The Pagan House

8 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)

We believe that Kingdom now coming is the same that was established in heaven at the Second Coming of Christ [70 AD]. Then God commenced a kingdom in human nature independent of the laws of this world. We look for its reestablishment here, and this extension of an existing government into this world is that we mean by the Kingdom of God. I will put the question. Is not now the time for us to commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come?

The Spiritual Moralist, John Prindle Stone, 1845

Mary is gone, in zealous spirit, to accompany Captain Carter on a missionary visit to an infant Perfectionist congregation in Greencastle. Little Georgie is with Mary’s sister in Rochester. George spends his hermitry in work upon the land and studies of the Bible. He has never felt quite so lonely. His spirits and vitality are sinking. He can hardly rouse himself to go to the general store on Turkey Street. Even blind Jess grows peevish with lack of use. In compensation he feeds her too many turnips.

He had not realized how dependent his energies are upon Mary’s. In the absence of his wife, he is without initiative, petulant and doltish. His beard grows. His clothes are dirty. Each day he resolves anew to abandon this place, to follow the missionaries to Greencastle, to join his child in Rochester, to visit John Prindle Stone in Vermont, or else return to New York City, where he might taunt his sluggish spirits with the sin he has left behind. Each night he falls sleepless into bed, the day ahead of him stretching out as empty and useless as the previous one. He sets himself small tasks that seem, in their midnight contemplation, manageable. Each morning he fails to accomplish or even begin any one of them. He has become accustomed to rising late, to sit out the lethargic death of the morning at the table in the parlour, still in his night-clothes and sleeping cap.

He can play the violin, that at least he is capable of: the sounds he coaxes from it, the action of the strings beneath his fingers, bring the image of his wife closer.

They had met for the first time on the Bowery. George was walking back to his lodgings from the newspaper office to wash and change before setting out for the weekly meeting of the Moral Reform League at Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street. An Irish urchin running pellmell through the crowd collided with George Pagan, who held him, looking for the purse in his pale hand, the pursuing robbed gentleman. The boy’s hands were empty and the only pursuer was a young lady, who smiled at George as she took hold of the urchin. The child twisted and struggled and wept and surrendered. George asked if he should fetch an officer. Her amused eyes reached straight into George to a place that he had no prior acquaintance with or even knowledge of. She told him she was the child’s teacher, bringing her charge home.

‘This happens at the end of every day. He tries to run back to school. It is my task to persuade him home.’ She stroked the child’s hair and brow. His shoulders relaxed. She wiped the tear tracks off his face. She whispered to him, comforting words to the melody of a Congregationalist hymn, and George was startled by a stab of jealousy for this child, who could so unthinkingly provoke such actions of heart and hand.

‘This is surely a novelty,’ George said. ‘I would have thought it a unique case, a schoolboy that cannot bear to be absent from school.’

‘We fail the ones who love us best. Education affords a glimpse of somewhere else, a preferable place, without always offering a way there.’

And then, with that quality of quickness that would always so enchant George Pagan, she interrupted his considerations of a reply with a curtsy, as if the drab crowded street were a débutante ball. ‘Mary Johnson,’ she said.

‘George Pagan. At your service.’

‘Good afternoon, George Pagan,’ she said, and, businesslike, she led the spent, unresisting child to his unwelcome door.

Mary lived, as Mr Stone would later remark, in the perpetual now. Everything moved fast with her as if without precedence or consequence: her decisions, her wit, her curiosity. Where George’s understanding crabbed from ignorance to knowledge, dimly inching through objections and inconsistencies like a blind man tapping along a nighttime street, the speed of her attention annihilated the distance between darkness and light.

Her pastoral task achieved, she seemed unsurprised to be walking in step up Second Avenue with George Pagan, and her consent to accompany him to the meeting at Mr Green’s was only slightly more miraculous than his boldness in issuing the invitation.

At Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street, the congregants drank tea and lemonade from Mrs Green’s pale blue china. Marriage rights were discussed, and the liquor question, and universal suffrage was allowed, and slavery abolished, and faith-healing argued for and against, while Mrs Green poured tea, and the philanthropist Mr Green blinked merrily at the enthusiasm in his parlour, but for Mary this was never going to be quite enough. Speed of progress, if only in talk, had to keep up with the quickness of her heart.

No photograph could picture her. In photographs—taken at the end of the Prince Street school year, three short lines of pupils and staff, or at the penultimate meeting of the Reform League at Mr Green’s, or at their wedding, with her preacher father already standing aloof from his unmanageable daughter—her slim face looked pinched and narrow, her chin and brow too mannishly strong, her eyes wide and impatient. George looked at his best in photographs. His strongly carved features became sculptural, implying all the power he knew he lacked in life. Mary’s vivacity charmed and beautified everything around her. Later, he would encounter the ferocity of her temper, which—until events gave her greater opportunity for remorse—was the ashamed subject of her largest self-reproach, flaring with a sudden heat, but then, as abruptly, it would dampen, abate, the flames clearing, her true nature revealed again, unscorched, her good fellowship and ardour and sympathy reestablishing themselves as the ruling agents of her passions.