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.”
And deliberately he put on his hat and left the room.
The net result of the meeting was a vote to reduce the pastor’s salary a thousand dollars and add it to the music fund; and Van Meter hired two detectives to watch the minister.
CHAPTER VII — A STOLEN KISS
For several weeks after Gordon flung down the gauntlet to his Board of Trustees and began his battle for supremacy, his wife maintained a strange attitude of silence and reserve.
She had hired a nurse and resumed her study of music. Her contralto voice, one of great depth and sweetness, he had admired extravagantly in the days of their courtship, but she had ceased to sing of late years. He always listened to her lullaby to the children with fascination. The soft round notes from her delicate throat seemed full of magic and held him in a spell.
Before he left for his study one morning, she looked up into his face with yearning in her dark eyes.
“Come into the parlour, Frank; I will sing for you.”
She took her seat at the piano, and her white tapering fingers ran lightly over the keys with deft, sure touch.
“What would you like to hear?” she asked timidly, from beneath her long lashes, with the old haunting charm in her manner.
“Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!’ No poet ever dreamed that song as you have sung it, Ruth.”
Never did he hear her sing with such feeling. Her Voice, low, soft and caressing with the languid sensuousness of the South, quivered with tenderness, and then rose with the storm and broke in round, deep peals of passion until he could hear the roar of the surf and feel its white spray in his face. Her erect lithe figure, with the small white hands and wrists flashing over the keys, the petite anxious face with stormy eyes and raven hair, seemed the incarnate soul of the storm.
“Glorious, Ruth!” he cried, with boylike wonder.
And then she bent over the piano and burst into tears.
“Why, what ails you, my dear?”
“Oh, Frank, I’m selfish to leave the children to a nurse and study music.”
“Nonsense. Self-sacrifice is rational only as it is the highest form of self-development. It is your duty to develop yourself. Self is the source of all knowledge and strength; books are its record; the world exists only through its eyes.”
“I’m afraid of it. I wish to give all to you and the children, not to myself. I want you all to myself, and you are growing away from me. I know it, and it is breaking my heart.”
He laughed at her fears, kissed her and went to his study.
Since his break with his Board, he had grown daily in power—power in himself and over his people. Conflict was always to him the trumpet call to heroic deeds. The knowledge that Van Meter was now his open enemy and that he was attempting to build a hostile faction within the church roused his soul to its depths. Thrown back thus upon himself and his appeal to the greater tribunal of the people, he preached as never before in his life. His sermons had the vigour and prophetic fire of the crusader. His crowds increased until it was necessary to ask for police aid to control the exits and entrances to the building. Long before the hour of service, a dense mass of men and women were packed against the doors.
Van Meter watched this growth of influence with wonder and disgust. He determined to leave no stone unturned that might put a stumbling-block in his way. His detectives had failed as yet to find any clue that might compromise him. Once they rushed to his office with the information that they had tracked him to a questionable house. The Deacon called up his son-in-law and asked excitedly for a reporter to write a thrilling piece of news. The reporter found that Gordon had called at the house, but in answer to a summons to see a dying girl.
Van Meter insisted upon the item being printed, but the young city editor scowled and threw it in the waste basket.
The Deacon at length discovered Ruth’s jealousy and located the woman who was its object. A costly bouquet of flowers was placed on Gordon’s desk in the study every morning, and an enormous one blossomed every Sunday morning and evening on the little table beside his chair in the pulpit. The sexton could not tell who paid the bills. A florist sent them.
The Deacon had been bitterly chagrined at the outcome of his movement in reducing the salary. At first the people heard it with amazement, and then, when Gordon informed a reporter of the fight in progress and it was published, they laughed, and a cheque was sent him for two thousand dollars to make good the deficit and add one thousand more.
The day after this advent he had a hard day’s work. A procession of people drained him of every cent of money he could spare and every ounce of sympathy and shred of nerve force in his body.
He had tried the year before to establish a free employment bureau to relieve him of this strain. But the bureau added to his work. He had to close it. It had required the employment of five assistants, and even these could make little impression on the list of applicants who crowded the rooms and blocked the pavements from morning until night.
When the sick and hungry and out-of-works had been disposed of after a fashion, the miscellaneous crowd filed in.
An old college mate came in shivering in a dirty suit. He fumbled at his hat nervously until he caught Gordon’s eye and saw him smile.
“Well, by the great hornspoon, Ned, you look like you’ve fallen into a well!”
“Worse’n that, Frank; I slipped clean into hell. I got with some fellows, went on a drunk, stayed a month and lost my place. I want you to loan me money to get to Baltimore, buy a decent suit of clothes, and I’ll get another position. Yes, and I’ll lift my head up and be a man.”
Gordon sent out to the bank and got the money for him.
Another seedy one softly explained to him that he was a fellow countryman from Indiana. Gordon gave him a quarter.
A sobbing woman closely veiled he recognised as a bride he had married in the church after prayer meeting two weeks before.
“Doctor,” she said in a whisper, “I’ve called to beg you please not to allow any one to know of my marriage. My husband turned out to be a burglar. He stole ten thousand dollars from an old lady who is one of our boarders, and skipped. He married me to get the run of the house. He tried to marry her first, though she was seventy-five years old, got in her room last night, stole the money, and now he’s gone. I’m heartbroken!”
“What! because he’s gone?”
“No; because I was a fool. I know he has a dozen wives. He was so handsome.”
“Madam, I’m not very sorry for you. I tried to prevent you marrying him that night. I begged you to go back to Jersey City to your own church.”
“You will keep it secret, Doctor?” she begged.
“I’ll not publish it. But the certificate is on file in the Hall of Records. Any one can see it who wishes. It is beyond my control.”
An old woman with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly face timidly approached. She had been overlooked.
“Doctor, you’re my last chance. I come up to New York to see my son-in-law, as grand a rascal as ever lived. He owes me a thousand dollars and won’t pay it. We lost our crop down in Old Virginia. So I scraped up the money and got here to squeeze what he owed out of that rascal. Now he’s turned me out into the street and moved where I can’t find him. I’m starvin’ to death. I ain’t got a cent to go home; an’ what’s worse’n all, I got a letter this mornin’ tellin’ me my idiot boy’s down sick an’ cryin’ for me. I’m the only one can do anything for him. He can’t understand nobody else.”
Her voice broke and she bit her lips to keep back the tears.
“I’ve begged all day. Everybody laughs at me. I heard you preach one Sunday. I knowed you wouldn’t laugh at me. I want you to loan me twenty dollars to get home quick. I’ll start the minute I can get to the train, an’ I’ll pay you back if I have to sell my feather beds. Now, will you do it?”
“Well, a more improbable story was never told a New Yorker, but something whispers to me you’re telling the truth.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
She drew a deep breath, and cried with streaming eyes:
“Oh, Lord, have mercy on my poor soul, that I doubted You, and thought You had forsaken me!”
Gordon handed her the cheque.
“I’m going to kiss you!” she fairly screamed.
Before he could lift his hand or protest, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
As he took her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst into hysterical laughter.
Gordon rose and escorted the woman to the door with courtesy.
“You will find the bank at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street—the Garfield National. Write me how your son is when you reach home, and send me the money when you are able.”
“I will. God bless you, sir,” she answered with fervour.
When he returned to his study, Ruth was still hysterical, and he sat down without a word and began to write.
“Frank, I’m sorry to have been so rude,” she said at length.
“Is that all?”
“No; I’m sorry I humiliated myself by spying on you.”
She sat twisting her handkerchief, glancing at him timidly.
“And you can’t understand how deeply you have wounded me by such an act, Ruth. I hope you have heard all that passed here this morning.”
“It’s strange how I always seem to be in the wrong. Frank, I am very sorry. You must forgive me. And I have another confession. I’ve been receiving anonymous letters about you for the past three weeks. I was too weak and cowardly to show them to you. It was one of these letters which caused me to come here this morning. And now I’ve wounded you, and alienated your heart from me more than ever. I feel I shall die.”
She began to sob.
“Come, Ruth, you must conquer this insanity. Naturally you are bright, witty, cheerful and altogether charming. Jealousy reduces you to a lump of stupidity.”
“You do forgive me?”
“Yes; and don’t, for heaven’s sake, do such a thing again. Ask me what you wish to know. I am not a liar; I will tell you the truth.”
“But I don’t want to hear it if it’s cruel,” she protested.
“The truth is best, gentle or cruel.”
She kissed him impulsively and left.
He sat for an hour, tired, sore and brooding over this scene with his wife. He caught the perfume of the flowers on his desk, and in the tints of the roses saw the warm blushes of the woman who had sent them. Her voice was friendly and caressing and her speech, words of sweetest flattery—flattery that cleared the stupor from his brain and gave life and new faith in himself and his work; flattery that had in it a mysterious personal flavour that piqued his curiosity and fed his vanity. How clearly he recalled her—the superb figure, with rounded bust and arms full and magnificent, in the ripe glory of youth, her waving auburn hair so thick and long it could envelop half her body. Often he had watched the light blaze through its red tints while he talked to her of his dreams, her lips half parted with lazy tenderness and ready with gentle words. He recalled the rhythmic music of her walk, strong and insolent in its luxury of health. And he was grateful for the cheer she had brought into his life.
CHAPTER VIII — SWEET DANGER
Kate Ransom had attempted no close analysis of her absorbing interest in Gordon’s work. The change in her life from weariness to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette. Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.
She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman’s soul responded with eager interest.
She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor’s dummy. Her nature was warm, rich and passionate, and she was consumed with longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.
Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert. She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.
Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood, brooded in tenderness over her new work—the tortures of half-starved mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and say, “I understand you; come with me.” His eloquence and emotional thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew not whence nor why.
Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were drawing him with resistless magnetism.
As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over Kate’s determination to stay, but there was no help for it.
July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.
The babies began to die by thousands—more than two thousand a week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city’s wagons raked the little black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters’ Field, one on top of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies, or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets, pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.
Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full. She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park which stretched back from the water’s edge into the towering hills.
He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor space. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were sparkling with pleasure.
The man’s eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.
He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never seen God’s green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted childhood.
His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.
“A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows with a touch of divine beauty.”
“It does break one’s heart to see such children, doesn’t it?” she answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute to her beauty.
“Are we all ready?” Gordon cried.
“If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?”
“No; I couldn’t persuade her. She took our chicks to the seashore.”
As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of the music.
In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.
“Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!” Kate exclaimed.
But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the creamy lace on her full bosom rise and fall.
They sat down on a rock beside a brook.
“What an inspiration to see this old yet ever new miracle of regeneration unfold under the magic touch of a woman’s hand!”
“You mean a man’s hand,” she replied. “This would never have interested me except that you led me to see it.”
“Then we’ve helped one another. I’m beginning to feel you are indispensable. I wonder if you, too, will leave us after awhile as so many pass on.”
“No; this has become my very life,” she soberly answered, looking down at the ground and then into his face with frank, open-eyed pleasure.
He was silent for several minutes and then softly laughed.
“What is it?” she cried.
“You could never guess.”
She lifted her superb arms, showing bare to the elbow, and felt of the mass of auburn hair. “That load of red hay about to fall?”
“Don’t be sacrilegious. No.”
“Harness broken anywhere?” She felt of her belt, and ran her hands down the lines of her beautiful figure, eyeing him laughingly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, sinking his voice to its lowest note of expressive feeling, while a whimsical smile played round the corners of his eyes. “Sitting here in the woods by your side on this glorious summer day, your eyes looked so blue in the creamy satin of your face, I suddenly thought I smelled the violets with which God mixed their colours.”
“You think of such silly things,” she said with mock severity.
“There’s nothing silly about it. Beauty is an attribute of the divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman’s face or form or eyes.”
She lowered her head.
“Do you know the old legend of the opal?” he asked.
He took some stones from his pocket and held in the light an opal of rare luster.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she cried.
“And its story is as beautiful as its face. Listen: A sunbeam lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising moon and the golden glory of the sunset.”
“I believe you made that up,” she laughed.
“I wish I were poet enough.”
“I had no idea you dreamed of such romantic nonsense.”
“Yes, I dream many things. I had a funny dream about you the other night.”
“Tell me what it was,” she begged.
“I dare not.”
“I thought you would dare anything.”
“No; you see, dreams are such intimate, unconventional mysteries. Dreams have no regard for law or custom The soul and the body seem equally free and without sin or shame. I have a curious feeling of awe about sleep and dreams. It’s the surest evidence I have of immortality and the reality of a spiritual life. It is to me the prophecy of the ideal world, too, in which we will dare to live some day what we really are, without pretence or hypocrisy—live that deep secret inner life we try sometimes to hide from the eye of God.”
“And you will not even give me a hint of this dream?”
“No. It was very foolish, but very charming and beautiful. It was in part a picture from that dream which made me laugh awhile ago about your eyes.”
“I think it mean in you to tell me that much and no more.”
“I would tell you if I dared. I may dare some day.”
She was afraid to ask him after that, and yet something within cried for joy.
They rose, gathered the children for dinner, ands after three hours in the woods, returned to the city as the twilight softly fell over its ragged steel and granite sky-line.
“You must take tea with us to-night,” she said, as they stepped from the boat.
His wife would not return for supper and he consented.
It was not the first time he had spent an hour at the table of the Ransom household. Mrs. Ransom deemed herself honoured by his visits, and his chats with the invalid father about books were bright spots in his life.
Kate had sent the stringed band from the boat to the house and stationed them in the conservatory opening into the dining-room. The tender strains of the music, the splash of a fountain mingled with the songs of birds in their cages, the gleam of silver and diamond flash of cut glass, gave Gordon’s senses a soothing contrast to the wild beauty of the woods. His nature responded to art and luxury as quickly as to the sensuous voice of Nature in the glory of her summer’s splendour.
There was something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel, that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings. Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean.
When Kate appeared, dressed for tea, simply but richly, with her splendid neck and shoulders bare and little ringlets of hair curling about her face as though scorched by the warmth of the red blood below, he felt the picture complete.
She chatted with him before entering the dining-room.
Her manner was always flattering and frankly gracious, but to-night there was an added note of warmth and familiar comradeship. Never had he seen her so charming and so resistless. Always intensely conscious of her sex, she seemed to have the power to-night of communicating to the man before her that consciousness so intimately, so directly and yet so delicately that he was led captive.
With scarcely a spoken word their relationship leaped the space of years. The quiver of her eyelid, the dilation of a nostril, little inarticulate exclamations, the turn of her head, the rising and falling of her bosom, the flash of her violet eyes, the subtle perfume of her hair or the graceful movement of her magnificent form spoke the language of life deep and rhythmic which no words have ever expressed.
He went home, on fire with the dream of an ideal life and work with such a woman of supreme beauty.
CHAPTER IX — THE SPIDER
The passing of a year added immensely to the fame of the pastor of the Pilgrim Church. His sermons now reached twenty millions of people through the daily press every Monday morning. It had become necessary to issue tickets of admission to the members and admit them by a small door that was cut beside the large ones.
Van Meter had ceased to be of sufficient importance for serious notice. The growth of Gordon’s influence within the year had been so rapid, he found he had set out to fight a flea with artillery.
The old man felt his eclipse with bitterness. He had quit talking much, but writhed in silent fury at the sight of this tall athlete with his conquering gray eyes and smooth, serious face. Yet he was a regular attendant. The preacher’s eloquence, the vibrant tones of his voice, full of passion, or trembling with prophetic zeal, and the whole drama of a living militant church with this daring revolutionist at its head, risen from the grave of the old, fascinated him in spite of his hatred.
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.