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The Inside of the Cup — Complete

by Winston Churchill · English · Gutenberg #5364 · 994,394 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Inside of the Cup — Complete

Author: Winston Churchill


        
Release date: October 17, 2004 [eBook #5364]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5364

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDE OF THE CUP — COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





THE INSIDE OF THE CUP

By Winston Churchill




TABLE OF CONTENTS

     Volume 1.
     I.     THE WARING PROBLEMS
     II.    MR. LANGMAID'S MISSION
     III.   THE PRIMROSE PATH
     IV.    SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

     Volume 2.
     V.     THE RECTOR HAS MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
     VI.    “WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT”
      VII.   THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD
     VIII.  THE LINE of LEAST RESISTANCE.

     Volume 3.
     IX.    THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
     X.     THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
     XI.    THE LOST PARISHIONER
     XII.   THE WOMAN OF THE SONG

     Volume 4.
     XIII.  WINTERBOURNE
     XIV.   A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
     XV.    THE CRUCIBLE
     XVI.   AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM

     Volume 5.
     XVII.  RECONSTRUCTION
     XVIII. THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
     XIX.   MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN

     Volume 6.
     XX.    THE ARRAIGNMENT
     XXI.   ALISON GOES TO CHURCH
     XXII.  WHICH SAY TO THE SEERS, SEE NOT!

     Volume 7.
     XXIII.  THE CHOICE
     XXIV.   THE VESTRY MEETS
     XXV.   “RISE, CROWNED WITH LIGHT!”
      XXVI.   THE CURRENT OF LIFE

     Volume 8.
     XXVII.  RETRIBUTION
     XXVIII. LIGHT




THE INSIDE OF THE CUP




Volume 1.




CHAPTER I. THE WARING PROBLEMS


I

With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place in
one of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of
that portion called the Middle West,--a city once conservative and
provincial, and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them,
and linked by lightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the
modern world: a city overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has
swept our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific--Prosperity. Before
its advent, the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings, the Prestons and the
Atterburys lived leisurely lives in a sleepy quarter of shade trees
and spacious yards and muddy macadam streets, now passed away forever.
Existence was decorous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives,
and the Authorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So
Dr. Gilman preached, and so they believed.

Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days--you could
tell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changed
the quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses,
knew it: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.
Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their minds
with ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church
bells. You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city
suddenly became full of churches, as though they had magically been let
down from heaven during Saturday night. They must have been there on
week days, but few persons ever thought of them.

Among the many church bells that rang on those bygone Sundays was that
of St. John's, of which Dr. Gilman, of beloved memory, was rector. Dr.
Gilman was a saint, and if you had had the good luck to be baptized or
married or buried by him, you were probably fortunate in an earthly as
well as heavenly sense. One has to be careful not to deal exclusively in
superlatives, and yet it is not an exaggeration to say that St. John's
was the most beautiful and churchly edifice in the city, thanks
chiefly to several gentlemen of sense, and one gentleman, at least, of
taste--Mr. Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its
building; but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoiled as
yet by factory smoke, its spire delicately pointing to untainted skies,
its rose window glowing above the porch, citizens on Tower Street often
stopped to gaze at it diagonally across the vacant lot set in order by
Mr. Thurston Gore, with the intent that the view might be unobstructed.

Little did the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings and Prestons and
Atterburys and other prominent people foresee the havoc that prosperity
and smoke were to play with their residential plans! One by one, sooty
commerce drove them out, westward, conservative though they were, from
the paradise they had created; blacker and blacker grew the gothic
facade of St. John's; Thurston Gore departed, but leased his corner
first for a goodly sum, his ancestors being from Connecticut; leased
also the vacant lot he had beautified, where stores arose and hid the
spire from Tower Street. Cable cars moved serenely up the long hill
where a panting third horse had been necessary, cable cars resounded in
Burton Street, between the new factory and the church where Dr. Gilman
still preached of peace and the delights of the New-Jerusalem. And
before you could draw your breath, the cable cars had become electric.
Gray hairs began to appear in the heads of the people Dr. Gilman had
married in the '60's and their children were going East to College.



II

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Asa, Waring still clung to
the imposing, early Victorian mansion in Hamilton Street. It presented
an uncompromising and rather scornful front to the sister mansions with
which it had hitherto been on intimate terms, now fast degenerating into
a shabby gentility, seeking covertly to catch the eye of boarders, but
as yet refraining from open solicitation. Their lawns were growing a
little ragged, their stone steps and copings revealing cracks.

Asa Waring looked with a stern distaste upon certain aspects of modern
life. And though he possessed the means to follow his friends and
erstwhile neighbours into the newer paradise five miles westward, he had
successfully resisted for several years a formidable campaign to
uproot him. His three married daughters lived in that clean and verdant
district surrounding the Park (spelled with a capital), while Evelyn and
Rex spent most of their time in the West End or at the Country Clubs.
Even Mrs. Waring, who resembled a Roman matron, with her wavy white
hair parted in the middle and her gentle yet classic features, sighed
secretly at times at the unyielding attitude of her husband, although
admiring him for it. The grandchildren drew her.

On the occasion of Sunday dinner, when they surrounded her, her heart
was filled to overflowing.

The autumn sunlight, reddened somewhat by the slight haze of smoke,
poured in at the high windows of the dining-room, glinted on the silver,
and was split into bewildering colors by the prisms of the chandelier.
Many precious extra leaves were inserted under the white cloth, and Mrs.
Waring's eyes were often dimmed with happiness as she glanced along
the ranks on either side until they rested on the man with whom she had
chosen to pass her life. Her admiration for him had gradually grown into
hero-worship. His anger, sometimes roused, had a terrible moral quality
that never failed to thrill her, and the Loyal Legion button on his
black frock coat seemed to her an epitome of his character. He sat for
the most part silent, his remarkable, penetrating eyes, lighting
under his grizzled brows, smiling at her, at the children, at the
grandchildren. And sometimes he would go to the corner table, where the
four littlest sat, and fetch one back to perch on his knee and pull at
his white, military mustache.

It was the children's day. Uproar greeted the huge white cylinder
of ice-cream borne by Katie, the senior of the elderly maids; uproar
greeted the cake; and finally there was a rush for the chocolates,
little tablets wrapped in tinfoil and tied with red and blue ribbon.
After that, the pandemonium left the dining-room, to spread itself over
the spacious house from the basement to the great playroom in the attic,
where the dolls and blocks and hobby-horses of the parental generation
stoically awaited the new.

Sometimes a visitor was admitted to this sacramental feat, the dearest
old gentleman in the world, with a great, high bridged nose, a slight
stoop, a kindling look, and snow white hair, though the top of his
head was bald. He sat on Mrs. Waring's right, and was treated with the
greatest deference by the elders, and with none at all by the children,
who besieged him. The bigger ones knew that he had had what is called
a history; that he had been rich once, with a great mansion of his own,
but now he lived on Dalton Street, almost in the slums, and worked among
the poor. His name was Mr. Bentley.

He was not there on the particular Sunday when this story opens,
otherwise the conversation about to be recorded would not have taken
place. For St. John's Church was not often mentioned in Mr. Bentley's
presence.

“Well, grandmother,” said Phil Goodrich, who was the favourite
son-in-law, “how was the new rector to-day?”

“Mr. Hodder is a remarkable young man, Phil,” Mrs. Waring declared, “and
delivered such a good sermon. I couldn't help wishing that you and Rex
and Evelyn and George had been in church.”

“Phil couldn't go,” explained the unmarried and sunburned Evelyn, “he
had a match on of eighteen holes with me.”

Mrs. Waring sighed.

“I can't think what's got into the younger people these days that they
seem so indifferent to religion. Your father's a vestryman, Phil, and
I believe it has always been his hope that you would succeed him. I'm
afraid Rex won't succeed his father,” she added, with a touch of regret
and a glance of pride at her husband. “You never go to church, Rex. Phil
does.”

“I got enough church at boarding-school to last me a lifetime, mother,”
 her son replied. He was slightly older than Evelyn, and just out of
college. “Besides, any heathen can get on the vestry--it's a financial
board, and they're due to put Phil on some day. They're always putting
him on boards.”

His mother looked a little distressed.

“Rex, I wish you wouldn't talk that way about the Church--”

“I'm sorry, mother,” he said, with quick penitence. “Mr. Langmaid's a
vestryman, you know, and they've only got him there because he's the
best corporation lawyer in the city. He isn't exactly what you'd call
orthodox. He never goes.”

“We are indebted to Mr. Langmaid for Mr. Hodder.” This was one of Mr.
Waring's rare remarks.

Eleanor Goodrich caught her husband's eye, and smiled.

“I wonder why it is,” she said, “that we are so luke-warm about church
in these days? I don't mean you, Lucy, or Laureston,” she added to her
sister, Mrs. Grey. “You're both exemplary.” Lucy bowed ironically. “But
most people of our ages with whom we associate. Martha Preston, for
instance. We were all brought up like the children of Jonathan Edwards.
Do you remember that awful round-and-round feeling on Sunday afternoons,
Sally, and only the wabbly Noah's Ark elephant to play with, right in
this house? instead of THAT!” There was a bump in the hall without, and
shrieks of laughter. “I'll never forget the first time it occurred to
me--when I was reading Darwin--that if the ark were as large as Barnum's
Circus and the Natural History Museum put together, it couldn't have
held a thousandth of the species on earth. It was a blow.”

“I don't know what we're coming to,” exclaimed Mrs. Waring gently.

“I didn't mean to be flippant, mother,” said Eleanor penitently, “but I
do believe the Christian religion has got to be presented in a different
way, and a more vital way, to appeal to a new generation. I am merely
looking facts in the face.”

“What is the Christian religion?” asked Sally's husband, George Bridges,
who held a chair of history in the local flourishing university. “I've
been trying to find out all my life.”

“You couldn't be expected to know, George,” said his wife. “You were
brought up an Unitarian, and went to Harvard.”

“Never mind, professor,” said Phil Goodrich, in a quizzical,
affectionate tone. “Take the floor and tell us what it isn't.”

George Bridges smiled. He was a striking contrast in type to his
square-cut and vigorous brother-in-law; very thin, with slightly
protruding eyes the color of the faded blue glaze of ancient pottery,
and yet humorous.

“I've had my chance, at any rate. Sally made me go last Sunday and hear
Mr. Hodder.”

“I can't see why you didn't like him, George,” Lucy cried. “I think he's
splendid.”

“Oh, I like him,” said Mr. Bridges.

“That's just it!” exclaimed Eleanor. “I like him. I think he's sincere.
And that first Sunday he came, when I saw him get up in the pulpit and
wave that long arm of his, all I could think of was a modern Savonarola.
He looks one. And then, when he began to preach, it was maddening. I
felt all the time that he could say something helpful, if he only would.
But he didn't. It was all about the sufficiency of grace,--whatever that
may be. He didn't explain it. He didn't give me one notion as to how to
cope a little better with the frightful complexities of the modern
lives we live, or how to stop quarrelling with Phil when he stays at the
office and is late for dinner.”

“Eleanor, I think you're unjust to him,” said Lucy, amid the laughter
of the men of the family. “Most people in St. John's think he is a
remarkable preacher.”

“So were many of the Greek sophists,” George Bridges observed.

“Now if it were only dear old Doctor Gilman,” Eleanor continued, “I
could sink back into a comfortable indifference. But every Sunday this
new man stirs me up, not by what he says, but by what he is. I hoped
we'd get a rector with modern ideas, who would be able to tell me what
to teach my children. Little Phil and Harriet come back from Sunday
school with all sorts of questions, and I feel like a hypocrite. At
any rate, if Mr. Hodder hasn't done anything else, he's made me want to
know.”

“What do you mean by a man of modern ideas, Eleanor?” inquired Mr.
Bridges, with evident relish.

Eleanor put down her coffee cup, looked at him helplessly, and smiled.

“Somebody who will present Christianity to me in such a manner that it
will appeal to my reason, and enable me to assimilate it into my life.”

“Good for you, Nell,” said her husband, approvingly. “Come now,
professor, you sit up in the University' Club all Sunday morning and
discuss recondite philosophy with other learned agnostics, tell us what
is the matter with Mr. Hodder's theology. That is, if it will not shock
grandmother too much.”

“I'm afraid I've got used to being shocked, Phil,” said Mrs. Waring,
with her quiet smile.

“It's unfair,” Mr. Bridges protested, “to ask a prejudiced pagan like me
to pronounce judgment on an honest parson who is labouring according to
his lights.”

“Go on, George. You shan't get out of it that way.”

“Well,” said George, “the trouble is, from the theological point of
view, that your parson is preaching what Auguste Sabatier would call a
diminished and mitigated orthodoxy.”

“Great heavens!” cried Phil. “What's that?”

“It's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring,” the
professor declared. “If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain
that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't
assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before
Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the
premises on which it was based.”

“What premises?”

“That the Almighty had given it a charter, like an insurance company, of
a monopoly of salvation on this portion of the Universe, and agreed
to keep his hands off. Under this conception, the sale of
indulgences, masses for the soul, and temporal power are perfectly
logical--inevitable. Kings and princes derive their governments from the
Church. But if we once begin to doubt the validity of this charter, as
the Reformers did, the whole system flies to pieces, like sticking a pin
into a soap bubble.

“That is the reason why--to change the figure--the so-called Protestant
world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation.
The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the
material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and
concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded
hereafter. They demand some sort of infallibility. And when we let go
of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked
like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility of the
Bible. And now that has begun to roll.

“What I mean by a mitigated orthodoxy is this: I am far from accusing
Mr. Hodder of insincerity, but he preaches as if every word of the Bible
were literally true, and had been dictated by God to the men who held
the pen, as if he, as a priest, held some supernatural power that could
definitely be traced, through what is known as the Apostolic Succession,
back to Peter.”

“Do you mean to say, George,” asked Mrs. Waring, with a note of pain
in her voice, “that the Apostolic Succession cannot be historically
proved?”

“My dear mother,” said George, “I hope you will hold me innocent of
beginning this discussion. As a harmless professor of history in our
renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our
sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought
up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector.”

“They will leave us nothing!” she sighed.

“Nothing, perhaps, that was invented by man to appeal to man's
superstition and weakness. Of the remainder--who can say?”

“What,” asked Mrs. Waring, “do they say about the Apostolic Succession?”

“Mother is as bad as the rest of us,” said Eleanor.

“Isn't she, grandfather?”

“If I had a house to rent,” said Mr. Bridges, when the laughter had
subsided, “I shouldn't advertise five bath rooms when there were only
two, or electricity when there was only gas. I should be afraid my
tenants might find it out, and lose a certain amount of confidence in
me. But the orthodox churches are running just such a risk to-day, and
if any person who contemplates entering these churches doesn't examine
the premises first, he refrains at his own cost.

“The situation in the early Christian Church is now a matter of history,
and he who runs may read. The first churches, like those of Corinth and
Ephesus and Rome, were democracies: no such thing as a priestly line to
carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of. It may
be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the
mind of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another
hierarchy, which then existed in Israel. The Apostles were no more
bishops than was John the Baptist, but preachers who travelled from
place to place, like Paul. The congregations, at Rome and elsewhere,
elected their own 'presbyteri, episcopoi' or overseers. It is, to say
the least, doubtful, and it certainly cannot be proved historically,
that Peter ever was in Rome.”

“The professor ought to have a pulpit of his own,” said Phil.

There was a silence. And then Evelyn, who had been eating quantities of
hothouse grapes, spoke up.

“So far as I can see, the dilemma in which our generation finds itself
is this,--we want to know what there is in Christianity that we can
lay hold of. We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our
education contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon. We
don't know where to turn. We have the choice of going to people
like George, who know a great deal and don't believe anything, or to
clergymen like Mr. Hodder, who demand that we shall violate the reason
in us which has been so carefully trained.”

“Upon my word, I think you've put it rather well, Evelyn,” said Eleanor,
admiringly.

“In spite of personalities,” added Mr. Bridges.

“I don't see the use of fussing about it,” proclaimed Laureston Grey,
who was the richest and sprucest of the three sons-in-law. “Why can't we
let well enough alone?”

“Because it isn't well enough,” Evelyn replied. “I want the real thing
or nothing. I go to church once a month, to please mother. It doesn't do
me any good. And I don't see what good it does you and Lucy to go every
Sunday. You never think of it when you're out at dinners and dances
during the week. And besides,” she added, with the arrogance of modern
youth, “you and Lucy are both intellectually lazy.”

“I like that from you, Evelyn,” her sister flared up.

“You never read anything except the sporting columns and the annual
rules of tennis and golf and polo.”

“Must everything be reduced to terms?” Mrs. Waring gently lamented. “Why
can't we, as Laury suggests, just continue to trust?”

“They are the more fortunate, perhaps, who can, mother,” George Bridges
answered, with more of feeling in his voice than he was wont to show.
“Unhappily, truth does not come that way. If Roger Bacon and Galileo
and Newton and Darwin and Harvey and the others had 'just trusted,' the
world's knowledge would still remain as stationary as it was during
the thousand-odd years the hierarchy of the Church was supreme, when
theology was history, philosophy, and science rolled into one. If God
had not meant man to know something of his origin differing from
the account in Genesis, he would not have given us Darwin and his
successors. Practically every great discovery since the Revival we owe
to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced into opposition
to the tremendous power of the Church, which always insisted that
people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek
philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and
temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church
as the last word on science, philosophy, history, metaphysics, and
government.”

“Stop!” cried Eleanor. “You make me dizzy.”

“Nearly all the pioneers to whom we owe our age of comparative
enlightenment were heretics,” George persisted. “And if they could have
been headed off, or burned, most of us would still be living in mud
caves at the foot of the cliff on which stood the nobleman's castle; and
kings would still be kings by divine decree, scientists--if there
were any--workers in the black art, and every phenomenon we failed to
understand, a miracle.”

“I choose the United States of America,” ejaculated Evelyn.

“I gather, George,” said Phil Goodrich, “that you don't believe in
miracles.”

“Miracles are becoming suspiciously fewer and fewer. Once, an eclipse of
the sun was enough to throw men on their knees because they thought it
supernatural. If they were logical they'd kneel today because it has
been found natural. Only the inexplicable phenomena are miracles; and
after a while--if the theologians will only permit us to finish the
job--there won't be any inexplicable phenomena. Mystery, as I believe
William James puts it may be called the more-to-be-known.”

“In taking that attitude, George, aren't you limiting the power of God?”
 said Mrs. Waring.

“How does it limit the power of God, mother,” her son-in-law asked, “to
discover that he chooses to work by laws? The most suicidal tendency in
religious bodies today is their mediaeval insistence on what they are
pleased to call the supernatural. Which is the more marvellous--that God
can stop the earth and make the sun appear to stand still, or that he
can construct a universe of untold millions of suns with planets and
satellites, each moving in its orbit, according to law; a universe
wherein every atom is true to a sovereign conception? And yet this
marvel of marvels--that makes God in the twentieth century infinitely
greater than in the sixteenth--would never have been discovered if the
champions of theology had had their way.”

Mrs. Waring smiled a little.

“You are too strong for me, George,” she said, “but you mustn't expect
an old woman to change.”

“Mother, dear,” cried Eleanor, rising and laying her hand on Mrs.
Waring's cheek, “we don't want you to change. It's ourselves we wish to
change, we wish for a religious faith like yours, only the same teaching
which gave it to you is powerless for us. That's our trouble. We have
only to look at you,” she added, a little wistfully, “to be sure there
is something--something vital in Christianity, if we could only get at
it, something that does not depend upon what we have been led to believe
is indispensable. George, and men like him, can only show the weakness
in the old supports. I don't mean that they aren't doing the world a
service in revealing errors, but they cannot reconstruct.”

“That is the clergyman's business,” declared Mr. Bridges. “But he must
first acknowledge that the old supports are worthless.”

“Well,” said Phil, “I like your rector, in spite of his
anthropomorphism--perhaps, as George would say, because of it. There is
something manly about him that appeals to me.”

“There,” cried Eleanor, triumphantly, “I've always said Mr. Hodder had a
spiritual personality. You feel--you feel there is truth shut up inside
of him which he cannot communicate. I'll tell you who impresses me in
that way more strongly than any one else--Mr. Bentley. And he doesn't
come to church any more.”

“Mr. Bentley,” said her, mother, “is a saint. Your father tried to get
him to dinner to-day, but he had promised those working girls of his,
who live on the upper floors of his house, to dine with them. One of
them told me so. Of course he will never speak of his kindnesses.”

“Mr. Bentley doesn't bother his head about theology,” said Sally. “He
just lives.”

“There's Eldon Parr,” suggested George Bridges, mentioning the name of
the city's famous financier; “I'm told he relieved Mr. Bentley of his
property some twenty-five years ago. If Mr. Hodder should begin to
preach the modern heresy which you desire, Mr Parr might object. He's
very orthodox, I'm told.”

“And Mr. Parr,” remarked the modern Evelyn, sententiously, “pays the
bills, at St. John's. Doesn't he, father?”

“I fear he pays a large proportion of them,” Mr. Waring admitted, in a
serious tone.

“In these days,” said Evelyn, “the man who pays the bills is entitled to
have his religion as he likes it.”

“No matter how he got the money to pay them,” added Phil.

“That suggests another little hitch in the modern church which will have
to be straightened out,” said George Bridges.

“'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye make clean
the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of
extortion and excess.'”

“Why, George, you of all people quoting the Bible!” Eleanor exclaimed.

“And quoting it aptly, too,” said Phil Goodrich.

“I'm afraid if we began on the scribes and Pharisees, we shouldn't stop
with Mr. Parr,” Asa Wiring observed, with a touch of sadness.

“In spite of all they say he has done, I can't help feeling sorry for
him,” said Mrs. Waring. “He must be so lonely in that huge palace of
his beside the Park, his wife dead, and Preston running wild around the
world, and Alison no comfort. The idea of a girl leaving her father as
she did and going off to New York to become a landscape architect!”

“But, mother,” Evelyn pleaded, “I can't see why a woman shouldn't lead
her own life. She only has one, like a man. And generally she doesn't
get that.”

Mrs. Waring rose.

“I don't know what we're coming to. I was taught that a woman's place
was with her husband and children; or, if she had none, with her family.
I tried to teach you so, my dear.”

“Well,” said Evelyn, “I'm here yet. I haven't Alison's excuse. Cheer up,
mother, the world's no worse than it was.”

“I don't know about that,” answered Mrs. Waring.

“Listen!” ejaculated Eleanor.

Mrs. Waring's face brightened. Sounds of mad revelry came down from the
floor above.




CHAPTER II. MR. LANGMAID'S MISSION


I

Looking back over an extraordinary career, it is interesting to attempt
to fix the time when a name becomes a talisman, and passes current for
power. This is peculiarly difficult in the case of Eldon Parr. Like many
notable men before him, nobody but Mr. Parr himself suspected his future
greatness, and he kept the secret. But if we are to search what is now
ancient history for a turning-point, perhaps we should find it in the
sudden acquisition by him of the property of Mr. Bentley.

The transaction was a simple one. Those were the days when gentlemen,
as matters of courtesy, put their names on other gentlemen's notes;
and modern financiers, while they might be sorry for Mr. Bentley, would
probably be unanimous in the opinion that he was foolish to write on the
back of Thomas Garrett's. Mr. Parr was then, as now, a business man, and
could scarcely be expected to introduce philanthropy into finance. Such
had been Mr. Bentley's unfortunate practice. And it had so happened,
a few years before, for the accommodation of some young men of his
acquaintance that he had invested rather generously in Grantham mining
stock at twenty-five cents a share, and had promptly forgotten the
transaction. To cut a long story short, in addition to Mr. Bentley's
house and other effects, Mr. Parr became the owner of the Grantham
stock, which not long after went to one hundred dollars. The reader may
do the figuring.

Where was some talk at this time, but many things had happened since.
For example, Mr. Parr had given away great sums in charity. And it may
likewise be added in his favour that Mr. Bentley was glad to be rid of
his fortune. He had said so. He deeded his pew back to St. John's, and
protesting to his friends that he was not unhappy, he disappeared from
the sight of all save a few. The rising waters of Prosperity closed over
him. But Eliza Preston, now Mrs. Parr, was one of those who were never
to behold him again,--in this world, at least.

She was another conspicuous triumph in that career we are depicting.
Gradual indeed had been the ascent from the sweeping out of a store to
the marrying of a Preston, but none the less sure inevitable. For many
years after this event, Eldon Parr lived modestly in what was known as a
“stone-front” house in Ransome Street, set well above the sidewalk, with
a long flight of yellow stone steps leading to it; steps scrubbed with
Sapoho twice a week by a negro in rubber boots. There was a stable with
a tarred roof in the rear, to be discerned beyond the conventional side
lawn that was broken into by the bay window of the dining-room.
There, in that house, his two children were born: there, within those
inartistic walls, Eliza Preston lived a life that will remain a closed
book forever. What she thought, what she dreamed, if anything, will
never be revealed. She did not, at least, have neurasthenia, and for all
the world knew, she may have loved her exemplary and successful
husband, with whom her life was as regular as the Strasburg clock.
She breakfasted at eight and dined at seven; she heard her children's
lessons and read them Bible stories; and at half past ten every Sunday
morning, rain or shine, walked with them and her husband to the cars on
Tower Street to attend service at St. John's, for Mr. Parr had scruples
in those days about using the carriage on the Sabbath.

She did not live, alas, to enjoy for long the Medicean magnificence
of the mansion facing the Park, to be a companion moon in the greater
orbit. Eldon Part's grief was real, and the beautiful English window in
the south transept of the church bears witness to it. And yet it cannot
be said that he sought solace in religion, so apparently steeped in it
had he always been. It was destiny that he should take his place on the
vestry; destiny, indeed, that he should ultimately become the vestry
as well as the first layman of the diocese; unobtrusively, as he had
accomplished everything else in life, in spite of Prestons and Warings,
Atterburys, Goodriches, and Gores. And he was wont to leave his weighty
business affairs to shift for themselves while he attended the diocesan
and general conventions of his Church.

He gave judiciously, as becomes one who holds a fortune in trust, yet
generously, always permitting others to help, until St. John's was a
very gem of finished beauty. And, as the Rothschilds and the Fuggera
made money for grateful kings and popes, so in a democratic age, Eldon
Parr became the benefactor of an adulatory public. The university, the
library, the hospitals, and the parks of his chosen city bear witness.



II

For forty years, Dr. Gilman had been the rector of St. John's. One
Sunday morning, he preached his not unfamiliar sermon on the text, “For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” and when
the next Sunday dawned he was in his grave in Winterbourne Cemetery,
sincerely mourned within the parish and without. In the nature of mortal
things, his death was to be expected: no less real was the crisis to be
faced At the vestry meeting that followed, the problem was tersely set
forth by Eldon Parr, his frock coat tightly buttoned about his chest,
his glasses in his hand.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to fulfil a grave responsibility to the
parish, to the city, and to God. The matter of choosing a rector to-day,
when clergymen are meddling with all sorts of affairs which do not
concern them, is not so simple as it was twenty years ago. We have, at
St. John's, always been orthodox and dignified, and I take it to be the
sense of this vestry that we remain so. I conceive it our duty to find
a man who is neither too old nor too young, who will preach the faith
as we received it, who is not sensational, and who does not mistake
socialism for Christianity.”

By force of habit, undoubtedly, Mr. Parr glanced at Nelson Langmaid as
he sat down. Innumerable had been the meetings of financial boards at
which Mr. Parr had glanced at Langmaid, who had never failed to
respond. He was that sine qua non of modern affairs, a corporation
lawyer,--although he resembled a big and genial professor of
Scandinavian extraction. He wore round, tortoise-shell spectacles, he
had a high, dome-like forehead, and an ample light brown beard which he
stroked from time to time. It is probable that he did not believe in the
immortality of the soul.

His eyes twinkled as he rose.

“I don't pretend to be versed in theology, gentlemen, as you know,” he
said, and the entire vestry, even Mr. Parr, smiled. For vestries, in
spite of black coats and the gravity of demeanour which first citizens
are apt to possess, are human after all. “Mr. Parr has stated, I
believe; the requirements, and I agree with him that it is not an easy
order to fill. You want a parson who will stick to his last, who will
not try experiments, who is not too high or too low or too broad or too
narrow, who has intellect without too much initiative, who can deliver
a good sermon to those who can appreciate one, and yet will not get the
church uncomfortably full of strangers and run you out of your pews. In
short, you want a level-headed clergyman about thirty-five years old who
will mind his own business.”

The smiles on the faces of the vestry deepened. The ability to put a
matter thus humorously was a part of Nelson Langmaid's power with men
and juries.

“I venture to add another qualification,” he continued, “and that is
virility. We don't want a bandbox rector. Well, I happen to have in mind
a young man who errs somewhat on the other side, and who looks a little
like a cliff profile I once saw on Lake George of George Washington
or an Indian chief, who stands about six feet two. He's a bachelor--if
that's a drawback. But I am not at all sure he can be induced to leave
his present parish, where he has been for ten years.”

“I am,” announced Wallis Plimpton, with his hands in his pockets,
“provided the right man tackles him.”



III

Nelson Langmaid's most notable achievement, before he accomplished
the greater one of getting a new rector for St. John's, had been to
construct the “water-tight box” whereby the Consolidated Tractions
Company had become a law-proof possibility. But his was an esoteric
reputation,--the greater fame had been Eldon Parr's. Men's minds had
been dazzled by the breadth of the conception of scooping all the
street-car lines of the city, long and short, into one big basket, as it
were; and when the stock had been listed in New York, butcher and baker,
clerk and proprietor, widow and maid, brought out their hoardings; the
great project was discussed in clubs, cafes, and department stores,
and by citizens hanging on the straps of the very cars that were to be
consolidated--golden word! Very little appeared about Nelson Langmaid,
who was philosophically content. But to Mr. Parr, who was known to
dislike publicity, were devoted pages in the Sunday newspapers, with
photographs of the imposing front of his house in Park Street, his altar
and window in St. John's, the Parr building, and even of his private
car, Antonia.

Later on, another kind of publicity, had come. The wind had whistled
for a time, but it turned out to be only a squall. The Consolidated
Tractions Company had made the voyage for which she had been
constructed, and thus had fulfilled her usefulness; and the cleverest
of the rats who had mistaken her for a permanent home scurried ashore
before she was broken up.

All of which is merely in the nature of a commentary on Mr. Langmaid's
genius. His reputation for judgment--which by some is deemed the highest
of human qualities--was impaired; and a man who in his time had selected
presidents of banks and trust companies could certainly be trusted to
choose a parson--particularly if the chief requirements were not of a
spiritual nature...

A week later he boarded an east-bound limited train, armed with plenary
powers.

His destination was the hill town where he had spent the first fifteen
years of his life, amid the most striking of New England landscapes, and
the sight of the steep yet delicately pastoral slopes never failed to
thrill him as the train toiled up the wide valley to Bremerton. The
vision of these had remained with him during the years of his toil in
the growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an
ideal to which he hoped sometime permanently to return. But he never
had. His family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea,
and he had perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every
other summer, accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen. On such
occasions, he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.

The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither
village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both. French
Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that
revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick
edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House. Enterprising Italians
had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate glass and
asphalt were in evidence. But the hills looked down unchanged, and in
the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences,
were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.

He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who
invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely
did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by.
For life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs.
Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.

“I know what you've come for, Nelson,” she said reproachfully, when she
greeted him at the station. “Dr. Gilman's dead, and you want our Mr.
Hodder. I feel it in my bones. Well, you can't get him. He's had ever so
many calls, but he won't leave Bremerton.”

She knew perfectly well, however, that Nelson would get him, although
her brother characteristically did not at once acknowledge his mission.
Alice Whitely had vivid memories of a childhood when he had never failed
to get what he wanted; a trait of his of which, although it had before
now caused her much discomfort, she was secretly inordinately proud. She
was, therefore, later in the day not greatly surprised to find herself
supplying her brother with arguments. Much as they admired and loved
Mr. Hodder, they had always realized that he could not remain buried in
Bremerton. His talents demanded a wider field.

“Talents!” exclaimed Langmaid, “I didn't know he had any.”

“Oh, Nelson, how can you say such a thing, when you came to get him!”
 exclaimed his sister.

“I recommended him because I thought he had none,” Langmaid declared.

“He'll be a bishop some day--every one says so,” said Mrs. Whitely,
indignantly.

“That reassures me,” said her brother.

“I can't see why they sent you--you hardly ever go to church,” she
cried. “I don't mind telling you, Nelson, that the confidence men place
in you is absurd.”

“You've said that before,” he replied. “I agree with you. I'm not going
on my judgment--but on yours and Gerald's, because I know that you
wouldn't put up with anything that wasn't strictly all-wool orthodox.”

“I think you're irreverent,” said his sister, “and it's a shame that the
canons permit such persons to sit on the vestry....”

“Gerald,” asked Nelson Langmaid of his brother-in-law that night, after
his sister and the girls had gone to bed, “are you sure that this young
man's orthodox?”

“He's been here for over ten years, ever since he left the seminary, and
he's never done or said anything radical yet,” replied the mill owner of
Bremerton. “If you don't want him, we'd be delighted to have him stay.
We're not forcing him on you, you know. What the deuce has got into you?
You've talked to him for two hours, and you've sat looking at him at the
dinner table for another two. I thought you were a judge of men.”

Nelson Langmaid sat silent.

“I'm only urging Hodder to go for his own good,” Mr. Whitely continued.
“I can take you to dozens of people to-morrow morning who worship
him,--people of all sorts; the cashier in the bank, men in the mills,
the hotel clerk, my private stenographer--he's built up that little
church from nothing at all. And you may write the Bishop, if you wish.”

“How has he built up the church?” Langmaid demanded

“How? How does any clergyman buildup a church

“I don't know,” Langmaid confessed. “It strikes me as quite a tour de
force in these days. Does he manage to arouse enthusiasm for orthodox
Christianity?”

“Well,” said Gerard Whitely, “I think the service appeals. We've made it
as beautiful as possible. And then Mr. Hodder goes to see these people
and sits up with them, and they tell him their troubles. He's reformed
one or two rather bad cases. I suppose it's the man's personality.”

Ah! Langmaid exclaimed, “now you're talking!”

“I can't see what you're driving at,” confessed his brother-in-law.
“You're too deep for me, Nelson.”

If the truth be told, Langmaid himself did not quits see. On behalf
of the vestry, he offered next day to Mr. Hodder the rectorship of St.
John's and that offer was taken under consideration; but there was in
the lawyer's mind no doubt of the acceptance, which, in the course of a
fortnight after he had returned to the West, followed.

By no means a negligible element in Nelson Langmaid's professional
success had been his possession of what may called a sixth sense,
and more than once, on his missions of trust, he had listened to its
admonitory promptings.

At times he thought he recognized these in his conversation with the
Reverend John Hodder at Bremerton,--especially in that last interview in
the pleasant little study of the rectory overlooking Bremerton Lake. But
the promptings were faint, and Langmaid out of his medium. He was not
choosing the head of a trust company.

He himself felt the pull of the young clergyman's personality, and
instinctively strove to resist it: and was more than ever struck by Mr.
Hodder's resemblance to the cliff sculpture of which he had spoken at
the vestry meeting.

He was rough-hewn indeed, with gray-green eyes, and hair the color of
golden sand: it would not stay brushed. It was this hair that hinted
most strongly of individualism, that was by no means orthodox. Langmaid
felt an incongruity, but he was fascinated; and he had discovered on the
rector's shelves evidences of the taste for classical authors that he
himself possessed. Thus fate played with him, and the two men ranged
from Euripides to Horace, from Horace to Dante and Gibbon. And when
Hodder got up to fetch this or that edition, he seemed to tower over the
lawyer, who was a big man himself.

Then they discussed business, Langmaid describing the parish, the
people, the peculiar situation in St. John's caused by Dr. Gilman's
death, while Hodder listened. He was not talkative; he made no promises;
his reserve on occasions was even a little disconcerting; and it
appealed to the lawyer from Hodder as a man, but somehow not as a
clergyman. Nor did the rector volunteer any evidences of the soundness
of his theological or political principles.

He gave Langmaid the impression--though without apparent egotism--that
by accepting the call he would be conferring a favour on St. John's; and
this was when he spoke with real feeling of the ties that bound him to
Bremerton. Langmaid felt a certain deprecation of the fact that he was
not a communicant.

For the rest, if Mr. Hodder were disposed to take himself and his
profession seriously, he was by no means lacking in an appreciation of
Langmaid's humour....

The tempering of the lawyer's elation as he returned homeward to report
to Mr. Parr and the vestry may be best expressed by his own exclamation,
which he made to himself:

“I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!” A parson
was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.



IV

A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a
stop. Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign
'Marcion' against the yellow brick of the station set down in the
prairie mud, and flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars
backed up to a factory.

The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its
multitudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in
the city to which he was bound.

“We 'most in now, sah,” the negro porter volunteered. “You kin see the
smoke yondah.”

Hodder's mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city's
presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,--the huge pall seemed an
emblem of the weight of the city's sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own
making which shut her in from the sight of heaven. Absorbed in the mad
contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to
lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.

He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it. The
mission on which he was bound, like the prophets of old, was somehow to
gain the ears of this self-absorbed population, to strike the fear of
the eternal into their souls, to convince them that there was Something
above and beyond that smoke which they ignored to their own peril.

Yet the task, at this nearer view, took on proportions overwhelming--so
dense was that curtain at which he gazed. And to-day the very skies
above it were leaden, as though Nature herself had turned atheist. In
spite of the vigour with which he was endowed, in spite of the belief
in his own soul, doubts assailed him of his ability to cope with this
problem of the modern Nineveh--at the very moment when he was about to
realize his matured ambition of a great city parish.

Leaning back on the cushioned seat, as the train started again, he
reviewed the years at Bremerton, his first and only parish. Hitherto (to
his surprise, since he had been prepared for trials) he had found the
religious life a primrose path. Clouds had indeed rested on Bremerton's
crests, but beneficent clouds, always scattered by the sun. And there,
amid the dazzling snows, he had on occasions walked with God.

His success, modest though it were, had been too simple. He had
loved the people, and they him, and the pang of homesickness he now
experienced was the intensest sorrow he had known since he had been
among them. Yes, Bremerton had been for him (he realized now that he had
left it) as near an approach to Arcadia as this life permits, and the
very mountains by which it was encircled had seemed effectively to shut
out those monster problems which had set the modern world outside to
seething. Gerald Whitely's thousand operatives had never struck; the
New York newspapers, the magazines that discussed with vivid animus
the corporation-political problems in other states, had found Bremerton
interested, but unmoved; and Mrs. Whitely, who was a trustee of the
library, wasted her energy in deploring the recent volumes on economics,
sociology, philosophy, and religion that were placed on the shelves. If
Bremerton read them--and a portion of Bremerton did--no difference
was apparent in the attendance at Hodder's church. The Woman's Club
discussed them strenuously, but made no attempt to put their doctrines
into practice.

Hodder himself had but glanced at a few of them, and to do him justice
this abstention had not had its root in cowardice. His life was
full--his religion “worked.” And the conditions with which these books
dealt simply did not exist for him. The fact that there were other
churches in the town less successful than his own (one or two, indeed,
virtually starving) he had found it simple to account for in that their
denominations had abandoned the true conception of the Church, and were
logically degenerating into atrophy. What better proof of the barrenness
of these modern philosophical and religious books did he need than
the spectacle of other ministers--who tarried awhile on starvation
salaries--reading them and preaching from them?

He, John Hodder, had held fast to the essential efficacy of the word of
God as propounded in past ages by the Fathers. It is only fair to
add that he did so without pride or bigotry, and with a sense of
thankfulness at the simplicity of the solution (ancient, in truth!)
which, apparently by special grace, had been vouchsafed him. And to it
he attributed the flourishing condition in which he had left the Church
of the Ascension at Bremerton.

“We'll never get another rector like you,” Alice Whitely had exclaimed,
with tears in her eyes, as she bade him good-by. And he had rebuked her.
Others had spoken in a similar strain, and it is a certain tribute
to his character to record that the underlying hint had been lost on
Hodder. His efficacy, he insisted, lay in the Word.

Hodder looked at his watch, only to be reminded poignantly of the chief
cause of his heaviness of spirit, for it represented concretely the
affections of those whom he had left behind; brought before him vividly
the purple haze of the Bremerton valley, and the garden party, in the
ample Whitely grounds, which was their tribute to him. And he beheld,
moving from the sunlight to shadow, the figure of Rachel Ogden. She
might have been with him now, speeding by his side into the larger life!

In his loneliness, he seemed to be gazing into reproachful eyes. Nothing
had passed between them. It, was he who had held back, a fact that in
the retrospect caused him some amazement. For, if wifehood were to be
regarded as a profession, Rachel Ogden had every qualification. And Mrs.
Whitely's skilful suggestions had on occasions almost brought him to
believe in the reality of the mirage,--never quite.

Orthodox though he were, there had been times when his humour had borne
him upward toward higher truths, and he had once remarked that promising
to love forever was like promising to become President of the United
States.

One might achieve it, but it was independent of the will. Hodder's
ideals--if he had only known--transcended the rubric. His feeling for
Rachel Ogden had not been lacking in tenderness, and yet he had recoiled
from marriage merely for the sake of getting a wife, albeit one with
easy qualification. He shrank instinctively from the humdrum, and sought
the heights, stormy though these might prove. As yet he had not analyzed
this craving.

This he did know--for he had long ago torn from his demon the draperies
of disguise--that women were his great temptation. Ordination had not
destroyed it, and even during those peaceful years at Bremerton he had
been forced to maintain a watchful guard. He had a power over women,
and they over him, that threatened to lead him constantly into wayside
paths, and often he wondered what those who listened to him from the
pulpit would think if they guessed that at times, he struggled with
suggestion even now. Yet, with his hatred of compromises, he had scorned
marriage.

The yoke of Augustine! The caldron of unholy loves! Even now, as he sat
in the train, his mind took its own flight backward into that remoter
past that was still a part of him: to secret acts of his college days
the thought of which made him shudder; yes, and to riots and revels. In
youth, his had been one of those boiling, contagious spirits that carry
with them, irresistibly, tamer companions. He had been a leader in
intermittent raids into forbidden spheres; a leader also in certain more
decorous pursuits--if athletics may be so accounted; yet he had capable
of long periods of self-control, for a cause. Through it all a spark had
miraculously been kept alive....

Popularity followed him from the small New England college to the
Harvard Law School. He had been soberer there, marked as a pleader, and
at last the day arrived when he was summoned by a great New York lawyer
to discuss his future. Sunday intervened. Obeying a wayward impulse, he
had gone to one of the metropolitan churches to hear a preacher renowned
for his influence over men. There is, indeed, much that is stirring to
the imagination in the spectacle of a mass of human beings thronging
into a great church, pouring up the aisles, crowding the galleries,
joining with full voices in the hymns. What drew them? He himself was
singing words familiar since childhood, and suddenly they were fraught
with a startling meaning!

          “Fill me, radiancy divine,
          Scatter all my unbelief!”

Visions of the Crusades rose before him, of a friar arousing France,
of a Maid of Orleans; of masses of soiled, war-worn, sin-worn humanity
groping towards the light. Even after all these ages, the belief, the
hope would not down.

Outside, a dismal February rain was falling, a rain to wet the soul.
The reek of damp clothes pervaded the gallery where he sat surrounded by
clerks and shop girls, and he pictured to himself the dreary rooms from
which they had emerged, drawn by the mysterious fire on that altar. Was
it a will-o'-the-wisp? Below him, in the pews, were the rich. Did they,
too, need warmth?

Then came the sermon, “I will arise and go to my father.”

After the service, far into the afternoon, he had walked the wet streets
heedless of his direction, in an exaltation that he had felt before, but
never with such intensity. It seemed as though he had always wished to
preach, and marvelled that the perception had not come to him sooner.
If the man to whom he had listened could pour the light into the dark
corners of other men's souls, he, John Hodder, felt the same hot spark
within him,--despite the dark corners of his own!

At dusk he came to himself, hungry, tired, and wet, in what proved to be
the outskirts of Harlem. He could see the place now: the lonely, wooden
houses, the ramshackle saloon, the ugly, yellow gleam from the street
lamps in a line along the glistening pavement; beside him, a towering
hill of granite with a real estate sign, “This lot for sale.” And he had
stood staring at it, thinking of the rock that would have to be cut away
before a man could build there,--and so read his own parable.

How much rock would have to be cut away, how much patient chipping
before the edifice of which he had been dreaming could be reared! Could
he ever do it? Once removed, he would be building on rock. But could
he remove it?... To help revive a faith, a dying faith, in a material
age,--that indeed were a mission for any man! He found his way to an
elevated train, and as it swept along stared unseeing at the people who
pushed and jostled him. Still under the spell, he reached his room and
wrote to the lawyer thanking him, but saying that he had reconsidered
coming to New York. It was not until he had posted the letter, and was
on his way back to Cambridge that he fully realized he had made the
decision of his life.

Misgivings, many of them, had come in the months that followed,
misgivings and struggles, mocking queries. Would it last? There was the
incredulity and amazement of nearest friends, who tried to dissuade him
from so extraordinary a proceeding. Nobody, they said, ever became
a parson in these days; nobody, at least, with his ability. He
was throwing himself away. Ethics had taken the place of religion;
intelligent men didn't go to church. And within him went on an endless
debate. Public opinion made some allowance for frailties in other
professions; in the ministry, none: he would be committing himself to be
good the rest of his life, and that seemed too vast an undertaking for
any human.

The chief horror that haunted him was not failure,--for oddly enough he
never seriously distrusted his power, it was disaster. Would God give
him the strength to fight his demon? If he were to gain the heights,
only to stumble in the sight of all men, to stumble and fall.

Seeming echoes of the hideous mockery of it rang in his ears: where
is the God that this man proclaimed? he saw the newspaper headlines,
listened in imagination to cynical comments, beheld his name trailed
through the soiled places of the cities, the shuttlecock of men and
women. “To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden
manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name
written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it.” Might he ever
win that new name, eat of the hidden manna of a hidden power, become the
possessor of the morning star?

Unless there be in the background a mother, no portrait of a man is
complete. She explains him, is his complement. Through good mothers are
men conceived of God: and with God they sit, forever yearning, forever
reaching out, helpless except for him: with him, they have put a man
into the world. Thus, into the Supreme Canvas, came the Virgin.

John Hodder's mother was a widow, and to her, in the white, gabled house
which had sheltered stern ancestors, he travelled in the June following
his experience. Standing under the fan-light of the elm-shaded doorway,
she seemed a vision of the peace wherein are mingled joy and sorrow,
faith and tears! A tall, quiet woman, who had learned the lesson
of mothers,--how to wait and how to pray, how to be silent with a
clamouring heart.

She had lived to see him established at Bremerton, to be with him there
awhile....

He awoke from these memories to gaze down through the criss-cross of a
trestle to the twisted, turbid waters of the river far below. Beyond
was the city. The train skirted for a while the hideous, soot-stained
warehouses that faced the water, plunged into a lane between humming
factories and clothes-draped tenements, and at last glided into
semi-darkness under the high, reverberating roof of the Union Station.




CHAPTER III. THE PRIMROSE PATH


I

Nelson Langmaid's extraordinary judgment appeared once more to be
vindicated.

There had been, indeed, a critical, anxious moment, emphasized by the
agitation of bright feminine plumes and the shifting of masculine backs
into the corners of the pews. None got so far as to define to themselves
why there should be an apparent incompatibility between ruggedness and
orthodoxy--but there were some who hoped and more who feared. Luther
had been orthodox once, Savonarola also: in appearance neither was more
canonical than the new rector.

His congregation, for the most part, were not analytical. But they
felt a certain anomaly in virility proclaiming tradition. It took them
several Sundays to get accustomed to it.

To those who had been used for more than a quarter of a century to
seeing old Dr. Gilman's gentle face under the familiar and faded dove of
the sounding-board, to the deliberation of his walk, and the hesitation
of his manner, the first impression of the Reverend John Hodder was
somewhat startling. They felt that there should be a leisurely element
in religion. He moved across the chancel with incredible swiftness, his
white surplice flowing like the draperies of a moving Victory, wasted
no time with the pulpit lights, announced his text in a strong and
penetrating, but by no means unpleasing voice, and began to speak with
the certainty of authority.

Here, in an age when a new rector had, ceased to be an all-absorbing
topic in social life, was a new and somewhat exhilarating experience.
And it may be privately confessed that there were some who sat in St.
John's during those first weeks of his incumbency who would indignantly
have repudiated the accusation that they were not good churchmen and
churchwomen, and who nevertheless had queer sensations in listening
to ancient doctrines set forth with Emersonian conviction. Some were
courageous enough to ask themselves, in the light of this forceful
presentation, whether they really did believe them as firmly as they
supposed they had.

Dear old Dr. Gilman had been milder--much milder as the years gained
upon him. And latterly, when he had preached, his voice had sounded like
the unavailing protest of one left far behind, who called out faintly
with unheeded warnings. They had loved him: but the modern world was
a busy world, and Dr. Gilman did not understand it. This man was
different. Here was what the Church taught, he said, and they might
slight it at their peril!

It is one thing to believe one's self orthodox, and quite another to
have that orthodoxy so definitely defined as to be compelled, whether or
no, to look it squarely in the face and own or disown it. Some indeed,
like Gordon Atterbury, stood the test; responded to the clarion call for
which they had been longing. But little Everett Constable, who also sat
on the vestry, was a trifle uncomfortable in being reminded that absence
from the Communion Table was perilous, although he would have been the
last to deny the efficacy of the Sacrament.

The new rector was plainly not a man who might be accused of policy in
pandering to the tastes of a wealthy and conservative flock. But if,
in the series of sermons which lasted from his advent until well after
Christmas, he had deliberately consulted their prejudices, he could not
have done better. It is true that he went beyond the majority of them,
but into a region which they regarded as preeminently safe,--a region
the soil of which was traditional. To wit: St. Paul had left to the
world a consistent theology. Historical research was ignored rather
than condemned. And it might reasonably have been gathered from these
discourses that the main proofs of Christ's divinity lay in his Virgin
Birth, his miracles, and in the fact that his body had risen from the
grave, had been seen by many, and even touched. Hence unbelief had no
excuse. By divine commission there were bishops, priests, and deacons in
the new hierarchy, and it was through the Apostolic Succession that he,
their rector, derived his sacerdotal powers. There were, no doubt,
many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite; a
catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day--a
sufficiently sweeping statement--were wholly due to deplorable lapses
from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since
it transcended all modern wanderings after truth. Hell, though not
definitely defined in terms of flames, was no less a state of torture
(future, by implication) of which fire was but a faint symbol. And
he gave them clearly to understand that an unbaptized person ran no
inconsiderable risk. He did not declare unqualifiedly that the Church
alone had the power to save, but such was the inference.



II

It was entirely fitting, no doubt, when the felicitations of certain of
the older parishioners on his initial sermon were over, that Mr.
Hodder should be carried westward to lunch with the first layman of the
diocese. But Mr. Parr, as became a person of his responsibility, had
been more moderate in his comment. For he had seen, in his day, many
men whose promise had been unfulfilled. Tightly buttoned, silk
hatted, upright, he sat in the corner of his limousine, the tasselled
speaking-tube in his hand, from time to time cautioning his chauffeur.

“Carefully!” he cried. “I've told you not to drive so fast in this part
of town. I've never got used to automobiles,” he remarked to Hodder,
“and I formerly went to church in the street-cars, but the distances
have grown so great--and I have occasionally been annoyed in them.”

Hodder was not given to trite acquiescence. His homely composure belied
the alertness of his faculties; he was striving to adapt himself to the
sudden broadening and quickening of the stream of his life, and he felt
a certain excitement--although he did not betray it--in the presence of
the financier. Much as he resented the thought, it was impossible
for him not to realize that the man's pleasure and displeasure were
important; for, since his arrival, he had had delicate reminders of this
from many sources. Recurrently, it had caused him a vague uneasiness,
hinted at a problem new to him. He was jealous of the dignity of the
Church, and he seemed already to have detected in Mr. Parr's manner
a subtle note of patronage. Nor could Hodder's years of provincialism
permit him to forget that this man with whom he was about to enter into
personal relations was a capitalist of national importance.

The neighbourhood they traversed was characteristic of our rapidly
expanding American cities. There were rows of dwelling houses, once
ultra-respectable, now slatternly, and lawns gone grey; some of these
houses had been remodelled into third-rate shops, or thrown together to
make manufacturing establishments: saloons occupied all the favourable
corners. Flaming posters on vacant lots announced, pictorially, dubious
attractions at the theatres. It was a wonderful Indian summer day, the
sunlight soft and melting; and the smoke which continually harassed this
district had lifted a little, as though in deference to the Sabbath.

Hodder read the sign on a lamp post, Dalton Street. The name clung in
his memory.

“We thought, some twenty years ago, of moving the church westward,” said
Mr. Parr, “but finally agreed to remain where we were.”

The rector had a conviction on this point, and did not hesitate to state
it without waiting to be enlightened as to the banker's views.

“It would seem to me a wise decision,” he said, looking out of the
window, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the evidences of
misery and vice, “with this poverty at the very doors of the church.”

Something in his voice impelled Eldon Parr to shoot a glance at his
profile.

“Poverty is inevitable, Mr. Hodder,” he declared. “The weak always
sink.”

Hodder's reply, whatever it might have been, was prevented by the sudden
and unceremonious flight of both occupants toward the ceiling of the
limousine, caused by a deep pit in the asphalt.

“What are you doing, Gratton?” Mr. Parr called sharply through the tube.

Presently, the lawns began to grow brighter, the houses more cheerful,
and the shops were left behind. They crossed the third great transverse
artery of the city (not so long ago, Mr. Parr remarked, a quagmire), now
lined by hotels and stores with alluring displays in plate glass windows
and entered a wide boulevard that stretched westward straight to the
great Park. This boulevard the financier recalled as a country road
of clay. It was bordered by a vivid strip, of green; a row of tall
and graceful lamp posts, like sentinels, marked its course; while the
dwellings, set far back on either side, were for the most part large and
pretentious, betraying in their many tentative styles of architecture
the reaching out of a commercial nation after beauty. Some, indeed, were
simple of line and restful to the trained eye.

They came to the wide entrance of the Park, so wisely preserved as a
breathing place for future generations. A slight haze had gathered over
the rolling forests to the westward; but this haze was not smoke. Here,
in this enchanting region, the autumn sunlight was undiluted gold,
the lawns, emerald, and the red gravel around the statesman's statue
glistening. The automobile quickly swung into a street that skirted the
Park,--if street it might be called, for it was more like a generous
private driveway,--flanked on the right by fences of ornamental ironwork
and high shrubbery that concealed the fore yards of dominating private
residences which might: without great exaggeration, have been called
palaces.

“That's Ferguson's house,” volunteered Mr. Parr, indicating a marble
edifice with countless windows. “He's one of your vestrymen, you know.
Ferguson's Department Store.” The banker's eyes twinkled a little for
the first time. “You'll probably find it convenient. Most people do.
Clever business man, Ferguson.”

But the rector was finding difficulty in tabulating his impressions.

They turned in between two posts of a gateway toward a huge house of
rough granite. And Hodder wondered whether, in the swift onward roll
of things, the time would come when this, too, would have been deemed
ephemeral. With its massive walls and heavy, red-tiled roof that sloped
steeply to many points, it seemed firmly planted for ages to come. It
was surrounded, yet not hemmed in, by trees of a considerable age. His
host explained that these had belonged to the original farm of which all
this Park Street property had made a part.

They alighted under a porte-cochere with a glass roof.

“I'm sorry,” said Mr. Parr, as the doors swung open and he led the way
into the house, “I'm sorry I can't give you a more cheerful welcome, but
my son and daughter, for their own reasons, see fit to live elsewhere.”

Hodder's quick ear detected in the tone another cadence, and he glanced
at Eldon Parr with a new interest....

Presently they stood, face to face, across a table reduced to its
smallest proportions, in the tempered light of a vast dining-room,
an apartment that seemed to symbolize the fortress-like properties of
wealth. The odd thought struck the clergyman that this man had made his
own Tower of London, had built with his own hands the prison in which he
was to end his days. The carved oaken ceiling, lofty though it was, had
the effect of pressing downward, the heavy furniture matched the heavy
walls, and even the silent, quick-moving servants had a watchful air.

Mr. Parr bowed his head while Hodder asked grace. They sat down.

The constraint which had characterized their conversation continued,
yet there was a subtle change in the attitude of the clergyman. The
financier felt this, though it could not be said that Hodder appeared
more at his ease: his previous silences had been by no means awkward.
Eldon Parr liked self-contained men. But his perceptions were as keen as
Nelson Langmaid's, and like Langmaid, he had gradually become conscious
of a certain baffling personality in the new rector of St. John's. From
time to time he was aware of the grey-green eyes curiously fixed on
him, and at a loss to account for their expression. He had no thought
of reading in it an element of pity. Yet pity was nevertheless in the
rector's heart, and its advent was emancipating him from the limitations
of provincial inexperience.

Suddenly, the financier launched forth on a series of shrewd and
searching questions about Bremerton, its church, its people, its
industries, and social conditions. All of which Hodder answered to his
apparent satisfaction.

Coffee was brought. Hodder pushed back his chair, crossed his knees,
and sat perfectly still regarding his host, his body suggesting a repose
that did not interfere with his perceptive faculties.

“You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder?”

The rector smiled and shook his head. Mr. Parr selected a diminutive,
yellow cigar and held it up.

“This,” he said, “has been the extent of my indulgence for twenty years.
They are made for me in Cuba.”

Hodder smiled again, but said nothing.

“I have had a letter from your former bishop, speaking of you in the
highest terms,” he observed.

“The bishop is very kind.”

Mr. Parr cleared his throat.

“I am considerably older than you,” he went on, “and I have the future
of St. John's very much at heart, Mr. Hodder. I trust you will remember
this and make allowances for it as I talk to you.

“I need not remind you that you have a grave responsibility on your
shoulders for so young a man, and that St. John's is the oldest parish
in the diocese.”

“I think I realize it, Mr. Parr,” said Hodder, gravely. “It was only the
opportunity of a larger work here that induced me to leave Bremerton.”

“Exactly,” agreed the banker. “The parish, I believe, is in good
running order--I do not think you will see the necessity for
many--ahem--changes. But we sadly needed an executive head. And, if I
may say so, Mr. Hodder, you strike me as a man of that type, who might
have made a success in a business career.”

The rector smiled again.

“I am sure you could pay me no higher compliment,” he answered.

For an instant Eldon Parr, as he stared at the clergyman, tightened his
lips,--lips that seemed peculiarly formed for compression. Then they
relaxed into what resembled a smile. If it were one, the other returned
it.

“Seriously,” Mr. Parr declared, “it does me good in these days to hear,
from a young man, such sound doctrine as you preach. I am not one of
those who believe in making concessions to agnostics and atheists. You
were entirely right, in my opinion, when you said that we who belong
to the Church--and of course you meant all orthodox Christians--should
stand by our faith as delivered by the saints. Of course,” he added,
smiling, “I should not insist upon the sublapsarian view of election
which I was taught in the Presbyterian Church as a boy.”

Hodder laughed, but did not interrupt.

“On the other hand,” Mr. Parr continued, “I have little patience with
clergymen who would make religion attractive. What does it amount
to--luring people into the churches on one pretext or another,
sugar-coating the pill? Salvation is a more serious matter. Let the
churches stick to their own. We have at St. John's a God-fearing,
conservative congregation, which does not believe in taking liberties
with sound and established doctrine. And I may confess to you, Mr.
Hodder, that we were naturally not a little anxious about Dr. Gilman's
successor, that we should not get, in spite of every precaution, a man
tinged with the new and dangerous ideas so prevalent, I regret to say,
among the clergy. I need scarcely add that our anxieties have been set
at rest.”

“That,” said Hodder, “must be taken as a compliment to the dean of the
theological seminary from which I graduated.”

The financier stared again. But he decided that Mr. Hodder had not meant
to imply that he, Mr. Parr, was attempting to supersede the dean. The
answer had been modest.

“I take it for granted that you and I and all sensible men are happily.
agreed that the Church should remain where she is. Let the people come
to her. She should be, if I may so express it, the sheet anchor of
society, our bulwark against socialism, in spite of socialists who call
themselves ministers of God. The Church has lost ground--why? Because
she has given ground. The sanctity of private property is being menaced,
demagogues are crying out from the house-tops and inciting people
against the men who have made this country what it is, who have risked
their fortunes and their careers for the present prosperity. We have no
longer any right, it seems, to employ whom we will in our factories and
our railroads; we are not allowed to regulate our rates, although
the risks were all ours. Even the women are meddling,--they are not
satisfied to stay in the homes, where they belong. You agree with me?”

“As to the women,” said the rector, “I have to acknowledge that I have
never had any experience with the militant type of which you speak.”

“I pray God you may never have,” exclaimed Mr. Parr, with more feeling
than he had yet shown.

“Woman's suffrage, and what is called feminism in general, have never
penetrated to Bremerton. Indeed, I must confess to have been wholly out
of touch with the problems to which you refer, although of course I have
been aware of their existence.”

“You will meet them here,” said the banker, significantly.

“Yes,” the rector replied thoughtfully, “I can see that. I know that the
problems here will be more complicated, more modern,--more difficult.
And I thoroughly agree with you that their ultimate solution is
dependent on Christianity. If I did not believe,--in spite of the
evident fact which you point out of the Church's lost ground, that her
future will be greater than her past, I should not be a clergyman.”

The quiet but firm note of faith was, not lost on the financier, and
yet was not he quite sure what was to be made of it? He had a faint and
fleeting sense of disquiet, which registered and was gone.

“I hope so,” he said vaguely, referring perhaps to the resuscitation of
which the rector spoke. He drummed on the table. “I'll go so far as to
say that I, too, think that the structure can be repaired. And I believe
it is the duty of the men of influence--all men of influence--to assist.
I don't say that men of influence are not factors in the Church to-day,
but I do say that they are not using the intelligence in this task which
they bring to bear, for instance, on their business.”

“Perhaps the clergy might help,” Hodder suggested, and added more
seriously, “I think that many of them are honestly trying to do so.”

“No doubt of it. Why is it,” Mr. Parr continued reflectively, “that
ministers as a whole are by no means the men they were? You will pardon
my frankness. When I was a boy, the minister was looked up to as an
intellectual and moral force to be reckoned with. I have heard it
assigned, as one reason, that in the last thirty years other careers
have opened up, careers that have proved much more attractive to young
men of ability.”

“Business careers?” inquired the rector.

“Precisely!”

“In other words,” said Hodder, with his curious smile, “the ministry
gets the men who can't succeed at anything else.”

“Well, that's putting it rather strong,” answered Mr. Parr, actually
reddening a little. “But come now, most young men would rather be a
railroad president than a bishop,--wouldn't they?”

“Most young men would,” agreed Hodder, quickly, “but they are not the
young men who ought to be bishops, you'll admit that.”

The financier, be it recorded to his credit, did not lack appreciation
of this thrust, and, for the first time, he laughed with something
resembling heartiness. This laughter, in which Hodder joined, seemed
suddenly to put them on a new footing--a little surprising to both.

“Come,” said the financier, rising, “I'm sure you like pictures, and
Langmaid tells me you have a fancy for first editions. Would you care to
go to the gallery?”

“By all means,” the rector assented.

Their footsteps, as they crossed the hardwood floors, echoed in the
empty house. After pausing to contemplate a Millet on the stair landing,
they came at last to the huge, silent gallery, where the soft but
adequate light fell upon many masterpieces, ancient and modern. And it
was here, while gazing at the Corots and Bonheurs, Lawrences, Romneys,
Copleys, and Halses, that Hodder's sense of their owner's isolation grew
almost overpowering Once, glancing over his shoulder at Mr. Parr, he
surprised in his eyes an expression almost of pain.

“These pictures must give you great pleasure,” he said.

“Oh,” replied the banker, in a queer voice, “I'm always glad when any
one appreciates them. I never come in here alone.”

Hodder did not reply. They passed along to an upstairs sitting-room,
which must, Hodder thought, be directly over the dining-room. Between
its windows was a case containing priceless curios.

“My wife liked this room,” Mr. Parr explained, as he opened the case.
When they had inspected it, the rector stood for a moment gazing out at
a formal garden at the back of the house. The stalks of late flowers lay
withering, but here and there the leaves were still vivid, and clusters
of crimson berries gleamed in the autumn sunshine. A pergola ran down
the middle, and through denuded grape-vines he caught a glimpse, at the
far end, of sculptured figures and curving marble benches surrounding a
pool.

“What a wonderful spot!” he exclaimed.

“My daughter Alison designed it.”

“She must have great talent,” said the rector.

“She's gone to New York and become a landscape architect,” said his
host with a perceptible dryness. “Women in these days are apt to be
everything except what the Lord intended them to be.”

They went downstairs, and Hodder took his leave, although he felt an odd
reluctance to go. Mr. Parr rang the bell.

“I'll send you down in the motor,” he said.

“I'd like the exercise of walking,” said the rector. “I begin to miss it
already, in the city.”

“You look as if you had taken a great deal of it,” Mr. Parr declared,
following him to the door. “I hope you'll drop in often. Even if I'm not
here, the gallery and the library are at your disposal.”

Their eyes met.

“You're very good,” Hodder replied, and went down the steps and through
the open doorway.

Lost in reflection, he walked eastward with long and rapid strides,
striving to reduce to order in his mind the impressions the visit
had given him, only to find them too complex, too complicated by
unlooked-for emotions. Before its occurrence, he had, in spite of an
inherent common sense, felt a little uneasiness over the prospective
meeting with the financier. And Nelson Langmaid had hinted,
good-naturedly, that it was his, Hodder's, business, to get on good
terms with Mr. Parr--otherwise the rectorship of St. John's might not
prove abed of roses. Although the lawyer had spoken with delicacy, he
had once more misjudged his man--the result being to put Hodder on his
guard. He had been the more determined not to cater to the banker.

The outcome of it all had been that the rector left him with a sense of
having crossed barriers forbidden to other men, and not understanding
how he had crossed them. Whether this incipient intimacy were ominous
or propitious, whether there were involved in it a germ (engendered by
a radical difference of temperament) capable of developing into future
conflict, he could not now decide. If Eldon Parr were Procrustes
he, Hodder, had fitted the bed, and to say the least, this was
extraordinary, if not a little disquieting. Now and again his thoughts
reverted to the garden, and to the woman who had made it. Why had she
deserted?

At length, after he had been walking for nearly an hour, he halted and
looked about him. He was within a few blocks of the church, a little to
one side of Tower Street, the main east and west highway of the city,
in the midst of that district in which Mr. Parr had made the remark that
poverty was inevitable. Slovenly and depressing at noonday, it seemed
now frankly to have flung off its mask. Dusk was gathering, and with it
a smoke-stained fog that lent a sickly tinge to the lights. Women slunk
by him: the saloons, apparently closed, and many houses with veiled
windows betrayed secret and sinister gleams. In the midst of a block
rose a tall, pretentious though cheaply constructed building with the
words “Hotel Albert” in flaming electric letters above an archway. Once
more his eye read Dalton Street on a lamp....

Hodder resumed his walk more slowly, and in a few minutes reached his
rooms in the parish house.




CHAPTER IV. SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY


I Although he found the complications of a modern city parish somewhat
bewildering, the new rector entered into his duties that winter with
apostolic zeal. He was aware of limitations and anomalies, but his faith
was boundless, his energy the subject of good-natured comment by his
vestry and parishioners, whose pressing invitations' to dinners he
was often compelled to refuse. There was in John Hodder something
indefinable that inflamed curiosity and left it unsatisfied.

His excuse for attending these dinners, which indeed were relaxing and
enjoyable, he found in the obvious duty of getting to know the most
important members of his congregation. But invariably he came away from
them with an inner sense of having been baffled in this object. With
a few exceptions, these modern people seemed to have no time for
friendship in the real meaning of the word, no desire to carry a
relationship beyond a certain point. Although he was their spiritual
pastor, he knew less about most of them at the end of the winter than
their butlers and their maids.

They were kind, they were delightful, they were interested in him--he
occasionally thought--as a somewhat anachronistic phenomenon. They
petted, respected him, and deferred to him. He represented to them an
element in life they recognized, and which had its proper niche. What
they failed to acknowledge was his point of view--and this he was wise
enough not to press at dinner tables and in drawing-rooms--that religion
should have the penetrability of ether; that it should be the absorbent
of life. He did not have to commit the banality of reminding them of
this conviction of his at their own tables; he had sufficient humour and
penetration to credit them with knowing it. Nay, he went farther in his
unsuspected analysis, and perceived that these beliefs made one of his
chief attractions for them. It was pleasant to have authority in a black
coat at one's board; to defer, if not to bend to it. The traditions of
fashion demanded a clergyman in the milieu, and the more tenaciously he
clung to his prerogatives, the better they liked it.

Although they were conscious of a certain pressure, which they gently
resisted, they did not divine that the radiating and rugged young man
cherished serious designs upon them. He did not expect to transform the
world in a day, especially the modern world. He was biding his time,
awaiting individual opportunities.

They talked to him of the parish work, congratulated him on the vigour
with which he had attacked it, and often declared themselves jealous of
it because it claimed too much of him. Dear Dr. Gilman, they said,
had had neither the strength nor the perception of 'modern needs; and
McCrae, the first assistant clergyman, while a good man, was a plodder
and lacking in imagination. They talked sympathetically about the
problems of the poor. And some of them--particularly Mrs. Wallis
Plimpton were inclined to think Hodder's replies a trifle noncommittal.
The trouble, although he did not tell them so, was that he himself had
by no means solved the problem. And he felt a certain reluctance to
discuss the riddle of poverty over champagne and porcelain.

Mrs. Plimpton and Mrs. Constable, Mrs. Ferguson, Mrs. Langmaid, Mrs.
Larrabbee, Mrs. Atterbury, Mrs. Grey, and many other ladies and their
daughters were honorary members of his guilds and societies, and found
time in their busy lives to decorate the church, adorn the altar, care
for the vestments, and visit the parish house. Some of them did more:
Mrs. Larrabbee, for instance, when she was in town, often graced the
girls' classes with her presence, which was a little disquieting to
the daughters of immigrants: a little disquieting, too, to John Hodder.
During the three years that had elapsed since Mr. Larrabbee's death, she
had, with characteristic grace and ease, taken up philanthropy; become,
in particular, the feminine patron saint of Galt House, non-sectarian, a
rescue home for the erring of her sex.

There were, too, in this higher realm of wealth in and out of which
Hodder plunged, women like Mrs. Constable (much older than Mrs.
Larrabbee) with whom philanthropy and what is known as “church work”
 had become second nature in a well-ordered life, and who attended
with praiseworthy regularity the meetings of charitable boards and
committees, not infrequently taking an interest in individuals in Mr.
Hodder's classes. With her, on occasions, he did discuss such matters,
only to come away from her with his bewilderment deepened.

It was only natural that he should have his moods of depression. But the
recurrent flow of his energy swept them away. Cynicism had no place in
his militant Christianity, and yet there were times when he wondered
whether these good people really wished achievements from their rector.
They had the air of saying “Bravo!” and then of turning away. And he did
not conceal from himself that he was really doing nothing but labour.
The distances were great; and between his dinner parties, classes,
services, and visits, he was forced to sit far into the night preparing
his sermons, when his brain was not so keen as it might have been.
Indeed--and this thought was cynical and out of character--he asked
himself on one occasion whether his principal achievement so far had
not consisted in getting on unusual terms with Eldon Parr. They were
not lacking who thought so, and who did not hesitate to imply it. They
evidently regarded his growing intimacy with the banker with approval,
as in some sort a supreme qualification for a rector of St. John's, and
a proof of unusual abilities. There could be no question, for instance,
that he had advanced perceptibly in the estimation of the wife of
another of his vestrymen, Mrs. Wallis Plimpton.

The daughter of Thurston Gore, with all her astuteness and real estate,
was of a naivete in regard to spiritual matters that Hodder had grown
to recognize as impermeable. In an evening gown, with a string of large
pearls testing on her firm and glowing neck, she appeared a concrete
refutation of the notion of rebirth, the triumph of an unconscious
philosophy of material common-sense. However, in parish house affairs,
Hodder had found her practical brain of no slight assistance.

“I think it quite wonderful,” she remarked, on the occasion at which he
was the guest of honour in what was still called the new Gore mansion,
“that you have come to know Mr. Parr so well in such a short time. How
did you do it, Mr. Hodder? Of course Wallis knows him, and sees a great
deal of him in business matters. He relies on Wallis. But they tell me
you have grown more intimate with him than any one has been since Alison
left him.”

There is, in Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, a formula for answering people
in accordance with their point of view. The rector modestly disclaimed
intimacy. And he curbed his curiosity about Alison for the reason that
he preferred to hear her story from another source.

“Oh, but you are intimate!” Mrs. Plimpton protested. “Everybody says
so--that Mr. Parr sends for you all the time. What is he like when he's
alone, and relaxed? Is he ever relaxed?” The lady had a habit of
not waiting for answers to her questions. “Do you know, it stirs my
imagination tremendously when I think of all the power that man has.
I suppose you know he has become one of a very small group of men who
control this country, and naturally he has been cruelly maligned. All he
has to do is to say a word to his secretary, and he can make men or ruin
them. It isn't that he does ruin them--I don't mean that. He uses his
wealth, Wallis says, to maintain the prosperity of the nation! He feels
his trusteeship. And he is so generous! He has given a great deal to the
church, and now,” she added, “I am sure he will give more.”

Hodder was appalled. He felt helpless before the weight of this
onslaught.

“I dare say he will continue to assist, as he has in the past,” he
managed to say.

“Of course it's your disinterestedness,” she proclaimed, examining him
frankly. “He feels that you don't want anything. You always strike me as
so splendidly impartial, Mr. Hodder.”

Fortunately, he was spared an answer. Mr. Plimpton, who was wont to
apply his gifts as a toastmaster to his own festivals, hailed him from
the other end of the table.

And Nelson Langmaid, who had fallen into the habit of dropping into
Hodder's rooms in the parish house on his way uptown for a chat about
books, had been struck by the rector's friendship with the banker.

“I don't understand how you managed it, Hodder, in such a short time,”
 he declared. “Mr. Parr's a difficult man. In all these years, I've been
closer to him than any one else, and I don't know him today half as well
as you do.”

“I didn't manage it,” said Hodder, briefly.

“Well,” replied the lawyer, quizzically, “you needn't eat me up. I'm
sure you didn't do it on purpose. If you had,--to use a Hibernian
phrase,--you never would have done it. I've seen it tried before. To
tell you the truth, after I'd come back from Bremerton, that was the one
thing I was afraid of--that you mightn't get along with him.”

Hodder himself was at a loss to account for the relationship. It
troubled him vaguely, for Mr. Parr was the aggressor; and often at dusk,
when Hodder was working under his study lamp, the telephone would ring,
and on taking down the receiver he would hear the banker's voice. “I'm
alone to-night, Mr. Hodder. Will you come and have dinner with me?”

Had he known it, this was a different method of communication than that
which the financier usually employed, one which should have flattered
him. If Wallis Plimpton, for instance, had received such a personal
message, the fact would not have remained unknown the next day at his
club. Sometimes it was impossible for Hodder to go, and he said so; but
he always went when he could.

The unwonted note of appeal (which the telephone seemed somehow to
enhance) in Mr. Parr's voice, never failed to find a response in the
rector's heart, and he would ponder over it as he walked across to Tower
Street to take the electric car for the six-mile trip westward.

This note of appeal he inevitably contrasted with the dry,
matter-of-fact reserve of his greeting at the great house, which loomed
all the greater in the darkness. Unsatisfactory, from many points of
view, as these evenings were, they served to keep whetted Hodder's
curiosity as to the life of this extraordinary man. All of its vaster
significance for the world, its tremendous machinery, was out of his
sight.

Mr. Parr seemed indeed to regard the rest of his fellow-creatures with
the suspicion at which Langmaid had hinted, to look askance at the
amenities people tentatively held out to him. And the private
watchman whom Hodder sometimes met in the darkness, and who invariably
scrutinized pedestrians on Park Street, seemed symbolic, of this
attitude. On rare occasions, when in town, the financier dined out,
limiting himself to a few houses.

Once in a long while he attended what are known as banquets, such as
those given by the Chamber of Commerce, though he generally refused
to speak. Hodder, through Mr. Parr's intervention, had gone to one of
these, ably and breezily presided over by the versatile Mr. Plimpton.

Hodder felt not only curiosity and sympathy, but a vexing sense of the
fruitlessness of his visits to Park Street. Mr. Parr seemed to like to
have him there. And the very fact that the conversation rarely took any
vital turn oddly contributed to the increasing permanence of the lien.
To venture on any topic relating to the affairs of the day were merely
to summon forth the banker's dogmatism, and Hodder's own opinions on
such matters were now in a strange and unsettled state. Mr. Parr liked
best to talk of his treasures, and of the circumstances during his trips
abroad that had led to their acquirement. Once the banker had asked him
about parish house matters.

“I'm told you're working very hard--stirring up McCrae. He needs it.”

“I'm only trying to study the situation,” Hodder replied. “I don't think
you quite do justice to McCrae,” he added; “he's very faithful, and
seems to understand those people thoroughly.”

Mr. Parr smiled.

“And what conclusions have you come to? If you think the system should
be enlarged and reorganized I am willing at any time to go over it with
you, with a view to making an additional contribution. Personally, while
I have sympathy for the unfortunate, I'm not at all sure that much of
the energy and money put into the institutional work of churches isn't
wasted.”

“I haven't come to any conclusions--yet,” said the rector, with a touch
of sadness. “Perhaps I demand too much--expect too much.”

The financier, deep in his leather chair under the shaded light,
the tips of his fingers pressed together, regarded the younger man
thoughtfully, but the smile lingered in his eyes.

“I told you you would meet problems,” he said.



II

Hodder's cosmos might have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in
the Ptolemaic theory of the ancients. Like a cleverly carved Chinese
object of ivory in the banker's collection, it was a system of spheres,
touching, concentric, yet separate. In an outer space swung Mr. Parr;
then came the scarcely less rarefied atmosphere of the Constables and
Atterburys, Fergusons, Plimptons, Langmaids, Prestons, Larrabbees,
Greys, and Gores, and then a smaller sphere which claims but a passing
mention. There were, in the congregation of St. John's, a few people of
moderate means whose houses or apartments the rector visited; people to
whom modern life was increasingly perplexing.

In these ranks were certain maiden ladies and widows who found in church
work an outlet to an otherwise circumscribed existence. Hodder met them
continually in his daily rounds. There were people like the Bradleys,
who rented half a pew and never missed a Sunday; Mr. Bradley, an elderly
man whose children had scattered, was an upper clerk in one of Mr.
Parr's trust companies: there were bachelors and young women, married
or single, who taught in the Sunday school or helped with the night
classes. For the most part, all of these mentioned above belonged to an
element that once had had a comfortable and well-recognized place in the
community, yet had somehow been displaced. Many of them were connected
by blood with more fortunate parishioners, but economic pressure had
scattered them throughout new neighbourhoods and suburbs. Tradition
still bound them to St. John's.

With no fixed orbit, the rector cut at random through all of these
strata, and into a fourth. Not very far into it, for this apparently
went down to limitless depths, the very contemplation of which made him
dizzy. The parish house seemed to float precariously on its surface.

Owing partly to the old-fashioned ideas of Dr. Gilman, and partly to the
conservatism of its vestry, the institutionalism of St. John's was by
no means up to date. No settlement house, with day nurseries, was
maintained in the slums. The parish house, built in the early nineties,
had its gymnasium hall and class and reading rooms, but was not what in
these rapidly moving times would be called modern. Presiding over its
activities, and seconded by a pale, but earnest young man recently
ordained, was Hodder's first assistant, the Reverend Mr. McCrae.

McCrae was another puzzle. He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat
forehead and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles. He had a
numerous family. His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces
of a Caledonian accent. And this, with the addition of the fact that he
was painstaking and methodical in his duties, and that his sermons were
orthodox in the sense that they were extremely non-committal, was all
that Hodder knew about him for many months. He never doubted, however,
the man's sincerity and loyalty.

But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his
conviction deepened that his assistant was watching him. The fact that
this tacit criticism did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate
the impatience that he felt from time to time. He had formed a higher
estimate of McCrae's abilities than that generally prevailing throughout
the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his attitude, was
drawn toward the man. This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it from the
expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant's face, was one
of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and
a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet
it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that he
deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.

But he was a difficult man to talk to.

If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these
activities of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the
more acute his feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the
principle was somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of
the proletariat they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random,
strange specimens! brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and
held them by sheer struggling. And sometimes, when they slipped away,
dived after them. The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part
did the diving; or, in scriptural language, the searching after the lost
sheep.

The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked,
strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.
The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of
Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off
their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of
the Jews and Germans and Russians. The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium
and reading-rooms: some of them were drafted into the choir, yet
the singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of
regeneration. The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new
environments not wholly without results. But the rector was an idealist.

He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their
confidence, and with a considerable measure of success. On more than one
occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and
he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during
the six months he had once spent in Europe. The Irish-Americans and the
Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part
young workingmen and youths by no means destitute. When they were out of
a place, he would often run across them in the reading-room or sitting
among the lockers beside the gymnasium, and they would rise and talk to
him cordially and even familiarly about their affairs. They liked and
trusted him--on a tacit condition. There was a boundary he might not
cross. And the existence of that boundary did not seem to trouble
McCrae.

One night as he stood with his assistant in the hall after the men had
gone, Hodder could contain himself no longer.

“Look here, McCrae,” he broke out, “these men never come to church--or
only a very few of them.”

“No more they do,” McCrae agreed.

“Why don't they?”

“Ye've asked them, perhaps.”

“I've spoken to one or two of them,” admitted the rector.

“And what do they tell you?”

Hodder smiled.

“They don't tell me anything. They dodge.”

“Precisely,” said McCrae.

“We're not making Christians of them,” said Hodder, beginning to walk up
and down. “Why is it?”

“It's a big question.”

“It is a big question. It's the question of all questions, it seems to
me. The function of the Church, in my opinion, is to make Christians.”

“Try to teach them religion,” said McCrae--he almost pronounced it
releegion--“and see what happens. Ye'll have no classes at all. They
only come, the best of them, because ye let them alone that way, and
they get a little decency and society help. It's somewhat to keep them
out of the dance-halls and saloons maybe.”

“It's not enough,” the rector asserted. “You've had a great deal of
experience with them. And I want to know why, in your view, more of them
don't come into the Church.”

“Would ye put Jimmy Flanagan and Otto Bauer and Tony Baldassaro in Mr.
Parr's pew?” McCrae inquired, with a slight flavour of irony that was
not ill-natured. “Or perhaps Mrs. Larrabbee would make room for them?”

“I've considered that, of course,” replied Hodder, thoughtfully, though
he was a little surprised that McCrae should have mentioned it. “You
think their reasons are social, then,--that they feel the gap. I feel it
myself most strongly. And yet none of these men are Socialists. If they
were, they wouldn't come here to the parish house.”

“They're not Socialists,” agreed McCrae.

“But there is room in the back and sides of the church, and there is the
early service and the Sunday night service, when the pews are free. Why
don't they come to these?”

“Religion doesn't appeal to them.”

“Why not?”

“Ye've asked me a riddle. All I know is that the minute ye begin to
preach, off they go and never come back.”

Hodder, with unconscious fixity, looked into his assistant's honest
face. He had an exasperating notion that McCrae might have said more, if
he would.

“Haven't you a theory?”

“Try yourself,” said McCrae. His manner was abrupt, yet oddly enough,
not ungracious.

“Don't think I'm criticizing,” said the rector, quickly.

“I know well ye're not.”

“I've been trying to learn. It seems to me that we are only
accomplishing half our task, and I know that St. John's is not unique
in this respect. I've been talking to Andrews, of Trinity, about their
poor.”

“Does he give you a remedy?”

“No,” Hodder said. “He can't see any more than I can why Christianity
doesn't appeal any longer. The fathers and mothers of these people went
to church, in the old country and in this. Of course he sees, as you and
I do, that society has settled into layers, and that the layers won't
mix. And he seems to agree with me that there is a good deal of energy
exerted for a comparatively small return.”

“I understand that's what Mr. Parr says.”

These references to Mr. Parr disturbed Hodder. He had sometimes
wondered, when he had been compelled to speak about his visits to the
financier, how McCrae regarded them. He was sure that McCrae did regard
them.

“Mr. Parr is willing to be even more generous than he has been,” Hodder
said. “The point is, whether it's wise to enlarge our scope on the
present plan. What do you think?”

“Ye can reach more,” McCrae spoke without enthusiasm.

“What's the use of reaching them, only to touch them? In addition to
being helped materially and socially, and kept away from the dance-halls
and saloons, they ought to be fired by the Gospels, to be remade. They
should be going out into the highways and byways to bring others into
the church.”

The Scotchman's face changed a little. For an instant his eyes lighted
up, whether in sympathy or commiseration or both, Hodder could not tell.

“I'm with ye, Mr. Hodder, if ye'll show me the way. But oughtn't we to
begin at both ends?”

“At both ends?” Hodder repeated.

“Surely. With the people in the pews? Oughtn't we to be firing them,
too?”

“Yes,” said the rector. “You're right.”

He turned away, to feel McCrae's hand on his sleeve.

“Maybe it will come, Mr. Hodder,” he said. “There's no telling when the
light will strike in.”

It was the nearest to optimism he had ever known his assistant to
approach.

“McCrae,” he asked, “have you ever tried to do anything with Dalton
Street?”

“Dalton Street?”

The real McCrae, whom he had seemed to see emerging, retired abruptly,
presenting his former baffling and noncommittal exterior.

“Yes,” Hodder forced himself to go on, and it came to him that he had
repeated virtually the same words to Mr. Parr, “it is at our very doors,
a continual reproach. There is real poverty in those rooming houses, and
I have never seen vice so defiant and shameless.”

“It's a shifty place, that,” McCrae replied. “They're in it one day and
gone the next, a sort of catch-basin for all the rubbish of the city.
I can recall when decent people lived there, and now it's all light
housekeeping and dives and what not.”

“But that doesn't relieve us of responsibility,” Hodder observed.

“I'm not denying it. I think ye'll find there's very little to get hold
of.”

Once more, he had the air of stopping short, of being able to say more.
Hodder refrained from pressing him.

Dalton Street continued to haunt him. And often at nightfall, as he
hurried back to his bright rooms in the parish house from some of the
many errands that absorbed his time, he had a feeling of self-accusation
as he avoided women wearily treading the pavements, or girls and
children plodding homeward through the wet, wintry streets. Some glanced
at him with heavy eyes, others passed sullenly, with bent heads. At such
moments his sense of helplessness was overpowering. He could not follow
them to the dreary dwellings where they lodged.

Eldon Parr had said that poverty was inevitable.




Volume 2.




CHAPTER V. THE RECTOR HAS MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT


I

Sunday after Sunday Hodder looked upon the same picture, the winter
light filtering through emblazoned windows, falling athwart stone
pillars, and staining with rich colours the marble of the centre aisle.
The organ rolled out hymns and anthems, the voices of the white robed
choir echoed among the arches. And Hodder's eye, sweeping over the
decorous congregation, grew to recognize certain landmarks: Eldon
Parr, rigid at one end of his empty pew; little Everett Constable,
comfortably, but always pompously settled at one end of his, his
white-haired and distinguished-looking wife at the other. The space
between them had once been filled by their children. There was Mr.
Ferguson, who occasionally stroked his black whiskers with a prodigious
solemnity; Mrs. Ferguson, resplendent and always a little warm,
and their daughter Nan, dainty and appealing, her eyes uplifted and
questioning.

The Plimptons, with their rubicund and aggressively healthy offspring,
were always in evidence. And there was Mrs. Larrabbee. What between
wealth and youth, independence and initiative, a widowhood now emerged
from a mourning unexceptionable, an elegance so unobtrusive as to border
on mystery, she never failed to agitate any atmosphere she entered,
even that of prayer. From time to time, Hodder himself was uncomfortably
aware of her presence, and he read in her upturned face an interest
which, by a little stretch of the imagination, might have been deemed
personal....

Another was Gordon Atterbury, still known as “young Gordon,” though
his father was dead, and he was in the vestry. He was unmarried and
forty-five, and Mrs. Larrabbee had said he reminded her of a shrivelling
seed set aside from a once fruitful crop. He wore, invariably, checked
trousers and a black cutaway coat, eyeglasses that fell off when he
squinted, and were saved from destruction by a gold chain. No wedding or
funeral was complete without him. And one morning, as he joined Mr. Parr
and the other gentlemen who responded to the appeal, “Let your light
so shine before men,” a strange, ironical question entered the rector's
mind--was Gordon Atterbury the logical product of those doctrines which
he, Hodder, preached with such feeling and conviction?

None, at least, was so fervent a defender of the faith, so punctilious
in all observances, so constant at the altar rail; none so versed in
rubrics, ritual, and canon law; none had such a knowledge of the Church
fathers. Mr. Atterbury delighted to discuss them with the rector at
the dinner parties where they met; none was more zealous for foreign
missions. He was the treasurer of St. John's.

It should undoubtedly have been a consolation to any rector to possess
Mr. Atterbury's unqualified approval, to listen to his somewhat delphic
compliments,--heralded by a clearing of the throat. He represented
the faith as delivered to the saints, and he spoke for those in the
congregation to whom it was precious. Why was it that, to Hodder, he
should gradually have assumed something of the aspect of a Cerberus? Why
was it that he incited a perverse desire to utter heresies?

Hodder invariably turned from his contemplation of Gordon Atterbury to
the double blaring pew, which went from aisle to aisle. In his heart, he
would have preferred the approval of Eleanor Goodrich and her husband,
and of Asa Waring. Instinct spoke to him here; he seemed to read in
their faces that he failed to strike in them responsive chords. He was
drawn to them: the conviction grew upon him that he did not reach them,
and it troubled him, as he thought, disproportionately.

He could not expect to reach all. But they were the type to which he
most wished to appeal; of all of his flock, this family seemed best to
preserve the vitality and ideals of the city and nation. Asa Waring was
a splendid, uncompromising survival; his piercing eyes sometimes met
Hodder's across the church, and they held for him a question and a
riddle. Eleanor Goodrich bore on her features the stamp of true nobility
of character, and her husband, Hodder knew, was a man among men. In
addition to a respected lineage, he possessed an unusual blending of
aggressiveness and personal charm that men found irresistible.

The rector's office in the parish house was a businesslike room on the
first floor, fitted up with a desk, a table, straight-backed chairs,
and a revolving bookcase. And to it, one windy morning in March, came
Eleanor Goodrich. Hodder rose to greet her with an eagerness which, from
his kindly yet penetrating glance, she did not suspect.

“Am I interrupting you, Mr. Hodder?” she asked, a little breathlessly.

“Not at all,” he said, drawing up a chair. “Won't you sit down?”

She obeyed. There was an awkward pause during which the colour slowly
rose to her face.

“I wanted to ask you one or two things,” she began, not very steadily.
“As perhaps you may know, I was brought up in this church, baptized and
confirmed in it. I've come to fear that, when I was confirmed, I wasn't
old enough to know what I was doing.”

She took a deep breath, amazed at her boldness, for this wasn't in the
least how she had meant to begin. And she gazed at the rector anxiously.
To her surprise, he did not appear to be inordinately shocked.

“Do you know any better now?” he asked.

“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “But the things of which I was sure at that
time I am not sure of now. My faith is--is not as complete.”

“Faith may be likened to an egg, Mrs. Goodrich,” he said. “It must be
kept whole. If the shell is chipped, it is spoiled.”

Eleanor plucked up her courage. Eggs, she declared, had been used as
illustrations by conservatives before now.

Hodder relieved her by smiling in ready appreciation.

“Columbus had reference to this world,” he said. “I was thinking of a
more perfect cue.”

“Oh!” she cried, “I dare say there is a more perfect one. I should hate
to think there wasn't--but I can't imagine it. There's nothing in the
Bible in the way of description of it to make me really wish to go
there. The New Jerusalem is too insipid, too material. I'm sure I'm
shocking you, but I must be honest, and say what I feel.”

“If some others were as honest,” said the rector, “the problems of
clergymen would be much easier. And it is precisely because people will
not tell us what they feel that we are left in the dark and cannot
help them. Of course, the language of St. John about the future is
figurative.”

“Figurative,--yes,” she consented, “but not figurative in a way that
helps me, a modern American woman. The figures, to be of any use, ought
to appeal to my imagination--oughtn't they? But they don't. I can't see
any utility in such a heaven--it seems powerless to enter as a factor
into my life.”

“It is probable that we are not meant to know anything about the
future.”

“Then I wish it hadn't been made so explicit. Its very definiteness is
somehow--stultifying. And, Mr. Hodder, if we were not meant to know its
details, it seems to me that if the hereafter is to have any real value
and influence over our lives here, we should know something of its
conditions, because it must be in some sense a continuation of this. I'm
not sure that I make myself clear.”

“Admirably clear. But we have our Lord's example of how to live here.”

“If we could be sure,” said Eleanor, “just what that example meant.”

Hodder was silent a moment.

“You mean that you cannot accept what the Church teaches about his
life?” he asked.

“No, I can't,” she faltered. “You have helped me to say it. I want to
have the Church's side better explained,--that's why I'm here.” She
glanced up at him, hesitatingly, with a puzzled wonder, such a positive,
dynamic representative of that teaching did he appear. “And my husband
can't,--so many people I know can't, Mr. Hodder. Only, some of them
don't mention the fact. They accept it. And you say things with such a
certainty--” she paused.

“I know,” he replied, “I know. I have felt it since I have come here
more than ever before.” He did not add that he had felt it particularly
about her, about her husband: nor did he give voice to his instinctive
conviction that he respected and admired these two more than a hundred
others whose professed orthodoxy was without a flaw. “What is it in
particular,” he asked, troubled, “that you cannot accept? I will do my
best to help you.”

“Well--” she hesitated again.

“Please continue to be frank,” he begged.

“I can't believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth,” she responded in
a low voice; “it seems to me so--so material. And I feel I am stating a
difficulty that many have, Mr. Hodder. Why should it have been thought
necessary for God to have departed from what is really a sacred and
sublime fact in nature, to resort to a material proof in order to
convince a doubting humanity that Jesus was his Son? Oughtn't the proof
of Christ's essential God-ship to lie in his life, to be discerned by
the spiritual; and wasn't he continually rebuking those who demanded
material proof? The very acceptance of a material proof, it seems to me,
is a denial of faith, since faith ceases to have any worth whatever the
moment the demand for such proof is gratified. Knowledge puts faith out
of the question, for faith to me means a trusting on spiritual grounds.
And surely the acceptance of scriptural statements like that of
the miraculous birth without investigation is not faith--it is mere
credulity. If Jesus had been born in a miraculous way, the disciples
must have known it. Joseph must have known it when he heard the
answer 'I must be about my father's business,' and their doubts are
unexplained.”

“I see you have been investigating,” said the rector.

“Yes,” replied Eleanor, with an unconscious shade of defiance, “people
want to know, Mr. Dodder,--they want to know the truth. And if you
consider the preponderance of the evidence of the Gospels themselves--my
brother-in-law says--you will find that the miraculous birth has very
little to stand on. Take out the first two chapters of Matthew and
Luke, and the rest of the four Gospels practically contradict it. The
genealogies differ, and they both trace through Joseph.”

“I think people suffer in these days from giving too much weight to
the critics of Christianity,” said the rector, “from not pondering more
deeply on its underlying truths. Do not think that I am accusing you of
superficiality, Mrs. Goodrich; I am sure you wish to go to the bottom,
or else you would be satisfied with what you have already read and
heard.”

“I do,” she murmured.

“And the more one reflects on the life of our Lord, the more one is
convinced that the doctrine of the virgin birth is a vital essential;
without it Christianity falls to pieces. Let us go at the matter the
other way round. If we attribute to our Lord a natural birth, we come at
once to the dilemma of having to admit that he was merely an individual
human person,--in an unsurpassed relationship with God, it is true, but
still a human person. That doctrine makes Christ historical, some one
to go back to, instead of the ever-present, preexistent Son of God and
mankind. I will go as far as to assert that if the virgin birth had
never been mentioned in the Gospels, it would nevertheless inevitably
have become a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. Such a truth
is too vast, too far-reaching to have been neglected, and it has a much
higher significance than the mere record of a fact. In spite of the
contradictions of science, it explains as nothing else can the mystery
of the divinity as well as the humanity of the Saviour.”

Eleanor was unconvinced. She felt, as she listened, the pressure of
his sincerity and force, and had to strive to prevent her thoughts from
becoming confused.

“No, Mr. Hodder, I simply can't see any reason for resorting to a
physical miracle in order to explain a spiritual mystery. I can see why
the ancients demanded a sign of divinity as it were. But for us it has
ceased even to be that. It can't be proved. You ask me, in the face
of overwhelming evidence against it, to teach my children that the
Incarnation depends on it, but when they grow up and go to college and
find it discredited they run the risk of losing everything else with it.
And for my part, I fail utterly to see why, if with God all things are
possible, it isn't quite as believable, as we gather from St. Mark's
Gospel, that he incarnated himself in one naturally born. If you reach
the conclusion that Jesus was not a mere individual human person, you
reach it through the contemplation of his life and death.”

“Then it isn't the physical miracle you object to, especially?” he
asked.

“It's the uselessness of it, for this age,” she exclaimed. “I think
clergymen don't understand the harm it is doing in concentrating the
attention on such a vulnerable and non-essential point. Those of us who
are striving to reorganize our beliefs and make them tenable, do not
bother our heads about miracles. They may be true, or may not, or some
of them may be. We are beginning to see that the virgin birth does not
add anything to Christ. We are beginning to see that perfection and
individuality are not incompatible,--one is divine, and the other human.
And isn't it by his very individuality that we are able to recognize
Jesus to-day?”

“You have evidently thought and read a great deal,” Dodder said,
genuinely surprised. “Why didn't you come to me earlier?”

Eleanor bit her lip. He smiled a little.

“I think I can answer that for you,” he went on; “you believe we are
prejudiced,--I've no doubt many of us are. You think we are bound
to stand up for certain dogmas, or go down, and that our minds are
consequently closed. I am not blaming you,” he added quickly, as she
gave a sign of protest, “but I assure you that most of us, so far as my
observation has gone, are honestly trying to proclaim the truth as we
see it.”

“Insincerity is the last thing I should have accused you of, Mr.
Hodder,” she said flushing. “As I told you, you seem so sure.”

“I don't pretend to infallibility, except so far as I maintain that
the Church is the guardian of certain truths which human experience has
verified. Let me ask you if you have thought out the difference
your conception of the Incarnation;--the lack of a patently divine
commission, as it were,--makes in the doctrine of grace?”

“Yes, I have,” she answered, “a little. It gives me more hope. I cannot
think I am totally depraved. I do not believe that God wishes me to
think so. And while I am still aware of the distance between Christ's
perfection and my own imperfection, I feel that the possibility is
greater of lessening that distance. It gives me more self-respect, more
self-reliance. George Bridges says that the logical conclusion of
that old doctrine is what philosophers call determinism--Calvinistic
predestination. I can't believe in that. The kind of grace God gives me
is the grace to help myself by drawing force from the element of him in
my soul. He gives me the satisfaction of developing.”

“Of one thing I am assured, Mrs. Goodrich,” Hodder replied, “that the
logical result of independent thinking is anarchy. Under this modern
tendency toward individual creeds, the Church has split and split again
until, if it keeps on, we shall have no Church at all to carry on the
work of our Lord on earth. History proves that to take anything
away from the faith is to atrophy, to destroy it. The answer to your
arguments is to be seen on every side, atheism, hypocrisy, vice, misery,
insane and cruel grasping after wealth. There is only one remedy I can
see,” he added, inflexibly, yet with a touch of sadness, “believe.”

“What if we can't believe?” she asked.

“You can.” He spoke with unshaken conviction.

“You can if you make the effort, and I am sure you will. My experience
is that in the early stages of spiritual development we are impervious
to certain truths. Will you permit me to recommend to you certain books
dealing with these questions in a modern way?”

“I will read them gladly,” she said, and rose.

“And then, perhaps, we may have another talk,” he added, looking down at
her. “Give my regards to your husband.”

Yet, as he stood in the window looking after her retreating figure,
there gradually grew upon him a vague and uncomfortable feeling that
he had not been satisfactory, and this was curiously coupled with the
realization that the visit had added a considerable increment to his
already pronounced liking for Eleanor Goodrich. She was, paradoxically,
his kind of a person--such was the form the puzzle took. And so ably had
she presented her difficulties that, at one point of the discussion,
it had ironically occurred to him to refer her to Gordon Atterbury. Mr.
Atterbury's faith was like an egg, and he took precious care not to have
it broken or chipped.

Hodder found himself smiling. It was perhaps inevitable that he began at
once to contrast Mrs. Goodrich with other feminine parishioners who
had sought him out, and who had surrendered unconditionally. They had
evinced an equally disturbing tendency,--a willingness to be overborne.
For had he not, indeed, overborne them? He could not help suspecting
these other ladies of a craving for the luxury of the confessional. One
thing was certain,--he had much less respect for them than for Eleanor
Goodrich....

That afternoon he sent her the list of books. But the weeks passed,
and she did not come back. Once, when he met her at a dinner of Mrs.
Preston's, both avoided the subject of her visit, both were conscious
of a constraint. She did not know how often, unseen by her, his eyes had
sought her out from the chancel. For she continued to come to church as
frequently as before, and often brought her husband.



II

One bright and boisterous afternoon in March, Hodder alighted from an
electric car amid a swirl of dust and stood gazing for a moment at the
stone gate-houses of that 'rus in urbe', Waverley Place, and at the gold
block-letters written thereon, “No Thoroughfare.” Against those gates
and their contiguous grill the rude onward rush of the city had
beaten in vain, and, baffled, had swept around their serene enclosure,
westward.

Within, a silvery sunlight lit up the grass of the island running down
the middle, and in the beds the softening earth had already been broken
by the crocus sheaves. The bare branches of the trees swayed in the
gusts. As Hodder penetrated this hallowed precinct he recognized, on
either hand, the residences of several of his parishioners, each in its
ample allotted space: Mrs. Larrabbee's; the Laureston Greys'; Thurston
Gore's, of which Mr. Wallis Plimpton was now the master,--Mr. Plimpton,
before whose pertinacity the walls of Jericho had fallen; and finally
the queer, twisted Richardson mansion of the Everett Constables, whither
he was bound, with its recessed doorway and tiny windows peeping out
from under mediaeval penthouses.

He was ushered into a library where the shades were already drawn, where
a-white-clothed tea-table was set before the fire, the red rays dancing
on the silver tea-kettle. On the centre-table he was always sure to
find, neatly set in a rack, the books about which the world was
talking, or rather would soon begin to talk; and beside them were ranged
magazines; French, English, and American, Punch, the Spectator, the
Nation, the 'Revue des deux Mondes'. Like the able general she was, Mrs.
Constable kept her communications open, and her acquaintance was by
no means confined to the city of her nativity. And if a celebrity were
passing through, it were pretty safe, if in doubt, to address him in her
care.

Hodder liked and admired her, but somehow she gave him the impression
of having attained her ascendancy at a price, an ascendancy which
had apparently been gained by impressing upon her environment a new
note--literary, aesthetic, cosmopolitan. She held herself, and those she
carried with her, abreast of the times, and he was at a loss to see how
so congenial an effort could have left despite her sweetness--the little
mark of hardness he discerned, of worldliness. For she was as well
born as any woman in the city, and her husband was a Constable. He had
inherited, so the rector had been informed, one of those modest fortunes
that were deemed affluence in the eighties. His keeping abreast of the
times was the enigma, and Hodder had often wondered how financial genius
had contrived to house itself in the well-dressed, gently pompous little
man whose lack of force seemed at times so painfully evident. And yet he
was rated one of the rich men of the city, and his name Hodder had read
on many boards with Mr. Parr's!

A person more versed in the modern world of affairs than the late rector
of Bremerton would not have been so long in arriving at the answer
to this riddle. Hodder was astute, he saw into people more than they
suspected, but he was not sophisticated.

He stood picturing, now, the woman in answer to whose summons he had
come. With her finely chiselled features, her abundant white hair, her
slim figure and erect carriage she reminded him always of a Vigee Lebrun
portrait. He turned at the sound of her voice behind him.

“How good of you to come, Mr. Hodder, when you were so busy,” she said,
taking his hand as she seated herself behind the tea-kettle. “I wanted
the chance to talk to you, and it seemed the best way. What is that you
have, Soter's book?”

“I pinked it up on the table,” he explained.

“Then you haven't read it? You ought to. As a clergyman, it would
interest you. Religion treated from the economic side, you know, the
effect of lack of nutrition on character. Very unorthodox, of course.”

“I find that I have very little time to read,” he said. “I sometimes
take a book along in the cars.”

“Your profession is not so leisurely as it once was, I often think it
such a pity. But you, too, are paying the penalty of complexity.” She
smiled at him sympathetically. “How is Mr. Parr? I haven't seen him for
several weeks.”

“He seemed well when I saw him last,” replied Hodder.

“He's a wonderful man; the amount of work he accomplishes without
apparent effort is stupendous.” Mrs. Constable cast what seemed a
tentative glance at the powerful head, and handed him his tea. “I wanted
to talk to you about Gertrude,” she said.

He looked unenlightened.

“About my daughter, Mrs. Warren. She lives in New York, you know--on
Long Island.”

Then he had remembered something he had heard.

“Yes,” he said.

“She met you, at the Fergusons', just for a moment, when she was out
here last autumn. What really nice and simple people the Fergusons are,
with all their money!”

“Very nice indeed,” he agreed, puzzled.

“I have been sorry for them in the past,” she went on evenly. “They had
rather a hard time--perhaps you may have heard. Nobody appreciated them.
They were entombed, so to speak, in a hideous big house over on the
South Side, which fortunately burned down, and then they bought in Park
Street, and took a pew in St. John's. I suppose the idea of that huge
department store was rather difficult to get used to. But I made up my
mind it was nonsense to draw the line at department stores, especially
since Mr. Ferguson's was such a useful and remarkable one, so I
went across and called. Mrs. Ferguson was so grateful, it was almost
pathetic. And she's a very good friend--she came here everyday when
Genevieve had appendicitis.”

“She's a good woman,” the rector said.

“And Nan,--I adore Nan, everybody adores Nan. She reminds me of one of
those exquisite, blue-eyed dolls her father imports. Now if I were
a bachelor, Mr. Hodder--!” Mrs. Constable left the rest to his
imagination.

He smiled.

“I'm afraid Miss Ferguson has her own ideas.” Running through Hodder's
mind, a troubled current, were certain memories connected with Mrs.
Warren. Was she the divorced daughter, or was she not?

“But I was going to speak to you about Gertrude. She's had such a
hard time, poor dear, my heart has bled for her.” There was a barely
perceptible tremor in Mrs. Constable's voice. “All that publicity, and
the inevitable suffering connected with it! And no one can know the
misery she went through, she is so sensitive. But now, at last, she has
a chance for happiness--the real thing has come.”

“The real thing!” he echoed.

“Yes. She's going to marry a splendid man, Eldridge Sumner. I know the
family well. They have always stood for public spirit, and this Mr.
Summer, although he is little over thirty, was chairman of that Vice
Commission which made such a stir in New York a year ago. He's a lawyer,
with a fine future, and they're madly in love. And Gertrude realizes
now, after her experience, the true values in life. She was only a child
when she married Victor Warren.”

“But Mr. Warren,” Hodder managed to say, “is still living.”

“I sometimes wonder, Mr. Hodder,” she went on hurriedly, “whether we can
realize how different the world is today from what it was twenty years
ago, until something of this kind is actually brought home to us. I
shall never forget how distressed, how overwhelmed Mr. Constable and I
were when Gertrude got her divorce. I know that they are regarding such
things differently in the East, but out here!--We never dreamed that
such a thing could happen to us, and we regarded it as a disgrace.
But gradually--” she hesitated, and looked at the motionless
clergyman--“gradually I began to see Gertrude's point of view, to
understand that she had made a mistake, that she had been too young to
comprehend what she was doing. Victor Warren had been ruined by money,
he wasn't faithful to her, but an extraordinary thing has happened in
his case. He's married again, and Gertrude tells me he's absurdly happy,
and has two children.”

As he listened, Hodder's dominating feeling was amazement that such a
course as her daughter had taken should be condoned by this middle-aged
lady, a prominent member of his congregation and the wife of a
vestryman, who had been nurtured and steeped in Christianity. And not
only that: Mrs. Constable was plainly defending a further step, which
in his opinion involved a breach of the Seventh Commandment! To have
invaded these precincts, the muddy, turbulent river of individualism had
risen higher than he would have thought possible....

“Wait!” she implored, checking his speech,--she had been watching him
with what was plainly anxiety, “don't say anything yet. I have a letter
here which she wrote me--at the time. I kept it. Let me read a part of
it to you, that you may understand more fully the tragedy of it.”

Mrs. Constable thrust her hand into her lap and drew forth a thickly
covered sheet.

“It was written just after she left him--it is an answer to my protest,”
 she explained, and began to read:

“I know I promised to love Victor, mother, but how can one promise to
do a thing over which one has no control? I loved him after he stopped
loving me. He wasn't a bit suited to me--I see that now--he was
attracted by the outside of me, and I never knew what he was like until
I married him. His character seemed to change completely; he grew morose
and quick-tempered and secretive, and nothing I did pleased him. We led
a cat-and-dog life. I never let you know--and yet I see now we might
have got along in any other relationship. We were very friendly when we
parted, and I'm not a bit jealous because he cares for another woman who
I can see is much better suited to him.

“'I can't honestly regret leaving him, and I'm not conscious of having
done anything wrong. I don't want to shock you, and I know how terribly
you and father must feel, but I can see now, somehow, that I had to go
through this experience, terrible as it was, to find myself. If it were
thirty years ago, before people began to be liberal in such matters, I
shudder to think what might have become of me. I should now be one
of those terrible women between fifty and sixty who have tried one
frivolity and excess after another--but I'm not coming to that! And my
friends have really been awfully kind, and supported me--even Victor's
family. Don't, don't think that I'm not respectable! I know how you look
at such things.'” Mrs. Constable closed the letter abruptly.

“I did look at such things in that way,” she added, “but I've changed.
That letter helped to change me, and the fact that it was Gertrude
who had been through this. If you only knew Gertrude, Mr. Hodder, you
couldn't possibly think of her as anything but sweet and pure.”

Although the extent of Hodder's acquaintance with Mrs. Warren had been
but five minutes, the letter had surprisingly retouched to something
like brilliancy her faded portrait, the glow in her cheeks, the iris
blue in her eyes. He recalled the little shock he had experienced
when told that she was divorced, for her appeal had lain in her very
freshness, her frank and confiding manner. She was one of those
women who seem to say, “Here I am, you can't but like me:” And he had
responded--he remembered that--he had liked her. And now her letter,
despite his resistance, had made its appeal, so genuinely human was it,
so honest, although it expressed a philosophy he abhorred.

Mrs. Constable was watching him mutely, striving to read in his grave
eyes the effect of her pleadings.

“You are telling me this, Mrs. Constable--why?” he asked.

“Because I wished you to know the exact situation before I asked you, as
a great favour to me, to Mr. Constable, to--to marry her in St.
John's. Of course,” she went on, controlling her rising agitation,
and anticipating a sign of protest, “we shouldn't expect to have any
people,---and Gertrude wasn't married in St. John's before; that wedding
was at Passumset our seashore place. Oh, Mr. Hodder, before you answer,
think of our feelings, Mr. Constable's and mine! If you could see Mr.
Constable, you would know how he suffers--this thing has upset him more
than the divorce. His family have such pride. I am so worried about him,
and he doesn't eat anything and looks so haggard. I told him I would see
you and explain and that seemed to comfort him a little. She is, after
all, our child, and we don't want to feel, so far as our church
is concerned, that she is an Ishmaelite; we don't want to have the
spectacle of her having to go around, outside, to find a clergyman--that
would be too dreadful! I know how strict, how unflinching you are, and I
admire you for it. But this is a special case.”

She paused, breathing deeply, and Hodder gazed at her with pity. What he
felt was more than pity; he was experiencing, indeed, but with a deeper
emotion, something of that same confusion of values into which Eleanor
Goodrich's visit had thrown him. At the same time it had not escaped his
logical mind that Mrs. Constable had made her final plea on the score of
respectability.

“It gives me great pain to have to refuse you,” he said gently.

“Oh, don't,” she said sharply, “don't say that! I can't have made the
case clear. You are too big, too comprehending, Mr. Hodder, to have a
hard-and-fast rule. There must be times--extenuating circumstances--and
I believe the canons make it optional for a clergyman to marry the
innocent person.”

“Yes, it is optional, but I do, not believe it should be. The question
is left to the clergyman's' conscience. According to my view, Mrs.
Constable, the Church, as the agent of God, effects an indissoluble
bond. And much as I should like to do anything in my power for you and
Mr. Constable, you have asked the impossible,--believing as I do, there
can be no special case, no extenuating circumstance. And it is my duty
to tell you it is because people to-day are losing their beliefs that we
have this lenient attitude toward the sacred things. If they still held
the conviction that marriage is of God, they would labour to make it a
success, instead of flying apart at the first sign of what they choose
to call incompatibility.”

“But surely,” she said, “we ought not to be punished for our mistakes! I
cannot believe that Christ himself intended that his religion should be
so inelastic, so hard and fast, so cruel as you imply. Surely there
is enough unhappiness without making more. You speak of
incompatibility--but is it in all cases such an insignificant matter?
We are beginning to realize in these days something of the effects of
character on character,--deteriorating effects, in many instances. With
certain persons we are lifted up, inspired to face the battle of life
and overcome its difficulties. I have known fine men and women whose
lives have been stultified or ruined because they were badly mated.
And I cannot see that the character of my own daughter has deteriorated
because she has got a divorce from a man with whom she was profoundly
out of sympathy--of harmony. On the contrary, she seems more of a person
than she was; she has clearer, saner views of life; she has made her
mistake and profited by it. Her views changed--Victor Warren's did not.
She began to realize that some other woman might have an influence over
his life--she had none, simply because he did not love her. And love is
not a thing we can compel.”

“You are making it very hard for me, Mrs. Constable,” he said. “You
are now advocating an individualism with which the Church can have no
sympathy. Christianity teaches us that life is probationary, and if we
seek to avoid the trials sent us, instead of overcoming them, we find
ourselves farther than ever from any solution. We have to stand by our
mistakes. If marriage is to be a mere trial of compatibility, why go
through a ceremony than which there is none more binding in human and
divine institutions? One either believes in it, or one does not. And,
if belief be lacking, the state provides for the legalization of
marriages.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

“If persons wish to be married in church in these days merely because
it is respectable, if such be their only reason, they are committing
a great wrong. They are taking an oath before God with reservations,
knowing that public opinion will release them if the marriage does not
fulfil their expectations.”

For a moment she gazed at him with parted lips, and pressing her
handkerchief to her eyes began silently to cry. The sudden spectacle, in
this condition, of a self-controlled woman of the world was infinitely
distressing to Hodder, whose sympathies were even more sensitive than
(in her attempt to play upon them) she had suspected... She was aware
that he had got to his feet, and was standing beside her, speaking with
an oddly penetrating tenderness.

“I did not mean to be harsh,” he said, “and it is not that I do not
understand how you feel. You have made my duty peculiarly difficult.”

She raised up to him a face from which the mask had fallen, from which
the illusory look of youth had fled. He turned away... And presently she
began to speak again; in disconnected sentences.

“I so want her to be happy--I cannot think, I will not think that she
has wrecked her life--it would be too unjust, too cruel. You cannot know
what it is to be a woman!”

Before this cry he was silent.

“I don't ask anything of God except that she shall have a chance, and it
seems to me that he is making the world better--less harsh for women.”

He did not reply. And presently she looked up at him again, steadfastly
now, searchingly. The barriers of the conventions were down, she had
cast her pride to the winds. He seemed to read in her a certain relief.

“I am going to tell you something, Mr. Hodder, which you may think
strange, but I have a reason for saying it. You are still a young man,
and I feel instinctively that you have an unusual career before you.
You interested me the first time you stepped into the pulpit of St.
John's--and it will do me good to talk to you, this once, frankly. You
have reiterated to-day, in no uncertain terms, doctrines which I once
believed, which I was brought up to think infallible. But I have lived
since then, and life itself has made me doubt them.

“I recognize in you a humanity, a sympathy and breadth which you are
yourself probably not aware of, all of which is greater than the rule
which you so confidently apply to fit all cases. It seems to me that
Christ did not intend us to have such rules. He went beyond them, into
the spirit.

“Under the conditions of society--of civilization to-day, most marriages
are merely a matter of chance. Even judgment cannot foresee the
development of character brought about by circumstances, by environment.
And in many marriages I have known about intimately both the man and the
woman have missed the most precious thing that life can give something
I cannot but think--God intends us to have. You see,”--she smiled at him
sadly--“I am still a little of an idealist.

“I missed--the thing I am talking about, and it has been the great
sorrow of my life--not only on my account, but on my husband's. And so
far as I am concerned, I am telling you the truth when I say I should
have been content to have lived in a log cabin if--if the gift had
been mine. Not all the money in the world, nor the intellect, nor the
philanthropy--the so-called interests of life, will satisfy me for its
denial. I am a disappointed woman, I sometimes think a bitter woman. I
can't believe that life is meant to be so. Those energies have gone into
ambition which should have been absorbed by--by something more worth
while.

“And I can see so plainly now that my husband would have been far, far
happier with another kind of woman. I drew him away from the only work
he ever enjoyed--his painting. I do not say he ever could have been a
great artist, but he had a little of the divine spark, in his enthusiasm
at least--in his assiduity. I shall never forget our first trip abroad,
after we were married--he was like a boy in the galleries, in the
studios. I could not understand it then. I had no real sympathy with
art, but I tried to make sacrifices, what I thought were Christian
sacrifices. The motive power was lacking, and no matter how hard I
tried, I was only half-hearted, and he realized it instinctively--no
amount of feigning could deceive him. Something deep in me, which was
a part of my nature, was antagonistic, stultifying to the essentials of
his own being. Of course neither of us saw that then, but the results
were not long in developing. To him, art was a sacred thing, and it
was impossible for me to regard it with equal seriousness. He drew into
himself,--closed up, as it were,--no longer discussed it. I was hurt.
And when we came home he kept on in business--he still had his father's
affairs to look after--but he had a little workroom at the top of the
house where he used to go in the afternoon....

“It was a question which one of us should be warped,--which personality
should be annihilated, so to speak, and I was the stronger. And as I
look back, Mr. Hodder, what occurred seems to me absolutely inevitable,
given the ingredients, as inevitable as a chemical process. We were
both striving against each other, and I won--at a tremendous cost.
The conflict, one might say, was subconscious, instinctive rather than
deliberate. My attitude forced him back into business, although we had
enough to live on very comfortably, and then the scale of life began to
increase, luxuries formerly unthought of seemed to become necessities.
And while it was still afar off I saw a great wave rolling toward us,
the wave of that new prosperity which threatened to submerge us, and I
seized the buoy fate had placed in our hands,--or rather, by suggestion,
I induced my husband to seize it--his name.

“I recognized the genius, the future of Eldon Parr at a time when he was
not yet independent and supreme, when association with a Constable meant
much to him. Mr. Parr made us, as the saying goes. Needless to say;
money has not brought happiness, but a host of hard, false ambitions
which culminated in Gertrude's marriage with Victor Warren. I set my
heart on the match, helped it in every way, and until now nothing but
sorrow has come of it. But my point--is this,--I see so clearly, now
that it is too late, that two excellent persons may demoralize each
other if they are ill-mated. It may be possible that I had the germs of
false ambition in me when I was a girl, yet I was conscious only of the
ideal which is in most women's hearts....

“You must not think that I have laid my soul bare in the hope of
changing your mind in regard to Gertrude. I recognize clearly, now, that
that is impossible. Oh, I know you do not so misjudge me,” she added,
reading his quick protest in his face.

“Indeed, I cannot analyze my reasons for telling you something of which
I have never spoken to any one else.”

Mrs. Constable regarded him fixedly. “You are the strongest reason. You
have somehow drawn it out of me.... And I suppose I wish some one to
profit by it. You can, Mr. Hodder,--I feel sure of that. You may
insist now that my argument against your present conviction of the
indissolubility of marriage is mere individualism, but I want you
to think of what I have told you, not to answer me now. I know your
argument by heart, that Christian character develops by submission, by
suffering, that it is the woman's place to submit, to efface herself.
But the root of the matter goes deeper than that. I am far from
deploring sacrifice, yet common-sense tells us that our sacrifice should
be guided by judgment, that foolish sacrifices are worse than
useless. And there are times when the very limitations of our
individuality--necessary limitation's for us--prevent our sacrifices
from counting.

“I was wrong, I grant you, grievously wrong in the course I took, even
though it were not consciously deliberate. But if my husband had been an
artist I should always have remained separated from his real life by a
limitation I had no power to remove. The more I tried, the more apparent
my lack of insight became to him, the more irritated he grew. I studied
his sketches, I studied masterpieces, but it was all hopeless. The thing
wasn't in me, and he knew it wasn't. Every remark made him quiver.

“The Church, I think, will grow more liberal, must grow more liberal, if
it wishes to keep in touch with people in an age when they are thinking
out these questions for themselves. The law cannot fit all cases, I am
sure the Gospel can. And sometimes women have an instinct, a kind of
second sight into persons, Mr. Hodder. I cannot explain why I feel that
you have in you elements of growth which will eventually bring you more
into sympathy with the point of view I have set forth, but I do feel
it.”

Hodder did not attempt to refute her--she had, indeed, made discussion
impossible. She knew his arguments, as she had declared, and he had the
intelligence to realize that a repetition of them, on his part, would
be useless. She brought home to him, as never before, a sense of
the anomalistic position of the Church in these modern days, of its
appallingly lessened weight even with its own members. As a successor of
the Apostles, he had no power over this woman, or very little; he could
neither rebuke her, nor sentence her to penance. She recognized his
authority to marry her daughter, to baptize her daughter's children,
but not to interfere in any way with her spiritual life. It was as a
personality he had moved her--a personality apparently not in harmony
with his doctrine. Women had hinted at this before. And while Mrs.
Constable had not, as she perceived, shaken his conviction, the very
vividness and unexpectedness of a confession from her--had stirred him
to the marrow, had opened doors, perforce, which he, himself had marked
forbidden, and given him a glimpse beyond before he could lower his
eyes. Was there, after all, something in him that responded in spite of
himself?

He sat gazing at her, his head bent, his strong hands on the arms of the
chair.

“We never can foresee how we may change,” he answered, a light in his
eyes that was like a smile, yet having no suggestion of levity. And his
voice--despite his disagreement--maintained the quality of his sympathy.
Neither felt the oddity, then, of the absence of a jarring note. “You
may be sure, at least, of my confidence, and of my gratitude for what
you have told me.”

His tone belied the formality of his speech. Mrs. Constable returned his
gaze in silence, and before words came again to either, a step sounded
on the threshold and Mr. Constable entered.

Hodder looked at him with a new vision. His face was indeed lined and
worn, and dark circles here under his eyes. But at Mrs. Constable's
“Here's Mr. Hodder, dear,” he came forward briskly to welcome the
clergyman.

“How do you do?” he said cordially. “We don't see you very often.”

“I have been telling Mr. Hodder that modern rectors of big parishes have
far too many duties,” said his wife.

And after a few minutes of desultory conversation, the rector left.




CHAPTER VI. “WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT?”

It was one of those moist nights of spring when the air is pungent with
the odour of the softened earth, and the gentle breaths that stirred
the curtains in Mr. Parr's big dining-room wafted, from the garden,
the perfumes of a revived creation,--delicious, hothouse smells. At
intervals, showers might be heard pattering on the walk outside. The
rector of St. John's was dining with his great parishioner.

Here indeed were a subject for some modern master, a chance to picture
for generations to come an aspect of a mighty age, an age that may some
day be deemed but a grotesque and anomalistic survival of a more ancient
logic; a gargoyle carved out of chaos, that bears on its features a
resemblance to the past and the future.

Our scene might almost be mediaeval with its encircling gloom, through
which the heavy tapestries and shadowy corners of the huge apartment may
be dimly made out. In the center, the soft red glow of the candles, the
gleaming silver, the shining cloth, the Church on one side--and what on
the other? No name given it now, no royal name, but still Power. The two
are still in apposition, not yet in opposition, but the discerning may
perchance read a prophecy in the salient features of the priest.

The Man of Power of the beginning of the twentieth century demands a
subtler analysis, presents an enigma to which the immortal portraits
of forgotten Medicis and Capets give no clew. Imagine, if you can, a
Lorenzo or a Grand Louis in a tightly-buttoned frock coat! There must
be some logical connection between the habit and the age, since crimson
velvet and gold brocade would have made Eldon Parr merely ridiculous.

He is by no means ridiculous, yet take him out of the setting and put
him in the street, and you might pass him a dozen times without noticing
him. Nature, and perhaps unconscious art, have provided him with a
protective exterior; he is the colour of his jungle. After he has
crippled you--if you survive--you will never forget him. You will
remember his eye, which can be unsheathed like a rapier; you will recall
his lips as the expression of a relentless negative. The significance
of the slight bridge on the narrow nose is less easy to define. He
is neither tall nor short; his face is clean-shaven, save for scanty,
unobtrusive reddish tufts high on the cheeks; his hair is thin.

It must be borne in mind, however, that our rector did not see him in
his jungle, and perhaps in the traditional nobility of the lion there
is a certain truth. An interesting biography of some of the powerful of
this earth might be written from the point of view of the confessor
or the physician, who find something to love, something to pity, and
nothing to fear--thus reversing the sentiments of the public.

Yet the friendship between John Hodder and Eldon Parr defied
any definite analysis on the rector's part, and was perhaps the
strangest--and most disquieting element that had as yet come into
Hodder's life. The nature of his intimacy with the banker, if intimacy
it might be called, might have surprised his other parishioners if they
could have been hidden spectators of one of these dinners. There were
long silences when the medium of communication, tenuous at best, seemed
to snap, and the two sat gazing at each other as from mountain peaks
across impassable valleys. With all the will in the world, their souls
lost touch, though the sense in the clergyman of the other's vague
yearning for human companionship was never absent. It was this yearning
that attracted Hodder, who found in it a deep pathos.

After one of these intervals of silence, Eldon Parr looked up from his
claret.

“I congratulate you, Hodder, on the stand you took in regard to
Constable's daughter,” he said.

“I didn't suppose it was known,” answered the rector, in surprise.

“Constable told me. I have reason to believe that he doesn't sympathize
with his wife in her attitude on this matter. It's pulled him
down,--you've noticed that he looks badly?”

“Yes,” said the rector. He did not care to discuss the affair; he had
hoped it would not become known; and he shunned the congratulations of
Gordon Atterbury, which in such case would be inevitable. And in spite
of the conviction that he had done his duty, the memory of his talk with
Mrs. Constable never failed to make him, uncomfortable.

Exasperation crept into Mr. Pares voice.

“I can't think what's got into women in these times--at Mrs. Constable's
age they ought to know better. Nothing restrains them. They have reached
a point where they don't even respect the Church. And when that happens,
it is serious indeed. The Church is the governor on our social engine,
and it is supposed to impose a restraint upon the lawless.”

Hodder could not refrain from smiling a little at the banker's
conception.

“Doesn't that reduce the Church somewhere to the level of the police
force?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said Eldon Parr, whose feelings seemed to be rising. “I
am sorry for Constable. He feels the shame of this thing keenly, and he
ought to go away for a while to one of these quiet resorts. I offered
him my car. Sometimes I think that women have no morals. At any rate,
this modern notion of giving them their liberty is sheer folly. Look
what they have done with it! Instead of remaining at home, where they
belong, they are going out into the world and turning it topsy-turvy.
And if a man doesn't let them have a free hand, they get a divorce and
marry some idiot who will.”

Mr. Parr pushed back his chair and rose abruptly, starting for the door.
The rector followed him, forcibly struck by the unusual bitterness in
his tone.

“If I have spoken strongly, it is because I feel strongly,” he said in
a strange, thickened voice. “Hodder, how would you like to live in this
house--alone?”

The rector looked down upon him with keen, comprehending eyes, and saw
Eldon Parr as he only, of all men, had seen him. For he himself did not
understand his own strange power of drawing forth the spirit from its
shell, of compelling the inner, suffering thing to reveal itself.

“This poison,” Eldon Parr went on unevenly, “has eaten into my own
family. My daughter, who might have been a comfort and a companion,
since she chose not to marry, was carried away by it, and thought it
incumbent upon her to have a career of her own. And now I have a choice
of thirty rooms, and not a soul to share them with. Sometimes, at night,
I make up my mind to sell this house. But I can't do it--something
holds me back, hope, superstition, or whatever you've a mind to call it.
You've never seen all of the house, have you?” he asked.

The rector slowly shook his head, and the movement might have been one
that he would have used in acquiescence to the odd whim of a child. Mr.
Parr led the way up the wide staircase to the corridor above, traversing
chamber after chamber, turning on the lights.

“These were my wife's rooms,” he said, “they are just as she left them.
And these my daughter Alison's, when she chooses to pay me a visit. I
didn't realize that I should have to spend the last years of my life
alone. And I meant, when I gave my wife a house, to have it the best in
the city. I spared nothing on it, as you see, neither care nor money.
I had the best architect I could find, and used the best material. And
what good is it to me? Only a reminder--of what might have been. But
I've got a boy, Hodder,--I don't know whether I've ever spoken of him to
you--Preston. He's gone away, too. But I've always had the hope that he
might come back and get decently married, and live, here. That's why I
stay. I'll show you his picture.”

They climbed to the third floor, and while Mr. Parr way searching for
the electric switch, a lightning flash broke over the forests of the
park, prematurely revealing the room. It was a boy's room, hung
with photographs of school and college crews and teams and groups
of intimates, with deep window seats, and draped pennons of Harvard
University over the fireplace. Eldon Parr turned to one of the groups on
the will, the earliest taken at school.

“There he is,” he said, pointing out a sunny little face at the bottom,
a boy of twelve, bareheaded, with short, crisping yellow hair, smiling
lips and laughing eyes. “And here he is again,” indicating another
group. Thus he traced him through succeeding years until they came to
those of college.

“There he is,” said the rector. “I think I can pick him out now.”

“Yes; that's Preston,” said his father, staring hard at the picture. The
face had developed, the body had grown almost to man's estate, but the
hint of crispness was still in the hair, the mischievous laughter in
the eyes. The rector gazed earnestly at the face, remembering his own
boyhood, his own youth, his mind dwelling, too, on what he had heard of
the original of the portrait. What had happened to the boy, to bring to
naught the fair promise of this earlier presentment?

He was aroused by the voice of Eldon Parr, who had sunk into one of the
leather chairs.

“I can see him now,” he was saying, “as he used to come running down
that long flight of stone steps in Ransome Street to meet me when I came
home. Such laughter! And once, in his eagerness, he fell and cut his
forehead. I shall never forget how I felt. And when I picked him up he
tried to laugh still, with the tears rolling down his face. You know the
way a child's breath catches, Hodder? He was always laughing. And how
he used to cling to me, and beg me to take him out, and show such an
interest in everything! He was a bright boy, a remarkable child, I
thought, but I suppose it was my foolishness. He analyzed all he saw,
and when he used to go off in my car, Brennan, the engineer, would
always beg to have him in the cab. And such sympathy! He knew in an
instant when I was worried. I had dreams of what that boy would become,
but I was too sure of it. I went on doing other things--there were so
many things, and I was a slave to them. And before I knew it, he'd gone
off to school. That was the year I moved up here, and my wife died. And
after that, all seemed to go wrong. Perhaps I was too severe; perhaps
they didn't understand him at boarding-school; perhaps I didn't pay
enough attention to him. At any rate, the first thing I knew his whole
nature seemed to have changed. He got into scrape after scrape at
Harvard, and later he came within an ace of marrying a woman.

“He's my weakness to-day. I can say no to everybody in the world but to
him, and when I try to remember him as he used to come down those steps
on Ransome Street....

“He never knew how much I cared--that what I was doing was all for
him, building for him, that he might carry on my work. I had dreams of
developing this city, the great Southwest, and after I had gone Preston
was to bring them to fruition.

“For some reason I never was able to tell him all this--as I am telling
you. The words would not come. We had grown apart. And he seemed to
think--God knows why!--he seemed to think I disliked him. I had Langmaid
talk to him, and other men I trusted--tell him what an unparalleled
opportunity he had to be of use in the world. Once I thought I had him
started straight and then a woman came along--off the streets, or little
better. He insisted on marrying her and wrecking his life, and when I
got her out of the way, as any father would have done, he left me. He
has never forgiven me. Most of the time I haven't even the satisfaction
of knowing were he is--London, Paris, or New York. I try not to think
of what he does. I ought to cut him off,--I can't do it--I can't do it,
Hodder--he's my one weakness still. I'm afraid--he'd sink out of sight
entirely, and it's the one hold I have left on him.”

Eldon Parr paused, with a groan that betokened not only a poignant
sorrow, but also something of relief--for the tortures of not being able
to unburden himself had plainly become intolerable. He glanced up and
met the compassionate eyes of the rector, who stood leaning against the
mantel.

“With Alison it was different,” he said. “I never understood her--even
when she was a child--and I used to look at her and wonder that she
could be my daughter. She was moody, intense, with a yearning for
affection I've since sometimes thought--she could not express. I did not
feel the need of affection in those days, so absorbed was I in building
up,--so absorbed and driven, you might say. I suppose I must accept
my punishment as just. But the child was always distant with me, and I
always remember her in rebellion; a dark little thing with a quivering
lip, hair awry, and eyes that flashed through her tears. She would take
any amount of punishment rather than admit she had been in the wrong. I
recall she had once a fox terrier that never left her, that fought all
the dogs in the neighbourhood and destroyed the rugs and cushions in the
house. I got rid of it one summer when she was at the sea, and I think
she never forgave me. The first question she asked when she came home
was for that dog--Mischief, his name was--for Mischief. I told her what
I had done. It took more courage than I had thought. She went to her
room, locked herself in, and stayed there, and we couldn't get her to
come out for two days; she wouldn't even eat.

“Perhaps she was jealous of Preston, but she never acknowledged it. When
she was little she used once in a while to come shyly and sit on my lap,
and look at me without saying anything. I hadn't the slightest notion
what was in the child's mind, and her reserve increased as she grew
older. She seemed to have developed a sort of philosophy of her own even
before she went away to school, and to have certain strongly defined
tastes. She liked, for instance, to listen to music, and for that very
reason would never learn to play. We couldn't make her, as a child.

“Bad music, she said, offended her. She painted, she was passionately
fond of flowers, and her room was always filled with them. When she came
back from school to live with me, she built a studio upstairs. After
the first winter, she didn't care to go out much. By so pronounced a
character, young men in general were not attracted, but there were a
few who fell under a sort of spell. I can think of no other words strong
enough, and I used to watch them when they came here with a curious
interest. I didn't approve of all of them. Alison would dismiss them or
ignore them or be kind to them as she happened to feel, yet it didn't
seem to make any difference. One I suspect she was in love with--a
fellow without a cent.

“Then there was Bedloe Hubbell. I have reason enough to be thankful now
that she didn't care for him. They've made him president, you know, of
this idiotic Municipal League, as they call it. But in those days he
hadn't developed any nonsense, he was making a good start at the bar,
and was well off. His father was Elias Hubbell, who gave the Botanical
Garden to the city. I wanted her to marry Gordon Atterbury. He hung on
longer than any of them--five or six years; but she wouldn't hear of
it. That was how the real difference developed between us, although the
trouble was deep rooted, for we never really understood each other. I
had set my heart on it, and perhaps I was too dictatorial and insistent.
I don't know. I meant the best for her, God knows.... Gordon never got
over it. It dried him up.”.... Irritation was creeping back into the
banker's voice.

“Then it came into Alison's head that she wanted to 'make something of
her life,'--as she expressed it. She said she was wasting herself, and
began going to lectures with a lot of faddish women, became saturated
with these nonsensical ideas about her sex that are doing so much harm
nowadays. I suppose I was wrong in my treatment from the first. I never
knew how to handle her, but we grew like flint and steel. I'll say this
for her, she kept quiet enough, but she used to sit opposite me at the
table, and I knew all the time what she was thinking of, and then I'd
break out. Of course she'd defend herself, but she had her temper under
better control than I. She wanted to go away for a year or two and study
landscape gardening, and then come back and establish herself in an
office here. I wouldn't listen to it. And one morning, when she was
late to breakfast, I delivered an ultimatum. I gave her a lecture on a
woman's place and a woman's duty, and told her that if she didn't marry
she'd have to stay here and live quietly with me, or I'd disinherit
her.”

Hodder had become absorbed in this portrait of Alison Parr, drawn by her
father with such unconscious vividness.

“And then?” he asked.

In spite of the tone of bitterness in which he had spoken, Eldon Parr
smiled. It was a reluctant tribute to his daughter.

“I got an ultimatum in return,” he said. “Alison should have been a
man.” His anger mounted quickly as he recalled the scene. “She said she
had thought it all out: that our relationship had become impossible;
that she had no doubt it was largely her fault, but that was the way she
was made, and she couldn't change. She had, naturally, an affection for
me as her father, but it was very plain we couldn't get along together:
she was convinced that she had a right to individual freedom,--as she
spoke of it,--to develop herself. She knew, if she continued to live
with me on the terms I demanded, that her character would deteriorate.
Certain kinds of sacrifice she was capable of, she thought, but what I
asked would be a useless one. Perhaps I didn't realize it, but it was
slavery. Slavery!” he repeated, “the kind of slavery her mother had
lived....”

He took a turn around the room.

“So far as money was concerned, she was indifferent to it. She had
enough from her mother to last until she began to make more. She
wouldn't take any from me in any case. I laughed, yet I have never been
so angry in my life. Nor was it wholly anger, Hodder, but a queer tangle
of feelings I can't describe. There was affection mixed up in it--I
realized afterward--but I longed to take her and shake her and lock her
up until she should come to her senses: I couldn't. I didn't dare. I was
helpless. I told her to go. She didn't say anything more, but there
was a determined look in her eyes when she kissed me as I left for the
office. I spent a miserable day. More than once I made up my mind to
go home, but pride stopped me. I really didn't think she meant what she
said. When I got back to the house in the afternoon she had left for New
York.

“Then I began to look forward to the time when her money would give out.
She went to Paris with another young woman, and studied there, and then
to England. She came back to New York, hired an apartment and a studio,
and has made a success.”

The rector seemed to detect an unwilling note of pride at the magic
word.

“It isn't the kind of success I think much of, but it's what she started
out to do. She comes out to see me, once in a while, and she designed
that garden.”

He halted in front of the clergyman.

“I suppose you think it's strange, my telling you this,” he said. “It
has come to the point,” he declared vehemently, “where it relieves me to
tell somebody, and you seem to be a man of discretion and common-sense.”

Hodder looked down into Mr. Parr's face, and was silent. Perhaps he
recognized, as never before, the futility of the traditional words
of comfort, of rebuke. He beheld a soul in torture, and realized with
sudden sharpness how limited was his knowledge of the conditions of
existence of his own time. Everywhere individualism reared its ugly
head, everywhere it seemed plausible to plead justification; and once
more he encountered that incompatibility of which Mrs. Constable had
spoken! He might blame the son, blame the daughter, yet he could not
condemn them utterly.... One thing he saw clearly, that Eldon Parr had
slipped into what was still, for him, a meaningless hell.

The banker's manner suddenly changed, reverted to what it had been. He
arose.

“I've tried to do my duty as I saw it, and it comes to this--that we
who have spent the best years of our lives in striving to develop this
country have no thanks from our children or from any one else.”

With his hand on the electric switch, he faced Hodder almost defiantly
as he spoke these words, and suddenly snapped off the light, as though
the matter admitted of no discussion. In semi-darkness they groped down
the upper flight of stairs....




CHAPTER VII. THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD


I

When summer arrived, the birds of brilliant plumage of Mr. Hodder's
flock arose and flew lightly away, thus reversing the seasons. Only the
soberer ones came fluttering into the cool church out of the blinding
heat, and settled here and there throughout the nave. The ample Mr.
Bradley, perspiring in an alpaca coat, took up the meagre collection on
the right of the centre aisle; for Mr. Parr, properly heralded, had
gone abroad on one of those periodical, though lonely tours that
sent anticipatory shivers of delight down the spines of foreign
picture-dealers. The faithful Gordon Atterbury was worshipping at the
sea, and even Mr. Constable and Mr. Plimpton, when recalled to the city
by financial cares, succumbed to the pagan influence of the sun, and
were usually to be found on Sunday mornings on the wide veranda of the
country club, with glasses containing liquid and ice beside them, and
surrounded by heaps of newspapers.

To judge by St. John's, the city was empty. But on occasions, before
he himself somewhat tardily departed,--drawn thither by a morbid though
impelling attraction, Hodder occasionally walked through Dalton Street
of an evening. If not in St. John's, summer was the season in Dalton
Street. It flung open its doors and windows and moved out on the steps
and the pavements, and even on the asphalt; and the music of its cafes
and dance-halls throbbed feverishly through the hot nights. Dalton
Street resorted neither to country club nor church.

Mr. McCrae, Hodder's assistant, seemed to regard these annual
phenomena with a grim philosophy,--a relic, perhaps, of the Calvinistic
determinism of his ancestors. He preached the same indefinite sermons,
with the same imperturbability, to the dwindled congregations in summer
and the enlarged ones in winter. But Hodder was capable of no such
resignation--if resignation it were, for the self-contained assistant
continued to be an enigma; and it was not without compunction that he
left, about the middle of July, on his own vacation. He was tired, and
yet he seemed to have accomplished nothing in this first year of the
city parish whereof he had dreamed. And it was, no doubt, for that very
reason that he was conscious of a depressing exhaustion as his train
rolled eastward over that same high bridge that spanned the hot and
muddy waters of the river. He felt a fugitive. In no months since he had
left the theological seminary, had he seemingly accomplished so little;
in no months had he had so magnificent an opportunity.

After he had reached the peaceful hills at Bremerton--where he had gone
on Mrs. Whitely's invitation--he began to look back upon the spring and
winter as a kind of mad nightmare, a period of ceaseless, distracted,
and dissipated activity, of rushing hither and thither with no results.
He had been aware of invisible barriers, restricting, hemming him in on
all sides. There had been no time for reflection; and now that he had a
breathing space, he was unable to see how he might reorganize his work
in order to make it more efficient.

There were other perplexities, brought about by the glimpses he had
had into the lives and beliefs--or rather unbeliefs--of his new
parishioners. And sometimes, in an unwonted moment of pessimism, he
asked himself why they thought it necessary to keep all that machinery
going when it had so little apparent effect on their lives? He sat
wistfully in the chancel of the little Bremerton church and looked into
the familiar faces of those he had found in it when he came to it,
and of those he had brought into it, wondering why he had been foolish
enough to think himself endowed for the larger work. Here, he had been
a factor, a force in the community, had entered into its life and
affections. What was he there?

Nor did it tend to ease his mind that he was treated as one who has
passed on to higher things.

“I was afraid you'd work too hard,” said Mrs. Whitely, in her motherly
way. “I warned you against it, Mr. Hodder. You never spared yourself,
but in a big city parish it's different. But you've made such a success,
Nelson tells me, and everybody likes you there. I knew they would, of
course. That is our only comfort in losing you, that you have gone to
the greater work. But we do miss you.”



II

The air of Bremerton, and later the air of Bar Harbor had a certain
reviving effect. And John Hodder, although he might be cast down, had
never once entertained the notion of surrender. He was inclined to
attribute the depression through which he had passed, the disappointment
he had undergone as a just punishment for an overabundance of ego,--only
Hodder used the theological term for the same sin. Had he not, after
all, laboured largely for his own glory, and not Gods? Had he ever
forgotten himself? Had the idea ever been far from his thoughts that it
was he, John Hodder, who would build up the parish of St. John's into
a living organization of faith and works? The curious thing was that he
had the power, and save in moments of weariness he felt it in him. He
must try to remember always that this power was from God. But why had he
been unable to apply it?

And there remained disturbingly in his memory certain phrases of Mrs.
Constable's, such as “elements of growth.”

He would change, she had said; and he had appeared to her as one with
depths. Unsuspected depths--pockets that held the steam, which was
increasing in pressure. At Bremerton, it had not gathered in the
pockets, he had used it all--all had counted; but in the feverish,
ceaseless activity of the city parish he had never once felt that
intense satisfaction of emptying himself, nor, the sweet weariness that
follows it. His seemed the weariness of futility. And introspection
was revealing a crack--after so many years--in that self that he had
believed to be so strongly welded. Such was the strain of the pent-up
force. He recognized the danger-signal. The same phenomenon had driven
him into the Church, where the steam had found an outlet--until now. And
yet, so far as his examination went, he had not lost his beliefs, but
the power of communicating them to others.

Bremerton, and the sight of another carrying on the work in which he had
been happy, weighed upon him, and Bar Harbor offered distraction. Mrs.
Larrabbee had not hesitated to remind him of his promise to visit her.
If the gallery of portraits of the congregation of St. John's were to
be painted, this lady's, at the age of thirty, would not be the least
interesting. It would have been out of place in no ancestral hall, and
many of her friends were surprised, after her husband's death, that she
did not choose one wherein to hang it. She might have. For she was the
quintessence of that feminine product of our country at which Europe has
never ceased to wonder, and to give her history would no more account
for her than the process of manufacture explains the most delicate
of scents. Her poise, her quick detection of sham in others not so
fortunate, her absolute conviction that all things were as they ought
to be; her charity, her interest in its recipients; her smile, which was
kindness itself; her delicate features, her white skin with its natural
bloom; the grace of her movements, and her hair, which had a different
color in changing lights--such an ensemble is not to be depicted save by
a skilled hand.

The late Mr. Larrabbee's name was still printed on millions of bright
labels encircling cubes of tobacco, now manufactured by a Trust.
However, since the kind that entered Mrs. Larrabbee's house, or houses,
was all imported from Egypt or Cuba, what might have been in the nature
of an unpleasant reminder was remote from her sight, and she never drove
into the northern part of the city, where some hundreds of young women
bent all day over the cutting-machines. To enter too definitely into
Mrs. Larrabbee's history, therefore, were merely to be crude, for she is
not a lady to caricature. Her father had been a steamboat captain--once
an honoured calling in the city of her nativity--a devout Presbyterian
who believed in the most rigid simplicity. Few who remembered the
gaucheries of Captain Corington's daughter on her first presentation
to his family's friends could recognize her in the cosmopolitan Mrs.
Larrabbee. Why, with New York and London at her disposal, she elected to
remain in the Middle West, puzzled them, though they found her answer,
“that she belonged there,” satisfying Grace Larrabbee's cosmopolitanism
was of that apperception that knows the value of roots, and during her
widowhood she had been thrusting them out. Mrs. Larrabbee followed by
“of” was much more important than just Mrs. Larrabbee. And she was,
moreover, genuinely attached to her roots.

Her girlhood shyness--rudeness, some called it, mistaking the effect
for the cause--had refined into a manner that might be characterized as
'difficile', though Hodder had never found her so. She liked direct men;
to discover no guile on first acquaintance went a long way with her, and
not the least of the new rector's social triumphs had been his simple
conquest.

Enveloped in white flannel, she met his early train at the Ferry; an
unusual compliment to a guest, had he but known it, but he accepted it
as a tribute to the Church.

“I was so afraid you wouldn't come,” she said, in a voice that conveyed
indeed more than a perfunctory expression. She glanced at him as he sat
beside her on the cushions of the flying motor boat, his strange eyes
fixed upon the blue mountains of the island whither they were bound, his
unruly hair fanned by the wind.

“Why?” he asked, smiling at the face beneath the flying veil.

“You need the rest. I believe in men taking their work seriously, but
not so seriously as you do.”

She was so undisguisedly glad to see him that he could scarcely have
been human if he had not responded. And she gave him, in that fortnight,
a glimpse of a life that was new and distracting: at times made him
forget--and he was willing to forget--the lower forms of which it was
the quintessence,--the factories that hummed, the forges that flung
their fires into the night in order that it might exist; the Dalton
Streets that went without. The effluvia from hot asphalt bore no
resemblance to the salt-laden air that rattled the Venetian blinds of
the big bedroom to which he was assigned. Her villa was set high above
the curving shore, facing a sheltered terrace-garden resplendent in its
August glory; to seaward, islands danced in the haze; and behind the
house, in the sunlight, were massed spruces of a brilliant arsenic green
with purple cones. The fluttering awnings were striped cardinal and
white.

Nature and man seemed to have conspired to make this place vividly
unreal, as a toy village comes painted from the shop. There were no
half-tones, no poverty--in sight, at least; no litter. On the streets
and roads, at the casino attached to the swimming-pool and at the golf
club were to be seen bewildering arrays of well-dressed, well-fed women
intent upon pleasure and exercise. Some of them gave him glances that
seemed to say, “You belong to us,” and almost succeeded in establishing
the delusion. The whole effect upon Hodder, in the state of mind in
which he found himself, was reacting, stimulating, disquieting. At
luncheons and dinners, he was what is known as a “success”--always that
magic word.

He resisted, and none so quick as women to scent resistance. His very
unbending attitude aroused their inherent craving for rigidity in his
profession; he was neither plastic, unctuous, nor subservient; his very
homeliness, redeemed by the eyes and mouth, compelled their attention.
One of them told Mrs. Larrabbee that that rector of hers would “do
something.”

But what, he asked himself, was he resisting? He was by no means a
Puritan; and while he looked upon a reasonable asceticism as having
its place in the faith that he professed, it was no asceticism that
prevented a more complete acquiescence on his part in the mad carnival
that surrounded him.

“I'm afraid you don't wholly approve of Bar Harbor,” his hostess
remarked; one morning.

“At first sight, it is somewhat staggering to the provincial mind,” he
replied.

She smiled at him, yet with knitted brows.

“You are always putting me off--I never can tell what you think. And
yet I'm sure you have opinions. You think these people frivolous, of
course.”

“Most of them are so,” he answered, “but that is a very superficial
criticism. The question is, why are they so? The sight of Bar Harbor
leads a stranger to the reflection that the carnival mood has become
permanent with our countrymen, and especially our countrywomen.”

“The carnival mood,” she repeated thoughtfully, “yes, that expresses
it. We are light, we are always trying to get away from ourselves, and
sometimes I wonder whether there are any selves to get away from. You
ought to atop us,” she added, almost accusingly, “to bring us to our
senses.”

“That's just it,” he agreed, “why don't we? Why can't we?”

“If more clergymen were like you, I think perhaps you might.”

His tone, his expression, were revelations.

“I--!” he exclaimed sharply, and controlled himself. But in that moment
Grace Larrabbee had a glimpse of the man who had come to arouse in her
an intense curiosity. For an instant a tongue of the fires of Vulcan had
shot forth, fires that she had suspected.

“Aren't you too ambitious?” she asked gently. And again, although she
did not often blunder, she saw him wince. “I don't mean ambitious for
yourself. But surely you have made a remarkable beginning at St. John's.
Everybody admires and respects you, has confidence in you. You are so
sure of yourself,” she hesitated a moment, for she had never ventured
to discuss religion with him, “of your faith. Clergymen ought not to be
apologetic, and your conviction cannot fail, in the long run, to have
its effect.”

“Its effect,--on what?” he asked.

Mrs. Larrabbee was suddenly, at sea. And she prided herself on a lack of
that vagueness generally attributed to her sex.

“On--on everything. On what we were talking about,--the carnival
feeling, the levity, on the unbelief of the age. Isn't it because the
control has been taken off?”

He saw an opportunity to slip into smoother waters.

“The engine has lost its governor?”

“Exactly!” cried Mrs. Larrabbee. “What a clever simile!”

“It is Mr. Pares,” said Hodder. “Only he was speaking of other symptoms,
Socialism, and its opposite, individualism,--not carnivalism.”

“Poor man,” said Mrs. Larrabbee, accepting the new ground as safer, yet
with a baffled feeling that Hodder had evaded her once more, “he has
had his share of individualism and carnivalism. His son Preston was here
last month, and was taken out to the yacht every night in an unspeakable
state. And Alison hasn't been what might be called a blessing.”

“She must be unusual,” said the rector, musingly.

“Oh, Alison is a Person. She has become quite the fashion, and has more
work than she can possibly attend to. Very few women with her good looks
could have done what she has without severe criticism, and something
worse, perhaps. The most extraordinary thing about her is her contempt
for what her father has gained, and for conventionalities. It always
amuses me when I think that she might have been the wife of Gordon
Atterbury. The Goddess of Liberty linked to--what?”

Hodder thought instinctively of the Church. But he remained silent.

“As a rule, men are such fools about the women they wish to marry,” she
continued. “She would have led him a dance for a year or two, and then
calmly and inexorably left him. And there was her father, with all his
ability and genius, couldn't see it either, but fondly imagined that
Alison as Gordon Atterbury's wife, would magically become an Atterbury
and a bourgeoise, see that the corners were dusted in the big house, sew
underwear for the poor, and fast in Lent.”

“And she is happy--where she is?” he inquired somewhat naively.

“She is self-sufficient,” said Mrs. Larrabbee, with unusual feeling,
“and that is just what most women are not, in these days. Oh, why has
life become such a problem? Sometimes I think, with all that I have, I'm
not, so well off as one of those salesgirls in Ferguson's, at home. I'm
always searching for things to do--nothing is thrust on me. There are
the charities--Galt House, and all that, but I never seem to get at
anything, at the people I'd like to help. It's like sending money
to China. There is no direct touch any more. It's like seeing one's
opportunities through an iron grating.”

Hodder started at the phrase, so exactly had she expressed his own case.

“Ah,” he said, “the iron grating bars the path of the Church, too.”

And just what was the iron grating?

They had many moments of intimacy during that fort night, though none in
which the plumb of their conversation descended to such a depth. For
he was, as she had said, always “putting her off.” Was it because he
couldn't satisfy her craving? give her the solution for which--he began
to see--she thirsted? Why didn't that religion that she seemed outwardly
to profess and accept without qualification--the religion he taught set
her at rest? show her the path?

Down in his heart he knew that he feared to ask.



That Mrs. Larrabbee was still another revelation, that she was not at
rest, was gradually revealed to him as the days passed. Her spirit, too,
like his own, like 'Mrs Constable's, like Eldon Parr's, like Eleanor
Goodrich's, was divided against itself; and this phenomenon in Mrs.
Larrabbee was perhaps a greater shock to him, since he had always
regarded her as essentially in equilibrium. One of his reasons,
indeed,--in addition to the friendship that had grown up between
them,--for coming to visit her had been to gain the effect of her poise
on his own. Poise in a modern woman, leading a modern life. It was thus
she attracted him. It was not that he ignored her frivolous side; it was
nicely balanced by the other, and that other seemed growing. The social,
she accepted at what appeared to be its own worth. Unlike Mrs. Plimpton,
for instance, she was so innately a lady that she had met with no
resistance in the Eastern watering places, and her sense of values had
remained the truer for it.

He did not admire her the less now he had discovered that the poise was
not so adjusted as he had thought it, but his feeling about her changed,
grew more personal, more complicated. She was showing an alarming
tendency to lean on him at a time when he was examining with some
concern his own supports. She possessed intelligence and fascination,
she was a woman whose attentions would have flattered and disturbed any
man with a spark of virility, and Hodder had constantly before his
eyes the spectacle of others paying her court. Here were danger-signals
again!

Mrs. Plaice, a middle-aged English lady staying in the house, never
appeared until noon. Breakfast was set out in the tiled and sheltered
loggia, where they were fanned by the cool airs of a softly breathing
ocean. The world, on these mornings, had a sparkling unreality, the
cold, cobalt sea stretching to sun-lit isles, and beyond, the vividly
painted shore,--the setting of luxury had never been so complete. And
the woman who sat opposite him seemed, like one of her own nectarines,
to be the fruit that crowned it all.

Why not yield to the enchantment? Why rebel, when nobody else
complained? Were it not more simple to accept what life sent in its
orderly course instead of striving for an impossible and shadowy ideal?
Very shadowy indeed! And to what end were his labours in that smoky,
western city, with its heedless Dalton Streets, which went their
inevitable ways? For he had the choice.

To do him justice, he was slow in arriving at a realization that seemed
to him so incredible, so preposterous. He was her rector! And he had
accepted, all unconsciously, the worldly point of view as to Mrs.
Larrabbee,--that she was reserved for a worldly match. A clergyman's
wife! What would become of the clergyman? And yet other clergymen had
married rich women, despite the warning of the needle's eye.

She drove him in her buckboard to Jordan's Pond, set, like a jewel in
the hills, and even to the deep, cliff bordered inlet beyond North East,
which reminded her, she said, of a Norway fiord. And sometimes they
walked together through wooded paths that led them to beetling shores,
and sat listening to the waves crashing far below. Silences and
commonplaces became the rule instead of the eager discussions with which
they had begun,--on such safer topics as the problem of the social
work of modern churches. Her aromatic presence, and in this
setting, continually disturbed him: nature's perfumes, more
definable,--exhalations of the sea and spruce,--mingled with hers,
anaesthetics compelling lethargy. He felt himself drowning, even wished
to drown,--and yet strangely resisted.

“I must go to-morrow,” he said.

“To-morrow--why? There is a dinner, you know, and Mrs. Waterman wished
so particularly to meet you.”

He did not look at her. The undisguised note of pain found an echo
within him. And this was Mrs. Larrabbee!

“I am sorry, but I must,” he told her, and she may not have suspected
the extent to which the firmness was feigned.

“You have promised to make other visits? The Fergusons,--they said they
expected you.”

“I'm going west--home,” he said, and the word sounded odd.

“At this season! But there is nobody in church, at least only a few, and
Mr. McCrae can take care of those--he always does. He likes it.”

Hodder smiled in spite of himself. He might have told her that those
outside the church were troubling him. But he did not, since he had
small confidence in being able to bring them in.

“I have been away too long, I am getting spoiled,” he replied, with an
attempt at lightness. He forced his eyes to meet hers, and she read in
them an unalterable resolution.

“It is my opinion you are too conscientious, even for a clergyman,” she
said, and now it was her lightness that hurt. She protested no more.
And as she led the way homeward through the narrow forest path, her head
erect, still maintaining this lighter tone, he wondered how deeply she
had read him; how far her intuition had carried her below the surface;
whether she guessed the presence of that stifled thing in him which
was crying feebly for life; whether it was that she had discovered,
or something else? He must give it the chance it craved. He must get
away--he must think. To surrender now would mean destruction...

Early the next morning, as he left the pier in the motor boat, he saw
a pink scarf waving high above him from the loggia. And he flung up
his hand in return. Mingled with a faint sense of freedom was intense
sadness.




CHAPTER VIII. THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE

From the vantage point of his rooms in the parish house, Hodder reviewed
the situation. And despite the desires thronging after him in his flight
he had the feeling of once who, in the dark, has been very near to
annihilation. What had shaken him most was the revelation of an
old enemy which, watching its chance, had beset him at the first
opportunity; and at a time when the scheme of life, which he flattered
himself to have solved forever, was threatening once more to resolve
itself into fragments. He had, as if by a miracle, escaped destruction
in some insidious form.

He shrank instinctively from an analysis of the woman in regard to
whom his feelings were, so complicated, and yet by no means lacking in
tenderness. But as time went on, he recognized more and more that she
had come into his life at a moment when he was peculiarly vulnerable.
She had taken him off his guard. That the brilliant Mrs. Larrabbee
should have desired him--or what she believed was him--was food enough
for thought, was an indication of an idealism in her nature that he
would not have suspected. From a worldly point of view, the marriage
would have commended itself to none of her friends. Yet Hodder perceived
clearly that he could not have given her what she desired, since the
marriage would have killed it in him. She offered him the other thing.
Once again he had managed somehow to cling to his dream of what the
relationship between man and woman should be, and he saw more and more
distinctly that he had coveted not only the jewel, but its setting. He
could not see her out of it--she faded. Nor could he see himself in it.

Luxury,--of course,--that was what he had spurned. Luxury in contrast
to Dalton Street, to the whirring factories near the church which
discharged, at nightfall, their quotas of wan women and stunted
children. And yet here he was catering to luxury, providing religion for
it! Religion!

Early in November he heard that Mrs. Larrabbee had sudde

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