Free The Tomorrow-Tamer by Margaret Laurence

the going wage–you told me so yourself. And now he does this.”
    â€œSo would you,” I said, “in his place.”
    â€œThat’s where you’re wrong,” Brother Lemon contradicted, so sharply that I never tried that approach again.
    â€œAll these things are keeping me from my work,” he went on plaintively. “That’s the worst of it. I’ve been in the country three weeks tomorrow, and I haven’t begun services yet. What’s the home congregation going to think of me?”
    Then he knotted his big hands in sudden and private anguish.
    â€œNo–” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t say that. It shouldn’t matter to me. The question is–what is the Almighty going to think?”
    â€œI expect He’s learned to be patient,” I ventured.
    But Brother Lemon hadn’t even heard. He wore the fixed expression of a man beholding a vision.
    â€œThat’s it,” he said finally. “Now I see why I’ve been feeling so let down and miserable. It’s because I’ve been putting off the work of my mission. I had to look around–oh yes, see the sights, buy souvenirs. Even my worry about the servants, and the people who live so poor and all. I let these things distract me from my true work.”
    He stood up, there in his doll’s house, an alabaster giant.
    â€œMy business,” he said, “is with the salvation of their immortal souls. That, and that alone. It’s the greatest kindness I can do these people.”
    After that day, he was busy as a nesting bird. I met him one morning in the Post Office, where he was collecting packages of Bibles. He shook my hand in that casually formal way of his.
    â€œI reckon to start services within a week,” he said. “I’ve rented an empty lot, temporarily, and I’m having a shelter put up.”
    â€œYou certainly haven’t wasted any time recently.”
    â€œThere isn’t any time to waste,” Brother Lemon’s bell voice tolled. “Later may be too late.”
    â€œYou can’t carry all that lot very far,” I said. “Can I give you a lift?”
    â€œThat’s very friendly of you, Mr. Kettridge, but I’m happy to say I’ve got my new car at last. Like to see it?”
    Outside, a dozen street urchins rushed up, and Brother Lemon allowed several of them to carry his parcels on their heads. We reached the appointed place, and the little boys, tattered and dusty as fallen leaves, lively as clickety-winged cockroaches, began to caper and jabber.
    â€œMastah–I beg you–you go dash me!”
    A “dash” of a few pennies was certainly in order. But Brother Lemon gave them five shillings apiece. They fled before he could change his mind. I couldn’t help commenting wryly on the sum, but his eyes never wavered.
    â€œYou have to get known somehow,” Brother Lemon said. “Lots of churches advertise nowadays.”
    He rode off, then, in his new two-toned orchid Buick.
    Brother Lemon must have been lonely. He knew no other Europeans, and one evening he dropped in, uninvited, to my house.
    â€œI’ve never explained our teaching to you, Mr. Kettridge,” he said, fixing me with his blue-polished eyes. “I don’t know, mind you, what your views on religion are, or how you look at salvation–”
    He was so pathetically eager to preach that I told him to go ahead. He plunged into his spiel like the proverbial hart into cooling streams. He spoke of the seven golden candlesticks, which were the seven churches of Asia, and the seven stars–the seven angels of the churches. The seven lamps of fire, the heavenly book sealed with seven seals, the seven-horned Lamb which stood as it had been slain.
    I had not read Revelation in years, but its weird splendour came back to me as I listened to him. Man, however, is many-eyed as the beasts around that jewelled throne. Brother Lemon