The American Mercury, June 1924
I
There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still
of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and
long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord.
Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path
by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that
made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the
voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg’s Drug Store
when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the
soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap
desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from
hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the
other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward
before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the
summer moon.
But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o’clock. From
his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the
Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which
in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque
labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.
One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs
down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful,
intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a
patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy.
This was to conceal his relief that some one had come into his haunted room.
Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two
enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment
their expression startled him — then he saw that his visitor was in a state of
abject fear.
“Your mouth is trembling,” said Father Schwartz, in a haggard
voice.
The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.
“Are you in trouble?” asked Father Schwartz, sharply. “Take your
hand away from your mouth and tell me what’s the matter.”
The boy — Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a
parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent — moved his hand reluctantly off his
mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper.
“Father Schwartz — I’ve committed a terrible sin.”
“A sin against purity?”
“No, Father . . . worse.”
Father Schwartz’s body jerked sharply.
“Have you killed somebody?”
“No — but I’m afraid — ” the voice rose to a shrill whimper.
“Do you want to go to confession?”
The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared
his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind thing.
In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act like God. He
repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in return God would help
him to act correctly.
“Tell me what you’ve done,” said his new soft voice.
The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured
by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created.
Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller began
to tell his story.
“On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to
confession, because I hadn’t been for a month, and the family they go every
week, and I hadn’t been. So I just as leave go, I didn’t care. So I put it off
till after supper because I was playing with a bunch of kids and father asked
me if I went, and I said ‘no,’ and he took me by the neck and he said ‘You go
now,’ so I said ‘All right,’ so I went over to church. And he yelled after me:
‘Don’t come back till you go.’. ..”
II
"On Saturday, Three Days Ago."
The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal
creases, leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man’s old shoe. Behind the
curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz,
priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet,
broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question.
Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and
waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was being said
within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him. His own turn came
next, and the three or four others who waited might listen unscrupulously while
he admitted his violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.
Rudolph had never committed adultery, nor even coveted his
neighbor’s wife — but it was the confession of the associate sins that was
particularly hard to contemplate. In comparison he relished the less shameful
fallings away —they formed a grayish background which relieved the ebony mark
of sexual offenses upon his soul.
He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his
refusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him in turn,
when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional made him sink his
face precipitately into the crook of his elbow. Fear assumed solid form, and
pressed out a lodging between his heart and his lungs. He must try now with all
his might to be sorry for his sins — not because he was afraid, but because he
had offended God. He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must
first convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a
tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by allowing no
other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this state of emotion
unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set on end, he would have
survived another crisis in his religious life.
For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed
him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother that he
had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfortunately, involved
the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative he could say that he had
gone to confession, but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for
communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and
he would crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.
Again Father Schwartz’s voice became audible.
“And for your — ”
The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly to
his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession this
afternoon. He hesitated tensely. Then from the confessional came a tap, a
creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the plush curtain
trembled. Temptation had come to him too late. . . .
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . . I confess to Almighty
God and to you, Father, that I have sinned. . . . Since my last confession it
has been one month and three days. . . . I accuse myself of— taking the Name of
the Lord in vain . . . .”
This was an easy sin. His curses had been but bravado — telling of
them was little less than a brag.
“ . . . of being mean to an old lady.”
The wan shadow moved a little on the latticed slat.
“How, my child?”
“Old lady Swenson,” Rudolph’s murmur soared jubilantly. “She got
our baseball that we knocked in her window, and she wouldn’t give it back, so
we yelled ‘Twenty-three, Skidoo,’ at her all afternoon. Then about five o’clock
she had a fit, and they had to have the doctor.”
“Go on, my child.”
“Of — of not believing I was the son of my parents.”
“What?” The interrogation was distinctly startled.
“Of not believing that I was the son of my parents.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, just pride,” answered the penitent airily.
“You mean you thought you were too good to be the son of your
parents?”
“Yes, Father.” On a less jubilant note.
“Go on.”
“Of being disobedient and calling my mother names. Of slandering
people behind my back. Of smoking — ”
Rudolph had now exhausted the minor offenses, and was approaching
the sins it was agony to tell. He held his fingers against his face like bars
as if to press out between them the shame in his heart.
“Of dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires,” he whispered
very low.
“How often?”
“I don’t know.”
“Once a week? Twice a week?”
“Twice a week.”
“Did you yield to these desires?”
“No, Father.”
“Were you alone when you had them?”
“No, Father. I was with two boys and a girl.”
“Don’t you know, my child, that you should avoid the occasions of
sin as well as the sin itself? Evil companionship leads to evil desires and
evil desires to evil actions. Where were you when this happened?”
“In a barn in back of — ”
“I don’t want to hear any names,” interrupted the priest sharply.
“Well, it was up in the loft of this barn and this girl and — a
fella, they were saying things — saying immodest things, and I stayed.”
“You should have gone — you should have told the girl to go.”
He should have gone! He could not tell Father Schwartz how his
pulse had bumped in his wrist, how a strange, romantic excitement had possessed
him when those curious things had been said. Perhaps in the houses of
delinquency among the dull and hard-eyed incorrigible girls can be found those
for whom has burned the whitest fire.
“Have you anything else to tell me?”
“I don’t think so, Father.”
Rudolph felt a great relief. Perspiration had broken out under his
tight-pressed fingers.
“Have you told any lies?”
The question startled him. Like all those who habitually and
instinctively lie, he had an enormous respect and awe for the truth. Something
almost exterior to himself dictated a quick, hurt answer.
“Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies.”
For a moment, like the commoner in the king’s chair, he tasted the
pride of the situation. Then as the priest began to murmur conventional
admonitions he realized that in heroically denying he had told lies, he had
committed a terrible sin— he had told a lie in confession.
In automatic response to Father Schwartz’s “Make an act of
contrition,” he began to repeat aloud meaninglessly:
“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . . ”
He must fix this now — it was a bad mistake — but as his teeth
shut on the last words of his prayer there was a sharp sound, and the slat was
closed.
A minute later when he emerged into the twilight the relief in
coming from the muggy church into an open world of wheat and sky postponed the
full realization of what he had done. Instead of worrying he took a deep breath
of the crisp air and began to say over and over to himself the words
“Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!”
Blatchford Sarnemington was himself, and these words were in
effect a lyric. When he became Blatchford Sarnemington a suave nobility flowed
from him. Blatchford Sarnemington lived in great sweeping triumphs. When
Rudolph half closed his eyes it meant that Blatchford had established dominance
over him and, as he went by, there were envious mutters in the air: “Blatchford
Sarnemington! There goes Blatchford Sarnemington.”
He was Blatchford now for a while as he strutted homeward along
the staggering road, but when the road braced itself in macadam in order to
become the main street of Ludwig, Rudolph’s exhilaration faded out and his mind
cooled, and he felt the horror of his lie. God, of course, already knew of it —
but Rudolph reserved a corner of his mind where he was safe from God, where he
prepared the subterfuges with which he often tricked God. Hiding now in this
corner he considered how he could best avoid the consequences of his
misstatement.
At all costs he must avoid communion next day. The risk of
angering God to such an extent was too great. He would have to drink water “by
accident” in the morning, and thus, in accordance with a church law, render
himself unfit to receive communion that day. In spite of its flimsiness this
subterfuge was the most feasible that occurred to him. He accepted its risks
and was concentrating on how best to put it into effect, as he turned the
corner by Romberg’s Drug Store and came in sight of his father’s house.
III
Rudolph’s father, the local freight-agent, had floated with the
second wave of German and Irish stock to the Minnesota-Dakota country.
Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man of energy in that
day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable of establishing either with
his superiors or his subordinates the reputation for approximate immutability
which is essential to success in a hierarchic industry. Somewhat gross, he was,
nevertheless, insufficiently hard-headed and unable to take fundamental
relationships for granted, and this inability made him suspicious, unrestful,
and continually dismayed.
His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman
Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill.
Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient —
the sense of things, the feel of things, the hint of rain in the wind on the cheek.
Miller’s mind worked late on the old decisions of other men, and he had never
in his life felt the balance of any single thing in his hands. His weary,
sprightly, undersized body was growing old in Hill’s gigantic shadow. For
twenty years he had lived alone with Hill’s name and God.
On Sunday morning Carl Miller awoke in the dustless quiet of six
o’clock. Kneeling by the side of the bed he bent his yellow-gray hair and the
full dapple bangs of his mustache into the pillow, and prayed for several minutes.
Then he drew off his night-shirt — like the rest of his generation he had never
been able to endure pajamas — and clothed his thin, white, hairless body in
woollen underwear.
He shaved. Silence in the other bedroom where his wife lay
nervously asleep. Silence from the screened-off corner of the hall where his
son’s cot stood, and his son slept among his Alger books, his collection of
cigar-bands, his mothy pennants — “Cornell,” “Hamlin,” and “Greetings from
Pueblo, New Mexico” — and the other possessions of his private life. From
outside Miller could hear the shrill birds and the whirring movement of the
poultry, and, as an undertone, the low, swelling click-a-tick of the
six-fifteen through-train for Montana and the green coast beyond. Then as the
cold water dripped from the wash-rag in his hand he raised his head suddenly —
he had heard a furtive sound from the kitchen below.
He dried his razor hastily, slipped his dangling suspenders to his
shoulder, and listened. Some one was walking in the kitchen, and he knew by the
light footfall that it was not his wife. With his mouth faintly ajar he ran
quickly down the stairs and opened the kitchen door.
Standing by the sink, with one hand on the still dripping faucet
and the other clutching a full glass of water, stood his son. The boy’s eyes,
still heavy with sleep, met his father’s with a frightened, reproachful beauty.
He was barefooted, and his pajamas were rolled up at the knees and sleeves.
For a moment they both remained motionless — Carl Miller’s brow went
down and his son’s went up, as though they were striking a balance between the
extremes of emotion which filled them. Then the bangs of the parent’s moustache
descended portentously until they obscured his mouth, and he gave a short
glance around to see if anything had been disturbed.
The kitchen was garnished with sunlight which beat on the pans and
made the smooth boards of the floor and table yellow and clean as wheat. It was
the center of the house where the fire burned and the tins fitted into tins
like toys, and the steam whistled all day on a thin pastel note. Nothing was
moved, nothing touched — except the faucet where beads of water still formed
and dripped with a white flash into the sink below.
“What are you doing?”
“I got awful thirsty, so I thought I’d just come down and get — ”
“I thought you were going to communion.”
A look of vehement astonishment spread over his son’s face.
“I forgot all about it.”
“Have you drunk any water?”
“No — ”
As the word left his mouth Rudolph knew it was the wrong answer,
but the faded indignant eyes facing him had signalled up the truth before the
boy’s will could act. He realized, too, that he should never have come
downstairs; some vague necessity for verisimilitude had made him want to leave
a wet glass as evidence by the sink; the honesty of his imagination had
betrayed him.
“Pour it out,” commanded his father, “that water!”
Rudolph despairingly inverted the tumbler.
“What’s the matter with you, anyways?” demanded Miller angrily.
“Nothing.”
“Did you go to confession yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Then why were you going to drink water?”
“I don’t know — I forgot.”
“Maybe you care more about being a little bit thirsty than you do
about your religion.”
“I forgot.” Rudolph could feel the tears straining in his eyes.
“That’s no answer.”
“Well, I did.”
“You better look out!” His father held to a high, persistent,
inquisitory note: “If you’re so forgetful that you can’t remember your religion
something better be done about it.”
Rudolph filled a sharp pause with:
“I can remember it all right.”
“First you begin to neglect your religion,” cried his father,
fanning his own fierceness, “the next thing you’ll begin to lie and steal, and
the next thing is the reform school!”
Not even this familiar threat could deepen the abyss that Rudolph
saw before him. He must either tell all now, offering his body for what he knew
would be a ferocious beating, or else tempt the thunderbolts by receiving the
Body and Blood of Christ with sacrilege upon his soul. And of the two the
former seemed more terrible — it was not so much the beating he dreaded as the
savage ferocity, outlet of the ineffectual man, which would lie behind it.
“Put down that glass and go up-stairs and dress!” his father
ordered, “and when we get to church, before you go to communion, you better
kneel down and ask God to forgive you for your carelessness.”
Some accidental emphasis in the phrasing of this command acted
like a catalytic agent on the confusion and terror of Rudolph’s mind. A wild,
proud anger rose in him, and he dashed the tumbler passionately into the sink.
His father uttered a strained, husky sound, and sprang for him.
Rudolph dodged to the side, tipped over a chair, and tried to get beyond the
kitchen table. He cried out sharply when a hand grasped his pajama shoulder,
then he felt the dull impact of a fist against the side of his head, and
glancing blows on the upper part of his body. As he slipped here and there in
his father’s grasp, dragged or lifted when he clung instinctively to an arm,
aware of sharp smarts and strains, he made no sound except that he laughed
hysterically several times. Then in less than a minute the blows abruptly
ceased. After a lull during which Rudolph was tightly held, and during which
they both trembled violently and uttered strange, truncated words, Carl Miller
half dragged, half threatened his son up-stairs.
“Put on your clothes!”
Rudolph was now both hysterical and cold. His head hurt him, and
there was a long, shallow scratch on his neck from his father’s finger-nail,
and he sobbed and trembled as he dressed. He was aware of his mother standing
at the doorway in a wrapper, her wrinkled face compressing and squeezing and
opening out into new series of wrinkles which floated and eddied from neck to
brow. Despising her nervous ineffectuality and avoiding her rudely when she
tried to touch his neck with witch-hazel, he made a hasty, choking toilet. Then
he followed his father out of the house and along the road toward the Catholic
church.
IV
They walked without speaking except when Carl Miller acknowledged
automatically the existence of passers-by. Rudolph’s uneven breathing alone
ruffled the hot Sunday silence.
His father stopped decisively at the door of the church.
“I’ve decided you’d better go to confession again. Go in and tell
Father Schwartz what you did and ask God’s pardon.”
“You lost your temper, too!” said Rudolph quickly.
Carl Miller took a step toward his son, who moved cautiously
backward.
“All right, I’ll go.”
“Are you going to do what I say?” cried his father in a hoarse
whisper.
“All right.”
Rudolph walked into the church, and for the second time in two
days entered the confessional and knelt down. The slat went up almost at once.
“I accuse myself of missing my morning prayers.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
A maudlin exultation filled him. Not easily ever again would he be
able to put an abstraction before the necessities of his ease and pride. An
invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware of his isolation —
aware that it applied not only to those moments when he was Blatchford
Sarnemington but that it applied to all his inner life. Hitherto such phenomena
as “crazy” ambitions and petty shames and fears had been but private
reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of his official soul. Now he
realized unconsciously that his private reservations were himself — and all the
rest a garnished front and a conventional flag. The pressure of his environment
had driven him into the lonely secret road of adolescence.
He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt
up — when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the seat — and
tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge. Beside him his father
prayed that God would forgive Rudolph, and asked also that his own outbreak of
temper would be pardoned. He glanced sidewise at his son, and was relieved to
see that the strained, wild look had gone from his face and that he had ceased
sobbing. The Grace of God, inherent in the Sacrament, would do the rest, and
perhaps after Mass everything would be better. He was proud of Rudolph in his
heart, and beginning to be truly as well as formally sorry for what he had
done.
Usually, the passing of the collection box was a significant point
for Rudolph in the services. If, as was often the case, he had no money to drop
in he would be furiously ashamed and bow his head and pretend not to see the
box, lest Jeanne Brady in the pew behind should take notice and suspect an
acute family poverty. But to-day he glanced coldly into it as it skimmed under
his eyes, noting with casual interest the large number of pennies it contained.
When the bell rang for communion, however, he quivered. There was
no reason why God should not stop his heart. During the past twelve hours he
had committed a series of mortal sins increasing in gravity, and he was now to
crown them all with a blasphemous sacrilege.
“Domini, non sum dignus; ut interes sub tectum meum; sed tantum
dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. . . . “
There was a rustle in the pews, and the communicants worked their
ways into the aisle with downcast eyes and joined hands. Those of larger piety
pressed together their finger-tips to form steeples. Among these latter was
Carl Miller. Rudolph followed him toward the altar-rail and knelt down,
automatically taking up the napkin under his chin. The bell rang sharply, and
the priest turned from the altar with the white Host held above the chalice:
“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam
aeternam.”
A cold sweat broke out on Rudolph’s forehead as the communion
began. Along the line Father Schwartz moved, and with gathering nausea Rudolph
felt his heart-valves weakening at the will of God. It seemed to him that the
church was darker and that a great quiet had fallen, broken only by the
inarticulate mumble which announced the approach of the Creator of Heaven and
Earth. He dropped his head down between his shoulders and waited for the blow.
Then he felt a sharp nudge in his side. His father was poking him
to sit up, not to slump against the rail; the priest was only two places away.
“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam
aeternam.”
Rudolph opened his mouth. He felt the sticky wax taste of the
wafer on his tongue. He remained motionless for what seemed an interminable
period of time, his head still raised, the wafer undissolved in his mouth. Then
again he started at the pressure of his father’s elbow, and saw that the people
were falling away from the altar like leaves and turning with blind downcast
eyes to their pews, alone with God.
Rudolph was alone with himself, drenched with perspiration and
deep in mortal sin. As he walked back to his pew the sharp taps of his cloven
hoofs were loud upon the floor, and he knew that it was a dark poison he
carried in his heart.
V
"Sagitta Volante in Dei"
The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes
that sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his sin to
Father Schwartz — and the square of sunshine in which he sat had moved forward
half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become less frightened now; once eased
of the story a reaction had set in. He knew that as long as he was in the room
with this priest God would not stop his heart, so he sighed and sat quietly,
waiting for the priest to speak.
Father Schwartz’s cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet
pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless
vines and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked insistently toward
sunset, and from the ugly room and from the afternoon outside the window arose
a stiff monotony, shattered now and then by the reverberate clapping of a
far-away hammer on the dry air. The priest’s nerves were strung thin and the
beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt
of his table top. He could not remember now what it was he should say.
Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of
this little boy’s eyes — the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them
reluctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more.
For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited,
and the priest struggled to remember something that was slipping farther and
farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken house. Then Father
Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar voice:
“When a lot of people get together in the best places things go
glimmering.”
Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz’s face.
“I said — ” began the priest, and paused, listening. “Do you hear
the hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that’s no good. The thing
is to have a lot of people in the center of the world, wherever that happens to
be. Then” — his watery eyes widened knowingly — “things go glimmering.”
“Yes, Father,” agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?”
“Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while,” answered
Rudolph nervously, “but I don’t think that’s a very good ambition, so I think
I’ll be an actor or a Navy officer.”
Again the priest stared at him.
“I see exactly what you mean,” he said, with a fierce air.
Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the
implication that he had, he became more uneasy.
“This man is crazy,” he thought, “and I’m scared of him. He wants
me to help him out some way, and I don’t want to.”
“You look as if things went glimmering,” cried Father Schwartz
wildly. “Did you ever go to a party?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And did you notice that everybody was properly dressed? That’s
what I mean. Just as you went into the party there was a moment when everybody
was properly dressed. Maybe two little girls were standing by the door and some
boys were leaning over the banisters, and there were bowls around full of
flowers.”
“I’ve been to a lot of parties,” said Rudolph, rather relieved
that the conversation had taken this turn.
“Of course,” continued Father Schwartz triumphantly, “I knew you’d
agree with me. But my theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in
the best places things go glimmering all the time.”
Rudolph found himself thinking of Blatchford Sarnemington.
“Please listen to me!” commanded the priest impatiently. “Stop
worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on
the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?”
Rudolph had not the faintest idea what Father Schwartz was talking
about, but he nodded and the priest nodded back at him and returned to his
mysterious preoccupation.
“Why,” he cried, “they have lights now as big as stars — do you
realize that? I heard of one light they had in Paris or somewhere that was as
big as a star. A lot of people had it — a lot of gay people. They have all
sorts of things now that you never dreamed of.”
“Look here — ” He came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew away,
so Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his eyes dried out and
hot. “Did you ever see an amusement park?”
“No, Father.”
“Well, go and see an amusement park.” The priest waved his hand
vaguely. “It’s a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at
night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place — under dark trees.
You’ll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide
shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of
peanuts — and everything will twinkle. But it won’t remind you of anything, you
see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon — like
a big yellow lantern on a pole.”
Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.
“But don’t get up close,” he warned Rudolph, “because if you do
you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.”
All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph,
because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes
open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt
that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably
gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God. He no longer thought that
God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood
that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening
up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud. At the
moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pennon had flapped out
into the breeze somewhere and there had been the crunch of leather and the
shine of silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green
hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breastplates like the picture at
home of the German cuirassiers at Sedan.
But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken
words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open
window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz collapsed
precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back against a chair.
“Oh, my God!” he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the
floor.
Then a human oppression rose from the priest’s worn clothes, and
mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp
cry and ran in a panic from the house — while the collapsed man lay there quite
still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded
with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of laughter.
Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and
girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields,
calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in the lines
between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the
necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had
burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the
land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the
farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.