you arranged with Winch to make those bogus offers—just to lead others on?” he demanded.
Sister Soulsby\'s large eyes beamed down upon him in reply, at first in open merriment, then more soberly, till their regard was almost pensive.
“Let us talk of something else,” she said. “All that is past and gone. It has nothing to do with you, anyway. I\'ve got some advice to give you about keeping up this grip you\'ve got on your people.”
The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke. He put his hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders began slowly pacing the room. After a turn or two he came to the desk, and leaned against it.
“I doubt if it\'s worth while going into that,” he said, in the solemn tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing is being uttered. She waited to hear more, apparently. “I think I shall go away—give up the ministry,” he added.
Sister Soulsby\'s eyes revealed no such shock of consternation as he, unconsciously, had looked for. They remained quite calm; and when she spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech, with what he read to be a gaze of affectionate melancholy—one might say pity. She shook her head slowly.
“No—don\'t let any one else hear you say that,” she replied. “My poor young friend, it\'s no good to even think it. The real wisdom is to school yourself to move along smoothly, and not fret, and get the best of what\'s going. I\'ve known others who felt as you do—of course there are times when every young man of brains and high notions feels that way—but there\'s no help for it. Those who tried to get out only broke themselves. Those who stayed in, and made the best of it—well, one of them will be a bishop in another ten years.”
Theron had started walking again. “But the moral degradation of it!” he snapped out at her over his shoulder. “I\'d rather earn the meanest living, at an honest trade, and be free from it.”
“That may all be,” responded Sister Soulsby. “But it isn\'t a question of what you\'d rather do. It\'s what you can do. How could you earn a living? What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a living out of? Not one, my man, not one.”
Theron stopped and stared at her. This view of his capabilities came upon him with the force and effect of a blow.
“I don\'t discover, myself,” he began stumblingly, “that I\'m so conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings, and very good ones, too.”
“Of course you\'re not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you\'re greatly the other way, or I shouldn\'t be taking this trouble with you. But you\'re what you are because you\'re where you are. The moment you try on being somewhere else, you\'re done for. In all this world nobody else comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.”
The phrase sent Theron\'s fancy roving. “I know a Catholic priest,” he said irrelevantly, “who doesn\'t believe an atom in—in things.”
“Very likely,” said Sister Soulsby. “Most of us do. But you don\'t hear him talking about going and earning his living, I\'ll bet! Or if he does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same. They\'ve got horse-sense, those priests. They\'re artists, too. They know how to allow for the machinery behind the scenes.”
“But it\'s all so different,” urged the young minister; “the same things are not expected of them. Now I sat the other night and watched those people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister Lovejoy—did you see her?—coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish—I positively believe it was all that made me ill. I couldn\'t stand it. I can\'t stand it now. I won\'t go back to it! Nothing shall make me!”
“Oh-h, yes, you will,” she rejoined soothingly. “There\'s nothing else to do. Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in, and you\'ll be surprised how easy it\'ll all come to be. You were speaking of the revival business. Now that exemplifies just what I was saying—it\'s a part of our machinery. Now a church is like everything else,—it\'s got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that people will listen to and mind. The Catholics are different, as you say. Their church is chuck-full of authority—all the way from the Pope down to the priest—and accordingly they do as they\'re told. But the Protestants—your Methodists most of all—they say \'No, we won\'t have any authority, we won\'t obey any boss.\' Very well, what happens? We who are responsible for running the thing, and raising the money and so on—we have to put on a spurt every once in a while, and work up a general state of excitement; and while it\'s going, don\'t you see that THAT is the authority, the motive power, w............