THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON
But in addition to mills and the falls, Paterson offered another subject
of conversation. Only recently there had been completed there an
evangelical revival by one “Billy” Sunday, who had addressed from eight
to twenty thousand people at each meeting in a specially constructed
tabernacle, and caused from one to five hundred or a thousand a day to
“hit the trail,” as he phrased it, or in other words to declare that
they were “converted to Christ,” and hence _saved_.
America strikes me as an exceedingly intelligent land at times, with its
far-flung states, its fine mechanical equipment, its good homes and
liberal, rather non-interfering form of government, but when one
contemplates such a mountebank spectacle as this, what is one to say? I
suppose one had really better go deeper than America and contemplate
nature itself. But then what is one to say of nature?
We discussed this while passing various mills and brown wooden streets,
so poor that they were discouraging.
“It is curious, but it is just such places as Paterson that seem to be
afflicted with unreasoning emotions of this kind,” observed Franklin
wearily. “Gather together hordes of working people who have little or no
skill above machines, and then comes the revivalist and waves of
religion. Look at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. See how well Sunday did
there. He converted thousands.”
He smiled heavily.
“‘Billy’ Sunday comes from out near your town,” volunteered Speed
informatively. “He lives at Winona Lake. That’s a part of Warsaw now.”
“Yes, and he conducts a summer revival right there occasionally, I
believe,” added Franklin, a little vindictively, I thought.
“Save me!” I pleaded. “Anyhow, I wasn’t born there. I only lived there
for a little while.”
This revival came directly on the heels of a great strike, during which
thousands were compelled to obtain their food at soup houses, or to
report weekly to the local officers of the union for some slight dole.
The good God was giving them wrathful, condemnatory manufacturers, and
clubbing, cynical police. Who was it, then, that “revived” and “hit the
trail”? The same who were starved and clubbed and lived in camps, and
were railroaded to jail? Or were they the families of the bosses and
manufacturers, who had suppressed the strike and were thankful for past
favors (for they eventually won, I believe)? Or was it some intermediate
element that had nothing to do with manufacturers or workers?
The day we went through, some Sunday school parade was preparing. There
were dozens of wagons and auto-trucks and automobiles gaily bedecked
with flags and bunting and Sunday school banners. Hundreds, I might
almost guess thousands, of children in freshly ironed white dresses and
gay ribbons, carrying parasols, and chaperoned by various serious
looking mothers and elders, were in these conveyances, all celebrating,
presumably, the glory and goodness of God!
A spectacle like this, I am free to say, invariably causes me to scoff.
I cannot help smiling at a world that cannot devise some really poetical
or ethical reason for worshiping or celebrating or what you will, but
must indulge in shrines and genuflections and temples to false or
impossible ideas or deities. They have made a God of Christ, who was at
best a humanitarian poet—but not on the basis on which he offered
himself. Never! They had to bind him up with the execrable yah-vah of
the Hebrews, and make him now a God of mercy, and now a God of horror.
They had to dig themselves a hell, and they still cling to it. They had
to secure a church organization and appoint strutting vicars of Christ
to misinterpret him, and all that he believed. This wretched mountebank
“who came here and converted thousands”—think of him with his yapping
about hell, his bar-room and race-track slang, his base-ball vocabulary.
And thousands of poor worms who could not possibly offer one reasonable
or intelligible thought concerning their faith or history or life, or
indeed anything, fall on their knees and “accept Christ.” And then they
pass the collection plate and build more temples and conduct more
revivals.
What does the God of our universe want, anyway? Slaves? Or beings who
attempt to think? Is the fable of Prometheus true after all? Is
autocracy the true interpretation of all things—or is this an accidental
phase, infinitely brief in the long flow of things, and eventually to be
done away with? I, for one, hope so.
Beyond Paterson we found a rather good road leading to a place called
Boonton, via Little Falls, Singac, and other smaller towns, and still
skirting the banks of the Passaic River. In Paterson we had purchased
four hard-boiled eggs, two pies, four slices of ham and some slices of
bread, and four bottles of beer, and it being somewhere near noon we
decided to have lunch. The task of finding an ideal spot was difficult,
for we were in a holiday mood and content with nothing less than
perfection. Although we were constantly passing idyllic
scenes—waterfalls, glens, a canal crossing over a stream—none would do
exactly. In most places there was no means of bringing the car near
enough to watch it. One spot proved of considerable interest, however,
for, although we did not stay, in spying about we found an old
moss-covered, red granite block three feet square and at least eight
feet long, on which was carved a statement to the effect that this canal
had been completed in 1829, and that the following gentlemen, as
officers and directors, had been responsible. Then followed a long list
of names—Adoniram this, and Cornelius that, good and true business men
all, whose carved symbols were now stuffed with mud and dust. This same
canal was very familiar to me, I having walked every inch of it from New
York to the Delaware River during various summer holidays. But somehow I
had never before come upon this memorial stone. Here some twenty men, of
a period so late as 1829, caused their names to be graven on a great
stone which should attest their part in the construction of a great
canal—a canal reaching from New York Bay to the Delaware River—and here
lies the record under dust and vines! The canal itself is now entirely
obsolete. Although the State of New Jersey annually spends some little
money to keep it clean, it is rarely if ever used by boats. It was
designed originally to bring hard coal from that same region around
Wilkes-Barré and Scranton, toward which we were speeding. A powerful
railroad corporation crept in, paralleled it, and destroyed it. This
same corporation, eager to make its work complete, and thinking that the
mere existence of the canal might some day cause it to be revived, and
wanting no water competition in the carrying of coal, had a bill
introduced into the State legislature of New Jersey, ordering, or at
least sanctioning that it should be filled in, in places. Some citizens
objected, several newspapers cried out, and so the bill was dropped. But
you may walk along a canal costing originally fifty million dollars, and
still ornamented at regular intervals with locks and planes, and never
encounter anything larger than a canoe. Pretty farm houses face it now;
door yards come down to the very water; ducks and swans float on its
surface and cattle graze nearby. I have spent as much as two long
springtimes idling along its banks. It is beautiful—but it is useless.
We did eventually come to a place that suited us exactly for our picnic.
The river we were following widened at this point and skirted so near
the road that it was no trouble to have our machine near at hand and
still sit under the trees by the waterside. Cottages and tents were
sprinkled cheerily along the farther shore, and the river was dotted
with canoes and punts of various colors. Under a group of trees we
stepped out and spread our feast. It was all so lovely that it seemed a
bit out of fairyland or a sketch by Watteau. Franklin being a Christian
Scientist, it was his duty, as I explained to him, to “think” any flies
or mosquitoes away—to “realize” for us all that they could not be, and
so leave us to enjoy our meal in peace. Miss H—— was to be the
background of perfection, the color spot, the proof of holiday, like all
the ladies in Watteau and Boucher. The machine and Speed, his cap
adjusted to a rakish angle, were to prove that we were gentlemen of
leisure. On leaving New York I saw that he had a moustache capable of
that upward twist so admired of the German Emperor, and so now I began
to urge him to make the ends stand up so that he would be the embodiment
of the _distingué_. Nothing loath, he complied smilingly, that same
collie-like smile in his eyes that I so much enjoy.
It was Franklin who had purchased the eggs. He had gone across the
street in Paterson, his belted dust-coat swinging most impressively, and
entering a little quick lunch room, had purchased these same eggs.
Afterward he admitted that as he was leaving he noticed the black
moustached face of a cook and the villainous head of a scullion peering
after him from a sort of cook’s galley window with what seemed to him “a
rumor of a sardonic smile.” But suspecting nothing, he went his way.
Now, however, I peeled one of these eggs, and touching it with salt, bit
into it. Then I slowly turned my head, extracted as much as I could
silently with a paper napkin, and deposited it with an air of great
peace upon the ground. I did not propose to be the butt of any ribald
remarks.
Presently I saw Franklin preparing his. He crushed the shell, and after
stripping the glistening surface dipped it in salt. I wondered would it
be good. Then he bit into it and paused, took up a napkin with a very
graceful and philosophic air, and wiped his mouth. I was not quite sure
what had happened.
“Was your egg good?” he said finally, examining me with an odd
expression.
“It was not,” I replied. “The most villainously bad egg I have had in
years. And here it goes, straight to the fishes.”
I threw it.
“Well, they can have mine,” observed Miss H——, sniffing gingerly.
“What do you know about that?” exclaimed Speed, who was sitting some
distance from the rest of us and consuming his share. “I think the man
that sold you those ought to be taken out and slapped gently,” and he
threw his away. “Say! And four of them all at once too. I’d just like to
get a camera and photograph him. He’s a bird, he is.”
There was something amazingly comic to me in the very sound of Speed’s
voice. I cannot indicate just what, but his attempt at scorn was so
inadequate, so childlike.
“Well, anyhow, the fishes won’t mind,” I said. “They like nice, fresh
Franklin eggs. Franklin is their best friend, aren’t you, Franklin? You
love fishes, don’t you?”
Booth sat there, his esoteric faith in the wellbeing of everything
permitting him to smile a gentle, tolerant smile.
“You know, I wondered why those two fellows seemed to smile at me,” he
finally commented. “They must have done this on purpose.”
“Oh no,” I replied, “not to a full fledged Christian Scientist! Never!
These eggs must be perfect. The error is with us. We have _thought_ bad
eggs, that’s all.”
We got up and tossed the empty beer bottles into the stream, trying to
sink them with stones. I think I added one hundred stones to the bed of
the river without sinking a single bottle. Speed threw in a rock
pretending it was a bottle and I even threw at that before discovering
my mistake. Finally we climbed into our car and sped onward, new joys
always glimmering in the distance.
“Just to think,” I said to myself, “there are to be two whole weeks of
this in this glorious August weather. What lovely things we shall see!”