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The Experience Of Hannah Prime
by
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.”