Shoddy

Chapter I I

For the moment, an aspect of peace rested on all Methodism.

The next General Conference was not yet near enough to be within the range of practical politics. The legislation of the preceding supreme council of the church had all been made operative, with such significant modifications as the elder statesmen had agreed were necessary, knowing as they did that a General Conference, like Congress, sometimes in¬ serts stultifying rather than enacting clauses into its legisla¬ tion.

It had been months since the American Labor and Capital Council had “launched a broadside” in the general direction of Bishop Eberle; and though in public that astute and inde¬ pendent cleric had nothing to say, to his friends he voiced his wonder at this long immunity. He was using the days of truce to gather new stores of the explosive sort of fact he delights in.

The Western Wesleyan had become mixed up in a violent dispute which raged around the preaching of a famous heretic of the Dutch Reformed Church, temporarily supplying the pulpit of the President’s church in Washington. So it had suspended for the time its denunciations of the doctrinal un¬ faithfulness which the Board of Missions permitted among its “employees,” as the Wesleyan urbanely tagged the church’s missionaries.

For the first time since the war the sloganeers were silent. They seemed to have lost confidence in their wares. The outworn tags of the Centenary were not being replaced by new-coined mottoes such as those which, in the more spacious easy money days, would have been counted on to stimulate successive crowd-minded spasms of sacrifice among the rank and file.

Here and there a modest local “drive” was on; in the denomination at large, none at all. A huge unpopularity had befallen the word and the thing it stood for.

In an excess of zeal an amateur census taker had announced that the Methodists, North and South, could claim as co¬ religionists by far the largest if not the shrewdest group in Congress. Thereby he had much embarrassed some of the church’s untiring propagandists. In the face of the figures, and with the Methodists’ own proven abilities as politicianbaiters, the horrendous warnings of these one-idea’d brethren against the possible machinations of other religious groups in public affairs evoked gusts of ribald laughter among the knowing ones of the Capitol.

College presidents were busy with the collection of some¬ what reluctant long-term subscriptions; pledges which had been made in haste and were being repented of, as well as being paid, at distressingly deliberate leisure.

And, from Boston to Los Angeles, for weeks on end, the newspapers had been unable to produce a front-page story of student revolt or student orgy in any Methodist institution of higher learning.

It was the luck of the Methodists that in such a time of dearth Bishop Bartelmy Bonafede, the church’s symbol of shrewdness and poise, should crumple up on a college plat¬ form into strengthless, wordless terror, right in the midst of so unexciting a performance as a Baccalaureate Sunday sermon.

Instantly the editors, with Monday’s yawning columns to fill, recognized the event as, for them providential. The re¬ sulting story was promptly spread in front-page frankness before all the world, and read avidly by that great multitude which tends to be gleeful when the Methodists “get theirs.”

In these pages is presented the whole Bonafede story, which the newspapers could not know, nor would have printed if they had found it out. Its marrow is the marrow of ecclesiasticism in the bones of Methodism.

Whether you like Methodists or not—and, of course, you do or you don’t; there’s no middle position—you must admit that they have what amounts to an instinct for the spotlight. At times they enjoy it, when they shouldn’t; at other times they dodge it, when its revelations might be wholesome. But, for better or worse, there they are; endless good copy for the reporter who tries to know his business.

It is their inescapable legacy from John Wesley.

ii

“So Bonafede had a field day?” remarked Colonel Burling¬ ton. “He would. Always does, when it can be arranged. And he usually knows how to arrange it, or did, before this crash I was telling you about. What sort of recovery he will make, of course nobody can tell. If he’s not physically broken, he’ll come back. I know Bishop Bonafede.”

It was the end of a London summer. Two Americans sat in the lounge of the National Liberal Club, around the corner from Whitehall. They had been guests of a Methodist knight at a luncheon in that Victorian sanctuary. Much of the table talk dealt with the place of worship sometimes pridefully called the “Cathedral of Methodism,” but, more simply and accu¬ rately, “Wesley’s Chapel,” in the City Road.

One of the two men, Professor Athelstan Dailey, head of the history department in a Middle-West college, found it vari¬ ously profitable to cross the Atlantic as often as professional means would allow. His companion, a fellow-Methodist, and more recently arrived, had no more than the tourist’s excuse for being in England. They were old friends, and, as expa¬ triates will, found peculiar solace in each other’s company. The Colonel had been bringing his friend down to date in the mat¬ ter of news from home.

“What you say about Bishop Bonafede’s breakdown at the Calder commencement is disturbing,” said the professor, “even though I’m not enamored of the bishop. I was thinking, while Sir Charles was talking about Wesley’s Chapel, of the time, a couple of years ago, when Bishop Bonafede preached there. Did you ever hear the story?”

“Why, no,” said Colonel Burlington. “An American Method¬ ist bishop in John Wesley’s pulpit is not so unusual as to make a story, I should think.”

Professor Dailey, with his half-conscious and slightly awk¬ ward approach to the English manner, said, “Quite. But there were circumstances. The bishop is English-born, you know; comes from the heavy woolen district of Yorkshire. He had let it be known in the West Riding that he was to occupy the City Road pulpit, and an excursion of Bonafedes and their con¬ nections to the fourth remove descended on London for the occasion. The fortunes of the Bonafedes—some of them—have been looking up since the bishop’s family emigrated. They say it was a strange and motley company that swelled the City Road congregation—prosperous mill-owners and their families, a couple of Sir Thomas Liptons in miniature, and even the mayor of a thriving little borough near Huddersfield, together with many cousins of lesser degree. The City Road sidesmen were greatly impressed, and the story is on the way to becom¬ ing a minor legend in London Methodism,—a sort of Metho¬ dist combination of Benjamin Franklin, Dick Whittington, and P. T. Barnum.”

“Hadn’t heard of it,” said Colonel Burlington. “You’ve evi¬ dently been specializing in Bonafede antiquities this trip. What else have you discovered?”

“Well, I’ve learned that Bonafede had a hard start,” the professor answered. “And that, if it were known, might make a difference when the brethren at home assume to sit in judg¬ ment on him. You see, I was down in the bishop’s native haunts last month.”

“On the Bonafede trail?” the Colonel suggested.

“No, not exactly. Though you might almost think so. But the town where the bishop was born has a rather romantic ruined abbey, with its reminders of Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell. That was my first interest in the place. Once there, it was not difficult to discover that the district was one of the first homes of the shoddy trade, and that the town is still a shoddy center.”

“Shoddy!” Colonel Burlington laughed. “What’s shoddy, or the abbey either, got to do with Bartelmy Bonafede?”

“Don’t laugh. I told you he had a hard start. Let me sketch for you the background of his childhood, as I saw it. Balaklava Terrace is a drab little street of this drab little town called Thornlea, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In that part of the country, where woolens are woven for the whole earth, shoddy is anything but comic. It has both business and social standing. My economist colleagues on the campus at home recognize shoddy in their treatises as a laudable example of the utilization of what otherwise would be waste material.

Thornlea exists to illustrate that thesis. Shoddy is the breath of its life.

“But with all its admitted usefulness, shoddy is shoddy; and I suppose a town which specializes in it cannot help being sub¬ dued to the fibers it works in. So Thornlea was, and is; and our own Bishop Bartelmy Bonafede, authentic child of Balaklava Terrace, Thornlea—how could he escape?

“Do you know much about shoddy, by the way, Colonel? No? Neither did I. But I found out a lot about it in Thorn¬ lea, where it is very much at home. Shoddy, as everybody should know, but doesn’t, begins by being worsted or woolen rags; just rags. But there are vast differences in rags. They may have been royal raiment, in fact or merely figuratively, as having been worn for virtue’s sake.

“Battlefields have always been rich in rag deposits, though if the uniforms of those who fell there were shoddy in the first place, as millions of them were, the profits of the second gathering and processing are discounted somewhat. Rags come from next door, and from far places of the earth. No famine or pestilence or earthquake-smitten area of the Orient is so remote that it has not sent dead men’s rags to Thornlea.”

“You’re not serious when you say that, of course,” the Col¬ onel interjected. “Not dead men’s rags, at any rate. There are limits to my credulity, you know.”

“My dear Colonel, I assure you it is precisely as I say. The rag merchant is no respecter of the amenities, or of places. Battlefields, back alleys, my lady’s boudoir, are all the same to him. But don’t think he is a befouler of his customers. He has processes which take out the dirt, the blood, the mud, the germs, and all that sort of thing, and leave nothing but thor¬ oughly aseptic fibers. They’re more than sanitary when they start to become cloth once again.

“The special value of all this raw material is that, not being really raw, but having paid for itself once, it is therefore a sort of salvage, and salvage-cheap. It is a short-cut to new cloth. Shoddy has various forms, and names to match—mungo, extracted wool, flocks, noils. I was told by a Thornlea philos¬ opher that Thornlea can manage to use anything which once grew T on a sheep’s back and is still long enough to have two ends.

“Shoddy must have had a lot to do with the bishop’s early training. He was just in his teens when his father gave up his business in Thornlea, and decided on America as his only hope. Indeed, I have a theory that you can explain much about Bishop Bonafede if you remember that he was out of the sixth grade before he was out of the atmosphere of shoddy.”

“I wonder,” said Colonel Burlington. “It depends on what you think there is to explain. Remember the talk we had on your front porch when I stopped off in May for the Leyton Center dedication? You believe Bonafede has made a mess of life. I believe he’s made a go of it, even if this collapse means he’s through. I’m a man of ideas; you’re an idealist. That’s why we differ. And now, since the rain seems to have quit, if you don’t mind I’ll stroll along the Embankment. Re¬ member, you’re dining with me tonight at the Victoria. I’m asking a new Englishman to meet us; one of those Ministry of Information men who helped Northcliffe to win the war. He knows young Bonafede,—says he gave him his start as a war correspondent.”

Chapter II I

Professor Athelstan Dailey was more nearly right than so casual an observer deserves to be. Shoddy and Thornlea had left their mark on Bishop Bartelmy Bonafede. The place ground into his soul both the taint and the terror of shoddy. It made him an easy picker-up of borrowed and re-worked ideas; and it put into his heart the perpetual dread of being discovered for other than he seemed.

His father, while not directly in shoddy, was affected, like all Thornlea folk, by the vicissitudes of the trade. He was a master carpenter in a small way.

In the late sixties and early seventies of the last century, this town of Thornlea enjoyed its customary ups and downs. Its chief trade languished or flourished, affected by causes which few in the town clearly understood, and no one could control. And the ups and downs of shoddy were necessarily the ups and downs of the little shop in the Cliff Road, and, by consequence, of the little four-room-and-scullery cottage in Balaklava Terrace, just on the wrong side of the line between Lower and Upper Thornlea.

Into the varying fortunes of this cottage and this shop came Bartelmy, first-born of Luke and Hannah Bonafede, at the slack period between the ending of the Civil War in America and the beginning of Napoleon the Little’s grandiose adventure which finished so flatly at Sedan.

When little Bartelmy was ready for dame school, Thornlea began to have one of its flush intervals. The Franco-Prussian War gave Bartelmy a dame-school education.

Then came the debacle of Sedan, the siege of Paris, the tri¬ umphal entry of the Prussian king, on his way to become, at Versailles, the German Emperor. Then the Commune. And the bottom dropped out of the shoddy market.

As shoddy orders fell off, the carpenter jobs which depended on them became fewer in number and more difficult to get themselves paid for. Luke Bonafede in spirit was gentle and sensitive, and when the slack days came, he had more worries than the lack of work. Even in good times he managed badly the simple bookkeeping which his shop required, but in dull times his troubles began with the first entries in cash book and journal, and progressed by increasing distresses to the agonies of collection.

As Bartlemy came to be ten years old or so, the bad trade had become, if anything, worse. And his father practiced a weak man’s evasion by using the boy for the more distasteful collection errands.

On a Saturday night in the black time, therefore, he gave Bartelmy a note to deliver.

“Wash thisen a bit, an’ tak’ that to Mr. Jessop, on Abbey Ridge,” he said. “Happen ’e’ll pay it this time; it’s little enough, an’ ’e’s made plenty a’ promises. If ’e does pay it, we’ll ’ave a roast pork supper when tha’ comes back. Careful tha’ duzent lose a penny, nah!”

Bartelmy’s mother was at her knitting. The knitting must go on, be the fortunes of the family for the moment good or bady. She knit all the children’s stockings, and Luke’s as well. As for darning, Luke sometimes said that he never really enjoyed wearing his stockings until Hannah had darned them a bit.

Hannah Bonafede looked up from her needles, without stop¬ ping her work; a slender, once comely woman, and still not unpleasant to the eye. Her friends said she had married be¬ neath her. Certainly her accent and manner had touches of a world beyond Balaklava Terrace, and she scorned to use the accent of her neighbors, though she had more than a trace of the local idiom.

“Nay, Luke, why forever send the lad? A great big man like you—what’s to hinder you going yourself?”

But Luke Bonafede, well aware, were he to undertake the errand up Abbey Ridge, that Mr. Jessop would be certain to find some new excuse for putting him off, shrank from the en¬ counter as if it were some physical torment. He had no shame for this weakness, any more than for his trick of relapsing, in spite of his wife’s tutelage in proper speech, into the broad Yorkshire of the shop and the mill.

“Tha’ knaws, Hannah,” he told his wife, mildly, “ony man can manage me. They mak’ silly excuses, an’ Ah knaw they’re silly, but Ah alius find misen ahtside t’door, wi’ no brass; an’ all. Ah can remember is the way Ah axed ther’ pardon for wor¬ ritin’ me betters. Bartelmy cannot do waur, an’ ’e isn’t so easy shamed.”

“Yes, father,” Hannah said, “I know how you feel. But you don’t consider the lad. He is ’shamed. He has no better stomach for this sort of thing than you have. If you would just make up your mind not to be put upon, you could make Jessop pay, and all the lot.”

“Well, that’s reight enough;” admitted Luke, “but Ah just can’t, and theer’s an end. If Bartelmy’s not to fetch t’ money, then w T e mun mak’ shift wi’out it.”

“Make shift, you may well say,” Mrs. Bonafede repeated, acidly. “I know what that means. Isn’t there even a few shillings left from the shop takings this week?”

Luke sighed. “Nay, how could ther’ be? Ther’ was nobbut ten shillin’ for Sylvester, an’ ’e grumbled rarely ovver that. Sed ’e wor good enough joiner to deserve a paand. But ther’ were nowt more in the till.”

“Well,” said his wife, with a touch of bitterness as she echoed his words, “I’ve ’nowt more’ in the house, either. Even if we got any money now, there’s no chance for a Sunday joint, though I nearly forgotten what a decent bit of beef tastes like. There’s some bread in the piggin, and we’ve enough tea and rhubarb for our breakfast in the morning, and a bit of oatmeal for the children’s porridge. And that’s all, Luke, my man. You ought to know by now what I have to do with. There’s bound to be an end of contriving, sometime.”

With the smell of soap still on him, his neck-scarf tied under his chin and the ends tucked into his coat, Bartelmy set out obediently but forlornly enough, carrying the Jessop bill and a respectfully appealing note addressed to “Samuel Jessop, Esq.”

Like other Thornlea worthies, literally of the shoddy aristoc¬ racy,—the Tanners, the Issots, the Savilles,—Samuel Jessop had laid the foundation of his fortune in the days, then not long past, of the Franco-Prussian war.

A Thornlea man he was through and through; illiterate, can¬ ny ; with a streak of nearness all his own. He was still so close to his days of struggle that their more obvious marks were not yet worn away. The very house toward which Bartelmy clumped in his clogs on this raw autumn night was a shameless revelation of the Jessop preference for expensive and ostenta¬ tious ugliness.

The fame of his “elegant modern villa-mansion” was no mere local repute. It had reached to London itself, and had been immortalized in the sacred pages of Punch. As Punch got the story, Sam Jessop, then rapidly becoming rich, and struggling mightily to become the “Samuel Jessop, Esq.” of Luke Bonafede’s note, bought an eligible site on Abbey Ridge, in later days referred to always by Thornlea cynics as Shoddy Hill, and gave an unlucky architect the commission and those successive instructions in design and ornament which had resulted in this ornate monstrosity.

In one of the early consultations, the architect, with bland and flattering deference, inquired, “And what sort of an aspect had you thought the house should have, Mr. Jessop?”

“Haspect?” that worthy climber had repeated, as nearly as the unfamiliar word and his own untempered tongue allowed, “haspect? Wot’s that? Does it go wi’ a right mansion? ’As Walter Tanner’s new ’ouse got one? ’Cos if it ’as, let’s ’ave one just like ’is, on’y bigger!”

ii

It was to this “Norfolk Lodge” and its bigger “haspect” that Bartelmy had come on his unwanted and dubious errand. He knew his place, and went to the back entrance, which the cook opened at his timid knock. Cook, almost at the last of her Saturday work, was fairly cheerful in the prospect of early bed and late getting up the next morning. Besides, in her heart she liked boys, as good cooks do.

“Sit yo’ daan, lad,” she said, friendly enough. “Sit yo’ daan o’ that chair, while I take yore letter to Mester Jessop in t’ libr’y.”

So here sat Bartelmy, from his straight-backed chair survey¬ ing the kitchen of what was to him a great house. It was evi¬ dence, to his awed eyes, not of mere money, but of limitless wealth.

He gazed at the rows of gleaming utensils hanging on the walls. His mother had two or three iron cooking vessels. His eye measured the wide and deep range. The kitchen at Balaklava Terrace had the usual little open fire, with a tiny oven on one side and an iron water-box on the other. Different as its appurtenances were from the equipment of his mother’s kit¬ chen, the Jessop display was not exactly a mystery. It was merely unbelievably lavish and rich; scaled to proportions far outside what ordinary humans could need or even use.

To Bartelmy it had an authentic eloquence. It spoke of feasting, not of meals. It suggested the glorious opulences of a perpetual Christmas. He could well imagine this kitchen as a shrine where geese and fowls and turkeys became glorified burnt offerings; or an exposition hall to which vegetable mar¬ row, and pineapples, and kidney potatoes, and huge roasts of beef, and legs of mutton, and meat pies, and deep dishes of fruit overlaid with delectable brown crusts, and sponge cakes, and pastries, and Stilton cheese, came and went in profuse and endless richness.

That he had begun the day with bread and dripping and tea, and that his noonday meal had been dry bread and a rind of cheese and more tea, and that his supper, if Mr. Jessop proved in complaisant mood, would be a slice of roast pork, bought ready cooked from the pork butcher’s, or, if his errand proved futile, just nothing at all—this did not prevent him from con¬ juring up visions of the feasts which this mighty kitchen must regularly produce, not as a magician produces marvels from his hat. His child’s imagination was quickened by the certainty that for him any supper whatever must depend on the word which would presently issue from the library.

And, of course, the word was—no supper. The commercial aspect of the unpaid bill meant little to Bartelmy, but when the kindly cook brought her message, gently enough, he would have died before he would have told her what bitterness of meaning her words held for him and the Bonafedes who awaited his return. There it was;, no supper. Also, as he could not forget, no Sunday dinner. His mother had made that clear.

“Mester says,” so cook reported, with the air of one reciting a formula, “he thinks the bill ought not to ’ave been brought so late in the day, and a Saturday, too. He ’asn’t enough money in the ’ouse to pay it now, because ’e’s paid out all he thought to bring ’ome. Says he’ll send in and pay it some day next week.”

Cook, discerning the child’s utter dejection, suddenly dropped her messenger’s tone and accent.

“Nay, but tha’s hungry, bairn. Ah can see that, plain. Here, let me cut thee a slice o’ bread an’ butter. Tha’ can eyt it as tha’ gooas hooam.”

Swiftly and expertly she cut, not one slice, but two, and spread the butter royally, scorning resort to Thornlea’s thrifty trick of scraping most of it off again. In a generous excess of pity she turned out the last third of a jar of Dundee marma¬ lade, and smeared that ambrosia thickly over the butter.

“Nah,” she said, in purest Thornlea, “tha’s gotten summat to stay thi stummick for an ’aar or two;” and turned away from Bartelmy’s confused thanks.

The boy who plodded slowly and, despite the good bread he munched, unhappily down Abbey Ridge Road had not yet learned, if he ever did, to analyze his feelings. But he knew he was the center of a black and impotent misery. His fre¬ quent hunger was the acute part of it, but back of the hunger was the old desperate fear that he would always be hungry, the fear that had been with him all his childhood. Hunger might be the proper and necessary thing for people like him and his; he didn’t know. Proper or not, he hated the Jessops and all their sort, not for being rich, but for keeping him from his slice of roast pork.

The windows of the houses, gas-lit and cheery, into which he looked on the way home added to his dull, resentful distress. For in some of them he could see, through the Nottingham cur¬ tains, the familiar signs of Saturday night supper impending. It was a little early for the full flavor of that rite, but an occa¬ sional housewife relished the observance the more, since she knew it for a sort of spendthrift joy, and must needs set the table while yet her family lingered among the shops and stalls of the High Street. The late supper of Saturday night is an ancient institution; it holds a flavor of secular license which the Sunday dinner, climax of the week’s provisioning though it may be, is unable, by reason of the day’s austerities, to offer.

His mother, inured as she was to respectable Christian pov¬ erty and orthodox Christian resignation, would have been shocked if she had guessed the wickedness of her little boy’s thoughts. For a ten-year-old boy, who lived in a four-room cottage and went to the Wesleyan Chapel, to think as he did about a gentleman like Mr. Jessop, who lived in a mansion and went to Church, just because that gentleman did not find it convenient, late on Saturday night, to pay a tradesman’s tri¬ fling bill, was very naughty indeed. And this Bartelmy could have found out, not only at home, but at his Sunday School on Spring Wood Hill, if he had ever asked. But asking for infor¬ mation on the boundaries of ethics was something little Wes¬ leyan boys took special pains never to do. They were told enough, as it was.

When he got home the younger children were in bed. Their mother had told them, with a choke in her throat, that if Bart had good luck she would waken them when he came back, and they could come down to supper. She was not greatly surprised, nor, to be sure, was his father, when the boy came home with nothing but Mr. Jessop’s cheap excuse and easy promise, and half the bread and marmalade.

“We’ll save that for the little ’uns in the morning,” said his mother shortly.

He slid into bed beside his two smaller brothers, and fell asleep by and by, exhausted by hunger, silent tears, and by his wishes that manifold disaster might come upon all who owed his father money and would not pay.

hi

Next morning’s breakfast was a dreary thing. Mrs. Bonafede got it over as quickly as possible. Then she put on a shawl over her house dress, which was quite the correct mode at so early an hour, but which would have scandalized Thornlea if seen two hours later, and went out by the back door. All the Bonafedes knew where she was going, and her word as she let go the door-snek was addressed to nobody in particular. “I’m going over to grandfather’s,” she said. Grandfather’s was a retreat always open, but not to be used save in extremity.

Luke Bonafede sat in the “room,” aimlessly picking out tunes from “Hymns Ancient and Modern” on the squeaky little har¬ monium, as was his Sunday morning habit, observed more faithfully, if anything, in bad times than in good.

Soon Mrs. Bonafede was back. “We’re to go to grand¬ father’s for dinner,” she said to Bartelmy, who was wiping out the clumsy panshon, after washing up the breakfast things. “Tell your father.”

There was no need. All hands knew. In the room father was running his great stumpy fingers over the keys, and sing¬ ing, in rather pleasant tenor, one of his favorite minor tunes from the old book.

“We’re to go to grandfather’s for dinner, father,” Bartelmy said, not as a news bringer, but merely because he had been told to say it. And Luke Bonafede scarcely interrupted his singing to answer, “I thowt as much. All reight.”

So everything might have gone on to the end of the Thornlea chapter, with no beginning of any other. But a Christmas came which was unlike other Christmases. Instead of a little work; none. Instead of an occasional dinner at Grandfather Oldroyd’s many meals there; and increasing gloominess at home.

It was Betsey Bennett, grandfather’s old housekeeper, who set in motion the machinery of change. One day when the Bonafedes had gone back to Balkalava Terrace after Betsey had given them their tea (a knife-and fork affair it was, too— no mere formality of thin tea, thinner bread and vanishing butter), she came in from the kitchen, giving her wrinkled hands a final wipe on her apron.

Betsey, for all her grimness, had a heart. And she was a woman with more privileges than she usually cared to exercise. Just now she intended to speak plainly to her employer, and she knew he would not rebuke her.

“Mester,” she said, as she stood before his chair, “Yo’ knawed when Luke Bonafede wed Hannah that it wor a chancy match.”

Jonas Oldroyd nodded. “I knew that, Betsey,” he said, “but they cared for each other, and do yet, for aught I know. But happen something’s wrong; is there?”