THE RECTOR KNOWS
The Reverend Smith Boyd came down to breakfast with a more or less
hollow look in his face, and his mother, inspecting him keenly, poured
his coffee immediately. There was the trace of a twinkle in her eyes,
which were nevertheless extremely solicitous.
“How is your head?” she inquired.
“All right, thank you.” This listlessly.
“Are you sure it doesn’t ache at all?”
The Reverend Smith Boyd dutifully withdrew his mind from elsewhere, to
consider that proposition justly.
“I think not,” he decided, and he fell into exactly such a state of
melancholy, trifling with his grape fruit, as Mrs. Boyd wished to test.
She focussed her keen eyes on him microscopically.
“Miss Sargent is coming back to-night; on the six-ten train.”
There was a clatter in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s service plate. He had
been awkward with his spoon, and dropped it. He made to pick it up, but
reached two inches the other side of the handle. Mrs. Boyd could have
laughed aloud for sheer joy. She made up her mind to do some energetic
missionary work with Gail Sargent at the first opportunity. The foolish
notions Gail had about the church should be removed. Mrs. Boyd had long
ago studied this matter of religion, with a clear mind and an honest
heart. It was a matter of faith, and she had it; so why be miserable!
Her reverie was broken by the calm and mellow voice of her son.
“That is delightful news,” he returned with a frank enthusiasm which was
depressing to his mother.
“I think I shall have the Sargents over to dinner,” she went on,
persisting in her hope.
“That will be pleasant.” Frank again, carefree, aglow with neighbourly
friendliness; even affection!
Mrs. Boyd had nothing more to say. She watched her son Tod start
vigorously at his grape fruit, with a vivacity which seemed to indicate
that he might finish with the rind. He drew his eggs energetically
toward him, buttered a slice of toast, and finished his breakfast.
Suddenly he looked at his watch.
“I have an extremely busy day before me,” he told her briskly. “I have
Vedder Court this morning, some calls in the afternoon, and a mission
meeting at four-thirty. I might probably be late for dinner,” and
feeling to see if he had supplied himself with handkerchiefs, he kissed
his mother, and was gone without another word about Gail! She could have
shaken him in her disappointment. What was the matter with Tod?
The Reverend Smith Boyd sang as he went out of the door, not a tune or
any set musical form, but a mere unconscious testing of his voice. It
was quite unusual for him to sing on the way to Vedder Court, for he
devoted his time to this portion of his duties because he was a
Christian. He had sympathy, more than enough, and he both understood and
pitied the people of Vedder Court, but, in spite of all his intense
interest in the deplorable condition of humanity’s weak and helpless, he
was compelled to confess to himself that he loathed dirt.
Vedder Court was particularly perfect in its specialty this morning. The
oily black sediment on its pavements was streaked with iridescence, and
grime seemed to be shedding from every point of the drunken old
buildings, as if they had lain inebriated in a soaking rain all night,
and had just staggered up, to drip. They even seemed to leer down at the
Reverend Smith Boyd, as if his being the only clean thing in the street
were an impertinence, which they would soon rectify. It had been
comparatively dry in the brighter streets of New York, but here, in
Vedder Court, there was perpetual moisture, which seemed to cling, and
to stick, and to fasten its unwholesome scum permanently on everything.
Never had the tangle of smudge-coated children seemed so squalid; never
had the slatternly women seemed so unfeminine; never had the spineless
looking men seemed so shuffling and furtive and sodden; never had the
whole of the human fungi in Vedder Court seemed so unnecessary, and
useless, and, the rector discovered in himself with startled contrition,
so thoroughly not worth saving, body or soul!
A half intoxicated woman, her front teeth missing and her colourless
hair straggling, and her cheekbones gleaming with the high red of
debauchery, leered up at him as he passed, as if in all her miserable
being there could be one shred, or atom, to invite or attract. A
curly-headed youngster, who would have been angelically beautiful if he
had been washed and his native blood pumped from him, threw mud at the
Reverend Smith Boyd, out of a mere artistic desire to reduce him to
harmony with his surroundings. A mouthing old woman, with hands clawed
like a parrot’s, begged him for alms, and he was ashamed of himself that
he gave it to her with such shrinking. The master could not have been
like this. A burly “pan handler” stopped him with an artificial whine. A
cripple, displaying his ugly deformity for the benefit and example of
the unborn, took from him a dole and a wince of repulsion.
“The poor ye have always with ye!” For ages that had been the excuse for
such offences as Vedder Court. They were here, they must be cared for
within their means, and no amount of pauperising charity could remove
them from the scheme of things. In so far, Market Square Church felt
justified in its landlordship, that it nursled squalor and bred more.
Yet, somehow, the rector of that solidly respectable institution was not
quite satisfied, and he had added a new expense to the profit and loss
account in the ledger of this particular House of God. He had hired a
crew of forty muscular men, with horses and carts, and had caused them
to be deputised as sanitary police, and had given them authority to
enter and clean; which may have accounted for the especially germ laden
feel of the atmosphere this morning. Down in the next block, where the
squad was systematically at work, there were the sounds of countless
individual battles, and loud mouthings of the fundamental principles of
anarchy. A government which would force soap and deodorisers and
germicides on presumably free and independent citizens, was a government
of tyranny; and it had been a particular wisdom, on the part of the
rough-hewn faced man who had hired this crew, to select none but
accomplished brick dodgers. In the ten carts which lined the curb on
both sides, there were piled such a conglomerate mass of nondescript
fragments of everything undesirable that the rector felt a trace better,
as if he had erased one mark at least of the long black score against
himself. Somehow, recently, he had acquired an urgent impulse to clean
Vedder Court!
He turned in at one of the darkest and most uninviting of the rickety
stairways. He skipped, with a practised tread, the broken third step,
and made a mental note to once more take up, with the property
committee, the battle of minor repairs. He stopped at the third landing,
and knocked at a dark door, whereupon a petulant voice told him to come
in. The petulant voice came from a woman who sat in a broken rockered
chair, with one leg held stiffly in front of her. She was heavy with the
fat which rolls and bulges, and an empty beer pail, on which the froth
had dried, sat by her side. On the rickety bed lay a man propped on one
elbow, who had been unshaven for days, so that his sandy beard made a
sort of layer on his square face. The man sat up at once. He was a
trifle under-sized, but broad-shouldered and short-necked, and had
enormous red hands.
“How are you to-day, Mrs. Rogers?” asked the rector, sitting on a
backless and bottomless chair, with his hat on his knees, and holding
himself small, with an unconscious instinct to not let anything touch
him.
“No better,” replied the woman, making her voice weak. “I’ll never know
a well day again. The good Lord has seen fit to afflict me. I ain’t
saying anything, but it ain’t fair.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd could not resist a slight contraction of his
brows. Mrs. Rogers invariably introduced the Lord into every
conversation with the rector, and it was his duty to wrestle with her
soul, if she insisted. He was not averse to imparting religious
instruction, but, being a practical man, he could not enjoy wasting his
breath.
“There are many things we can not understand,” he granted. “What does
the doctor say about your condition?”
“He don’t offer no hope,” returned the woman, with gratification. “This
knee joint will be stiff till the end of my days. If I had anything to
blame myself with it would be different, but I ain’t. I say my prayers
every night, but if I’m too sick, I do it in the morning.”
“Can that stuff!” growled the man on the bed. “You been prayin’ once a
day ever since I got you, and nothin’s ever happened.”
“I’ve brought you a job,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd promptly. “I
have still ten places to fill on the sanitary squad which is cleaning up
Vedder Court.”
The man on the bed sat perfectly still.
“How long will it last?” he growled.
“Two weeks.”
“What’s the pay?”
“A dollar and a half a day.”
The man shook his head.
“I can’t do it,” he regretted. “I don’t say anything about the pay, but
I’m a stationary engineer.” He was interested enough in his course of
solid reasoning to lay a stubby finger in his soiled palm. “If I take
this two weeks’ job, it’ll stop me from lookin’ for work, and I might
miss a permanent situation.”
The rector suppressed certain entirely human instincts.
“You have not had employment for six months,” he reminded Mr. Rogers.
“That’s the reason I can’t take a chance,” was the triumphant response.
“If I’d miss a job through takin’ this cheap little thing you offer me,
I’d never forgive myself; and you’d have it on your conscience, too.”
“Then you won’t accept it,” and the rector rose, with extremely cold
eyes.
“I’d like to accommodate you, but I can’t afford it,” and the man
remained perfectly still, an art which he had brought to great
perfection. “All we need is the loan of a little money while I’m huntin’
work.”
“I can’t give it to you,” announced the Reverend Smith Boyd firmly.
“I’ve offered you an opportunity to earn money, and you won’t accept it.
That ends my responsibility.”
“You’d better take it, Frank,” advised the woman, losing a little of the
weakness of her voice.
“You ’tend to your own business!” advised Mr. Rogers in return. “You’re
supposed to run the house, and I’m supposed to earn the living! Reverend
Boyd, if you’ll lend me two dollars till a week from Saturday—”
“I told you no,” and the rector started to leave the room.
There was a knock at the door. A thick-armed man with a short, wide face
walked in, a pail in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other. On the
back of his head was pushed a bright blue cap, with “Sanitary Police” on
it, in tarnished braid. Mr. Rogers stood up.
“What do you want?” he quite naturally inquired.
“Clean up,” replied the sanitary policeman, setting down his pail and
ducking his head at the rector, then mopping his brow with a bent
forefinger, while he picked out a place to begin.
“Nothin’ doing!” announced Mr. Rogers, aflame with the dignity of an
outraged householder. “Good-night!” and he advanced a warning step.
The wide set sanitary policeman paused in his survey long enough to wag
a thick forefinger at the outraged householder.
“Don’t start anything,” he advised. “There’s some tough mugs in this
block, but you go down to the places I’ve been, and you’ll find that
they’re all clean.”
With these few simple remarks, he turned his back indifferently to Mr.
Rogers, and, catching hold of the carpet in the corner with his fingers,
he lifted it up by the roots.
“There’s no use buckin’ the government,” Mr. Rogers decided, after a
critical study of the sanitary policeman’s back, which was extremely
impressive. “It’s a government of the rich for the rich. Has a poor man
got any show? I’m a capable stationary engineer. All I ask is a chance
to work—at my trade.” This by an afterthought. “If you’ll give me two
dollars to tide me over—”
The Reverend Smith Boyd stepped out of the way of the sanitary
policeman, and then stepped out of the door.
“And you call yourself a minister of the gospel!” Mr. Rogers yelled
after him.
That was a sample of the morning’s work, and the Reverend Smith Boyd
felt more and more, as he neared luncheon time, that he merited some
consideration, if only for the weight of the cross he bore. There were
worse incidents than the abuse of men like Rogers; there were the
hideous sick to see, and the genuinely distressed to comfort, and
depthless misery to relieve; and any day in Vedder Court was a terrific
drain, both upon his sympathies and his personal pocket.
He felt that this was an exceptionally long day.
Home in a hurry at twelve-thirty. A scrub, a complete change of
everything, and a general feeling that he should have been sterilised
and baked as well. Luncheon with the mother who saw what a long day this
was, then a far different type of calls; in a sedate black car this
time, up along the avenue, and in and out of the clean side streets,
where there was little danger of having a tire punctured by a wanton
knife, as so often happened in Vedder Court. He called on old Mrs.
Henning, who read her Bible every day to find knotty passages for him to
expound; he called on the Misses Crasley, who were not thin but bony,
who sat frozenly erect with their feet neatly together and their hands
in their laps, and discussed foreign missions with greedy relish; he
spent a half hour with plump Mrs. Rutherford, who shamelessly hinted
that a rector should be married, and who was the worried possessor of
three plump daughters, who did not seem to move well from the shelves;
he listened to the disloyal confessions of Mrs. Sayers, who at heart
liked her husband because he provided her so many faults to brood upon;
he made brief visits with three successive parishioners who were sweet,
good women with a normally balanced sense of duty, and with two
successive parishioners who looked on the Kingdom of Heaven as a
respectable social circle, which should be patronised like a sewing
girls’ club or any other worthy institution.
Away to Vedder Court again, dismissing his car at the door of Temple
Mission, and walking inside, out of range of the leers of those senile
old buildings, but not out of the range of the peculiar spirit of Vedder
Court, which manifested itself most clearly to the olfactory sense.
The organ was playing when he entered, and the benches were half filled
by battered old human remnants, who pretended conversion in order to
pick up the crumbs which fell from the table of Market Square Church.
Chiding himself for weariness of the spirit, and comforting himself with
the thought that one greater than he had faltered on the way to Golgotha
he sat on the little platform, with a hymn book in his hand, and, when
the prelude was finished, he devoted his wonderful voice to the
blasphemy.
The organist, a volunteer, a little old man who kept a shoemaker’s shop
around the corner, and who played sincerely in the name of helpfulness,
was pure of heart.
The man with the rough-hewn countenance, unfortunately not here to-day,
was also sincere in an entirely unspiritual sort of way; but, with these
exceptions, and himself, of course, the rector knew positively that
there was not another uncalloused creature in the room, not one who
could be reached by argument, sympathy, or fear! They were past
redemption, every last man and woman; and, at the conclusion of the
hymn, he rose to cast his pearls before swine, without heart and without
interest; for no man is interested in anything which can not possibly be
accomplished.
With a feeling of mockery, yet upheld by the thought that he was holding
out the way and the light, not only seven times but seventy times seven
times, to whatever shred or crumb of divinity might lie unsuspected in
these sterile breasts, he strove earnestly to arouse enthusiasm in
himself so that he might stir these dead ghosts, even in some minute and
remote degree.
Suddenly a harsh and raucous voice interrupted him. It was the voice of
Mr. Rogers, and that gentleman, who had apparently secured somewhere the
two dollars to tide him over, was now embarked on the tide. He had taken
just enough drinks to make him ugly, if that process were possible, and
he had developed a particularly strong resentment of the latest
injustice which had been perpetrated on him. That injustice consisted of
the Reverend Smith Boyd’s refusal to lend him money till a week from
next Saturday night; and he had come to expose the rector’s shallow
hypocrisy. This he proceeded to do, in language quite unsuited to the
chapel of Temple Mission and to the ears of the ladies then present;
most of whom grinned.
The proceedings which followed were but brief. The Reverend Smith Boyd
requested the intruder to stop. The intruder had rights, and he stood on
them! The Reverend Smith Boyd ordered him to stop; but the intruder had
a free and independent spirit, which forbade him to accept orders from
any man! The Reverend Smith Boyd, in the interests of the discipline
without which the dignity and effectiveness of the cause could not be
upheld, and pleased that this was so, ordered him out of the room. Mr.
Rogers, with a flood of abuse which displayed some versatility, invited
the Reverend Smith Boyd to put him out; and the Reverend Smith Boyd did
so. It was not much of a struggle, though Mr. Rogers tore two benches
loose on his way, and, at the narrow door through which it is difficult
to thrust even a weak man, because there are so many arms and legs
attached to the human torso, he offered so much resistance that the
reverend doctor was compelled to practically pitch him, headlong, across
the sidewalk, and over the curb, and into the gutter! The victim of
injustice arose slowly, and turned to come back, but he paused to take a
good look at the stalwart young perpetrator, and remembered that he was
thirsty.
The Reverend Smith Boyd found himself standing in the middle of the
sidewalk, with his fists clenched and his blood surging. The atmosphere
before his eyes seemed to be warm, as if it were reddened slightly. He
was tingling from head to foot with a passion which he had repressed,
and throttled, and smothered since the days of his boyhood! He had
striven, with a strength which was the secret of his compelling voice,
to drive out of him all earthly dross, to found himself on the great
example which was without the cravings of the body; he had sought to
make himself spiritual; but, all at once, this conflict had roused in
him a raging something, which swept up from the very soles of his feet
to his twirling brain, and called him man!
For a quivering moment he stood there, alive with all the virility which
was the richer because of his long repression. He knew many things now,
many things which ripened him in an instant, and gave him the heart to
touch, and the mind to understand, and the soul to flame. He knew
himself, he knew life, he knew, yes, and that was the wonderful miracle
of the flood which poured in on him, he knew love!
He reached suddenly for his watch. Six-ten. He could make it! Still
impelled by this new creature which had sprung up in him, he started;
but at the curb he stopped. He had been in such a whirl of emotion that
he had not realised the absence of his hat. He strode into the mission
door, and the rays of the declining sun, struggling dimly through the
dingy glass, fell on the scattered little assemblage—as if it had been
sent to touch them in mercy and compassion—on the weak, and the poor,
and the piteously crippled of soul; and a great wave of shame came to
him; shame, and thankfulness, too!
He walked slowly up to the platform, and, turning to that reddened
sunlight which bathed his upturned face as if with a benediction, he
said, in a voice which, in its new sweetness of vibration, stirred even
the murky depths of these, the numb:
“Let us pray.”