Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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"They tell us that yesterday a man in a fit of insanity murdered
his wife and two daughters. Insanity? Love has its hours when
death becomes beautiful. Poets sing of old Virginius who slew his
daughter to save her from dishonour. May it not be better to die
a man than live a beast?
"There are conditions about us where suicide is a luxury and the
death of a child a joy. They are gathered to the Potters' Field,
but they rest. We pile them one on top of the other in big black
trenches, but the dawn does not call them to beastly toil. Their
little forms moulder, but they no longer cry for bread and their
pinched faces no longer try to smile. They are safe in Death's
land-locked harbour.
"Last year the deaths on this island numbered forty thousand. Ten
thousand--one in four--were buried from hospitals, jails, almshouses,
asylums and workhouses. I have been assailed by a deacon of this
church because I no longer preach hell. Why preach hell to people
who expect to better their condition in the next world whether they
go up or down?
"I am here henceforth to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
the healing of the bruised, the release of the captive, and to
preach the Gospel to the poor.
"Let snobs and apes hear me. Democracy is the goal of the race,
the destiny of the world. American Democracy is but a hundred years
old, yet not one crowned head is left on the western hemisphere.
Crowns, thrones, scepters, titles, privileges belong to the past;
they are doomed. The people already rule the world. Emperors, kings
and presidents exist, not by the grace of God, but by the consent
of the people, to whom they give account of their stewardship.
Empires are the dungheaps out of which democracies grow.
"The historian writes of the common people. Once of kings
and princes were their stories. The eyes of the world are on the
masses. Science toils to make Nature their servant. Art portrays
their life. Literature, once a clown at the feet of Fortune's
fools, now writes of the people. Wealth lays its tribute at their
feet. The millionaire, who dies to-day grasping his millions as his
own, is hissed while he lives, openly cursed while he lies cold in
death, and forgotten in contempt.
"Outside the history of the common people there is nothing worth
recording. They are mankind. As a half-million miles make no
difference in the vast distance to the sun in figuring an eclipse,
so the classes may be disregarded.
"Jesus Christ was the carpenter's son. His home was humble, His
birth lowly. He was born poor, lived and died poor. The foxes had
holes, the birds of the air nests, but He had not where to lay His
head. Our robes and altar cloths, our tin and tinsel, were not His.
"When John Wesley raised his voice for the people the Church of
England had the opportunity to become the Church of the Anglo-Saxon
race, that is now conquering the world. They called him a liar,
a hypocrite, a Jesuit, a devil, cast him out, and the opportunity
passed forever.
"I see a man before me who hates this big crowd and yet expects to
go to heaven. Heaven is the home of millions--'a great multitude
which no man could number,' says the seer. Hell is the home of
swell society."
The words leaped from Gordon's lips a rushing torrent and swept the
crowd. Growing each moment more and more conscious of his strength,
he attained the heights of eloquence. Intoxicated with the reflex
action from the sea of eager listeners, he outdid himself with each
succeeding climax of feeling. Never had his voice been so deep,
so full, so clear, so penetrating, so thrilling, and never had he
been so conscious of its control. Not once did it break. Its loudest
trumpet note echoed with sure roundness.
When he turned his eyes from Van Meter after his first assault they
rested on the face of Kate Ransom, her magnificent figure tense,
rigid, her cheeks scarlet, her blue eyes flashing with tears of
excitement. She was stirred to her soul's depths, and no figure in
all the throbbing crowd gave to the speaker such inspiring response.
Her face flashed back as from a mirror every throb of thought and
stroke of his heart.
Van Meter gazed on him hypnotised by the violence of his onrush.
When Gordon would suddenly lift his enormous blue-veined hand
high over his head in an impassioned gesture the Deacon cowered
unconsciously beneath his towering figure.
Pausing a moment, while the crowd held its' breath, watching every
movement and every twitch of a muscle of his face, he pointed his
long finger at the Deacon and continued:
"And, as if to mock intelligence, Tradition raises the feeble cry
of reminiscent senility, 'Back to the old paths!'
"Protestantism is the rebellion of reason against the shackles of
authority. Our conscience fettered by tradition stultifies its own
life. We must go forward or die.
"Theology is a science, religion a life. The one is a fact, the
other an analysis after the fact. The stage-coach yielded to the
limited, the sailing craft to the ocean greyhound, but we are told
that the only age that ever knew the truth, or had the right to
express it, was the age which burned witches, executed dumb animals
as criminals, whipped church bells for heresy, held chemistry a black
art and electricity a manifestation of the devil or the Shekina of
God.
"The men to whom I speak have seen New York grow from a town of
three hundred thousand on the lower end of Manhattan Island to be
the imperial metropolis of the New World with four millions within
her golden gates.
"Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain
of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our
buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with
their flag-staffs in the clouds.
"Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution
established.
"The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world
made.
"Steam and electricity have been applied to travel and speech,
and the earth transformed into a whispering gallery. The cylinder
press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned
the brow of humanity with a coronet of light.
"But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods
are the methods of their fathers--a solecism, stupid, irrational,
immoral.
"The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to
the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe
of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt,
rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of
life.
"Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to
be the friend of publicans and harlots.
"Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty
and blood, flame, sword, thumb-screw, rack and torch. The blackest
pages in the story of the martyrdom of man have been written by
their hands. They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with
fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was
drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons
and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning
plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from
limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or
the piteous cry of expectant motherhood.
"The Bible they made a bludgeon with which to brain heretics, forged
its word into chains, and with its leaves kindled martyr fires.
"They have arraigned the reason, the heart and the knowledge of the
race against Jesus Christ and His religion. They stretched Galileo
on the rack for inventing a telescope which gave new beauty to
the psalm, 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth His handiwork.'
"They are driving manhood from the modern Church. Your New York
congregations average four women to one man. Of forty-three Governors
of our states, only seventeen are members of any church; yet all
profess allegiance to the religion of Jesus. The men have formed
secret societies outside the Church.
"The Church triumphant will be a social power. Man to-day is more
than an individual. The individual has played his role in the growth
of the centuries. This is the age of federation, organisation,
society, humanity. Man can no longer live to himself or die to
himself.
"I proclaim again the universal priesthood of believers. I call
for those mighty forces among the unordained which thrilled the
Waldenses, the Franciscans, the Puritan and early Methodists and
sent them on their glorious careers. I preach a holy crusade for
man as man, in the name of God, whose image he bears. I ask you
to join with me as man, not as priest, and build here a 'Temple of
Humanity' that shall be for a sign of hope and faith and freedom."
As he closed, a spontaneous burst of applause shook the building,
and instead of the usual prayer which ended his sermons he lifted
both his big hands high above his head and the audience rose.
"Let us sing the national hymn, 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee, Sweet
Land of Liberty,'" he cried, his voice still throbbing with emotion.
"And while we sing the ushers will pass the subscription cards that
you may join with us in our enterprise."
He dismissed the crowd with the Benediction, and the whole mass
lingered, discussing with flushed faces the extraordinary scene
they had witnessed and speculating on its outcome. It was evident
his action and speech had produced a moral earthquake in the church.
The older and more conservative members slipped out one by one and
went home dazed.
The younger and more sensitive crowded about Gordon in hundreds,
wrung his hand and pledged their support. For half an hour he could
not move, so dense was this struggling mass around him.
He did not see Kate among them. He knew the scene had cut too deeply
into her life for such poor expression. The ushers at last handed
him a bundle of subscription cards and he hurried to his study to
read their verdict.
CHAPTER XI
AN ANSWER TO PRAYER
When Gordon reached his study and locked the door, he turned the
bundle of cards over nervously, afraid to look at them.
He untied the package, read the first, and ran rapidly through the
pile. The total subscriptions reached only twenty thousand dollars.
He had asked for a million.
A sickening sense of failure crushed him. How weak and puerile
the eloquence of words or the beat of the human heart against that
mysterious force gleaming at him through Van Meter's black eyes!
He sat brooding over the power wielded by a dozen men whose names
were linked with the Deacon's in Wall Street. This group of men had
personal fortunes of more than eight hundred millions and controlled
as much more. He believed that they dictated the policy of railroads,
banks, trade, the State, the Nation, and that no king or emperor
of the world wielded such despotism over men as these uncrowned
monarchs of money. He felt as though he had collided with the stars
in their courses and been crushed to dust.
An Answer to Prayer 129
In the middle of the pile of cards he found one signed by Kate
Ransom. She had written across the printed form in her smooth,
flowing hand:
"Please call after the service and let me know the result. I will
send you my subscription to-morrow."
He knew that she would make a liberal gift, but her fortune could
not be more than a million, perhaps not half so large. Her generosity
could not save the day even if she gave half of all she possessed,
a supposition of course preposterous.
He could not summon courage to go in the bitterness of his defeat.
He scrawled a note and sent it by the sexton.
"Feeling too blue to call. Failure complete and pitiful. The
subscriptions reach only twenty thousand dollars. GORDON."
There was but one forlorn hope left. He had written personal letters
to several millionaires he knew in town. They might respond.
He sat in his study in the afternoon, dull, stupid and sick, feeling
an iron band around his brain. He could not think. Ho gave up the
work on his evening sermon and determined to repeat an old one.
As he sat in an aching stupor the sexton announced a gentleman who
insisted on seeing him on important business.
"I told him you would see no one at this hour, but he says he must
see you."
"Show him in," Gordon said, with a frown.
The man entered, gazed at the preacher with curious interest, and
stood with his silk hat in hand, smiling.
"This is Doctor Gordon?"
"Leave off the doctor and you have it right."
"I am the bearer of good news. A client of mine has instructed me
to call and say that the sum of one million dollars will be placed
to your credit in the Garfield National Bank within two years, and
that you will be its sole trustee for the building of your projected
Temple. One-third of it will be available within three months. I
am sorry, I am forbidden to disclose the name."
Gordon sprang to his feet, pale as death, overwhelmed with awe. To
have the answer of his prayers, the agonising of his soul for years,
answered in the hour of utter defeat thrilled him with a sense
of solemnity he had never felt. The man was not a man. He was the
messenger swift and beautiful from the courts of heaven, for whose
coming his eyes had long strained and his ears listened. Not a
doubt of its truth shadowed his mind. He knew it was true. It was
the fulfilment of life. It had been ordained from eternity. He had
seen it always. Now he saw with his eyes. A paean of exaltation
welled within him.
With dimmed eyes he grasped the lawyer's hand and fairly crushed
it in his iron grip.
"My friend, your face will always be beautiful to me, and your name
a song of joy. You have come to lift me from the gulf of despair
and renew my faith."
"With all my heart I congratulate you," he warmly responded.
He left his card, and Gordon locked his door, walked back to his
desk and fell on his knees. In transports of childlike gratitude he
poured out his soul. All the old faith in prayer was in him again,
the breath he breathed. He talked to God as to a loving father,
promising in broken accents to cleanse his heart of every selfish
thought and consecrate anew every energy to his work.
And then he caught the perfume of flowers, and saw the face of a
woman, and she was not the wife of his youth or the mother of his
children.
"God forgive me for the drifting of the past," he cried. "I will
tear this madness out of my heart and love only Thee. I will be true
to the vows taken at Thy altar. I have been wayward and sinned in
Thy sight in heart and thought. Wash me in Thy love and I shall be
clean, and though my sins be as scarlet they shall be like wool."
He rose from his knees determined to go immediately to Kate Ransom,
tell her the news, make a clean breast of his love for her, beg her
to put the ocean between them, and for all time end their dangerous
relationship.
She greeted him with reserve, and seemed embarrassed.
With impetuous rush he told her the tidings.
"I've been lifted from the depths of Sheol to the highest heaven.
Every hope and dream of my struggle is a living reality. An unknown
millionaire has given the whole sum needed--a million dollars--and
our Temple will rise in grandeur!"
She smiled timidly, and said: "I knew it would be so. You were
glorious this morning."
He felt her embarrassment and wondered if she could have divined
his grim purpose of separation.
"You do not seem so glad as I thought you would be," he said, with
something of reproach in his voice.
"Some joys are too intense for speech. The scene this morning and
your burning message went too deep for words."
"I understand," he said softly.
"I wonder if you do?" she asked, dropping her eyes.
"Yes, and I have come to the hardest task of my life, one of the
bitterest and one of the sweetest," he said, with deliberation.
She glanced at him quickly and began to tremble.
"Not another hour must pass without a confession to you."
He moved across the room and sat down as if by an effort to put
distance between them.
"What is it?" she asked, colouring.
He was silent a moment and then said with low, deliberate tenderness:
"I love you."
She sobbed, and he looked steadily out of the window.
"I dare not sit by your side when I tell you this," he continued
passionately. "I have felt it growing in spite of reason or will.
I know it's tragedy and sealed my lips with bolts of steel. I have
been too weak to keep away from you, strong enough to keep silent.
But God has sent his messenger to-day to recall me to duty. There
is truth in the old faith. He has heard and answered the prayer
of my heart. Somewhere in this Mammon-cursed city there is one
beautiful disinterested soul that gives and asks nothing. I have
seen, as in a flash of lightning, my danger. I must tear this
passion out of my life, though it kill me. I must be true to my
vows. I must live without scandal or shame. And you," he paused and
his voice sank to a tense whisper--"my beautiful darling, glorious
love of my manhood--you must help me!"
He buried his face in his great hands, convulsed with emotion.
"I will, my dearest," she tenderly answered.
"If I had failed to-day," he went on tremblingly, "perhaps in
reckless fury I might have forgotten duty, dashed the cup of this
martyrdom from my lips, and drowned conscience in the sweetness of
your kiss. But God sent success, not failure. And I must be worthy.
I have sinned a thousand times as I have gloated over your beauty,
heard the music of your voice, touched your soft hand and looked
into your soul through those dear blue eyes. It must end. One hour
thus face to face we will speak, and never again by word or deed
recall that we are aught to one another. I have not asked if you
love me. How well I know the tragic truth! But you will tell me
once, that my ears may never forget the words on your lips."
"I love you, I love you, I-love-you!" she sobbed in anguish.
"We must never be together alone again," he sighed.
"No."
"We must not see each other any more."
"It is best," she said, with despair.
"I dare not touch your hand--good-by!" he cried, staggering to his
feet.
"Good-by, Frank, my hero, my love--my God!"
He took one step toward the door, but his feet carried him to her
side.
He trembled, hesitated, and then slowly drew her to his heart.
Her arms stole around his neck and her head drooped on his breast,
the perfume of her hair was in his nostrils, and their lips met in
burning kisses.
"God forgive us! It was more than mortal flesh could bear to go
without one moment of love's sweet life!" he cried. "And now we
must part."
He took her hands in his and gently kissed them, while she looked
away seeing only his face, for it had long since filled the world.
He turned abruptly into the hall, and, moving to the door with
swift step, he saw lying on the silver tray the card of the lawyer
he had met an hour ago. In a moment it flashed over him that Kate
was the unknown messenger. He had not dreamed her fortune of such
magnitude.
He seized the card and rushed back into the room.
"Is that your lawyer's name?" he gasped.
She smiled and nodded her head in assent.
"And I never dreamed it possible!"
He looked at her as though in a trance.
"Yes, I will confess now. You have confessed to me. My fortune
came direct from my grandmother, who willed me her farm on which
the oil was discovered. My father's fortune is worth perhaps five
hundred thousand dollars. Mine was worth about two million dollars.
I have given one to you. I may give you the other if you ask it.
One was all you asked."
Again he took her to his heart.
"I have misread the message. Such love is in itself divine, and
its own defense. You are mine by the higher law of life. I will not
give you up--you are mine, mine! I will defy the world. I loved my
child-wife. I was honest then. I will be honest now. I loved as a
boy loves. Now I am a man, with a man's fierce passions, and you
are the answer--strength calling to strength, deep answering unto
deep! Your eyes, my darling, flash the beauty of every flower that
blooms and every star of the sky; in your hair is the rose's breath
and the golden glory of the sun! I will not live with one woman
and love another."
And the twilight deepened into night while they held each other's
hands and smiled into each other's faces.
CHAPTER XII
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
When Gordon announced at the evening service that a million dollars
had been subscribed to the new "Temple of Man," and that he had
been constituted its sole trustee, the crowd burst into a storm of
applause.
In vain he raised his big muscular hand over the tumult.
Troops of young men and women with flushed faces, some laughing,
some crying, sprang from their seats, rushed to the platform and
seized his hand.
The strains of the national hymn suddenly burst from the crowd,
and they rose en masse singing it with triumphant peal. As its last
note died away a woman's voice started "Nearer, My God, to Thee,"
the people caught it instantly and its mighty chorus rolled
heavenward. The singing had in it the spontaneous rhythm of hearts
transported by resistless feeling. For half an hour they stood
and sang the old familiar hymns whose sentences were wet with the
tears and winged with the hopes and mysteries of their lives.
Instead of a sermon, Gordon read his resignation as pastor of the
Pilgrim Church.
And then, folding his hands behind him, in trumpet tones he cried:
"Next Sunday morning will be the last service I will ever conduct
in this church; the Sunday morning following, at eleven o'clock,
the first services of the 'Church of the Son of Man' will be held
in the old Grand Opera House. It will seat four thousand people.
All who wish to join this independent society are cordially invited
to be present and bring your friends. The work of building the
'Temple of Man' will begin at once. Within six months we hope to
lay its corner-stone."
The meeting was closed at once with the Doxology and Benediction.
The reporters crowded around him for fuller details. He refused
to give any further information. They interviewed every officer of
the church and congregation from whom any news might be secured,
and it was nine o'clock before the excitement had subsided and the
crowd left.
The organist and quartet choir lingered to rehearse their music
for the following Sunday.
Gordon retired to his study, where he had asked Kate to meet him
for an important conference.
The church opened on the cross street and stretched its barn shape
through the entire block. The study was beside the pulpit platform,
a little beyond the centre of the building. Behind it was the
Sunday-school and reading-room, opening on the rear.
Kate had the keys to the reading-room, which was under her direction,
and Gordon asked her to come to his study from the rear entrance
through the Sunday-school room that she might avoid the suspicion
of the reporters. For the same reason he did not wish to be seen
at her house. He had left the door of his study unlocked for her,
and she entered before the crowd had left the church.
Within a few moments from the time she unlocked the door of the
reading-room, Van Meter's detectives informed him that she was in
the pastor's study and that he had left the rear door open for her
to secretly enter.
The Deacon despatched one of his men with an anonymous note to
Ruth informing her that Gordon was in his study alone by secret
appointment with Kate Ransom, and giving to her duplicate keys to
every door in the church building.
The detective did not see Ruth, but the maid said she was at home,
and he handed her the package.
Gordon had telephoned to her briefly the facts of the excitement
of the morning, and told her he was so exhausted that he would not
return for dinner, but would take his meals at a hotel and come
home after the evening service.
When Ruth received the note and keys she was brooding over his absence
and peering in the depths of the widening gulf which separated them
in such a crisis of his life.
The note threw her into the wildest excitement. All the old fiery
temper and jealousy which she had kept smouldering in restraint
now burst its bounds.
Flushed and trembling she rushed from the house and soon reached
the church.
She opened the door gently, and with soft feline step was about to
enter the Sunday-school room to reach his study, when through the
glass sliding partition she heard the voice of Van Meter talking
in the dark to a detective and a reporter.
She listened intently.
"I wish you had a flashlight camera," he was saying. "His wife
will be here in a few minutes and the scene in that room would be
worth ten thousand dollars. I have a good photograph of the woman
you can use. You can get his anywhere."
"It will be a great scoop on the other fellows who will write up
the Temple without the Priestess!" the reporter whispered.
"I'd give a thousand dollars to see his face in the morning when he
picks up your paper and reads its headlines," chuckled the Deacon.
"His eloquence, his bullfrog voice, his curling locks, his splendid
eyes, will all be needed, and will all of them be inadequate to
the occasion."
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