No One Hears but Him Read online

  “Yes, I told the Board, when I was a young man every small town had its harmless eccentrics and the senile, but they were accepted as part of the community and didn’t need ‘therapy.’ But why are so many others now ‘disturbed’? ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said, ‘it’s because they have lost God and religion. Whose fault is that? The clergy who are so modern and up-to-date? I won’t join their ranks! I may not be the best of shepherds or the wisest, but I won’t betray my people to passing ‘intellectual’ fashions, and the silly, feverish preoccupations which will be laughed at or forgotten tomorrow.’”

  Now he had the strange impression that the man was listening to him not with reproach or reproof but with sadness, and with understanding. He was so grateful that he sat down again, leaned forward with his hands tightly clasped between his knees, his tired face very earnest.

  “They think I know nothing, that I live in some sort of simple past. But I know all that they know, and more. I’m an educated man; I read—which is more than some of the more glib and knowledgeable of my congregation do! I know about the desperate illness of the world, and the depravity, and the lack of peace and the turmoil and hate and the threat of the holocaust. I know about homosexualism and all vice. I know of the terror in which the majority of mankind now lives. And I know something most of them don’t know: They have left God; they have no frame of reference; they accept the world of their feeble senses and reject the world of their immortal souls, which is the only reality.

  “They are avid materialists, smugly rejoicing in their ‘sense of what is relatively true.’ You see, they believe in relativism; truth has no eternal verity to them. It is protean, to them. It changes hour by hour and never has the same face. They love it. They find in ‘new truths’ excuses for their excesses, for their lack of fortitude and courage and strength. They are dishonorable, for they owe no allegiance to anything, not to God and country, not to each other as true men and true brothers, not to law and order. They are the cruelest generation ever to have cursed this world, for they do not love each other as once Christians loved each other, verily, in the Name of Almighty God. Now they pretend to love each other in the name of ‘social justice,’ or their fake brotherhood. Liars! Liars! They would, without the slightest qualm, cut a ‘brother’s’ throat for any damned reason at all!

  “They have no tender concern, one with another. A neighbor could die on their doorstep and they would not answer his call, while listening all the time to some television story about ‘involvement with all mankind.’ A woman is attacked before their very windows, and they draw their blinds, and read all about their community obligations and how well they are engaging in them. They talk about ‘responsibility’ and they are abjectly irresponsible. No, not abjectly. Monstrously, sinfully irresponsible! Once a man was proud of his work and his competence at it, no matter how humble or how important. Now, everyone wants his children to have a college education, and as most men are very ordinary—something they didn’t mind once or admitted happily—only a very small percentage of our young people are college material. But most would make excellent workers in the service occupations, something which they despise and think ‘beneath them.’ I tell them that Christ, Himself, The Wonderful, with the Government on His Shoulder, was a carpenter, sinewy and strong, and proud of His work. They think I am a fool. Christ is a shadow to them. He lived so long ago, you see, in the past, and what have they to do with the past?

  “If it were the young people only who were so sadly stupid, so heartbreakingly stupid and irrational, one could have patience, and wait, and patiently teach, until they saw the mighty face of the only Reality for themselves. But it isn’t just the young people who babble so endlessly and so foolishly and so mindlessly. It is their parents, also, their up-to-date, ‘these days’ parents. The parents who tell them that it isn’t what you know that is important, but who you know, and get with it and become fat and rich and successful and well-adjusted and a leader. Be a scoundrel; be a liar; be exigent and merciless. Everything goes, so long as it leads to material success.

  “In the meantime, of course, you must keep up the chatter of loving your brother, and pretend that you care about him. It makes you seem such a civilized, nice person. Such an admirable nice person. And admirable nice people are liked, and when you are liked others will promote your welfare and your happy future.

  “As if, my God, this world is all there is! But the trouble, you know, is that they believe it is all there is, even my most regular parishioners who come comfortably to hear me every Sunday—and never really hear a word I say.”

  His tiredness took all his body until it seemed to him that he could never move again. “No wonder,” he muttered, “that so many young people are strange these days, and disordered. No wonder the girls love to dress and behave like hard, bold young men, and the young men love to dress disreputably and behave like weak women. What have their parents and their teachers given them but falsities, false values and slogans? They are ‘rebellious,’ they say. Against what are they rebelling? They don’t know it, but they are truly rebelling against the lack of values in their lives, against the lack of authority and discipline, and the lack of decency and honor in their elders. I’ve seen them picketing or mouthing noisily and incoherently, and I see their parents as only a minister can see them: Silly fools who never possessed authority in their lives nor had any values in their lives, nor any faith or pride.

  “Sometimes we clergy are blamed for all that. We didn’t give the people what they wanted. Shall the sheep tell the shepherd where he is to take them, and what they shall eat? Shall the sheep lead the shepherd, and he indulgently permit them, until they wander into the valley of the shadow of death?”

  He stopped, struck. He blinked at the blue curtains. He bit his lip.

  “But what of us who try, and who are laughed at, and ignored and derided? What are our struggles worth? If we lift our voices they tumble out and leave us hastily. If we admonish, they pretend to hide their smiles. The sheep have left their shepherds, and they no longer hear our voices or respond to them. My own sheep call me ‘Hell-fire Harry,’ because I tell them the truth and the awful danger in which their souls now stand. The older people smooth their furs or their gloves and make large eyes at us and talk of ‘young people these days, who are more sophisticated and more educated.’ We are supposed to applaud that callowness, that stupidity. We are supposed to smile approvingly.

  “I can’t do it!” He sprang to his feet again. “I’m not going to up-date myself and talk of secular matters in my pulpit! I’m no worldly Sadducee, like so many of my kind! I’m getting out; they don’t want me any longer. I have no sheep. I must go where I’ll have some, and where they will listen to the shepherd!”

  He was breathing loudly. He was desperate, and desperate with impatience, for the man behind that curtain said not a word at all. He only waited. But there was no more to say. The minister recalled that someone had said that you had only to touch the button near the curtains to see the man who had listened to you.

  “Oh, my God!” he said. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear you tell me that I must ‘update’ and ‘modernize’ Christ for a blind and silly and weak and degenerate and immoral and wicked generation—the worst this world has ever seen! How can I help them if they refuse to be helped—”

  He halted. What had he seen in the wall in the waiting room, and which he had read but had not felt? “I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me.” Once that would have struck on his heart and his soul would have answered. But now he was too broken, too besieged by despair. He stretched out his hand and touched the button, preparing to brace himself for the smooth and urbane words of the clergyman who had sat there, hidden, and had smugly listened to an “old-timer.”

  The curtains moved aside and a light burst out from behind its silent folds, and in that light he saw the man who listens.

  They looked at each other, and the minister turned ashen white and he staggered back s
tep by step until he was pressing against the wall and the door through which he had entered.

  The man did not turn away his eyes. He gazed at the minister long and sternly, and the Reverend Mr. Henry Blackstone was sure he heard, in his inner ear, a mighty voice say to him: “Feed My Sheep!”

  The minister held out his hands straight before him, as if in self-protection. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. They don’t want me to feed them. They don’t even see me. They left me; I didn’t leave them.”

  Again he heard the voice, more penetrating now and more inflexible, in the corridors of his mind: “Feed My Sheep!”

  “With bread they won’t eat?” The minister implored the man. “With bread they reject? With bread they despise? Let me go! Let me end my life in some quiet place, with no turmoil and no heat and no derision—”

  Feed My Sheep.

  The barren places where the sheep lay and sweltered and were blind with dust and the fierce light of a sun from which they could find no shelter. A weary land. A land of rocks and rivers of fire, and no living waters. The sheep lay there and died, far from a life of certitude and true security. And where was the shepherd?

  He was turning and leaving them. They had wandered from him and he had not stayed with them and had not led them—because they had despised him in their sheeplike folly. If the world had been too much for him, how much more terribly had the world been too much for them!

  The minister felt that he dared not approach nearer the man. He knelt where he had stood, and he put his hands over his face.

  “I see,” he said, “why I felt so separated from God in these past years. What had mockery and scorn meant to Our Lord? Nothing. He had fed the hungry sheep, though they had bared their teeth in derision at Him. They had laughed at Him from the thresholds; they had jeered at Him in the temples. They had shouted their contempt for Him in the market-place and in the streets. They had tried to seize and destroy Him, and He had slipped gently from their ravenous hands.

  “But always He taught His sheep. Despised and rejected—He still taught. And eventually, because He was so steadfast a few listened.

  “Only a few. But they saved the world. And only a few now, even now, can save the world.”

  The worldly Sadducees who had believed in mortality and not immortality; who had sponsored ethics and right behavior in man, but had denied their Source; who had politely talked of enlightenment and had lived in darkness! And the Pharisees who detested the people and honored only the letter of the law and not the Lawgiver! Which was the worst? Was he, Henry Blackstone, to be numbered among them? Or was he worse than they, a shepherd preparing to desert his sheep for his own peace and his own contentment of mind?

  “Forgive me,” he prayed. “Lord, forgive me. Does it matter what they call me, or how they laugh at me? I shall struggle with them more passionately, and with less meekness and less self-consciousness. I shall not be afraid of their fear, nor shall their monstrous world ever intrude on me again. Not again.

  “They may drive me out, as they drove you out. They may shatter what is left of my life, and trample it. They may exile me because they can’t ‘update’ me.

  “But never again—if you abide with me—shall I dream of deserting them and leaving them hungry.

  “And we shall walk together again—and, who knows?—the sheep may follow.”

  He smiled timidly at the man who appeared, now, to be tenderly smiling at him. He said, “My mother used to sing a hymn, and now I truly know what it means:

  “‘Dark though the nights at times,

  And sad and forlorn,

  But long have I loved Thee, Lord!

  And bided the morn.’”

  SOUL EIGHT

  The Husbandman

  “—when that it remembreth me

  Upon my youth and on my jolitee

  It tikleth me about min herte roote—

  That I have had my world as in my time!”

  “Wife of Bath.”

  SOUL EIGHT

  “Well, hello, Parson,” said the old man with gravity as he faced the calm blue curtain of the alcove. “You are a parson, ain’t you? That’s what everybody says, anyhow. You listen to folks’ troubles and then you tell them what to do. That’s real kind of you. Didn’t know there was that kind left in the world, no sir. Everybody loving each other and nobody loving anybody: that’s what goes on now. Like the patriotism you read about in the newspapers and nobody’s patriotic, seems like. Why, there was a time, I remember, if folks had trouble, even in the city, everybody’d come with baked goods and fruit and maybe a roast chicken, and there’d be real sympathy. Now it’s all fake, newspapers full of brotherly love and the rights of everybody, and people talkin’ and the pastors telling you, in their pulpits, to do good to everybody, ’specially people you don’t know in foreign parts, and nobody gives a damn about their next-door neighbor. Easy to be sympathetic about people a thousand miles away or more; costs you nothin’ to roll your eyes and make your voice all deep and soft. But gettin’ off your butt and doin’ something about the people next door, with your own money and your own work: Oh, no. That doesn’t mean anythin’ now. It isn’t havin’ a sense—what do they call it with their mealy-mouths?—of world-wide responsibility. Hell.”

  He settled back comfortably in his chair and felt for his pipe. He’d prepared it outside, and he had that lighter Al, his son, had given him, and so it didn’t make no difference smoking in here, and that air-conditioning took the smoke away anyway. He hadn’t felt this comfortable since Beth had died: relaxed and at peace, talking to somebody who understood.

  “There’s that young fellow I just saw outside, in his fancy city clothes, big city. He tells me he don’t have any troubles. Well, if that young feller don’t have troubles I’ll eat my hat. Just smells all over with ’em. Like all the city folks, and some of the country ones do, these days. All the ‘love’ and the rushin’ and bein’ alert and mindin’ your neighbors’ business—’specially if the neighbor is clear around the other side of the world—is sure not makin’ people happy. Downright miserable. Never saw such miserable people in my life, like you see nowadays, and people so full of hate they’re mean as sin. Somethin’s wrong.”

  He smoked a little, reflectively. “When Jesus talked about lovin’ your neighbor, I reckon He didn’t mean runnin’ off from your own country as fast as you could and lookin’ for a ‘neighbor’ in Greece or Rome or whatever to do good to. He meant the feller livin’ right next door to you, with his troubles. Why, there’s Missuz Campbell, next farm to mine, a big farm, collective like the Chinese and the Rooskis, from what I hear: She’s in the Fairmont papers all the time collectin’ for this and that for people she’ll never see, what we used to call the heathen Chinee and Darkest Africa, and workin’ for the United Nations, and all that, and on the other side of me, little farm, there’s that young widow with three kids strugglin’ alone and not makin’ ends meet with the poor land and all, and only her oldest to help her, and I says to Missuz Campbell, ‘There’s Susy Trendall, and she ain’t got money this year for fertilizer, and how about ante-ing up and helping her out, she don’t get much in the way of subsidies,’ and Missuz Campbell, she says, ‘All our money that we’re collectin’ is goin’ to the Association for the United Nations and the Emerging Nations, and Mrs. Trendall should go on Relief if she’s so poverty-stricken.’

  “Now, I tell you. Is that Christian charity and helpin’ your neighbor? No sir. It’s fake. Fake and cruel like the jaws of charity. So, I go over there to Suzy’s and help with the tractor and fix it up, and I tell Missuz Campbell to go love her neighbor and not look for Causes to make her feel important and good. Goooood! What a hypocrite. Seems like the whole damn country is a-seethin’ with liars and hypocrites now, and not fine sound people like I’d always known since I was a kid on the farm that belonged to my granddad and my father and now to me. All the goodie-goodies I see around these days got hearts of solid iron and eyes like wildcats. It ma
kes me feel sick at my stomach.”

  The pipe was puffing agitatedly now. “One time, we had mean folks that used to hide under what we call the ‘religious cloak,’ that helped hide their meanness and greediness and hate for their neighbor, while they quoted Scripture and watched their bank accounts grow. But those same folks don’t go in for religious cloaks to hide their sinfulness of heart any longer. They go for somethin’ some parsons call ‘the social gospel.’ It works just the same: Keep your money, talk big about ‘love,’ try to fool your neighbors about what a soft heart you got, and get a wonderful reputation for bein’ a fine feller. Funny thing. When folks hid under the lyin’ religious cloak we all caught on and made fun of them. We don’t do that with the ‘social gospel’ folks. Some of us believe ’em, and that’s part of the general foolishness that gives me a pain in the—well, you know.”

  He nodded his head bitterly. He had the strangest feeling that the man behind the curtain was agreeing with him.

  “And there’s the government always interferin’ with your life. Once we’d have gotten out our guns and chased the government men right off our land, and we had the Constitution to back us up. Well, I can say, and I got pride, that never once did I take one of their damned checks, though they offered it over and over. Take a check from government and you put a chain around your neck. No sir, not for me. I got to pay that social security or whatever they call it, but that’s all, and so long as I got one shake in my legs to help me walk I don’t go on any social security, no sir. And maybe not even then. I got my pride.

  “And that brings me to what I’m doin’ here, takin’ up your time.

  “One time, when I was a kid, and even up to twenty years ago, there was eighteen farms around me. Now just one family owns them, the Campbells! Think of that. The other folks sold up their land to those damn greedy Campbells, with their ‘modern’ industrial farm, and went off to live in town in one of them boxes they call housin’ developments. The towns always did stink. They stink worse now. And the stink isn’t just in the dirty air and the soot; it’s in their souls. Babylons. Not real hearty sin that a person can understand, sins of the body. No, they got sins of the soul, real black sickenin’ sins that scare the hell out of you. Babylons.”