THE BLACK CAT
When Van Meter heard of the scheme to appeal directly to the people
to build the temple in defiance of the Board of Trustees, who were
the legal managers of the church's property, he was thunderstruck.
When the Sunday arrived he came half an hour earlier than usual
to watch every incident of the day with his little black eyes open
their widest.
It was a crisp November morning. Recent rains had washed the streets
clean, the wind was blowing fresh, the sky was cloudless and the
sun lit in cool gleaming splendour every avenue and park of the
great city.
The people had returned from their country places and the hotels
were thronged with merchants and visitors from the four quarters
of the earth.
An enormous crowd squeezed into every inch of space the police
would allow to be filled in the church, and hundreds were turned
away, unable to gain admission.
Gordon had spent the entire day and night before in an agony of
preparation, and he had not left his study until two o'clock Sunday
morning. He took his seat in the pulpit trembling with anxiety. The
organ burst into the strains of the Doxology and the crowd rose.
He stood with folded hands looking over the sea of faces, and his
heart began to ache with an agony of suspense and fear of failure.
The singing ceased, and every head bent as he lifted his big hand,
with its blue veins standing out like a net of steel wires, and
pronounced a brief invocation.
When he read the hymn, the people felt in his voice the shock of a
storm of pent-up emotion. He read it slowly, beautifully, and with
exquisite tenderness.
While they sang he sat with his elbow on the little table on which
stood a vase of roses, his face resting thoughtfully on his left
hand, studying the people, his soul on fire with the sense of their
infinite needs.
Crouching low in his seat under the left gallery, he saw a man who
had confessed a great wrong and was searching for peace.
At a post on the right, in a seat where he had been accustomed
to see a working-girl for the past two years, a stranger sat. The
girl was found dead in her room the week before. She had lost her
place because she wore shabby clothes, and she wore shabby clothes
because she had been sending her earnings to her home in Connecticut,
supporting an aged father, mother and a worthless brother.
The rich, the poor, the old, the young, the outcast, the publican
and sinner, the strange woman and the sweet face of innocent girlhood
were there looking up at him for guidance and help.
But outnumbering all were massed rows of clean-faced young men whom
his enthusiasm had drawn resistlessly. His heart went out to them
in yearning sympathy, fighting their battles in the morning of life
with the powers and princes of the spirit world for the mastery of
the soul.
He felt the sledge-hammer blow of their united heart-beat strike
his brain with the pain of a bludgeon.
The agony of fear was now upon him. He saw Van Meter sitting in
the central tier of seats watching him sharply out of his little
half-closed eyes, the incarnate sign of the mortal enmity of
organised wealth, and he must appeal for money.
His great crowd had infinite needs, but much money they did not
have. He thought with hope of the twenty millions of people who
read his sermons on Monday morning, and of a dozen big-hearted men
of wealth he knew in the city, and he was cheered.
He had prepared a most powerful sermon on the text, "The common
people heard Him gladly." He felt they could not resist his appeal.
And yet in spite of himself his gaze would wander back to Van Meter,
drawn by his black eyes as by the charm of an adder.
The Deacon was wondering, as he watched him, what could possibly be
the outcome of this daring insanity. He had been fooled so often by
the power of this athletic dreamer, he feared to predict the end,
though he felt certain what it would be.
The services were unusually impressive. Special music had been
prepared by the choir and rendered magnificently. Gordon read
the hymns and Scripture with a feeling so intense the people were
thrilled. His prayer had been simple and heartfelt, and had melted
scores of people to tears.
He rose and faced the crowd with the keenest sense of solemnity.
The hour was propitious; he could feel the hearts of the people
beat responsive to his slightest tone, word or gesture.
As he swept rapidly through his introduction and into his theme
he knew he was holding these thousands of breathless listeners in
the hollow of his hand. He could feel their heartstrings quiver
as he touched them with tenderness or struck them with some mighty
thought.
His soul was singing with triumph, when suddenly a ripple of laughter
ran along the front tier of the gallery, and a hundred heads were
turned upward to see what the disturbance meant.
Had a bolt of lightning struck his spinal column he could not have
been more shocked.
He repeated mechanically the last sentence in a dazed sort of
way, and a louder ripple of laughter ran the entire length of both
galleries and echoed through the main floor.
He stopped, fumbled at his notes, and turned red. The people
before him were smiling and craning their necks to see more plainly
something on the wide platform of the pulpit.
He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head
in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.
He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little black cat
with big yellow eyes.
She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised
his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on
this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat
accompaniment to the functions of a priest.
When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him
at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:
"Meow!"
And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.
At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind,
he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in
helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty
crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power
of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that
cat and regain control of his audience.
He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like
hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.
He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side,
opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:
"M-e-o-w!"
Which unmistakably meant, "I'm very sorry you don't like me as well
as I do you."
Again the crowd laughed.
Gordon stepped backward and bent slowly over the cat. She did not
look very bright, but she was too shrewd for that movement.
The crowd watched breathlessly. He grasped at her.
She sprang quickly to one side, bowed her back, bushed her tail,
and scampered across the platform crying:
"Pist! pist!" and ran up the column that supported the end of the
gallery.
The preacher's empty hand struck the bare floor, and the crowd was
convulsed.
A young man sitting in the gallery near the column caught the cat
as she climbed over the rail, ran to a window and was about to
throw her down to the pavement twenty feet below.
Gordon lifted his hand and cried:
"Don't do that, young man--don't hurt her; bring her here."
It had, suddenly occurred to the preacher as he watched Van Meter
bending low in his pew overcome with laughter, that he had stooped
to this contemptible trick to defeat him and make the solemnest
hour of life ridiculous. He knew the Deacon had come to the church
earlier than usual. He was sure he had done it.
A curious smile began to play about his lips, and a cold glitter
came into his steel-gray eyes.
He took the cat in his arms and stroked her gently. She purred
and rubbed her face against his and moved her feet up and down,
sheathing and unsheathing her claws in his robe with evident delight.
The crowd grew still. Instinctively they knew that something big
was happening in the soul of the man they were watching.
"This little cat, my friends," he said, "is an innocent actor
in a tragedy this morning, but she is the agent of one who is not
innocent."
He fixed his gaze on Van Meter, who stirred with uneasy amazement.
"They say that cats sometimes incarnate the souls of dead men. This
one is the soul of a living man, my good friend, Deacon Arnold Van
Meter, who had her brought here this morning."
The Deacon turned red, drew his head down as though he would pull
it within his shoulders, and shrank from the gaze of the crowd.
Gordon handed the cat back to the young man, whispered something
to him, and he disappeared.
Then, walking up to the pulpit, he snatched off its crimson cloth
and threw it behind him. He ran his big muscular hands into the
throat of his robe, ripped it open, tore it from his arms, crushed
it into a shapeless mass and threw it on the floor.
He snatched up the golden lectern pulpit, hurled it back into the
comer, and moved the little table with its vase of roses into its
place. He did this quickly, without a word or an exclamation to
break the awful stillness with which the crowd watched him.
They knew that a tremendous drama was being enacted before them.
So intense was the excitement the people on the back tiers of the
galleries sprang impulsively to their feet and stood on the pews.
Van Meter's eyes danced with wild amazement as he straightened
himself up, sure Gordon had gone mad. But when he advanced to the
edge of the platform, looking a foot taller in his long black Prince
Albert coat, folded his giant arms across his breast, the nostrils
of his great aquiline nose dilated, his lips quivering, and looked
straight into Van Meter's face, the Deacon saw there was dangerous
method in his madness.
His eyes blazing with pent-up passion, he began in deliberate tones
an extempore address.
In a moment the air was charged with the thrill of his powerful
personality wrought to the highest tension of emotional power.
[Illustration: "Ripped it open, tore it from his arms, and threw
it on the floor."]
"My friends," he began, "there are moments in our experience when
we live a lifetime--moments when the hair of our heads turns gray,
a soul dies within a laving body, or a dead one rises, shakes off
its grave clothes, and lifts its head in the sunlight.
"From this hour I am a free man. I will live what I am, and speak
what I feel to be the truth. The truth shall be its own justification.
I will wear no robes, mumble no ceremonies, call no man Rabbi, and
permit no man to call me Rabbi. I proclaim the universal priesthood
of believers.
"While I am your pastor the Kitchen Mission in which we have gathered
the poor on the East Side will be closed at the hour of service,
and all God's children shall enter this house because it is their
Father's!"
Van Meter shrank back in his pew as a ripple of applause ran round
the galleries.
"If men ask a sign to-day whether the Church of the living God
exists in New York, what is our answer?
"Look about you. New York is the centre of the commerce, society,
art, literature and politics of the Western World. Her port, in
which fly the flags of every nation, is the gateway of two worlds.
The feet of four millions daily press her pavements. Her walls frame
the furnace in which are being tried by fire the faiths, hopes and
dreams of the centuries past and to come. In mere volume of population
she is the equal of three great Atlantic states: Virginia, North
and South Carolina. One man alone of her millions of citizens
possesses wealth greater than the valuation of all the property
of the State of North Carolina, the cradle of American democracy,
containing fifty thousand square miles and supporting a population
of a million six hundred thousand.
"In the roar of this modern Babylon beats the fevered heart of
modern civilisation. He who wins that heart holds the key to the
century. Imperial Rome, mistress of the world, was a pygmy compared
to this.
"And what are we doing?
"Our Protestant churches have thirty-five thousand men and one
hundred thousand women enrolled out of two millions on Manhattan
Island. Our invested capital is one hundred million dollars, our
annual gifts four millions, and we fail to hold one-half the children
born in our own homes.
"As a remedy for this the Trustees proposed to me to sell out and
move uptown to vacant lots! They say the people have gone. They
have come--come in such numbers and with such problems, churches
have fled before the avalanche of humanity.
"Within a stone's throw of this church are districts in which ten
men and women sleep in one room twelve feet square. New York is
the most crowded city in the world. London has seven people to a
house; we have sixteen. In two houses were found the other day one
hundred and thirty-six children. Death stalks through these crowded
alleys with scythe ever swinging.
"Shall we, too, desert?
"I hear the tread of coming thousands from these shadows who will
laugh at your flag, who know not the name of your President, or
your God, whose heavy hands upon your doors will summon you before
the tribunal of the knife, the torch, the bomb to make good your
right to live.
"When your population shall number ten millions, and the gulf between
the rich and poor shall have become impassable, some gigantic corner
shall have doubled the price of bread, starvation spread her black
wings, and idle thousands sullen and desperate begin to look with
darkening brows on your unprotected wealth, then will come the test
of modern society.
"This growth of the city is as resistless and inevitable as the
movement of time. Why people continue to turn their backs upon the
open fields and crowd into this great foul, rattling, crawling,
smoking, stinking, ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, oozing
poison at every pore, is beyond my ken, but they come. They come
each year in hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, crowding
the crowded trades, crowding closer the crowded dens in which human
beings whelp and stable as beasts. They leave friends and neighbours
who love them, leave earth for hell, and still they come. The
tenement, huge monster of modern greed, engulfs them, and the word
home is stricken from their tongue.
"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.