Stephen laid down his paper and tried to fit the jigsaw pieces of the day’s news into some comprehensible pattern. What had happened to the country? Either the Times hadn’t printed the right news—or else (a disturbing alternative) the American people were frittering away their energies in infantile nonsense.
Stephen picked up The Saturday Evening Post. Here was substance: two hundred pages of glossy-coated paper, containing a serial, several short stories, and inspiring articles by America’s leading writers—all for a nickel. He skipped the literature, and turned to the advertising pages—a glowing world of pearly-toothed smiles and almost intolerable satisfactions. Into a candlelit dining room gleaming with crystal and silver, a liveried butler proudly bore aloft on his salver a can of baked beans while the diners repressed jets of saliva with politely lifted napkins. A female with exquisite bosoms peeping through her French nightgown lay back with an ecstatic smile on a snow-white bed and beamed: “My Yumsutta sheets are satin-smooth at a ridiculously low price.” In gleaming kitchens, unperturbed housewives whipped up a Sunday-night snack for an unexpected party of eight by reaching for a tin of Five-Star Deviled Ham and a can opener. A high-powered executive type pointed his finger straight at Stephen and cried: “I am looking for a man I can pay five thousand a year. Are you equipped to accept my offer?”
Stephen was mulling over the proposition when a glossy-napped individual entered from the dining car and sat down in the next chair. Quite successfully the newcomer proceeded to give the impression that he was a director not only of the Pullman Company, but also the Pennsylvania Railroad, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, United States Steel, and sundry other blue-chip enterprises. His finest directorial effect was achieved when he summoned the porter in an “I-mean-you” voice and ordered him to produce a table immediately so that some highly important work could be done on papers involving figures of the eleventh power. From his calfskin brief case he drew out a sheaf of documents and began marking them with a patent gold pencil containing red, blue, and green leads. He made at least twenty marks before holding up the pencil for Stephen’s inspection:
“Neatest little invention since the coaster brake,” he announced with considerable breeze power. Without waiting for Stephen’s comment, he began to demonstrate. “Suppose you’re breaking down a list of clients into their Dun and Bradstreet ratings. AAA customers—that means a credit rating over a million dollars—get a blue check-mark. Anything between a million and five hundred thousand—that’s a prospect of another color. So you just give this little knob a quarter twist, and out pops a green lead. See the point, Dominie?”
“A pun my word I do,” said Stephen.
“Not bad, not bad, Padre.” In his best board-room voice, the gadget lover summoned the porter again. “George, bring me a bottle of Poland Springs water. Not Vichy, not Saratoga, but Poland Springs, hear?”
When the water came, Stephen’s companion tapped the label on the bottle and said: “Beauty of advertised trade names. Be sure of what you’re getting when you ask for what you want. Almost good enough for a slogan, eh, Reverend?” Modestly he withdrew the claim. “Guess I’ll leave ad writing to the other fellow. Not my territory.” Solicitude larded his query. “How’s business in your line, Doctor?”
“We’re doing all right, thanks.”
“Glad to hear it. No reason why religion can’t be put on a paying basis in the United States. You a Catholic or Episcopalian, Father?”
“Catholic. Roman Catholic.”
“Cozy outfit. Plenty of organization and showmanship all the way down the line. Course there’s a lot of people with funny notions about importing religion from Rome—but that’s bigotry stuff. Believe and let believe, I say. Only the other day I was lunching at the Willard with a big Catholic client. Happened to be a Friday, and he ordered pompano. Had to respect the man.”
Next thing he’ll say, thought Stephen, is: “Catholic, Jew, Protestant —what’s the difference?” The man said exactly that, then added: “We’re going to have a long ride together … might as well get acquainted. I’m Horace F. Stoner, sales manager of the Hearthstone Security Corporation. Home office in Dayton, O.—branches all over.” He handed his business card to Stephen. “Ever need any investment advice, just give me a ring.”
“Thank you very much,” said Stephen. “It’s not likely I’ll ever be in a position to make any investments.”
“Never can tell. Client of ours in Detroit—pastor of a big parish—salts down a regular amount every month in Hearthstone. Got a Methodist bishop in Wilkes-Barre—shrewd operators, these divines—all loaded for the next big rise.”
“Will there be another rise?”
“Will there be! Padre, let me put it in conservative terms—Hearthstone terms. Inside of three weeks there’s going to be a touch-off that’ll send our national economy right through the ceiling. Don’t take my word for it.” Horace Stoner clicked open his brief case. “Just cast your clerical optics over this statement by the U. S. Commerce Department.”
Stephen glanced at the mimeographed release, complete with graphs and pie charts. “The recent advances in stock prices,” he read, “may be considered the first insistent reading of the new and greater prosperity for which the people of the United States have been consciously preparing. These advances (see graph, page 2) are based on an unprecedented increase in national wealth, ascribable chiefly to (1) assembly-line production; (2) more efficient methods of distribution; (3) a new attitude toward investment on the part of the general public.”
“Sounds pretty convincing,” said Stephen.
“Convincing! I’m sold up to here.” Mr. Stoner held a rigid forefinger under his nose like a man trying to stop hiccups. “And the things that sell me hardest are the magic little words ‘assembly-belt production.’ Ever see a belt in operation?”
“Can’t say I ever did.”
“Then, Mister, I mean Padre, you’ve got a treat coming. When that old conveyor belt slips into high, she purrs like a dynamo throwing off sparks of pure gold. Finest flower of American ingenuity. Do anything on a belt—stamp, cut, drill, saw, spin, polish—cheaper and better, too. Funny thing, it turns out stuff in ever-increasing quantities at ever decreasing costs. Get it? Means more cars, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and coffee percolators for more people.”
“I understand the theory,” said Stephen. “But does it work out in practice? How can the average wage earner afford to buy all the goods whirling off the production line?”
Mr. Stoner disposed of the question as a surgeon disposes of a soiled dressing. “Installment buying fixes all that.” He waved a deprecatory hand. “Oh, I know—five years ago, people thought there was something immoral about buying things they couldn’t pay cash for. My old man, for instance—he’d rather be caught flagrante delictu (excuse the expression, Doctor) than coming out of an installment house. But the new generation is different. These days people want immediate possession, and industry’s smart enough to let them have it. Anyway, it’s not called ‘installment buying’ any more. You ‘exercise your credit,’ buy a car on ‘deferred payments.’ Budget as you go. More dignified.”
So. Wishes had become horses, and beggars could ride. In dignity, too. “Sooner or later,” said Stephen, “everyone will have everything. What’ll happen then?”
This gruesome idea found a “No admittance” sign nailed to the portals of Mr. Stoner’s mind. He spent the hour between Wilmington and Philadelphia explaining just why American purchasing power could expand forever. Tinctures of poesy tinted his argument. Under the guidance of the American businessman (pictured by Horace Stoner as a combination of daring navigator and benevolent captain), the bark of private enterprise was sailing into the palm-fringed harbors of a permanent Utopia. Or, to change the figure, the airtight infield of installment buying, advertising, and salesmanship was performing the miraculous triple play by which that snide base runner, Poverty, would never again reach home plate. As he talked
, the luxurious train whirling northward through an industrial gantlet of factories seemed to corroborate his predictions. Maybe he was right.
Only after Stoner had left for bigger operations in the smoking car did Stephen have a chance to test the investment broker’s argument against the logic of fact. Shocking rebuttals lay near at hand. Behind the facade of factories in Pennsylvania and New Jersey manufacturing towns, Stephen saw the gray wasteland of tenements and mean streets. No flight of business rhetoric could make the scene anything but what it was: a wretched landscape of substandard dwellings peopled by the workers who kept the production line whirring. Was this the palm-fringed Utopia that Horace Stoner had painted with such glowing colors?
Crossing the Jersey marshes, the train halted for a moment while waiting for the block signal’s permission to plunge into the Manhattan tunnel. Harsh fumes seeped into the waiting cars: the acrid stench of industrial chemicals—sulphur, chlorine, and ammonia—mingled with the odors of decay rising from the stagnant marshes. As the train entered the dark tunnel, Stephen could not help thinking that the approaches to Dante’s city of Dis were scarcely more ominous or terrifying.
STEPHEN had dinner that evening with his brother George on the glassed-in roof of the Lawyers’ Club atop one of the recently built skyscrapers in the Grand Central district. George was making a name for himself in the field of workmen’s compensation—a new branch of law stemming from the social legislation of Governor Alfred E. Smith. At thirty-two, an inch taller and ten pounds heavier than Stephen, George rather resembled Gene Tunney. There was about him, however, a truculence that Tunney always lacked. Definitely, George was cast in the crusader mold, with a pugnacity of mind and a jut of jaw inherited from Dennis Fermoyle. In the four years since Stephen had seen his brother, George had channeled his energies into the cause of social reform—nothing radical, of course; merely a practical wage-and-hour program for labor. Apparently he was taking an active part in the political push behind A1 Smith. His enthusiasm for the Brown Derby fell just short of idolatry.
“The Governor’s twenty years ahead of everyone else in his legislation for the common man,” he told Steve. “If he keeps moving forward, he’ll have more than a chance for the Democratic nomination in 1928.”
“But Smith’s a Catholic. …”
“Well? There’s nothing in the Constitution that says a Catholic can’t be President, is there?” George simmered down. “I know what you mean, Stuffy. Any R. C. candidate for the presidency has two and a half strikes against him. But aside from the religious angle, Smith’s program should appeal to a lot of ordinary working stiffs who aren’t getting their share of Coolidge prosperity. This boom stuff is caviar for the few, not meat and potatoes for the general.”
To support his statement, George began laying down a factual barrage. “Did you know, Stuff, that steel puddlers are still getting twenty-seven dollars for a sixty-hour week? And that coal miners average twenty-four-fifty—when they work? I’m not inventing these figures; they’re in the Department of Commerce report, if anyone wants to look them up.”
How would Horace Stoner’s patent gold pencil check that? thought Stephen. “Funny, George, I said something like that to a man on the train today. Investment salesman. He blasted my ear off, telling me how wrong I was.”
“Don’t be fooled by their canvass, Stuff. Those salesmen are so busy blowing four-colored bubbles, they don’t know what’s going on in the country.”
“What is going on, George? In the four years since I’ve been away, something’s changed. I sensed it the minute I stepped off the boat. The papers, the very air, seem full of snarling contradictions and frightful discords. You’re the social student—what’s the clash all about?”
George pondered the question. “Everyone has a different theory. Some say it’s the emotional backlash of an unfinished war. The energy we generated for high martial adventure never got used up on the Germans, so now we turn it on ourselves in gang wars, race riots, lynchings, and floggings. There’s something to it.” George stirred his coffee gloomily. “Others say we’re afraid to accept the challenge of world leadership offered us at Versailles and are seeking infantile substitutes in bunion derbies and goldfish-swallowing.”
“Those are only surface symptoms,” prodded Stephen. “The disease itself must lie deeper.”
“It does. The real cause of our trouble—well, let me put it this way: in the last five years American technology has developed a remarkable system of industrial production. Agreed?”
“That’s what the man on the train said.”
“What he didn’t say is that our oh-so-wonderful technology has become a runaway juggernaut, leaving the rest of our social institutions far behind. An enormous, unlovely gap has opened between our technical achievements and our cultural ideas. The gap widens every day, and no plan is being devised for bridging it. Whole sections of the population, people, Stuffy, are falling into the chasm, while our so-called leaders don’t even know that it exists.”
“Your theory isn’t exactly new,” said Stephen. “Leo XIII stated it thirty-five years ago in his encyclical Rerum novarum.”
“I know. Leo made a powerful plea for social justice. But he didn’t offer any practical methods for obtaining it. I hate to say this, Stuffy, but the Catholic Church—along with education, Congress, and everything else—hasn’t kept pace with the needs of people in a machine age. I wish she’d draw up with the times and really get interested in the plight of troubled human beings.”
“The Church is so interested in troubled human beings that she can’t be interested in anything else. Whom do you suppose Christ was talking to when He said: ‘Come unto me, ye who are heavy laden.’”
“When Christ said that, He was talking to fishermen, laborers in the vineyard, hewers of wood, and drawers of water—men who lived and worked in a simpler age.” George spoke with moving sincerity. “I’m not just trying to win an argument, Stuff. All I’m saying is that technology has made life so fearfully complex that the old premachine formulas don’t work any more. Can the ordinary working-stiff—the steel puddler at his open-hearthed hell, for instance—find support in a ‘Come-unto-me’ religion? Can such a religion bring emotional and economic security to the assembly-line robot or bridge the widening gap between man and technology? Don’t be blithe, Steve. Answer me!”
Stephen Fermoyle was in no mood to be blithe. He had been through quite a day. He had listened to Horace Stoner’s selling line, read the news in the Times and the ads in the Post. He had run the gantlet of factories between Wilmington and New York, seen the festering slums behind them. He had smelled the mingled odors of chemical waste and natural decay blowing across the Jersey marshes. And now he had heard his brother’s indictment of an archaic culture that included the Catholic Church. The effect of all these sights, sounds, smells, and ideas disturbed Stephen as he began his reply.
“We’ve always differed about the part the Church should play in human affairs. I think I know why.” Stephen chose his words carefully. “You, as a layman, see the problem in terms of this world. I, as a priest, see it in terms of the next. You’re interested in the cure of social disorders; I’m interested in the cure of man’s immortal soul.”
“Can’t the two programs be combined?” asked George.
“Some hard thinking has been done on the subject by Catholic theologians. The outlook is hopeful. But get this, George.” Stephen was teaching now. “It’s not the mission of the Church to work out practical methods by which the just state is brought into being. The function of the Church is to form public men who will. Men of Christian conscience and moral purpose, who believe that human beings have a right to live on the plane of morality, dignity, and security intended by God.”
Stephen hammered out the final link—part definition, part apology—in his argument. “When you accused me of being blithe a moment ago, it stung. I had to tell myself, and I have to tell you now, that a priest is not a sociologist or politician or labor
organizer. He is simply a mediator between God and man. He must keep his function pure, even though, as Leo XIII has shown, the Church is not indifferent to economic ills.”
Then, in summation, Stephen Fermoyle stated the priest’s reason for being. “Only poets can write poetry; only women can bear children. Only a priest can remind men that God forever was, is now, and—come hell, high water, or technology—always will be.”
CHAPTER 8
THE INTER-FAITH CONVOCATION began next day with a luncheon in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. The Right Reverend Alfred Cartmell, Episcopal Bishop of Long Island, invoked the blessing of God on the assembly, ending his prayer with the plea: “Let Thy light so illuminate our hearts that we may see eye to eye those common truths vouchsafed unto all peoples through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Stephen, seated on the right wing of the speaker’s table, found himself between Rabbi Jonas Mordecai, patriarch of orthodox Judaism, and Hubbell K. Whiteman, Ph.D., lay author of Protestantism on the March. The dubious droop of Rabbi Mordecai’s beard bred more interest than Dr. Whiteman’s chin-up militancy. After exchanging amenities with both luncheon partners, Stephen turned a sympathetic eye on the Rabbi as the latter gazed mournfully at the lobster cocktail heading the menu. Rabbi Mordecai went so far as to lift a small-tined fork, then laid it down again with a four-thousand-year-old smile of resignation.
“I’m out of the running already,” he whispered to Stephen. In the Rabbi’s voice were melancholy echoes of Leviticus: “Whatsoever hath not fins and scales shall be an abomination unto you.” Properly interpreted, the Rabbi’s observance of the ancient code of Jewish holiness was no mere dietary whim; rather a reverberation of Sinai’s thunder: “I, the Lord your God, am holy, and have set you apart from the peoples that ye should be Mine.”
Across Stephen’s meditation fell the voice of Dr. Hubbell K. White-man, “What hopes do you entertain, Monsignor, for the success of our Inter-Faith movement?” The question, legitimate enough, had the quality of a skirmisher’s shot. Dr. Whiteman was merely finding his range.
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