The Argonauts of North Liberty

CHAPTER I
The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just
ceased
ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town,
was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath
sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from
the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings
and
the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at
last
settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On this chilly
March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into an
offended
sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail in the
faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the church,
step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, until they
seemed to be carrying its forbidding portals at the point of their
umbrellas.
Within that sacred but graceless edifice, the rigors of the hour and
occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the
austere
pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of
colorless
vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and
hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from
the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm
exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the
presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary
apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless,
neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only
to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few
children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back
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The Argonauts of North Liberty
benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture,
were
laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a watchful deacon.
The dry, monotonous disturbance of the bell had given way to the
strain
of a bass viol, that had been apparently pitched to the key of the
east
wind without, and the crude complaint of a new harmonium that seemed
to
bewail its limited prospect of ever becoming seasoned or mellowed in
its
earthly tabernacle, and then the singing began. Here and there a human
voice soared and struggled above the narrow text and the monotonous
cadence with a cry of individual longing, but was borne down by the
dull, trampling precision of the others' formal chant. This and
a certain muffled raking of the stove by the sexton brought the
temperature down still lower. A sermon, in keeping with the previous
performance, in which the chill east wind of doctrine was not tempered
to any shorn lamb within that dreary fold, followed. A spark of human
and vulgar interest was momentarily kindled by the collection and the
simultaneous movement of reluctant hands towards their owners'
pockets;
but the coins fell on the baize-covered plates with a dull thud, like
clods on a coffin, and the dreariness returned. Then there was another
hymn and a prolonged moan from the harmonium, to which mysterious
suggestion the congregation rose and began slowly to file into the
aisle. For a moment they mingled; there was the silent grasping of
damp
woollen mittens and cold black gloves, and the whispered interchange
of each other's names with the prefix of "Brother" or "Sister," and
an utter absence of fraternal geniality, and then the meeting slowly
dispersed.
The few who had waited until the minister had resumed his hat,
overcoat,
and overshoes, and accompanied him to the door, had already passed
out;
the sexton was turning out the flickering gas jets one by one, when
the
cold and austere silence was broken by a sound--the unmistakable echo
of
a kiss of human passion.
As the horror-stricken official turned angrily, the figure of a man
glided from the shadow of the stairs below the organ loft, and
vanished
through the open door. Before the sexton could follow, the figure of a
woman slipped out of the same portal and with a hurried glance after
the
first retreating figure, turned in the opposite direction and was lost
in the darkness. By the time the indignant and scandalized custodian
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The Argonauts of North Liberty
had
reached the portal, they had both melted in the troubled sea of
tossing umbrellas already to the right and left of him, and pursuit
and
recognition were hopeless.
CHAPTER II
The male figure, however, after mingling with his fellow-worshippers
to the corner of the block, stopped a moment under the lamp-post as if
uncertain as to the turning, but really to cast a long, scrutinizing
look towards the scattered umbrellas now ...