الفصل الفصل 5 · CHAPTER V. A Useful Minister—In Church—The Climax

. CHAPTER V. A Useful Minister—In Church—The Climax

About half-past ten the cracked bell of the small church began to ring,

and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon. The

Sunday-school children distributed themselves about the house and

occupied pews with their parents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt

Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her—Tom being placed next

the aisle, in order that he might be as far away from the open window

and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd filed up

the aisles: the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days;

the mayor and his wife—for they had a mayor there, among other

unnecessaries; the justice of the peace; the widow Douglas, fair,

smart, and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill

mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much

the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could

boast; the bent and venerable Major and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson, the

new notable from a distance; next the belle of the village, followed by

a troop of lawn-clad and ribbon-decked young heart-breakers; then all

the young clerks in town in a body—for they had stood in the vestibule

sucking their cane-heads, a circling wall of oiled and simpering

admirers, till the last girl had run their gantlet; and last of all came

the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful care of his mother as

if she were cut glass. He always brought his mother to church, and was

the pride of all the matrons. The boys all hated him, he was so

good. And besides, he had been “thrown up to them” so much. His

white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as usual on

Sundays—accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys

who had as snobs.

The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more,

to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the

church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the

choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all

through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred,

but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago,

and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in

some foreign country.

The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through with a relish, in a

peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country. His

voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached a

certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost word

and then plunged down as if from a spring-board:

Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow’ry _beds_

of ease,

Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro’ _blood_

-y seas?

He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church “sociables” he was

always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies

would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps,

and “wall” their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, “Words

cannot express it; it is too beautiful, TOO beautiful for this mortal

earth.”

After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into

a bulletin-board, and read off “notices” of meetings and societies and

things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of

doom—a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities,

away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is

to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went

into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the

church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself;

for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United

States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the

President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed

by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of

European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light

and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear

withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with

a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace

and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a

grateful harvest of good. Amen.

There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down.

The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he

only endured it—if he even did that much. He was restive all through it;

he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously—for he was not

listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman’s regular

route over it—and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded,

his ear detected it and his whole nature resented it; he considered

additions unfair, and scoundrelly. In the midst of the prayer a fly had

lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by

calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and

polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with

the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping

its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they

had been coat-tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if

it knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom’s

hands itched to grab for it they did not dare—he believed his soul would

be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going

on. But with the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal

forward; and the instant the “Amen” was out the fly was a prisoner of

war. His aunt detected the act and made him let it go.

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an

argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod—and

yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and

thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly

worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he

always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything

else about the discourse. However, this time he was really interested

for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the

assembling together of the world’s hosts at the millennium when the lion

and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead

them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle

were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the

principal character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the

thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child,

if it was a tame lion.

Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed.

Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was

a large black beetle with formidable jaws—a “pinchbug,” he called it. It

was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to

take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went

floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went

into the boy’s mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs,

unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out

of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in

the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came

idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the

quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the

drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around

it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew

bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly

snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy

the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws,

and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent

and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin

descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp,

a flirt of the poodle’s head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards

away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators

shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and

hand-kerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish,

and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a

craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on

it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his

fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at

it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But

he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a

fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close

to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the

beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony

and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so

did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew

down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the

home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was

but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of

light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang

into its master’s lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of

distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.

By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with

suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill.

The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all

possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest

sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of

unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson

had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole

congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced.

Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was

some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety

in it. He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog

should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in

him to carry it off.