Held to Answer/Chapter 16
To make money quickly and steadily and in considerable amounts, was his immediate necessity. He remembered, naturally, that only seven months ago William N. Scofield had offered him a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year, and he went to see that gentleman promptly. But while the Traffic Manager's eye lighted at sight of him, the light faded. Scofield did not refer to the offer he had made or the things he had talked about that night in the Pacific Union Club. He only said absently: "I will speak to Parsons." The next day Parsons offered Hampstead a position in the rate department at one hundred dollars per month. John was not greatly surprised. He knew the world was like that.
Of course, he might have gone next to Mr. Mitchell, but did not. In the first place John knew that no position which that kind-hearted gentleman might offer could pay as much money as he must have. In the second place, he felt himself big with a sense of new-grown powers, of personality that he wanted to capitalize, not for some employer, but for himself.
"Seems to me," he communed, as he walked down Market Street, "that I could sell real estate, or stocks, or bonds; that I could promote enterprises, work with big men, put through their deals, and make a lot of money. I believe I will try it."
An advertisement which seemed to promise something like this was answered by him in person, but it proved instead a proposition to sell books. John revolted at the idea, but the books interested him greatly. The set was designed for self-improvement, and the price was thirty dollars.
"Every time you sell a young man or woman a set of these, you do them good," he suggested to the manager, with a glow upon his face.
"Exactly," assented that suave gentleman, sighting two prime essentials of a salesman, faith in his article and a missionary enthusiasm. "You could make a hundred a week selling 'em!"
One hundred dollars a week! John looked his incredulity.
"What were you doing before?" inquired the manager.
"Acting!"
"Selling books is like acting," mused the manager. "If you are a good actor, you could make a hundred a week easy."
Because John needed one hundred dollars a week, and reflected that the experience would be good training for that higher form of salesmanship upon which he meant to embark, he took his prospectus and started out. The first week his commissions were $7.50. He had made one sale. But he needed one hundred dollars worse the second week, and set forth with greater determination. That week he made two sales. "I've almost got it," he assured himself, gritting his teeth desperately. And the third week he did get it. His commissions for six days were $74.50, for the next week $112.50, for the fifth week $145.00. John Hampstead was successfully launched upon an enterprise that would care for all his money wants.
And the work itself was happy work. It was no foot-in-the-door, house-to-house campaign on which he had entered. Ways were found of gathering lists of persons likely to be interested. He called upon these people like a gentleman; he was received and entertained like one. His self-respecting manner, his stage-trained presence, his growing store of personal magnetism, his strong, interesting face, with the odd light of spiritual ardor in his eyes, and the little choke of enthusiasm that came into his voice, all helped to make his presence welcome and his canvass entertaining. He became an adept in reading character and in playing upon the springs of desire and resolution.
He discovered, too, something to interest and admire in nearly every one upon whom he called. He was surprised to find how nice people were generally. He had before known people mainly in the mass, as publics, as audiences, or congregations. Now he began to know them as individuals, and to like them, to conceive a sort of social passion for them, and to desire fervently to do all men good. With this went the knowledge that he was becoming socially very skillful, and a sense of still increasing personal power peppered his veins with the sparkle of new hopes. Ambition flamed once more. The king in his soul was alive again. He could not only meet people, but handle them. He felt that as a politician he could win votes, as a lawyer he could sway juries.
He might even turn again to the stage, with the prospect of swifter and surer success; but he had begun to discover that one cannot go back, that no life ever flows up-stream.
Yet the thing which really made the stage career no longer possible was this sense of new powers grown up within him that were not mimetic, but creative and constructive, and which would insistently demand some other form of expression.
Besides, the perspective of his life was now long enough for him to look back and see how all his experiences had enriched him. His very awkwardness, his temporary blindness, his dramatic ambition, the calamity which shattered that career and made him a seller of books, each had been a step into power. His passion for Marien even, while it was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which taught him self-control and made his love for Bessie a tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher devotion than it could otherwise have been.
This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and half-religious, that his existence was being ordered for him by a power above his own. The effect of this was to increase his eager zest for life itself. He lived excitedly, hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him from behind the next corner.
Meantime, he was making money. Within six months all the bills were paid and he had more than a thousand dollars in the bank. Rose was out of the sanitarium and, with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on the slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting sun flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide ocean rolled always in the distance.
John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come when he could go back to Bessie and tell her of his love. The past seemed very far past indeed. The memory of those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to Marien Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced slumber into which he had sunk but once, and from which he had awakened forever.
Letters had passed frequently between himself and Bessie. On his part, these were carefully studied and almost devoutly restrained in expression; but none the less freighted in every line with the fervor of his growing devotion to her.
On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively rich with the essence of her own happy, effervescent self as they had always been. She had expressed a loyal sympathy with him in the shattering of his stage career, but had commended him for his renunciation, while through the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to discover for the first time that Bessie's concurrence in his dramatic ambitions was never without misgivings. True, she had told him this once, but it was when he had been too deaf to hear. What pleased John most in this correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost from letter to letter, which the big man felt revealed her perception of his growing love for her.
Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that made it seem as though his love for Bessie had always been a part of his life, and the impulse to declare it a legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown slowly towards perfection.
In this mood a day was set when John would go to Los Angeles to visit Bessie. As the time approached, he could think of nothing else. On the morning of that day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban population of several hundred thousand people across the Bay from San Francisco, the largest municipal unit of which is the City of Oakland. But thoughts of Bessie crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy clouds that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing power."
As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks long and half a block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with graceful palms, with tall, shapely, shiny-leaved acacias, and covered with a thick sod of grass, laced at intervals by curving walks.
Upon a bench in the very center of this park Hampstead dropped down and gave himself up to blissful meditations. Across the street from him was a block of happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great middle-class folk of America, the one class that John knew well and sympathetically, for he himself was of it.
On the corner directly before him was a grass-sodded lot, larger than the others, holding in its center, not a cottage, but a structure of the country schoolhouse type, painted white, and with a small hooded vestibule out in front. Over the wide doors admitting to this vestibule was a transom of glass, on which was painted in very plain letters the words: Christian Chapel.
"The house of God does not look so happy as the homes of men hereabout," Hampstead remarked, and just then was surprised out of his own thoughts by seeing the door of the deserted looking chapel open and two men come out. One was tall and heavy, gray of moustache and red of face, wearing a silk hat, a white necktie, and a full frock coat.
"An ex-clergyman," voted Hampstead shrewdly, because, aside from his dress, the man looked aggressively unclerical.
The other was slender, with a black, dejected moustache and also frock-coated, but the material of the garment was gray instead of black, and the suit rubbed at the elbows and bagged at the knees. This man carried a small satchel.
"Some sort of a missionary secretary, I'll bet you," was John's second venture at identification.
Another incongruous thing about the man with the clerical dress was that he had a carpenter's hammer in his hand. Dropping this tool upon the wooden landing, where it clattered loudly, he drew a key from his pocket and locked the door, shaking it viciously to make sure that it was fast. Then, descending the steps, with the claw of the hammer he pried loose a plank, some six or eight feet long, from the wooden walk that ran across the sod to the concrete pavement in front. The missionary secretary took one end of this, and the two raised it across the door, where the ex-clergyman disclosed the fact that his bulging left hand contained nails, as with swinging blows, he began to cleat the door fast.
"Nailing up God!" commented John, whose mood had become sardonic.
"What's the story, I wonder," he remarked next, and rising, sauntered across the narrow street and up the wooden walk, till he stopped with one foot on the lower step, gazing casually, with mild curiosity expressed upon his face.
The missionary secretary had noted John's advance and appeared to recognize that his chance interest was legitimate.
"A miserable, squabbling little church," the man remarked, an expression of pain upon his face. "A disgrace to the communion. I'm the District Evangelist. I've had to step in from the outside and close it up, in the interest of peace. Brother Burbeck, here, is a leader of one of the wings. He has tried to bring peace in vain."
"I have stood up for the Lord against the disturber," announced Brother Burbeck over his shoulder, while he dealt a vicious blow, as if the head of the nail were instead the head of the malefactor.
"And who was the disturber?" queried John. "A man of bad character, I suppose."
"No, you couldn't call him that, could you, Brother Burbeck?" ventured the District Evangelist. "Just a young man from the Seminary, with his head overflowing with undigested facts."
"Near facts, they was—only," interjected Brother Burbeck sententiously, as he held another nail between a hard thumb and a knotted finger, and tapped the head gently to start it.
"Rather undermining the faith of the people in the old Gospel," went on the Evangelist.
"Takin' away what he couldn't never put back," amended Brother Burbeck, between blows, and then added accusingly: "He had no respect for the Elders, not a bit."
Brother Burbeck's tones, as he contributed this additional detail, were as sharp as his blows.
"You were one of the Elders?" inquired John, in an even voice that might have been construed to mean respect for the eldership.
"I am one of 'em," corrected the driver of nails. "I preached the old Jerusalem Gospel myself for twenty years," he affirmed proudly, "until my health failed, and I went into undertaking."
"You appear to have got your health back," observed John dryly, noting marks of the hammer upon the plank where the nail heads had been beaten almost out of sight by his slashing blows.
"Yep," admitted that gentleman, just as dryly.
Looking at Elder Burbeck's large head, with its iron-gray hair, at the silk hat, which stuck perilously, but persistently, to the back of it; noticing the folds of oily flesh on his bullock neck, the working of his broad, fat shoulders, and the sweat standing out on his heavy jowls, as if protesting mutely this unusual activity discharged with such vehemence, John made up his mind that he could never like Elder Burbeck. In his heart he took the part of the disturber.
"You know what this reminds me of, somehow?" he asked, with just a minor note of accusation in his tone.
"Not being a mind reader, I don't," replied Elder Burbeck, turning on John a look which showed as plainly as his speech that in the same interval of time when John was deciding he didn't like Burbeck, Burbeck was deciding he didn't like John. "What does it?" and the Elder-undertaker stared fiercely at the book agent.
"Nailing Jesus to the Cross," replied John, shooting a glance at Burbeck that was hard and beamlike.
"Hey!" exclaimed Burbeck, his red face reddening more.
"But," explained the Secretary, interjecting himself anxiously, as a man not too proud of his duty that day, "it is in the interests of peace. We expect to give time a chance to heal the wounds. In six months the disturbing element will have gone away or given up, and then we can open the doors to peace and the old faith."
"Oh, I see," said John, as instinctively liking the Missionary Secretary as he instinctively disliked Brother Burbeck, "it is a movement in behalf of the status quo?"
"Yes," replied the Secretary, smiling faintly, as he noticed the shaft of humor in John's eye.
"And Brother Burbeck?" John twitched his chin in the direction of the tipsy silk hat and the vehemently swinging hammer. "He is the apostle of the status quo?"
"Yes," assented the Missionary, smiling yet more faintly, after which he countered with: "Are you a Christian, my brother?"
"I was a Deacon in the First Church, Los Angeles," answered John, "but I've been traveling round for a year or so. Hampstead's my name."
The Secretary's face lighted with unexpected pleasure.
"How do you do, Brother Hampstead," he exclaimed, putting out his hand quickly. "My name's Harding."
"Glad to meet you, Brother Harding," said John; "I've seen your name in the church papers."
"Brother Burbeck, this is Brother Hampstead, of the First Church, Los Angeles," announced Harding, when that gentleman, having driven his last nail and smashed the plank a parting blow with his hammer, turned to them again.
Elder Burbeck's manner instantly changed. "Oh, one of our brethren, eh, Hampstead? Why, say, I remember hearing you talk one night down there in Christian Endeavor when I was down at the Undertakers' Convention. They told me you were going on the stage. That's how I remember you so well, I guess."
"I got over that nonsense," said John easily. "Sorry to hear you've been having trouble in your little church."
"It's been a mighty sad case," sighed the Elder, heaving his ponderous bosom and mopping his red brow and scalp, for the removal of his hat revealed that his iron-gray hair was only a fringe.
"By the way," asked John, who was contemplating the bulletin board, "what about the Sunday school? I see it's down for nine forty-five."
"Dwindled to a handful of children," declared Burbeck, as if a handful of children was something entirely negligible.
John had a reason for feeling especially tender where the feelings of children were concerned.
"But they'll come next Sunday, and they'll be terribly disappointed," he urged. "It will shake their faith in God himself. They won't understand at all, will they?"
"I reckon they will when they see the church nailed up," answered Burbeck grimly, quite too triumphant over spiking an enemy's guns to consider the mystified, wondering soul of childhood as it might stand before that nailed door four mornings forward from this, for the day of the crucifixion of the door was Wednesday.
Their task completed, the Elder and the Evangelist were turning toward the street. "Good-by, Brother," said Harding, again shaking hands.
"Oh, good-by, Brother Hampstead," exclaimed Burbeck, turning as if he had forgotten something, and offering his stout, once sinewy palm.
John gave it a grip that shook the huge frame of Elder Burbeck, and made him feel, as he seldom felt about any man, that here was a personality and a physical force at least as vigorous as his own.
"Good-by, Brother Burbeck," John responded, with an open smile; and then while the two men took themselves down the street in the direction of the car line, the book-agent went back and sat contemplatively in the park.
It was a marvelously pleasant day. A few fleecy clouds were drifting overhead, revealing patches of the unrivaled blue of California's sky above them. The sun shone warmly when the clouds were not in the way, and when they were, the lazy breeze made its breath seem cooler and more bracing, as if to compensate for the absence. Down the street two or three blocks Hampstead could see the Bay waters dancing in the sunlight. The cottages on both sides of the park were embowered with vines, roses mostly, white roses and red, with here and there a giant bougainvillea, some of its lavender, clusterlike flowers abloom, and some of them still sealed in their transparent pods that looked like envelopes of isinglass.
High in the blue an occasional pigeon circled; off to the left a kite appeared, sailing high, and bounding vigorously when the upper air currents freshened.
On John's own level, the world was faring onward very happily.
About every cottage there was an air of nature's cheer and a suggestion of blooming activity. Only the little church looked hopeless and abandoned of men, the letters of its name staring out big-eyed and lonely from above the glass transom, while the plank of the status quo, nailed rudely across its front, was a brutal advertisement of its dishonored state.
"Some day," mused John, "I think I'll build a church, and I believe I'll build it to look like a cottage, with roses round it and bougainvilleas and palms, with broad verandas, inviting lawns, and bowering vines. I'll make it the most homey looking place in the whole neighborhood, with a rustic sign stuck up somewhere that says 'The Home of God', or something like that."
Still musing, the scornful words spoken to John by Scofield more than a year ago on the steps of the Pacific Union Club, came idling into his mind: "Remember! You're not an actor! You're a preacher." He smiled as he recalled Scofield's irritation at the idea, and his own. How ridiculously impossible it had seemed then and seemed to-day! And it was still so irritating as to stir him into getting up and walking away from the little chapel in the direction of the street car. Yet his mind reverted to the closed door.
"Won't they be disappointed, though? Those children!"
At the corner he turned and looked back as if to make sure. Yes, there was the weather-worn streak upon the door, at that reckless angle which proclaimed the mood of the man who placed it there.
"And they nailed up God!" Hampstead commented grimly, swinging upon his car.
That afternoon at five o'clock he left for Los Angeles.