"This is the most wonderful thing I ever heard and I want father pushed
to the limit with the planning. I don't care where the parson comes in,
just so I don't have to join the church to get the garden," I said, as I
tinkled the ice in Nickols' empty glass, while he consumed the last bit
of cream from the empty plate.
"Oh, I'll join the church if it is needed to push the garden," said
Nickols with a laugh, as he lit a cigarette and puffed a smoke ring out
toward the gray little chapel. "Most people who join churches do it for
some kind of pull, social or business, or a respectability stamp or to
be white-washed. I'll put on a frock coat and pass the plate if it will
help the parson evolve another phase of gardenism."
"Billy gets home from his poker game at the Last Chance, down in the
Settlement, on Sunday morning, just in time to bathe and get into his
frock coat to perform that office," I said with a laugh that had a hint
of recklessness tinged with contempt.
"I'll see Billy through both ceremonials," said Nickols. "Has Billy come
into the fold?"
"He has! So have all the rest," I answered. "I am the only black sheep
and they are all backsliding down on me. I am getting, and will get,
the blame of it all as a corrupter of public morals."
"Why don't you join and then do as you please with the official stamp of
Christianity upon you?" Nickols asked, as he puffed comfortably away in
the moonlight.
One of the things that cause me the deepest hurt is to try to get
Nickols to look down into my depths and read one, just any one, of the
hieroglyphics there. I know each time I open my nature to him he is
going to turn aside, and yet I will try. As his arm stole around me I
made another one of the attempts that I always know beforehand are
doomed to failure.
"There is something in me, a quality of mind that seems to be judicial,
which insists that as a cold scheme for existence in this universe
nothing compares with that of life followed by eternal redemption
through personal effort interpreted by a mediator. The bare Christian
tenets have a nobility that it kills me to see belittled by the bored,
half-hearted observances of most of its protestants, who in turn are not
to be blamed for being half-hearted and bored by the dogmas and
restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been
enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to
play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see
Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson
incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery--they allow a young
man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred
dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been
encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent on that same six
hundred dollars. The great men who are expected to direct our spiritual
destinies don't get as much money as many ordinary grocers and certainly
not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of
the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater
degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging
stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the
use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves if we
want immortality."