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.