A Bungalow In Arcady
A BUNGALOW IN ARCADY
Ir was Mrs. Samuel Wesley who was the presiding genius of that strange. school which John Wesley organized for young Delamotte and Miss Sophy at Savannah.
With a woman's tenacity to save old home things Wesley found infinite pleasure in rolling up Epworth, Oxford and Stanton in England and unrolling them in his American shack.
He made a garden and drove in stakes for a neat fence.
He cleaned his house out and made it a home.
He arranged his books and played on the flute.
With his two pupils he found the joy of children of his own to be instructed in all Susanna's ways, with the added elegance of Aspasia's French and the a Kempis pattern of dear Varanese.
There followed the happiest days that Wesley was to know in Georgia. Delamotte gave him a lad's hero-worship and Miss Sophy came to breakfast.
All day she stayed with him, and Wesley would see her home in the sweet evening light and return to Delamotte confident of another blissful day tomorrow.
When Wesley was ill Miss Sophy nursed him so tenderly that it gave a lovely home feeling to his Arcadian bungalow.
She was so neat, and he loved neat women.
There had been no frills at Epworth, with its plain living and high thinking, and even Aspasia, for all her ramping flowers, had
SONs
TO SUSANNA
been very neat.
So much of what had been best in England might perchance be found again in America with this girl of eighteen summers and her rapt attention for her strangest of schoolmasters.
In Susanna Wesley's school at Epworth they had all loved to sing Psalms each day before the real struggle began with their lessons. Now Wesley followed his mother's example and added on the hymns of Dr. Watts and the new Moravian songs to the collection. A fascinating plan took shape of making his own hymnbook.
He chose some of the old home ones which he could remember and added one of his father's to adjust the balance.
It was the one that Susanna remembered when the old man died, with its inner meaning of the secret that had made them one:
"Behold the Saviour of mankind Nailed to the shameful tree!
How vast the love that Him inclined To bleed and die for thee!"
Wesley translated the German hymns and beat them into verses and tried them out first on Miss Sophy.
The diary is full of her and of singing.
The days were bright with more than Cotswold sunshine, and the nights beautiful with the moon which had once brought Aspasia to his mind in a College Quad. The garden was his own, and he had 4 Kempis in his pocket, but at Wesley's side now sat a beautiful girl singing to him songs of melting love.
Surely this
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IN ARCADY
was the strangest way of all to take to bring about a revival of religion, and yet it was to prove most gloriously in the plan.
The Moravian hymns were a revelation.
Through the words of their Divine passion throbs a very human heart.
The worshiper no longer falls prostrate before Jehovah with clouds and lightning round about Him, but he touches tenderly the wounds of Jesus.
The Moravian came to religion by way of his heart. He fell in love with Christ, and ever after, like the true lover, walked on air. Nothing more of the sorrow of this world could touch him, for he had passed through the veil of flesh and was safe in the very heart of his Lord.
The blood of Jesus drowned all fear:
"With faith I plunge me in this sea, Here is my hope, my joy, my rest; Hither, when hell assails, I flee, I look into my Saviour's breast:
Away, sad doubt and anxious fear!
Mercy is all that's written there."
Here was all the protection and the love which John Wesley could ask.
It was a perfect escape from all entanglements, and it had the added advantage of quenching the old flames of that Dissenter's Hell to which his mother had introduced him at so tender an age.
Moreover, the hymns were so human.
They spoke fearlessly of hearts, breasts, faces and arms of love.
It was daring imagery to give to the Godhead,
SON TO SUSANNA
but Wesley knew just what it meant.
He was accustomed to watch the faces of his friends. He knew when Miss Sophy had a headache because the sparkling eye was dulled, and well he knew what the hymn meant which bade him read the signs of anger or mercy in the face of God himself.
He had never dared to look God in the face before for all his vaunted reason.
He believed in the head-in-the-sand method there and in a very good insurance policy in his good deeds.
He never passed an hour without God, but it was a great relief to combine the emotions which Miss Sophy aroused with the ones which God should evoke.
It set Wesley eagerly translating those strange hymns, and the singing of them took the place of much of the ejaculatory prayer.
This was something like a religion at last.
It could be sung in gardens that reminded him of Stanton and in school hours that reminded him of home.
Wesley could now halloo God's name to the reverberate hills when his heart was full of that old teasing emotion which had once destroyed his peace of mind.
He could get these dangerous women into proper perspective if he might sublimate them into the love of God.
He had never before known such an experience.
He sang now everywhere he went.
He introduced hymns into his stiff little services, and sang them in the houses and by the sickbeds of his parishioners.
He sang them as he walked and before he dressed in his correct Church of England cassock.
House, garden and forest echoed with these wistful German songs which spoke so strangely of the love
A BUNGALOW
IN ARCADY
of God.
The Moravians could be little better than heretics, and as for Watts he was the Arch-Dissenter, but it looked as though they were having their own way with the son of the Rector of Epworth.
There could have been no revival of religion without just that quality of love which John Wesley found and appropriated in the forests of Georgia.
Years afterwards England and America would still be struggling with his secret.
Continents would still be discussing the morality of such hymns in the outcrop of revivalist meetings and the lilt and compulsion of Sankey's harmonium.
But the secret was John Wesley's first, and perhaps Miss Sophy must bear her share of responsibility.
It was that susceptible heart of his that was always betraying him, but he would soon brace himself against it and fall back into the perfect model of Orthodoxy.
The word "Resolution" would soon stand in his diary side by side with the word "German."
Soon he would see more in those hymns than at first appeared, and would find that they also deplored the loving of God with but half the heart.
Soon Wesley would be singing pensively 'Strange flames far from my heart remove," and he discovered a singular attachment for one of these hymns which mourned an earthly thraldom:
"My soul before Thee prostrate lies, To Thee, her source, my spirit flies.
My wants I mourn, my chains I see:
O let Thy presence set me free!"
SON
TO SUSANNA
But there was a going in the treetops and among the shriveled leaves of old memories in Wesley's heart.
It must have dawned upon him that things had come to a pretty pass when he broke his Friday fast because
Miss Sophy had offered him a cup of coffee. Young Delamotte also put in a word of warning.
The lad was consumed with jealousy, and wept to think of his own fate should Wesley actually marry the woman.
At present the wretch did go home at night, but she came back so early in the morning that Delamotte groaned under her leechlike presence.
He. scarcely ever now had his beloved John Wesley all to himself, and he declared, not without sadness, that his chief was "losing ground."
It was an amusing representation of the eternal triangle, but the actors were very serious about it all.
Indeed the worst nearly happened one day when Wesley all but proposed to the girl amid this lovely hymn singing.
It was only a sudden thought which "had not the consent of my mind," and he was really rather grateful for the girl's answer, which landed him once more on firm ground.
He had read old Puritan literature to her and put her through her paces in his hymnbook, and after such bewilderment she very rightly said "she thought it was best for clergymen not to be encumbered with worldly cares."
But Wesley knew that the ground of the Holy Club had tottered beneath him and that he had had "a very narrow escape."
He turned to Delamotte for advice, who followed up his advantage with much sound wisdom against the match.
But Wesley was not satisfied.
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He turned to the Germans and was quite startled with their full-blooded and bracing counsel.
They really could not see what all the fuss was about.
Why, if the man wanted to marry, let him have the girl.
This tentative distress and endless discussion was not the way of their robust wooings.
But they had not been rescued from fire and been taught how strait was the gate by a mother who had wrestled long with matrimony.
Deeply wretched and greatly in love, the only way open to John Wesley seemed now the way of flight.
The city of refuge was named Irene, but it was four miles away from Miss Sophy, so had its points for all its feminine appellation.
Before his departure he sat down to write some sort of explanation of his conduct.
It was after dinner on Sunday that the priest took up his pen for one of his well-known letters, and there, as he wondered how to word the tumult of his heart, the fire motif came rushing up from the depth.
That was it exactly, and so he could write it down thus: "I find, Miss Sophy, I can't take fire into my bosom and not be burnt.
I am therefore retiring for a while to desire the direction of God.
Join with me, my friend, in fervent prayer that He would show me what is best to be done."
At Irene John Wesley firmly meant to find out what was best to be done.
He made a desperate effort to cast fire from his bosom by his old method of self-examination and prayer.
It had helped him through the loss of Varanese and Aspasia, but now it
SON
TO SUSANNA
broke down under the strain.
He discovered that God had not even half his attention, for "my heart was, with Miss Sophy all the time."
He flew at the trees and blazed a trail through the forest in a desperate effort to drive the minx away by sweating toil, but round and round her person his mind would turn and twist in a terrible obsession.
Half ashamed, he crept back to Savannah, but yet he would not give up the fight altogether and pay her a visit, although he felt he must die could he not see her passing by, for "I longed to see her were it but for a moment."
There at Savannah by the sad sea waves Wesley paced up and down stabbed through and through by the strong pain of desire. And yet fear held him, and he obeyed the summons to get into a boat and return to Irene, although he confessed it was for him as the sentence of death.
But at Irene he managed to stay until his reasonable and legitimate round of duties hailed him back to Savannah.
This time the strain had been terrible, and it had told on him as in the far-off Stanton days. He was ill with his old complaint and a pitiable collapse of nerve.
Again he had resolved to renounce the world.
He shrank back from reality and could not bear to envisage "the complicated temptations of a married state," and yet his heart and his flesh cried out against him. Sunday and Church always seemed to make his way so difficult with these dangerous women, for now Sunday was upon him and the Lord would send
Miss Sophy to worship whether Wesley's knees knocked together or no.
It only remained to bring
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IN ARCADY
out the old armor of self-preservation and to keep praying hard before the service and holding on to a Kempis for dear life.
Delamotte looked on and wondered. How heartily he must have detested Miss Sophy then, but, with fine self-effacement, he took her place at the hymn singing with his master and, in more practical fashion, sent for the doctor after dinner.
x VS
MISS SOPHY COMES TO
BREAKFAST
Joun Westxy had spent two hours of his precious time on Saturday "'mending the way."
Was he repairing the road to his bungalow for the feet of that lass with the delicate air?
On Monday she surely would come along it with that crumpled note about fire in her keeping, and as surely she must walk straight in and take possession of his heart.
But would she?
Wesley was in strange agitation as she came, in the sweet morning air, up the path to his bungalow.
He got through breakfast with strong doses of the old Puritan Owen, and then he knew his hour had come.
Would she step into the garden with him for a moment?
And Sophy stepped.
She was expecting nothing less than an offer of marriage after that letter of fire in the priest's bosom and reports of his Sunday agitation and the arrival of his doctor.
She could not have been prepared for the unexpected burrow down which her quarry bolted.
The man was obviously pierced with Cupid's arrow, but here in the garden she was to watch his desperate struggle to wrench it from its target.
It was surely the strangest wooing, for the words she heard were these: "I am resolved, Miss Sophy, if I marry at all, not to do it till I have been among the Indians."
Were the two of them made of flesh and blood at