The Experience Of Hannah Prime

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Title:     The Experience Of Hannah Prime
Author: Alice Brown [More Titles by Brown]

Tiverton Hollow had occasionally an evening meeting; this came about naturally whenever religious zeal burned high, or when the congregation felt, with some uneasiness, that it had remained too long aloof from spiritual things. To-night, the schoolhouse had been designated for an assembling place, and the neighborhood trooped thither, animated by an excited importance, and doing justice to the greatness of the occasion by "dressing up." Farmers had laid aside their ordinary mood, with overalls and jumpers, and donned an uncomfortable solemnity, an enforced attitude of theological reflection, with their stocks. Wives had urged their patient fingers into cotton gloves, and in cashmere shawls, and bonnets retrimmed with reference to this year's style, pressed into the uncomfortable chairs, and folded their hands upon the desks before them in a sweet seriousness not unmingled with the desire of thriftily completing a duty no less exigent than pickle-making, or the work of spring and fall. Last came the boys, clattering with awkward haste over the dusty floor which had known the touch of their bare feet on other days. They looked about the room with some awe and a puzzled acceptance of its being the same, yet not the same. It was their own. There were the maps of North and South America; the yellowed evergreens, relic of "Last Day," still festooned the windows, and an intricate "sum," there explained to the uncomprehending admiration of the village fathers, still adorned the blackboard. Yet the room had strangely transformed itself into an alien temple, invaded by theology and the breath of an unknown world. But though sobered, they were not cast down; for the occasion was enlivened, in their case, by a heaven-defying profligacy of intent. Every one of them knew that Sammy Forbes had in his pocket a pack of cards, which he meant to drop, by wicked but careless design, just when Deacon Pitts led in prayer, and that Tom Drake was master of a concealed pea-shooter, which he had sworn, with all the asseverations held sacred by boys, to use at some dramatic moment. All the band were aware that neither of these daring deeds would be done. The prospective actors themselves knew it; but it was a darling joy to contemplate the remote possibility thereof.

Deacon Pitts opened, the meeting, reminding his neighbors how precious a privilege it is for two or three to be gathered together. His companion had not been able to come. (The entire neighborhood knew that Mrs. Pitts had been laid low by an attack of erysipelas, and that she was, at the moment, in a dark bedroom at home, helpless under elderblow.)

"She lays there on a bed of pain," said the deacon. "But she says to me, 'You go. Better the house o' mournin' than the house o' feastin',' she says. Oh, my friends! what can be more blessed than the counsel of an aged and feeble companion?"

The deacon sat down, and Tom Drake, his finger on the pea-shooter, assured himself, in acute mental triumph, that he had almost done it that time.

Then followed certain incidents eminently pleasing to the boys. To their unbounded relief, Sarah Frances Giles rose to speak, weeping as she began. She always wept at prayer meeting, though at the very moment of asserting her joy that she cherished a hope, and her gratitude that she was so nearly at an end of this earthly pilgrimage and ready to take her stand on the sea of glass mingled with fire. The boys reveled in her testimony. They were in a state of bitter uneasiness before she rose, and gnawed with a consuming impatience until she began to cry. Then they wondered if she could possibly leave out the sea of glass; and when it duly came, they gave a sigh of satiated bliss and sank into acquiescence in whatever might happen. This was a rich occasion to their souls, for Silas Marden, who was seldom moved by the spirit, fell upon his knees to pray; but at the same unlucky instant, his sister-in-law, for whom he cherished an unbounded scorn, rose (being "nigh-eyed" and ignorant of his priority) and began to speak. For a moment, the two held on together, "neck and neck," as the happy boys afterward remembered, and then Silas got up, dusted his knees, and sat down, not to rise again at any spiritual call. "An' a madder man you never see," cried all the Hollow next day, in shocked but gleeful memory.

Taking it all in all, the meeting had thus far mirrored others of its class. If the droning experiences were devoid of all human passion, it was chiefly because they had to be expressed in the phrases of strict theological usage. There was an unspoken agreement that feelings of this sort should be described in a certain way. They were not the affairs of the hearth and market; they were matters pertaining to that awful entity called the soul, and must be dressed in the fine linen which she had herself elected to wear.

Suddenly, in a wearisome pause, when minds had begun to stray toward the hayfield and tomorrow's churning, the door was pushed open, and the Widow Prime walked in. She was quite unused to seeking her kind, and the little assembly at once awoke, under the stimulus of surprise. They knew quite well where she had been walking: to Sudleigh Jail, to visit her only son, lying there for the third time, not, as usual, for drunkenness, but for house-breaking. She was a wiry woman, a mass of muscles animated by an eager energy. Her very hands seemed knotted with clenching themselves in nervous spasms. Her eyes were black, seeking, and passionate, and her face had been scored by fine wrinkles, the marks of anxiety and grief. Her chocolate calico was very clean, and her palm-leaf shawl and black bonnet were decent in their poverty. The vague excitement created by her coming continued in a rustling like that of leaves. The troubles of Hannah Prime's life had been very bitter--so bitter that she had, as Deacon Pitts once said, after undertaking her conversion, turned from "me and the house of God." A quickening thought sprang up now in the little assembly that she was "under conviction," and that it had become the present duty of every professor to lead her to the throne of grace. This was an exigency for which none were prepared. At so strenuous a challenge, the old conventional ways of speech fell down and collapsed before them, like creatures filled with air. Who should minister to one set outside their own comfortable lives by bitter sorrow and wounded pride? What could they offer a woman who had, in one way or another, sworn to curse God and die? It was Deacon Pitts who spoke, but in a tone hushed to the key of the unexpected.

"Has any one an experience to offer? Will any brother or sister lead in prayer?"

The silence was growing into a thing to be recognized and conquered, when, to the wonder of her neighbors, Hannah Prime herself rose, She looked slowly about the room, gazing into every face as if to challenge an honest understanding. Then she began speaking in a low voice thrilled by an emotion not yet explained. Unused to expressing herself in public, she seemed to be feeling her way. The silence, pride, endurance, which had been her armor for many years, were no longer apparent; she had thrown down all her defenses with a grave composure, as if life suddenly summoned her to higher issues.

"I dunno's I've got an experience to offer," she said. "I dunno's it's religion. I dunno what 'tis. Mebbe you'd say it don't belong to a meetin'. But when I come by an' see you all settin' here, it come over me I'd like to tell somebody. Two weeks ago I was most crazy"--She paused of necessity, for something broke in her voice.

"That's the afternoon Jim was took," whispered a woman to her neighbor. Hannah Prime went on.

"I jest as soon tell it now. I can tell ye all together what I couldn't say to one on ye alone; an' if anybody speaks to me about it afterwards, they'll wish they hadn't. I was all by myself in the house. I set down in my clock-room, about three in the arternoon, an' there I set. I didn't git no supper. I couldn't. I set there an' heard the clock tick. Byme-by it struck seven, an' that waked me up. I thought I'd gone crazy. The figgers on the wall-paper provoked me most to death; an' that red-an'-white tidy I made, the winter I was laid up, seemed to be talkin' out loud. I got up an' run outdoor jest as fast as I could go. I run out behind the house an' down the cart-path to that pile o' rocks that overlooks the lake; an' there I got out o' breath an' dropped down on a big rock. An' there I set, jest as still as I'd been settin' when I was in the house."

Here a little girl stirred in her seat, and her mother leaned forward and shook her, with alarming energy. "I never was so hard with Mary L. afore," she explained the next day, "but I was as nervous as a witch. I thought, if I heard a pin drop, I should scream."

"I dunno how long I set there," went on Hannah Prime, "but byme-by it begun to come over me how still the lake was. 'Twas like glass; an' way over where it runs in 'tween them islands, it burnt like fire. Then I looked up a little further, to see what kind of a sky there was. 'T was light green, with clouds in it, all fire, an' it begun to seem to me as if it was a kind o' land an' water up there--like our'n, on'y not solid. I set there an' looked at it; an' I picked out islands, an' ma'sh-land, an' p'ints running out into the yeller-green sea. An' everything grew stiller an' stiller. The loons struck up, down on the lake, with that kind of a lonesome whinner; but that on'y made the rest of it seem quieter. An' it begun to grow dark all 'round me. I dunno 's I ever noticed before jest how the dark comes. It sifted down like snow, on'y you couldn't see it. Well, I set there, an' I tried to keep stiller an' stiller, like everything else. Seemed as if I must. An' pretty soon I knew suthin' was walkin' towards me over the lot. I kep' my eyes on the sky; for I knew 't would break suthin' if I turned my head, an' I felt as if I couldn't bear to. An' It come walkin', walkin', without takin' any steps or makin' any noise, till It come right up 'side o' me an' stood still. I didn't turn round. I knew I mustn't. I dunno whether It touched me; I dunno whether It said anything--but I know It made me a new creatur'. I knew then I shouldn't be afraid o' things no more--nor sorry. I found out 't was all right. 'I'm glad I'm alive,' I said. 'I'm thankful!' Seemed to me I'd been dead for the last twenty year. I'd come alive.

"An' so I set there an' held my breath, for fear 'twould go. I dunno how long, but the moon riz up over my left shoulder, an' the sky begun to fade. An' then it come over me 't was goin'. I knew 't was terrible tender of me, an' sorry, an' lovin', an' so I says, 'Don't you mind; I won't forgit!' An' then It went. But that broke suthin', an' I turned an' see my own shadder on the grass; an' I thought I see another, 'side of it. Somehow that scairt me, an' I jumped up an' whipped it home without lookin' behind me. Now that's my experience," said Hannah Prime, looking her neighbors again in the face, with dauntless eyes. "I dunno what 't was, but it's goin' to last. I ain't afraid no more, an' I ain't goin' to be. There ain't nuthin' to worry about. Everything's bigger'n we think." She folded her shawl more closely about her and moved toward the door. There she again turned to her neighbors.

"Good-night!" she said, and was gone.

They sat quite still until the tread of her feet had ceased its beating on the dusty road. Then, by one consent, they rose and moved slowly out. There was no prayer that night, and "Lord dismiss us" was not sung.

[The end]
Alice Brown's short story: The Experience Of Hannah Prime

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