|THE Sexton Avenue Assembly hall was a large building of red brick,
with wide windows and a tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the
Avenue in a block of bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house
from the corner. Aidee rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room,
but his study was in the Assembly building. The house belonged to
one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote
articles for _The Chronicle_, and verses which were military at one
time, nay, even ferocious, which afterward reflected her pensioned
widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She hoped her drawing-room might
be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. She was tall, thin,
grey-haired, and impressive.
The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a
kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater,
but some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly
organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who
delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations
of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There
was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule.
Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and
rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had
fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye.
There was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted
for excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large,
good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her
trail, Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling
mills.
T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he
liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was
on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded
from his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission
into Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set
forever on higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs.
Tillotson's drawing-room, and held conversation.
Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by
means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature
by the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with
natural gas and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern,
intensely modern.”
Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man
of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism
there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he
came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his
life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war,
leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and
“Lolly,” on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on
the same small farm.
The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and
then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in
that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by
the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions
objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school
commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left
it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm,
the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud
of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period
followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed
himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces.
Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and
solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out.
“Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!”
“We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.”
But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared,
a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce,
affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him
to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a
pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with
a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed
miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men.
“You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric
youth,” said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!”
There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level
horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in
astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in
an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart.
“By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell,
do you? Got any idea where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Ho! You have!”
“Some hot chunks of it in this town.”
“You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent,
and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof
off. What church are you, anyhow?”
“I'm no church. I'm a freak.”
“Ho! You don't say!”
“I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost,
strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.”
But they did not find him.
Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee.
But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him.
The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was
a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which
followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a
burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience,
and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself
loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and
good may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,”
says the penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of
unuse, if they came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse
there was, and irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt.
“The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that
title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become
a tyranny.”
In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is
certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before
him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey
volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near
the beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have
mainly given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man,
has known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker
becoming a larger glow,--the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better
moments than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The
other has seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and
brooding and pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour.
Two lamps--the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.”
So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting
multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated
thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and
died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier
and more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still.
“Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an
elemental unit.”
If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and
to care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him,
Port Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing
the Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in
opposition next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth
and nail on local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the
mystery.
“T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its
way. Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton
Avenue Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port
Argent concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid
man it found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for
rhetorical speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted
him a definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it
found him rather repellent.
The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days
had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics
started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one
newspaper, _The Chronicle_, and sometimes elected a few councilmen,
sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the
Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by
over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and
disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied
to a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They
generally do.
Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became
familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He
walked much about the city, watching faces--dingy and blurred faces,
hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no
equality among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew
to be a kind of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them.
Personally, he was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about
other men by too much direct contact with them, they put him out. He
looked at them hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him
companionable. His solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his
conscience.
Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her
aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring
bells for a place of residence.
He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall
with its platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his
wide-windowed study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind,
scatter his seed, and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could
do no more than throw his personality into the welter of things, and
leave the worth of it to other decisions than his own. Here his travels
were ended, except as one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and
timeless.
In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by
two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and
overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of
the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner
Republic,” might be called signboards, or statements of condition.
Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,”
crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations,
showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal
sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured
humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate
championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they
were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of
their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the
platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written
“Allen.”
“Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you
sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish,
violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and
my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does
not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For
though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp
this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's
desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but
human,--and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.”
The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen,
present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his
speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse
drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the
next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had
ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was
no jest in that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly
into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern.
The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street
and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll
glittered with malice.
“Say, that man's name was Hicks.”
“What of it?”
“Why, he's one of your heelers.”
“Don't know him.”
“Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in
Muscadine Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way
back under your gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and
drinking eloquence like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.”
“Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?”
Carroll shook his head.
“Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never
saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular.
No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet.”
Carroll laughed and flitted away.
Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody
cared what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his
brother's keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business
to do his best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a
likeable man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee
had seen men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest.
If somebody from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's
paragraphs by applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business
of Carroll's either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with
seeing that they said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused
them to say.
But the thing tasted badly.
He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a
man translated “Down with the devil!” into “Go shoot Wood!” and became
ready to take another's life and give over his own in exchange.
He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door,
followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping
Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and
giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's “brotherly
love” was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan
that his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played
dolls with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the “Standard Oil” by way
of relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with
thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident.
A lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no
opinions, except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was
better than these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And
who were the bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men
followed him now or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman
like the murderer, Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care
for him, Aidee. They liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew
of no one person in Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was
a collection of the half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated,
the drunken with a little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches,
and a percentage of socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch
plaids. What dedication was there in any of them?
What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is
genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was
one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One
could not deny that.
Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success,
when he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day
in Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on
the edge of his claim--which was paying at that time--and felt the same
mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis.
Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning
stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why
at other times their voices were effortless and sweet.
On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss
of Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was
final, and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest
percentage of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move
men had come, and brought with it the longing to move them to certain
ends, and he had thought:
“All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is
afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but
neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of
the other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the
solitary issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my
message.” Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and
had faith.
Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith
and doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them
bacteria. They passed from man to man--they floated in the air--one
caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera--they were
apt to be epidemic.
And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them
disease. The one we must have, the other we must be rid of.
So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out
gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown
by the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street
car, a headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent
people were talking of the Wood murder--some gabbling about it like Mrs.
Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated
me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!”
The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his
life--harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in the
street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door,
and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the
house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an
hour he took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson
drawing-room.