Teeftallow/Chapter 9

MR. DITMAS might have spared himself any effort in advertising his proposed Sunday baseball, for the news, once hinted, spread over the village with the swiftness of a fire alarm. A defensive reaction set up at once. The merchants discussed the new departure with confused disapproval. Some of them were afraid something would happen to their village if they played ball on Sunday, a storm, a fire . . . a bolt from Heaven.

The garage itself was undecided on the point. The boys who were to play this unholy game shuffled about, spat dubiously upon the cement floor, and would ask each other, "Air you goin' to play, Jim?" "I'm goin' to do what the rest of you do." It turned out that everyone, Abner included, was going to do what the rest did. Tug Beavers alone stood out against this flaccid unanimity. He swore he would throw his influence in the right direction no matter what he did himself. This was interpreted to be anti-baseball propaganda.

While the men of Irontown were vague and inarticulate on the point, the women were clear-cut. High-pitched denunciations of Sunday baseball were flung across backyard fences. The telephone wires buzzed with the outrage. For example, the bell tinkled in the home of a Mrs. Roxie Biggers, who before her marriage was a Northcutt. She was a tall, thin, humpbacked woman with a thin, hawklike face, a compressed mouth, a thin, humped nose with the lobes cut in the high triangles of temper and wilfulness. This good woman's husband, Mr. Timothy Biggers, a druggist, had not made a suggestion in his home since ​the day of his marriage, twenty years before. Instead he had taken quietly to the use of laudanum and other sedatives, thus escaping by way of the back door a hard and intensely religious world entirely dominated by his wife.

When Mrs. Biggers got the news over the wire she acted at once. She seized her hat off the bed, clapped it on her gray hair in any fashion, and hurried out into the street, her thin lips pressed together in determination. She set out walking in the direction of the home of her brother, Mr. Perry Northcutt, the banker.

When Mrs. Biggers reached this residence, she entered without the formality of a ring, hastened down a hallway, and then with the briefest rap entered the combined sitting room and bedroom of her brother and his wife.

When Mrs. Biggers entered she found the banker, his fat, rather sullen-looking wife, and their three children engaged in family prayers. At this sight Mrs. Biggers was somewhat soothed, a certain sweet satisfaction welled up in her bosom, for she was eleven years older than the banker and, during his childhood, had occupied toward him a maternal relation. Now to see her brother kneeling in prayer reminded her of their father who had been dead these many years, and she thought, "If there ever was a real Christian, brother Perry is one."

As Mr. Northcutt finished his devotions, his sister broke out abruptly, "Perry, did you know that man Ditmas is getting up a baseball game for this afternoon?"

The banker arose deliberately from his kneeling.

"I had heard it."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"It may not be true."

"You know it's so, ever'thing bad and wicked is so."

Mr. Northcutt hesitated, then said, "I don't know that I am going to do anything about it, Roxie."

This was a literal truth. He did not know what he was going to do. He had been worrying over the question all that forenoon, and in his prayer he had been silently asking ​God what should he do about the desecration that threatened the village Sabbath.

His answer irritated Mrs. Biggers instantly. "You don't know! Do you mean you are not goin' to stan' up for your Lord and Saviour against the devil?"

The banker's wife, who was perhaps the most tactless woman in all Irontown, now said in her flat nasal tone, "Perry does a lot of business with them railroad folks . ." and this was the truth.

Mr. Northcutt glanced at the fat mother of his children in sharp irritation. She had blurted out what he had meant to say by careful, self-respecting innuendo. The wife's answer set off his sister.

"Trade! Bankin'! Givin' over God's day to revellers for dollars! What good will dollars do you when you come to die?"

"Now, Roxie, I didn't say that; Nannie there said that!"

"You know that's the real reason," stated Nannie in her flat, matter-of-fact voice.

"There are a lot of things to be considered," pursued the banker, disregarding this interruption. "You must remember Ditmas is a Yankee, and Northern people don't look at these things like we do. I don't think they live quite as close to God as we do."

"What's that got to do with it? We've got laws against disturbing the Sabbath, ain't we, even if the Yankees ain't? No, Perry Northcutt, you know yore duty as well as I do, and if you don't go down and stop that game this afternoon, I'll do it myself!"

With that she started out of the room. The banker made a gesture after her.

"Now, don't you be flying off like that. If it's got to be done, I'll do it."

"Well, see that you do," and Mrs. Biggers left the house and went striding back to her home at her characteristic gait.

The contemplated action was thoroughly distasteful to ​the banker. It threatened to break up his highly profitable relations with the railroad if he antagonized Ditmas; still, to violate the Sabbath was wrong; he shouldn't allow it. Moreover, he had been praying earnestly to God for direction in this crisis of his life and—Roxie had come. . . .

While the forces for righteousness were thus mobilizing in the village, a very half-hearted spirit moved the baseball players themselves. When the crowd gathered in the old field south of the railroad site nobody really wanted to play. All the players wanted to drop the matter but could not because they were victims of their own gregariousness. Even the score or so of spectators were uncomfortable.

Mr. Tug Beavers was the only man who refused point-blank to enter the game. He stated flatly, "When I do a wrong thing, I mean her to be wrong and I don't pertend she's right like Mr. Ditmas is tryin' to do. By God, no matter what I do myself, my influence is goin' to go in the right direction."

The players were impressed with this stand. There was something bracing about it. One or two others withdrew, there was a re-selection from the spectators, and the game finally proceeded.

During all this preparation a mere breath of persuasion would have broken up Sunday baseball in Irontown, but unfortunately, at this juncture, Mr. Perry Northcutt arrived.

The banker came walking over the railroad levee from the direction of the village; a thin figure clad in funereal black. From the moment he appeared the game halted automatically and all eyes focussed on Northcutt. When he came nearer the crowd saw he had a bloodless, placatory smile on his thin face and that he was rubbing his hands together in a most diplomatic manner. In his heart the banker earnestly wished to be diplomatic and agreeable. He knew that thousands of dollars in bank deposits and the good will of the managing engineer hung on the outcome of his venture. ​He would have given it up most heartily if his conscience had permitted.

The banker came on until he was well within the circle of players. He nodded at those whom he knew with his conciliatory smile.

"Boys," he began in the voice of an elder speaking to children, "do you think it is quite right to be playing ball here on the Lord's day?" This phrase, "Lord's day," produced a clear-cut distaste in his hearers, whose mental associations with it were uniformly monotonous and disagreeable.

"Don't you think if He gives you six days to enjoy yourselves you might set apart one day to worship Him?"

Every man in the crowd took an antagonistic point of view at once. Somebody said, "What's the use in not playing ball? We ain't goin' to church noway."

It was characteristic of Northcutt that he could never brook the slightest opposition. Now he said in a sharper tone, "At least you won't be desecrating the Sabbath with your whoopings and shoutings!"

"Don't God like to hear folks have a good time?"

"He tells you how to have a good time! He doesn't say 'Play ball,' He says retire to your closets and seek Him in prayer. If you men would do that—eat the secret bread of life on your knees in your closets!" the banker's face lighted with eremitic zeal.

Another voice put in, "Well, Sunday ain't the Sabbath anyway, it's Sattidy. Do you keep Sattidy holy? Wasn't you doin' business at yore bank yestiddy?"

"Look here," cried the banker, irritated at this ancient thrust at the date of Sunday, "when Christ came to this earth, you know the old dispensation was finished and a new one began. They changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. . . ."

The banker had launched one of those futile Biblical arguments characteristic of the hill people. That the banker ​should indulge in it amazed Mr. Ditmas; at last it moved him to speech.

"Look here, gentlemen, we know the purpose of either Saturday or Sunday—it was a day of rest; but for active young men rest doesn't mean doing nothing; their normal rest is play, a change from the routine of work, that's the spirit of the Bible."

The banker turned on the engineer tensely. "Mr. Ditmas, I'm surprised to find you encouraging Sunday sports! Do sports glorify God? The Bible says retire to your closets and pray! That's the way to spend the Lord's day, not in wicked sports!"

Ditmas was astonished at the banker's harsh hebraism, but was saved from saying anything more by Mr. Tug Beavers, who injected himself into the argument.

"All right, boys," he shouted, "let Perry Northcutt have his way. If it's plain-out wrong to play ball on Sunday, by God, I'll have a game myself. Come on, let's play!"

He waved his thick arms toward the diamond and a number of players followed him out into the field.

The banker was beside himself. "Stop it!" he cried in a high voice. "I try to be nice to you barbarians and you won't let me. I've got the constable right behind that railway dump waiting to take you up with a warrant if you don't stop desecrating this day! Now, you ain't going to do it, boys. I'm telling you!"

"Take us up!" exploded Tug. "I'm not skeered of you, you damned little spindle-legged, knife-faced hypocrite! You break the law ever' day chargin' eight per cent. in your damned ol' bank, then come out here tryin' to bust up our baseball game cause it's wrong! Bring your officer and be damned to both of you!"

The gratification of "cursing out" the banker extended to every man in the crowd when a dry voice said rather calmly, "Hold on, Mr. Beavers."

The crowd parted and a graying middle-aged man moved ​toward the disputants. He held up a finger at the banker and asked in an assured and faintly supercilious tone, "Perry, you talkin' about God not approving of this and that—what makes you think there is any God?"

The whole crowd came to a horrified hush at this new departure. The banker looked at his new antagonist.

"Now, look here, Belshue," he said in a different tone, "I'm not going to argue with any infidel. Unless you believe in God, you—well, you just ain't human, that's all."

"You won't argue because you kain't prove it," said Belshue, staring at the banker with gloomy eyes.

"Prove it! I don't have to prove it, I know it!"

"How do you know it?"

"The same way I know I'm talking to you. I go to my heavenly Father and He speaks to me just as plain as you're speaking now. Once I was prayin' to Him when my little daughter died and He come down and touched my head and blessed me. Praise His holy name! Praise God! He brought me a peace you will never know, Andy Belshue, till you find God, too. Find Him, brother, find Him!"

The banker's thin face lighted up as he related these supernatural experiences.

"That was imagination," stated the jeweller, who knew every inch of the ground he was defending. "That doesn't prove there is any God."

"My imagination!" cried the banker, turning paler. "Don't you think I know my own Father's voice!"

The crowd was, by common impulse, turning back to the village now, the disputants with them. They would probably have stayed and played ball had not Belshue begun his shocking argument. Abner Teeftallow and his friend Zed Parrum followed behind the wranglers. Abner could hardly believe his ears.

"Zed, don't that man Belshue believe in no God?" he whispered incredulously.

"No, he's a infidel," returned Zed in the same tone. ​"They say he can out-argue anybody. He reads Ingersoll and Tom Paine."

"Don't he know he'll go to hell?"

"He don't believe in no hell."

"He don't!"

"No, it don't make no diff'runce to him how bad he gits; he don't believe he'll git punished fer it. He thinks when he dies he'll jest be dead; that's all."

Abner stared after this fantastic man in horror. As the banker suggested, Mr. Belshue seemed scarcely human at all, but a sort of moral monster, ghoulish, unimaginable. At last a corollary struck Abner, and he asked Zed in a quick voice, "Look here, if he don't believe in no future punishment, why don't he rob and steal and jest raise hell generally?"

"Search me," grunted Zed. "I've often wondered why he don't myse'f."

Such a course of action seemed indicated to the young men because they held the hill belief that all wickedness was inherently pleasant, and all virtuous and right things were by nature unpleasant.

It was this same belief which had caused the banker to come out and break up the baseball game. If the workmen got pleasure out of it, it was sinful. All pleasure was sinful. Out of pure conscience Mr. Northcutt had placed thousands of dollars of bank deposits in jeopardy to prevent in the labourers the sinfulness of enjoying a pleasant afternoon.