When he got to Mrs. Spear’s the maid showed him into a little study. The room was so small that it made his grandmother, who was waiting there, seem immense, like a great spreading idol. But she managed to get to her feet; her arms engulfed him; he sank into her warmth as into a tepid sea. If he’d been a child he would have burst out crying, she smelt so like home and the Mapledale Avenue soap!
“Oh, Vanny, Vanny—my little Vance … this is God’s Hand,” she said, and hugged him.
He thought, with a quick recoil: “She wouldn’t have dragged God in that way, in old times—” and suddenly heard an emotional murmur at his back, and became aware that his grandmother, as she clasped him, had seen Mrs. Spear enter the room.
Vance’s recoil was only momentary; yet the impression left a faint smirch on the freshness of Mrs. Scrimser’s spontaneity. She had become a prophetess now, conscious of her audience.
“Dear Mrs. Scrimser, you’ll forgive me? I felt I must see the meeting between you two!” Mrs. Spear sighed out with eloquent eyes and a hand affectionately extended to Vance.
But already there were sounds of arrival in the hall; the sense of the little apartment becoming more and more packed with people; the door of the study opening to admit Saidie Toler, straight and colourless as usual, and accompanied by a large battered blonde, Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop, who declared emotionally that she must see Vance before the speaker took her place on the platform. …
The two little drawing rooms had been thrown into one, and they were already crowded when Vance slipped in at the back. Before him, rank on rank, the packed heads of the “Seekers” stretched up to an improvised platform, with wax lights and a table covered with old brocade. Vance did not recognize many people; most of those present seemed to belong to other regions of Mrs. Spear’s rambling activities. But he was sure they were representative of their kind; Mrs. Spear was not the woman to have anything but the newest, even in religion. This world of spiritual investigation was unfamiliar to him; there were no “Seekers” in the Tarrant group, much less at the Coconut Tree or Rebecca Stram’s. The audience seemed mainly composed of elderly men with beards and gold-rimmed glasses, pallid youths, and ladies of indeterminate age, in black silk or Greek draperies. He was surprised to see among them Mrs. Pulsifer, with Tarrant at her side, and in another part of the room the sleek heads and jewelled arms of a cluster of smart young women who belonged to the Tarrant set. Such a mixture was unexpected, and still more so the earnest and attentive expression of the fashionable members of the audience, who appeared to have come in good faith, and not to scoff, as he had feared.
Vance forgot to wonder if Halo Tarrant were in the room; forgot everything but his passionate curiosity to see what impression his grandmother would make on an audience so strangely blent, and so new to her. Whoever they were, he knew the “Seekers” would test Mrs. Scrimser by standards other and more searching than those of Euphoria, or even of Dakin and Lakeshore; and his heart was up in arms to defend her.
And now here she was, in the soft illumination of the little platform. As he gazed at her across the fervent backs of the “Seekers” she seemed to him to have grown still larger. Saidie Toler, seated at one elbow, looked like a shadow, Mrs. Mennenkoop, at the other, like a shrivelled virgin. Womanhood, vast and dominant, billowed out between them.
Mrs. Scrimser rose to her feet. Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop had spoken a few words of introduction; phrases about a “new message,” “our spiritual leader,” “the foremost exponent of the new psychical ethics,” had drifted by unheeded; the “Seekers” wanted Mrs. Scrimser.
She swayed to them across the table and began. “Meet God,” she said, spacing her syllables impressively; then she paused. Her voice sounded richer, more resonant than ever; but Vance’s unaccustomed ear was shocked by her intonation. Had she always had those hideous drawling gutturals?
“Meet God—that’s what I want all you dear people here with me this evening to do … I presume some of you know about God already; and all of you at least know of Him,” she urged, caressing her italics. She paused again, reaching out toward her audience. “The way we know about folks in the next street.” (“New Yorkers don’t,” her grandson reflected.) “Or the way we know of famous people in the past: great heroes or splendid noble-hearted women. That’s not the way I want you to know about God. I want you to know Him Himself—to get acquainted with Him, the way you would if He was living in the house next door, and you sent round to borrow the lawn mower. I want you to get to know Him so well that you’re always borrowing, and He’s always lending; so that finally you don’t hardly know what belongs to you and what belongs to Him—and I guess maybe He don’t either. That’s the reason I say to you all: Meet God!
