Red and Black

Their first sight of each other--Red and Black--was across the space which stretches between pulpit and pew. It’s sometimes a wide space, and impassable; again, it’s not far, and the lines of communication are always open. In this case, neither of them knew, as yet, just what the distance was.

Black--Robert McPherson Black--if you want his full name, had been a bit nervous in the vestry where he put on his gown. He had been preaching only five years, and that in a Southern country parish, when a visiting committee of impressive looking men had come to listen to him--had come again--and once more--and then had startled him with a call to the big suburban town and the fine old, ivy-grown church generally known as the “Stone Church.”

“But, gentlemen,” he had said, swinging about quickly in his study chair when Mr. Lockhart, the chairman of the committee, had asked him if he would consider a call--“I’m--I’m--why, I’m not good enough for you!”

The committee had smiled--it was quite a remarkable committee, and had a sense of humour. At least Samuel Lockhart had, and one other of the five who were waiting upon Mr. Black in his study after the evening service.

“Meaning virtue--or ability?” inquired the chairman, with his friendly smile.

“Both. You see--well, to put it honestly--I’m just a country boy as yet, born in Scotland and brought up in your South. I haven’t had the training----”

“Very good things have come out of the country--and Scotland--and the South,” Mr. John Radway had suggested. “And I believe you are a graduate of--a perfectly satisfactory college and seminary, and have built this church up from desertion to popularity----”

Well, they had had it out on those lines, and others, in the next hour, the committee falling more and more in love with its candidate--if so emotional a phrase may be used of the feelings stirred in the breasts of five middle-aged, steady-going, sensible men--as they watched the young man’s face go from pale to red and back again, and heard him tell them not only what he thought he was not, but what he thought they might not be either--in so frank and winning a way that the more he wasn’t sure he’d better come the surer they were he must!

In the end he came--called and accepted, after the modern methods, wholly on the judgment of the committee, for he had refused absolutely and finally to come and preach a candidating sermon. So when he emerged from the vestry door, on that first May Sunday, he faced for the first time his newly acquired congregation, and the church faced for the first time its minister-elect. Which was wholly as it should be, and the result was a tremendously large audience, on tiptoe with interest and curiosity.

Red was not in the congregation when Black first came in through the vestry door. Instead, as usual, he was racing along the road in a very muddy car, trying to make four calls in the time in which he should really have made two, because his wife had insisted very strenuously that he should do his best to get to church on that particular morning. It seemed that she had learned that the new minister was from the South, and she, being a Southerner, naturally felt an instant sense of loyalty. It was mighty seldom that Red could ever be got to church, not so much because he didn’t want to go--though he didn’t, really, unless the man he was to hear was exceptionally good--as because he couldn’t get around to it, not once in a blue moon--or a Sunday morning sun. And if, by strenuous exertion, he did arrive at church, there was one thing which almost invariably happened--so what was the use? The young usher for Doctor Burns’ aisle always grinned when he saw him come in, because he knew perfectly that within a very short time, he, the usher, would be tiptoeing down the aisle and whispering in the ear below the heavy thatch of close-cropped, fire-red hair. And then Doctor Burns’ attending church for that day would be over.

The chances seemed fair, however, on this particular morning, because Red did not come into church till the preliminary service was well along. He stole in while the congregation was on its feet singing a hymn, so his entrance was not conspicuous; but Black saw him, just the same. Black had already seen every man in the congregation, though he had noted individually but few of the women. He saw this big figure, stalwart yet well set up; he saw the red head--he could hardly help that--it would be a landmark in any audience. He saw also the brilliant hazel eyes, the strong yet finely cut face. To put it in a word, as Redfield Pepper Burns came into the crowded church, his personality reached out ahead of him and struck the man in the pulpit a heavy blow over the heart. Too strong a phrase? Not a bit of it. If the thing has never happened to you, then you’re not a witness, and your testimony doesn’t count. But plenty of witnesses can be found.

Robert Black looked down the aisle, and instantly coveted this man for a friend. “I’ve got to have you,” he said within himself, while the people went on singing the last stanza of a great hymn. “I’ve got to have you for a friend. I don’t know who else may be in this parish but as long as you’re here there’ll be something worth the very best I can do. I wonder if you’ll be easy to get. I--doubt it.”

Now this was rather strange, for the family with whom he was staying while the manse was being put in order for the new minister had spoken warmly of Doctor Burns as the man whom they always employed, plainly showing their affection for him, and adding that half the town adored the red-headed person in question. When that red head came into church late, looking as professional as such a man can’t possibly help looking, it was easy enough for Black to guess that this was Doctor Burns.

Across the space, then, they faced each other, these two, whose lives were to react so powerfully, each upon the other--and only one of them guessed it. To tell the truth, Red was more than a little weary that Sunday morning; he was not just then electrically sensitive, like the other man, to every impression--he was not that sort of man, anyhow. He had been up half the night, and his hair-trigger temper--which had inspired the nickname he had carried from boyhood--had gone off in a loud explosion within less than an hour before he appeared in the church. He was still inwardly seething slightly at the recollection, though outwardly he had returned to calm. Altogether, he was not precisely in a state of mind to gaze with favour upon the new man in the pulpit, who struck him at once as disappointingly young. He had been told by somebody that Robert McPherson Black was thirty-five, but his first swift glance convinced him that Robert had not been strictly truthful about his age--or else had encouraged an impression that anybody with half an eye could see was a wrong one. He was quite evidently a boy--a mere boy. Burns liked boys--but not in the pulpit, attempting to take charge of his life and tell him what to do.

Therefore Red looked with an indifferent eye upon the tall figure standing to read the Scriptures, but acknowledged in his mind that the youth had a pleasing face and personality--Red liked black hair and eyes--he had married them, and had never ceased to prefer that colouring to any other. He admitted to himself that the intonations of Black’s voice were surprisingly deep and manly for such a boy--and then promptly closed his mind to further impressions, and ran his hand through his red hair and breathed a heavy sigh of fatigue. Vigorous fellow though he was at forty years, it was necessary for him to get an occasional night’s sleep to even things up. If it hadn’t been for his wife’s urging he might have been snatching forty winks this minute on a certain comfortable wide davenport at home. These Southerners--how they did hang together--and Black wasn’t a real Southerner, either, having spent his boyhood in Scotland. Red could have heard the new man quite as well next Sunday--or the one after. He glanced sidewise at his wife, and his irritation faded--as it always did at the mere sight of her. How lovely she was this morning, in her quiet church attire. Bless her heart--if she wanted him there he was glad he had come. And of course it was best for the children that they see their father in church now and then.... But he hoped the boy in the pulpit would not make too long a prayer--he, Red, was so deadly sleepy, he might go to sleep and disgrace Ellen. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But he didn’t hear the prayer--and not because he went to sleep. It was during the offertory sung by the expensive quartette (which he didn’t like at all because he knew the tenor for a four-flusher and the contralto for a little blonde fool, who sometimes got him up in the night for her hysterics--though he admitted she could sing), that the young usher came tiptoeing down the aisle and whispered the customary message in the ear beneath the red thatch. Dr. Redfield Pepper Burns had been in church precisely eleven minutes this time before being called out. What in thunder was the use of his coming at all? He gave an I-told-you-so look at his wife as he got up and hung his overcoat on his arm and went up the aisle again, his competent shoulders followed by the disappointed gaze of Black from the pulpit. The doors closed behind him, and the young usher exhibited his watch triumphantly to another young usher, making signs as of one who had won a bet. Eleven minutes was the shortest time since February, when on a certain remembered Sunday Burns had never got to his seat at all, but had been followed down the aisle by the usher practically on a run. Somebody had got himself smashed up by a passing trolley almost outside the door of the sanctuary. Being an usher certainly had its compensations at times.

Yes, Black was disappointed. Of course he faced a large and interested congregation, and everybody knows that a minister should not be more anxious to preach to one man than to another. Unfortunately, being quite human, he sometimes is. On this occasion, having suffered that blow over the heart before mentioned, he had found himself suddenly peculiarly eager to speak to the red-headed doctor--from the pulpit--and convince him that he himself was not as young as he looked--and that he could be a very good friend. Red looked to him like the sort of man who needed a friend, in spite of all Black’s hostess had said to him about Burns’ popularity and his enormous professional practice. During those eleven minutes, through part of which Black had been at leisure to glance several times at Red, he had received the distinct impression that he was looking at a much overworked man, who needed certain things rather badly--one of which was another man who was not just a good-fellow sort of friend, but one who understood at least a little of what life meant--and what it ought to mean.

Thus thinking Black rose to make his prayer--the prayer before the sermon. His thoughts about Red had made him forget for a little that he was facing his new congregation--and that was a good thing, for it had taken away most of his nervousness. And after the prayer came the sermon--and after the sermon came a very wonderful strain of music which made Black lift his head toward the choir above him with a sense of deep gratitude that music existed and could help him in his task like that. At this time, of course, he didn’t know about the “four-flusher” tenor, and the little fool of a blonde contralto who always felt most like smiling at the moment when he was preaching most earnestly. When he did know--well--in the end there were two new members of that quartette.