August First

August First

The Project Gutenberg eBook, August First, by Mary Raymond
Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray, Illustrated by A. I. Keller
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Title: August First
Author: Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray

Release Date: June 7, 2006 [eBook #18529]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FIRST***
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AUGUST FIRST
by
MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN ANDREWS and ROY IRVING
MURRAY
Illustrated by A. I. Keller

[Frontispiece: "She--that's it--that's the gist of it--fool that I am."]

New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1915 Copyright, 1915, by Charles
Scribner's Sons Published March, 1915

AUGUST FIRST
"Whee!"
The long fingers pulled at the clerical collar as if they might tear it
away. The alert figure swung across the room to the one window not
wide open and the man pushed up the three inches possible. "Whee!"
he brought out again, boyishly, and thrust away the dusty vines that
hung against the opening from the stone walls of the parish house close
by. He gasped; looked about as if in desperate need of relief; struck
back the damp hair from his face. The heat was insufferable. In the
west black-gray clouds rolled up like blankets, shutting out heaven and
air; low thunder growled; at five o'clock of a midsummer afternoon it
was almost dark; a storm was coming fast, and coolness would come
with it, but in the meantime it was hard for a man who felt heat
intensely just to get breath. His eyes stared at the open door of the room,
down the corridor which led to the room, which turned and led by

another open door to the street.
"If they're coming, why don't they come and get it over?" he murmured
to himself; he was stifling--it was actual suffering.
He was troubled to-day, beyond this affliction of heat. He was the new
curate of St. Andrew's, Geoffrey McBirney, only two months in the
place--only two months, and here was the rector gone off for his
summer vacation and McBirney left at the helm of the great city parish.
Moreover, before the rector was gone a half-hour, here was the worst
business of the day upon him, the hour between four and five when the
rector was supposed to be found in the office, to receive any one who
chose to come, for advice, for godly counsel, for "any old reason," as
the man, only a few years out of college, put it to himself. He dreaded it;
he dreaded it more than he did getting up into the pulpit of a Sunday
and laying down the law--preaching. And he seriously wished that if
any one was coming they would come now, and let him do his best,
doggedly, as he meant to, and get them out of the way. Then he might
go to work at things he understood. There was a funeral at seven; old
Mrs. Harrow at the Home wanted to see him; and David Sterling had
half promised to help him with St. Agnes's Mission School, and must
be encouraged; a man in the worst tenement of the south city had raided
his wife with a knife and there was trouble, physical and moral, and he
must see to that; also Tommy Smith was dying at the Tuberculosis
Hospital and had clung to his hands yesterday, and would not let him
go--he must manage to get to little Tommy to-night. There was plenty
of real work doing, so it did seem a pity to waste Lime waiting here for
people who didn't come and who had, when they did come, only
emotional troubles to air. And the heat--the unspeakable heat! "I can't
stand it another second!" he burst out, aloud. "I'll die--I shall die!" He
flung himself across the window-sill, with his head far out, trying to
catch a breath of air that was alive.
As he stretched into the dim light, so, gasping, pulling again at the stiff
collar, he was aware of a sound; he came back into the room with a
spring; somebody was rapping at the open door. A young woman, in
white clothes, with roses in her hat, stood there--refreshing as a cool

breeze, he thought; with that, as if the thought, as if she, perhaps, had
brought it, all at once there was a breeze; a heavenly, light touch