The Ball of Fire

by George Randolph Chester; Lillian Chester

There was a clatter in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s service plate. He had been awkward with his spoon, and dropped it. He made to pick it up, but reached two inches the other side of the handle. Mrs. Boyd could have laughed aloud for sheer joy. She made up her mind to do some energetic missionary work with Gail Sargent at the first opportunity. The foolish notions Gail had about the church should be removed. Mrs. Boyd had long ago studied this matter of religion, with a clear mind and an honest heart. It was a matter of faith, and she had it; so why be miserable! Her reverie was broken by the calm and mellow voice of her son.

“That is delightful news,” he returned with a frank enthusiasm which was depressing to his mother.

“I think I shall have the Sargents over to dinner,” she went on, persisting in her hope.

“That will be pleasant.” Frank again, carefree, aglow with neighbourly friendliness; even affection!

Mrs. Boyd had nothing more to say. She watched her son Tod start vigorously at his grape fruit, with a vivacity which seemed to indicate that he might finish with the rind. He drew his eggs energetically toward him, buttered a slice of toast, and finished his breakfast. Suddenly he looked at his watch.

“I have an extremely busy day before me,” he told her briskly. “I have Vedder Court this morning, some calls in the afternoon, and a mission meeting at four-thirty. I might probably be late for dinner,” and feeling to see if he had supplied himself with handkerchiefs, he kissed his mother, and was gone without another word about Gail! She could have shaken him in her disappointment. What was the matter with Tod?

The Reverend Smith Boyd sang as he went out of the door, not a tune or any set musical form, but a mere unconscious testing of his voice. It was quite unusual for him to sing on the way to Vedder Court, for he devoted his time to this portion of his duties because he was a Christian. He had sympathy, more than enough, and he both understood and pitied the people of Vedder Court, but, in spite of all his intense interest in the deplorable condition of humanity’s weak and helpless, he was compelled to confess to himself that he loathed dirt.

Vedder Court was particularly perfect in its specialty this morning. The oily black sediment on its pavements was streaked with iridescence, and grime seemed to be shedding from every point of the drunken old buildings, as if they had lain inebriated in a soaking rain all night, and had just staggered up, to drip. They even seemed to leer down at the Reverend Smith Boyd, as if his being the only clean thing in the street were an impertinence, which they would soon rectify. It had been comparatively dry in the brighter streets of New York, but here, in Vedder Court, there was perpetual moisture, which seemed to cling, and to stick, and to fasten its unwholesome scum permanently on everything. Never had the tangle of smudge-coated children seemed so squalid; never had the slatternly women seemed so unfeminine; never had the spineless looking men seemed so shuffling and furtive and sodden; never had the whole of the human fungi in Vedder Court seemed so unnecessary, and useless, and, the rector discovered in himself with startled contrition, so thoroughly not worth saving, body or soul!

A half intoxicated woman, her front teeth missing and her colourless hair straggling, and her cheekbones gleaming with the high red of debauchery, leered up at him as he passed, as if in all her miserable being there could be one shred, or atom, to invite or attract. A curly-headed youngster, who would have been angelically beautiful if he had been washed and his native blood pumped from him, threw mud at the Reverend Smith Boyd, out of a mere artistic desire to reduce him to harmony with his surroundings. A mouthing old woman, with hands clawed like a parrot’s, begged him for alms, and he was ashamed of himself that he gave it to her with such shrinking. The master could not have been like this. A burly “pan handler” stopped him with an artificial whine. A cripple, displaying his ugly deformity for the benefit and example of the unborn, took from him a dole and a wince of repulsion.

“The poor ye have always with ye!” For ages that had been the excuse for such offences as Vedder Court. They were here, they must be cared for within their means, and no amount of pauperising charity could remove them from the scheme of things. In so far, Market Square Church felt justified in its landlordship, that it nursled squalor and bred more. Yet, somehow, the rector of that solidly respectable institution was not quite satisfied, and he had added a new expense to the profit and loss account in the ledger of this particular House of God. He had hired a crew of forty muscular men, with horses and carts, and had caused them to be deputised as sanitary police, and had given them authority to enter and clean; which may have accounted for the especially germ laden feel of the atmosphere this morning. Down in the next block, where the squad was systematically at work, there were the sounds of countless individual battles, and loud mouthings of the fundamental principles of anarchy. A government which would force soap and deodorisers and germicides on presumably free and independent citizens, was a government of tyranny; and it had been a particular wisdom, on the part of the rough-hewn faced man who had hired this crew, to select none but accomplished brick dodgers. In the ten carts which lined the curb on both sides, there were piled such a conglomerate mass of nondescript fragments of everything undesirable that the rector felt a trace better, as if he had erased one mark at least of the long black score against himself. Somehow, recently, he had acquired an urgent impulse to clean Vedder Court!