Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and pressed her red lips together,
shivering. "O dear! O dear! what a cry! I can't go any closer. I'll
wait for you out at the edge of the crowd."
He pushed into the throng, lifted the woman, spoke a few words of
tenderness to her, and told her he would call at her home later.
As he was about to leave, a tall, delicate man working among the
ruins reeled and sank in a faint. When he revived, he quit his job
and went home without a word.
"What was the matter with that man?" Gordon asked the foreman of
the wrecking company.
"Starved, to tell you the truth. He came here yesterday and begged
for a job. He looked so pale and sick I couldn't refuse him. He
fainted the first hour and went home. He came back this morning and
begged me to try him again. I did, but you see he is too weak. He
told me his family was starving."
He joined Kate and they crossed the City Hall Square and walked
down Centre Street to the Tombs prison.
She was pale and quiet, glancing at him now and then.
"I've an engagement at the Tombs," he told her, "with a lady to
whom I used to make innocent love in our youth in a college town.
I got a note from her yesterday, written in the clear, beautiful
hand I recognised from the memory of little perfumed things she used
to send me. You don't know what a queer sick feeling came over me
when I recognised from the street number that she was in prison.
I haven't seen her in fifteen years. She was the village belle and
made what was supposed to be a brilliant marriage."
They entered the grim old prison, that looked like an Egyptian
temple, with its huge slanting walls of granite squatting low on
Centre Street like a big pot-bellied spider, watching with one eye
the brilliant insects of wealth on Broadway and with the other the
gray vermin swarming under the Bridge and along the river.
Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and drew closer as they passed
down its gloomy corridor to the warden's office.
She tried to smile, but by the twitching at the corners of her
full lips he could see she was nearer to crying. Again, as her body
touched his, he felt the warmth and glow of her beauty, her blue
eyes, cordial and grave, her waving auburn hair with its glowing
fires, her step luxurious and rhythmic, and. now as her hand
trembled, instead of the gleam of cruelty and conscious power, the
timid appeal to the strength of the man.
She looked at him and lowered her eyes, and then flashed them up
straight into his face with a smile.
"I'm not afraid!" she said impulsively.
"Of course not."
His steel-gray eyes looked into hers, and they both laughed.
Gordon asked the warden's permission to see the woman whose letter
had brought him and also the young man who had returned from Sing
Sing for a new trial.
"What is the charge against the woman?" he asked.
"Shoplifting, sir. She's been here before and begged off. But they
are going to send her up this time. I'll allow her to see you in
the reception room."
She came in, with a poor attempt at dignity, and then collapsed
into whining but hopeful lying. She was dressed in an old sunburnt
frock. Her hair was tousled, her shoes untied, and a corset-string
was hanging outside her skirt. Her front teeth were out, and the
red blotches on her face told the story of drink and drugs.
"Doctor, it's all a mistake. I swear to you I am innocent. You
don't know how it humiliates me for you to see me like this--you,
who knew me in the old days at home, when I was rich and petted
and loved. And now I haven't a friend in the world. My husband left
me. If you will tell them to let me off, they will do it for your
sake. I swear to you I will leave New York, go back to my old home
and try to begin life over again." She buried her face in her hands.
"What shall I do?" he whispered to Kate. "She is lying. She will
never leave New York."
"Promise her--promise her; I'll try to do something for her."
They passed inside, along Murderers' Row, and stopped before the
cell in which stood the man waiting his new trial. He poured out
his story again, and as Gordon looked sadly through the bars at his
face the certainty of his guilt gave the lie to every fair word.
As his glib tongue rattled on, Gordon's mind was farther and farther
away. He was thinking of that grim sentence from the old Bible,
"Sin when it is full grown bringeth forth death." And again this
problem of sin, the wilful and persistent violation of known law,
threw its shadow for a moment over his dream of social brotherhood.
The voice of the man angered him. He frowned, bade him good-by and
left.
And as he passed out, he felt, in spite of the charm of Kate's
companionship, the shadow of that veiled mother by his side, and
heard the bitter cries of her broken heart, until the sin and shame
of the man seemed his own. The pity and pathos of it all haunted
and filled him with vague forebodings.--"Now for something more
cheerful," he said, as they passed out of the Tombs and boarded an
uptown car.
"A derrick at work in that wreck yesterday fell on a working-man.
He has a wife and four children. We must see how he is getting on."
They got off on the Bowery, turned down a cross street toward the
East River, threading their way through the masses of people jamming
the sidewalks, and dodging missiles from dirty children screaming
and romping at play.
"Mercy!" exclaimed Kate, "I thought Broadway and Fifth Avenue and
the shopping districts crowded--but this is beyond belief! I didn't
know there were so many people in the world."
"And what you see, just a drop in the ocean of humanity. There are
miles and miles of these tenements in New York--square mile after
square mile, packed from cellar to attic. We have a million and a
half crowded behind these grim walls on this island alone."
"Surely not all so ugly and wretched as these?"
"Many worse. But don't let the outside deceive you. Back of
these nightmares of scorched mud, festooned with shabby clothes,
are thousands of brave loving men and women, living their lives
cheerfully, not asking us for pity. Even in this squalor grow
beautiful, innocent girls like flowers in a muck-heap. When I see
these children growing up thus into fair men and women with such
sur-roundings, I know that every babe is born a child of God, not
of the devil."
They climbed a dark stairway and knocked at the back door of a
double-decker tenement.
A stout woman opened it, and they entered the tiny kitchen, so
small that the table had to be pushed against the wall to pass it
and the family of six could not all eat at one time because the
table could not be pulled out into the room.
"How is John this afternoon, Mrs. McDonald?"
"We don't know, sir. The doctor's in there now. If he dies, God
knows what we will do; and if he lives, a cripple, it'll be worse."
The doctor called them into the front room and whispered to Gordon:
"He's got to die, and I'm going to tell him. I'm glad you are here."
He took the man by the hand.
"Well, John, I'm sorry to say so to you, but you must know it. You
can't live beyond the day."
The man drew himself upon his elbow, looked at the doctor in a
dazed sort of way and then at his wife holding his crying baby in
her arms, the other little ones clinging to her dress, and gasped:
"Did you say die? Here--now--to-day--die? And if I do, I leave my
helpless ones to starve."
He paused, fingering the covering nervously, shut his jaws firmly
and looked at the doctor.
"Almighty God! I can't die!" he growled through his teeth. "I will
not die!"
"No, no, you sha'n't die, John. We'll help you to live!" his wife
cried.
"Very well; if you keep on feeling that way you may live," said
the doctor cheerfully. "We will hope for the best."
Kate's eyelids drooped as she stood watching this scene as in a
dream. She took the woman by the hand as she left:
"I do hope he will live for your sake. I believe he will."
When they reached the street, the doctor said to her:
"Glad to welcome you, Miss Ransom, from the little world into the
great one."
"Thank you. I begin to feel I have not been in the world at all
before. Will he live, do you think?"
"If he holds that iron will with the grip he has on it now he'll
pull through--and be a hopeless invalid for life. He will join
the great army of industrial cripples--a havoc that makes war seem
harmless. The wrecking corporation have already sent their lawyer
and settled his case for eighty-five dollars cash: not enough to
bury him. He thought it better than nothing."
The doctor hurried on to another patient.
It had grown quite dark. Gordon took Kate by the arm after the
modern fashion, and they threaded their way through the crowds
made denser by the return of the working people. She had removed
her right glove in the house and did not replace it immediately.
His big hand clasped her rounded, beautiful arm, and a thrill of
emotion swept him at the consciousness of her nearness, her sympathy,
her open admiration and sweet companionship in his work.
Again, as she walked with the quick, sinuous and graceful swing of
her body, he was impressed with her perfect health and vital power.
She had recovered her balance now, and when she spoke it was with
contagious enthusiasm.
"I can never thank you enough for opening the door of a real world
to me, Doctor," she declared, looking up at him soberly.
"And you have no idea what inspiration you have given the church--just
at a time I need it, too," he answered warmly.
"I've been wondering what I did here for nine years, unconscious
of this wonderful drama of love and shame, joy and sorrow about
me. But what did he mean by an army of cripples greater than the
havoc of war?"
"Victims of machinery. It's incredible to those who do not come
in contact with it. The railroads alone kill and wound thirty-five
thousand working-men every year: this is a small percentage of
the grand total. More men are killed and wounded by machinery in
America than were killed and wounded any year in the great Civil War,
the bloodiest and most fatal struggle in history. We pay billions
in pensions to our soldiers, but nothing is done about this. The
social order that permits such atrocity must go down before the
rising consciousness of human brotherhood. The employers ask, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' and forget that they are echoing the shriek
of the first murderer over his victim's body."
"And I never thought of it before. How strange that so many people
are in the world and never a part of it."
"You can begin to see the outlines of the problems before us. It
will be years before you can realise the height and depth of need
that calls here to-day for deeds more heroic than knights of old
ever dreamed."
Again she looked at him with frank admiration.
"But the most wonderful thing I have seen to-day has been a man,"
she boldly said. "Your faith, your optimism, your dreams in the face
of the awful facts of life, and with it a tenderness of sympathy
I never thought in you, have been a revelation to me. I feel more
and more ashamed of the years I have wasted."
She said this very tenderly, while Gordon unconsciously tightened
the grip of his big hand on her arm, and then went on as though
she had not spoken.
"What a call to an earnest life! New York City furnishes two-thirds
of the convicts of the state. We have one murder and ten suicides
every week. More than eighty thousand men and women are arrested
here every year. Fifty thousand pass through that basilisk's den we
saw to-day. We have a hundred thousand child workers out of whose
tender flesh we are coining gold. Three hundred thousand of our
women are hewers of wood and drawers of water, robbed of their divine
right of love and motherhood. There are twenty thousand children
and fifty thousand men and women homeless in our streets. I have
seen more than five hundred of them fighting for the chance of
sleeping on the bare planks of a dirty police lodging-house."
He felt her nerves quiver with sympathy and surprise.
"I never dreamed such things took place in New York."
"Yes, and those homeless children are the saddest tragedy. We haven't
orphanages for them. When a house burns down that has a coal shute
or an opening in it where a child can crawl, the firemen thrust
their hooks in and pull out a bundle of charred rags and flesh--one
of these homeless waifs. No father or mother that ever bent over
a cradle, looked into a baby's face and felt its warm breath can
realise that horror and not go mad. We don't realise it. We ignore
it. We have four hundred churches. We open them a few hours every
week. We have nine thousand saloons opened all day, most of the
night, and Sunday too. We haven't orphanages, but we have these
nine thousand factories where orphans are made. When our country
friends come to see us we take them to see the saloons! Our shame
is our glory. You have to-day seen some of the fruits."
"And yet you have faith?"
"Yes; I have eyes that see the invisible. In all this crash of brute
forces I see beauty in ugliness, innocence in filth. Here one is
put to the test. Here the great powers of Nature have gathered for
their last assault and have challenged man's soul to answer for
its life. Dark spiritual forces shriek their battle-cries over the
din of matter. The swiftness of progress, crushing and enriching,
the mad greed for gold, the worship of success--a success that sneers
at duty, honour, love and patriotism--the filth and frivolity of our
upper strata, the growth of hate and envy below, the restlessness
of the masses, the waning of faith, the growth of despair, the
triumph of brute force, the reign of the liar and huckster--all
these are more real and threatening here, as beasts and reptiles
increase in size as we near the tropics. We are nearing the tropics
of civilisation. We must not forget that the flowers will be richer,
wilder, more beautiful, and life capable of higher things."
They had reached her door, and he released her arm, soft, round
and warm, with a sense of loss and regret.
"Yet with all its shadows and sorrows," he cried with enthusiasm,
"I love this imperial city. It is the centre of our national
life--its very beating heart. If we can make it clean, its bright
blood will go back to the farthest village and country seat with
life. I shall live to see its black tenements swept away, and homes
for the people, clean, white and beautiful, rise in their places.
I have a vision of its streets swept and garnished, of green parks
full of happy children, of working-men coming to their homes with
songs at night as men once sang because their work was glad. I
haven't much to depend on just now in the church. But God lives.
I have a growing group of loyal young dreamers, and you have come
as an omen of greater things."
She smiled.
"I'll do my best not to disappoint you."
He shook hands with her, declining to go in, and, as she sprang
swiftly and gracefully up the steps, his eyes lingered a moment on
the rhythm of her movement and the glory of her splendid figure in
sheer rapture for its perfect beauty.
As he turned homeward, he thrust his hand, yet warm with the touch
of her bare arm, into his pocket, drew out two pearls, looked
tenderly at them and felt their smooth, rounded forms. A longing
for such companionship in work with his wife swept his soul.
CHAPTER VI
THE PUDDLE AND THE TADPOLE
When Gordon started home from his round of visits with Kate the
wind had hauled to the north and it began to spit drops of snow.
The cars were still crowded, the aisles full and the platforms
jammed, though it was seven o'clock. He buttoned his coat about his
neck and paced the station, waiting for a train in which he could
find a seat.
"Bad omen for my trustee meeting to-night," he muttered. "This air
feels like Van Meter's breath."
He allowed four trains to pass, and at last boarded one worse crowded
than the first. With a sigh for the end of chivalry, he pushed his
way through the dense mass packed at the doors, wedging his big form
roughly among the women, to the centre of the car, and mechanically
seized a strap. He was so used to this leather-strap habit that he
held on with one hand and, while reading, unfolded and folded his
paper with the other.
He climbed the hill to his home in the face of a howling snow-storm.
Ruth looked at him intently.
"I am sorry I couldn't get home earlier," he said, "I've had a hard
day."
"But such pleasant help that you didn't mind it, I'm sure. I heard
Miss Ransom was assisting you. I went to the church and found you
had gone out with her. I hear she is becoming indispensable in your
work."
"Come, Ruth, let's not have another silly quarrel."
"No; it's a waste of breath," she replied bitterly.
He slipped quietly out of the house after supper and hurried back
to his study to collect his thoughts for the battle he knew he must
wage with Van Meter. This one man had ruled the church with his
rod of gold for twenty years. He had established a mission station
on the East Side and gathered into it the undesirable people. He
was the watchdog of the Prudential Committee guarding the door to
membership.
This trustee meeting had for him a double interest. A panic in Wall
Street had all but ruined Van Meter. He had attempted to corner
the bread market. The wheat crop had been ruined by a hard winter,
and the little black eyes, watching, believed the coup could be
made.
The attempt was in concerted action through his associate houses
in Chicago and St. Louis, and he had plunged as never before. The
corner had failed. It was reported that he had made an assignment.
This had proved a mistake. His long-established credit and his high
personal standing in Wall Street had rallied money to his support
and he had pulled out with the loss of three-fourths of his fortune.
Gordon wondered what the effect of this blow would be on his
character and attitude toward the church's work. He was specially
anxious to know the effect of the reverse on the imagination of
the other members of the Board, who merely revolved in worshipful
admiration around his millions.
He asked Van Meter to come to his study for a personal interview
before the meeting. The Deacon was cool and polite, and his little
eyes were shining with a distant luster.
"I was sorry, Deacon, to learn of your personal misfortunes."
Van Meter wet his dry lips with his tongue, looked Gordon squarely
in the face and snapped:
"Were you the clergyman who made the statement concerning that
corner reported yesterday in an evening paper?"
Gordon flushed, turned uneasily in his chair, and boldly replied:
"Yes, I was, and I repeat it to you. On every such attempt to coin
money out of hunger and despair, I pray God's everlasting curse to
fall. I am glad your corner failed. The world is larger than New
York, and New York is larger than the Stock Exchange. Am I clear?"
"Quite so. With your permission I will return to the trustee
meeting."
"Very well. I wish to make a statement to the Board when you are
ready."
Gordon frowned, sat down and made some notes of the points he wished
to urge.
He had often wondered at the impotence of the average preacher in
New York. But as he felt the forces of materialism closing about
him, and their steel grip on his heart, he began to know why New
York is the preacher's graveyard. He had won his great audience.
His voice had not been drowned in the roar of the breakers of this
ocean of flesh, but he had met bitter disillusioning. As he looked
into the faces of his Board of Trustees, dominated by that little
bald-headed man, he felt the cruel force of Overman's sneer at
the modern church as the home of the mean and the crippled and the
sick. The appeal to the ideal seemed to stick in his throat.
He had thrilled at the struggle with the big city's rushing millions.
Their stupendous indifference dared him to conquer or die, and
he had conquered. He had seen these indifferent millions swallow
cabinets, presidents, princes and kings, and rush on their way
without a thought whether they lived or died. He had made himself
heard. But this power that worshiped a dollar and called it God,
that controlled the finances of the church and sought to control
its pastor and strangle his soul--this was the force slowly choking
him to death unless he could conquer it.
The average preacher, when he landed in New York and faced the roar
of its advancing ocean of materialism, fluttered hopelessly about
for a year or two like a frightened sand-fiddler in the edge of
the surf of a cyclone, was engulfed, and disappeared.
To conquer this sea and lift his voice in power above its thunder,
and then be strangled in a little yellow puddle full of tadpoles,
was more than his soul could endure.
"I'll not submit to it," he growled, with clenched fist.
When he entered the meeting, the dozen men were hanging on Van
Meter's lips as on the inspired word of Moses.
"I was just telling the Board," he suavely explained, "that Mr.
Wellford, on whom we must depend for such a building enterprise
involving millions, has declared his hostility to the scheme. He is
out of sympathy with the sensational methods of the Pilgrim Church."
"I'll inform the Board," said Gordon, as he advanced toward Van
Meter and thrust his hands in his pockets, "that it's not true. I
have seen Mr. Wellford, by his invitation, this week at his home.
I laid our great plan before him. I found him a big man, a man who
thinks big thoughts, and does big things. He told me frankly he was
heartily in favour of it and would do his part the moment we were
ready and other men of wealth would join in the movement. He simply
declares that we must act first."
Van Meter pursed his lips and tried to lift his nose into a sneer.
"May I ask, Doctor, if it is your intention to demand a vote to-night
on this building scheme?"
"It is."
"Then I suggest that we vote first and hear your speech afterward.
Some of us may wish to go before you're done."
Gordon turned red with rage and started to sit down, but, wheeling,
he again faced the chairman and glared at him.
"Pardon my business methods, Doctor," he went on, "but your visions
are rather tiresome. We are old New Yorkers. We know what you are
going to tell us of the dark problem of the city's corruption, the
poverty of the poor, and so on. Every now and then we see such sacred
fires burning in the heart of a country parson called to town. Yet,
in spite of the splendour of these little fizzling pinwheels that
light the cruelty and darkness of metropolitan life for a moment,
New York has managed somehow to jog along."
Gordon's anger melted into a laugh as he watched the Deacon's face
grow purple with fury as he fairly hissed the last sentence of
his speech. He was not an impressive man in an attempted flight of
eloquence, and the preacher's laughter quite unhorsed him.
"Gentlemen," Gordon said with quiet dignity, "I came here to-night
to make an appeal. But, I'm no longer in the mood. I see in your
faces the folly of it. I make an announcement to you. The Temple
will be built, with or without you. I prefer your cooperation. I
can do it with your united opposition. God lives, and the age of
miracles is not passed."
"In behalf of the Board, I accept your challenge and await the
miracle," retorted Van Meter. "You can pray till you're blue in
the face and you will never get money enough to buy a lot on Fifth
Avenue big enough to bury yourself, to say nothing of rearing a
Solomon's Temple on it."
"We shall see," the young giant replied.
"This Board is tired of the circus business," Van Meter went on
angrily. "You have transformed the church already into a menagerie.
We don't want any more of your Soup-House Sarahs, Hallelujah Johns
nor decorative bums testifying here to the power of miracles,
while we wonder whether our overcoats will be on the rack when we
recover from the spell of their eloquence. It's a big world, there's
room for us all, but there's not room for any more new wrinkles in
this church."
"Yes, it is a big world, Deacon, but there are some small potatoes
in it. There's hope for a fool, he may be turned from his folly,
but God Almighty can't put a gallon into a pint cup."
"We'll see who the small potato is before the day is done," Van
Meter snorted.
Gordon continued, meditatively, without noticing the interruption:
"Of all the little things on this earth a little New Yorker is the
smallest. I've met ignorance in the South, sullen pigheadedness
in New England; I've measured the boundless cheek of the West, my
native heath; but for self-satisfied stupidity, for littleness in
the world of morals, I have seen nothing on earth, or under it,
quite so small as a well-to-do New Yorker. He has little brains,
or culture, and only the rudiments of common sense, but, being from
New York, he assumes everything. Of God's big world, outside Wall
Street, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Central Park and Coney Island, he
knows nothing; for he neither reads nor travels; and yet pronounces
instant judgment on world movements of human thought and society."
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