CHAPTER XXX
THE HOUSE OF PEACE
WINGFIELD, Walsh and Paddock sat in melancholy council in Walsh’s glass box of an office. The Blotter had been at it again. Wingfield had suggested bringing Paddock into the matter, though Walsh had demurred that it was hardly decent to use a preacher as a policeman. It was Walsh’s idea that Wayne—who had used his motor car as a battering ram against the austere walls of the county jail—should be dispatched to a sanatorium for treatment. Paddock shook his head.
“Please—not yet!” begged the minister.
“But you’ve got to come to it sooner or later. It’s a disease in that boy and we may as well handle it on that basis.”
Wingfield, who had consulted several medical friends as to the treatment of dipsomania, confirmed and supported Walsh. Paddock smiled sadly.
“I happen to know that he had been tried a good deal of late. He has had a staggering blow or two. He had been straight for several months—made a new record. And he ran against a very serious proposition that was too much for him.”
“What’s that?” demanded Walsh bluntly.
“He told me last fall that he had decided to go to hell—in just those words—he’s disappointed; he’s found out that it’s not so easy as he thought.”
“Um,” grunted Walsh, feeling in his pocket for a cigar to chew.
“I mean,” said Paddock, “that he’s too much of a man for the devil to handle. There’s real manhood in Wayne Craighill; he would be lonesome in hell. And besides, the road downward isn’t so easy as it looks. Please understand me, gentlemen, I’m not talking religion; I’m merely stating the plain truth from my own observation and experience. I had the same idea once myself. I’m not proud of it and mention it only to illuminate my point. I used to get most beastly and hideously drunk, so I don’t take a purely academic view of such cases, but where there’s any manhood left in a fellow he can’t be as wicked as he wants to be. I’ve had my eye on Wayne all winter. Good influences have touched him. But with the good came unhappiness and he saw no way out but the red door that pushes in on greased hinges. He’s like a child. When he can’t get what he wants he vents his rage by getting drunk and trying to tear the town to pieces. He will profit by a brief rustication in a safe place where no one will bother him and where he won’t feel the shame of being hustled into a drunkard’s cure somewhere. We can always fall back on the doctors. Let’s send him to a place I know over here in Virginia where they’re practising a new idea in just such cases——”
“Hypnotism, psychotherapy—what is it?” asked Wingfield.
“Bless you, no! It’s the idea I’ve already suggested, which was developed by a friend of mine in the ministry, that no man can be as base as he wants to be—an attack on sin on the score of its futility. Wayne had begun to catch glimpses of that a little while ago. He thought he saw a straight road right down to the bottom, but he was surprised to find that it wasn’t such clear sailing after all. Something happened very unexpectedly to make him pause; then he couldn’t get what he wanted so he decided it was all off again and he’s been drunk and disorderly. Now if you’ll let me have him for a couple of weeks, I’ll see if we can’t give him a new idea or two, and when you’ve interrupted the downward course several times—a score if necessary—he’ll begin to understand that we don’t really fashion our own lives at all. As I said before, we can’t be as wicked as we’d like to be—assuming, of course, that we are not utterly depraved and abandoned and that there’s still something left to nail to. All this isn’t my idea—Paul Stoddard suggested it.”
“Stoddard—the Protestant monk,” remarked Wingfield doubtfully.
“Not in the mediæval sense, however,” replied Paddock. “He’s an original, up-to-date monk. He takes cases that everybody else has given up—and he has no failures.”
“Um. If you think praying over Wayne Craighill will cure him of drunkenness you can do it,” growled Walsh, who had with difficulty rescued Wayne from the clutches of the police only the night before. “I’d rather try some other kind of medicine.”
“You needn’t be afraid of Stoddard. He won’t pray over Wayne or scold him or preach to him.”
“You spoke of some hard blow Wayne had recently. Was it a woman?” asked Wingfield.
“Yes,” the clergyman answered.
“What was the matter with her?” growled Walsh resentfully.
“I suppose it was my fault,” Paddock answered. “She is a fine woman—but she wasn’t quite free, as we look at it in the Church.”
“And of course the Church couldn’t sacrifice itself,” Walsh grumbled.
“It wasn’t as easy as that, Mr. Walsh. There were three people to consider, leaving the Church out entirely.”
“Well, I’m for trying the monastery,” said Wingfield. “It can do no harm, and he may resume operations while we sit here talking about it.”
“Mr. Paddock,” began Walsh, as his visitors rose, “do I understand you to say that a man can’t go to the bad if he works hard enough at it?”
Walsh frowned so fiercely that Paddock laughed.
“Oh, not so broad as that! But there are good influences at work in the world—you see evidences of them all around—and they are increasing all the time. And they make things harder for the ambitious sinner; he’s engaged in a sort of obstacle race.”
“Um,” was Walsh’s only comment. He threw up the window of his cage that looked upon the wintry street and watched Wingfield and the clergyman picking their way cautiously through a battery of noisy trucks. The porters and clerks saw his bald pate hanging ominously above them in the crisp air, but the window closed with a bang without the usual malediction. Walsh growled to himself for a while and then, seeking an outlet for his emotions, summoned a frightened little stenographer whom he had threatened with dismissal that morning and raised her wages two dollars a week.
Wayne Craighill followed Paddock from the train at a station high in the Virginia hills. The poison had been steamed out of him, but his mind was still dull from its latest punishment. He had been glad in the first hours of his reaction to have Paddock’s sympathy and he had agreed to leave town with the minister without quite comprehending where they were going.
A buckboard was waiting and they were soon off, threading their way through the snowy hills. Wayne stared ahead indifferently, and when they reached a lonely stone house, perched high on a rough crag, he accepted this as their destination unquestioningly. And so he came to the house of the Brothers of Bethlehem.
Stoddard himself flung the door open—a tall man of thirty-five, alert, quick of movement and ready of speech. It was, it seemed, the most natural thing in the world that Wayne Craighill should be there—no questions asked, no discussion of the reasons for his coming, no time fixed for his departure, no laying down of rules.
“We want you to make yourself perfectly at home, Mr. Craighill. The walks are fairly well cleared in the neighbourhood and the air is the finest on earth. We call this the House of Peace—no newspapers, mail once a week, and telegrams are almost unknown. We have the place for ourselves and our friends to rest in. You will find a schedule of the day’s events in your room but don’t let the religious offices disturb you. They go on all the time and it is not in the least necessary for you to attend them. Please be free to do as you like. You and Paddock are St. John’s boys—I’m one, too—five years ahead of you, though.”
He led the way to a small bedroom on the second floor, whose windows framed at the moment the ruddy winter sunset. The room was severely simple, its woodwork white and scrupulously clean, the furniture limited to essentials.
“The best thing about the room is the view,” observed Stoddard and in a moment he had gone, for it was the hour of vespers and the brothers were already assembling in the little chapel below.
Wayne turned gloomily from the window.
“Stung! Kidnapped and smuggled into a monastery! Well, Jimmy Paddock, you have your nerve! It’s all right with me, but how about that big fellow—what is he, the abbot?—if he knew what an outlaw had got into his joint he’d probably drop me into the valley down there. Are you going to leave me here alone with nothing to do but say my prayers?”
“Sorry I’ve got to go, but I’m off to-night.”
“So you’ve brought me here to lose me! How long am I in for?”
“You can leave any time you want to and you can do as you please while you’re here, just as Stoddard told you.”
“Thank you,” mocked Wayne. “I’m going to fool you by staying.”
The novelty of his situation, the strangeness of the life of a religious house, and the quiet good fellowship of the men who gathered at the common table of the refectory, clad in their brown robes, interested Wayne in spite of himself. The brothers were all young graduates of American colleges, vigorous, manly fellows, who did not discuss religion to-night, but social and political questions just then before the world. Stoddard asked Paddock for an account of his own work at Ironstead and the minister described the general social conditions of Pittsburg, throwing out questions to bring Wayne into the talk.
Wayne’s presence was accepted as a matter of course; no particular importance attached to him as a guest, and he had not for a long time felt so wholly at ease as among these young priests, whose aims were utterly different from any idea he had ever entertained of religious work. There were only ten of them and they had assembled for a period of rest and discussion with their leader before separating to continue their work in various parts of the country immediately after Christmas. One of the brothers who particularly attracted Wayne had been a sailor. He had spent his summers sailing in coastwise ships to earn his way through college. Another had been a ranchman in Colorado and was to leave shortly for work in Montana. At the end of the meal as at the beginning they stood in their places and recited prayers, making the sign of the cross. All but Stoddard, the Superior, went about their affairs at once. He asked his guests into the library, a comfortable lounging room where they continued the talk of the table until a brother appeared to carry Paddock to the station.
Wayne rode down with them, returning to what seemed to be a deserted house; but as he stood uncertainly in the hall he heard from the little oratory the deep voice of Stoddard reciting compline. He went to the door and peered in upon the brothers at prayer. The room was quite dark and there were no lights for this service on the tiny altar. Stoddard’s voice boomed through the little chapel; the kneeling priests in the rough choir stalls responded in the antiphonals with deep, hearty voices. There was nothing spectacular or theatrical in the scene; the setting was too bare for this; and these men, Wayne reflected, were seriously commending their souls to the mercy and protection of a God in whom he did not believe. He went out into the night and followed the rough road that climbed farther into the mountains, pausing now and then, where breaks in the woodland offered clear, moonlit vistas, to gaze across the valley to the hills beyond.
In the depression following his latest plunge into the depths, while his head ached and his hands shook, a dark thought had crossed his mind and it came back upon him now. A slip on the edge of one of these iron crags and he would crash into oblivion, and that would be the end of his troubles. If Paddock had lodged him here with the idea that he might be won to a belief in religion he had made a stupid blunder. The religion of emotion might in certain circumstances have appealed to Wayne Craighill, but the religion of service as practised by Stoddard and Paddock struck him as vain and futile.
The road followed a sharp defile and the sheer depths below invited him. It would be quite decent of him to free the world of his wretched self, that had given him no joy and that had become a byword and a hissing wherever his name was known. He wondered why he had delayed so long. Life was a prison-house and the labour was hard; below, there in the snowy ravine, lay peace. He stopped abruptly by a clump of cedars, clutched them and bent over to scan the depths. He could see no bottom, and the place was so lone that they might not find him when it was over. He felt that he had never before been so wholly master of himself, and the thought steadied him; if he had ever been sane it was now, when he was about to take French leave of a dreary and unprofitable world. The moon looked down upon him coldly; the snow-clad hills were indifferent; the wind lay still, waiting for this life to slip away like a pebble into the gorge. The place was fitting; he chose his spot and made ready for the leap.
Steps sounded behind him as of someone walking, but whoever came moved deliberately along the shoulder of the hill toward the top. There was no reason for delaying; ample time remained in which to step into the gorge and be done with it. Wayne clung stubbornly to the slippery edge; but the moments passed. The tall figure of Stoddard, the priest, drew nearer, his head bowed and his arms folded under a long cloak. His shovel hat gave a bizarre note to his costume. He gained the crown of the ridge and lifted his head.
“Ah, you came out to watch the moon to bed! That, Mr. Craighill, is my own privilege.”
Wayne stood doggedly by the ravine edge. It was on his lips to berate the priest for appearing at this crucial moment, and Stoddard’s calm manner angered him.
“This is the best view possible anywhere about here,” the priest continued. “You have an eye for landscape, but the wind is rising; let us walk on into the wood and get away from it.”
“Father Stoddard, you have done me an injury. If I had not heard your step when I did I should be lying at the bottom of the gap.”
The reaction had been sudden and he was all unstrung. His voice was strange in his own ears.
“Oh! You had intended doing that? I really can’t believe it.”
“You might as well believe it; it is quite true,” persisted Wayne, irritably.
“Those things do occur to all of us sometimes,” replied the priest calmly. “But in your own case it is quite impossible. I advise you to dismiss the matter from your mind.”
“I tell you I was going to do it; a second more and I should have been a dead man.”
The priest readjusted his cloak, throwing an end over his shoulder.
“Well, why don’t you go ahead?” he remarked carelessly. “I give you my word I shall never mention it. But see—you haven’t the will to do it. You yielded yourself for a moment to the absurd hallucination that your life was a complete and finished thing, but it is not; I take it upon myself, my dear Craighill, to say that it is not. There are many rough edges; the design is incomplete. You will have to wait a little, my friend. The will of God has not had its divine way with you yet.”
“The will of God!” cried Wayne, hardly knowing in his anger that he was following the priest away from the precipice; “do you think I believe any of that rot?”
“Then,” the tall priest replied, speaking brusquely, as was his way, “we will say the way of the devil, if that pleases your humour better. The devil, then, hasn’t made a very good job of you yet. He has his sense of artistic completeness, and he can hardly look upon you as one of his chefs d’œuvre. Even the devil requires time. It doesn’t strike me off-hand, from my observation of his patterns, that he’s made much headway with you. He would undoubtedly accomplish more in time; but you are not ready for his collection yet. Let’s continue our walk. We must have a good many ideas in common. In your day at St. John’s did they afflict you with roast veal every Thursday? They did in my time and it was always a trial to me. I remember——”
A light way, indeed, to treat the heroic impulse of a man ready, a moment before, to plunge into the dark; but Paul Stoddard was not without his wisdom.
He wrote a note to Paddock that night in which he said: “Craighill is a good fellow and there is hope for him. He is a man in search of his own soul and he will find it in time. Pray for him.”
The days passed. At the end of a week Wayne expected to leave; but the freedom and peace were sweet. He was enjoying a luxury of unhappiness. Christmas came, but it brought him no joy, only unhappy memories. He kept clear of the oratory, where the recitation of offices was interminable. The priests were happy souls to be able to believe in such things! Brother Azarius, the sailor, asked him to walk to the village for the mail after the midday meal, which was amplified into a feast by gifts from the farmers of the valley. A novel Christmas this, for Wayne Craighill, dining with priests in a mountain monastery, but they were cheerful, wholesome fellows and he liked their talk, which was utterly unaffected and interesting. He set out with Brother Azarius for the village in the valley soon after dinner. When the mail-bag was handed out at the general store Wayne felt a pang of homesickness—his first—at beholding this tie between the quiet hills and the throbbing world below. He had sent no message of any kind to Fanny, who had always included him in the Christmas celebrations at her house; she was still South when he left and unless Wingfield had told her, she did not know his whereabouts. He wrote a telegram in the railway station wishing her and her household a merry Christmas. “Don’t trouble about me; I am perfectly well.”
He began a message to his father, paused uncertainly when he had written the address, and tore it up, the old resentment on fire again. He left the station but paused in the highway and went back. “Best wishes for a happy Christmas,” he wrote to Jean at her boarding-house address. He could not for the life of him add a word to this, though he wasted half a dozen blanks in futile trials, while Brother Azarius tramped up and down the station platform. Poor Wayne! Too bad life isn’t all spelled out in the nursery picture books that we might know the worst at the beginning and be done with it! It was well that Brother Azarius had that capital story of his shipwreck off Martinique up his sleeve for emergencies like this or Wayne might have found the memory of Jean’s hand on his cheek too much for him—that dear, brave hand that had known labour!
The brothers cut their own fuel and the next morning he found an axe and plunged into the snowy wood. The priests had scattered widely and only two remained at the house. Stoddard had gone West to be absent a month, but Wayne was beginning to enjoy his security and isolation.
By noon he had blistered his hands, but he kept manfully at work. In a few days he had developed skill and viewed the increase in his daily product with satisfaction. His bodily health had never been so good. At times he was almost happy and went whistling about his work. This was what Jean had told him to do: find labour with his hands. And all these days Jean was never out of his thoughts, never out of his heart.
So the weeks passed and Wayne lingered at the House of Peace, taking long walks over the hills; talking with the brothers, whose circle changed frequently; felling trees in the snowy wood, and performing such other manual labour as offered. He saw the earliest vanguard of spring steal into the hills, resisted, flung back, but camping at last on the summits, smiling conquerors. He watched the swelling buds and bore proudly home the first furtive arbutus. His blood was purified, his spirit lightened in the lustral air. He read much, sending away for books and periodicals; he wrote letters to Jean and tore them up; he brooded, pondered, wondered, and walked the ridges with the stars.
One evening, near the end of April, Stoddard, who had just returned after a long absence, came into his room.
“I’m sorry, Craighill, but your time is up. You must go home to-morrow.”
“But I’m not ready to leave yet! If you’ll let me go on chopping wood and carrying water I’d like to stay. I’m a failure down below there—I don’t want to go back; I can’t go back.”
“That is good; I’m glad you feel that way about it.”
“I can’t lie to you: I don’t believe in God. You’ve done a good deal for me and I see things better; but I’m likely to stumble and fall again the day I leave here.”
“That is quite likely, as you say,” said the priest. “There may be some further struggles and difficulties; your old friend the devil isn’t so easily shaken off; he has the pride of his craftsmanship, as I told you the night you came. There are some men who, if they asked to be allowed to remain here permanently to escape the dangers and temptations of the world, I should not refuse. I should feel that way in the case of weaklings, failures or cowards; but you are different, Craighill. You do not fall within these classifications. The House of Peace is not for you; you’ve got to go back into the world to wrestle with it, to get under the devil’s heels perhaps, but to find your feet finally and in time to become a man, honoured, respected and loved by men. I am not a prophet, and have no knowledge of your future that I don’t read in yourself; but I am not alone in my feeling about you. These members of the Brotherhood see and feel it and they are, you may say, experts in cases like yours. Without trying, you have made them like you. We are all your friends. You don’t believe in God—the God we preach—and I’m not going to discuss that with you. It is barely possible that you are incapable of belief; but those things are a good deal a matter of phrases and words. No two men of our brotherhood have exactly the same idea of the person of God. No two souls are just alike any more than the eyes of two persons respond to the same test. When I read I am obliged to use a pair of glasses which would probably blind you utterly and it would be absurd for me to force you to use them. And it is equally far from my intention to force my religious ideas upon you.”
Wayne was silent for what seemed a long time, for he was half-ashamed of the question he wished to ask.
“How did it happen that you found me that first night when I was actually at the point of tumbling over the cliff out yonder?”
“My dear Craighill, I wish you wouldn’t ask me hard questions like that,” laughed the big priest. “You may call that chance, if you please. I did not follow you by intention, or know as a matter of fact that you had gone in that direction.” Stoddard was silent for a moment; then he laughed happily. “You don’t believe in my God, you tell me, but, my dear fellow, I believe in yours!”
Wayne’s hand shook as he drew it across his face.
“Don’t send me away from here,” he pleaded huskily.
“This isn’t the place for you, my brother, my friend. The world isn’t wholly bad—not by any means—you must go back to it,” said Stoddard kindly. “If you feel at any time that I can help you, send for me; the doors of this house are open to you day and night. We are often widely scattered—only one brother remains here always and you can come at any time without notice. But to-morrow you must go back and take your place in the ranks of the fighting men.”
The priest rose. For a moment he rested his hands lightly on Wayne’s shoulders.
“Good night. God bless you, Wayne Craighill.”
Wayne returned immediately to Pittsburg and to his father’s house. Mrs. Blair, to whom he reported promptly by telephone, greeted him in her usual excited fashion, but, having been charged by Wingfield, through her husband, not to force Wayne to discuss his banishment, she was obliged to forego the pleasure of acquainting herself with her brother’s experience of the monastic life. His Christmas gifts from her house were still piled on his dressing-table where he found also the haberdashery his father always bestowed upon him; and there was a book inscribed “Addie to Wayne, Christmas, 1907.” His father greeted him with that urbane tolerance with which Wayne had long been familiar. The prodigal’s place at the table was waiting, and no painful questions were asked as to the cause of his absence. Mrs. Craighill showed her brightest face, and no chance visitor would have known that the son of the house had last appeared in it on the eve of a prolonged spree. There was no exchange of confidences, no confessions, no exhortations behind closed doors. Colonel Craighill talked of social affairs and of the events of the new year, and Wayne added a word now and then when Addie’s eyes beseeched his. He was sorry for Addie, who did not know or care what progress was making in disarmament or whether the African slave traffic had really been abolished.
The ways that had known Wayne knew him again. He returned to the office, where little had changed; he met Wingfield at the Club and learned all the gossip of the city. Walsh, in his glass cage, discussed the profits of the mercantile company, and brought Wayne to date as to the financial situation, over which he growled characteristically. He answered Wayne’s questions as to Colonel Craighill’s affairs guardedly, but from his manner Wayne assumed the worst. Walsh was reluctant to discuss these matters, but he proposed, in his usual blunt fashion, that Wayne join him in the management of the mercantile company.
“I’ve got too much to do down here. You can name your own salary, and create your own job. We can double the territory we work now and it would be a big help to me to have you. You’ve got your oats sowed now and when I curl up with apoplexy some day you will be ready to continue the business at the old stand.”
Wayne, touched by the old fellow’s generosity, asked a day or two to think it over.
From Paddock, who called on him at the Craighill offices, Wayne learned that Joe had recovered and had found employment with a sporting goods house; but he asked no questions and Jean’s name was not spoken.
It was finally agreed that on the first of May Wayne should assume an active part in the management of the mercantile company; but Wayne’s life was not so easily to be brought to tranquil waters, as we shall see.