In this mood a day was set when John would go to Los Angeles to visit Bessie. As the time approached, he could think of nothing else. On the morning of that day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban population of several hundred thousand people across the Bay from San Francisco, the largest municipal unit of which is the City of Oakland. But thoughts of Bessie crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy clouds that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing power."
As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks long and half a block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with graceful palms, with tall, shapely, shiny-leaved acacias, and covered with a thick sod of grass, laced at intervals by curving walks.
Upon a bench in the very center of this park Hampstead dropped down and gave himself up to blissful meditations. Across the street from him was a block of happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great middle-class folk of America, the one class that John knew well and sympathetically, for he himself was of it.
On the corner directly before him was a grass-sodded lot, larger than the others, holding in its center, not a cottage, but a structure of the country schoolhouse type, painted white, and with a small hooded vestibule out in front. Over the wide doors admitting to this vestibule was a transom of glass, on which was painted in very plain letters the words: CHRISTIAN CHAPEL.
"The house of God does not look so happy as the homes of men hereabout," Hampstead remarked, and just then was surprised out of his own thoughts by seeing the door of the deserted looking chapel open and two men come out. One was tall and heavy, gray of moustache and red of face, wearing a silk hat, a white necktie, and a full frock coat.
"An ex-clergyman," voted Hampstead shrewdly, because, aside from his dress, the man looked aggressively unclerical.
The other was slender, with a black, dejected moustache and also frock-coated, but the material of the garment was gray instead of black, and the suit rubbed at the elbows and bagged at the knees. This man carried a small satchel.
"Some sort of a missionary secretary, I'll bet you," was John's second venture at identification.
Another incongruous thing about the man with the clerical dress was that he had a carpenter's hammer in his hand. Dropping this tool upon the wooden landing, where it clattered loudly, he drew a key from his pocket and locked the door, shaking it viciously to make sure that it was fast. Then, descending the steps, with the claw of the hammer he pried loose a plank, some six or eight feet long, from the wooden walk that ran across the sod to the concrete pavement in front. The missionary secretary took one end of this, and the two raised it across the door, where the ex-clergyman disclosed the fact that his bulging left hand contained nails, as with swinging blows, he began to cleat the door fast.
"Nailing up God!" commented John, whose mood had become sardonic.