Charles Sheldon Writes In His Steps

The pews were already half full when I slipped through the side door that first October evening. The air inside Central Congregational still carried the smell of the day's soup kettle and wet wool from the street. I took my usual place near the back, where I could watch the door and still see the pulpit without craning. Sheldon stood at the reading desk with a stack of handwritten pages, the top sheet already curled at the corner from his grip.

He cleared his throat once, looked out over the congregation as if counting who had come, then began. The story opened in a town that sounded like ours on a bad week, with a young printer who had walked the length of the main street looking for work. No one needed him. He listened to hymns through an open window and wondered why the singers never seemed to leave the building.

Sheldon read without raising his voice. When he reached the part where the printer collapsed near the communion table, the only sound in the room was the scrape of one man's chair leg against the floor. The question the printer asked before he died hung there. Sheldon let it sit. Then he closed the pages for that night and said the next chapter would come the following Sunday.

I walked home through the same streets the story described. A man I knew from the day kitchen sat on the curb with his head in his hands. I gave him the quarter I had left and kept walking. The next week the crowd at the evening service was larger. People brought extra chairs from the Sunday school room. Sheldon read the part where the minister asked the whole congregation to promise they would ask the same question before any decision. A woman near me nodded once, hard, as if she had already made the promise in her own head.

By the third reading the church was full an hour early. Sheldon had to stand aside while the ushers opened the side doors to let the overflow hear from the hallway. The story moved into the newspaper office and the railroad shops. The characters began to lose money and invitations because they kept their word. No one complained about the length. When Sheldon stopped at the end of a chapter, people stayed seated until he gathered the pages and left the platform.

I started staying after the service to help stack the chairs. One night Sheldon asked if I would carry a bundle of the manuscript pages to the post office the next morning. He had sold the story to a magazine in Chicago for seventy-five dollars. The pages were tied with ordinary string. I carried them under my coat so the rain would not reach them.

The first installment appeared in November. A copy of the magazine reached Topeka by train and was passed hand to hand through the congregation. The words on the page were the same ones we had heard, only now they sat still enough to read twice. People began asking one another the question in the middle of ordinary sentences. A grocer on Kansas Avenue told me he had turned down a shipment because he could not be sure where the flour had been milled.

Sheldon kept writing the later chapters through the winter. He read them on Sunday nights while the magazine printed the earlier ones. The church stayed full. When the final chapter was read aloud, the room stayed quiet for a long minute afterward. Then the ushers opened the doors and the crowd moved out into the cold without much talk.

The book came out the next year from the same company that published the magazine. The cloth copies cost a dollar. The paper ones were twenty-five cents. I bought one of the paper copies and kept it in the drawer with the rent receipts. Within a month another printer in another city brought out the same story without asking. Then another. Sheldon had put his name on a copyright, but the magazine had not, and the lawyers said the protection did not hold.