how David fetched the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the Lord "made a breach" upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark to save it when the oxen stumbled. The little boys were much impressed by this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to Uzza to have "a breach" made upon him. The unwisdom of touching an Ark of the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly brought home to them. They liked also to hear of the instruments played upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps, psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of fir-wood.
Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession "girded with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed, it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David's wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him "leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of David's years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."
So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy, prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys—a place where they had gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not see God there, actually, neither in the horsehair sofa nor the bleak melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from the ceiling—yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb—an all-pervading thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or spirit he conceived to be God—the more as it came to him in a flash of divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark of the Covenant.
Thus the Front Room became what "Heaven" meant to him when he heard the word—a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart; a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games and sweets and joyous idleness.
The word "God," then, became at this time a word of evil import to the littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie's, with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who, clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely, like very princes.
To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, "Oh, it must be awful, awful wicked—because I want to do it very, very much!—not like, going to church."
Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation—particularly when Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the care-free Sabbath loafers.
Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come to the Feet before he died. "But I believe he will come to the Feet," she added, "even if it's on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat standing on his brow. It would make a lovely tract—him coming to the Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything."
The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn't come to the Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn't, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it—and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room—particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.
During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State. It began thus:
"New Hampshire is a pretty place,
I did go there to see
The maple-sugar being boiled
By one that's dear to me."
Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza——
"I loved to hear the banjo hum,
It sounds so very calmly;
If a happy home you wish to find,
Visit the Thompson family."
After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice—
"At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee;
Some are made on land,
Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave
Streams of tears."
He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.
Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:
"For her dear sake whom he did pity,
He took her back to Jersey City."
But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven. And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands. There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.
There
