The Iron Heel

THE BISHOP

It was after my marriage that I chanced upon Bishop Morehouse. But I
must give the events in their proper sequence. After his outbreak at
the I. P. H. Convention, the Bishop, being a gentle soul, had yielded
to the friendly pressure brought to bear upon him, and had gone away on
a vacation. But he returned more fixed than ever in his determination
to preach the message of the Church. To the consternation of his
congregation, his first sermon was quite similar to the address he had
given before the Convention. Again he said, and at length and with
distressing detail, that the Church had wandered away from the Master’s
teaching, and that Mammon had been instated in the place of Christ.

And the result was, willy-nilly, that he was led away to a private
sanitarium for mental disease, while in the newspapers appeared
pathetic accounts of his mental breakdown and of the saintliness of his
character. He was held a prisoner in the sanitarium. I called
repeatedly, but was denied access to him; and I was terribly impressed
by the tragedy of a sane, normal, saintly man being crushed by the
brutal will of society. For the Bishop was sane, and pure, and noble.
As Ernest said, all that was the matter with him was that he had
incorrect notions of biology and sociology, and because of his
incorrect notions he had not gone about it in the right way to rectify
matters.

What terrified me was the Bishop’s helplessness. If he persisted in the
truth as he saw it, he was doomed to an insane ward. And he could do
nothing. His money, his position, his culture, could not save him. His
views were perilous to society, and society could not conceive that
such perilous views could be the product of a sane mind. Or, at least,
it seems to me that such was society’s attitude.

But the Bishop, in spite of the gentleness and purity of his spirit,
was possessed of guile. He apprehended clearly his danger. He saw
himself caught in the web, and he tried to escape from it. Denied help
from his friends, such as father and Ernest and I could have given, he
was left to battle for himself alone. And in the enforced solitude of
the sanitarium he recovered. He became again sane. His eyes ceased to
see visions; his brain was purged of the fancy that it was the duty of
society to feed the Master’s lambs.

As I say, he became well, quite well, and the newspapers and the church
people hailed his return with joy. I went once to his church. The
sermon was of the same order as the ones he had preached long before
his eyes had seen visions. I was disappointed, shocked. Had society
then beaten him into submission? Was he a coward? Had he been bulldozed
into recanting? Or had the strain been too great for him, and had he
meekly surrendered to the juggernaut of the established?

I called upon him in his beautiful home. He was woefully changed. He
was thinner, and there were lines on his face which I had never seen
before. He was manifestly distressed by my coming. He plucked nervously
at his sleeve as we talked; and his eyes were restless, fluttering
here, there, and everywhere, and refusing to meet mine. His mind seemed
preoccupied, and there were strange pauses in his conversation, abrupt
changes of topic, and an inconsecutiveness that was bewildering. Could
this, then, be the firm-poised, Christ-like man I had known, with pure,
limpid eyes and a gaze steady and unfaltering as his soul? He had been
man-handled; he had been cowed into subjection. His spirit was too
gentle. It had not been mighty enough to face the organized wolf-pack
of society.

I felt sad, unutterably sad. He talked ambiguously, and was so
apprehensive of what I might say that I had not the heart to catechise
him. He spoke in a far-away manner of his illness, and we talked
disjointedly about the church, the alterations in the organ, and about
petty charities; and he saw me depart with such evident relief that I
should have laughed had not my heart been so full of tears.

The poor little hero! If I had only known! He was battling like a
giant, and I did not guess it. Alone, all alone, in the midst of
millions of his fellow-men, he was fighting his fight. Torn by his
horror of the asylum and his fidelity to truth and the right, he clung
steadfastly to truth and the right; but so alone was he that he did not
dare to trust even me. He had learned his lesson well—too well.

But I was soon to know. One day the Bishop disappeared. He had told
nobody that he was going away; and as the days went by and he did not
reappear, there was much gossip to the effect that he had committed
suicide while temporarily deranged. But this idea was dispelled when it
was learned that he had sold all his possessions,—his city mansion, his
country house at Menlo Park, his paintings, and collections, and even
his cherished library. It was patent that he had made a clean and
secret sweep of everything before he disappeared.

This happened during the time when calamity had overtaken us in our own
affairs; and it was not till we were well settled in our new home that
we had opportunity really to wonder and speculate about the Bishop’s
doings. And then, everything was suddenly made clear. Early one
evening, while it was yet twilight, I had run across the street and
into the butcher-shop to get some chops for Ernest’s supper. We called
the last meal of the day “supper” in our new environment.

Just at the moment I came out of the butcher-shop, a man emerged from
the corner grocery that stood alongside. A queer sense of familiarity
made me look again. But the man had turned and was walking rapidly
away. There was something about the slope of the shoulders and the
fringe of silver hair between coat collar and slouch hat that aroused
vague memories. Instead of crossing the street, I hurried after the
man. I quickened my pace, trying not to think the thoughts that formed
unbidden in my brain. No, it was impossible. It could not be—not in
those faded overalls, too long in the legs and frayed at the bottoms.

I paused, laughed at myself, and almost abandoned the chase. But the
haunting familiarity of those shoulders and that silver hair! Again I
hurried on. As I passed him, I shot a keen look at his face; then I
whirled around abruptly and confronted—the Bishop.

He halted with equal abruptness, and gasped. A large paper bag in his
right hand fell to the sidewalk. It burst, and about his feet and mine
bounced and rolled a flood of potatoes. He looked at me with surprise
and alarm, then he seemed to wilt away; the shoulders drooped with
dejection, and he uttered a deep sigh.

I held out my hand. He shook it, but his hand felt clammy. He cleared
his throat in embarrassment, and I could see the sweat starting out on
his forehead. It was evident that he was badly frightened.

“The potatoes,” he murmured faintly. “They are precious.”

Between us we picked them up and replaced them in the broken bag, which
he now held carefully in the hollow of his arm. I tried to tell him my
gladness at meeting him and that he must come right home with me.

“Father will be rejoiced to see you,” I said. “We live only a stone’s
throw away.

“I can’t,” he said, “I must be going. Good-by.”

He looked apprehensively about him, as though dreading discovery, and
made an attempt to walk on.

“Tell me where you live, and I shall call later,” he said, when he saw
that I walked beside him and that it was my intention to stick to him
now that he was found.

“No,” I answered firmly. “You must come now.”

He looked at the potatoes spilling on his arm, and at the small parcels
on his other arm.

“Really, it is impossible,” he said. “Forgive me for my rudeness. If
you only knew.”

He looked as if he were going to break down, but the next moment he had
himself in control.

“Besides, this food,” he went on. “It is a sad case. It is terrible.
She is an old woman. I must take it to her at once. She is suffering
from want of it. I must go at once. You understand. Then I will return.
I promise you.”

“Let me go with you,” I volunteered. “Is it far?”

He sighed again, and surrendered.

“Only two blocks,” he said. “Let us hasten.”

Under the Bishop’s guidance I learned something of my own neighborhood.
I had not dreamed such wretchedness and misery existed in it. Of
course, this was because I did not concern myself with charity. I had
become convinced that Ernest was right when he sneered at charity as a
poulticing of an ulcer. Remove the ulcer, was his remedy; give to the
worker his product; pension as soldiers those who grow honorably old in
their toil, and there will be no need for charity. Convinced of this, I
toiled with him at the revolution, and did not exhaust my energy in
alleviating the social ills that continuously arose from the injustice
of the system.

I followed the Bishop into a small room, ten by twelve, in a rear
tenement. And there we found a little old German woman—sixty-four years
old, the Bishop said. She was surprised at seeing me, but she nodded a
pleasant greeting and went on sewing on the pair of men’s trousers in
her lap. Beside her, on the floor, was a pile of trousers. The Bishop
discovered there was neither coal nor kindling, and went out to buy
some.

I took up a pair of trousers and examined her work.

“Six cents, lady,” she said, nodding her head gently while she went on
stitching. She stitched slowly, but never did she cease from stitching.
She seemed mastered by the verb “to stitch.”

“For all that work?” I asked. “Is that what they pay? How long does it
take you?”

“Yes,” she answered, “that is what they pay. Six cents for finishing.
Two hours’ sewing on each pair.”

“But the boss doesn’t know that,” she added quickly, betraying a fear
of getting him into trouble. “I’m slow. I’ve got the rheumatism in my
hands. Girls work much faster. They finish in half that time. The boss
is kind. He lets me take the work home, now that I am old and the noise
of the machine bothers my head. If it wasn’t for his kindness, I’d
starve.

“Yes, those who work in the shop get eight cents. But what can you do?
There is not enough work for the young. The old have no chance. Often
one pair is all I can get. Sometimes, like to-day, I am given eight
pair to finish before night.”

I asked her the hours she worked, and she said it depended on the
season.

“In the summer, when there is a rush order, I work from five in the
morning to nine at night. But in the winter it is too cold. The hands
do not early get over the stiffness. Then you must work later—till
after midnight sometimes.

“Yes, it has been a bad summer. The hard times. God must be angry. This
is the first work the boss has given me in a week. It is true, one
cannot eat much when there is no work. I am used to it. I have sewed
all my life, in the old country and here in San Francisco—thirty-three
years.

“If you are sure of the rent, it is all right. The houseman is very
kind, but he must have his rent. It is fair. He only charges three
dollars for this room. That is cheap. But it is not easy for you to
find all of three dollars every month.”

She ceased talking, and, nodding her head, went on stitching.

“You have to be very careful as to how you spend your earnings,” I
suggested.

She nodded emphatically.

“After the rent it’s not so bad. Of course you can’t buy meat. And
there is no milk for the coffee. But always there is one meal a day,
and often two.”

She said this last proudly. There was a smack of success in her words.
But as she stitched on in silence, I noticed the sadness in her
pleasant eyes and the droop of her mouth. The look in her eyes became
far away. She rubbed the dimness hastily out of them; it interfered
with her stitching.

“No, it is not the hunger that makes the heart ache,” she explained.
“You get used to being hungry. It is for my child that I cry. It was
the machine that killed her. It is true she worked hard, but I cannot
understand. She was strong. And she was young—only forty; and she
worked only thirty years. She began young, it is true; but my man died.
The boiler exploded down at the works. And what were we to do? She was
ten, but she was very strong. But the machine killed her. Yes, it did.
It killed her, and she was the fastest worker in the shop. I have
thought about it often, and I know. That is why I cannot work in the
shop. The machine bothers my head. Always I hear it saying, ‘I did it,
I did it.’ And it says that all day long. And then I think of my
daughter, and I cannot work.”

The moistness was in her old eyes again, and she had to wipe it away
before she could go on stitching.

I heard the Bishop stumbling up the stairs, and I opened the door. What
a spectacle he was. On his back he carried half a sack of coal, with
kindling on top. Some of the coal dust had coated his face, and the
sweat from his exertions was running in streaks. He dropped his burden
in the corner by the stove and wiped his face on a coarse bandana
handkerchief. I could scarcely accept the verdict of my senses. The
Bishop, black as a coal-heaver, in a workingman’s cheap cotton shirt
(one button was missing from the throat), and in overalls! That was the
most incongruous of all—the overalls, frayed at the bottoms, dragged
down at the heels, and held up by a narrow leather belt around the hips
such as laborers wear.

Though the Bishop was warm, the poor swollen hands of the old woman
were already cramping with the cold; and before we left her, the Bishop
had built the fire, while I had peeled the potatoes and put them on to
boil. I was to learn, as time went by, that there were many cases
similar to hers, and many worse, hidden away in the monstrous depths of
the tenements in my neighborhood.

We got back to find Ernest alarmed by my absence. After the first
surprise of greeting was over, the Bishop leaned back in his chair,
stretched out his overall-covered legs, and actually sighed a
comfortable sigh. We were the first of his old friends he had met since
his disappearance, he told us; and during the intervening weeks he must
have suffered greatly from loneliness. He told us much, though he told
us more of the joy he had experienced in doing the Master’s bidding.

“For truly now,” he said, “I am feeding his lambs. And I have learned a
great lesson. The soul cannot be ministered to till the stomach is
appeased. His lambs must be fed bread and butter and potatoes and meat;
after that, and only after that, are their spirits ready for more
refined nourishment.”

He ate heartily of the supper I cooked. Never had he had such an
appetite at our table in the old days. We spoke of it, and he said that
he had never been so healthy in his life.

“I walk always now,” he said, and a blush was on his cheek at the
thought of the time when he rode in his carriage, as though it were a
sin not lightly to be laid.

“My health is better for it,” he added hastily. “And I am very
happy—indeed, most happy. At last I am a consecrated spirit.”

And yet there was in his face a permanent pain, the pain of the world
that he was now taking to himself. He was seeing life in the raw, and
it was a different life from what he had known within the printed books
of his library.

“And you are responsible for all this, young man,” he said directly to
Ernest.

Ernest was embarrassed and awkward.

“I—I warned you,” he faltered.

“No, you misunderstand,” the Bishop answered. “I speak not in reproach,
but in gratitude. I have you to thank for showing me my path. You led
me from theories about life to life itself. You pulled aside the veils
from the social shams. You were light in my darkness, but now I, too,
see the light. And I am very happy, only . . .” he hesitated painfully,
and in his eyes fear leaped large. “Only the persecution. I harm no
one. Why will they not let me alone? But it is not that. It is the
nature of the persecution. I shouldn’t mind if they cut my flesh with
stripes, or burned me at the stake, or crucified me head-downward. But
it is the asylum that frightens me. Think of it! Of me—in an asylum for
the insane! It is revolting. I saw some of the cases at the sanitarium.
They were violent. My blood chills when I think of it. And to be
imprisoned for the rest of my life amid scenes of screaming madness!
No! no! Not that! Not that!”

It was pitiful. His hands shook, his whole body quivered and shrank
away from the picture he had conjured. But the next moment he was calm.

“Forgive me,” he said simply. “It is my wretched nerves. And if the
Master’s work leads there, so be it. Who am I to complain?”

I felt like crying aloud as I looked at him: “Great Bishop! O hero!
God’s hero!”

As the evening wore on we learned more of his doings.

“I sold my house—my houses, rather,” he said, “all my other
possessions. I knew I must do it secretly, else they would have taken
everything away from me. That would have been terrible. I often marvel
these days at the immense quantity of potatoes two or three hundred
thousand dollars will buy, or bread, or meat, or coal and kindling.” He
turned to Ernest. “You are right, young man. Labor is dreadfully
underpaid. I never did a bit of work in my life, except to appeal
aesthetically to Pharisees—I thought I was preaching the message—and
yet I was worth half a million dollars. I never knew what half a
million dollars meant until I realized how much potatoes and bread and
butter and meat it could buy. And then I realized something more. I
realized that all those potatoes and that bread and butter and meat
were mine, and that I had not worked to make them. Then it was clear to
me, some one else had worked and made them and been robbed of them. And
when I came down amongst the poor I found those who had been robbed and
who were hungry and wretched because they had been robbed.”

We drew him back to his narrative.

“The money? I have it deposited in many different banks under different
names. It can never be taken away from me, because it can never be
found. And it is so good, that money. It buys so much food. I never
knew before what money was good for.”

“I wish we could get some of it for the propaganda,” Ernest said
wistfully. “It would do immense good.”

“Do you think so?” the Bishop said. “I do not have much faith in
politics. In fact, I am afraid I do not understand politics.”

Ernest was delicate in such matters. He did not repeat his suggestion,
though he knew only too well the sore straits the Socialist Party was
in through lack of money.

“I sleep in cheap lodging houses,” the Bishop went on. “But I am
afraid, and never stay long in one place. Also, I rent two rooms in
workingmen’s houses in different quarters of the city. It is a great
extravagance, I know, but it is necessary. I make up for it in part by
doing my own cooking, though sometimes I get something to eat in cheap
coffee-houses. And I have made a discovery. Tamales[1] are very good
when the air grows chilly late at night. Only they are so expensive.
But I have discovered a place where I can get three for ten cents. They
are not so good as the others, but they are very warming.

[1] A Mexican dish, referred to occasionally in the literature of the
times. It is supposed that it was warmly seasoned. No recipe of it has
come down to us.

“And so I have at last found my work in the world, thanks to you, young
man. It is the Master’s work.” He looked at me, and his eyes twinkled.
“You caught me feeding his lambs, you know. And of course you will all
keep my secret.”

He spoke carelessly enough, but there was real fear behind the speech.
He promised to call upon us again. But a week later we read in the
newspaper of the sad case of Bishop Morehouse, who had been committed
to the Napa Asylum and for whom there were still hopes held out. In
vain we tried to see him, to have his case reconsidered or
investigated. Nor could we learn anything about him except the
reiterated statements that slight hopes were still held for his
recovery.

“Christ told the rich young man to sell all he had,” Ernest said
bitterly. “The Bishop obeyed Christ’s injunction and got locked up in a
madhouse. Times have changed since Christ’s day. A rich man to-day who
gives all he has to the poor is crazy. There is no discussion. Society
has spoken.”