For a long time back truly aesthetic and truly educational motion pictures have been shown in the school and University class rooms. Many of them are scientific and historical records and renderings. In the odd hours of loafing through these three months I have noted many of them as of the best gifts of the new time. But our stubborn St. Friend, as a member of the school board, generally votes against them, and in solitary grandeur. While at one with the general policies of the educational system, he makes many a speech before the members for the restoration of the regime of the book and the blackboard. He truly says that these are now almost abolished in the presence of the protean triumphant films, of the street pageantry, the training of skilled labor in the high schools, of the oral, the phonographic, telegraphic and telephone methods, applied to all forms of teaching. And only last week he met what appeared to be his Waterloo when it was voted to extend and enlarge the entirely respectable, if a little frigid, university dance halls and to include motion picture loafing rooms, the better to run competition with the Yellow Halls.
Some of these things I go over with Avanel, as we walk home from witnessing Surto Hurdenburg’s oath, and we wonder just what of the forbidden things, besides motion pictures, St. Friend will include in his pledge for the Liberal Observance. Avanel says: “I admit that the men who are sworn in, like this Surto Hurdenburg, are apt to become useful, if fanatical, citizens. Their poor strength must be economized in narrow channels if it is to last and be recuperated. But if St. Friend tries to put such a set of chains on me I will not speak to him for a month.”
Saturday, June 7:—St. Friend has today given it out by word of mouth and by editorials in the five papers that the whole world is welcome to his bread. The Order of the Liberal Observance is already more popularly called by the alternate descriptive title: “The Citizens in the Communion of the Blessed Bread.” There is no oath; even a Quaker may join.
Sunday, June 8:—It is the warmest morning of the year, so far, in an exceedingly backward summer. It is the first real June weather, and all the people rejoice in it. Avanel walks to church in the most wonderful of white airy dresses. And in these vacuum-cleaned streets, with no soot and no coal dust and no factory grime, people, working or playing, can be dressed all day as for a party if they choose.
All day yesterday couriers of all faiths, representing St. Friend’s personal rather than his religious companions, have been out inviting the people. At least one member of each family has been asked to bring his tribe to the Cathedral green and to listen and carry the message back with the bread.
Avanel and I are early for Church and so we make a circuit, enjoying the airy splendors of the crowd. And we go around by St. John’s Hospital, so lately rebuilt by the insistence of Mayo Sims, to vindicate his scientific zeal, and they say it is a splendid scientific monument to any man. It is east of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, as it has been for over four generations. And the heretic synagogue and the school for teaching Hebrew, conducted by Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, are on the sites where the two orthodox synagogues were, one hundred years ago.
The green in front of the Cathedral was enclosed by a beautiful Gothic wall long ago, at the same time the devout congregation rebuilt the church. The enclosure is rapidly filling with people. St. Friend is to speak to the whole city from the Cathedral steps.
Piled on great wooden trays on the side of the Cathedral steps are the splendid brown loaves, put there for all the world by the Brotherhood of the Strict Observance, who are about in their almost monkish official robes, proud indeed to be so prominent.
Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg, so lately sworn in, is an ex-headwaiter of alleged New York hotel training and he is now to prove his mettle. He is about his task decorously and swiftly enough, for those seated and settled already have the tissue-wrapped loaves in their laps, and all through the sermon, as fast as our citizens are settled, they are given their loaves without a sound or a grimace, and Hurdenburg, the efficient, rises high at once in the estimation of the children of light.
But now the saint rises to speak. He is indeed a figure; his white hair gleams in the June morning air. His face is the face of Lincoln, grown old, with a touch of St. Francis eternally young. He straightens to his full height. He is fifty years younger. He is one of those capable of seeming collapse for weeks, when it is but the storage time, and then the lightning is discharged in one tremendous hour.