THE SHORTHORN DEACON
Gordon and Overman came into town on the four o'clock express. They
sat down in opposite seats near the centre of the car.
Neither of them noticed Van Meter, who also lived at Babylon in the
summer, board the train as it pulled out of the station. He was a
pompous little man, short and red-faced, with gray side whiskers
and bald head. His eyes were sharp and beady and shined like
shoe-buttons. Piety and thrift were written all over him. As a
deacon he passed the bread and wine at the Lord's Table on Sunday,
with his black eyes half closed, dreaming of cornering the bread
market of the world on Monday. For him New York was the centre of
the universe, and the Stock Exchange was the centre of New York.
The rest of this earth was provincial, tributary soil. He had gone
abroad, but rarely ventured beyond Philadelphia or Coney Island on
this side. He was the presiding officer of the Stock Exchange and
the President of the Metropolitan Bible and Tract Society. He took
himself very seriously.
As they got out of the car at Long Island City, Gordon said to him:
"Deacon, I wish to have a talk with you tomorrow. Shall I call at
your home or office?"
"Come down to the office at two o'clock; I'll be out at night,"
Van Meter answered briskly.
The next day Gordon walked from the church down Fourth Avenue to
Union Square and down Broadway to the Battery. It was a glorious day
in early spring. The air had in it yet the cool breath of winter,
but the electric thrill of coming life was in the soft breezes
that came from the South, where flowers were already blooming and
birds singing. The hucksters were selling sweet violets and the
cry of the strawberry man echoed along the side streets.
Fourth Avenue was piled with builders' material. The old brick
homes were crumbling and steel-ribbed monsters climbing into the
sky from their sites.
"Progress everywhere but in the churches," muttered Gordon. "The
Church alone seems dead in New York."
Broadway was one vast river of humanity. As far as the eye could
reach the throng engulfed the pavements and overflowed into the
streets between the curbs, mingling with the mass of cars, cabs,
trucks and wagons. On either side towered the interminable miles
of business houses whose nerves and arteries reach to the limits
of the known world, savage and civilised. Behind those fronts sat
the engineers of industry with their hands on the throttles of the
world's machinery, their keen eyes and ears alert to every sound
of danger in the ceaseless roar around them.
Shadowy and far away seemed the Spirit world from those hurrying,
rushing, cursing, struggling men. And yet the earth was quivering
beneath them with the shock of spiritual forces. The age of miracles
was only dawning.
He felt like climbing to the tower of one of those great temples
of trade and shouting to the throng to lift up their heads from
the stones below and beyond the line of towering steel and granite
see the Glory of God. And as he thought how little that crowd would
heed it if he did, he felt himself in the grip of Titanic forces
of Nature sweeping through time and eternity, and that he was but
an atom tossed by their fury.
As he passed the City Hall his eye rested on the towering castles
of the metropolitan newspapers. He could feel in the air the throb
of their presses, the whir of their wheels within wheels telling
the story of a day's life, wet with tears of hope and love, or
poisoned with slander and falsehood, their minarets and domes the
flaming signs in the sky of a new power in history, a menace to
the life of the ancient Church and its priesthood. Was this power
a threat to human liberty, or the highest expression of its hope?
Only the future would reveal. What silent forces crouched behind
those towers with their throbbing cylinders the world could only
guess as yet.
He walked past old Castle Garden where so many weary feet have
landed and found hope.
His heart filled with patriotic pride. Far out in the harbour stood
Liberty Enlightening the World, lifting her torch among the stars,
her face calm and majestic, gazing serenely out to sea.
"Land of faith and hope--my country!" he exclaimed. "Here the
commonest man has risen from the dust and proved himself a king.
Home of the broken-hearted, the tyrant-cursed, the bruised, the
oppressed, within thy magic gates the miracle of life has been
renewed!"
He looked out on the great emerald harbour gleaming in the sunlight,
its sky-line white with clouds and penciled with the pennant-tipped
masts of a thousand ships flying the flags of every nation of the
earth. His soul was flooded again with the sense of the city's
imperial splendour, stretching out her hand to grasp the financial
scepter of the world, already the second city of the earth, a
kingdom mightier than Caesar ruled and richer than Croesus dreamed.
He came back to Wall Street, and, as he turned into the narrow
lane, felt its power shadow his imagination.
"After all," he muttered, "Van Meter is not far wrong in his idea
of the omnipotence of this street."
The Deacon's office was plainly furnished. He was seated at an
old-fashioned mahogany desk, evidently a relic of his Knickerbocker
past. Born in New York sixty years before, he was popularly reckoned
a multimillionaire, though his wealth was overestimated. Compared
to the big-brained, eagle-eyed men who had come from the West and
mastered Wall Street, Van Meter was really a pygmy.
He greeted Gordon politely.
"Delighted to welcome you, Doctor, to my office. This is the first
call you have ever honoured me with downtown."
"I've been to your home often, Deacon."
"But somehow you've always been shy of Wall Street," said Van Meter,
expansively. "I suppose you look on us down here somewhat as the
old-time preacher regarded the saloon-keeper. You should know us
better. This alley is the jugular vein of the nation, and the Stock
Exchange its heart. We have a President and Congress at Washington,
and some very handsome buildings there. It is supposed to be the
capital of the republic. A political myth! Here is the capital. The
money centre is the seat of government. The Southern Confederacy
failed, not for lack of soldiers or generals of military genius,
but because it had no money."
Van Meter's stature grew taller and his eyes larger as Gordon felt
the truth of his words.
"Well, Deacon, I wish to know you better. I'm afraid I've not always
been fair to you as the senior officer of the church and one of
its oldest members."
"I haven't worried over it," he replied quickly.
"I know you in your home life," Gordon continued. "You are a faithful
and tender husband and father. If you were to die to-morrow, your
servants would stand sobbing at the doorway when I entered. You
are one of the kindest men in your individual life."
"Thanks. I hardly thought you would say so much."
"Then you have misjudged me. The only criticism I've ever made
of you has been as a part of our social and economic order. This
is a question, it seems to me, we might differ about and still be
friends. Now, I wish you to tell me honestly, face to face, why
you object to me as the pastor of your church?"
"You wish me to be perfectly frank?" he asked, with his black eyes
twinkling.
"Perfectly so. You couldn't say anything that would anger me. I am
too much in earnest."
"Well, to begin with, you don't preach the simple gospel."
"No; but I do preach the gospel of Christ."
"Your reference to the strike amongst the women shirt-makers in
New York drove one of the richest men out of our church."
"Yes; I saw him jump up and go out during the service. The women
were making shirts for his house at thirty-five cents a dozen,
finding their own thread and using their own machines. I said if I
found one of those shirts in my house I'd put it in the fire with
a pair of tongs, and I would. I'd be afraid to touch a seam lest
I felt the throb of a woman's bruised fingers in it."
The Deacon softly stroked his whiskers.
"It was an unfortunate remark. He contributed $500 a year to the
church. He has gone where the simple gospel of Christ is preached."
"Yes, so simple that he can sleep through it and know that it will
never touch his life," Gordon said with a sneer. "What's the use to
talk about mustard plaster? I say apply it to the place that hurts."
"You preach Evolution. I don't like the idea that man is descended
from a monkey."
"The weight of scholarship sustains the theory."
"Well, my idea is, if it's true, the less said about it the better.
And then you lack dignity out of the pulpit."
"Even so, Deacon, the most dignified man I ever saw was a dead
man--a dead New Yorker. What we need in the church is life."
"But you have departed from the faith of our fathers."
"Perhaps," Gordon said, with a twinkle in his eye, "if you mean
our famous fathers who 'landed first on their knees and then on
the aborigines.'"
Van Meter ignored the remark.
"You said one day that in America we had but two classes, the masses
and the asses. That sentence cost the church a thousand dollars in
pew-rents. I think such assertions blasphemous."
"Well, it's true."
"I don't think so; and if it were, it don't pay to say such things."
"Am I only to preach the truths that pay?"
"We hired you to preach the simple gospel of Christ."
"Pardon me, Deacon; I am not your hired man. I chose this church
as the instrument through which I could best give my message to
the world. I answer to God, not to you. The salary you pay me is
not the wage of a hireling. My support comes from the free offerings
laid on God's altar."
"We call them pew-rents. You are trying to abolish this system,
as old as our life, and allow a mob of strangers to push and crowd
our old members out of their pews."
"I believe the system of renting pews un-Christian and immoral-a
mark of social caste."
"And that's why I think you're a little crazy. Even your best
friends say you're daft on some things."
"So did Christ's."
The Deacon's face clouded and his black eyes flashed.
"From denouncing private pews you have begun to denounce private
property. Our church is becoming a Socialist rendezvous and you
a firebrand." "Deacon, you have allowed your commercial habits to
master your thinking, your religion and your character. In your
home, you are a good man. In Wall Street," he smiled, "pardon me,
you are a highwayman, and you carry the ideals and methods of the
Street into your duties as a churchman."
"Pretty far apart for a pastor and deacon, then, don't you think?"
"You ran the preacher away who preceded me, too," mused Gordon.
The Deacon's eyes danced at this acknowledgment of his power.
"He was a little slow for New York. You are rather swift."
Gordon rose and looked down good-naturedly on the shining bald head
as he took his leave.
"I suppose we will have to fight it out?"
"It looks that way. My kindest regards to Mrs. Gordon."