From the Bottom Up Part 18

"Yes'r, she done squeezed in wif ol' Mammy Jackson," and she pointed out the tenement.

As I pa.s.sed down the steps I noticed a small pile of furniture on the sidewalk. Something impelled me to ask about it.

"Yes'r," the negress said, "dem's her house traps; d' landlord done gone frow'd dem out."

I found her sitting with an old negress by the stove in a second-floor back tenement.

"I bring you a message of love from your mother," I said, without making myself known. We talked for a few minutes. I saw nothing whatever of the girl of long ago. There was a little of the voice--the fine musical voice--but nothing of form, nothing of feature. Deep lines of care and suffering marred her face and labour had calloused her hands. She was poorly dressed--had been ill and out of work, and behind in her rent. Too proud to beg, she was starving with her neighbours, the black people. I excused myself, found the landlord, and rearranged the home she had so heroically struggled to hold intact.

"Do you remember the farm at Moylena?" I asked.

"Yes, of course."

"And a farm boy----"

"Yes, yes," she said, adding: "those few days on that farm were the only happy days of my life!"

"I am that boy and I have come to thank you for the inspiration you were to me so long ago." She looked at me intently, perhaps searching for the boy as I had been searching for the girl.

"There was a wide gulf between us then," she said. "In these long years you have crossed to where I was and I--I have crossed to where you were, and the gulf remains."

CHAPTER XVI

NEW HAVEN AGAIN--AND A FIGHT

In December, 1901, the New Haven Water Company applied for a renewal of its charter. The city had been getting nothing for this valuable franchise, and there was considerable protest against a renewal on the same terms. The Trades Council asked the ministers of the churches to make a deliverance on the question, but there was no answer. I was directly challenged to say something on the subject. I attended a hearing in the city hall. It was the annual meeting night of our church, and I closed the church meeting in the usual manner.

As quickly as possible I made my way to the public hearing. The committee room was crowded; on one side were the labouring men and on the other the stockholders and officers of the company. Several prominent members of my church, whom I had missed at the annual meeting, were in the committee room.

When called upon to speak, I asked the committee to hold the balance level. "We tax a banana vendor a few dollars a year for the use of the streets," I said, "then why should a rich corporation be given an infinitely larger use of them for nothing?"

This provoked the rich men of the church, for most of them were stockholders in the company, and two of them were officers.

The thing was talked over afterward in the back end of a small store where all the church policies were formulated. One of the members was sent to the parsonage to question and warn me. My visitor spoke of former pastors who had been "called of G.o.d" elsewhere for much less than I had done. Another man came later, and asked for a promise that I would keep out of such affairs in the future.

This was the first fly in the ointment, the first break in the most cordial of relationships between me and the church.

The church had been organized fifty years when this incident occurred.

We were preparing to celebrate the golden jubilee.

I gathered the officers together, and we went over the articles one by one. Not a man in the church believed in "everlasting d.a.m.nation," but they voted unanimously to leave the h.e.l.l-fire article just as they had found it. They had all subscribed to it, and it "hadn't hurt them."

"Do you mean to tell me," I asked, "that none of you believe in eternal punishment, and yet you are going to force every man, woman, and child who joins your church to solemnly swear before G.o.d that they do believe in it?" There was a great silence. "Yes, that's exactly what's what," one man said.

This incident ill.u.s.trates the seared, calloused, surfeited condition of the average mind in the churches. It is glutted with sham, and atrophied by the reiteration of high-sounding but meaningless, pious phrases.

I managed to persuade them to so amend their by-laws that children baptized into the church became by that act church members. They did not know that by that amendment they were setting aside two-thirds of their creed, because they didn't know the creed.

One of my sermons at the Jubilee attracted the attention of Philo S.

Bennett, a New York tea merchant, who made his home in New Haven. We became very close friends. One day Mr. Bennett and Mr. W.J. Bryan called at the parsonage. I happened to be out at the time, but dined with them that evening. Next morning a church member, who was a sort of cat's-paw for the rich men, called at the parsonage and informed me of the "disgust" of the leading members. "They won't stand for it!" he said vehemently.

When I spoke at the city hall they catalogued me as a Socialist, and when Mr. Bryan called, they moved me into the "free and unlimited coinage of silver" column. By "they," I mean four or five men--men of means, who absolutely ruled the church. The deacons had nothing to say, the church had as little. "The Society" was the thing. The "Society" in a Congregational church is a sort of secular adjunct charged with the duty of providing the material essentials. Their word is law, the only law. In their estimation business and religion could not be mixed, nor could things of the church be permitted to interfere in politics. The purchase of an alderman was to them as legitimate as the purchase of a cow. Some of them laughed as they told me of buying an election in the borough. It was a great joke to them. They were patriotic, very loudly patriotic, and their special hobby was "the majesty of the law."

I was to be punished for that water company affair, and a man was selected to administer the punishment. I had brought this man into the church; I had created a church office for him, and pushed him forward before the men. He was supposed to be my closest friend. He came to the parsonage one morning, to talk over casually the question of salary.

"Now," he said, "you don't care how we raise your salary, do you?"

"Of course not."

"Well, the Society's hard up this year and can only raise $1,600; but the church will raise the other $400, and I have one of them already promised."

This seemed a most unusual proceeding, but I was unsuspecting. A few months afterward this man, with tears in his eyes, said:

"Mr. Irvine, whatever happens you will be my friend--won't you?"

He was doing their work, and wincing under the load of it.

"Brother," I said, "when I know whether you are playing the role of Judas or John, I will be better able to answer you."

At the end of the year it all came out. I was literally fined $400 for attending that meeting.

As my term of service drew to a close, the workingmen who had joined the church during my inc.u.mbency got together. They were in a majority.

A church meeting was called, and a motion pa.s.sed to call a council of the other churches. The purpose of the call was to advise the church how to proceed to force its own Society to pay the pastor's salary. A leading minister drew up the call. All ministers knew the record of the church: only one minister in its history had left of his own accord. The council met. It was composed of ministers and laymen of other churches. Among the laymen was the president of the telephone company. I had publicly criticized the company for disfiguring the streets with ugly cross-bars that looked like gibbets. The president's opposition to me was well known.

The council, under such influence, struck several technical snags, and adjourned. The president of the council wrote me later that the president of the telephone company had advised him not to recall the council, and he had come to that decision.

Concerning the defrauding me of my salary, the best people in that church to this day, when speaking of it, say: "Well, we didn't owe it to him, _legally_." The Society spent the money in fitting up the parsonage for my successor.

CHAPTER XVII

I JOIN A LABOUR UNION AND HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH STRIKES

After the public hearing on the water contract, several labour unions elected me to honorary membership. The carriage makers' union had so elected me, and a night was set for my initiation. It was a wild winter's night--the streets of the city were covered with snow, and the thermometer registered five above zero. Few hard-working men would come out a night like this. Who would expect them? I was rather glad of the inclement weather. I was weary and tired, and hoped the thing would soon be over. I entered an old office building on Orange street and climbed to the top floor.

A man met me as I reached the top of the stairs and led me to a door, where certain formalities were performed. There was an eye-hole in the door, through which men watched each other. There were whispered words in an unknown tongue, then a long pause. Why all this secrecy? What means this panther-like vigilance? It is a time of war. This body of craftsmen is an organized regiment. The battle is for bread. Before the door is opened there is a noise like the sound of far-off thunder.

What can it mean? To what mysterious doings am I to become an eye-witness to-night? I became a little anxious, perhaps a little nervous, and regretful. An eye appeared at the hole in the door; there is a whispered conference and I find myself between two men marching up the centre of the hall to the desk of the presiding officer.

My entrance was the signal of an outburst of applause such as I had seldom heard before. The hall was small, and it was a mystery how six hundred men could be packed into it. But there they were, solidly packed on both sides of the hall, and as I marched through them they seemed to shake the whole building with their cheers. The chairman rapped for order, and made a short speech.

"I ain't what ye'd call a Christian," he said, "but I know the genuine article when I see it. If the Bible is true, Jesus went to the poor, and if the rich wanted him they'd have to look him up. Do you fellows ever notice the church ads in the Sunday papers? They remind me of the columns where ye look for a rent. They all advertise their 'modern improvements.' This minister is doin' th' Jesus business in th' old way. That's why we like him, an' that's why he's here."