Slippy McGee | Page 3

hours to the day in a South Carolina town--plenty
of time to live in, so that one can afford to do things unhurriedly and
has leisure to be neighborly. For you do have neighbors here. It is true
that they know all your business and who and what your grandfather
was and wasn't, and they are prone to discuss it with a frankness to
make the scalp prickle. But then, you know theirs, too, and you are at
liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided you do it
politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is perfectly permissible
for you to say exactly what you please about your own people to your
own people, but should an outsider and an alien presume to do likewise,
the Carolina code admits of but one course of conduct; borrowing the
tactics of the goats against the wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder
and present to the audacious intruder an unbroken and formidable front
of horns.
And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is in
nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly--a much rarer and far
finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South
Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is
charming.
I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to become
somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came to
be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to go
back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish priest,
no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De
Rancé, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning
sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable beauty,

dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and honored
name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that I looked
with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities and prayers.
If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to pray for,
save that things might ever remain as they were: that I should remain
me, myself, young Armand De Rancé, loving and above all beloved of
that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young, wealthy,
strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that, crowded into
the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much!
I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I did
upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go a-Maying with
her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were children playing
together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set in its walled
inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me, calling me by my
name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It was her mother. And
while I stood staring at her changed face she took me by the hand and
began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know. Blindly, like one
bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a darkened room, and saw
what lay there with closed eyes and hair still wet from the river into
which my girl had cast herself.
No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never
really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I
died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only
half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the
corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which
none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the
mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the
sepulcher of myself; and I came--alive again, and free, of a strong spirit,
but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an irremediable disaster
God had called me to His service, chastened and humbled.
"_Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?_"
And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find it
easy to tell my mother. Then:

"Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have
been called. I am for the Church."
We were in her pleasant morning room, a beautiful room, and the lace
curtains were pushed aside to allow free ingress of air and sunlight.
Between the windows hung two objects my mother most greatly
cherished--one an enameled