Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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In the local development of the church Kate Ransom had become,
next to the pastor, the most important factor. She had shown strong
administrative talent, had organized kindergartens, night-schools
for teaching domestic science to girls, established a reading-room,
and opened a coffee house on the corner near the church, fitting
it up with the magnificence of a saloon, with free lunch counter,
music and singing. It was crowded with working-men and women every
night.
Her work had brought her in daily contact with Gordon, and their
comradeship had become so constant and so sweet that neither of
them dared face the problem of its meaning.
To the woman the man had become little less than her God. Their
daily life, its hopes, its poetry, its dreams of social and civic
salvation, were enough in themselves: she did not analyse or
question.
For the man, this fair woman, beautiful in face and form beyond the
flight of his fancy, and loyal in the worship of his strength, as
the soul of the strong man ever desires of his ideal woman, she had
become a daily inspiration. And yet he had not acknowledged this
even in a whisper of his soul.
In the meanwhile, his wife's interest in music had ceased, and she
was rarely seen at the church on Sundays or at its weekday functions.
She had withdrawn from its life and had settled into a state of
somber resentment.
She would frequently sit through a meal eating little, speaking in
monosyllables, her black eyes staring, wide open, and yet seeing
nothing, looking past the things that bound her, back into the
sunlit years of girlhood, or forward into the future whose shadow's
chill she felt already on her soul. Often he found her at night
seated by the window in the dark alone, looking down on the city
below.
She had ceased to ask him of his work or plans and he no longer
troubled her with their discussion. Their lives were separated by
an ever-widening gulf.
Stimulated by a sermon he had preached in August of the previous
summer, when the death-rate was at its highest, a wave of reform
had swept over New York. In his sermon he had arraigned the city
government in terms so trenchant and terrible the people had rallied
as to a trumpet call to battle.
A resistless movement for the overthrow of a corrupt administration
took the city by storm. Day and night with voice and pen, with all
the fire and passion of his magnetic personality, he had led these
assaults.
Complete success crowned the movement. The reform Mayor was elected
by a large majority.
Ten months had passed and the net results were discouraging. Police
scandals ran riot as of yore; gambling, drinking and the social
evil flourished as before; and the press, that had valiantly and
almost unanimously championed Reform, now exhausted upon it the
vocabulary of abuse.
Gordon was disgusted and sickened and felt that one of his fairest
dreams had been shattered forever.
The reaction from this reform programme had thrown him more than
ever back upon his ideas of a Socialistic revolution which should
destroy Commercialism itself, and he had become its enthusiastic
champion.
Kate Ransom had followed his change of views with keenest sympathy.
She had read every book after him and had responded to his every
mood.
"No; we're on the wrong tack, with our half-way measures and our
fitful charities," he said to her.
"We must go deeper. We must make the Fatherhood of God and the
Brotherhood of Man our daily life, not merely a poetic theory.
"We have hundreds of beautiful-souled men and women giving their
lives in sacrifice for the city's poor and fallen. They seem to
make little impression on its ocean of misery. We are bailing out
the sea with teaspoons."
"I feel you are right, as you always are," she responded, unconscious
of the contradiction.
"The Brotherhood of Man and the Solidarity of the Race we must
make vital realities. Greed, commercialism, competition and the
monopolistic instincts are the cause of all this crime and misery
and confusion. Love, not force, must rule the world."
"And you are the prophet to lead humanity into this Kingdom of
Love," she said, her eyes enfolding him with their soft blue light.
"I fear I'm too great a coward for such a task. The man who does
it must break with the past, become accursed for the truth's sake,
defy social law and convention, breast the storm of the world's
hate, die despised, and wait for a nobler generation to place his
name on the roll of the world's heroes."
"It is your work," she cried with elation.
"It's a lonely way for the soul to travel."
"You will have one loyal follower the blackest hour of the darkest
night that comes."
A curious smile played around her full lips, and he looked away,
afraid to say anything.
"Yes, I know that," he softly answered. "And I'm more afraid for
that very reason."
"I'm not afraid." Her voice rang clear and thrilling.
"I wonder if you know the meaning of such words; or if you are
thinking of one thing and I of another?" he slowly asked.
"I dare to think many things I've never dared to say," she replied.
"A break must come sooner or later," he went on. "No man of my
temperament and brain can live under the conditions here, feel the
grip of this cruelty on the throat of humanity, read and think,
and endure it."
"It seems to me a social revolution must come quickly."
"I wondered if you had felt that?" Gordon asked, as he leaned back
in his chair and locked his powerful hands behind his head. "This
presentiment of overwhelming change haunts me day and night and
makes many things seem childish and futile.
"Ill and feverish from overwork one day last week, I stood by my
window, looking down on the city, dreaming and listening to its
cries for help, watching the sweep of the elevated trains coming
and going, and I was overwhelmed with the immensity of its complex
life. Our hurrying cars carry within the corporate limits daily
more passengers than all the railroads of the western hemisphere.
I thought of the rivers of human flesh that flow unceasingly through
its streets and flood its market places. And these millions are
but one wave of the ocean forever breaking on the shores of time,
its tides everlasting, insistent, resistless, never pausing, behind
them the pressure of the heaped centuries, and over them the lowering
clouds of fresh storms soon to burst and add their tons."
He paused and closed his eyes as though to shut out the roar, while
she listened with half-parted lips.
"And as I looked out the window I had a startling experience. I
saw a huge dragon-like beast begin to crawl slowly down from the
hills and stretch his big claws over the housetops of the city below.
I was not asleep or in a trance, but wide awake, only a little
feverish. With increasing horror I watched this monster stretch his
enormous body, covered with scales, and short hair growing between
the scales, on and on, until he covered the city and gathered its
thousands of houses within his huge paws. His eyes were enormous
and blood-red, his breath hot.
"I moved back, gasping with surprise and horror, to find it was
only a spider crawling down his slender thread on the window close
to my eye. It was a fevered delusion, but it haunted me for days,
and haunts me still.
"I am growing in the conviction that the very foundations of morals
are shifting, and that Religion, Society and Civilisation must
readjust themselves or humanity sink into unspeakable degradation.
"Belief in the old religious authority is gone. Our church is thronged
because of a peculiar personal power with which I am endowed. I
could wield that power without a church, society, creed or Bible.
Esthetic forces now draw people to non-ritualistic churches that
once came for prayer and preaching. The preacher must secularise
his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been
destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight
of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of
Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."
"And you are the seer called to lead out of this chaos," the woman
whispered. "I know this from my own life. But for you I would be
listening to idiotic platitudes, cultivating sham, my very soul
'crucified between a whimper and a smile.' I owe it to you that I
am a woman--not a cross between an angel and an idiot."
The passion with which she said this, bending her beautiful face,
flushed with emotion, so close to his that he caught the perfume
of her mass of waving hair, went to the man's head like wine.
"Why not spring our building scheme on the people at once, without
authority from the Board of Trustees, and make it the rallying cry
of the new Humanity?" he cried eagerly.
"I believe it will succeed," she answered, her heart glowing with
the consciousness of the intimacy of that little word "our" he had
used.
She got pad and pencil, and Gordon dictated to her a plan for
engaging every force of the church and its congregation and various
societies in the project.
He fixed the Sunday on which to make the effort of his life
in his appeal to the people of his congregation and the world for
the million-dollar fund needed. It was eleven o'clock before they
finished the discussion of the scheme, and aglow with enthusiasm
he left for his home.
As he sat down in the car and lived over again his happiness of the
past hours in this woman's companionship the paradox of his return
in a few minutes to the arms of his wife struck him squarely in
the face for the first time.
He could not plead a mistake in his first love. His romance was
genuine. He had loved with all the fire of his youth. The passion
which drew him to Ruth was mutual and resistless. Yet its ardour
had cooled. He could not say it was his fault, not altogether hers.
It seemed as inevitable in its decline as its onrush was resistless.
Yet at the thought of this new woman he felt his heart beat with
quicker stroke. He was older and stronger than the youth of the
past, and the woman more mature in the ripened glory of beauty.
Yet he began to recall with infinite tenderness the love life with
Ruth. Its memories were very real and very sweet. And the faces of
his children haunted him with strange power. The idea of a divorce
from Ruth and the loss of these children cut him with sharp pain.
Had he outgrown his first love? Could he continue to live with one
woman if he loved another? Was not this the one unpardonable sin
and shame? And yet to break that bond and form the other if he could
meant the end of associations in which the fibers of his very life
were wrought.
But was not this one of the burning problems of the new humanity,
this freedom of the soul and body, this new birth into the liberty
and love of a great Brotherhood? Was not sham and hypocrisy now
the law of life, and was not Society perishing because of it?
Thus wrestling with the tragic dilemma he felt closing about him,
he went past his station to the end of the line and had to take
the down train back. It was past midnight when he reached his home.
CHAPTER X
THE BLACK CAT
When Van Meter heard of the scheme to appeal directly to the people
to build the temple in defiance of the Board of Trustees, who were
the legal managers of the church's property, he was thunderstruck.
When the Sunday arrived he came half an hour earlier than usual
to watch every incident of the day with his little black eyes open
their widest.
It was a crisp November morning. Recent rains had washed the streets
clean, the wind was blowing fresh, the sky was cloudless and the
sun lit in cool gleaming splendour every avenue and park of the
great city.
The people had returned from their country places and the hotels
were thronged with merchants and visitors from the four quarters
of the earth.
An enormous crowd squeezed into every inch of space the police
would allow to be filled in the church, and hundreds were turned
away, unable to gain admission.
Gordon had spent the entire day and night before in an agony of
preparation, and he had not left his study until two o'clock Sunday
morning. He took his seat in the pulpit trembling with anxiety. The
organ burst into the strains of the Doxology and the crowd rose.
He stood with folded hands looking over the sea of faces, and his
heart began to ache with an agony of suspense and fear of failure.
The singing ceased, and every head bent as he lifted his big hand,
with its blue veins standing out like a net of steel wires, and
pronounced a brief invocation.
When he read the hymn, the people felt in his voice the shock of a
storm of pent-up emotion. He read it slowly, beautifully, and with
exquisite tenderness.
While they sang he sat with his elbow on the little table on which
stood a vase of roses, his face resting thoughtfully on his left
hand, studying the people, his soul on fire with the sense of their
infinite needs.
Crouching low in his seat under the left gallery, he saw a man who
had confessed a great wrong and was searching for peace.
At a post on the right, in a seat where he had been accustomed
to see a working-girl for the past two years, a stranger sat. The
girl was found dead in her room the week before. She had lost her
place because she wore shabby clothes, and she wore shabby clothes
because she had been sending her earnings to her home in Connecticut,
supporting an aged father, mother and a worthless brother.
The rich, the poor, the old, the young, the outcast, the publican
and sinner, the strange woman and the sweet face of innocent girlhood
were there looking up at him for guidance and help.
But outnumbering all were massed rows of clean-faced young men whom
his enthusiasm had drawn resistlessly. His heart went out to them
in yearning sympathy, fighting their battles in the morning of life
with the powers and princes of the spirit world for the mastery of
the soul.
He felt the sledge-hammer blow of their united heart-beat strike
his brain with the pain of a bludgeon.
The agony of fear was now upon him. He saw Van Meter sitting in
the central tier of seats watching him sharply out of his little
half-closed eyes, the incarnate sign of the mortal enmity of
organised wealth, and he must appeal for money.
His great crowd had infinite needs, but much money they did not
have. He thought with hope of the twenty millions of people who
read his sermons on Monday morning, and of a dozen big-hearted men
of wealth he knew in the city, and he was cheered.
He had prepared a most powerful sermon on the text, "The common
people heard Him gladly." He felt they could not resist his appeal.
And yet in spite of himself his gaze would wander back to Van Meter,
drawn by his black eyes as by the charm of an adder.
The Deacon was wondering, as he watched him, what could possibly be
the outcome of this daring insanity. He had been fooled so often by
the power of this athletic dreamer, he feared to predict the end,
though he felt certain what it would be.
The services were unusually impressive. Special music had been
prepared by the choir and rendered magnificently. Gordon read
the hymns and Scripture with a feeling so intense the people were
thrilled. His prayer had been simple and heartfelt, and had melted
scores of people to tears.
He rose and faced the crowd with the keenest sense of solemnity.
The hour was propitious; he could feel the hearts of the people
beat responsive to his slightest tone, word or gesture.
As he swept rapidly through his introduction and into his theme
he knew he was holding these thousands of breathless listeners in
the hollow of his hand. He could feel their heartstrings quiver
as he touched them with tenderness or struck them with some mighty
thought.
His soul was singing with triumph, when suddenly a ripple of laughter
ran along the front tier of the gallery, and a hundred heads were
turned upward to see what the disturbance meant.
Had a bolt of lightning struck his spinal column he could not have
been more shocked.
He repeated mechanically the last sentence in a dazed sort of
way, and a louder ripple of laughter ran the entire length of both
galleries and echoed through the main floor.
He stopped, fumbled at his notes, and turned red. The people
before him were smiling and craning their necks to see more plainly
something on the wide platform of the pulpit.
He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head
in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.
He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little black cat
with big yellow eyes.
She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised
his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on
this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat
accompaniment to the functions of a priest.
When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him
at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:
"Meow!"
And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.
At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind,
he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in
helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty
crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power
of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that
cat and regain control of his audience.
He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like
hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.
He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side,
opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:
"M-e-o-w!"
Which unmistakably meant, "I'm very sorry you don't like me as well
as I do you."
Again the crowd laughed.
Gordon stepped backward and bent slowly over the cat. She did not
look very bright, but she was too shrewd for that movement.
The crowd watched breathlessly. He grasped at her.
She sprang quickly to one side, bowed her back, bushed her tail,
and scampered across the platform crying:
"Pist! pist!" and ran up the column that supported the end of the
gallery.
The preacher's empty hand struck the bare floor, and the crowd was
convulsed.
A young man sitting in the gallery near the column caught the cat
as she climbed over the rail, ran to a window and was about to
throw her down to the pavement twenty feet below.
Gordon lifted his hand and cried:
"Don't do that, young man--don't hurt her; bring her here."
It had, suddenly occurred to the preacher as he watched Van Meter
bending low in his pew overcome with laughter, that he had stooped
to this contemptible trick to defeat him and make the solemnest
hour of life ridiculous. He knew the Deacon had come to the church
earlier than usual. He was sure he had done it.
A curious smile began to play about his lips, and a cold glitter
came into his steel-gray eyes.
He took the cat in his arms and stroked her gently. She purred
and rubbed her face against his and moved her feet up and down,
sheathing and unsheathing her claws in his robe with evident delight.
The crowd grew still. Instinctively they knew that something big
was happening in the soul of the man they were watching.
"This little cat, my friends," he said, "is an innocent actor
in a tragedy this morning, but she is the agent of one who is not
innocent."
He fixed his gaze on Van Meter, who stirred with uneasy amazement.
"They say that cats sometimes incarnate the souls of dead men. This
one is the soul of a living man, my good friend, Deacon Arnold Van
Meter, who had her brought here this morning."
The Deacon turned red, drew his head down as though he would pull
it within his shoulders, and shrank from the gaze of the crowd.
Gordon handed the cat back to the young man, whispered something
to him, and he disappeared.
Then, walking up to the pulpit, he snatched off its crimson cloth
and threw it behind him. He ran his big muscular hands into the
throat of his robe, ripped it open, tore it from his arms, crushed
it into a shapeless mass and threw it on the floor.
He snatched up the golden lectern pulpit, hurled it back into the
comer, and moved the little table with its vase of roses into its
place. He did this quickly, without a word or an exclamation to
break the awful stillness with which the crowd watched him.
They knew that a tremendous drama was being enacted before them.
So intense was the excitement the people on the back tiers of the
galleries sprang impulsively to their feet and stood on the pews.
Van Meter's eyes danced with wild amazement as he straightened
himself up, sure Gordon had gone mad. But when he advanced to the
edge of the platform, looking a foot taller in his long black Prince
Albert coat, folded his giant arms across his breast, the nostrils
of his great aquiline nose dilated, his lips quivering, and looked
straight into Van Meter's face, the Deacon saw there was dangerous
method in his madness.
His eyes blazing with pent-up passion, he began in deliberate tones
an extempore address.
In a moment the air was charged with the thrill of his powerful
personality wrought to the highest tension of emotional power.
[Illustration: "Ripped it open, tore it from his arms, and threw
it on the floor."]
"My friends," he began, "there are moments in our experience when
we live a lifetime--moments when the hair of our heads turns gray,
a soul dies within a laving body, or a dead one rises, shakes off
its grave clothes, and lifts its head in the sunlight.
"From this hour I am a free man. I will live what I am, and speak
what I feel to be the truth. The truth shall be its own justification.
I will wear no robes, mumble no ceremonies, call no man Rabbi, and
permit no man to call me Rabbi. I proclaim the universal priesthood
of believers.
"While I am your pastor the Kitchen Mission in which we have gathered
the poor on the East Side will be closed at the hour of service,
and all God's children shall enter this house because it is their
Father's!"
Van Meter shrank back in his pew as a ripple of applause ran round
the galleries.
"If men ask a sign to-day whether the Church of the living God
exists in New York, what is our answer?
"Look about you. New York is the centre of the commerce, society,
art, literature and politics of the Western World. Her port, in
which fly the flags of every nation, is the gateway of two worlds.
The feet of four millions daily press her pavements. Her walls frame
the furnace in which are being tried by fire the faiths, hopes and
dreams of the centuries past and to come. In mere volume of population
she is the equal of three great Atlantic states: Virginia, North
and South Carolina. One man alone of her millions of citizens
possesses wealth greater than the valuation of all the property
of the State of North Carolina, the cradle of American democracy,
containing fifty thousand square miles and supporting a population
of a million six hundred thousand.
"In the roar of this modern Babylon beats the fevered heart of
modern civilisation. He who wins that heart holds the key to the
century. Imperial Rome, mistress of the world, was a pygmy compared
to this.
"And what are we doing?
"Our Protestant churches have thirty-five thousand men and one
hundred thousand women enrolled out of two millions on Manhattan
Island. Our invested capital is one hundred million dollars, our
annual gifts four millions, and we fail to hold one-half the children
born in our own homes.
"As a remedy for this the Trustees proposed to me to sell out and
move uptown to vacant lots! They say the people have gone. They
have come--come in such numbers and with such problems, churches
have fled before the avalanche of humanity.
"Within a stone's throw of this church are districts in which ten
men and women sleep in one room twelve feet square. New York is
the most crowded city in the world. London has seven people to a
house; we have sixteen. In two houses were found the other day one
hundred and thirty-six children. Death stalks through these crowded
alleys with scythe ever swinging.
"Shall we, too, desert?
"I hear the tread of coming thousands from these shadows who will
laugh at your flag, who know not the name of your President, or
your God, whose heavy hands upon your doors will summon you before
the tribunal of the knife, the torch, the bomb to make good your
right to live.
"When your population shall number ten millions, and the gulf between
the rich and poor shall have become impassable, some gigantic corner
shall have doubled the price of bread, starvation spread her black
wings, and idle thousands sullen and desperate begin to look with
darkening brows on your unprotected wealth, then will come the test
of modern society.
"This growth of the city is as resistless and inevitable as the
movement of time. Why people continue to turn their backs upon the
open fields and crowd into this great foul, rattling, crawling,
smoking, stinking, ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, oozing
poison at every pore, is beyond my ken, but they come. They come
each year in hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, crowding
the crowded trades, crowding closer the crowded dens in which human
beings whelp and stable as beasts. They leave friends and neighbours
who love them, leave earth for hell, and still they come. The
tenement, huge monster of modern greed, engulfs them, and the word
home is stricken from their tongue.
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