Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger
By WINSTON CHURCHILL
1917
In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont toboast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,the helpless—and there are many—are torn from the parent rock, crushed,rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was EdwardBumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm graniteof seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surroundedby fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, atfive and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan ChipperingMill in the city of Hampton.
That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of anhistoric river should be a part of his native New England seemed at timesto be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions intowhich he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For along time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believewas the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in theedifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attendedfor a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewilderedPuritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, tocompromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley ofrounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And theminister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, hearoused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage.Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church,prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal permanence amidst thechaos which had succeeded permanence!
There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpus andhis wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his wayto the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved allthe outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduringand secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindlingcongregation,—the remains of a social stratum from which he had beenpried loose; and—more irony—this street, called Warren, of arching elmsand white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of those prosperousIrish who had moved thither from the tenements and ruled the city.
On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Doltonhad Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rootedthere since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen hewould have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history ofa family that by right of priority and service should have been destinedto inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see itdelivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards hadbeen tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could neverunderstand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, hadsuddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite ofyouthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectariancollege on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence mayprosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For morethan