“What do you mean, Jim?”
“Well, I guess it’s them that beats him nowadays. Anyways, that’s what young Hal Greene says. He said when he went there once he heard the old man screaming bloody murder. And serves him right! Hell will be too good for Isaac. Of all the mean sons of bees—”
I got no more out of Jim; but a week later, when for the first time I triumphantly drove the Ford up the hill to Captain Phippen’s, I began to feel something very sinister and dangerous in the situation. Captain Phippen was surprisingly serious about it.
“You know what I think, Bill?” he said.
“What?”
“I think those scarecrows’ll kill him. That’s what I think. I think they’ll kill him.”
“Why?”
“They’re crazy as bedbugs. To my mind, they should all have been locked up years ago. And Good Jumping Jupiter Almighty! look what the old devil has put them through! You couldn’t blame them.… Not that I’m in love with the old man, any more than with those she-fiends either. But just the same it kind of gives you the shivers to think of him sitting there in a wheel-chair with his Bible, and those two harpies just itching to cut his throat!… Doesn’t it?”
This was a new light on the situation.
“It does,” I said.
“You bet it does!”
“Couldn’t something be done?”
“Go and try it, my boy. Even Mr. Perkins, the minister, don’t dare go near the place.”
“Well, how do they live?”
“God knows. But they live, somehow.”
I returned home with a new sense of disaster impending; but neither I, nor anybody else, could possibly have foreseen what shape it was to take, or how horrible it was to be.
It was difficult at “Witch Elms,” however, to be for long concerned about remote possibilities of disaster; and as I settled down once more into the peaceful life with Aunt Julia and Aunt Jenny, I thought less and less about the Willards. To tell the truth, my boyish excitement about them had worn itself out. If indeed a tragedy was enacting itself in that forlorn old house, it no longer seemed to me of heroic proportions. My former terrors and wonder now seemed to me childish, and I drove past the house in the Ford twice a day with scarcely a glance at it. And, moreover, my aunts kept me busy. The car was a new toy, and they couldn’t have enough of it. What with that and the new telephone, and the phonograph, the tempo of life had changed at the farm; and the days went like minutes. Hardly a day passed, in fact, that we didn’t make a long expedition. My aunts had seldom been more than ten miles from Hackley Falls, and it was wildly exciting to them to be taken to Rutland, to Burlington, to Bellows Falls, or over the Mohawk Trail to Fitchburg. We even spent a night at Windsor, and I shall always remember with what girlish delight and flutter Aunt Jenny and Aunt Julia came down to dinner in the great gilt dining hall of the Green Mountain House. They were as pink as debutantes, and as coquettish, and they insisted on eating every item in an enormous table-d’hôte dinner. I even think they would have danced with me if I had suggested it—though Aunt Julia’s scorn of “these modern so-called dances” was outspoken.
Meanwhile, Hackley Falls was having a new excitement of its own. A revival had come to town—something the town had never had before. I first heard of it from Mr. Greene at the post office; he was surprised I hadn’t known. It had been there for three days already, and the whole countryside was wild about it. Farmers and their families were driving in from miles around. There were mourners’ benches and a sawdust trail and all the fixings, he said. And the Reverend something-or-other Boody, a Southerner, was a humdinger, a real old-fashioned artist in brimstone and hellfire. Fairly fried your liver in you, Mr. Greene said, and talked just like a nigger.… Mr. Perkins, the local minister (who got a salary of a thousand dollars a year) was furious. He had said something nasty about the Reverend Boody in his last Sunday’s sermon.… But the Reverend Boody continued to take in money.
It was that same afternoon, when I was bringing the aunts back from a drive to Manchester, that I first saw it. It was a circular tent, of about the size used in county fairs, with a little peak at the top, and it had been pitched in a field on the Hammond farm at the western end of the town, half a mile out. At the far end of the field, which had been churned and trampled brown with feet and hoofs and wheels, was a motley assemblage of cars, wagons and buggies, and tethered horses. I wondered what Cross-eyed Hammond got for it. The tent itself was emblazoned, all the way round, with flamboyant posters. In scarlet flaming letters we were adjured to Hit the Sawdust Trail, to Come to Jesus, Repent, Repent, Seek Salvation in the Lord, Cling to Jesus, and so on. I stopped the car and invited the aunts to go in. We could hear the somewhat dismal sound of a hymn. But they declined, and I drove on, resolving to come back myself later.
The next day brought a typical northeast gale and rain. At such times the clouds seemed to come right down into the valley, like fog, and sensible people stayed indoors. My aunts had no desire to use the car, so I decided I would use it myself. I went for the mail in the forenoon and then drove out to the revival and, as I might have foreseen, found that the weather had been too much for most of Mr. Boody’s audience. Only a half-dozen vehicles stood in the muddy field, and from the tent, though the wind was blowing toward me, I couldn’t hear a sound. However, I got out and crossed the field and entered the tent through a flap-door. At first when I entered my entire attention was taken up by the tent itself, which seemed to be on the point of collapse. It rocked like a tree in a storm. I had no sooner got in and seen the sawdust trail before me than a violent gust almost lifted the whole structure. With a series of sharp reports like cannon-shots, the segments of canvas on the lee side bellied outward, and then, as the pressure relaxed, clapped inward again. The ropes creaked, a damp wind assailed me across the sawdust, and in the roof of the tent there was a continuous low whistling. And, uplifted against the elements, I could hear the shrill voice of the Reverend Boody.
“Who’s a-goin’ to discountenance the Lord?” he cried. And then after a moment he answered himself, “No one!”
And just as I sneaked into a bench at the back, the rest of the tiny audience stood up and chanted:
“Amen!”
I rose hastily and sat down when they did.
“Who’s a-goin’ to flout the King of Justice?” he cried—and I saw him now, a small, knock-kneed, plump fellow, with a frock coat and moist eyes. And again he answered himself sternly, “No one!” And again the small audience rose and sang, “Amen,” drawling it out interminably.… “Who’s a-goin’ to fool the Lord of Hosts?… No one.”
“A-a-a-a-a … me-n-n-n-n!”
I was just beginning to think that this business of standing up and sitting down might soon become a nuisance, when Mr. Boody launched himself into what seemed to be a kind of sermon. He walked to and fro on his little muslin-draped platform, with his pudgy hands clasped behind his back, and began shouting disjointed phrases.
“Abraham! Abraham and Isaac on the mountain!… And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and went unto the place of which God had told him!”
He paused, glowering at his audience, and it was in that moment that I saw, for the first time, the Willards, Mrs. Willard and Lydia. They were at the extreme left-hand end of the second row, all by themselves, so that I could see them in profile. They were both in white, with black hats, and leaning intently forward. Their noses were exactly, preposterously, alike.