III
If you had cut Andrew Pengilly to the core, you would have found him white clear through. He was a type of clergyman favored in pious fiction, yet he actually did exist.
To every congregation he had served these forty years, he had been a shepherd. They had loved him, listened to him, and underpaid him. In 1906, when Frank came to Catawba, Mr. Pengilly was a frail stooped veteran with silver hair, thin silver mustache, and a slow smile which embraced the world.
Andrew Pengilly had gone into the Civil War as a drummer boy, slept blanketless and barefoot and wounded in the frost of Tennessee mountains, and come out still a child, to “clerk in a store” and teach Sunday School. He had been converted at ten, but at twenty-five he was overpowered by the preaching of Osage Joe, the Indian evangelist, became a Methodist preacher, and never afterward doubted the peace of God. He was married at thirty to a passionate, singing girl with kind lips. He loved her so romantically—just to tuck the crazy-quilt about her was poetry, and her cowhide shoes were to him fairy slippers—he loved her so ungrudgingly that when she died, in childbirth, within a year after their marriage, he had nothing left for any other woman. He lived alone, with the undiminished vision of her. Not the most scandalmongering Mother in Zion had ever hinted that Mr. Pengilly looked damply upon the widows in his fold.
Little book-learning had Andrew Pengilly in his youth, and to this day he knew nothing of Biblical criticism, of the origin of religions, of the sociology which was beginning to absorb church-leaders, but his Bible he knew, and believed, word by word, and somehow he had drifted into the reading of ecstatic books of mysticism. He was a mystic, complete; the world of plows and pavements and hatred was less to him than the world of angels, whose silver robes seemed to flash in the air about him as he meditated alone in his cottage. He was as ignorant of Modern Sunday School Methods as of single tax or Lithuanian finances, yet few Protestants had read more in the Early Fathers.
On Frank Shallard’s first day in Catawba, when he was unpacking his books in his room at the residence of Deacon Halter, the druggist, the Reverend Mr. Pengilly was announced. Frank went down to the parlor (gilded cattails and a basket of stereopticon views) and his loneliness was warmed by Mr. Pengilly’s enveloping smile, his drawling voice:
“Welcome, Brother! I’m Pengilly, of the Methodist Church. I never was much of a hand at seeing any difference between the denominations, and I hope we’ll be able to work together for the glory of God. I do hope so! And I hope you’ll go fishing with me. I know,” enthusiastically, “a pond where there’s some elegant pickerel!”
Many evenings they spent in Mr. Pengilly’s cottage, which was less littered and odorous than that of the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples, only because the stalwart ladies of Mr. Pengilly’s congregation vied in sweeping for him, dusting for him, disarranging his books and hen-tracked sermon-notes, and bullying him in the matters of rubbers and winter flannels. They would not let him prepare his own meals—they made him endure the several boardinghouses in turn—but sometimes of an evening he would cook scrambled eggs for Frank. He had pride in his cooking. He had never tried anything but scrambled eggs.
His living-room was overpowering with portraits and carbon prints. Though every local official board pled with him about it, he insisted on including madonnas, cinquecento resurrections, St. Francis of Assisi, and even a Sacred Heart, with such Methodist worthies as Leonidas Hamline and the cloaked romantic Francis Asbury. In the bay window was a pyramid of wire shelves filled with geraniums. Mr. Pengilly was an earnest gardener, except during such weeks as he fell into dreams and forgot to weed and water, and through the winter he watched for the geranium leaves to wither enough so that he could pick them off and be able to feel busy.
All over the room were the aged dog and ancient cat, who detested each other, never ceased growling at each other, and at night slept curled together.
In an antiquated and badly listed rocking-chair, padded with calico cushions, Frank listened to Mr. Pengilly’s ramblings. For a time they talked only of externals; gossip of their parishes; laughter at the man who went from church to church fretting the respectable by shouting “Hallelujah”; local chatter not without a wholesome and comforting malice. Frank was at first afraid to bare his youthful hesitancies to so serene an old saint, but at last he admitted his doubts.
How, he demanded, could you reconcile a Loving God with one who would strike down an Uzza for the laudable act of trying to save the Ark of the Covenant from falling, who would kill forty-two children (and somewhat ludicrously) for shouting at Elisha as any small boy in Catawba today would shout? Was it reasonable? And, if it wasn’t, if any part of the Bible was mythical, where to stop? How would we know if anything in the Bible was “inspired”?
Mr. Pengilly was not shocked, nor was he very agitated. His thin fingers together, far down in his worn plush chair, he mused:
“Yes, I’m told the higher critics ask these things. I believe it bothers people. But I wonder if perhaps God hasn’t put these stumbling blocks in the Bible as a test of our faith, of our willingness to accept with all our hearts and souls a thing that may seem ridiculous to our minds? You see, our minds don’t go far. Think—how much does even an astronomer know about folks on Mars, if there are any folks there? Isn’t it with our hearts, our faith, that we have to accept Jesus Christ, and not with our historical charts? Don’t we feel his influence on our lives? Isn’t it the biggest men that feel it the most? Maybe God wants to keep out of the ministry all the folks that are so stuck on their poor minds that they can’t be humble and just accept the great overpowering truth of Christ’s mercy. Do you—When do you feel nearest to God? When you’re reading some awful smart book criticizing the Bible or when you kneel in prayer and your spirit just flows forth and you know that you’re in communion with him?”
“Oh, of course—”
“Don’t you think maybe he will explain all these puzzling things in his own good time? And meanwhile wouldn’t you rather be a help to poor sick worried folks than write a cute little book finding a fault?”
“Oh, well—”
“And has there ever been anything like the Old Book for bringing lost souls home to happiness? Hasn’t it worked?”
In Andrew Pengilly’s solacing presence these seemed authentic arguments, actual revelations; Bruno Zechlin was far off and gray; and Frank was content.
Equally did Mr. Pengilly console him about the intelligent workmen who would have none of the church. The old man simply laughed.
“Good Heavens, boy! What do you expect, as a preacher? A whole world that’s saved, and nothing for you to do? Reckon you don’t get much salary, but how do you expect to earn that much? These folks don’t go to any Christian church? Huh! When the Master started out, wa’nt anybody going to a Christian church! Go out and get ’em!”
Which seemed disastrously reasonable to the shamed Frank; and he went out to get ’em, and didn’t do so, and continued in his ministry.
He had heard in theological seminary of the “practise of the presence of God” as a papist mystery. Now he encountered it. Mr. Pengilly taught him to kneel, his mind free of all worries, all prides, all hunger, his lips repeating “Be thou visibly present with me”—not as a charm but that his lips might not be soiled with more earthly phrases—and, when he had become strained and weary and exalted, to feel a Something glowing and almost terrifying about him, and to experience thus, he was certain, the actual, loving, proven nearness of the Divinity.
He began to call his mentor Father Pengilly, and the old man eluded him only a little … presently did not chide him at all.
For all his innocence and his mysticism, Father Pengilly was not a fool nor weak. He spoke up harshly to a loud-mouthed grocer, new come to town, who considered the patriarch a subject for what he called “kidding,” and who shouted, “Well, I’m getting tired of waiting for you preachers to pray for rain. Guess you don’t believe the stuff much yourselves!” He spoke up to old Miss Udell, the purity specialist of the town, when she came to snuffle that Amy Dove was carrying on with the boys in the twilight. “I know how you like a scandal, Sister,” said he. “Maybe taint Christian to deny you one. But I happen to know all about Amy. Now if you’d go out and help poor old crippled Sister Eckstein do her washing, maybe you’d keep busy enough so’s you could get along without your daily scandal.”
He had humor, as well, Father Pengilly. He could smile over the cranks in the congregation. And he liked the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples. He had him at the house, and it healed Frank’s spirit to hear with what beatific calm Father Pengilly listened to the Doc’s jibes about the penny-pinchers and the sinners in the church.
“Lem,” said Father Pengilly, “you’ll be surprised at this, but I must tell you that there’s two-three sinners in your fold, too. Why, I’ve heard of even horse-thieves that didn’t belong to churches. That must prove something, I guess. Yes, sir, I admire to hear you tell about the kindhearted atheists, after reading about the cannibals, who are remarkably little plagued with us Methodists and Baptists.”
Not in his garden only but in the woods, along the river, Father Pengilly found God in Nature. He was insane about fishing—though indifferent to the catching of any actual fish. Frank floated with him in a mossy scow, in a placid backwater under the willows. He heard the gurgle of water among the roots and watched the circles from a leaping bass. The old man (his ruddy face and silver mustache shaded by a shocking hayfield straw hat) hummed “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” When Father Pengilly mocked him, “And you have to go to books to find God, young man!” then Frank was content to follow him, to be his fellow preacher, to depend more on Pengilly’s long experience than on irritating questions, to take any explanation of the validity of the Bible, of the mission of the church, the leadership of Christ, which might satisfy this soldier of the cross.
Frank became more powerful as a preacher. He went from Catawba, via pastorates in two or three larger towns, to Eureka, a camp of forty thousand brisk industrialists, and here he was picked up and married by the amiable Bess.