The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister (beach read book txt) 📗

He drawled it out in his gentle way, precisely as if no nine days stood between it and our last real intercourse.

“Take?” I was still vaguely moving in my distance. “How?”

His next question brought me home.

“I expect the Pope's is the biggest of them parson jobs?”

It was with an “Oh!” that I now entirely took his idea. “Well, yes; decidedly the biggest.”

“Beats the English one? Archbishop—ain't it?—of Canterbury? The Pope comes ahead of him?”

“His Holiness would say so if his Grace did not.”

The Virginian turned half in his saddle to see my face—I was, at the moment, riding not quite abreast of him—and I saw the gleam of his teeth beneath his mustache. It was seldom I could make him smile, even to this slight extent. But his eyes grew, with his next words, remote again in their speculation.

“His Holiness and his Grace. Now if I was to hear 'em namin' me that-a-way every mawnin', I'd sca'cely get down to business.”

“Oh, you'd get used to the pride of it.”

“'Tisn't the pride. The laugh is what would ruin me. 'Twould take 'most all my attention keeping a straight face. The Archbishop”—here he took one of his wide mental turns—“is apt to be a big man in them Shakespeare plays. Kings take talk from him they'd not stand from anybody else; and he talks fine, frequently. About the bees, for instance, when Henry is going to fight France. He tells him a beehive is similar to a kingdom. I learned that piece.” The Virginian could not have expected to blush at uttering these last words. He knew that his sudden color must tell me in whose book it was he had learned the piece. Was not her copy of Kenilworth even now in his cherishing pocket? So he now, to cover his blush, very deliberately recited to me the Archbishop's discourse upon bees and their kingdom:

“'Where some, like magistrates, correct at home... Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings, Make loot upon the summer's velvet buds; Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor: He, busied in his majesty, surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

“Ain't that a fine description of bees a-workin'? 'The singing masons building roofs of gold!' Puts 'em right before yu', and is poetry without bein' foolish. His Holiness and his Grace. Well, they could not hire me for either o' those positions. How many religions are there?”

“All over the earth?”

“Yu' can begin with ourselves. Right hyeh at home I know there's Romanists, and Episcopals—”

“Two kinds!” I put in. “At least two of Episcopals.”

“That's three. Then Methodists and Baptists, and—”

“Three Methodists!”

“Well, you do the countin'.”

I accordingly did it, feeling my revolving memory slip cogs all the way round. “Anyhow, there are safely fifteen.”

“Fifteen.” He held this fact a moment. “And they don't worship a whole heap o' different gods like the ancients did?”

“Oh, no!”

“It's just the same one?”

“The same one.”

The Virginian folded his hands over the horn of his saddle, and leaned forward upon them in contemplation of the wide, beautiful landscape.

“One God and fifteen religions,” was his reflection. “That's a right smart of religions for just one God.”

This way of reducing it was, if obvious to him, so novel to me that my laugh evidently struck him as a louder and livelier comment than was required. He turned on me as if I had somehow perverted the spirit of his words.

“I ain't religious. I know that. But I ain't unreligious. And I know that too.”

“So do I know it, my friend.”

“Do you think there ought to be fifteen varieties of good people?” His voice, while it now had an edge that could cut anything it came against, was still not raised. “There ain't fifteen. There ain't two. There's one kind. And when I meet it, I respect it. It is not praying nor preaching that has ever caught me and made me ashamed of myself, but one or two people I have knowed that never said a superior word to me. They thought more o' me than I deserved, and that made me behave better than I naturally wanted to. Made me quit a girl onced in time for her not to lose her good name. And so that's one thing I have never done. And if ever I was to have a son or somebody I set store by, I would wish their lot to be to know one or two good folks mighty well—men or women—women preferred.”

He had looked away again to the hills behind Sunk Creek ranch, to which our walking horses had now almost brought us.

“As for parsons “—the gesture of his arm was a disclaiming one—“I reckon some parsons have a right to tell yu' to be good. The bishop of this hyeh Territory has a right. But I'll tell yu' this: a middlin' doctor is a pore thing, and a middlin' lawyer is a pore thing; but keep me from a middlin' man of God.”

Once again he had reduced it, but I did not laugh this time. I thought there should in truth be heavy damages for malpractice on human souls. But the hot glow of his words, and the vision of his deepest inner man it revealed, faded away abruptly.

“What do yu' make of the proposition yondeh?” As he pointed to the cause of this question he had become again his daily, engaging, saturnine self.

Then I saw over in a fenced meadow, to which we were now close, what he was pleased to call “the proposition.” Proposition in the West does, in fact, mean whatever you at the moment please,—an offer to sell you a mine, a cloud-burst, a glass of whiskey, a steamboat. This time it meant a stranger clad in black, and of a clerical deportment which would in that atmosphere and to a watchful eye be visible for a mile or two.

“I reckoned yu' hadn't noticed him,” was the Virginian's reply to my ejaculation. “Yes. He set me goin' on the subject a while back. I expect he is another missionary to us pore cow-boys.”

I seemed from a hundred yards to feel the stranger's forceful personality. It was in his walk—I should better say stalk—as he promenaded along the creek. His hands were behind his back, and there was an air of waiting, of displeased waiting, in his movement.

“Yes, he'll be a missionary,” said the Virginian, conclusively; and he took to singing, or rather to whining, with his head tilted at an absurd angle upward at the sky:

“'Dar is a big Car'lina nigger, About de size of dis