Book: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
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Winston Churchill >> The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked,
strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.
The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of
Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off
their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of
the Jews and Germans and Russians. The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium
and reading-rooms: some of them were drafted into the choir, yet the
singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of
regeneration. The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new
environments not wholly without results. But the rector was an idealist.
He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their
confidence, and with a considerable measure of success. On more than one
occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and
he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during the
six months he had once spent in Europe. The Irish-Americans and the
Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part
young workingmen and youths by no means destitute. When they were out
of a place, he would often run across them in the reading-room or sitting
among the lockers beside the gymnasium, and they would rise and talk to
him cordially and even familiarly about their affairs. They liked and
trusted him--on a tacit condition. There was a boundary he might not
cross. And the existence of that boundary did not seem to trouble
McCrae.
One night as he stood with his assistant in the hall after the men had
gone, Hodder could contain himself no longer.
"Look here, McCrae," he broke out, "these men never come to church--or
only a very few of them."
"No more they do," McCrae agreed.
"Why don't they?"
"Ye've asked them, perhaps."
"I've spoken to one or two of them," admitted the rector.
"And what do they tell you?"
Hodder smiled.
"They don't tell me anything. They dodge."
"Precisely," said McCrae.
"We're not making Christians of them," said Hodder, beginning to walk up
and down. "Why is it?"
"It's a big question."
"It is a big question. It's the question of all questions, it seems to
me. The function of the Church, in my opinion, is to make Christians."
"Try to teach them religion," said McCrae--he almost pronounced it
releegion--"and see what happens. Ye'll have no classes at all. They
only come, the best of them, because ye let them alone that way, and they
get a little decency and society help. It's somewhat to keep them out of
the dance-halls and saloons maybe."
"It's not enough," the rector asserted. "You've had a great deal of
experience with them. And I want to know why, in your view, more of them
don't come into the Church."
"Would ye put Jimmy Flanagan and Otto Bauer and Tony Baldassaro in Mr.
Parr's pew?" McCrae inquired, with a slight flavour of irony that was
not ill-natured. "Or perhaps Mrs. Larrabbee would make room for them?"
"I've considered that, of course," replied Hodder, thoughtfully, though
he was a little surprised that McCrae should have mentioned it. "You
think their reasons are social, then,--that they feel the gap. I feel it
myself most strongly. And yet none of these men are Socialists. If they
were, they wouldn't come here to the parish house."
"They're not Socialists," agreed McCrae.
"But there is room in the back and sides of the church, and there is the
early service and the Sunday night service, when the pews are free. Why
don't they come to these?"
"Religion doesn't appeal to them."
"Why not?"
"Ye've asked me a riddle. All I know is that the minute ye begin to
preach, off they go and never come back."
Hodder, with unconscious fixity, looked into his assistant's honest face.
He had an exasperating notion that McCrae might have said more, if he
would.
"Haven't you a theory?"
"Try yourself," said McCrae. His manner was abrupt, yet oddly enough,
not ungracious.
"Don't think I'm criticizing," said the rector, quickly.
"I know well ye're not."
"I've been trying to learn. It seems to me that we are only
accomplishing half our task, and I know that St. John's is not unique
in this respect. I've been talking to Andrews, of Trinity, about their
poor."
"Does he give you a remedy?"
"No," Hodder said. "He can't see any more than I can why Christianity
doesn't appeal any longer. The fathers and mothers of these people went
to church, in the old country and in this. Of course he sees, as you and
I do, that society has settled into layers, and that the layers won't
mix. And he seems to agree with me that there is a good deal of energy
exerted for a comparatively small return."
"I understand that's what Mr. Parr says."
These references to Mr. Parr disturbed Hodder. He had sometimes
wondered, when he had been compelled to speak about his visits to the
financier, how McCrae regarded them. He was sure that McCrae did regard
them.
"Mr. Parr is willing to be even more generous than he has been," Hodder
said. "The point is, whether it's wise to enlarge our scope on the
present plan. What do you think?"
"Ye can reach more," McCrae spoke without enthusiasm.
"What's the use of reaching them, only to touch them? In addition to
being helped materially and socially, and kept away from the dance-halls
and saloons, they ought to be fired by the Gospels, to be remade. They
should be going out into the highways and byways to bring others into the
church."
The Scotchman's face changed a little. For an instant his eyes lighted
up, whether in sympathy or commiseration or both, Hodder could not tell.
"I'm with ye, Mr. Hodder, if ye'll show me the way. But oughtn't we to
begin at both ends?"
"At both ends?" Hodder repeated.
"Surely. With the people in the pews? Oughtn't we to be firing them,
too?"
"Yes," said the rector. "You're right."
He turned away, to feel McCrae's hand on his sleeve.
"Maybe it will come, Mr. Hodder," he said. "There's no telling when the
light will strike in."
It was the nearest to optimism he had ever known his assistant to
approach.
"McCrae," he asked, "have you ever tried to do anything with Dalton
Street?"
"Dalton Street?"
The real McCrae, whom he had seemed to see emerging, retired abruptly,
presenting his former baffling and noncommittal exterior.
"Yes," Hodder forced himself to go on, and it came to him that he had
repeated virtually the same words to Mr. Parr, "it is at our very doors,
a continual reproach. There is real poverty in those rooming houses, and
I have never seen vice so defiant and shameless."
"It's a shifty place, that," McCrae replied. "They're in it one day
and gone the next, a sort of catch-basin for all the rubbish of the city.
I can recall when decent people lived there, and now it's all light
housekeeping and dives and what not."
"But that doesn't relieve us of responsibility," Hodder observed.
"I'm not denying it. I think ye'll find there's very little to get hold
of."
Once more, he had the air of stopping short, of being able to say more.
Hodder refrained from pressing him.
Dalton Street continued to haunt him. And often at nightfall, as he
hurried back to his bright rooms in the parish house from some of the
many errands that absorbed his time, he had a feeling of self-accusation
as he avoided women wearily treading the pavements, or girls and children
plodding homeward through the wet, wintry streets. Some glanced at him
with heavy eyes, others passed sullenly, with bent heads. At such
moments his sense of helplessness was overpowering. He could not follow
them to the dreary dwellings where they lodged.
Eldon Parr had said that poverty was inevitable.