Now I been introducedTo the Father and the Son, And I ain’tNot stranger now.

　　When Florence cried, Gabriel was moving outward in fiery darkness, talking to the Lord.

　　Her cry came to him from afar, as from unimaginable depths; and it was not his sister’s cry heheard, but the cry of the sinner when he is taken in his sin. This was the cry he had heard so manydays and nights, before so many altars, and he cried to-night, as he had cried before: ‘Have yourway, Lord! Have your way!’

　　Then there was only silence in the church. Even Praying Mother Washington had ceased tomoan. Soon someone would cry again, and the voices would begin again; there would be music byand by, and shouting, and the sound of the tambourines. But now in this waiting, burdened silenceit seemed that all flesh waited—paused, transfixed by something in the middle of the air—for thequickening power.

　　This silence, continuing like a corridor, carried Gabriel back to the silence that hadpreceded his birth in Christ. Like a birth indeed, all that had come before this moment waswrapped in darkness, lay at the bottom of the sea of forgetfulness, and was not now countedagainst him, but was related only to that blind, and doomed, and stinking corruption he had beenbefore he was redeemed.

　　The silence was the silence of the early morning, and he was returning from the harlot’shouse. Yet all around him were the sounds of the morning: of birds, invisible, praising God; ofcrickets in the vine, frogs in the swamp, of dogs miles away and closed at hand, roosters on theporch. The sun was not yet half awake; only the utmost tops of trees had begun to tremble at histurning; and the mist moved sullenly before Gabriel and all around him, falling back before thelight that rules by day. Later, he said of that morning that his sin was on him; then he knew onlythat he carried a burden and that he longed to lay it down. This burden was heavier than theheaviest mountain and he carried it in his heart. With each step that he took his burden grewheavier, and his breath became slow and harsh, and, of a sudden, cold sweat stood out on his browand drenched his back.

　　All alone in the cabin his mother lay waiting; not only for his return this morning, but forhis surrender to the Lord. She lingered only for this, and he knew it, even though she no longerexhorted him as she had in days but shortly gone by. She had placed him in the hands of the Lord,and she waited with patience to see how He would work the matter.

　　For she would live to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. She would not go to her restuntil her son, the last of her children, he who would place her in the winding-sheet, should haveentered the communion of the saints. Now she, who had been impatient once, and violent, who hadcursed and shouted and contended like a man, moved into silence, contending only, and with thelast measure of her strength, with God. And this, too, she did like a man: knowing that she hadkept the faith, she waited for Him to keep His promise. Gabriel knew that when he entered shewould not ask him where he had been; she would not reproach him; and her eyes, even when sheclosed her lids to sleep, would follows him everywhere.

　　 Later, since it was Sunday, some of the brothers and sisters would come to her, to sing andpray around her bed. And she would pray for him, sitting up in bed unaided, her head lifted, hervoice steady; while he, kneeling in a corner of the room, trembled and almost wished that shewould die; and trembled again at this testimony to the desperate wickedness of his heart; andprayed without words to be forgiven. For he had no words when he knelt before the throne. And hefeared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that untilhe made the vow he would never find the strength.

　　For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed heshould find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, Hiswell-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down fromHeaven to testify that Jesus was the son of God. He wanted to be the master, to speak with thatauthority which could only come from God. It was later to become his proud testimony that hehated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in hisbody, and he feared it, as he feared and heated the lions of lust and longing that prowled thedefenceless city of his mind. He was later to say that this was a gift bequeathed him by his mother,that it was God’s hand on him from his earliest beginnings; but then he knew only that when eachnight came, chaos and fever raged in him; the silence in the cabin between his mother and himselfbecame something that could not be borne; not looking at her, facing the mirror as he put on hisjacket, and trying to avoid his face there, he told her that he was going to take a little walk—hewould be back soon.

　　Sometimes Deborah sat with his mother, watching him with eyes that were no less patientand reproachful. He would escape into the starry night and walk until he came to a tavern, or to ahouse that he had marked already in the long daytime of his lust. And then he drank until hammersrang in his distant skull; he cursed his friends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; inthe morning he found himself in mud, in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouthsour, his clothes in rags, from all of him arising the stinks of his corruption. Then he could noteven weep. He could not even pray. He longed, nearly, for death, which was all that could releasehim from the cruelty of his chains.

　　And through all this his mother’s eyes were on him; her hand, like fiery tongs, gripped thelukewarm ember of his heart; and caused him to feel, at the thought of death, another, colder terror.

　　To go down into the grave, unwashed, unforgiven, was to go down into the pit for ever, whereterrors awaited him greater than any the earth, for all her age and groaning, had ever borne. Hewould be cut off from the living, for ever; he would have no name for ever. Where he had beenwould be silence only, rock, stubble, and no seed; for him, forever, and for his, no hope of glory.

　　Thus, when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow—feelinghimself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbiddendarkness where it could only die. He cursed the betraying lust that lived in him, and he cursed itagain in others. But: ‘I remember,’ he was later to say, ‘the day my dungeon shook and my chainsfell off.’

　　And he walked homeward, thinking of the night behind him. He had seen the woman at thevery beginning of the evening, but she had been with many others, men and women, and so he hadignored her. But later, when he was on fire with whisky, he looked again directly at her, and saw immediately that she had also been thinking of him. There were not so many people with her—itwas as though she had been making room for him. He had already been told that she was a widowfrom the North, in town for only a few days to visit her people. When he looked at her she lookedat him and, as though it were part of the joking conversation she was having with her friends, shelaughed aloud. She had the lie-gap between her teeth, and a big mouth; when she laughed, shebelatedly caught her lower lip in her teeth, as though she were ashamed of so large a mouth, andher breasts shook. It was not like the riot that occurred when big, fat women laughed—her breastsrose and fell against the tight cloth of her dress. She was much older than he—around Deborah’sage, perhaps thirty-odd— and she was not really pretty. Yet the distance between them wasabruptly charged with her, and her smell was in his nostrils. Almost, he felt those moving breastsbeneath his hand. And he drank again, allowing, unconsciously, or nearly, his face to fall into thelines of innocence and power which his experience with women had told him made their lovecome down.

　　Well (walking homewards, cold and tingling) yes, they did the thing. Lord, how they rocked intheir bed of sin, and how she cried and shivered; Lord how her love came down! Yes (walkinghomewards through the fleeing mist, with the cold sweat standing on his brow), yet, in vanity andthe pride of conquest, he thought of her, of her smell, the heat of her body beneath his hands, ofher voice, and her tongue, like the tongue of a cat, and her teeth, and her swelling breasts, and howshe moved for him, and held him, and labored with him, and how they fell, trembling andgroaning, and locked together, into the world again. And, thinking of this, his body freezing withhis sweat, and yet altogether violent with the memory of lust, he came to a tree on a gentle rise,beyond which, and out of sight, lay home, where his mother lay. And there leaped into his mind,with the violence of water that has burst the dams and covered the banks, rushing uncontrolledtoward the doomed, immobile houses—on which, on rooftops and windows, the sun yet palelyshivers—the memory of all the mornings he had mounted here and passed this tree, caught for amoment between sins committed and sins to be committed. The mist on this rise had fled away,and he felt that he stood, as he faced the lone tree, beneath the naked eye of Heaven. Then, in amoment, there was silence, only silence, everywhere—the very birds had ceased to sing, and nodigs barked, and no rooster crowed for day. And he felt that this silence was God’s judgment; thatall creation had been stilled before the just and awful wrath of God, and waited now to see thesinner—he was the sinner—cut down and banished from the presence of the Lord. And hetouched the tree, hardly knowing that he touched it, out of an impulse to be hidden; and then hecried: ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy! Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!’

　　And he fell against the tree, sinking to the ground and clutching the roots of the tree. Hehad shouted into silence and only silence answered—and yet, when he cried, his cry had caused aringing to the outermost limits of earth. This ringing, his lone cry rolling through creation,frightening the sleeping fish and fowl, awakening echoes everywhere, river, and valley, andmountain wall, caused in him a fear so great that he lay for a moment silent and trembling at thebase of the tree, as though he wished to be buried there. But that burdened heart of his would notbe still, would not let him keep silence—would not let him breathe until he cried again. And so hecried again; and his cry returned again; and still the silence waited for God to speak.

　　 And his tears began—such tears as he had not known were in him. ‘I wept,’ he said later,‘like a little child.’ But no child had ever wept such tears as he wept that morning on his facebefore Heaven, under the mighty tree. They came from deeps no child discovers, and shook himwith an ague no child endures. And presently, in his agony, he was screaming, each cry seeming totear his throat apart, and stop his breath, and force the hot tears down his face, so that theysplashed his hands and wet the root of the tree: ‘Save me! Save me!’ And all creation rang, but didnot answer. ‘I couldn’t hear nobody pray.’

　　Yes, he was in that valley where his mother had told him he would find himself, wherethere was no human help, no hand outstretched to protect or save. Here nothing prevailed save themercy of God—here the battle was fought between God and the Devil, between death andeverlasting life. And he had tarried too long, he had turned aside in sin too long, and God wouldnot hear him. The appointed time had passed and God had turned His face away.

　　‘Then,’ he testified, ‘I heard my mother singing. She was a-singing for me. She was a-singing low and sweet, right there beside me, like she knew if she just called Him, the Lord wouldcome.’ When he heard this singing, which filled all the silent air, which swelled until it filled allthe waiting earth, the heart within him broke, and yet began to rise, lifted of its burden; and histhroat unlocked; and his tears came down as though the listening skies had opened. ‘Then I praisedGod, Who had brought me out of Egypt and set my feet on the solid rock.’ When at last he liftedup his eyes he saw a new Heaven and a new Earth; and he heard a new sound of singing, for asinner had come home. ‘I looked at my hands and my hands were new. I looked at my feet and myfeet were new. And I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change mymind.’ And, yes, there was singing everywhere; the birds and the crickets and the frogs rejoiced,the distant dogs leaping and sobbing, circled in their narrow yards, and roosters cried from everyhigh fence that here was a new beginning, a blood-washed day!

　　And this was the beginning of his life as a man. He was just past twenty-one; the century was notyet one year old. He moved into town, into the room that awaited him at the top of the house inwhich he worked, and he began to preach. He married Deborah in that same year. After the deathof his mother, he began to see her all the time. They went to the house of God together, andbecause there was no one, any more, to look after him, she invited him often to her home formeals, and kept his clothes neat, and after he had preached they discussed his sermons; that is, helistened while she praised.

　　He had certainly never intended to marry her; such an idea was no more in his mind, hewould have said, that the possibility of flying to the moon. He had known her all his life; she hadbeen his older sister’s older friend, and then his mother’s faithful visitor; she had never, forGabriel, been young. So far as he was concerned, she might have been born in her severe, hersexless, long and shapeless habit, always black or gray. She seemed to have been put on earth tovisit the sick, and to comfort those who wept, and to arrange the last garments of the dying.

　　Again, there was her legend, her history, which would have been enough, even had she notbeen so wholly unattractive, to put her for ever beyond the gates of any honorable man’s desires.

　　This, indeed, in her silent, stolid fashion, she seemed to know: where, it might be, other women held as their charm and secret the joy that they could give and share, she contained only the shamethat she had borne—shame, unless a miracle of human love delivered her, was all she had to give.

　　And she moved, therefore, through their small community like a woman mysteriously visited byGod, like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool. No ornaments ever graced her body;there was about her no tinkling, no shining, and no softness. No ribbon falsified her blameless andimplacable headgear; on her woolen head there was only the barest minimum oil. She did notgossip with the other women—she had nothing, indeed, to gossip about—but kept hercommunication to yea and nay, and read her Bible, and prayed. There were people in the church,and even men carrying the gospel, who mocked Deborah behind her back; but their mockery wasuneasy; they could never be certain but that they might be holding up to scorn the greatest saintamong them, the Lord’s peculiar treasure and most holy vessel.

　　‘You sure is a godsend to me, Sister Deborah,’ Gabriel would sometimes say. ‘I don’tknow what I’d do without you.’

　　For she sustained him most beautifully in his new condition; with her unquestioning faithin God, and her faith in him, she, even more than the sinners who came crying to the altar after hehad preached, bore earthly witness to his calling; and speaking, as it were, in the speech of men shelent reality to the mighty work that the Lord had appointed to Gabriel’s hands.

　　And she would look up at him with her timid smile. ‘You hush, Reverend. It’s me thatdon’t never kneel down without I thank the Lord for you.’

　　Again: she never called him Gabriel or ‘Gabe,’ but from the time that he began to preachshe called him Reverend, knowing that the Gabriel whom she had known as a child was no more,was a new man in Christ Jesus.

　　‘You ever hear from Florence?’ she sometimes asked.

　　‘Lord, Sister Deborah, it’s me that ought to be asking you. That girl don’t hardly neverwrite to me.’

　　‘I ain’t heard from her real lately.’ She paused. Then: ‘I don’t believe she so happy upthere.’

　　‘And serve her right, too—she ain’t had no business going away from here like she did, justlike a crazy woman.’ And then he asked, maliciously: ‘She tell you if she married yet/’

　　She looked at him quickly, and looked away. ‘Florence ain’t thinking about no husband,’

　　she saidHe laughed. ‘God bless you for your pure heart, Sister Deborah. But if that girl ain’t goneaway from here a-looking for a husband, my name ain’t Gabriel Grimes.’

　　‘If she’d a-wanted a husband look to me like she could a-just picked one right here. Youdon’t mean to tell me she done traveled all the way North just for that?’ And she smiled strangely,a smile less gravely impersonal. He, seeing this, thought that it certainly did a strange thing to herface; it made her look like a frightened girl.

　　‘You know,’ he said, watching her with more attention, ‘Florence ain’t never thought noneof these niggers around here was good enough for her.’

　　 ‘I wonder,’ she ventured, ‘if she ever going to find a man good enough for her. She soproud—look like she just won’t let anybody come near her.’

　　‘Yes,’ he said, frowning, ‘she so proud the Lord going to bring her low one day. You markmy words.’

　　‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘the Word sure do tell us that pride goes before destruction.’

　　‘And a haughty spirit before a fall. That’s the Word.’

　　‘Yes,’ and she smiled again, ‘ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend?

　　You is just go to be in it, that’s all—’cause every word is true, and the gates of Hell ain’t going tobe able to stand against it.’

　　He smiled, watching her, and felt a great tenderness fill his heart. ‘You just stay in theWord, little sister. The windows of Heaven going to open up and pour down blessings on you tillyou won’t know where to put them.’

　　When she smiled it with heightened joy. ‘He done blessed me already, Reverend. He blessed me when (now) He save(was) d your s(a) oul and sent you out to preach His gospel.’

　　‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, slowly, ‘all that sinful time—was you a-praying for me?’

　　Her tone dropped ever so slightly. ‘We sure was, Reverend. Me and your mother, we wasa-praying all the time.’

　　And he looked at her, full of gratitude and a sudden, wild conjecture: he had been real forher, she had watched him, and prayed for him during all those years when she, for him, had beennothing but a shadow. And she was praying for him still; he would have her prayers to aid him allhis life long—he saw this, now, in her face. She said nothing, and she did not smile, only looked athim with her grave kindness, now a little questioning, a little shy.

　　‘God bless you, sister,’ he said at last.

　　It was during this dialogue, or hard on the heels of it, that the town was subjected to amonster revival meeting. Evangelists from all the surrounding counties, from as far south asFlorida and as far north as Chicago, came together in one place to break the bread of life. It wascalled the Twenty-Four Elders Revival Meeting, and it was the great occasion of that summer. Forthere were twenty-four of them, each one given his night to preach—to shine, as it were, beforemen, and to glorify his Heavenly Father. Of these twenty-four, all of them men of great experienceand power, and some of them men of great fame, Gabriel, to his astonished pride, was asked to beone. This was a great, a heavy honor for one so young in the faith and in years—who had but onlyyesterday been lying, vomit-covered, in the gutters of sin—and Gabriel felt his heart shake withfear as this invitation came to him. Yet he felt that it was the hand of God that called him out soearly to prove himself before such mighty men.

　　He was to preach on the twelve night. It was decided, in view of his possible failure toattract, to support him on either side with a nearly equal number of war horses. He would have,thus, the benefits of the storm they would certainly have stirred up before him; and should he failto add substantially to the effect they had created, there would be others coming after him toobliterate his performance.

　　 But Gabriel did not want his performance—the most important of his career so far, and onwhich so much depended—to be obliterated; he did not want to be dismissed as a mere boy whowas scarcely ready to be counted in the race, much less to be considered a candidate for the prize.

　　He fasted on his knees before God and did not cease, daily and nightly, to pray that God mightwork through him a mighty work and cause all men to see that, indeed, God’s hand was on him,that he was the Lord’s anointed.

　　Deborah, unasked, fasted with him, and prayed, and took his best black suit away, so that itwould be clean and mended and freshly pressed for the great day. And she took it away again,immediately afterwards, so that it would be no less splendid on the Sunday of the great dinner thatwas officially to punctuate the revival. This Sunday was to be the feast day for everyone, but moreespecially for the twenty-four elders, who were, that day, to be gloriously banqueted at the saints’

　　expense and labor. On the evening when he was to preach, he and Deborah walked together to thegreat, lighted, lodge hall that had but lately held a dance band, and that the saints had rented for theduration of the revival. The service had already begun; light spilled outward into the streets, musicfilled the air, and passers-by paused to listen and to peek in through the half-open doors. Hewanted all of them to enter; he wanted to run through the streets and drag all sinners in to hear theWord of God. Yet, as they approached the doors, the fear held in check so many days and nightsrose in him again, and he thought how he would stand to-night, so high, and all alone, to vindicatethe testimony that had fallen from her lips, that God had called him to preach.

　　‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, suddenly, as they stood before the doors, ‘you sit where I can seeyou?’

　　‘I sure will do that, Reverend,’ she said. ‘You go on up there. Trust God.’

　　Without another word he turned, leaving her in the door, and walked up the long aisle tothe pulpit. They were all there already, big, comfortable, ordained men; they smiled and nodded ashe mounted the pulpit steps; and one of them said, nodding towards the congregation, which wasas spirited as any evangelist could wish: ‘Just getting these folks warmed up for you, boy. Want tosee you make them holler to-night.’

　　He smiled in the instant before he knelt down at his throne-like chair to pray; and thoughtagain, as he had been thinking for eleven nights, that there was about his elders an ease in the holyplace, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy. While he sat, waiting, he saw that Deborah hadfound a seat in the very front of the congregation, just below the pulpit, and sat with her Biblefolded on her lap.

　　When, at last, the Scripture lesson read, the testimonies in, the songs sung, the collectiontaken up, he was introduced—by the elder who had preached the night before—and found himselfon his feet, moving toward the pulpit where the great Bible awaited him, and over that sheer dropthe murmuring congregation; he felt a giddy terror that he stood so high, and with this,immediately, a pride and joy unspeakable that God had placed him there.

　　He did not begin with a ‘shout’ song, or with a fiery testimony; but in a dry, matter-of-factvoice, which trembled only a little, asked them to look with him at the sixth chapter of Isaiah, andthe fifth verse; and he asked Deborah to read it aloud for him.

　　 And as she read, in a voice unaccustomedly strong: ‘ “Then said I, Woe is me! for I amundone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts,” ’

　　Silence filled the lodge hall after she had read this sentence. For a moment Gabriel wasterrified by the eyes on him, and by the elders at his back, and could not think how to go on. Thenhe looked at Deborah, and began.

　　These words had been uttered by the prophet Isaiah, who had been called the Eagle-eyedbecause he had looked down the dark centuries and foreseen the birth of Christ. It was Isaiah alsowho had prophesied that a man should be as a hiding-place from the wind and tempest, Isaiah whohad described the way of holiness, saying that the parched ground should become a pool and thethirsty land springs of water: the very desert would rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It was Isaiahwho had prophesied, saying: ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the governmentshall be upon His shoulder.’ This was a man whom God had raised in righteousness, whom Godhad chosen to do many works, yet this man, beholding the vision of God’s glory, had cried out:

　　‘Woe is me!’

　　‘Yes! cried a woman. ‘Tell it!’

　　‘There is a lesson for us all in this cry of Isaiah’s, a meaning for us all, a hard saying. If wehave never cried this cry then we have never known salvation; if we fail to live with this cry,hourly, daily, in the midnight hour, and in the light of the noonday sun, then salvation has left usand our feet have laid hold on Hell. Yes, bless our God forever! When we cease to tremble beforeHim we have turned out of the way.’

　　‘Amen!’ cried a voice from far away. ‘Amen! You preach it, boy!’

　　He paused for only a moment and mopped his bow, the heart within him great with fearand trembling, and with power.

　　‘For let us remember that the wages of sin is death; that it is written, and cannot fail, thesoul that sinneth, it shall die. Let us remember that we are born in sin, in sin did our mothersconceive us—sin reigns in all our members, sin is the foul heart’s natural liquid, sin looks out ofthe eye, amen, and leads to lust, sin is in the hearing of the ear, and leads to folly, sin sits on thetongue, and leads to murder. Yes! Sin is the only heritage of the natural man, sin bequeathed us byour natural father, that fallen Adam, whose apple sickens and will sicken all generations living,and generations yet unborn! It was sin that drove the son of the morning out of Heaven, sin thatdrove Adam out of the Eden, sin that caused Cain to slay his brother, sin that built the tower ofBabel, sin that caused the fire to fall on Sodom—sin, from the very foundations of the world,living and breathing in the heart of man, that causes women to bring forth their children in agonyand darkness, bows down the backs of men with terrible labor, keeps the empty belly empty, keepsthe table bare, sends our children, dressed in rags, out into the whore houses and dance halls of theworld!’

　　‘Amen! Amen!’

　　‘Ah. Woe is me. Woe is me. Yes, beloved—there is no righteousness in man. All men’shearts are evil, all men are liars—only God is true. Hear David’s cry: “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler and the hornof my salvation, and my high tower.” Hear Job, sitting in dust and ashes, his children dead, hissubstance gone, surrounded by false comforters: “Yea, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”

　　And hear Paul, who had been Saul, a persecutor of the redeemed, struck down on the road toDamascus, and going forth to preach the gospel: “And if ye be Christ’s, then ye are Abraham’sseed, and heirs according to the promise!” ’

　　‘Oh, yes,’ cried one of the elders, ‘bless our God forever!’

　　‘For God had a plan. He would not suffer the soul of man to die, but had prepared a planfor his salvation. In the beginning, way back there at the laying of the foundations of the world,God had a plan, amen!, to bring all flesh to a knowledge of the truth. In the beginning was theWord and the Word was with God and the Word was God—yes, and in Him was life, hallelujah!

　　and this life was the light of men. Dearly beloved, when God saw how men’s hearts waxed evil,how they turned aside, each to his own way, how they married and gave in marriage, how theyfeasted on ungodly meat and drink, and lusted, and blasphemed, and lifted up their hearts in sinfulpride against the Lord—oh, then, the Son of God, the blessed lamb that taketh away the sins of theworld, this Son of God who was the Word made flesh, the fulfillment of the promise—oh, then, Heturned to His Father, crying: “Father, prepare me a body and I’ll go down and redeem sinful man.”

　　’

　　‘So glad this evening, praise the Lord!’

　　‘Fathers, here to-night, have you ever had a son who went astray? Mothers, have you seenyour daughters cut down in the pride and fullness of youth? Has any man here heard the commandwhich came to Abraham, that he must make his son a living sacrifice on God’s altar? Fathers, thinkof your sons, how you tremble for them, and try to lead them right, try to feed them so they’ll growup strong; think of your love for your son, and how any evil that befalls him cracks up the heart,and think of the pain that God has borne, sending down His only begotten Son, to dwell amongmen on the sinful earth, to be persecuted, to suffer, to bear the cross and die—not for His own sins,like our natural sons, but for the sins of all the world, to take away the sins of all the world—thatwe might have the joy of bells ringing deep in our hearts to-night!’

　　‘Praise Him!’ cried Deborah, and he had never heard her voice so loud.

　　‘Woe is me, for when God struck the sinner, the sinner’s eyes were opened, and he sawhimself in all his foulness naked before God’s glory. Woe is me! For the moment of salvation is ablinding light, cracking down into the heart from Heaven—Heaven so high, and the sinner so low.

　　Woe is me! For unless God raised the sinner, he would never rise again!’

　　‘Yes, Lord! I was there!’

　　How many here to-night had fallen where Isaiah fell? How many had cried—as Isaiahcried? How many could testify, as Isaiah testified, ‘Mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord ofhosts’? Ah, whosoever failed to have this testimony should see His face, but should be told, on thatgreat day: ‘Depart from me, ye that work iniquity,’ and be hurled for ever into the lake of fireprepared for Satan and all his angels. Oh, would the sinner rise to-night, and walk the little mile tohis salvation, here to the mercy seat?

　　 And he waited. Deborah watched him with a calm, strong smile. He looked out over theirfaces, their faces all upturned to him. He saw joy in those faces, and holy excitement, and belief—and they all looked up to him. Then, far in the back, a boy rose, a tall, dark boy, his white shirtopen at the neck and torn, his trousers dusty and shabby and held up with an old necktie, and helooked across the immeasurable, dreadful, breathing distance up to Gabriel, and began to walkdown the long, bright aisle. Someone cried: ‘Oh, bless the Lord!’ and tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.

　　The boy knelt, sobbing, at the mercy seat, and the church began to sing.

　　Then Gabriel turned away, knowing that this night he had run well, and that God had usedhim. The elders all were smiling, and one of them took him by the hand, and said: ‘That wasmighty fine, boy. Mighty fine.’

　　Then came the Sunday of the spectacular dinner that was to end the revival—for whichdinner, Deborah and all the other women, had baked, roasted, fried, and boiled for many daysbeforehand. He jokingly suggested to repay her a little for her contention that he was the bestpreacher of the revival, that she was the best cook among the women. She timidly suggested thathe was here at a flattering disadvantage, for she had heard all of the preachers, but he had not, for avery long time, eaten another woman’s cooking.

　　When the Sunday came, and he found himself once more among the elders, about to go tothe table, Gabriel felt a drop in his happy, proud anticipation. He was not comfortable with thesemen—that was it—it was difficult for him to accept them as his elders and betters in the faith.

　　They seemed to him so lax, so nearly worldly; they were not like those holy prophets of old whogrew thin and naked in the service of the Lord. These, God’s ministers, had indeed grown fat, andtheir dress was rich and various. They had been in the field so long that they did not tremble beforeGod any more. They took God’s power as their due, as something that made the more excitingtheir own assured, special atmosphere. They each had, it seemed, a bagful of sermons oftenpreached with great authority, and brought souls low before the altar—like so many ears of cornlopped off by the hired laborer in his daily work—they did not give God the glory, nor count it asglory at all; they might as easily have been, Gabriel thought, highly paid circus-performers, eachwith his own special dazzling gift. Gabriel discovered that they spoke, jokingly, of the comparativenumber of souls each of them had saved, as though they were keeping score in a pool-room. Andthis offended him and frightened him. He did not want, ever, to hold the gift of God so lightly.

　　They, the ministers, were being served alone in the upper room of the lodge hall—the less-specialized workers in Christ’s vineyard were being fed at a table downstairs—and the womenkept climbing up and down the stairs with a loaded platters to see that they ate their fill. Deborahwas one of the serving-women, and though she did not speak, and despite his discomfort, he nearlyburst each time she entered the room, with the pride he knew she felt to see him sitting there, soserene and manly, among all these celebrated others, in the severe black and white that was hisuniform. And if only, he felt, his mother could be there to see—her Gabriel, mounted so high!

　　But, near the end of the dinner, when the women had brought up the pies, and coffee, andcream, and when the talk around the table had become more jolly and more good-naturedly loosethan ever, the door had but barely closed behind the women when one of the elders, a heavy,cheery, sandy-haired man, whose face, testifying no doubt to the violence of his beginnings, wassplashed with freckles like dried blood, laughed and said, referring to Deborah, that there was a holy woman, all right! She had been choked so early on white men’s milk, and it remained so sourin her belly yet, that she would never be able, now, to find a nigger who would let her taste hisricher, sweeter substance. Everyone at the table roared, but Gabriel felt his blood turn cold thatGod’s ministers should be guilty of such abominable levity, and that that woman sent by God tocomfort him, and without whose support he might already have fallen by the wayside, should beheld in such dishonor. They felt, he knew, that among themselves a little rude laughter could do noharm; they were too deeply rooted in the faith to be made to fall by such an insignificant tap fromSatan’s hammer. But he stared at their boisterous, laughing faces, and felt that they would havemuch to answer for on the day of judgment, for they were stumbling-stones in the path of the truebeliever.

　　Now the sandy-haired man, struck by Gabriel’s bitter astounded face, bit his laughter off,and said: ‘What’s the matter, son? I hope I ain’t said nothing to offend you?’

　　‘She read the Bible for you the night you preached, didn’t she?’ asked another of the elders,in a conciliatory tone.

　　‘That woman,’ said Gabriel, feeling a roaring in his head, ‘is my sister in the Lord.’

　　‘Well, Elder Peters here, he just didn’t know that,’ said someone else. ‘He sure didn’t meanno harm.’

　　‘Now, you ain’t going to get mad?’ asked Elder Peters, kindly—yet there remained, toGabriel’s fixed attention, something mocking in his face and voice. ‘You ain’t going to spoil ourlittle dinner?’

　　‘I don’t think it’s right,’ said Gabriel, ‘to talk evil about nobody. The Word tell me it ain’tright to hold nobody up to scorn.’

　　‘Now you just remember,’ Elder Peter said, as kindly as before, ‘you’s talking to yourelders.’

　　‘Then it seem to me,’ he said, astonished at his boldness, ‘that if I got to look to you for aexample, you ought to be an example.’

　　‘Now, you know,’ said someone else, jovially, ‘you ain’t fixing to make that woman yourwife or nothing like that—so ain’t no need to get all worked up and spoil our little gathering. ElderPeters didn’t mean no harm. If you don’t never say nothing worse that that, you can count yourselfalready up there in the Kingdom with the chosen.’

　　And at this a small flurry of laughter swept over the table; they went back to their eatingand drinking, as though the matter were finished.

　　Yet Gabriel felt that he has surprised them; he had found them out and they were a littleashamed and confounded before his purity. And he understood suddenly the words of Christ,where it was written: ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’ Yes, and he looked around the table,already jovial again, but rather watchful now, too, of him—and he wondered who, of all these,would sit in glory at the right hand of the Father?

　　And then, as he sat there, remembering again Elder Peter’s boisterous, idle remark, thisremark shook together in him all those shadowy doubts and fears, those hesitations and tenderness, which were his in relation to Deborah, and the sum of which he now realized was his certainty thatthere was in that relationship something fore-ordained. It came to him that, as the Lord had givenhim Deborah, to help him to stand, so the Lord had sent him to her, to raise her up, to release herfrom that dishonor which was hers in the eyes of men. And this idea filled him, in a moment,wholly, with the intensity of a vision: What better woman could be found? She was not like themincing daughters of Zion! She was not to be seen prancing lewdly through the streets, eyes sleepyand mouth half-open with lust, or to be found mewing under night fences, uncovered, uncoveringsome black boy’s hanging curse! No, their married bed would be holy, and their children wouldcontinue the line of the faithful, a royal line. And, fired with this, a baser fire stirred in him also,rousing a slumbering fear, and he remembered (as the table, the ministers, the dinner, and the talkall burst in on him again) that Paul had written: ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’

　　Yet, he thought, he would hold his peace awhile; he would seek to know more clearly theLord’s mind in this matter. For he remembered how much older she was than he—eight years; andhe tried to imagine, for the first time in his life, that dishonor to which Deborah had been forced somany years ago by white men: her skirts above her head, her secrecy discovered—by white men.

　　How many? Had she borne it? Had she screamed? Then he thought (but it did not really troublehim, for if Christ to save him could be crucified, he, for Christ’s greater glory, could well bemocked) of what smiles would be occasioned, what filthy conjecture, barely sleeping now, wouldmushroom upward overnight like Jonah’s gourd, when people heard that he and Deborah weregoing to be married. She, who had been the living proof and witness of their daily shame, and whohad become their holy fool—and he, who had been the untamable despoiler of their daughters, andthief of their women, their walking prince of darkness! And he smiled, watching their elders’ well-fed faces and their grinding jaws—unholy pastors all, unfaithful stewards; he prayed that he wouldnever be so fat, or so lascivious, but that God should work through him a mighty work: to ring, itmight be, through ages yet unborn, as sweet, solemn, mighty proof of His everlasting love andmercy. He trembled with the presence that surrounded him now; he could scarcely keep his seat.

　　He felt that light shone down on him from Heaven, on him, the chosen; he felt as Christ must havefelt in the temple, facing His so utterly confounded elders; and he lifted up his eyes not caring fortheir glances, or their clearing of throats, and the silence that abruptly settled over the table,thinking: ‘Yes. God works in many mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’

　　‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, much later that night as he was walking her to her door, ‘the Lorddone laid something on my heart and I want you to help me to pray over it and ask Him to lead meright.’

　　He wondered if she could divine what was in his mind. In her face there was nothing butpatience, as she turned to him, and said: ‘I’m praying all the time. But I sure will pray extra hardthis week if you want me to.’

　　And it was during this praying time that Gabriel had a dream.

　　He could never afterwards remember how the dream began, what had happened, or who hewas with in the dream; or any details at all. For there were really two dreams, the first like a dim,blurred, infernal foreshadowing of the second. Of this first dream, the overture, he rememberedonly the climate, which had been like the climate of his day—heavy, with danger everywhere,Satan at his shoulder trying to bring him down. That night as he tried to sleep, Satan sent demons to his bedside—old friends he had had, but whom he saw no more, and drinking and gamblingscenes that he had thought would never rise to haunt him again, and women he had known. Andthe women were so real that he could nearly touch them; and he heard again their laughter andtheir sighs, and felt beneath his hands their thighs and breasts. Though he closed his eyes andcalled on Jesus—calling over and over again the name of Jesus—his pagan body stiffened andflamed and the women laughed. And they asked him why he remained in his narrow bed alonewhen they waited for him; why he had bound his body in the armor of chastity while they sighedand turned on their beds for him. And he sighed and turned, every movement torture, each touch ofthe sheets a lewd caress—and more abominable, then, in his imagination, than any caress he hadreceived in life. And he clenched his fists and began to plead the blood, to exorcise the hosts ofHell, but even this motion was like another motion, and at length he fell on his knees to pray. Byand by he fell into a troublous sleep—it seemed that he was going to be stoned, and then he was inbattle, and then shipwrecked in the water—and suddenly he awoke, knowing that he must havedreamed, for his loins were covered with his own white seed.

　　Then, trembling, he got out of bed again and washed himself. It was a warning, and heknew it, and he seemed to see before him the pit dug by Satan—deep and silent, waiting for him.

　　He thought of the dog returned to his vomit, of the man who had been cleansed, and who fell, andwho was possessed by seven devils, the last state of that man being worse than his first. And hethought at last, kneeling by his cold bedside, but with the heart within him almost too sick forprayer, of Onan, who had scattered his seed on the ground rather than continue his brother’s line.

　　Out of the house of David, the son of Abraham. And he called again on the name of Jesus; and fellasleep again.

　　And he dreamed that he was in a cold, high place, like a mountain. He was high, so highthat he walked in mist and cloud, but before him stretched the blank ascent, the teep side of themountain. A voice said: ‘Come higher.’ And he began to climb. After a little, clinging to the rock,he found himself with only clouds above him and mist below—and he knew that beyond the wallof mist reigned fire. His feet began to slip; pebbles and rocks began ringing beneath his feet; helooked up, trembling, in terror of death, and he cried: ‘Lord, I can’t come no higher.’ But the voicerepeated after a moment, quiet and strong and impossible to deny: ‘Come on, son. Come higher.’

　　Then he knew that, if he would not fall to death, he must obey the voice. He began to climb again,and his feet slipped again; and when he thought that he would fall there suddenly appeared beforehim green, spiny leaves, and he caught on to the leaves, which hurt his hand, and the voice saidagain: ‘Come higher.’ And so Gabriel climbed, the wind blowing through his clothes, and his feetbegan to bleed, and his hand were bleeding; and still he climbed, and he felt that his back wasbreaking; and his legs were growing numb and they were trembling, and he could not controlthem; and still before him there was only cloud, and below him the roaring mist. How long heclimbed in this dream of his, he did not know. Then, of a sudden, the clouds parted, the felt the sunlike a crown of glory, and he was in a peaceful field.

　　He began to walk. Now he was wearing long, white robes. He heard singing: ‘Walked inthe valley, it looked so fine, I asked my Lord was all this mine.’ But he knew that it was his. Avoice said: ‘Follow me.’ And he walked, and he was again on the edge of a high place, but bathedand blessed and glorified in the blazing sun, so that he stood like God, all golden, and looked down, down, at the long race he had run, at the step side of the mountain he had climbed. And nowup this mountain, in white robes, singing, the elect came. ‘Touch them not,’ the voice said, ‘myseal is on them.’ And Gabriel turned and fell on his face, and the voice said again: ‘So shall thyseed be.’ Then he awoke. Morning was at the window, and he blessed God, lying on his bed, tearsrunning down his face, for the vision he had seen.

　　When he went to Deborah and told her that the Lord had led him to ask her to be his wife,his holy helpmeet, she looked at him for a moment in what seemed to be speechless terror. He hadnever seen such an expression on her face before. For the first time since he had known her hetouched her, putting his hands on her shoulders, thinking what untender touch these shoulders hadonce known, and how she would be raised now in honor. And he asked: ‘You ain’t scared, is you,Sister Deborah? You ain’t got nothing to be scared of?’

　　Then she tried to smile, and began, instead, to weep. With a movement at once violent andhesitant, she let her head fall forward on his breast.

　　‘No,’ she brought out, muffled in his arms, ‘I ain’t scared.’ But she did not stop weeping.

　　He stroked her coarse, bowed head. ‘God bless you, little girl,’ he said, helplessly. ‘Godbless you.’

　　The silence in the church ended when Brother Elisha, kneeling near the piano, cried out and fellbackward under the power of the Lord. Immediately, two or three others cried out also, and a wind,a foretaste of that great downpouring they awaited, swept the church. With this cry, and theechoing cries, the tarry service moved from its first stage of steady murmuring, broken by moansand now and again an isolated cry, into that stage of tears and groaning, of calling aloud andsinging, which was like the labor of a woman about to be delivered of her child. On this threshing-floor the child was the soul that struggled to the light, and it was the church that was in labor, thatdid not cease to push and pull, calling on the name of Jesus. When Brother Elisha cried out and fellback, Sister McCandless rose and stood over him to help him pray. For the rebirth of the soul wasperpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.

　　Sister Price began to sing:

　　‘I want to go through, Lord,I want to go through.

　　Take me through, LordTake me through.’

　　A lone voice, joined by others, among them, waveringly, the voice of John. Gabrielrecognized the voice. When Elisha cried, Gabriel was brought back in an instant to this presenttime and place, fearing that it was John he heard, that it was John who lay astonished beneath thepower of the Lord. He nearly looked up and turned around; but then he knew it was Elisha, and hisfear departed.

　　 ‘Have your way, Lord,Have your way.’

　　Neither of his sons was here to-night, had ever cried on the threshing-floor. One had beendead for nearly fourteen years—dead in a Chicago tavern, a knife kicking in his throat. And theliving son, the child, Roy, was headlong already, and hardhearted: he lay at home, silent now, andbitter against his father, a bandage on his forehead. They were not here. Only the son of the bondwoman stood where the rightful heir should stand.

　　‘I’ll obey, Lord,I’ll obey.’

　　He felt that he should rise and pray over Elisha—when a man cried out, it was right thatanother man should be his intercessor. And he thought how gladly he would rise, and with whatpower he would pray if it were only his son who lay crying on the floor to-night. But he remained,bowed low, on his knees. Each cry that came from the fallen Elisha tore through him. He heard thecry of his dead son and his living son; one that cried in the pit forever, beyond the hope of mercy;and one who would cry one day when mercy would be finished.

　　Now Gabriel tried, with the testimony he had held, with all the signs of His favor that Godhad shown him, to put himself between the living son and the darkness that waited to devour him.

　　The living son had cursed him—bastard— and his heart was far from God; it could not be that thecurse he had heard to-night falling from Roy’s lips was but the course repeated, so far, so longresounding, that the mother of his first son had uttered as she thrust the infant from her—herselfimmediately departing, this curse yet on her lips, into eternity. Her course had devoured the firstRoyal; he had been begotten in sin, and he had perished in sin; it was God’s punishment, and itwas just. But Roy had been begotten in the marriage bed, the bed that Paul described as holy, andit was to him the Kingdom had been promised. It could not be that the living son was cursed forthe sins of his father; for God, after much groaning, after many years, had given him a sign tomake him know he was forgiven. And yet, it came to him that this living son, this headlong, livingRoyal, might be cursed for the sin of his mother, whose sin had never been truly repented; for thatthe living proof of her sin, he who knelt to-night, a very interloper among the saints, stood betweenher soul and God.

　　Yes, she hardhearted, stiff-neck, and hard to bend, this Elizabeth whom he had married; shehad not seemed so, years ago, when the Lord had moved in his heart to lift her up, she and hernameless child, who bore his name to-day. And he was exactly like her, silent, watching, full ofevil pride—they would be cast out, one day, into the outer darkness.

　　Once he had asked Elizabeth—they had been married a long while, Roy was a baby, andshe was big with Sarah—if she had truly repented of her sin.

　　 And she looked at him, and said: ‘You done asked me that before. And I done told you,yes.’

　　But he did not believe her; and he asked: ‘You mean you wouldn’t do it again? If you wasback there, where you was, like you was then—would you do it again?’

　　She looked down; then, with impatience, she looked into his eyes again: ‘Well, if I wasback there, Gabriel, and I was the same girl! …’

　　There was a long silence, while she waited. Then, almost unwillingly, he asked: ‘And …would you let him be born again?’

　　She answered, steadily: ‘I know you ain’t asking me to say I’m sorry I brought Johnny inthe world. Is you?’ And when he did not answer: ‘And listen, Gabriel. I ain’t going to let you makeme sorry. Not you, nor nothing, nor nobody in this world. We is got two children, Gabriel, andsoon we’s going to have three; and I ain’t going to make no difference amongst them and you ain’tgoing to make none neither.’

　　But how could not be difference between the son of a weak, proud woman and somecareless boy, and the son that God had promised him, who would carry down the joyful line hisfather’s name, and who would work until the day of the second coming to bring about His father’sKingdom? For God had promised him this so many years ago, and he had lived only for this—forsaking the world and its pleasures, and the joys of his own life, he had tarried all these bitteryears to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. He had let Esther die, and Royal had died, andDeborah had died barren—but he had held on to the promise; he had walked before God in truerepentance and waited on the promise. And the time of fulfillment was surely at hand. He had onlyto possess his soul in patience and wait before the Lord.

　　And his mind, dwelling bitterly on Elizabeth, yet moved backwards to consider once againEsther, who had been the mother of the first Royal. And he saw her, with the dumb, pale, startledghosts of joy and desire hovering in him yet, a thin, vivid, dark-eyed girl, with something Indian inher cheekbones and her carriage and her hair; looking at him with that look in which were blendedmockery, affection, desire, impatience, and scorn; dressed in the flame-like colors that, in fact, shehad seldom worn, but that he always thought of her as wearing. She was associated in his mindwith flame; with fiery leaves in autumn, and the fiery sun going down in the evening over thefarthest hill, and with the eternal fires of Hell.

　　She had come to town very shortly after he and Deborah were married, and she took a jobas serving-girl with the same white family for which he worked. He saw her, therefore, all thetime. Young men were always waiting for her at the back door when her work was done: Gabrielused to watch her walk off in the dusk on a young man’s arm, and their voices and their laughterfloated back to him like a mockery of his condition. He knew that she lived with her mother andstepfather, sinful people, giving to drinking and gambling and ragtime music and the blues, whonever, except at Christmas-time or Easter, appeared in church.

　　He began to pity her, and one day when he was to preach in the evening he invited her tocome to church. This invitation marked the first time she ever really looked at him—he realized itthen, and was to remember that look for many days and nights.

　　 ‘You really going to preach to-night? A pretty man like you?’

　　‘With the Lord’s help,’ he said, with a gravity so extreme that it was almost hostility. Atthe same time, at her look and voice something leaped in him that he thought had been put downfor ever.

　　‘Well, I be mighty delighted,’ she said after a moment, seeming to have briefly regrettedthe impetuosity that had led her to call him a ‘pretty’ man.

　　‘Can you make yourself free to come to-night?’ he could not prevent himself from asking.

　　And she grinned, delighted at what she took to be an oblique compliment. ‘Well, I don’tknow, Reverend. But I’ll try.’

　　When the day was ended, she disappeared on the arm of yet another boy. He did notbelieve that she would come. And this so strangely depressed him that he could scarcely speak toDeborah at dinner, and they walked all the way to church in silence. Deborah watched him out ofthe corner of her eye, as was her silent and exasperating habit. It was her way of conveying respectfor his calling; and she would have said, had it ever occurred to him to tax her with it, that she didnot wish to distract him when the Lord had laid something on his heart. To-night, since he was topreach, it could not be doubted that the Lord was speaking more than usual; and it behooved her,therefore, as the helpmeet of the Lord’s anointed, as the caretaker, so to speak, of the sanctifiedtemple, to keep silence. Yet, in fact, he would have liked to talk. He would have liked to ask her—so many things; to have listened to her voice, and watched her face while she told him of her day,her hopes, her doubts, her life, and her love. But he and Deborah never talked. The voice to whichhe listened in his mind, and the face he watched with such much love and care, belonged not toDeborah, but to Esther. Again he felt this strange chill in him, implying disaster and delight; andthen he hoped that she would not come, that something would happen that would make itimpossible for him ever to see her again.

　　She came, however; late, just before the pastor was about to present the speaker of the hourto the congregation. She did not come alone, but had brought her mother with her—promisingwhat spectacle Gabriel could not imagine, nor could he imagine how she had escaped her youngman of the evening. But she had; she was there; she preferred, then, to hear him preach the gospelthan to linger with others in carnal delight. She was here, and his heart was uplifted; somethingexploded in his heart when the opening door revealed her, smiling faintly with her eyes downcast,moving directly to a seat in the back of the congregation. She did not look at him at all, and yet heknew immediately that she had seen him. And in a moment he imagined her, because of thesermon that he would preach, on her knees before the altar, and then her mother and that gambling,loud-talking stepfather of hers, brought by Esther into the service of the Lord. Heads turned whenthey came in, and a murmur, barely audible, of astonishment and pleasure swept over the church.

　　Here were sinners, come to hear the Word of God.

　　And, indeed, from their apparel the sinfulness of their lives was evident: Esther wore a bluehat, trimmed with many ribbons, and a heavy, wine-red dress; and her mother, massive, and darkerthan Esther, wore great gold ear-rings in her pierced ears and had that air, vaguely disreputable,and hurriedly dressed, of women he had known in sporting-houses. They sat in the back, rigid anduncomfortable, like sisters in sin, like a living defiance of the drab sanctity of the saints. Deborah turned to look at them, and in that moment Gabriel saw, as though for the first time, how black andhow bony was this wife of his, and how wholly undesirable. Deborah looked at him with awatchful silence in her look; he felt the hand that held his Bible begin to sweat and tremble; hethought of the joyless groaning of their marriage bed; and he hated her.

　　Then the pastor rose. While he spoke, Gabriel closed his eyes. He felt the words that hewas about to speak fly from him; he felt the power of God go out of him. The the voice of thepastor ceased, and Gabriel opened his eyes in the silence and found that all eyes were on him. Andso he rose and faced the congregation.

　　‘Dearly beloved in the Lord,’ he began—but her eyes were on him, that strange, thatmocking light—‘let us bow our heads in prayer.’ And he closed his eyes and bowed his head.

　　His later memory of this sermon was like the memory of a storm. From the moment that heraised and looked out over their faces again, his tongue was loosed and he was filled with thepower of the Holy Ghost. Yes, the power of the Lord was on him that night, and he preached asermon that was remembered in camp-meetings and in cabins, and that set a standard for visitingevangelists for a generation to come. Years later, when Esther and Royal and Deborah were dead,and Gabriel was leaving the South, people remembered this sermon and the gaunt, possessedyoung man who had preached it.

　　He took his text from the eighteen chapter of the second book of Samuel, the story of theyoung Ahimaaz who ran too soon to bring the tidings of battle to King David. For, before he ran,he was asked by Joab: ‘Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready?’

　　And when Ahimaaz reached King David, who yearned to know the fate of his headlong son,Absalom, he could only say: ‘I saw a great tumult but I knew not what it was.’

　　And this was the story of all those who failed to wait on the counsel of the Lord; who madethemselves wise in their own conceit and ran before they had the tidings ready. This was the storyof innumerable shepherds who failed, in their arrogance, to feed the hungry sheep; of many afather and mother who gave their children not bread but a stone, who offered not the truth of Godbut the tinsel of this world. This was not belief but unbelief, not humility but pride: there workedin the heart of such a one the same desire that had hurled the son of the morning from Heaven tothe depths of Hell, the desire to overturn the appointed times of God, and to wrest from him whoheld all power in His hands power to meet for men. Oh, yes, they had seen it, each brother andsister beneath the sound of his voice to-night, and they had seen the destruction caused by a solamentable unripeness! Babies, bawling, fatherless, for bread, and girls in the gutters, sick with sin,and young men bleeding in the frosty fields. Yes, and there were those who cried—they had heardit, in their homes, and on the street corners, and from the very pulpit—that they should wait nolonger, despised and rejected and spat on as they were, but should rise to-day and bring down themighty, establishing the vengeance that God had claimed. But blood cried out for blood, as theblood of Abel cried out from the ground. Not for nothing was it written: ‘He that believeth will notmake haste.’ Oh, but sometimes the road was rocky. Did they think sometimes that God Forgot?

　　Oh, fall on your knees and pray for patience; fall on your knees and pray for faith; fall on yourknees for overcoming power to receive the crown of life. For God did not forget, no wordproceeding from his mouth could fail. Better to wait, like Job, through all the days of ourappointed time until our change comes than to rise up, unready, before God speaks. For if we but wait humbly before Him, He will speak glad tidings to our souls; if we but wait our change willcome, and that in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye—we will be changed one day from thiscorruption into incorruptibility forever, caught up with Him beyond the clouds. And these are thetidings we now must bear to all the nations: another son of David has hung from a tree, and he whoknows not the meaning of that tumult shall be damned forever in Hell! Brother, sister, you mayrun, but the day is coming when the King will ask: ‘What are the tidings that you bear? And whatwill you say on that great day if you know not the death of His Son?

　　‘Is there a soul here to-night’—tears were on his face and he stood above them with armsoutstretched—‘who knows not the meaning of that tumult? Is there a soul here to-night who wantsto talk to Jesus? Who wants to wait before the Lord, amen, until He speaks? Until He makes toring in your soul, amen, the glad tidings of salvation? Oh, brothers and sisters’—and still she didnot rise; but only watched him from far away—‘the time is running out. One day He’s comingback to judge the nations, to take His children, hallelujah, to their rest. They tell me, bless God,that two shall be working in the fields, and one shall be taken and the other left. Two shall belying, amen, in bed, and one shall be taken and the other left. He’s coming, beloved, like a thief inthe night, and no man knows the hour of His coming. It’s going to be too late then to cry: “Lord,have mercy.” Now is the time to make yourself ready, now, amen, to-night, before His altar. Won’tsomebody come to-night? Won’t somebody say No to Satan and give their life to the Lord?’

　　But she did not rise, only looked at him and looked about her with a bright, pleasedinterest, as though she were at a theater and were waiting to see what improbable delights wouldnext be offered to her. He somehow knew that she would never rise and walk that long aisle to themercy seat. And this filled him for a moment with a holy rage–that she stood, so brazen, in thecongregation of the righteous and refused to bow her head.

　　He said amen, and blessed them, and turned away, and immediately the congregation beganto sing. Now, again, he felt drained and sick; he was soaking wet and he smelled the odor of hisown body. Deborah, singing and beating her tambourine in the front of the congregation, watchedhim. He felt suddenly like a helpless child. He wanted to hide himself for ever and never ceasefrom crying.

　　Esther and her mother left during the singing—they had come, then, only to hear himpreach. He could not imagine what they were saying or thinking now. And he thought of tomorrow, when he would have to see her again.

　　‘Ain’t that the little girl what works at the same place with you?’ Deborah asked him on theway home.

　　‘Yes,’ he said. Now he did not feel like talking. He wanted to get home and take his wetclothes off and sleep.

　　‘She mighty pretty,’ said Deborah. ‘I ain’t never seen her in church before.’

　　He said nothing‘Was it you invited her to come out to-night?’ she asked, after a bit.

　　‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think the Word of God could do her no harm.’

　　 Deborah laughed. ‘Don’t look like it, does it. She walked out just as cool and sinful as shecome in—she and that mother of her’n. And you preached a mighty fine sermon. Look like she justain’t thinking about the Lord.’

　　‘Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord,’ he said, ‘one day He ain’t going to have no time forthem.’

　　When they got home she offered to make him a hot cup of tea, but he refused. Heundressed in silence—which she again respected—and got into bed. At length, she lay beside himlike a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

　　The next morning Esther said to him, coming into the yard while he was chopping wood for thewoodpiles: ‘Good morning, Reverend. I sure didn’t look to see you to-day. I reckoned you’d be allwore out after that sermon—do you always preach as hard as that?’

　　He paused briefly with the axe in the air; then he turned again, bringing the axe down. ‘Ipreach the way the Lord leads me, sister,’ he said.

　　She retreated a little in the face of his hostility. ‘Well,’ she said in a different tone, ‘it was amighty fine sermon. Me and Mama was mighty glad we come out.’

　　He left the axe buried in the wood, for splinters flew and he was afraid one might strikeher. ‘You and your ma—you don’t get out to service much?’

　　‘Lord Reverend,’ she wailed, ‘look like we just ain’t got the time. Mama works so hard allweek she just want to lie up in bed on Sunday. And she like me,’ she added quickly, after a pause,‘to keep her company.’

　　Then he looked directly at her. ‘Does you really mean to say, sister, that you ain’t got notime for the Lord? No time at all?’

　　‘Reverend,’ she said, looking at him with the daring defiance of a threatened child, ‘I doesmy best. I really does. Ain’t everybody got to have the same spirit.’

　　And he laughed shortly. ‘Ain’t but one spirit you got to have—and that’s the spirit of theLord.’

　　‘Well,’ she said, ‘that spirit ain’t got to work in everybody the same, seems to me.’

　　Then they were silent, each quite vividly aware that they had reached an impasse. After amoment he turned and picked up the axe again. ‘Well, you go along, sister. I’m praying for you.’

　　Something struggled in her face then, as she stood for yet a moment more and watched him—a mixture of fury and amusement; it reminded him of the expression he had often found on theface of Florence. And it was like the look on the faces f the elders during that far-off and somomentous Sunday dinner. He was too angry, while she thus stared at him, to trust himself tospeak. Then she shrugged, the mildest, most indifferent gesture he had ever seen, and smiled. ‘I’mmighty obliged to you, Reverend,’ she said. Then she went into the house.

　　This was the first time they spoke in the yard a frosty morning. There was nothing in thatmorning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechlessbefore the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had lefther not a moment’s peace. ‘That weren’t no reverend looking at me them morning in the yard,’ shehad said. ‘You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the HolyGhost.’ But he believed that the Lord had laid her like a burden on his heart. And he carried her inhis heart; he prayed for her and exhorted her, while there was yet time to bring her soul to God.

　　But she had not been thinking about God; though she accused him of lusting after her in hisheart, it was she who, when she looked at him, insisted on seeing not God’s minister but a ‘prettyman.’ On her tongue the very title of his calling became a mark of disrespect.

　　It began on an evening when he was to preach, when they were alone in the house. Thepeople of the house had gone away for three days to visit relatives; Gabriel had driven them to therailroad station after supper, leaving Esther clearing up the kitchen. When he came back to lock upthe house, he found Esther waiting for him on the porch steps.

　　‘I didn’t think I’d better leave,’ she said, ‘till you got back. I ain’t got no keys to lock upthis house, and white folks is so funny. I don’t want them blaming me if something’s missing.’

　　He realized immediately that she had been drinking—she was not drunk, but there waswhisky on her breath. And this, for some reason, caused a strange excitement to stir in him.

　　‘That was mighty thoughtful, sister,’ he said, staring hard at her to let her know that heknew she had been drinking. She met his stare with a calm, bold smile, a smile mockinginnocence, so that her face was filled with the age-old cunning of a woman.

　　He stared past her into the house; then, without thinking, and without looking at her, heoffered: ‘If you ain’t got nobody waiting for you I’ll walk you a piece on your way home.’

　　‘No,’ she said, ‘ain’t nobody waiting for me this evening, Reverend, thank you kindly.’

　　He regretted making his offer almost as soon as it was made; he had been certain that shewas about to rush off to some trysting-place or other, and he had merely wished to be corroborated.

　　Now, as they walked together into the house, he became terribly aware of her youthful, vividpresence, of her lost condition; and at the same time the emptiness and silence of the house warnedhim that he was alone with danger.

　　‘You just sit down in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I be as quick as I can.’

　　But his speech was harsh in his own ears, and he could not face her eyes. She sat down atthe table, smiling, to wait for him. He tried to do everything as quickly as possible, the shutteringof windows, and locking of doors. But his fingers were stiff and slippery; his heart was in hismouth. And it came to him that he was barring every exit to this house, except the exit through thekitchen, where Esther sat.

　　When he entered the kitchen again she had moved and now stood in the doorway, lookingout, holding a glass in her hand. It was a moment before he realized that she had helped herself tomore of the master’s whisky.

　　She turned at this step, and he stared at her, and at the glass she held, with wrath andhorror.

　　 ‘I just thought,’ she said, almost entirely unabashed, ‘that I’d have me a little drink while Iwas waiting, Reverend. But I didn’t figure on you catching me at it.’

　　She swallowed the last of her drink and moved to the sink to rinse the glass. She gave alittle, ladylike cough as she swallowed—he could not be sure whether this cough was genuine or inmockery of him.

　　‘I reckon,’ he said, malevolently, ‘you is just made up your mind to serve Satan all yourdays.’

　　‘I done made up my mind,’ she answered, ‘to live all I can while I can. If that’s a sin, well,I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t you fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.’

　　He moved and stood next to her, full of anger.

　　‘Girl,’ he said, ‘don’t you believe God? God don’t lie—and He says, plain as I’ talking toyou, the soul that sinneth, it shall die.’

　　She sighed. ‘Reverend, look like to me you’d get tired, all the time beating on poor littleEsther, trying to make Esther something she ain’t. I just don’t feel it here,’ she said, and put onehand on her breast. ‘Now, what you going to do? Don’t you know I’m a woman grown, and I ain’tfixing to change?’

　　He wanted to weep. He wanted to reach out and hold her back from the destruction she soardently pursued—to fold her in him, and hide her until the wrath of God was past. At the sametime there rose to his nostrils again her whisky-laden breath, and beneath this, faint, intimate, theodor of her body. And he began to feel like a man in a nightmare, who stands in the path ofoncoming destruction, who must move quickly—but who cannot move. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ rangover and over again in his mind, like a bell—as he moved closer to her, undone by her breath, andher wide, angry, mocking eyes.

　　‘You know right well,’ he whispered, shaking with fury, ‘you know right well why I keepafter you—why I keep after you like I do.’

　　‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity.

　　‘I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways withoutall the time trying to make her miserable.’

　　He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. ‘I just don’t want to see yougo down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old,and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.’

　　But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done withtalking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over.

　　‘Reverend,’ she said, ‘I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I don’t donothing I’m ashamed of, ever.’

　　At the word ‘Reverend,’ he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both herhands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and aguarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should moveaway. But he did not move—he could not move.

　　 ‘But I can’t help it,’ she said, after a moment, maliciously teasing, ‘if you done things thatyou’s ashamed of, Reverend.’

　　He held on to her hands as though he were in the middle of the sea and her hands were thelifeline that would drag him in to shore. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he prayed, ‘oh, Jesus, Jesus. Help meto stand.’ He thought that that he was pulling back against her hands—but he was pulling her tohim. And he saw in her eyes now a look that he had not seen for many a long day and night, a lookthat was never in Deborah’s eyes.

　　‘Yes, you know,’ he said, ‘why I’m all the time worrying about you—why I’m all the timemiserable when I look at you.’

　　‘But you ain’t never told me none of this,’ she said.

　　One hand moved to her waist, and lingered there. The tips of her breasts touched his coat,burning in like acid and closing his throat. Soon it would be too late; he wanted it to be too late.

　　That river, his infernal need, rose, flooded, sweeping him forward as though he were a long-drowned corpse.

　　‘You know,’ he whispered, and touched her breasts and buried his face in her neck.

　　So he had fallen: for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life. Fallen:

　　he and Esther in the white folks’ kitchen, the light burning, the door half-open, grappling andburning beside the sink. Fallen indeed: time was no more, and sin, death, Hell, the judgment wereblotted out. There was only Esther, who contained in her narrow body all mystery and all passion,and who answered all his need. Time, snarling so swiftly past, had caused him to forget theclumsiness, and sweat, and dirt of their first coupling; how his shaking hands undressed her,standing where they stood, how her dress fell at length like a snare about her feet; how his handstore at her undergarments so that the naked, vivid flash might meet his hands; how she protested:

　　‘Not here, not here’; how he worried, in some buried part of his mind, about the open door, aboutthe sermon he was to preach, about his life, about Deborah; how the table got in their way, how hiscollar, until her fingers loosened it, threatened to choke him; how they found they foundthemselves on the floor at last, sweating and groaning and locked together; locked away from allothers, all heavenly or human help. Only they could help each other. They were alone in the world.

　　Had Royal, his son, been conceived that night? Or the next night? Or he next? It had lastedonly nine days. Then he had come to his senses—after nine days God gave him the power to tellher this thing could not be.

　　She took his decision with the same casualness, the same near-amusement, with which shehad taken his fall. He understood about Esther, during those nine days: that she considered his fearand trembling fanciful and childish, a way of making life more complicated than it need be. Shedid not think life was like that; she wanted life to be simple. He understood that she was very sorryfor him because he was always worried. Sometimes, when they were together, he tried to tell herof what he felt, how the Lord would punish them for the sin they were committing. She would notlisten: ‘You ain’t in the pulpit now. You’s here with me. Even a Reverend’s got the right to takeoff his clothes sometimes and act like a natural man.’ When he told her that he would not see herany more, she was angry, but she did not argue. Her eyes told him that she thought he was a fool; but that, even had she loved him ever so desperately, it would have been beneath her to argueabout his decision—a large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what shecould not have with ease.

　　So it was over. Though it left him bruised and frightened, though he had lost the respect ofEsther for ever (he prayed that she would never again come to hear him preach) he thanked Godthat it had been worse. He prayed that God would forgive him, and never let him fall again.

　　Yet what frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledgethat, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again. Having possessed Esther, thecarnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere. He was made to remember thatthough he was holy he was yet young; the women who had wanted him wanted him still; he hadbut to stretch out his hand and take what he wanted—even sisters in the church. He struggled towear out his visions in the marriage bed, he struggled to awaken Deborah, for whom daily hishatred grew.

　　He and Esther spoke in the yard again as spring was just beginning. The ground was stillwith melting snow and ice; the sun was everywhere; the naked branches of the trees seemed to belifting themselves upward toward the pale sun, impatient to put forth leaf and flower. He wasstanding at the well in his shirt-sleeves, singing softly to himself—praising God for the dangers hehad passed. She came down the porch steps into the yard, and though he heard the soft steps, andknew that it was she, it was a moment before he turned round.

　　He expected her to come up to him and ask for his help in something she was doing in thehouse. When she did not speak, he turned around. She was wearing a light, cotton dress of light-brown squares, and her hair was braided tightly all around her head. She looked like a little girl,and he almost smiled. Then: ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her; and felt the heart within himsicken.

　　‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘I going to have a baby.’

　　He stared at her; she began to cry. He put the two pails of water carefully on the ground.

　　She put out her hands to reach him, but he moved away.

　　‘Girl, stop that bellering. What you talking about?’

　　But, having allowed her tears to begin, she could not stop them at once. She continued tocry, weaving a little where she stood, and with her hands to her face. He looked in panic aroundthe yard and toward the house. ‘Stop that,’ he cried again, not daring here and now to touch her,‘and tell me what’s the matter!’

　　‘I told you,’ she moaned, ‘I done told you. I going to have a baby.’ She looked at him, herface broken up and the hot tear falling. ‘It’s the Lord’s truth. I ain’t making up no story, it’s theLord’s truth.’

　　He could not take his eyes from her, though he hated what he saw. ‘And when you donefind this out?’

　　‘Not so long. I thought maybe I was mistook. But ain’t no mistake. Gabriel, what we goingto do?’

　　 Then, as she watched his face, her tears began again.

　　‘Hush,’ he said, with a calm that astonished him, ‘we going to do something, just you bequiet.’

　　‘What we going to do, Gabriel? Tell me—what you a-fixing in your mind to do?’

　　‘You go on back in the house. Ain’t no way for us to talk now.’

　　‘Gabriel——’

　　‘Go on in the house, girl. Go on!’ And when she did not move, but continued to stare athim: ‘We going to talk it to-night. We going to get to the bottom of this thing to-night!’

　　She turned from him and started up the porch steps. ‘And dry your face,’ he whispered. Shebent over, lifting the front of her dress to dry her eyes, and stood so for a moment on the bottomstep while he watched her. Then she straightened and walked into the house, not looking back.

　　She was going to have his baby—his baby? While Deborah, despite their groaning, despitethe humility with which she endured his body, yet failed to be quickened by any coming life. Itwas in the womb of Esther, who was not better than a harlot, that the seed of the prophet would benourished.

　　And he moved from the well, picking up, like a man in a trance, the heavy pails of water.

　　He moved toward the house, which now—high, gleaming roof, and spun-gold window—seemed towatch him and to listen; the very sun above his head and the earth beneath his feet had ceased theirturning; the water, like a million warning voices, lapped in the buckets he carried on each side; andhis mother, beneath the startled earth on which he moved, lifted up, endlessly, her eyes.

　　They talked in the kitchen as she was cleaning up.

　　‘How come you’—it was the first question—‘to be so sure this here’s my baby?’

　　She was not crying now. ‘Don’t you start a-talking that way,’ she said. ‘Esther ain’t in thehabit of lying to nobody, and I ain’t gone with so many men that I’m subject to get my mindconfused.’

　　She was very cold and deliberate, and moved about the kitchen with a furious concentrationon her tasks, scarcely looking at him.

　　He did not know what to say, how to reach her.

　　‘You tell your mother yet?’ he asked, after a pause. ‘You been to see a doctor? How comeyou to be so sure?’

　　She sighed sharply. ‘No, I ain’t told my mother, I ain’t crazy. I ain’t told nobody exceptyou.’

　　‘How come you to be so sure?’ he repeated. ‘If you ain’t seen no doctor?’

　　‘What doctor in this town you want me to go see? I go to see a doctor, I might as well getup and shout it from the housetops. No, I ain’t seen no doctor, and I ain’t fixing to see one in ahurry. I don’t need no doctor to tell me what’s happening in my belly.’

　　‘And how long you been knowing about this?’

　　 ‘I been knowing this for maybe a month—maybe six weeks now.’

　　‘Six weeks? Why ain’t you opened your mouth before?’

　　‘Because I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d wait and make sure. I didn’t see no need for getting allup in the air before I knew. I didn’t want to get you all upset and scared and evil, like you is now, ifit weren’t no need.’ She paused, watching him. Then: ‘And you said this morning we was going todo something. What we going to do? That’s what we got to figure out now, Gabriel.’

　　‘What we going to do?’ he repeated at last; and felt that the sustaining life had gone out ofhim. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at whirling pattern on the floor.

　　But the life had not gone out of her; she came to where he sat, speaking softly, with bittereyes. ‘You sound mighty strange to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t look to me like you thinking of nothingbut how you can get shut of this—and me, too—quick as you know how. It wasn’t like thatalways, was it, Reverend? Once upon a time you couldn’t think of nothing and nobody but me.

　　What you thinking about to-night? I be damned if I think it’s me you thinking of.’

　　‘Girl,’ he said, wearily, ‘don’t talk like you ain’t got good sense. You know I got a wife tothink about——’ and he wanted to say more, but he could not find the words, and, helplessly, hestopped.

　　‘I know that,’ she said with less heat, but watching him still with eyes from which the old,impatient mockery was not entirely gone, ‘but what I mean is, if you was able to forget her onceyou ought to be able to forger her twice.’

　　He did not understand her at once; but then he sat straight up, his eyes wide and angry.

　　‘What you mean, girl? What you trying to say?’

　　She did not flinch—even in his despair and anger he recognized how far she was frombeing the frivolous child she had always seemed to him. Or was it that she had been, in so short aspace of time, transformed? But he spoke to her at this disadvantage: that whereas he wasunprepared for any change in her, she had apparently taken his measure from the first and could besurprised by no change in him.

　　‘You know what I mean, she said. ‘You ain’t never going to have no kind of life with thatskinny, black woman—and you ain’t never going to be able to make her happy—and she ain’tnever going to have no children. I be blessed, anyway, if I think you was in your right mind whenyou married her. And it’s me that’s going to have your baby!’

　　‘You want me,’ he asked at last, ‘to leave my wife—and come with you?’

　　‘I thought,’ she answered, ‘that you had done thought of that yourself, already, many andmany a time.’

　　‘You know,’ he said, with a halting anger, ‘I ain’t never said nothing like that. I ain’t nevertold you I wanted to leave my wife.’

　　‘I ain’t talking,’ she shouted, at the end of patience, ‘about nothing you done said!’

　　 Immediately, they both looked toward the closed kitchen doors—for they were not alone inthe house this time. She sighed, and smoothed her hair with her hand; and he saw then that herhand was trembling and that her calm deliberation was all a frenzied pose.

　　‘Girl,’ he said, ‘does you reckon I’m going to run off and lead a life of sin with yousomewhere, just because you tell me you got my baby kicking in your belly? How many kinds of afool you think I am? I got God’s work to do—my life don’t belong to you. Nor to that baby,neither—if it is my baby.

　　‘It’s your baby,’ she said, coldly, ‘and ain’t no way in the world to get around that. And itain’t been so very long ago, right here in this very room, when looked to me like a life of sin wasall you was ready for.’

　　‘Yes,’ he answered, rising, and turning away, ‘Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the firstman been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.’

　　‘You be careful,’ said Esther, ‘how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by aholy man, neither.’

　　‘Ruined?’ he cried. ‘You? How you going to be ruined? When you been walking throughthis town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture? How you going tostand there and tell me you been ruined? If it hadn’t been me, it sure would have been somebodyelse.’

　　‘But it was you,’ she retorted, ‘and what I want to know is what we’s going to do about it.’

　　He looked at her. He face was cold and hard—ugly; she had never been so ugly before.

　　‘I don’t know,’ he said, deliberately, ‘what we is going to do. But I tell you what I thinkyou better do: you better go along and get one of these boys you been running around with tomarry you. Because I can’t go off with you nowhere.’

　　She sat down at the table and stared at him with scorn and amazement; sat down heavily, asthough she had been struck. He knew that she was gathering her forces; and now she said what hehad dreaded to hear:

　　‘And suppose I went through town and told your wife, and the churchfolks, and everybody—suppose I did that, Reverend?’

　　‘And who you think,’ he asked—he felt himself enveloped by an awful, falling silence—‘isgoing to believe you?’

　　She laughed. ‘Enough folks’d believe me to make it mighty hard on you.’ And she watchedhim. He walked up and down the kitchen, trying to avoid her eyes. ‘You just think back,’ she said,‘to that first night, right here on this damn white folks’ floor, and you’ll see it’s too late for you totalk to Esther about how holy you is. I don’t care if you want to live a lie, but I don’t see no reasonfor you to make me suffer on account of it.’

　　‘You can go around and tell folks if you want to,’ he said, boldly, ‘but it ain’t going to lookso good for you neither.’

　　 She laughed again. ‘But I ain’t the holy one. You’s a married man, and you’s a preacher—and who you think folks is going to blame most?’

　　He watched her with a hatred that was mixed with his old desire, knowing that once moreshe had the victory.

　　‘I can’t marry you, you know that,’ he said. ‘Now, what you want me to do?’

　　‘No,’ she said, ‘and I reckon you wouldn’t marry me even if you was free. I reckon youdon’t want no whore like Esther for your wife. Esther’s just for the night, for the dark, where won’tnobody see you getting your holy self all dirtied up with Esther. Esther’s just good enough to goout and have your bastard somewhere in the goddamn woods. Ain’t that so, Reverend?’

　　He did not answer. He could find no words. There was only silence in him, like the grave.

　　She rose, and moved to the open kitchen door, where she stood, her back to him, lookingout into the yard and on the silent streets where the last, dead rays of the sun still lingered.

　　‘But I reckon,’ she said slowly, ‘that I don’t want to be with you no more’n you want to bewith me. I don’t want no man what’s ashamed and scared. Can’t do me no good, that kind of man.’

　　She turned in the door and faced him; this was the last time she really looked at him, and he wouldcarry that look to his grave. ‘There’s just one thing I want you to do,’ she said. ‘You do that, andwe be all right.’

　　‘What you want me to do?’ he asked, and felt ashamed.

　　‘I would go through this town,’ she said, ‘and tell everybody about the Lord’s anointed.

　　Only reason I don’t is because I don’t want my mama and daddy to know what a fool I been. Iain’t ashamed of it—I’m ashamed of you—you done made me feel a shame I ain’t never feltbefore. I shamed before my God—to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.’

　　He said nothing. She turned her back to him again.

　　‘I … just want to go somewhere,’ she said, ‘go somewhere, and have my baby, and thinkall this out of my mind. I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That’s what I want youto do—and that’s pretty cheap. I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.’

　　‘Girl,’ he said, ‘I ain’t got no money.’

　　‘Well,’ she said, coldly, ‘you damn well better find some.’

　　Then she began to cry. He moved toward her, but she moved away.

　　‘If I go out into the field,’ he said, helplessly, ‘I ought to be able to make enough money tosend you away.’

　　‘How long that going to take?’

　　‘A month maybe.’

　　And she shook her head. ‘I ain’t going to stay around here that long.’

　　They stood in silence in the open kitchen door, she struggling against her tears, hestruggling against his shame. He could only think: ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’

　 ‘Ain’t you got nothing saved up? she asked at last. ‘Look to me like you been married longenough to’ve saved something!’

　　Then he remembered that Deborah had been saving money since their wedding day. Shekept it in a tin box at the top of the cupboard. He thought how sin led to sin.

　　‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a little. I don’t know how much.’

　　‘You bring it to-morrow,’ she told him.

　　‘Yes,’ he said.

　　He watched her as she moved from the door and went to the closet for her hat and coat.

　　Then she came back, dressed for the street and, without a word, passed him, walking down theshort steps into the yard. She opened the low gate and turned down the long, silent, flaming street.

　　She walked slowly, head bowed, as though she were cold. He stood watching her, thinking of themany times he had watched her before, when her walk had been so different and her laughter hadcome ringing back to mock him.

　　He stole the money while Deborah slept. And he gave it to Esther in the morning. She gavenotice that same day, and a week later she was gone—to Chicago, said her parents, to find a betterjob and to have a better life.

　　Deborah became more silent than ever in the weeks that followed. Sometimes he was certain shehad discovered that the money was missing and knew that he had taken it—sometimes he wascertain that she knew nothing. Sometimes he was certain that she knew everything: the theft, andthe reason for the theft. But she did not speak. In the middle of the spring he went out into the fieldtom preach, and was gone three months. When he came back he brought the money with him andput it in the box again. No money had been added in the meanwhile, so he still could not be certainwhether Deborah knew or not.

　　He decided to let it all be forgotten, and begin his life again.

　　But the summer brought him a letter, with no return name or address, but postmarked fromChicago. Deborah gave it to him at breakfast, not seeming to have remarked the hand or thepostmark, along with the bundle of tracts from a Bible house which they both distributed eachweek through the town. She had a letter too, from Florence, and it was perhaps this novelty thatdistracted her attention.

　　Esther’s letter ended:

　　What I think is, I made a mistake, that’s true, and I’m paying for it now. Butdon’t you think you ain’t going to pay for it—I don’t know when and I don’t knowhow, but I know you going to be brought low one of these days. I ain’t holy like youare, but I know right from wrong.

　　I’m going to have my baby and I’m going to bring him up to be a man. And Iain’t going to read to him out of no Bible and I ain’t going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don’t drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a betterman than his Daddy.

　　‘What Florence got to say?’ he asked dully, crumpling his letter in his fist.

　　Deborah looked up with a faint smile. ‘Nothing much, honey. But she sound like she goingto get married.’

　　Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field. He could not stand his home, his job,the town itself—he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he hadknown all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he saw hisguilt in everybody’s eyes. When he stood in the pulpit to preach they looked at him, he felt, asthough he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him as he had once condemned thetwenty-three elders. When souls came weeping to the altar he scarce dared to rejoice, rememberingthat soul who had not bowed, whose blood, it might be, would be required of him at judgment.

　　So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had sotransformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth becamea prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere. In every church he entered,his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from thealtar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him, waiting for him in his seat. It staredupward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble.

　　When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit of the Lord’s day, to beholdthings past, present, and to come, saying: ‘he which is filth, let him be filthy still,’ it was he who,crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherdboy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, while they shouted: ‘Amen!’

　　and: ‘Hallelujah!’ struggled once more in his chains; when he spoke of the day of Pentecost whenthe Holy Ghost had come down on the apostles who tarried in the upper room, causing them tospeak in tongues of fire, he thought of his own baptism and how he had offended the Holy Ghost.

　　No: though his name was writ large on placards, though they praised him for the great work Godworked through him, and though they came, day and night, before him to the altar, there was noword in the Book for him.

　　And he saw, in this wandering, how far his people had wandered from God. They had allturned aside, and gone out into the wilderness, to fall down before idols of gold and silver, andwood and stone, false gods that could not heal them. The music that filled any town or city heentered was not the music of the saints but another music, infernal, which glorified lust and heldrighteousness up to scorn. Women, some of whom should have been at home, teaching theirgrandchildren how to pray, stood, night after night, twisting their bodies into lewd hallelujahs insmoke-filled, gin-heavy dance halls, singing for their ‘loving man.’ And their loving man was anyman, any morning, noon, or night—when one left town they got another—men could drown, itseemed, in their warm flesh and they would never know the difference. ‘It’s here for you and ifyou don’t get it it ain’t no fault of mine.’ They laughed at him when they saw him—‘a pretty man like you?’—and they told him that they knew a long brown girl who could make him lay his Bibledown. He fled from them: they frightened him. He began to pray for Esther. He imagined herstanding one day where these women stood to-day.

　　And blood, in all cities through which he passed, ran down. There seemed no door,anywhere, behind which blood did not call out, unceasingly, for blood; no woman, whether singingbefore defiant trumpets or rejoicing before the Lord, who had not seen her father, her brother, herlover, or her son cut down without mercy; who had not seen her sister become part of the whiteman’s great whorehouse, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that house herself; no man,preaching, or cursing, strumming his guitar in the lone, blue evening, or blowing in fury andecstasy his golden horn at night, who had not been made to bend his head and drink white men’smuddy water; no man whose manhood had not been, at the root, sickened, whose loins had notbeen dishonored, whose seed had not been scattered into oblivion and worse than oblivion, intoliving shame and rage, and into endless battle. Yes, their parts were all cut off, they weredishonored, their very names were nothing more than dust blown disdainfully across the field oftime—to fall where, to blossom where, bringing forth what fruit hereafter, where?—their verynames were not their own. Behind them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and all aroundthem destruction, and before them nothing but the fire—a bastard people, far from God, singingand crying in the wilderness!

　　Yet, most strangely, and from deeps not before discovered, his faith looked up; before thewickedness from which he fled, he yet beheld, like a flaming standard in the middle of the air, thatpower of redemption to which he must, till death, bear witness; which, though it crush him utterly,he could not deny; though none among the living might ever behold it, he had beheld it, and mustkeep the faith. He would not go back into Egypt for friend, or lover, or bastard son: he would notturn his face from God, no matter how deep might grow the darkness in which God his His facefrom him. One day God would give him a sign, and the darkness would all be finished—one dayGod would raise him, who had suffer him to fall so low.

　　Hard on the heels of his return that winter, Esther came home too. Her mother and stepfathertraveled north to claim her lifeless body and her living son. Soon after Christmas, on the last, deaddays of the year, she was buried in the churchyard. It was bitterly cold and there was ice on theground, as during the days when he had first possessed her. He stood next to Deborah, whose armin his shivered incessantly with the cold, and watched while the long, plain box was lowered intothe ground. Esther’s mother stood in silence beside the deep hole, leaning on her husband, whoheld their grandchild in his arms. ‘Lord have mercy, have mercy, have mercy,’ someone began tochant; and the old mourning women clustered of a sudden round Esther’s mother to hold her up.

　　Then earth struck the coffin; the child awakened and began to scream.

　　Then Gabriel prayed to be delivered from blood-guiltiness. He prayed to God to give him asign one day to make him know he was forgiven. But the child who screamed at that moment inthe churchyard had cursed, and sung, and been silenced for ever before God gave him a sign.

　　And he watched this son grow up, a stranger to his father and a stranger to God. Deborah,who became after the death of Esther more friendly with Esther’s people, reported to him from the very beginning how shamefully Royal was being spoiled. He was, inevitably, the apple of theireye, a fact that, in operation, caused Deborah to frown, and sometimes, reluctantly, to smile; and,as they said, if there was any white blood in him, it didn’t show—he was the spit and image of hismother.

　　The sun did not rise or set but that Gabriel saw his lost, his disinherited son, or heard ofhim; and he seemed with every passing day to carry more proudly the doom printed on his brow.

　　Gabriel watched him run headlong, like David’s headlong son, toward the disaster that had beenwaiting for him from the moment he had been conceived. It seemed that he had scarcely begun totalk before he cursed. Gabriel often saw him on the streets, playing on the curbstone with otherboys his age. Once, when he passed, one of the boys had said: ‘Here comes Reverend Grimes,’ andnodded, in brief, respectful silence. But Royal had looked boldly up into the preacher’s face. Hesaid: ‘Hoe-de-do, Reverend?’ and suddenly, irrepressible, laughed. Gabriel, wishing to smile downinto the boy’s face, to pause and touch him on the forehead, did none of these things, but walkedon. Behind him, he heard Royal’s explosive whisper: ‘I bet he got a mighty big one!’—and then allthe children laughed. It came to Gabriel then how his own mother must have suffered to watch himin the unredeemed innocence that so surely led to death and Hell.

　　‘I wonder,’ said Deborah idly once, ‘why she called him Royal? You reckon that’s hisdaddy’s name?’

　　He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he wouldcalled him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line—his son would be a royal child.

　　And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her lastbreath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she hadcarried into eternity a curse on him and his.

　　‘I reckon,’ he said at last, ‘it must be his daddy’s name—less they just given him that namein the hospital up north after … she was dead.’

　　‘His grandmama, Sister McDonald’—she was writing a letter, and did not look at him asshe spoke—‘well, she think it must’ve been one of them boys what’s all time passing through here,looking for work, on their way north—you know? Them real shiftless niggers—well, she think itmust’ve been one of them got Esther in trouble. She say Esther wouldn’t never’ve gone north ifshe hadn’t been a-trying to find that boy’s daddy. Because she was in trouble when she left here’—and she looked up from her letter a moment—‘that’s for certain.’

　　‘I reckon,’ he said again, made uncomfortable by her unaccustomed chatter, but not daring,too sharply, to stop her. He was thinking of Esther, lying cold and still in the ground, who had beenso vivid and shameless in his arms.

　　‘And Sister McDonald say,’ she went on, ‘that she left here just a little bit of money; theyhad to keep a-sending her money all the time she was up there almost, specially near the end. Wewas just talking about it yesterday—she say, look like Esther just decided overnight she had to go,and couldn’t nothing stop her. And she say she didn’t want to stand in the girl’s way—but ifshe’d’ve known something was the matter she wouldn’t never’ve let that girl away from her.’

　　 ‘Seems funny to me,’ he muttered, scarcely knowing what he was saying, ‘that she didn’tthink something.’

　　‘Why she didn’t think nothing, because Esther always told her mother everything—weren’tno shame between them—they was just like two women together. She say she never dreamed thatEsther would run away from her if she got herself in trouble.’ And she looked outward, past him,her eyes full of a strange, bitter pity. ‘That poor thing,’ she said, ‘she must have suffered some.’

　　‘I don’t see no need for you and Sister McDonald to sit around and talk about it all thetime,’ he said, then. ‘It all been a mighty long time ago; that boy is growing up already.’

　　‘That’s true,’ she said, bending her head once more, ‘but some things, look like, ain’t to beforgotten in a hurry.’

　　‘Who you writing to?’ he asked, as oppressed suddenly by the silence as he had been byher talk.

　　She looked up. ‘I’m writing to your sister, Florence. You got anything you want me tosay?’

　　‘No,’ he said. ‘Just tell her I’m praying for her.’

　　When Royal was sixteen the war came, and all the young men, first the sons of the mighty, andthen the sons of his own people, were scattered into foreign lands. Gabriel fell on his knees eachnight to pray that Royal would not have to go. ‘But I hear he want to go,’ said Deborah. ‘Hisgrandmama tell me he giving her a time because she won’t let him go and sign up.’

　　‘Look like,’ he said sullenly, ‘that won’t none of these young men be satisfied till they cango off and get themselves crippled or killed.’

　　‘Well, you know that’s the way the young folks is,’ said Deborah, cheerfully. ‘You can’tnever tell them nothing—and when they find out it’s too late then.’

　　He discovered that whenever Deborah spoke of Royal, a fear deep within him listened andwaited. Many times he had thought to unburden his heart to her. But she gave him no opportunity,never said anything that might allow him the healing humility of confession—or that might, forthat matter, have permitted him at last to say how much he hated her for her barrenness. Shedemanded of him what she gave—nothing—nothing, at any rate, with which she could bereproached. She kept his house and shared his bed; she visited the sick, as she had always done,and she comforted the dying, as she had always done. The marriage for which he had oncedreamed the world would mock him had so justified itself—in the eyes of the world—that no onenow could imagine, for either of the, any other condition or alliance. Even Deborah’s weakness,which grew marked with the years, keeping her more frequently in her bed, and herbarrenness,likehe(more) r previous dishonor, had come to seem mysterious proof of how completely shehad surrendered herself to God.

　　He said: ‘Amen,’ cautiously, after her last remark, and cleared his throat.

　　‘I declare,’ she said, with the same cheerfulness, ‘sometimes he remind me of you whenyou was a young man.’

　　 And he did not look at her, though he felt her eyes on him; he reached for his Bible andopened it. ‘Young men,’ he said, ‘is all the same, don’t Jesus change their hearts.’

　　Royal did not go to war, but he went away that summer to work on the docks in anothertown. Gabriel did not see him any more until the war was over.

　　On that day, a day he was never to forget, he went when work was done to buy somemedicine for Deborah, who was in bed with a misery in her back. Night had not yet fallen and thestreets were grey and empty—save that here and there, polished in the light that spilled outwardfrom a pool-room or a tavern, white men stood in groups of half-a-dozen. As he passed eachgroup, silence fell, and they watched him insolently, itching to kill; but he said nothing, bowing hishead, and they knew, anyway, that he was a preacher. There were no black men on the street at all,save him. There had been found that morning, just outside the town, the dead body of a soldier, hisuniform shredded where he had been flogged, and, turned upward through the black skin, raw, redmeat. He lay face downward at the base of a tree, his fingernails digging into the scuffed earth.

　　When he was turned over, his eyeballs stared upward in amazement and horror, his mouth waslocked open wide; his trousers, soaked with blood, were torn open, and exposed to the cold, whiteair of morning the thick hairs of his groin, matted together, black and rust-red, and the wound thatseemed to be throbbing still. He had been carried home in silence and lay now behind lockeddoors, with his living kinsmen, who sat, weeping, and praying, and dreaming of vengeance, andwaiting for the next visitation. Now, someone spat on the pavement at Gabriel’s feet, and hewalked on, his face not changing, and he heard it reprovingly whispered behind him that he was agood nigger, surely up to no trouble. He hoped that he would not be spoken to, that he would nothave to smile into any of these so well-known white-faces. While he walked, held by his cautionmore rigid than an arrow, he prayed, as his mother had taught him to pray, for loving kindness; yethe dreamed of the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the headwobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered nothing but the rushing blood. And he wasthinking that it was only the hand of the Lord that had taken Royal away, because if he had stayedthey would surely have killed him, when, turning a corner, he looked into Royal’s face.

　　Royal was now as tall as Gabriel, broad-shouldered, and lean. He wore a new suit, blue,with broad, blue stripes, and carried, crooked under his arm, a brown-paper bundle tied with string.

　　He and Gabriel stared at one another for a second with no recognition. Royal stared in blankhostility, before, seeming to remember Gabriel’s face, he took a burning cigarette from betweenhis lips, and said, with pained politeness: ‘How-de-do, sir.’ His voice was rough, and there was,faintly, the odor of whisky on his breath.

　　But Gabriel could not speak at once; he struggled to get his breath. Then: ‘How-de-do,’ hesaid. And they stood, each as though waiting for the other to say something of the greatestimportance, on the deserted corner. Then, just as Royal was about to move, Gabriel rememberedthe white men all over town.

　　‘Boy,’ he cried, ‘ain’t you got good sense? Don’t you know you ain’t got no business to beout here, walking around like this?’

　　 Royal stared at him, uncertain whether to laugh or to take offense, and Gabriel said, moregently: ‘I just mean you better be careful, son. Ain’t nothing but white folks in town to-day. Theydone killed … last night …’

　　Then he could not go on. He saw, as though it were a vision, Royal’s body, sprawled heavyand unmoving for ever against the earth, and tears blinded his eyes.

　　Royal watched him, a distant and angry compassion in his face.

　　‘I know,’ he said abruptly, ‘but they ain’t going to bother me. They done got their niggerfor this week. I ain’t going far noway.’

　　Then the corner on which they stood seemed suddenly to rock with the weight of mortaldanger. It seemed for a moment, as they stood there, that death and destruction rushed towardthem: two black men alone in the dark and silent town where white men prowled like lions—whatmercy could they hope for, should they be found here, talking together? It would surely bebelieved that they were plotting vengeance. And Gabriel started to moved away, thinking to savehis son.

　　‘God bless you, boy,’ said Gabriel. ‘You hurry along now.’

　　‘Yeah,’ said Royal, ‘thanks.’ He moved away, about to turn the corner. He looked back atGabriel. ‘But you be careful, too,’ he said, and smiled.

　　He turned the corner and Gabriel listened as his footfalls moved away. They wereswallowed up in silence; he heard no voices raised to cut down Royal as he went his way; soonthere was silence everywhere.

　　Not quite two years later Deborah told him that his son was dead.

　　And now John tried to pray. There was a great noise of weeping and of song. It was SisterMcCandless who led the song, who sang it nearly alone, for the others did not cease to moan andcry. It was a song he had heard all his life:

　　‘Lord, I’m traveling, Lord,I got on my traveling shoes.’

　　Without raising his eyes, he could see her standing in the holy place, pleading the bloodover those who sought there, her head thrown back, eyes shut, foot pounding the floor. She did notlook, then, like the Sister McCandless who sometimes came to visit them, like the woman whowent out every day to work for the white people downtown, who came home at evening, climbing,with such weariness, the long, dark stairs. No: her face was transfigured now, her whole being wasmade new by the power of her salvation.

　　‘Salvation is real,’ a voice said to him, ‘God is real. Death may come soon or late, why doyou hesitate? Now is the time to seek and serve the Lord.’ Salvation was real for all these others,and it might be real for him. He had only to reach out and God would touch him; he had only to cry and God would hear. All these others, now, who cried so far beyond him with such joy, hadonce been in their sins, as he was now—and they had cried and God had heard them, and deliveredthem out of all their troubles. And what God had done for others, He could also do for him.

　　But—out of all their troubles? Why did his mother weep? Why did his father frown? IfGod’s power was so great, why were their lives so troubled?

　　He had never tried to think of their trouble before; rather, he had never before confronted itin such a narrow place. It had always been there, at his back perhaps, all these years, but he hadnever turned to face it. Now it stood before him, staring, nevermore to be escaped, and its mouthwas enlarged without any limit. It was ready to swallow him up. Only the hand of God coulddeliver him. Yet, in a moment, he somehow knew from the sound of that storm which rose sopainfully in him now, which laid waste—for ever?— the strange, yet comforting landscape of hismind, that the hand of God would surely lead him into this staring, waiting mouth, these distendedjaws, this hot breath as of fire. He would be led into darkness, and in darkness would remain; untilin some incalculable time to come the hand of God would reach down and raise him up; he, John,who having lain in darkness would no longer be himself but some other man. He would have beenchanged, as they said, for ever; sown in dishonor, he would be raised in honor: he would have beenborn again.

　　Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but the son of his Heavenly Father, theKing. Then he need no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it were, their quarrel over hisfather’s head to Heaven—to the Father who loved him, who had come down in the flesh to die forhim. Then he and his father would be equals, in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God. Thenhis father could not beat him any more, or despise him any more, or mock him any more—he,John, the Lord’s anointed. He could speak to his father then as men spoke to one another—as sonsspoke to their fathers, not in trembling but in sweet confidence, not in hatred but in love. His fathercould not cast him out, whom God had gathered in.

　　Yet, trembling, he knew that this was not what he wanted. He did not want to love hisfather; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred, and give his hatred words one day. He did notwant his father’s kiss—not any more, he who had received so many blows. He could not imagine,on any day to come and no matter how greatly he might be changed, wanting to take his father’shand. The storm that raged in him to-night could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree in allJohn’s country, all that remained to-night, in this, John’s floodtime.

　　And he bowed his head yet lower before the altar in weariness and confusion. Oh, that hisfather would die!—and the road before John be open, as it must be open for others. Yet in the verygrave he would hate him; his father would but have changed conditions, he would be John’s fatherstill. The grave was not enough for punishment, for justice, for revenge. Hell, everlasting,unceasing, perpetual, unquenched for ever, should be his father’s portion; with John there towatch, to linger, to smile, to laugh aloud, hearing, at last, his father’s cries of torment.

　　And, even then, it would not be finished. The everlasting father.

　　Oh, but his thought were evil—but to-night he did not care. Somewhere, in all thiswhirlwind, in the darkness of his heart, in the storm—was something—something he must find. Hecould not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eyes to wonder at, treasure and debris longforgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearlsthat had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness allaround him.

　　The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly blackand the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the raincame. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of thegood uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, lickedwith fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of thecabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck ofthe flower. The world turned dark, for ever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their glasspanes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this force,uncontrollable, so abruptly visited on the earth. Gabriel walked homeward through this wildernessof water (which had failed, however, to clear the air) to where Deborah waited for him in the bedshe seldom, these days, attempted to leave.

　　And he had not been in the house five minutes before he was aware that a change hadoccurred in the quality of her silence: in the silence something waited, ready to spring.

　　He looked up at her from the table where he sat eating the meal that she had painfullyprepared. He asked: ‘How you feel to-day, old lady?’

　　‘I feel like about the way I always do,’ and she smiled. ‘I don’t feel no better and I don’tfeel no worse.’

　　‘We going to get the church to pray for you,’ he said, ‘and get you on your feet again.’

　　She said nothing and he turned his attention once more to his plate. But she was watchinghim; he looked up.

　　‘I hear some mighty bad news to-day,’ she said slowly.

　　‘What you hear?’

　　‘Sister McDonald was over this afternoon, and Lord knows she was in a pitiful state.’ Hesat stock-still, staring at her. ‘She done got a letter to-day what says her grandson—you know, thatRoyal—done got hisself killed in Chicago. It sure look like the Lord is put a curse on that family.

　　First the mother, and now the son.’

　　For a moment he could only stare at her stupidly, while the food in his mouth slowly grewheavy and dry. Outside rushed the armies of the rain, and lightening flashed against the window.

　　Then he tried to swallow, and his gorge rose. He began to tremble. ‘Yes,’ she said, not looking athim now, ‘he been living in Chicago about a year, just a-drinking and a-carrying on—and hisgrandmama, she tell me that look like he got to gambling one night with some of them northernniggers, and one of them got mad because he thought the boy was trying to cheat him, and took outhis knife and stabbed him. Stabbed him in the throat, and she tell me he died right there on the floor in that bar-room, didn’t even have time to get him to no hospital.’ She turned in bed andlooked at him. ‘The Lord sure give that poor woman a heavy cross to bear,’

　　Then he tried to speak; he thought of the churchyard where Esther was buried, and Royal’sfirst, thin cry. ‘She going to bring him back home?’

　　She stared. ‘Home? Honey, they done buried him already up there in the potter’s field.

　　Ain’t nobody never going to look on that poor boy no more.’

　　Then he began to cry, not making a sound, sitting at the table, and with his whole bodyshaking. She watched him for a long while and, finally, he put his head on the table, overturningthe coffee cup, and wept aloud. Then it seemed that there was weeping everywhere, waters ofanguish riding the world; Gabriel weeping, and rain beating on the roof, and at the windows, andthe coffee dripping from the end of the table. And she asked at last:

　　‘Gabriel … that Royal … he were your flesh and blood, weren’t he?’

　　‘Yes,’ he said, glad even in his anguish to hear the words fall from his lips, ‘that was myson.’

　　And there was silence again. Then: ‘And you sent that girl away, didn’t you? With themoney outen that box?’

　　‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’

　　‘Gabriel,’ she asked, ‘why did you do it? Why you let her go off and die, all by herself?

　　Why ain’t you never said nothing?’

　　And now he could not answer. He could not raise his head.

　　‘Why,’ she insisted. ‘Honey, I ain’t never asked you. But I got a right to know—and whenyou wanted a son so bad?

　　Then, shaking, he rose from the table and walked slowly to the window, looking out.

　　‘I asked my God to forgive me,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want no harlot’s son.’

　　‘Esther weren’t no harlot,’ she said quietly.

　　‘She weren’t my wife. And I couldn’t make her my wife. I already had you—and he saidthe last words with venom—‘Esther’s mind weren’t on the Lord—she’d of dragged me right ondown to Hell with her.’

　　‘She mighty near has,’ said Deborah.

　　‘The Lord He held me back,’ he said, hearing the thunder, watching the lightning. ‘He putout His hand and held me back.’ Then, after a moment, turning back into the room: I couldn’t ofdone nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, andme a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ He looked at her, old and black andpatient, smelling of sickness and age and death. ‘Ah,’ he said, his tears still falling, ‘I bet you wasmighty happy to-day, old lady, weren’t you? When she told you he, Royal, my son, was dead. Youain’t never had no son.’ And he turned again to the window. Then: ‘How long you been knowingabout this?’

　　 ‘I been knowing,’ she said, ‘ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come tochurch.’

　　‘You got a evil mind,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t never touched her then.’

　　‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but you had already done touched me.’

　　He moved a little from the window and stood looking down at her from the foot of the bed.

　　‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, andmake me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time.’ She was very calm;her face was very bitter and patient. ‘Look like it weren’t His will. Look like I couldn’t nohowforget … how they done me way back there when I weren’t nothing but a girl.’ She paused andlooked away. ‘But, Gabriel, if you’d said something even when that poor girl was buried, if you’dwanted to own that poor boy, I wouldn’t nohow of cared what folks said, or where we might havehad to go, or nothing. I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and hemight be living now.’

　　‘Deborah,’ he asked, ‘what you been thinking all this time?’

　　She smiled. ‘I been thinking,’ she said, ‘how you better commence to tremble when theLord, He gives you your heart’s desire.’ She paused. ‘I’d been wanting you since I wantedanything. And then I got you.’

　　He walked back to the window, tears rolling down his face.

　　‘Honey,’ she said, in another, stronger voice, ‘you better pray God to forgive you. Youbetter not let go until He make you know you been forgiven.’

　　‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘I’m waiting on the Lord.’

　　Then there was only silence, except for the rain. The rain came down in buckets; it wasraining, as they said, pitchforks and nigger babies. Lightning flashed again across the sky andthunder rolled.

　　‘Listen,’ said Gabriel. ‘God is talking.’

　　Slowly now, he from his knees, for half the church was standing: Sister Price, Sister McCandless,andPray(rose) ing Mother Washington; and the young Ella Mae sat in her chair watchingElisha where he lay. Florence and Elizabeth were still on their knees; and John was on his knees.

　　And, rising, Gabriel thought of how the Lord had led him to this church so long ago, andhow Elizabeth, one night after he had preached, had walked this long aisle to the altar, to repentbefore God her sin. And then they had married, for he believed her when she said that she waschanged—and she was the sign, she and her nameless child, for which he had tarried so many darkyears before the Lord. It was as though, when he saw them, the Lord had returned to him again thatwhich was lost.

　　Then, as he stood with the others over the fallen Elisha, John rose from his kneed. He benta dazed, sleepy, frowning look on Elisha and the others, shivering a little as though he were cold;and then he felt his father’s eyes and looked up at his father.

　　 At the same moment, Elisha, from the floor, began to speak in a tongue of fire, under thepower of the Holy Ghost. John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and withsomething come to life between them—while the Holy Ghost spoke, Gabriel had never seen such alook on John’s face before; Satan, at that moment, stared out of John’s eyes while the spirit spoke;and yet John’s staring eyes to-night reminded Gabriel of other eyes: of his mother’s eyes when shebeat him, of Florence’s eyes when she mocked him, of Deborah’s eyes when she prayed for him,of Esther’s eyes and Royal’s eyes, and Elizabeth’s eyes to-night before Roy cursed him, and ofRoy’s eyes when Roy said: ‘You black bastard.’ And John did not drop his eyes, but seemed towant to stare for ever into the bottom of Gabriel’s soul. And Gabriel, scarcely believing that Johncould have become so brazen, stared in wrath and horror at Elizabeth’s presumptuous bastard boy,grown suddenly so old and evil. He nearly raised his hand to strike him, but did not move, forElisha lay between them. Then he said, soundlessly, with his lips: ‘Kneel down.’ John turnedsuddenly, the movement like a curse, and knelt again before the altar.

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