His house stood on a hill looking over the village of Preston Plains, which lay in a flat valley. In the middle of the village the church-steeple shot up tapering and tall.
It was a bickering community. The church was a centre of interest. The outlines of the building were clean and shapely, but in detail it stood for a variety of opinions. A raised tracery ran along the pseudo-classic frieze of its front, representing a rope of flowers with little cupids holding up the loops. They may have been cherubs. The community had quarrelled about them long ago when the church was building, but that subject had given way to other subjects.
The choir gallery bulged over the rear seats, as if to dispute the relative importance of the pulpit. That was nothing. But it needed bracing. The committee decided against a single pillar, and erected two, one of them in the middle of Adam Wick's pew.
Adam looked at things simply. It seemed to his simplicity that the community had conspired to do him injustice. The spirit of nonconformity stirred within him. He went to the minister.
“Andrew Hill, nor any other man, nor committeeman's got no rights in my pew.”
“The pew, Mr. Wick, belongs to the church.”
“No such thing! I sat twenty-four years in that pew.”
“No such thing! I'll have no post in my pew, for Andrew Hill nor no minister neither.”
He stumped out of the minister's green-latticed doorway and down the gravel path. His eyes on either side of his sharp nose were like those of an angry hawk, and his stooping shoulders, seen from behind, resembled the huddled back of the hawk, caged and sullen.
The minister watched him. Properly speaking, a primitive nature is an unlimited monarchy where ego is king, but the minister's reflections did not run in these terms. He did not even go so far as to wonder whether such primitive natures did not render the current theory of a church inaccurate. He went so far as to wonder what Adam Wick would do.
One dark, windy night, near midnight, Adam Wick climbed in at the vestibule window of the church, and chopped the pillar in two with an axe. The wind wailed in the belfry over his head. The blinds strained, as if hands were plucking at them from without. The sound of his blows echoed in the cold, empty building, as if some personal devil were enjoying the sacrilege. Adam was a simple-minded man; he realized that he was having a good time himself.