Held to Answer/Chapter 5
The week went by like a shot. On Sunday night the glory that was a very stagy Rome burned down for the last time beneath the gridiron of the old Burbank Theater. On Monday morning no odor of grease paint and no noxious smell of stewing glue, which proclaims the scene painter at his work, was in the nostrils of John. Instead, the clack of typewriters, the tinkle of telephone bells, the droning voices of dictators, and the shuffling feet of office boys filled his ears.
As if to completely re-merge the man in his environment, Robert Mitchell came walking in, tossed a bundle of papers upon the desk, fixed the rate clerk with a shaft of his blue eye, and commanded drily:
"Ursus! Make a set of tariffs embracing our new lines to correspond with the commodity tariffs of the San Francisco and El Paso."
John colored slightly at the thrust of that name Ursus, but looked Mr. Mitchell fairly and meekly in the eye and answered:
"Yes, sir."
"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the General Freight Agent, as he turned away.
Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek face behind his books and snickered. John shot a scowl at Burman and then for a few minutes hunched his shoulders over the documents in the case.
The California Consolidated was being consolidated some more. Two more roads in the big system had just been pitchforked into the jurisdiction of Robert Mitchell, adding twelve hundred additional miles to his responsibility and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder of promotion.
These additions made the California Consolidated competitive with the San Francisco and El Paso lines at hundreds of new stations. John's job was to consolidate the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure that they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing stations. It was an enormous task, and the General Freight Agent had breezily commanded it to be done in ten weeks. That was why Burman snickered. It was also why Hampstead scowled.
Now a freight tariff starts youthfully out to be the most scientific thing in the world, but it ends by being the most utterly unscientific document that ever was put together. The longer a tariff lives, the more depraved it becomes. The S. F. & E. P. tariffs were very old, but not, therefore, honorable.
John turned to the shelf that contained them and scowled again, a double scowl, as black as his blond Viking brows could manage. These were to be his models. They were yellow—a disagreeable color to begin with,—each a half inch thick and larger than a letter page,—abortions, every one of them! They were pea-vine growths like the monster system which issued them, cumbered with the adjustments and easements of the years.
The flour tariff! The hay tariff! The grain tariff! John took these in his hands one by one and glowered at them. The mistakes, the inconsistencies, the clumsiness of thirty sprawling years were in them. And he was asked to duplicate these confusions on his own system.
Should he do it? No; be hanged if he would! He felt big and self-important as he slammed the first of them face down upon his desk and each thereafter in succession upon its fellow, until the pile toppled over, after which, leaving the reckless heap behind him, while Burman snickered again, John stamped out of the room.
"These S. F. & E. P. tariffs are so old they've got whiskers on 'em," he began to say to Mr. Mitchell, "and hairs! And the hair has never been cut nor even combed. They have been tagged and fattened and trimmed and sliced and slewed round till the tariff is issued just to keep up the basis and the tradition, and then you look in something else,—an amendment, or a special, or a 'private special', or sometimes the carbon copy of a letter,—to find out what the rate actually is. Sometimes when I call their office up on the 'phone to get a rate, it takes 'em twenty-four hours to answer, and maybe a week later they notify me the answer was wrong. Our slate is clean; why not simmer the figures down to what is the actual basis instead of the assumed one, and publish the rates as we intend to charge 'em, and as we know they do charge 'em?"
Mitchell had listened with surprise at first to this rash proposal. It sounded youthful and impetuous. But it also sounded sensible. Mitchell hated red tape, and he knew that John's idea was the right one; but tradition was god on the S. F. & E. P. They would fight the innovation and fight it hard; they might win, too, and Mr. Mitchell had no stomach for tilting at windmills. However, it might be a good thing for John, this fight; might make him forget that foolish stage ambition of his; and if he won, might crown him so lustrously that of itself it would save him to a future already assuredly brilliant in the railroad business.
"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before their faces, John, when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell asked tentatively, but also by way of further firing the soul of the fighter.
"I believe I could," replied John ardently.
"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.
And John went to it.
But there was another man who had been shocked by John's theatrical venture, and that was the pastor of the First Church, who had his virtues, much as other men. His face was round and like his figure, full of fatness. He was a merry soul and loved a joke. He had a heart as tender as his sense of humor was keen.
But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his convictions. His pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft. He steered her straight. To Heaven with Scylla! To Gehenna with Charybdis! Indeed, if there was one man in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all the rest of the world too, it was this same Charles Thompson Campbell, pastor of the aforesaid grand old First Church. Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were black. His voice had the ultimate roar in it. When he stood up, locks flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his pulpit with that fat doubled fist, the palm of which had been moulded in youth upon the handle of a plow, every nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with the force of his utterance. But Doctor Campbell's convictions, like most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.
Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned. One was the modern novel. Another was the stage! Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted largely, had shed some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature; but he never quoted Shakespeare. One could almost doubt if he had read him, and when Shakespeare came to town, he never went to see him.
On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor Campbell read in the papers that the youngest of his deacons had the night before made his début as Ursus in Quo Vadis, he was not only pained but moved to self-reproach. Grief enveloped him. It thrust the sharp cleft of a frown into his smooth brow. It thrust his chin down upon his bosom and caused him to heave a tumultuous sigh. He bowed his head beside his study table and then and there put up an earnest petition for the soul of John Hampstead. It was a sincere and natural prayer, because Doctor Campbell was a sincere man and believed in the efficacy of prayer.
Besides, he loved John Hampstead. The young man's impending fate stirred the minister deeply and caused him to reproach himself. In this mood, he dug out all his sermons on the stage, nine years of annual sermons on the influence of the drama, and read them sketchily and with disappointment. Paugh! Piffle! How weak and ineffective they seemed. He delved into his concordance for a text and found one. Then he drove his pen deep into his inkwell and began to write.
The following Sunday night Doctor Campbell's red, excited features were seen dimly through dun, sulphurous clouds of brimstone and fire; but to the preacher's dismay, John Hampstead was not present for fumigation. The reverend gentleman, in his unthinking goodness, had quite overlooked the fact that the play in which John was performing concluded on Sunday night instead of Saturday night; and so while his pastor was hurling his fiery diatribes at that conspicuously assailable institution, the stage, Deacon Hampstead was blissfully bearing Marien Dounay about in his arms.
But the next morning John read the sermon published in the newspaper. He had already noted that the more doubtful the sermon, the more likely it is to get into the headlines, because from the editor's standpoint it thus becomes news, and late Sunday night, which is the scarcest hour of the whole week for news, there is more joy in the "city room" over one sermon that breathes the fiery spirit of sensation than over ninety and nine which need no hell and damnation in which to express the tender gospel of Jesus. John read it with a sense of wrath, of outrage, and of humiliation. That night he launched himself at the study door of his pastor.
"I was very sorry you did not hear my sermon last night," began Doctor Campbell blandly, sensing the advantage of striking first.
"Brother Campbell, I have come to arraign you for that sermon," retorted John, with an immediate outburst of feeling. "I say that you spoke what you did not know. I say," and his voice almost broke with the weight of its own earnestness, "I say that you bore false witness!"
The amazed minister's mouth opened, but John repressed his utterance with a gesture.
"You will say you preached your convictions. I say you preached your prejudice, your ignorance. I say you bore false witness against struggling women, against aspiring men, against those of whose bitter battlings you know nothing."
The Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell leaned back aghast. No man had ever presumed to talk to him like this, no man of twice his years and spiritual attainments; yet here was this stripling not only talking to him like this, but with a fervor of unction in his utterance that made his upbraiding sound half inspired.
"You are condemning the stage as an institution," went on John scornfully. "You might as well condemn the printing press as an institution. You discriminate with regard to newspapers and books. Do the same with the stage. Taboo the corrupt play and teach your people to avoid it. Support the good and teach the managers that you will. Taboo the notorious actor or actress if you wish. Give the rest of them the benefit of the doubt, as you do in your personal contact with all humanity. Oh, Doctor Campbell, you are so charitable in your personal relations with men and so uncharitable in much of your preaching!"
This one exclamatory sentence had in it enough of affectionate regard to enable the minister to contain himself a little longer, under the impassioned tide which now flowed again.
"The stage? The stage as an institution?" John appeared to pause and wind himself up. "Why, listen! The stage function is a godlike function. When God created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life he planted in man's breast also the instinct to create. That instinct is the foundation of all art. Man has always exhibited this passion to create something in his own image. It might be a rude drawing on a rock, or only a manikin sculptured in mud and set in the sun to dry; or it might be a marble of Phidias, with the form, the strength, the spirit of life upon it. The painter can go farther. He gets the color and the very visage of thought and even of emotion. Yet each falls short. There is no God to breathe into their creations the breath of life."
The minister leaned back a little as if to put his understanding more at poise.
"But," continued Hampstead, "the playwright and the actor can go farther. They breathe into their creations that very breath of God himself, which he breathed into man. They make a character real because he is a living man. They put him in the company of other men and women who are as real for the same reason; they toss them all into the sea of life together; the winds of life blow upon them. Hate and love, virtue and vice, hope and despair, weakness and strength, birth and death, work their will upon them."
"That is very beautiful, John," said Doctor Campbell, "very beautiful."
The tribute was sincere, but John was not to be checked even by a compliment.
"The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on. "It can raise the dead. It makes men and women live again—Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Dolly Madison. It seizes whole segments out of the circles of past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day, with the glow of life and the sheen of reality over all, so that for an afternoon or a night we live in another continent or another age. We see the life, the customs, the petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very pulse-beats of men of other circumstances and other generations than our own, so that when we come out of the theater into the times of to-day, we have actually to wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?"
Doctor Campbell leaned forward now. His mouth was round, his eyes were widely open.
"It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power," concluded John. "It is the highest expression of man's instinct to create a new life in a more ideal Eden than that in which he finds himself. When you condemn the stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on his desert rock, "you had better pause to think if you do not condemn Him who planted that instinct in the human breast."
Hampstead had now finished; but the minister was in no hurry to speak. He felt the spell of the picture which had been painted, but he felt still more the spell of the young man's ardent enthusiasm.
"You must have thought that out very carefully, John," he said.
"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"
But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his return was quietly forceful.
"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness, must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."
This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.
"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are you?"
"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.
"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the two. "Are you—John?"
Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of mortification deepened perceptibly.
The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions. He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."
"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was short.
"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption. Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"
Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that this was only a part of his tact.
As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to defend the stage from himself.
"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my own weakness in unaccustomed surroundings. It was not the fault of the surroundings themselves, nor of any other person. Besides, it was nothing very grave."
"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell as he walked to the door with his caller, and the minister's tone intimated his conviction that this particular deterioration had been very grave indeed.