Chapter 18
The next thing they asked him to do was to let them elect him state president of the Christian Endeavor Society.
It meant nothing whatever to him when they told him, because he did not know what Christian Endeavor even stood for at that time, but he smiled and turned it down flat with the excuse that he could not give any more time to outside things. He owed his whole energy to the bank. Mr. Harper would not like it if he accepted other duties here and there.
Then it developed that Mr. Harper would like it very much. It was just what Mr. Harper wanted of his bank teller, to be prominent in social and religious matters. A committee had waited upon Mr. Harper, and he came himself to plead with the young man, stressing that he would like him to accept as a personal favor to himself. He felt it would give their bank a good standing to have their employees identified with such organizations.
The young committee pleaded eagerly and promised to do all the work for him. They would prepare all the programs and suggest competent helpers on each committee who understood their work thoroughly. There really would be little left for him to do but preside at the state conventions and attend a county convention now and then. Wouldn’t he stretch a point and take the office? They needed him terribly just now, having lost a wonderful president through serious illness.
It sounded easy. He did not imagine it meant much but calling a meeting to order now and then, and as there was a vice president, he could always get out of it on the score of pressing business when he did not want to go. So Murray “stretched a point” and said yes. He was beginning to enjoy the prestige given by these various activities which they had pressed upon him. He had almost forgotten that he was an outlaw. For the time being he seemed to himself to have become Allan Murray. He was quite pleased with himself that he was fitting down into the groove so well. Even the religious part was not so irksome as he had felt at first. He might in time come to enjoy it a little. He had not slipped away that next Saturday night. He had lived very tolerably through three more Sundays. He was even becoming somewhat fond of those seven little devils in his Sunday school class. His popularity as a Sunday school teacher was evidenced by the fact that seven other little devils, seven times worse than the first seven, had joined themselves to the knot that closed around him for a brief half hour every Sunday afternoon. There was even talk of giving him a room by himself next to the Primary room.
Fearing that he never would be able to teach a lesson, he had conceived the idea of offering a prize of a story to the class after they had told him the lesson for the day. This relieved him of any responsibility in the matter of the teaching, and kept excellent order in the class. All he had to do was to have a hairbreadth experience ready to relate during the last ten minutes of the session.
But Mrs. Summers, wise in her day and generation, perhaps wiser than Murray ever suspected, brought to bear her gentle heaven-guided influence upon the young teacher. If she suspected his need, she never told anybody but her heavenly Father, but she quietly hunted out little bits here and there about the lesson—illustrations, an unusual page from the Sunday School Times, a magazine article with a tale that covered a point in the lesson, now and then an open Bible dictionary with a marked paragraph—and laid them on his reading table under the lighted lamp.
“I found such a wonderful story today when I was studying for my Sunday school class,” she would say while she passed him the puffy little biscuits and honey at the supper table. “I thought you might like to use it for your boys. I took the liberty of laying it up on your table, with the verses marked in the Bible where it fits. You have so little time; it is only right the rest of us should help you in the wonderful work you are doing in that Sunday school class.”
He thanked her, and then because he did not like to seem ungrateful, and he was afraid he might be asked what he thought ofit, he read what she had left there and was surprised to find himself getting interested. Strange how a dull thing grew fascinating if you just once gave your mind to it. He wondered if that were true of all dull things. He actually grew interested in getting ready for his Sunday school class. There were times when he even preferred it to going out socially, although that was where he naturally shone, it being more his native element.
Yet he often felt a constraint when he went out to dinner or to a social gathering. There were very few invitations to the kind of thing to which he had been accustomed. The whole community seemed to be pretty well affected by the sentiments of that Presbyterian church. They did not seem to know how to play cards, not the ones who were active, and they did not seem to think of dancing when they got together. Not that he missed those things. He was rather more interested in the novelty of their talk and their games, and their music, which was some of it really good. It appeared that the girl Anita was quite a fine musician. She had been away for a number of years studying. Yet he was always a little bit afraid of Anita. Was it because she reminded him of Bessie, or because she seemed to not quite trust him? He could not tell. When he was in the same company with her, he found himself always trying to put his best foot forward. It annoyed him. She seemed to be always looking through him and saying: “You are not what you are trying to seem at all. You are an impostor! You have stolen a dead man’s name and character, and you killed a girl once! Someday you will kill the good man’s good name, too, and everybody will find outthat you are a murderer!” When these thoughts came through his mind, he would turn away from her clear eyes, and a sharp thought of Bessie like an intense pain would go through his soul. At such times he was ready to give it all up and run away. Yet he stayed on.
He was flooded with invitations to dinners and teas and evening gatherings, little musicals and concerts, and always at these gatherings there was the tang of excitement lest he should be found out. He was growing more and more skillful in evading direct questions and bantering gaiety intended to draw him out. He came to be known as a young man of great reserve. He never talked about himself. They began to notice that. All they knew about him they had heard from others before he came. They liked him all the better for this, and perhaps the mystery that this method gradually put about him made him even more fascinating to the girls. All except Anita.
Anita kept her own counsel. She was polite and pleasant, consulting with him when it was necessary, that is, when she could not get someone else to do it for her, but never taking him into the gracious circle of her close acquaintances. Jane often asked her why she had to be so stiff. Jane was more effusive than ever about the young hero of the town. But Anita closed her lips and went about her business, as charming as ever and just as distant. It intrigued Murray. He never had had a girl act like that to him. If it had not been for the fact that she reminded him unpleasantly of Bessie and made him uncomfortable every time he came in her vicinity, he would have set to work in earnest to do somethingabout it, but he really was very busy and almost happy at the bank and was quite content to let her go her way. His work at the bank was growing more and more fascinating to him. He was like a child who is permitted to work over machinery and feel that he is doing real work with it. He fairly beamed when his accounts came out just right, and he loved being a wheel that worked the machinery of this big clean bank. While he was there he forgot all that was past in his life, forgot that any minute a stranger might walk in and announce himself as the real Allan Murray, and he would have to flee. In the sweet wholesomeness of the monotony of work, it seemed impossible that such things as courts of justice could reach a long arm after him and place him in jail and try him for his life.
He liked most of the men with whom he was associated; also he liked Mrs. Summers. The little talks they had at night before he went up to his room gave him something like comfort. It was a new thing, and he enjoyed it. He even let her talk about religious questions and sometimes asked her a shy question now and then, though most of all he was afraid to venture questions lest he reveal his utter ignorance and lay himself open to suspicion. More and more as the days w
ent by he began to cling to the new life he was carving out for himself and to dread to lose it. The respect of men, which he had never cared about in his other days, was sweet to him now. To have lost his first inheritance gave him a great regard for the one into which he had dropped unawares. It was not his, but he had none now, and he must not let them take this one awayfrom him. He flattered himself now and then that he had been born again, as the sign in that trolley car had advised. He was like a little child learning a new world, but he was learning it, and he liked it.
Into the midst of this growing happiness and assurance entered the State Christian Endeavor Convention.
It was to be held in a nearby city. He had not understood that he would have to go away to a strange place when he took the office, but it was too late to refuse now. He must risk it. Still, it worried him some. Here in Marlborough he was known, now, and would not easily be taken for someone else. Practically everybody in town knew him or knew who he was. He would not likely be mistaken or arrested for anyone else, even if his picture were put up in the bank right opposite his own window. He had by this time ventured to look the picture of the advertised man on the wall fully in the face and discovered it did not look in the least like himself, so he had grown more relaxed about such things. If all this time had passed and nothing had come out about him, surely his father had found a way to hush things up. Poor Dad! He wished he dared send him word that he was all right and on the way to being a man. But he must not. It might only precipitate a catastrophe. He was dead and had been born again. He must be dead to all his old life if he hoped to escape its punishment.
He journeyed to the convention in company with a large party from the Marlborough churches, who hovered around him and made him feel almost like a peacock with all their adulation. Theypinned badges on him, chattered to him about their committee work, asked his advice about things he had never heard of before, and it amused him wonderfully to see what answers he could give them that would satisfy them, and at the same time would in no way give himself away.
But when they arrived at the strange city and went together to the convention hall, and Murray saw for the first time the great auditorium, with its bunting and streamers and banners and mottoes, his heart began to fail him. A kind of sick feeling came over him. It appalled him that he was to be made conspicuous in a great public assembly like this. He never imagined that it was to be a thing of this sort. He began to realize what a fool he had been to get into a fix like this—what an unutterable fool that he did not clear out entirely. He did not belong among people like this. He could never learn their ways, and inevitably sometime, probably soon, he would be found out. Every day, every hour he remained would only make the outcome more unspeakable. This business of being born again was an impossible proposition from the start. One could not work it. He ought to go. He would go at once! This was as good a time as any. Much better than in Marlborough, for no one around would recognize him, and he could get far away before his absence was discovered.
He cast a quick glance around him, and saw that his delegation were all being seated up near the front of the auditorium. With swift steps he marched down the aisle and out the door and came face-to-face with the man who was to lead the devotional meeting, to whom he had just been introduced.
“I was looking for you, Murray,” he said. “You’re wanted at once up on the platform. They want to consult you about the appointment of the committees before the meeting opens. Better hurry! It’s time to begin.”
Baffled again, Murray turned back up the aisle, resolving to find some excuse to slip out the side door, which he could see opening from the platform. There was to be a devotional meeting. He had heard talk about selecting hymns. He would slip out while they were singing. At any rate, there was no escape here just now, for the leader of the devotional meeting was just behind him.
So he went to the platform, bowed, smiled, and tried to conduct himself in an altogether happy and carefree manner, assenting to all the suggestions about committees, listening to reasons for certain appointments as if he knew all about it and was interested, with that flattering deference that was second nature to him. But his eyes kept turning constantly to the door at the left of the platform, and when they were finally through with him and motioned him to a seat in the center of the platform, he sank into the big chair of honor with relief. Now, at last, his release was at hand! When they arose to sing the first hymn, he would look up as if someone beckoned. No matter where that door led to, he would get out of sight somewhere and stay hidden until this infernal convention was over, and he could safely vanish into the world again.
Someone handed him a hymnbook open to the hymn. Hewas not acquainted with any hymns, but it struck him as strange that this one should be about hiding. He accepted the book, as he did all things when he was conscious of his predicament, merely as a mask to keep him from suspicion, and he pretended to sing, although he had never heard the tune before.
“Oh, safe to the Rock that is higher than I,
My soul in its sorrow and anguish would fly;
So sinful, so weary, Thine, Thine would I be;
Thou blest ‘Rock of Ages,’ I’m hiding in Thee!”
Murray Van Rensselaer had never heard of the Rock of Ages except in connection with an insurance company. He did not understand even vaguely the reference, but as his lips formed the words which his eyes conveyed to his brain from the book, his heart seemed to grasp for them and be saying them in earnest. Hiding! Oh, if there were only some hiding for him! Sinful? Yes, he must be sinful! He had never thought he was very bad in the days that were past, but somehow since he had been in this region where everybody talked about Right and Wrong as if they were personified, and where all the standards of living were so different, it had begun to dawn upon him that if these standards were true, then he personally was a sinner. It was not just his having been responsible for Bessie’s death. It was not even his running away when he found he had killed her. Nor yet was it his allowing these good people to think he was Allan Murray—a Christian with a longrecord of good deeds and right living behind him. It was something behind all that—something that had to do with the Power they called God and with that vague Person they called Jesus, who was God’s Son. It was dawning upon him that he had something to do with God! He had never expected that he would ever have anything in the remotest way connected with God, and now suddenly it seemed as if God was there all the time, behind everything, and had not been pleased with his relation to life. It seemed that God had been there dealing with him even before he was born into the family of Van Rensselaer. Before being Van Rensselaer’s child, he was God’s child! His father had bitterly berated him for the way he had misused and been disloyal to the fine old name of Van Rensselaer; how would God speak to him sometime about the way he had treated Him?
“Hiding in Thee! Hiding in Thee!” sang the gathering throng earnestly and joyously, and he shuddered as his lips joined with theirs. Hiding in God! How could he hide in God? It would be like taking refuge in a court of justice and expecting them to protect him from his own sin!
He recalled the first lesson his Sunday school class had taught him about Saul who was Paul, when a light shined round about him and he met the Lord on the way to Damascus. He had heard more of him since, in sermons, and in the Bible readings, and in his talks with Mrs. Summers. One could not hear a story like that referred to again and again without getting the real meaning into his soul, but never before had it come home to him as a thing thatreally happened, and that might happen again, as it did while he sat there singing. It seemed to him that he was suddenly seeing the Lord—that for the first time he had been halted in his giddy life and made to see that he was fighting against the Lord God, that his whole life had been a rebellion against the Power that had created him, just as his whole former life at home had been a life apart from the parents who had given him life and supported him. It was not the decent thing at all. He had never thought of it so before. He would not h
ave done it if he had ever thought of it that way. Of course his father had told him in a way—a bitter way, cursed at him, but given him the money to pay for his follies just the same. And he had not been honest with his father! He had not been honest with the law of the land either! He had broken it again and again, and counted it something to be proud of when he got away without having to pay a fine. All his life he had run away from fines and punishments. So far as law was concerned, he had been many times guilty. And then when one went further and thought about the laws of God, why, he did not even know what they were. He had never inquired before until a Sunday school session had forced the Ten Commandments to his attention. Of course he had always heard of the Ten Commandments, but they had seemed as archaic as the tomb of some Egyptian pharaoh. He had no notion whatever that anybody connected them with any duties of life today, until Mrs. Summers had discussed the subject briefly one night in that mild impersonal way of hers.
But now as he sat on that platform, singing those words about a hiding place for a soul that was sinful and weary, he knew that he ought to have known those commandments. He ought to have found out God’s will for him. He knew that the right name for the state he was in was sin, and he felt an overwhelming burden from the knowledge. He was hearing God’s voice speak to him, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,” and he did not understand it any better than Saul had done as he lay blinded on the way to Damascus.
The singing had ceased, and he realized that he had not yet slipped away. This was to be a devotional meeting. Perhaps during a prayer he might find a better opportunity.