THE MINE FOR THE GOLDEN ALTAR
Vedder Court was a very drunkard among tenement groups. Its decrepit old
wooden buildings, as if weak-kneed from dissipation and senile decay,
leaned against each other crookedly for support, and leered down, at the
sodden swarms beneath, out of broken-paned windows which gave somehow a
ludicrous effect of bleared eyes. A heartless civic impulse had once
burdened them with fire escapes, and these, though they were
comparatively new, had already partaken of the general decay, and
looked, with their motley cluttering of old bedding, and nondescript
garments hung out to dry, and various utensils of the kitchen and
laundry, and various unclassified junk, as if they were a sort of foul,
fungoid growth which had taken root from the unspeakable uncleanliness
within. There had once been a narrow strip of curbed soil in the centre
of the street, where three long-since departed trees had given the
quarter its name of “Court,” but this space was now as bare and dry as
the asphalt surrounding it, and, as it was too small even for the
purpose of children at play, a wooden bench, upon which no one ever sat,
as indeed why should they, had long ago been placed on it, to become
loose-jointed and weather-splintered and rotted, like all the rest of
the neighbourhood.
As for its tenants; they were exactly the sort of birds one might expect
to find in such foul nests. They were of many nations, but of just two
main varieties; stupid and squalid, or thin and furtive; but they were
all dirty, and they bore, in their complexions, the poison of crowded
breathing spaces, and bad sewerage, and unwholesome or insufficient
food.
Into this mire, on a day when melting snow had fallen and made all
underfoot a black, shining, oily, sticky canal, there drove an utterly
out-of-place little electric coupé, set low, and its glistening plate
glass windows hung with absurd little lace curtains held back by pink
ribbon bows. At the wheel was the fresh-cheeked Gail Sargent, in a
driving suit and hat and veil of brown, and with her was the
twinkling-eyed Rufus Manning, whose white beard rippled down to his
second waistcoat button. They drove slowly the length of the court and
back again, the girl studying every detail with acute interest. They
stopped in front of Temple Mission, which, with its ugly red and blue
lettering nearly erased by years of monthly scrubbings, occupied an old
store room once used as a saloon.
“So this is the chrysalis from which the butterfly cathedral is to
emerge,” commented Gail, as Manning held the door open for her, and
before she rose she peered again around the uninviting “court,” which
not even the bright winter sunshine could relieve of its dinginess;
rather, the sun made it only the more dismal by presenting the ugliness
more in detail.
“This is the mine which produces the gold which is to gild the altar,”
assented Manning, studying the sidewalk. “I don’t think you’d better
come in here. You’ll spoil your shoes.”
“I want to see it all this time because I’m never coming back,” insisted
Gail, and placed one daintily shod foot on the step.
“Then I’ll have to shame Sir Walter Raleigh,” laughed the
silvery-bearded Manning, and, to her gasping surprise, he caught her
around the waist and lifted her across to the door, whereat several
soiled urchins laughed, and one vinegary-faced old woman grinned, in
horrible appreciation, and dropped Manning a familiarly respectful
courtesy.
There was no one in the mission except a broad-shouldered man with a
roughly hewn face, who ducked his head at Manning and touched his
forefinger to the side of his head. He was placing huge soup kettles in
their holes in the counter at the rear of the room, and Manning called
attention to this.
“A practical mission,” he explained. “We start in by saving the bodies.”
“Do you get any further?” inquired Gail, glancing from the empty benches
and the atrociously coloured “religious” pictures on the walls to the
windows, past which eddied a mass of humanity all but submerged in
hopelessness.
“Sometimes,” replied Manning gravely. “I have seen a soul or two even
here. It is because of these two or three possibilities that the mission
is kept up. It might interest you to know that Market Square Church
spends fifteen thousand dollars a year in charity relief in Vedder Court
alone.”
Gail’s eyelids closed, her lashes curved on her cheeks for an instant,
and the corners of her lips twitched.
“And how much a year does Market Square Church take out of Vedder
Court?”
“I was waiting for that bit of impertinence,” laughed Manning. “I shall
be surprised at nothing you say since that first day when you
characterised Market Square Church as a remarkably lucrative enterprise.
Have you never felt any compunctions of conscience over that?”
“Not once,” answered Gail promptly. She had started to seat herself on
one of the empty benches, but had changed her mind. “If I had been given
to any such self-injustice, however, I should reproach myself now. I
think Market Square Church not only commercial but criminal.”
“I’ll have to give your soul a chastisement,” smiled Manning. “These
people must live somewhere, and because Vedder Court, being church
property, is exempt from taxation, they find cheaper rents here than
anywhere in the city. If we were to put up improved buildings, I don’t
know where they would go, because we would be compelled to charge more
rent.”
“In order to make the same rate of profit,” responded Gail. “Out of all
this misery, Market Square Church is reaping a harvest rich enough to
build a fifty million dollar cathedral, and I have sufficient disregard
for the particular Deity under whom you do business, to feel sure that
he would not destroy it by lightning. I want out of here.”
“Frankly, so do I,” admitted Manning; “although I’m ashamed of myself.
It’s all right for you, who are young, to be fastidious, but your Daddy
Manning is coward enough to want to make his peace with Heaven, after a
life which put a few blots on the book.”
She looked at him speculatively for a moment, and then she laughed.
“You know, I don’t believe that, Daddy Manning. You’re an old fraud, who
does good by stealth, in order to gain the reputation of having been
picturesquely wicked. Tell me why you belong to Market Square Church.”
“Because it’s so respectable,” he twinkled down at her. “When an old
sinner has lost every other claim to respectability, he has himself put
on the vestry.”
He dropped behind on their way to the door, to surreptitiously slip
something, which looked like money, to the man with the roughly hewn
countenance, and as he stood talking, the Reverend Smith Boyd came in,
not quite breathlessly, but as if he had hurried.
“I knew you were here,” he said, taking Gail’s slender hand in his own;
then his eyes turned cold.
“You recognised my pink ribbon bows,” and she laughed up at him frankly.
“You haven’t been over to sing lately.”
“No,” he replied, seemingly blunt, because he could not say he had been
too busy.
“Why?” this innocently round-eyed.
Even bluntness could not save him here.
“Will you be at home this evening?” he evaded, still with restraint.
“I’ll have our music selected,” and, in the very midst of her
brightness, she was stopped by the sudden sombreness in the rector’s
eyes.
“Eight o’clock?”
“That will be quite agreeable.”
Simple little conversation; quite trivial indeed, but it had been
attended by much shifting thought. To begin with, the rector regretted
the necessity of disapproving of a young lady so undeniably attractive.
She was a pleasure to the eye and a stimulus to the mind, and always his
first impulse when he thought of her was one of pleasure, but in the
very moment of taking her hand, he saw again that picture of Gail,
clasped in the arms of the impulsive young man from home. That picture
had made it distasteful for him to call and sing. He had not been too
busy! Another incident flashed back to him. The night of the toboggan
party, when she had stood with her face upturned, and the moonlight
gleaming on her round white throat. He had trembled, much to his later
sorrow, as he fastened the scarf about her warm neck. However, she was
the visiting niece of one of his vestrymen, who lived next door to the
rectory. She was particularly charming in this outfit of brown, which
enhanced so much her rich tints.
Gail jerked her pretty head impatiently. If the Reverend Smith Boyd
meant to be as sombre as this, she’d rather he’d stay at home. He was
dreadfully gloomy at times; though she was compelled to admit that he
was good-looking, in a manly sort of way, and had a glorious voice and a
stimulating mind. She invariably recalled him with pleasure, but
something about him aggravated her so. Strange about that quick
withdrawal of his hand. It was almost rude. He had done the same thing
at the toboggan party. He had fastened her scarf, and then he had jerked
away his hands as if he were annoyed! However, he was the rector, and
her Uncle Jim was a vestryman, and they lived right next door.
“You just escaped a blowing up, Doctor Boyd,” observed “Daddy” Manning,
joining them, and his eyes twinkled from one to the other. “Our young
friend from the west is harsh with the venerable Market Square Church.”
“Again?” and the Reverend Smith Boyd was gracious enough to smile. “What
is the matter with it this time?”
“It is not only commercial, but criminal,” repeated Manning, with a sly
smile at Gail, who now wore a little red spot in each cheek.
“In what way?” and the rector turned to her severely.
“The mere fact that your question needs an answer is sufficient
indication of the callousness of every one connected with Market Square
Church,” she promptly informed him. “That the church should permit a
spot like this to exist, when it has the power to obliterate it, is
unbelievable; but that it should make money from the condition is
infamous!”
The Reverend Smith Boyd’s cold eyes turned green, as he glared at this
daring young person. In offending the dignity of Market Square Church
she offended his own.
“What would you have us do?” he quietly asked.
“Retire from business,” she informed him, nettled by the covert sneer at
her youth and inexperience. She laid aside a new perplexity for future
solution. In moments such as this the rector was far from ministerial,
and he displayed a quickness to anger quite out of proportion to the
apparent cause. “The whole trouble with Market Square Church, and of the
churches throughout the world, is that they have no God. The Creator has
been reduced to a formula.”
Daddy Manning saved the rector the pain of any answer.
“You’re a religious anarchist,” he charged Gail.
Her face softened.
“By no means,” she replied. “I am a devoted follower of the Divine
Spirit, the Divine Will, the Divine Law; but not of the church; for it
has forgotten these things.”
“You don’t know what you are saying,” the rector told her.
“That isn’t all you mean,” she retorted. “What you have in mind is that,
being a woman, and young, I should be silent. You would not permit
thought if you could avoid it, for when people begin to think, religion
lives but the church dies; as it is doing to-day.”
Now the Reverend Smith Boyd could be triumphant. There was a curl of
sarcasm on his lips.
“Are you quite consistent?” he charged. “You have just been objecting to
the prosperity of the church.”
“Financially,” she admitted; “but it is a spiritual bankrupt. Your
financial prosperity is a direct sign of your religious decay. Your
financial bankruptcy will come later, as it has done in France, as it is
doing in Italy, as it will do all over the world. Humanity treats the
church with the generosity due a once valuable servant who has out-lived
his usefulness.”
“My dear child, humanity can never do without religion,” interposed
Daddy Manning.
“Agreed,” said Gail; “but it outgrows them. It outgrew paganism,
idolatry, and a score of minor phases in between. Now it is outgrowing
the religion of creed, in its progress toward morality. What we need is
a new religion.”
“You are blaming the church with a fault which lies in the people,”
protested the rector, shocked and disturbed, and yet feeling it his duty
to set Gail right. He was ashamed of himself for having been severe with
her in his mind. She was less frivolous than he had thought, and what
she needed was spiritual instruction. “The people are luke-warm.”
“What else could they be with the watery spiritual gruel which the
church provides?” retorted Gail. “You feed us discarded bugaboos,
outworn tenets, meaningless forms and ceremonies. All the rest of the
world progresses, but the church stands still. Once in a decade some
sect patches its creed, and thinks it has been revolutionary, when in
fact it has only caught up with a point which was passed by humanity at
large, in its advancing intelligence, fifty years before.”
“I am interested in knowing what your particular new religion would be
like,” remarked Daddy Manning, his twinkling eyes resting affectionately
on her.
“It would be a return to the simple faith in God,” Gail told him
reverently. “It is still in the hearts of the people, as it will always
be; but they have nowhere to gather together and worship.”
Daddy Manning laughed as he detected that bit of sarcasm.
“According to that we are wasting our new cathedral.”
“Absolutely!” and it struck the rector with pain that Gail had never
looked more beautiful than now, with her cheeks flushed and her brown
eyes snapping with indignation. “Your cathedral will be a monument,
built out of the profits wrung from squalor, to the vanity of your
congregation. If I were the dictator of this wonderful city of
achievement, I would decree that cathedral never to be built, and Vedder
Court to be utterly destroyed!”
“It is perhaps just as well that you are not the dictator of the city.”
The young Reverend Smith Boyd gazed down at her from his six feet of
serious purpose, with all his previous disapproval intensified. “The
history of Market Square Church is rich with instances of its usefulness
in both the spiritual and the material world, with evidence of its power
for good, with justification for its existence, with reason for its
acts. You make the common mistake of judging an entire body from one
surface indication. Do you suppose there is no sincerity, no conscience,
no consecration in Market Square Church?” His deep, mellow baritone
vibrated with the defence of his purpose and that of the institution
which he represented. “Why do you suppose our vestrymen, whose time is
of enormous value, find a space amid their busy working hours for the
affairs of Market Square Church? Why do you suppose the ladies of our
guild, who have agreeable pursuits for every hour of the day, give their
time to committee and charity work?” He paused for a hesitant moment.
“Why do you suppose I am so eager for the building, on American soil, of
the most magnificent house of worship in the world?”
Gail’s pretty upper lip curled.
“Personal ambition!” she snapped, and, without waiting to see the pallor
which struck his face to stone, she heeled her way out through the mud
to her coupé.