TOO MANY MEN
“A conscience must be a nuisance to a rector,” sympathised Gail Sargent,
as she walked up the hill beside the Reverend Smith Boyd.
The tall, young rector shifted the thin rope of the sled to his other
hand.
“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with
a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that
charge, but he reflected that it was unwise to assume the speech worth
serious consideration. Moreover, he had come to this toboggan party for
healthful physical exercise!
“Then you’re guilty of an epigram,” retorted Gail, who was annoyed with
the Reverend Smith Boyd without quite knowing why. “You can’t believe
all you are compelled, as a minister, to say.”
“That,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd coldly, “is a matter of
interpretation.” He commended himself for his patience, as he proceeded
to instruct this mistaken young person. She was a lovable girl, in spite
of the many things he found in her of which to disapprove. “The eye of
the needle through which the camel was supposed not to be able to pass,
was, in reality, a narrow city gate called the Needle’s Eye.”
Gail looked at him with that little smile at the corners of her red
lips, eyelids down, curved lashes on her cheeks, and beneath the lashes
a sparkle brighter than the moonlight on the snow crystals in the
adjoining field.
“It seems to me there was something about wealth in that metaphor,” she
observed, her round eyes flashing open as she smiled up at him. “If it
was so difficult even in those days for a rich man to enter the Kingdom
of Heaven, how can a rich church hope to enter the spirit of the
gospel?”
The Reverend Smith Boyd hastily, and almost roughly, drew her aside, as
a long, low bob-sled, accompanied by appropriate screams, came streaking
down the hill, and passed them. They both turned and followed its
progress down the narrowing white road, to where it curved away in a
silver line far at the bottom of a hill. Hills and valleys, and fences
and trees, and even a distant stream were covered with the fleecy mantle
of winter, while high over head in a sky of blue, hung a round, white
moon, which flooded the country-side with mellow light, and strewed upon
earth’s fresh robe a wealth of countless sparkling gems.
“This is a wonderful sermon,” mused Gail; then she turned to the rector.
She softened toward him, as she saw that he, too, had partaken of the
awe and majesty of this scene. He stood straight and tall, his
splendidly poised head thrown back, and his gaze resting far off where
the hills cut against the sky in tree-clad scallops.
“It is an inspiration,” he told her, with a tone in his vibrant voice
which she had not heard before; and for that brief instant these two,
between whom there had seemed some instinctive antagonism, were nearer
in sympathy than either had thought it possible to be. Then the Reverend
Smith Boyd happened to remember something. “The morality or immorality
of riches depends upon its use,” he sonorously stated, as he stepped out
into the road again, dragging his sled behind him, following the noisy,
loitering crowd with the number two bob-sled. “Market Square Church,
which is the one I suppose you meant in your comparison with the rich
man, intends to devote all the means with which a kind Providence has
blessed it, to the glory of God.”
“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still
annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.
He turned to her almost savagely.
“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.
“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she
heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has
practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three
principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken
away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better
and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”
Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently,
and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide
leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from
under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which
nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow,
made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through
forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically
onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the
president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market
Square Church.
“That used to be lots of fun,” remembered Gail, looking after her Uncle
Jim in envy.
“Market Square Church has dispensed millions in charity,” the rector
felt it his duty to inform her, as they started up the hill again.
“If it’s like our church at home it costs ninety cents to deliver a
dime,” she retorted, bristling anew with bygone aggravations. “So long
as you can deliver baskets of provisions in person, it is all right, but
the minute you let the money out of your sight it filters through too
many paid hands. I found this out just before I resigned from our
charity committee.”
He looked at her in perplexity. She was so young and so pretty, so
charming in the ermine which framed her pink face, so gentle of speech
and movement, that her visible self and her incisive mind seemed to be
two different creatures.
“Why are you so bitter against the church?” and his tone was troubled,
not so much about what she had said, but about her.
“I didn’t know I was,” she confessed, concerned about it herself. “All
at once I seem to look on it as an old shoe which should be cast aside.
It is so elaborate to do so little good in the world. Morality is on the
increase, as any page of history will show.”
“I believe that to be true,” he hastily assured her, glad to be able to
agree with her upon something.
“But it is in spite of the church, not because of it,” she immediately
added. “You can’t say that there is a tremendous moral influence in a
congregation which numbers eight hundred, and sends less than fifty to
services. The balance show their devotion to Christianity by a quarterly
check.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd felt unfairly hit.
“That is the sorrow of the church,” he sadly confessed; “the
lukewarmness of its followers.”
She felt a trace of compunction for him; but why had he gone into the
ministry?
“Can you blame them?” she demanded, as much aggrieved as if she had
suffered a personal distress. “Not so long ago, the governing body of
the church held a convention in which the uppermost thought was this
same lukewarmness. It was felt, and acknowledged, that the church was
losing its personal hold on its membership, and that something should be
done about it; yet that same body progressed no further in this problem
than to realise that something should be done about it; and spent hours
and hours wrangling over whether banana wine could be used for the
sacrament in Uganda, where grapes do not grow, and where every bottle of
grape wine carried over the desert represents the life of a man. Of what
value is that to religion? How do you suppose Christ would have decided
that question?”
The rector flushed as if he had been struck, and he turned to Gail with
that cold look in his green eyes.
“That is too deep a subject to discuss here, but if you will permit me,
I will take it up with you at the house,” he quietly returned, and there
was a dogged compulsion in his tone.
“I shall be highly interested in the defence,” accepted Gail, with an
aggravating smile.
There seemed to be but very little to say after that, and they walked
silently up the hill together towards the yellow camp fire, fuming
inwardly at each other. Near the top of the hill, her ermine scarf came
loose at the throat, and, with her numbed hands, she could not locate
the little clasp with which it had been held.
“May I help you?” offered the rector, constraining himself to
politeness.
“Thank you.” She was extremely sweet about it, and he reached up to
perform the courtesy. The rounded column of her neck was white as marble
in the moonlight, and, as he sought the clasps, his fingers, drawn from
his woollen gloves, touched her warm throat, and they tingled. He
started as if he had received an electric shock, and, as he looked into
her eyes, a purple mist seemed to spring between them. He mechanically
fastened the clasps, though his fingers trembled. “Thank you,” again
said Gail, and he did not notice that her voice was unusually low. She
went on over to the group gathered around the fire, but the Reverend
Smith Boyd stood where she had left him, staring stupidly at the ground.
He was in a whirl of bewilderment, amid which there was some unreasoning
resentment, but beneath it all there was an inexplicable sadness.
“Just in time for the Palisade Special, Gail,” called Lucile Teasdale.
“I don’t know,” laughed Gail. “I think of going on a private car this
trip,” and she sought among the group for distraction from certain
oppressive thought. Allison, and Lucile and Ted and Arly, were among the
more familiar figures; besides were a cherub-cheeked young lady in a
bear skin, to whom Ted Teasdale was pretending to pay assiduous
attention; and the thoughtful Willis Cunningham; and Houston Van Ploon,
who was a ruddy-faced young fellow with an English moustache, and a
perpetual air of having just come from his tailor’s; and a startling
Adonis, with pink cheeks and a shining black goatee and a curly
moustache, and large, round, black eyes, which were deep, and full of
almost anything one might wish to put into them. This astoundingly
fascinating gentleman had been proudly introduced as Dick Rodley, by
Arlene, early in the evening, with an air which plainly stated that he
was a personal discovery for which she gave herself great credit. At
present, however, he was warming the slender white hands of Lucile
Teasdale. Now he sprang up and came towards Gail.
“The Palisade Special will not start without Miss Sargent,” he declared,
bending upon her an ardent gaze, and bestowing upon her a smile which
displayed a flash of perfect white teeth.
Gail breathlessly thought him the most dangerously handsome thing she
had ever seen, but she missed the foreign accent in him. That would have
made him complete.
“I’m sorry that the Palisade Special will be delayed,” she coolly told
him, but she tempered the deliberateness of that decision with an upward
and sidelong glance, which she was startled to recognise in herself as
distinct coquetry. She concluded, however, on reflection, that this was
only a just meed which no one could withhold from this resplendent
creature.
“You haven’t the heart to refuse,” protested handsome Dick, coming
nearer, and again smiling down at her.
“I have a prior claim,” laughed Allison, stepping up and taking her by
the arm. “It’s my turn to guide Miss Sargent on the two-passenger sled.”
There was something new about Allison to-night. There was the thrill and
the exultation of youth in his voice, and twenty years seemed to have
been dropped from his age. There was an intensity about him, too, and
also a proprietor-like compulsion, which decided Gail on a certain
diversion she had entertained. She was oppressed with men to-night. The
world was full of them, and they had closed too nearly around her.
Suddenly she broke away with a laugh, and, taking the two-passenger sled
from Smith Boyd, who still stood in preoccupation at the edge of the
group, she picked it up and ran with it, and threw herself face forward
on it, as she had done when she was a kiddy, and shot down the hill, to
the intense disapproval of the Reverend Boyd! Dick Rodley, ever alert in
his chosen profession, grabbed a light steel racer from the edge of the
bank, and, with a magnificent run, slapped himself on the sled, and
darted in pursuit! The rector’s lip curled the barest trace at one
corner, but Edward E. Allison, looking down the hill, grinned, and lit a
cigar.
“Ted Teasdale, come right over here,” ordered Lucile.
“Can’t,” carelessly returned Ted. “I’m having a serious flirtation with
Miss Kenneth.”
“You have to stop, and flirt with me,” Lucile insisted, and going over,
she slipped a hand within his sleeve, and passed the other arm
affectionately around Marion Kenneth. “Gail stole the ornament.”
“Serves you right,” charged Arly Fosland. “You stole him from me. Come
on, Houston, bring out the Palisade Special.”
Houston Van Ploon, who was a brother to all ladies, obediently dragged
forward the number two bob-sled, and set its nose at the brow of the
hill, and the merry mob piled on.
“Coming Allison?” called Cunningham. “There’s room for you both,
Doctor.”
“I don’t think I’ll ride this trip, thanks,” returned Allison, and, as
the rector also declined with pleasant thanks, Allison gave the voyagers
a hearty push, and walked back to the camp fire.
“I received the ultimatum of your vestry to-day, Doctor Boyd,” observed
Allison when they were alone. “Still that eventual fifty million.”
“Well, yes,” returned the rector briskly, and he backed up comfortably
to the blaze. He was a different man now. “We discussed your proposition
thoroughly, and decided that, in ten years, the property is worth fifty
million to you, for the purpose you have in mind. Consequently why take
less.”
Allison surveyed him shrewdly for a moment.
“That’s the argument of a bandit,” he remarked. “Why accept all that the
prisoner has when his friends can raise a little more?”
“I don’t see the use of metaphor,” retorted the rector, who dealt
professionally in it. “Business is business.”
Allison grunted, and flicked his ashes into the fire.
“By George, you’re right,” he agreed. “I’ve been trying to handle you
like a church, but now I’m going after you like the business
organisation you are.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd reddened. The charge that Market Square Church
was a remarkably lucrative enterprise was becoming too general for
comfort.
“The vestry has given you their decision,” he returned, standing stiff
and straight, with his hands clasped behind him. “You may pay for the
Vedder Court tenement property a cash sum which, in ten years, will
accrue to fifty million dollars, or you may let it alone,” and his tone
was as forcefully crisp as Allison’s, though he could not hide the
musical timbre of it.
“I won’t pay that price, and I won’t let the property alone,” Allison
snapped back. “The city needs it.”
For a moment the two men looked each other levelly in the eyes. There
seemed to have sprang up some new enmity between them. A thick man with
a stubby moustache came puffing up to the fire, and sat down on his sled
with a thump.
“Splendid exercise,” he gasped, holding his sides. “I think about a week
of it would either reduce me to a living skeleton, or kill me.”
“Your vestry’s an ass,” Allison took pleasure in informing him.
“Same to you and many of them,” puffed Jim Sargent. “What’s the trouble
with you? Trying to take a business advantage of a church.”
“I’d have a better chance with a Jew,” was Allison’s contemptuous reply.
“Oh, see here, Allison!” remonstrated Jim Sargent seriously. He even
rose to his feet to make it more emphatic. “You mustn’t treat Market
Square Church with so much indignity.”
“Why not? Market Square Church puts itself in a position to be
considered in the light of any other grasping organisation.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd, finding in himself the growth of a most
uncloth-like anger, decided to walk away rather than suffer the
aggravation which must ensue in this conversation. Consequently, he
started down the hill, dragging Jim Sargent’s sled behind him for
company. There were no further insults to the church, however.
“Jim, what are the relations of the Towando Valley to the L. and C.?”
asked Allison, offering Sargent a cigar.
“Largely paternal,” and the president of the Towando Valley grinned. “We
feed it when it’s good, and spank it when it cries.”
“Hold control of the stock?”
“No, only its transportation,” returned Sargent complacently.
“Stock is a good deal scattered, I suppose.”
“Small holdings entirely, and none of the holders proud,” replied
Sargent. “It starts no place and comes right back, and the share-holders
won’t pay postage to send in their annual proxies.”
“Then the stock doesn’t seem to be worth buying,” observed Allison, with
vast apparent indifference.
“Only to piece out a collection,” chuckled Sargent. “I didn’t know you
were interested in railroads.”
“I wasn’t a week ago,” and Allison looked out across the starry sky to
the tree-scalloped hills. “With the completion of the consolidation of
New York’s transportation system, and the building of a big central
station, I thought I was through. It seemed a big achievement to gather
all these lines to a common centre, like holding them in my hand; to
converge four millions of people at one point, to handle them without
confusion, and to re-distribute them along the same lines, looked like a
life’s work; but now I’m beginning to become ambitious.”
“Oh, I see,” grinned Jim Sargent. “You want to do something you can
really call a job. If I remember rightly, you started with an equipment
of four horse cars and two miles of rusted rail. What do you want to
conquer next?”
Allison glanced down the hill, then back out across the starlit sky.
Some new fervor had possessed him to-night which made him a poet, and
loosened the tongue which, previous to this, could almost calculate its
utterances in percentage.
“The world,” he said.