cause of Christ in general, a third hymn was indulged in, and then
some tracts describing the mission rescue work being distributed,
such voluntary gifts as were forthcoming were taken up by Asa--the
father. The small organ was closed, the camp chair folded up and
given to Clyde, the Bible and hymn books picked up by Mrs.
Griffiths, and with the organ supported by a leather strap passed
over the shoulder of Griffiths, senior, the missionward march was
taken up.
During all this time Clyde was saying to himself that he did not
wish to do this any more, that he and his parents looked foolish
and less than normal--"cheap" was the word he would have used if
he could have brought himself to express his full measure of
resentment at being compelled to participate in this way--and that
he would not do it any more if he could help. What good did it do
them to have him along? His life should not be like this. Other
boys did not have to do as he did. He meditated now more
determinedly than ever a rebellion by which he would rid himself of
the need of going out in this way. Let his elder sister go if she
chose; she liked it. His younger sister and brother might be too
young to care. But he--
"They seemed a little more attentive than usual to-night, I
thought," commented Griffiths to his wife as they walked along, the
seductive quality of the summer evening air softening him into a
more generous interpretation of the customary indifferent spirit of
the passer-by.
"Yes; twenty-seven took tracts to-night as against eighteen on
Thursday."
"The love of Christ must eventually prevail," comforted the father,
as much to hearten himself as his wife. "The pleasures and cares
of the world hold a very great many, but when sorrow overtakes
them, then some of these seeds will take root."
"I am sure of it. That is the thought which always keeps me up.
Sorrow and the weight of sin eventually bring some of them to see
the error of their way."
They now entered into the narrow side street from which they had
emerged and walking as many as a dozen doors from the corner,
entered the door of a yellow single-story wooden building, the
large window and the two glass panes in the central door of which
had been painted a gray-white. Across both windows and the smaller
panels in the double door had been painted: "The Door of Hope.
Bethel Independent Mission. Meetings Every Wednesday and Saturday
night, 8 to 10. Sundays at 11, 3 and 8. Everybody Welcome."
Under this legend on each window were printed the words: "God is
Love," and below this again, in smaller type: "How Long Since You
Wrote to Mother?"
The small company entered the yellow unprepossessing door and
disappeared.
Chapter 2
That such a family, thus cursorily presented, might have a
different and somewhat peculiar history could well be anticipated,
and it would be true. Indeed, this one presented one of those
anomalies of psychic and social reflex and motivation such as would
tax the skill of not only the psychologist but the chemist and
physicist as well, to unravel. To begin with, Asa Griffiths, the
father, was one of those poorly integrated and correlated
organisms, the product of an environment and a religious theory,
but with no guiding or mental insight of his own, yet sensitive and
therefore highly emotional and without any practical sense
whatsoever. Indeed it would be hard to make clear just how life
appealed to him, or what the true hue of his emotional responses
was. On the other hand, as has been indicated, his wife was of a
firmer texture but with scarcely any truer or more practical
insight into anything.
The history of this man and his wife is of no particular interest
here save as it affected their boy of twelve, Clyde Griffiths.
This youth, aside from a certain emotionalism and exotic sense of
romance which characterized him, and which he took more from his
father than from his mother, brought a more vivid and intelligent
imagination to things, and was constantly thinking of how he might
better himself, if he had a chance; places to which he might go,
things he might see, and how differently he might live, if only
this, that and the other things were true. The principal thing
that troubled Clyde up to his fifteenth year, and for long after in
retrospect, was that the calling or profession of his parents was
the shabby thing that it appeared to be in the eyes of others. For
so often throughout his youth in different cities in which his
parents had conducted a mission or spoken on the streets--Grand
Rapids, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, lastly Kansas City--it had
been obvious that people, at least the boys and girls he
encountered, looked down upon him and his brothers and sisters for
being the children of such parents. On several occasions, and much
against the mood of his parents, who never countenanced such
exhibitions of temper, he had stopped to fight with one or another
of these boys. But always, beaten or victorious, he had been
conscious of the fact that the work his parents did was not
satisfactory to others,--shabby, trivial. And always he was
thinking of what he would do, once he reached the place where he
could get away.
For Clyde's parents had proved impractical in the matter of the
future of their children. They did not understand the importance
or the essential necessity for some form of practical or
professional training for each and every one of their young ones.
Instead, being wrapped up in the notion of evangelizing the world,
they had neglected to keep their children in school in any one
place. They had moved here and there, sometimes in the very midst
of an advantageous school season, because of a larger and better
religious field in which to work. And there were times, when, the
work proving highly unprofitable and Asa being unable to make much
money at the two things he most understood--gardening and
canvassing for one invention or another--they were quite without
sufficient food or decent clothes, and the children could not go to
school. In the face of such situations as these, whatever the
children might think, Asa and his wife remained as optimistic as
ever, or they insisted to themselves that they were, and had
unwavering faith in the Lord and His intention to provide.
The combination home and mission which this family occupied was
dreary enough in most of its phases to discourage the average youth
or girl of any spirit. It consisted in its entirety of one long
store floor in an old and decidedly colorless and inartistic wooden
building which was situated in that part of Kansas City which lies
north of Independence Boulevard and west of Troost Avenue, the
exact street or place being called Bickel, a very short thoroughfare
opening off Missouri Avenue, a somewhat more lengthy but no less
nondescript highway. And the entire neighborhood in which it stood
was very faintly and yet not agreeably redolent of a commercial life
which had long since moved farther south, if not west. It was some
five blocks from the spot on which twice a week the open air
meetings of these religious enthusiasts and proselytizers were held.
And it was the ground floor of this building, looking out into
Bickel Street at the front and some dreary back yards of equally
dreary frame houses, which was divided at the front into a hall
forty by twenty-five feet in size, in which had been placed some
sixty collapsible wood chairs, a lectern, a map of Palestine or the
Holy Land, and for wall decorations some twenty-five printed but
unframed mottoes which read in part:
"WINE IS A MOCKER, STRONG DRINK IS RAGING AND WHOSOEVER IS DECEIVED
THEREBY IS NOT WISE."
"TAKE HOLD OF SHIELD AND BUCKLER, AND STAND UP FOR MINE HELP."
PSALMS 35:2.
"AND YE, MY FLOCK, THE FLOCK OF MY PASTURE, are men, AND I AM YOUR
GOD, SAITH THE LORD GOD." EZEKIEL 34:31.
"O GOD, THOU KNOWEST MY FOOLISHNESS, AND MY SINS ARE NOT HID FROM
THEE." PSALMS 69:5.
"IF YE HAVE FAITH AS A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED, YE SHALL SAY UNTO
THIS MOUNTAIN, REMOVE HENCE TO YONDER PLACE; AND IT SHALL MOVE; AND
NOTHING SHALL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO YOU." MATTHEW 17:20.
"FOR THE DAY OF THE LORD IS NEAR." OBADIAH 15.
"FOR THERE SHALL BE NO REWARD TO THE EVIL MAN." PROVERBS 24:20.
"LOOK, THEN, NOT UPON THE WINE WHEN IT IS RED: IT BITETH LIKE A
SERPENT, AND STINGETH LIKE AN ADDER." PROVERBS 23:31,32.
These mighty adjurations were as silver and gold plates set in a
wall of dross.
The rear forty feet of this very commonplace floor was intricately
and yet neatly divided into three small bedrooms, a living room
which overlooked the backyard and wooden fences of yards no better
than those at the back; also, a combination kitchen and dining room
exactly ten feet square, and a store room for mission tracts,
hymnals, boxes, trunks and whatever else of non-immediate use, but
of assumed value, which the family owned. This particular small
room lay immediately to the rear of the mission hall itself, and
into it before or after speaking or at such times as a conference
seemed important, both Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths were wont to retire--
also at times to meditate or pray.
How often had Clyde and his sisters and younger brother seen his
mother or father, or both, in conference with some derelict or
semi-repentant soul who had come for advice or aid, most usually
for aid. And here at times, when his mother's and father's
financial difficulties were greatest, they were to be found
thinking, or as Asa Griffiths was wont helplessly to say at times,
"praying their way out," a rather ineffectual way, as Clyde began
to think later.
And the whole neighborhood was so dreary and run-down that he hated
the thought of living in it, let alone being part of a work that
required constant appeals for aid, as well as constant prayer and
thanksgiving to sustain it.
Mrs. Elvira Griffiths before she had married Asa had been nothing
but an ignorant farm girl, brought up without much thought of
religion of any kind. But having fallen in love with him, she had
become inoculated with the virus of Evangelism and proselytizing
which dominated him, and had followed him gladly and enthusiastically
in all of his ventures and through all of his vagaries. Being
rather flattered by the knowledge that she could speak and sing, her
ability to sway and persuade and control people with the "word of
God," as she saw it, she had become more or less pleased with
herself on this account and so persuaded to continue.
Occasionally a small band of people followed the preachers to their
mission, or learning of its existence through their street work,
appeared there later--those odd and mentally disturbed or distrait
souls who are to be found in every place. And it had been Clyde's
compulsory duty throughout the years when he could not act for
himself to be in attendance at these various meetings. And always
he had been more irritated than favorably influenced by the types
of men and women who came here--mostly men--down-and-out laborers,
loafers, drunkards, wastrels, the botched and helpless who seemed
to drift in, because they had no other place to go. And they were
always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had
rescued them from this or that predicament--never how they had
rescued any one else. And always his father and mother were saying
"Amen" and "Glory to God," and singing hymns and afterward taking
up a collection for the legitimate expenses of the hall--
collections which, as he surmised, were little enough--barely
enough to keep the various missions they had conducted in
existence.
The one thing that really interested him in connection with his
parents was the existence somewhere in the east--in a small city
called Lycurgus, near Utica he understood--of an uncle, a brother
of his father's, who was plainly different from all this. That
uncle--Samuel Griffiths by name--was rich. In one way and another,
from casual remarks dropped by his parents, Clyde had heard
references to certain things this particular uncle might do for a
person, if he but would; references to the fact that he was a
shrewd, hard business man; that he had a great house and a large
factory in Lycurgus for the manufacture of collars and shirts,
which employed not less than three hundred people; that he had a
son who must be about Clyde's age, and several daughters, two at
least, all of whom must be, as Clyde imagined, living in luxury in
Lycurgus. News of all this had apparently been brought west in
some way by people who knew Asa and his father and brother. As
Clyde pictured this uncle, he must be a kind of Croesus, living in
ease and luxury there in the east, while here in the west--Kansas
City--he and his parents and his brother and sisters were living in
the same wretched and hum-drum, hand-to-mouth state that had always
characterized their lives.
But for this--apart from anything he might do for himself, as he
early began to see--there was no remedy. For at fifteen, and even
a little earlier, Clyde began to understand that his education, as
well as his sisters' and brother's, had been sadly neglected. And
it would be rather hard for him to overcome this handicap, seeing
that other boys and girls with more money and better homes were
being trained for special kinds of work. How was one to get a
start under such circumstances? Already when, at the age of
thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, he began looking in the papers,
which, being too worldly, had never been admitted to his home, he
found that mostly skilled help was wanted, or boys to learn trades
in which at the moment he was not very much interested. For true
to the standard of the American youth, or the general American
attitude toward life, he felt himself above the type of labor which
