No One Hears but Him Read online

  His father had never mentioned taxes. Washington was so far away it was almost a myth. The Fourth of July was an occasion to gather in the park to hear the German band, and then to eat from the fat picnic baskets and listen to the orators and to stand and sing patriotic songs and wave small flags. And then the home-going, happily weary and surfeited with ice cream and fried chicken, in the warm dusk with the birds sleepily cheeping in the trees, and windows lighting up along the street, and hot cocoa and cookies in prospect and then his bed, tucked away safely for the night. Of what did his parents speak?

  Of the Depot. Of neighbors. Of the minister’s sermon last Sunday. Of the need to cut the grass; of the new baby down the street, of fellow-workers and their wives and children, of the worry over their own parents, of hopes of their own. Above all, of their innocent faith in God and the acceptance of everything He was pleased to send them, whether good or distressing. He could hear his young parents’ voices so clearly far over the arch of the decades. His mother was annoyed that the sponge cake had fallen today, and that the milk had soured too early. He heard his father laugh at her lovingly, and kiss her. They talked then of the raise he expected after Christmas, and what they would do with the money, besides saving some of it. But there was no talk of taxes, of deductions, of juvenile delinquents a mile away, of “misunderstood” girls who had “made a mistake.” (One didn’t mention such girls; he had never known such a one in his youth; they were not only unmentionable, they were unspeakable.) There was no frantic conversation concerning a new gadget which a contemptuous neighbor was loftily showing to her envious friends, no insistence that his mother should have the same. There was no fast and jerky talk from his father, full of greed that others had more than he nor any resentment against fellow-workers or derision for “the boss.” The planning for the future was certain and contented. Harry would have the best education his parents could afford. Harry would marry and give them grandchildren. Harry would walk humbly with his God, and in safety and in peace. In the meantime the roof was sound above them all, and the old walls sheltering.

  There was no war. There was no clangor, no shrilling, no beat of undisciplined feet, no slogans, no hot wearinesses of the uncontrolled, no anarchy, neither of the body nor the mind, no lawlessness of spirit. No rootlessness, no running to-and-fro to nowhere.

  Am I sure? the minister asked himself, and for the first time in many days the answer returned to him: You are sure. It was so.

  If so, then what had happened to the world? Why had it become—what was the graphic word?—sleazy, in the old meaning of the word: raveled, cheap, second-rate, flimsy, gaudy, without strength.

  Suddenly the minister heard his young mother singing her favorite hymn to him as sweetly and as confidently as he had heard it in his childhood:

  “Long have I loved Thee, Lord!

  Long through my days.

  Long have I loved Thee, Lord!

  In all my ways.

  “Dark though the nights at times,

  And sad and forlorn,

  But long have I loved Thee, Lord!

  And bided the morn.”

  Long have I loved Thee, Lord, thought the minister. But somewhere we parted, didn’t we? Was it my fault, as they say it is? Is that why I don’t hear You any longer?

  He heard a soft chime, insistent, as if questioning, and he started and looked about him. He was alone. So the chime had sounded for him, and he stood and hesitated again, sadly wondering if the man who waited there had any answer for him. What if he were a clergyman also, but of another kind than himself? Then there would be only renewed confusion, more distress, more uncertainty, and more despair.

  He went into the other room. He was not surprised by its gleaming yet gentle austerity, for someone—who?—had told him what was there, white marble walls indirectly lighted, a white marble chair with a blue cushion, and a great blue alcove behind the draperies of which waited the good man who listened so patiently and gave good advice. A little confidence returned to the tired minister.

  “Good evening,” he said in his great voice, which needed no amplification in his large wooden church.

  No one replied to his greeting, but the minister was sure he could sense a presence behind the curtains. He felt no hurt that no one had replied to him. He sat down in the chair and gazed at the intense blueness that shielded the alcove.

  “I’ve heard that you are a fellow-clergyman,” he said. “I hope so. Only one of us can help the other now, isn’t that so? We should have a union of sorts, shouldn’t we?” His laugh was deep and sincere. “Oh, my name. The Reverend Mr. Henry Blackstone. Or, as my younger parishioners call me, ‘Hell-fire Harry.’ That should reveal a lot to you!”

  He laughed again, but there was more sadness in his laughter than amusement. “Perhaps you’ll call me that, yourself. And maybe I’ll deserve it. I don’t know, and that’s the trouble. Is the world out of joint—or is it I alone? I—I have some friends in the clergy. Smart and keen and aware. They don’t have the highest opinion in the world of me. If they were much younger, or very young, I’d understand. Youth is always intolerant. Or at least that is what people are always telling me, with indulgence, as if intolerance were a kind of heroic virtue in itself instead of a boredom to men my age. Well, anyway, most of the clergy who have a low opinion of me are my age, or just a little younger, and some are even older. That’s what bothers me. Some are older, and yet they are ‘with it,’ as they say now. Silly phrase, isn’t it, and yet it’s pithy.

  “You see, my problem is simple. Betty, my wife, is disgusted and heartsick. She’s fifty-three, and not smart and young and modern like other clergymen’s wives these days, eternally young, God help them, poor things! We’ve known each other almost all our lives. We’re from Midville, five hundred miles from here, almost in New England. We had the same kind of lives, and we have the same point of view. For a long time we were reasonably happy in this city. In spite of the fact that we don’t have any children, and all those damnable wars which seemed to get in the way of honest, sound living. After they’re over no one seems to know what they were really about, after all, and worse, no one seems to care.

  “But, my problem. I’m no use to my congregation any longer, not to the old, the middle-aged, and not, especially, to the young. I had five hundred souls, once. Now I have only about two hundred. My congregation dwindles year by year. My people go to the smart ministers who can satisfy them and give them what they want. I don’t try to dissuade them—”

  He paused. There it came again, the vast uneasiness, the sense of reproof, the feeling of being reproached—but for what?

  “After all,” he said, “we are to be free in religion, aren’t we? Sometimes, you know, I envy the authority of Catholic priests. But maybe they don’t have much authority any longer. I don’t know. I’ve seen some of the older ones, friends of mine, suddenly becoming very still and very silent, sometimes, when we’ve been talking of our people, and sometimes they look lost, too, as I probably look lost. I gather the impression that many of them have their doubts about all that ‘updating’ you hear about—as if God isn’t the Eternal, and never changes. Yes, we have our worries, the old guys and I. But, somehow, that seems to be a subject we can’t talk about freely. I don’t know why. It’s as if something is too powerful—too powerful—Oh, I don’t know. As if we were beset, to use an old-fashioned phrase. I’m an old-fashioned man, you see.

  “In any event, Betty wants me to resign and go back to Midville or anywhere else provided it’s a small town. It was Socrates, wasn’t it? who said that men should not live in large cities, but in hamlets, that men’s souls wither in the cry of the streets and the leaflessness of their lives, and that tranquillity and contemplation and the knowledge of God can only be found on the land, in the sight of great forests and noble mountains and flowing rivers. And the peaceful long lawns at sunset in the shadow of high trees after the day’s work is over.

  “They haven’t yet said so, my Board, but I
know no one will regret my resignation. Betty and I—we’ll have our life again, in contentment and in quietness, among a few friends and in the company of those who know us and understand us. Something we can’t have in this stony wilderness, this noisy wilderness, this feverish, frantic, and heated wilderness, where there is no rock in a weary land.”

  The feeling of reproach struck his heart so heavily that it was actually physical, and he caught his breath.

  “The wilderness,” he muttered, and stared at the closed curtains. He was positive that the man was gazing at him through some aperture and that he was affronted.

  “You don’t understand, I see,” said the minister. “You agree with the Board. But don’t condemn me, please, until I’ve finished. As a minister, yourself, you should wait to hear my side of the story. Again, as they tell me, I’m not ‘with it.’ No, I’m not with it, I can’t be with it, because I’m not part of it! I never was. I never will be. No, no, don’t speak yet. Let me tell you, and then we’ll talk it over together reasonably, and perhaps you can give me some advice. God knows, I need it.

  “Why don’t I talk to my superiors? I have. They’re displeased with me; I can tell. After all, a minister isn’t much of a success if his congregation keeps dwindling. One or two suggested that a small congregation, in a town like Midville, would be best for me. I think it would; Betty is sure it would. In time, anyway, I’d be mandatorily retired and sent out to pasture. Probably in ten years, though there are old ministers who are still in their pulpits at eighty. If I stay here, until I am retired, then my congregation will wither away more and more, until there is nothing. At the rate it is withering I won’t need to wait! They’ll all be gone in a couple of years.

  “And yet, and yet. You see, God and I walked together until about fifteen years ago or so. I was so certain I had His ear, and that we understood each other. But now, He is far removed from me. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t conciliate my congregation as I ought to have done, and updated myself to be one with them, as some of my clergy friends have advised. They don’t worry and torment themselves as I do. They live very snugly and very neatly, and speak of this best possible of worlds—when,” and the minister raised his voice in a shaking cry, “when it is obvious this is the most terrible of all worlds and the most lost!”

  He got to his feet. “You don’t agree with me! Hardly anyone does, except old Father Moran and one or two other clergymen. You think I should have brought myself up-to-date, and been one of the boys with every man in my congregation, and an indulgent confidant to the girls and the women and the children, and talked of every damn thing in the world except about what it is: The terror of everything innocent that lives.

  “Listen to me, before you pass judgment on me as an outdated old body who can’t, and won’t, understand this modern world! I beg of you, listen. Do you know what Christianity has become, in the main, in these days? Secularism. Not one with the people, as Christ was, but worldly, busy with many things except simple faith and the Fatherhood of God. Oh, they talk a lot, professing Christians do, about the brotherhood of man, but suggest, just try, that there is no brotherhood of man without the acknowledged Fatherhood of God, and there is an embarrassed silence or a few superior smiles.

  “I’m not sophisticated, I confess it. I’m not urbane; I don’t ‘understand this changing world.’ That’s what they say. But when was not the world changing from the very moment it came from the hand of God? It is always in flux; they don’t understand that, my people. They think there is something unique in this instant moment, something that has never been before, something so far superior to the past that the past should be totally forgotten, and all the heroic things that lie in the past. Including, most of the time, God. Oh, they are willing to profess faith, but there is no faith in them. In more ways than one they are a faithless and adulterous generation. As one clergyman to another, I must be honest. A faithless and adulterous generation. Is that lack of charity to confess the truth? There is so much talk these days of ‘charity,’ and ‘the spirit of the modern aspiring man,’ but there is no charity any longer, and the aspirations of modern men are the frivolous aspirations of an eternal child.

  “Whose fault is it? The clergy’s? But what can we do when they turn restlessly away from us, with covert smiles? We can’t forbid them; we don’t have the authority, either secular or spiritual, as once we did. This is the Day of the Layman, some clergymen say, smilingly abdicating their position as shepherds and contented, even proud, to be one of the herd. Brotherhood! No authority, though authority was given us when we were ordained. Is the shepherd less than the sheep? If so, who will guard them from the wolves?”

  Sweat stood in large drops on his forehead. He shook his head heavily over and over. He held the back of the chair in his right hand.

  “Don’t condemn me yet. Please let me finish. I look at the world. It’s crowded with things; just things. And not one of them of any verity or soundness. It’s crowded with gadgets, with machinery, with automated houses and factories and offices; it’s clangorous with hideous noise. The worst noise of all is people-noise, heedless, quarreling, discontented, rootless, demanding, petulant, dissatisfied, asking, wanting, or just making clamor.

  “I’ve lived sixty years,” said the minister, “and I’ve never known a world like this. I knew the Great Depression, and it was better than this, believe me. At least people were face to face with sharp reality, and not the ugly ‘realism’ they talk of now. They knew stern privation and hunger and the frightful face of despair and a profound fear. But these were real things, and could be surmounted, for always there was hope.

  “But now everyone has everything. Wasn’t it Ibsen who said that when every man has everything no one has anything of value? And nothing is real when man has no longer any need to struggle. I’ve known awful poverty. I tell you, I prefer that to coziness and luxuries and all the affluence I see about me. For at least in poverty I had certitude, and so did all the poor people with me. But the luxurious about me now, from machinist to businessman, from doctor to plumber, from secretary to housewife, have absolutely no certitude, no roots, no calm stature, and so no hope.

  “They don’t want what I have to give them. They reproach me that I don’t talk to them about ‘social justice’ and ‘social problems,’ or whatever is the frenzied fad of the moment. Once I quoted the great English statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, of nearly two hundred years ago:

  “‘No sound ought to be heard in the Church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all of its affairs, upon which they pronounce with such confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passion they excite. Surely the Church is a place where one day’s truce ought to be allowed the dimensions and animosities of mankind! We need no political theologians nor theological politicians.’

  “But they know nothing of that great man, Edmund Burke, though most of the young people know all about Marx!

  “Well, they accused me of being ‘outdated,’ as if truth is ever an anachronism! I talk to them of the eternal verities of God and read to them from the Gospels, and tell them that when men walk with God and His truth and His justice, and practice them humbly in their daily lives, social justice will inevitably come about and social problems will solve themselves.

  “Then there is the silly talk these days of ‘the search for identity,’ but they do not know what they mean any more than I do! I tell them once that they had ‘identity’ from the moment they were conceived, and that their sole duty in life is to save their individual, immortal souls.

  “Do you know what they did? They gave me their sickening, indulgent smiles. And there was the S
unday that I talked of the solid reality of Satan, and his great triumph when he had persuaded men he did not exist. I talked of sin—imagine that, sin! The Board told me later that it was unrealistic to talk so, and insulting to the intelligence of my congregation, and that ‘sin’ was only a matter of bad ‘mental health’ and not the fault of the ‘sinner’ at all! They gently suggested that I ‘try to understand these modern days’ in which everyone is now so science-minded and so psychologically aware.

  “I blew up. I admit it, and I’m sorry, but I felt besieged.

  “I told the Board that I knew all about ‘mental illness,’ as they call it, and all about the blather you read in the press concerning it, and the solemn mouthings over it by people who have ignorantly learned a new vocabulary of pseudo-science and wish to impress others with it. Forgive me, but I’ve never known more truly ignorant and more pretentious men and women than I do now, God help them. They know nothing of God, the human soul and the mind of man, and what they don’t know they speak of loudly, and never stop. The more ignorant, the more noisy and insistent, until you feel embarrassed for them just before you feel alarmed about them. They seem a new kind of people, and all of them vulgar.