Pride House: The Quest for Vainglory

by Rob Summers

Chapter 29 The Triumph

  After a harsh winter came a week of early and gracious spring. Through the grime of unwashed windows, Pride and Doubt watched the flowering of the neighbors’ ornamental bushes and the greening of their narrow yards.

  Spring depressed them. As long as the outer world was as cold and lifeless as their inner one, they could view life with a certain serenity. But now they were assaulted by contrasts: life outside, death inside; light outside, darkness inside; hope outside, dreary pain inside. Pride ordered all the blinds and shutters closed, but Conscience and Reason, with now typical insubordination, had them reopened. Pride retreated to the library and shut the blinds there himself.

  Doubt’s attack had left her weaker than ever. She was ambulatory but listless and distracted as a death row prisoner. She stopped listening at doors and at the telephone extensions and made no more plans to manipulate Pride. Her sarcasm and temper were absent from the rooms and hallways. When she asked herself if this meant she had surrendered the house to her enemies, it was a question too burdensome to be approached. Moving through the house like a ghost, she waited, waited for a reckoning of some sort.

  Ten days had passed since Pride’s first prayer, and he had not repeated the experiment. In the meantime he had twice called Fame, finding ready access and a pleasant reception. She fairly chattered to him about this and that, and still insisted that she must come see him as soon as her schedule allowed.

  He was in the library pondering this one afternoon when his cousin looked in on him. Reason wore a sundress and held a VCR tape in her hand.

  “Say, cous’,” she said cheerily, “I’ve brought you something else to watch. Hey, where’s the policeman?”

  “I haven’t seen much of him lately,” Pride said. “Knock on wood, eh?”

  “Well, I can’t say I miss him.” She stepped determinedly to a window and shot the blind up. “Look, I was in the park with Truth this afternoon and I’ve actually got some tan. Isn’t it nifty?”

  Pride had to agree that Reason looked healthier than she ever had.

  “Well, it’s my doctor then,” she chided. “The guy you called a quack. He gave me the tape, by the way. It’s called All Things Made New. It’s a foreign film—made in Heaven.”

  “Are there subtitles?”

  “Better than that, it’s dubbed. And the quality is excellent. I’ve already seen it. Really, it ought to win all the Oscars if there were any justice.”

  “Well, go ahead with it. Shut the blind first.”

  She ignored his last instruction and started the tape.

  The film began with scenes of a dilapidated home in the country: paintless clapboards, muddy yard, sagging porch, and windows taped over with plastic sheets. It shifted to the interior, where lived a shabby, mean-spirited family, the Oldhams, who argued continually among themselves, amid miserable surroundings of filth and clutter.

  On a summer night a great thunderstorm assaulted the house, making its old frame creak and twist, and greatly frightening the Oldhams. The porch collapsed and much of the roof was torn away. The rooms within were deluged.

  When the storm ended, in the very early morning, the Oldhams looked with rainwashed faces on the sunrise and the ruins. Then Pa Oldham buried his pride and slouched down the road to ask the neighbors for help. He came to a simple but well kept home surrounded by vegetable gardens and flowerbeds, the home of the Newells. They helped him to place a call to a Mr. Carpenter, an itinerant handyman who promised to restore the house in return for room and board.

  Mr. Carpenter soon drove to the Oldham place in his van. He repaired the storm damage and then began to fix the place generally. Furthermore, he trained the Oldhams, even the children, to take part in the remodeling. By winter the house was trim and presentable, inside and out, and due to Mr. Carpenter’s presence, the inhabitants were an orderly and peaceful family, full of kindness and good humor. Mr. Carpenter remained as a permanent guest.

  The next part of the movie Pride found the most interesting, for he saw in it a possible glimpse of his own future. Many brief scenes depicted several decades of life in the renewed house. Vagrants were sheltered within, animals harbored, and babies born. Gardens rose around the home until the grounds looked like Eden. The family members worked and joked, sacrificed and dreamed, all under the guiding eye of Mr. Carpenter.

  At last a day came when a great earthquake shook the house, causing it to collapse, and the Oldhams became refugees and traveled to Heaven. But the same home was re-erected in the new Kingdom, and within it the inhabitants lived again.

  Reason stopped the tape and set it to rewind. She came and sat by him.

  “You know, cous’,” she said, “I’ve started to dream about our house being like that. This could be a joyful, loving place.”

  “If what they say is true,” he added.

  “Yes, if.”

  Pride felt it, too, the longing to cast off the old, foul life like a snakeskin and to serve a new Master. The idea of total commitment had gripped them both: to plunge into the holy and not come up. They felt a third presence in the room.

  “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed in a whisper.

  They looked at each other and they were frightened.

  “Does Humility have a paper for me to sign?” Pride asked.

  She nodded.

  “And they’ll really take a place like this and people like us?”

  “So they say. Are—are you sure you want to?”

  “You’ve been trying to talk me into it,” he said without reproach.

  “I know, but they aren’t like us. They’re wonderful, but unpredictable. I know they love us, but who are they really? And who is their King?”

  He stood. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  That evening they gathered the household for the signing. Only Pain, who was on patrol, was absent. Pride seated himself at the great rolltop desk in the study and took the wooden, oriental pen from its holder. Humility spread a document before him, and Pride paused to read aloud its few lines.

  I, Pride, the master of Pride House and possessor of its rights of Humanwill, do hereby relinquish all authority therein to the true and proper Owner, Christ the Lord. Furthermore, declaring loyalty to the Heavenly government, I petition that Pride House (henceforth to be called Grace House) be occupied and managed by representatives of Heaven, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

  Pride signed and dated the document.

  “You had better all get dressed for company,” Humility announced. “In a few minutes people will begin arriving from the Heavenly Embassy.”