CHAPTER XXIX. WAITING.
It required Flossy's eyes and heart both to keep watch of her boy during the progress of that meeting. The novelty of the scene, the strangeness of seeing ladies occupying the speaker's stand, kept him quiet and alert, until Mrs. Partridge, that woman with wonderful power over the forgotten, neglected portion of the world, arrested all his bewildering thoughts and centered them on the strange stories she had to tell. Did you ever hear her tell that remarkable story of her first attempt at controlling that remarkable class which came under her care, many years ago, in St. Louis? It is full of wonder and pathos and terror and fascination, even to those who are somewhat familiar with such experiences. But Flossy and her boy had never heard, or dreamed of its like. No, I am wrong; the boy had dreamed of scenes just so wild and daring, but even he had not fancied that such people ever found their way to Sunday-schools.
Peanuts, cigars, a pack of cards, and a bowie-knife! Imagine yourself, teacher, to be seated before your orderly and courteous class of boys next Sunday morning and find them transformed into beings represented by such surroundings as these! It was Mrs. Partridge's experience. How fascinating that story is! That one incorrigible boy, the one with the bowie-knife, the one who would make no answer to her questions, show no interest in her stories, ignore her very presence and go on with his horrible mischief, until it even came to a stabbing affray right there in the class-room!
Imagine her meeting that boy ten years afterward, when he was not only a man, but a gentleman; not only that, but a Christian and not only that, but a working Christian, superintending a mission Sunday-school, giving his best energies and his best time to work like that! Think of being told by him that the determination to amount to something was taken that morning, ten years before, when he seemed not to be listening nor caring! What is ten years of Christian work when we can hope for such results as that!
Flossy had forgotten her charge; her face was all aglow; so was her heart. She knew more about Christian work than she did an hour before. She had learned that we must take the step that plainly comes next to be taken, no matter for the darkness of the day and the apparent gloom of the future. Work is ours; results are God's. This life business is divided. Partnership with God. Nothing but the work to do; so that it is done to the utmost limit of our best, the responsibility is the Lord's. That was blessed! She could dare to try.
Meantime the boy. He had listened in utmost silence, and with eyes that never for an instant left the speaker's face! When the spell was broken he drew a long sigh, and this was his mighty conclusion.
"That chap was enough sight meaner than I'd ever be, and yet he got to be some ! I'll be blamed if I don't see what can be done in that line!" A small beginning; so small that on Flossy's face it excited only smiles. She was ignorant, you know. To Mrs. Partridge that sentence would have been worth a wedge of gold. But it is possible that Flossy's first simple little reach after work may have fruit to bear. It is difficult to begin to tell about that next day at Chautauqua. There was so much crowded into it that it would almost make a little book of itself. The morning was spent by a large class of people in a state of excited unrest and expectancy. The sensible ones by the hundreds, and indeed I suppose I may say by the thousands, went to the morning service, as usual, and heard the children's sermon, delivered by Dr. Newton; and those who did not, and who afterward had the misfortune to fall in with those who did, bemoaned their folly in not doing likewise. On the whole, the children, and those who had brains enough to become children for the time being, were the only comfortable ones at Chautauqua that Saturday morning.
The president was coming! So, apparently, was the rest of the world! Oh, the throngs and throngs that continually arrived! It of itself was a rare and never-to-be-forgotten novelty to those who had never in their lives before seen such a vast army of human beings gathered into a small space, and all perfectly quiet and correct, and even courteous in their deportment.
"Where are the drunken men?" said Marion, looking around curiously on the constantly increasing throng. "We always read of them as being in great crowds." "Yes, and the people who swear," added Eurie. "I haven't heard an oath this morning, and I have roamed around everywhere. I must say Chautauqua will bear off the palm for getting together a most respectable-looking, well-behaved 'rabble!' That is what I overheard a sour-looking old gentleman, who doesn't approve of having a president—or of letting him come to a religious meeting, I don't know which—say would rush in to-day. It certainly is a remarkably orderly 'rush.' Girls, look at Dr. Vincent! I declare, Chautauqua has paid, just to watch him! He ought to be the president himself. I mean to vote for him when female suffrage comes in. Or a king! Wouldn't he make a grand king? How he would enjoy ordering the subjects and enforcing his laws!" "All of which he seems able to do now," Marion said. "I don't believe he would thank you for a vote. His realm is large enough, and he seems to have willing subjects." "He has go-ahead-a-tive-ness." Eurie said. "What is the proper word for that, school-ma'am? Executive ability, that's it. Those are splendid words, and they ought to be added to his name. I tell you what, girls, I wish we could cut him up into seven men, and take him home with us. Seven first-class men made out of him and distributed through the towns about us would make a new order of things." All this was being said while they were scrambling with the rest of the world down to the auditorium to secure seats, for the grand afternoon had arrived, and people had been advised to be "in their seats as soon after one o'clock as they could make it convenient." "How soon will that be, I wonder?" Marion said, quoting this sentence from Dr. Vincent's advice given in the morning, and holding up her watch to show that it was five minutes of one. "It looks to me as though those deluded beings who arrive here at one o'clock will have several hours of patient waiting before they will make it convenient to secure seats. Just stand a minute, girls, and look! It is worth seeing. Away back, just as far as I can see, there is nothing but heads! The aisles are full, and space between the seats, and the office is full, and the people are just pouring down from the hill in a continuous stream. To look that way you wouldn't think that any had got down here yet!" Now I really wish I had a photograph of that gathering of people to put right in here, on this page! Many of them would have looked much better at this point than they did after four hours of patient waiting. How that crowd did fidget and fix and change position, as far as it was possible to change, when there was not an inch of unoccupied space. How they talked and laughed and sang and grumbled and yawned, and sang again!
It was a tedious waiting. It had its irresistibly comic side. There were those among the Chautauqua girls who could see the comic side of things with very little trouble. The material out of which they made some of their fun might have appeared very meager to orderly, decorous people. But they made it.
What infinite sport they got out of the fidgety lady before them, who could not get herself and her three children seated to her mind! Those ladies who labored so industriously in order that the nation's flags, draping the stand, should float gracefully over the nation's chief, were an almost inexhaustible source of amusement to our girls. "Look!" said Eurie, "that arrangement doesn't suit; some of the stars are hidden; see them twitch it; it will be down! Now that one has it looped just to her fancy. No! I declare, there it comes down again! The other one twitched it this time; they are not of the same mind. Girls, do look! It is fun to watch them; they work as though the interests of this meeting all turned on a right arrangement of that flag." By this time the attention of the girls was engaged, and the number of witty remarks that were made at the expense of those flags would no doubt have disconcerted the earnest workers thereat could they have heard them.
The hours waned, and the president did not arrive. The waiters essayed to sing, but to lead such an army of people was a difficult task, especially when there was no one to lead. Such singing!
"We came out ahead, anyhow!" said Flossy, stopping to laugh.
Five or six thousand people had finished their verse, while five or six thousand in the rear were in the third line of it.
"We need Mr. Bliss or Mr. Sherwin or somebody ," said Ruth. "What a pity that they have all gone, and Dr. Tourjée hasn't come! I thought he was to be here." Presently came a singer to their rescue. The girls did not know who he was, but he led well, and the singing became decidedly enjoyable. Suddenly he disappeared, and they went back again into utter confusion. They stopped singing and began to grumble.
"Queer arrangements, anyhow," said a surly-looking man in front. "Why didn't they have a speaker ready to address this throng, instead of keeping us waiting here with nothing to entertain us?" "I know it," said Marion, briskly addressing herself to her party. "Dr. Vincent has not used his accustomed foresight. He ought to have known that the presidential party would be three hours late, and filled up the programme with speeches, especially since there has been such a dearth of speech-making during the past two weeks. We are really hungry for an address! I don't know who would have undertaken the task, however, unless they sent for Gabriel or some other celestial. I know I have no desire to listen to a common mortal." Before them sat a lady absorbed in a book. During the singing she joined heartily, and when Dr. Vincent came, on one of his numerous journeys to try to encourage the crowd with the information that the party waited for had not yet arrived, she looked and listened with the rest, but always with her finger between the leaves, as if the place was too interesting to be lost.
Eurie's curiosity rose to such a pitch that she leaned forward for a peep at the title-page, and drew back suddenly. It was a copy of the Teacher's Bible! A silence fell upon the company near the front, broken suddenly by an old lady who leaned lovingly toward her chubby-faced grandson, and said:
"Frankie, you must look in a few minutes and you will see the President of the United States." "That is good news, anyhow," spoke forth a rough-looking, good-natured man near by, and the listeners, who were in that excited state of weariness and waiting that they were ready to laugh or cry as the slightest occasion offered, burst forth into roars of laughter, which rang back among the crowds behind and enticed them to join, though I suppose not twenty of the laughers knew what the joke was, if indeed there was one. A sudden rush. Some one occupied the stand. A notice.
"A telegram!" said a ringing voice. "For Mrs. C.G. Hammond. Marked—'Death!'" A sympathetic murmur ran through the great company, as they moved and wedged and fell back, and did almost impossible things, to make a road out of that dense throng of humanity for the one to whom the president had suddenly become an insignificance.
Just then came the "Wyoming Trio." Blessings on them, whoever they are. Nothing ever could have fitted in more splendidly than they did just there and then. And the singing rested and helped them all.
Now a sensation came in the shape of a poem that had been written for the occasion, and was to be learned to sing in greeting to the president. How they rang those jubilant words through those old trees! Tender, touching words, with the Chautauqua key-note quivering all through them.
"Greet him! Let the air around him Benedictions bear; Let the hearts of all the people Circle him with prayer.' "I wonder if he realizes what a blessed thing it is to be circled with prayer?" said she of the Teacher's Bible, turning a thoughtful face upon the four girls who had attracted her attention. "I wonder who Mary A. Lathbury is?" said Eurie, reading from the poem. "She is a poet, whoever she is. There isn't a line in this that is simply rhyme . I doubt if the president ever had such a rhythmical tribute as that." "She is the lady with blue eyes and curls who designs the pictures in that charming child's paper which flutters around here. I have forgotten the name of it, but the pictures are little poems themselves." This was Flossy's bit of information. "Which designs them, the blue eyes or the curls?" Marion asked, gravely. And then these four simpletons burst into a merry laugh.
Still the president did not appear. The audience had exhausted their resources and their good humor. Ominous grumblings and cross faces began to predominate. Some darkly hinted that he was not coming at all, and that this was a design to draw the immense crowd together. Nobody believed it, but many were in a mood to pretend that they did.
"I never believed in this thing," said a tall, dark-faced, solemn-featured man, speaking in a voice loud enough to interest the crowd in front "This sensation business I don't believe in. What do we want of the president here! Who cares to see him? I don't like it; I believe it is all wrong, turning a religious meeting upside down for a sensation, and I told them so." Our friend Marion, you will remember, was gifted with a clear voice and a saucy tongue.
"If he doesn't like it," she said, quickly, "and doesn't want to see the president, why do you suppose he has kept one of the best chairs for four mortal hours? Don't you think that is selfish?" Which sentence caused ripples of laughter all about them, and quenched the solemn-visaged man.
But it was growing serious, this waiting. It was a great army of people to be kept at rest, and though they had been quiet and decorous enough thus far, it was not to be presumed that they were all people governed by nice shades of propriety. Would the disappointment break forth into any disagreeable demonstrations? Dr. Vincent had done what he could; he had appeared promptly on the arrival of dispatches, and given the latest news that the telegraph and the telescope would send. But what can any mortal man do who has arranged for people to come who do not come, except wait for them with what patience he can command.
At this ominous moment he appeared before them again. Not a notice this time; something which shone in his eyes and quivered in every vein and rang in his trumpet-like voice. This was what he said.
