第85章

The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist districts of Octavius and Thessaly was held this year in the second half of September, a little later than usual.

Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday.

On the noon of that day the Rev.Theron Ware escaped for some hours from the burden of work and incessant observation which he shared with twenty other preachers, and walked alone in the woods.

The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at.A spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight.In the centre was a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but stained and weather-beaten with time.Behind it were some lines of horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush.

At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their newness.The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was lifted highest from the ground.Inside this half-ring of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two.

In the centre, just under the edge of the roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air stand for musicians.In front of this, and leading from it on the level of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively rustic woodwork.

The nearest benches came close about this platform.

At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of life about this encampment.The four or five hundred people who were in constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house, or the cottages or the tents.It was not the time of day for strangers.

Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses of nature about them.

The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were lighted.

The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and the size and importance of what they illumined.

The preacher, bending forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the abashed faces of those on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool night air which stirred across the clearing.

The change was in the blood of those who saw and heard him, too.The decorum and half-heartedness of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began.

And if there was in the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.

But in the evening not all were worshippers.For a dozen miles round on the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year--no more to be missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many points of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either.

Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less so because all the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as they knew how.

These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches where the light was dim.More often they stood outside, in the circular space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls, drovers' yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the "Amens" of the earnest congregation.Their rough horse-play on the fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough;everybody knew that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness.Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.

Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money.This was unfair.

No doubt the money played its part, but there was something else far more important.The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought.Theirs was pre-eminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in the storm.The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face.

The daylight services became more and more perfunctory, as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason that THEN came the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh and blood.And it was not so one-sided a contest, either!

No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit.