With these few simple remarks, he turned his back indifferently to Mr. Rogers, and, catching hold of the carpet in the corner with his fingers, he lifted it up by the roots.
“There’s no use buckin’ the government,” Mr. Rogers decided, after a critical study of the sanitary policeman’s back, which was extremely impressive. “It’s a government of the rich for the rich. Has a poor man got any show? I’m a capable stationary engineer. All I ask is a chance to work—at my trade.” This by an afterthought. “If you’ll give me two dollars to tide me over—”
The Reverend Smith Boyd stepped out of the way of the sanitary policeman, and then stepped out of the door.
“And you call yourself a minister of the gospel!” Mr. Rogers yelled after him.
That was a sample of the morning’s work, and the Reverend Smith Boyd felt more and more, as he neared luncheon time, that he merited some consideration, if only for the weight of the cross he bore. There were worse incidents than the abuse of men like Rogers; there were the hideous sick to see, and the genuinely distressed to comfort, and depthless misery to relieve; and any day in Vedder Court was a terrific drain, both upon his sympathies and his personal pocket.
He felt that this was an exceptionally long day.
Home in a hurry at twelve-thirty. A scrub, a complete change of everything, and a general feeling that he should have been sterilised and baked as well. Luncheon with the mother who saw what a long day this was, then a far different type of calls; in a sedate black car this time, up along the avenue, and in and out of the clean side streets, where there was little danger of having a tire punctured by a wanton knife, as so often happened in Vedder Court. He called on old Mrs. Henning, who read her Bible every day to find knotty passages for him to expound; he called on the Misses Crasley, who were not thin but bony, who sat frozenly erect with their feet neatly together and their hands in their laps, and discussed foreign missions with greedy relish; he spent a half hour with plump Mrs. Rutherford, who shamelessly hinted that a rector should be married, and who was the worried possessor of three plump daughters, who did not seem to move well from the shelves; he listened to the disloyal confessions of Mrs. Sayers, who at heart liked her husband because he provided her so many faults to brood upon; he made brief visits with three successive parishioners who were sweet, good women with a normally balanced sense of duty, and with two successive parishioners who looked on the Kingdom of Heaven as a respectable social circle, which should be patronised like a sewing girls’ club or any other worthy institution.
Away to Vedder Court again, dismissing his car at the door of Temple Mission, and walking inside, out of range of the leers of those senile old buildings, but not out of the range of the peculiar spirit of Vedder Court, which manifested itself most clearly to the olfactory sense.
The organ was playing when he entered, and the benches were half filled by battered old human remnants, who pretended conversion in order to pick up the crumbs which fell from the table of Market Square Church. Chiding himself for weariness of the spirit, and comforting himself with the thought that one greater than he had faltered on the way to Golgotha he sat on the little platform, with a hymn book in his hand, and, when the prelude was finished, he devoted his wonderful voice to the blasphemy.
The organist, a volunteer, a little old man who kept a shoemaker’s shop around the corner, and who played sincerely in the name of helpfulness, was pure of heart.