The Damnation of Theron Ware quotes

“Oh, don’t, Theron!” she said hastily. “

Don’t talk to me about the Lord tonight; I can’t bear it!

”

He could not look without blinking timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading upward to dazzling heights of greatness.

At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they were eight hundred dollars in debt.

The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred dollars in debt meant.

At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they were eight hundred dollars in debt.

The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred dollars in debt meant.

It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material matters.

“But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!” commented the doctor. “

My dear sir, they are not even on speaking terms.

”

The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids’ tree-worship is identical with that of the Chaldeans—those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.

Everything is built on the ruins of something else.

Just as the material earth is made up of countless billions of dead men’s bones, so the mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men’s thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of dead races’ faiths and imaginings.”

“Quite so,” interjected the doctor. “That is the voluntary system. But these fellows can’t drop out.

There’s no bottom to the Catholic Church. Everything that’s in, stays in.

If you don’t mind my saying so—of course I view you all impartially from the outside—but it seems logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not for those who by their own profession are so good already …

They used to lie in wait for him all day long, with stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season. The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but he patiently lived it all down.

The Chinaman has the patience to live everything down⁠—the Caucasian races included.

He will see us all to bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!”

Then, all at once, he wheeled and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.

He had never been inside a Catholic church before.

Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration, these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man’s mouth to speak harshly of Jeremiah Madden.

He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one.

When he was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his neighbors, starve to death.

He could recall her coming back next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.

“While there’s a calf on the shank, there’s no starvation,” they had explained to her.

The girl died without profiting by this official apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now, after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he remembered best about Ireland.

The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. “

Distressed fiddlesticks!

” was her only other comment.

It was long before your time. All her family moved away years ago. You wouldn’t know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn’t know as much as I do now.

I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it.

Looking back now, I can see that I might have had her if I’d asked her. But I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and Sunday-school and prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings after the sermon.

Levi Gorringe answered the minister’s pleasantry with a smile which curled his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his eyes. “No,” he said jestingly. “

I’m death on collecting debts; and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I’ll have one yet.

”

Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife’s honest face. “Don’t you see, dear,” she explained patiently, “I only asked him because I knew he couldn’t come.

A little butter spreads a long way, if it’s only intelligently warmed.

”

the words were old; the music was new.

What Sister Soulsby said did not matter. The way she said it⁠—the splendid, searching sweep of her great eyes; the vibrating roll of her voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly triumphant; the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the stress of her eloquence⁠—was all wonderful.

When she had finished, and stood, flushed and panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she held up a hand deprecatingly as the resounding “Amens!” and “Bless the Lords!” began to well up about her.

“Now we’re getting at it,” said Sister Soulsby, briskly. “

My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in.

Just look at the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference.

That doesn’t prove that the play, out in front, isn’t beautiful and affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery—by organization.

The trouble is that you’ve been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you’re so green⁠—if you’ll pardon me⁠—that you want to sit down and cry because the trees are cloth, and the moon is a lantern. And I say, don’t be such a goose!

”

“Of course you’re not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you’re greatly the other way, or I shouldn’t be taking this trouble with you. But you’re what you are because you’re where you are. The moment you try on being somewhere else, you’re done for.

In all this world nobody else comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.

”

“See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences: “I’ll tell you something. It’s about myself.

I’ve got a religion of my own, and it’s got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can’t be done a minute before.

”

Now that’s machinery, management, organization. We take these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at the time, and pass ’em off on the brethren for hymns.

It’s a fraud, yes; but it’s a good fraud. So they are all good frauds.

I say frankly that I’m glad that the change and the chance came to help Soulsby and me to be good frauds.”

Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. “I’d puzzle you more, I’m afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it.

I divide people up into two classes, you know⁠—Greeks and Jews.

Once you get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications, such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It is the only true division there is.

“Both,” said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. “But now I’ll play.

I told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you.

He is the Greekiest of the Greeks. There was a nation where all the people were artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have written his music for them.”

“How could it be the end?” he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the tumultuous fluttering of his heart.

“Things don’t end that way!”

A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while the brave words were on his lips.

“I dare say we forced the pace a little,” she remarked, after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth. “

It doesn’t do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.

”

The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace, was what struck him now first of all.

It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.

Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to him.

still less did he feel any desire just now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at all? There was no reason whatever—save that Alice would be expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason.

Wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do.

The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings and goings.

“We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,” replied Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest’s face with a quizzical half-smile. “That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated question as sex is involved,” he added. “

We have been studying the female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven’t arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.

”

The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled in his beard.

“Yes, you are the type,” he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in the conceit. “Your name isn’t Johnny any more. It’s the Rev. Theron Ware.”

The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought.

Theirs was preeminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in the storm.

The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face.

“I can do nothing at all with him,” this newcomer said to her. “He’ll not be said by me. Perhaps he’d listen to you!”

“It’s likely I’ll go down there!” said Celia.

“He may do what he likes for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away.

Ware.” He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Workingmen with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added,

“It wouldn’t be worth any grown man’s while to quarrel with so poor a creature as you are.”

Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger.

“And you have larger ambitions now?” asked the other. “Pray let me help you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and trip us up.

We clergymen are like streetcar horses. The more steadily we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.

”

Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, had been eating. He pushed aside his cheese-plate. “I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race sometimes,” he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. “But I make up for it other times—most of the time—by scolding them.

If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.

”

I have got way beyond caring for any consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools—what are they? Life itself—what does it amount to? Nothing at all—with you in the balance!”

“Yes⁠—but I am not in the balance,” observed Celia, quietly. “That is where you have made your mistake.”

Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected. Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling, almost cheeky, sort.

He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.

“It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,” she proceeded, in low tones. “I speak for others as well as myself, mind you⁠—we find that you are a bore.”

Theron’s stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare unblinkingly up into her eyes.

I can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement was degeneration.

When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lapdog.

And it wasn’t even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!”

“Tell me this, Father Forbes,” the other demanded, with impulsive suddenness, “is it true that you don’t want me in your house again? Is that the truth or not?”

“The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware,” replied the priest, turning away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive sound.

Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his legs wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh despair, to the effects of his great grief.