Absolution, F. Scott Fitzgerald

ABSOLUTION

There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg’s Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o’clock. From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.

One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that some one had come into his haunted room.

Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him—then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear.

«Your mouth is trembling,» said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.

The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.

«Are you in trouble?» asked Father Schwartz, sharply. «Take your hand away from your mouth and tell me what’s the matter.»

The boy—Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent—moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper.

«Father Schwartz—I’ve committed a terrible sin.»

«A sin against purity?»

«No, Father … worse.»

Father Schwartz’s body jerked sharply.

«Have you killed somebody?»

«No—but I’m afraid—» the voice rose to a shrill whimper.

«Do you want to go to confession?»

The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in return God would help him to act correctly.

«Tell me what you’ve done,» said his new soft voice.

The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created. Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller began to tell his story.

«On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to confession, because I hadn’t been for a month, and the family they go every week, and I hadn’t been. So I just as leave go, I didn’t care. So I put it off till after supper because I was playing with a bunch of kids and father asked me if I went, and I said ‘no,’ and he took me by the neck and he said ‘You go now,’ so I said ‘All right,’ so I went over to church. And he yelled after me: ‘Don’t come back till you go.’…»

II
«On Saturday, Three Days Ago.»

The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal creases, leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man’s old shoe. Behind the curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question.

Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was being said within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him. His own turn came next, and the three or four others who waited might listen unscrupulously while he admitted his violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

Rudolph had never committed adultery, nor even coveted his neighbor’s wife—but it was the confession of the associate sins that was particularly hard to contemplate. In comparison he relished the less shameful fallings away—they formed a grayish background which relieved the ebony mark of sexual offenses upon his soul.

He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his refusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him in turn, when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional made him sink his face precipitately into the crook of his elbow. Fear assumed solid form, and pressed out a lodging between his heart and his lungs. He must try now with all his might to be sorry for his sins—not because he was afraid, but because he had offended God. He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must first convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by allowing no other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this state of emotion unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set on end, he would have survived another crisis in his religious life.

For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother that he had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfortunately, involved the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative he could say that he had gone to confession, but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.

Again Father Schwartz’s voice became audible.

«And for your——»

The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly to his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession this afternoon. He hesitated tensely. Then from the confessional came a tap, a creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the plush curtain trembled. Temptation had come to him too late….

«Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…. I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, that I have sinned…. Since my last confession it has been one month and three days…. I accuse myself of—taking the Name of the Lord in vain….»

This was an easy sin. His curses had been but bravado—telling of them was little less than a brag.

«… of being mean to an old lady.»

The wan shadow moved a little on the latticed slat.

«How, my child?»

«Old lady Swenson,» Rudolph’s murmur soared jubilantly. «She got our baseball that we knocked in her window, and she wouldn’t give it back, so we yelled ‘Twenty-three, Skidoo,’ at her all afternoon. Then about five o’clock she had a fit, and they had to have the doctor.»

«Go on, my child.»

«Of—of not believing I was the son of my parents.»

«What?» The interrogation was distinctly startled.

«Of not believing that I was the son of my parents.»

«Why not?»

«Oh, just pride,» answered the penitent airily.

«You mean you thought you were too good to be the son of your parents?»

«Yes, Father.» On a less jubilant note.

«Go on.»

«Of being disobedient and calling my mother names. Of slandering people behind my back. Of smoking——»

Rudolph had now exhausted the minor offenses, and was approaching the sins it was agony to tell. He held his fingers against his face like bars as if to press out between them the shame in his heart.

«Of dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires,» he whispered very low.

«How often?»

«I don’t know.»

«Once a week? Twice a week?»

«Twice a week.»

«Did you yield to these desires?»

«No, Father.»

«Were you alone when you had them?»

«No, Father. I was with two boys and a girl.»

«Don’t you know, my child, that you should avoid the occasions of sin as well as the sin itself? Evil companionship leads to evil desires and evil desires to evil actions. Where were you when this happened?»

«In a barn in back of——»

«I don’t want to hear any names,» interrupted the priest sharply.

«Well, it was up in the loft of this barn and this girl and—a fella, they were saying things—saying immodest things, and I stayed.»

«You should have gone—you should have told the girl to go.»

He should have gone! He could not tell Father Schwartz how his pulse had bumped in his wrist, how a strange, romantic excitement had possessed him when those curious things had been said. Perhaps in the houses of delinquency among the dull and hard-eyed incorrigible girls can be found those for whom has burned the whitest fire.

«Have you anything else to tell me?»

«I don’t think so, Father.»

Rudolph felt a great relief. Perspiration had broken out under his tight-pressed fingers.

«Have you told any lies?»

The question startled him. Like all those who