I said, "I'm saved! I'm saved! I know it."
"So am I," said Flora Haines. "I was a long time ago, but I didn't like to say anything." And if I hadn't just been converted I should have thought it rather mean of her. In the dusk of the coal-hole we heard Pauline sniffling.
"I suppose it's because I'm so much worse a sinner," she admitted, "but I just can't feel it."
"You must give yourself into the Lord's hands, Pauline dear." Flora Haines had heard the evangelist. I began to offer myself passionately in prayer as a vicarious atonement for Pauline's shortcomings.
"Don't you feel anything?" Flora urged, "not the least thing?"
"Well … sort of … something," Pauline confessed.
"Well, of course, that's it."
"Yes, that's it," I insisted.
"Well, I suppose it is," Pauline gave in, mopping her eyes with her handkerchief, "but it isn't the least like what I expected."
We heard the school clock strike the quarter hour, and got up, brushing our knees rather guiltily. Flora Haines and I were kept in all that afternoon recess for exceeding our excuse, but Pauline saved herself by bursting into tears as soon as she reached her room, and being sent home with a headache.
That was on Thursday, and Saturday afternoon we were all to meet at our house and go together to a great children's meeting, where we were expected to announce that we were saved. Pauline was a little late. I was explaining to Flora Haines that I was to join our church on probation on Sunday, but Flora, being a Baptist, had been put off by her minister until the Revival should be over and he could attend to all the baptisms at once. We naturally expected something similar from Pauline.
"I hardly think," she said, stroking her muff and looking very ladylike, "that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."
"But," I objected, "how can anything be more important?"
"It's your soul, Pauline!" Flora Haines was slightly scandalized.
"That's just the reason; it's so important my mother thinks I ought not to take any steps until I can give it my most mature judgment."
Flora Haines and I looked at one another silently; we might have known Pauline's mother wouldn't let her do anything so common as get converted.
CHAPTER VI
I was duly taken into the church on the following Sabbath, to the great relief of my family, having for once exhibited the normal reaction of a young person in my circumstances, and though I have laid much to the door of that institution of the retarding of my development and the dimming of the delicate surface of happiness, I think now it was not wholly bad for me. If I hadn't up to this time found any way of being good by myself, I was now provided with a criterion of conduct toward which even those who hadn't been able to manage it for themselves, moved a public approbation. I have heard my mother say that even Mr. Farley, the banker, who read books on evolution and was a Freethinker (opprobrious term), had been known to pronounce the church an excellent thing for women.
The church left you in no doubt about things. You attended morning and evening service; as soon as you were old enough for it, which was before you were fit, you taught in Sunday school; you waited on table at oyster suppers designed for the raising of the minister's salary, and if you had any talent for it you sang in the choir or recited things at the church sociables. And when you were married and consequently middle-aged, you joined the W. F. M. S. and the Sewing Society.
It was after the incident of the coal-hole that I began to experience this easy irreproachability, and to build out of its ready-to-hand materials a sort of extra self, from which afterward to burst was the bitter wound of life. For my particular church went farther and provided a chart for all the by-lanes of behaviour. "You were never," said the evangelist, whose relish of the situation on the day that a score or so of us had renounced the devil and all his works, gave me a vague sensation of having made a meal and licked his lips over us, "you should never go anywhere that you could not take your Saviour with you," and when I saw Cousin Judd wag at my mother and she smile and pat her hymn book, I was apprised that we had come to the root of the whole matter.
I have wondered since to how many young converts in Ohianna that phrase has been handed out and with what blighting consequences.
For a Saviour as I knew Him at thirteen and a half, was a solemn presence that ran in your mind with the bleakness of plain, whitewashed walls and hard benches and a general hush, a vague sensation of your chest being too tight for you, and a little of the feeling you had when you had gone to call at the Allinghams and had forgotten to wipe your feet; and it was manifest if you took that incubus everywhere you went you wouldn't have any fun.
It was fortunate at that time that it was not the desire for entertainment that moved me so much as the need of my youth to serve; the unparented hunger for authority. But with the pressure of that environment, if there had been anybody with the wit to see where my Gift lay, what anybody could have done about it it is difficult to say. When all that Taylorville afforded of the proper food of Gift, brightness, music, and the dance, was of so forlorn a quality, it has been a question if I do not owe the church some thanks for cutting out the possible cheapening of taste and the satisfaction of ill-regulated applause—that is, if Gift can be hurt at all by what happens to the possessor. It can be cramped and enfeebled in expression, rendered tormenting in its passage and futile to the recipient, but to whom it comes its supernal quality rises forever beyond all attainder.
What happened to the actress during all the time I was undertaken by the church to be made into the sort of woman serviceable to Taylorville, was inconsiderable; what grew out of it for Olivia was no small matter, and much of it I lay without bitterness to Cousin Judd, who, from having got himself named adviser in my father's will, was in a position to affect my life to the worse.
And yet, in so far as I am not an unprecedented sport on the family tree, I had more in common with this shrewd-dealing, loud-praying, twice-removed soldier cousin than with any of my kin, though I should hardly say as much to him, for he has never been in a theatre, and if he still considers me a hopeful subject for prayer it is because his Christian duty rises superior to his conviction.
He is pricked out in my earlier recollections by the difficulty he seems to have had in effecting a compromise between the traditional distrustfulness of the Ohianna farmer toward the Powers in general, and particularly of the weather, and his obligation of Christian Joy, and for a curious effect of not belonging to his wife, a large, uninteresting woman with a sense of her own merit which she never succeeded in imposing on anybody but Cousin Judd. She had a keen appreciation of worldly values which led her always to select the best material for her clothes, and another feeling of their expensiveness which resulted in her being always a little belated in the styles. She approved of religion, though not active in it, and in twenty years she and Cousin Judd had arrived at a series of compromises and excuses which enabled her to appear at church one Sunday in five and still keep up the interest of the clergyman and congregation as to why she didn't come the other four.
Whenever the days were short or the roads too heavy, Cousin Judd would put up over night at our house, and I remember how my mother would always be able to say, looking about the empty democrat wagon as though she expected her in ambush somewhere:
"And
