Held to Answer/Chapter 20
Five years walked along, and great events took place. The earthquake seized the San Francisco Bay district and shook it as a dog shakes a rat. Fire swept the great city on the peninsula almost out of existence; it made rich men poor, and hard hearts soft—for a few days at least—and by shifting populations and business centers, affected the east side of the Bay almost as much as the west, so that in all that water-circling population there was no business and no society, no man or woman or child even, that was thereafter quite as it or he or she had been.
In this seething ferment of change nothing altered more than the circumstances of John Hampstead. He had buried himself and found himself. He had sought relief in a self-abandoning plunge into obscurity, yet never had a minister so humble gained such burning prominence. The town hung on him. Men who never went to church at all leaned upon him and upon the things they read about him from day to day.
He had gone upon a thousand missions of mercy; he had fought for his lambs like a lion; he had faced calumny; he had dared personal assault. He had triumphed in all his conflicts and stood out before this sprawling, half metropolitan, half-suburban community of half a million people as a man whom it trusted—too much almost.
Under his ministry in these five years, the wretched little chapel had grown into the great All People's Church. To attend All People's was a fad; to belong to it almost a fashion. The newspapers daily made its pastor into a hero, and the moral element in the population looked upon him as its most fearless champion and aggressive leader.
But into this situation and into All People's one morning a woman came walking, with power to shake it more violently than an earthquake could have done.
The choir was just disposing of the anthem. The Reverend John Hampstead sat, but not at ease, in his high pulpit chair, which, somehow, this morning reminded him of the throne chair of Denmark upon its stage in that barn of a theater which at this very instant was only five years—and five miles—distant; the chair from which he used to arise suddenly to receive the rapier thrust of his nephew, Hamlet. This morning a vague uneasiness filled him, as if he were about to receive a real rapier thrust.
The minister's sermon outline was in his hand, but his eye roamed the congregation. It took note of who was there and who was absent; it took note of who came in; but suddenly the eye ceased to rove and started forward in its socket.
Deacon Morris was escorting a lady down the right-center aisle. To distinction of dress and bearing the newcomer added a striking type of beauty. Her figure was tall, combining rounded curves and willowy grace. In the regularity of its smooth chiseling, her profile was purely Greek. The eyes were dark and lustrous, the cheeks had a soft bloom upon them, the lips were ripely red; and if art had helped to achieve these contrasts with a skin that was satiny smooth and of ivory creaminess, it was an art contributory and not an art subversive.
"More beautiful than ever!" murmured the minister with the emphasis of deep conviction.
The lady accepted a sitting well to the front. Her head was reverently bowed for an interval and then raised, while the black eyes darted one illuminative glance of recognition at the man in the pulpit, a glance that made the minister start again and confess to himself an error by admitting beneath his breath: "No, not more beautiful—more powerful!"
Lengthened scrutiny confirmed this judgment. Soft contours had yielded, though ever so slightly, to lines of strength. There was greater majesty in her bearing. She was less appealing, but more commanding. John reflected that it was rather impossible it should be otherwise. The man or the woman who fights and conquers always sacrifices lines of beauty to those muscle clamps of strength which seem to sleep but ill-concealed upon the face.
And Marien Dounay had conquered! In five years she had mounted to the top. With the memory of her latest Broadway triumphs still ringing, this very day her name would be mentioned in every dramatic column in every Sunday paper in America. To have uttered that name aloud in this congregation would have caused every neck to crane.
Alone conscious of her presence, John found himself counting the cost of her success. Part of that cost he could see tabulated on her face. Another part of it was the grisly and horrible intimation to the loathsome Litschi, which he had overheard on the unforgetable night in the restaurant. He found himself assuming that she had paid this latter price and experienced a feeling of revulsion at recalling how once this woman's mere presence, the glance of an eye, the touch of a hand, the purring tones of her voice, had been sufficient to melt him with unutterable emotions. This morning, gazing at her through that peculiar mist of apprehension, almost of fear, that had been clouding his mind since before her entry, John knew that she was a more dangerous woman now than then; and yet the same glance showed that she was not dangerous to him, for the dark eyes looked at him hungrily, with something strangely like adoration in them, and there was an expression of longing upon the beautiful face.
When he stood up to preach, she followed his every movement and appeared to drink down his utterance thirstily. Skilled now in spiritual diagnosis, the minister of All People's read her swiftly. She had gained—but she had not gained all. Something was still desired, and, he could not help but believe, desired of him. Having coldly driven him from her with a terrible kind of violence, she had come back humbly, almost beseechingly.
So marked was this suggestion of intense longing that the feeling of horror and revulsion which had come to Hampstead with the entry of the actress gave way entirely to an emotion of pity and a desire to help, and he tried earnestly to make his sermon in some degree a message to the woman's heart.
The position of the Reverend John Hampstead in All People's Church and in the community round about was due to no miracle, but had grown naturally enough out of the strong heart of the man and his experiences.
When, for instance, in the early days at the chapel, John missed the Pedersen children from the Sunday school, and found their mother in tears at home because the children had no shoes, and that they had no shoes because Olaf gambled away his weekly wage in "Beaney" Webster's pool room where race-track bets were made, and poker and other gambling games were played, all in defiance of law,—and when he found the police supine and prosecutors indifferent,—the practical minded young divine sent Deacon Mullin—who, to his frequent discomfiture resembled a "tin can" sport more than a church official—into Beaney's to bet upon a horse. When the Deacon's horse won, and Beaney all unsuspecting paid the winnings over in a sealed envelope, the next Sunday night John took the envelope into the pulpit and shook it till it jingled as he told the story which next morning the newspapers printed widely, while the minister himself was swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Beaney.
That was the beginning, but to John's surprise it was not the end. Beaney did not plead guilty meekly. He fought and desperately, for this meddlesome amateur clergyman had lifted the cover on a sneaking underground system of petty gambling, of illicit liquor selling, and of graver violations of the moral laws, which ramified widely. Attacked in one part, all its members rallied to a defence of the whole that was impudent, determined and astonishingly powerful.
Hampstead was unknown, his church small and wretched and despised. His sole weapon was the newspapers who would not endorse him, but who would print what he said and what he did. What he said was not so much, but what John Hampstead did was presently considerable, for a few public-spirited citizens put money in his hand for detectives and special prosecutors, and he spent more hours that year in police courts than he did in his church.
In the end he won. The lawless element, sore and chastened, acknowledged their defeat, while the forces of good and evil alike recognized thus early the entry into the community of a man whose character and personality were henceforth to be reckoned with.
But while these battlings earned John publicity and high regard, they also won him hate and trouble. The work cost him tremendous expenditure of energy and sleepless nights. It made enemies of men whose friendship he desired. It brought him threats innumerable. A stick of dynamite was found beneath his study window. Yet John's devotion made him careless of personal danger. He trembled for Rose and Dick and Tayna; he trembled for the man who had crept through the shadow of the palms to plant that stick and time that fuse, which mercifully went out; but somehow he did not tremble for himself.
Besides, out of the shadow of danger, there seemed to reach sometimes the flexing muscles of an omnipotent arm. As, for instance, when an arrested gambler, out upon bail, came into his study one night with intent to kill. At first the minister was talking on the telephone, and some chivalric instinct restrained the would-be assassin from shooting his nemesis in the back.
Next John laughed at the preposterous idea of being killed, failing to understand that the threat was earnest or to perceive how much his caller was fired by liquor. Such merriment was unseemly to the man on murder bent; he found himself unable to shoot a bullet into the open mouth of laughter, and fumbled helplessly with his hand behind him and his tongue shamefacedly tied until the minister directed his mind aside with a question about his baby, following quickly with sympathetic talk about the man's wife and mother, until the spirit of vengeance went out of him, and he broke down and cried and went away meekly with a parting handshake from his intended victim.
It was only after the man had gone that John felt strangely weak with fright and bewildered by an odd sense of deliverance.
Yet all these battles were only a part of John's activities; nor did they grow out of a fighting spirit, but out of a sympathetic nature, out of his passion for the hurt and helpless, and his brave pity for the defenceless.
His impulsive boldness, his ready tact, and his disposition to follow an obligation or an opportunity through to the end, no matter where it led, had made him father confessor to men and women of every sort and the unofficial priest of a parish that extended widely on the surface and in the underworld of the life about him.
Naturally, All People's was extremely proud of its pastor, of his broad sympathies and his devoted activities. Impressionable ladies felt that there was something romantic in seeing him stand yonder in the pulpit, so grave and priestly; in seeing him come down at the end of the service, so approachable to all; and in taking his hand, not knowing whether some archcriminal had not wrung it an hour before he entered the pulpit, or whether last night those firm fingers might not have smoothed back the hair from the brow of some dying nameless woman in a place about which nice people could scarcely permit themselves to think.
There was even excitement in attending the church, because one never knew who would be sitting next,—some famous personage or some notorious one,—for Doctor Hampstead won his friends and admirers from the strangest sources imaginable.
As to pulpit eloquence, there was admittedly seldom a flash of it at All People's. By an enormous digestive feat, John had assimilated that seminary course of which the Dean had spoken, boasting that he read his Greek Testament entirely through in the three years, upon the street cars that plied between his home and the seat of theological learning. But this did not make of Hampstead a strong preacher, although the impression that he might be, if he chose, was unescapable. His passion, he declared, was not to preach the gospel but to do the gospel. People sat before him spellbound, not by his eloquence, but by a sense of mysterious spiritual forces at work about them. At times, the mere exhalations of the man's sunny personality seemed sufficient to account for all his influence; at others there was that mysterious feeling of the Presence.
But as the membership grew and the sphere of its pastor's influence extended, there began to be less and less of his personality left for expenditure upon that "backbone of the church" which had been there longest and felt it first.
More than once Elder Burbeck took occasion to voice a protest over this. John put these protests aside mildly until one day, when the minister's nerves had been more than usually frazzled by a series of petty annoyances, the Elder blunderingly declared that the church paid the minister his salary and was entitled to have his services.
"Is that the way you look at it?" asked John sharply. "That you pay me my salary? Then don't ever put another coin in the contribution box. I thought you gave the money to God, and God gave it to me. I do not acknowledge to you or to any member of this church one single obligation except to be true in your or their soul's relation. I owe you neither obedience nor coddling nor back-smoothing."
"But you don't realize," urged the Elder. "These things were well enough when our church was small. But now it is big. It occupies a dignified position in the community, and all this riff-raff that you are running after—"
"Riff-raff!" John exploded. "Jesus gathered his disciples from the riff-raff! His message was to the riff-raff! He said: 'Leave the avenues and boulevards and go unto the riff-raff!' What is any church but riff-raff redeemed? What is any sanctimonious, self-satisfied Pharisee but a soul on the way to make riff-raff of himself again? What gave this church its dignified position in the community? Did you, when you nailed the plank across the door?"
Elder Burbeck flushed redder than ever and turned stiffly on his heel, not only inflamed by the crushing sarcasm of this rebuke, but stolidly accepting it as one more evidence that in his heart this minister of All People's was much more human and much less godlike than many gaping people seemed to think. Both the resentment and the inference the Elder stored up carefully against a day which he felt that he could see advancing, while the minister, too intent upon his work to scan the horizon for a cloud, hurried away upon another of his errands to the riff-raff.
With this fanatic ardor of personal service now highly developed, it was inevitable that the appeal in the eyes of Marien Dounay should act like a challenge upon the chivalrous nature of John Hampstead.